by John Gardner
‘Yes.’
‘Designer?’
‘Tony Holt.’
‘Well, you know him and he’s got a fair range. Music?’
‘We’ve commissioned Raymond Leggat.’
‘Mmmm.’ Rolfe mused to himself. ‘It’ll be hummable stuff anyway, none of your twelve note chromatics from him.’ He leaned back. ‘It’s a big operation, Douglas. Needs wide vision and a large staff for the P.R. department. I presume that whoever took over would have total control of Public Relations for the entire project: theatre, environment, restaurant, company…?’
They talked about the casting and the difficulties of catering for such a wide variety of temperaments for half an hour or so. Then, Douglas said, ‘There is one more area we haven’t discussed.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve mentioned selling the environment. The grounds are exceptional, and they ought to be, we employ a permanent staff of fifteen gardeners.’
‘Who are helping you to weed the permanent administrative staff I presume.’
Douglas let the frivolity pass and replied seriously. ‘No, but I’m bringing in an executive director to take care of that. Fifteen gardeners and the grounds look fabulous in the summer.
However, with our weather you can sell them the grounds and all they see when they arrive is sodden turf and dripping trees.’
‘And the rain it raineth’ every day.’
‘Quite. We have to offer them something else, if only as a diversion between dinner and the play.’
‘Such as?’
‘You remember the Shakespeare centenary exhibition they put on in Stratford for the fourth centenary celebrations?’
‘Shakespeare’s life and the plays, yes. Exhibits, set pieces, statuary, models, jewels, paintings, music, speech, light. Splendid. There was a marvellous London street with the street cries and noises, and a representation of the Globe with Gielgud doing Prospero on tape—’
‘And Larry as Othello and Peggy and Paul doing a snatch of Lear and Cordelia.’
‘Great, it had great style. Stays in the memory.’
‘Right. I want to mount a similar exhibition at Shireston. A permanent section, not just about Shakespeare, but setting out the background to his time; yes, a London street like the one at Stratford, and a Long Gallery, do you remember that? With its view of London?’ Rolfe nodded as Douglas went on, ‘Those kind of things and more: how they really lived in Elizabethan England, attitudes to religion, superstition, what they ate —with the smells, the good smells not the bad — dress, adornment, language, the texture of life; and we could end with something like the Globe thing at Stratford, but keyed to the productions at Shireston. I also want a permanent section on the Shireston Festival and its history, its past, present and future.’
The conversation became even more animated, inspiration and the ideas flying. The change of key was notable with Adrian Rolfe talking about ‘Us’ and ‘the festival’ and ‘We could always...’
By three-forty-five Douglas knew he had sold him the idea. It would take Rolfe a month to clear from his other job, but he would start in on engaging people straight away and drawing up preliminary plans. ‘How soon do I get an office down there?’ he asked.
‘I’ll see your offices are ready within a week, so that you can start moving people in. I’m going down tomorrow and I know we already have a team decorating and renovating the offices and living quarters before they start on the theatre itself — that’s got to have the full treatment. But I’ll make your offices a priority.’
This quickly shifted them on to the question of salaries and budget. They ended back in the Rupert Street office, talking, planning, working until after seven. By then they had a magnificent vision. Carried away by their imaginations they saw Shireston as a beautiful image, the smooth velvet lawns and shading conifers, the house rising among crunched drives and walks bordered by vivid flowers; the restaurant efficient, a gourmet’s haven, the exhibition teeming with visitors experiencing a new dimension; droves of elegant people arriving on clean, well-staffed Pullman trains or sweeping up the broad drive in purring coaches: the theatre, white and shining in the evening sun, and performances which stunned the imagination. When they parted, on that particular evening, neither Douglas nor Adrian were taking into account the individual complexities of men, the clash of temperament, lust, greed or crass inefficiency.
After Adrian left, Douglas Silver dialled Carol’s number, waiting a long time before resigning himself to the fact that she must be out. Irrationally he felt annoyed, like a lover who expects his girl to be waiting for him to call and is ruffled and offended if she is not there for his convenience alone.
The sensation remained with him all evening, and there were still traces of it in his mind as he drove down to Shireston on the following morning.
‘That’s your problem. We’ll have to lift the pros’.’ Douglas stood at the back of the auditorium of the Shireston Festival Theatre pointing down at the stage and the proscenium arch, to which he had been referring. He had never been a great lover of picture-frame stages and this one was worse than most, the arch diminishing the size of the stage and almost forming an invisible barrier between stage and auditorium.
‘You can move the sidepillars a good three feet and lift the arch four and a half to five.’ He said. ‘It needs some kind of decoration as well. Something like that thirteenth-century swan they used for Stratford and the Aldwych.’
‘Would a cygnet do?’ Tony Holt was beside him, tubby with a head that looked top heavy, shoulder length hair and a small beard; the big, aquiline Alec Keene, the theatre’s house manager, was with them, also Wilfred Brownhill, in charge of property maintenance.
It had been a hard and detailed day. Autumn was already beginning to topple into winter and the grounds of Shireston looked less inviting, more bleak and threadbare, than they had done on Douglas’s last visit. But Tony had been waiting for him, bursting with ideas and agility.
One of Douglas’s first actions on accepting the directorship was commissioning Tony, not simply to design costumes and settings for the four plays, but to convert the stables into a modern and workable restaurant, and advise on any refurbishing, both inside and out of the theatre and house.
They spent most of the morning going through the house and stables where a labour force of forty or fifty men were already working. The house itself was fascinatingly ugly, a grotesque mixture of styles and odd additions: a combination of all possible excesses of mock gothic architecture: red weathered brick clashing with stone, small turret windows appeared in the most unlikely places, a pair of stubby castellated towers rose from the centre section from which the whole building seemed to spill out in all directions.
Douglas was amazed to find that the original conversion work, carried out in the late ‘twenties, had not only been done intelligently, but also with a fine standard of craftsmanship: now, apart from a lot of painting, only small adjustments were called for, a number of new telephone lines were being brought in, minor alterations in plumbing and some general patching up. On the whole the condition was good.
The central section and west wing were made over entirely to administrative offices, the property department, wardrobe and living accommodation for office and theatre staff; while the east wing had been broken up into quarters for the company: some thirty single bed-sitting rooms, fifteen small double flats with their own kitchens and bathrooms, and ten larger apartments.
The director’s accommodation was among the latter, with a high-ceilinged sitting-room overlooking the lawns, a large bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and, for want of a better name, breakfast room. Jen would not care much for the shabby furnishings but they would be bringing a fair amount of their stuff down from London. Douglas lingered in the flat for a while, aware of the fact that this would be his home for the bulk of at least three years if everything went well, and trying to envisage what Jen would do to these rooms. There was a long bow window into which their leather butto
ned settee would fit. But where would she decide to hang the Bratby or the David Arnot collage? A moment of longing as the wind hit the wide leaded window: trying to picture Jen in the room, the atmosphere tinted with her particular scent, her movement, the essential parts of her. Then Tony called him, and Douglas had to move on and look at something else.
Right at the beginning, after he had first visited Shireston, Tony Holt had written to Douglas suggesting that the Victorian atmosphere of the house’s interior should, in some way, be made less powerful: he argued that there were areas where it became depressing and overbearing. They might even camp it up a bit with framed playbills and objects selected from the property department. Tony had, in fact, already started to put his ideas into practice by having a mural painted on one wall of the company restaurant, once — aptly some thought — the servants’ hall, and by making some discreet changes in the appointments of the green room, originally the large family dining-room.
‘The place looked like one of those fading political club rooms you find in the provinces,’ he said. ‘I expected to find dead old actors under the dustcovers clutching yellowed copies of The Stage.’
In the stables they were already well advanced, the interior gutted, leaving the bare slatted wooden walls, some of the wood flaking old paint. The new parquet floor was being put down, the smooth area ending abruptly, half-way across the building, in a squarely serrated coastline. While the exterior was to remain unaltered, except for a paint job and new fitments, Tony designed false walls and ceilings for the interior, with one wall entirely made up of mirror to add a sense of spaciousness. They had already worked out the major essential statistics — that the main dining-room would seat eighty people at one time and, as far as the design was concerned, no one person should have to take more than an hour over dinner.
They lunched quietly in the permanent staff cafeteria, an undistinguished meal, soggy and overcooked without any style. Douglas made a note that this was another area which needed attention quickly: you could not expect staff to work properly if they were being fed slop. A further thought struck him: if this was the normal standard of food, the administrative people were probably a pretty dull lot to accept it. The need for an executive director was even more apparent.
Over lunch they looked at Tony’s first draft designs for the productions. The Venetian settings for The Merchant and Othello were exciting, suggesting the city by subtle innuendo rather than doing a straight job of pictured realism, while the Cyprus sets for the later action of Othello were light and sunny, using a lot of white walls and creating the idea of hard reflected sunlight. Verona, for Romeo and Juliet, was complicated, worked out on three, sometimes four, levels; streets winding off into narrow stairways, balconies and small windows clustered overhead. He had been least successful with Richard III, a standing set of wooden scaffolding that reminded Douglas of early Sean Kenny. The ideas which had emerged during the conversation with Catellier called for something more positive.
‘A standing set by all means,’ he told Tony Holt, ‘but I need to express change. Up to the second scene of act four, the coronation, the court has got to be in a kind of decaying decadence. We must feel it, shredding velvet, grubby silk and worn rugs. After Richard becomes king there has to be complete change: a military dominance: you know, the outward signs that the regime is working. The whole fascist dictator thing. You can suggest it in the costumes as well.’ He went on to talk about the costume designs for the other plays, having found Tony’s first drawings too classic for his conception of the season.
Tony did not take the criticism well, remaining slightly sullen for the rest of the day. Douglas added yet another mental note to his growing list: that he would have to revise his instructions to Raymond Leggat regarding the music for Richard.
After lunch they went over to the theatre where the real depression set in for Douglas. The exterior alone was in need of a great deal of repair, he did not need Alec Keene and Wilfred Brownhill to point it out. The façade, with its Spanish cloister running the length of the frontage, had become reminiscent of some old, peeling and impoverished Mexican hotel. Inside, the auditorium was even more cheerless.
‘Like a 1920s cinema that nobody’s thought of renovating,’ Douglas observed.
He got the details settled about the proscenium arch, and Tony agreed to look for some suitable symbol for them to use above the arch and in front of the theatre: something they could reproduce on posters and programmes, some instant identification with Shireston.
‘God alone knows what we’re going to do with the auditorium.’ Douglas looked about himself, raised his arms and let them drop slackly to his sides. The walls and ceilings were filthy, the lighting inadequate, the seating looked in bad shape and the floor coverings were threadbare. It was no wonder that the festival had gone downhill. Douglas thought for a moment.
‘How long to get an estimate for new carpeting, seating and lighting?’ he asked, turning to Keene and Brownhill.
They looked at their feet and muttered together. Douglas felt his irritation rise, realizing that, so far, he had probably been too easy going.
‘About a month,’ replied Brownhill at last.
‘One week,’ snapped Douglas. ‘And a realistic estimate in one week, or both your resignations on my desk. As for the rest, we’ll have to make do with a good paint job.’
The remainder of the afternoon was spent discussing the possibility of the exhibition with Tony.
‘I can’t take that on, not on top of everything else,’ Tony protested. ‘Christ, Douglas, I’m up to my eyes already.’
‘Yes, I can see that, but I’ve got to have some other diversion for the customers. I didn’t reckon on having to find another salary for an exhibition director, we’re going to leap over budget anyway if I’m not careful — especially if I’ve got to refit the whole bloody auditorium.’
‘Never mind mate, you might save yourself something on Alec and Wilf’s salaries.’ Tony grinned.
‘Could be yours as well, chum.’ Douglas did not smile, his cosiness had departed during the day, the anxiety of running a project like this starting to gnaw his secret nerves.
He drove badly on the way back to London and found himself taking unnecessary risks. Once in the apartment he mixed a stiff whisky and soda and slumped into his favourite armchair. Saturday night and nowhere to go. Nobody to go with either. He dialled Carol’s number but, once more, she was not home.
At last he decided to assuage his anxiety and rage with work. He got out his notes, clip board and copy of Othello and started to plot the play, using a square of cardboard as the stage and coloured counters for the actors. But the day came between him and the text. The long mental list compiled at Shireston ticked itself in his mind. Just one day at Shireston had shown him what was in store, and he had yet to have a proper meeting with the finance people; there was also the exhibition and the need to get help for Tony: a hundred minor points and decisions blundered through his mind.
When he finally gave up and went to bed, the anxieties still churned — and there weren’t any actors there yet. He smiled, cynicism on his lips in the dark. Actors would bring a bundle of trouble with them. The fabric; decay; the gardens; the exhibition; the house; restaurant; auditorium; kitchens and cafeteria; executive director; Christ who needs actors? Tomorrow, he remembered, he had to see an actor.
CHAPTER SIX
It was warm, dark and comfortable. He was Asher Grey; in his mind there was recognition of himself: the knowledge of the morning; and it was warm, dark and comfortable. He was content: the first stirrings, a pinpoint of consciousness, a tip of light in the centre of Asher Grey’s mind: the light containing the necessary things, all surrounded by blackness and warmth.
Something else: pleasurable, making him turn on to his back and wriggle against the sheets and go on writhing the small of his back and his buttocks into the mattress beneath him: a hand, small and light, stroking his genitals. Julia Philips’s hand. That was n
ice, and not usual: Julia, his little cross, feeling him up in the wee small hours. She did more than just stroke now, the hand kneading him into an untamed erection. He moved close to her, moved his body as she moved, the pair setting up a rhythm they had learned long together. Pleasure, warmth and satisfaction fed the light until it grew more brilliant at the periphery, taking other facts into the pattern of consciousness.
Douglas Silver...Silver and gold...I am not covetous for gold...That was something, somewhere from Shakespeare. Douglas Silver...Christ...Sunday. London.
‘What the bloody hell’s the time?’ Asher Grey grunted. ‘I’ve got a train to catch.’
‘Shshshsh.’ Julia did not falter in her movements as she soothed. ‘It’s early yet. Only about half-past-three.’
Reassured, he took up the rhythm again, thrusting towards her; but she reached over his body and gently flattened him on the bed, her hand moving still, the other parting his thighs as a man will ease a woman open before mounting her: then, thigh against thigh, she was kneeling inside his legs, holding him with both hands. He groped upwards to feel the soft nest of hair and part her wet lips as she lowered herself on to him, her hands guiding the stiff centre of his being towards its natural place; lips parting, the passage giving away and sucking him into her belly. Julia slowly straightened her body on top of his, legs lifting astride him and moving with assured strokes, the roles reversed, she playing the male dominant. The flash of comprehension like a great magnesium flare in the mind. He saw his mother at the foot of the stairs goading his father, lips moving in soundless flow; the picture on the wall, some fancy unnatural print of cows going to be milked over plastic green grass and false mud. Cusha bloody cusha calling. Cows all of them. His first woman ever, Anthea at RADA lowing him to her room. He had turned in the act of undressing and seen the stained dirty underclothes and she reminded him of his father, not a young lively girl. Scheming cows with red mouths which opened and closed incessantly with whines and threats and, once in a while, cold comfort. The cheap barometer. His father, hands flat against the wall trying to gain his balance late on a Saturday, viewed from the top of the stairs with his mother prancing down in worn slippers, a yellow thin housecoat billowing and patterned, a Viking raider in full sail ploughing down the stairs in curlers to ravage the drunken Saxon. Fish teas, cold meat on Sundays with the floral decorated bowl erupting with lettuce and the saffron eyes of hard boiled eggs. A whole stink of memories overridden with melancholy.