Poor Tom's Ghost

by Jane Louise Curry

  “Right. I will need the car if I’m to see to the utilities and the roof and some kitchen equipment. So you have your choice of Brentford Junction in fifteen minutes or Isleworth in … twenty-four.”

  On the way to Isleworth Station Jo said—too casually for an impulse of the moment—“Just a thought, Roger, but if you stayed up in town until after the Wednesday matinee too, you could make a start at packing up some of our things. And bring down some clothes. By Wednesday I shall hate the sight of an unironed denim shirt, clean or not! Besides,” she added, “your hopeless father needs someone to do his breakfast for him.”

  It suited Roger well enough. “I don’t mind.” He grinned. “And if the old man tries another two-o’clock walk I’ll be right on his heels. That is what you meant, isn’t it?”

  Tony directed an amused glance at him in the rearview mirror. “How would you like to belt up?”

  At Waterloo Station as they handed in their tickets to the guard at the platform gate, Tony asked suddenly, “Care to see the play tonight? We may not be as up as we were last week, but at least my first act should be better. I got off to a dragging start on opening night—bad timing, the lot—but by Thursday it had come right. We can have supper somewhere afterward. Sound all right to you?”

  “Gosh, yes.” Roger had missed his father’s opening night because of a Schools Orchestra concert in which he had played. “Don’t they save the front seats to sell on the day of performance?”

  “Yes. And no,” Tony said firmly. “I do not care to catch a subliminal glimpse out of the corner of my eye of you sitting down there a-scowl with concentration. Moreover, as you well know, they are not the best seats. You want a feeling for the performance as a whole, not just a chance to see whose tights are wrinkled.”

  “I like to watch the faces.” Roger objected mildly, though he knew from experience that it was useless.

  From the station to the theatre was only a shortish walk. Tony and Roger parted at the head of the Upper Ground, Tony going round the parking-ramp corner to the stage entrance and Roger off to the “Today’s Performance” box office. There was a queue—a mixed lot of tourists, old hands, and students—for returns and the cheaper seats reserved until the day of performance. Roger lounged around, re-reading the posters and looking through the brochures for the current and next booking periods. Next week, he noted idly, the Hamlet ran for five performances; the week after for only two.

  It was a good ten minutes before the telephone message came through from Tony up in the dressing-rooms. The box-office supervisor beckoned to Roger.

  “You’re Roger Nicholas? Your father just rang down about a seat for you, and we’re in luck. We were holding a good single in the centre of Row H for someone who’s just cancelled. I’ll put it aside for you until tonight.” He smiled. “To spare the feelings of the queue. Enjoy the play tonight.”

  “I will, thanks,” said Roger, but he had a twinge of regret for Rows B or C in spite of Tony’s insistence that actors played “over the heads” of the front rows.

  On a sudden impulse, instead of walking up past the main box office and out, Roger took advantage of a moment when no one was looking in his direction to go quickly and quietly the other way. Moving up the carpeted stair, he kept to the shadows, and on the mezzanine level found himself in luck. The doors into the Circle of the Lyttelton Theatre should have been locked, but one had been overlooked. Easing one leaf of the door open, Roger slipped inside. The house lights were half up so he didn’t dare try for a seat, but kept instead to the shadowed gangway.

  On stage a thin young man was sweeping inside the thin lead circle that marked the central acting area on the dark floor. The set was simple, but imposing. Converging lead-coloured lines led from the forestage across the circle to a massive portal at the rear, at arrangement that could suggest either the interior or exterior of the Danish castle of Elsinore. A man wearing earphones appeared from behind the false proscenium to the right of the stage to announce, “Ready when you are,” to a bearded man sitting at the centre of the stalls seats below.

  “I’ve been ready for five minutes. Where’s Tony?”

  “Here,” Tony called. He appeared at stage right in breeches and tights with his shirt half-buttoned and a doublet over his arm.

  Tony and several of the others sat on the apron of the stage, and when everyone on call had gathered, the man in the stalls put aside his clipboard and notes and said, “Originally I called this rehearsal because Tony and I wanted to smooth a few things out, and I made it a costume call because we want to try a few changes in lighting intensity, one in this scene, and a few more complicated ones in the play-within-the-play. The changes we made to adapt to Tony’s height and colouring still need some adjustment. However, it turns out that Rosencrantz has come down with the flu overnight and Andrew will be standing in, so we’ll make it a full run-through of the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern scenes, and set the lighting changes when we come to them.”

  When the house lights had dimmed to a glow, the run-through began. To Roger, who had seen only a film of Hamlet, and that when he was too young to care for any of it but the ghost and the sword-fighting, it seemed to go smoothly enough. It was, in the way of many rehearsals, more a matter of movement and timing, of business and rhythms and inflections rather than the full deceptions and passions these would embody in an actual performance. When it came to Rosencrantz’s news that the travelling players were come to Elsinore—the actors from the city that Hamlet had so enjoyed—Tony’s Hamlet asked “Do they hold the same estimation they did when I was in the city? Are they so followed?”

  The new Rosencrantz made a gesture of regret. “No indeed they are not.”

  And then the scene began to fall apart at the seams. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern stood dumbfounded as Hamlet answered with bitter humour, “It is not very strange. For my uncle is King of Denmark, and those that would make mouths at him while my father lived, give twenty, forty, fifty—a hundred ducats apiece—for his picture in little. S’Blood, there is something in this more than natural, if philosophy could find it out.”

  There was an awkward silence, broken by a halfhearted flourish of trumpets from offstage, before the man sitting in the stalls called, “For God’s sake, Tony, don’t you know what you did? You cut the whole of the little eyases.”

  Tony shaded his eyes to look out across the footlights. “I what?”

  “The ‘little eyases’ passage. The child actors across the river.” The voice rose with a faint edge to its patient tone. “Andy, give him the cue again. And Tony? Dress to your left about three feet. You’re crowding. O.K. Andy?”

  Rosencrantz repeated his gesture. “No indeed they are not.”

  Tony scowled. “How is that? No—How comes … it?”

  He sketched an angry flourish in the air. “All right, what is it? I would remind you that it’s not two weeks since you cut the passage.”

  The director looked up from conferring with a second man wearing earphones who had come to sit beside him in the stalls. “I cut it? What are you on about?”

  Tony’s face sharpened and his voice grew tight and flat. “I happened to be speaking the scene as you instructed.”

  “The hell you were! Somebody give him a script.”

  In the Circle, Roger was unaccountably frightened. He eased erect from sitting on his heels and fell further back into the shadows. Even without stage makeup Tony, standing there in doublet, breeches, and tights, body all tension, his face darkened in confusion and frustration, was a frightening echo of the man on the darkened landing. The illusion vanished as the house lights came up halfway, but there was still an uncomfortable feeling in the air as Tony, taking the script that was passed from the stage manager to Guildenstern to Rosencrantz, read through the passage, scanned it sharply once again, and tossed the script back to its owner in a long, neat arc.

  “Very well,” he said with obscure amusement. “Had I known that you did not mean after all to end the war, I wo
uld have been ready with the speech, as little as I like it. Shall we go on?”

  The looks that were exchanged at this comment conveyed complete mystification, but when Tony gave Hamlet’s “How comes it? Do they grow rusty?” Rosencrantz took the cue with a hasty “Nay, their endeavor keeps in the wonted pace; but there is, sir, an eyrie of children, little eyases, that cry out…” and the scene went on without a hitch. At its end Roger, not knowing just what it was that he had dreaded, slipped out to make his way downstairs and onto the Embankment.

  At Hamilton Terrace Roger eased the tightness in his middle with a glass of milk and a lunch of yoghourt and tinned peaches, then packed his cello down to the bus stop, where he boarded a Number 8 bus for Tottenham Court Road and Professor Albert Clock’s dark little flat off Museum Street. At the end of his hour he had to tell the old man that the Nicholases were moving to Isleworth and that he would not be coming again. It was as much a struggle to get the words out as if he were cutting a last, frail mooring rope. For five years, not counting the one spent in California, Professor Clock had been the single, sure, predictable thing in life: Thursdays at five during term time, Mondays and Thursdays at two during holidays. “Home” might shift endlessly, and schools follow each other in dreary succession, but the musty little flat with all its floor awash in tumbled heaps of string solos and orchestral scores, and its faint, ever-present odour of cat-box, has always been there. This past year had been spent, Roger knew, in concealing the fact that there was really nothing more the old professor could teach him. The prospect of cutting loose, of finding another teacher who might be less reassuring, more demanding, more passionately (if not more completely) involved in music, had been too dismaying. But now the cord was cut.

  Roger stepped off the bus at Elgin Avenue without the least recollection of having caught it in the first place, but feeling a little better about Albert Clock. It meant at least an end to pretending. All the way up the hill and along past St. Mark’s Church he expected to find Tony at Home—if not in the bath with the latest Michael Innes mystery, then out in the sunny garden. But he was not there.

  Roger unlocked the door of the little coach house, propped the cello case in a corner of the entryway, and called, but Tony did not answer. There was no sign of him upstairs in the wide-windowed sitting room or in the garden below, so Roger retrieved the cello and went on through the passage to the bedrooms, which were in the basement of the large house adjoining. The coach house, before the conversion of the big house into flats, had once served as just that: a carriage-house and then garage.

  He left the cello in his own room (or rather, Amy Dance’s—he could not think of its rose and grey sleekness as his), and then checked Jo and Tony’s room and the bathroom. Finding no sign that Tony had been home at all, he went through to the kitchen for another glass of milk, using sugar, an egg, orange juice and the blender to make it into a passable version of an Orange Julius, and took it in to watch a tennis match on the TV. Gradually, as one sharply contested game followed another, he forgot the vague, unnamed disquiet over his father. However unpredictable, Tony was quite able to look out for himself. Even when sunk in deepest gloom he could be counted on to come bobbing to the surface before long, with a cheerfulness to rival Alan’s.

  The tennis match was tied again, two sets all, when Roger decided to leave. There was nothing in the fridge to hold him until supper after the play, and he needed time to find something to eat on the way. On impulse he took from the lounge bookcase a battered paperbound copy of Hamlet and set out for the Maida Vale underground station. He took a train to Charing Cross, crossing the Thames by the footbridge to the Festival Hall, where he joined the queue in the cafeteria and chose two ham sandwiches, tea, ice cream, and chocolate cake and took them to a window table. As he ate he riffled through the pages of Hamlet in search of the scene he had seen played that morning.

  It had been Act II, Scene 2, and he learned from the footnotes that the “little eyases”—the boy actors of the Children of the Chapel Royal and of St. Paul’s—were not only worrisome competitors of the public playhouses, including Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, but added insult to injury with satiric attacks on the adult players. But what all that might have to do with Tony’s strange comment about disliking the speech remained obscure. At seven Roger closed the book with a defeated slap and set out to walk the short distance along the Embankment to the theatre.

  The play was incredible. From the first appearance of the Ghost, Roger was caught by a sense of hurtling inertia, of unwilled movement toward catastrophe, and stunned by the power of the play even though he suspected some of it passed him by. Even the reflective moments when Tony was alone onstage were not still, but notes held and explored for a measure with no sense of easing in that inexorable movement. The pace slowed; the timing held. And the movement of the whole swept on. It never faltered, though there were moments when it seemed as if Tony somehow were the timekeeper even when he had no part in a scene—a conductor willing, cajoling, holding his musicians to a pitch and precision beyond what they willed themselves. His voice, compelling, with an odd, soft shadow of accent, his gestures—even the line of his back turned upon the audience—were the notes of a fine instrument played with intensity and ease, passion and restraint. Roger’s private belief that his father was one of the best actors anywhere almost faltered. It seemed incredible that even Tony could be so good.

  At the interval the audience sat stunned for fully half a minute before breaking into a groundswell of applause, and when at the final curtain Hamlet’s body was borne away in honour at Fortinbras’ command, Roger found his eyes were filled with tears. The applause was thunderous, and went on for so long and for so many curtain calls even after the house lights came up, that it died away only when the iron safety curtain was closed in an unusual and unmistakable gesture of finality.

  The crush at the exits was heavy, and by the time Roger emerged, a pale and exhausted Tony was already waiting out on the Embankment. Roger spotted him slouched under one of the dolphin lamps, trying to look anonymous.

  “I made a run for it,” Tony said with a shadow of a grin. “I couldn’t face bein’ trapped back at the stage entrance. Would you mind very much if we skipped that late supper and took a taxi directly home? I know I promised, but I’m not really up to it. I feel like an empty toothpaste tube.”

  Roger, still gripped by an unaccustomed awe, swallowed with difficulty. “Sure, Pa,” he whispered.

  Four hours later Roger was wakened from darkness and a shapeless dream into a guttering circle of light and the chill of a cold cloth on his forehead. A thin runnel of water slid past his ear and down his neck. The bed was his accustomed bed and the room Amy Dance’s, but there was little comfort in the recognition.

  A single candle burned in a brass candlestick on the bedside table, and a basin of water sat beside it. On a chair drawn up beside the bed, Tony sat, round shouldered with exhaustion and his face streaked with tears. As Roger watched in bewilderment, his father wrung out the rag over the basin and reached out to replace it tenderly on his forehead.

  “Ah, Jack. Dear Jack.” Tony groaned and covered his face with his hands. “Why must you’ve followed me back into this pesthole? ’Tis hard enough Kath’rine should leave me for a tinsel gallant. Now you’ll have caught your death and I must lose you and Kitten both.”

  O there be players that I have seene play

  TONY STILL HAD NOT STIRRED AT TEN, and Roger let him sleep. If he were supposed to be at the theatre someone would telephone soon enough, but Roger did not expect that. The engagement calendar in the kitchen showed nothing for the morning, only notes of an afternoon rehearsal, the evening performance, and the cryptic scribble Coll. Th. P. gn f/Jo. Collecting something for Jo?

  Tony finally appeared a little before eleven, dressed, shaven, and looking relaxed and rested. The outfit made Roger, who rarely saw him in anything but jeans and denim shirts, blink. The blue velvet, silver-buttoned Navajo shirt from Arizon
a and the pepper-coloured Italian stacks had only once before been off their clothes hangers, and that in California.

  He said nothing about having had a restless night, and Roger, after an unhappy wrangle with himself, decided not to mention the strange, unhappy sleepwalking scene. Once fully awake himself, he had coaxed Tony back to his own bed and then wakened him. But if he remembered nothing of all that, why, let it lie, Roger thought gratefully. He could not have explained why it had frightened him so. Besides, if worry was at the root of sleepwalking, then the less of it Tony had, the better.

  Roger went ahead of his father into the kitchen. “I’ll do the breakfast. You read the newspaper.” He turned on the grill to re-heat the already cooked sausages and switched on the electric kettle.

  Tony moved to the place set for him at the table by the back window. “Am I meant to begin with the grapefruit or the Guardian? From your look of the cat that’s been at the cream, I would guess the paper. On the Arts page?”

  Roger nodded, and while he poured the boiling water into the coffee filter kept one eye on his father’s spreading grin. The Guardian’s second-look review of last night’s performance ought to be enough to set him up for weeks.

  Marvelling, Tony lowered the paper and met Roger’s eyes. “Was I really that good?”

  Roger’s grin matched his own. “Better,” he said happily, easing two eggs into a pan of boiling water and setting the timer.

  “If everyone says so, I suppose I must’ve been,” Tony admitted with disarming candour. “A happy chance, too, havin’ a critic in the house. He did a piece Saturday before last about my first performance, so this is pure gravy.” He leaned back to read aloud, relishing every word: “ ‘In my enthusiasm for the original production I did not miss this quickened pace or the fluency and tension of ensemble playing which helped to make last night’s performance so astonishing but having been brought literally to the edge of my seat, I may never again be content to sit well back and accept a pleasing sum of unequal parts as a whole.’ Hah! There’s praise indeed!”