by John Bowen
*
Gertrude said, “I’ll tell you something. I was not a great actress. Good, but not great. Perhaps I was too intelligent.”
As tar breaks out in bubbles upon the roads during hot weather, our secret thoughts began to come out of us as we lay there in the sun. “I began to have doubts, you see,” Gertrude said.
“You did?”
“Yes. Isn’t that strange? Not very often at first. Just sometimes at night. Perhaps if people didn’t sleep alone … but I never married; nobody lasted long enough with me. Sir Charles Cochran once told me I was too intense for life—born for the theatre, not for life, he said. But then, he had to be polite because he was turning me down for a job.”
“What doubts?” I said.
“Whether it was all worth while.”
“Casting couch and that?”
“Not that so much. Surprisingly little of that goes on, though people like to think so. One finds it more on the variety stage, with agents of the shadier sort, and sometimes the smallest parts … or ASM’s…. But really, my dear, people are far more ready to offer than directors are to accept. There is so much competition, and so little talent. Boys from the Midlands who’ve been playing at being artistic all their lives, and don’t want to go into the family business. And the girls—once they used to visit the sick, but nowadays it’s the stage—something to do with the need for self-expression, but why the public should suffer it, I never could tell. And all those silly irresponsible people one found; I suppose it’s because professionals have a reputation for irresponsibility that so many irresponsible people think they ought to enter the profession. But it won’t do. My dear, there always used to be such a fuss because eighty per cent of us were unemployed, but they never considered how many of us were unemployable.”
“But your doubts.”
“They grew deeper. First of all, I doubted the value of the theatre as I knew it.”
“As we all knew it,” I said.
Banner said, “I never knew it. Except for the amateurs, of course. We used to write away to the British Drama League for one-act plays with an all-female cast.”
“Most of us were discontented with the theatre,” Gertrude said. “There were articles about that every Sunday. Once television came along, you could hardly get the public to go to anything if there wasn’t a cash prize in it somewhere. Then there were the costs, and rents going up and all that, and people worked it out that you had to run for a year or you weren’t making a profit, or something; I could never understand it. I played Antigone in the West End when I was twenty-four. Six years ago, I went back to the same theatre, but this time I was playing the mother-in-law in a kitchen comedy. I was so full of life when I was young. I had written”Gertrude Harrison. Actress“in pencil on the wall by my dressing-table, and it was still there when I went back, so I crossed out the “Actress”…. During our second year in that play, people came by charabanc from Widnes to see us. They never did that for Antigone.”
“But Goodness!” I said. “If that was all that bothered you——”
“No, of course not. Those who loved the theatre only did so more strongly when there was less of it. The Third Programme revived my Antigone, and there was the Highbrow Theatre Club. Do you remember?—it gave you a kind of joint membership of the Arts, the Royal Court, the Mermaid, and the Comedy, and there was some kind of income tax deduction if you bought more than ten tickets in a year. Whenever we lost one theatre, another smaller one took its place, like the Shakespeare group in Southwark who converted an old stables into an Elizabethan playhouse after the Old Vic had been taken over by the Secondary Schools Association.”
“I remember,” I said. “Publishers used to advertise in the programmes, and Encounter was on sale in the foyers. Still, it all helped to keep the theatre alive.”
“My dear, that was the trouble; I kept wondering why. Don’t you see?—my doubts weren’t concerned with what was happening to the theatre, but with the nature of the theatrical experience itself. It was my religion; it always had been. Beauty, art, all the highest things—they really took the place of God for me. I believed so strongly in them, until I began to lie awake at night, wondering what was high and what was low, and whether one was any better than the other, and whether I just used ‘high’ and ‘low’ without thinking, and whether everybody else did the same. And then I began to think about theatrical values—You know that thrill up the spine one used to get whenever one was in the presence of what we called ‘real theatre’?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“I discovered it could be self-induced. And I began to wonder whether the whole thing wasn’t just a daydream we had made up for ourselves to prove we were people of greater sensibility. The whole thing. Everything that had given meaning to my life. Everything I was trying to teach my pupils. Of course, I didn’t give in without a struggle. I read all I could about aesthetics. I went back to my Jung and my Plato—books I’d been given, you know, when I was younger (for I’d been a great success among academic people, and always preferred them to the businessmen)…. They were books I hadn’t opened much, but I went through them all … Myths … Ritual … The nature of tragedy … Catharsis … I could come away from a performance of Lear feeling noble and uplifted, I knew, but I also found I could get the same feeling from benzedrine.”
“But surely,” Banner said, “it is not only a matter of experience. One learns from great plays, does one not?”
“What?” I said.
“About the nature of life.”
I said, “I should have thought you’d learn more about the nature of life from one week as a social worker than from ten years of steady theatre-going. Isn’t that so, Gertrude?”
Banner interrupted. “But Gertrude, how could you teach if you felt like this?” he said.
“I didn’t have doubts all the time, you know. When I did, I would go to bed until I felt better. Doubts are only intermittent; otherwise they would be certainties. Oh, I would forget for a while, and go on in the old way, and it would be quite genuine. I didn’t pretend. Did you think I was pretending when we had our readings, or I recited to you?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“What I have felt at the moment, I have always felt completely. I used to think that a virtue; it is a very essential quality for us in the profession; I would always tell my pupils so.” Gertrude sighed. “But during the last few days, as my doubts have been coming back, they have forced me to look at the whole of my life, all the moments added together, and they amount to so very little.” We were all silent for a while. “It’s very strange,” Gertrude said, “Arthur told me…. He sees these things so differently. He told me there would be a place—that I should look upon it not as an end in itself, but as a skill…. He said that what I have been doing all my life is not wrong—because, you know, when my doubts were on me, I thought it was very wrong…. It is a matter of proportion, he said.”
“Of control.”
“What?”
“Of control,” Banner said. “It is all a matter of control; Arthur has assured me of that. Now we are to start again, he says. Things had got out of hand. That is why I was able to do no good. I had my own doubts, you know. I think all of us do.”
“You too? But if you never had a vocation in the first place, why were you bothered by doubts?” I said.
“Not of a religious nature. Of a practical nature. Christianity was not important to me, as you know. Perhaps it should have been, but you either have that sort of faith, or you haven’t. The faith I had was that I could help people, and the doubts I had were that my help wasn’t doing any good. It was all so complex. One tried to work on simple premises. Justice and injustice … it wasn’t as easy as that. For instance, I discovered—I was bound to when so many of my parishioners were in and out of prison—that the police often invent evidence. That made me very angry at first.”
“Are you sure of this?”
“Quite sure. After all, it’s fairly well k
nown among the legal people, and cases got into the papers from time to time, you know, and sometimes an unfortunate policeman would be sent to prison himself.”
“Unfortunate!”
“Yes. Because one sees their point of view as well. The police do not look upon the safeguards of the law as we do, you see, but as restrictions to be circumvented. Very often they know that some unhappy man has committed a crime, and they would feel—well, foolish if he were to escape conviction by some technicalities of the evidence. Of course they begin with an advantage. Most juries and all magistrates attach much more weight to the evidence of a police officer than they do to that of an ordinary witness. Juries very seldom realize, you see, that the police are interested parties, and that it is a point of pride to the police to get a conviction. I was very angry when I first discovered this, because the police are only human, and they do make mistakes. When they have come to a conclusion, they do not easily reverse it, so that there are cases when they have decided that someone is guilty when he is in fact quite innocent, and, in pinning the crime on him, the police commit an injustice. I found that very difficult to stomach, until it was pointed out to me that the alternative to this procedure would allow so many criminals to escape that the civilized society I valued would itself be imperilled. After a while I accepted this view, but it was not an easy one to explain to those who had themselves suffered under the system—I could accept it logically, if you like, that it was sometimes necessary for the police to place dust from the scene of a robbery in the trouser turn-ups of the spare suit of the man whom they believed to have committed it, but I could not accept it emotionally. Eventually I became very mixed up in my mind.”
Gertrude said, “But your work? This one thing was not enough to make you doubt the whole value of that?”
“No, but there were similar complications about so many things. Youth Clubs. They were such a good work. We needed them to keep young people off the streets, and to bring friends to lonely people. But in order to attract the youngsters into coming, and staying, I had to use what methods I could. I found that in one case all I had done was to create the nucleus of a gang; they wrecked the Club, and I had to disband it. Then on the advice of a colleague, I went in for evening classes and scenes from Shakespeare, but that didn’t take, so we fell back on table tennis. Then there were the undesirables. I could not be present the whole time; they would not have liked that. You would say I should have got rid of the undesirables, but they were the people who most needed help…. There were so many things. Nothing I did turned out simply well, and more and more I came to doubt whether I myself knew what was best. That is where a vocation might have helped me; at least I could have worked to rule. Finally came the deepest doubt of all. I began to doubt my own motives. It was something I overheard—a man talking about me in anger. He said I was bossy, and, you know, I realized that he was right. All my social purpose—just bossiness and wanting to tell people what to do. Like Gertrude, I had to go on. That was my job, and I was in the middle of too many things. I had to live in the moment, and hope that I was right. But the doubts would always be waiting for me when I was tired or things were turning out badly.”
“Mice,” said Gertrude. “Eating away at the rim of the mind.”
“If you like. But there will be no mice when the waters subside; the animals have not, if you will allow the joke, come in two by two. Our numbers are small enough to control. We can make a good start this time.”
I said, “Whatever sort of start we make, we shan’t be alive to know whether it was good or not when the results come in.”
“Arthur will see to it.”
“Yes,” Banner said, “Arthur will see to the results. We only have to do what is right.”
“And how shall we know?”
“Arthur will tell us.”
“But good God,” I said. “How can Arthur or anyone else possibly know——?”
“Arthur will do it.” Banner was angry and earnest. “I will not have this sort of speculation. It will all be controlled from the beginning.”
“Of course,” Gertrude said, “it is a matter of proportion.”
“A murderer!” I said. There was an immediate silence. “Arthur’s our leader, and we depend on him, but he’s not God,” I said. “He’s not above doing foolish and wicked things; you know that. It wouldn’t have hurt us to take in that man from the ark, but Arthur murdered him.”
“How hot it is!” Banner said. “We must be careful not to get too excited.”
Gertrude said, “I remember that as a very little girl, I could he all day in the sun. I used to soak it up. Mother said I was storing up energy for the winter.”
My eyes filled with tears. “You don’t want to hear,” I said. “You just lie here airing your bloody doubts, but you won’t allow yourself to think about—You won’t listen. You’re afraid of being upset.”
“But we are not afraid of anything,” Gertrude said. “Not while Arthur is here to look after us.”
*
That night I found it more than usually difficult to sleep. Whom could I trust? Sonya?—whether I could or not was out of the question, for obviously I did not. Tony?—he was an aching spot in my mind; I could not even directly hate him, since, whatever he and Sonya might have done together, he would not have taken the lead. Gertrude? Banner? Muriel?—they were Arthur’s creatures, and Arthur was mad, a figure from a horror comic. They were all mad, I thought, all mad but I, the single sane being in this small mad world. Mad, bad, the jingle went round in my mind, and dangerous to know, dangerous to me, dangerous to themselves, to each other, to Sonya, to me, to me….
The other men in the cabin were sleeping; I could hear them breathing in counterpoint. But something moved. Someone came out of the women’s room. A figure, moving swiftly on bare feet, passed by us, and went out on deck. I saw her framed in the open door only for the fraction of a moment, and it was not long enough for me to be able to tell who she was. Soon, I thought, someone from our own room would follow her. Soon Tony would get up and follow her, and I should know for certain.
There was a shuffling sound in the darkness. He was getting up, slowly and carefully. He was pausing for a moment beside each sleeper, listening to their breathing to make sure they were asleep. I closed my eyes, and moaned as if in a dream, and he went quickly by me. As he opened the door, I saw that he was not Tony, but Arthur.
I forced myself to wait before following him out on deck, for I dared not seem to be spying. I must not move stealthily. If I were discovered, it must appear that I had come out in all innocence to breathe the night air. I pushed open the door casually, and stepped out. I could see nobody outside, but dared not peer about me. I walked a little way towards the edge of the raft, and looked at the phosphorescence in the water. There was nobody on deck, unless they were hidden in the shadows of the other side of the cabin, but I could not go to see. There was nothing for me to do but wait a while, and then go back indoors.
“Not now,” a voice said. “Make your report first.” It was Arthur’s voice, and it was faint and far below me. I turned quickly, and glared into the darkness. Was Arthur a ventriloquist, sending his voice out to plague me while he himself sniggered in the shadows? Then, as Muriel answered, I realized that the voices came from the hold, and silently I took up my station at the top of the ladder to eavesdrop.
“Make your report.”
Muriel said, “They’re carrying on.”
“Who are?”
“Miss Banks and Mr. Ryle.”
“Have you seen them?”
It seemed to me that a long time passed between the question and Muriel’s answer to it. A hunger for and fear of the truth grew together in my mind. Then Muriel said, “No, but he knows.”
“How can you tell?”
“I’ve been watching him. He can’t keep his mind off it when they’re down here together. And she knows he knows. She’s been giving him some very funny looks.”
“And Mr. Ryle?”
“You can’t tell what that kind are thinking about. But it stands to reason, doesn’t it?”
There was a pause. Then Muriel’s voice again, eager and complicit. “Arthur?”
“Yes.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
“Nothing.”
“But they’re carrying on.”
“It is suitable that they should. Miss Banks is more realistic than her—than Mr. Clarke. She knows that when we have settled down, such matters will have to be arranged on a more rational basis than they are at present. She is unlikely to object therefore to being, as it were, shared. Should she do so, it will be enough to confront her with what we already know; that she has been promiscuous for her pleasure, and may be expected to continue to be promiscuous for the profit of the community as a whole.”
“Shared?”
A silence.
“Shall I be shared, Arthur?”
“Of course.”
Muriel giggled; it was a little horrible to hear her. “Well, it’ll make a change,” she said.
Arthur said, “What else have you to tell me?”
“He’s been talking against you.”
“Who?”
“Mr. Clarke.”
“In what way?”
“He said you were a murderer. He said that to Harold and Gertrude this afternoon. He said you did foolish and wicked things.”
“Foolish?”
“That’s what he said.”
“And what did they reply?”
“They said it was very hot.”
“Foolish!” Arthur said, “I should be angry if I did not consider the source. Let Mr. Clarke be a warning to you, Muriel. He has intelligence, but no wisdom.”
“Aren’t you going to punish him?”
“No.”
“Not when he’s been talking against you?”
“It is of no consequence; he does no harm. Mr. Clarke is without a backbone, my dear. He may destroy himself with doubts and scruples, hesitations and evasions, but he cannot destroy us because, when it comes to the point, he will always do what he is told. Meanwhile he is an excellent cook.”
