Unseen, she made her way past the posters that bore her face and name, and through the empty auditorium to her dressing-room. There, smoking his way through a pack of cigarettes, she found the object of her affection.
“Terry.”
She posed in the doorway for a moment, letting the fact of her reappearance sink in. He went quite white at the sight of her, so she pouted a little. It wasn’t easy to pout. There was a stiffness in the muscles of her face but she carried off the effect to her satisfaction.
Calloway was lost for words. Diane looked ill, no two ways about it, and if she’d left the hospital to take up her part in the Dress Rehearsal he was going to have to convince her otherwise. She was wearing no make-up, and her ash-blonde hair needed a wash.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, as she closed the door behind her.
“Unfinished business,” she said.
“Listen… I’ve got something to tell you…”
God, this was going to be messy. “We’ve found a replacement, in the show.” She looked at him blankly. He hurried on, tripping over his own words, “We thought you were out of commission, I mean, not permanently, but, you know, for the opening at least…”
“Don’t worry,” she said.
His jaw dropped a little.
“Don’t worry?”
“What’s it to me?”
“You said you came back to finish—”
He stopped. She was unbuttoning the top of her dress. She’s not serious, he thought, she can’t be serious. Sex? Now?
“I’ve done a lot of thinking in the last few hours,” she said as she shimmied the crumpled dress over her hips, let it fall, and stepped out of it. She was wearing a white bra, which she tried, unsuccessfully, to unhook. “I’ve decided I don’t care about the theatre. Help me, will you?”
She turned round and presented her back to him. Automatically he unhooked the bra, not really analyzing whether he wanted this or not. It seemed to be a fait accompli. She’d come back to finish what they’d been interrupted doing, simple as that. And despite the bizarre noises she was making in the back of her throat, and the glassy look in her eyes, she was still an attractive woman. She turned again, and Calloway stared at the fullness of her breasts, paler than he’d remembered them, but lovely. His trousers were becoming uncomfortably tight, and her performance was only worsening his situation, the way she was grinding her hips like the rawest of Soho strippers, running her hands between her legs.
“Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I’ve made up my mind. All I really want…”
She put her hands, so recently at her groin, on his face. They were icy cold.
“All I really want is you. I can’t have sex and the stage… There comes a time in everyone’s life when decisions have to be made.”
She licked her lips. There was no film of moisture left on her mouth when her tongue had passed over it.
“The accident made me think, made me analyze what it is I really care about. And frankly—” She was unbuckling his belt. ”—I don’t give a shit—”
Now the zip.
”—about this, or any other fucking play.”
His trousers fell down.
”—I’ll show you what I care about.”
She reached into his briefs, and clasped him. Her cold hand somehow made the touch sexier. He laughed, closing his eyes as she pulled his briefs down to the middle of his thigh and knelt at his feet.
She was as expert as ever, her throat open like a drain. Her mouth was somewhat drier than usual, her tongue scouring him, but the sensations drove him wild. It was so good, he scarcely noticed the ease with which she devoured him, taking him deeper than she’d ever managed previously, using every trick she knew to goad him higher and higher. Slow and deep, then picking up speed until he almost came, then slowing again until the need passed. He was completely at her mercy.
He opened his eyes to watch her at work. She was skewering herself upon him, face in rapture.
“God,” he gasped, “that is so good. Oh yes, oh yes.”
Her face didn’t even flicker in response to his words, she just continued to work at him soundlessly. She wasn’t making her usual noises, the small grunts of satisfaction, the heavy breathing through the nose. She just ate his flesh in absolute silence.
He held his breath a moment, while an idea was born in his belly. The bobbing head bobbed on, eyes closed, lips clamped around his member, utterly engrossed. Half a minute passed; a minute; a minute and a half. And now his belly was full of terrors.
She wasn’t breathing. She was giving this matchless blow-job because she wasn’t stopping, even for a moment, to inhale or exhale.
Calloway felt his body go rigid, while his erection wilted in her throat. She didn’t falter in her labor; the relentless pumping continued at his groin even as his mind formed the unthinkable thought:
She’s dead.
She has me in her mouth, in her cold mouth, and she’s dead. That’s why she’d come back, got up off her mortuary slab and come back. She was eager to finish what she’d started, no longer caring about the play, or her usurper. It was this act she valued, this act alone. She’d chosen to perform it for eternity.
Calloway could do nothing with the realization but stare down like a damn fool while this corpse gave him head.
Then it seemed she sensed his horror. She opened her eyes and looked up at him. How could he ever have mistaken that dead stare for life? Gently, she withdrew his shrunken manhood from between her lips.
“What is it?” she asked, her fluting voice still affecting life.
“You… you’re not… breathing.”
Her face fell. She let him go.
“Oh darling,” she said, letting all pretence to life disappear, “I’m not so good at playing the part, am I?”
Her voice was a ghost’s voice: thin, forlorn. Her skin, which he had thought so flatteringly pale was, on second view, a waxen white.
“You are dead?” he said.
“I’m afraid so. Two hours ago: in my sleep. But I had to come, Terry; so much unfinished business. I made my choice. You should be flattered. You are flattered, aren’t you?”
She stood up and reached into her handbag, which she’d left beside the mirror. Calloway looked at the door, trying to make his limbs work, but they were inert. Besides, he had his trousers round his ankles. Two steps and he’d fall flat on his face.
She turned back on him, with something silver and sharp in her hand. Try as he might, he couldn’t get a focus on it. But whatever it was, she meant it for him.
Since the building of the new Crematorium in 1934, one humiliation had come after another for the cemetery. The tombs had been raided for lead coffin-linings, the stones overturned and smashed; it was fouled by dogs and graffiti. Very few mourners now came to tend the graves. The generations had dwindled, and the small number of people who might still have had a loved one buried there were too infirm to risk the throttled walkways, or too tender to bear looking at such vandalism.
It had not always been so. There were illustrious and influential families interred behind the marble facades of the Victorian mausoleums. Founder fathers, local industrialists and dignitaries, any and all who had done the town proud by their efforts. The body of the actress Constantia Lichfield had been buried here (“Until the Day Break and the Shadows Flee Away”), though her grave was almost unique in the attention some secret admirer still paid to it.
Nobody was watching that night, it was too bitter for lovers. Nobody saw Charlotte Hancock open the door of her sepulchre, with the beating wings of pigeons applauding her vigour as she shambled out to meet the moon. Her husband Gerard was with her, he less fresh than she, having been dead thirteen years longer. Joseph Jardine, en famille, was not far behind the Hancocks, as was Marriott Fletcher, and Anne Snell, and the Peacock Brothers; the list went on and on. In one corner, Alfred Crawshaw (Captain in the 17th Lancers) was helping his lovely wife Emma from the rot of their bed.
Everywhere faces pressed at the cracks of the tomblids—was that not Kezia Reynolds with her child, who’d lived just a day, in her arms? and Martin van de Linde (the Memory of the Just is Blessed) whose wife had never been found; Rosa and Selina Goldfinch: upstanding women both; and Thomas Jerrey, and—
Too many names to mention. Too many states of decay to describe. Sufficient to say they rose: their burial finery flyborn, their faces stripped of all but the foundation of beauty. Still they came, swinging open the back gate of the cemetery and threading their way across the wasteland towards the Elysium. In the distance, the sound of traffic. Above, a jet roared in to land. One of the Peacock brothers, staring up at the winking giant as it passed over, missed his footing and fell on his face, shattering his jaw. They picked him up fondly, and escorted him on his way. There was no harm done; and what would a Resurrection be without a few laughs?
So the show went on.
“If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it; that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken and so die—”
Calloway could not be found at Curtain; but Ryan had instructions from Hammersmith (through the ubiquitous Mr. Lichfield) to take the show up with or without the Director.
“He’ll be upstairs, in the Gods,” said Lichfield. “In fact, I think I can see him from here.”
“Is he smiling?” asked Eddie.
“Grinning from ear to ear.”
“Then he’s pissed.”
The actors laughed. There was a good deal of laughter that night. The show was running smoothly, and though they couldn’t see the audience over the glare of the newly installed footlights they could feel the waves of love and delight pouring out of the auditorium. The actors were coming off stage elated.
“They’re all sitting in the Gods,” said Eddie, “but your friends, Mr. Lichfield, do an old ham good. They’re quiet of course, but such big smiles on their faces.”
Act I, Scene II; and the first entrance of Constantia Lichfield as Viola was met with spontaneous applause. Such applause. Like the hollow roll of snare drums, like the brittle beating of a thousand sticks on a thousand stretched skins. Lavish, wanton applause.
And, my God, she rose to the occasion. She began the play as she meant to go on, giving her whole heart to the role, not needing physicality to communicate the depth of her feelings, but speaking the poetry with such intelligence and passion the merest flutter of her hand was worth more than a hundred grander gestures. After that first scene her every entrance was met with the same applause from the audience, followed by almost reverential silence.
Backstage, a kind of buoyant confidence had set in. The whole company sniffed the success; a success which had been snatched miraculously from the jaws of disaster.
There again! Applause! Applause!
In his office, Hammersmith dimly registered the brittle din of adulation through a haze of booze.
He was in the act of pouring his eighth drink when the door opened. He glanced up for a moment and registered that the visitor was that upstart Calloway. Come to gloat I daresay, Hammersmith thought, come to tell me how wrong I was.
“What do you want?”
The punk didn’t answer. From the corner of his eye Hammersmith had an impression of a broad, bright smile on Calloway’s face. Self-satisfied half-wit, coming in here when a man was in mourning.
“I suppose you’ve heard?”
The other grunted.
“She died,” said Hammersmith, beginning to cry. “She died a few hours ago, without regaining consciousness. I haven’t told the actors. Didn’t seem worth it.”
Calloway said nothing in reply to this news. Didn’t the bastard care? Couldn’t he see that this was the end of the world? The woman was dead. She’d died in the bowels of the Elysium. There’d be official enquiries made, the insurance would be examined, a post-mortem, an inquest: it would reveal too much.
He drank deeply from his glass, not bothering to look at Calloway again.
“Your career’ll take a dive after this, son. It won’t just be me: oh dear no.”
Still Calloway kept his silence.
“Don’t you care?” Hammersmith demanded.
There was silence for a moment, then Calloway responded. “I don’t give a shit.”
“Jumped up little stage-manager, that’s all you are. That’s all any of you fucking directors are! One good review and you’re God’s gift to art. Well let me set you straight about that—”
He looked at Calloway, his eyes, swimming in alcohol, having difficulty focusing. But he got there eventually.
Calloway, the dirty bugger, was naked from the waist down. He was wearing his shoes and his socks, but no trousers or briefs. His self-exposure would have been comical, but for the expression on his face. The man had gone mad: his eyes were rolling around uncontrollably, saliva and snot ran from mouth and nose, his tongue hung out like the tongue of a panting dog.
Hammersmith put his glass down on his blotting pad, and looked at the worst part. There was blood on Calloway’s shirt, a trail of it which led up his neck to his left ear, from which protruded the end of Diane Duval’s nail-file. It had been driven deep into Calloway’s brain. The man was surely dead.
But he stood, spoke, walked.
From the theatre, there rose another round of applause, muted by distance. It wasn’t a real sound somehow; it came from another world, a place where emotions ruled. It was a world Hammersmith had always felt excluded from. He’d never been much of an actor, though God knows he’d tried, and the two plays he’d penned were, he knew, execrable. Book-keeping was his forte, and he’d used it to stay as close to the stage as he could, hating his own lack of art as much as he resented that skill in others.
The applause died, and as if taking a cue from an unseen prompter, Calloway came at him. The mask he wore was neither comic nor tragic, it was blood and laughter together. Cowering, Hammersmith was cornered behind his desk. Calloway leapt on to it (he looked so ridiculous, shirt-tails and balls flip-flapping) and seized Hammersmith by the tie.
“Philistine,” said Calloway, never now to know Hammersmith’s heart, and broke the man’s neck—snap!—while below the applause began again.
“Do not embrace me till each circumstance
Of place, time, fortune, do cohere and jump
That I am Viola.”
From Constantia’s mouth the lines were a revelation. It was almost as though this Twelfth Night were a new play, and the part of Viola had been written for Constantia Lichfield alone. The actors who shared the stage with her felt their egos shriveling in the face of such a gift.
The last act continued to its bitter-sweet conclusion, the audience as enthralled as ever to judge by their breathless attention.
The Duke spoke: “Give me thy hand;
And let me see thee in thy woman’s weeds.”
In the rehearsal the invitation in the line had been ignored: no-one was to touch this Viola, much less take her hand. But in the heat of the performance such taboos were forgotten. Possessed by the passion of the moment the actor reached for Constantia. She, forgetting the taboo in her turn, reached to answer his touch.
In the wings Lichfield breathed “no” under his breath, but his order wasn’t heard. The Duke grasped Viola’s hand in his, life and death holding court together under this painted sky.
It was a chilly hand, a hand without blood in its veins, or a blush in its skin.
But here it was as good as alive.
They were equals, the living and the dead, and nobody could find just cause to part them.
In the wings, Lichfield sighed, and allowed himself a smile. He’d feared that touch, feared it would break the spell. But Dionysus was with them tonight. All would be well; he felt it in his bones.
The act drew to a close, and Malvolio, still trumpeting his threats, even in defeat, was carted off. One by one the company exited, leaving the clown to wrap up the play.
“A great w
hile ago the world began,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
But that’s all one, our play is done
And we’ll strive to please you every day.”
The scene darkened to blackout, and the curtain descended. From the Gods rapturous applause erupted, that same rattling, hollow applause. The company, their faces shining with the success of the Dress Rehearsal, formed behind the curtain for the bow. The curtain rose: the applause mounted.
In the wings, Calloway joined Lichfield. He was dressed now: and he’d washed the blood off his neck.
“Well, we have a brilliant success,” said the skull. “It does seem a pity that this company should be dissolved so soon.”
“It does,” said the corpse.
The actors were shouting into the wings now, calling for Calloway to join them. They were applauding him, encouraging him to show his face.
He put a hand on Lichfield’s shoulder.
“We’ll go together, sir,” he said.
“No, no, I couldn’t.”
“You must. It’s your triumph as much as mine.” Lichfield nodded, and they went out together to take their bows beside the company.
In the wings Tallulah was at work. She felt restored after her sleep in the Green Room. So much unpleasantness had gone, taken with her life. She no longer suffered the aches in her hip, or the creeping neuralgia in her scalp. There was no longer the necessity to draw breath through pipes encrusted with seventy years’ muck, or to rub the backs of her hands to get the circulation going; not even the need to blink. She laid the fires with a new strength, pressing the detritus of past productions into use: old backdrops, props, costuming. When she had enough combustibles heaped, she struck a match and set the flame to them. The Elysium began to burn.
Over the applause, somebody was shouting:
“Marvelous, sweethearts, marvelous.”
It was Diane’s voice, they all recognized it even though they couldn’t quite see her. She was staggering down the centre aisle towards the stage, making quite a fool of herself.
The Living Dead Page 22