Freddie’s received a generous allocation of King John tickets for the right hand side of the stalls. The agencies, gambling on Voysey’s dedication, the name of William Beardless, and rumours of kinky sets and costumes, had taken the whole left hand side of the auditorium. Business was not bad at all.
Freddie herself did not go to the first night; she had not been out in the evening since the gala performance of Sleeping Beauty when Covent Garden was reopened after the war. On that occasion, it was remembered, she had looked round at the regal expanse of new Cecil Beaton crimson-striped wallpaper and asked whether there wasn’t a roll or two of it left over. Since then she had attended only matinées and previews. Latterly she had hinted that she might consider going out at night again, but the occasion had not been specified or even hinted at.
Hannah, who had been looking forward to the first night so much, did not go to it either. She had most firmly intended that Pierce should come with her, to show that whatever had passed between them must find its own level, and in no way cause any embarrassment from day to day. It was up to her, surely, to manage that, and she had the satisfaction of feeling sensible and wished she had someone to talk to about it if only to reassure her as to how sensible she was. Her mother, who still rang up twice a week, wouldn’t do for that at all; with the unwavering perversity of mothers, Mrs Graves remembered Pierce’s name out of all the many that had been mentioned to her, asking whether Hannah was having plenty of good times and cultural opportunities and plenty of young men to take her out beyond that Carroll fellow who was teaching with her; and then, for some reason, Hannah found herself defending Pierce, even to the point of tears. – ‘Who did you say his people were?’ – her mother had asked sharply.
Hannah owed it to herself to show that this kind of thing couldn’t affect her, by going to the first night quite calmly and casually with Pierce. They had to see each other every day of the week, after all, and might have to do so for years. Boney Lewis need not be mentioned between them, and indeed, since that rainy evening outside the theatre, he hadn’t been. Hannah had sent him a greetings telegram, like those she had seen in the dressing rooms, and the telegram would be the beginning and end of it. All that remained was to watch his performance which would be a little more interesting, perhaps, because she had actually met him, and then later on to discuss it over a cup of coffee with Pierce. The only drawback was, that if Hannah didn’t go with her, the Bluebell might feel neglected. That was a real possibility. A fear that she had in fact been counted upon seized her when Miss Blewett showed her a mauve lace bridge coatee, trimmed with silver picot.
‘The tarnishing is scarcely noticeable by artificial light,’ she said. ‘That’s a sign of quality. It was real metal lace.’
‘When are you going to wear it?’
‘Oh, to King John, to the first night.’ She turned the garment this way and that. ‘I’ve asked Pierce to escort me.’
Hannah was silent.
‘Such a sad look in his eyes, dear, but you mustn’t for a moment feel that I’m reproaching you, a young girl can’t help her power over men. I’ve never had a son, of course, but if I had I always thought it would have been so nice to go to the theatre with him and he’d just put his hand under my elbow quite lightly and steer me towards the right gangway.’
Hannah hoped that when the time came Pierce would think of doing this. No one could have the heart to wish anything less for Bluebell. And she herself, of course, was quite free to go with them if she wanted to. She had only to suggest it – perhaps she was intended to – but she didn’t. With an honesty which seemed to her less helpful than it used to be, she admitted to herself that she felt put out. The old parish priest at home (not the one they had now) would have called it a bit of a gunk. We’ve been walking out now for twelve years, Paddy Casey, and people are saying that we’ll soon be getting married. – Are they saying that, Maggie? – They are, Paddy. – Well then Maggie, they’ve got a terrible gunk coming. The harmless cruel story from the kindly priest. And Pierce too, drawing quietly into himself in total disappointment, he had had a bit of a gunk. But for that very reason, surely, she was justified in feeling put out. She had meant well, and to be spared carrying out our good intentions is a direct slight from Providence itself. She told herself that she was standing back to allow Miss Blewett to enjoy the outing. But that too turned out to be an illusion when the pair of them asked Jonathan Kemp whether he wouldn’t like to come along with them.
Jonathan was free because he was not at the moment Mattie’s understudy but covering for the understudy, a boy of seventeen, very much miscast, and due to be returned as soon as possible to the ranks of executioners, lords, servants and sheriff’s attendants. Ed hoped to have Jonathan in the part before Christmas and had told him in passing to try and see the show from the front of the house when he could. What could be better, then, than the arrangements they had made, and what could be more suitable than the mauve coatee, although it was rather too formal for Tito’s, where they were all going to have a little something before the show? And Freddie called out from within that if Hannah was going to be on her own that evening, perhaps she would spare the time to come back after work and sit a little with a poor old woman who would be glad of her company.
On a first night the Nonesuch divided itself, like every other theatre, into two parts, as though prepared to side with either. Behind the orchestra pit the illusion prepared itself with the desperation, a noble one after all, of a handful of human beings about to risk their professional future. The front part of the old house, on the other hand, creaked into cynical relaxation as the first nighters rustled and coughed through the twelve entrances, only half ready to believe that it had been worth while getting there by 7.30. By some law which defied the notion of gravity, the theatre filled from the top downwards. First the gallery, with its terribly steep stairs, then the upper circle, and in the front row of the upper circle the people craned forward, trying to get a glimpse, as the stalls filled up far below them, of the unrecognisable well-known.
Miss Blewett, Jonathan and Carroll attracted some attention. They hadn’t either the assurance, or the wish to appear to avoid notice, which would have marked them as celebrities, still it was possible that the queer threesome were somebodies of a kind and that one should have known their names. The little boy, short though he was, had managed to put his hand protectively under the elbow of the white-haired woman in mauve, steering her towards her seat. Behind them, the youngish-oldish man in a blue suit couldn’t really be anyone in his own right, but was likely to be her son, consequently the little boy’s father. There seemed to be some kind of affinity between them. If you looked carefully, they had the same roundish shape of head.
‘What time do we go up?’ Boney was enquiring thickly backstage. They were now fifteen minutes behind time. In these final moments Ed Voysey had discovered that the lights were reflecting too brightly from the crowns in the court scenes and had gone round and with his own hands rubbed over all the jewellery with soap. He appeared completely knackered. His voice, through the dressing-room loudspeakers, was hardly above a whisper. ‘I’ve no more to give you. Go out and throw it to them. Go out and stuff it down their throats.’
The auditorium was still on the move with long gusts of restlessness. But with the opening music the two opposing sides of the theatre gave up their independence and rejoined each other, waiting together, in a momentary truce.
Ed, and indeed the whole company, had relied on a strong immediate reaction to his opening set. Elgar faded to the music of a brass band thumping from a distant lawn, and Shakespeare’s court appeared as a lavish billiard room at Sandringham, where King John, perhaps rather implausibly, was receiving the envoys of France. The great chandeliers were lowered, and royal footmen, narrowly missing each other as in a ritual dance, circulated with trays of brandy and soda.
Ed was listening for the immediate and irrepressible gasp and murmur from the house which is like the darkness talk
ing to itself. He caught, alas, only the faintest snatch of it. Most of the audience, faced with an unfamiliar play, were bent over their programmes. They could have read them more easily earlier on, but chose to do so now. They accepted the presence on the stage of the Lords Salisbury and Pembroke, because the play was by Shakespeare and that was what Shakespeare was like. But they did not expect to be asked to distinguish between one lord and another, unless there was a war or a quarrel, and it was this that was causing them anxiety. Pembroke, look to it; farewell, Chatillon! cried King John. William Beardless paced this admirably, pausing in the middle of the line and selecting a cigar from a silver box offered by a footman. The heads of the audience turned to one another: Good, that must be Pembroke, then, and the one going out must be Chatillon.
The deputy stage manager leaned against the prop table, his head bowed low. ‘The Sandringham set, the footlights … they aren’t giving a fuck … they simply aren’t looking at them … it simply isn’t good enough, not good enough for them to look at …’ In going on like this he was giving an imitation, as far as he knew how to, of Ed. Those who create illusion must live by illusion. But Ed himself, now that his play had actually begun, was transformed. Pale, determined, without misgivings or reproach he prepared to go up to the private bar, at the end of the short first act, to meet the Press.
The Press (in the sixties the notices appeared in the newspapers the following day) were agreed that the play came completely to life only in Act 4, with the prison scene. During this scene something totally unexpected had taken place. It had nothing to do with little Prince Arthur, who looked altogether too cheerful and confident. But at the point where Hubert shows the child the royal warrant authorising his torture –
Read here, young Arthur.
I must be brief, lest resolution drop
Out at mine eyes in tender womanish tears.
Can you not read it? Is it not fair writ? …
– at this point, then, Boney Lewis, that easy-going, unambitious, acceptable character player, achieved the moment of electrifying contact with the audience in front of him which may only once or twice in a lifetime be the actor’s reward. Out of seventeen hundred spectators, not one stirred. The quality of the attention, even the texture of the silence, changed. The theatre had bound its spell upon them.
The fact of the matter was that when Boney snatched up and unrolled the warrant, with its dangling seal, the words that confronted him were: Just a little hint on Cutting Down. Today, have your first drink ten minutes later; tomorrow, twenty minutes later, and so on. Every day will be a little easier. The critics, with justice, praised the struggle for self-control which he so strongly and yet delicately expressed. ‘As Lewis first produces and later tears up the crucial document which orders the blinding of an innocent child totally at his mercy, the dialogue between unthinking political obedience and human decency springs to dramatic life. What Hubert decides at that moment, the Third World may have to decide tomorrow.’
Mattie, who had intended to steal every scene in which he appeared, and felt, indeed, that this was his right, was considerably thrown out by Boney’s success. He hadn’t expected this outcome of his joke with the document; chipper though he was, he was too young to know how to recover himself in time for his next appearance, Enter Arthur on the walls. The Jump, which he had fancied less and less as rehearsals went on, was a tame affair. Safe on his mattress, Prince Arthur expired with evident relief. To cover this, Ed Voysey sent the ever-useful Lords Pembroke and Salisbury on stage to find the body somewhat earlier than their cue.
‘A little disappointing,’ murmured Miss Blewett. ‘Mind you, that’s not our Mattie’s fault. It’s entirely the director’s responsibility, to make it tell. What did you think of it, Jonathan dear?’
‘It was terrific,’ Jonathan replied, unwilling to betray his friend to adults. ‘Mattie was fabulous.’
But in any case it would have been hard for him to explain what he felt about the play, since although he had sat through it with rigid small-boy’s attention he had barely registered the Prince Arthur passages on stage, because clearly superimposed on them in his mind, word by word and keeping pace with the performance itself, were the scenes as he knew they ought to be. Far from imagining himself as a centre of attention or as taking part in any way, he sat in passive detachment as this second play took its course, only coinciding with the real one when Mr Lewis tore up the king’s warrant. At Must you with hot irons burn out both mine eyes? he saw Mattie spreading his arms wide, rather as if he was just about to sing, but he also observed a different Prince Arthur, pressing his hands into his eyes to find out what it felt like to be blind.
‘What kind of ice-cream would you like, Jonathan?’ Carroll asked.
‘They only have Dairy Dips at the Nonesuch,’ Jonathan replied. Miss Blewett confirmed this. Carroll felt disappointed. Conscious of his shortcomings as a playgoer, he had hoped to make up for them by being a generous host.
‘But do you like Dairy Dips?’
‘They’re fabulous.’
But as soon as politeness allowed Jonathan disappeared backstage. Once there, a creature in his natural habitat, he made his way lightly and quickly to the dressing-room which Mattie shared (when there was absolutely no help for it) with seven others. Mattie, who had insisted that Jonathan should come, was lolling, but not relaxed, in his pretty pink and white make-up.
‘We’re going to take three calls at least. I can’t make up my mind whether to take my call in character or not. If I’m still in character I’ll have to go on looking pathetic, I won’t be able to smile at them, will I …’
‘What did they tell you to do?’
But Mattie’s worry lay deeper. ‘William said I was very good … how was I, anyway?’
But as though to prevent any possible answer, he jumped up. He would rather have had praise from Jonathan than anyone else on earth, but now felt the necessity to tease and harass him and depreciate him to the half-listening members of the cast who hurried in and out, and finally to hold him down and pretend to put out his eyes with a half-used stick of Boots greasepaint.
In the meantime Miss Blewett was telling Carroll that they mustn’t waste the interval but must stretch their legs a little and go for a stroll to see who was there. Did she know anyone who was likely to be there, Carroll asked her, but it seemed that was not the point and that she was a little like his sisters who went to the shops not to buy anything in particular but simply to have a look at the things and turn them over. In the ludicrously crowded bar it appeared that life itself, for the spectators, depended on passing a number of drinks over the heads of the forward ranks to those in a dangerous state of thirst in the rear. Carroll, mildly persistent, was successful here against all expectations, returning quite soon with a glass of Wee Robin for Miss Blewett. – I don’t know much about this drink, I hope it’s what you wanted – he said – I believe port is one of the constituents.
‘Don’t tell me!’ Miss Blewett cried. ‘So often it’s best to leave things a mystery.’
Fortunately it turned out not to be true that she knew no one there. From her years with Freddie and the variety of ways in which she had earned her living since the age of fourteen she had made so many acquaintances that it was a safe bet, almost anywhere, for her to wave and sparkle, as she did now, and to raise her Wee Robin to shoulder height, saluting humanity in general. Carroll, of course, had no opportunity to follow her example. He felt out of place, and would have been glad to hear Old Ernie barking. But for him, all time spent away from Hannah was a kind of limbo, into which the hours dropped without distinction.
Hannah had told Freddie that she wouldn’t be able to come back after work and sit with her. Freddie in return assured her that there had been a little misunderstanding. ‘It was simply that I was afraid that you mightn’t want to be on your own, dear.’
Hannah experienced a strong impulse to sit on the floor or some low piece of furniture and to confide in Freddie and ackn
owledge her power, and trust her absolutely. These impulses only come over women at certain times in the day and tea-time is one of them. But she knew that if she gave into it she would value herself less, and so, too, would Freddie.
She went back by herself to her room, put all the drawers in order, dusted, did the ironing, sewed back the loop in the neck of her dressing gown, oiled the hinges of the still unsatisfactory door, made a list of the letters she ought to write, threw away a number of things and then decided after all to keep one or two of them because they were perfectly good, and then washed her hair, holding her head cautiously under the taps of the little sink, and afterwards brushing it dry in front of the modest electric fire. She watched all the length of her hair roll away from the brush in a warm shining cloud which she confined in a rubber band to give it a curl. The nuns were most insistent that if you washed your hair too often it went grey much earlier; her mother, for instance, had gone grey at thirty. And, as they often did, the mysterious certainties with which one generation keeps the next in check came back to her, soothing now, because they had lost their power. If you hit your glass with a fork a sailor gets drowned somewhere. If you drop the fork it loses an ounce of silver. Don’t make faces like that or the milk will turn. Don’t carry on like that, you’re only play-acting.
She was in bed and nearly asleep or perhaps had been asleep when Boney arrived. He invaded the tidied room from the unpeaceful outside world, impelled by the recoil of spent emotions and lavished drink and deep fatigue. She hadn’t remembered to lock the door while she was fixing it and here he was, staggering and demanding, a huge alien.
‘You never came round!’
‘I wasn’t at the theatre at all tonight,’ Hannah said.
That was beyond him. ‘We opened tonight!’
At Freddie's Page 13