Light Thickens ra-32

by Ngaio Marsh

  “If I look any longer I’ll frighten myself,” said Rangi.

  “Quarter hour. Quarter hour please.”

  Gaston Sears dressed alone. He would have been a most uncomfortable companion, singing, muttering, uttering snatches of ancient rhymes, and paying constant visits to the lavatory. He occupied a tiny room that nobody else wanted but that seemed to please him.

  When Peregrine called he found him in merry mood. “I congratulate you, dear boy,” he cried. “You have undoubtedly hit upon a valid interpretation of the cryptic Seyton.”

  Peregrine shook hands with him. “I mustn’t wish you luck,” he said.

  “But why not, perceptive boy? We wish each other luck. À la bonne heure.”

  Peregrine hurried on to Nina Gaythorne’s room.

  Her dressing-table was crowded with objects of baffling inconsistency and each of them must be fondled and kissed. A plaster Genesius, patron saint of actors, was in pride of place. There were also a number of anti-witchcraft objects and runes. The actress who played the Gentlewoman shared the dressing-room and had very much the worst of the bargain. Not only did Nina take three quarters of the working bench for her various protective objects, she spent a great deal of time muttering prophylactic rhymes and prayers.

  These exercises were furtively carried out with one scared eye on the door. When Peregrine knocked she leaped up and cast her makeup towel over her sacred collection. She then stood with her back to the bench, her hands resting negligently upon it, and broke out into peals of unconvincing laughter. There was a strong smell of garlic.

  Macduff and Banquo were in the next-door room to Sir Dougal’s and were quiet and businesslike. Simon Morten was withdrawn into himself, tense and silent. When he first came he did a quarter of an hour’s limbering-up and then took a shower and settled to his makeup. Bruce Barrabell tried a joke or two but getting no response, fell silent. Their dresser attended to them.

  Bruce Barrabell whistled two notes, remembered it was considered unlucky, stopped short, and said, “Shit.”

  “Out,” said Simon.

  “I didn’t know you were one of the faithful.”

  “Go on. Out.”

  He went out and shut the door. A pause. He turned around three times and then knocked.

  “Yes?”

  “— humbly apologize. May I come back? Please.”

  “Come in.”

  “Quarter hour. Quarter hour, please.”

  William Smith dressed with Duncan and his sons. He was perfectly quiet and very pale. Malcolm, a pleasant young fellow, helped him make up. Duncan, attended by a dresser, benignly looked on.

  “First nights,” he groaned comprehensively. “How I hate them.” His glance rested upon William. “This is your first First Night, laddie, is it not?”

  “There’ve been school showings, sir,” said William nervously.

  “School showings, eh? Well, well, well,” he said profoundly. “Ah, well.” He turned to his ramshackle part propped up against his looking-glass and began to mutter. “So well thy words become thee as thy wounds.”

  “I’m at your elbow, Father. Back to audience. I’ll give it to you if needs be. Don’t worry,” said Malcolm.

  “You will, my boy, won’t you? No, I shan’t worry. But I can’t imagine why I dried like that. However.”

  He caught his cloak up in a practiced hand and turned round: “All right, behind?” he asked.

  “Splendid,” his son reassured him.

  “Good. Good.”

  “… Ten minutes, please.”

  A tap on the door. Peregrine looked in. “Lovely house,” he said. “They’re simmering. William” — he patted William’s head — “you’ll remember tonight through all your other nights to come, won’t you? Your performance is correct. Don’t alter anything, will you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “That’s the ticket.” He turned to Duncan. “My dear fellow, you’re superb. And the boys. Malcolm, you’ve a long time to wait, haven’t you? For your big scene. I’ve nothing but praise for you.”

  The witches stood in a tight group. The picture they presented was horrendous. They said, “Thank you,” all together and stood close to one another, staring at him.

  “You’ll do,” said Peregrine.

  He continued his rounds. It wasn’t too easy to find things to say to them all. Some of them hated to be wished well in so many words. They liked you to say facetiously, “Fall down and break your leg.” Others enjoyed the squeezed elbow and confident nod. The ladies were kissed — on the hands or in the air because of makeup. Round he went with butterflies busily churning in his own stomach, his throat and mouth dry as sandpaper, and his voice seeming to come from someone else.

  Maggie said: “It’s your night tonight, Perry dear. All yours. Thank you.” And kissed him.

  Sir Dougal shook both his hands. “Angels and ministers of grace defend us,” he said.

  “Amen,” Perry answered.

  Simon, magnificently dark and exuding a heady vitality, also shook his hands. “Thank you,” he said, “I’m no good at this sort of thing but blessings and thank you.”

  “Where’s Banquo?”

  “He went out. Having a pee, I suppose.”

  “Give him my greetings,” said Peregrine, relieved.

  On and on. The thanes, nervy and polite. The walking gents, much obliged to be visited. Finished at last.

  Front-of-house waiting for him: Winty’s assistant.

  “All right,” he said. “We’re pushing the whole house in. Bit of a job. There are the Royalty-hunters determined to stay in the foyer but we’ve herded them all in. Winty’s dressed up like a sore thumb and waiting in the entrance. The house is packed with security men and Bob’s your uncle. They’ve rung through to say the cars have left.”

  “Away we go?”

  “Away we go.”

  “Beginners, please. Beginners,” said the tannoy.

  The witches appeared in the shadows, came onstage, climbed the rostrum, and grouped around the gallows. Duncan and his sons and the thanes stood offstage, waiting for the short opening scene to end.

  An interval of perhaps three interminable minutes. Then trumpets filled the air with their brazen splendor and were followed by the sound of a thousand people getting to their feet. Now the National Anthem. And now they settled in their seats. A peremptory buzzer. The stage director’s voice.

  “Stand by. House lights. Thunder. Curtain up.”

  Peregrine began to pace to and fro, to and fro. Listening.

  After the fourth scene he knew. It was all right. Their hearts are in it, he thought and he crept into the Prompt-side box. Winty squeezed his arm in the darkness and said, “We’ll run for months and months. It’s a wow.”

  “Thank God.”

  He’d been right. They had left themselves with one more step to the top and now they took it.

  You darling creatures, he thought, suddenly in love with all of them. Ah, you treasures. Bless you. Bless you.

  The rest of the evening was unreal. The visit to the royal box and the royal visit to the cast. The standing ovation at the end. Everything to excess. A multiple Cinderella story. Sort of.

  Emily came and hugged him and cried and said: “Oh, yes, darling. Yes. Yes.”

  The company collected around him and cheered. And finally the critic whose opinion he most valued astonishingly came up to him; he said he was breaking the rule of a lifetime but it had undoubtedly been the best Macbeth since Olivier’s and the best Lady Macbeth in living memory and he must do a bolt.

  “We’ll get out of this,” Peregrine said. “I’m hungry.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “The Wig and Piglet. It’s only minutes away and they stay open till the papers come in. The manager’s getting them for me.”

  “Come on, then.”

  They edged through the milling crowd of shouting visitors and out the stage door. The alley was full of people waiting for actors to appear. Nobod
y recognized the director. They turned into the theatre car park, managed to fiddle their way out and up the lane.

  At the corner of the main street stood two lonely figures, a thin and faintly elegant woman and a small boy.

  “It’s William and his mum,” said Emily.

  “I want to speak to the boy.”

  He pulled up beside them. Emily lowered her window. “Hullo, Mrs. Smith. Hullo, William. Are you waiting for a bus?”

  “We hope we are,” said Mrs. Smith.

  “You’re not doing anything of the sort,” said Peregrine. “The management looks after getting you home on the first night,” he lied. “Didn’t you know? Oh, good luck; there’s a taxi coming.” Emily waved to it. “William,” Peregrine said. William ran around to the driver’s side. Peregrine got out. “You can look after your mother, can’t you? Here you are.” He pushed a note into William’s hand. “You gave a thoroughly professional performance. Good luck to you.”

  The taxi pulled up. “In you get, both of you.” He gave the driver the address.

  “Yes — but — I mean —” said Mrs. Smith.

  “No, you don’t.” They were bundled in. “Good-night.” He slammed the door. The taxi made off.

  “Phew! That was quick,” Emily said.

  “If she’d had a moment to get her second wind she’d have refused. Come on, darling. How hungry I am. You can’t think.”

  The Wig and Piglet was full. The head waiter showed them to a reserved table.

  “A wonderful performance, sir,” he said. “They are all saying so. My congratulations.”

  “Thank you. A bottle of your best champagne, Marcello.”

  “It awaits you.” Marcello beamed and waved grandly at the wine bucket on their table.

  “Really? Thank you.”

  “Nothing,” said Peregrine when he had gone, “succeeds like success.” He looked at Emily’s excited face. “I’m sorry,” he said gently. “On a night like this one should not think forward or back. I found myself imagining what it would have been like if we’d flopped.”

  “Don’t. I know what you mean but don’t put the stars out.”

  “No husbandry in our Heaven, tonight?” He reached out a hand. “It’s a bargain,” he said.

  “A bargain. It’s because you’re hungry.”

  “You may be right.”

  An hour later he said she was a clever old trout. They had a cognac each to prove it and began to talk about the play.

  “Gaston,” Peregrine said, “may be dotty but he’s pretty good where he is tonight, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Exactly right. He’s like death itself, presiding over its feast.”

  “You don’t think we’ve gone too far with him?”

  “Not an inch.”

  “Good. Winty says it’ll run for as long as Dougal and Maggie can take it.”

  “That’s a matter of temperament, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose so. For Maggie, certainly. She’s rock-calm and perfectly steady. It’s Dougal who surprises me. I’d expected a good, even a harrowing, performance but not so deeply frightening a one. He’s got that superb golden-reddish appearance and I thought, we must be very clever about makeup so that the audience will see it disintegrate. But, upon my soul, he does disintegrate, he is bewitched, he has become the devil’s puppet. I began, even, to wonder if it was all right or if it might be embarrassing, as if he’d discarded his persona and we’d come face to face with his naked personal collapse. Which would be dreadful and wrong. But no. It hasn’t happened. He’s come near the brink in the last scene, but he’s still Macbeth. Thanks to Gaston, he fights like a man possessed but always with absolute control. And so — evilly. For Macduff, it’s like stamping out some horror that’s lain under a stone waiting for him.”

  “And his whole performance?”

  “If I could scratch about for something wrong I would. But no, he’s going great guns. The straightforward avenger.”

  “I think he plays the English scene beautifully. I’m sorry,” said Emily. “I wish I could find something wrong and out-of-key or wanting readjustment somewhere but I can’t. Your problem will be to keep them up to this level.”

  They talked on. Presently the door into the servery opened and their waiter came in with an armful of Sunday papers.

  Peregrine’s heart suddenly thumped against his ribs. He took up the top one and flipped over the pages.

  At Last!

  A Flawless Macbeth!

  And two rave columns.

  Emily saw his open paper trembling in his hands. She went through the remaining ones, folding them back at the dramatic criticisms.

  “This is becoming ridiculous,” she said.

  He made a strange little sound of agreement. She shoved the little pile of papers over to him. “They’re all the same, allowing for stylistic differences.”

  “We’ll go home. We’re the only ones left. Poor Marcello!”

  He lowered his paper and folded it. Emily saw that his eyes were red. “I can’t get over it,” he said. “It’s too much.”

  He signed his bill and added an enormous tip. They were bowed out.

  The Embankment was being washed down. Great fans of water swept to and fro. In the east, buildings were silhouetted against a kindling sky. London was waking up.

  They drove home, let themselves in, and went to bed and a fathomless sleep.

  The first member of the company to wake on Sunday was William Smith. He consulted his watch, dragged on his clothes, gave a lick to his face, and let himself out by the front door. Every Sunday at the end of their little lane, a newsman set up his wares on a flight of steps in a major traffic road. He trustfully left his customers to put the right amount in a tin, helping themselves to change when required. He kept an eye on them from the Kaff on the Korner.

  William had provided himself with the exact sum. Mr. Barnes, he recollected, had said something about the “quality” papers being the ones that mattered. He purchased the most expensive and turned to the headlines.

  At Last!

  A Flawless Macbeth!

  William read it all the way home. It was glorious. At the end it said: “The smallest parts have been given the same loving attention. A pat on the head is here awarded to Master William Smith for totally avoiding the Infant Phenomenon.”

  William charged upstairs shouting: “Mum! Are you awake? Hi, Mum! What’s an Infant Phenomenon? Because I’ve avoided one.”

  By midday they had all read the notices and by evening most of them had rung up somebody else in the company and they were all delighted but feeling a sort of anticlimactic emptiness. The only thing left to say was: “Now we must keep it up, mustn’t we?”

  Barrabell went to a meeting of the Red Fellowship. He was asked to report on his tasks. He said the actors had been too much occupied to listen to new ideas but now that they were clearly set for a long run he would embark on stage two and hoped to have more to report at the next meeting. It was a case of making haste slowly. They were all, he said, soaked up to their eyebrows in a lot of silly superstitions that had grown up around the play. He had wondered if anything could be made of this circumstance but nothing had emerged other than a highly wrought state of emotional receptivity. The correct treatment would be to attack this unprofitable nonsense.

  Shakespeare, he said, was a very confused writer. His bourgeois origins distorted his thought-processes.

  Maggie stayed in bed all day and Nanny answered the telephone.

  Sir Dougal lunched at the Garrick Club and soaked up congratulations without showing too blatantly his intense gratification.

  Simon Morten rang up Maggie and got Nanny.

  King Duncan spent the afternoon cutting out notices and pasting them in his fourth book.

  Nina Gaythorne got out all her remedies and good-luck objects and kissed them. This took some time as she lost count and had to begin all over again.

  Malcolm and Donalbain got blamelessly drunk.

  The sp
eaking thanes and the witches all dined with Ross and his wife, bringing their own bottles, and talked shop.

  The Doctor and the Gentlewoman were rung up by their friends and were touchingly excited.

  The nonspeaking thanes dispersed into various unknown quarters.

  And Gaston? He retired to his baleful house in Dulwich and wrote a number of indignant letters to those papers whose critics had referred to the weapons used in the duel as swords or claymores instead of claidheamh-mors.

  Emily answered their telephone and, by a system they had perfected, either called Peregrine or said he was out but would be delighted to know they had rung up.

  So the day passed by and the evening and on Monday morning they pulled themselves together and got down to the theatre and to the business of facing the second night and a long run of Macbeth.

  Chapter 6

  FULL HOUSE

  It had been running to full houses for two weeks. There had been no more silly tricks and the actors had settled down to the successful run of the play. Peregrine no longer came down to every performance but on this Saturday night he was bringing his two older boys, home for half-term. He had a meeting with the management about how long the season should run and whether, for the actors’ sakes, after six months they should make a change and, if so, what that change should be.

  “We don’t need to worry about it if we decide to have a Shakespeare rep. season: say Twelfth Night and Measure for Measure. With Macbeth,” said Peregrine, “We’ll just keep it in mind. You never know what may turn up, do you?”

  They said no, you didn’t, and the discussion ended.

  The day turned out to be unseasonably muggy and exhausting. Not a breath of wind, the sky overcast, and a suggestion of thunder. “On the left,” said Gaston as he prepared to supervise the morning’s fight. “Thunder on the left meant trouble in Roman times. The gods rumbling, you know.”

  “They ought to have heard you,” said Dougal rudely. “That would have pulled them up in their tracks.”