Every Night's a Bullfight

by John Gardner

  As if this was not enough, Moir himself had written an editorial which seem to be aimed directly at Douglas. He wrote of Douglas Silver’s first season at Shireston, which seems to be one of gross experiment if the, so far released, casting is anything to go by. The board of Trustees has, it is rumoured, poured no less than half a million pounds into this venture and the people of Shireston have a right to question what this investment will bring to their quiet town. So far, our residents have been able to remain aloof from the more unpleasant trends of the late sixties and early seventies. Our magistrates, for instance, have not yet had to hear a case which involves drugs, and the care with which our council watchdog committees have gone about their business has kept such things as the more undesirable and sordid films from the two cinema screens in our midst.

  The Shireston Festival, though admittedly never such a draw as places like Stratford has usually maintained a standard of basically traditional Shakespearian productions. When they have been out of key, this newspaper, together with other local bodies, has always been quick to protest. Let us hope that the new leadership at the Shireston Festival is aware of local feeling and the power of local action.

  Douglas was rightly furious. ‘What do they think we are? Freaks?’ he snarled at Adrian who, while taken aback at the attack, regarded it with a certain amount of humour.

  ‘It’s just small town, out-dated, scared-of-change newspaper talk, Douglas. Take no notice. You made your point when they had a go before.’

  But Douglas could not sit back and do nothing about the newspaper. Before rehearsals that morning he made his views quite plain to the entire company. He wanted no idle chatter to reporters, either local or national, and restressed the question of private behaviour when newspapermen were around.

  During the afternoon, B.B.C.’s Nationwide news programme called Adrian, asking if Douglas would appear, that evening, and perhaps comment on the views expressed in the Gazette. Adrian carefully probed and discovered that they planned to have Hedley Moir on the show as well, so, playing it safe, he advised them that Douglas Silver was too tied up with rehearsals to do any television for a week or so.

  In the event, he breathed a sigh of relief that evening after the programme finished without a mention of the Gazette, Douglas, or the Shireston Festival.

  The time would come for Douglas to hit back and it would be better if an interview could be taped when the director felt more cool about local opinion. Perhaps if one of the first two productions was a shattering success Adrian would move heaven and earth to put Douglas up with Moir on Nationwide, or any other television programme. Part of his job at this point was to protect his director and the company from press and television as well as to expose them.

  On Sunday afternoon, Douglas announced that he would be having a lengthy meeting with Tony Holt about the Richard designs. It was the truth, though he had brought the whole thing forward to enable Jen to take full use of the apartment for David’s tea party. He did not particularly want to be around and possibly cramp David’s style; after all, it was the one chance his executive director would have to actually direct anything during this season.

  By four-thirty, the main living-room was peopled with the small group which David had brought together. Rachel Cohen and David helped Jennifer with the chore of handing out tea, sandwiches and cakes to the seven actors and actresses who were present and in good spirits, having got through the first week of rehearsals with a sense of some small achievement; in the relaxed, friendly and easy atmosphere even Conrad Catellier seemed to unwind.

  After tea, David talked informally about the four readings that had been proposed, displaying, Jennifer thought, a complete lack of preparation. Equally spaced through the summer, the readings were to be given in the theatre on Sunday evenings in late July and early August.

  ‘I thought we should have three distinct themes, drawing material from all ages and sources,’ David told them. ‘And we might finish with some large and rather splendid performance.’

  ‘Something like The Hollow Crown?’ asked Conrad. The Royal Shakespeare’s The Hollow Crown, a brilliant anthology on the Fall and Foibles of the Kings and Queens of England, had been a great international success in the sixties and would have well suited Conrad.

  David said that he felt The Hollow Crown had probably run its course by now but certainly he was thinking of something along those lines.

  ‘And what about the first three themes?’ asked Jennifer during the pause which followed.

  David hesitated. ‘A bit obvious I’m afraid, and rather hackneyed, but they’re the stuff of poetry.’

  ‘Well?’ Edward Crispin smiled.

  ‘Life. Death. Love.’

  ‘And we start off the Life programme with the Seven Ages of Man speech I suppose,’ said Conrad sounding weary.

  ‘Read by you, Conrad, it can never miss,’ David countered seriously.

  Another pause, eventually filled by Rachel piping, ‘Give me Love every time. If you want suggestions I know my favourite love poem.’ Her voice dropped as if she suddenly felt foolish. ‘Well it isn’t a love poem really. It’s about fear and bitterness really.’

  David Wills nodded to her, indicating that they would like to hear it.

  ‘It’s a translation from Horace,’ she began—

  ‘The young men come less often — isn’t it so? —to rap at midnight on your fastened windows; Much less often. How do you sleep these days?

  There was a time when your door gave with proficiency

  On easy hinges; now it seems apter at being shut.

  I do not think you hear many lovers moaning

  “Lydia, how can you sleep?”

  “Lydia, the night is so long!”

  “Oh, Lydia, I’m dying for you!”

  No. The time is coming when you will moan

  And cry to scornful men from an alley corner

  In the dark of the moon when the wind’s in a passion

  With lust that would drive a mare wild

  Raging in your ulcerous old viscera.

  You’ll be alone and burning then

  To think how happy boys take their delight In fresh and tender buds, the blush of myrtle, Consigning dry leaves to the winter sea.’

  Silence, because Rachel was no fool with the spoken word, before Edward Crispin said, ‘That’s certainly not a love poem, Rachel, but it’s great erotica.’

  ‘The bulk of all love poetry is basically erotica.’ David pompously rose both to the bait and Rachel’s defence.

  Crispin grinned. ‘Well, if we’re having that, I insist on the Alex Comfort piece called After Shakespeare.’

  ‘Can’t say I know it.’ From Conrad.

  Crispin began:

  ‘At the end of the third act, poetry gutters down —

  at eleven, the best pentameters drag their feet;

  Tragedy sinks to some old pother

  and we find ourselves holding hands in the street,

  suddenly tired of eloquence overdone

  and wondering why we went, who have each other

  in flesh and no pretence. We’ll let the great dead stay

  dead.

  That first act of our own

  is still the best act left. Let’s go to bed.’

  Everyone laughed.

  ‘A great put down for actors,’ chuckled Asher Grey.

  Catellier looked up grumpily. ‘Should be retitled After A Modern Movie.’

  More laughter, during which Jennifer caught Carol Evans sitting erect, eyes staring as though lost in thought. She did not know what prompted her, but even as she asked the question there was a jangle of premonition. ‘Carol, have you got a favourite poem? A favourite love poem?’

  Carol knew the Alex Comfort poem and, while it had no special significance for her, she found it took her mind leaping back to the weeks with Douglas, when life seemed to have taken up a new and warm spring. Funny, she could have sworn that all the feelings of then were dead. It is a strange unstabl
e state, this emotion, she thought; Douglas in a thousand different poses slotting into her mind: you think it has all gone, and you know it has because the circumstances are against it, yet the memories are never destroyed completely and the fire is still there, just under the surface, a dormant volcano. Douglas, only a few short months ago, for one night in Malta; then the captured evenings and nights in London; and now sitting here, in his apartment, with his wife, a woman to be envied — Speaking. She suddenly realized that Jennifer was speaking to her, asking her if she had a favourite poem; a favourite love poem.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Carol stammered. ‘I have a lot I like. I don’t know if there’s a favourite.’ Douglas in her head, strong; in her bed; across the restaurant table; on the other side of the room; poetry listened together, learned at each other’s knees and thighs. ‘There is one, but I expect you’d all think it far too sentimental. I once heard someone describe it as untreated emotional sewage.’

  ‘Go on love, there’s nothing wrong with sentiment, as long as you know how to control it.’ Asher Grey was talking to her from the far side of the room.

  ‘Okay,’ she heard herself say, and, as she spoke the first lines, the presence of Douglas Silver felt very close to her:

  ‘There is no loving without losing.

  You lose yourself to become part of somebody else,

  That’s just how it is.’

  Jennifer Frost shivered; before the black girl spoke she had known, a fraction of a second before the first line jolted the whole tunnel that she called her life, just as it had been first knocked when Douglas told her there had been someone else.

  She knew that it was foolish, to be uncalm about something like this; the world had changed, people on the whole did not get confused about affairs that were done and finished; but neither Douglas nor she were people; for her life had begun with

  Douglas and she never doubted him until—

  ‘I didn’t expect to remain the same, but,

  Oh I guess I didn’t know what to expect.

  It’s different every time though.’

  The black girl was speaking it the way Douglas had spoken it the one and only time Jennifer had heard it before. There was total recall of the moment, and what she had said — and what they had said:

  CI didn’t know you went for McKuen.’

  ‘Neither did I.’

  ‘You learned that with her, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, but that’s all over now.’

  ‘I’m glad.’

  ‘A new language invented,

  A new system stumbled on,

  Different from the old one.’ Carol continued.

  The bodies in Jennifer’s brain; the imagined intertwinings, they had all been wrong, just as the faceless woman’s face had been untinted; it had really been black; this girl, this woman, this black woman and Douglas.

  ‘A new way of engaging,

  And disengaging ourselves from each other.

  God knows how often I’ve looked into your eyes,

  But do you know, when I’m gone from you,

  No matter how I try to remember,

  Sometimes I forget the colour.’

  Jennifer wondered if Douglas had forgotten the colour, and then saw the terrible irony; she was playing Desdemona while this black bitch played...she quelled the sense of melodrama rising within her.

  ‘Yes, I’ve lost some things:

  Friends you didn’t approve of.

  I get clobbered in the game of touch now,

  Even with someone my own age.’

  Douglas said it was all over. How could he say that and then allow her to come down to Shireston? Was Jennifer completely wrong? Was it a stupid, emotional jump to an overwrought conclusion? Yet it was all there in Carol’s voice, as though the poem was some treacly love theme, played by a string-heavy orchestra, a backing to the romance which had been, or still was, must be—

  ‘Sometimes I feel out of practice with people too;

  Well, what would I do,

  If you went off,

  Or something happened?’

  Asher Grey looking intent because Carol was undoubtedly speaking with a great deal of feeling; Edward Crispin, eyebrow tilted, his thoughts transparent; David Wills concentrating more on the way in which Carol was performing than on the words; Rachel Cohen visibly moved; the familiar things in the room: the armchairs, the leather buttoned settee, the Arnot collage; they were all familiar to Douglas, part of their world; Jennifer frowned at the knowledge that there was, or had been, another world, presumably filled with other objects, like this one bloody poem.

  ‘I’m not equipped any more for relating to someone else;

  I’ve lost,

  Oh, only Jesus knows what I’ve lost,

  As there is no loving without losing something.

  What I have gained from being with you,

  I guess I couldn’t get anywhere else,

  And I’ll be damned if I’ll ever try.’

  A pause and then general gabble, argument, suggestion. Jennifer had the sensation of falling, dropping through a well of words, the rushing of wind in her ears coupled with fragments of poems quoted by those around her, out of context as if they were all vying for some prize. Above it that damned slush pounding in her head:

  What I have gained from being with you,

  I guess I couldn’t get anywhere else,

  And 1’11 be damned if I’ll ever try.

  How did that measure up against the words she could hear Edward Crispin speaking now:

  ‘The big words from those ages when as yet

  happening was visible are not for us,

  Who talks of victory? To endure is all.’

  The fragments and the sense of falling apart among the words.

  Asher Grey was quoting:

  ‘It seemed that out of battle I escaped

  Down some profound dull tunnel long since scooped

  Through granites which titanic wars had groined.

  Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,’

  Britten’s music circling her consciousness; The War Requiem, the words bringing back some performance, a performance listened to with Douglas: Wilfred Owen’s words and Britten’s music, a matched pair.

  Now somebody else:

  ‘Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,

  And they asked me into dinner, to get the beauty of it hot -

  HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME

  HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME

  Good night Bill, Good night Lou. Good night May. Good night. Ta ta. Good night. Good night.

  Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.’ It was Conrad.

  ‘I’ve always wanted to do The Waste Land.’

  ‘Couldn’t we finish with an Eliot programme?’

  ‘It’s a possibility. What does everybody else think...?’

  David, thought Jennifer, was like an uncertain school prefect, always wanting the advice of others in order to get a majority verdict. She was back in control of herself; back among her own things in her own room, looking across at the girl, black skin, jet hair, a sensual awareness with every movement; the long thighs rising under the mauve midi skirt; the rather terrible pain which came at the thought that Douglas had crept in between those thighs. It’s the same the whole world over, and ever was, thought Jennifer. Two could play at coupling: if Juliet, then also Desdemona. She shackled the new private knowledge to her, leaving it to simmer in the mind. She had the whole summer to screw the hurt away.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The legend appeared towards the end of January: on railway stations, hoardings, in hotel foyers, among the clamour of a hundred other advertisements in the London Underground; in Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool. Black print against grey parchment, simulated by some astute paper manufacturer. The cracked bell symbol and the words SEE SHAKESPEARE AT SHIRESTON. Underneath, the names: Joe Thomas, Jennifer Frost, Conrad Catellier, Maurice Kapstein, and
the others; then the names of the plays and their opening dates. It was a beautiful teaser poster, duplicated in the heavy Sunday newspapers and selected local weeklies.

  In tourist agencies and on the smooth counters of luxury hotels the small brochures appeared, and in newspapers and magazines up and down the country the small references began to add up, the first printed reactions to Adrian’s opening campaign:

  Shireston has always struck one as being a most beautiful setting for an evening of Shakespeare. Unhappily in recent years the journey has been hardly worth the end product, for, on a summer evening, the cool lawns, the flower walks and trees, the great house and the theatre itself have not been enough to make up for mediocre direction, poor design and lackadaisical acting.

  However, this year sees a change at Shireston with the advent of twenty-six-year-old Douglas Silver as overall director. Mr. Silver is already possibly the brightest, shining star in the field of classical theatre direction, and they tell me that the changes he has already made at Shireston should be enough to have playgoers fighting for tickets.

  Apart from a season which includes new productions of Othello, The Merchant of Venice, Richard III and Romeo and Juliet, Mr. Silver has peopled his company with names we usually associate with our cinema screens...There is also a new and luxurious restaurant, an exhibition and already you can book inclusive trips for an evening at Shireston through British Rail and four major coach tour operators...

  David Wills’s outburst at Graham Harper seemed to have had an effect. Before the beginning of. February the box office manager had recruited, and put to work, four girls to deal exclusively with the mail order bookings, and another two to do duty at the box office counter itself.

  However, the first week of February did not produce the tidal wave of expected bookings, and it was a wary and nervous David Wills who approached Douglas Silver at the end of the week.

  ‘Before you read the figures, I’d better tell you that they aren’t what we expected,’ he said, handing the stapled folio copies across the director’s desk.

  Douglas’s brow creased deeply; he had been gratefully aware of the changes which David had wrought in the box office, and Adrian’s promotion campaign was there for all to see, therefore he had not allowed himself even to think of a drop in ticket sales. By rights at least the first three months should be a total sell out, but a quick glance at the balance sheets showed that they were not even going to run in front of half-full houses on the present showing, and this included tickets already sold on a sale-or-return basis to agencies and tour operators (under their existing agreement, the agencies and tour organizations had to telephone the box office daily, between four and six, stating exactly what seats they wished to return, so that those tickets would be available for sale at the box office).