The Riddle of the River

by Catherine Shaw

  ‘It’s risky,’ said the older woman. ‘If the play were really good, we could overcome the public anger it’s bound to produce. But with a play as poor as this, it doesn’t stand a chance.’

  ‘I hate it!’ cried the younger actress vehemently, joining her colleague at the edge of the stage. ‘What does he think he knows? How does any man dare write about such things – as though he can possibly understand! How dare he – how dare he even pretend to imagine!’ She stamped her foot, and continued furiously. ‘He wrote these lines to be spoken by actresses. And what will the effect on the public be? It’s – it’s like a betrayal in the midst of our struggle. Our profession is only just beginning to be perceived as…honourable. No, that isn’t even true yet. No decent girl would be allowed to go on the stage, even today. But the subject is being raised, at least! There are some playwrights who are trying to tell the public that our profession is not to be confused with—’

  ‘The oldest profession in the world,’ broke in Mr Manning calmly. ‘All right, that’s enough, I understand your point. It was just a try, remember? Let’s take a break, and have a bit of a read of Act III after elevenses. If we all agree it won’t work, we’ll chuck it. I’ve got three others under consideration, remember?’

  ‘I’ll get a pot of tea,’ said the older actress, putting her arm around the younger girl’s shoulders. The one or two seated spectators rose, and scrambling directly up onto the stage, they crossed over to the back and disappeared. Only Mr Manning remained, shuffling together the pages of his own copy of the script, upon which he had been making notes. I went over towards him.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said softly. He turned abruptly.

  ‘Who are you?’ he said.

  ‘A friend of Ivy Elliott,’ I said.

  ‘A friend of Ivy’s!’ he exclaimed. ‘But what are you doing here? Don’t you know that Ivy is dead?’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ I said. ‘I have simply come to talk to you about her, if you will let me. Or rather, to ask you to talk to me. I – I wanted to meet the people she worked with.’

  He walked towards me and squinted directly into my eyes, unpleasantly.

  ‘You’re no friend of Ivy’s,’ he said. ‘What could she have had to do with someone like you? What are you – a journalist prying for information? I’ve nothing to tell about Ivy. I spoke to the police for two hours yesterday – that’s enough for me. She disappeared without warning, and we had no idea what had become of her till they came yesterday to tell us that she was dead.’

  ‘Alan!’ shouted a voice, and one of the young men who had been working in the backstage area came out onto the stage and looked down at us. ‘Tea! Who’s this?’ he added, moving forward to peer at me over the lights.

  ‘Some so-called friend of Ivy’s,’ said Mr Manning with a sneer of disbelief. The young actor jumped lithely off the stage to the floor and approached us.

  ‘What about Ivy?’ he asked quickly. ‘Anything new? You can say what you like, Alan, but it’s just unbearable, not knowing what happened to her. Do you know anything?’ he added, turning hopefully to me.

  ‘Not a lot, but more than you do, perhaps,’ I told him, thinking that sharing some information might be a small price to pay for learning more about this strange company.

  ‘Come along and join us for tea,’ he said. Then, noticing Mr Manning’s lowering brow, he added, ‘Oh, were you just chasing the lady off? Sorry! But you didn’t tell us a syllable about what the police said yesterday, and we’re still all in the dark. All we gathered was that Ivy is dead; not the how, not the where, not the why. Come on, don’t be so close.’

  ‘That’s all they told me. I didn’t hide anything from you,’ said Alan crossly.

  ‘Yes, but maybe this lady knows more.’

  ‘I do,’ I said quickly. ‘I come from Cambridge, and that is where she died.’

  ‘Come on then,’ he said, and I found myself awkwardly manoeuvring my way up onto the stage and through the rent in the backdrop, to where the actors were grouped around a large table on which had been placed a steaming teapot, several chipped cups without saucers, and a plain pound cake.

  ‘Folks, this lady has come unexpectedly to tell us something about Ivy,’ said the young man. There was a collective murmur of surprise, and everyone drew closer, even Mr Manning, although he still frowned.

  ‘I know that you are all aware that Ivy Elliott is dead,’ I said respectfully.

  ‘Well, we weren’t,’ said a young lady with bright eyes and dark hair, ‘only since the police came yesterday.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter, Jean. The point is: how did she die? What happened?’ asked a man who, now that he had descended from the ladder, I saw was extremely tall. I recognised the two of them as the actors who had played Hermia and Theseus.

  ‘She was murdered, and her body was found in the Cam,’ I said. ‘The exact circumstances of her death are not clear, but the post-mortem clearly shows that she was strangled shortly after midnight on the 21st of June, and her body placed in the river some three or four hours later, where it was found in the early morning by a passer-by.’

  ‘Oh, that’s horrible, too horrible. She was strangled? Who did it? Who could have done such a dreadful thing?’ cried the girl called Jean, turning pale.

  ‘Nobody knows at this point.’

  ‘What was Ivy doing in Cambridge?’ said the elderly lady who had been playing Mrs Warren. ‘Who took her there?’

  ‘She had a friend there, who invited her from time to time,’ I said. ‘She had just left his home when she was killed.’

  The woman sat down suddenly and placed her forehead in her hand.

  ‘It makes me feel queer,’ she said. ‘Ivy, dead. I can’t get used to it. I can’t get it into my head.’

  ‘We all feel that way, Paula,’ said the tall man, laying his hand on her shoulder. ‘It won’t be the same here without her.’ But she was sobbing quietly.

  ‘To think she was killed on the twenty-first,’ she said. ‘Her one free day.’

  ‘Why was she free then?’ I asked.

  ‘We alternate plays,’ replied the tall actress. ‘Tuesdays and Sunday evenings we play something modern. We’ve been doing The Wild Duck. Ivy wasn’t in it. Oh God. We must have been playing while she was being murdered.’

  ‘Not playing,’ said the actor. ‘If she was murdered after midnight, we would have been finished.’

  ‘Finished, but not gone,’ said Paula. ‘We never get out of here before one o’clock on the days we change plays, with all the dismantling. We were all right here. Oh, to think that if only we’d given her the role of Hedwig like she wanted – she wouldn’t have died!’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ said Jean quickly. ‘It makes me feel as though you all think it’s my fault she was killed!’

  Mr Manning turned towards the group and spoke rather sharply.

  ‘Nonsense, Paula,’ he snapped. ‘If somebody wanted to murder the girl, a time and a place to do it would have been found. It has nothing to do with The Wild Duck, nothing to do with us at all. Come,’ he added, beckoning me to follow him. ‘I think we had better talk in private.’ He was obviously not at all pleased at the emotional storm I had caused within his well-controlled company.

  I followed him over to a set of doors leading to a row of smaller rooms, no doubt actor’s lodges or something of the kind. One of them had been set up as a working room for Mr Manning, with a desk, a chair and a large number of papers, plays, books and notes scattered about. He offered me the chair and sat down on the desk himself.

  ‘Just what, exactly, did you come here for?’ he said.

  ‘I came to learn more about Ivy,’ I told him. He hesitated, and I thought he was going to challenge me to tell him why, but he suddenly changed his mind. Instead he said,

  ‘We don’t know much about her. She worked here, but kept her personal life very private. What kind of thing do you want to know?’

  ‘First of all, have you her address? Do you know where
she lived?’ I said. For answer, he wrote it out on a little scrap of paper and handed it to me in silence. I read it and thrust it into my dress.

  ‘Then, I would like to ask you how long you have known her, and when and how she came to join your company,’ I continued.

  He cast his mind back.

  ‘Let’s see, she came in…in June? No, in May. Last May, just over a year ago. We had put in an advertisement, actually, for two young ladies and a man. There are not many of us in the company, you see. We’re twenty all together; seven or eight main actors and actresses, and then a bunch of irregulars we call on occasionally to fill in the minor roles. At the time, we were just beginning. I put the Company together a few years ago with two or three of the people you have just met; they brought in a few friends. We put down what money we could, and found a sponsor. Our first plays were out in the country, and we made a success of them. As soon as we were able to hire enough extras, we started putting on Shakespeare. Our idea was that the country folks should be able to have as much Shakespeare as they need, without going to London for the purpose. After a couple of seasons we did well enough to try for the London audiences, and it worked. We did comedies first. Then we decided to try Hamlet. That was my decision. I’ve been waiting all my life to direct Hamlet.’ By this time, Mr Manning appeared to have forgotten my original question. His eyes were shining with an intense gleam. His words came tumbling out. ‘It’s dangerous, Hamlet, you know. It can make you or break you. Everything has been tried; the greatest actors have played Hamlet. If you can’t find something new to say, there’s no point to it. I wanted two things. One was the nature aspect. I wanted to do the play outside. I knew we could accomplish things that had never been tried before, by choosing the right spot and taking advantage of its possibilities. There are scenes in Shakespeare – the rehearsal scene in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the forest scenes in As You Like It – which take place among trees. Nothing like making them take place among real trees. Then I wanted something else which has been abandoned, I find, in all recent performances. I wanted something like simplicity; something classical, which has been lost with all the experimental performances we’ve had lately. Have you seen Ellen Terry playing Ophelia? A madwoman – that short hair standing all on end, her eyes staring crazily. She went to a lunatic asylum, they say, to study the behaviour of the madwomen there. The public drinks it in. But that’s not what I want. Ophelia doesn’t mean raving lunacy, not to me. What’s left in the human being when reason goes? Something meaningful – meaningful, I’m telling you. There’s a truth within us that goes far beyond reason; strip reason away and that’s what you’ll find. The human individual. Ellen Terry’s performance hurt me. I wanted to give Ophelia her truth back; the intelligence, the feelings, the innocence and the poetry that gleam all the stronger through the ruins of reason. But we didn’t have a good Ophelia. Carrie is fantastic in certain roles, although she’s a little typecast, being so tall. But she wasn’t what I had in mind. I put in the advertisement and got dozens of answers. Jean came then, the girl you saw in there. She wasn’t Ophelia, but I hired her; I knew she’d play a hundred roles to perfection. When I saw Ivy Elliott, I felt hopeful for a moment. She had the right physical appearance. But her acting experience was limited. She’d played only a few small roles. I asked her how she got her start and she said she answered advertisements and went to auditions; she wanted to be an actress more than anything she’d ever wanted in her life. She’d had no experience at first, but they taught her and she learnt quickly. Acting is a profession, you know. You can’t just stand there and spout words and gesticulate! Every tone, every gesture, every movement is meticulously planned by the director. The actor has to understand and execute. It isn’t easy. But I took a chance on Ivy, because she had something captivating about her that I thought might make up for her lack of experience, and her – her manner. She had the face, the hair, the figure. And something more.’ He stopped, lost in his own mental images.

  ‘What was she like?’ I asked to give him a little prod.

  ‘She was remarkable, in her way,’ he replied. ‘Her manners were common, her speech was common, her behaviour with men was worse than common; it was familiar. Yet she wasn’t vulgar. By her accent, she wasn’t from London originally. No Cockney there. In fact, I’ve no idea where she came from and what her background was, and I think I’d rather not know. What she had was what I was talking about before; she had a certain inner truth that lay deeper than all the cheap squalor life had surrounded her with, and the surprising capacity to let it come out when she acted. The Ivy we knew used to just fall away as soon as she walked onto the stage. I had to teach her a lot about where to walk and why, but not about how. She had a very jaunty step usually; not modest, you know. Ladies used to cringe sometimes, just brushing past her in the street. But she knew instinctively never to use it on stage. She had a grasp of complete simplicity that made her much easier to direct than some others I could name. There were a lot of roles she wouldn’t have been able to play, certainly. We couldn’t have found a place for her in Mrs Warren’s Profession. The characters are too bold.’

  ‘Is that the play you were reading just now?’ I said. ‘I wondered what it was.’

  ‘Bernard Shaw,’ he replied. ‘You don’t know it? It was published some years ago, but it hasn’t been performed yet. Too shocking. The mother a brothel-keeper, the daughter a smoking Cambridge graduate working in the City. I thought we could make something exciting of it, but you probably heard what Paula said. It might not be so easy.’

  ‘It is difficult to write and speak publicly about such things,’ I murmured.

  ‘And privately,’ he added, looking at me. ‘But the stage can help. That is one of its purposes. Some people think of it as being an artificial venue, a place where life is imitated. But it can be the contrary. Thanks to the screen of artificiality, truths can be said that can’t be stated in intimacy. Ibsen grasped that fact, and that’s what made his fame. The public is captive, silent – slam it into them while they’re sitting in the dark. Let them ferment and complain afterwards.’

  ‘But plays can fail if they offend,’ I said.

  ‘Certainly. That’s why Mrs Warren’s Profession may not be a good idea for us now. Yet it’s an interesting play in its way. Say it out loud! Shakespeare’s safer, of course. He said everything as well. Nothing is missing, yet nobody gets offended. And Shakespeare is full of roles for Ivy’s type. I hired her as a permanent member on a hunch, and it played out well. I was pleased with her work, and the public was quite fond of her. Over and above her acting, she had an excellent memory and she was accurate and businesslike. I liked that in her. She was always on time, always knew her lines, never had moods.’

  ‘She must have been pleased to be hired as a permanent member,’ I said, ‘if she were hoping only for a part in one play.’

  ‘Oh, she was pleased as Punch,’ he said. ‘Jumped at it. But I had to tell her we couldn’t pay her much. She was upset for just a moment, but then she accepted. And she scraped by. She supplemented it somehow or other; I don’t want to know more.’

  ‘Dare I ask how much you were able to pay her?’ I said.

  ‘Two,’ he said abruptly. ‘Two shillings a week during plays, three when she had a big role, one and six when she understudied, nothing when she was off. I couldn’t give more. I would have if I could. We’re practically running at a loss as it is,’ he went on defensively. ‘The trailer and tent are expensive; the travel and horses are expensive; we all need salaries. I told her she wasn’t expected to buy her own costumes. We have a fairly large collection here that she was free to use. She occasionally took things home with her, but as long as she altered them to fit herself and didn’t spoil them, that was all right with me.’

  ‘Such a salary is really not enough for anyone to live on,’ I said thoughtfully, without adding that salary was the wrong word – slave-wages would have been closer to the mark.

  ‘I know that; yet she
lived. I didn’t ask questions. I’m too busy just trying to survive. Getting this theatre is a stroke of luck; we’ve been offered it free for a month if we renovate. That costs us money as well, of course, but we’re doing as much as we can by ourselves. Losing Ivy is a blow, you know,’ he added. ‘A blow to the Company, and a personal one as well. I liked the girl. She wasn’t easy to come to know. She was pleasant, yet she kept herself to herself. But she was a good hard worker. She’d have enjoyed being here now.’

  He shrugged, and then rose, clearly intending to put an end to our conversation. I would have liked to speak with the others, but he guided me firmly across the stage.

  ‘We must get back to work,’ he said, as he gave me his hand to deposit me over the edge and pointed firmly towards the exit. I made my way among the seats to the aisle, crossed the foyer and stepped out into the street, closing the door behind me. I should have liked to talk to the members of the company a little more, yet I had food for thought already. And something else.

  I removed the scrap of paper bearing Ivy’s address from my pocket, smoothed it out and read it again, then walked until I spotted an empty cab idling near the kerb. Entering, I gave the man the address in Bayswater and settled back in my corner to think.

  The house in front of which he deposited me surprised me. I had expected something quite different, although I was not sure exactly what. I knew, of course, that Ivy did not live on the money from the theatre alone. Mr Archer, for one, had given her three pounds by his own admission, and from the description of one of the witnesses, it sounded like it might have been an even greater sum in fact. So it was not that I expected to find that she lived in a miserable hovel. But neither did I expect to find a neat stone house, converted into small flats, with clean front steps, geraniums at the windows, a well-swept area with trimly painted railings, and a highly polished brass doorknob. The house was eminently respectable, and so completely different from the image that I had evolved in my mind that I even wondered briefly if she had given a false address, or if I had come to the wrong place.