“OK. At the stile?”
Dave turned. His unarticulated shout floated across the stubble. She shook her head, then nodded it towards the dovecote.
“Down there,” she said. “Quarter to seven. Don’t be late.”
She turned and ran back to the binder. The tractor-engine roared, the blades clattered and the sheaves came tumbling out on to the stubble. Andrew slotted himself back into his job, using its rhythm to blank his mind once more so that the energies could go on gathering into the well of his inner self. At half past four Cousin Brown came down again to make sure that Mrs Althorp didn’t try to keep her cast at work a minute longer than the agreed time.
SEVEN
A hazed August evening. Bodies still sweaty with harvest, aching with the long day, tender with the scratch of thistly sheaves. From beyond the yew hedge the voices of the audience, their main note clearly American, restless, an irritable patch in the smooth calm of beechwoods and the sweep of unmown lawns. Everything weary, leaves still green but with a deadish hue, the tussocks of grass half fallen, stems pale, seed shed. A kind of ache in the air, in the slant dull light, a yearning to have all this world over and swept away by the scour of winter.
“Did you hear?” someone whispered. “We’ve taken Paris. It was on the six-o’clock.”
Cousin Brown had decided to begin her production with Ariel beckoning the whole cast to cross the stage in procession. Those needed for the opening scene were to peel off and take up their positions. Prospero, who was to remain on stage throughout the performance—sometimes asleep, sometimes watching in trance the action on stage, sometimes conducting or reacting to it—crossed to his cave down right while Caliban, his entrance concealed by the procession of courtiers, huddled invisible among the weed-covered rocks down left. The mariners posed in their mime of ship-work while the rest of the procession passed out of sight. Prospero summoned Ariel and mimed the transfer of powers that would allow him to wake the tempest, Jack rattled his thunder-sheet. The mariners woke into movement and the play would begin.
Sweltering in his heavy robe, with his tome under his arm, Andrew waited by the fresh-clipped arch. He had been first dressed because he needed to be alone, out of the fret and dither of the Green Room hut, away from the postmaster’s tedious wishes of good luck and Charles wittering round searching for his missing hose. The rest of the procession started to line up, the courtiers in velvets and golds, the mariners drabber, Trinculo in motley—Cousin Brown had amassed a biggish wardrobe over the years. Jean came and stood beside him, wearing a pale green floating tunic with a gold ribbon crossing between her breasts. Cousin Brown had erased her freckles, making her pink-and-white, with crimson half-pouting lips.
“You’re going to get some whistles,” he whispered.
She nodded, unperturbed.
“You’re still coming?” she said.
“Yes.”
She accepted his promise by practising her Miranda face at him, demure but eager. He smiled and turned away. She would understand he didn’t want to talk.
The next ten minutes were crucial. He had to get them right. It wasn’t only a matter of making a good impression on Mr Oakley—that was something practical, possibly useful, more likely a dead end. A career was certain to be full of people who could have helped but were too blind or busy to see their chance. The main thing was different but far more vital. It was already announced, clear and unchangeable on the playbills, in the programmes. “Prospero: Adrian Waring.”
Tonight he was born.
In conversation he had been casual about it—might as well start some time—but inwardly it had become all-important. No more come-and-go of Adrian at need, to outface problems, to get girls and other things he wanted. Now he was going to take his place before the world and become real. For this birth he must prepare so that he would walk on stage filled with his energies, robed with his powers. There would be hundreds, thousands of other performances through the years, but they all depended on getting this one right. The jeering note of the GIs’ chatter was a threat but also a test, exhilarating. If he got it right they would be silent for him.
Self-absorption did not mean unawareness—quite the opposite. He was conscious of everything, the itches and scratches of his skin and the ache of muscles, the silence of woods and lawns, the nervous gathering of the cast, the need to warn Jean about the whistles. If he had chosen he could have tuned his hearing and picked out the voice of a single soldier beyond the hedge, caught every syllable, understood not just the present meaning but all that had happened to cause that present, far back into some small-town boyhood.
He heard a muffled yelp and turned to see the door of the Men’s Green Room bang open and Charles burst out, half dressed, clutching the waistband of his hose at knee-level. At least he’d found them. He dropped his cloak and circlet on to the grass and finished pulling the hose up over his shirt-tails. His attitude expressed outrage, shock, fright. All the cast had turned at his yell and were watching, so they all saw Caliban come sidling out behind him. Impossible to think of him as Samuel, he was already so invested with his part, the grimaces, the gestures, the crab-like scuttlings. Cousin Brown was going over to speak to Charles. Caliban rushed past her, beyond his proper place in the procession and up to its head, where he seized Andrew by the arm and tried to drag him aside. Andrew resisted. The dark brown skin under its monster make-up seemed to be suffused almost purple. The eyes bulged. Andrew turned his head away. Cousin Brown was speaking to Charles. Charles said something, contrived a half-smile. Cousin Brown picked up the coronet and cloak and waited to help him dress.
“Baas! Baas!”
At least he kept his voice low. It was not his butler tone, nor Caliban’s, but the nigger-talk he had used with Uncle Vole.
“Not now,” muttered Andrew.
“You are the heir. You promise me. Send and fetch the wife.”
Andrew did not hesitate, did not even choose. The voice was already in his mouth, as it had been the morning he had killed Uncle Vole. He looked coldly down.
“Be quiet. You can tell me tomorrow.”
The contorted mouth opened to plead again, but now from beyond the hedge came a rasp of crackles, a magnified cough, a voice through a loudspeaker.
“Now, men, hear this. It is a great privilege, a very great privilege, for us to be here. Time to time you fellows get bitching about this war we’re fighting. You ask your pal what the hell good we’re doing over here, right?”
“Right, lieutenant,” called a voice. Others laughed.
“OK, guys, take it easy. Now I read some place how Bill Shakespeare who wrote this great play spoke the same way we do, with a good American accent. That doesn’t prove he was an American, but it shows he wasn’t only an Englishman. He was both. And this play of his …”
Caliban—Samuel—had not moved but still stood pleading, a violent agonized pose, the half-gripped hands held forward as if about to rip their way in, through the role of Prospero, through the public presence of Adrian to the inmost cave where Andrew had his secret being. Let him in, pay any attention at all, acknowledge his right to plead, and the focused powers would start to scatter. Andrew pivoted his own head away and allowed his body to follow it round. He felt fingers grip the elbow that held the tome against his side. Without looking down he raised his other hand and prised them loose. The cast were watching, mostly baffled but Charles now warily, out of the corners of his eyes. Cousin Brown marched up the line, took Samuel by the hand and led him to his place. Andrew faced the empty arch, seeing and hearing nothing and everything. The alien voice crackled to its peroration.
He waited for his long-planned life to start.
EIGHT
After seven weeks’ practice his fingers and toes knew the route from Florrie’s linen-room without conscious thought. The only strangeness was to be climbing down in the dawn, not up. The sash slid without a s
ound. Elbows on sill, reach with right foot for hopper-head of rainwater down-pipe, stretch right arm round corner to decorative bobble, swing body sideways and round into vertical slot, chimney down that, reach with right foot again—a blind bit, this—out and round for sill of Samuel’s pantry.
What?
Slither. The crackle of something plummeting into bushes. Craning, he could see where the leaves still trembled in the shrubbery below. He reached with his foot again, found the place, but wrong—greasy and unsafe. Retracting the foot and holding his body in tension he peered down at the tilted sole. A yellow smear. Even before he had reached down to touch it and then sniffed at his fingertip he had guessed what it was. Last night at the party … Cousin Blue’s lost treasure. The missing butter.
Very peculiar. Somebody must have put it there. After Samuel had closed the shutters, or he’d have seen. He’d have done that just before the play and there’d have been people in and out of the pantry after. One of the other servants, taking the below-stairs schism into new areas of spite? Cousin Blue herself, so as to be able to berate Samuel and thus remind him of his place after his triumph as Caliban? Wouldn’t she have done that more publicly? They’d been in the pantry when Andrew had rushed in for a wet cloth—Charles had spilt his wine over Jonny Price’s beautiful pale blue suit—God knows how many coupons. Cousin Blue with her back to him, low-voiced but vehement.
“… stolen by one of these strangers,” she was saying. “Nevertheless I will have butter …”
And then she’d stopped until Andrew had scurried out, cloth in hand.
He shook his head, refusing the mystery. It was part of the past, nothing to do with him any more. He eased the shoe off, gripped the laces in his teeth and with one bare foot climbed on. Round on to the sill, down on to elbows, reach with left foot for hopper-head of sink outlet, and down that pipe into the shrubbery. He could see the butter dish lying upside down a few feet down the slope, but he left it there. Perhaps on his way back he would retrieve it and take it to Samuel, give the old boy a chance to explain what he’d been so upset about last night. That was another bit of the past, but worth tidying up in order to be shot of it. Same with Jean.
He walked up the steep path to the front terrace and then immediately right down the stone stair that led towards the woodland garden. As he sat on the lowest step to put his shoe back on the air changed. Sunlight caught the topmost branches of the trees and moved steadily down. Dawn became day.
The woodland clattered with birdsong. He took deep, deliberate breaths of the dewy air, feeling marvellously alive, free, uplifted. The black, cold well of terror at his centre was gone, drained clean away, and in the space where it had been was thrilling hope. No, more than hope, certainty, foreknowledge of a life of glory. By his own powers he had wrought the change, he and Samuel, sweeping them all up—Hazel, Jean, Peter and the others, drawing out of them energies they never knew were there, so that the impossible audience was stilled and swept up too. And Barrie Oakley had been there to see, and had understood what had happened. Halfway up the valley an engine started, then another and another, as the dawn convoy readied itself to carry its seven hundred GIs away to the war.
Startled by the squeak of the gate rabbits flickered back into the wood as he came out into the field. The shadows of the stooks lay long in the barely risen sun, making a striped pattern across the silvery stubble. The harvest had kept going last evening after he’d left and the barley was reaped right up to the dovecote, which now stood naked apart from a fringe of nettles round its foot. Its shadow ran all the way to the camp fence.
There were still about ten minutes before Jean would show up, he guessed. He’d come early, on purpose, so that she shouldn’t have the slight advantage of having been kept waiting. Not that it made any difference. The whole thing was her fault, that afternoon at the chalk-pit. She’d known his resistance was at its lowest. She kept saying how well she knew him … well, in that case she’d know he wasn’t going to marry her. Money? Cousin Brown would stump up—she’d have friends too, actresses who’d got into the same sort of mess and could tell Jean who to go to … Anything, provided it was tidied and done with.
A pigeon was cooing in the further wood and a couple of doves were out on the sills of the flight-holes, muttering in their deeper, bubbling note. Now the noise of engines from the camp strengthened as the first lorries started grinding across the valley, parallel to his path but in the opposite direction. The symmetry prickled his skin. Seven hundred men going one way. He, alone, the other. Tomorrow they’d be in France. By next week the chosen ones—you, and you, and you—would be dead. They would die with their own memories, which made them what they were—childhood in a prairie town, or a particular girl, or some quarrel or moment of shame, some drunken night—but in one or two misting minds a paved stage which was supposed to be an island, people in fancy clothes who were supposed to be courtiers and sailors, a magician who for two hours had made those suppositions solid. A memory to die with.
He had fitted the big iron key into the lock before he noticed the splinters on the jamb. An instant later he felt the slight give in the door itself and heard the scrape on the threshold stone as he pushed it further. The metal block into which the lock-tongue slotted had been wrenched loose, screws and all. The door had been forced.
Poachers after dove-meat? GIs from the camp? Lovers desperate for a place—but the nights had been fine and warm and the woods were private enough. He tiptoed up the narrow spiral stair.
April 1986
How did it go?”
“Very well. Benny sends his love.”
“Really well? You weren’t …”
“Apparently not, judging by the fact that two of the audience screamed just after Polly’s exit. How’s the hand?”
“It hurts when I think about it. I’m not really interested in them. I want to know about you. Were you all right?”
“I’d like some hot milk with rum in it. Give yourself something. We’re not going to bed for a bit.”
“It’s half past two.”
“I know.”
“All right. You’d better come and get it. I might spill with a tray.”
He fidgeted while he waited for her call, interrupted the flow of the water-clock, fingered about among her collection of treen, made adjustments to the fire. At the sound of her voice he crossed rapidly to the kitchen but slowed his pace at the door. He came back behind her, carrying both mugs which he put on the table by the sofa. He adjusted the table, then finally settled with her into their tableau with himself propped against the wing of the sofa and her nestling between him and the back. He lifted her mug to her left hand and tasted his own.
“Not enough rum. Don’t move. It’s probably just as well. Now, listen. Driving up this afternoon I came to the conclusion that I was going to have to break it off with you. By the time I was dressing it had become a definite decision. It is not, as you are aware, the first time I have broken off a relationship such as ours. Usually I have enjoyed the process, or at least experimented with it, arranging for it to happen in ways that might be useful to me. Not this time.”
He paused and drank, studying her over the rim of his mug. Though her face was smooth with youth it was so structured—small snub nose, mobile mouth, too-round eyes—that it implied the sad and puzzled wrinkles you see in monkeys. Time would bring them. She was watching him dry-eyed but her tension showed in the hardening of the mouth-muscles.
“I was trying to remember when you stopped calling me Adrian,” he said.
“After your birthday party.”
“How do you know so precisely? Somebody … Priscilla?”
“She’s one of the haunters, isn’t she?”
“Uh?”
“Before me.”
“I doubt if she’ll haunt you in the kitchen. She never set foot there. Bitch. Did she tell you it wasn’t my real birthday?�
�
“Wasn’t it? August the twenty-fifth?”
“It is the birthday of Adrian Waring. Let us go back to your calling me by the ambiguous initial.”
“I saw she was trying to stir things up so I only did it a little at first. I sort of guessed you mightn’t like it if I actually asked. I’ll stop if … It’s too late, isn’t it?”
“Was it a deliberate choice on your part, to cover both names?”
“It just felt more comfortable.”
“Because it covered both names?”
“I suppose so.”
He put his mug down and lifted her bandaged hand on to his lap, meditatively fingering the criss-cross folds.
“You seem incapable of the saving lie,” he said.
“Of course not! I’m a terrible liar! You know that!”
“Not this time.”
“I’m sorry … darling Adrian … oh dear …”
“There is an important scene in Nada in which the narrator has to convince Chaka that he is telling the truth. Chaka is an appalling monster, prepared to sacrifice whole tribes, whole regiments, to his egotism. One of his decrees is that no son of his may live, but the narrator has rescued a baby boy, who becomes the hero of the story. Chaka suspects this to be the case, and makes the narrator hold his hand in the fire while he swears that it is not. He does so, saving his own life and the child’s at the cost of a permanently withered hand.”
“That’s quite different. I didn’t even think. Mine’s going to be well in a week, Fritz says.”
“Besides, the man was lying all along. You know, I do not think I am quite the monster Chaka was.”
“Of course not!”
“Certainly what appears to be my egotism is considerable. Equally certainly I have caused sacrifices to be made. People have suffered, because I needed them to. You will have met people who think that I have let them down badly, or deliberately betrayed them.”
Perfect Gallows Page 25