Free Familiar Rooms in Darkness by Caro Fraser

picture of herself, with a group of other people, in the foyer of the Royal Court. It was the opening night of
The Entertainer
, quite an occasion. Olivier had actually asked to play that part… There was a man who had always known what was good for him, unlike a lot of actors she knew. She gazed at herself, remembering the rustling feel of that dress, her first Dior, very chic. That was something girls missed today – the sensuousness of petticoats, that feeling of femininity…She closed her eyes, suddenly recalling, for no particular reason, the scent of cologne, Four-seven-eleven, and rouge in those little round green cardboard pots. How funny. What days they had been, the days of Harry’s early success. The people they had met. Dylan Thomas, trying one of her Sobranie Black Russian cigarettes and then cadging half a dozen. Robert Helpmann – so courteous and kind to her at some party where she felt out of place. What had been the occasion? Was it with some of Harry’s bohemian friends? Probably. Not that Harry had stayed bohemian for long. After the huge success of
Foremost First
, which Michael Langham produced, Harry had bought his first car, a Vauxhall Sniper Gazelle, of all things. A thousand pounds, it had cost. An absolutely enormous sum of money in those days. She remembered driving to see that revue with Tommy Cooper and Shirley Bassey,
Blue Magic
, in the days when you could park just about anywhere in London in the evenings, and then for supper at a jazz club…
    No one ever told you, when you were young, that it wouldn’t last. Well, maybe they did, but you never listened, never believed. People would laugh, nowadays, at the suggestion that the fifties had ever been a time of glamour, of wonderful innocence mixed with perfect sophistication. For them, the decade was an Osbert Lancaster joke. But in certain innocent ways the fifties had been glamorous and shining. She knew. She had been there.
    The next day Adam spent the morning on the phone to two commissioning editors, trying to whip up a bit ofinterest in an idea for a series of articles on women’s prisons, and chasing up money for articles for which he hadn’t yet been paid. In some superstitious way, he didn’t want to eat into the large slice of the advance which presently sat in his bank account. What if he never finished this biography? The thought of having to pay the money back haunted him. It was difficult to find time for both the biography and his freelance work, but he had already determined that he would spend that afternoon following up the mystery man in the wedding photograph. He had a feeling that it might not be time wasted.
    Armed with the photograph, he set off for the London Library. Painstakingly he looked up books on fifties and sixties Soho, trying to assess which ones would produce most in the way of photographs. The list he finished up with was dispiritingly long, covering both biography and topography, and it took him some time, tramping through the echoing rows and stacks, to track down volumes which looked as though they would be any good.
    He sat in the hush of the reading room, turning the pages in search of photographs, soon feeling thoroughly nauseated by black-and-white fifties images of depressing streets, battered faces, smoky nightclubs and dreary pubs. Until he opened the fourth volume. He had hardly flicked through the first few pages, not much expecting to find anything, when there was a picture of his man, flanked by a very young Jeffrey Bernard with his coat collar turned up against the shiverings of another morning hangover, and Jeffrey’s brother, Bruce. Once again the anonymous man was staring directly at the camera in a defiant fashion, one that made everyone else in the photo redundant.
    Adam’s eyes flicked to the caption.
Bruce and Jeffrey Bernard with the photographer George Meacher
.
    George Meacher. The name rang bells, but not very clear ones. Perhaps he