Night at the Vulcan ra-16

by Ngaio Marsh

  “Can’t we cut the flummery and get down to business?”

  “That’s just what I’m suggesting.”

  “Is it? I wasn’t listening. Press on, then, my dear fellow. Press on.”

  They settled down. Jacko gave Poole a block of notes and he began to work through them. “Nothing much in Act I,” he said, “until we get to—” His voice went on evenly. He spoke of details in timing, of orchestration and occasionally of stage-management. Sometimes a player would ask a question and there would be a brief discussion. Sometimes Clem Smith would make a note. For the scenes where Poole had been on, Jacko, it appeared, had taken separate notes. Martyn suddenly remembered that Jacko’s official status was that of assistant to Poole, and thought it characteristic of him that he made so little of his authority.

  From where she stood, holding the glass for Helena Hamilton, she could see all the players. In the foreground was the alert and beautiful face of her employer, a little older now with its make-up gone, turning at times to the looking-glass and at times, when something in his notes concerned her, towards Poole. Beyond Miss Hamilton sat J. G. Darcey, alone and thoughtfully filling his pipe. He glanced occasionally, with an air of anxious solicitude, at Miss Gainsford. At the far side Parry Percival lay in an armchair looking fretful. Bennington stood near the centre with a towel in his hands. At one moment he came behind his wife. Putting a hand on her shoulder, he reached over it, helped himself to a dollop of grease from a jar in her case and slapped it on his face. She made a slight movement of distaste and immediately afterwards a little secret grimace, as if she had caught herself out in a blunder. For a moment he retained his hold of her shoulder. Then he looked down at her, dragged his clean fingers across her neck and, smearing.the grease over his face, returned to his former position and began to clean away his make-up.

  Martyn didn’t want to look at Gay Gainsford but was unable altogether to avoid doing so. Miss Gainsford sat, at first alone, on a smallish sofa. She seemed to have herself tolerably well in hand, but her eyes were restless and her fingers plaited and replaited the folds of her dress. Bennington watched her from a distance until he had done with his towel. Then he crossed the stage and sat beside her, taking one of the restless hands in his.

  He looked hard at Martyn, who was visited painfully by a feeling of great compassion for both of them and by a sensation of remorse. She had a notion, which she tried to dismiss as fantastic, that Poole sensed this reaction. His glance rested for a moment on her and she thought: “This is getting too complicated. It’s going to be too much for me.” She made an involuntary movement and at once Miss Hamilton put out a hand to the glass.

  When Poole had dealt with the first act he turned to Dr. Rutherford, who had sat throughout with his legs extended and his chin on his chest, directing from under his brows a glare of extreme malevolence at the entire cast.

  “Anything to add to that, John?” Poole asked.

  “Apart from a passing observation that I regard the whole thing as a tour de force of understatement and with reservations that I keep to myself”—here Dr. Rutherford looked fixedly at Parry Percival—“I am mum. I reserve my fire.”

  “Act II, then,” said Poole, and began again.

  Martyn became aware after a few minutes that Dr. Rutherford, like Bennington, was staring at her. She was as horridly fascinated as a bird is said to be by the unwinking gaze of a snake. Do what she could to look elsewhere about the stage, she must after a time steal a glance at him, only to meet again his speculative and blood-shot regard. This alarmed her profoundly. She was persuaded that a feeling of tension had been communicated to the others, and that they too were aware of some kind of impending crisis. This feeling grew in intensity as Poole’s voice went steadily on with his notes. He had got about half-way through the second act when Dr. Rutherford ejaculated: “Hi! Wait a bit!” and began a frenzied search through his own notes, which seemed to be in complete disorder. Finally he pounced on a sheet of paper, dragged out a pair of spectacles and, with a hand raised to enjoin silence, read it to himself with strange noises in his breathing.

  Having scattered the rest of his notes over his person and the floor, he now folded this particular sheet and sat on it

  “Proceed,” he said. The cast stirred uneasily. Poole continued. He had come to the scene between himself and Miss Gainsford, and beyond a minor adjustment of position said nothing about it. Miss Hamilton, who had arrived at the final stage of her street make-up, dusted her face with powder, nodded good-humouredly at Martyn and turned to face Poole. Martyn thankfully shut the dressing-case and made for the nearest exit.

  At the same moment Poole reached the end of his notes for the second act and Dr. Rutherford shouted: “Hold on! Stop that wench!”

  Martyn, with a sensation of falling into chaos, turned in the doorway.

  She saw nine faces lifted towards her own. They made a pattern against the smoke-thickened air. Her eyes travelled from one to the other and rested finally on Poole’s.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “Go home.”

  “No, you don’t,” Dr. Rutherford shouted excitedly.

  “Indeed she does,” said Poole. “Run away home, Kate. Good night to you.”

  Martyn heard the storm break as she fled down the passage.

  Chapter V

  OPENING NIGHT

  From noon until half past six on the opening night of Dr. Rutherford’s new play, the persons most concerned in its birth were absent from their theatre. Left to itself, the Vulcan was possessed only by an immense expectancy. It waited. In the auditorium rows of seats, stripped of their dust-cloths, stared at the curtain. The curtain itself presented its reverse side to Jacko’s set, closing it in with a stuffy air of secrecy. The stage was dark. Battalions of dead lamps, focussed at crazy angles, overhung it with a promise of light. Cue-sheets, fixed to the switchboard, awaited the electrician, the prompt-script was on its shelf, the properties were ranged on trestle-tables. Everything bided its time in the dark theatre.

  To enter into this silent house was to feel as if one surprised a poised and expectant presence. This air of suspense made itself felt to the occasional intruders: to the boy who from time to time came through from the office with telegrams for the dressing-rooms, to the girl from Florian’s and the young man from the wig-makers, and to the piano-tuner who for an hour twanged and hammered in the covered well. And to Martyn Tarne who, alone in the ironing-room, set about the final pressing of the dresses under her care.

  The offices were already active and behind their sand-blasted glass- walls typewriters clattered and telephone bells rang incessantly. The blacked-out box-plan lay across Bob Grantley’s desk, and stacked along the wall were rectangular parcels of programmes, fresh from the printer.

  And at two o’clock the queues for the early doors began to form in Carpet Street

  It was at two o’clock that Helena Hamilton, after an hour’s massage, went to bed. Her husband had telephoned, with a certain air of opulence which she had learnt to dread, that he would lunch at his club and return to their flat during the afternoon to rest.

  In her darkened room she followed a practised routine and, relaxing one set of muscles after another, awaited sleep. This time, however, her self-discipline was unsuccessful. If only she could hear him come in, it would be better; if only she could see into what sort of state he’d got himself. She used all her formulae for repose but none of them worked. At three o’clock she was still awake and still miserably anxious.

  It was no good trying to cheer herself up by telling over her rosary of romantic memories. Usually this was a successful exercise. She had conducted her affairs of the heart, she knew, with grace and civility. She had almost always managed to keep them on a level of enchantment. She had simply allowed them to occur with the inconsequence and charm of self-sown larkspurs in an otherwise correctly ordered border. They had hung out their gay little banners for a season and then been painlessly tweaked up. Except, perhaps, for Adam. Wit
h Adam, she remembered uneasily, it had been different. With Adam, so much her junior, it had been a more deeply rooted affair. It had put an end, finally, to her living with Ben as his wife. It had made an enemy of Ben. And at once her thoughts were infested with worries about the contemporary scene at the theatre. “It’s such a muddle,” she thought, “and I hate muddles.” They’d had nothing but trouble all through rehearsals. Ben fighting with everybody and jealous of Adam. The Doctor bawling everybody out. And that wretchedly unhappy child Gay (who, God, knew, would never be an actress as long as she lived) first pitchforked into the part by Ben and now almost bullied out of it by the Doctor. And, last of all, Martyn Tarne.

  She had touched the raw centre of her anxiety. Under any other conditions, she told herself, she would have welcomed the appearance out of a clear sky and — one had to face it — under very odd circumstances, of this little antipodean: this throw-back to some forebear that she and Adam were supposed to have in common. She would have been inclined to like Martyn for the resemblance instead of feeling so uncomfortably disturbed by it. Of course she accepted Adam’s explanation, but at the same time she thought it rather naïve of him to believe that the girl had actually kept away from the theatre because she didn’t want to make capital out of the relationship. That, Helena thought, turning restlessly on her bed, was really too simple of Adam. Moreover, he’d stirred up the already exacerbated nerves of the company by giving this girl the understudy without, until last night, making public the relationship.

  There she went, thinking about last night’s scene: John Rutherford demanding that even at this stage Martyn should play the part, Gay imploring Adam to release her, Ben saying he’d walk out on the show if Gay went, and Adam— Adam had done the right thing of course. He’d come down strongly with one of his rare thrusts of anger and reduced them to complete silence. He had then described the circumstances of Martyn’s arrival at the theatre, and had added in a voice of ice that there was and could be no question of any change in the cast. He finished his notes and left the theatre, followed by Jacko.

  This had been the signal for an extremely messy row in which everybody seemed to bring to light some deep-seated grudge. Ben had quarrelled almost simultaneously with Parry Percival (on the score of technique), with Dr. Rutherford (on the score of casting), with his niece (on the score of humanity) and, unexpectedly, with J. G. Darcey (on the score of Ben bullying Gay). Percival had responded to a witticism of the Doctor’s by a stream of shrill invective which astonished everybody, himself included, and Gay had knitted the whole scene into a major climax by having a fit of hysterics from which she was restored with brutal efficiency by Dr. Rutherford himself.

  The party had then broken up. J.G. sustained his new role of knightly concern by taking Gay home. Parry Percival left in a recrudescence of fury occasioned by the Doctor flinging after him a composite Shakesperian epithet: “Get you gone, you dwarf; you minimus, of hindering knot-grass made; you bead, you acorn.” She herself had retired into the wings. The stage-staff had already disappeared. The Doctor and Ben, finding themselves in undisputed possession of the stage, had squared up to each other with the resolution of all-in wrestlers, and she, being desperately tired, had taken the car home and asked their man to return to the theatre for her husband. When she had awakened late in the morning she was told he had already gone out.

  “I wish,” a voice cried out in her mind, “I wish to God he’d never come back.”

  And at that moment she heard him stumble heavily upstairs.

  She expected him to go straight to his room and was dismayed when he came to a halt outside her door and, with a clumsy sound that might have been intended for a knock, opened it and came in. The smell of brandy and cigars came in with him and invaded the whole room. It was more than a year since that had happened.

  He walked uncertainly to the foot of the bed and leant on it — and she was frightened of him.

  “Hullo,” he said.

  “What is it, Ben? I’m resting.”

  “I thought you might be interested. There’ll be no more nonsense from John about Gay.”

  “Good,” she said.

  “He’s calmed down. I got him to see reason.”

  “He’s not so bad, really — old John.”

  “He’s had some good news from abroad. About the play.”

  “Translation rights?”

  “Something like that.” He was smiling at her, uncertainly. “You look comfy,” he said. “All tucked up.”

  “Why don’t you try and get some rest yourself?” He leant over the foot of the bed and said something under his breath. “What?” she said anxiously. “What did you say?”

  “I said it’s a pity Adam didn’t appear a bit sooner, isn’t it? I’m so extraneous.”

  Her heart thumped like a fist inside her ribs. “Ben, please,” she said.

  “And another thing. Do you both imagine I don’t see through this dresser-cum-understudy racket? Darling, I don’t much enjoy playing the cuckold in your Restoration comedy, but I’m just bloody well furious when you so grossly under-estimate my intelligence. When was it? On the New Zealand tour in 1930?”

  “What is this nonsense!” she said breathlessly.

  “Sorry. How are you managing to-night? You and Adam?”

  “My dear Ben!”

  “I’ll tell you. You’re making shift with me for once in a blue moon. And I’m not talking about to-night.”

  She recognized this scene. She had dreamt it many times. His face had advanced upon her while she lay inert with terror, as one does in a nightmare. For an infinitesimal moment she was visited by the hope that perhaps after all she had slept and, if she could only scream, would awaken. But she couldn’t scream. She was quite helpless.

  Adam Poole’s telephone rang at half past four. He had gone late to rest and was wakened from a deep sleep. For a second or two he didn’t recognize her voice, and she spoke so disjointedly that even when he was broad awake he couldn’t make out what she was saying.

  “What is it?” he said. “Helena, what’s the matter? I can’t hear you.”

  Then she spoke more clearly and he understood.

  At six o’clock the persons in the play began to move towards the theatre. In their lodgings and flats they bestirred themselves after their several fashions: to drink tea or black coffee, choke down pieces of bread and butter that tasted like sawdust, or swallow aspirin and alcohol. This was their zero hour: the hour of low vitality when the stimulus of the theatre and the last assault of nerves was yet to come. By a quarter past six they were all on their way. Their dressers were already in their rooms and Jacko prowled restlessly about the darkened stage. Dr. John James Rutherford, clad in an evening suit and a boiled shirt garnished with snuff, both of which dated from some distant period when he still attended the annual dinners of the B.M.A., plunged into the office and made such a nuisance of himself that Bob Grantley implored him to go away.

  At twenty past six the taxi carrying Gay Gainsford and J. G. Darcey turned into Carpet Street. Darcey sat with his legs crossed elegantly and his hat perched on them. In the half-light his head and profile looked like those of a much younger man.

  “It was sweet of you to call for me, J.G.,” Gay said unevenly.

  He smiled, without looking at her, and patted her hand. I’m always petrified myself,” he said, “on first nights.”

  “Are you? I suppose a true artist must be.”

  “Ah, youth, youth!” sighed J.G. — a little stagily perhaps, but, if she hadn’t been too preoccupied to notice it, with a certain overtone of genuine nostalgia.

  “It’s worse than the usual first-night horrors for me,” she said. “I’m just boxing on in a private hell of my own.”

  “My poor child.”

  She turned a little towards him and leant her head into his shoulder. “Nice!” she murmured and after a moment: “I’m so frightened of him, J.G.”

  With the practised ease of a good actor, he slipped his
arm round her. “I won’t have it,” he said. “By God, I won’t! If he worries you again, author or no author—”

  “It’s not him,” she said. “Not the Doctor. Oh, I know he’s simply filthy to work with and he does fuss me dreadfully, but it’s not the Doctor really who’s responsible for all my misery.”

  “No? Who is then?”

  “Uncle Ben!” She made a small wailing noise that was muffled by his coat. He bent his head attentively to listen. “J.G., I’m just plain terrified of Uncle Ben.”

  Parry Percival always enjoyed his arrival at the theatre when there was a gallery queue to be penetrated. One raised one’s hat and said: “Pardon me. Thanks so much,” to the gratified ladies. One heard them murmur one’s name. It was a heartening little fillip to one’s self-esteem.

  On this occasion the stimulant didn’t work with its normal magic. He was too worried to relish it wholeheartedly. For one thing his row with Dr. Rutherford still lingered like an unpleasant taste in his memory. Apart from the altogether unforgiveable insults the Doctor had levelled at his art, there was one in particular which had been directed at himself as a man and this troubled him deeply. It had almost brought him to the pitch of doing something that he dreaded to do — take stock of himself. Until now he had lived in an indeterminate hinterland, drifting first towards one frontier, then the other, unsure of his impulses and not strongly propelled by them in any one direction. He would, he thought, perhaps have turned out a happier being if he had been born a woman. “Let’s face it,” he thought uneasily, “I’m interested in their kind of things. I’m intuitive and sensitive in their way.” It helped a little to think how intuitive and how sensitive he was. But he was not in any sense a fair target for the sort of veiled insults the Doctor had levelled at him. And as if this weren’t enough of a worry, there was the immediate menace of Clark Bennington. Ben, he thought hotly, was insufferable. Every device by which a second-leading man could make a bit-part actor look foolish had been brought into play during rehearsals. Ben had up-staged him, had flurried him by introducing new business, had topped his lines and, even while he was seething with impotent fury, had reduced him to nervous giggles by looking sideways at him. It was the technique with which a schoolmaster could torture a small boy, and it revived in Parry hideous memories of his childhood.