Night at the Vulcan ra-16

by Ngaio Marsh

  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 the 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 aloft. His eyes were fixed on the wall behind Martyn. She turned her head to see a sketch in water-colour 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 “part,” 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. Finally, from an adjoining room he said indistinctly: “I advise that which I find difficult to perform. Do not allow yourself to become hag-ridden 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 anti-climax, and could scarcely summon up the resources of her young experience to meet it.

  The positions and moves had been planned with a vivid understanding of the text and seemed to spring out of it. She learnt them readily enough. Rather to her surprise, and, she thought, that of the other understudies, they were finally taken through her scenes at concert-pitch, so that by the end of the rehearsal the visual and aural aspects of her part had fused into a whole. She had got her routine. But it was no more than a routine: she spoke and paused and moved and spoke and there was no reality at all, she felt, in anything she did. Clem Smith, the stage-manager, said nothing about interpretation but, huddled in his overcoat, merely set the moves and then crouched over the script. She was not even a failure, she was just another colourless understudy and nothing had happened.

  When it was over, Clem Smith shut the book and said: “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Eleven in the morning, if you please.” He lit a cigarette and went down into the auditorium and out through the front of the house.

  Left alone on the stage, Martyn struggled with an acute attack of deflation. She tried to call herself to order. This in itself was a humiliating, if salutary, exercise. If, she thought savagely, she had been a Victorian young lady, she would at this juncture have locked herself away with a plush-bound journal and, after shedding some mortified tears, forced a confession out of herself. As it was, she set her jaw and worked it out there and then. The truth was, she told herself, she’d been at her old tricks again: she’d indulged in the most blatant kind of day-dream. She’d thought up a success-story and dumped herself down in the middle of it with half a dozen pageant-lamps bathing her girlish form. Because she looked like Poole and because last night she’d had a mild success with one
line by playing it off her nerves she’d actually had the gall to imagine— Here Martyn felt her scalp creep and her face burn. “Come on,” she thought, “out with it.”

  Very well, then. She’d dreamt up a further rehearsal with Poole. She’d seen herself responding eagerly to his production, she’d heard him say regretfully that if things had been different— She had even— At this point, overtaken with self-loathing, Martyn performed the childish exercise of throwing her part across the stage, stamping violently and thrusting her fingers through her hair.

  “Damn and blast and hell,” said Martyn, pitching her voice to the back row of the gallery.

  “Not quite as bad as all that.”

  Adam Poole came out of the shadowed pit and down the centre-aisle of the stalls. He rested his hands on the rail of the orchestral well. Martyn gaped at him.

  “You’ve got the mechanics,” he said. “Walk through it again by yourself before to-morrow. Then you can begin to think about the girl. Get the lay-out of the house into your head. Know your environment. What has she been doing all day before the play opens? What has she been thinking about? Why does she say the things she says and do the things she does? Listen to the other chaps’ lines. Come down here for five minutes and we’ll see what you think about acting.”

  Martyn went down into the house. Of all her experiences during these three days at the Vulcan Theatre, she was to remember this most vividly. It was a curious interview. They sat side by side as if waiting for the rise-of-curtain. Their voices were deadened by the plush stalls. Jacko could be heard moving about behind the set and in some distant room back-stage, somebody in desultory fashion hammered and sawed. At first Martyn was ill at ease, unable to dismiss or to reconcile the jumble of distracted notions that beset her. But Poole was talking about theatre and about problems of the actor. He talked well, without particular emphasis but with penetration and authority. Soon she listened with single hearing and with all her attention to what he had to say. Her nervousness and uncertainty were gone, and presently she was able to speak of matters that had exercised her in her own brief experience of the stage. Their conversation was adult and fruitful. It didn’t even occur to her that they were getting on rather well together.

  Jacko came out on the stage. He shielded his eyes with his hand and peered into the auditorium.

  “Adam?” he said.

  “Hullo? What is it?”

  “It is Helena on the telephone to inquire why have you not rung her at four, the time being now five-thirty. Will you take it in the office?”

  “Good Lord!” he ejaculated and got up. Martyn moved into the aisle to let him out.

  He said: “All right, Miss Tarne. Work along the lines we’ve been talking about and you should be able to cope with the job. We take our understudies seriously at the Vulcan and like to feel they’re an integral part of the company. You’ll rehearse again tomorrow morning and—” He stopped unaccountably, and after a moment said hurriedly: “You’re all right, aren’t you? I mean you feel quite happy about this arrangement?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Very happy.”

  “Good.” He hesitated again for a second and then said: “I must go,” and was off down the aisle to the front of the house. He called out: “I’ll be in the office for some time, Jacko, if anyone wants me.”

  A door banged. There was a long silence.

  Jacko advanced to the footlights. “Where are you?” he asked.

  “Here,” said Martyn.

  “I see you. Or a piece of you. Where is the rest? Reassemble yourself. There is work to be done.”

  The work turned out to be the sewing together of a fantastic garment created and tacked up by Jacko himself. It had a flamboyant design, stencilled in black and yellow, of double-headed eagles, and was made in part of scenic canvas. There was an electric sewing machine in the wardrobe-room, which was next to Mr. J. G. Darcey’s at the end of the passage. Here Jacko sat Martyn down, and here for the next hour she laboured under his exacting direction while he himself crawled about the floor cutting out further garments for the Combined Arts Ball. At half past six he went out, saying he would return with food.

  Martyn laboured on. Sometimes she repeated the lines of the part, her voice drowned by the clatter of the machine. Sometimes, when engaged in hand-work, it would seem in the silent room that she had entered into a new existence, as if she had at that moment been born and was a stranger to her former self. And since this was rather a frightening sensation, though not new to Martyn, she must rouse herself and make a conscious effort to dispel it. On one of these occasions, when she had just switched off the machine, she felt something of the impulse that had guided her first attempt at the scene with Poole. Wishing to retain and strengthen this experience, she set aside her work and rested her head on her arms as the scene required. She waited in this posture, summoning her resources, and when she was ready raised her head to confront her opposite.

  Gay Gainsford stood on the other side of the table, watching her.

  Martyn’s flesh leapt on her bones. She cried out and made a sweeping gesture with her arms. A pair of scissors clattered to the floor.

  “I’m sorry I startled you,” said Miss Gainsford. “I came in quietly. I thought you were asleep but I realize now — you were doing that scene. Weren’t you?”

  “I’ve been given the understudy,” Martyn said.

  “You’ve had an audition and a rehearsal, haven’t you?”

  “Yes. I was so frightful at rehearsal, I thought I’d have another shot by myself.”

  “You needn’t,” Miss Gainsford said, “try to make it easy for me.”

  Martyn, still shaken and bewildered, looked at her visitor. She saw a pretty face that under its make-up was sodden with tears. Even as she looked, the large photogenic eyes flooded and the small mouth quivered.

  “I suppose,” Miss Gainsford said, “you know what you’re doing to me.”

  “Good Lord!” Martyn ejaculated. “What is all this? What have I done? I’ve got your understudy. I’m damn thankful to have it and so far I’ve made a pretty poor showing.”

  “It’s no good taking that line with me. I know what’s happening.”

  “Nothing’s happening. Oh, please,” Martyn implored, torn between pity and a rising fear, “please don’t cry. I’m nothing. I’m just an old understudy.”

  “That’s pretty hot, I must say,” Miss Gainsford said. Her voice wavered grotesquely between two registers like an adolescent boy’s. “To talk about ‘any old understudy’ when you’ve got that appearance. What’s everyone saying about you when they think I’m not about? ‘She’s got the appearance!’ It doesn’t matter to them that I’ve had to dye my hair because they don’t like wigs. I still haven’t got the appearance. I’m a shoulder-length natural ash-blonde, and I’ve had to have an urchin cut and go black and all I get is insults. In any other management,” she continued wildly, “the author wouldn’t be allowed to speak to the artists as that man speaks to me. In any other management an artist would be protected against that kind of treatment. Adam’s worse, if anything. He’s so bloody patient and persistent and half the time you don’t know what he’s talking about.”

  She drew breath, sobbed and hunted in her bag for her handkerchief.

  Martyn said: “I’m so terribly sorry. It’s awful when things go badly at rehearsals. But the worst kind of rehearsals do have a way of turning into the best kind of performances. And it’s a grand play, isn’t it?”

  “I loathe the play. To me it’s a lot of high-brow hokum and I don’t care who knows it. Why the hell couldn’t Uncle Ben leave me where I was, playing leads and second leads in fortnightly rep? We were a happy family in fortnightly rep; everyone had fun and games and there wasn’t this ghastly graveyard atmosphere. I was miserable enough, God knows, before you came but now it’s just more than I can stand.”

  “But I’m not going to play the part,” Martyn said desperately. “You’ll be all right. It’s just got you down f
or the moment. I’d be no good, I expect, anyway.”

  “It’s what they’re all saying and thinking. It’s a pity, they’re saying, that you came too late.”

  “Nonsense. You only imagine that because of the likeness.”

  “Do I? Let me tell you I’m not imagining all the things they’re saying about you. And about Adam. How you can stay here and take it! Unless it’s true. Is it true?”

  Martyn closed her hands on the material she had been sewing. “I don’t want to know what they’re saying. There’s nothing unkind that’s true for them to say.”

  “So the likeness is purely an accident? There’s no relationship?”

  Martyn said: “It seems that we are very distantly related, so distantly that the likeness is a freak. I didn’t want to tell anyone about it. It’s of no significance at all. I haven’t used it to get into the theatre.”

  “I don’t know how and why you got in but I wish to God you’d get out. How you can hang on, knowing what they think, if it isn’t true! You can’t have any pride or decency. It’s so cruel. It’s so damnably cruel.”

  Martyn looked at the pretty tear-blubbered face and thought in terror that if it had been that of Atropos it could scarcely have offered a more dangerous threat. “Don’t!” she cried out. “Please don’t say that; I need this job so desperately. Honestly, honestly you’re making a thing of all this. I’m not hurting you.”

  “Yes, you are. You’re driving me completely frantic. I’m nervously and emotionally exhausted,” Miss Gainsford sobbed, with an air of quoting somebody else. “It just needed you to send me over the borderr line. Uncle Ben keeps on and on and on about it until I think I’ll go mad. This is a beastly unlucky theatre anyway. Everyone knows there’s something wrong about it and then you come in like a Jonah and it’s the rock bottom. If,” Miss Gainsford went on, developing a command of histrionic climax of which Martyn would scarcely have suspected her capable, “if you have any pity at all, any humanity, you’ll spare me this awful ordeal.”