Plays 6
Page 29
Vera (a wail) Oh Jesus, help me!
Peter Do you know how God punishes ingratitude?
Vera Oh Mother Queen of Heaven!
Peter He punishes ingratitude by –
Vera (still in tears) No, no, no, I’m not a child, you won’t wear me down or bully me with your talk or bringing God into it! Do you know what he (Ivan) says about you? He says your words would rot a person.
Anna joins the scene. She avoids eye contact with Peter.
Anna (to Ulita) I’ll just have a cup of tea. (To Ivan and Vera.) Good morning, good morning!
Vera retires.
Peter And no ‘good morning’ for me? (He kisses her.)
Anna Always kissing.
Peter You aren’t a stranger.
Anna I’m your niece.
Ivan (discards his ledger and whatever else) I don’t think I’m needed here any more.
On his way out he sees Arina and he stops for a moment to shake his head at her (‘You shouldn’t have handed over your property’), then a bow:
Ivan Ma’am. (And he’s gone.)
Peter Ah, dear friend Mama! (To Ulita.) Take morning tea to the mistress. Little Miss Madam thinks she’s leaving us today! In such a hurry to be off, and what is haste for?
Anna (mock airily, lightly) Lent is over, the theatres are opening up again!
Peter Haste is for catching fleas. The trouble I take for people, to arrange things so that they’ll be snug. In bed last night I was praying, asking God what we should do about our Anna, and kind God said, ‘Take your Anna by her plump little waist and hold her to your heart!’ And further, kind God said – I wrote it down. (He takes a note from his pocket and gives it to her.) Here, Miss, read it.
She looks at it. He watches her recoil from it.
And haste is what’s needed if there’s a fire in the house . . . I’ve been meaning to say to you, Anna, your grandmother and I don’t like the way you live.
Anna (mock airily) Not enough, Grandma, Uncle, to say you don’t like it, you must point a way out for me. That’s why I came home!
Peter Live here.
Anna (wryly) Don’t tempt me.
Vera rejoins the scene through the following.
Peter It’s soldiers she wants. We’re not good enough for her. She prefers going round from fair to fair with her guitar.
Anna What’re you talking about?
Peter Or is it a tambourine? With your sullen sister. Playacting for soldier boys and other riff-raff, having them look at you.
Anna (I) Don’t want to say anything unpleasant now.
Peter Having them touch you.
Anna You’re ridiculous!
Peter Oh?
Anna You talk terrible nonsense – have always done! – and insist on it too.
Peter She doesn’t like what I say!
Anna I don’t!
And she yields to a perverse compulsion to laugh at him. Which is followed by a harsh, coarse laughing sound – a rattle – from Vera at Peter, a complement to Anna’s laugh.
Peter The truth isn’t to your taste!
Another coarse laughing sound from Vera. He would enlist Arina’s assistance.
Peter Mama? (No help from Arina. To Anna.) Well then, you must forgive me but I am a plain-spoken man. I tell the truth and I expect to hear it back from others.
Anna (under the above) ‘Que j’aime, que j’aime, que j’aime!’
Peter If I’m asked to speak what isn’t true, I may feel sorry for you but I have to refuse.
Anna Do you really pretend to mean that?
Peter I never have to think things over. It’s my training – the seminary, and what I’ve understood and learned at my mother’s knee.
Anna Fine: we won’t say another word about it. (She directs the next to Arina.) There’s a paper, papers, a deed here for the farm – the mountain – that you want me to sign. Is this it? (She picks it up and a pen.)
Peter And be so kind as to take it with you and have your sister sign it.
Anna (to herself) My sullen sister . . . Grandma, Uncle, that won’t be necessary. One less annoyance for you, worry for you, nuisance, one less burden, one less hungry mouth to feed, one less vile useless creature, spawn of a shameful mother and a soldier boy. Bastard imp? (She signs the document. She’s quite dispassionate in the following. She has grown up.) Life for actresses touring the provinces is tricky. Specially if they are untrained, and especially if they have no sense of self-worth. And, hang it all, Uncle, Grandma, life really has to be about more than a struggle to protect one’s treasure. And men can be liberal, depending on the goods. So! (‘So!’ meaning, ‘We had a royal good time.’) But it all can go wrong. So astray, out of hand, that it got to the point where it became clear that I and my sister ought to die. And my sullen sister said, ‘Let’s get on with it then, let’s give it a hand.’ I said, ‘Let’s go home.’ No. She hated here, now more than ever. And though she did, she had, I knew, a longing, somewhere in her heart, to live in the place that she detested. We are young ladies, I told her, we have property, family graves. No, she kept on remembering that she was useless and that she was vile. She knew about phosphorus, the stuff they put on the tips of matches. I agreed. And we got all these matches and we got the phosphorus off the tips. She made a solution. I agreed. She inhaled the stuff, then she drank it. I hesitated with mine. She had drunk the stuff, I still hesitated, and she was dying. Drink it, drink it, you fucking bitch. I couldn’t. I couldn’t. She’s buried by the roadside as is the custom.
Peter And I don’t like the way you talk to your elders.
Anna Do you really mean to say you understand nothing?
Peter . . . Mama?
Arina (laughs into herself) Why am I still alive? . . . (Another fatalistic laugh into herself.) There’s something more to come?
Anna is putting on a coat. Vera would join her grievance to Anna’s, but it comes out as a whimper.
Vera Curse of hell on them, Miss Anna.
Anna I shall never come here again. It’s terrifying to be near you. There’s nothing I’ll have any regrets for here. (She leaves.)
Peter (calls after her) Silly! Silly! There she goes! Dull, dull, ‘It’s so dull here’ and she can’t say why! (He has followed her off.) She could have lived here with her uncle and old granny, but she has a mind of her own and that’s what a mind of her own has brought her to . . .
Vera (to Arina) Better that my father had cut my throat there and then than send me down here to work for you.
From the time of Anna’s leaving, Vera is again in tears. The emptiness of the place makes her more forlorn. And now a low wail:
Vera Oh Lord God Our Saviour . . . Oh Jesus, what am I to do . . . Mother Queen of Heaven . . . Oh Jesus . . .
Absently or through habit, she has started to clear and tidy the table. Ulita is coming in to assist in this work, her face again showing its disapproval of Vera’s behaviour, and a ‘Tck!’ And Vera holds up a knife as a warning of what she is capable of, and Ulita, knowing what’s best for her, retreats.
Vera sits down carelessly.
Arina, at a remove watches, waits, with a kind of fascination/ expectation of what’s next.
Vera (to no one) Mickelson’s housekeeper sits with her hands folded. She hardly has to do a tap of work. The master never flings a bad word her way. Nor she at him. He has her all dressed up. He doesn’t keep reminding her of what he gives her father. Bag of flour, bag oats, bag potatoes, bag, bag. He doesn’t pester her.
Peter (off, overlapping the last) Truth isn’t to her liking! She has a mind of her own! She – (He has come in. He sees Vera.) You whore! This won’t do! You whore! Is this the plan Jesus has for your life? Is it any use talking to you? Get along with you and get on with your work! I don’t know where you’ve learned these tricks but they must stop at –
Vera Silk! Silk!
When she says the last, he is almost at her side, standing just behind her. She doesn’t look back, her action is like that of someone putting away
a nuisance article: two backward thrusts of her hand, which still holds the knife she picked up earlier, stabbing him. He collapses. She continues talking, and leaves slowly through her speech.
He does nothing to annoy her. My dear, my darling, to each other I suppose. I wish I could have a good look at how sweethearts spend their time. Arm in arm I suppose, they walk through the house, into this room and that. And stopping to admire each other, look into each other’s eyes . . .
Arina has witnessed it all and sensed the emergence of her ghosts through the above. Lena now, too, has joined Victor, Steven and Paul. Now they have come forward; they are restive and vocally fitful. A cacophony. Victor, declaiming the Lermontov poem below, overlaps Vera’s last speech. Paul breaks into his ‘rambling’ speeches, as in Act Two, Scene Five: ‘Property, land . . . She sold her soul . . . She could easily have done something worthwhile with her life.’ Lena does her version of ‘Ah! Ah! Que j’aime’, or something from ‘An Old-Fashioned Colonel’. And Steven says ‘What a waste of life’, and tells the story below. All are the product of a disordered mind: Arina’s.
Victor
A lonely sail shows white
Out in the blue mist of the sea!
What does he seek so far away?
Why has he left his own country?’
Steven And another man told me of a man that knew a magic word. And if that man asked his mother for money and she refused, he’d say the magic word. (Then) Her eyes would bulge, arms, legs, go shooting out, her whole body into spasms of the most violent convulsions that would not stop, nor abate, until she’d forked out to him.
Victor
Alas, he seeks not fortune,
Nor leaves he happiness behind!
But rebelliously he seeks out storms
As though in storms his peace to find!
Steven It’s perfectly true.
Arina has made her slow, tired way out through them. Now, joined by Peter, they follow her.
Scene Two
Arina is coming in.
Arina If anyone’s expecting me to cry, expect again!
As in Scene One, it’s a cavernous place, only that it now appears to be an exterior. Day. As in Scene One, Arina looks self-possessed, able, erect and, if anything, younger. This image of her former self also comes from her disordered mind. She is dying but she will not see herself on a deathbed. She thinks she’s going home, walking to the mountain and climbing it.
She thought only about money, property, sold her soul, became a tyrant, cared nothing about her children – Enough insults, stupidity! She restored the fortunes of the family she married into, doubled them, changed the names of the lands she conquered – ‘Arina’ – and that’s failure, that’s a waste of life! (She nods in the direction ahead of her.) Up there I’m going. (She wipes her forehead.) Now they’re plastering her with oil, sprinkling cold water on her face, ‘Oh my God I’m heartily sorry’, in her ear, ‘Confess, repent, that you may receive salvation’, pestering her to death! I’m going home. Like I’ve been for so long promising myself. And she doesn’t want anyone hunting her!
The last as she checks behind her for pursuers. Then on again.
It wasn’t by lickerishness that anyone from up here made out. Or by going on the razzle either. What age was she when she came down to work for the windmill’s family? Her father’d done a deal with them for her. Thirteen, fourteen? Thereabouts. Did she cry then, whinge? That family’d lost most of what they had one time by that time, were losing more and no doubt in time would lose the lot. No greed left in them, which is a thing difficult to revere. And they thought she was a fool, because she let them.
She checks behind her again.
Then the young windmill started to waylay her. She never knew when he’d pounce, or where: Till, mind you, times, her heart’d be in her mouth waiting for the ambush. Which led of course to a change in her figure.
In all, she had four children, five miscarriages. Two grandchildren. Three.
But where is the understanding of empty-headed drunkards? I’d like to know. What was she to do? Things were out of hand. Let things go from bad to worse? – To nothing? Someone had to take over, full control. She took over. Full control. And I hate uselessness. And when the time came, she took on the bigger world. What was she to do? Watch chances rot, leave openings to the invader? She took on – seized – the bigger world, man’s world, of trading, business, dealing. No laughing matter, the excitement of it was frightening, the delight of being on a knife edge: Lord, Christ, Marvellous, Yes!
There is nobody can or is able to stop me! There is nothing I can’t do!
(I was) Tough? D’you think innocence stands a chance? And, do you, for a woman? Show your feelings and you’ll soon discover what softness can expect of male or any other kind of gallantry.
What something otherwise should she, could she, ought she, so worthwhile, so easily have done with her life? I’d still like to know about that one too.
She is checking behind her again. The absence of pursuers, her family, contrary to what she protests, now seems to be agitating her, disappointing her, making her angry and emotional.
And she cared nothing about her children? She saw that you were schooled, educated in what, yes, she thought would best suit each of you! Decisions. If she had doubts, who to share them with? She led by and set them an example of what could be done. What did the tyrant want in return? What was the deal? To be told she’d sold her soul? To see her determination used as the excuse for your weakness?! . . . I showed you as much love as was safe! Love is love, goes without saying, it doesn’t need frills – frills put a lie to it – love is deciding to take your next breath, love is life . . . (A lull.) And she’d love to grow old . . . She was watchful, feared for them – showed them as much of that too as she dared, lest fear, any defect in her be handed down. What did she want in return for herself? (She is shouting.) Each one of you to be better than me! . . . And maybe I’d be at peace. And I’d need envy no one. And I’d want nothing. And I’d need fear nothing . . . And don’t.
The last in reaction to becoming aware of her complete isolation and that it does not frighten her. The light is closing in around her.
. . . And don’t . . . What a waste of life? I don’t think so . . . Repent, confess, oh my God I’m heartily sorry? I don’t think so . . . In any case, that deal is to come. Between me and Him . . . It’s not that I’m going to enforce a claim on salvation. I won’t. Maybe I don’t even deserve it. But I’ll get it.
And she’s gone.
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