Night at the Vulcan

by Ngaio Marsh

  The positions and moves had been planned with a vivid understanding of the text and seemed to spring out of it. She learnt them readily enough. Rather to her surprise, and, she thought, that of the other understudies, they were finally taken through her scenes at concert pitch so that by the end of the rehearsal the visual and aural aspects of her part had fused into a whole. She had got her routine. But it was no more than a routine: she spoke and paused and moved and spoke and there was no reality at all, she felt, in anything she did. Clem Smith, the stage-manager, said nothing about interpretation but, huddled in his overcoat, merely set the moves and then crouched over the script. She was not even a failure, she was just another colourless understudy and nothing had happened.

  When it was over, Clem Smith shut the book and said: ‘Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Eleven in the morning if you please.’ He lit a cigarette and went down into the auditorium and out through the front of the house.

  Left alone on the stage, Martyn struggled with an acute attack of deflation. She tried to call herself to order. This in itself was a humiliating if salutary exercise. If, she thought savagely, she had been a Victorian young lady, she would at this juncture have locked herself away with a plush-bound journal and after shedding some mortified tears, forced a confession out of herself. As it was, she set her jaw and worked it out there and then. The truth was, she told herself, she had been at her old tricks again: she had indulged in the most blatant kind of day-dream. She had thought up a success story and dumped herself down in the middle of it with half a dozen pageant-lamps bathing her girlish form. Because she looked like Poole and because last night she had had a mild success with one line by playing it off her nerves she had actually had the gall to imagine—here Martyn felt her scalp creep and her face burn. ‘Come on,’ she thought, ‘out with it.’

  Very well, then. She had dreamed up a further rehearsal with Poole. She had seen herself responding eagerly to his production, she had heard him say regretfully that if things had been different…She had even…At this point overtaken with self-loathing Martyn performed the childish exercise of throwing her part across the stage, stamping violently and thrusting her fingers through her hair.

  ‘Damn and blast and hell,’ said Martyn, pitching her voice to the back row of the gallery.

  ‘Not quite as bad as all that.’

  Adam Poole came out of the shadowed pit and down the centre aisle of the stalls. He rested his hands on the rail of the orchestral well. Martyn gaped at him.

  ‘You’ve got the mechanics,’ he said. ‘Walk through it again by yourself before tomorrow. Then you can begin to think about the girl. Get the layout of the house into your head. Know your environment. What has she been doing all day before the play opens? What has she been thinking about? Why does she say the things she says and do the things she does? Listen to the other chaps’ lines. Come down here for five minutes and we’ll see what you think about acting.’

  Martyn went down into the house. Of all her experiences during these three days at the Vulcan Theatre, she was to remember this most vividly. It was a curious interview. They sat side by side as if waiting for the rise of curtain. Their voices were deadened by the plush stalls. Jacko could be heard moving about behind the set and in some distant room, back-stage, somebody in desultory fashion hammered and sawed. At first Martyn was ill at ease, unable to dismiss or to reconcile the jumble of distracted notions that beset her. But Poole was talking about theatre and about problems of the actor. He talked well, without particular emphasis but with penetration and authority. Soon she listened with single hearing and with all her attention to what he had to say. Her nervousness and uncertainty were gone and presently she was able to speak of matters that had exercised her in her own brief experience of the stage. Their conversation was adult and fruitful. It didn’t even occur to her that they were getting on rather well together.

  Jacko came out on the stage. He shielded his eyes with his hand and peered into the auditorium.

  ‘Adam?’ he said.

  ‘Hallo? What is it?’

  ‘It is Helena on the telephone to inquire why have you not rung her at four, the time being now five-thirty. Will you take it in the office?’

  ‘Good Lord!’ he ejaculated and got up. Martyn moved into the aisle to let him out.

  He said: ‘All right, Miss Tarne. Work along the lines we’ve been talking about and you should be able to cope with the job. We take our understudies seriously at the Vulcan and like to feel they’re an integral part of the company. You’ll rehearse again tomorrow morning and—’ He stopped unaccountably and after a moment said hurriedly: ‘You’re all right, aren’t you? I mean you feel quite happy about this arrangement?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Very happy.’

  ‘Good.’ He hesitated again for a second and then said: ‘I must go,’ and was off down the aisle to the front of the house. He called out: ‘I’ll be in the office for some time, Jacko, if anyone wants me.’ A door banged. There was a long silence.

  Jacko advanced to the footlights. ‘Where are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Here,’ said Martyn.

  ‘I see you. Or a piece of you. Where is the rest? Reassemble yourself. There is work to be done.’

  The work turned out to be the sewing together of a fantastic garment created and tacked up by Jacko himself. It had a flamboyant design, stencilled in black and yellow, of double-headed eagles and was made, in part, of scenic canvas. There was an electric sewing-machine in the wardrobe-room which was next to Mr J. G. Darcey’s at the end of the passage. Here Jacko sat Martyn down and here, for the next hour, she laboured under his exacting direction while he himself crawled about the floor cutting out further garments for the Combined Arts Ball. At half-past six he went out, saying he would return with food.

  Martyn laboured on. Sometimes she repeated the lines of her part, her voice drowned by the clatter of the machine. Sometimes, when engaged in hand-work it would seem, in the silent room, that she had entered into a new existence, as if she had at that moment been born and was a stranger to her former self. And since this was rather a frightening sensation, though not new to Martyn, she must rouse herself and make a conscious effort to dispel it. On one of these occasions, when she had just switched off the machine, she felt something of the impulse that had guided her first attempt at the scene with Poole. Wishing to retain and strengthen this experience she set aside her work and rested her head on her arms as the scene required. She waited in this posture, summoning her resources, and when she was ready, raised her head to confront her opposite.

  Gay Gainsford stood on the other side of the table, watching her.

  Martyn’s flesh leapt on her bones. She cried out and made a sweeping gesture with her arms. A pair of scissors clattered to the floor.

  ‘I’m sorry I startled you,’ said Miss Gainsford. ‘I came in quietly. I thought you were asleep but I realize now—you were doing that scene. Weren’t you?’

  ‘I’ve been given the understudy,’ Martyn said.

  ‘You’ve had an audition and a rehearsal, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes. I was so frightful at rehearsal, I thought I’d have another shot by myself.’

  ‘You needn’t,’ Miss Gainsford said, ‘try to make it easy for me.’

  Martyn, still shaken and bewildered, looked at her visitor. She saw a pretty face that, under its make-up, was sodden with tears. Even as she looked the large photogenic eyes hooded and the small mouth quivered.

  ‘I suppose,’ Miss Gainsford said, ‘you know what you’re doing to me.’

  ‘Good Lord!’ Martyn ejaculated, ‘what is all this? What have I done? I’ve got your understudy. I’m damn thankful to have it and so far I’ve made a pretty poor showing.’

  ‘It’s no good taking that line with me. I know what’s happening.’

  ‘Nothing’s happening. Oh, please,’ Martyn implored, torn between pity and a rising fear, ‘please don’t cry. I’m nothing. I’m just any old understudy.’
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br />   ‘That’s pretty hot, I must say,’ Miss Gainsford said. Her voice wavered grotesquely between two registers like an adolescent boy’s; ‘to talk about any old understudy when you’ve got that appearance. What’s everyone saying about you when they think I’m not about? “She’s got the appearance!” It doesn’t matter to them that I’ve had to dye my hair because they don’t like wigs. I still haven’t got the appearance. I’m a shoulder-length natural ash-blonde and I’ve had to have an urchin cut and go black and all I get is insults. In any other management,’ she continued wildly, ‘the author wouldn’t be allowed to speak to the artistes like that man speaks to me. In any other management an artiste would be protected against that kind of treatment. Adam’s worse if anything. He’s so bloody patient and persistent and half the time you don’t know what he’s talking about.’

  She drew breath, sobbed and hunted in her bag for her handkerchief.

  Martyn said: ‘I’m so terribly sorry. It’s awful when things go badly at rehearsals. But the worst kind of rehearsals do have a way of turning into the best kind of performances. And it’s a grand play, isn’t it?’

  ‘I loathe the play. To me it’s a lot of highbrow hokum and I don’t care who knows it. Why the hell couldn’t Uncle Ben leave me where I was, playing leads and second leads in fortnightly rep? We were a happy family in fortnightly rep; everyone had fun and games and there wasn’t this ghastly graveyard atmosphere. I was miserable enough, God knows, before you came but now it’s just more than I can stand.’

  ‘But I’m not going to play the part,’ Martyn said desperately. ‘You’ll be all right. It’s just got you down for the moment. I’d be no good, I expect, anyway.’

  ‘It’s what they’re all saying and thinking. It’s a pity, they’re saying, that you came too late.’

  ‘Nonsense. You only imagine that because of the likeness.’

  ‘Do I? Let me tell you I’m not imagining all the things they’re saying about you. And about Adam. How you can stay here and take it! Unless it’s true. Is it true?’

  Martyn closed her hands on the material she had been sewing. ‘I don’t want to know what they’re saying. There’s nothing unkind that’s true for them to say.’

  ‘So the likeness is purely an accident? There’s no relationship?’

  Martyn said: ‘It seems that we are very distantly related: so distantly that the likeness is a freak. I didn’t want to tell anyone about it. It’s of no significance at all. I haven’t used it to get into the theatre.’

  ‘I don’t know how and why you got in but I wish to God you’d get out. How you can hang on knowing what they think, if it isn’t true! You can’t have any pride or decency. It’s so cruel. It’s so damnably cruel.’

  Martyn looked at the pretty tear-blubbered face and thought in terror that if it had been that of Atropos it could scarcely have offered a more dangerous threat. ‘Don’t!’ she cried out. ‘Please don’t say that, I need this job so desperately. Honestly, honestly you’re making a thing of all this. I’m not hurting you.’

  ‘Yes, you are. You’re driving me completely frantic. I’m nervously and emotionally exhausted.’ Miss Gainsford sobbed with an air of quoting somebody else. ‘It just needed you to send me over the border-line. Uncle Ben keeps on and on and on about it until I think I’ll go mad. This is a beastly unlucky theatre anyway. Everyone knows there’s something wrong about it and then you come in like a Jonah and it’s the rock bottom. If,’ Miss Gainsford went on, developing a command of histrionic climax of which Martyn would scarcely have suspected her capable, ‘if you have any pity at all, any humanity, you’ll spare me this awful ordeal.’

  ‘But this is all nonsense. You’re making a song about nothing. I won’t be taken in by it,’ Martyn said and recognized defeat in her own voice.

  Miss Gainsford stared at her with watery indignation and through trembling lips uttered her final cliché. ‘You can’t,’ she said, ‘do this thing to me,’ and broke down completely.

  It seemed to Martyn that beyond a façade of stock emotionalism she recognized a real and a profound distress. She thought confusedly that if they had met on some common and reasonable ground she would have been able to put up a better defence. As it was they merely floundered in a welter of unreason. It was intolerably distressing to her. Her precarious happiness died, she wanted to escape: she was lost. With a feeling of nightmarish detachment she heard herself say: ‘All right. I’ll speak to Mr Poole. I’ll say I can’t do the understudy.’

  Miss Gainsford had turned away. She held her handkerchief to her face. Her shoulders and head had been quivering but now they were still. There was a considerable pause. She blew her nose fussily, cleared her throat, and looked up at Martyn.

  ‘But if you’re Helena’s dresser,’ she said ‘you’ll still be about.’

  ‘You can’t mean you want to turn me out of the theatre altogether.’

  ‘There’s no need,’ Miss Gainsford mumbled, ‘to put it like that.’

  Martyn heard a voice and footsteps in the passage. She didn’t want to be confronted with Jacko. She said: ‘I’ll see if Mr Poole’s still in the theatre. I’ll speak to him now if he is.’

  As she made for the door Miss Gainsford snatched at her arm. ‘Please!’ she said. ‘I am grateful. But you will be really generous won’t you? Really big? You won’t bring me into it will you? With Adam I mean. Adam wouldn’t underst—’

  Her face set as if she had been held in suspension like a motion picture freezing into a still. She didn’t even release her hold on Martyn’s arm.

  Martyn spun round and saw Poole, with Jacko behind him in the passage. To her own astonishment she burst out laughing.

  ‘No really!’ she stammered, ‘it’s too much! This is the third time. Like the demon king in pantomime.’

  ‘What the devil to you mean?’

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s just your flair for popping up in crises. Other people’s crises. Mine in fact.’

  He grimaced as if he gave her up as a bad job. ‘What’s the present crisis?’ he said and looked at Miss Gainsford who had turned aside and was uneasily painting her mouth.

  ‘What is it, Gay?’

  ‘Please!’ she choked. ‘Please let me go. I’m all right, really. Quite all right. I just rather want to be alone.’

  She achieved a tearful smile at Poole and an imploring glance at Martyn. Poole stood away from the door and watched her go out with her chin up and with courageous suffering neatly portrayed in every inch of her body.

  She disappeared into the passage and a moment later the door of the greenroom was heard to shut.

  ‘It is a case of miscasting,’ said Jacko, coming into the room. ‘She should be in Hollywood. She has what it takes in Hollywood. What an exit! We have misjudged her.’

  ‘Go and see what’s the matter.’

  ‘She wants,’ said Jacko, making a dolorous face, ‘to be alone.’

  ‘No, she doesn’t. She wants an audience. You’re it. Get along and do your stuff.’

  Jacko put several parcels on the table. ‘I am the dogsbody,’ he said, ‘to end all dogsbodies.’ And went out.

  ‘Now, then,’ Poole said.

  Martyn gathered up her work and was silent. ‘What’s the matter? You’re as white as a sheet. Sit down. What is all this?’

  She sat behind the machine.

  ‘Come on,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry if it’s inconvenient for you but I’m afraid I’ve got to give notice.’

  ‘Indeed? As dresser or as understudy?’

  ‘As both.’

  ‘It’s extremely inconvenient and I don’t accept it.’

  ‘But you must. Honestly, you must. I can’t go on like this: it isn’t fair.’

  ‘Do you mean because of that girl?’

  ‘Because of her and because of everything. She’ll have a breakdown. There’ll be some disaster.’

  ‘She doesn’t imagine you’re going to be given the part over her head, does she?’
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br />   ‘No, no, of course not. It’s just that she’s finding it hard anyway and the—the sight of me sort of panics her.’

  ‘The likeness?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She needn’t look at you. I’m afraid she’s the most complete ass, that girl,’ he muttered. He picked up a fold of the material Martyn had been sewing, looked absently at it and pushed the whole thing across the table. ‘Understand,’ he said. ‘I won’t for a second entertain the idea of your going. For one thing Helena can’t do without you and for another I will not be dictated to by a minor actress in my own company. Nor,’ he added with a change of tone, ‘by anyone else.’

  ‘I’m so terribly sorry for her,’ Martyn said. ‘She feels there’s some sort of underground movement against her. She really feels it.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I must admit I don’t much enjoy the sensation of being in the theatre on sufferance. But I was so thankful—’ She caught her breath and stopped.

  ‘Who makes you feel you’re on sufferance? Gay? Bennington? Percival?’

  ‘I used a silly phrase. Naturally, they all must think it a bit queer, my turning up. It looks queer.’

  ‘It’d look a damn sight queerer if you faded out again. I can’t think,’ he said impatiently, ‘how you could let yourself be bamboozled by that girl.’

  ‘But it’s not all bamboozle. She really is at the end of her tether.’

  Martyn waited for a moment. She thought inconsequently how strange it was that she should talk like this to Adam Poole who two days ago, had been a celebrated name, a remote legend, seen and heard and felt through a veil of characterization in his films.