The Swish of the Curtain (Blue Door Book 1)

by Pamela Brown

  “Wake up!” she cried. “It’s today!”

  She flung off her nightdress and danced madly round the room in her birthday suit, then began to hurry her clothes on. Vicky was wakened by the cold draught caused in the bed by Lyn’s exit, and she got up. Maddy and Sandra continued to slumber until the other two snatched their pillows from under them.

  “We can’t all bath, but I should think two of us could if we hurried. Anyone want to particularly?”

  “I do,” cried Lyn, and ran into the adjoining bathroom, where they heard her splashing and singing opera. The unmistakable aroma of bacon and eggs met them as they went down to breakfast. The bishop and the boys had preceded them, and Jeremy’s greeting to them was, “We’re waiting for the women, as usual.”

  “Trust men to be on the scene if there’s food about,” rejoined Maddy with spirit.

  The dining-room was very full of other visitors, and they were all staring at the peculiar party that sat at the centre table, making a considerable amount of noise, and evidently in charge of the elderly clerical gentleman. Two spinsters at the next table were overjoyed when the chance came to satiate their curiosity. Maddy, who, though a slow eater, was a thorough one, was left behind at the table to finish her egg while the others went to tidy their rooms. Instantly the two spinsters, who both wore pince-nez and had faded mousy hair, came and sat one on each side of her.

  “So you’ve come here for the Festival?” said the thinner one, in her reedy voice.

  Maddy, her mouth full, nodded an affirmative.

  “With your father, I suppose?” asked the plumper one, who, when Maddy nodded again, shot a triumphant glance at her companion. When Maddy’s mouth was empty she told them, “My father’s a bishop.”

  “So we noticed. And what a large family he has.” The thin one was pumping her scientifically.

  “Yes, there are six of us. But, of course, Sandra is his third wife.”

  “Sandra?”

  “Yes. The fair girl that sat at the end of the table. She’s only our stepmother, so we call her by name.”

  “But surely she’s very young?” said the plumper spinster.

  “Yes. She’s just eighteen. This is really their honeymoon. They were married on Easter Monday.”

  The spinsters were thrilled. Here was a nice piece of romance!

  “I suppose your real mother is dead?” asked the skinny spinster.

  “Yes.” Maddy made her voice break pathetically. “She died of dyspepsia.”

  “How sad!” breathed her audience eagerly.

  “It was father’s fault. He was so fond of curry that he wanted it every day, and it was poison to Mummy. Her last words were, ‘Never let Maddy eat curry.’ I’m Maddy. Jeremy, that’s the fair one, is my real brother, and the other ones are stepbrothers and stepsisters.”

  “You never knew your first stepmother, of course?” inquired the thin spinster.

  “No. But I expect you’ve heard of her. Her name was Anna Pavlova.”

  Somewhere in the musty depths of these ladies’ minds the name struck a chord. “The dancer?”

  “That’s right. And that’s where Vicky, the red-haired one, gets her talent from. She’s danced at Covent Garden already.”

  “Well, well.” The plump one clicked her false teeth. “What an interesting life you must have had!”

  “It’s all right,” acknowledged Maddy, “when father’s sober. But when he’s not – my goodness! Sandra doesn’t know that yet, though, so we try to keep him out of her way when he’s drunk. Only last night he came home tight, so the boys put him in the bath and turned the tap on. That’s the only way to cure him, we’ve found. And he went to Sandra as sober as anything.”

  The spinsters’ eyes goggled, and Maddy chuckled to herself. This would teach these horrible old women not to pry into other people’s business. She had finished the egg, so excusing herself, she ran upstairs to the bedroom, and lying on the bed heaved with silent laughter.

  “Whatever’s up with you?” Vicky asked.

  “I’m just ’cited,” replied Maddy.

  “Hurry up and clean your teeth. We’re going to the church to see Shakespeare’s monument.”

  “Would he mind very much if I didn’t clean my teeth? I bet he didn’t always remember.”

  The eight of them walked across the bridge over the Avon and to the little grey church where the Greatest Poet’s remains are laid. It was a fragile April morning, and the trees seemed to have awakened with a start to find their bright new coverings of green leaves. The elms in the stone-scattered graveyard stood protectingly round the church, plainly showing their jealousy of the stream of tourists who entered, staring and touching and talking. The interior was packed, and the bishop and his party had to fight their way to the monument on the north wall of the chancel, where a professional guide was holding forth.

  “A thousand-word-a-minute Oxford accent,” murmured Jeremy bitterly.

  They stared up at the bust set in a cherubim-surrounded grotto.

  “What do you think of it?” asked the bishop, in a neutral sort of voice.

  No one answered. Secretly they were disappointed at this gaudy piece of sculpture.

  “The skull on the top is the best part,” allowed Maddy.

  Lyn, at last spoke her mind. “I think it’s one of the ugliest things I’ve seen.”

  The bishop heaved a sigh of relief. “I was afraid you were going to say you liked it, because you thought it the right thing to say.”

  “He’s too fat,” criticized Vicky. “I’m sure he had a more aesthetic face than that.”

  “There is no actual proof that this was meant to be a bust of Shakespeare,” the bishop told them. “In fact, there is no real proof that Shakespeare was more than a pseudonym.”

  “How funny,” chuckled Bulldog, “if all these people here are taking all this trouble over someone that isn’t anyone.”

  They read the lines that are inscribed on the plate let into the floor of the chancel above his grave:

  Good frend, for Jesus’ sake forbeare

  To dig the dust encloased heare.

  Bleste be ye man yt spares thes stones,

  And curst be he yt moves my bones.

  “These words may have been written by him, or again they may not,” the bishop said. As they went out into the sunlight again he asked, “And now you would like to look round the shops a bit, no doubt?”

  “Rather!” replied the girls.

  “Well, I won’t come with you as I’ve seen them many times before. I will go and visit a friend of mine. If you meet me at the hotel at ten to eleven we shall have time to find somewhere to stand and watch the procession.”

  For the next hour they poked about the numerous second-hand shops in the side streets. They were packed with Shakespeare souvenirs of every kind. Lyn bought a minute copy of Romeo and Juliet, the size of a postage stamp, but very thick. Sandra bought a handkerchief with “Stratford-on-Avon” worked across it. The others contented themselves with bars of toffee with “Shakespeare Festival” written on the toffee with white sugar. Crowds were collecting in the main street, and ladies were selling sprigs of rosemary tied up with black and yellow ribbon, to help some local cause. They found the bishop and went out to procure a stance from which to watch the procession. In the middle of the road important-looking people of every nationality were gathering under their own particular flags, which were rolled at the mast-heads.

  “Look at that lovely Chinese lady! Isn’t she fat?” remarked Maddy loudly, as an apparition in a fur coat passed by. She had taken it for granted that the lady spoke only Chinese, but by the way she turned and glowered, Maddy felt that her assumption was incorrect.

  A lot of speeches were made, and then at a given signal the representatives pulled a cord and the flags fluttered triumphantly in the fresh April breeze. The crowd let out a roar of cheers, in which the bishop joined no less heartily than the Blue Door Theatre Company. The procession surged by, and they cried exc
itedly to one another, “Look! There’s a Frenchman; I can hear him talking.”

  “There’s an African!”

  “Gosh! Look at that Indian’s turban.”

  Lyn disappeared into the crowd with her fountain-pen and autograph album, and came back with page after page of scrawly signatures.

  “And now,” suggested the bishop, “shall we hurry back for lunch? The play starts at two o’clock, and I have booked seats for the circle.”

  During lunch the two spinsters got up and came purposefully across to the bishop.

  “We want to congratulate you, Bishop,” said the thin one.

  The bishop’s lean, dark face was puzzled. “Er – thank you very much.”

  “We think you have a most creditable family,” the plumper one said, insinuatingly.

  The bishop threw back his head and laughed. “Thank you very much,” he said again. “I’m rather proud of them myself.”

  The ladies walked out, and Maddy breathed once again.

  “So it was true,” the spinsters concluded.

  They got to the Memorial Theatre, square and modern in contrast to the genuine and imitation Elizabethan buildings that crowded the town. Their seats were in the front row of the circle, where they had a good view of the stage, now covered with a safety curtain, and of the auditorium and the tiers of seats behind them. It was fascinating to watch the various types of persons that filed in.

  “There are two schoolmarms,” pointed out Jeremy. “Look, they’ve got flat heels and tweed costumes.”

  “So’ve I,” remarked Vicky, “but I’m not one.”

  “You don’t look so dried up and soured.”

  “Thank you for the compliment, and here comes a schoolmaster. He’s wearing pince-nez and carrying a copy of Shakespeare.”

  “Look, those two ladies have come because it is fashionable.”

  “That man has come because his wife made him.” Lyn pointed to a bald, meagre little man in a bowler hat.

  “There are some schoolgirls just come in. They’ve got some nuns with them, so they must be from a convent.”

  “Look, there’s the orchestra.”

  They took their instruments, and as they tuned up Maddy remarked, to Jeremy’s disgust, “I don’t like the tune they’re playing.”

  To Lyn the merry overture seemed a waste of time, and she was not happy until the fire curtain disappeared and the heavy curtains swung apart and up, disclosing Orsino, Duke of Ilyria, in his sumptuous apartment, giving way to his varied emotions. Then the proscenium curtains fell, and the front part of the stage, now the sea coast, was occupied by the shipwrecked sailors and Viola.

  “Gosh, she’s good!” murmured Lyn to Sandra, before Viola had spoken a dozen words, and it became obvious as the play progressed that she was an actress of great ability, although of no great age. Maddy enjoyed more than anything the fooling of Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and of all the laughs that echoed in the rafters of the Memorial Theatre that afternoon hers was the loudest.

  “Good legs,” remarked Nigel to Lyn, as Viola appeared in her male attire.

  “This isn’t a musical comedy,” Lyn told him cuttingly.

  After Viola, the clown was the best of the company. He had a whimsical, twisted face, and was very small and agile; his rendering of “Come away, Death” was very clever.

  During the interval between Acts Two and Three the bishop and his party went out on the flat roof-top for a breath of air. They were quite weak from laughing at the scene in the garden where the foolish knights and Fabian had watched Malvolio reading the letter that he supposes to be from Olivia.

  As they gazed out over the peaceful valley and the winding river, Lyn said to the bishop, “I think the person who wrote ‘Green Fields of England’ must have been up here.” They returned to their seats, and nearly split their sides over the duel scene and the taunting of Malvolio in his cell. The man who played this part seemed to have been specially manufactured for it, as he was tall and thin and long-faced, and had the skinniest legs that the children had ever seen. During the last scene Maddy heaved a sigh of relief and confided in the bishop, “I thought they’d never be able to untangle the plot and live happily ever after.”

  “So you see how ‘the whirligig of time has brought about its revenges’,” quoted the bishop.

  Lyn made her way round to the stage door, where there was already a crowd of other autograph hunters, and when the actress who played Viola appeared she was surrounded with a sea of albums and fountain pens. Long before she had reached Lyn she glanced at her watch.

  “I’ve no more time now. Sorry,” she told her admirers and walked away.

  Lyn waited a second while the disappointed crowd dispersed, the she ran as fast as she could down the road after the slim figure in a camel-hair coat.

  “Please,” she panted, catching her up, “couldn’t you sign just one more?”

  “Sorry, I’m in a hurry.” She did not slacken her pace.

  “But you don’t know how much this means to me.” Lyn’s eyes filled with tears, and the actress’s heart melted.

  “O.K., kid. Give me your album.”

  As she wrote her name, “Felicity Warren”, Lyn told her, “I’m coming to the performance tonight.”

  “Are you? I’m Juliet. First time I shall have played it professionally.” She handed back the pen.

  “I wish you luck, then,” smiled Lyn. “Are you feeling nervous?”

  “A bit. Look here, like to walk a little way with me?”

  “I’d love it.” Lyn forgot the others, who were waiting for her by the main theatre entrance.

  As they walked “Viola” repeated, “Yes, it’s my first time, but I’m not particularly nervous. That always comes while I’m dressing.”

  “Same here,” agreed Lyn eagerly; “and you can’t stand still enough to do up fastens, and your face sweats so that make-up won’t stay on.”

  The actress looked at her in surprise. “Are you on the stage?”

  Lyn blushed and stammered, “Oh, no. I was only – I mean – ”

  “Amateur?” was the question.

  “That’s right,” and Lyn told her about the Blue Door.

  “You’re certainly enterprising people,” commended the actress, when Lyn had finished. “I suppose you all want to go on the stage eventually?”

  “I do,” Lyn told her earnestly; “it’s my only ambition. And I’d prefer Shakespeare to any other kind.”

  “It’s hard work, but it’s a wonderful life, if you’re fond of it. If you get to hate it, it’s the very devil. You know the woman who played Olivia this afternoon. What age would you say she is?”

  “Thirtyish,” guessed Lyn.

  “She’s over forty, and she can’t afford to retire from the stage, but she hates every minute of it.”

  “P’raps that’s why she’s not such a good actress as you,” reflected Lyn. “Although there’s nothing definably wrong with her. One can tell that you like it.”

  “Thank you. I adore it. I feel I could never give it up, but I shall have to make the wrench one day, and I’m saving so I can buy a nice little villa in Brixton and settle down to a dull, sober life.” Her intelligent face clouded, then she laughed and went on. “Still, when one has been shipwrecked, married a duke, eloped, and committed suicide, all in one day, for several years, perhaps one tires of excitement.” She stopped at the gate of a boarding house. “Here are my digs, so we’d better say good-bye.”

  They shook hands.

  “It’s been glorious talking to you,” Lyn told her, her eyes shining. “And good luck to you tonight.”

  Lyn ran all the way back to the hotel, bubbling with excitement. She had seen Twelfth Night, had chatted intimately with a real actress, and was going to see Romeo and Juliet in the evening! She found the others half-way through a high tea of eggs and chips, and before she had finished recounting her adventure, word for word, the bishop said:

  “Now calm down, Lyn, and eat up
your tea; you won’t get another meal till you get home some time after midnight. The play ends about half-past seven, so we shan’t get back to Fenchester till about one o’clock tomorrow.”

  They were back in the same seats in the circle at half-past five for the rise of the curtain. Lyn was imagining Felicity’s face in the mirror as she made up, and she felt a twinge of sympathetic stage fright. She was not particularly interested in the first scene, but the boys were thrilled with the duelling. At Romeo’s entry she thought, “But he’s far too old. He was only supposed to be nineteen or so.”

  The bishop was thinking, “What nice children these are to take to the theatre; they don’t eat sweets, or laugh in the wrong place, or talk to each other during the scenes.”

  When Juliet entered, in the third scene, Lyn sat up eagerly and strained across the edge of the balcony. Felicity was wearing a shimmering green satin dress and a sparkling sequin cap. She certainly looked no more than Juliet’s fourteen years. Her first few words were not quite audible, but presently she began to act with a charm and vigour which greatly excelled her performance as Viola.

  The ball scene was beautiful, with the music and the flowing pattern of the dancers making a colourful background for the first meeting of the lovers. But, as usual, the outstanding part of the play was the balcony scene. Nigel was in raptures over the artistic scenery, contrasts of white walls and dark blue sky, green trees and a silver moon. Romeo climbed over the wall, shrinking against it as his merry friends passed by; then, standing under the balcony of Juliet’s window, he soliloquized. Juliet appeared, radiant yet dreamy, leaning against the pillar.

  To the bishop the lines gave the pleasure of familiar and beautiful words, but to the children it was a new revelation of every romantic story they had heard. When the curtain fell, Lyn found herself squeezing Sandra’s hand with all her might, but Sandra had not noticed. They flopped back in their seats, smiling happily at one another, and the curtain rose on the scene in Friar Lawrence’s cell. After more duelling, and the stormings of old Capulet because his daughter refused to marry Paris, there came the scene in which Juliet drugs herself. Lyn noticed that the audience was becoming most appreciative of Felicity’s acting, and the applause that followed her exits was deafening.