The Living Dead

by John Joseph Adams

  But then La Duvall, as Edward insisted on calling her, didn’t need to be a great player, she was famous. So what if she spoke Shakespeare like it was Hiawatha, dum de dum de dum de dum? So what if her grasp of psychology was dubious, her logic faulty, her projection inadequate? So what if she had as much sense of poetry as she did propriety? She was a star, and that meant business.

  There was no taking that away from her: her name was money. The Elysium Theatre publicity announced her claim to fame in three-inch Roman Bold, black on yellow:

  “Diane Duvall: star of The Love Child.”

  The Love Child. Possibly the worst soap opera to cavort across the screens of the nation in the history of that genre, two solid hours a week of under-written characters and mind-numbing dialogue, as a result of which it consistently drew high ratings, and its performers became, almost overnight, brilliant stars in television’s rhinestone heaven. Glittering there, the brightest of the bright, was Diane Duvall.

  Maybe she wasn’t born to play the classics, but Jesus was she good box-office. And in this day and age, with theatres deserted, all that mattered was the number of punters on seats.

  Calloway had resigned himself to the fact that this would not be the definitive Twelfth Night, but if the production were successful, and with Diane in the role of Viola, it had every chance, it might open a few doors to him in the West End. Besides, working with the ever-adoring, ever-demanding Miss D. Duvall had its compensations.

  Calloway pulled up his serge trousers, and looked down at her. She was giving him that winsome smile of hers, the one she used in the letter scene. Expression Five in the Duvall repertoire, somewhere between Virginal and Motherly.

  He acknowledged the smile with one from his own stock, a small, loving look that passed for genuine at a yard’s distance. Then he consulted his watch.

  “God, we’re late, sweetie.”

  She licked her lips. Did she really like the taste that much?

  “I’d better fix my hair,” she said, standing up and glancing in the long mirror beside the shower.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you OK?”

  “Couldn’t be better,” he replied. He kissed her lightly on the nose and left her to her teasing.

  On his way to the stage he ducked into the Men’s Dressing Room to adjust his clothing, and dowse his burning cheeks with cold water. Sex always induced a giveaway mottling on his face and upper chest. Bending to splash water on himself Calloway studied his features critically in the mirror over the sink. After thirty-six years of holding the signs of age at bay, he was beginning to look the part. He was no more the juvenile lead. There was an indisputable puffiness beneath his eyes, which was nothing to do with sleeplessness, and there were lines too, on his forehead, and round his mouth. He didn’t look the wunderkind any longer; the secrets of his debauchery were written all over his face. The excess of sex, booze and ambition, the frustration of aspiring and just missing the main chance so many times. What would he look like now, he thought bitterly, if he’d been content to be some unenterprising nobody working in a minor rep, guaranteed a house of ten aficionados every night, and devoted to Brecht? Face as smooth as a baby’s bottom probably, most of the people in the socially committed theatre had that look. Vacant and content, poor cows.

  “Well, you pays your money and you takes your choice,” he told himself. He took one last look at the haggard cherub in the mirror, reflecting that, crow’s feet or not, women still couldn’t resist him, and went out to face the trials and tribulations of Act III.

  On stage there was a heated debate in progress. The carpenter, his name was Jake, had built two hedges for Olivia’s garden. They still had to be covered with leaves, but they looked quite impressive, running the depth of the stage to the cyclorama, where the rest of the garden would be painted. None of this symbolic stuff. A garden was a garden: green grass, blue sky. That’s the way the audience liked it North of Birmingham, and Terry had some sympathy for their plain tastes.

  “Terry, love.”

  Eddie Cunningham had him by the hand and elbow, escorting him into the fray.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Terry, love, you cannot be serious about these fucking (it came trippingly off the tongue: fuck-ing) hedges. Tell Uncle Eddie you’re not serious before I throw a fit.” Eddie pointed towards the offending hedges. “I mean look at them.” As he spoke a thin plume of spittle fizzed in the air.

  “What’s the problem?” Terry asked again.

  “Problem? Blocking, love, blocking. Think about it. We’ve rehearsed this whole scene with me bobbing up and down like a March hare. Up right, down left—but it doesn’t work if I haven’t got access round the back. And look! These fucking things are flush with the backdrop.”

  “Well they have to be, for the illusion, Eddie.”

  “I can’t get round though, Terry. You must see my point.”

  He appealed to the few others on stage: the carpenters, two technicians, three actors.

  “I mean—there’s just not enough time.”

  “Eddie, we’ll re-block.”

  “Oh.”

  That took the wind out of his sails.

  “No?”

  “Um.”

  “I mean it seems easiest, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes… I just liked…”

  “I know.”

  “Well. Needs must. What about the croquet?”

  “We’ll cut that too.”

  “All that business with the croquet mallets? The bawdy stuff?”

  “It’ll all have to go. I’m sorry, I haven’t thought this through. I wasn’t thinking straight.”

  Eddie flounced.

  “That’s all you ever do, love, think straight…”

  Titters. Terry let it pass. Eddie had a genuine point of criticism; he had failed to consider the problems of the hedge-design.

  “I’m sorry about the business; but there’s no way we can accommodate it.”

  “You won’t be cutting anybody else’s business, I’m sure,” said Eddie. He threw a glance over Calloway’s shoulder at Diane, then headed for the dressing-room. Exit enraged actor, stage left. Calloway made no attempt to stop him. It would have worsened the situation considerably to spoil his departure. He just breathed out a quiet “oh Jesus,” and dragged a wide hand down over his face. That was the fatal flaw of this profession: actors. “Will somebody fetch him back?” he said. Silence.

  “Where’s Ryan?”

  The Stage Manager showed his bespectacled face over the offending hedge.

  “Sorry?”

  “Ryan, love—will you please take a cup of coffee to Eddie and coax him back into the bosom of the family?”

  Ryan pulled a face that said: you offended him, you fetch him. But Calloway had passed this particular buck before: he was a past master at it. He just stared at Ryan, defying him to contradict his request, until the other man dropped his eyes and nodded his acquiescence.

  “Sure,” he said glumly.

  “Good man.”

  Ryan cast him an accusatory look, and disappeared in pursuit of Ed Cunningham.

  “No show without Belch,” said Calloway, trying to warm up the atmosphere a little. Someone grunted: and the small half-circle of onlookers began to disperse. Show over.

  “OK, OK,” said Calloway, picking up the pieces, “let’s get to work. We’ll run through from the top of the scene. Diane, are you ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “OK. Shall we run it?”

  He turned away from Olivia’s garden and the waiting actors just to gather his thoughts. Only the stage working lights were on, the auditorium was in darkness. It yawned at him insolently, row upon row of empty seats, defying him to entertain them. Ah, the loneliness of the long-distance director. There were days in this business when the thought of life as an accountant seemed a consummation devoutly to be wished, to paraphrase the Prince of Denmark.

  In the Gods of the Elysium, somebody moved. Calloway looked up
from his doubts and stared through the swarthy air. Had Eddie taken residence on the very back row? No, surely not. For one thing, he hadn’t had time to get all the way up there.

  “Eddie?” Calloway ventured, capping his hand over his eyes. “Is that you?”

  He could just make the figure out. No, not a figure, figures. Two people, edging their way along the back row, making for the exit. Whoever it was, it certainly wasn’t Eddie.

  “That isn’t Eddie, is it?” said Calloway, turning back into the fake garden.

  “No,” someone replied.

  It was Eddie speaking. He was back on stage, leaning on one of the hedges, cigarette clamped between his lips. “Eddie…”

  “It’s all right,” said the actor good-humouredly, “don’t grovel; I can’t bear to see a pretty man grovel.”

  “We’ll see if we can slot the mallet-business in somewhere,” said Calloway, eager to be conciliatory.

  Eddie shook his head, and flicked ash off his cigarette.

  “No need.”

  “Really—”

  “It didn’t work too well anyhow.”

  The Grand Circle door creaked a little as it closed behind the visitors. Calloway didn’t bother to look round. They’d gone, whoever they were.

  “There was somebody in the house this afternoon.”

  Hammersmith looked up from the sheets of figures he was poring over.

  “Oh?” His eyebrows were eruptions of wire-thick hair that seemed ambitious beyond their calling. They were raised high above Hammersmith’s tiny eyes in patently fake surprise. He plucked at his bottom lip with nicotine-stained fingers.

  “Any idea who it was?”

  He plucked on, still staring up at the younger man; undisguised contempt on his face.

  “Is it a problem?”

  “I just want to know who was in looking at the rehearsal that’s all. I think I’ve got a perfect right to ask.”

  “Perfect right,” said Hammersmith, nodding slightly and making his lips into a pale bow.

  “There was talk of somebody coming up from the National,” said Calloway. “My agents were arranging something. I just don’t want somebody coming in without me knowing about it. Especially if they’re important.”

  Hammersmith was already studying the figures again. His voice was tired.

  “Terry: if there’s someone in from the South Bank to look your opus over, I promise you, you’ll be the first to be informed. All right?”

  The inflexion was so bloody rude. So run-along-little-boy. Calloway itched to hit him.

  “I don’t want people watching rehearsals unless I authorize it, Hammersmith. Hear me? And I want to know who was in today.”

  The Manager sighed heavily.

  “Believe me, Terry,” he said, “I don’t know myself. I suggest you ask Tallulah—she was front of house this afternoon. If somebody came in, presumably she saw them.”

  He sighed again.

  “All right… Terry?”

  Calloway left it at that. He had his suspicions about Hammersmith. The man couldn’t give a shit about theatre, he never failed to make that absolutely plain; he affected an exhausted tone whenever anything but money was mentioned, as though matters of aesthetics were beneath his notice. And he had a word, loudly administered, for actors and directors alike: butterflies. One-day wonders. In Hammersmith’s world only money was forever, and the Elysium Theatre stood on prime land, land a wise man could turn a tidy profit on if he played his cards right.

  Calloway was certain he’d sell off the place tomorrow if he could maneuver it. A satellite town like Redditch, growing as Birmingham grew, didn’t need theatres, it needed offices, hypermarkets, warehouses: it needed, to quote the councilors, growth through investment in new industry. It also needed prime sites to build that industry upon. No mere art could survive such pragmatism.

  Tallulah was not in the box, nor in the foyer, nor in the Green Room.

  Irritated both by Hammersmith’s incivility and Tallulah’s disappearance, Calloway went back into the auditorium to pick up his jacket and go to get drunk. The rehearsal was over and the actors long gone. The bare hedges looked somewhat small from the back row of the stalls. Maybe they needed an extra few inches. He made a note on the back of a show bill he found in his pocket: Hedges, bigger?

  A footfall made him look up, and a figure had appeared on stage. A smooth entrance, up-stage centre, where the hedges converged. Calloway didn’t recognize the man.

  “Mr. Calloway? Mr. Terence Calloway?”

  “Yes?”

  The visitor walked down stage to where, in an earlier age, the footlights would have been, and stood looking out into the auditorium.

  “My apologies for interrupting your train of thought.”

  “No problem.”

  “I wanted a word.”

  “With me?”

  “If you would.”

  Calloway wandered down to the front of the stalls, appraising the stranger.

  He was dressed in shades of grey from head to foot. A grey worsted suit, grey shoes, a grey cravat. Piss-elegant, was Calloway’s first, uncharitable summation. But the man cut an impressive figure nevertheless. His face beneath the shadow of his brim was difficult to discern.

  “Allow me to introduce myself.”

  The voice was persuasive, cultured. Ideal for advertisement voice-overs: soap commercials, maybe. After Hammersmith’s bad manners, the voice came as a breath of good breeding.

  “My name is Lichfield. Not that I expect that means much to a man of your tender years.”

  Tender years: well, well. Maybe there was still something of the wunderkind in his face.

  “Are you a critic?” Calloway inquired.

  The laugh that emanated from beneath the immaculately swept brim was ripely ironical.

  “In the name of Jesus, no,” Lichfield replied.

  “I’m sorry, then, you have me at a loss.”

  “No need for an apology.”

  “Were you in the house this afternoon?”

  Lichfield ignored the question. “I realize you’re a busy man, Mr. Calloway, and I don’t want to waste your time. The theatre is my business, as it is yours. I think we must consider ourselves allies, though we have never met.”

  Ah, the great brotherhood. It made Calloway want to spit, the familiar claims of sentiment. When he thought of the number of so-called allies that had cheerfully stabbed him in the back; and in return the playwrights whose work he’d smilingly slanged, the actors he’d crushed with a casual quip. Brotherhood be damned, it was dog-eat-dog, same as any over-subscribed profession.

  “I have,” Lichfield was saying, “an abiding interest in the Elysium.” There was a curious emphasis on the word abiding. It sounded positively funereal from Lichfield’s lips. Abide with me.

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, I’ve spent many happy hours in this theatre, down the years, and frankly it pains me to carry this burden of news.”

  “What news?”

  “Mr. Calloway, I have to inform you that your Twelfth Night will be the last production the Elysium will see.”

  The statement didn’t come as much of a surprise, but it still hurt, and the internal wince must have registered on Calloway’s face.

  “Ah… so you didn’t know. I thought not. They always keep the artists in ignorance don’t they? It’s a satisfaction the Apollonians will never relinquish. The accountant’s revenge.”

  “Hammersmith,” said Calloway.

  “Hammersmith.”

  “Bastard.”

  “His clan are never to be trusted, but then I hardly need to tell you that.”

  “Are you sure about the closure?”

  “Certainly. He’d do it tomorrow if he could.”

  “But why? I’ve done Stoppard here, Tennessee Williams—always played to good houses. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “It makes admirable financial sense, I’m afraid, and if you think in figures, as Hammersmith does, there’s no ri
poste to simple arithmetic. The Elysium’s getting old. We’re all getting old. We creak. We feel our age in our joints: our instinct is to lie down and be gone away.”

  Gone away: the voice became melodramatically thin, a whisper of longing.

  “How do you know about this?”

  “I was, for many years, a trustee of the theatre, and since my retirement I’ve made it my business to—what’s the phrase?—keep my ear to the ground. It’s difficult, in this day and age, to evoke the triumph this stage has seen…”

  His voice trailed away, in a reverie. It seemed true, not an effect.

  Then, business-like once more: “This theatre is about to die, Mr. Calloway. You will be present at the last rites, through no fault of your own. I felt you ought to be… warned.”

  “Thank you. I appreciate that. Tell me, were you ever an actor yourself?”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “The voice.”

  “Too rhetorical by half, I know. My curse, I’m afraid. I can scarcely ask for a cup of coffee without sounding like Lear in the storm.”

  He laughed, heartily, at his own expense. Calloway began to warm to the fellow. Maybe he was a little archaic-looking, perhaps even slightly absurd, but there was a full-bloodedness about his manner that caught Calloway’s imagination. Lichfield wasn’t apologetic about his love of theatre, like so many in the profession, people who trod the boards as a second-best, their souls sold to the movies.

  “I have, I will confess, dabbled in the craft a little,” Lichfield confided, “but I just don’t have the stamina for it, I’m afraid. Now my wife—”

  Wife? Calloway was surprised Lichfield had a heterosexual bone in his body.

  ”—My wife Constantia has played here on a number of occasions, and I may say very successfully. Before the war of course.”

  “It’s a pity to close the place.”

  “Indeed. But there are no last-act miracles to be performed, I’m afraid. The Elysium will be rubble in six weeks’ time, and there’s an end to it. I just wanted you to know that interests other than the crassly commercial are watching over this closing production. Think of us as guardian angels. We wish you well, Terence, we all wish you well.”

  It was a genuine sentiment, simply stated. Calloway was touched by this man’s concern, and a little chastened by it. It put his own stepping-stone ambitions in an unflattering perspective. Lichfield went on: “We care to see this theatre end its days in suitable style, then die a good death.”