Night at the Vulcan

by Ngaio Marsh

  He finished his drink quickly and began to grease his face. He noticed how the flesh had dropped into sad folds under the eyes, had blurred the jaw-line and had sunk into grooves about the nostrils and the corners of the mouth. All right for this part, of course, where he had to make a sight of himself, but he had been a fine-looking man. Helena had fallen for him in a big way until Adam cut him out. At the thought of Adam he experienced a sort of regurgitation of misery and anger. ‘I’m a haunted man,’ he thought suddenly.

  He had let himself get into a state, he knew, because of this afternoon. Helena’s face, gaping with terror, like a fish, almost, kept rising up in his mind and wouldn’t be dismissed. Things always worked like that with him: remorse always turned into nightmare.

  It had been a bad week altogether. Rows with everybody: with John Rutherford in particular and with Adam over that blasted little dresser. He felt he was the victim of some elaborate plot. He was fond of Gay: she was a nice friendly little thing: his own flesh and blood. Until he had brought her into this piece she had seemed to like him. Not a bad little artiste either and good enough, by God, for the artsy-craftsy part they had thrown at her. He thought of her scene with Poole and of her unhappiness in her failure and how, in some damned cockeyed way, they all, including Gay, seemed to blame him for it. He supposed she thought he had bullied her into hanging on. Perhaps in a way he had, but he felt so much that he was the victim of a combined assault. ‘Alone,’ he thought, ‘I’m so desperately alone,’ and he could almost hear the word as one would say it on the stage, making an echo, forlorn and hopeless and extremely effective.

  ‘I’m giving myself the jim-jams,’ he thought. He wondered if Helena had told Adam about this afternoon. By God, that would rock Adam, if she had. And at once a picture rose up to torture him, a picture of Helena weeping in Adam’s arms and taking solace there. He saw his forehead grow red in the looking-glass and told himself he had better steady up. No good getting into one of his tempers with a first performance ahead of him and everything so tricky with young Gay. There he was, coming back to that girl, that phoney dresser. He poured out another drink and began his make-up.

  He recognized with satisfaction a familiar change of mood and he now indulged himself with a sort of treat. He brought out a little piece of secret knowledge he had stored away. Among this company of enemies there was one over whom he exercised almost complete power. Over one, at least, he had, overwhelmingly, the whip-hand and the knowledge of his sovereignty warmed him almost as comfortably as the brandy. He began to think about his part. Ideas, brand new and as clever as paint, crowded each other in his imagination. He anticipated his coming mastery.

  His left hand slid towards the flask. ‘One more,’ he said, ‘and I’ll be fine.’

  In her room across the passage, Gay Gainsford faced her own reflection and watched Jacko’s hands pass across it. He dabbed with his fingertips under the cheekbones and made a droning sound behind his closed lips. He was a very good make-up; it was one of his many talents. At the dress-rehearsals the touch of his fingers had soothed rather than exacerbated her nerves but tonight, evidently, she found it almost intolerable.

  ‘Haven’t you finished?’ she asked.

  ‘Patience, patience. We do not catch a train. Have you never observed the triangular shadows under Adam’s cheekbones? They are yet to be created.’

  ‘Poor Jacko!’ Gay said breathlessly, ‘this must be such a bore for you. Considering everything.’

  ‘Quiet, now. How can I work?’

  ‘No, but I mean it must be so exasperating to think that two doors away there’s somebody who wouldn’t need your help. Just a straight make-up, wouldn’t it be? No trouble.’

  ‘I adore making-up. It is my most brilliant gift.’

  ‘But she’s your find in a way, isn’t she? You’d like her to have the part, wouldn’t you?’

  He rested his hands on her shoulders. ‘Ne vous dérangez pas’ he said. ‘Shut up, in fact. Tranquillize yourself, idiot girl.’

  ‘But I want you to tell me.’

  ‘Then I tell you. Yes, I would like to see this little freak play your part because she is in fact a little freak. She has dropped into this theatre like an accident in somebody else’s dream and the effect is fantastic. But she is well content to remain off-stage and it is you who play and we have faith in you and wish you well with all our hearts.’

  ‘That’s very nice of you,’ Gay said.

  ‘What a sour voice! It is true. And now reflect. Reflect upon the minuteness of Edmund Kean, upon Sarah’s one leg and upon Irving’s two, upon ugly actresses who convince their audiences they are beautiful and old actors who persuade them they are young. It is all in the mind, the spirit and the preparation. What does Adam say? Think in, and then play out. Do so.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Gay said between her teeth. ‘I can’t.’ She twisted in her chair. He lifted his fingers away from her face quickly, with a wide gesture. ‘Jacko,’ she said. ‘There’s a jinx on this night. Jacko, did you know? It was on the night of the Combined Arts Ball that it happened.’

  ‘What is this foolishness?’

  ‘You know. Five years ago. The stage-hands were talking about it. I heard them. The gas-fire case. The night that man was murdered. Everyone knows.’

  ‘Be silent!’ Jacko said loudly. ‘This is idiocy. I forbid you to speak of it. The chatter of morons. The Combined Arts Ball has no fixed date and if it had, shall an assembly of British bourgeoisie in bad fancy-dress control our destiny? I am ashamed of you. You are altogether too stupid. Master yourself.’

  ‘It’s not only that. It’s everything. I can’t face it.’

  His fingers closed down on her shoulders. ‘Master yourself,’ he said. ‘You must. If you cry I shall beat you and wipe your make-up across your face. I defy you to cry.’

  He cleaned his hands, tipped her head forward and began to massage the nape of her neck. ‘There are all sorts of things,’ he said, ‘that you must remember and as many more to forget. Forget the little freak and the troubles of today. Remember to relax all your muscles and also your nerves and your thoughts. Remember the girl in the play and the faith I have in you, and Adam and also your Uncle Bennington.’

  ‘Spare me my Uncle Bennington, Jacko. If my Uncle Bennington had left me where I belong, in fortnightly rep, I wouldn’t be facing this hell. I know what everyone thinks of Uncle Ben and I agree with them. I never want to see him again. I hate him. He’s made me go on with this. I wanted to throw the part in. It’s not my part. I loathe it. No, I don’t loathe it, that’s not true. I loathe myself for letting everybody down. Oh, God, Jacko, what am I going to do.’

  Across the bowed head Jacko looked at his own reflection and poked a face at it.

  ‘You shall play this part,’ he said through his teeth, ‘mouse-heart, skunk-girl. You shall play. Think of nothing. Unbridle your infinite capacity for inertia and be dumb.’

  Watching himself, he arranged his face in an unconvincing glower and fetched up a Shakespearian belly-voice.

  ‘The devil damn thee black thou creamfaced loon. Where gottest thou that goose-look?’

  He caught his breath. Beneath his fingers, Gay’s neck stiffened. He began to swear elaborately, in French and in a whisper.

  ‘Jacko. Jacko. Where does that line come?’

  ‘I invented it.’

  ‘You didn’t. You didn’t. It’s Macbeth’ she wailed. ‘You’ve quoted from Macbeth,’ and burst into a flurry of terrified weeping.

  ‘Great suffering and all-enduring Saints of God,’ apostrophized Jacko, ‘give me some patience with this Quaking Thing.’

  But Gay’s cries mounted in a sharp crescendo. She flung out her arms and beat with her fists on the dressing-table. A bottle of wet-white rocked to and fro, over-balanced, rapped smartly against the looking-glass and fell over. A neatly splintered star frosted the surface of the glass.

  Gay pointed to it with an air of crazy triumph, snatched up her towel, and scrubb
ed it across her make-up. She thrust her face, blotched and streaked with black cosmetic, at Jacko.

  ‘Don’t you like what you see?’ she quoted, and rocketed into genuine hysteria.

  Five minutes later Jacko walked down the passage towards Adam Poole’s room leaving J.G., who had rushed to the rescue in his shirtsleeves, in helpless contemplation of the screaming Gay. Jacko disregarded the open doors and the anxious painted faces that looked out at him.

  Bennington shouted from his room:

  ‘What the hell goes on? Who is that?’

  ‘Listen,’ Jacko began, thrusting his head in at the door. He looked at Bennington and stopped short. ‘Stay where you are,’ he said and crossed the passage to Poole’s room.

  Poole had swung round in his chair to face the door. Bob Cringle stood beside him twisting a towel in his hands.

  ‘Well?’ Poole said. ‘What is it? Is it Gay?’

  ‘She’s gone up. Sky high. I can’t do anything nor can J.G. and I don’t believe anyone can. She refuses to go on.’

  ‘Where’s John. Is this his doing?’

  ‘God knows. I don’t think so. He came in an hour ago and said he’d be back at five-to-seven.’

  ‘Has Ben tried?’

  ‘She does nothing but scream that she never wants to see him again. In my opinion, Ben would be fatal.’

  ‘He must be able to hear all this.’

  ‘I told him to stay where he is.’

  Poole looked sharply at Jacko and went out. Gay’s laughter had broken down in a storm of irregular sobbing that could be heard quite clearly. Helena Hamilton called out, ‘Adam, shall I go to her?’ and he answered from the passage, ‘Better not I think.’

  He was some time with Gay. They heard her shouting. ‘No. No. I won’t go on. No,’ over and over again like an automaton.

  When he came out he went to Helena Hamilton’s room. She was dressed and made-up. Martyn, with an ashen face, stood inside the doorway.

  ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ Poole said, ‘but you’ll have to do without a dresser.’

  The call-boy came down the passage chanting:

  ‘Half-hour. Half-hour, please.’

  Poole and Martyn looked at each other.

  ‘You’ll be all right,’ he said.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Performance

  AT TEN-TO-EIGHT Martyn stood by the entrance.

  She was dressed in Gay’s clothes and Jacko had made her up very lightly. They had all wished her luck: Parry Percival, Helena Hamilton, Adam Poole, Clem Smith and even the dressers and stagehands.

  There had been something real and touching in their way of doing this so that, even in her terror, she had felt they were good and very kind. Bennington alone had not wished her well but he had kept right away and this abstention, she thought, showed a certain generosity.

  She no longer felt sick but the lining of her mouth and throat was harsh as if, in fact, she had actually vomited. She thought her sense of hearing must have become distorted. The actors’ voices on the other side of the canvas wall had the remote quality of voices in a nightmare whereas the hammer-blows of her heart and the rustle of her dress that accompanied them sounded exceeding loud.

  She saw the frames of the set, their lashings and painted legends, ‘Act I, P. 2’ and the door which she was to open. She could look into the prompt corner where the ASM followed the lighted script with his finger and where, high above him, the electrician leaned over his perch, watching the play. The stage-lights were reflected into his face. Everything was monstrous in its preoccupation. Martyn was alone.

  She tried to command the upsurge of panic in her heart, to practise an approach to her ordeal, to create, in place of these implacable realities, the reality of the house in the play and that part of it in which now, out of sight of the audience, she must already have her being. This attempt went down before the clamour of her nerves. ‘I’m going to fail,’ she thought.

  Jacko came round the set. She hoped he wouldn’t speak to her and as if he sensed this wish, he stopped at a distance and waited.

  ‘I must listen,’ she thought. ‘I’m not listening. I don’t know where they’ve got to. I’ve forgotten which way the door opens. I’ve missed my cue.’ Her inside deflated and despair griped it like a colic.

  She turned and found Poole beside her.

  ‘You’re all right,’ he said. ‘The door opens on. You can do it. Now, my girl. On you go.’

  Martyn didn’t hear the round of applause with which a London audience greets a player who appears at short notice.

  She was on. She had made her entry and was engulfed in the play.

  Dr Rutherford sat in the OP box with his massive shoulder turned to the house and his gloved hands folded together on the balustrade. His face was in shadow but the stage-lights just touched the bulging curve of his old-fashioned shirt-front. He was monumentally still. One of the critics, an elderly man, said in an aside to a colleague, that Rutherford reminded him of Watt’s picture of the Minotaur.

  For the greater part of the first act he was alone, having, as he had explained in the office, no masochistic itch to invite a guest to a Roman holiday where he himself was the major sacrifice. Towards the end of the act, however, Bob Grantley came into the box and stood behind him. Grantley’s attention was divided. Sometimes he looked down through beams of spot-lights at the stalls, cobbled with heads, sometimes at the stage and sometimes, sideways and with caution, at the doctor himself. Really, Grantley thought, he was quite uncomfortably motionless. One couldn’t tell what he was thinking and one hesitated, the Lord knew, to ask him.

  Down on the stage Clark Bennington and Parry Percival and J.G. Darcey had opened the long crescendo leading to Helena’s entrance. Grantley thought suddenly how vividly an actor’s nature could be exposed on the stage: there was for instance a kind of bed-rock niceness about old J.G., a youthful-ness of spirit that declaimed itself through the superimposed make-up, the characterization and J.G.’s indisputable middle-age. And Bennington? And Percival? Grantley had begun to consider them in these terms when Percival, speaking one of his colourless lines, turned down-stage. Bennington moved centre, looked at Darcey and neatly sketched a parody of Percival’s somewhat finicking movement. The theatre was filled with laughter. Percival turned quickly, Bennington smiled innocently at him, prolonging the laugh.

  Grantley looked apprehensively at the doctor.

  ‘Is that new?’ he ventured in a whisper. ‘That business?’

  The doctor didn’t answer and Grantley wondered if he only imagined that the great hands on the balustrade had closed more tightly over each other.

  Helena Hamilton came on to a storm of applause and with her entrance the action was roused to a new excitement and was intensified with every word she uttered. The theatre grew warm with her presence and with a sense of heightened surprise.

  ‘Now they’re all on,’ Grantley thought, ‘except Adam and the girl.’

  He drew a chair forward stealthily and sat behind Rutherford.

  ‘It’s going enormously,’ he murmured to the massive shoulder. ‘Terrific, old boy.’ And because he was nervous he added: ‘This brings the girl on, doesn’t it?’

  For the first time, the doctor spoke. His lips scarcely moved. A submerged voice uttered within him. ‘Hence,’ it said, ‘heap of wrath, foul indigested lump.’

  ‘Sorry, old boy,’ whispered Grantley and began to wonder what hope in hell there was of persuading the distinguished author to have a drink in the office during the interval with a hand-picked number of important persons.

  He was still preoccupied with this problem when a side door in the set opened and a dark girl with short hair walked out on the stage.

  Grantley joined in the kindly applause. The doctor remained immovable.

  The players swept up to their major climax, Adam came on and five minutes later the curtain fell on the first act. The hands of the audience filled the house with a storm of rain. The storm swelled prodigiously
and persisted even after the lights had come up.

  ‘Ah, good girl,’ Bob Grantley stammered, filled with the sudden and excessive emotion of the theatre. ‘Good old Adam. Jolly good show!’

  Greatly daring, he clapped the doctor on the shoulders. The doctor remained immovable.

  Grantley edged away to the back of the box. ‘I must get back,’ he said. ‘Look, John, there are one or two people coming to the office for a drink who would be—’

  The doctor turned massively in his seat and faced him. ‘No,’ he said, ‘thank you.’

  ‘Well, but look, dear boy, it’s just one of those things. You know how it is, John, you know how—’

  ‘Shut up,’ said the doctor, without any particular malice. ‘I’m going back-stage,’ he added. He rose and turned away from the audience. ‘I have no desire to swill tepid spirits with minor celebrities among the backsides of sandblasted gods. Thank you, however. See you later.’

  He opened the pass-door at the back of the box.

  ‘You’re pleased, aren’t you?’ Grantley said. ‘You must be pleased.’

  ‘Must I? Must I indeed?’

  ‘With the girl, at least? So far?’

  ‘The wench is a good wench. So far. I go to tell her so. By your leave, Robert.’

  He lumbered through the pass-door and Grantley heard him plunge dangerously down the narrow stairway to the stage.

  Dr Rutherford emerged in a kaleidoscopic world: a world where walls fell softly apart, landscapes ascended into darkness and stairways turned and moved aside. A blue haze rose from the stage which was itself in motion. Jacko’s first set revolved bodily, giving way to a new and more distorted version of itself which came to rest, facing the curtain. Masking pieces were run forward to frame it in. The doctor started off for the dressing-room passage and was at once involved with moving flats. ‘If you please, sir.’ ‘Stand aside, there, please.’ ‘Clear stage, by your leave.’ His bulky shape was screened and exposed again and again plunged forward confusedly. Warning bells rang, the call-boy began to chant: ‘Second Act beginners, please. Second Act.’