Death at the Dolphin

by Ngaio Marsh

  When Harry Grove heard about the glove he professed the greatest interest and exclaimed, in his skittish manner, ‘Someone ought to tell Mrs Constantia Guzman about this.’

  ‘Who on earth,’ Peregrine had asked, ‘is Mrs Constantia Guzman?’

  ‘Inquire of The King Dolphin,’ Harry rejoined. He insisted on referring to Marcus Knight in these terms to the latter’s evident annoyance. Peregrine saw Knight turn crimson to the roots of his hair and thought it better to ignore Harry.

  The two members of the company who were wholeheartedly moved by Peregrine’s announcement were Emily Dunne and Charles Random and their reaction was entirely satisfactory. Random kept saying: ‘Not true! Well, of course. Now, we know what inspired you. No – it’s incredible. It’s too much.’

  He was agreeably incoherent.

  Emily’s cheeks were pink and her eyes bright and that too was eminently satisfactory.

  Winter Morris, who was invited to the meeting, was in ecstasy.

  ‘So what have we got?’ he asked at large. ‘We have got a story to make the front pages wish they were double elephants.’

  Master Trevor Vere was not present at this rehearsal.

  Peregrine promised Jeremy that he would arrange for him to see the glove as often as he wanted to, at the museum. Morris was to get into touch with Mr Greenslade about safe-housing it in the theatre and the actors were warned about secrecy for the time being although the undercover thought had clearly been that a little leakage might be far from undesirable as long as Mr Conducis was not troubled by it.

  Stimulated perhaps by the news of the glove the company worked well that afternoon. Peregrine began to block the tricky second act and became excited about the way Marcus Knight approached his part.

  Marcus was an actor of whom it was impossible to say where hard-thinking and technique left off and the pulsing glow that actors call star-quality began. At earlier rehearsals he would do extraordinary things: shout, lay violent emphasis on oddly selected words, make strange, almost occult gestures and embarrass his fellow players by speaking with his eyes shut and his hands clasped in front of his mouth as if he prayed. Out of all this inwardness there would occasionally dart a flash of the really staggering element that had placed him, still a young man, so high in his chancy profession. When the period of incubation had gone by the whole performance would step forward into full light. ‘And,’ Peregrine thought, ‘there’s going to be much joy about this one.’

  Act Two encompassed the giving of the dead child Hamnet’s gloves on her demand to the Dark Lady: a black echo, this, of Bertrand and Bassanio’s rings and of Berowne’s speculation as to the whiteness of his wanton’s hand. It continued with the entertainment of the poet by the infamously gloved lady and his emergence from ‘the expense of spirit in a waste of shame’. It ended with his savage reading of the sonnet to her and to W. H. Marcus Knight did this superbly.

  W. Hartly Grove lounged in a window seat as Mr W. H. and, already mingling glances with Rosaline, played secretly with the gloved hand. The curtain came down on a sudden cascade of his laughter. Peregrine spared a moment to reflect that here, as not infrequently in the theatre, a situation in a play reflected, in a cockeyed fashion, the emotional relationships between the actors themselves. He had a theory that, contrary to popular fancy, this kind of overlap between the reality of their personalities in and out of their roles was an artistic handicap. An actor, he considered, was embarrassed rather than released by unsublimated chunks of raw association. If Marcus Knight was enraged by the successful blandishments of Harry Grove upon Destiny Meade, this reaction would be liable to upset his balance and bedevil his performance as Shakespeare deceived by Rosaline with W. H.

  And yet, apparently, it had not done so. They were all going great guns and Destiny, with only the most rudimentary understanding of the scene, distilled an erotic compulsion that would have peeled the gloves off the hands of the dead child as easily as she filched them from his supersensitive father. ‘She really is,’ Jeremy Jones had said, ‘the original overproof femme fatale. It’s just there. Whether she’s a goose or a genius doesn’t matter. There’s something solemn about that sort of attraction.’

  Peregrine had said: ‘I wish you’d just try and think of her in twenty years’ time with china-boys in her jaws and her chaps hitched up to her ears and her wee token brain shrunk to the size of a pea.’

  ‘Rail on,’ Jeremy had said. ‘I am unmoved.’

  ‘You don’t suppose you’ll have any luck?’

  ‘That’s right. I don’t. She’s busily engaged in shuffling off the great star and teaming up with the bounding Grove. Not a nook or cranny left for me.’

  ‘Oh, dear, oh dear, oh dear,’ Peregrine had remarked and they let it go at that.

  On this particular evening Peregrine himself had at last succeeded, after several rather baffling refusals, in persuading Emily Dunne to come back to supper at the studio. Jeremy, who supervised and took part in the construction and painting of his sets at a warehouse not far away, was to look in at The Dolphin and walk home with them over Blackfriars Bridge. It had appeared to Peregrine that this circumstance, when she heard of it, had been the cause of Emily’s acceptance. Indeed, he heard her remark in answer to some question from Charles Random: ‘I’m going to Jeremy’s.’ This annoyed Peregrine extremely.

  Jeremy duly appeared five minutes before the rehearsal ended and sat in the front stalls. When they broke, Destiny beckoned to him and he went up to the stage through the pass-door. Peregrine saw her lay her hands on Jeremy’s coat and talk into his eyes. He saw Jeremy flush up to the roots of his red hair and glance quickly at him. Then he saw Destiny link her arm in Jeremy’s and lead him upstage, talking hard. After a moment or two they parted and Jeremy returned to Peregrine.

  ‘Look,’ he said in stage Cockney, ‘do me a favour. Be a pal.’

  ‘What’s all this?’

  ‘Destiny’s got a sudden party and she’s asked me. Look, Perry, you don’t mind if I go? The food is all right at the studio. You and Emily can do very nicely without me: damn’ sight better than with.’

  ‘She’ll think you’re bloody rude,’ Peregrine said angrily, ‘and she won’t be far wrong, at that.’

  ‘Not at all. She’ll be enchanted. It’s you she’s coming to see.’

  ‘I’m not so sure.’

  ‘Properly speaking, you ought to be jolly grateful.’

  ‘Emily’ll think it’s a put-up job.’

  ‘So what? She’ll be pleased as Punch. Look, Perry, I – I can’t wait. Destiny’s driving us all and she’s ready to go. Look, I’ll have a word with Emily.’

  ‘You’d damn’ well better though what in decency’s name you can find to say!’

  ‘It’ll all be as right as a bank. I promise.’

  ‘So you say.’ Peregrine contemplated his friend whose freckled face was pink, excited and dreadfully vulnerable. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Make your excuses to Emily. Go to your party. I think you’re heading for trouble but that’s your business.’

  ‘I only hope I’m heading for something,’ Jeremy said. ‘Fanks, mate. You’re a chum.’

  ‘I very much doubt it,’ said Peregrine.

  He stayed front-of-house and saw Jeremy talk to Emily on stage. Emily’s back was towards him and he was unable to gauge her reaction but Jeremy was all smiles. Peregrine had been wondering what on earth he could say to her when it dawned upon him that, come hell or high water, he could not equivocate with Emily.

  Destiny was up there acting her boots off with Marcus, Harry Grove, and now Jeremy, for an audience. Marcus maintained a proprietary air to which she responded like a docile concubine, Peregrine thought. But he noticed that she managed quite often to glance at Harry with a slight widening of her eyes and an air of decorum that was rather more provocative than if she’d hung round his neck and said: ‘Now.’ She also beamed upon poor Jeremy. They all talked excitedly, making plans for their party. Soon they had gone away by the s
tage door.

  Emily was still on stage.

  ‘Well,’ Peregrine thought, ‘here goes.’

  He walked down the aisle and crossed to the pass-door in the box on the prompt side. He never went backstage by this route without a kind of aftertaste of his first visit to The Dolphin. Always, behind the sound of his own footsteps on the uncarpeted stairway, Peregrine caught an echo of Mr Conducis coming invisibly to his rescue.

  It was a slight shock now, therefore, to hear, as he shut the pass-door behind him, actual footsteps beyond the turn in this narrow, dark and winding stair.

  ‘Hallo?’ he said. ‘Who’s that?’

  The steps halted.

  ‘Coming up,’ Peregrine said, not wanting to collide.

  He went on up the little stairway and turned the corner.

  The door leading to the stage opened slightly admitting a blade of light. He saw that somebody moved uncertainly as if in doubt whether to descend or not and he got the impression that whoever it was had actually been standing in the dark behind the door.

  Gertrude Bracey said, ‘I was just coming down.’

  She pushed open the door and went on-stage to make way for him. As he came up with her, she put her hand on his arm.

  ‘Aren’t you going to Destiny’s sinister little party?’ she asked.

  ‘Not I,’ he said.

  ‘Unasked? Like me?’

  ‘That’s right,’ he said lightly and wished she wouldn’t stare at him like that. She leant towards him.

  ‘Do you know what I think of Mr W. Hartly Grove?’ she asked quietly. Peregrine shook his head and she then told him. Peregrine was used to uninhibited language in the theatre, but Gertrude Bracey’s eight words on Harry Grove made him blink.

  ‘Gertie, dear!’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘Gertie, dear. And Gertie dear knows what she’s talking about, don’t you worry.’

  She turned her back on him and walked away.

  IV

  ‘Emily,’ Peregrine said as they climbed up Wharfingers Lane, ‘I hope you don’t mind it just being me. And I hope you don’t think there’s any skulduggery at work. Such as me getting rid of Jer in order to make a heavy pass at you. Not, mark you, that I wouldn’t like to but that I really wouldn’t have the nerve to try such an obvious ploy.’

  ‘I should hope not,’ said Emily with composure.

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t. I suppose you’ve seen how it is with Jeremy?’

  ‘One could hardly miss it.’

  ‘One couldn’t, could one?’ he agreed politely.

  Suddenly for no particular reason they both burst out laughing and he took her arm.

  ‘Imagine!’ he said. ‘Here we are on Bankside, not much more than a stone’s throw from The Swan and The Rose and The Globe. Shakespeare must have come this way a thousand times after rehearsals had finished for the day. We’re doing just what he did and I do wish, Emily, that we could take water for Blackfriars.’

  ‘It’s pleasant,’ Emily said, ‘to be in company that isn’t self-conscious about him and doesn’t mistake devotion for idolatry.’

  ‘Well, he is unique, so what’s the matter with being devoted? Have you observed, Emily, that talent only fluctuates about its own middle line whereas genius nearly always makes great walloping bloomers?’

  ‘Like Agnes Pointing Upwards and bits of Cymbeline?’

  ‘Yes. I think, perhaps, genius is nearly always slightly lacking in taste.’

  ‘Anyway, without intellectual snobbery?’

  ‘Oh that, certainly.’

  ‘Are you pleased with rehearsals, so far?’

  ‘On the whole.’

  ‘I suppose it’s always a bit of a shock bringing something you’ve written to the melting pot or forge or whatever the theatre is. Particularly when, as producer, you yourself are the melting pot.’

  ‘Yes, it is. You see your darling child being processed, being filtered through the personalities of the actors and turning into something different on the way. And you’ve got to accept all that because a great many of the changes are for the good. I get the oddest sort of feeling sometimes, that, as producer, I’ve stepped outside myself as playwright. I begin to wonder if I ever knew what the play is about.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  They walked on in companionship: two thinking ants moving eastwards against the evening out-swarm from the City. When they reached Blackfriars it had already grown quiet there and the little street where Jeremy and Peregrine lived was quite deserted. They climbed up to the studio and sat in the window drinking dry martinis and trying to see The Dolphin on the far side of the river.

  ‘We haven’t talked about the letter and the glove,’ Emily said. ‘Why, I wonder, when it’s such a tremendous thing. You must have felt like a high-pressure cooker with it all bottled up inside you.’

  ‘Well, there was Jeremy to explode to. And of course the expert.’

  ‘How strange it is,’ Emily said. She knelt on the window-seat with her arms folded on the ledge and her chin on her arms. Her heartshaped face looked very young. Peregrine knew that he must find out about her: about how she thought and what she liked and disliked and where she came from and whether she was or had been in love and if so what she did about it. ‘How strange,’ she repeated. ‘To think of John Shakespeare over in Henley Street making them for his grandson. Would he make them himself or did he have a foreman-glover?’

  ‘He made them himself. The note says “mayde by my father”.’

  ‘Is the writing all crabbed and squiggly like his signatures?’

  ‘Yes. But not exactly like any of them. People’s writing isn’t always like their signatures. The handwriting experts have all found what they call “definitive” points of agreement.’

  ‘What will happen to them, Perry? Will he sell to the highest bidder or will he have any ideas about keeping them here? Oh,’ Emily cried, ‘they should be kept here.’

  ‘I tried to say as much but he shut up like a springtrap.’

  ‘Jeremy,’ Emily said, ‘will probably go stark ravers if they’re sold out of the country.’

  ‘Jeremy?’

  ‘Yes. He’s got a manic thing about the draining away of national treasures, hasn’t he? I wouldn’t have been in the least surprised, would you, if it had turned out to be Jeremy who stole the Goya “Wellington”. Simply to keep it in England, you know.’

  Emily chuckled indulgently and Peregrine thought he detected the proprietary air of romance and was greatly put out. Emily went on and on about Jeremy Jones and his shop and his treasures and how moved and disturbed he was by the new resolution. ‘Don’t you feel he is perfectly capable,’ she said, ‘of bearding Mr Conducis in his den and telling him he mustn’t let them go?’

  ‘I do hope you’re exaggerating.’

  ‘I really don’t believe I am. He’s a fanatic’

  ‘You know him very well, don’t you?’

  ‘Quite well. I help in their shop sometimes. They are experts, aren’t they, on old costume? Of course, Jeremy has to leave most of it to his partner because of work in the theatre but in between engagements he does quite a lot. I’m learning how to do all kinds of jobs from him like putting old tinsel on pictures and repairing bindings. He’s got some wonderful prints and books.’

  ‘I know,’ Peregrine said rather shortly. ‘I’ve been there.’

  She turned her head and looked thoughtfully at him. ‘He’s madly excited about making the gloves for the show. He was saying just now he’s got a pair of Jacobean gloves, quite small, and he thinks they might be suitable if he took the existing beadwork off and copied the embroidery off Hamnet’s glove on to them.’

  ‘I know, he told me.’

  ‘He’s letting me help with that, too.’

  ‘Fun for you.’

  ‘Yes. I like him very much. I do hope if he’s madly in love with Destiny that it works out but I’m afraid I rather doubt it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He’s a darling b
ut he hasn’t got anything like enough of what it takes. Well, I wouldn’t have thought so.’

  ‘Really?’ Peregrine quite shouted in an excess of relief. He began to talk very fast about the glove and the play and what they should have for dinner. He had been wildly extravagant and had bought all the things he himself liked best: smoked salmon with caviare folded inside, cold partridge and the ingredients for two kinds of salad. It was lucky that his choice seemed to coincide with Emily’s. They had Bernkastler Docktor with the smoked salmon and it was so good they went on drinking it with the partridge. Because of Jeremy’s defection there was rather a lot of everything and they ate and drank it all up.

  When they had cleared away they returned to the window-seat and watched the Thames darken and the lights come up on Bankside. Peregrine began to think how much he wanted to make love to Emily. He watched her and talked less and less. Presently he closed his hand over hers. Emily turned her hand, gave his fingers a brief matter-of-fact squeeze and then withdrew.

  ‘I’m having a lovely time,’ she said, ‘but I’m not going to stay very late. It takes ages to get back to Hampstead.’

  ‘But I’ll drive you. Jeremy hasn’t taken the car. It lives in a little yard round the corner.’

  ‘Well, that’ll be grand. But I still won’t stay very late.’

  ‘I’d like you to stay for ever and a day.’

  ‘That sounds like a theme song from a rather twee musical.’

  ‘Emily: have you got a young man?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you have a waiting list, at all?’

  ‘No, Peregrine.’

  ‘No preferential booking?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Are you ever so non-wanton?’

  ‘Ever so.’

  ‘Well,’ he sighed, ‘it’s original, of course.’

  ‘It’s not meant to madden and inflame.’

  ‘That was what I feared. Well, OK. I’ll turn up the lights and show you my photographs.’

  ‘You jolly well do,’ said Emily.

  So they looked at Peregrine’s and Jeremy’s scrapbooks and talked interminable theatre shop and presently Emily stood up and said: now she must go.