One May Smile

by Penny Freedman

  I’m feeling clammy and shivery by the time I get back to the villa. I find the others gathered on the verandah at the back with the glass doors closed against the slanting rain and the sea below dense and metallic in the strange light. The air in here is heavily warm and damp and there is a powerful smell of garlic emanating from vast, sliced pizzas which are being eaten almost in silence and without benefit of knives and forks.

  ‘No-one got much lunch,’ Clare says, ‘so we decided on an early supper.’

  Freda is sitting up at the table, perched on a pile of cushions, munching pizza with grave concentration. She has tomato sauce in her hair. It occurs to me that her diet today has been less than ideal: cocopops for breakfast, hot dog for lunch, pizza for supper. And God knows how much ice cream and chocolate she has consumed in the course of the afternoon. I vow to do better tomorrow, give her a kiss and help myself to a slice of pizza. I am starving and it tastes delicious.

  I take Freda upstairs for a bath when we have both had enough, and I change my own wet clothes and dry my hair. Then we do bedtime story and the rest of the nighttime routine, which seems to gather accretions day by day. Eventually, I go back downstairs and find everyone still on the verandah. The pizzas have been demolished and lager straight from the can seems to be the post-prandial drink of choice. I take a can and retire to a shadowy corner where I hope my ineptness at slurping from it won’t be noticed.

  The conversation is about future plans and it is remarkably different in tone from the discussion at breakfast this morning. I gather quite quickly that all passports have been confiscated and that the police line is that we may have to be here for some time. Inevitably, then, they have come back to the question of whether to go ahead with the production. This morning there seemed to be the chance to cut and run; this evening they have to decide how to cope with staying. Actually, you can tell they nearly all want to do the play, but Zada is protesting that it would be incredibly callous to carry on with Conrad dead and Jon in hospital, and they have to find a way of presenting to themselves the decision to carry on in a form that makes them feel not shallow and unfeeling but mature and balanced. It is quite fun watching this and I’m glad to say that no-one attempts the it’s what Conrad would have wanted argument, probably because everyone knows it isn’t true.

  They are manoeuvring neatly, speculatively recasting and rescheduling, the tone restrained and grown-up, when they hit a road block: recasting with the company already pared down to a minimum requires Stefan Pienkowsky, who plays Laertes, to double as Rosencrantz and he is resistant. ‘Dead man’s shoes,’ he says. ‘The guy isn’t even buried yet. I don’t feel comfortable about it.’ They go quiet. They feel rebuked. They sip their beers, watch the sea, avoid looking at each other.

  Then James, who has said very little so far, leans forward to stub out his cigarette in a saucer on the table and says, ’For God’s sake, people. Don’t tell me this whole project’s going to founder because we can’t find someone – anyone – to do Rosencrantz. I know Conrad would have had us all believe that it’s the key role of the play but actually any clown could play it – and better than Conrad.’

  There is the sound of a gasp and everyone watches as Sophie stands up and walks across to stand in front of him. Then, she raises a hand and deals him a perfectly aimed slap across the face before running out of the room. It’s a reaction both absurdly histrionic and perfectly appropriate at the same time. Someone attempts a laugh but it fizzles out into silence. James lights another cigarette. Adam waits a moment and then says, quietly, ‘I think we should have a show of hands before we go any further. How many people, in principle, are in favour of carrying on?’

  As far as I can see, everyone’s hand goes up except for Zada’s and Stefan’s. He looks around and throws up both hands in a gesture of surrender. ‘OK. I know I can’t wreck it for everyone. Obviously, I’ll have to do it.’

  ‘Actually, I’ve got an idea.’ The voice is Annie’s. She was here when I got back from putting Freda to bed. ‘I was thinking,’ she says, a bit pink from being suddenly in the spotlight, ‘that we could swap R and G round. I could do Rosencrantz and it wouldn’t feel so odd because I’d do it differently, because I’m – you know – a girl.’ There is a little cheer, and a whistle from Ray. ‘And Stefan can do Guildenstern and he’ll be stepping into a live woman’s shoes.’

  ‘OK, Stefan?’ Adam asks.

  ‘Yeah. OK. Thanks, Marianne.’

  Adam jumps up and goes over to hug Annie. ‘You are brilliant,’ he says, and she smiles but not as adoringly as she might have done a few days ago. Mildly fractured heart on the mend, I think. Adam turns to Zada, picks up her hand and kisses it. ‘And, you, darling? If I do Claudius, will you be my Gertie?’

  She gives a smoky bark of laughter. ‘Claude and Gertie,’ she says. ‘It sounds like a music hall act.’ She looks up at Adam. ‘Garn, then,’ she says. ‘Orright.’

  ‘Excellent.’ He drops her hand. ‘Let’s get down to it, then. A read-through-stroke-line-run. Off book if you’re playing the part you were playing yesterday.’

  People wander off to find scripts; James stays where he is, the red mark of Sophie’s slap still visible on his face. Adam calls out to Annie as she is leaving the room, ‘Can you read in Ophelia, darling, if Sophie doesn’t come back.’ She glances for a moment at James. ‘If you like,’ she says, ‘but shouldn’t someone go and see Sophie?’

  I haul myself to my feet. It has been a wearing day, in the course of which I have been interrogated, starved and soaked. What I would really like would be to go to bed. ‘Would you like me to go and talk to her?’ I ask.

  ‘No.’ Adam looks at James. ‘Thanks, Gina, but in the end it’s James who’s going to have to talk to her.’

  ‘And say what?’ James demands.

  ‘An apology of some sort would be nice, don’t you think?’

  James raises his eyebrows in exaggerated surprise. ‘She hits me and I apologise? Political correctness gone viral, wouldn’t you say? Besides –’ he stubs out his cigarette ‘– I was only saying what everyone else was thinking – or everyone except Sophie.’

  ‘Actually, not.’ Adam moves towards James so that he is standing over him. ‘We all bitched about Conrad but he’s dead and the rest of us feel ashamed. Stupid, maybe, and pointless, yes, but – you know – human.’ He turns to leave the room but stops and turns back. ‘And if we’re talking realpolitik, this show can’t go on without Sophie and she won’t go on without an apology. Not necessarily tonight, I would say – better to give everyone time to cool – but if you still want to play Hamlet, it’s up to you.’

  I decide not to go to bed. The bits of rehearsal I’ve seen have been randomly disjointed and I would like to hear the play from beginning to end. And without moves it will be short; it has been heavily cut anyway. I settle back with my can of beer to listen.

  Hearing it like this, cut and trimmed, without moves, without thoughts about costume to distract me, I hear the play quite freshly, and what strikes me most – not surprisingly, I suppose, in the light of recent events – is just how callous everyone is about death: Claudius seeing the deaths of Polonius and Ophelia only as political difficulties; Hamlet joking grimly about Polonius being at supper – ‘Not where he eats but where he is eaten’; the gravedigger’s detached professional interest in ‘how long a man may lie in the earth ere he rot’; above all, Hamlet’s contempt and pleasure as he plots the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. I listen to James.

  ‘And my two schoolfellows,

  Whom I will trust as I will adders fang’d,

  They bear the mandate…

  …Let it work;

  For ‘tis the sport to have the enginer

  Hoist with his own petard, and it shall go hard

  But I will delve one yard below their mines

  And blow them to the moon.’

  It’s a nice ambiguity in the play that we don’t know whether R and G are aware that the letter they a
re given to take to the English king is an order for Hamlet’s death, but Hamlet doesn’t care anyway. When he tells honest, decent Horatio what he did in substituting for his own death warrant an order for the execution of R and G themselves, Horatio comments, ‘So Rosencrantz and Guildenstern go to it’ and Hamlet sneers, ‘Why man, they did make love to this employment; they are not near my conscience.’ I hear the hard, dismissive edge in James’s voice now as he delivers the line and I wonder if he would have said it any differently if he’d seen Conrad’s body as I did last night. Poor, stupid Conrad with his pretensions to be an actor and his jibes at James, his pride in his car and his little-boy showing off. I feel stupid tears welling up and I start grubbing around in my bag for a tissue.

  The front door bell rings, loud in the hushed atmosphere of the reading. No-one else makes a move to get up so I go and am utterly unsurprised to find police officer Ingrid Larsen on the doorstep with another officer – a young lad in uniform – standing behind her. I look into her impassive face and I feel a powerful urge to slam the door in it. Why do I dislike her so much? Is it just our run-in this morning when she accused me of being a predatory older woman – a cougar, in fact? The thought of myself, standing here in baggy pedal pushers and a washed out t-shirt, as sleek, sexy and powerful makes me start to laugh and I have to cover it with a wide and insincere smile of welcome.

  ‘Good evening,’ I say

  Her face doesn’t move. ‘James Asquith?’ she asks.

  Well, that’s why I can’t stand her. It’s not just that she is stupid and insulting; it’s her determined gracelessness. How does Anders Mortensen, who is politeness itself, put up with her? Does he need someone to be rude for him?

  I laugh. ‘Well, I’m not James Asquith,’ I say. ‘Obviously.’

  ‘He is here?’

  I say nothing but I don’t shut the door on her. I turn to walk back to the verandah and she and her sidekick come tramping after me.

  On the verandah, Zada gives a wail at the sight of them and rushes out of the room. Ingrid Larsen pays no attention to her, but surveys the ring of faces turned towards her and says, ‘James Asquith, come with us please.’

  James doesn’t get up. In fact, he leans back in his chair. ‘Are you arresting me?’ he asks quietly.

  ‘Not at the moment. We have more questions for you.’

  ‘And they can’t wait till the morning?’

  ‘No.’

  He looks around, gathering up his cigarettes and his lighter, which are lying on the table in front of him. ‘So can I expect to be spending the night at the police station?’

  ‘That would be a good expectation.’ She turns to go. ‘Come,’ she says over her shoulder, and he gets up, looks at nobody and follows her. He is almost out of the room before a few people call out, ‘Bye James’ and, ‘Good luck’ half-heartedly, almost in whispers. I follow with the vague sense that I ought to see him off and I stand at the door, looking out into the rain-sodden evening, watching the car lights circle and disappear. Then because I can’t face any more talk, I go upstairs.

  I had forgotten Sophie. I find her not in her own bed but in mine, curled around Freda. In the pale light leaking in from the landing she looks, lying there with her blonde head next to Freda’s, like another child. I wonder who was comforting whom that they ended up like this, and I feel another lurch of guilt about Freda being mixed up in the drama. I would pack up and take her home if I could but Anders Mortensen has my passport. It occurs to me that the only person in our company who still has access to her passport is Freda but she can’t go home because I can’t go home. It’s time, I decide, to let Ellie know what’s going on. Better by email than by phone, I think – less alarming and allowing more time for thought – so I start rummaging in my case for my laptop.

  ‘What’s happening?’ a voice says behind me, and I turn to see Sophie sitting up in bed, eyes huge in the darkness. ‘Who was at the door?’ she asks.

  ‘The police,’ I say with as casual an intonation as I can manage, but her voice is sharp with alarm.

  ‘Why?’

  Freda stirs. ‘Outside,’ I mouth at Sophie and the two of us go along to the end of the landing, where we sit down on the floor outside the bathroom door and I say, ‘They just want to ask James some more questions.’

  ‘But why? He was in with them for ages this morning. What else do they want to know?’ Her voice has a panicky edge to it.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Are they talking to him here?’

  ‘No. At the police station.’

  ‘So they’ve arrested him?’

  ‘No, but it looks as though they’ll keep him there over night.’

  She has been sitting with her knees pulled up under the oversized t-shirt she sleeps in and her arms round them. Now she drops her head onto her knees and starts to cry, quietly and hopelessly, making no attempt to stop or even to wipe away her tears. Oh really. When I said at the beginning of this misbegotten adventure that I was afraid I was going to be pushed into the role of mother hen, wiping noses et cetera, I meant it metaphorically. I really didn’t expect to need a box of Kleenex with me wherever I went. I sit beside her and try to work out what, exactly, she is crying about. Eventually it seems that I shall just have to ask. I put an awkward arm round her and ask, as gently as I know how, ‘Is it Conrad or is it James?’ Then, when I get no response, I add, ‘Or both?’

  She mutters something into her knees and I lean close to hear her but all I pick up is, ‘…and there’s no-one now.’

  ‘I know it’s been hard for you,’ I say tentatively, not really knowing where I’m going with this, ‘things difficult between you and James, and then Conrad. It’s a terrible shock but –’ but what?

  I’m saved from having to go on by Sophie, who lifts her streaked face and wails, ‘Conrad’s dead and James is going to prison so what happens to me?’

  The temptation is to say, You’re twenty-one years old. You haven’t started yet. You go home, get a job and eventually meet someone else. That’s what happens to you. This bracing approach has always worked fairly well on my own daughters but I’m not sure it’s for Sophie, so instead I say, ‘James won’t go to prison. They don’t send innocent people to prison in Denmark.’

  She sits up straighter and pushes strands of wet hair off her face, wiping her eyes with the heels of her hands. ‘And what if he isn’t innocent?’ she asks.

  I gape. ‘You don’t think James killed Conrad?’ I croak. ‘What reason would he have?’ And then it strikes me that she has been James’s girlfriend for the past two years and would know, if anyone does, if he’s an Islamist agent. ‘Don’t tell me,’ I whisper, ‘that the police are right about their anti-Zionist conspiracy theory?’

  She leans her head back against the wall and shakes it fretfully. ‘No, of course not. They don’t understand, this Islamist stuff with James and his father, it’s all academic – academic and romantic. It’s not about bombs and suicide vests.’

  ‘So why would James kill Conrad? You don’t kill people for being annoying – at least not in cold blood.’ And James has plenty of that, I think, which would also rule out a crime passionel. I look at her. ‘You’re not thinking, are you,’ I ask, ‘that James did it because you and Conrad –’

  ‘No!’ She yells it suddenly, her face scarlet. ‘I’m not stupid, though you all think I am. I know James doesn’t care about me. What you don’t know – what none of you know – is that Conrad was trying to blackmail James. So there’s your motive for you.’

  Before I’ve even got my mouth open for a question, she is on her feet and heading back down to our room, and as I’m struggling to get up, the bathroom door beside me flies open and Zada emerges, still dressed but with her hair wrapped in a towel and holding to her eyes pale green pads designed to look like cucumber slices. She lifts them off and smiles wanly at me. ‘Been blubbing again,’ she explains, waving the green pads at me, ‘and trying to repair the ravages.’

 
If she wants a heart-to-heart, I’m not offering one. I need to pursue Sophie and find out what the hell she’s talking about. ‘Well, you know, this vale of tears,’ I say vaguely and depart as fast as my stiff knees will take me.

  Sophie is in her own bed with her back turned when I get back to the room. I lean over her. ‘Are you serious?’ I hiss. ‘What do you mean?’

  She keeps her eyes closed. ‘Nothing more to say,’ she says. ‘End of.’ And she pulls the duvet over her head.

  So that’s that. Any further attempts to get some sense out of her will only wake Freda, who is stirring already. On the other hand, there is no point in my going to bed because I’m fizzing with questions. I get my laptop and go downstairs, where I find a largish group still on the verandah and another group sitting round the kitchen table eating toast. The splendid salon, however, is empty. Hardly anyone ever sits in here – it overwhelms with its size and splendour. I find a chair in a corner, switch on a standard lamp, open up my laptop and click onto my emails. Ignoring the many messages in my inbox since none of them is from anyone I love, I start typing. I type furiously for twenty minutes, don’t read my missive through and click send. Then I fish out my mobile from my bag and write a text message. Murder mystery. Read your emails, I write and despatch it into the ether.