Dance and Skylark

by John Moore

  Councillor Noakes was delighted. “That’s the way to make money!” he said. “I might even consider going in for it myself! And now you’ve told me that, I’m set on having the book whatever it costs me. Real hot, it must be. Talking of hot, have you ever read any of the poems of Dame Joanna?”

  Stephen shook his head. “I thought they only existed in manuscript in the Bodleian?”

  “Well, yes; but Gurney’s going to bring out a little edition, expurgated of course, and have it printed by the man who does our Guides. He says it’ll help to put the town on the map; because sooner or later there’s bound to be a great vogue for Joanna. And I must say I agree with him. He showed me some bits he’d copied out and he said they were as good as Piers Plowman.”

  “He showed you some bits, did he?” asked Stephen, who had always thought it strange that so little was known about Dame Joanna if she were really deserving of a statue in the Pleasure Gardens.

  “Yes. I can’t say I completely understood them, although literature has always been my pet hobby, as you might say.” Councillor Noakes sighed. “I wish I’d had more time for it; but we public men have to make our sacrifices. So I had to tell Gurney that the stuff was a bit beyond me. Shakespeare, yes. Gilbert and Sullivan, yes. Byron, Rupert Brooke, yes. But Chaucer and Langland and those early people, definitely no. I can’t even pronounce the stuff, though I can see it’s good. However, Gurney’s going to hunt up a few lines for me to quote at the unveiling, and I’ll have to get them off pat by next week. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind glancing at them and—er—translating them for me?”

  “I’ll try; but I’m afraid it isn’t my period,” Stephen said. “It’s queer, though, that I’d never even heard of Dame Joanna till I saw Gurney’s synopsis of the Pageant.” The shadow of a horrid doubt was faintly stirring in his mind.

  “Well, I must do my best.” Noakes beamed. “Gurney promised he’d find something really suitable for the occasion. I must say he’s taking a lot of trouble over it. As you know, I don’t altogether get on with Gurney; but I’m a broad-minded man, and I won’t belittle his scholarship.”

  “I’ve often wondered,” Stephen dared to ask, “what was the cause of the trouble between you two.”

  “You’d hardly believe it: a young lady,” said Councillor Noakes surprisingly. “Her name was Abigail. It’s so long ago I can hardly remember; but the name sticks in my mind. The hot blood of youth, you know, the hot blood of youth!”

  Stephen found it difficult to keep his face straight as he tried to picture that grotesque past in which Councillor Noakes and Mr. Gurney contended for the favours of a young lady called Abigail. Noakes went on solemnly:

  “We’ve had our differences since then—in business, you know, in Public Life, and even at the Bowling Club; but I always suspect that Abigail lies at the root of all. And I can’t even remember the colour of her eyes! Ah, well… Anno Domini!” He glanced at his gold half-hunter. “Goodness, I must be off. I’ve got a meeting of the Sanitary Committee at twelve. From literature to sewage! What chequered lives we public men do lead ! Now whatever you do, don’t forget Fanny Hill.”

  Stephen showed him out through the front shop. At the door he paused to smile back at the sun which beamed from an immaculate sky.

  “Everything hunky-dory!” said Councillor Noakes.

  Stephen hurried back into his office, where two telephones were ringing, and dealt in turn with a press photographer who wanted to take pictures at the Dress Rehearsal, and with Sir Almeric, who complained that half the horses were suffering from galls on the withers. “Your precious performers don’t know how to saddle ’em, Mr. Stephen Tasker.” A moment later Faith came in, flushed with triumph because she had sold fifty pounds’ worth of seats in a couple of hours. The inquest, as she brutally put it, had “gone off well.” Virginia had testified with terrible precision that the late Mr. Micklethwaite had appeared to be in very ‘hay’ spirits; indeed he had gone so far as to ask her out for a drink, whereupon she had been compelled to explain that she did not take drinks with strangers. The Coroner had pointed out that this evidence might have an important bearing upon the deceased’s state of mind, since Virginia had been the last person to see him alive. The verdict was Accidental Death, and Virginia had her picture taken by a man who said it might come out in the News of the World.

  “It’s terribly exciting in the Booking Office,” added Faith. “The telephones go all the time, and we’ve sold out completely for the first night except the ten bobs.”

  “Can Virginia manage?”

  “She’s given up knitting and she’s got a girl to help her and she copes quite well. I rather like Virginia. I had a King Charles spaniel like her once, beautiful and silly and so good-natured.”

  She was picking up the newspapers on the desk one after another and studying the captions underneath the photographs of the tower.

  “The Mail mentions us,” she said; “but the Express doesn’t. However, even the picture by itself helps. ‘One-hundred-and-forty-foot death-fall.’”

  “You are,” said Stephen, “the most callous girl I have ever met in my life. May I ask, was Mr. Micklethwaite married?”

  “With four children,” said Faith, very wide-eyed. “Isn’t it awful?”

  “I think you are worse than Lady Macbeth.”

  Faith stretched out her hands and looked at them.

  “My brother was in the Navy in the war,” she said, “and one morning when he was in the middle of the Atlantic he woke up with an awful hangover. Gin, you know. He wanted a glass of water terribly badly, so he switched on the light beside his bunk. At the very moment he clicked the switch the ship was torpedoed. He said it was a most awe-inspiring thing, because for quite a long time he thought he’d done it. I mean, he thought he’d caused the bang. He was rescued all right, but in the end they had to put him in hospital because he couldn’t bring himself to touch electric-light switches. They called it a psychosis or something.”

  “What’s all this got to do with Mr. Micklethwaite?”

  “Don’t you see? In the same way I feel as if wed done it. First the flying saucers and then poor Mr. M. We started something when we sent off those balloons, Stephen.”

  “Frankenstein’s monster?” said Stephen, remembering that morning in the Red Lion when he had first played with the notion that perhaps the Festival would run away with its creators. Faith looked up sharply.

  “You feel that too?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “How funny. I do, all the time. And I keep on wondering what’s going to happen next.”

  What happened next was a knock on the door, accompanied by the scraping of large boots on the mat outside. There entered a burly man in overalls and a cloth cap who strode up to the desk with the purposeful air and owlishly solemn expression of one who brings heavy tidings on to the stage. Stephen was reminded of a Sergeant who had played Seyton for him in a rest-camp production of Macbeth. The man had stumped on to the boards as if he were entering an orderly-room to report all present and correct with the exception of one deserter. “The queen, my lord, is dead.”

  Astonishingly enough, this was more or less what the burly man did say. Touching his cap smartly, he announced:

  “Beg pardon, sir. But her’s jud.”

  “Dead?” echoed Faith. “But I saw her alive only this morning!”

  “In the long grass her was, at the bottom of the orchard, stiff’s a board.”

  “I can hardly believe it,” said Faith.

  “With her legs in the air,” added the burly man.

  Stephen, who had listened to this conversation with mounting horror, interjected at last:

  “Who are you talking about? Who’s dead?”

  The man turned to him ponderously.

  “Never seen a jud donkey before, sir, and that’s a fact. They lives so long, you see, that you hardly ever hears of one dying. But when we went to fetch her, as Miss Pargetter told us to, there her was, lying in the long grass, st
iff’s a poker. At first I thought she was rolling, seeing her legs sticking up in the air; and I said to my mate: ‘Don’t you touch her lest her kick.’ But there warn’t a kick left in her, not a kick. Jud’s a doornail.”

  “Well, that’s that,” said Stephen. “No donkey for the Holy Hermit.”

  “Afraid I’ll have to charge you for the journey, sir. Ten shillings.”

  Faith paid him ten shillings out of the Petty Cash. When he had gone she sighed.

  “Poor Mrs. Perks! She loved that old donkey. It was twenty-seven and it was called Toto.”

  “I expect it’s too late to get another one in time for the Dress Rehearsal?”

  “Too late? Good Lord, no.” She jumped to her feet and began to walk quickly up and down the room. Stephen had never seen her so animated.

  “I’ve got it!” she said suddenly. “‘The Donkey That Refused Fame.’ You can write, I can’t. Have a go at that.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “‘For twenty-seven years To to had lived in Mrs. Perks’ orchard, nibbling the moondaisies and the little red cider apples which fell from the trees in the autumn. Then, suddenly, stardom shone before her: all the glamour of a First Night. But Toto was modest.’” Under the stress of inspiration, Faith continued to stride to and fro and Stephen noticed that although she was so slight and trod so silently, her action was that of one who is accustomed to sticky ploughland. She planted her feet firmly and picked them up with decision. She had very long legs, which greatly attracted him.

  “‘Toto was modest. Rather than face the bright lights and the what-d’you-callums, plaudits of the crowd, like Tom Pearse’s grey mare she lay down and she died.’ That’s the line, I think; but you can write it while I get through on the telephone.”

  “Get through?”

  “We want another donkey and we want some more pub.,” explained Faith patiently, “and this will give us both. Now, you sit down and scribble. I think ‘Scorned’ is better than ‘Refused,’ don’t you? ‘The Donkey that Scorned Fame.’ Poor Toto. Poor Mrs. Perks. She’s very frail. I shouldn’t be surprised if the shock killed her.” She sighed deeply as she picked up the telephone. “Trunks Enquiries. … Give me, please, the number of the Daily Mirror.”

  II

  What Faith would later describe as Donkey Saturday, in contradistinction to Balloon Monday, dawned bright and clear. There were no donkeys as yet, though there was a moving paragraph about the death of Toto in the Daily Mirror. Stephen glanced at it and promptly forgot about it. He had enough worries of his own.

  The official opening of the Festival was due to take place in the Pleasure Gardens at three o’clock. There would be speeches by the Mayor and Councillors, followed by the choosing of the Beauty Queens. After that an immense Carnival Procession would perambulate the town. But the first night of the Pageant did not happen till Monday; one more rehearsal, therefore, lay before Stephen, the Dress Rehearsal at eight-thirty to which various bodies of schoolchildren, Old Folks, and patients from a neighbouring mental institution would be admitted free. Beyond the power of words to express Stephen dreaded it.

  Last night, from half-past six until nearly twelve, he had for the first time rehearsed the whole Pageant through from beginning to end: from the entry of Odo and Dodo leading their dismounted Hermit by the hand to the disastrous Grand Finale in which three hundred players, the band of the British Legion, and a pack of foxhounds tangled themselves into a confused insoluble mêlée which reminded him of the beaches of Dunkirk. As the lifeless episodes succeeded one another, it had seemed to Stephen that each was more excruciating than its predecessor. On leaden feet the Pageant went its doomed way like a procession of protracted death.

  In his little producer’s box at the back of the grandstand, which had draughty gaps between the floorboards and reminded Stephen of the penitentiary of a broody hen, he writhed in agony and sweated with shame. Even the loudspeaker installation had gone wrong, so that when he spoke into the microphone he could hear the echo of his own voice coming back to him, faint, distorted, a pitiful bleating like the plaint of a damned soul rising up from hell. There was no authority in it; and when, in an access of rage and frustration, he suddenly let himself go and shouted into the instrument, the only effect it had was to bring everybody to a standstill, in which situation they remained for a full thirty seconds, turning white faces in bewilderment up to the sky.

  Even on the rare occasions when the actors went correctly through the motions assigned to them, Dionysus for some reason withheld his magic, so that there was no illusion that they were anything but themselves. Odo and Dodo, stepping out the ground-plan of their projected Abbey, were simply Mr. Oxford and Timms walking from pub to pub collecting betting-slips. William Shakespeare, with an open folio carried before him, was Councillor Noakes gloating over an old book with naughty pictures in it which he had picked up cheap. Queen Margaret watching the battle was Sir Almeric’s formidable mother, the Dowager Lady Jukes, watching a Point-to-Point; and King Edward the Fourth, in command of the Yorkist army, was Sir Almeric himself, baulked at a gateway out hunting, crying petulantly, “‘Ware heels!”

  Lance’s choruses, mouthed by young ladies who were learning elocution and eurhythmies at a School of Dramatic Art, sounded like the keening of widowed women in a play of the Celtic Twilight. In remarkable contrast, the folk-songs chanted to Bloody Mary by another class from the same school were given with the terrible heartiness of Girl Guides singing around a camp fire. The “skirmish during the Civil War” was rendered farcical by the young curate in charge of the Roundheads, who always spoke as if he had a plum in his mouth and whose cry of “The bottle, the bottle, On with the bottle,” would undoubtedly get the only predictable laugh in the whole Pageant. During the next episode, when Charles was fleeing from his pursuers after the Battle of Worcester, the dusk thickened and Stephen called for the lights. But instead of helping to create an illusion, they served only to illuminate and emphasise the element of farce. Charles, who looked like a pickpocket on the run, was hunted all over the arena by a single wavering spotlight, which failed to catch up with him until he had reached the exit and was peacefully lighting a cigarette.

  As for the Grand Finale, Shakespeare had a word for it; and when, long past midnight, Stephen went back to the shop, he took down from his shelves a grubby copy of The Tempest—the reflection that almost all his books were in that condition only slightly deepened his depression—and turned the pages until he came to the Masque of the Goddesses. Shakespeare, evidently as sick of Masques as Stephen himself was, had sensibly given the whole thing up and written:

  “Enter certain NYMPHS. … Enter certain Reapers, properly habited; they join with the NYMPHS in a graceful dance … after which, to a strange and confused music, they heavily vanish!”

  Having underlined these words, and placed the book on Faith’s desk because he thought it would amuse her, Stephen went to bed. For most of the night, half-sleeping, half-waking, he wove the Pageant into a dreadful fantasy in his mind. Odo and Dodo, mounted on donkeys, galloped across the field shouting “Five to one bar!” Cavaliers in plumed hats intruded into the Wars of the Roses; Dame Joanna wagged her finger at Bloody Mary and severely commanded her, “Get thee to a nunnery”; Councillor Noakes, still dressed as Shakespeare, declaimed bawdy passages from The Memoirs of a Lady oj Pleasure. A little before dawn, as at last he composed himself to sleep, he thought rationally: “This is the consequence of being overtired; I shall feel better about it in the morning.”

  But in the morning he didn’t. When Virginia rang up to say that she already had full houses for six performances out of seven, his only reaction was one of horror that so many people would witness his shame. Nor, for once, did Faith have any encouragement to offer him; she refrained from mentioning the rehearsal and made no comment upon the book he had put on her desk. In any case there was no time for talk this morning. A series of large and lesser crises filled the hours between nine and twelve. I
nspector Heyhoe had discovered at the last moment an insoluble parking problem; for it was the day of the All Midlands Angling Competition, the car parks would be full of charabancs, the streets must be kept clear for the Carnival Procession, so where, therefore, would the visitors to the official opening put their cars? “Trouble, trouble, all around us trouble,” said Inspector Heyhoe; and Stephen heartily agreed. For the chinchilla lady was complaining of a mass escape of rabbits from the hutches at her abominable Exhibition, and Sir Almeric brought a catalogue of eleven horses which were suffering from splints, spavins, thoroughpins, kicks on the hocks, and a complaint called the staggers which Stephen had never heard of. The lighting-man announced that the flood water had got into his main cable and caused a short which had blown all his lamps; and the programmes, needless to say, had not yet arrived from the printers. While Stephen dealt as best he could with all these troubles, what seemed to him a positive spate of telegrams arrived one after another in the office. Faith opened them smiled, added them to the growing pile on her desk, but made no comment. There was one, however, which did not cause her to smile. She brought it across to Stephen and laid it in front of him. It was from the town’s M.P. who had promised to judge the Beauty Competition. It said:

  Deeply regret must fail you owing to pressing business in House.

  “Cold feet,” said Faith. “He’s got cold feet.”

  “I don’t blame him,” said Stephen. “What now?”

  “No local person would dare to take it on.”

  “Better tell the Mayor. It’s his affair more than ours.”

  But as Faith went back to her desk to telephone to the Mayor a new crisis arose. Followed by a number of her pupils, the lady from the School of Drama burst into the room. In the background, huge and fleshy, loomed Councillor Noakes. The Wardrobe Mistress, with a face of stone, followed. The Drama Lady explained incoherently that her Chorus had just put on for the first time the dresses which Robin had designed for them. They had then paraded on the Bloody Meadow before a Press photographer, and as they did so the sun had come out from behind a cloud. The muslin dresses had proved to be transparent. But transparent! said the Drama Lady. Everything showed through! But everything! And what, she asked, would be the effect of floodlights at night? But unthinkable! Her girls, she observed, were Ladies. They did not belong to a Pantomime. She had not understood that the Pageant was a branch of the Folies Bergères. Something would have to be done about it immediately.