Lovers, Make Moan (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “Oh, my word, yes. He and Lynn between them made almost an extra scene for themselves and I must say it was quite amusing. Lynn is so pleased with his share in it that I can’t very well tell them to cut it shorter.”

  “Oh, well, if it amuses the audience, I suppose it’s all right to let them get away with it.”

  “The play takes quite long enough as it is. We don’t want people slipping away before the end because they have trains to catch or something of that sort. Nothing is more unnerving than to see your audience sneaking off before the end of the show.”

  “Not to worry. They won’t. In these days of the ubiquitous automobile, very few people have trains to catch and the local buses don’t run as late as the play does, anyway. Let it rip. If those two can get some fun out of Shakespeare’s clowning, good luck to them, says I.”

  “You’ll speak to Narayan Rao, then?”

  “Of course I will. In any case, he may have forgiven Rinkley by this time.”

  “I doubt it. These motoring cases can be the very devil when a cross-summons is brought. After all, Rao only lost on a technicality. I don’t know the details, but I believe it was touch and go how the verdict went.”

  “But it was the court’s decision, not Rinkley’s. Surely Narayan realises that.”

  “I don’t suppose it compensates him, any more than it compensated Rinkley in the other case he was involved in, that wretched charge of molesting a child, although he got off.”

  “One thing, it doesn’t matter two hoots whether we have a little changeling boy on stage or not. I should think the signora would be thankful not to have another small child to look after, particularly one she doesn’t know.”

  “Dr. Jeanne-Marie has committed us now, I’m afraid, if Narayan agrees.”

  “Oh, well, I’ll speak to Narayan. That will settle it one way or the other. It will be up to him to bring the kid or to opt out.”

  “See that you make quite sure to mention Rinkley. But I do wish Dr. Jeanne-Marie hadn’t stuck her oar in. I’ve got enough problems without having a race-relations squabble on my hands.”

  “Narayan’s case would have had just the same result if Narayan had been an Englishman, you know.”

  “I doubt very much whether Narayan sees it quite like that. The ethnic minorities are very sensitive, I believe.”

  “Anyway, I’ll talk to him and see how it goes. He’s a nice chap. I don’t suppose he bears Rinkley any real malice.”

  “That’s your guess, not mine.”

  “What does Marcus think of the play? Has he said anything—made any comments?”

  “He seems well satisfied, I think. He has certainly done us proud over the whole production. Your supposedly diamond dewdrop get-up looked fantastic under the lights. Now our only query seems to be the weather. Fate must have something up its sleeve. That dress rehearsal went ever so much too well.”

  5

  All Right on the Night

  And we will do it in action as we will do it before the duke.

  Marcus Lynn was well satisfied with all the arrangements. To his mind, simple in all its workings except where finance and sheer business acumen were concerned, nothing could have been more pleasing than the woodland setting for the production, the splendid (albeit very expensive) designs the theatrical dressmakers had contrived for the costumes, the lighting and sound effects and the few but important theatrical properties which had been provided to augment the swords and daggers he had brought.

  More than anything else, he was pleased with his Emma. He was fully aware that unkind opinion was convinced that he had married her for her money and he was honest enough with himself to admit that, to a large extent, this was true. However, the dowry the plain-featured and shy young woman had brought with her had given him the capital he needed in order (in his own words) to get going. It was now, however, but a drop in the ocean of his financial success, and he had paid it back in the form of a trust for her.

  Moreover, he had been a kind and most considerate husband and although Emma had not provided him with the child he so desperately longed for, he had never held it against her. Even though medical opinion had informed him that it was not due to any deficiency on his part that no issue had come from the marriage, neither was there any physical reason why Emma should not conceive. After three years of frustration, they had adopted the boy Jasper, the son of a woman cousin of his who had had an affair with what Marcus vaguely referred to as “a lord.”

  “When I buy stock it’s got to be pedigree,” he said to Emma.

  “It’s a poor start for the boy, being illegitimate,” she said. “We must do our best for him. He’s ten. He’s sure to know he is not our own.”

  “Of course, but he also knows his mother is dead. That’s reason enough for us to have taken him on. No need for him to know about the rest of it. I don’t suppose she told him.”

  “It will come out at some time or other.”

  “Leave things alone,” said Marcus. “Our money will see him through.” This had been seven years ago. On the night of the play he said to her, “Not nervous about the show, are you?—or about Jasper’s performance?”

  “Mrs. Bradley won’t let me be nervous, and Jasper is used to being in the school plays, so he’ll be all right. Anyway, Barbara Bourton is so outstanding as Hermia that nobody is going to notice little me. I’m not surprised Jasper looks at her and nobody else. He’s completely moonstruck, poor boy.”

  “You’ve got better speeches than hers in the opening scene and you say them well.”

  “That’s Deborah Bradley’s doing. What I say really ought to be addressed to her, you know, not to Barbara Bourton. ‘Your eyes are lode-stars; and your tongue’s sweet air More tuneable than lark to shepherd’s ear, When wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear.’ I love those lines, don’t you, Marcus?”

  “Oh, well, they’re Shakespeare, of course,” said Marcus, looking at her rather anxiously. “Not getting a ‘thing’ about Deborah Bradley, are you?”

  So near midsummer day, the opening scenes of the play took place in daylight, but by the time the fairy scenes came on, so did the lamps among the trees, and effectively enough, although they were seen to greater advantage towards the end, when the wonderful summer night was brilliant with stars.

  Dame Beatrice and Laura attended the first performance, for, as Laura pointed out, it was likely to be the best.

  “They will all be nervous and on their toes,” she observed, “and will excel themselves in consequence. Nothing like being scared to death to bring out the best in people.”

  “A strange philosophy, surely?” said Dame Beatrice.

  “I don’t know so much. Look at people in the last war. They were so unexpectedly brave when it really came to the crunch.”

  “I wonder how Rosamund will acquit herself this evening?”

  “‘So wonder on, till Truth make all things plain’,” quoted Laura. “Not that I have any doubts. Rosamund was born minus nerves and plus the most immortal crust the Lord ever bestowed on a human being. As for Edmund, he will most likely babble everybody’s part as well as his own. They’ll probably have to gag him for the second performance.”

  Dame Beatrice had declined an invitation to dine with her relatives, rightly supposing (as Laura put it) that they would have enough on their plates without the added distraction of having to entertain company. Jonathan was disappointed, but Deborah was grateful. She had not only Rosamund and Edmund to calm down and then dress in their fairy costumes, but she also had on her hands the two delightful, ebullient little boys, Ganymede and Lucien, full of fun, laughing and chattering, sometimes in English, sometimes in French, and abounding with what she classified as the joys of spring.

  “We are not to be a trouble to you,” Ganymede, aged four, confided to her.

  “Maman will demand a full report,” said Lucien, who was six. “Elle dit qu’il faut être très gentil chez vous.”

  “Well, so you are. I think you a
re both beautifully behaved,” said Deborah. “Now, when you are dressed, I would like you to sit and look at picture books and not to race around and get hot and dirty. I have to dress up, too, and so has Mr. Bradley, so please help Rosamund to keep an eye on Edmund while Mr. Bradley and I are upstairs.”

  Jonathan and Deborah had decided, long before the dress-rehearsal, that the summer-house and the conservatory were too inadequate and inconvenient to serve as dressing-rooms for the rest of the cast, so the male actors had been allotted the dining-room and the females the small morning-room. Signora Moretti and her fairies had been given the entrance hall. It had the advantage of having a cloakroom of its own. This was a consideration which mattered a good deal when a dozen excitable children with doubtful control over their bodily functions had to be kept comfortable and free from anxiety.

  As the auditorium was a small one, having been fashioned by the previous owner as a setting for private theatricals only, the number of tickets available had had to be limited to one hundred and twenty for each performance. Statistics showed that the first and third nights had been sold out, but that the attendance on the second night had slumped somewhat. This had been anticipated and disappointed nobody.

  “The second night of a three-night amateur show is always the dud one,” said Brian Yorke philosophically. “The effervescence of the opening night has worn off and the keyed-up atmosphere of the third night hasn’t arrived. We must try to keep each other up to scratch, that’s all. One thing: Barbara is a professional and won’t let things slide. So long as the rest of us play up to her we shall be all right. Rinkley will pull off the workmen’s scenes and the fairies are a knock-out anyway. Signora Moretti will see to that. Her living depends on it.”

  Prevented by Emma’s arguments from offering Deborah money or an expensive present, the grateful Marcus had approached Jonathan and suggested a handsome sum for the use of the sylvan and most appropriate setting for the play. Jonathan, who liked him, had laughed and slapped him on the back and had pointed out that he himself was the tenant, not the owner of the property.

  “But my cousin gave full permission for the play to be staged here,” he said, “and it’s made a lot of fun for my wife and me.” Although he did not say so, he respected Marcus for choosing a minor part for himself which was well inside his scope instead of opting for a major role which, under the circumstances, could hardly have been refused him. As for the “gate-money,” he knew that Lynn had never expected to get back what he had spent on the play, let alone make a profit.

  “It’s a bit of fun for Emma and the boy and me, too,” Marcus said. “I’m glad the boy is in it. Tosses off his lines as Egeus rather well, don’t you think?”

  “I’m sure Yorke will give him a bigger part next time, when he’s got through his A-levels,” said Jonathan tactfully. “He has a good stage presence.”

  “I reckon so. Lad’s got the breeding, you know. Son of a lord, even if he was born the wrong side of the blanket.”

  There was to be an interval fairly early on in the play so that the elves and fairies, having danced and sung and, in the case of Peasblossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustardseed, said their first little bits of dialogue, could be removed, dressed in their ordinary clothes and claimed by their mothers. From the outset Deborah had insisted that the children’s parts were to finish at the end of the first scene in Act Three.

  “After all,” she said, “their bedtime will be late enough anyway and it is far more important than scratching a donkey’s head. As for the fairy procession at the end, well, you will have to do without it. Nobody speaks except Oberon, Titania, and Puck, so they will have to carry it on their own.”

  “In any case,” said Emma Lynn, “nobody wants the job of minding little children from the end of the first scene in the third act right to the end of the play. Most of them would be asleep, anyway, or making themselves miserable and cross, poor little things.”

  There had been a slight contretemps at the dress-rehearsal. It was not nearly enough to dispose of Brian Yorke’s superstitions, partly because its real significance, that the stage “props” were sacred objects, did not appear until later, but mostly because, at the time it occurred, he knew nothing about it.

  The two bloodhounds, bred and lent by Tom Woolidge, were not to make their brief appearance on stage until the hunting-scene in the fourth act. They were tied up outside the summer-house. This was in a little clearing in the woods and had a stoutly-railed verandah to which the dogs were tethered. They were gentle, amenable creatures, their evening meal and bowls of water were placed well within their reach, and no trouble of any kind was expected from them. Even if they bayed, they were far enough from the stage for this to be a matter of no great concern.

  Yolanda, in whose charge they were placed when they made their appearance, had always, at rehearsals, been zealous in her care of them. As her scenes were in company with her father and mother, she sat with her parents in the woodland wings on the O.P. side, but paid occasional visits to the summer-house to ensure that all was well with her charges.

  At the dress-rehearsal she had been so much entranced with the Elizabethan costumes that she spent most of her time avidly watching the stage and it was not until about the middle of the third act, when she was finding the exchanges between the four lovers excessively boring, that she remembered the bloodhounds and went to visit them. She returned in short order and whispered agitatedly to her mother, “Mummy, the dogs have gone!”

  Valerie Yorke drew her daughter further back from the stage and asked, “Darling, what do you mean?”

  “I went to see whether they were all right and their leads were there, but they’d gone.”

  “What about their collars? Have they slipped them?”

  “No, their collars had gone, too. There were only the leads left. Anyway, I don’t think bloodhounds can slip their collars. Oh, Mummy, what shall we do?”

  “Don’t worry, darling. I think I know where they are. We didn’t have Rosamund stay at our house for nothing.” She went to Deborah, who was off stage until the opening of the fourth act (from which the fairies had been dispensed) and gave her the news. Deborah’s conclusion was the same as her own, so they waylaid Puck as he came off the stage and Deborah said to him,

  “These draperies of mine are a bit of a nuisance if I need to run. Could you belt up to the house and bring back the bloodhounds? I am sure my little wretches have collected them.”

  Young Peter Woolidge bounded away and tore uphill through the woods and up to the house, where he found one of the dogs in bed with Rosamund, the other with Edmund. Before Peter led them back to where they should be, Valerie had followed him and addressed a stern admonition, backed up by threats of chastisement, to the chief culprit.

  “The dogs are ‘props’. Don’t you know better than to meddle with props?” she demanded. “If you ever play about with any other props I’ll spank you hard.”

  Rosamund apparently took these words to heart, for the Thursday and Friday performances passed off without a hitch, and Brian Yorke’s presages of disaster vanished and were replaced by a cautious optimism.

  Rinkley proved himself not sensitive enough to realise that Bottom’s wood was an enchanted one and that Bottom, no more than Thomas the Rhymer, would never be quite the same man again after his encounter with the Queen of the Fairies. Rinkley had never read lines which, of all the cast, probably only Deborah knew.

  ‘Harp and carp, Thomas,’ she said;

  ‘Harp and carp along with me—

  But if you dare to kiss my lips,

  Sure of your body I shall be.’

  ‘Betide me weal, betide me woe,

  That weird shall never daunten me.’

  Syne he has kissed her rosy lips

  All underneath the Eildon Tree.’

  And so, thought Deborah, had it been with Bottom the Weaver, but there was no magic in Rinkley’s soul. He saw no poetry in the cloddish clown. As Pyramus, however, Rinkley excelled himself.
At the first full rehearsal, when, not having been supplied with body-armour, he had pushed the retractable dagger somewhat gingerly against his breast, Yorke was heard to exclaim: “For God’s sake, man, put a jerk in it! You’re killing yourself, not brushing flies off a sleeping Venus!” But that was the only time Rinkley was faulted, so, finding that the dagger could be trusted, Pyramus thereafter tackled his suicide with a will and accomplished a back-fall on to the turf which might have been the pride of a professional tumbler.

  “I’ve made a bruise on my chest, thanks to you,” he said to Yorke, after the first full rehearsal. “That dagger hurt me.”

  “It was worth it. You were great, old boy, simply magnificent. Keep it up, because that scene is practically the climax of the play.”

  Apart from his main task of welding his actors, with their varying talents, into a team, Yorke, as producer as well as director, had had other problems to solve. One was to decide how much scenery was needed in addition to that provided by the garden itself, and the other was how to bridge the distance the dressing-rooms were from the stage.

  His first problem was solved easily and satisfactorily. The woods curved round towards the terrace, so all that was needed was a reversible wooden backdrop on one side of which was painted some Ionian pillars to represent the palace of Theseus and on the other a window in a plain wall to represent Quince’s cottage. For the woodland scenes another backdrop was painted with highly stylised trees which almost met the real ones, but leaving the actors with an obvious exit. Both backdrops were mounted on wheels and the scenes were changed, Chinese fashion, in full view of the audience.

  The second problem was also easily solved. Except for the donning of his accoutrements by Pyramus, which could be done in the wings, the only necessary changes of costume should have been for Theseus, Hippolyta, Philostrate, and Egeus for the hunting-scene, but this also involved a change back again for the last scene of all. Faced with the fact that the dressing-rooms were up at the house, Yorke had compromised. He allowed Philostrate and Egeus no change of costume at all and himself as Theseus a pair of thigh-length boots to wear over his elegant Tudor hose. He gave the only real change of costume to Hippolyta who, for this scene, was to appear as the goddess Artemis with bow and arrow.