So Much Blood

by Simon Brett

‘And half of them get stabbed . . .’

  ‘Yes.’ He nodded vigorously. ‘Though he wasn’t a lot more use to me when he was alive.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Never came to bloody rehearsals. Didn’t participate in the concentration exercises or movement classes, any of the workshop stuff. I mean, how can you build an ensemble with people like that? He hadn’t any acting talent anyway.’

  ‘Then why did you cast him in your show?’

  ‘I didn’t cast him. Look, I’m offered this job—’

  ‘You mean you’re nothing to do with the university?’

  ‘Good God, no.’ Michael was severely affronted. ‘I’m a professional director. They booked me to get some professional feel into their production. And then like bloody amateurs they don’t give me enough time to get it together properly. Everyone off for other rehearsals. Do you know how long it takes to build up an ensemble?’

  ‘About four years?’

  ‘Well, four weeks anyway. And four weeks’ work. Not four weeks doing bourgeois revues and middle-class Shakespeare.’

  ‘No, of course not. You were saying how Willy Mariello came to be in the show . . .’

  ‘Yes. O.K., I take the job. I go to Derby to hold auditions. And already I’m told that Willy is doing the music and, since Rizzio’s a guitarist and he has a couple of songs, O.K., he’s playing Rizzio too.’

  ‘Who told you this?’

  ‘Sam Wasserman, the guy who wrote this crappy play.’

  ‘Is it crappy?’

  ‘Yes, but it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘My style of direction doesn’t need a good play. In fact the play can get in the way. It’s only a starting point from which the totality emerges—the iron filing dropped into the acid which produces the perfect crystal.’ He added the last image with great satisfaction, albeit dubious chemistry. Then he looked at Charles with pitying contempt. ‘I suppose you still think a play has got to have words.’

  Charles smiled apologetically. There was no point in alienating such a ready source of information. ‘Yes, I am a bit of an old fuddy-duddy on that score. I expect Sam Wasserman probably thinks words are quite important too.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘He sounds an interesting bloke. I’d like to meet him.’

  Michael gave a snort of laughter that could have meant anything. ‘You should get a chance quite soon. He’s coming up to Edinburgh.’

  ‘For the opening in the Third Week?’

  ‘No, before that, I hope. We’ve been sending telegrams all over Europe for him. He’s going to come up and take over the part of Rizzio.’

  ‘Oh really.’ That was very interesting. ‘He plays guitar too?’

  ‘Yes. He was going to do the music for the show himself until Willy was brought in.’

  ‘Ah.’ That was also interesting. ‘So everything’s back to where it started?’

  ‘I suppose so. More drink?’

  ‘Thank you.’ Charles held out his cup and the malt was sloshed in like school soup. Trying desperately to sound casual, he asked, ‘What did you think of Willy Mariello?’

  ‘Useless, unco-operative bastard. Ruining my production. From my point of view, his death was the best thing that could have happened.’

  It was an uncompromising statement of hatred. So much so that Charles felt inclined to discount it. A murderer would be more guarded . . . Unless it was an elaborate double bluff . . . Oh dear. The further he got into the business of detection, the further certainty seemed to recede. Still, keep on probing. Try to find out some more hard facts. Again he imposed a relaxed tone on his voice. ‘Were you rehearsing last weekend?’

  ‘Of course. I rehearse whenever I can get my cast together. I am trying to create something, you know.’

  ‘Of course. So Willy was rehearsing all weekend?’

  ‘No. That’s a good example of what I mean. He rehearses on Saturday with his usual bad grace. Sunday—no sign of him. Monday he is not there and I am so furious I break the rehearsal and I go up to his house to drag him back—by force if necessary.’

  ‘Was he there?’

  ‘Oh yes, he’s there. Calmly decorating. Plaster dust everywhere, paint brushes, so on and so on.

  ‘Did you get him to rehearsal?’

  ‘Yes, till mid-afternoon. Then he slipped off again when we had a break.’

  ‘Hmm. Perhaps he wanted to get back to his decorating.’

  ‘Yes. Or to the girl.’

  ‘Girl?’

  ‘Yes. When I finally got him out on the Monday morning, he called out “Goodbye” to someone upstairs.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  In they go—in jackets, and cloaks,

  Plumes, and bonnets, turbans and toques,

  As if to a Congress of Nations:

  Greeks and Malays, with daggers and dirks,

  Spaniards, Jews, Chinese, and Turks—

  Some like original foreign works,

  But mostly like bad translations.

  MISS KILMANSEGG AND HER PRECIOUS LEG

  BY SUNDAY 18TH AUGUST Edinburgh was beginning to feel the Festival. Over-night the city was full of tourists—tweedy music-lovers on leisurely promenades, earnest Americans decked with rucksacks and guide-books, French and Japanese drawn by the twin attractions of culture and Marks and Spencer pullovers. The residents who had not escaped on holiday wore expressions of resignation, hardened to the idea of their streets clogged with ambling foreigners, their early nights troubled by returning revue audiences and the distant massed pipes and drums of the Military Tattoo.

  Because that Sunday was the day when it all started officially. In the words of the Festival brochure, ‘The twenty-eighth Edinburgh Festival will be opened with a Service of Praise and Thanksgiving in St Giles’ Cathedral on Sunday 18th August at 3 p.m. Later, starting from the Castle Esplanade at 9.45 p.m., relays of torch-bearing runners will light a bonfire on Arthur’s Seat.’

  And in the little halls of Edinburgh on that Sunday morning would-be cultural torch-bearers blew earnestly at the smoulderings of what was in many cases incombustible material. Experimental and university groups realised that their rehearsal time was running out and put on a spurt to justify the extravagant claims of their publicity. There were dress rehearsals for at least a dozen ‘funniest revues on the Fringe’, some twenty ‘revolutionary new plays’, and three or four ‘new artistic concepts which would flatten the accepted barriers of culture’. If all these ambitions were realised, British theatre would never be the same again.

  In the Masonic Hall in Lauriston Street Charles Paris was trying to realise more humble ambitions and finding it hard work. The lighting technician he had been allocated was a fat and contemptuous youth, whose blue denim had faded and dirtied to the colour of sludge. He was known as Plug, and Charles found it difficult to call anyone ‘Plug’.

  It had been made clear that, considering the exacting demands of creative amateur theatre, there was not going to be much time or effort left for him, a mere professional. ‘Um . . . Plug?’ he said exploratively, ‘I wonder about the chances of moving the back-projector round. If it stays there, I’m going to be masking the slides.’

  ‘That’d mean moving the screen too,’ Plug grunted accusingly.

  ‘Yes, it will.’

  ‘Can’t be done. Haven’t got the extension leads.’

  ‘Can’t you get them?’

  ‘Shouldn’t think so.’

  Charles bit back his anger. It was difficult dealing with amateurs. In a professional context, no problem; he could have bawled the guy out, justified because a service that was being paid for was not being provided. But the amateur relies on goodwill and there did not seem to be much of it in evidence.

  So he gritted his teeth and played stupid, apparently bowing to Plug’s technical expertise and working the youth round till he did what was required as a demonstration of his abilities. It was important, Charles had gone to considerable trouble to have
slides made of Hood’s woodcuts. They had originally been printed with the poems and the crude humour of the pictures extended the range of the verse. In a one-man show it is important to give the audience as much varied stimulus as possible.

  By application of simple child psychology he got the back-projector and screen moved and started a run. It was not easy. With only two stage areas in use, the lighting plot was simple. But Plug refused to rehearse the cues on their own, saying that he would pick them up on a full run. Then, in spite of the carefully marked-up script that Charles had given him, he proceeded to get every single effect wrong.

  The one benefit of the run was that it tested Charles’ knowledge of his words, because whether he moved to the table or the lectern, there was a guarantee of total darkness on that area. And whenever he turned to the back-projection screen, he was confronted either by a blank or the wrong slide.

  It was also a useful concentration exercise. In the darkness beyond the stage people kept wandering in and out. Plug greeted them all loudly and conducted irrelevant conversations at the top of his voice. Charles was ignored like a television in the corner of the room.

  The show limped to its close. As he stood at the lectern to read the final Stanzas, ‘Farewell, Life! My senses swim . . .’, he was amazed to find the light was actually where it should be. It had taken the whole show to get one cue right, but at least it offered hope. Encouraged, he put more emotion into the poem. It approached its end with the dying fall he had intended.

  ‘O’er the earth there comes a bloom—

  Sunny light for sullen gloom,

  Warm perfume for vapour cold—’

  then, before ‘I smell the Rose above the Mould’, the pause held long and dramatic.

  Too long. Too dramatic. Plug snapped the lights out before the line was delivered.

  Charles’ reserves cracked. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘What’s up?’ Plug grunted from the darkness.

  ‘That’s not the cue. There’s another line.’

  Plug did not seem unduly concerned. He brought up the house lights. ‘Never mind.’

  ‘And then, after the last line, there’s supposed to be a three-second pause and a five-second fade down to black.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It’s clearly marked in the script.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Charles decided there was little point in concealing his feelings. ‘That was pretty abysmal.’

  Plug nodded sympathetically, unaware that the comment referred to him. ‘Hmm. Perhaps you need more rehearsal.’

  ‘I think it’s you who needs more rehearsal. None of the cues were right.’

  Plug’s silence indicated that this was an unworthy attack on his life work. Charles continued, ‘So let’s have one run-through of just the cues and then do the whole show again.’

  ‘There’s not much point.’

  ‘Why not? The show opens tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes, but I won’t be doing the lights then. I’m only here for the rehearsal.’

  Charles tried to find out what would be happening about his lights in the actual show from the Company Manager, and Brian Cassells was confident that everything would be all right. Charles, who found Brian’s confidence increasingly unnerving, was not convinced.

  ‘Oh, incidentally, Charles, will you be going down to the Fringe reception?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘At five o’clock. Royal Mile Centre. It’s sort of to launch everything. You know, Press’ll be there and all that.’

  ‘Then I’ll certainly come.’ Any chance of publicity must be taken. He was not too optimistic of the ‘DUDS of the Fringe’ poster bringing audiences flocking to see him.

  Since the pubs were not open on Sunday, he had cabbage lunch with the rest of the group. The conversation was all of the coming shows. Willy Mariello’s death had been almost forgotten. Charles looked round the table. Anna was not there. He suddenly wished she was, or wished that he was with her somewhere keeping the blues at bay.

  The loud T-shirted crowd joked and attitudinised. He felt old and envious. Their values were so simple. What they were doing on the Fringe was the most important thing that had ever happened; that was all there was to it. Their shows consumed all their thoughts and energies.

  Except for the thoughts of one person—the murderer. He or she must be feeling regret or anxiety or something. But the lunch time crowd showed no signs of guilty conscience. They all seemed interchangeably brash and cheerful. Pam Northcliffe was up the far end of the table as nervously bright and giggly as the rest. Communal excitement had replaced the short tempers of earlier in the week.

  Martin Warburton was not there. Charles wondered if he would be sharing in the group gaiety if he were. There was still a lot to be found out about Martin Warburton. That afternoon might be a good opportunity to read Who Now?—a Disturbing New Play.

  It was disturbing. The language was good, there was some sense of structure, but the content was frightening. As the title implied, questions of identity figured large. None of the characters seemed to have a fixed personality; they were chameleons who took on the colour of different forms of violence. There was a woolly Leftish political message coming through the monologues that made up the play. Its main tenet seemed to be that, come the Revolution, the bourgeois would be destroyed. But it was the way in which they were going to be destroyed that was disturbing. Images of bombings, secret beatings and firing squads abounded. Continually blood welled, bones cracked, corpses twitched and entrails spilled. So much blood.

  Under normal circumstances, Charles would have put it down to overwriting. Some of the extended metaphors even reminded him of his own adolescent literary excesses. But even so, and even given a young person’s insensitive ignorance of the real facts of death, there was something obsessive about the play. A morbid preoccupation with violence unbalanced the writer’s considerable natural talent.

  And became uncomfortably relevant in the light of Willy Mariello’s death.

  About half past four Martin Warburton suddenly appeared in the men’s dormitory. He seemed in a hurry and had dropped in to collect something from his suitcase. Charles was lying on his camp-bed checking through So Much Comic . . .

  ‘Oh, Martin, I’ve read your play.’

  ‘Ah.’ He seemed embarrassed.

  ‘I’d like to talk about it.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Now? If you’re walking down to this reception, we could chat on the way.’

  ‘I’m not going to the reception.’ Martin hesitated. He was improvising. ‘I’m going to meet someone down at . . . er . . . Dean Village.’

  ‘Oh. O.K. Well, some other time.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Charles started off with some of the Mary cast to walk to the Royal Mile Centre. Just as they were about to cross Princes Street to go up the Mound, he realised that he had not brought any of his hand-outs. Even a playbill offering one of the DUDS of the Fringe was better than no publicity. Brian Cassells would not have thought to take any. With some annoyance, because it was a warm afternoon, he started back along Princes Street.

  He was waiting for the lights to cross Charlotte Street when he saw Martin over the other side striding purposefully along Lothian Road. In the opposite direction from Dean Village.

  Charles was not aware of making the decision, but it seemed natural to cross over Princes Street and follow. He was some fifty yards behind his quarry and there were enough meandering tourists about to make the pursuit look casual. He kept his eyes fixed on the blue denim back ahead.

  Martin turned left along Castle Terrace which skirts the great Castle rock, then crossed over Spittal Street and climbed up towards Lauriston Place. Maybe going to the Masonic Hall. The scene of the crime. There were no rehearsals that afternoon. Everyone was going down to the reception. Or perhaps Martin was aiming for the Mariello’s house in Meadow Lane. Charles felt a spurt of excitement.

  There were less people about in this
part of the old town, so he dawdled. He did not want to be noticed if Martin stopped suddenly.

  But the boy did not stop. The blue denim back continued its progress. Past the Masonic Hall, no hesitation. Past the Meadow Lane turning. On past the Infirmary, looking neither left nor right. Charles began to feel it was a long walk.

  And it continued. On past the University Union with its cloth banner advertising Russell Hunter in Knox. On to Nicholson Square and then suddenly right, along the broad pavement of Nicholson Street. Martin still kept up his even, preoccupied pace, with Charles alternately lingering and hurrying along behind.

  The whole thing seemed pointless. Charles could not really think what he was doing, playing this elaborate game of cops and robbers when he should be snatching much-needed publicity at the reception. Perhaps Martin was just going out for a walk. Something innocuous. Something—

  Martin had disappeared. The fact jerked Charles out of his reverie. One moment the denim back had been moving smoothly along, the next it was gone. In the middle of a parade of shops. No chance of having turned up a side street.

  Cautiously Charles moved forward to where he had last seen Martin. All the shops were Sunday shut. Their fronts were separated by doors which served the flats above. Gently Charles pushed the one nearest to where he had last seen Martin.

  It was a heavy door, but it gave. The stone hall was dark and suddenly cool. A pram. A bicycle. Stone stairs, a metal rail. And attached to the top of the door a heavy chain that was part of some antiquated system to open it from the flats above.

  Just an ordinary hall of an ordinary tenement block. Silence. He could not start barging into private flats at high tea time on an Edinburgh Sunday afternoon. Anyway, what was he looking for? He went out into the street again.

  The names on the old-fashioned bell-pushes told him nothing. McHarg, Stewart, Grant, Wilson. He waited for about five minutes, apparently intrigued by a display of dusty Pyrex in an adjacent shop. Martin did not reemerge. It was after half past five. Charles set off for the Royal Mile Centre.

  At the entrance he was asked to identify himself.

  ‘Charles Paris.’