‘One might almost suppose that you disliked the poor woman.’
‘I do, heartily. One thing,’ added Laura, grinning, ‘I don’t believe she’s going to continue to like Denbigh as much as she does at present. I’m waiting for her to find out that he is going to boss the show without any assistance from her and I’m longing for her reactions when she reads the script of The Beggar’s Opera. When she learns the kind of people it’s about, she’s going to have a heart attack if I’m any judge. By the way, they’ve given me the part of Mrs Peachum, so I’m only on in the first act and can come and sit with you in the audience for the rest of the time. That is if you’re going to favour us with your patronage.’
‘Nothing would induce me to stay away.’
‘Right. I’ll make sure you have a good seat for the last night, then.’
‘I had some idea that you mentioned a production of Othello.’
‘I did, but it’s been shelved pro. tem, in favour of this Caxton Festival thing. It seems we have a William Caxton living in the neighbourhood, so what with that, and this year’s being the five-hundredth anniversary of the English printing press, Clarice Blaine pressurised the Ladies’ Guild into putting on a pageant and then wished this Festival business on to the dramatic society.’
‘So who suggested The Beggar’s Opera?’
‘Denbigh himself. To begin with, anybody who wished could put forward a suggestion and you really ought to have been there and heard some of the ideas. Then Sybil Gartner, who’s having her voice trained, put in a big word for comic opera – it was agreed, you see, that the Festival piece should be something cheerful, that’s why Othello has been referred back. I think that man Rodney Crashaw is rather sick about it. He was to be Othello, you see, and now he won’t have much of a part at all because, although he says he can sing, Denbigh offered him only a minor rôle and I think he’s turned it down.’
‘But Othello is only postponed, you say. He has his pleasure in store.’
‘I don’t want him to have any pleasure. He’s a heel. He’s got his blonde, but he makes passes at people. He’s a prize nuisance.’
‘I imagine that you keep him in his place.’
‘I put my fist in his face once. His nose bled something shocking.’
‘These Amazonian antics! “I thought the girl had been better bred!’ ”
‘Don’t pinch my lines! Oh, honestly, though, I’m delighted at the idea of being Mrs Peachum. I never expected to get a part at all, as I’m a pretty new member.’
‘So Dr Denbigh has already cast the opera.’
‘Oh, yes, quietly but firmly he took over the whole meeting. I should think he’s a force to be reckoned with in that training college. He made all those who fancied a part to stand up and form a line so that he could get a good look at us and assess height and appearance and so forth. Then we each had to recite a nursery rhyme and sing a verse of our favourite song. After that we had to walk up and down the room in front of him.’
‘And could most people manage the verse of a song?’
‘They all tried except young Stella Walker. She was dying to be in it, but said she couldn’t even croak. However, she is quite pretty, so Denbigh has given her two little bits and one of the others is to sing her ditties from the wings. She’s bucked to death. At first Crashaw wouldn’t even have a go. He’s very bitter about Othello. There are to be three rehearsals a week for the next six weeks and Ernest Farrow, the treasurer, who’s only got a tiny part right at the beginning, will play the piano for us. We shan’t rehearse with the college orchestra until nearer the time.’
‘Dr Denbigh seems to have had everything planned.’
‘Yes. I think he was determined to do The Beggar’s Opera. I like people who know their own minds and get things done. I offered him a lift back to the College, but he’s got his own car. He calls it Lillian, after the cat in Damon Runyan’s story.’
‘Ah, yes, I remember. The cat became what the author describes as a rum-pot and because of this it accidentally saved a baby’s life.’
‘Well, Denbigh claims that his car is another rum-pot, only, instead of whisky, it drinks an alarming amount of petrol. He thinks it will be cheaper, in the long run, to scrap it and buy a newer model.’
‘And you have been given a leading rôle in his production?’
‘Yes, I have, and the very one I should have chosen. My word! I can just see myself! I shall be a riot. I shall have the audience rolling in the aisles, you see if I don’t! Incidentally, Crashaw’s blowsy blonde tried conclusions with Mrs Blaine and won.’
Dame Beatrice received her visitor with wary courtesy. She could imagine no reason why Mrs Blaine should call on her. However, she offered Clarice a chair and rang for tea.
‘You won’t know me from Adam – or perhaps I should say from Eve,’ said the visitor.
‘Oh, but, in a sense, I do,’ Dame Beatrice assured her.
‘Oh, well, yes, I am somewhat of a public figure, I admit.’
‘Laura has spoken of you to me.’
‘Laura?’ Mrs Blaine looked startled.
‘Laura Gavin, my friend, companion and confidential secretary.’
‘Really? I assure you I had no idea. I know the names of all our members, of course, but they come from near and far and I know very few of their addresses. So dear Laura lives here.’ She looked around appreciatively at the well-appointed room. ‘But I thought she was Mrs Gavin. Is she – she is not widowed, by any chance, I hope? One likes to know that kind of thing so that one may avoid tactlessness.’
‘Quite. Laura is married to an Assistant Commissioner of Police at New Scotland Yard, if it is still so called, and the marriage is a happy one.’
‘Indeed? How very interesting and nice.’
‘She is in London at the moment, as a matter of fact. Her husband is on annual leave.’
‘Oh, really? I am sorry not to greet her, but, indeed, Dame Beatrice, it is you I came to see, and, I ought to explain, upon a begging errand. Oh, no, not for money,’ Clarice hastily added, perceiving that her hostess had now assumed the expression of a benevolent snake and was making a move towards a Hepplewhite bureau-bookcase which stood against a side wall. ‘Not for money at all, unless – well, as you know dear Laura so well – unless you would care to subscribe to the funds by purchasing tickets for our next performance.’
‘Given by the dramatic and operatic society? I shall be delighted.’
‘Thank you so much. Perhaps a tiny cheque when I go. Oh, no sugar, please.’ She glanced down at her buxom figure. ‘One needs to watch one’s weight.’ She nullified this assertion by ignoring the thin bread and butter and reaching out for one of Henri’s delicious cream cakes. ‘No, I really came to beg a favour of you – two favours,’ she added, as though, by putting it thus, she removed any apprehension which the statement might have engendered. Dame Beatrice took a sip of tea and waited for the blow, or, rather, the two blows, to fall. ‘We are preparing to honour the fifth centenary of Caxton’s – of the setting up of Caxton’s printing press,’ Mrs Blaine went on.
‘So Laura has told me.’
‘What very delicious cakes these are! You do not make them yourself, by any chance?’
‘No. They are of Gallic origin. My own activities, I regret to say, are purely cerebral. I should be of no practical use to the Ladies’ Guild in the guise of amateur cake-maker and stall-holder.’
‘Ah, yes, the Ladies’ Guild,’ said Clarice, taking up the cue, as Dame Beatrice had intended that she should. ‘That’s just it. Caxton is being obstructive, so we wondered whether – your profession, you know – your power over the mind…’
‘Caxton is being obstructive? But, dear Mrs Blaine, I am a psychiatrist, not a necromancer or a medium for spirits; neither have I any personal experience of the ouija board.’
Clarice Blaine stared and then half-heartedly laughed, uncertain whether the remarks were made seriously or not.
‘No, no. You don’t understand,�
�� she said. ‘Our Caxton is not the real Caxton, of course. He happens to bear the same name, that’s all. It was his name and, of course, the date, which gave me the idea for the Ladies’ Guild pageant.’
‘He calls himself William Caxton?’
‘That is his name. What makes it so interesting is that, in an amateur way, he also is a printer.’
‘Yes, these bizarre occupations do seem to run in families,’ said Dame Beatrice absently, her thoughts busy with A.C. Swinburne, T.E. Lawrence and now W. Caxton and R. Crashaw. She recollected herself. ‘Will you take another cup of tea? And do help yourself to the cakes.’
‘Thank you, yes, another cup, if you please, and, do you know, in spite of my doctor’s orders, I believe I will have another of these delicious morsels. Well, as I was saying, it seemed such a good idea to have a Caxton pageant, but, of course, we need Caxton himself to lead it. Can you believe, though, that he refuses, absolutely refuses to have anything to do with it? Well, as I said to him, how can we have a Caxton pageant without Caxton?’
‘You could get someone to impersonate him, could you not?’
‘Oh, but, Dame Beatrice, what an anticlimax when we could get the real man,’
‘But, dear Mrs Blaine, your Caxton is not the real man.’
‘He must be a lineal descendant. You said yourself that these things run in families.’
‘So I did. I should be interested to meet your William Caxton.’
‘And compel him to do his duty and lead our pageant? How delighted I am to hear you say so! Well, that is the first of my tiresome requests got out of the way. The last time I called on him he showed me the door, but he will find that I am not to be deterred by a mere exhibition of ill-manners. I shall beard him again in the person of someone…’ she looked with satisfaction at Dame Beatrice’s sharp black eyes, claw-hands and beaky little mouth – ‘someone whom he will find impossible to withstand.’
‘Well, I promise nothing. However, in so good a cause as the Caxton pageant,’ said Dame Beatrice, with a crocodile grin, ‘I shall do my best to persuade this young man. Is he young?’
‘In his thirties, I would say.’
‘To a centenarian like myself that must seem young.’ Mrs Blaine’s large and arrogant face wore an expression to which it was unaccustomed, an expression of doubt and perplexity. She essayed what she hoped was a light laugh and decided to change the subject.
‘We come now,’ she said, as she had said so often when taking the chair at her Ladies’ Guild, ‘to an equally important but totally different matter.’ Her face changed its expression to one with which Hamilton Haynings would have been uneasily familiar. ‘It concerns my second request and is a matter of extreme urgency and considerable delicacy. Dame Beatrice, the Caxton Festival cannot produce The Beggar’s Opera.’
‘I thought Dr Denbigh was producing it,’ said Dame Beatrice innocently.
‘You do not grasp my meaning. Neither I nor the Ladies’ Guild can countenance the production of such a piece in Chardle. It is not only vulgar, it is immoral.’
‘Dear me! What could poor John Gay have been thinking of to write such a thing?’
‘I can tell you what he was thinking of. He was thinking of the criminal classes. He was thinking of thieves and highwaymen; of the receivers of stolen goods; of pickpockets and prostitutes; of illegitimate children and of co-habitation outside the sanctity of marriage. The piece has not one single uplifting or ennobling theme or thought. It is disgracefully improper. My son, a child of sixteen years, has been given the part of Filch, a pickpocket, and words cannot express the horror I felt when, upon glancing through the copy of the words with which, at my request, Dr Denbigh had supplied me, my eye lighted upon one of the speeches which my son will be required to make. I am fully and disapprovingly aware, Dame Beatrice, that we live in a decadent and so-called permissive age, but surely…’
‘I am convinced that you need have no fear,’ said Dame Beatrice, as words appeared, for once in her masterful career, to fail Mrs Blaine. ‘I am familiar with the text of The Beggar’s Opera and I have no doubt that Dr Denbigh will sufficiently expurgate the text to make it acceptable to the Ladies’ Guild and the other unsullied minds of Chardle. Sir Nigel Playfair himself thought it better not to include those lines in your son’s speech to which I think you refer.’
‘I am relieved to hear it, but that does not alter the fact that this profligate piece extols and approves the drunken skylarkings of…’
‘Pimps, trulls and trollops?’
‘You appear to take the matter light-heartedly, Dame Beatrice!’
‘Surely that is the way John Gay intended it to be taken?’
‘But the characters he depicts! I repeat – highwaymen, pickpockets, receivers of stolen goods! Every man in it, including the prison authorities, is an infamous scoundrel. As for the so-called “ladies of the town”, in other words the drabs of Drury Lane…’
‘Lewkner’s Lane,’ amended Dame Beatrice solemnly. ‘In fact, we are told that some of the ladies came from as far away as Hockley-in-the-Hole. Macheath must have had great charm and, “although the bank hath stopped payment”, to have been generously free with his money.’
‘You appear to be extremely familiar with the text, Dame Beatrice,’ said poor Clarice, striving vainly, although valiantly, to keep disapproval out of her voice, ‘but perhaps you have used it as an exercise in the psychology of human depravity. The frailty of human nature…’
‘Particularly the frailty of women, to whom the author gives, in the person of Mrs Peachum (to be played, to her great delight, by Laura) some excellent advice. May I quote?’
‘Please do,’ said Mrs Blaine stiffly, ‘if you see any point in doing so.’
‘She says,’ continued Dame Beatrice in her beautiful voice, ‘ “Yes, indeed, the sex is frail. But the first time a woman is frail she should be somewhat nice, methinks, for then or never is the time to make her fortune.” So pleasant to have the word “nice” correctly used, don’t you think? The speech of the eighteenth century was so eminently superior to our present-day slipshod methods of using and misusing the language.’
‘I am not aware of being slipshod or of misusing the language,’ said Clarice, ‘and I still think the piece is utterly unsuitable for public performance in Chardle.’
‘You are of Jeeves’s opinion, perhaps, that “what pleases the London public is not always so acceptable to the rural mind. The metropolitan touch sometimes proves a trifle too exotic for the provinces”. May I ask whether you are alone in your disapproval of the piece?’
‘Unfortunately, this appears to be so.’
‘Then I suppose there is nothing to be done but to accept the democratic principle that the wishes of the majority must be respected.’
‘Democracy is the most inefficient form of government ever invented!’ snorted Clarice angrily.
‘That is so true; and yet, if vox populi is vox dei, who are we to set ourselves against it?’ asked her hostess.
The visitor rose to take her leave. She tore a leaf out of a tiny notebook and handed it to Dame Beatrice.
‘It is good of you to promise to visit Caxton. Here is his address,’ she said abruptly. ‘It is a little off the beaten track. The best way is to take the Brockenhurst road and enquire at Buckett’s farm. Caxton is their tenant. I have to thank you for a most delicious tea.’
‘She may have enjoyed a delicious tea, but I do not think she saw mine as a delicious mind,’ said Dame Beatrice to Laura when the latter returned. ‘As for giving my kind co-operation in the matter of attempting to persuade William Caxton to lead the Ladies’ Guild through the streets of Chardle, I would not have agreed except that I want an excuse to meet this aptly-named printer.’
‘Do I gather you didn’t much take to our Clarice?’
‘I am sure she is the worthiest of women and, no doubt, a good wife and mother.’
‘But, as a companion on a walking tour she wouldn’t be exactly your first choice
. Oh, well, we don’t always recognise or appreciate the highest when we see it. She’s a bit cheesed off, you know, because Denbigh has ridden rough-shod over her. She’s accustomed to try to produce our shows as well as stage-manage them, I’m told, so I do rather hope you didn’t tease her, but I’m rather afraid you might have done. Did she touch you for a subscription?’
‘In the beginning, yes, but at parting she refused it. I think the refusal was a mark of her displeasure. In fact, I am quite sure it was.’
‘Too right, I’d say. Well, you’ve agreed to tackle Caxton, it seems, so do you want me to accompany you on your visit to this wild man of the woods?’
‘If you will agree to leave all the talking to me, I shall be glad of your company. I have the liveliest suspicions concerning him.’
‘What is he? – clad in goat skins, like Robinson Crusoe, or a demander of cheese, like poor Ben Gunn?’
‘Neither, I trust. Does the name William Caxton convey anything to you, apart from the printing press and the date 1476?’
‘Convey anything to me? No. Why should it? There are probably dozens of Caxtons in the telephone book and William isn’t exactly an uncommon Christian name.’
‘You relieve my mind.’
Laura stared hard at her employer. ‘What is all this?’ she asked.
Dame Beatrice cackled. ‘Just a foolish notion I entertained; an idea which you have now, I am glad to say, relegated to its proper sphere, which is limbo.’
Laura looked dissatisfied.
‘You don’t often get ideas which have to be treated like unbaptised infants,’ she remarked. ‘Limbo is where they’re supposed to go. You wouldn’t care to come clean and give me the gist of your thoughts, I suppose?’
‘I am ashamed of them. The clear light of your commonsense has shown me how foolish they are.’
Laura went into the library, the adjoining room, to write to the handsome husband whom she had recently left in London, but, instead of beginning her letter, she scribbled on the blotting-pad – an anachronism in an age of ball-point pens – William Caxton, William Wallace, William Shakespeare, William Wilberforce, William of Orange, William Wordsworth, William Butler Yeats, William Congreve, William of Wykeham. She tapped on the blotter as she studied the list. Then she read it aloud. When she came to the last name she repeated it and then uttered it a third time. She scribbled all across the list of names, took a piece of writing paper from a drawer and began her letter to Assistant Commissioner Rober Gavin.
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