Redlegs

by Chris Dolan

  “I like it,” replied Elspeth firmly.

  “Good for you, dearie.”

  Inside, stage and stalls and ceilings were painted in every colour imaginable – dark greens and indigo, scarlet, crimson and maroon – with depictions of King George riding in a carriage over the sea, Arthur and Excalibur, Henry V at Agincourt. The seats were leather-upholstered and even the curtain and backcloths were sumptuous and enchanting, embroidered in gold and silver thread with seahorses, stars, snowflakes, sugar crystals, and birds of paradise. Coak watched his new recruit run from stage to stalls, up onto the balcony, and back down through the wings into the dressing-rooms, her childishness a joy to witness.

  Lord Coak left that first afternoon. At the stage door of the Lyric, where a gang of slaves en route to somewhere Elspeth could not imagine sat heavily eating fruit doled out by a gaffer, he doffed his hat at Elspeth, like he might to a stranger in the street. “I shall be back Friday to see how your initiation is going. Until then, my dear, all you need do is watch, listen, learn and enjoy.”

  Elspeth attended her first performance at the Lyric with Mr. Philbrick and Mrs. Overton. Some nonsense cobbled together by Philbrick himself and Frederick Denholm – the Lyric’s leading man and budding writer – on the theme of colonial childhood. Nonie struggled in her part as a girl clearly a decade younger than herself. Elspeth genuinely marvelled at the production’s professionalism and the sophistication of its theatrical engineering. The play itself mattered less to her than the audience. The performance was not full, yet there must still have been nearly five hundred people in that hall. The rough trade in the stalls seemed aristocracy compared to the rabble who used to congregate in front of her in Falkirk and Glasgow. Stevedores, shop attendants and even agricultural workers they may have been, but they didn’t bay and curse like the Scots, and were very smartly turned out. The balcony and box seats were occupied by the island’s bejewelled, well-fed, if slightly sleepy, upper crust. The play itself made hardly any impact on her, but the beauty of the new costumes, the sheer size of the cast, and the effect of modern stage-lighting – gas-pumped! – were a wonder to her. She was not so overawed, however, that she felt the need to keep her criticisms to herself in the lounge after the curtain came down.

  “I wondered if there couldn’t a bit more movement about it. Everyone stood around a lot.”

  Mrs. Bartleby – who topped the bill alongside Mr. Denholm – paled at the impudence. “I think you’ll find, my dear, our public prefer to mull over a drama’s significance undistracted by clumping and dashing around.”

  Nonie rescued her from a dressing-down at the hands of Mrs. Bartleby, flanked and supported on either side by the Misters Denholm and Philbrick, and took her off to a room behind the prop store which the younger members of the cast had made their hideaway. Christian Bloom made coffee on a little open range, and laced it with rum. As the three of them sipped – Nonie and Christian still in costume as sixteen-year-olds but, in the lamplight, actually looking ten years older than their true selves – other members of the cast popped in and out, shook Elspeth’s hand, downed drams of straight rum, laughed and swore, and went out again. The names of these visitors were thrown at her – in the gloom, each caller indistinguishable from the next – snippets of advice were given her, and more spirit was added to her coffee. At the end of the night, Nonie took her back to her actress’s lodgings in a dark and noisy street somewhere behind the city’s main thoroughfares.

  “Baxter’s Road. I don’t know the part of the world that you come from, Ellie, but I imagine you’ll feel more at home here than anywhere else.”

  Nonie was right: the smell of cheap food and alcohol, the shadows and muffled noises, clandestine activities being played out up side streets and beyond the doors of rowdie-houses took her back to Greenock, Glasgow and Leith. In a way, she was glad to be reminded that life everywhere has its givens and constants; yet at the same time she was disheartened that every part of her new world was not utterly different and contrary to the life she’d left behind. Nonie’s lodgings were akin to those Elspeth had suffered in countless towns from Dumfries to Dundee: a single room, filled with the sickly smell of tallow candle, an awkward landlady and boisterous neighbours. Sleep was made all the more difficult by the heat that lay on her like a heavy blanket. But the excitement of the day, a shared cup of rum with Nonie, and an hour or two’s whispered chattering soon saw both ladies unconscious for the night.

  The next three days followed the pattern set down on the first. Rehearsals in the morning, lunch at the Lyric with Mr. Philbrick and the senior cast, a stroll round Bridgetown in the afternoon – the shiny new town and steady hot sun reviving her. She helped stagehands rearrange scenery before the next performance, sorted scripts with prompters, and assisted Nonie into her costume, before sitting through the show again.

  Elspeth followed Philbrick, Denholm or Mrs. Bartleby around, like a five-year-old too uncomprehending to do much more. Inwardly, however, she made her judgements on the Lyric Company. Its superintendence – comprised of Philbrick, and Denholm and Bartleby as the senior players – disappointed her. Coak himself, who had shown such acumen and taste in Greenock, was much less involved in the venture than she had hoped. Philbrick, despite his puffed-up English, reminded her of her father: stale brandy ill-concealed by lavender water; yoked to a frustrated career that made him critical of all around him. Their artistic vision was limited and – in the opinion of a young lady who had never entered even an Edinburgh playhouse – provincial in the extreme. Their playbill for the coming season consisted of tired old renderings of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and indifferent plays scribed by Mr. Denholm. As actors, both he and Mrs. Bartleby struck Elspeth as less than compelling. Neither was of a particularly attractive bearing – Mr. Denholm was still just young enough to grace a stage, but slight and mousy and with a girny, whimpering voice, while Mrs. Bartleby was far too old and bulky to be playing the parts she was given.

  “Yuh mus’n fret over them. They’ll not be of much hindrance to you, Ellie,” Nonie assured her at the end of the second performance. Constance Veronica Sturges – the Primrose of Tyrone, as the play-bills described her – would not be a hindrance herself either. She had been performing around Bridgetown for nearly a decade and had hardly become a sensation. In the candlelight of the Lyric, Nonie could look quite glamorous and fierce, but up-close, in daylight, the pockmarks of some childhood illness defaced her. On stage, she feigned a low, breathy voice that sounded neither Irish nor Colonial, but which adequately maintained the attention of the audience. Off stage, she veered between her natural Hibernian tones – especially after a rum or two – and attempting to sound, inexplicably, like a darkie servant girl.

  “Neither of ’em have a following in the town. Denholm come here when nobody in London waste their shillins on him any more. Mrs. Bartleby, she from Jamaica, and afore then, Virginia. She say she was in music-hall, but I heerd she was a five-nickel dancer in saloon bars. Don’ yuh pay either of ’em any mind.”

  Laughing at the deficiencies of their senior actors, Elspeth and Nonie quickly became co-conspirators against Mr. Philbrick’s little regime. Bartleby and Philbrick, Nonie informed her, were secretly compromised – a circumstance which prejudiced the Manager’s casting decisions.

  “You have to hand it to Mrs. Philbrick and poor old Edmund Bartleby,” said Christian. “Either they’re touchingly immune to all gossip, or relieved to have their spouses off their hands. They’re the only two people in all Barbados apparently unaware of what’s going on.”

  Despite what it might mean for Elspeth’s career, the fact that the relationship between the general manager and the leading lady was widely known and casually commented upon – even though both parties were married and their spouses close by – amazed and delighted Elspeth. The West Indies seemed to her at once quaintly old-fashioned and remarkably freethinking. On the one hand, there was all the silly pomp and circumstance of the old order; social gatherings on
the island were like scenes from plays authored a hundred years ago, ridiculous in their etiquette. On the other hand she and her fellow thespians behaved like spirited children far from home, without parent or nanny, King or Government, to check them. There was a laxness about their morals – lambasted and deplored daily in the town’s Gazette – that agreed with Elspeth’s natural temperament.

  In this nook of the newly emerging world, it seemed, a lowly player could live the risqué life she thought available only to aristocratic artists – the Lord Byrons and Mr. Shelleys of this world. The junior members of the cast joyfully imitated the style and panache of the great Romantics. Before her first week was out, Elspeth was learning how to dress, talk and act like a freethinking artisan. She was not so well read as she would have liked, but now, instead of spending days and nights walking over bogs and peat land, she could devote time to reading. Or better still, glean the gist of great texts from conversations with her colleagues.

  The theatre itself, while grander than any house she had ever seen, let alone played in, still possessed something of the ambience of the penny gaff. The auditorium was of no great size, yet the company retained a group of equestrian actors and a menagerie of animals. In the least likely of dramas, a horse might be ridden down the narrow aisle to dance on stage. Trained dogs performed tricks between acts. Melodramas and pantomime stories had been delivered, in recent months, by actors standing on the backs of horses cantering around the stage. The playbill for the Lyric’s next production – Rob Roy McGregor – proudly announced the spectacle of “Bailie Nicol Jarvie on Horseback!”

  By the fourth day – although still in a kind of Limbo, the strength and health she felt building inside her having no outlet in her role as novice – Elspeth began to distinguish the colleagues of her own generation one from the other. The young ladies of the company hailed from all parts of the world: Nonie, from Ireland; Virginie from France. Isabella claimed her dark beauty was Spanish, though it was rumoured that she was a quadroon of Venezuelan farmers’ blood mixed with African. Some had no memory of where they originated. Their conversation was shockingly direct and their ways of speaking and turns of phrase comical and artless. The young men lacked the dullness and baseness than the rustics back home, but weren’t nearly so sickly and pernickety as the gentry whom Elspeth had encountered in Scotland. The sun had darkened the lads’ and lasses’ skin and brightened their eyes. The entire company, with all its attendants and spouses and aficionados, was tall, confident and deliciously disreputable. Elspeth could have kissed each and every one of them out of sheer gratitude for their existence – excepting, of course, Mr. Philbrick and Mrs. Bartleby.

  Many people – even those born and bred in the West Indies – complained of the heat, but not Elspeth Baillie. The light fell on her skin like angels’ kisses, the sun wrapped its warmth around her like a passionate lover’s embrace. The climate entirely suited her constitution. She had never felt so healthy in all her life, and even the slight scrofulous wheeze that had pestered her since childhood vanished within days of disembarking from the Alba. Her hair grew faster and thicker, its colour in reality unchanged but, under the intense light of the Barbados sky, glowing with a vibrant chestnut sheen – a deep, dusty, cherry colour, like the cinnamon she saw in the slaves’ and freemen’s markets. She felt her neck growing longer, more slender. The damage of so many years of bending and crooking against driving rain and whistling winds on trudges between fairs and trysts over sodden heaths was quickly undone. For the first time in her life she could walk to her full height, broaden her shoulders, and strip away layers of shawls and coats and underskirts. She felt half her true weight and twice as quick and wondered if a sea breeze wouldn’t one day lift her off her feet.

  When Lord Coak eventually returned to town he heard about the comments Elspeth had made to Mrs. Bartleby about the Lyric’s production, and of a growing division between the two women. “Now that’s a storm I’d like to have witnessed,” he smiled to Elspeth. It seemed he was not unduly concerned by his protégé’s forwardness, although there might have been a tincture of reproach in his look. Elspeth felt she still could not read Coak as well as she could other people. She would not have much opportunity to rectify the matter, as she was destined to see even less of the planter in the coming months. A business expedition to Havana was pressing, to which city he would be sailing at the end of this visit.

  “I had no idea you would be absent so much,” she said, and heard a five year-old’s whine in her own voice.

  “I am the owner, Elspeth dear, of the Lyric. Not its manager. You will inhabit its soul much more than I ever could.”

  During his short stay, Elspeth moved back into the Overtons’ servants’ quarters, while Coak took a room, for a few days, in the house proper. She was brought again into the drawing rooms not only of the Overtons, but also of Belles, Seallys and Grahams – Barbados’s high society. Coak showed her off like a new medal, his very own Daurama, White Witch Woman of the North. He spoke enthusiastically of her “native talent” and her unblemished gift. With not much more than a week or so behind her in the company of professional, sophisticated actors, Elspeth already wished to show she possessed more than “native talent”.

  She had had no time to properly increase her knowledge, having only watched a few rehearsals before whiling away the evenings in the prop room and Nonie’s lodgings. Her new friends had taught her the trick of pretending expertise. The naif of only a fortnight ago was already being replaced by a confident young woman quoting “Prometheus Unbound” and “The Ancient Mariner” – though she knew nothing beyond those brief, memorised passages – and flirtatiously asserting her new-found, liberating atheism. In return, she was admired more openly for her prettiness, and complimented on her outspokenness. Colonial gentry apparently delighted in their artisans’ nonconformism where their Scots counterparts abominated it. It was at one of these functions that Elspeth met George Lisle – the son of the rich planter who had come to inspect her on her first night on the island.

  “Master Lisle has been on vacation in London,” Mrs. Overton informed her, when the heir to the largest fortune on the island arrived, dressed unremarkably, a tousled and distracted bearing about him. “Normally, he can’t tear himself away from the theatre – as you’ll soon discover.”

  She had already heard his name; had gathered he was a favourite of the young actors and stagehands, who referred to him as a bosom buddy, regardless of their status in comparison to his. Nonie, Virginie and Isabella giggled at the mere mention of him. At first sight, she could not see why. Master Lisle was not particularly tall – unlike his father – nor refined in feature. Heavier set than she had expected of a man both high-born and a favourite of her girlfriends, he blended a little too easily into the set of thick-bodied colonials. He was also, she reckoned, a little older than she had been given to believe. Once introduced, though, she quickly felt at ease in his company.

  “I hear you’re quick with advice to the Lyric’s luminaries, Miss Baillie.”

  “I merely made a passing remark.”

  “Make more of them!” he beamed widely, leaning in innocently as a brother or cousin might. “Too many fresh talents have buckled under the weight of the Denholms, Philbricks and Bartlebys.”

  As he said this, he smiled genially towards each of those doyens in turn, nudging Elspeth lightly, and she began to see why the company had taken so much to him: he lacked the stuffy formalities of his peers. Expressions flew fast across his face, unchecked by duplicity or calculation. George Lisle talked hard and enthusiastically, but he listened hard too: his minute reactions to her every word meant either he was genuinely engaged with what she was saying, or that he was a fine actor in his own right. “Perhaps you’re just saying what you think it is I want to hear, Mr. Lisle. In a few moments you’ll be over there with Mr. Philbrick saying something quite different.”

  “Of course.”

  “Then you’re a fake.”

  “Nothin
g wrong in faking, if you’re aware that’s what you’re doing. Look at these planters and administrators and shopholders. They’re all fakes and don’t even know it.”

  “But you’re different?”

  “I know how to keep on Philbrick’s good side, so that I can run free around the theatre, but I’m only too aware of what bunkum it is to be a colonial planter’s son. Live as long as I have, Elspeth, in a world as dreary as this – at the slightest flicker of intelligence and energy, I’m a mosquito on the scent of blood.”

  George seemed a genuinely open and pleasant man, with that same whiff of candour and rascality she loved so much already in her colleagues. They chattered amiably in a corner of Mr. Belle’s hall, long enough for Nonie, in passing, to raise an eyebrow, and Christian Bloom to give them both a knowing look. Lord Coak passed them from time to time but gave no indication of displeasure. Elspeth felt a flush of anger at this patent lack of interest. Was she to believe that her patron’s audacious request in Greenock amounted to no more than it pretended to be – a test of dramatic ability and resolve? Having seen what he had seen, how could a middle-aged unmarried man not be nettled by the sight of her giggling in close intimacy of a younger man? Close on the heels of that spasm of anger followed a further, stronger one, of shame. Coak was what he seemed. And what need had she for the lustful gape of a soft-fleshed old coof?

  Eventually Coak did look around at the pair of them, and George, as if reading her mind, remarked, “Don’t be fooled by his businesslike air. At this very moment he is seeing you, in his mind’s eye, naked.”

  She considered telling George that the businessman would not need much of an imagination to conjure up that sight; that he had already sat back in his armchair and studied every part of her meticulously. She might even have acted on the impulse – not in order to create a scandal, but for the sheer adventure of being bold with a young, rich, stranger – had not Coak broken way from his party to approach them.