Mrs Midnight and Other Stories

by Oliver, Reggie

  London deserted in the early hours is a great place to be. After about half past one it’s almost dead, and that’s when I sometimes go back to the theatre to stare at the giant photos of myself on the front of house, and I look, when no-one else is looking, at my name in big gold letters and the brief quotations of critical acclaim: ‘a gripping performance’, ‘he holds the audience spellbound’.

  A funny thing I’ve noticed these last few days. When I’m walking about London and it comes to the witching hour of about half past one or two, you often get quite a bit of fog. I had always imagined that fog in London was a thing of the past, what with the Clean Air Act, but it would appear not. I can’t say I like it much. It seems to put its white arms around you, and sometimes it smells of mothballs. No. I’m imagining that.

  22nd December

  It’s all over the papers. The soap star Bill Terry was mugged and knifed yesterday evening. The details are unclear, but he is in hospital in a critical condition. ‘Plans for Bill to take over the role of Edgar Poe in Rue Morgue,’ said the Evening Standard, ‘have been put on hold until he has made a full recovery.’ ‘Edgar Poe’ indeed! Everyone seems to be happy for me except Jill. As I passed her on the way to my first entrance I heard her say: ‘Someone seems to be looking after you.’

  All this makes me very restless and after the show I go for a drink alone at the Salisbury in St Martin’s Lane and when they close I walk and walk. I walk into the fog at about half past one and it thickens so much I can barely see my feet on the ground. I might be in Bratislava or 1897 for all I know. I hear distant traffic but see nothing apart from a few distant yellow headlights.

  It doesn’t frighten me. It reminds me of being on stage, in the way that you are wrapped round by another world, not this one. I try to think about poor Bill Terry, and how his agony is my good fortune, but the thoughts slip away from me, and I am not going to pretend a compassion I cannot really feel.

  I think I was by the embankment—at least I heard water and felt a parapet—when he joined me. For some time I have known he was around, and I suppose I have not been quite honest with myself about this.

  Of course I couldn’t quite see him in the night and fog, but I know he was big and dark, and rough smelling, though with that overriding odour of mothballs I had noticed before. It was his presence that I felt most strongly, the presence of a man who has been outside and alone for too long, of someone who was everyone’s enemy except mine. And I was only his temporary and convenient ally.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ I have put off the question for too long.

  ‘Jesus Christ. The Emperor of Johore. My name it is MacGregor and my foot is upon my native heath. And you are my heir.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘What do I want? What do I want?’ The man and his voice seemed to swell with anger. ‘What d’ye think? Meat, money and fame, boy. Meat, money and fame.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Oh, ye do, son. Ye do. We’re the same under the skin. We’re actors both. And what do actors want? Meat, money and fame!’

  ‘Leave me alone. Go away.’

  ‘I canna go away. I am your man and your maker. So tell me what ye think?’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of the play, man! Of the play!’

  ‘Do you mean Countess Otho?’ I had to force the words out. Everything in me was rebelling against the impossibility of it all.

  ‘What d’ye think?’

  ‘Extraordinary.’

  ‘Aye . . . My hour has come. I have been waiting. So what will ye do?’

  ‘Do?’

  ‘As payment for services. The quad pro quo, as they say. The quad pro quo.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Ye know what I mean. Y’are bound to me, and I canna let ye go. Blood brothers we are. Lo I am with you always even unto the end of time. D’ya ken now?’ His voice rose to a roar.

  The mist cleared a little and I saw his face, a shaggy, dark, unshaven thing with hungry, restless eyes hanging over me. He pushed his head down close to mine and his smell was like a blow in the face. It was the age-old smell of vagrancy and desolation. He had been out in the cold far, far too long.

  When I came to, I was standing outside the theatre, looking up at my name in foot-high golden letters over the entrance canopy. A solitary taxi was coming down the Strand. I hailed it and took it back to my flat in the King’s Road.

  13th January 1988

  A third huge parcel of Great Aunt Cecily’s papers has arrived from Vince. It consists of letters, postcards, loose photos, bits cut out of magazines and newspapers: the usual detritus of a long life. Had Vince felt anything except contempt for me, he wouldn’t have treated me as a kind of human rubbish tip. But I’m glad he has.

  Among the garbage were two items of importance. Though my Great Aunt Cecily kept them both, it was for different reasons, and she could not have made the connection that I did. The first is a cutting from the Sunday Express from the 1960s, one of those gaudy ‘historical true crime’ pieces with which the paper once adorned its centre pages.

  THE MELODRAMA THAT REALLY HAPPENED:

  THE JEALOUS ACTOR AND THE STAR.

  On Thursday December 16th 1897 William Terriss, leading actor of the day, and one of the handsomest men of his time was stabbed to death outside the stage door of the Adelphi theatre in the Strand. His attacker was one Richard Archer, or Richard Archer Prince, as he styled himself, an out-of-work actor who had once played walk-on parts in Terriss’s company. Archer, an uneducated Scotsman from Dundee, harboured impossible ambitions to become a great and famous actor, and these delusions had been fostered by another, more successful actor in the same Adelphi company. This was William Abingdon who often played the villain to Terriss’s hero. Abingdon, partly out of mischief, partly out of jealousy of the popular Terriss, encouraged Archer to think that Terriss was hampering his career. He even got up a private rehearsal at which, to the derision of those who witnessed it, Archer performed Terriss’s part of the hero in the successful melodrama, One of the Best. In the Adelphi company Archer was known as ‘Mad Archer’ and, once, when faced with this accusation had replied: ‘Mad? Mad? You will hear of my madness. The whole world will ring with it.’ When his engagement at the Adelphi finished, Archer found himself increasingly hard up and his delusions increased. He attempted to interest managements in a play he had written called Countess Otho, but this failed. He resorted to sponging off his sister, a well known prostitute, who frequented the notorious Empire Promenade. On the morning of December 16th, Archer, wandering the streets of London, encountered his sister on the arm of his old colleague William Abingdon. Archer begged them for money, but was brutally rejected. With the remaining pennies in his pocket Archer bought a knife and stationed himself outside the stage door of the Adelphi. When Terriss arrived for the evening performance of his new play Secret Service, Archer approached him and stabbed him several times in the back. Terriss was dead in a matter of hours. Not long after the funeral, Terriss’s son-in-law, the musical comedy star Seymour Hicks, confronted William Abingdon with his responsibility for the crime. Abingdon broke down completely and soon after left for America. After prospering for a while in the States as an actor, Abingdon began to be increasingly out of work, and on the 19th May 1918 committed suicide by cutting his throat. Archer, found guilty but insane at his trial, survived in Broadmoor until the year 1937. He harboured to the end his fantasies about becoming a great actor, and often took the lead in performances put on by the asylum’s criminally insane inmates.

  Among the letters my Great Aunt had kept I found one that had been read and then carefully replaced in its envelope which carried an American stamp. It is written on the office notepaper, the heading of which was familiar:

  Sammons Plays Ltd, for the Finest in Today’s Drama,

  303 W 57th St. NY. U.S.A.

  December 20th 1918.

  Dear Miss Payne,

  I shouldn’t be writin
g you this only I got a hint that my Boss Mr Sammons was going to send you something through the post which you should not accept. The Boss means no good by you, Miss Payne. This I know. He’s still awful bitter about the way things broke up between you two, and when he gets bitter he can be awful mean. That thing he sent in the post to you may just look like paper, but believe me it ain’t. It caused nothing but trouble. I can’t explain exactly, but wherever it was this bum kept hanging around the office. He had these eyes like he’d gone dark inside. We kind of saw him and yet we didn’t. And whenever he was there, this play script was out lying on the desk or something, even when it had been locked away. There was rows and fights about it like you wouldn’t believe.

  In the end Mr Cresby—you remember him? He’s the Boss’s right hand man—he says, let’s burn the darn thing. But the Boss says, no, I got a better use for it. Then I see the boss tying up a parcel to send to you, so I guess it might be the play script. I come in to take the mail and offer to take it, but the boss says no, I’ll post it myself. May be he knew I would have burnt it rather than send you trouble. So if you get that parcel, don’t you open it. Just get rid of it or something. It sure ain’t no Christmas Present.

  You won’t know me. I’m just the office boy round here, but I remember you. You always smiled at me awful nice when you came into the office to see the Boss. And you once stopped to talk to me.

  Sincerely your friend,

  Martin Luther Jackson

  4th March

  He kept me awake and would not let me go. I could only sleep during the day, and once nearly missed a matinee performance as a result. It was only because a rough and unseen hand shook me awake at the last moment that I made it to the theatre on time.

  At night he always walked with me through foggy streets of solitude. My friends whom I shunned must have thought I was mad, but what could I do? He was my making and could be my breaking, or so he constantly reminded me. What was I to do?

  The solution, as I eventually realised, lay in the manuscript of Countess Otho itself. As the Countess says in Act III: ‘My Acts of Madness must be proclaimed from the church tower. They must be sung and rung throughout the land. They must reach the lowliest rat in the street, and the foulest drab in her fœtid sheets, They must pierce like a dagger through the hearts of proud prelates and psalm-singers. They must be in the minds of merchants and newsboys and sting them to life!’

  So I went and saw an old schoolfriend who works at Sotheby’s. As luck would have it—was it luck, or my mad destiny?—he happened to be organising a new departure for the famous auction house: a specialist sale of the memorabilia of crime. Countess Otho would be the star item. That night, for the first time the man in the overcoat smiled.

  Today at Sotheby’s they sold the manuscript of Countess Otho amid a fanfare of publicity. Sitting at the back of the auction room, watching the bidding pass the reserve and then go on until it left behind anything Vince will achieve for his wretched Louis XVI escritoire, I feel a sense of triumph and vindication not simply for me, but for another. Meanwhile they are queuing to see me in Rue Morgue and I shall sleep soundly. As I arrive at the stage door this evening I see him quite clearly, standing behind a greasy little knot of Book People. He nods and smiles again. We smell of success. The whole world rings with our madness.

  MEETING WITH MIKE

  I

  It looked as if one of Mad King Ludwig’s fantasy castles had developed middle age spread. It clung to a steep, fir-clad slope; the many turrets and pinnacles, Gothic in appearance if in nothing else, turning its skyline into a forest of steep conical roofs. Between the turrets were stretches of wall into which rows of identical French windows with tiny balconies had been set, each one with a south-facing view over the glittering lake below. Immediately in front of this bloated pseudo-palace, terraced gardens and promenades had been laid out to pleasure a sedentary and unadventurous clientèle. It was, of course, a Swiss hotel.

  Or rather, it had been. The fashion for holidaying in Switzerland during the summer was more or less dead by the end of the Second World War and the St Germain Palace Hotel, as it had been called in its heyday, passed through several hands until it was bought by an organisation called the Institute for Psychic Health and made into its headquarters. I knew nothing about the Institute for Psychic Health (usually referred to by the acronym I.P.H.): all I understood was that I was going to its headquarters to see a king about his autobiography.

  How this came about can be briefly explained. I am a historian with several fairly successful books to my credit, mainly about the Balkans in the early twentieth century. Have you heard of Paths to Sarajevo, or Crisis in Bosnia? I wrote them, and it was at the launch of the latter in the Traveller’s Club that I first met Princess Helen of Slavonia.

  Experiences with royalty in the past had taught me that its members have a peculiar concept of friendship. To them a friend is a kind of unpaid upper servant. Royals can be enormously kind to you, but you know that at some time they will call in their favours, and you must oblige them or go into the dark. For this reason I was wary of Princess Helen from the beginning, but I was also curious. So I waited while she allowed me to accompany her to theatres and receptions, showed me precious family papers and photograph albums, and made me welcome at the ‘Sunday Afternoons’ she held at her house in Holland Park.

  Helen is in her thirties, has no children and is married to a very wealthy Q.C. whom I have met only once, very briefly. He does not seem to intrude much on her social life, but the arrangement appears to be perfectly amicable. Though somewhat plump and dumpy, Helen is not unattractive and she has a habit of fixing her big, lustrous brown eyes on you, as if you are the only person in the world she wants to talk to. At a first meeting she may give the impression of being a placid, amiable, perhaps even a rather dim person. This is not the case, as I discovered when she invited me round for ‘a drink’ one Thursday evening in May.

  I was surprised to find that I was her only guest, but, having got over this shock, I was not surprised to find that she had invited me there because she wanted me to do something for her. In short, she wanted me to go out to Switzerland to help her father King Kyril of Slavonia—the notion of an ‘ex-king’ was, of course, anathema—to write his autobiography. My writing skills and particular historical expertise would be invaluable, she told me.

  It had already been arranged, apparently. She had spoken to my agent; she had even made enquiries about flights to Geneva. Of course, there was nothing I could do to resist, even if I had wanted to. I asked if King Kyril himself had approved his choice of assistant.

  ‘I have written to him and told him you would be perfect,’ said Princess Helen with a charming smile.

  I knew at once that this was her exquisitely courteous way of hinting that I should not enquire too deeply into the whys and wherefores of the matter. A little later on she did let fall something, perhaps deliberately, which suggested that there might be a hidden motive to my mission.

  ‘My father has an apartment in Lausanne, but now my mother is dead he is spending more and more time at St Germain with the Institute for Psychic Health. I’m sure the I.P.H. people are all very admirable in their way, but I think it would be good for him to be involved with someone who is not in that milieu. You know how cliquey and closed these people can be.’

  ‘Do you get out to see him often?’ I asked. The princess frowned. She had picked up my own subtle implication: ‘if you’re so concerned, why don’t you go and sort it out yourself?’

  ‘I wish I could, but I have such a busy schedule here. There are all my charities which mean so much to me, as you know. I do my best to keep in touch. But e-mail and phone are so unsatisfactory. You never know who might be looking or listening in.’

  That last remark struck me as slightly odd, but I let it pass. Princess Helen then embarked on a brief résumé of her father’s life, much of which I already knew. When Hitler had invaded Slavonia in 1941 Kyril’s father, King Bogdan
III, had made some accommodation with the Nazis. Prince Kyril, still only a young boy, was fortunately away from the country with his mother in America following a marital disagreement. King Bogdan had been assassinated by communist partisans towards the end of the war, and by the time Kyril was able to return to Slavonia as its new king, the nation was in Stalin’s iron grip. For the rest of his life King Kyril of Slavonia had been wandering the earth, waiting for the call to return to his realm, a call which, even with the death of communism, had not come. ‘Exile,’ as the saying goes, ‘is the wound of kingship’.

  The night before I flew to Switzerland Princess Helen took me to see Parsifal at Covent Garden. We sat in a box, and had champagne and caviare sandwiches in the interval. I was reminded of the treats my parents used to give me at the end of the holidays, before I had to go back to my hated boarding school.

  II

  A smiling, bald man met me at Geneva airport and drove me to St Germain. His driving was excellent despite the fact that he wore a black patch over one eye, which lent an oddly piratical look to his otherwise neat and undistinguished appearance. He introduced himself as Hans and spoke excellent English with a German accent. Almost immediately he began to ask me questions about myself, absorbing the information I gave him without expressing the least interest in it, as if he were filling in a form in his head. Very soon I got tired of this game so I began to ask him about what he did.