I shook my head.
‘I mean, I know she was out of work and all that, but . . . She must have had some sort of mental trouble. A breakdown. Terrible. She was a dear, sweet thing. Not without talent.’ There was a pause, then he said, ‘You know, Godders, I hate to say it, but young people today, they don’t seem to have the backbone. They give up too easily. I mean, we’ve all had our bad patches in this profession, God knows, but you need a bit of grit and spunk to stick to it. Don’t you agree?’ To my shame I nodded and Roddy gave me a great bear hug.
The next minute the lights had gone up on stage and I was striding into another world as Kent and uttering the first words of the play: ‘I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall.’
Roddy never mentioned Yolande again in my presence, but I believe there was a moment that night, at the end of the play, when perhaps he remembered her. It came in the final scene when Lear is on the ground, lamenting over the dead body of Cordelia, and I am in attendance, and he says the words:
‘A plague upon you, murderers, traitors all!
I might have saved her; now she’s gone for ever.’
At that moment he did something he’d never done before: he looked up at me. There were tears in his eyes, and they were not stage tears. I like to think they weren’t.
So we moved to our London venue, the Irving Theatre in The Strand, for a limited run of three months, and the critics fortunately decided that Roddy was a great Lear. All the same, after the exhilaration of the tour, when we were all discovering how good the show was, the West End run seemed to be a bit flat, and, of course, because in London most of the cast had their own homes to go to and their own lives to lead, some of the camaraderie in the company went too.
I didn’t particularly like the Irving. It’s a big, draughty old Victorian building, perhaps even a little sinister, and it had, of course, a theatre cat. They’re vital things, you know, because theatres get rats, and rats gnaw cables, and gnawed electric cables start fires, especially in theatres. The Irving cat was a black tom called Nimrod, not a very sociable beast, but, as befitted his name, a ‘mighty hunter before the Lord’ who kept the rats and mice down very effectively. But here’s a funny thing: about a week into our run Nimrod disappeared.
The theatre manager was very distressed and offered a reward for his discovery and return. There was even a bit in the papers about it. I wouldn’t have mentioned this, only it may have had a bearing on what happened next.
Fortunately, the disappearance of Nimrod did not result in a rodent invasion. In fact — and this was something that puzzled many of us — the odd half-eaten rat or mouse could still be found in odd corners of the theatre, if anything with more frequency than before Nimrod’s vanishing act. These grisly remains, which had been left around by Nimrod as tokens of his prowess, were now nearly always to be found either in the wings or in the corridor leading to Dressing Room Number 1: Roddy’s of course. In fact, Roddy came in one day for a matinée to find a headless rat carefully placed on the very threshold of Number 1. He made a terrific fuss about that, as he had every right to, of course, but I thought there was a touch of hysteria in his manner which was uncharacteristic. He didn’t usually play the prima donna.
A couple of days later Roddy happened to meet me back stage in the interval, and invited me to his dressing room for a whisky. The one he poured himself was unusually large. He’d never been a boozer, and certainly not during a show. He seemed to be under some sort of strain.
Having sat me down, he said, ‘Now, then, Godders, what are we going to do about this cat business?’ I looked blank. He said, ‘Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed this damned cat which keeps following me around the theatre?’
I said that I hadn’t seen any cat and anyway — didn’t he know? — Nimrod had disappeared. Roddy banged his glass impatiently down on the dressing table.
‘Yes! Yes! I know all about Nimrod. That dam’ theatre manager is obsessed with Nimrod. I didn’t mind Nimrod. He kept out of your way and did his job. This is a different cat altogether. It won’t leave me alone. It keeps coming up to me just as I’m going on stage, and purring, and doing that thing that cats do, you know, curling itself round your legs. It nearly tripped me up the other day just as I was going on for “Blow Winds!” It’s a blasted nuisance. And it keeps leaving these offerings for me in my dressing room. You know, bits of disembowelled rat and mouse. I trod on an intestine with my bare foot the other day as I was changing. Ugh! I can’t think how the bugger gets in. I always lock my dressing room when I go. I suppose it must be the cleaners. I’ve spoken to the manager about it but he hasn’t a clue. He’s so obsessed about Nimrod I don’t think he believes in this other cat.’
I asked what it looked like.
‘Funny sort of colour. I don’t know. Greyish, I think, but these sort of yellow eyes which look as if they light up in the dark. You know how some cats seem to have luminous eyes. It’s difficult to tell exactly what it looks like, because I haven’t seen it in full light. It usually turns up in the wings, just outside the glare of the stage lights. I wouldn’t mind only — I know this is a funny thing to say — it’s so damned fond of me. It’s obsessed. It’s like, you know, some creepy sort of stalker. Godders, you must have seen it.’
There was pleading in his voice, but I had to confess that I hadn’t. To reassure him I said I said I would keep ‘a weather eye’ open for it. He liked that: a nautical expression, you see, ‘weather eye’.
In the final scene that night an odd thing happened. Lear has come on with the dead body of Cordelia and we’re standing around. Roddy, was doing pretty well, but not on top form, I thought. He kept looking off stage. Then comes his final speech when he is lamenting over the dead Cordelia and he says:
‘Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,
And thou no breath at all?’
Except that this night he doesn’t quite say that, he says:
‘Why should a dog, a horse, a cat have life,
And thou no breath at all?’
And his eyes are fixed on something off stage right, in the wings. Well, I couldn’t resist looking there myself. I was half dazzled by the stage lights, so I can’t be sure, but do you know for a second or two, somewhere in the gloom, I thought I did catch sight of two yellow cat’s eyes staring at the action on stage. Well, I can’t be sure, because I had to get back to my job. I still had lines to say, but when I’d said my last ones — you remember——
‘I have a journey, sir, shortly to go;
My master calls me, I must not say no.’
—I look back into the wings, and there’s nothing there. The eyes have gone.
Next day was a matinée day and before the first house Roddy summoned me to his dressing room. He seemed very excited.
He said: ‘I think I’ve got the little bugger taped. You see this?’ He held up a transparent plastic phial, the kind you pee into for doctors. It had about a centimetre of white powder in it. ‘Know what that is?’ He didn’t wait for my answer. ‘Strychnine. Don’t ask me how I got it. Had to pull a few strings. One of the few advantages of being Sir Roderick is that you can occasionally pull a string or two. I’m going to put it in some milk and put the milk in a saucer in my dressing room, and when that dam’ cat comes it is going to drink that milk. All cats like milk, don’t they?’
I said I was no expert, but I understood that cats liked milk.
He said: ‘Right! That dam’ cat’s going to die,and all our troubles are over!’
I couldn’t help feeling that Roddy had got things rather out of proportion, but he seemed exhilarated, and that afternoon a slightly sparse audience got the performance of a lifetime. By the end of it Roddy was clearly exhausted, which worried me, but something was keeping him alight. He seemed — what’s the word I’m looking for? — febrile, that’s it, and it worried me.
That was why I decided to look in on him in his dressing room just before the half-hour call for the ev
ening show. I knocked on the door, which was slightly ajar, but got no reply, so I looked in.
Roddy had got out of his last act costume but not his make-up. He was lying on the floor of his dressing room in a towelling bath robe, arms outstretched. He didn’t look to me as if he was breathing. Beside him on the floor was a bowl half full of milk. At the corners of his open mouth were little droplets of liquid which looked to me like milk.
But that was not the worst of it. Crouched on his chest was the biggest damned cat I’ve ever seen in my life. Its fur was shaggy and grey — it looked like a great ball of dirty smoke — and its angry eyes were a bright sulphur yellow. Slowly it arched its back and gave me a low, stertorous hiss like the sudden escape of steam from an engine under pressure.
You don’t believe me? Well, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
I ran to get the company stagemanager, and when we returned to Number One dressing room, Roddy was still there on the floor, but the cat had gone. We phoned an ambulance and they carted him off to hospital, but it wasn’t any good. He was dead as mutton: heart failure apparently. I said nothing about the strychnine business because I thought it would only muddy the waters, and it probably wasn’t relevant.
That night, for the first and last time in my life, I went on for Roddy as King Lear. Did I tell you I was his understudy? Made a pretty good fist of it, too, though I says it as shouldn’t. Standing ovation and all that.
‘Godders,’ Roddy used to say to me, ‘you’re a good actor. Devilish good, but you haven’t enough personality to worry a leading man.’ Well, he should have seen me that night! What? Another Bell’s? Oh, all right, just this once, since you’re twisting my arm.
The Old Silence
I VISITED THE GRAVE of Norman Fand today, just to make sure he is still dead. Someone — I expect it was Carl — has put some yellowish pink roses in a cheap glass tumbler on the barren rectangle of green chippings in front of the headstone. I am not vindictive, I am not, so I left the flowers alone. I did not smash the glass into fragments and grind the roses under my heel until they looked like a trail of vomit. And because I didn’t, I felt like a coward as I walked away. I felt he had won.
A little over a year ago my aunt, a widow of seventy-seven and a modestly successful writer of crime novels, became interested in Spiritualism. For that there were a number of reasons, the chief of them being that Norman Fand had come to live three doors down from her on the Westwood Estate. Situated on Highgate Hill, the Estate has the leafy, discreet air of one of the more expensive outer London suburbs. The houses, built in the early twenties, are decorous with bow windows and half timbered fronts: Mock Tudor perhaps, but the mockery is very gentle. Her house and Norman Fand’s looked almost identical from the outside.
Norman Fand was a famous medium; famous, that is, in the little world of Spiritualism which, like croquet, or stamp collecting, or Imperial Roman epigraphy, has its private pantheon unknown to the general public. He was that rare creature in Spiritualist circles, the ‘direct voice’ medium: that is, he purported not merely to transmit messages from the dead but to reproduce their actual speech by means of an ectoplasmic voice box. This apparently marked him out as an aristocrat in their country of shadows. Occasionally his reputation would penetrate the general consciousness through an article in one of the Sunday papers, which, I believe, is how Aunt Dora discovered that she had a celebrated neighbour. In any case she had an interest, both professionally and personally, in the business of death. Her marriage to a violinist had been childless and relatively short-lived but by all accounts, chiefly hers, exceptionally happy; her husband Anton having died of cancer in his early fifties. Twenty-five years later she still mourned and missed him; and over that period she had given much thought to the possibilities of meeting him again, either in the next life or in this. The silver-framed photograph of Anton on the mantelpiece, taken in his youth, staring dreamily out of a soft, sepia mist, always looked to me as if it came from the next world; yet it was only the routine idealisation of a fashionable 1930’s photographer.
Once or twice a year I would meet Aunt Dora at the top of Highgate Hill and walk with her down to the part of Highgate Cemetery which is open only to plot owners. It was overgrown, and in summer it was like a fairy wood, with waist-high meadowsweet and hosts of buttercups starring the lush grass between the stone monuments. No sounds of traffic penetrated; we heard only the ringing calls of birds that flitted from tomb to tomb and made their nests in the cracks of long-neglected mausolea. Aunt Dora would carry a bunch of roses, and always we had trouble finding Anton’s grave. She liked the fact that it was overgrown, and when she laid her roses tenderly upon it she did the minimum amount of clearing, only enough to see the lettering: just a name and a date, that was all.
Once, not long ago, when we were walking back from the grave, she said to me, ‘Perhaps it is best as it is. He would have hated to grow old and lose his looks, bless his darling, ordinarily masculine-vain heart. Even when he was dying he got very upset about the amount of hair he was losing.’
‘I didn’t think musicians worried about their appearance.’
‘Don’t you believe it! I do still miss him, though, dreadfully. I remember after he died, I couldn’t think for myself at all. You can’t. Everything stops making sense. Instead two lines from a rather ridiculous song, one of those Indian Love Lyrics, kept running through my mind, over and over again:
‘I would have rather felt you round my throat,
Crushing out life, than waving me farewell!’
‘Absurd, isn’t it? I am not, as I hope you know, Geoffrey, prone to melodrama, but that’s how I felt at the time. In a way, I still do. The wound doesn’t heal, you see; you just learn how to live with it.’
What had held her back from consulting a medium before this time was a certain steely common sense, which was often at war with the more imaginative and emotional side of her nature. On this occasion, the presence of a medium on her doorstep seemed too good an opportunity to miss, especially as it had occurred to her that Mr Fand and his world might provide intriguing source material for one of her stories. Among her papers I have discovered extensive notes for a crime novel called The Dead Have Voices.
Aunt Dora used to have what she called an ‘At Home’ on the first Saturday of every month. It began with tea at four and ended with sherry and wine between six and eight. Those regularly attending included relatives and friends, the odd fan of her work, and an assortment of people whom Dora called ‘my lame dogs’. She took pity on and tried to help a number of people, but more, I think out of a sense of duty than sentiment. In private she could be quite scathing about them. I was expected to attend her At Homes if I was not otherwise engaged, but if she specially wanted me to be there she would ring me up.
On the first Friday in June last year she rang to ask if I were coming to her the following day. ‘I want you to meet someone who’ll interest you, I think,’ she said. It was a familiar phrase, one I had come to dread, because it usually meant a woman whom Aunt Dora considered might be suitable for me to marry. My Aunt was a passionate advocate for the state of marriage, though her brief ecstatic experience of it, which she had never attempted to repeat, hardly qualified her as an expert on the subject. Where Aunt Dora found these candidates for my hand I never discovered, but there seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of them, all perfectly nice, often divorced with a child or two, but usually very nervous, for some reason, especially when I explained to them that I lecture in Philosophy at University College, London and have written a book entitled Towards a Definition of Meaning. I am forty-five and do not intend to marry.
I have been told by a number of my acquaintances that I have no ‘intuition’. I don’t quite know what this means, which, I suppose, indicates that they may be right. Certainly I don’t, as a rule, take instant likings or dislikings to people in the way that others do. The idea of love at first sight seems to me quite bizarre; but I did once come close to hatred at fi
rst sight. It was that afternoon when I first met Norman Fand.
Even for this I can furnish a fairly rational explanation. When I arrived at the house shortly after six Dora’s door was opened to me by Peggy Wentworth, an elderly woman, one of my aunt’s small coterie of fans. She always treated me with deference, which I knew had nothing to do with my own achievements, and everything to do with the fact that I was Aunt Dora’s closest living relative. She was large, grey haired, and amiable, her print dress had on it a pattern of purple petunias as big as cabbages, and I am afraid she sickened me.
‘We are all in the back room,’ she said. ‘You’ve come just in time for the sherry.’ She winked at me roguishly, as if to imply that I had deliberately avoided the tea part of my Aunt’s At Home. I should explain that Aunt Dora had her tea party in her front parlour from four to six, at which time the company moved to the back drawing room for sherry and wine. It was one of those stylish little arrangements of hers which lent distinction and grace to everything she did.
I resented Peggy Wentworth’s implication, and still more her presumption of familiarity. Yes, I know I am a snob: you will have to accept that about me. I suppose this put me in a bad frame of mind for my first meeting with Norman Fand as I followed Peggy into the back drawing room. It was a fine summer evening, and the drawing room’s French windows were open to the garden beyond.
A stocky, stout, shortish man in his sixties, wearing a well-tailored, pale grey double-breasted suit was standing in front of the fireplace. He had so placed himself that he was inevitably the focus of attention to the dozen or so people present. Anyone who didn’t know the situation would have assumed that it was he, and not my Aunt Dora, who was the host. She was sitting to one side of the fireplace, staring up at him attentively.
MASQUES OF SATAN Page 18