by Ngaio Marsh
‘Upon this scene there enters, in the guise of a dresser,’ he jabbed his finger at the fly-blown glass, ‘this. Look at it. If I set out to draw the daughter or the young sister of the leading man, that is what I should draw. Everybody has a look at her and retires again into corners to ask what it is about. Because obviously, she is not a dresser. Is she perhaps—and there are many excited speculations. “A niece for a niece?” we ask ourselves, and there is some mention of Adam’s extreme youth, you must excuse me, and the wrong side of the rose bush, and everybody says it cannot be an accident and waits to see, except Papa Jacko whose curiosity will not permit him to wait.’
Martyn cried out, ‘I’ve never seen him before, except in films in New Zealand. He knows nothing about me at all. Nothing. I came here from New Zealand a fortnight ago and I’ve been looking for a job ever since. I came to the Vulcan looking for a job, that’s all there is about it.’
‘Did you come looking for the job of dresser to Miss Hamilton?’
‘For any job,’ she said desperately. ‘I heard by accident about the dresser.’
‘But it was not to be a dresser that you came all the way from New Zealand, and yet it was to work in the theatre, and so perhaps after all you hoped to be an actress.’
‘Yes,’ Martyn said, throwing up her hands, ‘all right, I hoped to be an actress. But please let’s forget all about it. You can’t imagine how thankful I am to be a dresser, and if you think I’m secretly hoping Miss Gainsford will get laryngitis or break her leg, you couldn’t be more mistaken. I don’t believe in fairy tales.’
‘What humbugs you all are.’
‘Who?’ she demanded indignantly.
‘All you Anglo-Saxons. You humbug even yourselves. Conceive for the moment the mise en scène, the situation, the coincidence, and have you the cheek to tell me again that you came thirteen thousand miles to be an actress and yet do not wish to play this part. Are you a good actress?’
‘Don’t,’ Martyn said, ‘don’t. I’ve got a job and I’m in a sort of a trance. It makes everything very simple and I don’t want to come out of it.’
Jacko grinned fiendishly. ‘Just a little touch of laryngitis?’ he suggested.
Martyn got up. ‘Thank you very much for my nice dinner,’ she said. ‘I ought to be getting on with my job.’
‘Little hypocrite. Or perhaps after all you know already you are a very bad actress.’
Without answering she walked out ahead of him, and they returned in silence to the Vulcan.
Timed to begin at seven, the dress-rehearsal actually started at ten-past eight. Miss Hamilton had no changes in the first act, and told Martyn she might watch from the front. She went out and sat at the back of the stalls near the other dressers.
Suddenly the lights went up along the fringe of the curtain. Martyn’s flesh began to creep. Throughout the auditorium other little flames sprang up, illuminating from below, like miniature footlights, the faces of the watchers in front. A remote voice said, ‘OK. Take it away,’ a band of gold appeared below the fringe of the curtain, widened and grew to a lighted stage. Parry Percival spoke the opening line of Dr Rutherford’s new play.
Martyn liked the first act. It concerned itself with the group of figures Jacko had already described—the old man, his son, his son’s wife, their daughter and her fiancé. They were creatures of convention, the wife alone possessed of some inclination to reach out beyond her enclosed and aimless existence.
Gay Gainsford’s entry as the daughter was a delayed one, and try as she might not to anticipate it, Martyn felt a sinking in her midriff when at last towards the end of the act Miss Gainsford came on. It was quite a small part but one of immense importance. Of the entire group the girl represented the third generation, the most completely lost, and in the writing of her part Rutherford displayed the influence of Existentialism. It was clear that with a few lines to carry her she must make her mark, and clever production was written over everything she did. Agitated as she was by Jacko’s direct attack, Martyn wondered if she only imagined that there was nothing more than production there, and if Miss Gainsford was really as ill at ease as she herself supposed. A specific gesture had been introduced and was evidently important, a sudden thrust of her fingers through her short hair, and she twice used a phrase: ‘That was not what I meant’ where in the context it was evidently intended to plant a barb of attention in the minds of the audience. When this moment came, Martyn sensed uneasiness among the actors. She glanced at Poole and saw him make the specific gesture he had given Miss Gainsford, a quick thrust of his fingers through his hair.
At this juncture the voice in the circle ejaculated: ‘Boo!’
‘Quiet!’ said Poole.
Miss Gainsford hesitated, looked wretchedly into the auditorium, and lost her words. She was twice prompted before she went on again. Bennington crossed the stage, put his arm about her shoulder and glared into the circle. The prompter once more threw out a line, Miss Gainsford repeated it and they were off again. Poole got up and went back-stage through the pass-door. The secretary leant forward and shakily lit one cigarette from the butt of another. For the life of her, Martyn couldn’t resist glancing at Jacko. He was slumped back in his stall with his arms folded—deliberately imperturbable, she felt—putting on an act. The light from the stage caught his emu-like head and as if conscious of her attention, he rolled his eyes round at her. She hastily looked back at the stage.
With Gay Gainsford’s exit, Martyn could have sworn, a wave of relaxation blessed the actors. The dialogue began to move forward compactly with a firm upward curve towards some well-designed climax. There was an increase in tempo corresponding with the rising suspense. Martyn’s blood tingled and her heart thumped. Through which door would the entrance be made? The players began a complex circling movement accompanied by a sharp crescendo in the dialogue. Up and up it soared. ‘Now,’ she thought, ‘now!’ The action of the play was held in suspense, poised and adjusted, and into the prepared silence, with judgement and precision, at the head of Jacko’s twisted flight of steps, came Adam Poole.
‘Is that an entrance,’ thought Martyn, pressing her hands together, ‘or is it an entrance?’
The curtain came down almost immediately. The secretary gathered his notes together and went backstage.
Dr Rutherford shouted: ‘Hold your horses,’ thundered out of the circle, reappeared in the stalls, and plunged through the pass-door to back-stage where he could be heard cruelly apostrophizing the Almighty and the actors. Jacko stretched elaborately and slouched down the centre aisle, saying into the air as he passed Martyn, ‘You had better get round for the change.’
Horrified, Martyn bolted like a rabbit. When she arrived in the dressing-room she found her employer, with a set face, attempting to unhook an elaborate back fastening. Martyn bleated an apology which was cut short.
‘I hope,’ said Miss Hamilton, ‘you haven’t mistaken the nature of your job, Martyn. You are my dresser and as such are expected to be here, in this dressing-room, whenever I return to it. Do you understand?’
Martyn, feeling very sick, said that she did, and with trembling fingers effected the complicated change. Miss Hamilton was completely silent, and to Martyn, humiliated and miserable, the necessary intimacies of her work were particularly mortifying.
A boy’s voice in the passage chanted: ‘Second Act, please. Second Act,’ and Miss Hamilton said, ‘Have you got everything on-stage for the quick change?’
‘I think so, madam.’
‘Very well.’ She looked at herself coldly and searchingly in the long glass and added, ‘I will go out.’
Martyn opened the door. Her employer glanced critically at her. ‘You’re as white as a sheet,’ she said, ‘what’s the matter?’
Martyn stammered, ‘Am I? I’m sorry, madam. It must have been the first act.’
‘Did you like it?’
‘Like it?’ Martyn repeated. ‘Oh, yes, I liked it.’
‘As much as that?
’ As easily as if she had passed from one room into another, Miss Hamilton re-entered her mood of enchantment. ‘What a ridiculous child you are,’ she said. ‘It’s only actresses who are allowed to have temperaments.’
She went out to the stage, and as Martyn followed her she was surprised to feel in herself a kind of resistance to this woman who could so easily command her own happiness or misery.
An improvised dressing-room had been built on the stage for the quick change, and in or near it Martyn spent the whole of the second act. She was not sure when the quick change came, and didn’t like to ask anybody. She therefore spent the first quarter of an hour on tenterhooks, hearing the dialogue, but not seeing anything of the play.
After a short introductory passage the act opened with a long scene between Helena Hamilton and Adam Poole in which their attraction to each other was introduced and established, and her instinctive struggle against her environment made clear and developed. The scene was admirably played by both of them, and carried the play strongly forward. When Miss Hamilton came off she found her dresser bright eyed and excited. Martyn effected the change without any blunders and in good time. Miss Hamilton’s attention seemed to be divided between her clothes and the scene which was now being played between J. G. Darcey, Poole and her husband. This scene built up into a quarrel between Poole and Bennington which at its climax was broken by Poole saying in his normal voice, ‘I dislike interrupting dress-rehearsals, Ben, but we’ve had this point over and over again. Please take the line as we rehearsed it.’
There was complete silence, perhaps for five seconds, and then, unseen, so that Martyn formed no picture of what he was doing or how he looked, Bennington began to giggle. The sound wavered and bubbled into a laugh. Helena Hamilton whispered: ‘Oh, my God!’ and went out to the stage. Martyn followed. A group of stage-hands who had been moving round the set stopped dead as if in suspended animation. Parry Percival, waiting off-stage, turned with a look of elaborate concern to Miss Hamilton and mimed bewilderment.
Bennington’s laughter broke down into ungainly speech. ‘I always say,’ he said, ‘there is no future in being an actor-manager unless you arrange things your own way. I want to make this chap a human being. You and John say he’s to be a monster. All right, all right, dear boy, I won’t offend again. He shall be less human than Caliban, and far less sympathetic.’
Evidently Poole was standing inside the entrance nearest to the dressing-room, because Martyn heard Bennington cross the stage and when he spoke again he was quite close to her, and had lowered his voice. ‘You’re grabbing everything, aren’t you?’ the voice wavered. ‘On—and off-stage, as you might say—domestically and professionally. The piratical Mr Poole.’
Poole muttered, ‘If you are not too drunk to think, we’ll go on,’ and pitching his voice, threw out a line of dialogue: ‘If you knew what you wanted, if there was any object, however silly, behind anything you say or do, I could find some excuse for you—’
Martyn heard Helena Hamilton catch her breath in a sob. The next moment she had flung open the door and made her entrance.
Through the good offices of Jacko, Martyn was able to watch the rest of the act from the side. Evidently he was determined she should see as much as possible of the play. He sent her round a list, scribbled in an elaborate hand, of the warnings and cues for Miss Hamilton’s entrances and exits and times when she changed her dress. ‘Stand in the OP corner,’ he had written across the paper, ‘and think of your sins.’ She wouldn’t have dared to follow his advice if Miss Hamilton, on her first exit, had not said with a sort of irritated good nature: ‘You needn’t wait in the dressing-room perpetually. Just be ready for me: that’s all.’
So she stood in the shadows of the OP corner and saw the one big scene between Adam Poole and Gay Gainsford. The author’s intention was clear enough. In this girl, the impure flower of her heredity, the most hopelessly lost of all the group, he sought to show the obverse side of the character Poole presented. She was his twisted shadow, a spiritual incubus. In everything she said and did the audience must see a distortion of Poole himself, until at the end they faced each other across the desk, as in the scene that had been photographed, and Helena Hamilton re-entered to speak the line of climax: ‘But it’s you, don’t you see? You can’t escape it. It’s you’ and the curtain came down.
Gay Gainsford was not good enough. It was not only that she didn’t resemble Poole closely; her performance was too anxious, too careful a reproduction of mannerisms without a flame to light them. Martyn burnt in her shadowy corner. The transparent covering in which, like a sea-creature, she had spent her twenty-four hours’ respite, now shrivelled away and she was exposed to the inexorable hunger of an unsatisfied player.
She didn’t see Bennington until he put his hand on her arm as the curtain came down, and he startled her so much that she cried out and backed away from him.
‘So you think you could do it, dear, do you?’ he said.
Martyn stammered: ‘I’m sorry. Miss Hamilton will want me,’ and dodged past him towards the improvised dressing-room. He followed and with a conventionally showy movement, barred her entrance.
‘Wait a minute, wait a minute,’ he said. ‘I want to talk to you.’
She stood there, afraid of him, conscious of his smell of greasepaint and alcohol and thinking him a ridiculous as well as an alarming person.
‘I’m so angry,’ he said conversationally, ‘just literally so angry that I’m afraid you’re going to find me quite a difficult man. And now we’ve got that ironed out perhaps you’ll tell me who the bloody hell you are.’
‘You know who I am,’ Martyn said desperately. ‘Please let me go in.’
‘M’wife’s dresser?’
He took her chin in his hand and twisted her face to the light. Poole came round the back of the set. Martyn thought: ‘He’ll be sick of the sight of me. Always getting myself into stupid little scenes.’ Bennington’s hand felt wet and hot round her chin.
‘M’wife’s dresser,’ he repeated. ‘And m’wife’s lover’s little by-blow. That the story?’
The edge of Poole’s hand dropped on his arm. ‘In you go,’ he said to Martyn, and twisted Bennington away from the door. Martyn slipped through and he shut it behind her. She heard him say: ‘You’re an offensive fellow in your cups, Ben. We’ll have this out after rehearsal. Get along and change for the third act.’
There was a moment’s pause. The door opened and he looked in.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
‘Perfectly, thank you,’ Martyn said and in an agony of embarrassment added, ‘I’m sorry to be a nuisance, sir.’
‘Oh, don’t be an ass,’ he said with great ill-humour. The next moment he had gone.
Miss Hamilton, looking desperately worried, came in to change for the third act.
The dress-rehearsal ended at midnight in an atmosphere of acute tension. Because she had not yet been paid, Martyn proposed to sleep again in the greenroom. So easily do our standards adjust themselves to our circumstances that whereas on her first night at the Vulcan the greenroom had been a blessed haven, her hours of precarious security had bred a longing for a bed and ordered cleanliness, and she began to dread the night.
In groups and singly, the actors and stage-staff drifted away. Their voices died out in the alley and passages, and she saw, with dismay, that Fred Badger had emerged from the door of his cubby-hole and now eyed her speculatively. Desolation and fear possessed Martyn. With a show of preoccupation, she hurried away to Miss Hamilton’s dressing-room which she had already set in order. Here she would find a moment’s respite. Perhaps in a few minutes she would creep down the passage and lock herself in the empty room and wait there until Fred Badger had gone his rounds. He would think she had found a lodging somewhere and left the theatre. She opened the door of Miss Hamilton’s room and went in.
Adam Poole was sitting in front of the gas-fire.
Martyn stammered, ‘I’m sorry,’ and ma
de for the door.
‘Come in,’ he said and stood up. ‘I want to see you for a moment.’
‘Well,’ Martyn thought sickly, ‘this is it. I’m to go.’
He twisted the chair round and ordered rather than invited her to sit in it. As she did so she thought: ‘I won’t be able to sleep here tonight. When he’s sacked me I’ll get my suitcase and ask my way to the nearest women’s hostel. I’ll walk alone through the streets and when I get there the hostel will be shut.’
He had turned his back to her and seemed to be examining something on the dressing-shelf.
‘I would very much rather have disregarded this business,’ he said irritably, ‘but I suppose I can’t. For one thing, someone should apologize to you for Bennington’s behaviour. He’s not likely to do it for himself.’
‘It really didn’t matter.’
‘Of course it mattered,’ he said sharply. ‘It was insufferable. For both of us.’
She was too distressed to recognize as one of pleasure the small shock this last phrase gave her.
‘You realize, of course, how this nonsense started,’ he was saying. ‘You’ve seen something of the play. You’ve seen me. It’s not a matter for congratulation, I dare say, but you’re like enough to be my daughter. You’re a New Zealander, I understand. How old are you?’
