He walks to the edge of the balcony. Peers down into the parterre. The swimmy-headed compulsion to jump.
Teams of workmen are sprinkling shreds of lemon peel and handfuls of cinnamon – someone reckoned these odours repel wild cats – while scrubwomen on their knees trowel up the never-ending pellets of cat dirt. Meanwhile, three large and ugly tabbies sit watching from the stage, occasionally licking their paws. There is no doubting which species is the audience, which the show.
Now a slim, fox-faced fellow in a too-tight suit appears behind him at the top of the Upper Circle stairs.
‘Mr Stoker, sir?’
‘The same.’
The young man descends.
‘Name of Jonathan Harker.’ His cockney accent is music. ‘I wonder if you’ve received my note?’
‘I am new here, Mr Harker. Catching up, as it were.’
‘I’ve took the liberty of writing to Mr Irving, sir, about a position as apprentice scene-painter? Got a portfolio of my sketches here, should you care to take a look?’
Forests, deserts, beautiful portraits of soldiers, carefully inked mazes, seascapes, Turkish bazaars.
‘This is fine work, Mr Harker. Where did you train?’
‘Paris now and again, sir, whenever I could afford it. But self-taught, really, I suppose you might say.’
‘Been at it long?’
‘Since a boy, sir.’
‘You’re a little too good for the theatre, this level of detail is better than we need. Had you thought of seeking something at the Illustrated London News?’
‘The theatre’s what I love, sir. Proper determined on that. I don’t care to work in no newspaper.’
‘Why not, lad?’
‘Too sad, sir. All explosions and earthquakes and wars no one wanted. Chum of mine went to Zululand, sir, for the News, doing pictures once a week. Went into himself, no lie, never really come out.’
‘I’m not sure we have anything at the moment. Perhaps come back in a few months once we’re up on our feet?’
‘I do clean work, fast, sir. You wouldn’t regret it.’
‘I don’t doubt you. You seem a nice, bright boy. What age are you?’
‘Twenty, sir, next birthday. I’d work every hour of day and night, sir, so help me I would.’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know. What sort of terms were you looking for?’
‘Whatever you think is fair, sir, what I want is experience. I ain’t looking for no fortune, just a start and a bit of beer money.’
‘Can you count, Mr Harker?’
He laughs. ‘I believe so, sir, yes.’
‘Count every seat in this theatre. Consider yourself employed.’
Three o’clock of the morning. Decent London lies abed.
The hour when the city’s statues commence to twitch and creak, descend their lichened pedestals in powderclouds of rust.
A bronze Lord Lieutenant with a death mask for a face. A cracked marble Viscount with eerie blanks for eyes. A General on his horse, ruined by time and London gullshit, they clank through Hyde Park to drown babies in the Serpentine that oozes through the city’s nightmares.
No cruelty is beyond the statues. They live in the corroding rain of indifference, have endured being walked past by millions.
Gargoyles peel from a belfry, Death-Angels from mausoleums, tiny Christs from ten thousand gravestones. Dead Earls and their dowagers from coffin lids of granite. Stone imperial eagles from stern pillars outside palaces flap graven, etched wings over Whitechapel.
In deathbeds from Kent to Camden, a crashing weight is slammed. Doctors call it a stroke, a heart attack, a collapse. The statues have struck again.
His wife enters the breakfast room with a packet sent her by a cousin who works at the British Consulate in Berlin. A pirated copy in German of an anthology, Best English Ghost Tales, containing an early story of his own.
‘Rather flattering surprise,’ he says.
‘In what way?’
‘Well, that anyone would bother to translate one’s work. Or to read it at all, come to that.’
‘You don’t feel it to be wrong that your permission wasn’t sought? And I assume you won’t be paid.’
‘Copyright is a form of hubris, even selfishness in a way. How can something of the imagination be owned? May as well copyright birdsong. Or dawn.’
‘The author of birdsong and dawn is acknowledged hundreds of millions of times every day.’
‘This is different, my darling, it is not worth the bother.’
‘How can you say so?’
‘Most books die young. Sad but true, I’m afraid. In literature the rate of infant mortality is high.’
‘Every birth is worth recording, Bram.’
‘Nice idea. Doesn’t happen.’
‘But a book could have an afterlife about which the author knows nothing.’
‘How so?’
‘It might find readers years later, even after the novelist has died.’
‘I have never heard of such a case.’
‘What of that? It could happen.’
‘Theoretically yes, but—’
‘There is also right and wrong, Bram. Or doesn’t that matter?’
‘I must go to my work. Don’t upset yourself.’
Shortly after eleven, he attends the meeting he has called of the house staff. Boxkeepers, ushers, stagehands, fitters, scenery-movers, painters, musicians, 87 people in all. He distributes the rosters, answers the employees’ questions, most of which have to do with overdue wages, although some have to do with cats. ‘All you want to do, sir, is lay your hands on a couple of gallons of fox piss. That’s the stuff will drive ’em out.’ Reasons why a theatre manager might not want to sprinkle his premises with vulpine urine are expounded, as are the likely difficulties of sourcing several gallons of same.
He had hoped Irving would attend but there’s no sign of him, no message. ‘The Chief stays in bed until nightfall,’ someone jokes.
At lunchtime, head throbbing, Stoker takes a cab to Green Park, cools his face at the fountains, scribbles a few notes on his cuffs.
That elderly gentleman in the bath chair, being pushed by a maidservant. Two schoolboys rattling a stick through the grating of a fence. That shoeless man beneath the wych elm, dozing in the cold sunshine. What are their stories? Where are they going?
He pictures his Florence in the sepulchral silence of the Museum, surrounded by her books and papers. Then his Florence stepping out of her nightgown, letting it pool about her ankles, coming to him. So strange, marriage. Does everyone feel the same? Like music you can’t quite read.
Returned to the office, a packet is waiting on his desk with a note. ‘Look this over, if you would, and see if there’s a play here. If so, you might run up a treatment. Yours, Henry. P.S.: I assume you read French. You seem the type.’
The book is a collection of feverish stories by an American writer new to him, published by a small house in Paris. Eerie, sick yarns that would give you the shakes. People walled up in cellars, dead hearts that still beat, men harrowed by doppelgängers who haunt them. There might be stage possibilities in one or two of the tales – but roughing them out into scenes seems to burn them down, somehow – yet an idea of his own arises out of the ashes like an odour, a ghost story set not in the past but now, in Piccadilly.
How terrifying that would be for the audience, to see their own city on the stage but stalked by a monstrous evil. His ghoul would dress like an aristocrat, in finest Savile Row, would have a box at the opera, a carriage, membership of a Mayfair club, a teddibly English accent. At night he’d climb the hundred steps that lead to his townhouse’s turret, where he’d sit in a glass room glaring down on High Holborn through perpetual storms of heartache. Then he’d take to the streets, razor hidden in his waistcoat. And o, my dears, the revenge.
For a twist – yes – the monster is not a man but a woman in men’s attire, wronged by men all her life. First she steals away their wives. Then,
late at night, she strikes.
Would it work? Might it upset people, cause unrest, unhelpful questionings?
Never enough time to think a story through. Never enough money to stop thinking. Money is everything. He didn’t know it before. What a writer thirsts for is time, the permission to fail if needs be, the removal of the thumbscrews brought by having to pay the rent. Money is a work of fiction but it is needed all the same. The only kind of fiction that is.
The Costume Designer insists on speaking with him, the Orchestra Conductor is upset because a Second Violist has still not been hired, the actors are threatening mutiny because many of the wigs have lice. Two of the windows in the Quickchange Room are broken. The printer doing the programme has absconded with the money. It’s like standing on a pier in a storm of circling winds, wondering which of them will carry you away.
He buys a referee’s whistle and brings it to production meetings. When they threaten to get out of hand, as invariably they do, he blows it as hard as he can. Nothing can be accomplished if they shout each other down, he explains. Here is my hat. You will place it on your head. Only the person hatted has permission to speak. All other members of the company will listen in respectful silence.
‘… Mr Stoker, Mr Stoker, I was here first …’
‘One at a time! Let us not be unruly …’
The hat is accepted resentfully by the Chief Cloakroom Attendant who announces her immediate resignation.
He dreams of being in a cathedral-sized theatre carved out of ice, glacially quiet, a translucent basilica. Irving is seated in the Dress Circle peeling a pomegranate with a dagger, feeding handfuls of its bloody beads to his dog.
— VII —
The reader of respectable moral character will wish to pass over this chapter, in which pages from a diary kept in Pitman shorthand are offered, unclean expressions included.
5th January, 1879
Today my first book arrived in the mail from Dublin, having been commissioned by my former masters at the Castle while I was still in their employ.
The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland.
It is every bit as enthralling a read as it sounds.
But Florrie was lovely about it. We had champagne.
6th January, 1879
Told H.I. that I had been examining ways of making economies. One measure was that we might not beeswax the actors’ shoes before every performance, as he wishes to be done, but once or twice a week, the principal players only, and use common household polish, which is many times cheaper.
H.I.: All shoes will be beeswaxed daily, twice on matinee days.
Self: There is surely no need?
H.I.: Yes there is.
Self (reluctantly): As you wish.
H.I.: All swords, crowns and armour will be silvered before a performance, all costumes laundered and pressed, the players fined a night’s pay if they stain them. There is never to be so much as a speck of grime on my stage. The people want to see magic. They had better see it.
This, while behind him, on that same stage, a filthy grey cat hopped from packing crate to upturned cello-case to head of a prop Grecian statue, where it sat, regarding me coldly through the reams of ashen dust before loosening its mess over Athena.
An image which I think shall remain with me awhile.
Placed order for thirty pounds of beeswax.
7th January, 1879
This afternoon after luncheon I stepped out of rehearsal (which was very fractious indeed) and went to Hatchard’s book shop on Piccadilly to enquire as to the whereabouts of the work I had ordered some time ago but was irritated to be informed, in a somewhat lofty manner, that it had not yet arrived from the United States or was detained by HM Customs at Southampton. One would have imagined that, here in the capital of the civilised world, such relatively small requirements would be easy to supply. Damned frustrating.
But, then, surprisingly, as I made to leave, the young man (impudent mouth, lustrous black hair) called me back to the counter and said, mirabile dictu, that the parcel he had opened the very moment following my departure in fact contained the book.
It is The Principles and Science of Modern Theatrical Effects and How They Are Contrived by Edward Helsing and Edmund Lagrange. On the cursory overview that I was able to give, it appears poorly written – these colonials approach English as though blaming it for a murder – but contains a series of fascinating and detailed illustrations on the modern way of achieving such effects as authentic lightning, the roar of storms, the rushing of rivers, battle charges, cannon fire, earthquakes, tornadoes, typhoons, billows of smoke, ghosts, so on. Many of these would be shatteringly expensive – a matter no American impresario worries himself too much about, of course, the book is written as though money were rain – but some are intriguing and might be achievable even for a non-millionaire theatre.
The chapter on make-up is especially rewarding and gives direction on achieving such usable appearances as ‘Moroccan’, ‘Arab’, ‘ape-like Irish’, ‘Mediterranean (swarthy)’, ‘criminal’, ‘Spaniard’, ‘nobleman’, ‘murderer’, ‘low morals (male)’, low morals (female)’ and ‘innocent girl ruined by duke’. There is in addition a most fascinating and serviceable chapter on the conveying of ‘sundown’ and ‘dawn with birdsong’, this latter a marvel, what sounds a truly fiendish and awe-inspiring trick by which a player appears to disappear (as it were) before the audience’s eyes. It is done with precisely triangulated mirrors set behind a procession of scrims.
I mean to make an intent and long study of this and similar works for I believe that the theatre-going public will soon tire of old fashioned ways. In London this decomposition has already begun to occur. New sensations are wanted, modern, of our own world. If we can but steal a march on our rivals in this regard, we might triumph. ‘A lot is accomplished by distracting attention or by hiding in the open,’ as Helsing states in his sometimes almost literate preface. As though we didn’t know.
On the way back to the theatre I found Piccadilly Circus closed by the police because of an incident of public disorder – a woman had thrown paint at a passing cab containing the Prime Minister – and detoured across Leicester Square but was sorry to have done so. An army of poor people had congregated there, in pitiable and heart-breaking condition, very emaciated and in a terrible way. To see the men with their dignity taken away from them is a dreadful sight, many the worse for drink or given over to opium, and to see the women and children is appalling. Many of these misfortunate people were from Ireland, as I heard from their supplications. Gave what I could. Wished I had more.
How can such want be permitted in a wealthy, a generous kingdom? Why do we think that these people have different feelings, needs, from our own?
One small moment unmanned me to tears. A pigeon was hopping along on a patch of dirty grass having sustained some sort of injury making the use of one wing impossible and was flapping and piteously leaping. A feral little dog scampered from the rubbish heap and went to have at it, snarling. One of the ragged children leapt out shouting wildly ‘hie, hie, away’ and waving his arms until the mongrel slunk off, and the poor disarmed pigeon toddled on towards God knows whatever set of metropolitan jaws. But it moved me to my core to see that, in even a tiny child who can have known little enough of mercy or fairness in this world, there is at least the desire that matters should be evened up.
Intending to continue my return to the theatre, I turned down Charing Cross Road and went by St-Martin-in-the-Fields Church Path onto the Strand, when I happened to notice, through the window of the French Café on the corner of Villiers Street, the unmistakable figure of the Chief. He was seated alone and reading the Manchester Guardian. Glancing up, he saw me and, with a warm smile, beckoned.
‘And how is our princely Mr Stoker this fine morning, bedad?’
I said I was well.
‘So I see,’ he said. ‘Like stout Cortez when with eagle eye he gazed upon the Pacific.’
He asked if I w
ould take a cup of civet coffee with him.
I answered that I had a full plate of tasks to deal with at the theatre but he insisted, saying the place had dealt with itself for two hundred years and could struggle on another half an hour without our interference.
‘You shall be a welcome relief from the cussed newspaper,’ he said pleasantly. ‘I don’t know why I buy it. There is never anything one wants to read, don’t you find? Only the things one is told one should read by way of improvement.’
I found him in breezier mode than on previous occasions, amiable, likeable, affectionate. He was having a dish of porridge, onto which he poured a dram from a hipflask. ‘Bourbon County whiskey,’ he explained. ‘Nunc est Bibendum, mon brave.’
There was a morningtime sleepfulness in his manner, which can be charming in men.
‘Had a rough old time last night,’ he said with a rueful grin. ‘Fell in with bad company, down in the underworld. Place where a fellow can find whatever sort of fun he prefers. Head’s thumping. I don’t usually use alcohol.’
‘Why is that?’
‘I become unimpressive.’
I said he must be the only gentleman of the theatre not to be a devotee of the grape.
‘Well, let’s see,’ he answered, ‘I can reckon my account. In the mornings, as you’ve witnessed, I have a measure of Bourbon with my mash, like a good old horse. Then a glass or two of hock and seltzer around eleven, for pep. A bottle of claret with luncheon, a Beaumes de Venise afterwards, a flute of iced champagne around three to keep the old boilers fuelled, a good glass of beer or two immediately before I play – they like to see you sweat for them – then no grog at all until after the show. I have a snifter or two then, all right. I regard myself as practically teetotal.’
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