The Mammoth Book of Zombies

by Stephen Jones

  Calloway was certain he'd sell off the place tomorrow if he could manoeuvre it. A satellite town like Redditch, growing as Birmingham grew, didn't need theatres, it needed offices, hypermarkets, warehouses: it needed, to quote the councillors, growth through investment in new industry. It also needed prime sites to build that industry upon. No mere art could survive such pragmatism.

  Tallulah was not in the box, nor in the foyer, nor in the Green Room.

  Irritated both by Hammersmith's incivility and Tallulah's disappearance, Calloway went back into the auditorium to pick up his jacket and go to get drunk. The rehearsal was over and the actors long gone. The bare hedges looked somewhat small from the back row of the stalls. Maybe they needed an extra few inches. He made a note on the back of a show bill he found in his pocket: Hedges, bigger?

  A footfall made him look up, and a figure had appeared on stage. A smooth entrance, up-stage centre, where the hedges converged. Calloway didn't recognize the man.

  "Mr Calloway? Mr Terence Calloway?"

  "Yes?"

  The visitor walked down stage to where, in an earlier age, the footlights would have been, and stood looking out into the auditorium.

  "My apologies for interrupting your train of thought."

  "No problem."

  "I wanted a word."

  "With me?"

  "If you would."

  Calloway wandered down to the front of the stalls, appraising the stranger.

  He was dressed in shades of grey from head to foot. A grey worsted suit, grey shoes, a grey cravat. Piss-elegant, was Calloway's first, uncharitable summation. But the man cut an impressive figure nevertheless. His face beneath the shadow of his brim was difficult to discern.

  "Allow me to introduce myself."

  The voice was persuasive, cultured. Ideal for advertisement voice-overs: soap commercials, maybe. After Hammersmith's bad manners, the voice came as a breath of good breeding.

  "My name is Lichfield. Not that I expect that means much to a man of your tender years."

  Tender years: well, well. Maybe there was still something of the wunderkind in his face.

  "Are you a critic?" Calloway inquired.

  The laugh that emanated from beneath the immaculately-swept brim was ripely ironical.

  "In the name of Jesus, no," Lichfield replied.

  "I'm sorry, then, you have me at a loss."

  "No need for an apology."

  "Were you in the house this afternoon?"

  Lichfield ignored the question. "I realize you're a busy man, Mr Calloway, and I don't want to waste your time. The theatre is my business, as it is yours. I think we must consider ourselves allies, though we have never met."

  Ah, the great brotherhood. It made Calloway want to spit, the familiar claims of sentiment. When he thought of the number of so-called allies that had cheerfully stabbed him in the back; and in return the playwrights whose work he'd smilingly slanged, the actors he'd crushed with a casual quip. Brotherhood be damned, it was dog eat dog, same as any over-subscribed profession.

  "I have," Lichfield was saying, "an abiding interest in the Elysium." There was a curious emphasis on the word abiding. It sounded positively funereal from Lichfield's lips. Abide with me.

  "Oh?"

  "Yes, I've spent many happy hours in this theatre, down the years, and frankly it pains me to carry this burden of news."

  "What news?"

  "Mr Calloway, I have to inform you that your Twelfth Night will be the last production the Elysium will see."

  The statement didn't come as much of a surprise, but it still hurt, and the internal wince must have registered on Calloway's face.

  "Ah… so you didn't know. I thought not. They always keep the artists in ignorance don't they? It's a satisfaction the Apollonians will never relinquish. The accountant's revenge."

  "Hammersmith," said Calloway.

  "Hammersmith."

  "Bastard."

  "His clan are never to be trusted, but then I hardly need to tell you that."

  "Are you sure about the closure?"

  "Certainly. He'd do it tomorrow if he could."

  "But why? I've done Stoppard here, Tennessee Williams - always played to good houses. It doesn't make sense."

  "It makes admirable financial sense, I'm afraid, and if you think in figures, as Hammersmith does, there's no riposte to simple arithmetic. The Elysium's getting old. We're all getting old. We creak. We feel our age in our joints: our instinct is to lie down and be gone away."

  Gone away: the voice became melodramatically thin, a whisper of longing.

  "How do you know about this?"

  "I was, for many years, a trustee of the theatre, and since my retirement I've made it my business to - what's the phrase? - keep my ear to the ground. It's difficult, in this day and age, to evoke the triumph this stage has seen…"

  His voice trailed away, in a reverie. It seemed true, not an effect.

  Then, business like once more: "This theatre is about to die, Mr Calloway. You will be present at the last rites, through no fault of your own. I felt you ought to be… warned."

  "Thank you. I appreciate that. Tell me, were you ever an actor yourself?"

  "What makes you think that?"

  "The voice."

  "Too rhetorical by half, I know. My curse, I'm afraid. I can scarcely ask for a cup of coffee without sounding like Lear in the storm."

  He laughed, heartily, at his own expense. Calloway began to warm to the fellow. Maybe he was a little archaic-looking, perhaps even slightly absurd, but there was a full-bloodedness about his manner that caught Calloway's imagination. Lichfield wasn't apologetic about his love of theatre, like so many in the profession, people who trod the boards as a second-best, their souls sold to the movies.

  "I have, I will confess, dabbled in the craft a little," Lichfield confided, "but I just don't have the stamina for it, I'm afraid. Now my wife - "

  Wife? Calloway was surprised Lichfield had a heterosexual bone in his body.

  "- My wife Constantia has played here on a number of occasions, and I may say very successfully. Before the war of course."

  "It's a pity to close the place."

  "Indeed. But there are no last act miracles to be performed, I'm afraid. The Elysium will be rubble in six weeks' time, and there's an end to it. I just wanted you to know that interests other than the crassly commercial are watching over this closing production. Think of us as guardian angels. We wish you well, Terence, we all wish you well."

  It was a genuine sentiment, simply stated. Calloway was touched by this man's concern, and a little chastened by it. It put his own stepping-stone ambitions in an unflattering perspective. Lichfield went on: "We care to see this theatre end its days in suitable style, then die a good death."

  "Damn shame."

  "Too late for regrets by a long chalk. We should never have given up Dionysus for Apollo."

  "What?"

  "Sold ourselves to the accountants, to legitimacy, to the likes of Mr Hammersmith, whose soul, if he has one, must be the size of my fingernail, and grey as a louse's back. We should have had the courage of our depictions, I think. Served poetry and lived under the stars."

  Calloway didn't quite follow the allusions, but he got the general drift, and respected the viewpoint.

  Off stage left, Diane's voice cut the solemn atmosphere like a plastic knife.

  "Terry? Are you there?"

  The spell was broken: Calloway hadn't been aware how hypnotic Lichfield's presence was until that other voice came between them. Listening to him was like being rocked in familiar arms. Lichfield stepped to the edge of the stage, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial rasp.

  "One last thing, Terence - "

  "Yes?"

  "Your Viola. She lacks, if you'll forgive my pointing it out, the special qualities required for the role."

  Calloway hung fire.

  "I know," Lichfield continued, "personal loyalties prevent honesty in these matters."
/>   "No," Calloway replied, "you're right. But she's popular."

  "So was bear-baiting, Terence."

  A luminous smile spread beneath the brim, hanging in the shadow like the grin of the Cheshire Cat.

  "I'm only joking," said Lichfield, his rasp a chuckle now. "Bears can be charming."

  "Terry, there you are."

  Diane appeared, over-dressed as usual, from behind the tabs. There was surely an embarrassing confrontation in the air. But Lichfield was walking away down the false perspective of the hedges towards the backdrop.

  "Here I am," said Terry.

  "Who are you talking to?"

  But Lichfield had exited, as smoothly and as quietly as he had entered. Diane hadn't even seen him go. "Oh, just an angel," said Calloway.

  The first Dress Rehearsal wasn't, all things considered, as bad as Calloway had anticipated: it was immeasurably worse. Cues were lost, props mislaid, entrances missed; the comic business seemed ill-contrived and laborious; the performances either hopelessly overwrought or trifling. This was a Twelfth Night that seemed to last a year. Halfway through the third act Calloway glanced at his watch, and realized an uncut performance of Macbeth (with interval) would now be over.

  He sat in the stalls with his head buried in his hands, contemplating the work that he still had to do if he was to bring this production up to scratch. Not for the first time on this show he felt helpless in the face of the casting problems. Cues could be tightened, props rehearsed with, entrances practised until they were engraved on the memory. But a bad actor is a bad actor is a bad actor. He could labour till doomsday neatening and sharpening, but he could not make a silk purse of the sow's ear that was Diane Duvall.

  With all the skill of an acrobat she contrived to skirt every significance, to ignore every opportunity to move the audience, to avoid every nuance the playwright would insist on putting in her way. It was a performance heroic in its ineptitude, reducing the delicate characterization Calloway had been at pains to create to a single-note whine. This Viola was soap-opera pap, less human than the hedges, and about as green.

  The critics would slaughter her.

  Worse than that, Lichfield would be disappointed. To his considerable surprise the impact of Lichfield's appearance hadn't dwindled; Calloway couldn't forget his actorly projection, his posing, his rhetoric. It had moved him more deeply than he was prepared to admit, and the thought of this Twelfth Night, with this Viola, becoming the swan-song of Lichfield's beloved Elysium perturbed and embarrassed him. It seemed somehow ungrateful.

  He'd been warned often enough about a director's burdens, long before he became seriously embroiled in the profession. His dear departed guru at the Actors' Centre, Wellbeloved (he of the glass eye), had told Calloway from the beginning:

  "A director is the loneliest creature on God's earth. He knows what's good and bad in a show, or he should if he's worth his salt, and he has to carry that information around with him and keep smiling."

  It hadn't seemed so difficult at the time.

  "This job isn't about succeeding," Wellbeloved used to say, "it's about learning not to fall on your sodding face."

  Good advice as it turned out. He could still see Wellbeloved handing out that wisdom on a plate, his bald head shiny, his living eye glittering with cynical delight. No man on earth, Calloway had thought, loved theatre with more passion than Wellbeloved, and surely no man could have been more scathing about its pretensions.

  It was almost one in the morning by the time they'd finished the wretched run-through, gone through the notes, and separated, glum and mutually resentful, into the night. Calloway wanted none of their company tonight: no late drinking in one or others' digs, no mutual ego-massage. He had a cloud of gloom all to himself, and neither wine, women nor song would disperse it. He could barely bring himself to look Diane in the face. His notes to her, broadcast in front of the rest of the cast, had been acidic. Not that it would do much good.

  In the foyer, he met Tallulah, still spry though it was long after an old lady's bedtime.

  "Are you locking up tonight?" he asked her, more for something to say than because he was actually curious.

  "I always lock up," she said. She was well over seventy: too old for her job in the box office, and too tenacious to be easily removed. But then that was all academic now, wasn't it? He wondered what her response would be when she heard the news of the closure. It would probably break her brittle heart. Hadn't Hammersmith once told him Tallulah had been at the theatre since she was a girl of fifteen?

  "Well, goodnight Tallulah."

  She gave him a tiny nod, as always. Then she reached out and took Calloway's arm.

  "Yes?"

  "Mr Lichfield…" she began.

  "What about Mr Lichfield?"

  "He didn't like the rehearsal."

  "He was in tonight?"

  "Oh yes," she replied, as though Calloway was an imbecile for thinking otherwise, "of course he was in."

  "I didn't see him."

  "Well… no matter. He wasn't very pleased."

  Calloway tried to sound indifferent.

  "It can't be helped."

  "Your show is very close to his heart."

  "I realize that," said Calloway, avoiding Tallulah's accusing looks. He had quite enough to keep him awake tonight, without her disappointed tones ringing in his ears.

  He loosed his arm, and made for the door. Tallulah made no attempt to stop him. She just said: "You should have seen Constantia."

  Constantia? Where had he heard that name? Of course, Lichfield's wife.

  "She was a wonderful Viola."

  He was too tired for this mooning over dead actresses; she was dead wasn't she? He had said she was dead, hadn't he?

  "Wonderful," said Tallulah again.

  "Goodnight, Tallulah. I'll see you tomorrow."

  The old crone didn't answer. If she was offended by his brusque manner, then so be it. He left her to her complaints and faced the street.

  It was late November, and chilly. No balm in the night-air, just the smell of tar from a freshly laid road, and grit in the wind. Calloway pulled his jacket collar up around the back of his neck, and hurried off to the questionable refuge of Murphy's Bed and Breakfast.

  In the foyer Tallulah turned her back on the cold and dark of the outside world, and shuffled back into the temple of dreams. It smelt so weary now: stale with use and age, like her own body. It was time to let natural processes take their toll; there was no point in letting things run beyond their allotted span. That was as true of buildings as of people. But the Elysium had to die as it had lived, in glory.

  Respectfully, she drew back the red curtains that covered the portraits in the corridor that led from foyer to stalls. Barrymore, Irving: great names and great actors. Stained and faded pictures perhaps, but the memories were as sharp and as refreshing as spring water. And in pride of place, the last of the line to be unveiled, a portrait of Constantia Lichfield. A face of transcendent beauty; a bone structure to make an anatomist weep.

  She had been far too young for Lichfield of course, and that had been part of the tragedy of it. Lichfield the Svengali, a man twice her age, had been capable of giving his brilliant beauty everything she desired; fame, money, companionship. Everything but the gift she most required: life itself.

  She'd died before she was yet twenty, a cancer in the breast. Taken so suddenly it was still difficult to believe she'd gone.

  Tears brimmed in Tallulah's eyes as she remembered that lost and wasted genius. So many parts Constantia would have illuminated had she been spared. Cleopatra, Hedda, Rosalind, Electra…

  But it wasn't to be. She'd gone, extinguished like a candle in a hurricane, and for those who were left behind life was a slow and joyless march through a cold land. There were mornings now, stirring to another dawn, when she would turn over and pray to die in her sleep.

  The tears were quite blinding her now, she was awash. And oh dear, there was somebody behind her, probably M
r Calloway back for something, and here was she, sobbing fit to burst, behaving like the silly old woman she knew he thought her to be. A young man like him, what did he understand about the pain of the years, the deep ache of irretrievable loss? That wouldn't come to him for a while yet. Sooner than he thought, but a while nevertheless.

  "Tallie," somebody said.

  She knew who it was. Richard Walden Lichfield. She turned round and he was standing no more than six feet from her, as fine a figure of a man as ever she remembered him to be. He must be twenty years older than she was, but age didn't seem to bow him. She felt ashamed of her tears.

  "Tallie," he said kindly, "I know it's a little late, but I felt you'd surely want to say hello."

  "Hello?"

  The tears were clearing, and now she saw Lichfield's companion, standing a respectful foot or two behind him, partially obscured. The figure stepped out of Lichfield's shadow and there was a luminous, fine-boned beauty Tallulah recognized as easily as her own reflection. Time broke in pieces, and reason deserted the world. Longed-for faces were suddenly back to fill the empty nights, and offer fresh hope to a life grown weary. Why should she argue with the evidence of her eyes?

  It was Constantia, the radiant Constantia, who was looping her arm through Lichfield's and nodding gravely at Tallulah in greeting.

  Dear, dead Constantia.

  The rehearsal was called for nine-thirty the following morning. Diane Duvall made an entrance her customary half hour late. She looked as though she hadn't slept all night.

  "Sorry I'm late," she said, her open vowels oozing down the aisle towards the stage.

  Calloway was in no mood for foot kissing.

  "We've got an opening tomorrow," he snapped, "and everybody's been kept waiting by you."

  "Oh really?" she fluttered, trying to be devastating. It was too early in the morning, and the effect fell on stony ground.

  "OK, we're going from the top," Calloway announced, "and everybody please have your copies and a pen. I've got a list of cuts here and I want them rehearsed in by lunchtime. Ryan, have you got the prompt copy?"