Phelps lived in a village called Tiddenham about three miles out of Seaburgh in smooth, unspectacular East Anglian countryside. His house, the Old Rectory, stood by the church in its own grounds, a large grey, early nineteenth-century building on two floors with a severe Doric porch. Buildings provoke an instant reaction from me in a way that people don’t, and I disliked the Old Rectory at once. Perhaps it was the day on which I first came to it, humid and threatening rain; perhaps it was the dreary garden which surrounded it, all gravel paths, lawns and laurel bushes; perhaps it was the pretentious austerity of its architecture; or perhaps it was the dread of meeting its occupants socially for the first time. Whatever the cause I was attacked by an almost overwhelming sense of oppression as I was about to ring the front door bell. It was exactly four o’clock.
I must have waited three minutes before I heard shuffling footsteps and the door was opened about half an inch by a hideous old woman in a blue overall with a bright red gash of lipstick around her mouth. I explained who I was.
‘You should have come in round the back,’ she said brusquely. I started to walk away. In a slightly more conciliatory tone she added: ‘You’d better come in.’
I entered a large unlit hallway whose walls were hung with big, uncleaned pictures of dubious quality. To my left a door opened and Phelps emerged palely into the gloom. He wore cavalry twill trousers and a patched sports jacket of yellowish check. In these surroundings he more than ever resembled some dim submarine creature.
‘Ah! There you are,’ he said. ‘Did no-one tell you to come in round the back?’
‘No,’ I said, wondering guiltily whether Mrs Phelps would suffer for this omission in her instructions.
‘I told him to go round the back,’ said the old woman.
‘Ah,’ said Phelps. ‘Get the tea then, Nanny.’ Nanny shuffled off to get the tea, but not before giving me a venomous look.
Phelps summoned me into the drawing room, which was well-proportioned and furnished in the approved country house style with a chintz three piece suite and a few good items of eighteenth-century furniture. Coloured George Morland prints adorned the walls. It was all correct and elegant; the silver on display was Georgian and well-polished, but there was no character. Nothing there had been chosen with love or enthusiasm. It looked like a stage set furnished to create the right impression of gentility: The drawing room of the Old Rectory, Tiddenham, one dull afternoon in July. Over the mantelpiece was an undistinguished early nineteenth-century landscape in oils.
‘You see that?’ said Phelps. I nodded. ‘A Constable. You know how to tell a Constable? He always hides a face in his landscapes. You see. There!’ He pointed to a part of the painting. There was indeed a sort of face to be discerned in the configuration of the rocks beside a small stream in which a lumpy, misshapen boy was dully fishing. I had never heard of Constable putting a face in his landscapes, and this was no Constable, but I stayed silent. I had neither the courage to contradict him, nor the cravenness to agree.
Nanny came in with tea and cake on a silver tray, laying it down on a low table in front of the fireplace.
‘This is Nanny,’ said Phelps gesturing towards her as if exhibiting a prize pig. ‘Not my nanny, but my son’s. Stayed on after he’d gone. Stayed on to serve me. Loyalty, you see. Yes.’ Nanny left the room without indicating by so much as the flicker of an eyelid that she had heard this tribute.
Seeing only two teacups on the tray, I asked if Mrs Phelps would be joining us.
‘No, no,’ said Phelps who seemed disconcerted by the question. ‘She’s busy, you know. Visiting her mother . . . or something. She wouldn’t understand what we were talking about. She’s not a theatre professional like us. Help yourself to tea. And have some of that sponge cake. Made by Nanny. Superb. She wins prizes for it, you know.’ The cake was good, but had a suspiciously pristine, shop-bought look about it.
Our conversation during the next two hours consisted largely of a monologue about the theatre from Phelps punctuated by nods and murmurs from me when he seemed to require them. I tried to make these as ambiguous and unacquiescent as courtesy would allow since his views were fairly absurd. Occasionally he would ask me questions about the season and other members of the company. He seemed particularly interested in any rivalry or tension there might be among us, and he asked me my opinion, ‘in strictest confidence, of course’, of their acting abilities. I made my answers bland, sensing that he would not hesitate to exploit any indiscretion.
One topic recurred again and again in his monologues and this was The Golden Basilica, the work written by his son. He had the most grandiose plans for it. It was to be made into a play and performed in his theatre. Then it would be filmed, mostly in his theatre as well, though with a few external shots using the ‘magnificent East Anglian scenery’. He made it sound as if this too, like the theatre, was his property. I was intrigued, but every time I tried to find out what was The Golden Basilica and what was its story or theme, he became vague or replied simply that it was ‘a masterpiece’. Frustrated, I said, teasingly, that The Golden Basilica was certainly a splendid title. Phelps showed no awareness of the veiled irony, but seemed immensely gratified by what I had said. He picked up a silver framed photograph from a side table.
‘There you are,’ he said. ‘My son, Peter Digby Phelps. M.A. Oxon. Like you.’
The photograph, at a guess fifteen or twenty years old, showed the head and shoulders of a young man in his twenties. One could see the resemblance to his father in the slightly blunt features and the crinkly blond hair, but he was better looking than Phelps could ever have been. The father must have looked on his son as an idealised version of himself. A touch too of Phelps’s pretension was to be found in the ostentatiously large spotted cravat he wore. The expression was vaguely self-important, but gave little away.
‘Done while he was up at The House. He was a very popular figure. Joined all the clubs, you know. The Grid, the Bullingdon. Spoke at the Union. Great success. Double first in Economics and so on.’
The picture conjured up of the brilliant all rounder was somehow dated and unconvincing. I did not point out that one could not achieve a double, or even a single first in Economics alone at Oxford. Phelps rambled on with his semi-coherent tirades—Equity, the actor’s trade union being a particular bugbear—until the clock on the mantelpiece chimed six. Then a sort of muddled briskness took possession of him.
‘Ah. Six. Well. Must be getting on. Expect you have things to do. Lines to revise. I have papers to . . . er . . . go over. Good of you to come. Must do this again. Show yourself out. The back way. Nanny will direct you. We shall consult further. About The Golden Basilica. Would value your advice. As an Oxford man, you see.’
As he said this he was shepherding me out of the drawing room into the dim hall. Once there he pointed to two large nineteenth-century vases, decorated with Chinese motifs: commonplace things generally used as repositories for walking sticks and umbrellas. ‘Ming vases,’ he said impressively, ‘decorated with sayings of Confucius.’
**
I was invited to come again the following Sunday and the next. The visits developed into a ritual, which was especially unwelcome because I had to decline offers of a day out with the rest of the company. When I told them where I was going they were amused, but I felt they were also suspicious.
My visits to Phelps never varied. They began at four and ended at six. Nanny served the same tea with the same sponge cake. Worse still, Phelps treated me to almost the same monologue every week. Like most egoists he was either unconscious of repeating himself, or did not care if he was: in return I gave him the same responses every week. It was uncannily like being in a play.
Why did I continue to go? I was not exactly afraid of Phelps, but I did feel a certain obligation towards him as my employer. He seemed lonely, and I like to think that a kind of detached pity played a part. There was one other factor which seems absurd in retrospect, but which I cannot discount: I wanted to k
now more about The Golden Basilica.
Each time I went Phelps came tantalisingly close to revealing the nature of his son’s ‘masterpiece’. His praise of it became increasingly extravagant but was always couched in the vaguest of terms: ‘brilliant’, ‘beautiful’, ‘superb’, ‘witty’. For one brief moment he did step out into the daylight of exactitude. While talking about his proposed dramatisation of the work he told me that the opening scene would take place in St Mark’s Square, Venice. Just that. When I pressed him further, he slipped back into the mists of vagueness.
In the town of Seaburgh I tried to pick up as much information as I could about Phelps and his son. They had begun to obsess me. Many people were either reluctant to discuss Phelps, or treated him as an unpleasant joke. Shopkeepers in particular were wary, as he had a habit of running up bills and then not paying them until threatened with legal action. I heard that he had married his present wife some ten years ago after an acrimonious divorce and that his first wife was still living nearby. About his son Peter, offspring of his first marriage, people had even less to say except that he ‘lived abroad’ and that relations with his father were distant. I did gather one piece of information from the local chemist, Mr Wendice who took photographs of the productions at the Royalty Theatre and was one of the few people in Seaburgh to be on reasonable terms with Phelps. Wendice told me that before their estrangement Peter Digby Phelps had persuaded his father, who had made a fortune in the garment trade, to buy the Royalty Theatre for him to run.
Phelps’s peculiar attitude to the theatre was partly explained. He did not love the Royalty for itself, only as a link, however tenuous, with his absent son. It also explained his obsession with the staging of The Golden Basilica.
**
There came a week towards the end of August when I was not invited by Joy Phelps to take tea with her husband on Sunday. Though this came as a considerable relief, I was also troubled. Had I offended in some way? When Mr Wendice saw me entering his pharmacy, he simply nodded, as if he knew what I was after. He had a bland, watchful face, almost hairless except for a short frizz of sandy hair above each ear. This, combined with his gold-rimmed spectacles and his habitual white coat, gave him an excessively clinical appearance.
‘Yes,’ he said without further preliminaries. ‘I have some news for you. His son Peter is dead.’
The baldness of the announcement shocked me. I remember staring at a shelf full of toothbrushes for about half a minute before I asked for details.
According to Wendice, Peter Phelps had died in Italy of alcoholic poisoning. I asked if there had been any reconciliation with his father before he died. Mr Wendice did not know for sure, but he thought not. Phelps, he said, had been talking of visiting his son in Italy after the end of our theatre season, but Wendice thought nothing would have come of it.
I walked away from the pharmacy full of sadness. It was a bright windy day, and as I walked along the front, the wind that blew against me was the breath of grief. I heard the death rattle in the pebbles on the beach as they were raked by the ebbing tide. I decided that the only thing I could do was to write a letter to Mr Phelps. This I did, and gave it to Joy that evening. She seemed quite frightened by the fact that I knew about Peter: why, I wasn’t quite sure. It may have had something to do with what I had seen that morning as I was passing the theatre. Joy’s brother Ron had drawn his van up outside the stage door which was open. Out of it Joy and Ron with their mother in attendance were manhandling a large Victorian sideboard. They put the sideboard in the van. When Joy saw that I was watching them she said something to her two familiars, then hurried them inside the theatre. The sideboard was one of many pieces of furniture which were stored in the theatre for use in productions. I suspect that Joy believed that Phelps would soon be disposing of the theatre, and was attempting to salvage something for herself before it had gone.
The following day I received through Joy a large envelope from Phelps containing a letter from him thanking me for my note of condolence. He mentioned the production of The Golden Basilica and how he wished to make it a memorial to his son. Also included in the envelope was a rough bundle of notes which, Phelps claimed to have made on the subject. I was intrigued. At last I was about to discover what The Golden Basilica was about.
What I read disturbed me as much as it disappointed. There were random jottings of such generality that they were meaningless, such as: ‘the scenes must be effective in conveying the action’. There were phrases in quotation marks which appeared to be projections of what the critics might say: ‘The Golden Basilica is a masterpiece of wit, elegance and profundity.’ Interspersed among these were sentences which seemed to have no bearing on anything. Some of them, joined up, seemed to form a dialogue of some sort, but the conversation led nowhere.
‘Where are you?’
‘Come back.’
‘I never meant to.’
‘You fell over.’
‘Don’t have any more.’
‘We must talk. Come back.’
‘What you did to me.’
‘What I did to you.’
‘I’m in a pool of blood. You put me there.’
Finally, there were three sheets of paper on which had been written at the top of each:
Act I. St Mark’s Square, Venice.
Act II. The Steps of St Mark’s, Venice.
Act III. The Interior of St Mark’s, Venice.
Under these headings the sheets of paper were blank. I had no idea how to respond. Grief must have cut the last mooring rope connecting John Digby Phelps to reality. I could not share these things with anyone in the company. I did not want others to laugh or talk in some facile way about madness. This was not madness whatever that may mean: it was a self-imposed exile from the real world.
That evening after the show I had lingered in my dressing room. I did not want to go out drinking with the rest of the company. They knew about Peter’s death, and had been properly sad for Mr Phelps, but it had not distressed them deeply and they were now beginning to speculate about how it would affect the rest of the season. Would he cancel it? I found myself isolated and laid low by these events in a way I had not expected. I felt a responsibility to grieve with Phelps, but I could not think why. My pondering over this slowed me down. By the time I was ready to leave I was alone in the theatre except for Joy, who would lock up the theatre after we had gone. I could hear the faint chink and clatter of her washing up glasses in the bar.
But there was another sound. As I left my dressing room and passed along the corridor behind the stage I thought I could hear someone singing. It was a man’s voice, but high and reedy. I could not make out the words because the voice slurred over them drunkenly, but I knew the tune. It was the Barcarolle from Offenbach’s Contes d’Hoffman. The tune, romantic and wistful, had always struck me as being somehow desperately lonely; and it never had seemed more lonely than when I heard it that night. Someone in an abyss of solitude was clinging unsteadily onto a last fragment of beauty.
I stopped, trying to locate the sound. It seemed to come from the stage. Obviously a drunk had strayed into the theatre and was lurching about on the set of Gaslight which we had played that night. It was my duty to go and get him off before he did any damage.
I went through the pass door to the stage. Everything was in semi-darkness but the singing, though perfectly clear, seemed no closer than it had been. The voice was now half-singing, half-sobbing. The scenery flats prevented me from seeing the stage. I went to open one of the doors onto the set and, as I put my hand on the handle, I heard a thump like a body falling onto the floor. I opened the door and stepped into the heavy Victorian parlour of Gaslight. One faint working light illuminated the set. By it I could see that the stage was empty. I stood for some moments waiting for something to happen. As I did so I was aware of a stale, sour smell, like whisky on a drunk’s breath. Then something hissed in my ear, hideously close, icily cold. The words were:
‘The Golden Basilica
!’
Panicking, I blundered from the stage and in the corridor almost bumped into Joy.
‘Oh, I’m glad I caught you,’ she said. ‘Mr Phelps wants you on the phone.’
I followed Joy meekly to the box office. It did not strike me as peculiar that she had not asked what I was doing charging about in the gloom, because that was Joy Phelps. To her, the whole world she had entered on marrying Phelps was strange and fearful; an actor stumbling about in a darkened theatre was no odder than anything else.
On the telephone Phelps said: ‘Ah. There you are. Yes. Thank you for the letter. I believe I sent you some notes. About The Golden Basilica. What did you think?’
‘Well . . .’
‘Yes. Yes. Come and see me tomorrow. Four o’clock. We’ll discuss the whole thing. A tribute to my son. A genius. Yes. Are you coming?’ For a moment, a crack had appeared in that monumental self-assurance: he was begging me.
‘Yes.’
‘Good. . . . Good. . . . He’s coming home, you know.’
I suddenly felt very cold. ‘I’m sorry . . . ?’
‘The body. The body’s coming home. For the funeral. I’ve had it all arranged. Yes.’ Then he rang off.
The next afternoon I presented myself at the back door of the Old Rectory at four o’clock. It was a dark, gusty, rainy afternoon. I rang the back door bell and waited for Nanny’s familiar figure to shuffle into the scullery and grudgingly let me in. Five minutes passed; nobody came. I tried the door, found it unlocked and went in. I called out, but nobody replied.
The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories Page 22
