On the morning of the performance a large envelope arrived for me from Uncle Alfred. It contained scenery and characters for the missing final scene of The Boy in Green Velvet. In addition, some ancient sheets of typescript held together by a rusty paperclip provided me with the dialogue for the last scene. This threw me into a frenzy. Willis was not due to come until an hour before we were to perform for our friends. There would be no time to rehearse it but I knew I had to include this last scene in our play, so I spent the morning cutting out the characters and arranging the scenery.
In this scene Conrad was shackled to the Shadow. Cursorily I read through the script. It took place, very much as I had dreamed it, in one of the castle vaults. It was evidently some sort of storeroom as various barrels and bales of wood were piled up around the walls. Conrad was beginning a melancholy soliloquy on his captive state when Zamiel enters to announce that ‘they’ have been seen on the horizon and are approaching rapidly. Who ‘they’ are is not specified, but it is implied that they are coming for Conrad and are to be feared. Zamiel keeps going out and returning to announce that ‘they’ are coming nearer. Conrad begins to cry out in fear, but Zamiel warns him that if he screams too loud he will set the castle on fire. Still Conrad screams and his screams mysteriously start a blaze. A quick, ingenious transformation of scenery and characters shows him just before the final curtain engulfed in flames. He is still attached by chains to the Shadow who is now crouched on his back and seems to be sucking the life out of him.
I accepted the ending as dramatically effective, never questioning its logic or propriety. Only later did I realise that the whole play was terribly strange. Its uncanny preconfigurings of the absurdist drama of Beckett, Ionesco and Pinter only heightens the oddity.
By the time Willis arrived an hour before the tea party where we were to perform our play I was in a strange state of exaltation and extreme nervous tension. I was convinced that my young audience (with a smattering of parents) would be as entranced by the play as I was. I have a notion that Willis and my mother tried to disillusion me, but I ignored them. I outlined the final scene that was to be included and was surprised by Willis’s extreme reluctance to perform it. He complained that we would be doing it without any real rehearsal, but I brushed all considerations aside.
It is hard even now to describe the sheer disaster of the occasion. My school friends arrived and, after a lavish tea, sat down on the floor of the drawing room to watch the play, very well disposed towards the forthcoming entertainment. My toy theatre stood securely on a stout table in the middle of the room with screens to the right and left of the table and a cloth upon it reaching down to the ground so that, as far as possible, our machinations could be concealed.
Very soon after the curtain had gone up I became aware that the drama was not enthralling its audience. The little sounds of restlessness, boredom and perplexity were all too easily identified. From the few adults present I heard murmurs of disapproval when, in a desperate bid to win back my friends’ attention, I began to caricature the prosing boredom of Father Silas, the priest. For the first time, I found myself looking at the play objectively and I began to realise that it was rubbish and, what was worse, nasty rubbish.
I should have abandoned the whole thing at the end of the first scene, but stubbornness, pride, perhaps even a forlorn hope that somehow all would be well kept me going. In my anxiety I began to rush things and this agitated my friend Willis. Mistakes were made, lines were fluffed, characters made unscheduled appearances. I became increasingly irritated by his clumsiness. We stumbled on until the last scene. At this point the show descended into chaos, Having no idea of the lines we were desperately reading from an old, poorly typed script, the scenery was in a muddle, and Willis, who had become progressively paralysed by embarrassment, was saying his lines in a whisper. As we were trying to contrive the final transformation scene in which the castle bursts into flames, Willis managed to make the entire set fall down. The audience laughed heartily for the first time, and the ugly rage which had been boiling up inside me at last erupted.
I have no personal recollection of what happened next. I know now from witnesses that it took several strong adults to tear me off poor Willis. I was roaring at the top of my voice and trying to strangle him. Another ten seconds, apparently, and I would have succeeded in killing him. There was even talk of sending for the police, but moderation prevailed. In the immediate aftermath I felt utter humiliation mixed with astonishment at my own behaviour. The following day my mother made a bonfire in the garden of my toy theatre and took me to see a child psychiatrist who had nothing constructive to offer except to recommend that I should be taken away from my present school and sent to a boarding school outside Oxfordshire. This was done.
Much to my surprise, my mother did not reproach me with the incident. Perhaps she realised that the shame I felt was sufficient punishment. The calm efficiency with which she dealt with its consequences did much to heal the wound. I only once saw that calm exterior crack when one morning a letter dropped onto the front door mat. It was addressed to me and written in Uncle Alfred’s familiar violet ink. Before I could get near it my mother had seized the letter and torn it into tiny pieces.
**
Time passed. After leaving university I took a course at the Courtauld and, fulfilling my mother’s direst prophesies, entered the world of art and antiques. When I first got a flat in London mother gave me the Boulle clock as a housewarming present. ‘It belonged to your father and I never much liked it anyway,’ she said characteristically. I liked it and decided to spend hard earned money on getting it restored. As Uncle Alfred had predicted, neglect and unsympathetic treatment had rendered it almost beyond repair. The brass inlay was coming away from the tortoiseshell and had been broken off in several places. The clock mechanism had never worked since I could remember, so I decided to have that restored as well.
One day I received a call from the restorer to say that he had found something in the clock which I ought to see. He had found a stiff piece of folded paper jammed into the mechanism which was the chief reason for its not working. Unfolded, the paper turned out to be a will made by my paternal grandfather only a week or so before he died in 1947, five years before I was born. It was witnessed by the two nurses who had been looking after him, and, revoking all other wills, it left his entire estate not to my Uncle Alfred, but to my father. It was the briefest of documents and gave no reason for this radical change of heart.
I felt a mixture of emotions, but the principal one was of dismay. I wished I had never seen the will. I decided not to tell my mother, knowing that she would have gone into battle over it on my behalf, and that was not what I wanted. I did feel, however, that Uncle Alfred owed me some answers, so I rang him up at Glebe Place. The telephone was answered in the curtest way possible by his housekeeper Mrs Piercey. Mr Alfred Vilier was seeing nobody; he was ill; he knew nothing about a nephew; goodbye. A few weeks later he died, though I was not informed of this and consequently did not attend the funeral.
About a year after his death I happened to meet one of Alfred’s last remaining friends, a dealer in theatrical memorabilia. He told me terrible things about Alfred’s last days: how he had become increasingly reclusive, refused to go out, and had come to hate any kind of natural light or scenery. All the curtains in the house were permanently drawn. The dealer told me that in the end he could not bear to go there, the oppression was so tangible, the ever-present Mrs Piercey so unwelcoming. Alfred retreated to his bedroom and was found one morning by Mrs Piercey to have suffocated himself by tying a plastic bag around his head. A bizarre detail given to me by the dealer sticks in my mind: it was a Harrods plastic bag, apparently, of the customary dull green with the word ‘Harrods’ and the Royal Warrant emblazoned in gold upon it.
I half expected that out of guilt Uncle Alfred might make me heir to his estate, but I was disappointed. The bulk of his fortune and the house in Glebe Place was left to Mrs Piercey. The theatr
ical memorabilia was left to a museum and I was made the inheritor of one black japanned tin trunk labelled ‘Family Papers’. The label did not lie: the trunk was full of family papers of the dullest kind. Only one item was of any interest. It was a smallish mahogany box, with brass corners and decorated with a simple brass inlay, at a guess early nineteenth-century.
In the box which was lined with dark green velvet were two oval miniatures in gold frames. Their quality and the date 1814 engraved on their backs, suggested the work of Richard Cosway or one of his many talented pupils. They were head and shoulders portraits of a man and woman, young, handsome and dressed in the height of fashion. The woman had dark brown hair and delicate features, but there was something not quite likeable about the simpering expression which just showed her teeth: a certain capriciousness was suggested. You had the feeling that this was someone who might do or say anything on a whim, and be totally unaware of the damage she had caused. The picture of the man was much more striking. It was a brooding, Byronic face, not unlike the portraits one sees of the young Beethoven. A curious feature of the miniature was that he seemed to be looking intently at something slightly below his eye level and to his left. What that look meant precisely was unfathomable, but it was not at all pleasant. There were no names engraved on the miniatures and nothing to suggest who their subjects were, except for the only other thing in the box. It was a frail, yellowing copy of a journal called The Monthly Intellegencer dated December 1819. The Intellegencer was a tabloid-sized scandal sheet, typical of the period, whose longest items consisted of no more than two or three paragraphs. A heavy line in pencil was drawn down beside a paragraph which was headed:
HORRIFIC EVENTS AT THE
ROYAL COBURG THEATRE.
It read as follows:
On the 10th of this past month of November, during a performance of Elvira; or the Martyred Bride at the Royal Coburg Theatre, a startling and most lamentable series of incidents was observed to be taking place in one of the stage boxes. Sir George and Lady Vilier, a couple noted for moving in the most fashionable and elevated circles, having taken the box, appeared to be engaged in a fierce altercation during the performance. Suddenly Sir George was seen to seize his wife Lady Hester by the throat and begin to choke the life out of her. Before effective assistance could be rendered to the unfortunate lady she had expired under her husband’s violent assault. Sir George was immediately apprehended and is to stand trial shortly. It is widely believed that Sir George Vilier was possessed by an epileptic seizure in the course of which the balance of his mind was deranged. No other explanation can be found to account for the conduct of a gentleman widely regarded as a model of genteel manners and an ornament to his station in life. It has been said, we know not with what authority, that Sir George had of late lost large sums at cards and that he attributed his ill fortune to the colour green which he ever considered a most unlucky colour, and that on the night of the tragedy Lady Hester had on a new gown of bright green taffeta.
**
At last the wickedness was unwinding and, one evening, as I was doing the Times crossword, I recognised the anagrammatic significance of Valerie Fridl and the final thread was unravelled.
THE GOLDEN BASILICA
‘You were at Oxford?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ah. My son was at Oxford. Before your time. Christ Church. The House, you know.’
‘Yes.’
‘Were you at The House?’
‘No. Oriel.’
‘Ah, my son was up at The House, as they say. He lives in Italy. Professor at Venice University. He’s written a book, you know.’
‘What kind of book?’
‘It’s a masterpiece. It’s called The Golden Basilica. I’m going to have it made into a play. Yes.’
This odd fragment of conversation occurred in equally unlikely surroundings. The man with the son who had been at Christ Church was sitting opposite me in a large bare room at the YMCA in Great Russell Street. He was supposedly interviewing me for a Summer repertory season at the Royalty Theatre, Seaburgh and his name was John Digby Phelps. He was a pale, flabby man in his sixties, with the greasy remnants of curly blonde hair clinging to his large cranium. His eyes were grey, protuberant and watery. He brought to mind one of those creatures that fishermen haul up from the dark depths of the sea, accustomed to silent, murky regions of the biosphere, an impression enhanced by a baggy grey suit, shiny with age. Conversation streamed from him in a bubbling monotone, full of dropped names, and mild but insistent self-aggrandisement.
I had gone to see Phelps, the director and owner of the Royalty Theatre, to read for a number of leading roles in his season, but he was more interested in talking about himself than auditioning me. He seemed impressed by the fact that I had been to Oxford and that I talked, as he put it, ‘like a gentleman’. This rather relieved me because I felt at the time that these two factors often weighed against me with other more democratically inclined directors. Mr Phelps’s snobbery was, objectively speaking, repulsive, but, as far as I was concerned, it was redressing a balance. I read one or two speeches out of various plays, but I could tell he was hardly listening to me. He had made up his mind. A few days later a letter arrived from him offering me a three-month season at Seaburgh. My misgivings about Phelps himself only slightly dampened my pleasure and relief: almost a quarter of the year would be spent in gainful employment.
But the strange conversation about The Golden Basilica stayed in my mind and before I went up to Seaburgh I spent a fruitless afternoon looking for a book with such a title in libraries and bookshops. The title appealed to me: I had a vague idea of The Golden Basilica being an elegant, witty novel about English expatriates in Italy with perhaps a touch of E.M. Forster or even Henry James about it. I have no idea why I thought that. Out-of-work actors are prone to such ruminative fantasies: they will watch the mannerisms of someone sitting opposite them in the tube and construct whole dramas out of a few simple observations. Actually, I was almost relieved not to find a copy of The Golden Basilica. It meant that my fantasy could soar, ungrounded by reality.
About the Seaburgh season itself there is little to say. The company was good and the plays decent. We performed a repertoire of four plays consisting of Deathtrap, Gaslight and a couple of Alan Ayckbourn comedies. All of them, especially the Ayckbourns, went down well with Seaburgh audiences and were enjoyable to perform. Once the plays were rehearsed and in the repertoire we had a good deal of leisure.
However, there were peculiarities about the way the season was run which made the company uneasy at times. These peculiarities all emanated from John Digby Phelps. Though billed as director of the plays, he did not direct. He would scrawl a few pencilled notes on the printed edition of the plays, underline all the stage directions and then instruct the company stage manager to take rehearsals. The results gained by this method were indistinguishable from those achieved by the average theatre director, but it was evidence of his strange personality. Very occasionally Phelps was seen prowling round the back of the auditorium during a performance, but he rarely stayed for the entire duration of the play. The day after these visits he would deliver notes on the performance via the stage manager and they would be on two subjects only. The first was our appearance. If he took a dislike to an actor or actress’s hairstyle or dress, he could be severe, sometimes demanding a dress parade before the show to make sure that the desired adjustments had been made. The other theme of his comments was the curtain speech which thanked the audience and announced the forthcoming attraction. The exact words of the curtain speeches for every play were typed and pinned to a notice board, the slightest deviation from them bringing down sharp reproof, even threats of dismissal. Phelps’s conduct was sometimes described as eccentric, but eccentric is a subjective term. An analysis of his behaviour showed a pattern consistent with egocentricity rather than eccentricity.
For some reason, perhaps because of the Oxford connection, Phelps took a liking to me. I did not welcom
e this favour because it made the other members of the company suspicious that I was somehow ‘on his side’. In order to disabuse them I had regularly to make uncomplimentary remarks about him. This was not always safe to do, especially in the theatre, as Mrs Phelps was usually about.
Joy Phelps was Phelps’s second wife, a mousy, furtive little woman, twenty years his junior. She ran the box office and the bar. She cleaned and managed the theatre almost single-handedly, sometimes assisted by her elderly mother, a presence even more shadowy and unforthcoming than her inappropriately named daughter. If any repair work was needed on the theatre, Joy’s brother, a shrivelled imp called Ron, would turn up in a van that may once have been white. Their presence added to the stuffy, inward-looking atmosphere of the place.
One morning, as I was about to go into rehearsals, I was waylaid by Joy in the theatre foyer. I often came in through the front of house rather than by the stage door because our mail was delivered to the box office. She summoned me so secretively into her sanctum that I began to be afraid that something terrible had happened. Had a phone call come through announcing that my parents had died in an air crash? A hundred ugly possibilities rushed through my mind before she relieved my anxiety. Would I, she asked me almost in a whisper, if I were free, come and have tea with Mr Phelps at about four on Sunday? When I had said yes, she gave me directions to his house which was a short bus ride out of Seaburgh. I would be expected at four. She relayed these instructions in a solemn, urgent tone as if afraid that I would disobey or, worse, misunderstand them. She also intimated, in a roundabout way, that I was not to tell the others in the company about my visit. The implication was that Phelps’s invitation was an enormous privilege of which they might be jealous. I had no intention of telling my fellow actors but for the slightly different reason that it would confirm their suspicion that I was Mr Phelps’s toady.
The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories Page 21
