Dandy Gilver and a Spot of Toil and Trouble

by Catriona McPherson

  Bluey presided over another tray of drinks and offered us whisky, gin or a cocktail as we entered.

  ‘Don’t let him make you cocktails,’ Minnie called over from where she was standing in the hearth to get close enough to a sulky fire to do herself some good. ‘A little of everything that’s open and a glug of bitters.’

  Bluey gave her an affectionate look and poured us a couple of whiskies. Of the many features of northern life to which I have failed to cleave over the years, nothing brings me out in such a rash of goose pimples as the very thought of a hearty glassful of whisky, served without so much as a splash of water. Not the rim of cold fat on a slice of yesterday’s mutton, not the suet grease seeping from under the crust of a beef pie, not even the nameless rebarbative morsels that survive the mincer whenever a haggis is made.

  Thankfully, the arrival of Penny allowed me to put mine down unobtrusively in the shade of a bulbous plate warmer lurking on a sideboard. She stepped into the hearth to stand beside her mother, and I threw decorum to the winds and picked my way over the firedogs to claim the other side.

  ‘Another telegram,’ Penny said, plucking the thing from where she had tucked it into her belt and shaking it open. ‘And surely the last. They’ll all be here tomorrow.’ She cleared her throat. ‘M only choice.’

  ‘Marvellous!’ said Minnie. ‘Oh, it’s all going to be so very pretty.’

  ‘Jolly good,’ said Bluey.

  ‘M?’ said Alec.

  ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ said Bluey. ‘We made a strong bid for it and we appear to have carried the day.’

  ‘Despite Leonard—’ Minnie began.

  ‘Mother!’ said Penny.

  ‘Because Leonard—’ Minnie tried again.

  ‘The producer,’ Penny said firmly, ‘is an adventurous spirit. Ibsen, Chekhov, some of the Irish chaps. They’ve done wonderful things in Edinburgh. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is rather tame for him, actually.’

  ‘I thought you said they were performing The Tempest when the stage-floor fell in,’ I said.

  ‘The late plays are quite a different matter,’ Penny said. ‘I never thought Leonard would agree to a comedy.’

  ‘I saw a Chekhov play once,’ Alec said. ‘It was in Oxford. One performance on a Sunday afternoon.’

  ‘A Stage Society?’ said Penny, in the sort of voice one usually hears being used to say ‘a basket of puppies?’ or ‘a week in Monte Carlo?’ ‘Leonard was in one for two winters and did some thrilling work. Which play was it?’

  Alec played for time by taking a long sip of his whisky but it did not help him. ‘It might have been a chap’s name,’ he said. ‘Which one would that be?’

  ‘I saw Henry Irving as Othello once,’ I offered up, by means of help. ‘Gosh, it was terrifying. A whole matinee of nurses and nannies bolt upright with horror. Not a toffee wrapper rustling in stalls, circle or gods.’

  Penny gave me a kind look. I was interested to see that I had graduated onto kindness. Ten years before, any theatre fanatic would have withered me for such inanity.

  ‘Now, now, Penny,’ said her mother. ‘I see your thoughts as though they’re painted on your face. The choice of play is a good start, but you must promise to help me with Leonard. We need fairies with gauzy wings and flowers in their hair. We need rustics with green beards and red cheeks. We need beauty and lightness and laughter. You must stop Leonard if he threatens to get peculiar.’

  ‘But,’ Penny began.

  ‘We need a nice entertainment for the sort of people who’d like a picnic tea,’ said Minnie.

  ‘But,’ Penny tried again.

  ‘A delightful crowning glory to a day of lectures and country walks,’ said Minnie.

  ‘If you charge them theatre rent I don’t think you can also expect to have a say in the artistic decisions, Mother. Leonard—’

  ‘If Leonard wants to spend next winter with Norwegian housewives fainting all over his stage without falling through it,’ said Bluey, ‘he will need to spend this summer with pretty fairies flitting and rude mechanicals mugging and a jolly Puck. And being a businessman at heart he has seen that it is so. He has chosen well and will see sense about the rest of it if we present a united front to him.’

  I was speechless. Bluey had just displayed a knowledge of modern and classical theatre unrivalled in any man of our set. Penny looked mutinous at the description of her beloved as a businessman, but since her grandmother chose that moment to totter into the room on the arm of a little maid, the awkwardness passed.

  ‘Shepherd’s delight out the west windows,’ Ottoline announced. ‘Good weather for carpentering tomorrow.’

  In the murk of the castle, its shuttered casements and arrow-slits as much lead as glass, I had forgotten that it was summer outside and it was hard to credit that there was a June sunset going on beyond these feet-thick walls. The dinner, when it came, did not strike a summery note either: brown soup, smoked fish, roast pork, mashed roots and fruit mould. I returned to the plague chamber gravid with it.

  Waiting for Grant, though, I manhandled one of the shutters open and then managed to open the casement, bashing at the catch with a shoe until it gave. I threw the window wide, leaned out, and was charmed to see an almost full moon gleaming like a pearl in the hazy night and reflected softly in the stillness of the moat so that it looked, as I gazed down on it, like something submerged. I thought of a face looking up from deep underwater, its features blurred, and shivered.

  ‘You’ll catch your death, madam,’ said Grant’s voice from behind me. ‘Come away.’

  ‘How was your evening?’ I asked her. ‘It might be the last rest you have for a while, you know. There’s much talk of fairy wings and coronets.’

  ‘What’s that?’ said Grant. She had leaned out as far as she could stretch to pull the window closed and was craning over to the left where the track led across the field to the gate.

  ‘What’s what?’ I said, joining her. ‘Oh, yes. What is that?’

  A pair of lights, small and dotting about like fireflies, were winking in the darkness.

  ‘Do sheeps’ eyes reflect the light like cats’ eyes?’ said Grant.

  ‘Not that I’ve ever heard,’ I said. ‘No, surely not. Or driving through farmland with headlamps on would have been unnerving all these years in a way it hasn’t been.’

  ‘And it’s the wrong colour for cigarette ends,’ Grant said. ‘Should we raise the alarm?’

  ‘More of the famous burglars, right on cue?’ I said. ‘Rambling along the lane with torches lit?’

  Grant shrugged and then tugged the window shut with a sharp bang. In an instant, both little lights disappeared, leaving perfect blackness except for that pearly moon and the blurred face in the bottom of the moat.

  ‘You’ve scared the fairies away,’ I said, trying to make a joke of it and not quite succeeding. Grant, in turn, did not quite laugh.

  ‘How are your quarters?’ I asked her, to get things back to normal as I was undressing.

  ‘More modern than these,’ Grant said. ‘A square room with plastered walls and a flat floor. I’m sharing with Gilly.’

  Ordinarily she would have taken great umbrage at this. It was a mark of her reluctance to spend a night alone in a cursed castle that she welcomed the company.

  ‘Gilly?’ I said. ‘Is that the child who led Mrs Bewer into dinner? She seemed a nice sort.’

  ‘And she knows nothing of the history of this place and it’s to stay that way,’ Grant said. ‘They’ve had maid after maid take the vapours and leave. They had to go as far as Carlisle for this one and she is not to be unsettled.’

  Half an hour later, as I lay in my bed, high and narrow and hung about with curtains, I cast my eye around by the light of my candle and rather wished someone had decreed that no nasty stories were to unsettle me. I have never liked bed hangings. Nanny Palmer disapproved vociferously, of course, for fresh air was next door to a religion with her and sleeping inside a tent of cloth with spiders in
the folds kept all air, fresh and stale, shut out. When I was small, though, and could not have cared less about fresh air, any more than clean nails and straight backs, all I knew was that Nanny disapproved of bed hangings for me. With the self-regard of infants everywhere I surmised that they put me in mortal danger. Add the thrilling tales that were read to us at bedtime, of pirates and highwaymen and orphans out in the cold, and I spent many a night shaking in a huddle under my blankets, sure that some ne’er-do-well was stalking the corners of my room and, if it were not for those hangings, at least I might be able to see him.

  Back then, I was wont to put my fears from me by turning them on my little sister Mavis and delighting in her terror. Stevenson’s verses were a great help and poor Mavis’s temperament did its bit. Scoffing at her tears drove all memory of my own away.

  That first night in Castle Bewer, though, I felt a few wisps of those early horrors begin to steal back around me again. The candle guttered, the hangings shook as draughts caught them and once, just once, a vixen barked out there in the quiet night. I sat up and hugged my knees, ready to give myself a stern talking-to.

  It was a case like any other case. I looked forward to hearing what outlandish scheme Minnie was ‘pretty well certain’ not to pursue, of course, but there was plenty besides it to occupy me. Alec and I were to search for something lost and try to make sure no one else found it before us. It helped me to think of it that way: a lost item of high value. I cast my eyes around my bedroom. There must surely be floor plans of the castle. There must be a library amongst these lodgings and turrets and keeps. We could make a methodical search of the place from the chimneys to the dungeons and would either find the thing or report with confidence that it was gone.

  Tales of curses would not help us in the task. We had to stick to the plain facts. We had to put ourselves in the mind of Richard Bewer all those years ago and intuit what had happened. I sat up a little straighter. Something had certainly happened. Between his hiding the thing and his sending his first dogsbody back to fetch it for him, it had vanished. We needed the residents of Castle Bewer from those days, thirty years ago, to search their memories and dredge up any tiny thing that might be a clue.

  Methodical searching and a round of interviews, I thought. Mrs Bewer herself, Bluey if he had been at the castle and not in London the whole time. Any servants of long standing. It would surprise me if Pugh were not decades into serving the Bewer family.

  At last I felt sleep tug at my ravelled sleeve and I wriggled down into my bedclothes to let it do its work, feeling for the first time, equal to the task before me.

  Morning brought another surge of confidence and energy. I woke in my favourite way, to the echo of an excellent housemaid who had laid and lit a fire, opened curtains and shutters, and then brought and set down a tea tray, but whose first sound loud enough to rouse me was her closing the door behind her on leaving.

  The shepherd’s delight of the evening before had borne fruit: it was a sparkling blue day with swifts wheeling joyously back and forth across my window and the cheerful sound of a cart pony clip-clopping along the lane at a steady trot. I got up and went over to feast my eyes on the view.

  The sheep were steaming as the dew rose from their backs in the warmth of the morning and there were ducks making rippled darts in the moat far below. The pony harrumphed in a friendly way as its driver leapt down from the cart to lead it through the gate. I drew back a little, not liking to be seen in my nightie by a grocer’s boy or a late milkman. Taking a closer look at the carter, though, I suspected that this was the vanguard of the theatrical players. He was dressed, it is true, in ancient flannels and a collarless shirt with a cotton scarf at his neck and a pipe in his mouth, but something about his swagger marked him out. Besides, on the other side of the high seat there still sat a brawny young woman dressed in a long skirt of something with a shimmer to it and a tight coat of the cut Eliza Doolittle had learned not to wear. She was smoking a cigarette in a long black holder and lounging back against the bulk of the cart’s load.

  ‘They’re here!’ said Grant, coming in at my door. ‘The first of them anyway. The AM and the ASM.’ She was dying for me to ask what those letters stood for.

  ‘So I see,’ I said, nodding out at the cart. ‘Go down if you like. I can manage.’

  Grant cast a critical eye over me, evaluating this claim, but in the end contented herself with laying out my clothes, forbidding me from making any changes and pressing my hair hard all over my head with her fingers until she deemed it satisfactory.

  By the time I got down to breakfast, the flannel-clad man was sitting tucking into an enormous plate of eggs and bacon and the large, shimmering woman was nibbling a slice of toast. The shimmer was gone along with the tight coat and she was dressed in stout twill trews and a man’s shirt, minus its buttons and held closed over her front with twists of string. More of the same string held her abundant hair in a kind of mop-shape on the back of her head, as though she had started to dress it and been disturbed early on.

  ‘Mrs Gilver, this is Leonard,’ said Penny, ‘and Bess.’

  ‘How do you do, Mr …’ I said. ‘And Miss …’

  Minnie tutted but Penny did not complete the introduction. At least the graceless manners of the two youngsters spared me having to account for my presence. They cared not who I was nor why I was there.

  ‘Such a beautiful morning!’ Penny went on. ‘If it carries on like this, the opening will be a dream indeed.’

  I noticed that Leonard gave a quick frown at her words but he did not speak. He might be a cousin but he had none of the Bewers’ affability. On the other hand, he had escaped the Bewers’ unfortunate colouring too; I did not foresee him turning to a beetroot as the years rolled by, for his hair was as black as a raven’s wing, his skin milk white and his eyes as blue as the painted willows on Minnie’s breakfast china.

  ‘When do you open?’ said Alec. He had finished his breakfast and was sitting with a last cup of coffee and his first pipe of the day, enjoying the sight of another prodigious eater at work.

  ‘Saturday,’ said Leonard. ‘We’re cast and rehearsed. The whole company off the book. We’ll build sets today, tech and dress tomorrow, and Saturday night we open.’

  ‘Gosh,’ I said. ‘One day to build sets? Shall you manage it?’ I was imagining high wires set up for fairies to swing across above our heads and the many wooden trees it would take to turn the courtyard into a forest glade.

  ‘We are no longer prisoners of the proscenium arch,’ said Bess. Her tone was brusque to the point of rudeness.

  ‘But, Penny my dear,’ Minnie said, ‘we did discuss this. You are having some scenery, aren’t you? The paying public want to see a spectacle as well as listening to the poetry. We need to put on a good show.’

  ‘We had a quick look round,’ Leonard said, ‘and really we don’t want more than a doorway or two. This place is perfect already. If we can light some lamps in the open windows at either side of the stage … I mean, why make a paste castle when we’re in a real one?’

  ‘Castle?’ said Bluey. ‘Of course, it’s been a while since I saw the play and tastes have changed but are you really setting it in a castle?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Minnie. ‘I rather thought the audience would be up this way and you would build the stage at the other end where it’s open to the meadow and the far wood. How will the people get to their seats?’

  ‘Mother,’ said Penny. ‘They can come through the West Lodging passageway and out at the under-hall door. Really, you don’t need to concern yourself with the minutiae.’

  ‘We could move to the other end,’ Leonard said. ‘We have plenty willing hands. Everyone’s gladly walking on as messengers and soldiers. And none would quail at the thought of picking up a paintbrush or a hammer.’

  ‘Well,’ said Bess. She had nibbled as much of the toast as she wanted and she set it down and dabbed her lips. I wondered how a woman got so Amazonian without eating. ‘Don’t ask Dunc
an to knock together flats. He’s eighty if a day. And one of those witches is drawing a pension. As you’ll see when they get here, Minnie,’ she added, turning to her hostess and affecting not to notice the blink of astonishment Minnie gave at being addressed this way.

  ‘Witches?’ said Penny. ‘Duncan?’

  I think the truth broke on all of us at once, excepting Alec who has never been much of a one for Shakespeare.

  ‘You think the castle will make a better backdrop than the meadow,’ said Minnie, rather bleakly. ‘And the walk-ons are messengers and soldiers. And the elders in the cast are …’

  ‘Oh,’ said Alec. ‘Duncan and a witch!’

  ‘We were supposed to be doing A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ Penny wailed.

  ‘What?’ said Bess, with a snort. ‘That romantic twaddle?’

  ‘I sent you a telegram,’ said Leonard.

  ‘Telling me M was the only choice,’ Penny cried, her voice rising.

  ‘Yes. M,’ said Leonard. ‘The Dream would be D.’

  ‘But this won’t do!’ said Bluey. ‘We’ve been advertising a beautiful summer’s evening with love in the air. We’ve all been mugging up on Puck and Peaseblossom.’

  ‘We’ve painted bills to post around the village!’ said Penny. ‘Leonard, I’m surprised at you. I thought you had swept away all the hackneyed nonsense. I cannot believe you were too superstitious to write the word “Macbeth” in a telegram.’

  ‘I’m not!’ Leonard yelped. ‘Good grief, Penny, what do you take me for?’

  ‘Well, what in the blazes, then?’ said Bluey. ‘Were you trying to trick us into agreeing?’

  ‘I was trying to save six letters at a ha’penny each,’ Leonard said and his words had such a ring of truth and were so pertinent to everyone’s concern in this escapade that they silenced the entire party.