The Playmaker

by Thomas Keneally

  And what was remarkable was that H.E. spoke that dinner time as Ralph never expected to hear him speak, like a man who had visitations from angels, one angel saying attack and another counselling him that imitating a Spaniard could produce large results. Ralph felt too like a man subject to nothing but friendly visitations. Standing for Mr. Garrick, he floated closer to the great bulk of his San Augustin, that breastwork of impersonations, mockeries, passions, and grand mistakes Farquhar had constructed and named The Recruiting Officer.

  CHAPTER 30

  Performance

  At some point in the afternoon, when he left H.E.’s table and floated across the town to his own marquee, he found his players transmuted by Nicholls the perfumier. They were ghost white, but their cheekbones were rouged and their eyes so starkly marked it seemed to Ralph they looked at him with refined knowledge and saw that, yes, he was justifiably tipsy, and judged that yes, that was not inappropriate.

  Nancy Turner the Perjurer seemed to him totally swallowed by Melinda, her face a terrible alien white, her white, powdered breasts, marked here and there with beauty spots, scarcely held by her bodice. Oh what poor Private Dukes lost when he lost Nancy! Duckling too was ghost-white and fussily dressed. Mary Brenham had been costumed less ornately in the honest gown in which she would appear in Act One, Scene Two—a garment which would later be replaced by the white suit in which Ralph had mistaken her for Considen.

  John Wisehammer, the epiloguist, his face marked with black lines to give him age, stood by the theatrical Robert Sideway, who wore a fine grey suit borrowed from an indulgent Commissary Miller. Arscott the carpenter carried a sergeant’s jacket rakishly, and Nicholls had much ruddied up his features to give him a look of town-and-country rascality. Ketch Freeman as Balance wore a mask of ageless judicial seriousness. Curtis Brand, who would play Costar Pearmain and the bumpkin Bullock, had had his face skilfully painted a blank and witless blue. Rose, behind whose stark white face and emphasised eyes it was difficult to recognise the Cornish witch Bryant, stared at Ralph most omnisciently of all, and a strange and uninterpretable smile appeared briefly there. Lastly, the convict overseer Kable, in an excellently cut captain’s coat and a superbly pomaded wig, in boots too which carried a fine gloss, did some practice strutting across the floor of the marquee and murmured lines to himself.

  None of them would now take those rags off, wash the artifice from their faces and eyes, or become their accustomed lag selves until the performance had been done, the play perfectly rendered. They were locked up for the rest of the day in their characters. This gratified Ralph the playmaker, who would have been tempted—if he had had the power—to keep them like this forever.

  A number of private Marines of Ralph’s company had been detailed to shift furniture on stage. Ralph spent some hours directing them. A small sofa borrowed from Johnny White was necessary for the scenes involving Melinda, since Melinda was to be languid, and a sofa was an aid to languor. A table with a large cloth had been obtained for the Sergeant Kite fortune-telling scenes, and a series of counting tables loaned by the Judge Advocate and the Commissary needed to be placed together in the centre of the stage to form the bench at which Justice Balance would preside.

  Among the soldiers who had been assigned to this changing of scenes was the perfidious Private Hunt, the one who had turned evidence against his co-conspirators in the matter of the pillaged storehouse. He worked blithely, Ralph noticed. Just as no one on the excursion to find Ca-bahn had avoided Hunt, so now the other five Marine stage-handlers showed no reluctance to work with him. When he had hold of one end of a table, there was no scuffle among his five brothers to avoid picking up the other. He helped lump the heavy counting tables on and off stage, while the others groaned in unison with him and gave him ample friendly advice as the things were eased in and out the barracks door and up the steps to the platform. And as the players found their way among the furniture, enacting their lines for the last time short of performance, and Hunt and the others watched from the side of the stage, the recent King’s Evidence gave and received equal quantities of digs in the ribs at all the higher points of comedy and double meaning.

  Arscott had cut two holes in the backcloth to coincide with the windows of what would pass as Justice Balance’s Shrewsbury house. Through these, standing secretly in a small interstice between backdrop and the barracks rear wall, Ralph could see his creatures come and go on the bright stage. Throughout that promising afternoon he continued to make short visits to the place, especially to see Mary Brenham do her Silvia in that suit of white calico. Observing the players from his own special hide carried with it the same air of choice subterfuge as H.E.’s story of capturing the San Augustin.

  He did not leave the barracks until it was dusk and the last, fully costumed rehearsal of The Recruiting Officer had concluded nearly faultlessly. Turner the Perjurer had once or twice been distracted by the laughter of the Marine furniture movers, her speech had frozen and all she could do was to adopt a brave but—Ralph could see—desperate queenly stance and wait for rescue. Rescue was Mary Brenham, who was the play’s universal memory.

  Ralph had believed it was particularly the laughter of Private Hunt, whose evidence had hanged Private Dukes, that distracted Turner. He had toyed with the idea of ordering him away, but that would have left the other handlers of stage items short-handed. So he waited.

  The barracks was now entirely prepared for the performance. Candles had been put on spikes along the walls. Three braziers placed down the middle of the barracks-theatre would keep the audience warm. Flares dipped in pitch would light the stage. As the light vanished, Ralph stood alone in the midst of the floor. Everything was unlit, yet the stage seemed to him—though in the dimness the backdrop was barely discernible—to be still radiant with the latent energy of that afternoon’s costumed enactment. Echoes not of past but of coming laughter filled the space. He turned and left the barracks, going home to collect the sea cape he would need for warmth. For he would not be part of the animal humidity of the audience. He would move from his hidden niche to the wings of the stage to the barracks back door, and out across the clearing. Pacing among the eucalyptus trees, he hoped to savour the noises of amusement indoors.

  By the entrance to the marquee stood Hunt and Turner the Perjurer still in the form of Melinda. In spite of rumours he had heard of Nancy Turner being friendly with Hunt, Ralph had a powerful sense that now she was being abused. She stood very still, quiet—as Ralph’s mind proposed it to him—as a trapped animal, her bodice down, her eyes distant, while Hunt caressed her magnificently powdered, rouged, and beauty-spotted breasts. A little light came through the fabric from the marquee, where the other players ate their evening meal and chattered, tremulously certain of future applause. It was not enough light to tell whether Hunt was in a rampant and runaway state or not. Yet Ralph was somehow certain of it.

  That a man whose word had hanged six other Marines should now be enjoying Nancy Turner in their place, should be demonstrating in his flesh certain infallible signs of life while they lay mute and blind and loveless in a pit, unexpectedly enraged Ralph. There was also some element of protecting Nancy Turner, or of Melinda, in the action he took now. He grabbed off the ground a hefty fallen bough from one of those ungainly and unearthly trees and brought it down on the back of Hunt’s shoulders. Melinda danced backwards from Hunt, as if she were concerned that the impact of the blow might somehow derange her costume. Hunt staggered and gagged and fell to one knee. It was one blunt blow, Ralph thought, to go with the hundreds of sharp ones to which Hunt had been sentenced by military courts in the past. Melinda adjusted her bodice but too hastily, at a wild angle. Captain Plume appeared at the door of the tent and calmly considered the injury Ralph had done Hunt.

  The blow had not expended all Ralph’s fury. He hauled Hunt up by the shoulder. He called him a whoreson and an oaf and told him he was there merely to move the inhuman furniture and not to interfere with the human. Ralph was chastene
d then to see Mary Brenham, dressed in her female costume for the start of the play, appear at Plume’s side and look at Ralph with her characteristic equability.

  Ralph told the Marine to go and eat his dinner somewhere. Nor was he to malinger or play sick from the blow, and was to return on time to move the play’s furniture.

  Dazed but upright now, Hunt nodded without resentment. Ralph could have struck him again just the same—for souring the evening.

  Achieving something like normal breath, Hunt hobbled away.

  “Are you well?” Ralph Clark asked Turner the Perjurer, wanting her to know his rage had been paternal.

  “I am, Mr. Clark,” said Melinda.

  “Well then,” said Ralph, “look to your costume.”

  She turned back gratefully to re-enter the tent. Captain Plume, the convict overseer Kable, said, “I might have kicked his arse early on, except the military get all prideful at such action.”

  Ralph smiled. “You keep your Plume intact, Henry,” he told the overseer. Henry gave a theatrical bow, excessive enough to have come from Sideway, and himself re-entered the tent. Mary Brenham was still there, in the doorway. He feared unreasonably what she might think of his show of rage.

  She walked toward him and took up a confiding posture.

  “I have to tell you, you shouldn’t be concerned for Nancy Turner at the hands of Joe Hunt, Lieutenant Clark.” She still called him Lieutenant Clark in all circumstances, and always would, Ralph supposed.

  “I don’t see why she should have to be worried with Joe Hunt. Or by Joe Hunt, if it comes to it. It seems improper that he should caress her when she went to so much trouble saving her lover—even to the limit of taking a false oath and lying in court.”

  Mary looked away and he felt desire move in him. She was wearing a dress dyed lavender—God knew where the costumier had got the dye from. On her head was a large black hat which had probably been borrowed from one of the Marine wives, and around her shoulders a canvas shawl which Hart had worked on with a thin black brush to make it appear that it was made of mantua lace. Rouged up by Nicholls, she looked like the essence of Englishness transported beyond all sensible bounds, a divine little scintilla in the most un-English darkness. As if she had now completed the sum she was doing in her head, she returned her gaze to him.

  “I have found out, since we last talked about this, that Hunt is her lover. She would wed him if he would hear of it. Nancy Turner did not perjure herself.”

  “I was in the court when she did,” he told Mary, trying to keep from his voice that crackle of irritation which, he feared, could turn his wedding into a master and servant business. He did not want that sort of union. For the servant must do what the master says and enforces an inexcusable tyranny at the table and in the bed. Whereas Ralph needed his household to be a willing commonwealth.

  “Lieutenant Clark,” said Mary, putting her hand confidingly on his elbow, “Turner merely spoke the truth, but confident she would be disbelieved. The others had some grievance against Dukes, as thieves always do.”

  He took an instant to find her reference to thieves quaint, ironic, endearing. If he had not been so interested to hear the rest of her proposition, he might have teased her about it—“as thieves always do” might have become one of those regular lovers’ jokes. But there was no time at the moment for establishing anything like that, for the gauging of the balances of affection which must be completed before such small and recurrent teasings could be uttered.

  “As for Turner,” Mary Brenham went on, “she’d got sick of Dukes, and he had been sent to the outstation at Rosehill in any case. So she told the truth in court, knowing it would finish Dukes. For Dukes was, as Nancy said in court, not a member of that crew, the ones who worked the storehouses with forged keys.”

  “This is astounding,” said Ralph. “You must tell the Judge Advocate.”

  “But,” said Mary reasonably, “he can’t bring Private Dukes back to life.”

  She was asking Ralph to believe in what Harry Brewer had always been fascinated by—the mystery of criminal purpose, the mystery which manifested itself as much among the Marines as among the lags. She was asking him to remember how philosophic Baker and the others had been as Joe Hunt killed them with his evidence, and to believe that at the same time they were calm and cool and cunning enough then to settle an old grievance with Dukes. Didn’t they know, Ralph nearly asked her, that they had to share a grave with Dukes? That he would lie close as a lover to them?

  Ralph remembered that Dukes had tried to escape the twisting by naming other Rosehill Marines and convicts, but his evidence had not passed examination in court, and the other condemned or doomed Marines had mocked him for his effort.

  “It can’t be said, I think,” Brenham surmised, “that that is a crime. In telling the truth? Even to kill someone by telling the truth? It can’t be considered a trying offence?”

  “It isn’t a trying offence,” he agreed distractedly.

  “Hunt and Nancy Turner keep it pretty quiet,” she told him, shaking her head at their artifice. “But they will not be apart much longer. Your Melinda means to move into Joe Hunt’s cabin very soon. So you must not distress yourself for Nancy, Lieutenant Clark, even though it is good to see Joe Hunt take a beating, for he is a bad cull and a hound!”

  “Do all the lags know this?” asked Ralph, still teased by the old criminal conundrum.

  “They have always known it,” she said. “Even I, who find out things last of all, discovered it in time. I steer clear of the London mobs and crews you find in the women’s camp. I was never in a canting crew, you know. But even I find out in the end.”

  “You found out before me.”

  “But you are not a lag,” she said, and smiled so richly that he put his hand out to her face, but with a little grief. For now he indeed knew that there were two worlds and two truths—H.E.’s explanation and the Tawny Prince’s. The play would be performed for a divided audience and for two minds.

  “I poured out the gin which Goose sent as our wedding gift,” he told her.

  “I am not owned by Goose,” she said.

  “Goose thinks you are.”

  She took hold of the hand which still lay on her face.

  “We must think of the play, Lieutenant Clark, rather than that. The play is the most wonderful thing that has occurred in all my life.”

  From the punishment of Joe Hunt, the enlightenment of Ralph Clark by Brenham, to Wisehammer’s well-modulated utterance of the first words of the prologue seemed barely a confused instant. In that pulse of time, Ralph had had a chance only to take one glimpse of the two worlds sitting below the stage. Momentarily, and as many a theatrical manager before him, he was awed by the power of a play to summon people. “Against the spikes,” as Sideway said they called it in the London theatre, and as you might call it in this fabulous place eight moons distant from Drury Lane, sat the agent of sweet reason and Portuguese naval stratagem, H.E. His substantial and crooked legs shone in white twill in the middle of the front line.

  Beside him lolled Johnny Hunter, the impassive Scot, captain of the Sirius, the officer who had at the age of eight years nearly died in the Norwegian shipwreck of his father’s vessel and had been revived in a fishing village between the radiant breasts of two Norwegian sisters. Johnny seemed to be taking a light nap at H.E.’s right side. Ralph felt confident the first word of the play would rouse him.

  Over H.E.’s left shoulder shone the brown scholarly face and pale tunic of the astronomer Dawes. The surgeons Johnny White and Considen sat by him on his left, priests of surgery and dosage, autopsy and dentistry. The young Scot Surgeon Balmain had been rowed all the way down from the outstation at Rosehill to watch tonight’s celebration. He looked too red-faced and heavy-eyed with liquor to appreciate Sideway and Brenham, Kable and Turner. If he got rowdy, Considen would try to hush him, and Balmain would challenge the little Irishman to a duel, and the play might be interrupted.

  On H.E
.’s left sat those robust enquirers, Davy Collins the Judge Advocate, and Tench Watkin, his brown eyes, which stood out from his head not unpleasantly, alive for amusement. Robbie Ross and Jemmy Campbell sat at the end of the line and had separated themselves from what they saw as His pernicious Excellency with the entire officers’ mess—Lieutenant Creswell and George Johnston, Poulden and Lieutenant Long, elderly Lieutenant Alt, Lieutenants Furzer, Shairp, Davey, and Faddy, an old enemy of Ralph’s in hardly a better condition to watch a play than Surgeon Balmain. Ralph knew that, if he himself had not been manager, he would have been employed in the same manner by Jemmy and Robbie—to help give flesh to the rampart of younger officers they had raised between themselves and Harry Brewer’s Captain.

  Missing were Harry Brewer himself, who had sent apologies but was out with the Quarter Guard waiting for a visit from the fugitive Madagascan, John Caesar, and of course Dick Johnson, whose Eclectic Society principles dictated he could not attend the theatre, even if Ralph had never pursued the white-suited Mary Brenham and brought her into his household.

  Behind the line of officials, behind the two commissaries Miller and Clark, sat the married Marines and their wives and children, and then less regular, less discernible groupings of Marines and Sirius sailors and lags male and female. Ralph had time for one look at them. Meg Long, having seen the play at its rude beginning, was agog now to see its consummation. Goose sat by the brazier in the middle of the hall, her elbow room guarded and guaranteed by a cordon of young convicts. One held a bottle of brandy on one knee, and a goblet on the other—the bitch had a cup-boy!