‘Don’t be absurd, Oscar. I’m here preparing La Grange’s wardrobe.’
‘Of course, you are, dear boy; but when I arrived I noticed that you had left the dressing-room door ajar. Could it have been just in case a certain young lady chanced to float by?’
‘I still love her, Oscar,’ I said solemnly. ‘I still want her, but I acknowledge that something’s changed.’
‘Ah?’ said my friend, putting away his pocket watch. ‘Since when?’
‘Since I saw her with Garstrang on Saturday night, since I heard La Grange speak of her as he did yesterday.’
Oscar smiled at me and retrieved his copy of the Life of St Porphyry from the dressing table. ‘On one issue at least men and women agree,’ he said. ‘They both distrust women.’ I laughed. My friend put his hand on my shoulder. ‘That said, mon brave, you are young; if you get the chance, enjoy her. Every twenty-one-year-old should have the benefit of a beautiful mistress of thirty.’ He waved his book towards me as he made for the door. ‘Though whatever you get up to at Monsieur La Grange’s delightful love-nest I am confident it will not rival the goings-on at the Temple of Aphrodite before good St Porphyry came along.’
The little carriage clock on the sideboard began to strike the hour. Oscar departed. ‘I’ll leave the door open, he said gaily. Through the cheval mirror I watched him go. Marais’s office was an inhospitable and windowless room hidden in the bowels of the building. To reach it you had to cross the stage and make your way down a narrow flight of stone stairs in the upstage corner diagonally opposite La Grange’s dressing room. In the looking-glass, with some amusement, I observed Oscar’s halting progress across the stage. He had left full of confidence, with a spring in his step. Now — whether because of the gloom of the darkened stage or a sense of foreboding about his meeting — his pace had faltered. I was about to shout out a wry word of encouragement when I heard a curious, distant creaking sound and then caught sight of Oscar looking upward in alarm. Suddenly, my friend cried out in distress and, as he did so, he threw himself onto the ground. As he fell, face first, onto the stage, a huge stage weight — a square black sack filled with iron and sand — crashed within an inch of his head.
I threw down La Grange’s shoes and rushed at once to my friend’s aid. As I arrived, two stagehands emerged from the darkness of the wings and ran towards him. Together, we lifted Oscar to his feet.
‘How are you?’ I asked.
‘Alive,’ he said. He began to brush the dust from the front of his tweed jacket and trousers. I noticed that his hands were trembling. The stagehands shaded the sides of their eyes and peered up into the flies of the theatre.
‘Odd,’ said one of them.
‘It’s happened before,’ said a voice from the wings. It was Carlos Branco, standing at the side of the stage. He was dressed in a suit of armour and carrying a helmet in his hands.
‘When was that?’ asked Oscar.
‘Last season,’ said Branco, coming towards us, smiling. ‘We did Don Quixote and La Grange took the view that my Sancho Panza was not up to the mark.’ The old actor looked up towards the flies. ‘He’s a hard taskmaster is the great La Grange.’
‘Ah,’ murmured Oscar, his hands still trembling. ‘You are joking.’
Branco put an arm around Oscar’s shoulder. ‘It was an accident, my friend. In the theatre, these things happen all the time.’
‘How is the fly gallery reached?’ asked Oscar, looking towards the wings.
‘By the ladder at the back of the stage,’ said Branco. ‘It’s the only way.’
The younger of the stagehands — he was a boy of sixteen or seventeen — ran swiftly up the stage and disappeared behind a piece of scenery. ‘There’s no one here,’ he called.
The other stagehand — an older, red-faced man, with a drooping black moustache — was still staring into the flies. ‘There’s no one up there. The weight must just have slipped its moorings. It was poorly fastened.’
‘Are you all right, Oscar?’ asked Carlos Branco, squeezing Oscar’s shoulder.
‘I am alive,’ repeated Oscar. ‘Thank you.’
The two stagehands grunted, nodded to Carlos Branco and picked up the weighted sack. Its weight must have been considerable: between them they struggled to carry it into the wings. Oscar took a deep breath and picked up his book off the floor. He showed the cover to Carlos Branco. ‘St Porphyry teaches us not to believe in omens. He set himself against the snares of superstition.’ He glanced up at the empty flies and then looked at Branco and at me with troubled eyes. ‘I’m unnerved, my friends. I own it. A dog dies; then a blackamoor is killed; and now an Irishman is set to meet his doom.’
Carlos Branco laughed. ‘Do you think there’s a murderer in our midst, Oscar, gradually working his way through the animal kingdom?’
‘It was an accident, Oscar — surely?’ I said.
‘Surely,’ said Oscar, blowing the dust from the cover of his book. ‘If you’ll excuse me, gentlemen, I have a meeting to attend. I shall be late and Monsieur Marais will have the advantage of me.’
The dress rehearsal of Hamlet — the first of a week-long series of dress rehearsals — was due to begin at twelve noon. At ten o’clock the wings of the Théâtre La Grange were deserted. By 11.30 a.m. the stage and its environs were crowded with strutting players in assorted states of dress, undress and near-hysteria. Many were trying on their costumes for the first time and most were volubly unhappy with the colour, the cut, the fabric, the fit, the finish, the heritage of their attire. The production of Hamlet was new, but the costumes and accessories were not. Bernard La Grange, prince of Denmark, protested that his wig was ‘grotesque’ — ‘laughable, risible, beneath contempt’ — and that he wouldn’t be seen dead wearing blond curls! Maman, wardrobe and wig mistress to the Compagnie La Grange since time immemorial, explained to him that the wig had served his father and his grandfather well enough. Carlos Branco, who was to play the Ghost of Hamlet’s father as well as the role of Polonius, showed his contempt for the outsized suit of armour that he had been given to wear by marching about the ramparts of Elsinore Castle making his visor snap open and shut like the jaws of an ill-tempered alligator.
Edmond La Grange arrived with Agnès on his arm. He was at his gayest — a dress rehearsal was his happiest time — and he knew his costume well: he had worn it when he played Iago in Othello and Edmund Kean in the famous play by Dumas père. (Sarah Bernhardt had been his leading lady on both occasions.) Agnès made no complaint about her costume, either. She was wearing a simple white shift, trimmed and decorated with ribbons of cornflower blue: it was a dress that Maman had first worn sixty years before. Agnès looked serene and appeared much calmer than she had been when I had last seen her at the end of our evening at Le Chat Noir. She brought some flowers — white lilac blossom — to adorn her father’s dressing room.
When I had finished dressing La Grange, I was des-patched to offer any assistance that Maman might require. On my way to find her, in the crowded wings, I came face to face with Gabrielle de la Tourbillon. It was the first time I had seen her since Edmond La Grange had said that Garstrang and I could ‘share’ his mistress. It was the first time, too, since she had held my thigh at Le Chat Noir and I had seen her embrace Garstrang in the apartment hallway. She looked different. She looked old. She saw the confusion in my eyes. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘It’s disconcerting. You don’t recognise me, do you, Robert? It is the make-up. And the embon point. Gertrude is a mother. A mother has breasts.’
At twelve noon, the stage manager walked through the wings and across the stage ringing a hand bell. Slowly, the company began to come to order: the actors filed onto the stage and positioned themselves, according to seniority, around the ramparts; the stagehands and the wardrobe ladies hovered at the edge of the wings. No one told anyone where to stand: instinctively each seemed to know their place. The principals — Hamlet, Ophelia, Gertrude, Polonius — clustered centre stage. Immediately behind them stood Hora
tio and Laertes, with Osric, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern just beyond. Bernardo, Marcellus, Reynaldo and Fortinbras formed a line upstage right; the Player King and Queen and the grave-diggers formed another upstage left. The English Ambassador and the Norwegian Captain stood on the battlements, with attendant lords and ladies, priests and players, ranged on either side of them.
When everyone was gathered, Edmond La Grange walked onto the stage with Oscar Wilde and Richard Marais at his side. Marais carried a wooden stool which he placed centre stage in front of the footlights. Steadied by Oscar, La Grange stepped up onto the stool to address his troops. He smiled at them benevolently. ‘Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. We are about to perform a play with few equals in a version without equal. We can thank Monsieur Oscar Wilde for that.’ Oscar bowed his head as the company applauded. ‘This is our first dress rehearsal,’ La Grange continued. ‘You will remember our usual rules, of course — definition, clarity, energy, attack — but today our principal concerns are the costumes and the scenery. I hear that we had an accident this morning: a weight fell from the flies. Take care this afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Watch your step. By the end of the rehearsal, I want you to feel at ease in the clothes that you are wearing and at home in the setting that surrounds you.’ His eyes scanned the battlements and ramparts. He glanced towards the flies. ‘It’s painted wood and canvas, brought in and out by ropes and winches: we know that. By five o’clock, however, it must seem to you to be the very stones of Elsinore.’ He paused. ‘Any questions?’
Carlos Branco lifted his helmet’s visor. ‘This suit of armour stinks!’
As the laughter subsided, La Grange looked down at him. ‘That’s as it should be. You’ve read the play. “Something’s rotten in the state of Denmark.”‘
‘This wig is absurd,’ said Bernard La Grange, holding the mop of golden curls up in the air for all to see.
‘It’s a family tradition,’ squawked Maman from her station at the edge of the wings.
‘I won’t wear it!’ cried Bernard.
‘Don’t,’ said La Grange. He looked down at Bernard. ‘It doesn’t suit your colour.’
‘But the La Grange tradition,’ protested Liselotte La Grange, her arms outstretched like an aged crone in a Greek tragedy.
‘The tradition is dead, Maman,’ snapped La Grange.
‘Forget it.’ He turned back to the company. ‘Live in the moment, ladies and gentlemen. We start in five minutes.’
As La Grange jumped off the stool, the crowd dispersed. Eighty men and women — leading actors, supporting players, spear-carriers and sailors, stagehands, fly-men, carpenters and firemen, seamstresses and wardrobe assistants — moved at once, in an assortment of directions, like ants purposefully, preordinately going about their business.
Oscar and I passed one another briefly outside La Grange’s dressing room. ‘How are you?’ I asked.
‘Oscar is himself again,’ he answered, smiling.
‘And Marais? How was the meeting?’
‘Not easy. Marais sat behind his typewriting machine, hammering at the keys throughout. The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is not more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation, but it is annoying. Marais, of course, does not hear the noise it makes.’
‘Did you stand your ground?’
‘I did. And I doubled my money. This afternoon’s performance will give me twice the pleasure it might otherwise have done.’
I watched the dress rehearsal from the corner of the wings closest to La Grange’s dressing room. Oscar watched it from the auditorium. The performance was flawed, of course: there were technical hitches, missed lines and botched entrances; Maman and one or other of her helpers kept appearing on stage to sort out details of costume and accessory; the stage manager and his men took an eternity to change the scenes; there was no music; the lighting was perfunctory; the whole experience lasted nearly six hours instead of three. Nevertheless, it was already clear that this production of Hamlet was destined to be a memorable one, with extraordinary performances, especially from the twins.
Edmond La Grange told me once that a great actor must be in possession of ‘energy, an athletic voice, a well-graced manner, some unusually fascinating originality of temperament; vitality, certainly, and an ability to convey an impression of beauty or ugliness as the part demands, as well as authority and a sense of style’. Bernard and Agnès La Grange were blessed with all the necessary gifts.
At the end of the performance, Edmond La Grange called the entire cast and company onto the stage to give us ‘notes’ and to rehearse the curtain-call. It was then that we realised that Ophelia was missing.
17
A Night to Remember
La Grange appeared unconcerned at his daughter’s disappearance. He sent the stage manager to search for her, but when the man returned after twenty minutes with nothing to report, the great actor simply shrugged his shoulders. ‘She has played Ophelia to perfection. She is exhausted — to be expected. She’s not required for the rest of the day; let her be.’
At a little after six o’clock, the Hamlet company was dismissed. At 8 p.m., Edmond La Grange, Carlos Branco, Gabrielle de la Tourbillon and a dozen of the other actors were back on stage for the evening performance of L’Avare.
‘Regretfully, the house is not full, monsieur,’ said Richard Marais, at a little before eight o’clock, putting his bald head briefly around La Grange’s dressing-room door. ‘I have closed the gallery.’
‘Very good.’ La Grange nodded from his dressing table. ‘Don’t tell anyone else.’
When Marais had gone, La Grange looked up at me. ‘And don’t you tell anyone either.’
‘Of course, not, sir — if you say so. But may I ask why?’
‘Can’t you guess? If the actors know the gallery is empty they no longer play to it. They simply turn their attention to the stalls. Their performances shrink. The theatre feels a smaller, emptier place. That’s not what you want, especially with a comedy. You should always play comedy as though you have a house that’s fit to burst.’
I looked at the reflection of the great actor’s face in his dressing-table looking-glass. His thick white hair was streaked with henna; his forehead was deeply lined; the tip of his nose and his cheeks were daubed with rouge; his eyes, outlined in dark magenta, glistened. He looked old and ridiculous — and yet magnificent. ‘Do you never get tired, sir?’ I asked.
‘I have been exhausted for forty years!’ he roared. He swung round on his stool and looked directly at me. ‘But I go on, mon petit, because I must. It’s what I do. And tonight, who knows, there may be one person out there who has never seen me play before and may never see me play again. For them, I must be at my best.’ He got to his feet and held out his arms. I slipped Harpagon’s money-belt about his waist and secured it tightly. ‘Where’s Oscar?’ he asked.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘Taking a glass of wine, I expect. I’m meeting him later. We are going to Madame Bernhardt’ s.’
‘Of course,’ he murmured, ‘Sarah’s party.’
‘Will you be coming, sir?’
‘No, mon petit. I’ll not be coming. I’ll be playing cards. It’s what I do.’
That evening, Sarah Bernhardt was giving one of her celebrated soirées at her town house on the rue Fortuny.
I was invited because Oscar was asked, and as La Grange was planning, as usual, to play cards in his apartment with Garstrang, Branco and the doctor, Oscar suggested that I take advantage of the opportunity. ‘Carpe diem,’ he whispered to me conspiratorially when I saw him in the wings of the Théâtre La Grange at the conclusion of the Hamlet dress rehearsal. ‘Bring Gabrielle to Sarah’s, Robert; then take her home to bed. She’s had a long day. She’ll be too exhausted to refuse you! I’ll have a carriage waiting when the curtain falls.’
At a little before eleven o’clock, I handed Gabrielle de la Tourbillon up into Oscar’s promised coach-and-four. In the late February moonligh
t, dressed in a tight corsage of satin the colour of sapphires, above a matching skirt of gauze, with a string of diamonds about her neck and more diamonds in her hair, she looked like a princess in a Russian fairy tale. She was beautiful once more.
‘I love you,’ I murmured as I helped her into the carriage.
‘I’m glad.’ She laughed prettily. ‘A lady likes to be loved.’
Oscar was already inside the carriage, tucked into the corner, in full evening dress, with a sprig of lilac blossom in his buttonhole. He was not alone. Seated immediately facing him, dressed, despite the time of year, simply in black trousers, white shirt and unbuttoned waistcoat, was Bernard La Grange. His head was thrown back against the antimacassar and his eyes were half closed.
‘I have been saluting a great Hamlet,’ said Oscar, as Gabrielle and I climbed aboard. ‘And now,’ he added, raising Gabrielle’s white-gloved hand to his lips, ‘I can salute the nonpareil of Gertrudes, too.’ He looked between the actress and the actor and smiled at each in turn. ‘This afternoon you were mother and son — and utterly convincing. Now you could be sister and brother, you both look so young.’ Gabrielle seated herself next to Oscar and leant over to kiss him on the cheek.
I seated myself next to Bernard. ‘How is your sister?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied, looking out of the carriage window. The cab lurched forward, up the side street and into the boulevard du Temple.
‘Where is she?’ Oscar asked. ‘Do you know?’
‘I’m not sure.’ The young actor turned to look at Oscar and smiled wanly. ‘I’m not sure where I am myself.’
‘You are in a good place,’ said Oscar, ‘among friends.’
Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man's Smile Page 17