Death on the High C's

by Robert Barnard

  ‘Got over it?’ said Owen, looking at Hurtle uncertainly.

  ‘She always used to do it—back at Coona in the last year at High. Got engaged regularly once a week. Used to march into class and announce it on Monday mornings, regular as clockwork. But eventually even Gay had to see the funny side of that.’

  Owen gave a wintry smile.

  ‘I’m surprised she’s taken it up again,’ said Hurtle, with confused confidentiality. ‘Is she having trouble getting chaps?’

  ‘I—er—believe not,’ said Owen.

  ‘That’s a relief,’ said Hurtle. ‘You never know with these stage people, do you? Eventually she’ll get desperate, but I hope that’ll be when I’m not around. I’d give her a couple of years or so yet, so I’ll have time to take cover.’

  ‘Hurtle,’ boomed a voice like the noon-day gun from the other side of the hall.

  ‘What is it, Gay?” said Hurtle.

  ‘They’re getting at me,’ said Gaylene. Finally the insults had penetrated through her drunken good-humour, and she looked purple and angry.

  ‘Take it easy, Gay,’ said Hurtle, strolling over. ‘You always play in the scrum—in there shoving and kicking. Why don’t you make for the outfield now and then?’

  ‘Take me home,’ commanded Gaylene. ‘It’s nearly four. I need something inside me.’

  ‘Is Australians always so beeg?’ said Giulia Contini to Bridget, as she watched their cinemascoped figures heading for the door.

  ‘Always,’ said Bridget. ‘The race has expanded to fill the available space.’

  But Gaylene and Hurtle were interrupted in their departure. At the door there appeared a diminutive chap with a worried expression on his face. He looked about twelve, but in fact he was an unemployed school-leaver whom Mike Turner paid tiny sums to do odd jobs around the theatre.

  ‘I’ve got a message from Mr Turner,’ he said.

  ‘Mike?’ said Gaylene. ‘Isn’t he here?’

  ‘Naw,’ said the boy. ‘E’s been back at the theatre for hours. Which one is Bridget?’

  ‘There,’ said Gaylene, pointing sourly.

  ‘’E says, do you know the part of . . . Fordlingi,’ said the boy to Bridget.

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Ee, I’ve got it written down ’ere,’ said the boy, handing her a scrap of paper.

  ‘Fiordiligi,’ said Bridget. ‘Yes, I sang it at college.’

  ‘Well, there’s one gone sick,’ said the boy, ‘’er as was in’t family way. And ’e wants you to sing tomorrow.’

  ‘Christ,’ said Gaylene, clutching Hurtle in an iron grip, and making off with him through the door. ‘Now we really are down to Amateur Night at the RSL.’

  CHAPTER V

  One Fine Day

  It is not often hot in Manchester. When it is, the air is laden, the atmosphere almost tangible, and the warmth and grime and buzz of activity combine to exhaust the most active, to make people pant for rest and relief.

  It was a stifling day of this sort in early September that sent Calvin out into the park to sunbathe, to idle through the papers, and to think of Bridget. He was purposely keeping out of her way, for she had only this one morning and afternoon of rehearsal before appearing in Così Fan Tutte at 7:30. Even for a more experienced singer the prospect would be daunting. The day before, after receiving the summons, she had kissed him and retreated to her flat to study the score with that fierce concentration and energy which he recognized as part of her distinction as a singer. Today she would be rehearsing, working through her moves, establishing her relationships with the other characters. He knew she would want to be free of any distraction, particularly any emotional distraction. She would not want his advice: they discussed their parts, but in the end what they did was based on lonely personal decisions. It had to be so. And particularly now, with only one day’s notice, he realized instinctively that Bridget’s Fiordiligi would be the result of a hard white flame of concentration. So he would leave her alone, and slip into the gallery in the evening.

  He lay, lazy in the grimy sun, thinking about how the rehearsal would be going, thinking about himself, about his roles, about his future. He smiled sleepily to himself as he thought how these things always shifted and coalesced: when he played Rodolfo he could never keep Bridget out of his mind; when he was with Bridget he could never quite forget how he played Rodolfo. Perhaps it was a good thing that, as a tenor, he never got to play roles of any great psychological complexity. Tenors loved and died. He wished he was playing Ferrando to Bridget’s Fiordiligi: that was a part for him—light, sweet, impassioned. He tried over a phrase from ‘Un aura amorosa’, much to the surprise of a shop-girl taking an early lunch-break, who had been lying near him and looking at his brown baking body with interest, but who now put him down as a screwball.

  The sun ate into him, fighting against the particles of dust and smoke, and he lay, making patterns of his future, of the roles he would sing, and the houses he would sing in. Glyndebourne had been showing a tentative interest: he could expect small roles first, then bigger. Could he do the Rossini tenor roles? Yes, he thought he could. And Donizetti and Bellini. The bigger parts would have to wait. The voice would grow, he was sure of that, but he must not force it. The operatic world was littered with the blasted careers of tenors who forced their voices. Present and future, dream and reality merged in a hazy, warm, comfortable meditation.

  Opening an eye, preparatory to turning over on to his stomach he blinked, and registered among the dressed and undressed Mancunians around him in the park figures that he knew. He blinked again, and shook the sun from his head. Standing over in the shade of a clump of trees was the lithe, saturnine figure of Raymond Ricci, dressed as usual in black—incongruous in the summer heat, and adding to his suave, Mephistophelean air. He was bending his great height over—who? The girl turned round, looking the length of the park, and he saw it was Giulia Contini. She was wearing a dull grey skirt and a nondescript blue sweater. Calvin was puzzled. What had those two to say to each other that demanded an interview in the middle of the park? Was Ricci adding another to his long list of conquests? Surely Signor Pratelli would guard his charge better than that? He could see that Giulia, though decidedly uninteresting physically, would be an attractive proposition for the limpet type. She would be raking in the money, for the next two or three years at least, and a star-quality soprano could always insist on engagements with her less than star-quality husband. Was Raymond Ricci the limpet type? Calvin turned the question lazily over in his mind for a little.

  Then a more comfortable idea occurred to him. Of course, Raymond was virtually an Italian. He spoke it like a native. Naturally Giulia would welcome the chance to talk freely with him—as a rest from busy, voluble little Signor Pratelli. As he luxuriously turned himself over, he thought he noticed Giulia was gesturing emphatically, and that her face looked troubled, but he settled his face down on his folded shirt, closed his eyes, and felt the sun seep into his grassy back.

  • • •

  Raymond Ricci strolled through the traffic and the hot, irritable shoppers towards the stage door, with that catlike tread that was going to be so effective in the part of Sparafucile. His eyelids were stationed at their usual position of two-thirds down his eyeballs, and his face was lazily impassive. Only he could know that the muscles at the side of his mouth were twitching, in the beginnings of a smile. Raymond was pleased with himself.

  As he pushed open the stage-door casually, he registered at once Harrison, the stage-door-keeper. Sergeant Harrison to the performers of the Northern Opera, and to the young people in the gallery of the Prince of Wales Theatre, whom he ruled with a rod of iron and berated with a voice of sounding brass on his rare visits to that casual, carefree and good-hearted extremity of the theatre. Sergeant Harrison of the square build, Sergeant Harrison of the Chaplin moustache, Sergeant Harrison of the heavy hand, formed for raising a pint mug or smacking bottoms. Raymond Ricci noticed that Sergeant Harrison was being polite. S
ergeant Harrison was not always polite, either to the greater or the lesser stars under his ex-regimental supervision.

  ‘Mr Ritchie, thank ’eavens you’ve cum,’ he said. ‘There’s this telegram cum for you.’

  He passed the telegram over, and thoughts went through Ricci’s mind of his father, frailer than he ought to be, from over-work, and of his fat, cheery mother. Ripping it open he registered at once it had nothing to do with them. It was from abroad. Oslo. The words ‘Don Giovanni’ and ‘tonight’ hit him in the face at once. This was the second time this had happened: he’d been called to Lyons to sing the same part in March, and there had been a complimentary note in Opera. Now Oslo. All on the strength of a few performances with the Glyndebourne Touring Company. Not bad. Of course, Don Giovannis didn’t grow on trees, that was the reason, but still—not bad. It was a chance. A rush of thoughts went through Ricci’s head, a series of blinding explosions. It was a chance, a possibility, an unlooked-for opportunity.

  ‘Get on the phone to the airport,’ he said to Sergeant Harrison. ‘With a bit of luck there’ll be a plane that will make it in time.’

  • • •

  Owen Caulfield and Simon Mulley were alone with Mr Pettifer for one of the last Rigoletto rehearsals in the Pitford Methodist Hall. Already some rehearsals had taken place at the Prince of Wales Theatre, and tomorrow was to see the first full-scale rehearsal there with orchestra, costumes and scenery: they were into the last, exciting phase that would culminate in the dress rehearsal and the first night. The Methodist Hall would then be given over to other singers, rehearsing other works.

  Throughout the afternoon the two men had jogged along as best they could. Owen knew that with Simon Mulley he had to use the velvet glove, but there never was a velvet glove that more patently revealed the would-be iron hand inside. The worst of it was that with part of his conscious mind Owen had to admit that Simon had a real psychological grasp, and that, as a born man of the theatre, he knew precisely the most economical means to convey his perceptions. But Owen fought the admission: his own personal uncertainties made it almost impossible for him to admit brain, or talent, or potential in others. They were objects, to be manipulated, wheedled, bullied.

  Simon, for his part, wrestled with his role, went through the difficult phrases with Mr Pettifer over and over again, and all the time watched Owen. He tried to work with him, tried to integrate his suggestions into his performance, tried to discuss and compromise. But all the time he watched him, as if sparks from that difficult, twisted personality were to light the fire of his own performance as Rigoletto.

  ‘I feel it’s working against the music, dear boy,’ Simon said finally, after Owen had tried to impose on him a series of stereotyped dramatic gestures for Rigoletto’s big scene with the courtiers in Act II. ‘Of course it has to be theatrical to a certain extent, but you’ve also got to realize that this is the most terrible thing that has ever happened to him: the man’s distraught, off his head with hatred and fear and contempt. We can’t rely on the same old gestures to get this across.’

  Owen was really annoyed. He hadn’t thought of the moves he had been suggesting to Simon as being ‘the same old gestures’. Coming from a man with over a hundred performances of Rigoletto to his credit, the comment was damning. Nor did anything else more psychologically revealing suggest itself to him. He swallowed hard, twice.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Let’s run through the whole scene again, and do it your way. OK?’

  They went through the whole scene, from the courtiers’ taunting of Rigoletto, through his furious outburst ‘Cortigiani, vil razza dannata’, to the pleading and self-pity with which this part of the scene concludes. Simon Mulley was not a tall man, or a particularly striking one in everyday life, in spite of the touch of theatricality in his manner, but as soon as he opened his mouth he fixed the attention, so that the eye caught and the mind saw the significance of every tiny gesture. He succeeded in creating the entire scene: the courtiers, led by Marullo; the air of decadent elegance; the bile and heartbreak of Rigoletto himself. His gestures were taut, but they suggested a personality close to the end of his tether. Only in the final appeal did the innate theatricality of the jester, the side of him that was constantly giving a performance, break out in broad gestures of supplication. Whether or not it was intended as such, it was a lesson to Owen.

  Owen let a moment or two elapse.

  ‘Well, of course, if that’s how you feel it . . . ’ he said. Then, with a little struggle, he added: ‘There were some fine moments. I’ll have to rethink the courtiers’ movements, but I needn’t worry you with that. Now, could we run through ‘Pari siamo’ just once more, do you think?’

  They started in on the crucial monologue of self-doubt and self-disgust. When Simon came to the line: ‘That old man laid his curse on me’, he put his hand to his breast in a gesture of terror and foreboding. Owen stopped Mr Pettifer.

  ‘Very theatrical, don’t you feel, Simon?’

  Simon Mulley understood now why Owen had wanted to go over ‘Pari siamo’ again. He always made this gesture at this point, and Owen had felt the need to score off him after his implied criticism of the standardized theatricality of his own suggested movements.

  ‘But at this point there is a touch of theatricality,’ Simon explained patiently. ‘He’s superstitious and afraid, but nothing has happened yet. He’s a man who spends his life performing, so it’s natural to him to exaggerate a little.’ Then, unwisely, he added: ‘Listen to the music, dear boy; always listen to the music. That will tell you.’

  If there was anything Owen disliked more than people who disputed his orders, it was people who gave him advice. The first brought his judgement into question, but the second cast doubt on his whole competence to do his job.

  ‘Will you, just for once, Simon, let me do my own job without offering little dribs and drabs of platitudinous advice?’ he said, in a high strident voice. ‘You’re not the only one in this company who knows how to listen to music.’ He glared, red and furious, at the company’s star.

  ‘I’m sure Mr Mulley was only trying to be helpful,’ put in Mr Pettifer nervously from the piano.

  ‘The most helpful thing he could do would be to put his own performance in order, instead of reeling from one style of acting to another,’ continued Owen relentlessly. ‘God only knows how I am supposed to fit this mish-mash of mannerisms in with the rest of the production.’

  ‘Most of the rest of the cast are musicians,’ said Simon with no attempt to disguise his contempt. ‘You will find we shall not have any trouble. Could we take it from the beginning, Mr Pettifer?’

  He turned towards an imaginary audience a long way away from where Owen was standing and sang the opening lines:

  ‘We are equals . . . He is the man of laughter, and I of murder.’

  Both the others noticed that he had inadvertently got them the wrong way round.

  • • •

  The house for the first night of the revival of Così Fan Tutte was not quite full. There had been several performances the previous season, Così being a suitably small-scale opera for a company that had to watch every penny. The stifling weather, too, may have kept some of the more expensive seats unfilled, though the gallery was full of young people, some in jeans, some in shorts, many in love. Among the last was Calvin, sitting alone, and tense with anticipation. Before the lights went down Mike Turner made the announcement that Bridget was substituting for the ailing and pregnant soprano originally scheduled. The news caused no particular disappointment or expectation. Oddly enough, though, from the first bars of the overture some of the habitual galleryites noticed that the orchestra was playing with a zing, an effervescence, which had been definitely lacking in the performances last season. And from the moment the two ladies entered and floated their voices into an amorous concerted cadenza, there was a hush in the gallery, and an exchanging of meaningful glances that somehow communicated itself to the rest of the house, so that a thrill
of expectation—expectation of quite what nobody knew—settled itself on stalls and balcony. And backstage as well, where the undersized teenager who had fetched her the previous day was watching Bridget from the wings with an expression which could denote nothing but calf-love.

  Bridget felt the expectation. She had been rehearsing in the heat all day, and if she thought about it she would probably be tired. She did not think about it. She thought only of giving enough voice, but not too much—enough to reach the gallery, not so much as to coarsen the tone. Hellish difficult in a new theatre, and one so different from the little college theatre where she had played the part before. A devil of a part, too: one couldn’t skimp on the acting side and concentrate on the singing. This was one opera where everything had to be totally integrated, or the whole thing fell flat. The test would come at ‘Come scoglio.’

  When ‘Come scoglio’ came, Bridget had got the feel of the stage and the measure of the theatre, and was beginning to feel in total control of herself. If only the voice comes good, she said to herself. That fearsome extension down to the very lowest range of the voice, those ridiculous leaps. A voice that has been singing Gilda for some weeks was not really prepared. And the fire, the storm, the passion—how would they come?

  As Bridget turned to her pseudo-Albanian lover to launch her long, indignant recitative, she suddenly thought of Gaylene. Of Gaylene in the Methodist Hall turning on her, furious with jealousy, and screaming: ‘He’s black!’ Bridget squared her shoulders, and, fortified by the horrid memory, launched her fury at the stolid, rather lethargic frame of the tenor playing Ferrando. He looked as though he didn’t quite know what was hitting him.

  As the aria proper began Bridget turned to the audience. She was proclaiming her utter fidelity, blazoning her chastity to the roof-tops. ‘Like a rock,’ she trumpeted, ‘in ocean planted!’ The leaps came confidently, the lower notes firm, full, implacably determined. Out there somewhere, she knew, Calvin must be sitting. She sang to him. The rich, creamy sound surged out into the auditorium, sending shivers of sensuous pleasure down spines in the back row of the gallery. As the aria speeded up to its conclusion Bridget turned back to her sheepish, lumpish tenor, and fixed him with a blazing eye. Scorn, rejection, unutterable aversion were written in every line of her face.