The Curtain Rises

by Mary Burchell

  This time, although she was just as deeply involved with the drama and thrilled by the music, Nicola was also much more intensely aware of Julian Evett. For one thing, of course, he was right beside her. If she dropped her glance from the stage she could see his strong, well-shaped hand lying on his knee. Not quite such a powerful hand as Warrender's perhaps, but fine and sensitive. The hand of an artist. The hand of someone one would want to know more about. At least, in certain circumstances one would.

  She didn't really want to know much more about him, of course. She was slightly curious about his relationship with Michele Laraut. But only because Torelli was so sure there had been a love-affair between them and Oscar Warrender was equally emphatic that there had not.

  With a start, Nicola recalled herself to what was happening on the stage and was ashamed to find that she had allowed her attention to wander at the very moment when Macbeth had come to consult the witches again. After that, she kept her thoughts and reactions firmly under control, and by the time they came to the Sleep­walking Scene nothing happening in the auditorium could have attracted her notice.

  Immediately the rehearsal was over, Julian Evett nodded casually to her and took himself off, while Nicola made her way round backstage to her aunt's dressing-room, where she found Torelli—hot, tired and exultant.

  Nicola kissed her warm, damp cheek and said reproachfully, 'And you asked me to find something to criticize!'

  Torelli laughed.

  'It went well.' That was a statement rather than a question. 'It's not a bad production either. There are too many steps to negotiate, but then all modern producers are besotted with the idea of steps. I sometimes wish they had to run up and down them and sing a high C at the end. But almost everything seems relatively easy with Oscar. He was wonderful—wonderful!'

  'I thought so too. But you were simply marvellous. You're such an actress, Madame!'

  'You can call me "Gina" now,' observed Torelli graciously. 'We have reached that stage.'

  Then Oscar Warrender came in, congratulated her on her performance and, taking up the vocal score which lay on the dressing-table, he picked out one or two details which apparently required even finer polishing. Both of them lapsed into Italian at that point while Nicola, un­noticed, stood by astonished and moved to see these two consummate artists, at the end of a gruelling rehearsal, still passionately concerned to add the last ounce of per­fection to their work. She understood little of what they were actually saying, but their strong, handsome, lively faces conveyed every shade of meaning.

  When Warrender had gone again, Torelli called her dresser, repaired her make-up, and considered the rival merits of two wigs—putting them on and taking them off and studying herself in the mirror.

  'Aren't you nearly dead by now?' said Nicola in some concern. 'Wouldn't it be better to go home, and settle the business of the wigs some time tomorrow?'

  'No. It must be done now, while I'm still in character.' Disdainfully Torelli tweaked a strand of hair in the wig she was trying at that moment. 'She wouldn't do her hair that way,' she muttered. 'That's the way a woman does her hair when she wants to be provocative. Lady Mac­beth had other things on her mind. Maybe she used her attraction to put the old King at ease, but not as a woman to a man—just to quiet any fears he had, so that the murder would be the easier. Queer how you can feel it even in her hair. At least you ought to be able to.—Where is my score?'

  Both Nicola and the dresser looked around. Then Nicola exclaimed, 'Oh, I believe Mr. Warrender took it by mistake. He had a book in his hand when he went out of the room.'

  'Run and get it back for me then, there's a good girl,' said Torelli. 'I shall need it. He's probably still in his room. If not, he'll have left it on his desk. Room One, I think.'

  So Nicola went quickly in search of the conductor and found him in his room, just making ready to depart.

  On hearing her message, he apologized, found the score for her and handed it over. Then, on a note of unexpected indulgence he asked,

  'Did you enjoy the rehearsal? Evett said it was your first "Macbeth".'

  'Yes, it was.' Nicola blushed slightly at the idea of her being even so small a subject of discussion between the two conductors. 'And I simply adored it.'

  'Well, I think you have another treat in store when you hear Evett himself conduct "The Magic Flute",' Warren­der told her. 'He is specially gifted for Mozart, and no conductor need ask for higher praise.'

  'He's very gifted altogether, isn't he?' The shy question was out before she could stop it.

  'Very. He did some remarkable work during the Canadian Festival some months ago. No one at all knowledgeable was in any doubt about his quality after that'

  Something in the half kindly way he said that con­veyed to Nicola the absurd and unwelcome impression that he thought she was personally interested in Julian Evett. The very idea affronted her and she should, by rights, have dropped the subject instantly. But some­thing else, not even entirely defined, which had been struggling in the back of her mind for days, now forced its way to the front because of this conversation. And even as the conductor turned to go, she exclaimed breathlessly, 'Mr. Warrender, just a moment!'

  He turned, and her words came tumbling out hardly of her own volition.—'There's something I want to ask you, and please don't think it's just idle curiosity or—or impertinence on my part.'

  'Well?' Warrender had been pursued by every form of boring adoration in his time and he thought he recognized the signs now, so the glance he gave her was rather quelling.

  'It's about Michele Laraut. When we drove from the airport you and Madame Torelli spoke about her and—and you used an odd expression. You said it was not Julian Evett she dragged at her chariot wheels, and you spoke as though there were someone else that she—she did. Who was that?'

  'Good heavens!' Oscar Warrender looked half amused, half annoyed. 'It can't be of any importance, surely?'

  'Yes, it is. To me it is.' And suddenly her eyes were dark with a nameless sort of anxiety.

  Oscar Warrender regarded this oddly persistent girl with a touch of amused sympathy.

  'I tell you it was not Evett. Isn't that enough?'

  'No, of course not!' she cried, stung by the implication that Julian was all that mattered.

  'Well—' the conductor made a slight face—'I don't know that it matters speaking of it now. It's all water under the bridge, because the poor fellow is dead. It was a very gifted viola player in one of the visiting orchestras. A man called Brian Coverdale.'

  CHAPTER SIX

  'Brian Coverdale!' There was a note of incredulous dismay in Nicola's voice. 'You said Michele Laraut trailed Brian at her chariot wheels? But she couldn't have! It's quite, quite impossible.'

  Oscar Warrender shrugged, apparently with some dis­taste for his own picturesque expression now that it was used outside its casual context.

  'Not only possible. It was a fact,' he replied disagree­ably. 'I hardly see its importance now, and I've certainly no wish to argue the toss over a piece of backstage gossip, but—'

  'That was all it was!' Nicola cried eagerly. 'That must be all it was. Backstage gossip, without a shred of truth in it.'

  Vexed though he might be to have been drawn into a discussion on a point he obviously considered trivial, the great conductor was a man of keen perceptions and not basically unkind. He glanced at Nicola with more atten­tion now, and there was a slightly kinder air about him as he said, 'Does it matter so much?'

  'Brian and I were more or less engaged when he left for Canada,' she replied briefly.

  'Damn,' said Oscar Warrender with feeling. 'Why does one repeat these things? I'm sorry, child.'

  'But was it only gossip?' For a moment her hand rested urgently on his arm before he quite firmly removed it. 'You aren't the kind of man to repeat casual gossip. You despise the very idea, don't you? So what made you say such a thing? What did you really know about Brian and Michele Laraut?'

  'No one know
s what takes place between two other people,' replied Oscar Warrender drily, for he had fully recovered his usual self-possession by now. 'And I was not in the confidence of either. If you feel you simply must know more, I suppose the person who could tell you most is Julian Evett.'

  'I couldn't ask him!' exclaimed Nicola.

  'Then don't ask me to fill in the gaps from hearsay,' was the curt retort. 'Poor Coverdale is dead. The question is more or less academic. You'd be wiser to—'

  'If you lost your Anthea, and someone said she'd been in love with another man, would you be satisfied to regard the matter as academic?' she asked fiercely.

  It took a good deal to startle Oscar Warrender, but he looked startled then, though the look changed almost immediately to one of rather haughty reserve.

  'The cases are not parallel,' he said coldly, 'and I am not prepared to discuss this subject any longer with you. Ask Evett, if you like. If not, then dismiss it all as gossip. I'm sorry I ever made such an indiscreet remark. I would not have done so, of course, if I'd known your personal involvement. But there's nothing more to say. Take Madame Torelli her score now.'

  And he held open the door of his dressing-room for her to depart.

  There was nothing to do but go. No one—certainly not Nicola—could stand against an order from Oscar Warrender given in that peremptory tone. She went silently from the room and along the deserted stone cor­ridors until she came to her aunt's dressing-room. And here she was informed by a tired and irritable Torelli that she had taken much too long about a very simple errand.

  'I've been waiting to go home,' she exclaimed angrily, 'worn out by the effort of carrying most of the rehearsal on my shoulders. And you keep me sitting here—chilly, hungry and deathly tired.'

  For once, Nicola's withers remained unwrung by this harrowing picture.

  'I'm sorry,' she said mechanically as she handed over the missing score.

  'What were you doing?' Torelli wanted to know.

  'I was talking to Mr. Warrender.'

  'About me?' With splendid self-absorption, Torelli assumed that incense had been burned at her shrine and she immediately became less critical of the delay.

  'No.' For once Nicola was self-absorbed too and she failed to exercise her usual tact. 'We were speaking about Michele Laraut and—and—'

  'Michele Laraut?' Torelli was genuinely astonished. 'But what could there possibly be about her that would supply even five minutes' talk?—much less half an hour.'

  Nicola let this piece of gross exaggeration pass. She was still intensely agitated by what had been said in the conductor's dressing-room, and she went on doggedly, 'From Michele we arrived at the subject of Brian.'

  'My dear Nicola—' Torelli rose and gathered her furs round her with a gesture suggestive of the fact that she was still in the role of Lady Macbeth—'you occupy yourself altogether too much with thoughts of that young man. He is dead—a state to which admittedly we shall all have to come in time—but that really does for the moment put him outside one's day-to-day calculations, doesn't it? It is time you accepted that fact and decided to live your life with some regard for the people who happily are still around you.'

  She evidently referred primarily to herself. But Nicola was still not in a condition to accept her cue. She simply said stonily,

  'Did you ever hear that Brian was infatuated with Michele Laraut?'

  'No, I didn't,' returned her aunt firmly. 'Did you?'

  'Mr. Warrender says he was.'

  'Oscar says so?' Torelli paused in the act of picking up her gloves, and her expression was a curious mixture of astonishment, amusement and genuine interest. 'Impos­sible! Oscar never concerned himself with other people's infatuations. I've always thought that was why he didn't really know the moves when he fell for that silly little Anthea Benton. Though, of course,' she added, in frank parenthesis, 'one would have thought that Perini, in those earlier days, might have taught him something. Well, well, never mind about that now! So Oscar says the little Laraut got her hooks into Brian Coverdale? It's possible, I suppose. Even probable if Oscar repeated the story. Then still less,' she declared, coming to a very satisfactory conclusion, 'still less should you waste your time regretting the poor young man. He was evidently—'

  'I loved him!' interrupted Nicola fiercely. 'I was going to marry him. Don't you understand that I have to know the truth about this?'

  'No "have to" at all,' replied her aunt briskly. 'Many truths are best left unknown, particularly if the time for doing anything about them is past. Come along, child, and let us eat. Good food is comforting at all times, even when one's heart is broken. And if you feel you must have the truth about this business you had better ask Julian Evett.'

  'I can't ask Julian Evett,' reiterated Nicola, as she followed her aunt from the dressing-room and downstairs towards the stage door.

  'Then ask Michele,' replied Torelli calmly. 'She will be in London in a week or so, and—if I read her aright—she will be only too happy to talk at great length about her somewhat uninteresting self.'

  Nicola was immediately struck silent. Not by the re­proof still distinct in her aunt's tone, but by the simplicity of the solution offered. She could ask Michele. Not per­haps with the bludgeon-like frankness of the Torelli method. But at least in a way that might draw a little information.

  It would be agony to have to wait the week or so to which her aunt so airily referred. But the alternative—to ask Julian Evett—was not even to be thought of. She would ask Michele!

  'Well?' said Torelli, as she settled herself with a slight sigh of genuine weariness in the waiting Rolls. 'Does that solve your problem for you?'

  'Yes, I think it does.' Nicola smiled suddenly and began to look more like her usual self.

  'Good! Then we can let the matter rest.' With an expressive little gesture, Torelli almost visibly washed her strong, capable hands of her niece's inconsiderable affairs. 'And now perhaps you can spare a thought for my con­cerns. It is so many years since I have sung at Covent Garden that this is almost in the nature of a comeback. And a comeback is more difficult than a debut in many ways. I shall need a good deal of support from those around me. I hope I can rely on you in some degree.'

  'Oh, you can! indeed, you can,' exclaimed Nicola remorsefully. 'I'm sorry I was so self-absorbed. It was just that—'

  'I know, dear, I know. Don't tell me again about the importance of Brian Coverdale. I really couldn't bear it before I have had something to eat. And don't apologize either. It brings out all the worst in me when people are over-submissive.'

  So Nicola made a supreme effort to be her natural, independent but affectionate self. And if she still felt shattered by what Oscar Warrender had said, she managed to thrust all that into the background of her mind for the time being.

  It was just as well that she was experienced in this respect by now. For during the next two days everything in the joint lives of her aunt and herself was subordinated to the overriding importance of the Covent Garden return. This of course represented, even more than the Festival Hall concert, a challenge to every facet of Torelli's art. She would be defending her title as actress and stage personality as well as singer. And although the dress rehearsal had gone so sensationally well, this was no absolute guarantee that everything would go as well on the night.

  'I've seen many a good dress rehearsal followed by disaster,' she said to Nicola with almost operatic gloom.

  'But not, I'm sure, when it was based on cast-iron technique and a complete mastery of the stage,' replied Nicola firmly.

  The reply was momentarily acceptable and her aunt smiled. But a few minutes later she observed, 'Anyone can develop a cold at a moment's notice.'

  'Fortunately you don't show the slightest signs of doing so,' said Nicola cheerfully. 'Stop tormenting yourself for nothing.'

  'You don't know what you're talking about,' cried Torelli angrily. 'Only an artist understands what I'm going through at this moment. You're just a stupid, well-meaning, ove
r-talkative little girl who—'

  But just as she was getting ready to quarrel in earnest, most happily the telephone bell rang, and on inquiry Nicola found that it was a long-distance call from her uncle.

  'From Peter?' Torelli snatched the receiver and im­mediately burst into a flood of half tearful English and Italian.

  Nicola moved towards the door, but then she was held there for a moment by the sheer fascination of the varied expressions which chased each other across her aunt's face. She was everything by turns, from a romantically excited girl to a fretfully complaining middle-aged woman, and if she had been projecting it all to the last row of the gallery she could not have been more telling.

  'She loves him,' Nicola thought, as she slipped away out of the room. 'She really loves him very much.' And the discovery both touched and surprised her.

  Much later, when Torelli came to her in the small room where Nicola worked, it was obvious that whatever had transpired in the conversation had cheered and calmed her to a degree.

  'That was Peter,' said Torelli, exactly as though Nicola had not originally taken the call and known all about it. 'He's on his way home. He will probably be here in time for the first performance of "The Flute". He's on his way home!'

  'I'm so glad.' Nicola smiled at her aunt with all the warmth and affection she genuinely felt. 'You really love him very much, don't you?'

  'Love him?' Torelli looked slightly surprised. 'Yes, I suppose I do, in my way. There isn't much youthful rapture about it, of course. Why should there be? But he's like—like an old shoe. He fits me. He's comfortable—comfortable!' She broke off and sighed. 'I wish he were here already,' she said. 'I'd feel better if he were here.'

  'It won't be long now,' Nicola reminded her soothingly. 'And as for that "old shoe" stuff—whatever did he say to you that made you look suddenly like an excited girl?'

  'Did I look like that?' Torelli was visibly intrigued and gratified. 'I can't imagine, unless— Oh!' she broke off and laughed suddenly. Her perfectly beautiful laugh, only on a lighter note than she was wont to use. 'Nothing, really. Just something silly between ourselves.'