Grant gave me a look of incredulity and laughed loud enough to make Leonard turn again and swear this time. ‘It’s make-up, madam,’ she said. ‘I’m made up to play the ghost of Bloody Mary in the procession of kings. And if you think I’m bad!’ She nodded beyond my shoulder. I turned and gasped. Alec had sidled in at my other side, dressed and made up as Third Murderer, with dishevelled hair, a stubbled jaw, blackened teeth and grimy nails. He was dressed in a worn-looking tunic tied at the waist with frayed rope and some greyish brown hose, bagged at the knees and holey along the hems above bare filthy feet.
‘You look dreadful!’ I said. ‘You both look worse than the witches.’
‘Exactly,’ Grant said. ‘I asked to do the make-up and Leonard said no. So I thought I’d show him what he’s missing tonight and he’ll change his mind by tomorrow.’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘And why the blanket?’
‘Oh,’ said Grant airily, ‘just to keep my costume clean until my entrance.’
I had no idea what she was up to, but the dull speeches about battles had finished, the men were gone and the witches were back, as thrilling as a pantomime. When Banquo and Macbeth joined them, Paddy Ramekin none the worse that I could see for his dowsing, Leonard relaxed like a bag of meal with its string cut. He sat back and put his hands behind his head, lacing his fingers there, then stretched his feet out in front of him. It lasted for two lines until a speech by the third witch brought him snapping upright and scribbling in his script. Elizabeth, who had delivered the line, noticed – How could she not? – and her distraction distracted the other two. Max as Macbeth ploughed on with his next bit – ‘Stay, you imperfect speakers’ which drew a ‘Ha!’ from Leonard. It was so loud that even Macbeth stopped, befuddled, and looked out over the footlights with his hand above his brow.
‘What?’ he said.
‘Keep going! Keep going!’ said Leonard. ‘For God’s sake, this is a dress rehearsal. You keep going even if the whole set slides into the moat. I shall tell you all what I think of you at the interval.’
‘But how of Cawdor?’ said Max turning back to the witches. ‘The Thane of Cawdor lives.’
What’s wrong with him?’ I whispered to Grant, nodding at Leonard’s back.
‘The third witch said “beget” instead of “get”,’ said Grant. ‘Trying to make the prophecy about children a little clearer.’
‘That seems a sensible idea,’ I said. ‘Anything to help the audience understand. Unless we give all of them a book, like Ottoline, and let them just enjoy the spectacle.’ I gestured towards the front row but saw that, already, Otto had gone.
‘Listen,’ Grant said, holding up a finger just as Macbeth delivered the line ‘your children shall be kings’. ‘See?’ she said. ‘Half a page later and they sum it up nicely for everyone. There’s no need to pander.’
‘But in the interim people might get tired of being lost and just wander off like Mrs Bewer has,’ I said.
‘She didn’t wander,’ said Grant. ‘She bolted. Before the play had even started. Perhaps she’s not feeling well again.’
If so, I thought, Minnie and Bluey were being as callous as ever, for they were both just sitting there watching the rehearsal with every sign of enjoyment. I slipped past Grant and down to the ground level of the courtyard to follow Ottoline and make sure she was comfortable.
She was not in her room, nor in the sitting room, great hall, morning room nor book room. I was at a loss. I even went and stood listening outside the door of the nearest lavatory, hoping that I would not hear anything, then knocking to make doubly sure when indeed there was only silence from within. I set off for the kitchens next, thinking of Mrs Ellen and Ottoline had a close connection for mistress and servant and so perhaps Otto had gone there for succour if she was overcome by illness suddenly.
Then my footsteps stilled. There I was standing like a statue in the dark of the passageway as my thoughts raced. Close connections between mistress and servant, I thought to myself. Or master and servant anyway. Gunn, Nanny, Gilly, Pugh. I had missed something.
At last I started moving again, surprising myself with how I could so assuredly find my way through this warren of stone passages. I rapped on the door to alert Mrs Porteous to my presence and, when I entered, it was to see the bright room transformed by the leafy bough slung over the airer, filtering the sunlight from the high windows so that it seemed we were in a glade, as though it were the Dream after all that had stormed the castle. It was also to see a huddled figure, sitting with a blanket pulled right over its head, on a stool drawn close to the fire.
‘Otto?’ I said. ‘Are you ill?’
‘I’m ill,’ said the figure, pushing the blanket back and turning to me. ‘But I’m not Otto.’ It was Francis Mowatt, shivering and glassy-eyed. Mrs Porteous came in from the scullery with a basin and dropped it at his feet.
‘A mustard scald’ll see you to rights,’ she said, sounding more like one of the witches than ever and looking so unfortunately like one too. Francis’s reply was a huge sneeze that left him shuddering and brought more tears to his eyes.
‘You caught a chill in the moat then?’ I said.
‘I caught more than a chill,’ said Francis. ‘I’ve had a premonition of my death.’
The chill seemed more to the point right at that moment, but I did not want to appear rude.
‘How so?’
‘I thought I was drowning,’ said Francis. His voice had shrunk to a croak and he coughed piteously. ‘I saw visions and almost swooned before Paddy snatched me back up again.’
‘Are you able to go on?’
‘I’ve been on,’ Francis told me. ‘I’m Angus. I’ve just come off. Angus isn’t back until Birnam Wood in Act V but I’m the porter at the start of Act II as well and I need to get changed soon.’
‘If you take your clothes off in that howling draughty passage they’ve got fitted up as a dressing room you’ll catch your death,’ said Mrs Porteous. ‘They’ll have to get someone else to do it.’ She was back with a kettle and she proceeded to fill the basin with hot water.
‘Oh, oh, oh!’ said Francis. ‘It’s too hot! There is no one else. Leonard has us down to the bone already.’
‘It’s a scald,’ said Mrs Porteous witheringly. ‘Of course it’s hot. And as for no one else? The castle is fair lowping with actors. There must be one. I’ll get the mustard pot,’ she added and left again.
‘I don’t have to take anything off for the porter,’ Francis said. ‘Good God, look at my skin!’ He lifted one foot out of the basin and indeed it was as pink as a piglet and seemed to pulse with heat. ‘I just have to put a nightshirt and nightcap on and roll my hose up to look bare-legged. And I need this job and the show must—’ Then he fired off five sneezes in rapid succession. Tears were streaming down his face when he was done.
‘Alec could do it,’ I said. ‘He’s made up as a ghost though, and he doesn’t know the lines.’
‘Take him the book,’ said Francis, pointing to where a script lay on the table. ‘It doesn’t matter that he’s reading. Just take him the book and the cap and gown. As long as we don’t stop the dress. If we stop the dress Leonard will sack me and find a new Angus by tomorrow. This is my first proper job all year. Please, Mrs Gilver. Hurry.’
I snatched up the script and the bundle of linen that was sitting beside it and made my way at a trot to the door leading into the makeshift wings. ‘Where are we?’ I whispered to Bess who was in the prompt corner with a tungsten torch, following the lines with her finger. She did not turn, even for an instant, but just tapped the page with her finger. ‘Macbeth doth murder sleep,’ I read over her shoulder just as the same words came in a terrified, quaking voice from Max upon the stage:
‘Macbeth doth murder sleep, the innocent sleep, sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care.’
I fluttered the pages forward, muttering ‘porter, porter’, then finding nothing started to flutter them back again almost all the way to where I had
started. I gasped.
‘Sssh,’ said Bess, again without looking up.
‘It’s the next page!’ I whispered. ‘How can I get Alec round here by the next page?’
‘Will you shut up!’ said Bess, bending low over her book.
I peeped out of the wing to where Alec and Grant were sitting and waved madly. They did not see me. Then, at a tug on my arm, I turned to see that Tansy was reading the script over Bess’s shoulder and Bess was glaring at me.
‘Where’s that bloody Francis?’ she said, whispering so furiously it was more intimidating than if she had bellowed. ‘He’s on and he’s nowhere to be found. Have you seen him?’
‘I?’ I said, planning to lie to her in case she boxed my ears for being the bearer of bad tidings.
‘Is that the porter’s costume?’ she said. ‘What are you doing with it?’
‘Here!’ I said, shoving it at her. ‘He’s in the kitchen with his feet in a mustard scald, shivering and sneezing. You’ll have to go on. Here’s a script too.’
‘I can’t go on!’ said Bess. ‘I’m on the book.’
‘Well, Tansy then,’ I said.
‘I’m on soon,’ said Tansy without looking up. ‘And I’ve got Lady M’s quick change coming. She’ll never manage it herself. In fact, Bess, I need to step away.’
Bess looked down as Tansy disappeared.
‘Enter Porter,’ she said in an insufferable, told-you-so kind of a voice. And she knocked hard on the beam beside her little chair.
‘Porter!’ screamed Leonard from the front. ‘Where’s Francis? PORTER!’
‘Nothing else for it,’ said Bess. She seized the bundle of linen, shook the cap free of the nightgown, jammed it onto my head, turned the book back at the right page and, with both hands in the small of my back, shoved me onto the stage so firmly I stumbled and almost fell.
18
Seven o’clock on a midsummer evening in Scotland is not dark by any means, but the high castle walls to the west, the lights shining up from our feet and the fact, it must be said, that my eyes misted over with the kind of greyness that usually precedes a faint, meant that I could not see anything beyond the edge of the stage. Far from that reducing my state of utter panic, it increased it, for I could not look out and confirm for my reeling head and banging heart that only Leonard, the Bewers, Alec, Grant and the four American ladies were watching me. And since I was upon a stage, my flustered imagination filled in what is usually on the other side of those dazzling lights, what has been on the other side of them every time I have been in a theatre; namely, a packed audience of my peers, some of them exacting, half of them bored and all of them watching.
Bess knocked again on the beam by her stool and hissed: ‘Here’s a knocking indeed.’
I stared helplessly into the wings, witless and unable to tell what she wanted.
‘Get on with it!’ Leonard bellowed to someone. I turned back to face the front and squinted, trying to see him.
Knock, knock went Bess. And again she hissed: ‘Here’s a knocking indeed!’
‘Look at the bloody book!’ bellowed Leonard. I understood then that he was speaking to me and bent my head, searching the swimming words for anything that might help me.
A third time, Bess knocked on the beam and my eyes caught the words on the middle of the page. As she spoke so did I, so that we were in chorus.
‘Here’s a knocking indeed.’
Bess subsided and it was only me.
‘If a man were porter of hell gate – oh my! – he should have old turning the key.’ I had heard a soft giggle I was sure was Grant at my unintended ‘Oh my!’ and I gripped the book tighter.
Knock, knock, knock went Bess and this time I was ready for her.
‘Knock, knock, knock,’ I read. ‘Who’s there i’ the name of Beelzebub?’
On we went, me standing stock-still in the middle of the yawning stage, rambling on about a farmer, an English tailor, geese and primroses and bonfires, and over and over again Bess knocked on the beam and I answered ‘knock knock’ until at last, after what felt like half an hour, at her umpteenth knock, I answered instead ‘Anon!’
The stage direction told me to open the door. I went over to the prompt corner and mimed the action. Bess was so aghast she took her eyes off her precious book and stared at me.
‘I swear you remember the porter,’ I said, to thin air.
From the other side of the stage, George Bull and Roger appeared and I swung round and scampered over to them. It was not just Grant giggling now. I was sure I heard the sound of suppressed titters from the front row
George spoke and then I spoke and then George spoke again and if I had been hanging by my fingertips begging for a hand to safety I could not have told what any of the words were. Then George spoke again, but after his line he strode to the front of the stage and, shading his eyes, called up to Leonard, ‘Let’s skip the next speech.’
‘This,’ said Leonard with a quiet menace, ‘is a dress rehearsal. We do not “skip” speeches. Porter, your cue is “what three things does drink especially provoke?”’
I had seen it and I had seen my answer. I swallowed hard.
‘Marry, Sir,’ hissed Bess.
‘Marry, Sir,’ I said. ‘Nose-painting, sleep and …’ a long whinny of mirth came from the audience. I recognised it most definitely as Grant this time. ‘Urine!’ I cried. ‘Lechery, sir, it provokes and unprovokes.’ My voice was shaking and I thought I might cry. The American ladies were laughing too now, tittering, honking and choking as they tried to suppress it. ‘It provokes the desire and takes away the performance,’ I said. And on and on, my voice bleak with misery, while the lot of them collapsed into helpless gales of laughter, shaking with it, even George and Roger’s lips twitching.
At last it was over.
‘Is your master stirring?’ George said. Then Max Moore entered.
Or rather Macbeth entered. If my voice was bleak, his was bleaker. If my face was stark, his was starker.
‘Good morrow, both!’ he said, with a dreadful empty cheerfulness. Bess was waving at me from the wings and, when she caught my attention, she swept her arms backwards, telling me to subside upstage and let the principals play the scene.
And so I did, watching Macduff go off on his doomed errand to fetch the king, while Lennox chatted and Macbeth stumbled over his words, desperately trying to chat too. Macduff ran back on, shaking and wild.
‘Horror, horror, horror,’ he said. ‘Tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name thee!’
I do not know what the porter is supposed to do while the unspeakable truth is coming to light of foul murder and black treason, but this porter was transfixed. When Lady Macbeth came on, perfectly bleary from sleep, croaky-voiced and halt-limbed, I truly believed Sarah had been napping.
‘Woe, alas,’ she said. ‘What, in our house?’ I could only marvel at it. In six little words she took in the dreadful news, displayed enough fright for the men to be fooled, but with just enough missing for Banquo to wonder, and with a cold enough seam of evil underneath for the audience – or at least the porter – to shiver at her. How could one woman contain so many moods, cover so much and think so fast as to hoodwink everyone, all while her frailty tugged at our pity. Sarah Byrne, I decided on the spot, was welcome to her airs and graces for she was a great actress and deserved them.
At last the scene ended, the supposedly guilty guards tidily dead already, Lady Macbeth helped away, Macbeth and Macduff gone to dress in manly readiness, Malcolm and Donalbain fleeing the nation, twitching with suspicion. And the porter still standing there like a pillar of salt until Bess hissed one more time and cawed me off, to not a single smothered giggle.
‘Ten-minute tea break,’ Leonard shouted, ‘and then all back on stage for notes.’
‘How did they ever expect to get away with it!’ I found myself saying to Alec who had ‘come round’, as the saying goes, to congratulate me on my performance and apologise for laughing. Unfortunately,
as he tried to say sorry, he collapsed into giggles again.
‘Of all the parts in all the plays!’ he said. ‘The porter in Macbeth. Oh Dandy, it was priceless. I shall go to my grave glad to have seen it. And as for Grant! She’s had to go and repair her ghostly make-up because she cried it all down to her collar, weeping with laughter.’ He sighed and sobered. ‘How who got away with what?’
‘The Macbeths!’ I said. ‘How they thought they would get away with murdering the king in their own house and just getting rid of the guards.’
Alec was laughing again. ‘You were absolutely agog!’ he said. ‘Standing there pole-axed! Mrs Cornelius murmured that you must have had some dramatic training to be so realistic, but I knew it was all you. Have you never seen Macbeth, Dandy? How could the plot surprise you?’
‘It wasn’t the plot,’ I said. ‘It was the acting. Watching them at it up close, anyway. They’re really very good. Sarah gave me goose pimples. And it made me think too.’
‘Thank heavens you weren’t shoved on stage with Sara Bernhardt and …’
‘… Henry Thingamajig,’ I said. ‘Well yes, but I daresay they were never in productions where Angus and the porter were played by the same chap and he caught his death of cold jumping into a moat to drag bits of Birnam Wood back out the day before opening night. But I’m trying to tell you, darling, it got me thinking.’
‘Is that what happened?’ Alec said. ‘And speaking of Francis, will he be back on or are you to be Angus later too?’
‘He’ll be back,’ I said grimly. I ripped off my nightcap and set off towards the kitchen again to make sure of it.
‘Hie, Dandy,’ Alec said. ‘You never told me what it all got you thinking.’
‘What?’
‘You said watching them act made you think something. Something about the case?’
I stopped and stared at him, trying to bring it back to mind. ‘It’s gone,’ I said. ‘If you would ever learn not to interrupt me. It’s quite gone now.’
Dandy Gilver and a Spot of Toil and Trouble Page 22