by Ellis Peters
‘She’s good, isn’t she?’ said Johnny, whispering, as shy as if he praised himself.
‘She’s very good, Johnny. And she’ll be better yet, much better.’
She waited until he had closed the door again on the busy voices of the Countess and Susanna, a faint, mingling murmur in which he was no longer vitally interested. Then she said: ‘It worries me, Johnny, about Hero. She has usually such a good instinct about men, how could she be taken in by him? Are you sure you’re not mistaken?’
‘I’m not sure of anything with her now,’ he admitted disconsolately. ‘I thought I knew her so well, and now she’s got me baffled. But love does do funny things with very young girls – doesn’t it? They go overboard for the most revolting specimens, you’ve seen it.’
That was true enough; but still she frowned dubiously over this particular infatuation. ‘You know – it seems I must have been wrong, but I did think she was a little interested in Hans.’
‘Hans?’ Johnny uttered a short howl of laughter. ‘I only wish she was. She hates the sight of him since his performance of two nights ago, even if she didn’t before. Every time they come near each other now they’re scrapping. Didn’t you see them in the first act?’
His worried eyes gleamed momentarily at the memory.
‘It’s working out very well for the performance, as a matter of fact. I’ve never seen a Figaro where the Count and Cherubino really struck sparks from each other before. Gives it more body, you get the absurd rivalry between the jealous rooster and the chick, and at the same time a touch of reality in the heart of it, just the foretaste of a genuine rivalry to come, and no holds barred. It’s taken his mind off Tonda and Inga, too, and that’s all to the good. They were round his neck before, and much good that is, when they’re supposed to be fighting him tooth and nail. Now their blood’s up, and they’re really tearing into him.’
‘I’ve noticed it,’ agreed Gisela dryly, and smiled with him for one pleased moment, warmed by his delight in his perfect plaything.
The first act had gone wonderfully; the spring was wound, and the play and counterplay of characters moved with a taut precision that fused them all into one reality and one conviction; and the music clothed the drama in a translucent splendour of sound that made it timeless and universal, transmuting the Count’s autocratic tantrums, Cherubino’s quivering romantic temerity, Figaro’s sly, subversive fire, Susanna’s shrewd, resourceful charm, all into the stuff of immortality. Franz, directing from the harpsichord, was incandescent with inspiration. Everything that happened on the stage seemed to emerge out of an inner certainty that possessed them all, like a dream in which you cannot put a foot wrong. Even when the Count, hauling Cherubino angrily out of the great chair, had dealt him a resounding slap on his neat satin behind to go with the thundered: ‘Serpente!’ it had merely seemed to be an inspired improvisation arising inevitably out of his lordship’s jealous frustration.
But hadn’t it rather, thought Gisela, suddenly enlightened, been simply one opportunist blow in the off-stage battle those two were conducting, and nothing at all to do with da Ponte’s libretto? A coincidental felicity! Maybe, after all, Johnny was worrying about nothing where Hero was concerned. Maybe!
There remained, however, the others. The problem was not resolved, and at the end of every flight they came back to Mare Chatrier.
‘Yes,’ said Johnny, arriving by his own more circuitous route at the same insurmountable obstacle. She had taken up the black mantilla, and was arranging it carefully over her piled-up hair. He stood behind her, his eyes holding hers in the mirror, while he draped the folds over her shoulders. ‘Of course, I could kill him,’ he said thoughtfully.
‘Don’t talk such nonsense!’ said Gisela fiercely. ‘Give me my gloves, it’s nearly time I went down. And you’d much better come down with me and watch the performance.’
Johnny smoothed out the long strands of lace, looking down at them with a closed and unrelenting face.
‘But when you think,’ he said, ‘how many men we wiped out between us, just in the way of our daily work, not so long ago. Experts we were – had to be. And now we can’t rub out a snake to prevent him from biting. Does it make sense?’
She took the gloves from him, stroking them on and rolling them up to her elbows. When it was done she took him by both hands, and he looked up into her face speculatively, keeping his own counsel.
‘You won’t have to do any killing,’ she said. ‘Whatever happens, neither you nor anyone you care for shall suffer at Marc Chatrier’s hands. Don’t worry about Hero, don’t worry about the boys. You go and enjoy your triumph, and don’t let anything spoil tonight for you. To-morrow’s time enough for him.’
Johnny stood mute for a moment, regarding her with a slightly rueful smile. Then he stooped his head impulsively and kissed her on the cheek.
‘You’re a great old girl, Marcellina. But you stay out of this, and leave the vermin-clearance to me. Come on, grab your contract and let’s be after that lawyer of yours, or your husband will get away.’
He checked suddenly in the act of towing her towards the door, turning on her a horrified face.
‘Only suppose he really was your husband, girl! What a ghastly fate that would be!’
Before he left the bar, during the main interval, he stopped to have a word with Codger, who hovered greedy for his attention, struggling with the inevitable convulsion of all his disorganised features for speech.
Everybody made the extra effort for Codger. People who were in flaming tempers because of somebody else’s idiocy or their own mistakes contained themselves and spoke gently and equably to their mascot. Even Franz, when everything went wrong at rehearsals and his language to his company outdid that of a drill sergeant handling an awkward squad, muted the explosions when Codger appeared within earshot.
‘A new sweater, Codger! I never noticed.’ It was a pleasant blue-grey this time. The welt was nearly finished, two inches of neat ribbing stood stiff on the bright blue plastic needles. Dolly always bought the wool for him; he couldn’t manage the smallest such commission himself, though she sometimes took him with her to choose a colour, and no one ever objected if he selected a pastel pink or a luridly fashionable purple. ‘Did you finish the green one? Who’s going to get this one when it’s finished?’
Codger mouthed and gestured, agonising after the expression that always eluded him.
‘It’s for his lordship,’ translated Sam indulgently. ‘Took a liking to that lad, Codger has.’
‘Well, I’m sure it’ll suit him,’ said Johnny loyally, ‘and look even handsomer than that satin waistcoat.’
The effort to find something nice to say to Codger was always pathetically over-rewarded. He want away with Sam, beaming, satisfied with so little, understanding so little, so terrifyingly tenacious of what he did understand; and Johnny went to have a word with Hero before going round to his box for the third act.
He wasn’t sure if she was still punishing him for turning into a heavy father at this late stage, so he tapped at the door with a not entirely light-hearted parody of trepidation; but the reluctant officer, very trim in her laced coat and white breeches, looked round and grinned at him, too preoccupied with the business in hand to remember any incidental grudges.
‘Hi, Butch!’ said Johnny.
‘Hi, skipper! How’m I doing?’
She was busy laying out the dress she had to wear over her male clothes half-way through the act, so that she could dive into it and be laced up in the shortest possible time.
‘You’re doing fine,’ he said fervently, and loped over impulsively to kiss her. She lent him her cheek amiably, and returned him a hasty hug, but apparently she hadn’t so much as noticed that he’d been missing from his box all through the second act. He was so proud of her he could hardly speak without spilling over.
‘I’m going to be a case for Freud by the end of this business,’ said Hero, pushing him off as the warning bell sounded. ‘You’ve no idea how complica
ted it is trying to be a girl pretending to be a boy pretending to be a girl. Isn’t it odd how the type persists? Thank goodness the composer in Ariadne doesn’t dress up as a woman! Wouldn’t you think they’d let a “breeches part” be a breeches part?’
‘You would be a transvestist,’ said Johnny, and patted the seat of her smart regimentals and fled, somewhat cheered on one issue at least. She might be annoyed with him, but it didn’t go very deep. They could get back on to their old terms, if only the stumbling-stone could be removed. Removed. It had an easy, as well as a final, sound; but the word had no magic, and Marc Chatrier would not vanish for the sake of a wish.
Johnny watched the third act from his box. The complicated plot unfolded with a galloping impetus, so full of clichés, on the face of it, that it should have creaked at every turn, but so magically manipulated on the dazzling stream of the music that its very banalities illuminated the deepest places of the human heart, and the puppets blazed into a life more intense than realism could ever have given them. Marvellously still, the crowded house was uplifted and held taut on the tension of the ravishing sound.
Susanna pretended surrender, the Count swung in a few moments from triumph to frustrated malevolence, and his hoped-for vengeance melted and slipped through his fingers in the absurdities of the sextet, a whole novelette in itself. Long-lost son and long-bereaved mother (unmarried) embraced each other.
That cost Johnny his single lurching fall out of the alchemy of Mozart into the reality of his own predicament, the sight of Gisela and Marc Chatrier locked in each other’s arms. The sudden furious ache of his anger astonished him. She ought not to have to touch the fellow. And yet it was doubtful if at that moment she was even aware of him except as Figaro, for they had achieved the rare and timeless miracle, and they were no longer players, but the very creatures of Almaviva’s castle of Aguas Frescas, near Seville, acting out their immortal day unaware of being watched or overheard.
And there went Cherubino, the infant officer, slipping across the stage hand-in-hand with the gardener’s daughter to hide himself among the village girls. And here came the Countess, tall and pale and noble and distressed, to dictate to her maid the letter that should bring her jealous husband headlong into a trap.
Then the village girls bringing their flowers to the Countess, and the shy country cousin, gawky under his unaccustomed skirts – modern play-clothes made for good Cherubinos – was first favoured and then unmasked and scolded. And how little effect it ever had on him! Young Nan Morgan, who played Barbarina, took a deep breath and poured out her plea for him in a piping flood, innocently blackmailing the Count into letting him off yet again.
And then the procession of the two wedding couples, with that splendid, stylish march. How had one man managed to draw up out of the well of sound so many superlative tunes? And how was it there were any left for later genius to find? You’d have thought Mozart had taken them all. Tunes that seemed to glide so lightly over the dimpling face of human experience, and yet pierced so deeply into the unfathomable places of the personality, far beyond anywhere the loud, portentous boys could reach, as lofty and as deep and as far-ranging as the spirit has room at its largest.
Her uncle the gardener led Susanna to kneel before the Count and receive her wedding veil from him. Figaro brought in his mother Marcellina to receive the same favour at the hands of the Countess. The march paraded all its bravery and gaiety as they crossed the stage hand-in-hand, Gisela’s lace skirts swaying majestically about her.
They entered from the side opposite to Johnny’s box, and he had their faces in full view and an excellent light. They smiled, the lightly linked hands were easy. But he saw their lips moving, very slightly and carefully and coldly.
He reached for the glasses in the pocket under the rim of the box; ordinarily he seldom used them. The smiling mask of Gisela’s face leaped at him. It was a long time since he’d done any lip-reading, and the performance of professionals is a very different matter from the open speech of unsuspecting people; but he still had the accomplishment, one of many he had acquired for deadly purposes during the war. He watched, and read as best he could, missing words where there was not enough movement to give him a hold. He saw, framed almost imperceptibly on Gisela’s lips, his own name.
‘—touch Johnny,’ she said.
Chatrier was harder. His head was turned towards her, so that Johnny got only a partial view, but he saw the shape of ‘prevent me?’ and then, strangely, with every implication of astonishing intimacy: ‘—my dear!’
‘I’ve warned you,’ said Gisela clearly, and hand in hand with him she swung to face the Countess’s chair. The last glimpse Johnny caught said distinctly: ‘You won’t live to hurt him.’
Marcellina sank to her knees, with a deliberation nicely distinguished from Susanna’s lissome youthfulness, before the Countess. Figaro stepped back from her to his place beside his own bride, and the girls burst into their song of praise to their lord and master the Count. The mad day of Aguas Frescas drew to its climax and the end of the third act.
Johnny closed the glasses and put them away. The hand that snapped the catch of the pocket was not quite steady.
Figaro held the stage alone, the darkened stage shadowy with trees, the dim shapes of the two arbours discreetly withdrawn to left and right. He had set the scene for his revenge on the whole race of women, his witnesses were planted, his reproaches already prepared. He sang his raging aria with a contained but formidable passion that ripped the livery from his manhood. How could so small a spirit control so great a gift? On the bitter last line he withdrew into the stage pine grove, gradually melting into the darkness until he vanished utterly from sight.
They were using a slightly cut version which omitted Basilio’s aria, and transposed to this spot Barbarina’s giddy little recitative about the supper she had begged for her hidden Cherubino.
‘I had to pay for this with a kiss – but never mind, someone else will pay it back!’
The girl was going to be good, the secret fire of the evening had kindled a small flame in her, too. She heard the approach of Susanna and the Countess, and scuttled into the left-hand arbour with a tiny squeak of alarm. Oh, those arbours, stock properties of comedy like modern bedroom doors, tumbling out unexpected bodies at the end to confound everyone! Who would ever expect, if you wrote down the ingredients in cold blood, that something so transcendent could be made of them?
Barbarina had vanished, and the small conspiracy of women appeared, the Countess, Susanna and Marcellina all bound together by women’s enforced loyalty to one another in face of the stupidity and unreason of men. They knew all about the invisible listener, and two of them sweetly withdrew to leave the third to pay out her lover for his suspicions by twisting the screw another turn or two. Marcellina followed Barbarina into the left-hand arbour, the Countess slipped away into the trees.
‘“Now we shall see the great moment,”’ sang Figaro savagely out of the darkness; and again, echoing Susanna’s demure teasing with aching ferocity: ‘“To take the air – to take the air!”’
Time had brought them full circle from the moment when Chatrier first came in. Johnny’s mind, suddenly harking back to that hopeful entrance, recoiled in unreasonable revulsion from ‘Deh vieni non tardar.’ Tonda’s voice was as limpid as spring water; she stood with the whole stage to herself, her pretty head thrown back, her round throat shaping and spilling the heavenly notes like floating pearls. Johnny drew back from her, and slipped away out of his box without a sound.
Perhaps the greatest love song ever written for a woman sank to its close in triumphant stillness, like a folding of wings. The dove settled and nestled, soft as down:
‘“Ti vo la fronte incoronar – incoronar – di rose.”’
The whispering postlude followed on her heels as she drew back into the trees, dwindling like a candle-flame withdrawing into the night. Then, just as Figaro should have hissed his: ‘Perfida!’, just as Cherubino tripped out of
the wings with the trill poised on his lips, and the Countess moved softly forward from the bushes, Tonda hit a high note that was not in the score, the high note to end all high notes, soaring like a dart vertically to the roof of the theatre and sheering through it to split the night.
Cherubino, in the middle of a flushed and flustered entrance, jumped as though the steely point of that sound had pierced his flesh. The Countess dropped her handkerchief and swung about with an audible gasp. Faces loomed in the wings. The audience rustled uneasily and clutched at one another. And Tonda, drawing breath in a long, heaving cry, screamed and screamed until Franz signalled frantically from the orchestra pit, and the curtain came down between two uproars.
The stage lights went up, glaring white as the whole cast came running. Tonda was in a whimpering heap on the boards, her hands clutching her cheeks, her eyes staring in horrified shock at the body of Figaro, flat on his face among the stage trees with a pretty little dress rapier upright and quivering in his back.
Chapter Four
‘Yes,’ said Hero,’ I do recognise it, of course. It’s mine. I don’t mean just that I had to wear it in the opera. I had, but also it belongs to me. My father bought it for me once in Salzburg. It was made for a minor princeling, I forget his name, but he was thirteen years old, I remember that. I knew it was a real sword, not a toy.’
She stood before Inspector Musgrave sturdily, her pale face fixed and resolute, her grey eyes flickering from his deceptively mild regard to the note-book on his knee. A grey, precise man of about fifty, in a dinner-jacket. Light-lashed eyes slightly magnified behind thick lenses, sharp, irritable features that suggested an experienced and intolerant law clerk rather than a policeman. But the thick, self-assured body in its good clothes indicated something rather more prosperous, perhaps an autocratic but on the whole benevolent company director out for an evening at the opera.
It was for a doctor Johnny had appealed, he hadn’t bargained for a detective-inspector as well. Who would expect to find a Scotland Yard officer in the third row of the stalls?
