Fault in the Structure mb-52

by Gladys Mitchell

  When she had stamped the envelope and put it in the tray ready for posting, she went back to Dame Beatrice, who was industriously but purposelessly knitting.

  ‘William of Wykeham. William Wayneflete. Wayneflete College. Alfriston C. Swinburne, Thaddeus E. Lawrence, William Caxton,’ said Laura. ‘Am I right? But it’s a bit far-fetched, don’t you think?’

  ‘I am sure of it, and I have already confessed as much.’ Dame Beatrice cast aside the repulsive network of pale mauve wool which she had been knitting and added, ‘Let us think no more about it. When shall we go and see this young man?’

  ‘The tooter the sweeter.’

  They set off next day, Laura driving, took the Brockenhurst road and branched off past Buckett’s farm, but did not call there. The open common gave place to woods and a little stream. The car crossed a narrow bridge. Beyond this there was open forest and then a boundary lane bordered by a couple of shallow ponds. Some ponies were grazing and beyond them was the cottage which Laura, whose knowledge of the Forest was encyclopaedic, had found easily enough from the address which Mrs Blaine had left with Dame Beatrice.

  From the narrow road which the car had been following after it had crossed the bridge, not much more than the roof and chimneys of the cottage could be seen, for it was down in a dip. From the road an ill-defined path made by the feet of pedestrians across the turf could be seen leading to a wicket-gate. Laura pulled up off the narrow road and she and her employer took the path to the cottage.

  It was in a small enclosure which could hardly be called a garden and in this space there was an open shed containing a motor-cycle and an old mangle. The cottage itself was in need of a coat of paint. The door to it was open and through the doorway came the sound of song.

  Laura called out unnecessarily, ‘Anybody home?’ and a young man came to the open doorway.

  ‘Somebody asking for me?’ he enquired. Dame Beatrice came forward.

  ‘Mr William Caxton, I believe,’ she said. The young man smiled at her.

  ‘If you’ve come on behalf of the ladies of the town,’ he said, ‘you’ve wasted your time, I’m afraid. I have no intention whatever of appearing in their Caxton pageant.’

  ‘Not even if I am willing to give you the printing of all posters, tickets and programmes for the Festival play?’

  His face changed. He looked alert and interested.

  ‘That’s different,’ he said. ‘Would you do that?’

  ‘On condition of your appearing in the pageant, of course. Payment will be made when the pageant is over and you have taken part.’

  ‘Trusting, aren’t you?’ He grinned disarmingly. ‘O.K. I accept. I can do with the money. Incidentally, my work is good and not cheap. Come inside and I’ll give you an estimate.’

  ‘Forgive me for mentioning it,’ said Laura, when they were back in the car, ‘but surely Clarice Blaine didn’t authorise you to bribe the chap, did she?’

  ‘No, and I have not committed her or the Ladies’ Guild or the dramatic society to any financial transactions. I intend to pay for the printing myself if this obliging William Caxton undertakes to appear in the pageant. I feel that I owe Mrs Blaine something for having shocked her so deeply by my refusal to lend my support to her ban on The Beggar’s Opera. Besides, I have satisfied myself of one thing.’

  ‘I’ll take a guess. You know now that Caxton is really Caxton, although I bet it’s simply a trade name to advertise the fact that he has this printing press. And you also know that he isn’t Thaddeus E. Lawrence, not to mention Alfriston C. Swinburne.’

  ‘You are right, but you had already convinced me that my suspicions were foolish and irrational. Still, it is always as well to be sure.’

  ‘But our professional blonde, who opted for a pantomime as our Festival offering, could be Coralie St Malo,’ said Laura. ‘No, of course she couldn’t, any more than Caxton could be Lawrence.’

  ‘Sure, these are but imaginary wiles,

  And Lapland sorcerers inhabit here,’

  quoted Dame Beatrice, with an eldritch cackle. ‘There still remains R. Crashaw, of course.’

  Laura looked suspiciously at her employer, convinced that she was being teased, but unable to see the point of the teasing.

  CHAPTER 14

  « ^ »

  There are enough pickers and stealers in this town.

  Among few sets of people do envy and jealousy flourish more lushly and with more rapid growth than among the members of an amateur dramatic and operatic society. This generalisation does not apply to those who are given the leading rôles, of course. So far as the Chardle group was concerned, the three leading women players were well satisfied with the parts which Denbigh had allotted them. Laura was delighted to have been given Mrs Peachum, Sybil Gartner had expected to play Polly and had not been disappointed and, although she had her detractors, Melanie Cardew, that raddled tragedy queen, was pleased at first and (although nothing would have induced her to say so) surprised at having been asked to play Lucy Lockit, a part which, except for her defection, would have been offered to Marigold Tench, who had a better voice.

  That Polly Peachum had been given to Sybil nobody queried. It was known (for she frequently referred to the fact) that she took singing lessons and (like Cora Bellinger, whose voice could bring down plaster from the ceiling) was ‘studying for opera’. Besides this, she knew that she had a good stage presence. She was, in fact, a personable enough young woman although she had hard eyes and an obstinate chin. However, she also had an attractive figure, including what Damon Runyan would describe as ‘bumps here and there where a doll is entitled to have bumps’, and there was no doubt that, as Laura put it, she could out-voice the rest of the company even when she was singing pianissimo, for hers was a high, clear soprano, piercing rather than sweet, and of undoubted power.

  Over Laura’s own part in the production there had also been no envious murmurings. For one thing, there was no other obvious choice for Mrs Peachum and, for another, the character, dominant in the first Act, does not appear at all during the rest of the performance, a fact to deter the exhibitionists, the self-assertive and the merely vain. What was more, in Denbigh’s production it was decreed that whoever played Mrs Peachum should take over the dull and thankless office of prompter for the last two Acts. The Lucy Lockit, who did not come on stage until Act Two, was to occupy the prompter’s stool for Act One before handing over to Mrs Peachum at the first interval while the stage was being re-set for the scene at the Newgate tavern, but that ended her responsibility.

  Unlike Sir Nigel Playfair’s classic revival of The Beggar’s Opera in the 1920s, which was produced against only one background, the Chardle production was to enjoy various changes of scene, for with amateurs, as Denbigh knew, every dog must have his day and this applied as much to the stage carpenters and the scene-painters as to the actors themselves, so that the scene was to be changed not only between the Acts, but even between the two scenes in Act Two and the three scenes in Act Three. This took time, a fact which became of considerable importance later.

  Apart from those allotted to Laura, Sybil and Melanie, there were only minor rôles for the women and, once the three principal male rôles were settled, the men were in like case. There was no obvious candidate, moreover, for the principal male part, that of the highwayman Macheath, so, after some misgivings, Denbigh had chosen young Cyril Wincott, but more for his tall figure and handsome countenance than because of his dramatic and musical gifts. The choice was put down by his detractors to favouritism on the score that Cyril was a schoolmaster and therefore in Denbigh’s camp, but this was untrue.

  Cyril’s position, therefore, was a less happy one than Sybil’s or Laura’s, for whereas they had no detractors, Cyril had more than one. The president of the society, Hamilton Haynings, the possessor of a foghorn bass-baritone whose resonance, his critics agreed among themselves, would have been better employed on a tug on the Thames rather than in the confined space of the Chardle town hall, had e
xpected to be able to pull his rank and obtain the leading man’s part. He had been fobbed off (in his own opinion) with Lockit, Lucy’s jailor father, and his lines had been cut to restrict him to very short appearances with his daughter, with Macheath and with Peachum, Polly’s father. He was given no solo at all and his only contribution to the musical side of the affair was a bawling duet in which, Denbigh privately considered, his voice could do little harm.

  Peachum, a meaty part which, in lieu of playing Macheath, Hamilton would have accepted with good grace, had been given to James Hunty, the possessor of a baritone voice of good although untrained quality which he himself considered would have suited the part of Macheath far better than did Cyril’s light and pleasant tenor.

  ‘Macheath was never meant for a tenor,’ he said plaintively to Marigold Tench who, bitterly regretful of her walk-out from a meeting earlier on, persisted in haunting the rehearsals in a sick mood of masochistic self-punishment.

  ‘You couldn’t play Macheath, not with your waistline,’ said Marigold, displaying the reverse of the medal and turning sadistic. There were also others, as Laura soon found out, who were restless and dissatisfied. She had been mistaken, for one thing, in assuming, on too little evidence, that young Stella Walker was pleased with the two tiny parts of Jenny Diver and Diana Trapes. She was soon in the same camp as the blonde woman who had opted for a pantomime. The blonde, like Marigold, also insisted upon turning up at rehearsals, ostensibly to work out the costumes which would be required. She also decided to assist Farrow by turning over the pages of the score for him. It was in manuscript and not easy for the pianist to follow. Moreover, it was on separate sheets of paper which were madly inclined to flutter to the floor when anybody handled them with insufficient care. After the first two rehearsals, in fact, Ernest, living up to his name, learnt the tunes by heart and thus rendered the blonde’s officious assistance unnecessary. Apart from this, Haynings tackled her with so much belligerence that she thought it well to apologise and to behave herself at all subsequent rehearsals, which she still insisted upon attending.

  It had been arranged that, until the cast was word-perfect and had learnt the songs, Denbigh would not take over the rehearsals. The ‘words’ rehearsals for the society’s productions had usually taken place in Clarice Blaine’s house with coffee and biscuits to follow, but she had issued no invitation to the cast of The Beggar’s Opera to invade her drawing-room. This attitude was to mark her resentment at being turned down as stage manager and her dire disapproval of the piece, but her excuse (for even this autocratic lady felt bound to explain so blatant a departure from custom) was that she had no piano, an excuse which, at a words-only rehearsal, hardly made sense.

  All the rehearsals, until Denbigh took them over, were held, therefore, in the small, draughty hall of a local primary school, the hiring of which was cheap because its amenities were so few. Ernest, who had not dared to complain about Mabelle van Pieter’s behaviour at the piano, did complain bitterly (and with reason) about the instrument itself. It was out of tune, two of the notes made no sound at all and it was on castors so that, if anybody leaned against it, and this usually meant a soloist who had come over to expostulate with the pianist, it made a disconcerting right-angled turn and left the embarrassed and fuming Ernest playing on air instead of on the keyboard.

  ‘It’s good for the poor chap to have something inanimate to curse about,’ Laura informed Dame Beatrice, ‘because he’s too much of a rabbit to tackle anything human, either male or female. Anyway, come to that, most of us are at the stage of thinking before we speak and then not saying it. I even listen patiently to our blonde bomb-shell, the slightly overpowering (where she buys her perfume I can’t think, unless it’s privately imported from Port Said or somewhere), the very ripe Mabelle van Pieter.’

  ‘You listen patiently to her? Why, what has she to say which requires patience in the listener?’

  ‘Well, she claims to be a pro., you see, and I think it’s true. She tells me I “should ought to broaden out the part, dear”. Personally I think I’ve broadened it as far as it will stretch. She has forearms like a navvy, a spirited vocabulary and, apart from a lively hatred of Haynings since he, by no means mincing his own words, fought her to a standstill in a verbal battle last week, she gets on reasonably well with everybody, apart from giving them her unasked-for professional advice and leaping out from the wings in the middle of a scene to measure busts and hips.’

  ‘All very well-intentioned, no doubt.’

  ‘She may be well-intentioned, but there are those among us who are not. Even young Stella Walker, who seemed so pleased with her two little bits of parts, has begun to step high, wide and plentiful.’

  This was true, for Stella had become a very disgruntled young lady.

  ‘If only we’d settled on a straight play,’ she said at the beginning of the fifth rehearsal, ‘which, after all, was what nearly all of us wanted, I might have been given a decent part. I mean, I may not be able to sing, but I can act Sybil Gartner’s head off. Do you know how many speeches I’ve got as Jenny Diver? Three! And only one solo – and even that I only mime, while Melanie Cardew sings it from the wings. And it ought to be six speeches and two songs! I do think it’s wrong of him to mess up the script like this. And even the three speeches he has left me have all been shortened.’

  ‘My part has been cut, too,’ said Melanie, who overheard her. ‘The parts of Polly and Lucy ought to be of equal importance, but they’re not. And who wants to sing other people’s songs off-stage? Besides, the thing doesn’t suit my voice and who on earth can sing a line like “The gamesters and lawyers are jugglers alike,” I should wish to know?’ She walked over to the piano and began to berate poor Ernest whom the blonde had long since abandoned. Her place had been taken by Marigold Tench.

  ‘Then there’s the Diana Trapes part,’ went on Stella to anybody who was listening. ‘That’s been cut, too. He’s taken out all her main speeches and just left me with four little bits to say, and two of those have been cut to a single line. And again there’s only one solo instead of two. If it wasn’t for letting the rest of the cast down, I’d opt out and make him find somebody else to take my place. Anyway, if Melanie is to sing my songs, why can’t I be Lucy? I’m sure I’d look the part better than she does. She’s much too old for it.’

  Stella might not have been able to sing, but she had a vibrant, carrying speaking-voice and Melanie, who had strolled away after criticising Ernest’s rendering of her accompaniments, came over to her.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ she said venomously. ‘If, after that, you conceited little beast, you think I’m going to sing your solos from the wings while you mime the words like a monkey catching fleas, you may as well think again. Get somebody else to do it.’

  ‘I think I’d better, if that’s how you feel about it,’ said Stella, coming up and tossing her abundant red-gold hair almost in Melanie’s face. ‘In any case, nobody is going to believe that your strident trumpetings are coming from my larynx.’

  ‘No. You say your words like a child with tonsillitis.’

  ‘Perhaps Laura Gavin would sing for me,’ said Stella, not relishing this description of her vocal chords. ‘She’ll be off-stage in the second and third Acts, anyway, because she’s going to prompt when Act One is over, and I hope you fluff and have to be prompted good and loud.’

  ‘She’s a contralto, and Jenny Diver and Diana Trapes are written for mezzos in Denbigh’s version,’ said Marigold who, from sheer pique at having walked herself out of a part, had familiarised herself with the words and music of the opera. ‘I’ll stand in the wings and sing for you if you like.’

  However, the opera got under way in some sort of fashion and Laura, who, without ostentation or what she described as ‘throwing her weight about’ had been accepted as leader and arbiter during this trying time, was able to telephone the College and inform Philip Denbigh that she thought the company was ready for him to take over the rehearsals and
that Hamilton Haynings agreed with her on the matter.

  There was one member of the society who, not expecting to be given a part at all, had joyously snapped up the very minor rôle of Filch the pickpocket, although, to his mother’s relief, his best lines (as he thought them) had not only been cut, but had been removed altogether from the script, and this was the young lad Tom Blaine. In spite, however, of Denbigh’s concession to local good taste with regard to her son’s dialogue, Tom’s mother continued to do her best to sabotage the success of the production.

  For all the previous shows which the society had put on she had bludgeoned her Ladies’ Guild not only into buying tickets for themselves, their families and their friends, but in helping to fabricate the costumes for the various plays and in providing tea and cakes for sale during the intervals.

  On this occasion, however, she declined to ask the Ladies’ Guild to provide any of this valuable help. She could not, in conscience, she said, persuade people to assist at a project of which she so violently disapproved. Apart from that, the Guild had its hands completely full. The pageant also needed dressing. She added that her Young People’s Helpful Band would not be doing their usual rounds of house-to-house touting for the sale of tickets, either, another useful service she had organised in previous years.

  ‘I would not soil their young minds,’ she said, ‘by letting them know that such a piece was under contemplation.’