The Mistress of Alderley

by Robert Barnard

  “Not just promised: what he has made quite clear to me he has done. I wouldn’t think of asking, Alex. He’d probably think I was planning to bump him off.”

  “He can’t believe in your love for him if he imagined that.”

  Caroline sighed.

  “Joke, darling. I’ll put my mind to it some day, if it worries you. But you can’t expect me to think of it with Olivia’s first night in five days’ time.”

  Or, probably, after it, Alexander felt sure.

  Chapter 7

  First Night,

  Last Night

  Guy Fleetwood came down with his father on the following Friday, the day before the first night of Forza. He was a good-looking boy, taller than Marius, with a nice manner. He would be a wow at St. Andrew’s, Caroline thought, where he was to study computer science. She had noticed other times he’d been down that if Marius suggested he do something, he jumped to and did it, and that if he disagreed with his father about anything, he did so tentatively, almost apologetically. Caroline conjectured that his upbringing had been a great deal more traditional that her own brood’s. Stella capitalized on this.

  “Anyone feel like tennis?” she would say.

  “Guy would like a game, wouldn’t you, Guy?” Marius would reply, as if his son were a ten-year-old. And Guy would tear himself away from Alexander’s little computer room (where Guy could lord it, rather, by virtue of his greater sophistication and the superior equipment he was used to at home) and go out and bash a ball around on the tennis court, which Caroline had brought back from its overgrown state when she had taken over Alderley. Caroline didn’t know that he made little attempt to be agreeable during the game.

  Marius was to take Guy to York station on Monday morning early for the train to Edinburgh, and then continue on back to his workaday life in London. Meanwhile, there was the opera premiere to prepare for. Caroline knew better than to ring Olivia on Saturday to wish her well. The day of a first performance, one had to have entirely to oneself—either alone, or losing oneself in a crowd, for example, of shoppers. Caroline wouldn’t put it past Olivia to go and watch Leeds United that Saturday afternoon. Anyway, she phoned a florist in Leeds and had roses delivered to her daughter’s dressing room. Then she found that anything she settled down to didn’t serve its purpose, and when she jettisoned it for something else, that turned out to be equally useless at calming her nerves. “It’s worse than if it were my first night,” she said to Marius. She cooked a risotto followed by T-bone steaks for their early dinner. Marius and the children ate heartily, but she had to force her meal down. Then she dressed, and Marius put on his swankiest suit. They kissed the children good-bye, said, “Cross your fingers for Olivia,” and drove off.

  “Right,” said Guy, as they stood at the sitting-room window watching the Mercedes go down the drive. “Where does your mother keep her car keys? We’re going to hit the town.”

  “I don’t suppose you’re looking forward to this evening,” said Caroline, as Marius’s Mercedes glided past Wakefield.

  “On the contrary, I’m looking forward to it immensely.”

  “Not much fun if you’re cloth-eared, sitting through even half an hour or an hour of opera.”

  “I’m cloth-eared but I’m not tone deaf. You know that. And I shall enjoy the curtain calls immensely. I know my connection with the new star is tenuous, but I shall bask in your maternal pride, and get high on the cheers for your sake.”

  “Let’s hope there are cheers. All sorts of things can go wrong—with the voice, the production, the feel of the whole event.”

  “The feel is going to be one of enormous expectation. That can’t be bad. And I pay Olivia the compliment of saying that she knows her own voice, and how to take care of it. If she needed to cancel, she’d cancel, but we know she isn’t doing that.”

  Caroline had had a call from Colm just before dinner to say that Olivia was brimming with confidence and lively anticipation, though she didn’t want to talk to anyone. Caroline had been awfully touched that he’d thought to ring.

  “You’ll have a lot of time to kill,” she said. “What will you do?”

  “Oh, maybe a film. Or there’s something on in the Playhouse Courtyard Theatre that I could sample. I’ve never much cared for the pubs in the center of Leeds, but things open up all the time there, or change managers. Don’t worry about me. If there’s nothing on I want to see I’ll booze. I’ll try anything except an Irish-theme pub.”

  “It would have been better if we hadn’t eaten early, then you could have had a good meal.”

  “Why should you sit through your daughter’s triumph with a rumbling tummy? Anyway, you know me: if I feel like it I can eat a second dinner without any problem.”

  “I just hope we don’t meet Rick.”

  “Well, I hope we do. I’d like to cast my eye over Olivia’s father. I could ask him for a rendition of ‘On the Street Where You Live.’”

  “Oh God! You’re quite capable of doing that. And Rick is quite capable of obliging.”

  When they got to Leeds they drove to the concrete monstrosity of a car park in Woodhouse Lane, then walked down through the dank horror and sinister emptiness of the underpass, finally making it via Merrion Street to the Grand Theatre. They had no sooner entered the semicircular corridor around the stalls than they saw Rick. Caroline knew in her bones that he had been watching for them.

  “Caroline! Darling! And is this your new rich bloke?”

  “Marius, this is Rick.”

  Rick held out his hand, and Marius took his, his sparkling eyes aglow with curiosity.

  “So glad to meet you at last,” said Rick. “I’ve heard a lot about you. Funnily enough I’ve always got on well with Caroline’s blokes, though she never returns the compliment with my chicks.”

  “Rick, you sound as if you got stuck in a groove round about 1964,” said Caroline.

  “Perhaps I did, darling. Not a bad era to get stuck in. But let’s not spar. This isn’t our night at all. It’s that wonderful phenomenon we produced between us.”

  Caroline had to repress the urge to say “ugh.”

  “I hear you were in My Fair Lady when it first came over,” said Marius.

  “Well, not quite the first cast,” said Rick, because Caroline knew the truth. “I suppose Caroline’s told you how much she suffered from ‘On the Street Where You Live,’ has she? She used to tell everyone at the time. Well, let me tell you, it’s a bloody difficult song to get right. I’ve done quite a bit of Gilbert and Sullivan since, and it’s shown me how very much the American musicals took from them, at least until Sondheim. For example, when I used to launch myself into the song in question, which we won’t name…”

  Caroline drifted away. She knew that Rick, having proclaimed they were there for Olivia’s sake, would from then on talk entirely and exclusively about himself. Anyway, Marius would be less likely to call for a reprise of that ghastly song if she wasn’t there to get embarrassed. She stood in the crowd at the bar, was recognized by the barman, and got served at once. She got a gin and tonic for herself and a whiskey and soda for Marius. She put it in his hand as she passed him and Rick.

  “There’s a whole treasury of forgotten English musicals, if we could only find a style to do them in,” she could hear Rick saying. Caroline shuddered as she contemplated the thought of endless revivals of Lilac Time and Bless the Bride starring her onetime husband. She went and stood alone in a dark niche, to listen to the excited anticipation of the audience.

  “Excuse me, but aren’t you Caroline Fawley?” came a voice at her elbow. It belonged to a pleasant, rather faded middle-aged woman. “I did so love you in At the Kitchen Sink. Nobody makes sitcoms like that these days.”

  Caroline purred. This was more like it.

  “No, they don’t,” she said. “I sometimes wonder what has happened to the art of comedy.”

  *

  Guy nosed the car around the streets of Leeds, looking for a parking place he wouldn
’t have to pay for. It was just seven o’clock, early enough for there still to be one or two left. Under Alexander’s directions he kept well away from the Grand Theatre, where a capacity audience would have bagged all the places, and eventually found one behind the law courts.

  “Now—what time do we have to meet up, so we’re back before them?” he asked, turning to the two Fawleys. “When will this opera end?”

  Alexander shrugged.

  “It’s quite long. But they put the time of ending up in the foyer at the Grand Theatre.”

  “Right. And they’re going to a party afterwards. We’ll be on the safe side and allow half an hour from the time of finishing, and meet back here then. OK?”

  They both nodded. Guy strode off purposefully, though he knew of Leeds only what he had learned by driving round it. Alexander and Stella drifted off down to the Headrow, then she went in the direction of the cinemas and he, with no particular purpose in mind, found himself going toward the station.

  Oddly enough, Guy, once he was out of sight, slackened his pace and began looking around uncertainly. He was in a big town, new to him, and he needed to get his bearings. Needed, in fact, to read the indications that would tell him the most likely place to find what he wanted. He stopped in a doorway and began to observe the direction taken by most of the young people who passed.

  *

  The lights went down in the Grand promptly at seven-fifteen. The orchestra had been tuning up, and periodically phrases had emerged that Caroline recognized.

  “I wondered if we should invite your Rick out to a meal afterwards,” Marius whispered to her.

  “It will be far too late after the party,” she hissed back.

  “Darling, eating late doesn’t bother me.”

  “No. And he’s not my Rick. He’s any and everybody’s Rick.”

  “I quite liked him. Though he’s a bit of a bore.”

  “He could bore for England.”

  A large bearded man threaded his way through the orchestra, and (because directors abhor the vacuum of an overture) the moment the music started, the curtain went up and a mute scene was played out with Olivia, as Leonora, preparing for bed. Caroline recognized that the set was a permanent one—a shape that dimly suggested a gun—which would be varied with odd props. As the music became more exciting Olivia sat on a bed, having her long hair, actually a wig, combed by her maid. Marius’s fingers were tapping on his knee, but when Caroline looked down she saw that the taps bore no relation to the music that was being played.

  The opera proper began with Leonora bidding good night to her father, then agonizing in an aria over her decision to run off with her Indian-blooded lover: the aria was a second-sighted vision of herself as “Me pelegrina ed orfana” (“wandering alone and fatherless” in the translation), which was to become her fate in the course of the opera. Colm entered as the lover—a handsome figure, large if slightly strained of voice. They agonized together over the approaching elopement, as always in opera for a little too long: when they were interrupted by Leonora’s father, Colm as Alvaro threw his pistol to the floor in surrender; it went off, and killed the father. The pair escaped into the night.

  Olivia’s voice had been large, securely based, dramatic. Already the applause for the first scene was more than warm. Marius turned to Caroline.

  “See you at curtain call, or the party afterwards,” he whispered, then made his escape up the central aisle. It was seven-forty.

  As the interval approached Caroline wished she had someone beside her to share her growing excitement. Olivia had launched into “La Vergine degli angeli,” and Caroline thought it was the most beautiful melody she had ever heard. Olivia sang it with the softness of strength: one sensed the solid base to the voice, knew its immense potential power, and yet relished the yearning and the striving toward peace that the soft singing suggested.

  Caroline felt a surge of adrenaline. She had registered throughout the scene at the monastery that the audience was getting on to a high: their growing enthusiasm and excitement could not be mistaken by a theater person, and it gripped her. Interval would come as soon as the aria, and Act II, ended, and she wondered whether there would be anything special in the way of first-half applause. An audience in the grip of an exhilaration such as this—and the emergence of a new star involved an audience, almost as if they were themselves responsible, and deserved credit for the discovery—needed an outlet, and some particular demonstration might be the result. Caroline felt in her bones that it must come.

  And come it did. As the orchestra faded into silence the audience erupted into cheers—not end-of-opera cheers, but provisional cheers, a sort of down payment toward the triumph they felt sure would come. The curtain went up again, with Leonora still at center stage, with the Padre Guardiano some way behind her, and the chorus of monks a shadowy presence at the back. When Olivia had basked in the cheers for long enough she turned and drew the bass to share them with her. Then the curtain went down again, lights went up, and the audience began their invasion of the bars.

  People who were in the know knew who Olivia was the daughter of. As Caroline moved into the press of people in the center aisle, those whom she knew and those whom she was sure she had never seen in her life began to shake her hand, pat her on the back, tell her how proud she must feel. Any sense of loneliness vanished. When she gained the corridor around the stalls a young man came up, asked her if she’d ordered an interval drink, and when she said she’d forgotten, thrust his glass of wine into her hand and went back to join the scrum at the bar. “How kind!” she shouted after him.

  Still the congratulations went on, and Caroline was struck by the sheer pleasure people felt at the emergence of a new voice. This was succeeded by a sense of the absurdity of their showering praise on her. She saw some of her little crowd nudge each other and nod their heads in the direction to her left. Looking that way Caroline saw Rick, hovering outside the group, which speedily evaporated to leave them alone. Very tactful, but just what she didn’t want. Why, they probably thought Rick was her current bloke!

  “Isn’t it wonderful?” she said, to break the ice.

  “Absolutely killing.”

  “But a bit absurd that we get praise for it.”

  “In point of fact I wasn’t getting any praise for it, though if anyone—”

  “All right,” said Caroline loudly to his petulant face. “That’s not in dispute. If Olivia has got her singing voice from anyone, it’s you.” She nearly added that she had got her morals from the same source, but felt it wasn’t the time or place. Caroline had a strong sense of the suitability of different sorts of occasions.

  “Your Marius mooted the idea of a meal afterwards,” said Rick, “but I’m not too sure.”

  “I wouldn’t be able to eat a thing.”

  “I feel rather the same.”

  “Anyway, there’s the party afterwards—there’ll be the usual things there if either of us develops a hunger. I’d rather be up there, soaking up all the excitement and enthusiasm.”

  “Absolutely. We’re theater people, you and me, Caroline.”

  “Well, I was.”

  “Are. It’s like if the Jesuits get you. Once you’re a theater person, that’s what you are for life.”

  Looking away, to dissociate herself from Rick’s yoking of herself and him as similar animals, Caroline saw through the doors to the street a young girl very like Stella walk past, look at the time of the opera’s end, then walk quickly on. How absurd young people were today—dressing and even looking so alike! Caroline had shut from her mind the era of the miniskirt. She turned back to Rick.

  “So, no meal. We stay at the party and bask in the success of our offspring.”

  “That’s the ticket. We probably won’t be able to get near her. You know, that soft singing at the end, that was just like something I’ve always done as Frederic in The Pirates of Penzance—”

  “Good, God, surely Sullivan’s wet-behind-the-ears heroes are a thing
of the past for you, Rick.”

  “Bitch. Well, as Nanky-Poo then. You don’t have to look seventeen for him. In ‘Wandering Minstrel’ I try to refine the sound down to almost nothing, exactly like Olivia just now. Rather strange, that, because she’s never seen me do it. The Manchester Evening News said that I—”

  Caroline switched off, then looked around rather desperately. She realized that she must have lost none of her ability to convey hidden emotions, because someone in the mass of people around her registered her desperation and came over to congratulate her and say that this was one of the most exciting opera evenings of his life. Caroline wondered whether she ought to introduce Rick, but decided he would only burble on about himself, so she kept the fan to herself for the rest of the interval. Where Rick went she neither knew nor cared.

  Guy had sniffed early on that there was nothing doing at that hour in the clubs, and probably wouldn’t be until well after the time fixed for their journey home. Ten-fifty he had to be back at the car. The young people seemed to go into pubs to get tanked up in advance, doubtless much more cheaply than in the myriad clubs that peppered the city center. Many of the pubs and clubs seemed to cluster around the top end of Briggate and Vicar Lane, but with the Grand Theatre being within yards of them Guy was afraid of meeting his father there: Marius’s inability to sit through an opera or ballet was a joke in his own family. Guy chose a pub in a little alley off the middle stretch of Briggate where there seemed to be a big and raucous crowd of young people.

  Oddly enough, for all his apparent confidence, Guy did not feel altogether at home with this rowdy bunch. Truth to tell, his mother and father had always kept him on a fairly tight rein. He really knew almost nothing about the club scene in London, nothing at all about that in Leeds. But he intended to learn. And he intended to get what he had come for.

  Stella walked on past the Grand Theatre, having registered that the opera ended at ten-twenty, then past the turnoff to the Headrow, then down Briggate proper. She was trying to look ordinary, as if things were normal, but she knew they were not. What she really wanted was somewhere quiet, somewhere where she could come to terms with what she had seen.