A good night's rest.... A long night's melancholy. Come away, come away, death, and in sad cypress let me be laid. She threw open the window and looked out upon the street. Drawn curtains and blinds, shuttered windows. The black-and-white cat mewing from the gutter opposite. No lake, no moonlight.
'The trouble with you is, Jinnie, you won't grow up. You live in a dream world that doesn't exist. That's why you opted for the stage.' Her father's voice, indulgent but firm. 'One of these days,' he added, 'you'll come to with a shock.'
It was raining in the morning, misty, grey. Better, perhaps, like this, she thought, than golden bright like yesterday. Better to go off in the hired Austin with windscreen wipers slashing from side to side, and then with luck I might skid and crash in a ditch, be carried to hospital, become delirious, clamour for him to come. Nick kneeling at the bedside, holding her hand and saying, 'All my fault, I should never have sent you away.'
The little maid was waiting for her in the dining-room. Fried egg-and-bacon. A pot of tea. The cat, come in from the gutter, purred at her feet. Perhaps the telephone would ring, and a message would flash from the island before she left. 'Operation D put into effect. The boat is waiting for you.' Possibly, if she hovered about in the hall, something would happen. Murphy would appear in his van, or even the postmaster O'Reilly with a few words scribbled on a piece of paper. Her luggage was down, though, and the Austin was in the street outside. Mr Doherty was waiting to say goodbye.
'I hope I shall have the pleasure,' he said, 'of welcoming you to Ballyfane again. You'd enjoy the fishing.'
When she came to the signpost pointing to Lake Torrah she stopped the car and walked down the muddied track in the pouring rain. One never knew, the boat might be there. She came to the end of the track and stood there a moment, looking out across the lake. It was shrouded deep in mist. She could barely see the outline of the island. A heron rose from the reeds and flapped its way over the water. I could take off all my things and swim, she thought. I could just about make it, exhausted, almost drowned, and stagger through the woods to the house and fall at his feet on the verandah. 'Bob, come quick! It's Miss Blair. I think she's dying ...'
She turned, walked back up the track and got into the car. Started the engine, and the windscreen wipers began thrashing to and fro.
When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.
It was still raining when she arrived at Dublin airport. First she had to get rid of the car, then book a seat on the first available 'plane to London. She did not have long to wait there was a flight taking off within the next half-hour. She sat in the departure lounge with her eyes fixed on the door leading back to the reception hall, for even now a miracle might take place, the door swing open, a lanky figure stand there, hatless, black patch over his left eye. He would brush past officials, come straight towards her. 'No more practical jokes. That was the last. Come back with me to Lamb Island right away.'
Her flight was called, and Shelagh shuffled through with the rest, her eyes searching her fellow-travellers. Walking across the tarmac she turned to stare at the spectators waving goodbye. Someone tall in a mackintosh held a handkerchief in his hand. Not him--he stooped to pick up a child.... Men in overcoats taking off hats, putting dispatch-cases on the rack overhead, any one of them could have been, was not, Nick. Supposing, as she fastened her safety-belt, a hand came out from the seat in front of her, on the aisle, and she recognised the signet-ring on the little finger? What if the man humped there in the very front seat she could just see the top of his slightly balding head should suddenly turn, black patch foremost, and stare in her direction, then break into a smile?
'Pardon.'
A latecomer squeezed in beside her, treading on her toes. She flashed him a look. Black squash hat, spotty faced, pale, the fag end of a cigar between his lips. Some woman, somewhere, had loved, would love, this unhealthy brute. Her stomach turned. He opened a newspaper wide, jerking her elbow. Headlines glared.
'Explosions Across the Border. Are There More to Come?'
A secret glow of satisfaction warmed her. Plenty more, she thought, and good luck to them. I saw it, I was there, I was part of the show. This idiot sitting beside me doesn't know.
London Airport. Customs check. 'Have you been on holiday, and for how long?' Was it her imagination, or did the Customs Officer give her a particularly searching glance? He chalked her case and turned to the next in line.
Cars shot past the bus as it lumbered through the traffic to the terminal. Aircraft roared overhead, taking other people away and out of it. Men and women with drab, tired expressions waited on pavements for red to change to green. Shelagh was going back to school with a vengeance. Not to peer at the notice board in the draughty assembly-hall, shoulder to shoulder with giggling companions, but to examine another board, very similar, hanging on the wall beside the stage door. Not, 'Have I really got to share a room with Katie Matthews this term? It's too frantic for words', and smiling falsely, 'Hullo, Katie, yes, wonderful hols, super', but wandering instead into that rather poky cubby-hole they called the dressing-room at the bottom of the stairs, and finding that infuriating Olga Brett hogging the mirror, using Shelagh's or one of the other girls' lipstick instead of her own, and drawling, 'Hullo, darling, you're late for rehearsal, Adam is tearing his hair out in handfuls. But literally ...'
Useless to ring up home from the air terminal and ask Mrs Warren the gardener's wife to make up her bed. Home was barren, empty, without her father. Haunted, too, his things untouched, his books on the bedside table. A memory, a shadow, not the living presence. Better go straight to the flat, like a dog to a familiar kennel smelling only of its own straw, untouched by its master's hands.
Shelagh was not late at the first rehearsal on the Monday morning, she was early.
'Any letters for me?'
'Yes, Miss Blair, a postcard.'
Only a postcard? She snatched it up. It was from her mother at Cap d'Ail. 'Weather wonderful. Feeling so much better, really rested. Hope you are too, darling, and that you had a nice little trip in your car wherever it was. Don't exhaust yourself rehearsing. Aunt Bella sends her love and so do Reggie and May Hillsborough, who are here on their yacht at Monte Carlo. Your loving Mum.' (Reggie was the fifth Viscount Hillsborough.)
Shelagh dropped the postcard into a waste-paper basket and went down on to the stage to meet the group. A week, ten days, a fortnight, nothing came. She had given up hope. She would never hear from him. The theatre must take over, become meat and drink, love and sustenance. She was neither Shelagh nor Jinnie, she was Viola-Cesario, and must move, think, dream in character. Here was her only cure, stamp out all else. She tried to get Radio Eire on her transistor but it did not succeed. The voice of the announcer might have sounded like Michael's, like Murphy's, and roused some sort of feeling other than a total void. So on with the damned motley, and drown despair.
Olivia. Where goes Cesario?
Viola. After him I love,
More than I love these eyes, more than my life ...
Adam Vane, crouching like a black cat at the side of the stage, his horn-rimmed glasses balanced on his straggling hair, 'Don't pause, dear, that's very good, very good indeed.'
On the day of the dress rehearsal she left the flat in good time, picking up a taxi en route for the theatre. There was a jam at the corner of Belgrave Square, cars hooting, people hanging about on the pavement, mounted policemen. Shelagh opened the glass panel between herself and the driver.
'What's going on?' she asked. 'I'm in a hurry, I can't afford to be late.'
He grinned back at her over his shoulder. 'Demonstration,' he said, 'outside the Irish Embassy. Didn't you hear the one o'clock news? More explosions on the border. It looks as if it's brought the London--Ulster crowd out in force. They must have been throwing stones at the embassy windows.'
; Fools, she thought. Wasting their time. Good job if the mounted police ride them down. She never listened to the one o'clock news, and she hadn't even glanced at the morning paper. Explosions on the border, Nick in the Control Room, the young man with the headphones over his ears, Murphy in the van, and I'm here in a taxi driving to my own show, my own fireworks, and after it's over my friends will crowd round me saying, 'Wonderful, darling, wonderful!'
The hold-up had put her timing out. She arrived at the theatre to find the atmosphere a mixture of excitement, confusion, last-minute panic. Never mind, she could cope. Her first scene as Viola over, she tore back to the dressing-room to change to Cesario. 'Oh, get out, can't you? I want the place to myself.' That's better, she thought, now I'm in control. I'm the boss around this place, or very soon will be. Off with Viola's wig, a brush to her own short hair. On with the breeches, on with the hose. Cape set on my shoulders. Dagger in my belt. Then a tap at the door. What the hell now?
'Who is it?' she called.
'A packet for you, Miss Blair. It's come express.'
'Oh, throw it down.'
Last minute touch to eyes, then stand back, take a last look, you'll do, you'll do. They'll all be shouting their heads off tomorrow night. She glanced away from the mirror, down to the packet on the table. A square-shaped envelope. It bore the post-mark Eire. Her heart turned over. She stood there a moment holding it in her hands, then tore the envelope open. A letter fell out, and something hard, between cardboard. She seized the letter first.
Dear Jinnie,
I'm off to the U.S. in the morning to see a publisher who has finally shown interest in my scholarly works, stone circles, ring forts, Early Bronze Age in Ireland, etc., etc., but I spare you ... I shall probably be away for some months, and you can read in your glossy magazines about a one-time recluse spouting his head off in universities to the American young. In point of fact it suits me well to be out of the country for a while, what with one thing and another, as they say.
I have been burning some of my papers before leaving, and came across the enclosed photograph amongst a pile of junk in the bottom drawer of my desk. I thought it might amuse you. You may remember I told you that first evening you reminded me of someone. I see now that it was myself! Twelfth Night was the bond. Good luck, Cesario, and happy scalping.
Love, Nick.
America From her viewpooint it might just as well be Mars. She took the photograph out of its cardboard covers and looked at it, frowning. Another practical joke? But she had never had a photograph taken of herself as Viola-Cesario, so how could he have possibly faked this? Had he snapped her when she wasn't aware of it, then placed the head on other shoulders? Impossible. She turned it over. He had written across the back, 'Nick Barry as Cesario in Twelfth Night. Dartmouth. 1929.'
She looked at the photograph again. Her nose, her chin, the cocky expression, head tip-tilted in the air. Even the stance, hand on hip. The thick cropped hair. Suddenly she was not standing in the dressing-room at all but in her father's bedroom, beside the window, and she heard him move, and she turned to look at him. He was staring at her, an expression of horror and disbelief upon his face. It was not accusation she had read in his eyes, but recognition. He had awakened from no nightmare, but from a dream that had lasted twenty years. Dying, he discovered truth.
They were knocking at the door again. 'Curtain coming down on Scene Three in four minutes' time, Miss Blair.'
She was lying in the van, his arms around her. 'Pam giggled a bit, then passed out cold. She'd forgotten all about it by the morning.'
Shelagh raised her eyes from the photograph she was holding in her hand and stared at herself in the mirror.
'Oh no ...' she said. 'Oh, Nick ... Oh my God!'
Then she took the dagger from her belt and stabbed it through the face of the boy in the photograph, ripping it apart, throwing the pieces into the waste-paper basket. And when she went back on to the stage it was not from the Duke's palace in Illyria that she saw herself moving henceforth, with painted backcloth behind her and painted boards beneath her feet, but out into a street, any street, where there were windows to be smashed and houses to burn, and stones and bricks and petrol to hand, where there were causes to despise and men to hate, for only by hating can you purge away love, only by sword, by fire.
The Way of the Cross
THE REV. EDWARD BABCOCK stood beside one of the lounge windows of the hotel on the Mount of Olives looking across the Kedron Valley to the city of Jerusalem on the opposite hill. Darkness had come so suddenly, between the time of arrival with his small party, the allotting of rooms, unpacking, a quick wash; and now, with hardly a moment to get his bearings and study his notes and guidebook, the little group would be on him, primed with questions, each requiring some measure of individual attention.
He had not chosen this particular assignment: he was deputising for the vicar of Little Bletford, who had succumbed to an attack of influenza and had been obliged to stay on board the S.S. Ventura in Haifa, leaving his small party of seven parishioners without a shepherd. It had been felt that, in the absence of their own vicar, another clergyman would be the most suitable person to lead them on the planned twenty-four-hour excursion to Jerusalem, and so the choice had fallen on Edward Babcock. He wished it had been otherwise. It was one thing to visit Jerusalem for the first time as a pilgrim amongst other pilgrims, even as an ordinary tourist, and quite another to find himself in charge of a group of strangers who would be regretting the unavoidable absence of their own vicar, and would in addition expect him to show qualities of leadership or, worse, the social bonhomie that was so evident a characteristic of the sick man. Edward Babcock knew the type only too well. He had observed the vicar on board, forever moving amongst the more affluent of the passengers, hobnobbing with the titled, invariably at his ease. One or two even called him by his Christian name, notably Lady Althea Mason, the most prominent of the group from Little Bletford, and the doyenne, apparently, of Bletford Hall. Babcock, used to his own slum parish on the outskirts of Huddersfield, had no objection to Christian names--the members of his own youth club referred to him as Cocky often enough over a game of darts, or during one of the informal chats which the lads appeared to enjoy as much as he did himself--but snobbery was something he could not abide; and if the ailing vicar of Little Bletford thought that he, Babcock, was going to abase himself before a titled lady and her family, he was very much mistaken. Babcock had instantly summed up Lady Althea's husband, Colonel Mason, a retired army officer, as one of the old school tie brigade, and considered that their spoilt grandson Robin, instead of attending some private preparatory school, would have done better rubbing shoulders with the kids on a local council estate.
Mr and Mrs Foster were of a different calibre, but equally suspect in Babcock's eyes. Foster was managing director of an up-and-coming plastics firm, and from his conversation on the bus journey from Haifa to Jerusalem he seemed to think more of the possibilities of doing business with the Israelis than he did of visiting the Holy Places. His wife had countered the business chat by holding forth about the distress and starvation amongst Arab refugees, which, she insisted, was the responsibility of the whole world. She might have contributed towards this, thought Babcock, by wearing a less expensive fur coat, and giving the money saved to the refugees.
Mr and Mrs Smith were a young honeymoon couple. This had made them a special object of attention, giving rise to the usual indulgent glances and smiles--and even a few ill-judged jokes from Mr Foster. They would have done better, Babcock couldn't help telling himself, to have stayed in the hotel on the shores of Galilee and got to know each other properly, rather than trail around Jerusalem, the historical and religious importance of which they couldn't possibly grasp in their present mood.
The eighth, and oldest, member of the party was a spinster, Miss Dean. She was nearing seventy, she had informed them all, and it had been her life's dream to come to Jerusalem under the auspices of the vicar of Little Bletfor
d. The substitution of the Rev. Edward Babcock for her beloved vicar, whom she alluded to as Father, had evidently spoilt her idyll.
So, thought the shepherd of the flock, glancing at his watch, the
position is not an enviable one, but it is a challenge, and one that I must face. It is also a privilege.
The lounge was filling up, and the clamour of the many tourists and pilgrims who were already taking their places in the dining-room beyond rose in the air with discordant sound. Edward Babcock looked out once more towards the lights of Jerusalem on the opposite hill. He felt alien, alone, and curiously nostalgic for Huddersfield. He wished his crowd of friendly, though often rowdy, lads from the youth club could have been standing at his side.
Althea Mason was sitting on the stool before the dressing-table arranging a piece of blue organza round her shoulders. She had chosen the blue to match her eyes. It was her favourite colour, and she always managed to wear it somewhere on her person, no matter the circumstances, but this evening it looked particularly well against the darker shade of her dress. With the string of pearls, and the small pearl ear-rings, the effect was just right. Kate Foster would be overdressed as usual, of course--all that costume jewellery was in such bad taste, and the blue rinse to the hair added to her years, if she only realised it. It was a fact of life that however much money a woman had or a man either, for that matter--it could never make up for lack of breeding. The Fosters were amiable enough, and everyone said Jim Foster would stand for Parliament one of these days, which one did not begrudge him--after all, it was a known thing that his firm gave large sums to the Conservative Party--but there was just that little touch of ostentation, of vulgarity, which betrayed his origins. Althea smiled. Her friends always told her she was shrewd, a keen judge of human nature.
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