by John Gardner
‘What’s the matter darling?’ Again the flash of illogical apprehension for Jen.
‘Nothing.’ Douglas recovered balance. ‘Nothing love. It’s all so...’
‘Sudden?’
‘That’s a good word, sugar. You have the advantage of me.’
Jennifer grinned to herself, allowing a pause before, ‘Hey, Douglas Silver? Are you having an affair?’ She tried to smile with her voice.
‘A what?’ Douglas clutched the telephone close to his ear: mind filling with questions and the stomach roll of guilt. Tiny uncleared incriminating things left at Elton Court? Indiscretions?
Jen was still talking. ‘An affair Doug? An illicit relationship with your secretary.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Joke sweetheart. Your secretary was incredibly rude to me just now: asked me if I was Mrs. Douglas Silver or Mr. Silver’s mother.’
Douglas fought himself out of the sudden fluctuating panic. He swallowed and allowed a small laugh of relief. ‘That’s the fair Deborah. She can be rather trying.’
‘She’ll be trying when I get down to Shireston.’
‘I really should speak to her, but she’s great at keeping people at bay. But Jen, what’re we going to do about you being back? It’s great baby. I still can’t believe it.’
‘Oh the relief...’ downed Jennifer. ‘What are we going to do? Your place or mine?’
‘I don’t know baby, all I know is we can’t go on meeting like this.’ That was the old Douglas.
‘Well, are you coming up here or do I come down to you?’ The pause was longer than she expected. Then—
‘Look Jen, I haven’t really got our flat organized here. It needs your touch. I was leaving it for you to play with.’ Douglas had a picture of the Shireston House apartment bright in his mind and the mental note that someone would have to get in there and clean, fast. He had only been using it for sleep, leaving the home-making aspect as something else to be dealt with when Jen returned: like the other thing: black on white, white on black, white on white. ‘I’ve been slumming: really needs a woman’s touch. I think you’ll have to come down here and take a good look, decide what you want to get moved and how much of our stuff should be brought from Town. Look, I’ll tell you what, I’ll come up to London now.’
‘Can’t wait.’
‘Then I can bring you back here tomorrow. Okay?’
‘I just said: can’t wait.’
‘Be with you in a couple of hours then.’
‘Super. You all right Doug?’
‘I’m fine. Why?’
‘I don’t know. I just...’ She let it trail off, the vague thought in the corner of her brain that Douglas was not the man she had left, not the man to whom she dreamed of returning: the timbre of his voice: something guarded. ‘Oh it’s me, love, and the journey, greeting you on the telephone. Be careful driving. I’ll be waiting.’
Ten minutes after Douglas left the office Carol Evans telephoned. Deborah, who was blonde, twenty-two years old, a keeper of secrets and self-appointed guardian to Douglas Silver, director of the Shireston Festival, knew Miss Evans like she knew a lot of other voices on the telephone. Deborah worked strictly within the bounds of those things that were familiar and known to her. She had not known Mrs. Silver so her guard had been up. With Carol it was different.
‘I’m sorry Miss Evans, Mr. Silver’s gone to London.’
‘He has? Okay, I’ll probably get him there. Thank you.’
Deborah did not have time to say anything else. In London, Carol smiled, rubbing the palm of her right hand up and down her cheek. Douglas said he might possibly make it this week; tonight would be admirable.
An hour later Carol called the Elton Court number. Jen answered and a shaken Carol quietly replaced the receiver without speaking: she had never met Jennifer Frost but knew her voice immediately.
Jennifer was unnerved, she did not like kooky telephone calls, even though in her profession one learned to live with them. She had been idling away the time waiting for Douglas to arrive, just sitting, relaxing, trying to come back to normal after the hours of travel, letting her thoughts skim over her consciousness at not too deep a level. The telephone call jolted her into action, injecting a restlessness.
She shivered after putting down the telephone, stretched and then smiled before walking slowly into the bedroom to prepare herself for Douglas. Maybe Douglas did not need her so much when he was working, but they had been apart for a long time and that always sharpened his appetite. Jen felt the twinge of longing building to desire in her loins. Douglas’s need for her? What about her need for Douglas?
Jennifer had already made a start on Desdemona: like many actresses she found that, when tackling a difficult classic role it was best to get the words well into her head before dealing with the more difficult job of sorting out meaning, innuendo, dramatic intent or emotion. She preferred to have a foundation on which to work, the words firmly entrenched in her mind. Now she bathed, put on fresh clothes, choosing for Douglas’s pleasure, unpacked as far as possible, restarted her make-up before picking up her copy of Othello and beginning work again. She was concentrating on the text when Douglas turned his key in the lock.
A tiny blister of concern flowered in her mind as he embraced her. A nervousness or lack of passion? Uncertainty in the way he held her? She dismissed the quick-flooding questions as part of her imagination, knowing that she was tired and Douglas was in the middle of great works.
Douglas whisked her out to dinner, extravagance at Prunier’s, and talk, a stream of conversation, mainly concerned with Shireston — the festival as a whole, then the detail: the casting and its inherent problems, the publicity and promotion angles, the theatre itself and the changes he had inaugurated, the idea of an exhibition, the lures they were setting to bring people down to Shireston, the problems that were going to hit once the whole operation got underway and the company was settled into Shireston House.
Jennifer made a mental note that throughout all the talk Douglas hardly mentioned his true function, that of directing the plays.
Later she brought the matter up, feeling her way gently, tactfully. Douglas reacted violently, cursing the lack of time and the yoke of administrative difficulties. Even with David Wills in the executive chair he found it almost impossible to make time for the most essential end product.
‘You’re going to have to make time, sweetheart, otherwise the company will arrive with you unprepared. What’s happened to the director in you?’
Douglas knew what had happened. His sudden interest in the project as a whole; the infusion of power on a large scale, and lust for a beautiful black actress, had taken away the time. Jennifer was right and he wanted to react to her, yet, now she was here he seemed to have developed a strange negative feeling towards her. She was unquestionably the woman he loved, but the sacramental outward passion was transferred. He could envisage Jen as his wife at Shireston; see her in their apartment there; on stage as Desdemona or Lady Anne; being a wonderful hostess and companion; but in bed it was Carol who devoured and itched away within him. The guilt rose in conflict, quivering in his head.
They talked on — about the apartment at Shireston, Jennifer agreeing to come down with him on the following day and take over the organization of setting up their new home.
‘Christmas in a new home, Doug,’ she reached out and placed her hand over his, flat on the table. ‘How about that?’
‘Yes, how about that?’
She was conscious that he had moved his hand, and even though it was to grope for a handkerchief there was an unaccustomed clumsiness in the action.
The same kind of ineptitude was there in bed that night, disturbing Jennifer. Her own desire had grown throughout the evening, being close to Douglas bringing her own need into warm and firm perspective, yet she had to make all the moves: her hand had to caress him into readiness, her fingers first finding the erotic points. She pressed her crotch hard at him, when th
ey kissed his lips remained closed so that it was her tongue which had to force them open and jab into his mouth; she was aware, in the heights of her passion, that he did not return her kisses with his usual panting and licking ardour. When at last they were locked and sliding together he worked with his normal vigour, though Jennifer sensed a detachment, resulting in her reaching an orgasm before him: Douglas straining on long after her pulse of pleasure had died.
‘What’s wrong love?’ she asked in the darkness as they were lying together.
‘Oh the usual, Jen. Sorry, baby, I’m bugged with problems. Tired as well, I guess.’
‘So am I.’ She did not mean it to sound like a criticism.
‘Sure. I know. But with men, well...I didn’t expect you. Bodies often fit into mental patterns. I just wasn’t prepared.’ He gave her hand a little squeeze, as though to make up for the inadequacy. Jen had expected the squeeze to be elsewhere: it always had been before. Christ, she thought, I’m being bloody neurotic. This is ridiculous.
The following afternoon, at Shireston, Douglas found time to make a safe and private call to Carol who had wholly taken over his mind. She sounded hysterically distraught.
‘Your wife’s back. I called your apartment last night and she answered. Why didn’t you tell me she was back?’
‘I didn’t know myself. She called me late yesterday. It was unexpected.’
‘You said she wouldn’t be back until after Christmas, Douglas you said...’
‘That’s what I thought.’
Their voices seemed tunnelled on the lines, disembodied, wrapped in thin gloom.
‘Is she in London now?’ asked Carol.
‘No, she’s come down here to look at the flat.’
‘What’re we going to do?’
‘Just what I’ve always said.’ A pause before he spat out the words. ‘I’m sorry Carol.’ He felt that, in spite of all his good resolutions, he had, to a certain extent, come to depend heavily on Carol, her ways with him and his with her; this was a terrible, destructive thing for him to do.
‘You won’t see me again except when I come down to work?’
‘Don’t you think...?’
‘That it’s best? No. Douglas I’ve got to see you. Please. Please baby, I must, even if it’s just once, alone. I have to talk with you.’
Uninvited, Jen’s eagerness to please him on the previous evening leaped into his mind. The sweating smell of their union and the feel of her body, then over this was the whisper of the silky black girl and Jen diminished, vanished, so that it was white on black, all sense of dimension gone, sweeping as a single unit, one motor working perfectly carrying them to the plane of emotional, physical and intellectual pleasure — Douglas, I love you...I love you...I love you...Urgency growing in the throat.
‘Okay,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ll call you in a day or so. I’m sorry love...’
‘I’m sorry, but I love you Douglas.’ The last words wasted on the air because Deborah had tapped on Douglas’s door announcing David Wills who had a meeting with him at three o’clock.
Archie Swimmer was fifty-eight years old. He had been part of the permanent staff of the Shireston Festival since it first opened in 1928. In that season, aged sixteen, he was a junior stage hand. For the past eleven years he had been the stage carpenter. There was not much that Archie did not know about the Shireston, particularly when it came to its secrets, the private scandals, the real triumphs and failures. Archie was a close man, which was a good thing for the reputations of many actors, actresses and directors. He saw much and said little, though his memory was long and, if tapped, could have been the basis of a Sunday newspaper serial that might run for ever.
This afternoon he stood on the stage looking at the wreckage that was once the auditorium. Scaffolding ran up both sides of the proscenium and across the arch, which was in the process of being raised and lengthened, while the side pillars would be pushed outwards.
The auditorium itself looked as though several bulldozers had run amock in some violent barn dance, ripping the rows of seats from their cast iron moorings and tearing up the floor covering. Even the walls, and the jutting balcony, were not safe: scaffolding everywhere, growing like some obscene creeping disease, crawling with germs, men, stripping away the once gold wallpaper, removing light fittings, displaying the cracked and dirty nakedness of the plaster.
Archie remembered the shining auditorium as it had looked on the first night back in April 1928. On that evening the stage staff had been allowed to peep into the auditorium through the spy hole in the stage curtain. All those ladies and gentlemen in their evening clothes; he had thought that wonderful. The dresses and winged collars, the colour and glitter. The stage manager had pointed out Mr. James Agate with some awe, though, in those days, Archie did not know if James Agate was a stonemason or a butcher.
He glanced up, now, with apprehension at the men working on the proscenium. The alterations also meant adjustment to the grid, over which all the suspension gear ran. His eye took in all the familiar dimensions of the grid and the catwalk, his vision going up into the fly tower above. His boys, together with the chief electrician’s men, had spent much of the day clearing the grid, lowering the suspension lines and the long four-colour battens of lights, stripping away the remaining equipment.
Stephen Sultan. Christ why think of Stephen Sultan now? He was Orlando that year, 1928; jet haired and having it away with one of the girls from the booking office, Gladys Williams, a local girl, married now with three grown sons; saw her the other day down...Stephen Sultan, tall with fine looks, frenzied in the Forest of Arden searching for Rosalind: that was Emma Duncan, she was fine as well. Archie grinned. He had given it to Emma Duncan in the prop’ room one rainy Sunday afternoon that season. Sixteen years old and she must have been all of twenty-five; taught him a trick or two though, up the wide lace legs of her French knickers that afternoon. He could still smell the sharp odour of paint on canvas which pervaded the prop’ room that day, and the rain dripping down from the trees outside.
‘Sad day for you, eh Archie?’ Archie drew himself back from the pleasant past as Wilf Brownhill, head of property maintenance, advanced across the stage with Alec Keene, the house manager.
Brownhill and Keene had just escaped Douglas Silver’s wrath by coming up with a reasonable budget for the refurbishing of the auditorium: a budget based mainly on Wilf Brownhill’s long-standing contacts within the building trade.
‘Sad day?’ queried Archie Swimmer, hitching his trousers around a stomach running speedily to fat. His red face broke into a wide grin which deepened the many lines, forming abstract patterns at the top of his cheeks and around his eyes. ‘Sad day be buggered. It’s about time someone ripped the bloody place apart. I hope Demolishing Duggie goes on and does something about the fly tower and back stage.’
Brownhill sniggered at ‘Demolishing Duggie’. ‘You think Mr. Silver’s on to something then Archie?’ he asked.
‘Spendin’ a lot of money isn’t he? That’s what’s been needed here an’ all. Some of the locals are shouting about what the newspapers say he’s going to do this season though; but they always used to shout in the old days. If anyone did a play of William Shakespeare’s without the whole cast being got up in Elizabethan gear they went hairless. Now he’s got a pop singer playing Othello and a nig-nog as Juliet. Race riots we’ll have down here. Very conservative the locals.’
‘You’re a local, Archie.’ From Keene, winking broadly at Brownhill.
‘Ah,’ Archie laid a finger to his nose. ‘I’m a local, but I’m Theatre, Alec, so they don’t really trust me.’
‘Oi up,’ muttered Wilfred Brownhill, ‘here comes the scoutmaster.’
Douglas appeared at the far end of the auditorium with David Wills, the two men picking their way through unfamiliar rubble.
They had spent an hour that afternoon discussing what small steps David had managed to make with the exhibition; now David had persuaded his chief to come over
to the auditorium.
Douglas stood and looked at the wreckage which faced him. For a few seconds his nerve nearly gave way. He was responsible for this, he had okayed the estimates and the financial people had added their agreement, but to see the interior under the wrecker’s hammer was another matter. Certainly he was conscious that the refurbishing would be to their advantage, that out of the ripped flooring and cracked plaster a more pleasant and comfortable atmosphere would be born. But what if he, Douglas Silver, could not bring his chosen actors to the high state which the situation demanded? What if their corporate efforts did not prise people from their armchairs and bring them into this theatre?
He had screwed up his private life in a manner likely to explode into the company. It would be all too easy for him to screw up the whole project so that, at the end, the Shireston Festival would lie, a wreck like this auditorium, at his feet.
It was a difficult afternoon for Emilio Benneto. He had taken up his appointment on Monday and the week was spent sitting in his little office, bright and brand new, interviewing possible restaurant staff. Emilio was an enthusiastic man, though courage was not one of his particular virtues. He would, for instance, have preferred to have good Italian boys as his waiters, but Mr. Rolfe had put it to him that Shireston had its fair share of young girls looking for jobs. Good girls whom he, Emilio, could personally train as waitresses. Emilio capitulated because he had learned long ago that, in the end, you could not argue with men like Mr. Rolfe. He also knew that really he should be arguing with Mr. Wills or Mr. Silver.
On top of this he knew all about waitresses: he knew about boyfriend troubles which erupted just when you needed the girls most; he knew of the small discomforts which, with young girls, could be exploded into major hysterical dramas; he knew of their moods and their dangers; it was all very well Mr. Rolfe talking about the male patrons liking to see pretty faces and pretty legs, he knew about the female patrons. But he still interviewed the first few girls.
