“Incredulous,” said Laura.
“Incredulous. What is it?”
“Not believing, O Socrates.”
“What’s Sockertees?”
“Oh, my God!”
“Is that swearing?”
“No, it’s a cry for help, in this instance.”
“Are you sorry we’re only staying a week?”
“Ask me that again when the week is up,” said Laura. “Let’s go and look for bluebells in the woods.”
“We’re not allowed to pick the wild flowers. Mummy says we’re conversationists.”
“One of you is, at any rate, and who said anything about picking them? Anyway, I rather fancy you mean conservationists.”
“Yes. Wild flowers are not very interesting when you’re not allowed to pick them, though, are they? Why is it all right for Jasper Lynn to pick the wild flowers if we mustn’t?”
“Who is Jasper Lynn?”
“A big boy. He belongs to Mr and Mrs Lynn and he picked the wild flowers to give to Mrs Bourton and he’s Egeus. It is only a little part and a girl was going to have it, but when Mrs Lynn said Jasper must be in it, Mr Lynn said, ‘only a little part then, he’s got his A-levels’, so Mr Yorke said, ‘what about Egeus? We could paint some wrinkles on him and give him a beard’.”
“So Jasper is Egeus. Does he want the part? It’s not a very attractive one, to my way of thinking—just a bossy old father objecting to his daughter marrying the man of her choice,” said Laura.
“Jasper didn’t want to be in it at all at first, but when Auntie Deb told Mrs Lynn how to be Helena and Mrs Lynn said Mrs Bourton ought to be Hermia, Jasper said he would be Egeus and Mr Lynn laughed a lot and said a good chance to stand there and make sheep’s eyes at Barbara. What does that mean?—make sheep’s eyes?”
“Calf-love. Let’s leave it at that.”
“Uncle Jon had a calf when we went last year. It was a lovely little bull-calf and when you sang the French anthem it would join in.”
“Extraordinary.”
“Yes, it was. It wouldn’t join in any other song, only in the—how do you say it?”
“La Marseillaise. How patriotic of it. I knew a French breed had been introduced over here, but I did not know it could sing.”
“It sang like Edmund. Jasper Lynn can sing. He sang about a melody that’s sweetly played in tune. Well, it wouldn’t be a melody if it wasn’t, would it?”
“You know what a melody is, then?”
“I asked Jasper. Mr Yorke said Jasper didn’t ought to wear a sword because Egeus was an old man and an old man wouldn’t want to fight anybody, but Jasper said a sword was part of a gentleman’s dress, but he would settle for a dagger, and Mr Lynn said a good actor always let the producer have the last word, so Jasper was nasty and said all right, he would get himself a sword and Mr Lynn said, ‘Not one of mine you won’t, if Brian says not’, and Mr Yorke said, ‘It’s a moot point and I don’t stand upon points.’ What’s moot?”
“Debatable.”
Rosamund looked at her for further enlightenment, but none came, so she dismissed the matter in a practical way by saying that Peter Woolidge had taught her how to turn two somersaults, one after the other, and finish standing up.
“But he can do all sorts of things,” she went on. “He put two chairs together and turned a running somersault right over them without touching them.”
“I used to be able to do that,” said Laura, “but not nowadays, worse luck.”
“No, you are too old. Jasper Lynn isn’t old, though, so he is to have a beard in the play.”
“And a sword?”
“I expect so, because he turned nasty and said he wasn’t going to wear a beard, so I think they will give in about the sword if he wears the beard.”
“I can hardly wait to see this play of yours, although all the dramatic interest seems to take place off-stage.”
“Uncle Jon will invite you. Us and the other elves and fairies—they don’t speak, they only mostly dance—we are all going to sing a song. Shall I sing it to you? It’s all about come not near our fairy queen. I’m not sure I know it yet, and I don’t think the little black boys and Edmund ever will know it, but Uncle Jon says it will be all right on the night. Why is it called A Midsummer Night’s Dream?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“One of the fairies has a bigger part than me, but she’s nine. Her name is Yolanda and her daddy is the inducer.”
“Producer,” said Laura automatically.
“Much must have told in her favour,” said Dame Beatrice, “especially her father’s eminence.”
“Cook says kissing goes by favour. She said it when the milkman gave Carrie a rose, but he picked it off one of our bushes. I saw him. And Cook said it again when she knew that Mummy and Daddy were going all round the world on a ship, and then she said rolling stones gather no moss. What does that mean?”
“Perhaps you and Edmund would like to go into the kitchen. Henri will show you how to make gingerbread men,” said Dame Beatrice.
“We would rather make stick-jaw toffee.”
“What? Do you want to spend the rest of your lives with the dentist?” demanded Laura. “A very strange view some people take of their future! Ever heard of digging your grave with your teeth?”
“That’s silly. You couldn’t dig anything with your teeth. You’d get all dirt in your mouth. Last term a boy called Roger put all dirt in my mouth and my daddy told Roger’s daddy and Roger’s daddy put Roger over his knee and smacked him a lot of times, so now Roger only puts out his tongue at me. He doesn’t put dirt in my mouth any more, but Cook says what won’t fat ’ull fill.”
“Surely she didn’t say that about Roger putting dirt in your mouth?” asked Laura.
“No. She said it when she saw Saunders eating a raw carrot. Cook said raw carrots give you worms. I found a caterpillar once in my salad. Have you ever found a caterpillar in your salad?”
“No, thank goodness. Let’s change the subject. I thought you and Edmund were going to sing your fairy song.”
“Not Edmund. Mummy says he’s got a voice like a corncrake. What’s a—”
“Don’t ask me. I’ll ask you and then tell you. What’s a corncrake? It’s a noisy bird which lives in long grass and goes ark, ark, ark.”
“ ’Ark, ’ark, ’ark, while infanvoicers sing! ’Ark, ’ark, ’ark, while infanvoicers sing loud ozanner, loud ozanner, loud ozanner to our king. Jack fell down an’ broke his crown, so he couldn’t be a king any more,” contributed Edmund, first in corncrake, unmelodious chant and finishing with a serious statement directed at Laura and obviously offered as a challenge.
“It doesn’t mean a real crown,” she informed him. “It means that when he fell down he got a nasty bump on the top of his head.”
“I prefer Edmund’s interpretation,” said Dame Beatrice. “It is far more interesting and dramatic than yours.”
“Shall I sing now?” asked Rosamund, unwilling that the limelight should pass to her brother.
“Yes, tip us your stave,” said Laura. “Is it ‘You spotted snakes with double tongue’?”
“Yes. What does double tongue mean?”
“Forked tongue. You’ve seen snakes at the zoo, haven’t you? In Red Indian parlance I believe it means saying one thing and meaning something else.”
“Oh, I know! Like when Mr Yorke said to Mr Lynn that of course Mrs Lynn must be Hermia, but he really meant Mrs Bourton ought to be Hermia. When Mr Bourton was talking to Mr Woolidge afterwards he called Mrs Lynn ‘that silly moo’ and said they’d be lucky if she didn’t dish the whole show. He said, ‘But old Lynn is doing all the subbing up, so Yorke has got to kow-tow to him.’ What’s kow-tow?”
“A polite Japanese obeisance offered from necessity rather than from self-deprecation,” said Dame Beatrice. Rosamund stared at her in silence, then put her feet together and her hands behind her back and treated the company to ‘You spotted snakes with double to
ngue’. Her audience had been augmented by Henri, who stood beaming in the doorway with two small flowered aprons over his arm. When the song was ended he said:
“If Madame pleases, all is in readiness for the making of toffee.”
“Well!” said Laura, as the children ran off to the kitchen.
“We have been out-generalled by a superior tactician,” said Dame Beatrice. “The ground had already been prepared.”
“Sappers and miners have been at work. That frightful kid will end up in gaol,” said Laura.
“From what she disclosed in her last oration, I think her choice of ‘inducer’ rather than ‘producer’ was an inspired one,” said Dame Beatrice. “The most that anyone misguided enough to direct or produce an amateur dramatic society’s offerings can hope for is to induce the members to play their parts as he wishes. Without monetary compensation, few are prepared to surrender their own ideas merely to contribute to the common good.”
“Don’t eat that if you don’t want it, Rosamund,” said Dame Beatrice, turning a sympathetic eye on the valiant struggles of her young guest. Rosamund laid down her implements and sighed.
“Cook says ‘better belly bust than good stuff be lost’,” she observed. “She said it when Carrie had to come in and clean up the floor after Edmund.”
“I was sick,” said Edmund.
“No, you weren’t. You were naughty. He was only two,” explained Rosamund, turning to Laura, “but he was naughty. He said, ‘You gave me too much’, and he threw his plate of stewed fruit and custard on the floor.”
“Well, that was one way of dealing with the surplus,” said Dame Beatrice.
“Yes, but then he wanted a banana and Daddy said no, and Mummy said, ‘He knows what he wants’, and let him have one and he kept looking at Daddy and eating the banana so fast he got it all over his face and up into his hair, but he ate it all, so Mummy was right. Yolanda’s mummy was going to look after us for a fortnight when we go home, but they are having Mr Rinkley to stay with them while his flat is being done up, and he won’t be gone before we get back and they have only one spare room. I don’t like Mr Rinkley.”
“Because he is bagging the spare room?” asked Laura.
“No. He kept picking me up and throwing me in the air and catching me like he does Yolanda, and Auntie Deb said, ‘Please don’t do that. Rosamund doesn’t like it’, so then Mr Rinkley laughed and did it again, and Uncle Jon said, ‘You heard my wife, you oaf’—what’s an oaf?”
“A person of low origin and few manners.”
“So Uncle Jon punched Mr Rinkley in the stomach and Auntie Deb said, ‘Oh, please!’ and Mr Bourton said, ‘Play around with girls your own size, Rinkley, and leave small kids alone’, and Mr Yorke said, ‘Steady on, Bourton’, and Mr Rinkley went outside and was sick.”
“My, my! You do have fun at your rehearsals!” said Laura.
“Yes, so Mr Rinkley didn’t come to the next rehearsal, but it’s all right now. Mr Rinkley said, ‘I’m sorry I upset your dignity, little lady’, and I said, ‘I’m sorry I don’t like you’, and everybody laughed, but afterwards Mr Bourton said to Mr Woolidge, ‘What a swine that fellow is! I wish Yorke would kick him out of the play. He’s a something child mole-star’. What’s a something child mole-star?”
“A man who tosses little girls into the air when he has been told they don’t like it. Incidentally, did Cook ever remark that little pitchers have long ears?” asked Laura, anxious to change the subject. Rosamund considered the question, then shook her head and turned to other matters of interest, as Laura intended that she should.
“We have the rehearsals at our house now,” she said, “so people can get used to talking out of doors. They do our fairy scenes first and then we are sent upstairs, but Yolanda and I come down again and hide and listen. When Yolanda’s daddy gets cross he calls everybody ‘darling’. That’s how they know he is cross with them. He said, ‘Rinkley, darling boy, do you have to put your arm round Flute’s waist? Miss Hythe is supposed to be your fellow workman, not a girl you’re trying to chat up’. So Mr Rinkley said a lot of it went on in Shakespeare’s time and anyway he was only building up to the Pyramus and Thisbe scene when Miss Hythe really would be a girl, but Mr Yorke—that’s Yolanda’s daddy—he said, ‘Cut it out, darling boy, just to please me. Back to “Answer as I call you ”, everybody, please, and, Robina, darling, do try to look as though you’re taking an interest in what the others are saying, and Caroline, darling, I know Starveling is a tailor, but it isn’t necessary for you to play the whole scene pretending to be stitching or else waving your arms in the air’, and Miss Frome said, ‘Sorry. It will look better when we can use the “props”. It’s supposed to be my tailoring shears I’m waving,’ and Mr Yorke said, ‘You wouldn’t have brought your shears to the workmen’s rehearsal. Be more imaginative, darling, and, anyway, you mustn’t distract attention from the person who is actually speaking. It’s an old ham’s trick and you are not to use it’.”
“You must be learning a great deal about play-acting from Mr Yorke,” said Dame Beatrice. “Shall we adjourn? I see that George is bringing the dogs out for their run.”
“I wish they were little tiny ponies,” said Rosamund.
“I hadda little pony his name was Dappergay I lent him to a lady to ride-a-mile-away she stroked him she fed him she hadda lovely ride, she brought him backateventime a-walking by his side,” said Edmund, finishing up breathless.
“We don’t let him know the real words because of kindness to animals,” said Rosamund.
“Ought one to point out to that all-too-intelligent infant that she ought not to listen-in to the rehearsals when she is not supposed to be present?” asked Laura, when the children had gone out.
“It would be wrong to saddle her with a guilty conscience when she listens in next time, as, of course, she will, whether we point out her error of taste or not.”
“Do you think she represses Edmund too much?”
“From what we have heard, he seems capable of asserting himself when he feels it necessary. Besides, in a few years’ time his innate aggressiveness and his masculine ego will provide self-assertion enough and to spare, I fancy.”
“I wish I didn’t enjoy listening to Rosamund’s disclosures. Things seem to be hotting up nicely, don’t they? What with the women being ticked off for attempted scene-stealing, the ‘angel’s’ wife being referred to as a silly moo, and Jonathan punching Rinkley in the stomach and making him sick, I should say that this Dream is hardly as Shakespeare intended it, and that Thalia, up there on Mount Olympus, or Parnassus, or wherever she is, must be finding this a better comedy than the one The Bard wrote. All the same, though, I don’t like the sound of that man Rinkley. What he did with Rosamund seems harmless enough, although, as Jonathan pointed out to him, he should have desisted when asked, but to label a man a molester of children isn’t very pretty, is it? I wonder the Yorkes put him up when they had a nine-year-old girl in the house.”
“I think the epithet may have referred to an incident in Rinkley’s past; one that he had hoped was either unknown to the company or forgotten by them. That it was not, may have given him the shock which made him vomit.”
“Anyway, I’m glad Jonathan punched him in the stomach.”
“In the interests of the play it may have been better to punch him there, rather than to have given him a black eye or a broken nose or jaw. Jonathan is the most belligerent of all my relatives. I hoped Deborah would have tamed him by now,” said Dame Beatrice.
“I expect she has, except when she herself is involved,” said Laura. “It was because he’d laughed at Deborah that he got the punch in the stomach.”
Chapter 4
Retractable Blade
“… we will do no harm with our swords.”
« ^ »
You know, old boy,” said Rinkley to Brian Yorke, “that last scene needs all the aid it can get.”
“How can you say that, when it’s got yours?” asked Don
ald Bourton unpleasantly.
“No need to be sarky, old boy. I wasn’t meaning myself, but the supporting cast.”
“Meaning me, I suppose,” said Susan Hythe. “It might help if you didn’t breathe whisky fumes into my face through the supposed chink in the wall.”
“Not whisky fumes; the ardour of love, dear.”
“We’re all doing our best for you,” said Caroline Frome. “Nobody can make Wall really funny, so it isn’t my fault if I can’t get laughs.”
“You need not try to stick your finger in my eye when you make the chink. It’s wasted, anyway. The audience won’t spot it from the distance they’ll be away from us. As for Robina alternately dropping her dog and her lantern when she’s doing Moonshine, it’s abysmal.”
“Thanks very much!” said Robina Lester. “I’m only trying to back up your own feeble efforts to be funny.”
“The parts in the workmen’s play are meant to be crudely acted,” said her son David, who was Lion.
“Let’s take it through once more,” said Brian Yorke, “and, Susan darling, you fall across Pyramus when you kill yourself. You don’t just lie down in a graceful manner two yards away from him.”
“I should prefer to be further off still,” said Susan.
“And I don’t want that Two-Ton Tessie knocking all the breath out of me,” said Rinkley. “I’ve got a tender stomach.”
“As Mr Bradley found out, bless his heart,” said Robina viciously.
“Anyway, I’ve got a much better idea for that bit,” said Rinkley, ignoring her. “When Thisbe comes in and finds I’ve stabbed myself—incidentally, when are ‘props’ going to produce that sword? We need practice with it.”
“It will be available from tomorrow, I think. It won’t actually be a sword, but a dagger with a retractable blade,” said Marcus Lynn. “It’s very realistic, but quite harmless, of course. It’s a nice-looking thing, an exact replica of a sixteenth-century stiletto.”
“But do we want anything realistic in that particular scene?” asked Susan Hythe. “I thought it had to be completely farcical. What’s wrong with sticking the sword under our armpits? That’s the way it’s always done, I thought.”
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