At Freddie's

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  ‘About ten,’ said the assistant stage manager.

  ‘Yes, well, my thought here was to have him played as an old, old man, tottering on, scarcely capable, with a stick. This old, old man of ten who walks with a stick. I’m asking the casting director to find me an old, old actor. We’ll mime the stick, no props, or wait, the stick to be the only prop in the entire play. I trust you’re taking all this down. Young Prince Henry to be senile while everyone else on stage makes grotesquely childish gestures. All the young to be old and the old to be very, very young. King John himself to be sucking at a bottle of milk. Mime the milk.’

  Neither William Beardless nor Boney took much notice of this, as they believed from past experience that Ed would settle down after an hour or so and talk fairly sensibly, though only fairly. The younger actors were keen to join in, one of them suggesting that at the line ‘Why here I walk in the black brow of night’ all the lights should be at full strength. But Ed couldn’t bear anyone to stand aloof.

  ‘What’s your reaction, Boney and William, to actualising some of the scenes that are only talked about in the text? Example, there’s this description of a monk who’s tasted poisoned food, a resolved villain, etcetera, whose bowels suddenly burst out … that would get a slight laugh.’

  ‘Yes, and you could mime the bowels,’ said Boney.

  Mattie was already doing so. This drew attention to him, and Voysey spun round in his direction.

  ‘We’re having you in a sailor suit, you know,’ he told him. ‘To set your character the moment you come on – a silent victim – silent – a child forced by the adult world into the uniform of a killer. But with a 1910-ish broad straw hat to suggest innocence – those long bits of ribbon … or no, a sailor hat with white lettering on the front … ss TITANIC …’

  ‘That’ll be lost by the third row of the stalls,’ said the ASM. Ed dropped the subject, fearing to lose his players’ attention, for he knew that none of them had the slightest interest in any costume except their own.

  Although King John’s production manager went down and harangued the caretaker, asking how the Scout Movement, or any form of Youth, could continue in such conditions, the hall remained damp and cold. About this the players, true to their vagabond heritage, complained very little. It could be said they gloried in it. The greater the squalor, the greater the miracle. Ed asked them to be off book as soon as possible, and began to place one or two scenes.

  At the first glance Mattie had set his sights on William Beardless, aware that the actor was aware of him, and that something might be made out of it. But the torture scene had to be run through with Boney. On the subject of props Ed had given way sufficiently to allow the ASM to devise battery-powered red-hot pincers which, with a little fiddling, would gradually fade to black. They were not anything like right yet and had been sent back to the workshop, sweet Jesus grant they’d be ready for the opening. Meanwhile Boney, empty-handed but wearing round his shoulders something that looked like a pram-cover, to get the feel of a cloak, declaimed to Ed and to the empty chairs.

  Heat me these irons hot, and look thou stand

  Within the arras. When I strike my foot

  Upon the bosom of the ground, rush forth

  And bind the boy which you shall find with me

  Fast to the chair. Be … be …

  ‘I don’t want too much naturalism, Boney. You needn’t pretend you don’t know what’s coming next.’

  ‘I don’t know what’s coming next.’

  ‘I mean the apparent searching for the next phrase. It can be very effective, of course.’

  ‘I am searching for the next phrase,’ said Boney. ‘I’ve always been a rotten study. The reason is that quite often I’ve been drinking too much the night before, and that may well be the case now.’

  ‘Shall I give you the line, Mr Lewis?’ Mattie piped with calculated brightness. ‘“Uncleanly scruples! Fear you not! Look to’t!”’

  It was not the right line and Mattie only gave it – since he loved words – to roll the juicy syllables round his tongue.

  ‘You were asking for suggestions,’ said Boney. ‘How would it be if we varied this scene? Instead of being touched with mercy and putting away my vile intent, I could knock the little prince down and stamp on him.’

  Ed Voysey drew him aside.

  ‘I know, I know, the little shits are unbearable, they’re death, any scene with these little shits is death … You know, one of the reasons I asked you to play Hubert is because you’ve got that marvellous quality of, well, I can’t call it anything but tolerance. I call it tolerance. And William told me that you didn’t mind kids.’

  ‘I think that must have been true once. I’ve got three of my own somewhere. It’s just that it’s so long since I saw an ordinary child.’

  ‘When this one’s finished his eight weeks I’m getting another one from Freddie,’ the director pleaded.

  ‘I’m sure the supply is endless.’

  ‘I’ve auditioned the new one and he’s very good. If I can get him to use some more voice he’ll be very good, quite extraordinary. Mattie’s going to make an effect, yes, but this new one’s extraordinary.’

  ‘All that interests me is whether he’s going to try to give me my lines.’

  ‘Perhaps you’ll know them by then.’ Ed regretted saying this, as he made it a rule never to score off the cast. But Boney smiled. It was quite true that he was tolerant. He had forgiven his own shortcomings, and didn’t mind them being referred to. Presumably he had also forgiven something which no one spoke about to his face, the waste of his talent. To Boney a certain level of performance came so readily, and earned him such a reasonable living, that he might have felt it ungrateful to Providence to work harder. He had none of the actor’s natural craving for a long part, no matter how unintelligible. His nickname came from his appearance as Napoleon, in one of the numerous film versions of War and Peace, his only line being ‘Eez eet steel snowing?’ How much he had earned per word in that movie was still discussed. At forty-three, Boney was not likely to start making an effort now.

  But, if irredeemable, he was also, in his way, reliable. When the time came he would be word perfect, just as certainly as the party after the show would never quite get going without him, and just as he would have parked his large old Citroen in a place unacceptable to the police. And even now he braced himself to the task, correcting his expression of extreme distaste at Mattie’s

  I would to heaven

  I were your son, so you would love me, Hubert …

  to something suitable – duty struggling with pity – for

  If I talk to him, with his innocent prate

  He will awake my mercy …

  ‘Yes, dear, yes, dears, it’s very good, I’m touched,’ Ed called from the back.

  ‘Innocent Prate, there’s a good name for a character,’ Boney muttered. ‘Let’s say a blue film. How Mercy awaked and the nasty shock Innocent Prate gave her.’

  Voysey told them to take a break. After that he wanted to go through the whole scene again.

  10

  MATTIE knew that when Jonathan took over Prince Arthur he would do it very much better. About this he was jealous, but not resentful. Jealousy is in the very air that actors breathe, they can hardly dispense with it, and it is also natural to children. But Mattie, although he often wished that Jonathan was dead, loved him even more intensely for the success he was going to have. He would, however, have liked to control it completely, as with a mechanical toy of his own making. At every opportunity he gave advice. Jonathan mustn’t mind Boney, still less William, who was a soft touch, he’d have to be careful about his pauses, because Ed didn’t like long ones, he ought to ask Costumes for something a bit more important than a straw hat, or, being so short, he might look bloody silly. Mattie’s father, whose business had called him away at the moment to Zurich, would be back by the time Jonathan went into the show and after the first night he would take them both to Blooms for supper, anyt
hing they liked, no expense spared.

  Oddly enough, however, Mattie gave no advice at all on the most spectacular of his three scenes, the Jump, consisting of Arthur’s attempt to escape from gaol and the fatal fall on to hard ground.

  The wall is high, and yet will I leap down.

  I am afraid, and yet I’ll venture it.

  If I get down, and do not break my limbs

  I’ll find a thousand shifts to get away.

  As good to die and go as die and stay …

  O me! My uncle’s spirit is in these stones!

  Heaven take my soul, and England keep my bones!

  The truth was that at rehearsals, which had now moved into the theatre, the Jump was not going particularly well. Mattie was agile, but not courageous, and Ed Voysey had to lower the prison wall to an unconvincing height, really asking, as Boney pointed out, for a mass walkout by the inmates. The scene had to be rehearsed every morning by an instructor to meet safety regulations, and at his suggestion the stage was covered with foam rubber to such a depth that Mattie was liable to bounce comfortably off the pitiless ground before expiring. Ed was now thinking in terms of a filmed back projection in slow motion, with the prince falling like a wounded bird through the summer air. But there was no time for filming, no money either. And Mattie had after all many good points, playing Arthur with a sort of cheerful self-confidence, as though he was taking in the whole array of kings, queens, lords and torturers with his show of innocence. This largely made up for his feeble performance in his death scene. And Mattie, unwilling to admit the feebleness, avoided talking about it.

  But Jonathan, as he listened peaceably, wanted to consult somebody, before he went into rehearsal himself, about the Jump – someone, that is, apart from his Shakespeare coach. This coach, though as old or even older than Old Ernest, was meticulous, beloved and respected, invaluable to Freddie. His methods were well-tried. Many successful actors must still remember the bitter taste of painted wood as they were made to repeat their lines clearly with a pencil between their teeth. Jonathan was glad to oblige, particularly in the matter of the pencil. But when he was told to imagine himself, let us say, as a young prince, his attention withdrew. He felt the compulsion to pretend to be someone else, but in quite a different manner. Jonathan was born to be one of those actors who work from the outside inwards. To them, the surface is not superficial. He didn’t want to know what it felt like to be desperate enough to jump from a wall; he wanted to know what someone looked like when they did. From a walk, from a hesitation, from a nervous gesture, from breathing and silence, actors of Jonathan’s sort understand the human predicament. Jonathan, for instance, knew what frustration was from watching Carroll watch Hannah.

  Since he was not old enough to explain the process to himself he did not attempt to defend it to others. However, he wanted to consult Carroll, in whom, since the day of the Master’s visit, he had put absolute trust. The experience of being singled out in any way was quite new to Carroll and he turned it over and over in his mind before he could get used to it.

  Jonathan asked him whether he had ever seen anybody jump from a height because he’d do anything to escape? How cats do it he knew very well, as he was able to observe two of them in the warehouse opposite the classroom windows. A good deal of calculation and minute shifting from foot to foot is undertaken by a cat before it springs. But what about human beings? Had Sir ever had to jump like that? After one of his customary pauses Carroll replied that it so happened that he had.

  The two of them were sitting in Tito’s Cafe, drinking an unpleasant pinkish liquid, recommended by Jonathan.

  When Carroll was still at primary school, he and three other boys from his class had hitched a lift on the back of a lorry carrying straw bales. They had climbed on while the driver was in the Men’s in a layby, and knowing well what he was like they agreed to jump off just as he slowed down before the level crossing. Carroll had jumped third and landed badly. He felt his ankle go; they told him later it was a Potts fracture.

  ‘Well, how did your friends jump?’ Jonathan asked. ‘Did they hold their arms out sideways to steady themselves, or did they put them forward, like diving?’

  ‘You couldn’t call them friends, exactly,’ said Carroll. ‘They were just boys in my class. And it was only the last one, Jimmy Gorman, that I saw from below, from where I was lying on the grass verge.’

  ‘How did he have his arms?’

  ‘Straight down by his sides.’

  ‘I suppose he didn’t have a hat on?’

  ‘None of us had hats, but James Gorman had a school cap on, where it was from I don’t know, because we hadn’t caps at the primary. As he jumped he threw his head back in fright and the cap went spinning away.’

  ‘Which came to the ground first?’

  ‘First Jimmy, then the cap,’ Carroll replied. ‘I lay there on the grass and looked up at him, and he landed just as badly as I did, and there we were both in considerable pain, and all he did was to keep searching and asking for his cap.’

  ‘Why did he?’

  ‘That would be the effect of shock. When you have someone in shock they commonly fix on a very trivial detail, just to take their mind off the more important thing. What I’m telling you now is an example. There were Jimmy and I in two sorts of trouble, the other two boys had split and there we were neither of us able to walk and next thing the lorry was held up at the crossing and the driver looked round and saw us. All this time Jimmy was crying and calling out to me, “Pierce, did you see my cap?”’

  Carroll sighed, feeling that at least he was giving some kind of instruction, and hoping to be asked for more. But Jonathan, sitting opposite him, had taken in quite enough. He saw, in the form of a brightly lit frame surrounded by darkness, not the lorry and the cap, but Enter Arthur on the walls. The jump ought to be from as high as the director and safety would allow, and the straw hat drifted down slowly, turning once or twice, and seeming until it landed to be still alive, after the prince was already dead.

  He shook himself like a terrier, and interrupted Carroll, who was still droning on, by asking him whether he’d like to see a fortune-teller. This consisted of a sheet of paper torn from an exercise book and folded into a shape with sixteen corners, any of which could be pulled out to show what was written on it. Probably very few people go through any kind of schooldays in this country without making a fortune-teller, but it was a disconcerting and even touching thing to see how very few of these commonplace games the Temple children knew.

  Anxious to be going – Hannah would be just about back from her lunch break and they might exchange a few remarks – Carroll pulled out one corner of the creased and dirty paper. The words, in Jonathan’s disgraceful handwriting, were YOU WANT IT BUT DOES SHE?

  ‘That could hardly be termed a fortune,’ he said. ‘There’s no element of prediction in it.’

  Without troubling to explain this in easier terms, he got up and paid for the milk shakes, whose price was shouted by Tito in the depths to his stern wife at the cash. So the feelings that were precious to him, and which he thought he had managed to conceal so well, were being made game of. The girls, doubtless, had had a hand in it. Yet Jonathan’s face was sober. Probably he was trying to be helpful.

  Carroll did not ask to open the fortune-teller and try his luck again, suspecting that the same thing was written on each corner.

  11

  UNWIN, the enslaved accountant, always believed that Miss Blewett, being oppressed like himself, ought to take his part. She ought, for example, to encourage Joseph Blatt’s prospects of investment. And, in particular, she should try to check the unbridled gaiety in the office, where, with two boys booked for King John, several more in Dombey & Son, three in Peter Pan and a number of the girls taken on as Snowflakes in the Nutcracker, nothing now seemed impossible. Even Joybelle was in pantomime at Morecambe Bay. She rang up to say that she was the third Little Peach in the Fruit Scene. But Christmas, both Blatt and Unwin pointed out t
o the Bluebell, doesn’t last, and never has done.

  Miss Blewett, however, had not forgiven Blatt for dosing little Jonathan, and considered that he and Unwin were no better than conspirators. Furthermore she herself was a creature of tears and laughter – much worse, in that way, than Freddie, Unwin thought, though at least she wasn’t in charge of the administrative decisions. He repeated that the present favourable situation couldn’t last; in reply Freddie informed him that Noël Coward’s parting message, Play It Large, had come back to her since then as a Word. She had understood this as meaning that the staff (though of course their actual salaries could not be raised) should be treated more generously. By temperament, in fact, she was generous enough, as long as she kept the upper hand. Giving pleased her, even if not quite as much as taking.

  She sent for Hannah and told her that she would be wanted at the Nonesuch Theatre. Rehearsals for King John had now moved in, and under the Greater London Council’s regulations Mattie, if he worked there all day, was obliged to have three hours’ education a day from a tutor on the spot. It was the prospect, in fact the promise, of this which induced Hannah against her better judgement to take the job, but this was the first time it had come to anything.

  As she went to fetch her coat she met Carroll, carrying the large brass handbell which was rung to start and end the classes. Round the rim was the inscription: ‘“The iron tongue of midnight hath toll’d twelve”: to Freddie, in gratitude from her little Fairy Folk: Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1927.’ Carroll handled it with extreme caution, as the least sound from the clapper at the wrong time would provoke disorder, if not a stampede.

  ‘Are you off already, Hannah? Have you a headache?’

  Carroll had been conditioned by his large family to believe that women were weaker than men.

  ‘Perhaps you’d like me to see you to the bus stop,’ he added. ‘Or I could see you back, if you prefer.’