One May Smile

by Penny Freedman

  And that more or less deals with the matter. The troops outside glower at me and one of them slams a fist into my office door and tells me I haven’t heard the last of this, but they take themselves off. No longer in the mood for housekeeping, I bundle my files any old how into the filing cabinet and head out for some therapeutic holiday shopping before I pick up Freda.

  I was stretching a point when I told Costas that I was going on holiday. I am off to Denmark, to Helsingør, better known to us Brits as Elsinore. It is where Hamlet happens, and I’m sure it’s a charming place but the reason why this isn’t exactly a holiday is that I’m going with my daughter, Annie, and some of her Oxford chums to organise the costumes for a militaristic, police-state-style production of Hamlet, which they are putting on in the castle. You might wonder 1) why no student could be found in the whole of Oxford University to take on costuming and 2) why, in any case, it should fall to the assistant director’s overworked mother to take it on. The answer to 1) seems to be that everyone wants to be a star and no-one learns to sew at school any more; the answer to 2) is that, at nineteen, Annie carries in her head an exact credit and debit account of how much maternal cash, effort and proof of love has been expended on her, as compared with her sister. The fact that I helped out my elder daughter, Ellie, by doing the costumes for a school play she directed last year has apparently been looming large in Ellie’s credit column and Annie has made it clear that it’s balancing up time. I make it sound as though I’ve been bullied into this, but that’s only half true. Actually, I quite fancy it: I like young people, I like Hamlet, I have a predilection in favour of Denmark as a rational, civilised not-too-hot country and I haven’t been on a holiday anywhere for a long time. The holiday aspect is marred somewhat by the fact that I have to take three-year-old Freda with me, though. With unfortunate timing, her mother, Ellie, married a fellow-teacher last week and has gone off on honeymoon. Her new husband, Ben Biaggi, is taking her to Italy to meet his extended family and it didn’t seem appropriate for them to be accompanied by Freda. Ben, you understand, is not Freda’s father; the latter has always been a shadowy figure about whom Ellie has resolutely refused to speak.

  So I whiz round M&S, picking up a few garments that I hope will lend some freshness and bounce to my tired summer wardrobe and adding a couple of pairs of embroidered dungarees for Freda. In Boots I splurge on special sun cream for Freda, insect bite cream, travel sickness pills, paracetamols, Calpol, Germolene and a mammoth box of plasters. Travel hopefully, that’s what I say. I pick Freda up from the nursery and find that far from being excited about our adventure she is wisely apprehensive. She has never been abroad before (we only remembered very late in the day that she would need a passport) and she’s not sure whether she’s going to like it. For all I know she may have doubts about my ability to negotiate the perils ahead. If so, that makes two of us.

  I get her fed, bathed and bedded on an early schedule, clearing the decks for an evening of packing and fretting, and it’s when I’m standing contemplating piles of clothes and assessing quantity versus manageability that the phone rings. It is the duty porter at the college.

  ‘Sorry to bother you, Mrs Gray,’ he says, ‘but I can’t get hold of anyone from the International Office. We’ve had a call from the hospital about one of your students, a Miss Christodoulou. No details but can you get up there? They need to talk to someone, apparently.’

  And so it comes about that instead of packing, washing my hair and having an early night I run down the road to persuade a neighbouring teenager to leave her nice, flat screen television and come and watch our inferior box while keeping an ear open for Freda, and then I get on my bike and pedal up to the hospital. It takes an age to find out where Anastasia is, of course, and when I get there I discover that the harassed houseman wants me to sign a consent form in case they need to operate. He is tight-lipped about what happened to Anastasia but it seems to have involved an overdose of barbiturates.

  ‘Barbiturates as in sleeping pills?’ I ask, and he shrugs noncommittally.

  When I ask if she’ll be all right, he says, ‘Oh yes,’ as though that was never in any doubt.

  ‘So why did I have to sign for her having an operation?’

  ‘Oh it’s just procedure,’ he says, closing his file, off to the next case.

  I ask the ward sister if I can see Anastasia and she takes me into a stuffy little six-bed ward, where I find Anastasia yellowish-pale and unresponsive, hooked up to a drip.

  ‘Are you sure she’ll be all right?’ I ask the sister.

  She rolls her eyes dismissively. ‘These girls,’ she says.

  I cycle round to the college, where I go to my office, log on to the system, find Costas’s e-mail address and send him a message telling him what has happened (though maybe he knows already?) and asking him to contact his uncle and warn him. I can only hope that Costas is an obsessive e-mail checker. Then I leave messages on the office phones of Monica in the International Office, Gillian in our office and Janet, the Vice-Chancellor’s secretary, warning them of a likely visit from Mr Christodoulou and, with a heavy heart, I give my mobile number in each case and say that I shall be happy to talk to Mr Christdoulou at any time.

  Back at home, I pay off my babysitter, drink two glasses of wine, stuff our clothes into a suitcase, don’t wash my hair and retire to bed, where I spend an almost completely sleepless night assailed by visions of Anastasia as I last saw her, minus her make-up and her scowl, with her expensively streaked and tousled hair scraped back into an elastic band, shrunk to infancy in her hospital bed. She’s just a child, for God’s sake! the voice in my head screams at me. How the hell did you come to forget that?

  2

  DAY ONE

  You are welcome to Elsinore 2.2

  This was a mistake. Of course it was a mistake. How could I have thought otherwise? When I told you so chirpily that I liked young people and was therefore keen to come on this trip, I was thinking of the bounce and energy of the young, their whole-heartedness and optimism, but there’s not much of any of that to be seen in this rattly little van as we cover the grey miles of Sjælland between Copenhagen and Elsinore. I myself was feeling remarkably chipper considering my sleepless night, early start and plane journey with Freda. I even felt ready for a call from Mr Christodoulou when I switched on my phone as we landed. But that was before we were met by a man with a van and it turned out that Denmark is experiencing a British summer – rain, winds and temperatures in single figures. The van man is called Ray; he is the company techie, i/c sound and lighting, and he has heroically brought this minivan across on the car ferry, carrying my hampers of costumes with him, and has picked Freda and me up from Copenhagen airport, along with a couple more company members who were on our flight. Annie wanted me to travel on the ferry too, to take responsibility for the costumes, but I refused to undertake a twenty-hour boat journey with Freda. I know Annie suggested it only because she dreaded the possible embarrassment of being on the same flight as an obstreperous three-year-old niece, but she got round this by flying out two days earlier than us. Rehearsals start tomorrow and we are the last contingent.

  Anyway, it would all be all right – my cramped position, jammed behind a costume hamper with Freda asleep on my lap, the minute-by-minute possibility of a call from a raging Greek father, the relentless rain – if only my companions would cheer up. Really, they could hardly look more miserable if we were in a tumbrel on our way to the guillotine. I have met them before, when I went and took measurements for their costumes some weeks ago (I’ve learnt from experience that it’s no good asking people to provide their own measurements: men guess wildly and women lie), and I’ve got these three at least sorted out. Annie gave me some homework to do, sending me a draft programme with photos and mini-biographies, and some of them have stuck in my mind, but others remain vague. One thing I noticed is that they’ve mostly just graduated. Annie, at the end of her first year, is an anomaly in the group, and I have my own theor
y about that, which I shall discuss with you later. Their imminent ejection from the dreaming spires may, of course, explain why they’re looking so miserable. It’s a hard old world out here these days and even an Oxford degree doesn’t guarantee you much in the way of a lucrative job and a desirable lifestyle.

  They are conveniently arranged for me as the seating in this van, as configured at the moment, consists of long bench seats down either side and a short one across, behind the driver’s seat, to form a horseshoe effect, with the costume hamper and luggage piled in the centre. Seated on one side, I can survey everyone. I take a look round them to see if I can match them to their potted histories. The pale, smudgy-eyed girl with the limp, white-blonde hair who is stretched out along the bench seat opposite is Sophie Forrester. She’s air phobic, so took the ferry and threw up all the way we gathered when we met her and Ray at the airport. I caught him exchanging looks with some of the others and there was a lot of eye-rolling in Sophie’s direction, so I imagine she didn’t suffer in silence. She seems a mousey young woman but maybe she’s a bit passive aggressive. She’s asleep now in the aftermath of sea-sickness and Dramamines. Drowned Ophelia, I think, and it occurs to me at this point that since this production of Hamlet is at the centre of my saga, I should sketch in a bit about the play for those of you who have other things to carry round in your heads than the plots of 400-year-old plays. Just because they’re my special subject, I realise, they don’t have to be yours. And those of you who don’t need this information can, of course, look away now.

  So here it is. At the start of the play, Prince Hamlet’s father, Old Hamlet, King of Denmark, has died and has been succeeded by his brother, Claudius, who slipped onto the throne before young Hamlet had time to get back from university in Wittenberg, and has now married his brother’s widow, young Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude. A bad enough situation for Hamlet, you would think, and he is already having suicidal thoughts when his friend, Horatio, takes him up onto the castle battlements and introduces him to old King Hamlet’s ghost, who tells him that he was murdered by Claudius and enjoins Hamlet to avenge his death.

  Revenge tragedies were very popular in the 1600s, when Hamlet was written, and the expectation would be that Hamlet would set about plotting a terrible revenge. He can’t do it, though. Instead he adopts a variety of diversionary tactics. He pretends to be mad, he abuses his girlfriend, Ophelia, and he gets a group of travelling actors to put on a play about the murder of a king, in the hope that Claudius will reveal his guilt. To find out what is the matter with Hamlet (apart from the fact that Claudius has pinched both his throne and his mother) Claudius summons two of his student friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to spy on him and enlists the help of his Lord Chamberlain, Polonius, Ophelia’s father, to use Ophelia to trap Hamlet into self-revelation while Claudius and Polonius eavesdrop. Polonius, unfortunately, takes the eavesdropping habit too far and hides behind a tapestry in Queen Gertrude’s sitting room to listen to her private conversation with Hamlet. Hearing a noise, Hamlet assumes that the eavesdropper is Claudius and stabs Polonius through the tapestry, killing him.

  At this point, Claudius packs Hamlet off to the King of England, accompanied by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who have a letter for the king, ordering Hamlet’s death. Hamlet, however, gets seized by pirates on the voyage and is returned to Denmark, not before altering Claudius’s letter so that it commands that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern be killed. While he is away, Laertes, Polonius’s son, returns from university in Paris, demanding vengeance for his father’s death, and Ophelia goes spectacularly mad and dies by drowning. Hamlet returns in time to meet the men who are digging her grave and disrupt her funeral by fighting with Laertes. Claudius and Laertes join forces; Laertes challenges Hamlet to a fencing match in which he uses a poisoned foil. The final scene is one of utter carnage, in which almost everyone ends up dead. Claudius, Hamlet and Laertes are all stabbed, while Gertrude is poisoned by the drink Claudius has prepared, as a fail-safe, for Hamlet. This scene has the potential to be comic unless handled well. The rudderless state of Denmark is saved by the timely arrival of Fortinbras, heir to the Norwegian throne, who claims Denmark as his.

  Reduce any piece of literature to the bare bones of its plot and it is difficult to see wherein its greatness lies, but I hope you can see that it’s an arresting tale, and that Hamlet embodies the human condition in his struggle to play the role that has been handed to him. For me, the particular pleasure of the play is the way we see the effects of Claudius’s crime of fratricide spread out to pollute almost every character in the play – Polonius, Gertrude, Laertes, Ophelia, Rosencrantz, Guidenstern and Hamlet himself are all tainted, all behave dishonourably, led into dissimulation, spying, disloyalty, cruelty and murder. You could produce a pictorial representation of the play as a petrie dish under a microscope, in which deadly spores fan out to invade and destroy healthy cells.

  So, that’s the play we’re doing and along from me, beyond the hamper, where he has room for his long legs, is the man I thought would be playing Hamlet when I went to take their measurements. He’s looking very much the gloomy Dane now: blonded hair, heavy eyebrows, an air of moody detachment and a suit of woe – specifically a black jacket with the collar turned up that must have been murderously hot to wear at sweltering Gatwick. He’s achieved his air of detachment largely by not taking his eyes from his iPhone, to which he has been riveted ever since we were allowed to switch them back on when we landed. Is he dealing with an avalanche of e-mails, updating his facebook page or – and I suspect this is the case – playing some addictive game? Whatever it is, it seems to be designed to remove him from the messy world of human interaction. He’s Conrad Wagner, son of J.C. Wagner of Wagner Pictures by his first and least glamorous wife. He’s good-looking, probably unhappy, presumably rich, and a hopeless actor – which is a pity, since his programme biography tells us that he intends to make acting his career. It was Annie who told me he was hopeless (a startling lack of talent was The Oxford Mail’s verdict on his last stage appearance, apparently). She has an axe to grind because, as well as being assistant director, she’s playing Guildenstern to his Rosencrantz. This has caused me some problems on the costume front since I can’t get a clear answer either from Annie or from Adam, the director, about whether Guildenstern is to become Ms Guildenstern or Annie is going transgender. When I’ve pressed the point, they’ve looked at me as though they can’t believe that anyone – even a woman of my advanced age and retarded understanding – could be that literal-minded. Think androgynous, Gina, Annie drawled, running a hand over her new Emma Watson-style cropped hair. (She has decided to call me Gina for the duration of the trip, since her usual Ma is too juvenile, she feels, and I am to address her as Marianne – her Oxford name. Remembering not to call her Annie is at the top of a long list of prohibitions I have been given, including asking her where she is going or where she has been, commenting on her clothes, offering her food, expecting her to look after Freda and mentioning anything at all about her childhood years.) My problem with androgynous is that I could dress her and Conrad in unisex jeans and sweatshirts but in the autocratic, police-state world they’re going for I think Rosencrantz and Guildenstern would scrub up a bit for the royal court and not drift along in their denims. So I’ve resorted to a sharp trouser suit for Annie, and she can customise it as she chooses. Whether she wears a tie or not will probably be the clincher.

  But I’m wandering – blame the sleepless night. Meet the third member of my cheerful trio of travelling companions. James Asquith is playing Hamlet and looks quite the student prince of Wittenberg at the moment, making notes on a book he’s reading, which I’m pretty sure is in Arabic, though it might be Hebrew – it’s a language you read from back to front, anyway. Annie tells me he’s awesomely clever, has just got a First, and is about to start a doctoral thesis on something, though she’s vague about what. I’m amused to see that he has managed to ease Sophie’s head off his lap, where it was nestling ear
lier. They’ve been an item for some time, Annie says, and Sophie’s made no plans for the future because she’s expecting to stay around and eventually become a wife, when James gets the fellowship that must surely come his way. Tears before bedtime, I would say, judging by the body language I’m getting from him. And isn’t it a touch posey to be reading Arabic when everyone else in the company will be reading Scandinavian noir; Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankel, Peter Høeg, Jo Nesbø?

  We passengers have been silent for most of the journey. I tried a few early conversational sallies about the domestic architecture we could see outside but was met by the most minimal of non-verbal utterances. The question is, are they silent because of me? Is it like having the teacher sitting next to you on the school outing? Would they be chatting merrily if I weren’t here? Or does Freda frighten them? Do they fear that if they speak she will climb all over them and make them uncool? I have no idea, and I must admit that I have myself been blanking out the one occupant of the van who has been speaking. Ray, our driver, has given us a running review of place names as we passed them, all in a heavy parody of a Scandinavian accent that was mildly amusing for five minutes and is now distinctly annoying.

  ‘Hel-sing-ør,’ penetrates my willed deafness, though, and I look out to see that we are indeed on the outskirts of a town and that the rain has stopped. With impressive confidence, Ray takes us away from the town centre and out along Strandvejen (which I translate to myself as Beach Road), where our villa is situated. The others are evincing a mild interest by now and we look out to see a rain-washed sky above the Sound and the misty roofs of the Swedish coast on the other side. We slow down, looking for numbers, and pass a cluster of small shops – a general store, a konditori (which turns out to be an appealing-looking tea shop), a butik with a lot of underwear in the window and a damfrisør, which may indeed frizz dames but also, to judge from the pictures in the window, gives them shiny asymmetric haircuts in glossy colours.