by Rosie Thomas
On the way into dinner they followed two of the epicene young men. Gil murmured in her ear, ‘You understand what sort of a household this is?’
‘Yes. I told you about my good friend Jake Jones, didn’t I?’
‘Jake Jones the actor? Is he a …’
Gil’s hand made a small arc and she had begun an answer before she realised he was teasing her. This Roman establishment did strangely remind her of Whistlehalt, and as a result if she didn’t feel exactly at home she didn’t feel lost either. The understanding was the same; you could be anyone, man or mistress or matriarch or hermaphrodite, from any walk of life, and there would be no judgements passed. The only obligation was to be interesting and if possible amusing. It made her realise that she could and should take Gil to Whistlehalt and introduce him there.
At dinner she was placed beside Francis. Logically she knew that she had never been anywhere and couldn’t contribute to the political or artistic talk, but Gil’s old friend behaved as if she were the most sophisticated and intelligent woman he had ever met. He was the embodiment of charm and good manners and she liked him, as well as admiring his assurance. She was pleased to make him laugh with stories about working as a medium and her theatre background.
‘Can’t we persuade you to do a seance for us here, Nancy?’
‘Oh please, no. I am on holiday.’
He nodded, his eyes crinkling. ‘Everyone deserves a vacation. I’m happy to see my old friend thriving on his. Thanks to you, I believe.’
In Rome, Gil took her on the tourist circuit to the Coliseum and the Spanish Steps and St Peter’s, and she was suitably awed. They also went shopping – although to Nancy it was quite unlike the harrowing business of searching for anything she liked and could afford in London. They looked into one or two shops and that afternoon a stack of white and pink and gold boxes was delivered to the apartment. Inside layers of tissue were crisp blouses and sundresses in melting shades, silk scarves and exquisite kid gloves. There was lingerie too, with ribbons and lace edgings and inserts. Her favourite of all the things was a hat with a brim that shaded her eyes, in exactly the same golden straw as the fish bag.
‘I can’t possibly accept all this,’ she said. ‘But I will keep the hat.’
He looked hurt. ‘Why not? I am indulging myself far more than you.’
She understood that an argument was the last thing Gil wanted. In the end she accepted the wonderful clothes with some misgivings, but she wore them with elan.
After a week she was sorry to say goodbye to Francis and his friends.
‘I liked him so much,’ she said to Gil.
‘And he you.’
Rome had been even better than Paris, but now they took a train to the Mediterranean coast where Gil had borrowed a villa belonging to another friend. The house stood alone on a headland, surrounded by sunny or shaded terraces and overlooking a bay that looked too sapphire blue to be real. An Italian mamma came in every morning to do the housework and prepare a dinner, but otherwise they were completely alone. In the mornings, while Gil wrote letters or telephoned, Nancy read and sunbathed and went for walks through the aromatic scrub that clothed the headland. In the afternoons they climbed down to a little beach to swim and dry off by baking in the sand. In the late afternoons they strolled to the village, where Nancy found in the tiny square all the shades of yellow-grey and green-black and faded sepia that were the heart of Italy. Her skin turned golden in the sun and her limbs loosened with the days of swimming and relaxing; even her sharp bones seemed to melt in the buttery heat. Gil studied her from under the brim of his panama and then pulled her to him as if he would never let her go.
The two weeks of their idyll came to an end, and an old grey taxi bumped up the headland to take them to the dusty railway station. All the way up the Ligurian coast Nancy sat with her face to the carriage window, fixing the last glimpses of blue Mediterranean in her head. Gil held her hand and watched the same view.
When they reached London he said that Celia would be returning tomorrow and he must go to Bruton Street at once.
‘When will we see each other again?’
His face tautened. ‘As soon as I can arrange it.’
She nodded quickly, wishing she hadn’t asked.
She held the images of their holiday inside her like a series of lantern slides, reviewing them whenever she felt downcast. The Bloomsbury flat was airless from being closed up for the whole of July until she threw open the doors to the tiny garden. The telephone stood stubbornly silent on its table.
In Waterloo Street she admired Cornelius’s crop of summer vegetables and set about scouring away the grime that had collected in the kitchen in her absence. She went joyfully to the pub and to the pictures with Jinny and Ann. (‘Where did you get those?’ Ann demanded, eyeing the hat and the fish bag. ‘I’m not even going to ask,’ Jinny said. ‘But you look bloody marvellous.’) She went to visit Faith and Matthew at Bavaria and to see Jake in a new play by Noël Coward. At last, reluctantly, she turned her thoughts inwards to her stage work. The Palmyra was about to reopen for the new season with the anticipated spectacle.
Devil’s way of advertising a show had been honed over almost fifty years. Dreams of Ancient Egypt was only the latest in a long series. He liked to design posters in the old cluttered style and to pass out handbills to the crowds in the Strand. If he took out a press advertisement it was like-ly to be a quarter of a page in the Stage. Nancy tried to convince him to spend more money on teasing the public appetite, but he dismissed the idea.
‘You’re exactly like your mother, wanting to spend money on puffery. Word of mouth, that’s the best recommendation. When Carlo and I did The Philosopher’s Illusion people came to see me because their friends told them it was the best spectacle in London. The Prince of Wales himself came one night. I mean the old one, of course, not this boy.’
‘Yes, Pa.’
‘The craze for King Tut and anything Egyptian is playing straight to the Palmyra. It’s a great opportunity for us.’
‘If people aren’t tired of him?’
Devil retorted that the public was a fickle entity but he saw no serious decline in its enthusiasm for songs and fashions and cheap souvenirs based on the excavation of the boy king’s tomb.
‘Let him do it his own way,’ Cornelius said privately to Nancy.
‘When did he ever do anything else?’
Nancy and Cornelius went to the first night together. Cornelius seldom visited the theatre and never sat through a performance, but Devil insisted that he and old Gibb had done so much work on this trick that his children must be there to see the result. Arthur had already been posted abroad and there was a suggestion that Bella might be in an interesting condition, so she was staying at Henbury with her parents and Harry.
Desmond loyally reported that the rehearsals had gone smoothly, the various desert-themed support acts by singers and contortionists and magicians as well as Devil’s centrepiece. Nancy and Cornelius were sitting towards the back of the house. The fauteuils had all been taken by paying customers, and in any case they were both superstitious about sitting too close to the stage. It was only once they were seated that Nancy made the ominous realisation that she was sitting in exactly the same place as Lawrence Feather, the last time she had seen him. Since meeting Gil she had rarely even thought about the medium. To her relief his public presence seemed to have declined almost to nothing – she didn’t think he was even working any longer. Certainly he made no appearances at any of the venues she knew and when she passed by she noticed that the rooms in Gower Street had a new occupant.
Cornelius shifted heavily in his seat and fanned himself with the programme. The house lights dimmed and the green-and-gold curtains swept up on a line of girl dancers in Cleopatra costumes with gilt snakes coiled up their supple arms.
When the time came for Devil’s illusion a team of stagehands wheeled on a tall wooden structure in the shape of a pyramid. It stood well clear of the boards.
The front section swung open to reveal a replica of the famous sarcophagus with the gilded mask, its painted wide eyes gazing deep into the auditorium. There was a ripple of appreciative applause. At the same time a giant hopper with a funnel mouth was lowered from the flies.
Devil strode from the wings in a purple cloak with a golden key border. His eyes were painted to match the mask. He ran through his introduction with gleeful brio.
‘I will be buried alive before your eyes, but I shall escape the tomb itself,’ he promised.
Two of the Cleopatra girls came on and lifted his cloak from his shoulders. Beneath it he was wearing a white singlet and drawers. One of the girls chained his wrists and padlocked the chains, and a man was invited up from the front seats to make sure that the lock was secure. The second girl began to wind a thick bandage. She covered Devil’s face and head and his crossed arms and chained hands while her companion began working up from his feet to his knees and hips. Within a minute Devil was a wrapped mummy with only a tiny slit left for his nostrils. The girls gently turned him in a circle to show his back and then two men came onstage and hoisted him to stand upright in the narrow confines of the sarcophagus. After demonstrating that the box stood free of the pyramid and was otherwise empty, they indicated a steel brace bolted to the interior, before locking that round the mummy’s neck. The door of the sarcophagus was closed over him and the painted lid padlocked in the same way as his wrists and throat.
Now it was time for the burial.
The front of the pyramid was locked and chained but the tiny top section, too narrow for a man’s shoulders to squeeze through, was neatly hinged. This cone tipped sideways now and a whispering cascade of sand immediately fell from the hopper to fill the space inside the pyramid. The stream didn’t stop until the sand was overflowing on to the boards. The peak clicked back into place and locked, making the pyramid unassailable.
The four assistants stood aside and the theatre filled with the amplified ticking of a clock.
The seconds agonisingly stretched.
Nancy and Cornelius could not look at each other. There was a scrape of strings as one of the musicians shifted his position in the pit. Beads of sweat on the brow of one of the male assistants glittered in the lights. It seemed that several minutes passed.
The audience was transfixed.
The ticking suddenly stopped and Nancy gasped. The terror of a bad dream clung about her.
A great crash of music sounded as Devil staggered from behind the pyramid, dressed only in the sweat-soaked singlet and drawers. He held up his arms but his chest was visibly heaving as he gasped for breath. Slowly he sank to his knees. The Cleopatra girls quickly muffled him in the purple cloak, supporting him as they did so. The audience applauded in relief and Devil was dragged off the stage.
Horrified, Nancy was pinned in her seat. Cornelius rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand.
The programme indicated that Devil would perform another series of smaller sleights, but when the time came he did not appear. Without explanation the next artist came on in his place and the show continued.
As soon as they were able Nancy and Cornelius slipped out of their places and raced backstage. They found Devil slumped at his desk in the old office, his head buried in his hands. Sylvia hovered nearby, a small glass of brandy and water at the ready.
‘Pa? What happened?’
He looked up, his face sagging. Cornelius took hold of his wrist to count his pulse.
‘I dropped the hair grip.’
‘What hair grip?’
‘Eh?’ He seemed not quite sure of what was happening. ‘I dropped it, I tell you. There’s no room in that bloody box.’
Desmond appeared in the doorway.
‘It’s all right, Mr Wix, we’re covering. We’ve put in a longer dance number, I’ll ask the girls to show an extra inch of bum, and the band can extend the playing in. Don’t you move.’
Devil looked beseechingly at his children. ‘Eh? What’s he say?’
Cornelius waved everyone away.
‘Give him some space. Tell me, Pa. Does anywhere hurt? Your chest? Your head?’
Devil massaged his ribs with a shaking hand. But the question seemed to revive him.
‘You would be hurting everywhere, my boy, if you’d damn nearly suffocated. I dropped the hair grip, I tell you. I had it here.’ He lifted his other hand, fist clenched. ‘The bandages came off easily enough. But as I went to pick the wrist lock with the grip it fell between my feet. Lucky I’d already sprung the neck brace or I’d have garrotted myself trying to reach downwards. That sand is heavy, and hot. Speed is everything. I have to get out of the box as quick as I can, before the air’s all used up.’
He shook his head.
‘Not like tonight. I strained for the bloody hair grip but I could feel myself going. A big black hole yawning. I could hear your voice, Nancy, screaming like a little girl. Papa, Papa. That was what brought me back. Somehow I got the grip with the very tips of my fingers, freed my hands and pressed the box springs. Christ Almighty, what a relief. I just about got out of there, but I was more dead than alive when I took my bow.’
‘You looked it,’ Cornelius agreed.
Nancy tipped her father’s chin, forcing him to look into her eyes.
‘Pa, you’ll do no more escapology. It’s for young men. You are too old.’
Anxiety made her speak more sharply than she might have done.
Devil’s mouth slackened and his eyes filmed over. Suddenly and shockingly he began to weep. She stooped over him and held his shoulders. He had become the child and she the protective parent.
He sobbed. ‘Fifty years in the theatre. A man’s life.’
‘I know, Pa.’
She tried to soothe him but he was as inconsolable as an infant.
The next night Nancy and Gil were dining at Fifteen after seeing a new production of The Seagull. It was only the third time they had met since their return from Italy. Celia’s health had improved following the cure and she had been almost continuously in London. It was only three days ago that she had left to spend a long weekend at home in the country with her mother. Gil had been eager to see the play but Nancy’s head was too full of Devil and the Palmyra for Nina and Arkadina to have made much of an impression.
One of the soft-footed staff brought the late supper to their table and Gil refilled their glasses himself. Celia was to return to London in the morning and the Maitlands would be leaving almost immediately to stay with the de Laurys and some relatives in Scotland. Gil was expected to go shooting with his father-in-law.
Nancy was more than ever sharply aware that there would always be evenings like this, when separation loomed without any certainty as to when they would be able to see each other again. She told herself to be happy with what they did have and not to yearn for what was impossible.
As Gil reached across the table to touch her fingers she looked up to see the discreet head waiter threading his way towards their table.
Celia was following behind him.
Nancy snatched away her hand and the look on her face made Gil spin round. He was on his feet before his wife reached his side.
‘My darling. How wonderful to see you. How was your stay?’
Celia’s eyes were wide, only slightly dazed. She looked puzzled but she offered her cheek for her husband to kiss.
‘Mummy wanted to look at some new tweeds for Scot-land, so we came up to town this afternoon. They told me at home that you were probably here so I decided to come.’
She gave a little laugh but it trailed away in an uncertain cadence.
Gil said, ‘How marvellous. You remember Miss Wix, don’t you?’
‘Oh, the medium? Yes, yes, of course. Hullo there.’
She stretched out her fingers, sheathed in pearl-white evening gloves. A chair was hurried to the table and Celia sat.
Gil seemed absolutely untroubled.
‘Miss Wix and I were this moment talking about you.’
He glanced once, briefly, into Nancy’s eyes. And then he said to his wife, ‘Yes. Miss Wix has a message for you. She came to ask me what would be the best way to communicate it.’
Celia’s lips parted in amazement. She whispered, ‘A message for me? From Richard?’
Nancy’s face flamed and the muscles of her throat clenched. The impending betrayal cut in every direction and she writhed inwardly. How could she escape? She felt like her father, stifling in the hot sand of the pyramid.
Celia urgently leaned forward. A diamond cuff flashed as she seized Nancy’s wrist.
‘Tell me.’
‘Perhaps not here. I could … I could come to Bruton Street.’
The wrist grip tightened. Those fragile fingers were capable of startling pressure.
‘Tell me now.’
Celia’s voice was raised. Heads turned at the nearest tables and Nancy became aware of the clink of cutlery, even the rattle of ice in people’s glasses. She had to do it. Gil had thought quickly and if she could do the same they were reprieved. The words she hadn’t yet spoken tasted bitter on her tongue.
‘I need to know,’ Celia cried.
More heads were turning in their direction. The head waiter was poised at the side of the room. Gil adjusted the position of his cigarette case on the starched cloth.
Nancy slowly nodded. ‘I do understand.’
Celia was absolutely intent. ‘Go on.’
It was only like a seance. That was all. It was what she did. No more, no less of a deception. It would not be even as difficult to do as a Palmyra performance.
She spoke through the constriction in her throat.
‘I heard your brother’s voice.’
True.
Celia’s lips parted. She seemed to have stopped breathing. There might have been no one else in the room for either of them. Even Gil had become a shadow.
Nancy’s mind raced. What the hell were the words? Somehow they came to her. There was no going back. She recited in a low voice:
‘Fair Katherine, and most fair,
Will you vouchsafe to teach a soldier terms
Such as will enter at a lady’s ear