“Damn shame.”
“Too late for regrets by a long chalk. We should never have given up Dionysus for Apollo.”
“What?”
“Sold ourselves to the accountants, to legitimacy, to the likes of Mr. Hammersmith, whose soul, if he has one, must be the size of my fingernail, and grey as a louse’s back. We should have had the courage of our depictions, I think. Served poetry and lived under the stars.”
Calloway didn’t quite follow the allusions, but he got the general drift, and respected the viewpoint.
Off stage left, Diane’s voice cut the solemn atmosphere like a plastic knife.
“Terry? Are you there?”
The spell was broken: Calloway hadn’t been aware how hypnotic Lichfield’s presence was until that other voice came between them. Listening to him was like being rocked in familiar arms. Lichfield stepped to the edge of the stage, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial rasp.
“One last thing, Terence—”
“Yes?”
“Your Viola. She lacks, if you’ll forgive my pointing it out, the special qualities required for the role.”
Calloway hung fire.
“I know,” Lichfield continued, “personal loyalties prevent honesty in these matters.”
“No,” Calloway replied, “you’re right. But she’s popular.”
“So was bear-baiting, Terence.”
A luminous smile spread beneath the brim, hanging in the shadow like the grin of the Cheshire Cat.
“I’m only joking,” said Lichfield, his rasp a chuckle now. “Bears can be charming.”
“Terry, there you are.”
Diane appeared, over-dressed as usual, from behind the tabs. There was surely an embarrassing confrontation in the air. But Lichfield was walking away down the false perspective of the hedges towards the backdrop.
“Here I am,” said Terry.
“Who are you talking to?”
But Lichfield had exited, as smoothly and as quietly as he had entered. Diane hadn’t even seen him go.
“Oh, just an angel,” said Calloway.
The first Dress Rehearsal wasn’t, all things considered, as bad as Calloway had anticipated: it was immeasurably worse. Cues were lost, props mislaid, entrances missed; the comic business seemed ill-contrived and laborious; the performances either hopelessly overwrought or trifling. This was a Twelfth Night that seemed to last a year. Halfway through the third act Calloway glanced at his watch, and realized an uncut performance of Macbeth (with interval) would now be over.
He sat in the stalls with his head buried in his hands, contemplating the work that he still had to do if he was to bring this production up to scratch. Not for the first time on this show he felt helpless in the face of the casting problems. Cues could be tightened, props rehearsed with, entrances practised until they were engraved on the memory. But a bad actor is a bad actor is a bad actor. He could labour till doomsday neatening and sharpening, but he could not make a silk purse of the sow’s ear that was Diane Duvall.
With all the skill of an acrobat she contrived to skirt every significance, to ignore every opportunity to move the audience, to avoid every nuance the playwright would insist on putting in her way. It was a performance heroic in its ineptitude, reducing the delicate characterization Calloway had been at pains to create to a single-note whine. This Viola was soap-opera pap, less human than the hedges, and about as green.
The critics would slaughter her.
Worse than that, Lichfield would be disappointed. To his considerable surprise the impact of Lichfield’s appearance hadn’t dwindled; Calloway couldn’t forget his actorly projection, his posing, his rhetoric. It had moved him more deeply than he was prepared to admit, and the thought of this Twelfth Night, with this Viola, becoming the swan-song of Lichfield’s beloved Elysium perturbed and embarrassed him. It seemed somehow ungrateful.
He’d been warned often enough about a director’s burdens, long before he became seriously embroiled in the profession. His dear departed guru at the Actors’ Centre, Wellbeloved (he of the glass eye), had told Calloway from the beginning:
“A director is the loneliest creature on God’s earth. He knows what’s good and bad in a show, or he should if he’s worth his salt, and he has to carry that information around with him and keep smiling.”
It hadn’t seemed so difficult at the time.
“This job isn’t about succeeding,” Wellbeloved used to say, “it’s about learning not to fall on your sodding face.”
Good advice as it turned out. He could still see Wellbeloved handing out that wisdom on a plate, his bald head shiny, his living eye glittering with cynical delight. No man on earth, Calloway had thought, loved theatre with more passion than Wellbeloved, and surely no man could have been more scathing about its pretensions.
* * *
It was almost one in the morning by the time they’d finished the wretched run-through, gone through the notes, and separated, glum and mutually resentful, into the night. Calloway wanted none of their company tonight: no late drinking in one or others’ digs, no mutual ego-massage. He had a cloud of gloom all to himself, and neither wine, women nor song would disperse it. He could barely bring himself to look Diane in the face. His notes to her, broadcast in front of the rest of the cast, had been acidic. Not that it would do much good.
In the foyer, he met Tallulah, still spry though it was long after an old lady’s bedtime.
“Are you locking up tonight?” he asked her, more for something to say than because he was actually curious.
“I always lock up,” she said. She was well over seventy: too old for her job in the box office, and too tenacious to be easily removed. But then that was all academic now, wasn’t it? He wondered what her response would be when she heard the news of the closure. It would probably break her brittle heart. Hadn’t Hammersmith once told him Tallulah had been at the theatre since she was a girl of fifteen?
“Well, goodnight Tallulah.”
She gave him a tiny nod, as always. Then she reached out and took Calloway’s arm.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Lichfield…” she began.
“What about Mr. Lichfield?”
“He didn’t like the rehearsal.”
“He was in tonight?”
“Oh yes,” she replied, as though Calloway was an imbecile for thinking otherwise, “of course he was in.”
“I didn’t see him.”
“Well… no matter. He wasn’t very pleased.”
Calloway tried to sound indifferent.
“It can’t be helped.”
“Your show is very close to his heart.”
“I realize that,” said Calloway, avoiding Tallulah’s accusing looks. He had quite enough to keep him awake tonight, without her disappointed tones ringing in his ears.
He loosed his arm, and made for the door. Tallulah made no attempt to stop him. She just said: “You should have seen Constantia.”
Constantia? Where had he heard that name? Of course, Lichfield’s wife.
“She was a wonderful Viola.”
He was too tired for this mooning over dead actresses; she was dead wasn’t she? He had said she was dead, hadn’t he?
“Wonderful,” said Tallulah again.
“Goodnight, Tallulah. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
The old crone didn’t answer. If she was offended by his brusque manner, then so be it. He left her to her complaints and faced the street.
It was late November, and chilly. No balm in the night-air, just the smell of tar from a freshly laid road, and grit in the wind. Calloway pulled his jacket collar up around the back of his neck, and hurried off to the questionable refuge of Murphy’s Bed and Breakfast.
In the foyer Tallulah turned her back on the cold and dark of the outside world, and shuffled back into the temple of dreams. It smelt so weary now: stale with use and age, like her own body. It was time to let natural processes take their toll; there was no point in letting things run beyon
d their allotted span. That was as true of buildings as of people. But the Elysium had to die as it had lived, in glory.
Respectfully, she drew back the red curtains that covered the portraits in the corridor that led from foyer to stalls. Barrymore, Irving: great names and great actors. Stained and faded pictures perhaps, but the memories were as sharp and as refreshing as spring water. And in pride of place, the last of the line to be unveiled, a portrait of Constantia Lichfield. A face of transcendent beauty; a bone structure to make an anatomist weep.
She had been far too young for Lichfield of course, and that had been part of the tragedy of it. Lichfield the Svengali, a man twice her age, had been capable of giving his brilliant beauty everything she desired; fame, money, companionship. Everything but the gift she most required: life itself.
She’d died before she was yet twenty, a cancer in the breast. Taken so suddenly it was still difficult to believe she’d gone.
Tears brimmed in Tallulah’s eyes as she remembered that lost and wasted genius. So many parts Constantia would have illuminated had she been spared. Cleopatra, Hedda, Rosalind, Electra…
But it wasn’t to be. She’d gone, extinguished like a candle in a hurricane, and for those who were left behind life was a slow and joyless march through a cold land. There were mornings now, stirring to another dawn, when she would turn over and pray to die in her sleep.
The tears were quite blinding her now, she was awash. And oh dear, there was somebody behind her, probably Mr. Calloway back for something, and here was she, sobbing fit to burst, behaving like the silly old woman she knew he thought her to be. A young man like him, what did he understand about the pain of the years, the deep ache of irretrievable loss? That wouldn’t come to him for a while yet. Sooner than he thought, but a while nevertheless.
“Tallie,” somebody said.
She knew who it was. Richard Walden Lichfield. She turned round and he was standing no more than six feet from her, as fine a figure of a man as ever she remembered him to be. He must be twenty years older than she was, but age didn’t seem to bow him. She felt ashamed of her tears.
“Tallie,” he said kindly, “I know it’s a little late, but I felt you’d surely want to say hello.”
“Hello?”
The tears were clearing, and now she saw Lichfield’s companion, standing a respectful foot or two behind him, partially obscured. The figure stepped out of Lichfield’s shadow and there was a luminous, fine-boned beauty Tallulah recognized as easily as her own reflection. Time broke in pieces, and reason deserted the world. Longed-for faces were suddenly back to fill the empty nights, and offer fresh hope to a life grown weary. Why should she argue with the evidence of her eyes?
It was Constantia, the radiant Constantia, who was looping her arm through Lichfield’s and nodding gravely at Tallulah in greeting.
Dear, dead Constantia.
The rehearsal was called for nine-thirty the following morning. Diane Duvall made an entrance her customary half hour late. She looked as though she hadn’t slept all night.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said, her open vowels oozing down the aisle towards the stage.
Calloway was in no mood for foot-kissing.
“We’ve got an opening tomorrow,” he snapped, “and everybody’s been kept waiting by you.”
“Oh really?” she fluttered, trying to be devastating. It was too early in the morning, and the effect fell on stony ground.
“OK, we’re going from the top,” Calloway announced, “and everybody please have your copies and a pen. I’ve got a list of cuts here and I want them rehearsed in by lunchtime. Ryan, have you got the prompt copy?”
There was a hurried exchange with the ASM and an apologetic negative from Ryan.
“Well get it. And I don’t want any complaints from anyone, it’s too late in the day. Last night’s run was a wake, not a performance. The cues took forever; the business was ragged. I’m going to cut, and it’s not going to be very palatable.”
It wasn’t. The complaints came, warning or no, the arguments, the compromises, the sour faces and muttered insults. Calloway would have rather been hanging by his toes from a trapeze than maneuvering fourteen highly strung people through a play two-thirds of them scarcely understood, and the other third couldn’t give a monkey’s about. It was nerve-wracking.
It was made worse because all the time he had the prickly sense of being watched, though the auditorium was empty from Gods to front stalls. Maybe Lichfield had a spyhole somewhere, he thought, then condemned the idea as the first signs of budding paranoia.
At last, lunch.
Calloway knew where he’d find Diane, and he was prepared for the scene he had to play with her. Accusations, tears, reassurance, tears again, reconciliation. Standard format.
He knocked on the Star’s door.
“Who is it?”
Was she crying already, or talking through a glass of something comforting?
“It’s me.”
“Oh.”
“Can I come in?”
“Yes.”
She had a bottle of vodka, good vodka, and a glass. No tears as yet.
“I’m useless, aren’t I?” she said, almost as soon as he’d closed the door. Her eyes begged for contradiction.
“Don’t be silly,” he hedged.
“I could never get the hang of Shakespeare,” she pouted, as though it were the Bard’s fault. “All those bloody words.” The squall was on the horizon, he could see it mustering.
“It’s all right,” he lied, putting his arm around her. “You just need a little time.”
Her face clouded.
“We open tomorrow,” she said flatly. The point was difficult to refute.
“They’ll tear me apart, won’t they?”
He wanted to say no, but his tongue had a fit of honesty.
“Yes. Unless—”
“I’ll never work again, will I? Harry talked me into this, that damn half-witted Jew: good for my reputation, he said. Bound to give me a bit more clout, he said. What does he know? Takes his ten bloody per cent and leaves me holding the baby. I’m the one who looks the damn fool aren’t I?”
At the thought of looking a fool, the storm broke. No light shower this: it was a cloudburst or nothing. He did what he could, but it was difficult. She was sobbing so loudly his pearls of wisdom were drowned out. So he kissed her a little, as any decent director was bound to do, and (miracle upon miracle) that seemed to do the trick. He applied the technique with a little more gusto, his hands straying to her breasts, ferreting under her blouse for her nipples and teasing them between thumb and forefinger.
It worked wonders. There were hints of sun between the clouds now; she sniffed and unbuckled his belt, letting his heat dry out the last of the rain. His fingers were finding the lacy edge of her panties, and she was sighing as he investigated her, gently but not too gently, insistent but never too insistent. Somewhere along the line she knocked over the vodka bottle but neither of them cared to stop and right it, so it sloshed on to the floor off the edge of the table, counterpointing her instructions, his gasps.
Then the bloody door opened, and a draught blew up between them, cooling the point at issue.
Calloway almost turned round, then realized he was unbuckled, and stared instead into the mirror behind Diane to see the intruder’s face. It was Lichfield. He was looking straight at Calloway, his face impassive.
“I’m sorry, I should have knocked.”
His voice was as smooth as whipped cream, betraying nary a tremor of embarrassment. Calloway wedged himself away, buckled up his belt and turned to Lichfield, silently cursing his burning cheeks.
“Yes… it would have been polite,” he said.
“Again, my apologies. I wanted a word with—” his eyes, so deep-set they were unfathomable, were on Diane ”—your star,” he said.
Calloway could practically feel Diane’s ego expand at the word. The approach confounded him: had Lichfield undergone a volte-face?
Was he coming here, the repentant admirer, to kneel at the feet of greatness?
“I would appreciate a word with the lady in private, if that were possible,” the mellow voice went on.
“Well, we were just—”
“Of course,” Diane interrupted. “Just allow me a moment, would you?”
She was immediately on top of the situation, tears forgotten.
“I’ll be just outside,” said Lichfield, already taking his leave.
Before he had closed the door behind him Diane was in front of the mirror, tissue-wrapped finger skirting her eye to divert a rivulet of mascara.
“Well,” she was cooing, “how lovely to have a well-wisher. Do you know who he is?”
“His name’s Lichfield,” Calloway told her. “He used to be a trustee of the theatre.”
“Maybe he wants to offer me something.”
“I doubt it.”
“Oh don’t be such a drag, Terence,” she snarled. “You just can’t bear to have anyone else get any attention, can you?”
“My mistake.”
She peered at her eyes.
“How do I look?” she asked.
“Fine.”
“I’m sorry about before.”
“Before?”
“You know.”
“Oh… yes.”
“I’ll see you in the pub, eh?”
He was summarily dismissed apparently, his function as lover or confidant no longer required.
In the chilly corridor outside the dressing room Lichfield was waiting patiently. Though the lights were better here than on the ill-lit stage, and he was closer now than he’d been the night before, Calloway could still not quite make out the face under the wide brim. There was something—what was the idea buzzing in his head?—something artificial about Lichfield’s features. The flesh of his face didn’t move as interlocking system of muscle and tendon, it was too stiff, too pink, almost like scar-tissue.
“She’s not quite ready,” Calloway told him.
The Living Dead Page 20