by Mary Renault
“Oh, but surely not.” Hilary was so angry that her own careful voice made her feel quite sick. “It will be announced, won’t it? I should have thought it would rather add to the excitement of the thing for them. Particularly when they get a much better—” Julian had not even looked at her this time, but she did not complete the sentence. “If they get value for their money, they won’t worry about who it is, do you think?” She felt, rather than saw, his tension relax.
“Yes,” he said quickly. “It’s just a question of getting on with the job.”
Mrs. Fleming had risen in her chair. “Well, dear, Dr. Mansell is quite right; we shall just have to look at it in that way and make the best of it. Don’t be late back, will you? I shan’t wait in the hall, now that you’ll have your costume to change.”
“All right,” said Julian. “I’ll get out the car for you.”
“And please remember, dear, that you have to be careful of yourself, and don’t get carried away with any rough horseplay on the stage. It will make me very anxious if you do.”
“We don’t really. It’s just effect, you know.”
“Will you excuse me for a few minutes, Dr. Mansell? There are one or two things I must see about before I go. You had better be hurrying, hadn’t you, Julian, now you have all these extra preparations to make. I hope it will be a success, in spite of everything.”
She went out of the room, quietly and erectly. Hilary said, “I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you. The best of luck.”
“Thanks,” said Julian. He went over to one of the windows, closed the curtains, and proceeded methodically to the next. “I suppose I’d better be getting along.”
“What sort of a part is it? The dashing hero, or what?”
“Good Lord, no.” He spoke with an instant, spontaneous revulsion. “Captain Morgan. An extremely dirty villain.”
“I dare say we shall find Tom isn’t indispensable.” He would not turn to meet her smile.
“We’ll rub through, I expect. I hope to God I can get into those boots of his. If I split the coat it can’t be helped. Oh, God.”
“Whatever is it?”
“The beard. That fixes everything.” He turned round to face her like someone confronted with irretrievable catastrophe. He looked almost desperate. “I might have known. Something like this had to happen. I told the damned idiot not to take it home.”
“Is that so awful?” His sense of disaster had infected her in spite of herself. “Is there a lot of talk about it in the play?”
“Oh, probably. No, perhaps there isn’t. But it’s—oh, well, it’s just an essentially bearded sort of part. He was called Black-beard, even.”
“Well, that will be quite simple to cut.”
He said half to himself, as if he had not heard, “What on earth can I have instead?”
“But does it really matter so much? I don’t suppose anyone in the audience will know he was bearded—I didn’t. And if they do they won’t care.”
“Well, I do. It’s—it’s completely off-putting. Don’t you see it will mean making up practically straight?”
“But why not? You’d have a few lines, or something.”
“That’s not enough!” He almost snapped it at her, then said, awkwardly, “Actually, I never feel myself on the stage unless I look different. I really don’t know why.”
If he did know, she thought, it was no time to be asking. She said, matter-of-factly, “You know a good deal about make-up. You’ll think of something.”
“I shall have to,” he said. He walked to a glass that hung on the wall. She saw him put up his hand to his face, but his back was to her and she could not tell what he was doing. Presently, with a look of one who has solved something, he turned round. “I wonder—have you got your bag here with you, by any chance? Your doctor’s bag, I mean?”
“No. But I’ve got my car. What is it you want?”
“Oh, no, but what a frightful sweat for you.” His face had lightened, however, with relief. “No, I couldn’t possibly. Dragging you about at this time of night.”
“I had to pick something up from the surgery, in any case, on my way back. What shall I bring?”
“I oughtn’t to let you. But if you really mean that—It’s just a roll of strapping, the narrow sort.”
“That’s simple. I’ll give you a lift to the hall—it will be on my way—and bring it straight back to you there.”
“It would make all the difference. You always seem to be on the spot when one’s in a jam.” He had almost recovered his normal smile.
“I’d better make my apologies to Mrs. Fleming, hadn’t I, before I go?”
“Oh, yes, of course. I don’t know exactly where she is at the moment. Don’t worry, I’ll run up and tell her.”
He was gone scarcely more than two minutes; long enough, however, to give Hilary time for reflection. If she had not put her patched-up relations with Mrs. Fleming finally beyond repair, there seemed very little she had left undone toward it. She shrugged her shoulders; the milk had been spilled in a decent cause.
He was back again, with a face of determined unconcern, and a large japanned make-up box under one arm.
“She says,” he remarked with very plausible ease, “that you shouldn’t let me make such a nuisance of myself, but that it’s I cry good of you and she’ll see you in the hall.”
She turned her own car while he got out Mrs. Fleming’s and drove it to the door; after which, directions for negotiating the drive and the gates filled in, for a few minutes, the encroaching pause. When they reached the road, and the pause engulfed them, she tried to look like the careful kind of driver who would expect silence in any case. Obliquely, in the windscreen, she saw Julian trying to look like a careful driver’s considerate passenger. It was no use. The silence was becoming corrosive. It was evident that he was not going to break it with anything to the purpose. “Have you got many people to make up?” She could almost hear him sigh with relief.
“Well, the principals completely, I expect, and some general touching-up. I’ve dared anyone to lay hands on a liner till I get there. You’ve no idea what they get up to. The women are self-supporting, thank goodness. They soon pick it up.”
“Are there many?”
“Only two. A dusky maiden and a distracted heroine. The Creole is one of the secretaries at the factory. She’s made an intensive study of Dorothy Lamour and does it ever so sweetly, particularly in the places where she’s supposed to behave like a hellcat. And the younger of the schoolmistresses is the heroine.” He smiled to himself.
“Is she good?”
“Good as gold. The only thing is, one feels she’d make a better job of repelling Morgan’s dishonorable advances if she could bring herself to admit knowing what they mean. I’ve been on the point, once or twice, of suggesting she should go home and ask her mother to tell her. There are limits to a producer’s function, after all.”
Presently Julian opened the make-up box, and proceeded to check the contents. She knew him well enough, by now, not to doubt that he had done this already, before starting out. There were still six minutes or so to go. It felt like the prospect of an hour.
Four minutes. The fringes of the village began to appear. With the tail of her eye she saw him glance at her quickly, and then look straight ahead.
“I suppose you gathered, all this Morgan business was rather unpremeditated. I’m sorry about it. I’m afraid I rather let you in.”
Hilary lifted her foot on the accelerator. I ought to have known, she thought, he’d leave it till the last moment like this. She said, “Oh, I’m used to families. I belong to a large one.”
“I ought to have said something before you came. I never thought of anything cropping up. It’s hard to explain, really. Why she has this thing about my acting, I mean. It’s not that she’s narrow-minded about the stage, or anything. It’s just me. I think it must be just natural apprehension at the prospect of my making a fool of myself in front of a number of peopl
e. She’s frightfully un-exhibitionistic herself, and I suppose she extends it to me. That often happens, I believe.”
“Oh, but naturally. Stage fright on someone else’s behalf must be much worse than on one’s own. I suppose one would still feel that about someone belonging to one, even after they’d done pretty well for quite a time.”
“You mean Ouds? Well, you were up yourself, weren’t you? It doesn’t amount to so much to anyone out of touch with the place. That’s another thing I ought to have told you; I—really haven’t often mentioned it. A few lines in a paper easily get overlooked. It was a bit awkward about Oberon, because unfortunately it made a headline, which I hadn’t thought of. However, I was down by that time, and I’ve more or less stuck to producing since. It’s a pity to upset people, I think.”
“I believe,” said Hilary, “I ought to have turned left just now. However, we’ll be there in a few minutes. … Even allowing for families, you don’t strike one, somehow, as likely to be a source of anxiety in a village hall.”
“Well, I rather seem to let myself go to you. Perhaps it’s because you’re the only person who’s seen me, literally, with the lid off. Or something. But after I had, I ought to have warned you. Not that anyone could have coped better if they’d known.”
“Oh, I’ve had to do a certain amount of coping on my own account. You see, my mother made a great success of her domestic and family life, and she’d rather set her heart on my doing the same. She’s forgiven me now, but I don’t think she’s ever quite got over having a daughter who she feels has entirely wasted her vocation as a woman.”
“I should hate to seem rude to your people in any way. But if anyone else had felt that about you, I should have said they weren’t right in the head.”
The brakes squeaked.
“Oh, hullo,” said Julian. “Are we there? I wasn’t noticing.”
Hilary herself had only noticed in time to overshoot the hall by ten yards. She backed. Through the open door beyond the railings came sounds of purposeful confusion. Julian, opening the car, remarked, “Looks about time I came.”
“I won’t be long. If you’re not about I’ll leave it with someone at the door.”
“No, don’t do that, they can fetch me. Oh, just one thing. If you did happen to have a black eyeshade—for one eye, you know—? Sounds crude, but I think I could work it in.”
“Yes, I believe so.” At all events, she knew of a chemist who would sell it to her after hours.
“Sometimes I wonder what I’d do without you.”
There was no need after all to ask for him when she returned. He must have seen her through the open door, for she saw him almost at once, jumping down from the stage-level in the wings. He had changed into his costume, a traditional affair with an aisled coat, ruffles, and a cutlass belt; and must have miscalculated the size of Tom’s feet, for he was wearing tall thigh-boots which seemed not to incommode him. He had not made himself up yet, and had left his frilled shirt open, in readiness, at the neck.
Hilary filled in the next half-hour with a visit that would do as well today as tomorrow, and arrived three minutes to curtain time. The yeomanry had settled in, two benchfuls of small boys were scuffing joyfully at the back; the gentry were appearing; and a thin lady in pale blue with a fox stole was playing What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor! very archly on a piano just under the stage. Hilary recognized from afar the back of Mrs. Fleming’s hat, with an empty seat beside it. She had been so preoccupied that she had actually not considered, till now, what she was going to say when they met.
Fate was kind to her. They had no more than exchanged guarded smiles when the curtain was agitated from within, and yielded up a pink young man in a bow tie. Amid breathless silence, he embarked on a speech beginning, “Ladies and gentlemen, owing to unforeseen circumstances …” Its conclusion was greeted with social clapping from the front, interested clapping from the center, and a furor from the small boys’ benches at the back.
The play was a rip-roaring romance, vintage 1910, and struck Hilary as a sensible choice. It called for no subtleties of emotion or technique, offered plenty of parts in which the local accent could flourish unreproved, and allowed the whole cast to be excitingly involved. Before any of the principals were on, she had become aware that it differed from the amateur plays she had seen before in some particular which she could not at first define. Presently she realized that it was moving at almost a professional pace.
While she was making this mental note, the hero came on. He was a healthy and self-conscious young blond, very presentable except for a slight tendency to knock-knees which he underlined by refusing ever to balance his weight on both feet at once. His modest declaration to the captain’s daughter was interrupted by the sighting of the Jolly Roger just as the tender moment approached; action stations were called; the heroine cowered virginally; the stricken captain was borne in to entrust, with his last breath, the secret of the hidden bullion to her charge; and the dreaded name of Morgan was heard without.
Offstage, an evil and wholly unfamiliar voice snarled, “Stir, stir, you yellow scum. Break in this door.”
The door swung open. His hand on his cutlass hilt, Julian strode in. Hilary knew him by his clothes, which she had already seen.
She had been prepared for some degree of transformation; but had confidently, perhaps a little amusedly, looked forward to recognizing him through It. Instead she simply found herself receiving, along with the rest of the audience, a shock of fascinated repugnance. The face, on what might be called for convenience its good side, looked a vicious and hard-bitten forty-five. The other side was traversed, upward, by a great drawn scar which, disappearing under the eyeshade, hinted vividly at some hideous mutilation of the concealed eye. Below it, as if by a contraction of the scar tissue, the corner of the mouth was pulled into a permanent doglike grin.
From where she sat, a few yards away, the mechanics of all this should have been, and to some extent were, apparent; but it needed concentration to work them out. He must have counted on a near view, and been at considerable pains to meet it.
She was so set aback, and so absurdly shocked that it took her some time to settle into following the scene. She tried to find her way back as quickly as possible, feeling her too personal thoughts a kind of failure in co-operation; for she sensed, at once, that he was in need of all he could get. Perhaps, she thought, nobody else could tell, as she could instantly, that he was painfully tense. Superficially, against the fidgeting of the others, he conveyed an air of complete assurance merely by remaining almost motionless in an effective pose, and using gesture sparely and to the point. It isn’t fair, she thought, we ought to be shot, both of us, for coming at all.
The plot thickened; the funny man was chased by a whiskered pirate amid side-splitting appreciation; Morgan had a passage with the Dusky Maiden, displaying brutal indifference to her discarded charms.
The interval came soon after. Hilary, finding that refreshments were being sold in aid of whatever charity they were supporting, hastened, perhaps too eagerly, to leave her seat and find Mrs. Fleming coffee. She came back, having killed five minutes of interval time; and now some sort of comment could no longer be delayed.
“They’re all doing very well, aren’t they? And enjoying themselves too; country amateurs are generally so cowed and conscientious. Do you think it’s because there’s such a high proportion of men in the cast?”
“I believe this society is unusual in actually having more available.” Mrs. Fleming’s manner was, irreproachably, that of a perfect hostess; nothing might have happened at all. “So many come from the new aircraft works. No doubt, as it gets larger, it will become socially quite self-contained.” She seemed to approve this prospect. “I don’t know how far Julian influenced the choice of play. He has very little experience in directing women, of course.”
Lowering her voice discreetly, Hilary remarked. “I should say, considering his material, he was probably wise.”
“I don’t believe the level of talent was very high. But there must have been some disappointments, I’m afraid. When he gets carried away by an idea, he doesn’t always make as certain as he should that no one’s feelings are upset.”
“One can’t always, can one, if one means to get results?”
She had spoken unthinkingly, out of her experience and instinctive way of thought; but as soon as the words were out of her mouth, she saw in Mrs. Fleming’s face that she had confirmed a conclusion, ratified a judgment on herself. Something like this had been expected of her, and she had supplied it.
Having received no answer to the question, she went on, “He certainly seems to have pulled the cast well together.”
“He gets on well with most people.”
“And he’s giving a very capable and unselfish performance himself, don’t you think?” Something had sooner or later to be done with an omission which was becoming so oppressive; she got it over.
“Acting used to be quite a hobby of his, some years ago.”
The curtain went up again, and the play pursued its hearty and predictable course.
It was not till the last threads were being tied, that Hilary had time for her own conclusions. She remembered his lack of all but vicarious rehearsal; the quality of his support, of the play itself; the continual temptations to burlesque which both must have held out to anyone with a sophisticated technique. She remembered Caliban; before she met him, she had ceased to think of it as a rendering at all; it had become part of her permanent conception of the play. With a hesitancy akin to fear she thought, But he must really be good; not by these standards, by others that I don’t sufficiently understand. What shall I do? For she had ceased, by now, to question her own sense of responsibility present and to come.
The curtain was coming down. She clapped, like everyone else, with palm-scorching energy, feeling a little fidgeted as she did so by she scarcely knew what. As the curtain rose again on the assembled cast, she identified the source of her irritation with Mrs. Fleming, who in the midst of all this had been making furtive efforts to touch up her face. Hilary realized that she had been, if not weeping, at least so near to it that she distrusted the light. It was a discovery so unsettling, so destructive of all the adjustments she herself had been trying to make, that she scarcely noticed Julian being stamped and yelled for, and saw him appear in front of the curtain with vague surprise.