Curtain Call

by Anthony Quinn

  And, tired of pacing, he flopped down into an armchair. It was an unsatisfactory note on which to end the conversation, but Nina could think of nothing else to say. Her gaze drifted across the faceless figures on the wall. ‘When are you going to put faces on them? They rather give me the creeps.’

  ‘Ludo’s still thrashing out names with the committee. Apparently there’s quite a brouhaha about who’s to be in it. Threats of resignation and all sorts.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I know. You’d think it was the Last Supper I was painting – instead of members of a club nobody cares a button about.’

  Nina pouted slightly. ‘Well, they care, I suppose. They think if Stephen Wyley paints them they’ll be securing their little bit of posterity.’

  ‘They’re fools if they do. Nobody’ll remember them – us – at all. Tell me, those portraits on the staircase you passed on the way up – d’you think anybody looks at them and thinks fondly, “Ah yes – old so-and-so”? They’re gone, and forgotten.’

  ‘Darling, you’re awfully morbid tonight. What’s the matter?’

  His mouth made a noise that was somewhere between a laugh and a sigh. ‘I’m sorry – things on my mind. My twelve-year-old daughter’s written to me asking to be removed from her school. I’m terribly behind on my work. And I have that infernal dinner of Carmody’s to attend this Tuesday.’ He looked at her. ‘I can’t persuade you to come with me, can I?’

  She gave him a pitying look. ‘You know you can’t. I’m working. What about Mrs Wyley?’

  ‘Bridge night. And Cora hates that sort of thing anyway. Can’t say I blame her.’

  Nina, with a half-smile, decided not to make a fuss of this unintended slight. She realised how seldom either of them mentioned his wife, though her invisibility had become in itself a kind of presence to her. One of the few things she knew about ‘Cora’ was that she had cried at her performance in The Second Arrangement, giving a reluctant dab of interest to the mostly unfavourable picture she had formed. The only photograph of her she had seen, at Stephen’s studio, showed a willowy fair-haired woman, unsmiling, slightly prim in the English way, and so different from her own looks as to deepen her confusion. Was it merely a need for variety that had prompted Stephen to stray? She had wondered about that from the moment of their first tryst at the Imperial – and still did.

  Tom had been receiving ominous signals from within. He had come to regard his body as a city state locked in a volatile conflict between sickness and health, the one under continuous siege from the other. His seizures, those internal earthquakes, had not troubled him for years, to the point where he had imagined them to be a thing of the past, a finished chapter of his life. Alas, they had been merely biding their time, waiting for his defences to drop. The spies and informers of the interior had stayed vigilant, though, and warned him when trouble was on its way: a slight tremor in his limbs, a keening headache, a sudden disabling nausea. Sometimes, if the alarms came early enough, he could make provision, could gather himself to neutralise the threatened assault. He would lie on his bed, a cool flannel pressed to his brow, the curtains a saving shield against the light. There he would stay, as still as an effigy on a tomb, waiting, willing the frenzy that loomed at the corner of his vision to pass by.

  The blame, in a way, was his own. Having decided on a clean break from Jimmy he had felt a satisfaction in taking the initiative. That he had endured nine years in the job had become a cause of wonder. Was it pity that had kept him loyal to a miserly and manipulative employer? Or was there a natural indecision that had baulked his instinct to quit? Some amalgam of the two must have been in play that morning he had intended to hand in his notice. Somehow at the vital moment his nerve had failed him, and instead of shaking off Jimmy for good he had allowed himself to be enslaved once more, this time his tenure sealed with a wage increase so paltry as to be humiliating. Consciousness of this failure had first made him wretched; now it was making him ill.

  It so happened he had been reading Macbeth again, and was struck anew by the spiritual and psychological emergencies of the tragic hero. Driven to murder his way to the throne, Macbeth can’t help revealing his fragile mental state as the play proceeds. First, about to dispatch the sleeping Duncan, he stands irresolute, hallucinating the dagger in his own hand; then, having fled the dead man’s bedchamber, he becomes almost hysterical in the company of Lady Macbeth, worrying away at the fact that he could not say the word ‘Amen’ back at the scene of the crime. ‘I had most need of blessing, and “Amen” / Stuck in my throat.’ (How quickly his guilt follows on his deed.) His Lady, aghast that he has not disposed of the bloody daggers, tells him to take them back to the chamber. Macbeth, though, will not, afraid ‘to think what I have done’. How has this warrior, a recent colossus of the battlefield, become so squeamish about a single murder – a murder that was no crime passionel but something premeditated at least since the day he encountered the Three Witches?

  Even more intriguing to Tom was the Thane’s reaction to later events. When he is informed by his two assassins that Banquo has been murdered, but that Fleance, his son, has escaped, Macbeth says, ‘Then comes my fit again.’ My fit? There is the first hint. In the banquet scene that follows he is gripped with horror on seeing – so he imagines – the murdered Banquo, shaking his gory locks. Again, his Lady tries to excuse his outward distress (‘The fit is momentary’) and gives her husband a stern talking-to in private. Turning to his startled guests, he tries to explain away his outward fright: ‘I have a strange infirmity, which is nothing / To those that know me.’ The more Tom thought about it, the more he believed Macbeth’s ‘strange infirmity’ was epilepsy, which in Shakespeare’s day was thought to be a form of diabolic possession – the sufferer would be either shunned or chained to the wall of a lunatic asylum. This was not the fate Tom feared. What he dreaded was having a seizure in public, in front of people he knew, people he should have told of his condition but hadn’t. He could not pretend, as Macbeth did, that such a fit was ‘nothing to those that know me’. He had been close to telling one friend or another, but in the end had kept quiet: he couldn’t bear the pity that would pour down. Only Madeleine had witnessed him in that state, and something about her recessive manner suggested she wouldn’t be one to gossip.

  Madeleine: she was a puzzler. He couldn’t honestly say if his company was a pleasure to her or not. When he had made his surprise call at the Elysian, the club where she worked, he’d felt about as welcome as a leper. She was awkward and nervous with him, could barely catch his eye, and as he left – she’d dismissed him, really – he was more or less convinced their brief acquaintance was over. But he was wrong, for there she was at Edie’s birthday party last weekend, as diffident as ever but friendly again, perhaps even pleased to see him. He had introduced her to people, and though she wasn’t naturally a gregarious type he sensed her making the effort to be agreeable. It all seemed to be going well until she disappeared to the Ladies. As the party’s hubbub rose he began to wonder where she’d got to, and, feeling somewhat responsible, he eventually set off in search of her. He was edging through a press of people when he saw her and another woman emerge from the basement and head for the exit. They hadn’t noticed him, but he got a good look at the other woman and shrank back in surprise. Could it have been –?

  They were out the door and gone. Baffled, Tom retraced his steps to Edie and dipped his head towards her.

  ‘Do you know Nina Land, by any chance?’

  ‘Yes, she’s here,’ replied Edie, looking around her. ‘Known her for donkey’s. Why – got your eye on her?’

  ‘No, no . . . I’ve just seen her leave the room – with Madeleine.’

  Edie pulled a quizzical face. ‘How curious. Do they know each other?’

  I doubt it, thought Tom. But seeing the two of them together – their tense expressions, the purpose in their step – had made him wonder. That night at the theatre, Madeleine seemed to have recognised Nina Land; it had pr
eoccupied her through the interval. Then she’d had that funny turn afterwards . . .

  His curiosity was left unsatisfied, in any case, because Madeleine never returned to the party. Tom gave an involuntary groan. He was lying on his bed still, the flannel like a blindfold across his eyes. The city state, his body, was in commotion, and his mind was emptying of Madeleine, of Macbeth, of everything. He had to reduce himself to perfect immobility, and hope the convulsive forces within would spare him another outbreak of violence.

  Stephen had arrived at the Marquess fund-raiser in a mood of creeping dread. He had loitered outside the venue, the huge old Carlton on the corner of Pall Mall, to have a condemned-man’s smoke and delay his entrance for as long as decency allowed. Shadowed by a recessed doorway at the foot of Haymarket he watched as cars and taxis stopped to disgorge yet more tailcoated men at the hotel entrance, their shirt fronts brilliant against the bluish-black autumnal evening. The odd bray of laughter pierced the air, and caused his heart to drop a notch further. Once inside the place he did the same thing as always on such an occasion, knocked back the first drink very quickly, and took another for company. Skirting the packed reception he could hear Gerald Carmody’s voice, bullying its way to the noise’s crest. He looked about for theatre people, the sort he had met through Nina, but saw no face he recognised. There wasn’t much glamour about this lot – or even a whiff of money. So much for Carmody’s boasting that ‘Larry’ had pledged his support.

  It was only after they had sat down at dinner, and the wine waiters were ghosting unobtrusively along the tables, that Stephen felt the evening suddenly take an upturn. He had introduced himself to the fellow on his right, whose dwarfish stature and faintly comical aspect reminded him of something carved in stone and leering from a church tower. Yet the man himself seemed quite oblivious to the oddity of his appearance. His old-world courtesy was somehow of a piece with his accented English, which became excitable once he learned that Stephen was an artist.

  ‘Oh, I mostly do portraits these days,’ he said, on further enquiry.

  The man squinted, his face clearing. ‘Ah, Wyley – so you are Stephen Wyley?’

  Stephen admitted that he was, at which his interlocutor drew back in an exaggerated gesture of respect. ‘You are too modest, sir, to imply such a limit to your talent. I know your landscape paintings, and regard them with the greatest admiration.’

  Stephen felt himself blush with pleasure. It had been a while since he had heard someone – anyone – enthuse about the work dearest to his heart. As the man talked it became clear that his praise was no idle flattery either, he could describe what he had seen – the early paintings of the Suffolk borders and the clouded Norfolk coastline (‘something of Boudin there’), his rain-misted Scottish moors, even his cherished series of park studies, London Pastoral I–IX.

  ‘My God, you liked them? Nobody liked them, Mr – er – Tunner,’ he said, glancing at the typed place card in front of him.

  The man gave an apologetic smile. ‘Ah, I should explain – my friend Thomas – Mr Tunner – was indisposed this evening. I took his place at short notice. My name is Balázsovits, László Balázsovits,’ he said, with a shy little dip of his head.

  ‘Delighted,’ Stephen replied, meaning it. ‘I must say, it’s very gratifying to talk to someone who actually knows my work. I suppose you are in the business yourself?’

  Again came the slightly injured smile. ‘I regret to say I am not. Whatever small powers of discrimination I have I owe to my parents – they instilled in me, from an early age, an appreciation of music, of literature, of art. Our house, when we lived in Regent Square, was always full of it.’ He paused for a moment at this, and his gaze turned reminiscent. ‘I remember them taking me once on a visit to Vienna. We went to all the great museums, we dined at the large restaurants, we attended several concerts, and of course it was very, uh, overwhelming to a young boy. Well, when we returned home my father set me an exercise (I was educated at home, you see) to write about all the things I had seen in Vienna. Which was crazy! I thought “too much” – how could I begin to describe such variety? So: I decided to write my essay about just one thing.’ He held up a single digit in illustration. ‘Can you guess what it was?’

  Stephen thought he could. ‘A painting?’

  ‘Very good! Yes, a painting, which I saw at the Kunsthistorisches Museum one afternoon. It was called Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by a young Italian named Parmigianino – perhaps you know it? It is a remarkable thing, small, circular, like a barber’s mirror – indeed, the painter had a carpenter lathe a hemisphere of wood to produce the mirror’s identical proportions. Now, at first the portrait seemed to me simply a clever and amusing trick, its imitations of convexity finessed just so – the window and the walls behind the face bowing and arching up to the ceiling, the pale hand of this pretty young fellow (no more than a boy!) looming forwards, like a player shielding his cards. But then as I stared I began to see it in a different light. I realised that Parmigianino was painting in a way both literal and metaphorical, a double conceit, and for the early sixteenth century a very original one. It was literal in showing us only what he could see in the mirror, but also metaphorical in exploring the deep human unease of confronting one’s own image. That elongated hand, which distortion has made larger than the painter’s head, was there to remind us of illusion, nature’s illusion in the glass, and our inherent failure to grasp the truth of ourselves. Do you see?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Stephen, after a pause. In fact he had become rather mesmerised by the tiny fluctuations that had been enlivening László’s face as he spoke, a face he had initially thought like a gargoyle’s but which now seemed to him something marvellous, and rather affecting. Of course he could not explain this to its owner. ‘And you wrote all this in your essay?’

  ‘Oh yes. My father I recall was a little . . . bemused. He had asked me to write about Vienna and I had presented a piece of art criticism. But as I explained to him – is it not more useful to study one thing well than to cover a dozen things superficially?’

  ‘Did that satisfy him?’

  ‘I suppose it must have done. The next time I saw the piece was in the pages of a local newspaper. Although,’ he added, narrowing his eyes, ‘I do not recall being paid for it.’

  Stephen laughed, and said, ‘So you’re a writer?’

  ‘No, no. In my younger days I was a musician –’

  The conversation was interrupted at this moment by a shout of mingled greeting and relief from a rotund, wheezing gent, who took the vacant seat next to László and immediately enjoined the wine waiter to fill his glass. He drained it quickly, and, after a fleeting grimace at its taste, called for another.

  ‘James, good evening,’ said László, then turned to the guest on his other side. ‘I think perhaps you know Mr Stephen Wyley –’

  ‘We’ve never met,’ said Jimmy, forgetting his bogus claim of acquaintance a few weeks before and leaning across László to shake Stephen’s hand. ‘James Erskine.’

  ‘Mr Balázsovits has just been telling me about Parmigianino. For a musician he knows a great deal about art.’

  ‘Musician,’ said Jimmy, with a sidelong look. ‘Is that what he called himself? I suppose he’s also told you he knew Brahms – in fact he once held the door open for him.’

  László frowned at him. ‘As I explained to Mr Wyley I was a musician in my youth –’

  ‘And now you’re a piano teacher,’ he declared, for Stephen’s benefit. Jimmy’s meanness was born of irritation: he had specifically requested a seat next to Wyley and somehow it had been misassigned to László, who wouldn’t even have been invited had Tom not cried off the day before. (A severe headache, he had claimed over the telephone.) He looked around at the other diners, expecting to recognise a few faces, and failing. The starter had just preceded his own arrival – fried sprats – and he forked in a mouthful.

  ‘Ugh, greasy,’ he muttered.

  László,
who had already cleared a plate of these dainties, offered to take Jimmy’s from him, and was soon making light work of them. He ate as one who feared this meal might be his last, which, given his precarious finances, was not an unreasonable anxiety. Stephen watched in barely concealed surprise. László, catching his expression, looked abashed and said, ‘They’re very good – better than what I’m accustomed to. I often take my supper at a fried-fish shop in Cable Street, near my lodgings, where the quantity is known to be –’

  ‘I’m sorry – Cable Street, you say?’ The name had clanged on the air like a warning bell. Stephen leaned forward inquisitively. ‘Were you caught up in that business the other week?’

  It took László a moment to realise what ‘business’ Stephen had meant. ‘Oh! No, indeed, I was not.’

  ‘But with the blackshirts and the police and whatnot, you must have heard it at least?’

  László shook his head. ‘Alas, not even that! My neighbours kindly allow me the use of their piano on a Sunday, and while the hand of history was close by I myself was practising Chopin in their back parlour.’

  ‘Good Lord,’ said Stephen.

  ‘Yes, it came as quite a surprise the next day. I am reminded of the story of Louis XVI on the day the Bastille fell. He returned from a day’s hunting and wrote in his diary, Rien!’

  ‘Which Chopin?’ asked Jimmy.

  ‘Oh, Ballade Number 1.’

  ‘No wonder you couldn’t hear anything. All that presto con fuoco.’

  Stephen had noticed that the man seated opposite him was attending to their conversation quite closely. He had a long scar down one cheek, and sat ramrod-straight in his chair. After a moment he recognised him as the man he had seen Carmody saluting on the steps of the British People’s Brigade HQ. He couldn’t remember his name. When their eyes briefly met Stephen gave him a provisional half-smile – the sociable minimum – and was ignored. It didn’t bother him, for he sensed around the man a force field of brooding aggression he had no wish to engage. He also appeared to be drinking a great deal.