No one stopped her at any point. She was allowed to sing right through to the end. After which there was almost a minute’s silence that was, she knew, an astonished tribute to her unexpected performance.
‘Very beautiful,’ said Quentin Bannister’s voice from the darkness at last, as though he were just as surprised as everyone else. ‘I congratulate you on your pupil, Madame Marburger.’
Gail did not hear what tactful words her teacher murmured in reply, for Oscar Warrender came forward into the circle of light from the stage, looked up at her and said, ‘Have you studied the last act, Miss Rostall?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘Miss Gregory—’ he called into the wings, and the indifferent young woman—now looking rather slavish—trotted out expectantly. ‘Ask Mr. Paulton to come back here if he is still in the house.’
‘Yes, Mr. Warrender.’ She hurried away, and there was a slight pause, while Gail was aware of a good deal of low-toned conversation going on in the body of the theatre.
Then a rather slight, youngish-looking man with an eager, intelligent face came on to the stage.
‘Mr. Paulton’—that was Oscar Warrender again—‘this is Miss Rostall, who is auditioning for the part of Anya. We should like to hear her in the final scene. Would you mind joining her for the duet?’
It seemed he didn’t mind at all. He smiled at Gail in a friendly way and said, ‘Are we taking it from your entrance?’
‘I think so.’ She glanced inquiringly at the pianist, who nodded. And, quite naturally, as though she knew every move in the scene, Gail went to the back of the stage. Then, with the instinctive feeling for simple pathos which was one of her genuine gifts, she made a slow, bewildered, childlike entrance, singing her first broken phrases.
No one had really suggested that the two should act out the scene, as well as sing it. But young Paulton, who was a born stage person, immediately fell in with her mood, and together they went through to the end of the opera, giving quite a remarkable degree of acting power as well as some excellent singing.
At the end, Warrender said briefly, ‘Very good—both of you.’
Quentin Bannister said, ‘I would never have believed it, from a virtually unknown artist! You know, I doubt if we shall have to look much further.’
‘We’ll see.’ Warrender frowned at the indiscretion of such frank speech in front of mere audition material. Then he turned to Marc, who had volunteered nothing so far, and asked, ‘How do you feel about it, Marc?’
Gail could see him again very clearly in the light from the stage. He looked a good deal more relaxed, but he smoothed back his hair with both hands in a half nervous gesture.
‘I’m not quite sure. I like it—yes, of course I like it. An incredibly musical and sensitive performance. Not quite—’ Then he looked up suddenly and smiled full at Gail and said, ‘My word, you must have worked hard on that!’
‘I did.’ Gail smiled down at him. ‘And I’m simply in love with the part by now.’
‘Well, we won’t keep either of you any longer,’ observed Warrender, evidently feeling that the talk was becoming a little too unofficial. ‘We have several other people to hear in the next few days, but we will let you know if we need you here again.’ He spoke a word or two to the Bannisters in an undertone, and then added, ‘Will you keep next Friday afternoon clear, please.’
They both said they would. Then Gail and Henry Paulton left the stage together and he took her by the arm.
‘You were simply terrific!’ he told her with genuine enthusiasm. ‘Why haven’t I come across you before?’
‘Probably because I don’t really belong to the operatic world,’ Gail said. ‘This is the first time I’ve ever auditioned for an operatic role.’
‘The first time!’ He looked at her with frank incredulity. ‘You can’t mean it! Then you’re either a God-given natural at this job, or you’ve been coached by a genius.’ This was so dangerously near the truth that Gail laughed nervously, quite unable to find suitable words with which to reply.
‘You took the stage like a pro,’ he assured her. ‘And some of that phrasing was quite wonderful. Who taught you how to time those marvellous short pauses between the opening phrases?’
Who indeed?
‘Well, I thought—it sounded to me—’ Gail stammered into embarrassed silence. And then, to her measureless relief, Madame Marburger joined them at that moment, and she was saved from the necessity of explaining the inexplicable.
‘Let’s go now.’ She turned eagerly to her teacher. ‘I don’t know why, but I just suddenly feel completely flaked out.’
‘It’s the strain and excitement,’ Henry Paulton told her kindly. ‘The anxiety first, and then the relief of quite a remarkable success. Well, I’ll be seeing you, I hope. Till Friday!’ And he turned away.
Back in the small dressing-room, while she and Madame Marburger were putting on their coats, Gail had almost nothing to say. But the older woman evidently understood how she was feeling, for she made no attempt at conversation until they had left the theatre.
Then she firmly hailed a passing taxi, hustled Gail into it and, sitting down beside her said, ‘Well done, Gail. You were a great deal better than I dared to hope.’
‘Were you doubtful about me, then?’ Gail gave her a quick, searching glance.
‘Not at all. I meant that, high though my hopes were, you actually surpassed them. Frankly, any Anya who takes the part from you now will have to be very good indeed.’
‘Oh, I’m so glad!’ And just to show how glad she was Gail began to cry.
‘Come, come—’ her teacher’s tone was bracing, but not unsympathetic. ‘There’s nothing to cry about. Very much the reverse. But you’re getting a bit of nervous reaction now, I expect. I shall take you straight home. And you had better have a quiet and restful evening.’
‘Yes,’ Gail promised meekly. ‘And I can’t thank you enough for all your support.’
‘Don’t thank me!’ The other woman laughed quietly. ‘What sort of a present do you suppose this afternoon was for me too? One doesn’t often have even one’s best pupil seize an opportunity like this with both hands. If you get this part, my dear, I shall be just as pleased as you will.’
‘And will you be terribly disappointed if I don’t get it?’ Gail asked, with a sort of nervous anxiety she could not quite explain to herself.
‘To a certain degree—of course. Just as you will be,’ Madame Marburger replied. ‘But our profession is full of hopes and fears, triumphs and disappointments. One has to learn to take the one with the other. I have learned that long ago, and you will have to learn the same. If the account balances reasonably well in the end, one cannot complain.’
And, on this admirable piece of philosophy, she left Gail at her door and drove on in the taxi.
It was one thing to be told to have a quiet and restful time. It was quite another thing to carry out the advice. For several minutes after she got in, Gail just walked up and down the room, trying to quiet her nerves and balance her hopes and fears, as Madame Marburger had told her to do.
By any reckoning, it had been an afternoon of something like triumph. Oscar Warrender himself had praised her. Quentin Bannister had (with some effrontery, it must be admitted) spoken as though the role were already hers. Even Marc had praised her for the work she had done.
But then, of course, he thought he was hearing the result of a couple of weeks of unaided work. Unaided, that was to say, by anyone but her excellent singing teacher. He had no idea that what he had heard and seen that afternoon was the fine flower of his father’s determined coaching. That was the thought which came to sour the sweet flavour of success.
‘Oh, don’t be so silly!’ she admonished herself, even speaking aloud in the intensity of her desire to be convinced by her own arguments. ‘It doesn’t matter how you arrived at the final result. Only that you arrived there.’
An incredibly musical and sensitive performance! That had been Marc’s ac
tual verdict. And he had said that he liked it—that ‘of course’ he liked it. As though there could be no second opinion about that.
But his very first words, when Oscar Warrender had appealed to him for his opinion, had been, ‘I’m not quite sure—’
And that, Gail knew to the bottom of her soul, exactly described his genuine state of mind. He had no idea what had brought him to that point. He only knew that something intrinsically good had confused the issue for him with regard to his own creation.
She was so shocked by the acceptance of this thought that when the telephone rang at her elbow she jumped as though she had been shot.
It must be Marc! Her own guilty thoughts convinced her of that. And her heart was thumping and her hand trembling as she took up the receiver.
But it was Oliver’s gay, reassuring voice which said, ‘Hello, Gail! How did you get on? It was the audition this afternoon, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes. Yes, it was. And I got on—’ she swallowed nervously—‘pretty well.’
‘Only pretty well?’ He said that kindly, but with the true professional’s desire for exact information.
‘Well, Warrender said I was very good and—’
‘Warrender did?’ Oliver whistled appreciatively. ‘Those were his exact words? Then you must have done better than pretty well, my dear. He’s very sparing with his praise at the best of times. And at an audition he’s a regular old oyster. I take it Father gave a splendid performance of being as surprised as everyone else?’
‘Yes, he did. It made me feel guilty, somehow. Well, not exactly guilty—’ as there was a derisive sound of protest from Oliver. ‘But oh, it would have been so much, much nicer if everyone there had known the simple truth that your father was largely responsible for my being so satisfactory in the part. It all seemed so silly and unnecessary, this elaborate deception.’
‘It won’t, once everyone is satisfied that you are the right person to have the part,’ Oliver assured her soothingly. ‘How did Marc react?’
‘Favourably, on the whole,’ Gail said slowly. ‘I’d done the final scene with Henry Paulton—who is quite marvellous, by the way—’
‘I know. I’ve always admired him.’
‘—And then Mr. Warrender said we were both very good, and he turned to Marc and asked what he thought And although Marc praised us too, his first words were, “I’m not quite sure—” ’
‘Were they indeed?’ Suddenly Oliver sounded amused, and even a trifle smug.
‘I don’t know what’s so pleasing about that!’ she exclaimed with unexpected irritation.
‘I was just congratulating myself on being so right about my own family,’ he replied rather complacently.
‘Yes, you were quite right, weren’t you?’ Gail spoke quietly and very deliberately. ‘Marc knew the performance was intrinsically good. But it wasn’t his idea of the part. However, it was so good—’ she stated that without conceit or false modesty—‘that he was actually confused in his own mind about what he really wanted. Your father had successfully superimposed his idea of Anya on top of Marc’s theoretical conception of the part. That’s what makes me feel guilty about the work we’ve done together. And I’m not withdrawing the word this time.’
‘Don’t exaggerate things, darling—’ Oliver began, again in that soothing tone he had used before.
But, before he could get any further, she said sharply, ‘I can’t talk about it any more, Oliver. It upsets me too much.’ And she abruptly replaced the receiver.
Within a couple of minutes the telephone rang again.
So unwilling was she to continue the conversation that she wanted just to ignore the shrill sound. But it persisted and, knowing Oliver was perfectly well aware that she was there, she finally snatched up the receiver again and said breathlessly, ‘I’m sorry. But I just can’t—’
‘Gail, is that you?’ Marc’s voice cut across her words.
‘Oh—oh, yes,’ she stammered. ‘I thought it was—someone else.’
‘Were you expecting a call? Would you like me to ring off?’
‘No, no!’ Scared though she had been ten minutes ago at the very thought of speaking to him, now, she realized, the last thing she wanted him to do was to ring off again. ‘What is it, Marc?’
‘First of all, I want to congratulate you on your performance this afternoon. It was quite stunning, in its way. I want to talk to you about it Will you come out and have dinner with me?’
‘This evening, do you mean?’ Part of her was enraptured at the thought. But her fears made her prevaricate. ‘I’m rather tired, really. And—and—’
‘Yes, I know. It must have been a wearing afternoon for you. It was for me too, to tell the truth. We’ll go somewhere quiet, and just discuss Anya. Unless you’re sick of the subject. How about it, Gail?’
‘I’d like to,’ she said slowly. And then, on an impulse she couldn’t control, ‘Marc, tell me something. Did you really like my Anya?’
There was a moment of hesitation before he replied, ‘Yes. I liked it.’
‘But it just isn’t your idea of Anya at all, is it?’
This time the hesitation was a little longer. Then he said, ‘No, Gail, it isn’t. But maybe I’m wrong. That’s why I must talk to you about it.’
CHAPTER SIX
More than once during the hour or so before Marc came to take her out to dinner, Gail was tempted to telephone again and say that she could not come, after all. But, each time, her desire to go was just a bit stronger than her fear of the consequences. And so, when he arrived at seven o’clock, she was ready and waiting for him.
She looked from the window when the bell rang and saw that he was driving the car in which he had fetched her and Oliver from the station, that very first day. And, as she ran downstairs to join him, she could not help thinking how dramatically her life had changed since that day.
Her view of Marc had changed a good deal too. Not only because she had met him and talked with him since, but because it was not possible to have studied his work so intensively without gaining some knowledge of the sensitivity, the feeling for beauty, the real compassion and the deep human warmth which his music revealed.
‘I feel rather guilty to be dragging you out when you’re tired.’ He smiled at her as she got into the seat beside him. ‘But I must say you look remarkably fresh and charming for an exhausted girl.’
She laughed and said that she had had time to rest and was now ready to enjoy herself.
‘It must have been a lot worse for you,’ she declared as they drove away from the house. ‘To hear your own work given rough, smooth or sheerly brutal treatment over and over again, before a critical audience, must have been sheer murder.’
‘It was,’ he assured her. But he seemed able to smile about it now, all the same.
‘Just before I began—when I was feeling at my very worst—I caught a glimpse of you in the light from the stage,’ she told him. ‘You looked very much as I was feeling, and I realized suddenly that it must be ten times worse for you. While I was feeling sorry for you I somehow didn’t feel so frightful about myself. It steadied me quite a bit.’
‘Was that why you sang so beautifully?’
‘I suppose it was. If I did sing beautifully.’
‘You did, Gail. In fact, quite a lot of your performance would not have disgraced the most accomplished artist. I had no idea that you truly knew so much about your job. I completely underestimated you that time I first heard you. And I’m prepared to admit it now.’
‘Oh—’ she said, and cleared her throat nervously. Then after that she was silent. Partly because she was greatly moved by his generous admission. Partly because she wondered, rather panic-stricken, how long it would be before she somehow let slip the fact that someone other than herself was chiefly responsible for that incredibly mature performance.
He appeared to find nothing unusual in her silence, probably putting it down to the fact that she was, admittedly, tired and willing to take thi
ngs lazily. Indeed, not until they were established at a secluded table in a small, quiet and elegant restaurant did he revert to the subject of the audition again. And then only after he had consulted her about her exact tastes in food and drink.
Then, as they sipped their aperitifs, he asked—not searchingly, more in a tone of friendly curiosity, ‘How did you come to be so completely at home in that role in so short a time, Gail? Had you thought about it a great deal between your visit down home and your first getting the score two weeks ago?’
‘Yes, of course.’ That at least was strictly true. ‘I was fascinated by the work, and particularly by Anya’s music, from the first time I heard it at your home. Her character is so appealing, so—’
‘Is that how she seems to you?’ he interrupted. ‘You really think of her as young—touching—appealing? A sort of little-girl-lost?’
‘Y-yes, I think I do. Don’t you?’
‘Not at all.’ He shook his head. ‘I suppose that was why I was taken aback by your performance, as well as tremendously impressed by it.’
‘Tell me how you see her,’ said Gail rather timidly.
‘To me she is a typical woman from central or eastern Europe. Rather earthy. Almost peasant-like. Neither understanding nor liking much of what she sees around her in her new country. She’s lost, it’s true, in the deepest sense of the term. That’s why she bruises herself against every new and unexpected experience. But she is strong, in a primitive way. After all, she was sufficiently singleminded to go with her man into what was, for her, the unknown. That he abandons her there is her tragedy. But one is left, in that last scene, with the feeling that she will somehow rise above the tragedy, because she is basically strong and beautiful. I wrote her music with that type of woman in mind. It seems to me that what I wrote expresses her like that.’
Music of the Heart (The Warrender Saga No. 6) Page 10
