“Ah, now, she’s been an absolute godsend. Really, a gift from the gods. We are indebted.”
“She’s enjoying herself.”
“Salt of the earth, your Maryanne. And she worships you, Kathy, understandably enough.”
He seemed almost to be flirting with her. Kathy squirmed and managed a thin smile.
“Oh my God!” He suddenly drew back and made a little gesture of horror with one bony hand.
“What’s the matter?”
“You are surely not going to eat that?” He pointed at the pathetic sausage roll.
“Yes, that’s my dinner, Mr. Nesbit.”
“Stafford, Kathy, please. If this is not an official visit, we can’t go on addressing each other like aliens. Now there is a perfectly ordinary but no doubt sanitary Indian takeaway not three minutes from here. With your approval, I shall send Svärd the Orderly on a mission of mercy for some samosa, rogan josh, and rice. What do you say?”
“No, really . . .”
“And in return, to pay for your supper, I should like to beg something of you.”
“What’s that?”
“Our prompter’s taken to her bed, and we are desperate. While you’re sitting here, waiting for your aunt to finish her work, would you consider prompting for us?”
“Oh . . . I don’t think so. What does that involve, exactly?”
“It’s simplicity itself. You follow the text in the book, and when someone dries—forgets their lines—or misses bits out . . .”—he glared pointedly across the room at Edward Quinn—“. . . you speak out. Very simple.”
Kathy wondered what he was playing at. It was as if he were trying to draw her into something. She shrugged. “All right.”
“Excellent! And there really is no new development in Zoë’s case, then? No breakthroughs, no flashes of insight?”
“ ’Fraid not.”
“Well, that is a shame. But your aunt has assured me that if anyone can find the solution, it is you.” He held her eye for a moment, a slightly manic gleam in his. “Now, we really must start our rehearsal.”
He got abruptly to his feet and stalked off to give some instructions to a skinny man, presumably playing Svärd the Orderly, and then spoke to a striking, dark-haired woman, who came over to Kathy.
“Don’t mind Stafford,” she said. “We all have to put up with him. I’m Vicky.”
“Hi, I’m Kathy.”
“Yes, I saw you last week when you were here. You can use my book. We’re here, in act two, this scene between Edward, the Captain, and his wife, Laura. That’s me.”
“Vicky, darling!” Stafford’s voice cut in again, “Let us resume our struggle with the second act, if you please! From Bertha’s exit.”
“Don’t you want Bettina for the moment, then, Stafford?” Ruth Sparkes spoke up from the doorway. “Can we have her next door for her fitting?”
“Yes, yes.” He waved his hand impatiently, and Bettina stood up to follow Ruth out of the room. Kathy watched her go, out of place among the other actors, a generation apart, dressed in a black T-shirt and short black skirt with a frayed hem, below which a pair of sturdy legs ended in a pair of thick-soled Reeboks, also black.
“Silence, everyone!” Stafford barked. He pointed a bony finger at Vicky to begin.
“Oh, am I as powerful as that?” She spoke to Quinn with hands on hips, voice heavy with sarcasm.
“You insulted Nordling till he went away; and then you got your brother to scrape up votes for this man.”
Vicky stared at him blankly for a moment, then shook her head and turned away, dropping out of character.
“What’s the matter, darling?” Nesbit said with exaggerated patience.
“That’s not the line,” she complained. “You jumped again, Edward.”
“Did I? Sorry.” He looked hopefully at Kathy.
“Do you think a father . . .” Kathy prompted.
“Ah yes,” he nodded. “Do you think a father would let ignorant and conceited women teach his daughter that he is a charlatan?”
“It’s less important to a father.”
“Vicky, darling,” Stafford said, kneading his domed forehead, “why don’t you move downstage left at that point? We’re getting awfully static. Although you seem to be hopping about a bit, Edward. Have you got an itch?”
“I’m trying to keep clear of Vicky. She’s blocking me.”
“You’re upstaging me, Edward!” Vicky flashed back at him. “I can’t talk to him when he’s standing right behind me, Stafford.”
“I’m trapped by this bloody sofa, for God’s sake!”
“Children! Children!” Stafford thought for a moment. “Why don’t we have the Captain sitting on the sofa for this part, Edward? You could sit down when Bertha exits. On the line Leave us, Bertha. All right? You sit down and fold your arms, the stubborn husband. Laura, on the other hand, the manipulative wife, paces back and forward, between down right and down left. Vicky?”
She nodded, and Edward arranged himself expansively on the two chairs standing in for the sofa.
“Prompt, Kathy,” Nesbit said. “Can you give us the cue?”
“It’s less important to a father.”
“Right.”
“Oh? Why?” the Captain said.
“Because a mother’s nearer to the child—since it’s been discovered that no one can tell for certain who is a child’s father.”
Kathy thought how good Vicky was in the part of Laura. She was delivering her lines with a confidence that was compelling, and Kathy had to force her eyes back down to the page to follow the script.
“Edward, you’re looking a bit complacent, old chap. Begin to sit up as she says this. She’s showing you the weapon she’s got, the one she’s going to skewer you with. You might note the warning signs.”
“I thought it might be effective if I appeared a bit slow on the uptake, Stafford.”
“That shouldn’t be difficult,” Nesbit muttered under his breath, so that only Kathy, sitting nearby, heard it and smiled.
“Try it my way, Edward.”
Quinn nodded. “What has that to do with it?”
“Simply that you don’t know that you are Bertha’s father.”
“Is this a joke?”
“Of course I know!” Kathy broke in.
They all looked at her.
“He skipped a line,” she explained. “Is this a joke? comes after Laura’s next line.”
“Thank you!” Vicky smiled at her.
“Oh, look . . .” Edward threw up his hands. “We have a bit of latitude, Kathy, OK?”
“Sorry.”
“Latitude!” Vicky exploded. “You’re always doing this, Edward, mangling the lines. How can I get my timing right if I never know which line is coming next?”
They struggled on to the end of the scene, when Nesbit called a ten-minute break. Most people wandered off to get a drink from the bar, leaving Kathy, feeling rather shaken, alone with the Indian dinner which had arrived for her. Ruth Sparkes came in, and Kathy explained what had happened. “Every time I gave a prompt it seemed to make trouble.”
Ruth laughed. “That wasn’t your fault, Kathy. That’s Edward and Vicky. They’re always like that. Edward is notoriously slow learning his lines. And when the others nag him he sometimes deliberately makes mistakes, trying to corpse them.”
“Corpse them?”
“Yes. Corpsing is where you do something to try to throw somebody else out of their character, like make them laugh in the middle of a death scene.”
“That’s terrible! But he wouldn’t do it during an actual performance, would he?”
Ruth laughed. “Especially during an actual performance!”
“But that’s vicious! No wonder Vicky gets angry.”
“Well, it’s a kind of game. Taking risks with the characters, testing how good you are at staying in character, even when you’re struggling to work out what on earth is going on.”
Kathy shook her head. “I
don’t know how they can stand it. It must be bad enough going out there, hoping you can remember your own lines, without having to worry about all that going on around you. And the emotion! Even at rehearsals. It was exhausting just to watch.”
“Did we have an upstaging episode?”
“How did you guess?”
“It’s one of their routines. Another form of corpsing, really. One manoeuvres to the back of the stage to upstage the other and make them turn their back to the audience. So instead, the downstage person counter-attacks by moving directly in front to block the upstager, turns their back on them and delivers their lines directly to the audience. It can go on like that for some time.”
“You make it sound like a battle. I thought they were supposed to be on the same side.”
“Well, really”—Ruth leant forward, a mischievous gleam in her eye—“it’s a kind of foreplay. Stafford knows all about the chemistry. He’s very good at creating it, making it work for him.”
They didn’t reach the end of act two that evening, and by the time Stafford released them, Kathy felt drained. Aunt Mary too was showing signs of exhaustion, and sighed wearily as she lowered herself into the passenger seat beside Kathy.
“They’ve certainly worked you hard today, Mary,” Kathy said.
“That’s good, pet. Takes my mind off things, thinking about the problems we’ve got.”
“What sort of problems?”
“Well, bustles, for one thing.”
“Bustles?”
“Aye. According to the books Ruth’s been studying, bustles were back in fashion in 1887 when the play was written, and didn’t go out of fashion again till 1890. But Stafford says he doesn’t care—he doesn’t want bustles. He says they look stupid. He wants a stark look, more modern. Vicky, on the other hand, thinks she looks quite becoming in a bustle. When she told Stafford this, he said, in a very sarcastic tone, ‘becoming what?’ ”
“Ah. There’s more to all this than meets the eye, isn’t there?”
“That’s true enough. But they’re a grand crowd. I always thought southerners were cold, but they’re smashing. You should do something like this, you know, Kathy. You should have an outside interest. Give you something other than your work to think about. Something less morbid.”
“I don’t think I could stand the excitement. The drama of the play is nothing compared to what goes on among the cast.”
“Well, I don’t know anything about that, but they do have a very active social life, with parties and outings and all sorts. And that’s the kind of place you’d find a nice young man, like as not.”
Kathy didn’t rise to this.
“Well, anyway,” Mary said, satisfied she’d made her point, “I shall be looking out for them in the papers when they come touring up north.”
Kathy shook her head, getting a little tired of the subject. “They don’t go touring, Mary. They’re not that kind of a theatre company. They’re only amateurs.”
“Oh yes they do!” the old lady said tetchily. “Last year they went to Edinburgh. Next year they’re thinking of coming up to Scarborough.”
“Edinburgh?”
“Yes, Edinburgh. They took part in the Edinburgh Festival.” She closed the clasp of the handbag on her lap with a decisive loud snap.
Kathy said nothing for a bit. She almost let it drop, but that defiant little gesture with the handbag clasp had stirred some memory of her youth, and she was damned if the old girl was going to have the last word.
“No they didn’t,” she said firmly. “It just so happens I was looking at a list of all the theatre companies who were in the Edinburgh Festival last year, and SADOS was definitely not one of them. Someone’s been pulling your leg, Mary. You shouldn’t believe everything they tell you.”
Having driven the point home, and getting no further response from her aunt, who just sat there in silence like a hunched teddy-bear in her furry hat and coat, Kathy felt a stab of guilt.
Mary said nothing for the rest of the journey, nor as they walked to the lobby of the flats, nor as they went up in the lift. Only when they were in the living-room did she speak. “I would like to make a phone call,” she announced.
“Yes, yes, of course,” Kathy said penitently.
“In private, if I may.”
“Of course. There’s a plug in the bedroom. I’ll take it through for you.”
As she retired from the room, leaving Aunt Mary sitting on the edge of the bed dialling, Kathy thought, I’ve done it now. Hurt her pride. She’s arranging to go home.
A few minutes later the old lady opened the door again. “Katherine,” she said stiffly, “I would like you to speak to someone, if you please.”
Apprehensively Kathy went through and picked up the phone, expecting to hear the irate voice of Uncle Tom, or the taxi company. Instead she recognized Ruth Sparkes.
“Hello, Kathy? Maryanne has given me instructions to tick you off.”
Kathy smiled. “I’m sure she has, Ruth. Go on then, do your duty.”
“She wants me to convince you that we really did go to the Edinburgh Festival last year. Well, we did, honest.”
Kathy’s smile turned to a frown. “Are you sure about that? Couldn’t it have been the year before?”
“No, definitely last year. We’ve done it a couple of times now. We take up one of our productions and put it on for the Fringe. Last year it was Equus. Stafford staged it for the July production down here, and he took the same cast up north with it in August. It got a very good reception. I know, because I went up with them.”
“Well . . . Looks like I got it wrong, then.”
“Yes. It sounds as if you got yourself upstaged, Kathy.”
“Totally corpsed. ’Night.”
She replaced the phone and went out to make peace with her aunt.
ELEVEN
FIRST THING THE NEXT morning Kathy made another call to the Edinburgh police. “It’s about that list you faxed me, of acting companies at the Festival last year. I’ve come across another group, not on your list, who say they were there.”
“Really? What sort of group?” The Scotsman at the other end sounded young, somewhat harassed.
“A group of amateurs, from South London. They say they put something on at the Fringe.”
“Oh, aye. I think the list we sent you was the official programme for the main Festival events. I don’t think it included all the participants in the Fringe.”
“Do you have details of those?”
“I’m sure I can get them.”
Kathy gave him the information. “I’m interested in the dates they were there, and if the venue was anywhere near where Kirstie McFadden was found.”
The incident centre at Orpington was almost deserted, everyone out collecting data. Kathy asked the office if Bren was expected, but no one seemed to know.
“That’s not like him, is it? Would you check on that?”
She didn’t wait for the answer, hurrying out into the bright morning sunshine.
At the library she found the assistant who had helped her the previous time. “I’ve got another request. A play called Equus.”
The woman nodded. “Peter Shaffer,” she said, and tapped up the call number on the computer. “Yes, it’s in. Need a hand?”
“No, that’s fine. I’ll find it.”
When she did, she sat down in a quiet corner and read. After half an hour she returned to the desk and signed another form to take out the book. Preoccupied, she turned to go, still holding the librarian’s pen in her hand. “ ’Scuse me,” the woman called after her. “My pen.”
At first Kathy didn’t know what she was talking about. “Sorry, I was miles away.”
“You all right?” The librarian peered at her. “You look a bit pale.”
Back at the office, Kathy phoned Ruth Sparkes.
“Hello, Kathy. Do you want your aunt?”
“No, it was you I wanted, Ruth. As secretary, you would have records, wouldn’t you, of the
activities of your theatre group over the past few years?”
“Yes, that’s right, I keep all our records.”
“Where are they?”
“Why, here, at home. One of your people has already been through them, looking for the membership list, and notes of ticket sales.”
“Can I come over just now and have another look?”
“Of course, Kathy.”
“The first time we spoke on the phone, Ruth, I asked you if Zoë Bagnall might have visited the National Theatre before she disappeared.”
“Yes, I remember. I said not. Why? Was I wrong?”
“No. But you said that you sometimes went as a group to the National or the Old Vic.”
“Yes.”
Kathy took a deep breath. “Have you been recently?” It seemed to Kathy that her voice seemed absurdly flat and unemphatic, considering the significance of the question.
“Yes, just a couple of weeks ago, in point of fact. We went to see Macbeth.”
As she hurried out, Kathy stopped at the front desk. “Has anyone heard from Bren Gurney, do you know?”
No one had.
“Where the bloody hell is he? Look, I’m going to this number. Get him to ring me there will you, when he gets in touch. It’s urgent.”
RUTH SPARKES KEPT THE records of SADOS, like her own person, in immaculate order. She lifted the glasses that hung from the cord round her neck, placed them at the precisely correct point on the bridge of her nose, and set the files out on her dining-table for Kathy.
“Productions, Social Programme, Members, Publicity, Bookings, Minutes. I don’t keep the accounts, mind,” she said. “Stafford is the treasurer, as well as the president, and claims to keep them, but . . .”—she raised her eyebrows—“I rather doubt if he does anything of the kind. What he actually does, I believe, is to spend what he wants and make up any shortfall out of his own pocket. Once a year he provides a statement for the AGM, but we hold that in the upstairs room of the Three Crowns, and by the time we get to the treasurer’s report, everyone’s slightly merry.” She laughed, then saw that Kathy’s face remained grim.
All My Enemies Page 17
