The Memory of Blood

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘What time do you make it?’

  Mona squinted at a tiny gold watch. ‘Eight-thirty. I shan’t be staying late. I’m voice-coaching in the morning, teaching a class of Essex girls not to use glottal stops. They hardly need elocution to work in nail salons, but the money’s good.’

  The vast semicircular lounge had a sweeping curve of glass overlooking the Palladian streets below Trafalgar Square. All along the blue silk back wall were arranged dozens of theatre souvenirs: playbills, autographed headshots, programmes and props. At any one time there were over two hundred plays booking in London, and their convoluted histories were well represented here. The Duchess, the Duke of York’s, Wyndham’s, the Garrick, the Aldwych. Gielgud, Olivier, Richardson, Bernhardt, they all smiled down at the guests. There were Indonesian silhouettes and Chinese shadow puppets, Italian harlequins and French Guignol dolls.

  On one side of the lounge door stood a grotesque iron-plate minstrel in a top hat that grinned and rolled its eyes when fed coins. On the other side was a Jolly Jack Tar in a wooden case. The Victorian seaside amusement was a museum piece that seemed designed for the specific purpose of giving children nightmares. Its skin was just plaster, its rictus smile mere painted wood, but it looked leathery and cancerous, like an embalmed corpse. When a ten-pence piece was inserted, it rocked back and forth squealing with laughter while a crackly organ recording of ‘I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside’ played. The sailor grinned and eyed the guests from the side of its moulting head, as if to say I know what you’re up to.

  It was, everyone agreed, an extraordinary apartment. But then, it belonged to an extraordinary man, the host of this evening’s event.

  ‘I used to love the theatre,’ Mona Williams said. ‘So many British playwrights wrote eloquently about the human condition. Griffiths, Ayckbourn, Brenton, Nichols, Barnes—they created proper parts for real women, but where are those parts now? These days I’ll settle for a play that’s got a practical meal in the first half and a sofa in the second, so long as it’s closer to the West End than Harrow-on-the-Hill.’

  Always bitching, thought Neil Crofting wearily. She’s hardly been off the stage all her acting life, and still she complains about being hard done by. The West End is full of dreadful old musicals starring teenagers from TV talent shows. She should be glad she’s still working.

  A dull rumble of thunder tinkled the glasses on the sideboard, like an approaching earthquake. A moment later, rain drummed against the great windows of the penthouse. The conversation lowered its volume for a moment, as if in respect of the gods above.

  A knife rang out against the side of a delicate Lady Hamilton wineglass.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, if I could have your attention for a moment.’

  The host, Robert Julius Kramer, glared at the room’s inhabitants until they became more stilled by him than by the storm outside. ‘Thank you all so much for joining me here tonight in celebration of our first production, The Two Murderers. As you know, we took the unprecedented step of providing the critics with a special matinee today, in order to guarantee simultaneous reviews for the production. So far their advance comments have been, shall we say, unequivocal.’ A ripple of uneasy laughter pulsed through the room; the reaction of the critics as they filed glumly out into a miserable afternoon on the Strand had been absolutely horrific. ‘However, our producer, Gregory Baine, has just handed me a spreadsheet of the advance bookings, and I can safely say that we already have a guaranteed three-month run ahead of us. A clear indication that the public has much better taste than the critics.’

  Everyone turned around and stared at the critics in the room, who squirmed awkwardly. When it came to creating nervous tension, the party’s host was a master of his art.

  ‘It matters not,’ Kramer continued, ‘because there’s always a new Hamlet at the National for the critics to enjoy, and there’s always something in the West End to please the sensation-seekers, so everybody wins. Although I’d happily stage Shakespeare with pole dancers if I thought it would get more bums on seats. I’m a showman, not an intellectual.’

  ‘You can say that again,’ murmured Mona.

  The embarrassed amusement turned to forced applause. Kramer air-patted his congregation back into obedient attention. ‘As you know, my plan is to establish a permanent company at this theatre, starring in at least three repertory productions throughout the next winter season, four if we can manage it. And I am pleased to announce that we will begin casting for the second of these productions within the next few weeks. I’d like to thank our wonderful leads, Della Fortess and Marcus Sigler; my producer, Gregory Baine; our director, Russell Haddon, who has guided us through perilous seas; our brilliant set designer, Ella Maltby; our genius writer, Ray Pryce; and especially my lovely wife, Judith, whose handbag habit requires that I continue working later in life than I had intended. Oh, and to the critics here who were happy to take our bribes, stay and enjoy your free champagne. Now, I’d like you to charge your glasses to The Two Murderers—long may they continue to bring death and destruction to the West End.’

  ‘The Two Murderers!’ Thirty-five champagne flutes were raised aloft, and the casual conversation resumed, more excited than it had been before.

  ‘I notice we didn’t warrant a mention.’ Mona Williams sniffed. ‘My agent told me I’d be required for the second lead, not a character part. I shall have a word with Robert about that.’

  ‘Perhaps you should have a word with your agent,’ said Neil Crofting, turning aside to talk to a spectacularly endowed young lady who was shaking herself out of a wet jacket.

  The thunder rumbled, and a sharp crack of lightning turned the room into a dazzling tableau. The wall puppets stared down at the crowd with shining dead eyes. The room unfroze and glanced uneasily toward the windows. Chatter faltered. The storm had moved directly overhead.

  ‘I haven’t seen you before.’ Crofting directed his attention to the attractive girl who had just arrived. ‘I take it you’re not part of our disreputable production.’

  ‘Not yet, no,’ replied the girl, smiling pleasantly. ‘Mr Kramer hired me to start Monday as the ASM.’

  ‘But we already have an assistant stage manager,’ said Crofting.

  ‘She’s leaving to have a baby?’ The girl looked at this pair of old actors as if she was their caregiver. Crofting noticed that she inflected her sentence upwards, as so many young people did these days. He vaguely recalled seeing an assistant stage manager hovering in the background, complaining about the players’ timekeeping habits, and struggled to conjure up a face. The stage manager, a hateful old haystack called Barnesly, gave the impression that he detested actors, and never socialised with them. ‘You know, I never even realised she was pregnant. She’s so thin. The director drives us all so hard that we hardly get time to eat. I’m Neil Crofting.’ He held out his hand and waited for a glimmer of recognition from the girl to show that she had seen him in the BBC’s recent Sherlock Holmes series, but none came. Admittedly, it had only been a small part.

  ‘Gail Strong.’ She shook his hand and peered over his shoulder, already anxious to move on.

  ‘Well, I daresay we’ll be seeing a lot of each other in the weeks ahead—welcome aboard.’ But Gail Strong had already slipped away.

  ‘She was in a rush,’ he complained to Mona. ‘The young always are, aren’t they?’

  ‘Only when you talk to them,’ said Mona, draining her red wine. ‘Don’t you think there’s an odd feeling in here tonight?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Crofting was immune to sensitivities. In his experience, most actresses went mad after they hit fifty and started believing in all sorts of New Age rubbish.

  Mona sniffed and studied the guests. ‘Is there any trouble among the cast that you’re aware of? Apart from the usual old bollocks, I mean.’

  ‘Not that I know of. Why?’

  ‘There’s a bad atmosphere in the room. A kind of tension. I don’t like it.’

  ‘Storms alway
s put people on edge.’

  ‘Only if you’re doing Regent’s Park open-air theatre. No, this is something else. It’s hard to explain. You truly don’t feel it?’

  ‘No. Honestly, Mona, I don’t know why you can’t just relax and enjoy yourself like everyone else, instead of worrying about—atmospherics. Not everything has to be theatrical, you know. Shakespeare was wrong. All the world is not a stage, not really.’

  As if to disprove him, an immense bellow of thunder sounded, like a tumble of boulders rolling across the roof. A woman shrieked and Mona started, but the shriek turned into a laugh.

  ‘You must learn to accept, Neil, that some people are more sensitive than others. We all feel things differently. The older we get, the thinner the wall between life and death becomes.’ Mona was suddenly serious. ‘I can sense when someone is about to die.’

  ‘And you can sense that now? You can feel death in the air tonight?’ Crofting looked around. ‘Who’s giving you this feeling? Where is it coming from?’

  Mona glanced down at her shoes and shook her head. ‘I don’t know. Everyone’s being thoroughly ill-tempered; they’re just pretending things are fine. Robert’s over there saying hateful things about his first wife. Our writer is talking about moving to Australia where the money is apparently better. I overheard Russell complaining that he thought everyone’s performances were off this afternoon.’

  ‘Oh, he’s just the director. Everyone ignores him.’

  ‘I’m sorry—take no notice of me, darling. It’s been a long day. I didn’t think the matinee went especially well. Marcus was put out when that woman’s cell phone went off, did you notice? He lost a whole page in the fourth scene. He doesn’t seem to care that it throws the rest of us off.’

  ‘You know matinees never get the reaction they’re supposed to. It didn’t help to look out and see a row of critics sitting there making notes. I wonder if Robert really did try to bribe them. I wouldn’t put it past him.’

  ‘Do you mind if I sit down for a minute? I’m tired and it’s hot in here.’

  ‘Really? I was just thinking how oddly cold it was,’ Crofting replied. ‘There’s a draught coming from somewhere.’

  ‘Someone just walked over your grave,’ said Mona, raising her glass. ‘Be a darling and get me another drink, would you?’

  The great glass lounge cast a buttery glow across the street. The Kramers’ duplex penthouse occupied a key position on Northumberland Avenue, the elegant, underused thoroughfare that extended south of Trafalgar Square toward the Embankment. The terraced floor of ground-to-ceiling glass was topped with a minstrel gallery and three en suite bedrooms. The views took in the London Eye and the Royal Festival Hall. There were few more desirable properties in central London.

  Robert Julius Kramer, the host, was a self-made man who had come up with the bright idea of buying all the private car parks that had existed on former bomb sites around the city. The sites had made fortunes for their owners in the postwar years, until the city’s public transport system improved and London’s congestion charge kicked in.

  Kramer realised that the old property rights were mostly still attached to these derelict open spaces and warehouses, so he applied for planning permission to erect office buildings, offsetting his costs with funding provided by city regeneration schemes. He had become a millionaire before his twenty-fifth birthday, and celebrated the occasion by informing his loyal girlfriend that he was now rich, and was dumping her. That was when he added the name Julius. Now he was in his early forties, and his second wife, Judith, had recently given birth to their first son.

  Beneath the building’s portico, the liveried doorman glanced out at turbulent clouds and watched lightning crack the sky apart. All thirty-five of Robert Kramer’s guests had been checked against his list. No-one had failed to show up, even on a night like this. From what he’d heard, they wouldn’t dare to stay away if they valued their jobs. He settled back in the doorway to await their intoxicated departures.

  Up in the penthouse, Gail Strong, the new ASM, was working the other side of the room. Robert Kramer had suggested she should come along and meet everyone, but they were all wrapped up in private conversations. She passed a broad-shouldered man with a luxuriant cascade of glossy black hair, and heard someone call him Russell, so that had to be Russell Haddon, the play’s director. Pretty fit, but he was wearing a flashy wedding ring. She spotted an anxious-looking, bespectacled but oddly pretty young man with thin blond hair and a reticent attitude, seated alone beside the food display.

  ‘Hi, I’m Gail Strong, do you know anyone here?’ she asked, sitting down beside him. For a moment he seemed not to hear. When he turned to study her with faraway eyes, something prompted her to ask, ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘No, not exactly,’ he replied, breathing out. ‘I hate being here.’

  ‘I grew up accompanying my parents to parties like this almost every night. My father—’

  ‘—is the Public Buildings Minister. I know who you are. You’ve been in the papers quite a lot lately.’ He removed his glasses and wiped them. He had tiny black eyes, like a mouse. ‘I’m Ray Pryce. Pleased to meet you.’

  ‘I’ve just joined the company as the new ASM?’

  ‘Then we’ll be working together.’

  ‘Cool—I’ll be the one fining you when you’re late for rehearsals. What do you do?’

  ‘I’m the writer.’

  ‘Oh, my God, I’m like so embarrassed!’ She threw hands to her face. ‘I thought you were one of the cast. You’re so young. I saw the dress rehearsal of The Two Murderers last week, I thought it was totally amazing?’

  She had a way of moving her hands around her face that made him think of a deaf person signing. She had the studied elegance of a model. He fell for her, trying not to remember that everyone who met her fell in love—at first.

  ‘The critics don’t seem to agree with you.’ A note of annoyance crept into his voice. ‘There’s an old Chinese proverb: Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.’

  ‘Oh, who cares about them, you heard what Mr Kramer said, it’s a critic-proof show.’

  ‘He doesn’t seem to think so.’ Ray Pryce pointed through the gathering at a portly, bald man in his late thirties who was attacking a plate of salmon sandwiches. ‘That’s Alex Lansdale; he’s the theatre reviewer for Hard News. One of the critics Kramer couldn’t buy.’

  ‘I hate that paper. Their photographer took a picture of me coming out of The Ivy and said I was drunk, but I’d just broken my heel.’ In fact, Gail had broken her heel because she was drunk, but she felt it was important to rail against the gutter press whenever possible.

  ‘Lansdale wrote an incredibly insulting piece about the play even before the New Strand Theatre held its press event. Nobody does that; it breaks a long-standing unspoken rule of the West End. Now he has the nerve to turn up here for the party. If I was the host I’d have him thrown out. After all, Robert Kramer holds more power in this room than everyone else put together. The rest of us are just his players, but at least we’re here because we have skills. Theatre critics are just wannabees.’

  ‘Yeah, well, it gives you all a common enemy.’

  ‘We already have a common enemy.’ Pryce glared in the direction of a smarmy-looking city type with slicked reddish hair and a supercilious smirk. ‘Gregory Baine. The producer.’

  ‘I’ll never remember who everyone is,’ said Gail.

  ‘It doesn’t matter—you’ll soon get to know them, trust me.’

  ‘What’s the problem with him?’

  ‘Baine stopped our salaries and put us on a profit-share, says it’s better for us that way. He and Robert know they’ll be able to fiddle the books and prove the show hasn’t made enough money to pay us scale. We should never have signed our contracts, but I guess we were all desperate to work. What about you?’

  ‘I’m really an intern. This is my first professional job. I haven’t worked in a West End production before. My father thoug
ht it would be a good way of keeping me out of the papers for a while.’

  ‘Well, don’t expect to be recompensed for your labours.’

  ‘I guess Robert Kramer has plenty of money,’ said Gail, looking around. ‘This is a pretty cool penthouse.’

  ‘He bought the New Strand Theatre outright in order to indulge his hobby. Owners don’t use their own cash for shows anymore.’

  Gail didn’t have much of an attention span, and Pryce was already beginning to bore her. ‘What else have you written?’

  ‘This is my first full-length play. I took it to Robert because I was sure he’d buy it. The subject matter suits him down to the ground.’

  ‘It’s about betrayal, seduction and murder.’

  ‘Exactly.’ He threw her a meaningful look, then turned away.

  ‘Well, I was looking forward to working here,’ said Gail, annoyed with Ray Pryce for painting such a gloomy picture of her future. ‘I’m going to get myself a drink.’

  Glad to be away from the archetypically angry playwright, Gail allowed her champagne to be topped up and took small sips from the glass as she watched the room. Robert Kramer had issued his guests a warning that no photographs were to be taken at the party. The door security had taken their mobile phones away, as if they couldn’t be trusted to follow instructions.

  Mona Williams had been ignored by the waiter and was forced to head for the bar, where she poured herself a large glass of appallingly bitter red wine. Her companion seemed to have disappeared, so she stood admiring a framed set of Victorian music hall posters: Marie Lloyd in her tortuous corset and feathered hat; Little Titch leaning forward on his elongated boots; Vesta Tilley, George Robey and Harry Champion photographed against ambrosian backdrops. The apartment was a shrine to the world of artifice.

  Mona wondered how Kramer’s new wife coped with it all. The woman clearly had no interest in the theatre. She seemed a class above him. It was hard to imagine why she should have married such a man, if it wasn’t for his money. He was physically unattractive, loud and apparently brutish in his treatment of females. But Judith had given him a son, something Kramer had craved for a long time.