Night at the Vulcan ra-16

by Ngaio Marsh

  Hag-ridden by the fear that she had forgotten some important detail, she paused in the doorway and looked round the room. No, she thought, there was nothing more to be done. But as she turned to go she saw herself, cruelly reflected in the long cheval-glass. It was not, of course, the first time she had seen herself that night; she had passed before the looking-glasses a dozen times and had actually polished them, but her attention had been ruthlessly fixed on the job in hand and she had not once focussed her eyes on her own image. Now she did so. She saw a girl in a yellow sweater and dark skirt with black hair that hung in streaks over her forehead. She saw a white, heart-shaped face with smudges under the eyes and a mouth that was normally firm and delicate but now drooped with fatigue. She raised her hand, pushed the hair back from her face and stared for a moment or two longer. Then she switched off the light and blundered across the passage into the Greenroom. Here, collapsed in an armchair with her overcoat across her, she slept heavily until morning.

  Chapter II

  IN A GLASS DARKLY

  Martyn slept for ten hours. A wind got up in the night and found its way into the top of the stagehouse at the Vulcan. Up in the grid old back-cloths moved a little and, since the Vulcan was a hemp-house, there was a soughing among the forest of ropes. Flakes of paper, relics of some Victorian snowstorm, were dislodged from the top of a batten and fluttered down to the stage. Rain, driven fitfully against the theatre, ran in cascades down pipes and dripped noisily from ledges into the stage-door entry. The theatre mice came out, explored the contents of paste-pots in the sink-room and scuttled unsuccessfully about a covered plate of tongue and veal. Out in the auditorium there arose at intervals a vague whisper, and in his cubby-hole off the dock Fred Badger dozed and woke uneasily. At one o’clock he went on his rounds. He padded down corridors, flicking his torchlight on framed sketches for décor and costumes, explored the foyer and examined the locked doors of the offices. He climbed the heavily carpeted stairs and, lost in meditation, stood for a long time in the dress circle among shrouded rows of seats and curtained doorways. Sighing dolorously he returned backstage and made a stealthy entrance onto the set. Finally he creaked to the Greenroom door and, impelled by who knows what impulse, furtively opened it.

  Martyn lay across the chair, her knees supported by one of its arms and her head by the other. The glow from the gas fire was reflected in her face. Fred Badger stood for quite a long time eyeing her and scraping his chin with calloused fingers. At last he backed out, softly closed the door and tiptoed to his cubby-hole, where he telephoned the fire-station to make his routine report.

  At dawn the rain stopped and cleaning-vans swept the water down Carpet Street with their great brushes. Milk-carts clinked past the Vulcan and the first bus roared by. Martyn heard none of them. She woke to the murmur of the gas fire, and the confused memory of a dream in which someone tapped gently at a door. The windowless room was still dark but she looked at her watch in the fire-glow and found it was eight o’clock. She got up stiffly, crossed the room and opened the door on grey diffused daylight A cup of tea with a large sandwich balanced on it had been left on the floor of the passage. Underneath it was a torn scrap of paper on which was scrawled: Keep your pecker up matey see you some more.

  With a feeling of gratitude and timid security she breakfasted in the Greenroom, and afterwards explored the empty passage, finding at the far end an unlocked and unused dressing-room. To this room she brought her own suitcase and here, with a chair propped under the door-handle, she stripped and washed in icy water. In clean clothes, with her toilet complete, and with a feeling of detachment, as if she herself looked on from a distance at these proceedings, she crossed the stage and went out through the side door and up the alleyway into Carpet Street.

  It was a clean sunny morning. The air struck sharply at her lips and nostrils and the light dazzled her. A van had drawn up outside the Vulcan and men were lifting furniture from it. There were cleaners at work in the foyer and a telegraph boy came out whistling. Carpet Street was noisy with traffic. Martyn turned left and walked quickly downhill until she came to a corner shop called Florian. In the window a girl in a blue coverall was setting out a large gilt basket of roses. The door was still locked but Martyn, emboldened by fresh air and a sense of freedom and adventure, tapped on the window and when the girl looked up pointed to the roses and held up Mr. Grantley’s card. The girl smiled and, leaving the window, came to let her in.

  Martyn said: “I’m sorry to bother you, but Mr. Grantley at the Vulcan told me to get some roses for Miss Helena Hamilton. He didn’t give me any money and I’m afraid I haven’t got any. Is all this very irregular and tiresome?”

  “That will be quayte O.K.” the girl said in a friendly manner. “Mr. Grantley has an account.”

  “Perhaps you know what sort of roses I should get,” Martyn suggested. She felt extraordinarily light and rather loquacious. “You see, I’m Miss Hamilton’s dresser but I’m new and I don’t know what she likes.”

  “Red would be quayte in order, I think. There are some lovely Bloody Warriors just in.” She caught Martyn’s eye and giggled. “Well, they do think of the weirdest names, don’t they? Look: aren’t they lovelies?” She held up a group of roses with drops of water clinging to their half-opened petals. “Gorgeous,” she said, “aren’t they? Such a colour.”

  Martyn, appalled at the price, took a dozen. The girl looked curiously at her and said: “Miss Hamilton’s dresser. Fancy! Aren’t you lucky?” and she was vividly reminded of Fred Badger.

  “I feel terribly lucky this morning,” she said and was going away when the girl, turning pink under her makeup, said: “Pardon me asking, but I don’t suppose you could get me Miss Hamilton’s autograph. I’d be ever so thrilled.”

  “I haven’t even seen her yet but I’ll do my best.”

  “You are a duck. Thanks a million. Of course,” the girl added, “I’m a real fan. I never miss any of her pictures and I do think Adam Poole — pardon me, Mr. Poole — is simply mawvellous. I mean to say I think he’s just mawvellous. They’re so mawvellous together. I suppose he’s crazy about her in real life, isn’t he? I always say they couldn’t act together like that — you know, so gorgeously — unless they had a pretty hot clue on the sayde. Don’t you agree?”

  Martyn said she hadn’t had a chance of forming an opinion as yet and left the florist in pensive contemplation of the remaining Bloody Warriors.

  When she got back to the theatre its character had completely changed: it was alive and noisy. The dock-doors were open and sunlight lay in incongruous patches on painted canvas and stacked furniture. Up in the grid there was a sound of hammering. A back cloth hung diagonally in mid-air and descended in jerks, while a man in shirtsleeves shouted: “Down on yer long. Now yer short. Now bodily. Right-oh! Dead it. Now find yer Number Two.”

  A chandelier lay in a heap in the middle of the stage, and above it was suspended a batten of spotlights within reach of an elderly mechanist who fitted pink and straw-coloured mediums into their frames. Near the stage-door a group of men stared at a small Empire desk from which a stage-hand had removed a cloth wrapping. A tall young man in spectacles, wearing a red pullover and corduroy trousers, said irritably: “It’s too bloody chi-chi. Without a shadow of doubt, he’ll hate its guts.”

  He glanced at Martyn and added: “Put them in her room, dear, will you?”

  She hurried to the dressing-room passage and found that here too there was life and movement. A vacuum-cleaner hummed in the Greenroom, a bald man in overalls was tacking cards on the doors, somewhere down the passage an unseen person sang cheerfully and the door next to Miss Hamilton’s was open. These signs of preparation awakened in Martyn a sense of urgency. In a sudden fluster she unwrapped her roses and thrust them into the vase. The stalks were too long and she had nothing to cut them with. She ran down the passage to the empty room, and reflected as she rootled in her suitcase that she would be expected to have sewing materials at hand. Here was
the housewife an aunt had given her when she left New Zealand but it was depleted and in a muddle. She ran back with it, sawed at the rose stems with her nail-scissors and, when someone in the next room tapped on the wall, inadvertently jammed the points into her hand.

  “And how,” a disembodied voice inquired, “is La Belle Tansley this morning?”

  Sucking her left hand and arranging roses with her right, Martyn wondered how she should respond to this advance. She called out tentatively: “I’m afraid it’s not Miss Tansley.”

  “What’s that?” the voice said vaguely, and a moment later she heard the brisk sound of a clothes-brush at work.

  The roses were done at last. She stood with the ends of the stalks in her hand and wondered why she had become so nervous.

  “Here we go again,” a voice said in the doorway. She spun round to face a small man in an alpaca coat with a dinner-jacket in his hands. He stared at her with his jaw dropped. “Pardon me,” he said. “I thought you was Miss Tansley.”

  Martyn explained. “Well!” he said. “That’ll be her heart, that will. She ought to have given up before this. I warned her. In hospital, too? T’ch, t’ch, t’ch.” He wagged his head and looked, apparently in astonishment, at Martyn. “So that’s the story,” he continued, “and you’ve stepped into the breach. Fancy that! Better introduce ourselves, hadn’t we? The name’s Cringle but Bob’ll do as well as anything else. I’m ’is lordship’s dresser. How are you?”

  Martyn gave him her name and they shook hands. He had a pleasant face covered with a cobweb of fine wrinkles. “Been long at this game?” he asked, and added: “Well, that’s a foolish question, isn’t it? I should have said: Will this be your first place, or Are you doing it in your school holidays, or something of that sort.”

  “Do you suppose,” Martyn said anxiously, “Miss Hamilton will think I’m too young?”

  “Not if you give satisfaction, she won’t. She’s all right if you give satisfaction. Different from my case. Slave meself dizzy, I can, and if ’is lordship’s in one of ’is moods, what do I get for it? Spare me days, I don’t know why I put up with it and that’s a fact. But she’s all right if she likes you.” He paused and added tentatively: “But you know all about that, I dare say.” Martyn was silent and felt his curiosity reach out as if it were something tangible. At last she said desperately: “I’ll try. I want to give satisfaction.”

  He glanced round the room. “Looks nice,” he said. “Are you pressed and shook out? Yes, I can see you are. Flowers too. Very nice. Would you be a friend of hers? Doing it to oblige, like?”

  “No, no. I’ve never seen her. Except in the pictures, of course.”

  “Is that a fact?” His rather bird-like eyes were bright with speculation. “Young ladies,” he said, “have to turn their hands to all sorts of work these days, don’t they?”

  “I suppose so. Yes.”

  “No offence, I hope, but I was wondering if you come from one of those drama-schools. Hoping to learn a bit, watching from the side, like.”

  A kind of sheepishness that had hardened into obstinacy prevented her from telling him in a few words why she was there. The impulse of a fortnight ago to rush to somebody — the ship’s captain, the High Commissioner for her own country, anyone — and unload her burden of disaster had given place almost at once to a determined silence. This mess was of her own making, she had decided, and she herself would see it out. And throughout the loneliness and panic of her ordeal, to this resolution she had stuck. It had ceased to be a reasoned affair with Martyn: the less she said, the less she wanted to say. She had become crystallized in reticence.

  So she met the curiosity of the little dresser with an evasion. “It’d be wonderful,” she said, “if I did get the chance.”

  A deep voice with an unusually vibrant quality called out on the stage. “Bob! Where the devil have you got to? Bob!”

  “Cripes!” the little dresser ejaculated. “Here we are and in one of our tantrums. In here, sir! Coming, sir!”

  He darted towards the doorway but before he reached it a man appeared there, a man so tall that for a fraction of a second he looked down over the dresser’s head directly into Martyn’s eyes.

  “This young lady,” Bob Cringle explained with an air of discovery, “is the new dresser for Miss Hamilton. I just been showing her the ropes, Mr. Poole, sir.”

  “You’d much better attend to your work. I want you.” He glanced again at Martyn. “Good morning,” he said and was gone. “Look at this!” she heard him say angrily in the next room. “Where are you!”

  Cringle paused in the doorway to turn his thumbs down and his eyes up. “Here we are, sir. What’s the little trouble?” he was saying pacifically as he disappeared.

  Martyn thought: “The picture in the Greenroom is more like him than the photographs.” Preoccupied with this discovery she was only vaguely aware of a fragrance in the air and a new voice in the passage. The next moment her employer came into the dressing-room.

  An encounter with a person hitherto only seen and heard on the cinema screen is often disconcerting. It is as if the two-dimensional and enormous image had contracted about a living skeleton and in taking on substance had acquired an embarrassing normality. One is not always glad to change the familiar shadow for the strange reality.

  Helena Hamilton was a blonde woman. She had every grace. To set down in detail the perfections of her hair, eyes, mouth and complexion, her shape and the gallantry of her carriage would be to reiterate merely that which everyone had seen in her innumerable pictures. She was, in fact, quite astonishingly beautiful. Even the circumstance of her looking somewhat older than her moving shadow could not modify the shock of finding her its equal in everything but this.

  Coupled with her beauty was her charm. This was famous. She could reduce press conferences to a conglomerate of eager, even naïve, males. She could make a curtain-speech that every leading woman in every theatre in the English-speaking world had made before her and persuade the last man in the audience that it was original. She could convince bit-part actresses playing maids in first acts that there, but for the grace of God, went she.

  On Martyn, however, taken off her balance and entirely by surprise, it was Miss Hamilton’s smell that made the first impression. At ten guineas a moderately sized bottle, she smelt like Master Fenton, all April and May. Martyn was very much shorter than Miss Hamilton but this did not prevent her from feeling cumbersome and out-of-place, as if she had been caught red-handed with her own work in the dressing-room. This awkwardness was in part dispelled by the friendliness of Miss Hamilton’s smile and the warmth of her enchanting voice.

  “You’ve come to help me, haven’t you?” she said. “Now, that is kind. I know all about you from Mr. Grantley and I fully expect we’ll get along famously together. The only thing I don’t know, in fact; is your name.”

  Martyn wondered if she ought to give only her Christian name or only her surname. She said: “Tarne. Martyn Tarne.”

  “But what a charming name!” The brilliant eyes looked into Martyn’s face and their gaze sharpened. After a fractional pause she repeated: “Really charming,” and turned her back.

  It took Martyn a moment or two to realize that this was her cue to remove Miss Hamilton’s coat. She lifted it from her shoulders — it was made of Persian lamb and smelt delicious — and hung it up. When she turned round she found that her employer was looking at her. She smiled reassuringly at Martyn and said: “You’ve got everything arranged very nicely. Roses, too. Lovely.”

  “They’re from Mr. Grantley.”

  “Sweet of him but I bet he sent you to buy them.”

  “Well—” Martyn began and was saved by the entry of the young man in the red sweater with a dressing-case for which she was given the keys. While she was unpacking it the door opened and a middle-aged, handsome man with a raffish face and an air of boldness came in. She remembered the photographs in the foyer. This was Clark Bennington. He addressed himself to Mis
s Hamilton.

  “Hullo,” he said, ‘I’ve been talking to John Rutherford.”

  “What about?” she asked and sounded nervous.

  “About that kid. Young Gay. He’s been at her again. So’s Adam.”

  He glanced at Martyn. “I wanted to talk to you,” he added discontentedly.

  “Well, so you shall. But I’ve got to change now, Ben. And look, this is my new dresser, Martyn Tarne.”

  He eyed Martyn with more attention. “Quite a change from old Tansley,” he said. “And a very nice change, too.” He turned away. “Is Adam down?” He jerked his head at the wall.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll see you later, then.”

  “All right, but — yes, all right.”

  He went out, leaving a faint rumour of alcohol behind him.

  She was quite still for a moment after he had gone. Martyn heard her fetch a sigh, a sound half-impatient, half-anxious. “Oh, well,” she said, “let’s get going, shall we?”

  Martyn had been much exercised about the extent of her duties. Did, for instance, a dresser undress her employer? Did she kneel at her feet and roll down her stockings? Did she unhook and unbutton? Or did she stand capably aside while these rites were performed by the principal herself? Miss Hamilton solved the problem by removing her dress, throwing it to Martyn and waiting to be inserted into her dressing-gown. During these operations a rumble of male voices sounded at intervals in the adjoining room. Presently there was a tap at the door. Martyn answered it and found the little dresser with a florist’s box in his hands. “Mr. Poole’s compliments,” he said and winked broadly before retiring.

  Miss Hamilton by this time was spreading a yellow film over her face. She asked Martyn to open the box and, on seeing three orchids that lay crisp and fabulous on their mossy bed, sang “Darling!” on two clear notes. The voice beyond the wall responded. “Hullo?”