When the Chief Stagehand tried to insist, Harry countermanded him in a line that became legendary throughout London theatre. ‘We have sixteen-year-old girls here as cleaners, we have seamstresses and actresses. They should not have to walk through a whorehouse in order to do their work.’
He enforced it, too. He’d fine infractors a day’s wages. Home Rule was all very well but the emperor stepped in sometimes. That takes courage, the natives don’t like it.
So, Harry could be a brick. But he wasn’t always.
It’s just that everyone has a Mr Hyde, another version of the self. A direction not taken, perhaps. A road we didn’t know existed, or had no name for. We each of us carry our choices about, don’t we, darling? And every choice is a rejection, when you think.
But there is, too, a kind of shadowland where the Other always lives. Or at least, never dies. Just goes on. Hard to stumble into happiness if you don’t leave your shadowland behind. Harry never did, quite. Neither did Bram. Theatre people don’t, as a rule. Goes with the job. Everything is so precarious, almost all of the time. Makes it hard to settle. One gets fidgety. And when you’re someone else, every night, and twice on a Saturday, you can forget what it’s like being you.
I always felt, you know, two hands are needed here. One to wave farewell, the other to close the heart. Some ancient poet has an ode about it, can’t think of his name. But easier said than done. I don’t know that anyone succeeds.
Questionings. Dawn-thoughts. Mind ticking like a watch. Four in the morning but you’re staring out a window. What if I had married that other person? Or remained unmarried? What if I had accepted that job, or emigrated or stayed, or lived my life in a different way, a way that was truer to me, perhaps, but I was afraid of what people might think or say?
You see, part of you did do those things. To imagine is to do.
And there are moments when you feel a murderous envy of that part. The self that escaped. The self that chose freedom.
So, out comes the rage. But already too late.
It’s the only thing one’s learned. We’re in shadowland.
17th February, 1879
2.15 a.m.
All night, since my ascent to ‘Mina’s Lair’, I was unable to concentrate on my preparatory work for the American tour. Descending, I realised that I had a notion for a story. It was as though I had stumbled into it, above in the shadows, and it had adhered itself like dander to my clothes, beard and eyebrows.
The story would be in ten or a dozen monthly parts, told in the form of letters and entries in a private journal, the one to be at odds with the other. That is to say, the narrator in the letters is dissembling, or, as in a pantomime, does not realise what is happening to him, but the audience does and wishes to cry out ‘Look behind you, Chump!’
Part the First. A young man of facts, perhaps a scientist or mathematician, journeys to a distant land he does not know. Persia? Africa? An island off Connemara? Some place beyond the mapped world.
Say a lecturer in Medicine, but not an important professor. He must have that slight grain of stupidity all effective protagonists require, that quality of not getting the point at once. Say a junior in surgery at Dublin University or the Sorbonne, so besotted by his studies that common sense has never been valued or acquired. The sort of man who sees but does not see.
He is in search of a precious elixir, a potion that gives eternal life, which springs from a long-lost well or cleft in a rock. Drink it and one never dies.
Make him an orphan. No mother or father means his moral compass is askew, no guide, he must struggle on alone.
Arrived in the unknown country, he finds all the inns are full. In the midst of a violent storm he is taken in by an elderly nobleman, the lord of a stark and forbidding palace. At first the host is icily hospitable, if eccentric, which the young doctor ascribes to loneliness and the depredations of old age. Or to a discontented marriage.
The nobleman has all the queerness of unstintingly perfect hospitality. Plentiful food but always the same dish, a strange meat.
Unending wine, from his vineyards, but the lord will not partake of it himself. Is never witnessed eating. ‘I breakfasted late and do not sup.’ Heavy doors perpetually locked. Bars on every window. ‘You may leave in the morning,’ but morning never comes. Every night he falls into soporific, annihilating sleep but awakens in darkness, his host telling him he slept too long, the day has passed and with it the opportunity to depart.
Later
Quarter past five in the morning. Have just awakened from a terrible nightmare.
Was working at an anvil, bashing iron with a hammer. The spear-tipped black gates of an ancient cathedral torn down and being smelted in a furnace.
Then walking some city to which I have been, part Rotterdam, part Munich, maybe Prague, but none of those, or a composite of all. Gloomy streets, hungry doorways, skeletally thin tall houses overlooking canals. Strange figures hurrying through the desuetude, wolfish grunts, blue flames for eyes.
Wore a suit of armour so heavy I could scarcely move. This was what I had fashioned on the anvil. Droplets of my sweat hissing as they fell on the red iron.
Then, somehow, in a sumptuous chamber, bound, in a throne, hands and ankles tied.
Before me, the three innocent girls from the theatre, but now transformed by some wormlike sinfulness dredged from my imagination to lasciviousness, obscenity and mockery. They made me watch as they cavorted, one with the others, their mouths now about my face, their fingers in my hair, their lewd acts – I cannot write it.
‘O he is young and strong,’ one murmured, ‘there are kisses for us all’, as she knelt before me, unfastening my shirt. Soon her lips were upon me no matter how I writhed.
Now a hooded figure either came in or was seen to be there. Diamond crown on its hood, sceptre and orb in gauntleted hands.
‘Back to your tombs,’ it cried. ‘This man belongs to me.’
But ‘cried’ is too weak. Hideously more than a cry.
It was a scream, like a woman’s. But a man’s.
— CLOSE OF ACT I —
— X —
Entr’acte. In which we return to the train journey which opened our adventure, a pause now being taken by the travellers.
October 12th, 1905, Sheffield Station, 2.17 p.m.
Assisted by the conductor, Stoker descends from the train.
A howl of autumn leaves swirls dustily along the platform, moistening his weary eyes. Early afternoon but the sky is shroud-grey and cast-iron cold. Soot from the town’s factories on the air.
Stiff from the seven hours in a seat since King’s Cross, he turns and helps Irving down. The older man, frail, is shivering, weary. Stoker fastens the large buttons on his charge’s cloak.
‘Must be careful,’ he says. ‘They say there’s a hurricane about to blow up.’
‘Nonsense,’ Irving replies, holding a kerchief over his mouth to stop the dust. ‘I’ve had worse wind from an egg.’
The kohl around his eyes gives him an Egyptian stare. He taps his cane on the platform impatiently. Stoker whistles for a porter. The pigeon-toed man approaches, begins loading their luggage onto a handcart.
‘Bradford, is it, gentlemen? Tha’ll be wanting platform six at half after three.’
‘Thank you,’ Stoker says. ‘Would you happen to have a tearoom?’
He and Irving link arms in the flail of breeze as they follow the porter along the station. In the park across the street, scabby elms bend and groan. The floor of the underpass is slippery with dirty puddles – the latrine has overflowed, the porter confides tactfully, result of this morning’s rainstorm. More on the way.
‘Bloody Yorkshire,’ Irving mutters. ‘The island of the damned.’
‘Do shut up, will you.’
‘Give me my throat-spray.’
‘Can’t it wait a few moments?’
The porter is finding it difficult not to look at the show. You don’t often see a man wearing rouge in Sh
effield.
Southerner, of course. Spot ’em a mile off. Imagine having to live down there among all the other jessies. With pitying incomprehension, he leads them into the tea room, which, thankfully, is almost empty.
Irving seats himself at the most prominent table, opens his mouth in what appears to be the widest yawn he can perform and squirts himself, gargling, with the throat-spray. Behind the dirty counter, Big Jean the tea lady is staring, stern as Boadicea in a cardie. She’s drying that glass with white-eyed ferocity. She once slapped an orphan for crying.
‘Do you think,’ Stoker murmurs to Irving, ‘that you might be a little less ostentatious?’
‘Why are there no reporters?’
‘Please don’t start.’
‘Is the arrival of Sir Henry Irving in a godforsaken armpit of a town so insignificant now?’
‘I didn’t think you’d want the press. I know you value your privacy. Now for pity’s sake look at the menu.’
‘In truth it is the same with Northerners all over the world, had you noticed? People who live in the north of countries always inbreed and are mean. Darwin or someone explains it.’
‘I beseech you—’
‘And Darwin or someone is right as the mail. Peasants. Lummoxes. Whippet-training dolts. Wouldn’t know an artist if one gnawed off their arse. Which isn’t about to happen.’
Tongue sandwiches are brought, with a large pot of tea. Time passes.
Irving begins biting, then paring, his fingernails, whistling through his teeth as he does so. Now and again he snatches at the air in an attempt to catch a bluebottle, but like everyone who has ever attempted it, he fails.
‘Have we heard back from Chicago?’ he asks.
‘Not yet. I’m sure we shall.’
‘For Christ’s sake, my farewell American tour. What are they waiting for? Where precisely are we booked and confirmed for the summer?’
‘I have told you already.’
‘Tell me again.’
‘Philadelphia, Boston, Detroit, Baltimore, Washington, Des Moines, then over to San Francisco, then Helena, Montana, the new playhouse.’
‘Not Chicago or New York?’
‘As I said.’
‘It is a ruddy poor American tour if it doesn’t include Chicago or New York.’
‘That is why I am working on including them.’
‘What is that you’re reading?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Obviously, it doesn’t matter, darling, nothing you do matters. I thought we might go mad and indulge ourselves in a little social intercourse.’
‘You know that I am reading Walt Whitman, you can see it on the cover.’
‘Auntie loves refusing to argue, it makes her feel proper superior, don’t it?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Loves everything tightening up inside and refusing to give in. Holding onto her ladylike dignity.’
‘Have you finished?’
‘You larger girls do tend to love old Wally Whitman, it is odd.’
‘Many people the world over care deeply for Whitman’s poetry. He was a nurse in the American Civil War.’
‘So was my cock.’
‘Splendid.’
‘He reminds one of one of those fat German nudists one bumps into from time to time, you know at spa towns. Hands on hips like a tea-urn, and everything jiggling about. Terribly proud of himself and manly and lacking in bourgeois shame and so on, and you sort of wonder why. Makes one pine for a bit of reserve.’
‘If you are feeling at all reserved, please surrender to that feeling.’
‘Thank you, darling. Another tongue sandwich?’
‘I am ignoring you.’
‘It is the finest tongue in Yorkshire.’
The day-mail for London roars through.
It’s birching they want, big Jean reflects. Mind you, being Southerners, they’d like it.
‘What year did we play New Orleans?’ Irving asks. ‘’86 or ’87?’
‘’88. Our seventh American tour. We started there.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Our crossing was Southampton to New Orleans. We took on supplies at Philadelphia.’
‘That’s right, I remember now. We started in New Orleans. And we ended in Washington, wasn’t it, Bramzie?’
‘No, we ended in New York. Washington DC was the penultimate show.’
‘Are you certain?’
‘Positive.’
‘Could have sworn it was Washington.’
‘We played four nights in Washington, then finished with a week in New York. The final performance was Faust, August the twentieth, 1888. It started late because of a streetcar accident. You had a cold.’
‘I don’t think that’s right.’
‘It is.’
Nothing is said, they sit silent in the window. The older with a crocodile’s ability not to move, nor even blink, his assistant rarely turning a page.
He cannot be reading. Why is he pretending? As though awaiting permission, some cue from the teacups. Some sign that their story will be permitted to continue, the arrival of a train they doubt is coming.
ACT II
Do We Not Bleed?
— XI —
A letter
27 Cheyne Walk,
Chelsea,
London.
13th August, 1888
My dearest own husband, my much missed Bram.
I am sending this to the hotel in Washington DC and hope it arrives there before you do.
I trust that the American tour is coming out as you hoped and that you are looking after yourself and not too tired as the end peeps over the horizon. Nolly is on top form but misses his dada. Six months without you is a significant portion of a nine-year-old life. But he has been cock-a-hoop at your weekly parcels of toys, which always seem to arrive just as he is feeling mopey.
I have pinned the tour schedule and a large map of the United States to his bedroom wall so that he can follow your progress. What we do is to push a large needle into each city as you arrive there, and then the next, and so on, and we join the needles by lengths of draper’s black thread. The web is become an extraordinary knot, stretching westerly as far as Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco, northerly to Chicago, down to Charlotte and Lynchburg and Richmond, criss-crossing and retracing so that it looks like the lair of some monstrous Lord of Spiders. In addition, Nolly has begun a funny game with me, where he will say ‘Tonight my daddy is in the city containing the Liberty Bell’, and I must pretend not to know that that is Philadelphia, or ‘Tonight my daddy is at latitude 41.6, longitude 93.6’, and Nanny or I must attempt to guess where that is. (Des Moines.)
He is getting big and very strong for a boy of his age – you shan’t believe the size of him – and is able to chop wood, which I would prefer him not to do since that new axe is still so sharp, but he wraps me around his finger. I shall probably take him to Dublin on a little holiday next week for his birthday since my parents are quite in love with him. He is a little slow at his letters but will come along in time. I said to him a moment ago, ‘Noel Irving Stoker, you shall write to your father.’ So, you may expect an epistle from him soon.
I have a funny story to tell you, oh Bee, I wished you were here to see it. Some time ago – did I tell you – the Mechanics’ Institute decided my classes in reading and writing over the years had been such a success that they wished to take on a person to administer further schemes of the sort. I suggested, more accurately insisted, that I be one of the adjudicators, and after much grumbling and huffing, they agreed.
We received a couple of dozen applications and sifted them down to three, a task requiring much Christian forbearance on my part, as my colleagues tried to insist on jemmying in their own friends or favourites, sometimes with wearying directness. On a number of occasions I stepped outside the committee room, pleading the need for fresh air, and took the name of Our Lord in vain, which was revivifying.
The Tuesday
arrived when our trio presented themselves for consideration. Our jury of interview comprised four. Mr Masterson, Mr Madison, Mr Mowbray and myself. One would not have wanted to stammer on the sound ‘M’.
In came the three candidates each to give an account. We spent twenty minutes conversing with them and took notes as they answered. I will show you the notes when you come home.
When I tell you that one of the applicants was a pleasant, intelligent woman of thirty, working currently as a governess at Blackheath, speaking French, German and Italian fluently, the second a young man, also pleasant, a good-looking almost-halfwit who could not stop folding and unfolding his arms, the third a scrofulous old bore who staggered in reeking of whiskey and mediocrity (but was a great friend and comrade of Messrs Mowbray and Madison), you will know which contender was preferred by my colleagues, but they played their cards close for a time.
The young halfwit we eliminated quickly, for differing reasons. My fellow jurors, being oldfellows, did not like that he was young. I did not like that he was a halfwit.
He was breathtakingly handsome, as I say, but not to be entrusted with anything more demanding than counting the buttons on his waistcoat. I was given the task of breaking the news to him, he was waiting in the anteroom. He appeared relieved at being rejected and went away pleasantly, folding and unfolding his arms, tripping over his laces in the corridor and in general being completely adorable.
We came then to consider the governess, and I spoke ardently in her favour. If anything, I said, she was excessively qualified and experienced, we were fortunate to have attracted a person of such gifts. She had impressed me, during our conversation, by her calm, measured voice (which reminded me of your own mode of speaking).
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