by Ian Sansom
‘So it’s a sixteenth-century barn,’ began Mr Hudson as we arrived, ‘typical of its age—’
‘Fifteenth century,’ said Mrs Hudson.
‘Sixteenth century,’ insisted Mr Hudson.
‘Parts of it are fifteenth century,’ said Mrs Hudson.
‘But it’s mostly sixteenth century,’ continued Mr Hudson. ‘No foundations, obviously, when we began, so we had to remove the stone walls and the plinth—’
‘Blue Lias plinth,’ said Mrs Hudson.
‘The Blue Lias plinth,’ agreed Mr Hudson, ‘and restore the frame—’
‘The oak frame,’ said Mrs Hudson. ‘And the east end constructed in Coldwaltham sandstone, with galleting.’
‘Roof redone,’ said Mr Hudson.
‘Hand-made clay peg tiles,’ said Mrs Hudson.
‘You note the catslide roof,’ said Mr Hudson.
‘Excellent,’ said Morley. ‘Wonderful.’ In The County Guides, he describes the Hudsons’ barn as ‘one of the finest surviving barns in Sussex’. It was doubtless one of the most expensive – not least because inside its fully reconstructed exterior, the barn was a fully functioning proscenium arch theatre.
‘Goodness me,’ said Morley, as we made our way through the big restored barn doors. ‘This is quite extraordinary.’
‘Well, it’s not quite La Scala or the Estates Theatre in Prague,’ said Mr Hudson.
‘Look at this, though!’ said Morley, throwing out his arms in a gesture of appreciation and wonder. ‘In a barn!’ He threw his arms even wider. ‘In Sussex!’ And wider still, as if he might scoop the whole place up and embrace it.
‘Well, we’ve been very lucky,’ said Mr Hudson. ‘We’ve been able to achieve most of what we hoped.’
Most of what the Hudsons hoped looked to me exactly like a West End theatre: a large stage and raked seating in place of the threshing hall.
‘I thought it might simply be benches,’ said Morley.
‘Ah yes, the seats, yes. We were tremendously lucky with the seating,’ said Mr Hudson. ‘They were refurbishing a music hall in Brighton and we managed to snap up a lot of the fixtures and fittings. The seating, some of the lighting. The curtains, of course.’
At the west end of the barn was the raised wooden stage, with billowing red curtains forming the wings. Beyond the wings, linked to the barn from the backstage area was a one-storey building that housed the dressing rooms and a green room, and which had been converted from an old icehouse and a slaughterhouse, completely disassembled and reassembled ‘brick by brick’, according to Mr Hudson.
‘Stone by stone,’ said Mrs Hudson.
It was an incredible achievement: built with money, obviously, but clearly imagined and created with love and imagination.
Back in the barn, the arrival of the Hudsons had excited sudden and frantic activity among the various stagehands, technical staff, singers, costumiers, musicians and others who had previously been lounging and lurking in the shadows. Scenery was being hauled on- and offstage. Costumes – ball gowns, mostly, and the inevitable operatic doublets and hose – were being flung around and fitted on performers’ bodies. Lights were being hoisted on pulleys. Stage directions were being issued. Instruments were being tooted, plucked and honked upon. Basically, lots of operatic-type stuff was happening.
‘You’ll excuse me,’ Henry announced to our assembled company. ‘Time to clock on.’
‘Of course,’ said Mr Hudson. ‘The work of a set designer is never done.’
Molly had already disappeared, in a puff of perfume and a billow of her cloak, in the direction of the dressing rooms.
‘One forgets sometimes,’ said Morley, ‘that the opera is in fact an even more labour-intensive and demanding activity than the theatre.’
‘Oh one does, Father, yes,’ agreed Miriam, who was avoiding looking at me or indeed acknowledging my presence in any way. ‘It’s like working in a coal mine.’
In front of the stage there was a large trestle table set up, where Fritz had joined a group of others in intense discussion.
‘We’re lucky, we’re just in time for the probe,’ said Mr Hudson, lowering his voice.
‘The probe?’ I said quietly.
‘Ja, a probe,’ said Morley. ‘It’s what they call a rehearsal in German, Sefton.’
‘Ah.’
‘Or prova, in Italiano,’ said Mrs Hudson.
‘Of course,’ I said.
‘Both words, in both languages, suggesting “trying” or “testing”, I think,’ Morley clarified.
‘Very good,’ I said.
‘I was lucky some years ago to sit through the entire process of the production of The Marriage of Figaro, in St Petersburg,’ said Morley.
‘At the Mikhailovsky?’ said Mr Hudson.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Morley.
‘Oh, how wonderful,’ said Mr Hudson.
‘You might take a note actually, Sefton, for the book.’
I produced my trusty notebook.
‘So,’ he explained, ‘in any production, there’s the leseprobe.’
‘It’s all in German?’
‘Many of the processes and procedures have been codified and described in German, Sefton, yes, of course. Rehearsals are an art in and of themselves.’
‘Of course.’ During my time at college I had dabbled in amateur theatricals – farce mostly. Our rehearsals had always had the air of a sort of jolly jape, the director working haphazardly through any problems over a few drinks. It was all rather clubbable. Here, it felt rather more like a circus or a factory, with people working alongside, around and almost on top of one another in order to get things done.
‘Leseprobe, you’ve got that, Sefton?’
‘Yes, Mr Morley.’
‘The reading rehearsal, and then there’s the sitzprobe, the sitting rehearsal and now, what we have here, is the FD.’
‘FD?’
‘Final dress.’
‘That’s in English?’ I said.
‘Correct,’ said Mr Hudson.
‘And after that the production is frozen,’ said Mrs Hudson.
‘Frozen?’
‘Whatever you see at the FD,’ said Mr Hudson, ‘should be what you see on opening night – though between ourselves I can recall a few cases in which problems at the FD meant that the show could not be performed in front of paying audiences.’
‘Really?’ said Morley.
‘It’s very rare, of course,’ said Mr Hudson. ‘One usually says that the singer is ill or something similar. You know, a kidney infection or some such.’
‘Well,’ said Morley. ‘I never knew.’
‘Ssshhhh,’ said Fritz, in our direction.
‘Molly’s amazing,’ said Mr Hudson. ‘We’re so lucky to have her.’
There was silence as everyone shifted into position. Mrs Hudson excused herself while Morley, Miriam and I settled down in the front row of the stalls with Mr Hudson, close to the orchestra, which I was surprised to discover consisted of no more than about a dozen or so musicians.
‘We’ve had to go for reduced orchestration,’ said Mr Hudson to Morley.
‘Of course,’ said Morley.
‘We’re not quite a full opera house yet.’
‘No, no, quite understandable,’ said Morley.
To a man – and men they all were – the musicians looked as though they hadn’t slept for several weeks and they were wearing both the clothes and the expressions to suit. Typical musicians. The music began with a thundering chord, though – as it turned out – not nearly thundering enough. No sooner had the poor blighters’ fingers and lips hit their instruments than Fritz leapt to his feet.
‘Darker!’ he cried. ‘Darker! We have discussed this already, yes?’ Molly had explained in the car on the way from Brighton that the company had already spent a week or two in London working together, talking through how the music might work in the context of the staging, and how everything was now set. ‘We must begin in darkness, as
we end in darkness.’
‘He’s quite right,’ said Morley, leaning across to me and speaking quietly. ‘It is a very dark ending. You know the opera, of course?’
‘Not perhaps as well as I would like,’ I said, havering.
‘The first note needs to come to us, yes?’ continued Fritz. ‘It needs to come directly to us. It needs to pierce us, yes?’ He indicated the nature of a note coming to us and piercing us by jabbing at his heart with his fingers. The musicians then duly produced the opening chord again, rather heavier and louder, which I suppose might be interpreted as being piercing, and then moved into a Mozarty misterioso sort of sequence.
‘We are in the garden of the Commendatore,’ whispered Morley to me.
‘Right.’
A man appeared onstage, in the obligatory doublet and hose, looking rather shifty.
‘This is Leporello,’ said Morley, ‘Don Giovanni’s servant. He is complaining about his master and daydreaming about being free of him: Notte e giorno faticar. “Night and day I slave away.” The complaint about the master of course being a tradition that stretches back to the commedia dell’arte.’
‘And which persists to this day,’ I said.
‘Indeed,’ said Morley. ‘He is keeping watch while Don Giovanni is in the Commendatore’s house attempting to seduce the Commendatore’s daughter, Donna Anna. Now, Don Giovanni enters, pursued by Donna Anna.’
Don Giovanni did indeed enter, pursued by Molly in wig and gown as Donna Anna.
‘Don Giovanni is masked here, you see,’ said Morley. ‘And Donna Anna tries to unmask him, shouting for help.’
‘Non sperar, se non m’uccidi, Ch’io ti lasci fuggir mai!’ sang Molly, or something similar.
‘“Do not hope, unless you kill me, that I shall ever let you run away!”’ Morley translated.
‘Gosh,’ I said.
Don Giovanni then broke free of Donna Anna’s clutches, ran offstage, with her following, only to appear back onstage moments later, followed by—
‘The Commendatore,’ said Morley.
It was the black American from the Hudsons’ dinner playing the Commendatore and I have to say that his stentorian denunciation of Don Giovanni was really rather magnificent. If I’d been reviewing the opera, I’d already have identified the star.
As far as I could tell – although I have to admit by now I was already becoming rather bored – what happened next was that Don Giovanni killed the Commendatore, escaped with Leporello, Donna Anna returned onstage with her fiancé, Don Ottavio, was horrified to see her father lying dead and made Don Ottavio swear vengeance against the masked murderer, Don Giovanni. And this was the end of the action-packed first scene.
‘Well, what do you think?’ said Morley.
‘It is certainly rather dark,’ I said.
But not dark enough for Fritz, who was once again up on his feet issuing instructions to the cast, who had gathered together onstage.
‘Good, good, yes it is good, but it is too tentative, too too tentative, too dry, too nice, yes? You have the toe in the water, but the whole body must be in the water, yes?’
Don Giovanni and Donna Anna and the others all nodded yes, as if this body in the water reference made any actual sense. To me, it seemed like a horror. I saw Lizzie Walter’s face, the thin shoelace around her neck, everything fragile about her destroyed.
‘We need more tone, more fullness, more resonance, yes?’
Again, they all nodded.
‘It needs to come to me. It needs to pierce me.’
At which piercing moment, Mrs Hudson came howling into the barn.
‘Henry’s been taken away!’ she screamed.
‘What on earth’s happening?’ said Mr Hudson, leaping up.
‘Henry’s been taken away!’ repeated Mrs Hudson. ‘For the murder of a young woman.’
‘What?’
Up onstage, Molly fainted. Miriam ran outside. And I turned to Morley, who had already disappeared.
CHAPTER 22
AFTER THE HULLABALOO at the Hudsons’, Morley, Miriam and I drove back to Lewes in the Lagonda in complete and deadly silence. It was dark and it was cold. It was definitely November. The Downs no longer seemed so warm and welcoming: they seemed instead like a bad omen altogether. On the way to Lewes only yesterday, Morley had gone into raptures over the Downs: ‘The Downs in many ways are Sussex,’ he had enthused to Molly and to Miriam and to me, and indeed in The County Guides: Sussex he writes, in characteristic ebullient fashion, that ‘We might visit any of this country’s great counties and there find mighty forests and great rivers – any county in this great nation is blessed with such. But the Downs, the Downs belong to Sussex and to Sussex alone. You might perhaps find a verdant turf-covered chalk hill elsewhere, but nowhere are they as smooth and as easy, as calm and as spacious, as warm and as welcoming as the Sussex Downs.’ There is a particular prospect, he goes so far as to claim in the book, up around Plumpton Plain, ‘which I think may be the finest view in the whole of Europe’. (He made similar claims, it should be said, in other books, about various prospects and vistas from Land’s End to John O’Groats.) Only hours before he had been quizzing Miriam and me on the ‘great hymned’ Downs and the famous lines by Galsworthy: ‘Oh! the Downs high to the cool sky;/ And the feel of the sun-warmed moss;/ And each cardoon, like a full moon,/ Fairy-spun of the thistle floss.’
There were no hymns to thistle floss this evening. That night, it seemed to me that Dr Johnson had the Downs about right, quoted in Sussex by Morley only for the purposes of refutation: ‘a country so truly desolate that if one had a mind to hang oneself for desperation at being obliged to live there, it would be difficult to find a tree on which to fasten a rope.’ That night, the great humps and mounds of Sussex seemed like morbid symptoms of some terrible underlying disease.
Morley said only two words on the whole of the journey back, to correct Miriam when she referred to the ancient pathways that criss-crossed the landscape.
‘Cross-dykes,’ he said.
Somehow the words seemed to match our mood.
Mrs Hudson’s shock announcement in the theatre had been followed initially by hysteria, then by confusion, high emotions, some heated exchanges with the local constabulary, and then stunned silence and outrage, after which we all retreated – cast, musicians, stagehands and all – to the comparative safety of the Hudsons’ drawing room, where Mr Hudson loudly demanded of no one in particular which of his staff had spoken to the police, Mrs Hudson kept herself busy directing the dispensing of port, brandy, whisky and hot tea with lemon for Morley, and Molly desperately, operatically begged all of us to assist her in freeing Henry and clearing his name.
Over the course of several hours of shared conversations, and some shooter’s sandwiches, a couple of large raised pork pies, some little Sussex churdles (‘Made with hot-water-crust pastry,’ explained the mustachioed butler; ‘The working man’s pastry!’ exclaimed Morley), a Ten-to-One Pie, and lashings of something called shackle, a vegetable soup – the Hudsons not being ones to under-cater, even during the most difficult circumstances – the exact nature of the relationship between Henry and Lizzie Walter slowly emerged. Lizzie had been one of the volunteers working with Henry on the set design, a close relationship had formed over the weeks of preparation, they had spent some time together the previous evening at the Bonfire Night, apparently, after which Lizzie had disappeared, only to turn up at Pells Pool earlier that morning. There seemed to be no doubting the basic facts. The problem was establishing exactly what had happened, if anything had happened, between the pair between the hours of about 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. I was questioned more thoroughly by the Hudsons, Molly, Morley, Miriam and everyone else involved in the opera than I had been by the Lewes police, frankly, and by about ten o’clock I was so exhausted that I suggested to Morley that we retire for the night.
It was almost eleven by the time we arrived back at the hotel. Morley went straight to bed: he said he had books to read and re
view. Even his usual good humour seemed to have been shaken by events.
‘Goodnight, Mr Morley,’ I said.
‘Mmm,’ he replied, which was perhaps the shortest sentence I ever heard him utter.
‘Sefton, I want a word with you,’ said Miriam, as I was about to go up to my room.
‘A word, Miriam? Will it not wait till tomorrow? It has been rather a long day.’
‘Now,’ she said.
She guided me firmly by the elbow towards the hotel’s residents’ lounge, which was entirely deserted and in darkness, lit only by the dying embers of the fire.
‘So?’ I said. ‘You really do want a word.’
‘Yes. I do.’
‘I hope it’s important.’
She settled herself onto a chaise by the window, her face illuminated strangely, cinematically one might say, by the fire and the streetlights outside. She looked … my mind drifted, as so often, towards memories of Hedy Lamarr in a film I had seen in Soho some years previously.
‘If it’s about the dog—’
‘It’s not about the bloody dog, Sefton.’ She produced from her purse her favourite – Cartier – cigarette case, another gift from an admirer. The Persian-looking geometric patterns – lapis lazuli, gold? – caught the light. She produced a cigarette, without offering me one. ‘Of course it’s not about the dog.’ Lit the cigarette. ‘A young woman’s dead, for goodness sake.’
