by Ngaio Marsh
‘Nineteen, sir.’
‘You needn’t bother to pepper your replies with this “sir” business. It’s not in character and it’s entirely unconvincing. I’m thirty-eight. I toured New Zealand in my first job twenty years ago, and Bennington was in the company. That, apparently, is good enough for him. Under the circumstances I hope you won’t mind my asking you who your parents are and where you were born.’
‘I’ve no objection whatever,’ said Martyn with spirit. ‘My father was Martyn Tarne. He was the son and grandson of a high-country run-holder—a sheep-farmer—in the South Island. He was killed on Crete.’
He turned and looked directly at her for the first time since she had come into the room.
‘I see. And your mother?’
‘She’s the daughter of a run-holder in the same district?’
‘Do you mind telling me her maiden name, if you please?’
Martyn said: ‘I don’t see what good this will do.’
‘Don’t you, indeed? Don’t you, after all, resent the sort of conjecture that’s brewing among these people?’
‘I certainly haven’t the smallest desire to be thought your daughter.’
‘And I couldn’t agree more. Good Lord!’ he said. ‘This is a fat-headed way for us to talk. Why don’t you want to tell me your mother’s maiden name? What was the matter with it?’
‘She always thought it sounded silly. It was Paula Poole Passington.’
He brought the palm of his hand down crisply on the back of her chair. ‘And why in the world,’ he asked, ‘couldn’t you say so at once?’ Martyn was silent. ‘Paula Poole Passington,’ he repeated. ‘All right. An old cousin of my father’s—cousin Paula—married someone called Passington and disappeared. I suppose to New Zealand. Why didn’t she look me up when I went out there?’
‘I believe she didn’t care for theatricals,’ said Martyn. ‘She was my grandmother. The connection is really quite distant.’
‘You might at least have mentioned it.’
‘I preferred not to.’
‘Too proud?’
‘If you like,’ she said desperately.
‘Why did you come to England?’
‘To earn my living.’
‘As a dresser?’ She was silent. ‘Well?’ he said.
‘As best I could.’
‘As an actress? Oh, for God’s sake,’ he added, ‘it’s damnably late and I’ll be obliged if you’ll behave reasonably. I may tell you I’ve spoken to Jacko. Don’t you think you’re making an ass of yourself? All this mystery act!’
Martyn got up and faced him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s a silly business but it’s not an act. I didn’t want to make a thing of it. I joined an English touring company in New Zealand a year ago and they took me on with them to Australia.’
‘What company was this? What parts did you play?’
She told him.
‘I heard about the tour,’ he said. ‘They were a reasonably good company.’
‘They paid quite well and I did broadcasting too. I saved up enough to keep me in England for six months and got a job as an assistant children’s minder in a ship. Perhaps I should explain that my father lost pretty well everything in the slump, and we are poor people. I had my money in traveller’s cheques and the day we landed they were stolen out of my bag, together with my letters of introduction. The bank will probably be able to stop them and let me have it back but until they decide, I’m hard up. That’s all.’
‘How long have you been here?’
‘A fortnight.’
‘Where have you tried?’
‘Agencies. All the London theatres, I think.’
‘This one last? Why?’
‘One of them had to be last.’
‘Did you know of this—connection—as you call it?’
‘Yes. My mother knew of it.’
‘And the resemblance?’
‘I—we saw your pictures—people sometimes said—’ They looked at each other, warily, with guarded interest.
‘And you deliberately fought shy of this theatre because you knew I was playing here?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you know about this piece? The girl’s part?’
Martyn was beginning to be very tired. A weariness of spirit and body seeped up through her being in a sluggish tide. She was near to tears and thrust her hand nervously through her short hair. He made some kind of ejaculation and she said at once: ‘I didn’t mean to do that.’
‘But you knew about the part when you came here?’
‘There’s a lot of gossip at the agencies when you’re waiting. A girl I stood next to in the queue at Garnet Marks’ told me they wanted someone at the Vulcan who could be made up to look like you. She’d got it all muddled up with yesterday’s auditions for the touring company in another piece.’
‘So you thought you’d try?’
‘Yes. I was a bit desperate by then. I thought I’d try.’
‘Without, I suppose, mentioning this famous “connection”?’
‘Yes.’
‘And finding there was nothing for you in the piece you applied for the job of dresser?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s fantastic, but at least it’s less fantastic than pure coincidence would have been. One rather respects you by the way, if it’s not impertinent in a second cousin once removed to say so.’
‘Thank you,’ she said vaguely.
‘The question is: What are we going to do about it?’
Martyn turned away to the ranks of dresses and with businesslike movements of her trembling hands, tweaked at the sheets that covered them. She said briskly: ‘I realize of course that I’ll have to go. Perhaps Miss Hamilton—’
‘You think you ought to go?’ his voice said behind her. ‘I suppose you’re right. It’s an awkward business.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘But I’d like to—it’s difficult to suggest—’
‘I’ll be perfectly all right,’ she said with savage brightness. ‘Please don’t give it another thought.’
‘Why, by the way, are you still in the theatre?’
‘I was going to sleep here,’ Martyn said loudly. ‘I did last night. The night-watchman knows.’
‘You would be paid on Friday.’
‘Like the actors?’
‘Certainly. How much is there in the exchequer between now and Friday?’ Martyn was silent and he said with a complete change of voice: ‘My manners, you will already have been told, are notoriously offensive but I don’t believe I was going to say anything that would have offended you.’
‘I’ve got two and fourpence.’
He opened the door and shouted: ‘Jacko!’ into the echoing darkness. She heard the greenroom door creak and in a moment or two Jacko came in. He carried a hoard with a half-finished drawing pinned to it. This he exhibited to Poole. ‘Crazy, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Helena’s costume for the ball. What must I do but waste my beauty-sleep concocting it. Everybody will have to work very hard if it is to be made. I see you are in need of my counsel. What goes on?’
‘Against my better judgement,’ Poole said, ‘I’m going to follow your advice. You always think you’re indispensable at auditions. Give me some light out there and then sit in front.’
‘It is past midnight. This child has worked and worried herself into a complete bouleversement. She is as pale as a pierrot.’
Poole looked at her. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked her. ‘It won’t take ten minutes.’
‘I don’t understand, but I’m all right.’
‘There you are, Jacko,’ Poole said and sounded pleased. ‘It’s over to you.’
Jacko took her by the shoulders and gently pushed her down on the chair. ‘Attention,’ he said. ‘We make a bargain. I live not so far from here in an apartment house kept by a well-disposed French couple. An entirely respectable house, you understand, with no funny business. At the top one finds an attic room as
it might be in a tale for children, and so small, it is but twice the size of its nice little bed. The rental is low, within the compass of a silly girl who gets herself into equivocal situations. At my recommendation she will be accommodated in the attic which is included in my portion of the house and will pay me the rent at the end of a week. But in exchange for my good offices she does for us a little service. Again, no funny business.’
‘Oh, dear!’ Martyn said. She leant towards the dressing-shelf and propped her face in her hands. ‘It sounds so wonderful,’ she said and tried to steady her voice, ‘a nice little bed.’
‘All right, Jacko,’ Poole said. She heard the door open and shut. ‘I want you to relax for a few minutes,’ his voice went on. ‘Relax all over like a cat. Don’t think of anything in particular. You’re going to sleep sound tonight. All will be well.’
The gas-fire hummed, the smell of roses and cosmetics filled the warm room. ‘Do you smoke?’ Poole asked.
‘Sometimes.’
‘Here you are.’
She drew in the smoke gratefully. He went into the passage and she watched him light his own cigarette. Her thoughts drifted aimlessly about the bony structure of his head and face. Presently a stronger light streamed down the passage. Jacko’s voice called something from a great distance.
Poole turned to her. ‘Come along,’ he said.
On the stage, dust-thickened rays from pageant-lamps settled in a pool of light about a desk and two chairs. It was like an island in a vague region of blueness. She found herself seated there at the desk, facing him across it. In response to a gesture of Poole’s she rested her arms on the desk and her face in her arms.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘and don’t move. You are in the hall of an old house, beautiful but decaying. You are the girl with the bad heredity. You are the creature who goes round and round in her great empty cage like a stoat filled with a wicked desire. The object of your desire is the man on the other side of the desk who is joined to you in blood and of whose face and mind you are the ill reflection. In a moment you will raise your face to his. He will make a gesture and you will make the same gesture. Then you will say: “Don’t you like what you see?” It must be horrible and real. Don’t move. Think of it. Then raise your head and speak.’
There was a kind of voluptuousness in Martyn’s fatigue. Only the chair she sat on and the desk that propped her arms and head prevented her, she felt, from slipping to the floor. Into this defencelessness Poole’s suggestions entered like those of a mesmerist, and that perfection of duality for which actors pray and which they are so rarely granted now fully invested her. She was herself and she was the girl in the play. She guided the girl and was aware of her and she governed the possession of the girl by the obverse of the man in the play. When at last she raised her face and looked at him and repeated his gesture it seemed to her that she looked into a glass and saw her own reflection and spoke to it.
‘Don’t you like what you see?’ Martyn said.
In the pause that followed, the sound of her own breathing and Poole’s returned. She could hear her heart beat.
‘Can you do it again?’ he said.
‘I don’t know,’ she said helplessly. ‘I don’t know at all.’ She turned away and with a childish gesture hid her face in the crook of her arm. In dismay and shame she set loose the tears she had so long denied herself.
‘There now!’ he said, not so much as if to comfort her as to proclaim some private triumph of his own. Out in the dark auditorium Jacko struck his hands together once.
Poole touched her shoulder. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘These are growing pains. They will pass.’ From the door in the set he said: ‘You can have the understudy. We’ll make terms tomorrow. If you prefer it, the relationship can be forgotten. Goodnight.’
He left her alone and presently Jacko returned to the stage carrying her suitcase.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘we go home.’
CHAPTER FOUR
Second Dress-Rehearsal
WHEN MARTYN opened her eyes on the second morning of her adventure it was with the sensation of having come to rest after a painful journey.
She lay quiet and looked about her. It was a bright morning and the sun came in at the attic window above her bed. The room had an air of great cleanliness and freshness. She remembered now that Jacko had told her he occasionally made use of it and indeed, tiny as it was it bore his eccentric imprint. A set of designs for Twelfth Night was pinned to a wall-board. Ranged along the shelf were a number of figures dressed in paper as the persons in this play and on the wall facing her bed hung a mask of the fool, Feste, looking very like Jacko himself.
‘There never was such a little room,’ Martyn sighed and began to plan how she would collect and stow away her modest belongings. She was filled with gratitude and with astonished humility.
The bathroom was on the next floor and as she went downstairs she smelt coffee and fresh bread. A door on the landing opened and Jacko’s clownish head looked out.
‘Breakfast in ten minutes,’ he said. ‘Speed is essential.’
Of all the amenities, it seemed to Martyn, a hot bath was the most beneficent and after that a shower under which one could wash one’s hair quickly. ‘Lucky it’s short,’ she thought and rubbed it dry with her towel.
She was out again in eight minutes to find Jacko on the landing. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘In your woollen gown you are entirely respectable. A clean school child. In.’
He marshalled her into a largish room set out in an orderly manner as a workshop. Martyn wondered why Jacko, who showed such exquisite neatness in his work, should in his person present such a wild front to the world. He was dressed now in faded cotton trousers, a paint-stained undervest and a tattered dressing-gown. He was unshaven and uncombed and his prominent eyes were slightly bloodshot. His manner, however, was as usual, amiable and disarming.
‘I propose,’ he said, ‘that we breakfast together as a general rule. A light breakfast and supper are included in the arrangement. You will hand me your ration book and I shall shop with discretion. Undoubtedly I am a better cook than you and will therefore make myself responsible for supper. For luncheon you may return if you wish and forage ineffectually for yourself or make what other arrangement seems good to you. Approved?’
Martyn said carefully: ‘If you please, Jacko, I’m so grateful and so muddled I can’t think at all sensibly. You see, I don’t know what I shall be earning.’
‘For your dual and unusual role of understudy and dresser, I imagine about eight pounds a week. Your rental, demi-pension, here, is two.’
‘It seems so little,’ Martyn said timidly. ‘The rent, I mean.’
Jacko tapped the side of the coffee-pot with a spoon.
‘Attention,’ he said. ‘How often must I repeat. You will have the goodness to understand I am not a dirty old man. It is true that I am virile,’ he continued with some complacency, ‘but you are not my type. I prefer the more mature, the more mondaine, the—’ He stopped short, the spoon with which he had been gesticulating, still held aloof. His eyes were fixed on the wall behind Martyn. She turned her head to see a sketch in watercolour of Helena Hamilton. When she faced Jacko again, he was grinning desperately.
‘Believe me,’ he said, ‘you are in no danger of discomfort from the smallest whisper of scandal. I am notoriously pure. This morning there are eggs and therefore an omelette. Let us observe silence while I make it.’
He was gay, in his outlandish fashion, from then onwards. When they had finished their admirable breakfast she helped him wash up and he gave her what he called her orders for the day. She was to go down to the theatre with him, set about her work as a dresser and at three o’clock she would be given a formal rehearsal as understudy. At night, for the second dress-rehearsal, she would again take up her duties as Miss Hamilton’s dresser.
‘An eccentric arrangement,’ Jacko said. He groped in the bosom of his undervest and produced a somewhat tattered actor’s ‘pa
rt’, typewritten and bound in paper. ‘Only thirteen sides,’ he said. ‘A bit-part. You will study the lines while you press and stitch and by this afternoon you are word perfect, isn’t it? You are, of course, delighted?’
‘Delighted,’ Martyn said, ‘is not exactly the word. I’m flabbergasted and excited and grateful for everything and I just can’t believe it’s true. But it is a bit worrying to feel I’ve sort of got in on a fluke and that everybody’s wondering what it’s all about. They are, you know.’
‘All that,’ Jacko said with an ungainly sweep of his arm, ‘is of no importance. Gay Gainsford is still to play the part. She will not play it well but she is the niece of the leading lady’s husband and she is therefore in a favourable position.’
‘Yes, but her uncle—’
He said quickly: ‘Clark Bennington was once a good actor. He is now a stencil. He drinks too much and when he is drunk he is offensive. Forget him.’ He turned away and with less than his usual deftness began to set out his work-table. From an adjoining room he said indistinctly: ‘I advise that which I find difficult to perform. Do not allow yourself to become hagridden by this man. It is a great mistake. I myself—’ His voice was lost in the spurt of running water. Martyn heard him shout: ‘Run off and learn your lines. I have a job in hand.’
With a feeling of unease she returned to her room. But when she opened her part and began to read the lines this feeling retreated until it hung like a very small cloud over the hinterland of her mind. The foreground was occupied entirely by the exercise of memorizing and in a few minutes she had almost, but not quite, forgotten her anxiety.
She was given her moves that afternoon by the stage-manager and, at three o’clock, rehearsed her scenes with the other two understudies. The remaining parts were read from the script. Jacko pottered about back-stage intent on one of his odd jobs; otherwise the theatre seemed to be deserted. Martyn had memorized her lines but inevitably lost them from time to time in her effort to associate them with physical movement. The uncompromising half-light of a working-stage, the mechanical pacing to and fro of understudies, the half-muted lines raised to concert pitch only for cues, and the dead sound of voices in an empty house: all these workaday circumstances, though she was familiar enough with them, after all, laid a weight upon her: she lost her belief in the magic of the previous night. She was oppressed by this anticlimax, and could scarcely summon up the resources of her young experience to meet it.
