‘I got it from Karin’s brother,’ Conrad says, looking at James. ‘He gave me a good deal.’
James colours but says nothing and after a bit of awkward shuffling they limp back into rehearsal. I watch for a while but it’s unbearable really, like bear-baiting. I can’t believe that James can be so easy to rattle but Hamlet is a part that undoes even the best of actors – Daniel Day Lewis had a breakdown when he played it. James is only a student amateur, after all, and Conrad is intent on undoing him. Conrad will have to be dealt with somehow, and I could do it – I have reduced big boys to tears in my time – but it’s not up to me and I’m too scared of Annie to go barging in. There’s really nothing for me to do at all, in fact, until my costume rails are delivered tomorrow and I can unpack, so I take Freda off into the town with me for the glamorous purchase of a second kitchen bin and some liners, and we spend the rest of the afternoon sitting on the grass near the gatehouse, making daisy chains. Ray has now got permission to park the van here and beside it is a handsome blue convertible – a Mustang, I think. (I’m not at all interested in cars – I don’t even drive one – but ten years of being married to an auto fanatic have left me with a lot of irritating information in my head which I can’t get rid of.) It must be Conrad’s new acquisition and I can see how, if she likes that kind of thing, it might turn Sophie on. I wonder whether Freda and I might have our room to ourselves tonight.
When the others return to the van later they are subdued but not, at least, at one another’s throats. Conrad and Sophie rev away, while those of us who can fit in pile into the van and others go off to catch the bus. I’m thinking about hiring my own transport too, so I can come and go as I like, and avoid travelling in the van with Annie, who watches me for misdemeanours with such eagle-eyed scrutiny that I feel that I might develop Tourette’s syndrome out of reflex perversity. A bike with a child seat would do the trick.
Emma and Clare feed us well on pasta and meatballs and Freda is so exhausted by her day that she allows herself to be put to bed with the promise that I’ll be joining her soon, so I am allowed downstairs this evening. We sit companionably on the veranda drinking beer and watching the ships on the Sound become mere points of light as the sky and the sea darken. The conversation drifts and hovers, settling finally, inevitably, on the play. I’m saying nothing; it hardly needs Annie’s warning scowls to alert me to the danger of turning into the seminar leader if I let myself get started. Besides, they don’t need my opinions – they have more than enough of their own.
So I sit on the edge of the circle and I can’t see faces in the deepening dusk. I’m only half-listening as voices I mostly don’t recognise float out towards me.
‘That’s just the point,’ someone is saying. ‘He’s not a tragic hero at all, not in the proper sense. It’s his situation that makes him tragic.’
‘O cursèd spite
That ever I was born to set it right?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Of course, it’s very much a playwright’s idea – I suppose that’s why it fascinated Stoppard – take an artificial, formal convention like the revenge tragedy and put a real person in the middle of it – a thinking, feeling, civilised renaissance man – and see what you get. Chaos of course.’
‘You could imagine Feydeau doing the same thing.’
This jolts me out of my little reverie. Hamlet and Feydeau? That’s a bit of a stretch, isn’t it? Apparently not. The ball is caught without a fumble.
‘Well yes. If you take Bakhtin’s ideas about laughter – laughing truth degrades power.’
I wasn’t much good at this sort of thing when I was a student, these free-flowing discussions where half-formed ideas are sent skimming around, nothing gets scrutinised and everything has its own validity. I wanted to shout that the emperor had no clothes on. Not tonight though. Someone has put the lights on in the room behind us so I can see faces now in the light that filters through, casting curious and revealing shadows. I look round at them, clever, confident, animated, and unhappy every one of them, I would say. I watch Adam, who is lounging back in his seat, an arm slung carelessly, possessively, round Zada’s shoulders, and I notice again how thin his face is, how sharp the jaw line, the youthful flesh melted away by the heat of energy and will. Zada isn’t listening to the conversation; her face is a blank and has fallen, as those strong-boned faces so easily do, into a tragic mask. I would hardly recognise the laughing shopaholic I had tea with: the glow of animation is all gone, her eyes are deep-shadowed above those high cheekbones and her mouth, drained of colour, droops. I’m not the only one looking at her; as I look away I see that Jon McIntyre is watching her intently. I thought he was the love of my life, Zada said to me yesterday. And what does he feel about her, I wonder? I was impressed by him at the rehearsal this morning. He’s a public school Scot, I guess. In real life he has one of those crisp, witty Scottish accents, but playing Claudius he does Standard English with no trouble. He was focussed and on the ball this morning, word-perfect and quick on cues. He’s doing Medicine and he has a reassuring air of competence which should take him far. I’m not surprised that Zada’s parents were happy to have him for their daughter; I’d have taken him for one of my girls like a shot. He looks tired, though: his blue eyes are bright enough as they watch Zada, but they’re red-rimmed and his Scottish-pale skin is as white as paper.
Some of the others look all right: Ray looks happy enough, drinking lager out of a can, and David Underwood, Polonius and Gravedigger, looks relaxed, his funny, clever-boy, old-young face no beakier than usual as he sits with Emma, looking on, smiling. Clare and Tom aren’t here, I notice.
James is talking. He has picked up the introduction of Bakhtin into the conversation and now he has taken the floor and everyone else has gone silent. He’s fluent and authoritative but there’s a hard, ironic edge to what he says, and a contemptuousness in his tone that has warned everyone else off. We all sense, I suppose, that this display is compensation for today’s humiliations. When he stops talking, there is silence. No-one, not even Adam, is going to risk being embarrassed by James in this mood. They are creatures of two worlds, I think: bright, confident children of the day with jokes and laughter, summer tans, loves and friendships, and shadowy creatures of the dark, timid, suspicious and alone.
There’s a noise from inside the house, the glass doors from the sitting room burst open and Conrad and Sophie appear, laughing into the gloom. The silence breaks, people stir and pour more drinks, scattered conversations start up, someone lights some candles, the mood lifts with the light. Conrad, happy and expansive, starts to describe eating reindeer at a restaurant they have found along the coast, while Sophie mouths in mock-horror, ‘I kept thinking of Rudolph!’ When the beep of an incoming text message breaks through the general laughter, Conrad fishes his phone out of his pocket, glances casually at his message, flushes crimson and throws the phone down on the coffee table. Sophie, watching his reaction, goes to pick the phone up, but he snatches it from her. hurls it out into the garden and barges through the group, back into the house. Sophie looks round helplessly for a moment, then turns and follows him.
Much later, when everyone else has gone to bed but I feel it my duty to check that the candles are all snuffed out on the verandah and the doors are locked, I hear the sound of the phone trilling out in the darkness and I look out and spot it glowing and vibrating on the grass. I retrieve it and cut off the call because I’m not about to start answering students’ phones for them but, shamefully nosy as I am, I sneak a quick look at the message that had such a dramatic effect on Conrad. Text messages, I argue speciously to myself, are like postcards: they’re just there in plain view, so they can’t be private. So I read it. The message is surprising and mildly unsettling, but why it caused Conrad such fury remains a mystery. ‘So what was that about?’ I ask the looming shadows.
4
INTERLUDE
They say they have letters for you. 4.6
Marianne Gray
To “Eleanor Gray Biaggi” [email protected]
Sent 13th July 2011 23. 28
Subject Be glad you’re not here
Ciao Signora Biaggi!
Hope you’re having an ace time and soz for pouring out troubles to you but have to unload and figure you’ll be having a good enough time to cope with my moans.
El, I feel a total idiot. I knew it wasn’t going to be a long-term thing with me and Adam – he’s off to a traineeship at one of the Glasgow theatres after this – but when he asked me to be AD on this thing I thought at least we’d have some time together here and end on a high but now bloody Zada, who’s playing Gertrude, has got her claws into him and she’s rich and exotic and wears gorgeous clothes and I don’t stand a chance. And I don’t think I’m really going to be AD-ing at all – Adam just treats me like the office girl – just i/c rehearsal schedules. And it’s not as if the acting bit is any fun. Conrad is complete crap to act with – gives me absolutely nothing and spends all his time needling James (Hamlet). He started that during rehearsals in Oxford but he’s really stepped it up now and James is cracking under the strain. I can see Adam’s worried but he’s not talking to me about it.
And it makes it worse having Ma here cos you know how she is. She’ll see exactly what’s going on and I can’t bear to have her being sympathetic and patronising to me. And I feel a fool having her here anyway. I thought she’d be cool but she’s been lugging Freda around with her ever since she got here, looking all grannyish and I’m sure everyone is thinking it’s really weird her being here. El, I love Freda, you know I do, but I wish you’d timed your grand tour better. And Ma keeps calling me Annie even though everyone else has called me Marianne for the past year. It’s so typical of her to give me a decent name and then change it to something you’d call an Edwardian scullery maid.
Well, I’m not the only one who’s miserable so that’s something. Actually, we’re all pretty stressed, which is weird when this is supposed to be fun. There’s a lot of relationship stuff going on which I won’t bore you with since you don’t know who anyone is and it’d be like those people who try to tell you about what’s happening in a soap you never watch. BUT all is not lost. I have my eye on the very nice boyfriend that Zada dropped for Adam. He’s called Jon and he’s a bit freckly and Scottish-looking but sweet, I think, and doing medicine, which Granny would approve of. We’ve chatted a bit and I think he’s interested, though how we go on from here with Ma’s eagle eye on me God knows. Anyway, watch this space.
Hope the Biaggis are loving you.
xxxxxxxxxxxxx
MARIANNE
* * *
Gina Gray
From “Gina Gray” [email protected]
To “David Scott” [email protected]
Sent 14th July 2011 08.15
Subject Wish you were here?
Hi David
This extraordinary villa we’re living in has WiFi so I’m writing this on my laptop at the kitchen table while Freda is eating cocopops and I am hoping that a nice man is going to appear with pastries from the baker’s as he did yesterday. Otherwise I shall have to eat cereal too, but there are no what you might call grown-up cereals in the cupboard.
Anyway, we’re all right – journey, house, costumes all fine. Sleeping arrangements are less than ideal, but I’ve no doubt you’ll think I’ve only myself to blame for that. We shared a room the last two nights with a funny, victimy girl. She seems to have found herself a man to look after her now, but I have the feeling that my shoulder is going to be permanently damp with tears for the next two weeks – and not Freda’s. Not Annie’s either. Things have gone tits up for her but she’s giving me a very wide berth.
So there we are. The sun is shining, the villa is delightful, the play is a masterpiece, the costumes are perfectly chosen, the tourists are fascinated and the actors, I fear, are flaky at best. Too many hormones, too much angst. And to think that you could have been part of all this…
Talking of which, I hope you’re doing something with your leave. I’m sorry, sorry, sorry that I had to bring Freda with me and we couldn’t spend these two weeks romancing at the Marienlyst, but deciding to have a crap time just to show me how much I have messed up your life isn’t a very mature way to behave is it? Autorhinectomy a classicist friend of mine labelled that sort of behaviour – the Greek for cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. Go out and enjoy yourself. You are in Brighton, after all. Lie on the beach.
Love and all the rest
Gina
* * *
Eleanor Gray Biaggi
From “Eleanor Gray Biaggi” [email protected]
To “Marianne Gray” [email protected]
Sent 14th July 2011 10.04
Subject re: Be glad you’re not here
Ciao Sis! Do I really have to call you Marianne? After all these years?
All hugs, kisses, smiles and food here. Huge quantities of the last. I shall be vast by the time I leave.
Sorry about your troubles. Go for the nice guy if you can. And don’t blame Ma for everything. She’s doing you a favour. And she’s not the worst person to talk to if you’ve got problems. Mind you, her hourly updates on Freda are a bit over the top, loving mother though I am!
Chill, Babe. You’re supposed to be having fun.
Arrivederci, El
* * *
David Scott
From “David Scott” [email protected]
To “Gina Gray” [email protected]
Sent 14th July 2011 11.28
Subject re Wish you were here?
Well thanks for your care and concern so sensitively expressed. And you wonder why Annie doesn’t come to you for sympathy?
Thank you particularly for reminding me that we have a beach in Brighton because I really hadn’t thought of that.
Actually, the one thing I have promised myself for the next two weeks is not to open, read or reply to any emails. So if you have any other helpful advice I’m afraid you’ll have to keep it to yourself.
David.
5
DAY THREE
Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell! 3.4
Freda and I are first down to breakfast again. We’re without Sophie this morning, though she did spend the night with us. I had thought that she might be in the arms of Conrad, the man with the attractive credit card, but there she was again in her truckle bed when I went upstairs last night, and this morning she has her head under the duvet and refuses – quite rudely, actually – to be stirred. I make a large pot of coffee, fairly confident that this will rouse the sleepers of the house, and I sit with Freda as she eats her cocopops in the hopeful expectation that the efficient Ray will again come trotting in with buns.
I’ve picked a sunny corner of the kitchen table, under the window, where I can look out onto the shrub-strewn drive and appreciate the promising warmth of the morning. I get my phone out and text a message to Ellie with a rider from Freda to the effect that she is eating coco pops. Then I gaze out idly and I’m alerted by an improbable scene almost under the window. I crane forward to get a better look. Conrad and James are standing by the pale blue Mustang, apparently in amiable discussion. I can’t hear what they’re saying – a conservation-conscious Dane has double glazed this window – but it definitely looks amiable. Conrad even laughs at one point. Then they stroll away, round the side of the house in the direction of the beach. Well, here’s a turn up. Neither of them seemed to me to be the breach-healing type and yet here they are, apparently healed. It occurs to me, as I watch them go, that they were at school together – and not just any school, as they say in the adverts, but Eton no less. I read that Conrad was there in his programme entry: Conrad Wagner was born in Beverley Hills, California. He attended Emanuel Academy of Beverley Hills, Eton College, Berkshire, UK and Christ Church, Oxford. He plans to make a career as an actor and is currently lookin
g to engage an agent. James didn’t mention his schooling in his entry but I’m sure Annie told me he’d been at Eton. She’s impressed by such things but I expect she’ll grow out of it. In fact I expect they’ll all grow out of a lot of things, including the nerve-end emotions that make them such jangling company. The truth is, I find it difficult to take them seriously. I find it all quite interesting because I have an almost insatiable appetite for human interactions but I can’t help feeling that they’re just trying out relationships – the way puppies and kittens try out fighting and hunting. Of course, I took my own relationships desperately seriously when I was their age and I’m not so old that I can’t remember the agony, so I guess I should make an effort to be more empathetic with these fraught young things.
And, as if on cue, I see another fraught young thing approach the Mustang. Zada has come out of the house and is strolling towards the car. She stops a short way from it and appraises it, head on one side, then moves closer, circling it and running a hand appreciatively over it as I imagine she would a horse. She tries the door on the driver’s side, finds it open, takes a quick look around and then slips into the driving seat. I am riveted. Is she about to drive off in it? But no. She simply sits there for a minute, then gets out, closes the door and comes in with a gaggle of others in pursuit of breakfast. There follows a clamouring for coffee, the making of piles of toast and jam, and a general hubbub of jostling, laughing, yawning, eating, drinking and smoking. So intensely engaged are they in all this that they hardly notice the arrival of James and Conrad in dripping swimming trunks, standing in the doorway, towelling vigorously. What is it with these boys that they need to present themselves to be admired after any untoward physical activity? And while I’m on the subject, where is Ray this morning?
When someone does notice them, a silence descends like the Monty Python boot as all heads swivel round and we watch Conrad, all casual unconcern, pad across the kitchen to the cork board where Annie has efficiently pinned up the schedule for the day. He consults it and then, in the hush, calls across to James, ‘We’re neither of us needed this morning – they’re doing Ophelia’s mad scenes. D’you feel like helping me with the car? Points and plugs need cleaning, I think. It nearly died on us last night.’
One May Smile Page 5
