The Museum at the End of the World
Page 25
Anna beckoned him closer.
“You do that awfully well,” she said.
“What?”
“That ‘mate’ stuff.”
“It is,” he said, “but one of my many accomplishments.”
A girl far too young to be in the place, twelve or so, thought Forde, called out to her father, who was threading his way towards the bar, “No, no! Ginger Ale!”
A snarling eructation behind him.
Forde glanced round. Two old men staring in the direction of the ginger-ale girl, who was standing, waving, still trying to get her father’s attention.
He turned back to Anna.
One of their voices said
If it’s old enough to bleed…
The other voice said
… it’s old enough to slaughter.
Forde risked another glance. They were nodding sagely. Grizzled dirt-road worthies. They looked like extras in a movie staged in the Middle Ages.
She beckoned him closer again, against the noise.
“That stigmata joke,” she said, “and that sense of—”
She shrugged.
”Well, reverence, if you will. Well, I’ll tell you a naked thing, Forde. I went to England in the fall of 1948, so really it was 1949 before I was settling into that world. And all the actors I met, at some point or another, in conversations it would come up, at a party, green rooms, in the pub, what Olivier had done in 1946 at the New Theatre with Oedipus Rex.”
“What was that?” said Forde. “What did he do?”
“Those few seconds,” she said, “that was what everyone was still talking about. Well,” she said, “all through the play, the hints, the suggestions, the fears about his birth and paternity, all nebulous, swirling”—her hands patterning this—“but with the arrival of the Messenger—he brings the testimony of the Shepherd who saved the infant Oedipus—it all coalesces then into certainty. His sins are beyond forgiveness. His realization … you remember that speech?”
“Well,” said Forde, “it’s been some years…”
“He rushes offstage into the Palace to find that his wife who is his mother—Jocasta?”
“Right,” said Forde, “OK, yes.”
“You do know the Theban Plays?”
“In …” said Forde, “outline.”
“Oedipus realizes that he has killed his father and fathered children on his mother. He blinds himself in expiation—what he’s meaning in the speech, you see, when he says,
O light—now let me look my last on you!
Forde nodded, held helpless by her intensity.
“What they were talking about was what Olivier did at the end of the speech.”
Hands clenched into fists, she stared into the tabletop, gathering herself.
Then raised her head.
O god—
all comes true, all burst to light!
O light—now let me look my last on you!
I stand revealed at last—
cursed in my birth, cursed in marriage,
cursed in the lives I cut down with these hands!
“It was then, before he rushes from the stage to find Jocasta hanging, it was then at the end of the speech, that Olivier gave this vast cry, this cry of horror at himself, it was torn from him, ripped out of his anguish, and it filled the theatre with obliterating horror. The audiences were smashed down by the sound of it and then swept up and carried on the great wave of it.”
Forde stared at her.
Anna stared at him.
He could feel his heart beating.
He fell back against his chair, nodding assent to what she was talking about.
The ceiling was wavering.
“Yes,” he said.
Through the noise, bottles clinking on glasses, guffaws, chairs scraping, the low hubbub, Forde heard the girl’s voice cutting through.
The tank-top girl.
The titty-girl.
She had just said—could she have just said?—he sat staring into his snifter—she had just said,
I don’t do anal on a first date
“Think of it this way,” said Anna. “It’s not ephemeral. Don’t you see? It’s preserved in a chain, an unbroken chain from actor to actor; a juvenile, if they grow into major roles, they use what they saw and heard from Alec Clunes, Scofield, fill in the blanks—” waving her hand to gallop over details. “Great performances are held in the common memory, passed on to the young, changing, but always preserving something, the essence of past performances, the inheritance.
“The shape,” said Forde, “preserving the shape.”
“Yes,” said Anna, “exactly. The emotional shape. Not imitation—”
“No,” said Forde, nodding, “exactly, exactly.”
They smiled at each other.
“And theatres themselves,” said Anna. “I mean, think of a cathedral. All those centuries of prayer soaked into the stone. Theatres are like that. If you’re quiet and listen, the voice are there, in layers.
Gielgud, Wolfit, Martita Hunt, Sybil Thorndike, Alex Clunes, Jessica Tandy, Ralph Richardson—just their very names make me think of the disciples—‘and they began to speak with other tongues as the spirit gave them utterance’—Peggy Ashcroft, Miles Malleson, Irene Worth, Ustinov, Burton, Scofield… people to whom…”
Her voice wobbled, then regained control, strengthened.
“… people to whom utterance had been given.”
She paused.
“Sometimes,” she said, “when everyone had left and before Mr. George started the clean-up, I’d look out over the red plush, the little gilt-plaster cherubs blowing their herald trumpets on the box fronts, the swags, the cornucopias, the floral garden panels on the side walls and I felt, well, that this was where everything in my life had been leading me. I felt cradled in the voices. And my voice, if I spoke, the resonance, the bounce…”
Her voice beginning to break again.
”Anna,” said Forde. “Don’t. Please, don’t.”
He reached for her hand.
She gulped a noisy breath.
“I could—”
The tears welled.
“That smell…” she said.
Wiped under her eyes with the knuckle of her thumb.
Sniffed a wet sniff.
“Even though the stage lights were off, as I stood there I could feel the heat of them still coming off the stage. What they say about the theatre, the smell of the greasepaint. That’s not it at all. As I stood there in the stillness and silence, the warmth rising from the boards, the smell…”
She fell silent for long moments.
Forde, held and anxious, stared into her face.
“… the smell I was breathing, the theatre smell...”
She brought both fists up to her mouth.
“that smell—”
She lifted her face to him and stared at him, yet not at him.
“Sweat,” she said, “and hot dust.”
Silence.
She dragged her sleeve across her eyes.
His shoulders slumped, softening, surprising him.
“Oh, God!” she said. “I’m disgusting. I am so sorry. It must be the brandy.”
Sniffy, she said, “That President! Taking advantage of an old widder-woman. Have you got any Kleenex?”
She rooted in her purse.
“I thought I had a little cellophane packet.”
What Americans call a ‘clutch,’ Forde thought.
In irritation, she dumped all the contents out onto the table.
“What’s the expression? ‘A watery smile,’ ‘smiling bravely through the tears’?”
“I’ll tell you something naked, Anna.”
She looked at him and did try to smile.
&nb
sp; “I stand on that stage every day, too,” he said, “listening to the voices.”
He looked down at house keys, a propelling pencil, Polo mints, a small screwdriver, an emery board, a compact, a tube of Preparation-H, car keys, a glasses case, a change purse… She picked, picked at the cellophane wrapper.
Caught the direction of his glance.
“No, no, dear boy! Eyes. It’s for my eyes. Tightens the skin beneath, the droop of flesh.”
She picked up the tube—“Mother’s—” wagged it—“Mother’s little helper.”
She patted his hand.
“Good heavens!” said Forde.
“Shrinks the capacious bags beneath.”
She wiped and trumpeted with successive Kleenex.
“These latter days,” she said, “I worry less.”
“Worry about what?”
“When younger,” she said, “at an age when liaisons were yet a possibility…”
“Anna!” scolded Forde. “Were I not a married man…”
“Oh, how gallant! How gallant!”
He took her hands in his across the table and, one after the other, kissed them.
“Stop it, Forde, you fool!”
He turned her hands over and kissed her palms extravagantly.
“When younger,” she said, considering the tube, “I used to worry, irrationally, utterly irrationally, that it made my face smell like an arse.”
*
As Forde made his way back from the bar with the balloons of brandy, the room began to feel different, the shape and density changing, men pushing back from tables, drifting together, drifting into a small mass near the metal strip set into the floor, the strip that marked the regulation distance from the board. The bartender switched on the spotlight, which was trained on the board and the floods, which created a corridor of light towards it.
Forde actually preferred “barkeep” to “bartender” but couldn’t use it because it was dedicated, in his mind, to saloons in Westerns or joints in the Bowery. Oh, to rap on a bar with a silver dollar, snarl at the barkeep, grab the whiskey bottle, and pull the cork out with one’s teeth.
The room lights dimmed.
Though his bottle would contain Scotland’s whisky, not ‘whiskey’ with an ‘e’. Bourbon, he held, was not merely nasty but viciously dangerous, an abomination among drinks. He remembered awaking one morning in what might have been a hotel. It was the morning following a literary bunfest, an event called Southern Writing South, sponsored by the Jim Beam Company in a vast Nashville multi-level bookstore. After he had brushed his teeth and vomited, he slowly, slowly dressed to discover, in his jacket pocket, a faux-parchment document commissioning him Colonel in a Tennessee militia.
At the empty table next to the metal strip, men were opening plastic cases and lifting out their darts, some screwing together the weighted bodies and the long necks, smoothing and soothing, with a fingertip, flights made of feathers, others setting into slots flights of stiff card.
Peering into her compact’s mirror, Anna said, “I look like the wreck of the Hesperus.”
“This’ll set you to rights,” said Forde.
It was the schooner Hesperus,
That sailed the wintry sea;
chanted Anna
And the skipper had taken his little daughter,
To bear him company.
“Childe?” said Forde. “Or Bliss?”
“Longfellow.”
She peered again into the mirror.
“We had to learn it in grade school.”
Snapped the compact shut.
“Talk about that sailed the wintry sea,” said Anna.
“To Bitumen!” said Forde.
“Asphalt!” said Anna.
The university team captain, the Fair-Isle-pullover engineer-man, strands of blond hair over a rosy pate, was looking about him over heads. Progressing towards him, almost as if accidentally, the Legion captain, a small man in grey flannels and a blue blazer with an RCAF badge in wirework on the breast pocket. His glasses had one clear and one opaque yellow lens.
Forde held his snifter at his lower lip, breathing in and out at its mouth.
Stock was regrettably sweet.
The ceiling quivered.
He was feeling pleasantly fuddled.
In the brightly lit arena, beer was raised in greeting and salutation. Beer was quaffed. Lips sucked in the thin, foam heads. Shoulders were clapped. Jesting insults exchanged. It was like watching an enactment, a rather inept mime, a playlet mounted by rude mechanicals. Though the week before he himself had been playing. Playing a part. But even so, essentially, in essence, there was something suggestive of the rustic. Arboreal. Brunswickian, Even Hardyesque, somehow. Mayor of Casterbridge-ish. “Riding the Skimmington,” a skimmity ride.
Exactly! He felt ridiculously pleased to have got that sorted out.
A space cleared about them and Fair Isle called to Yellow Lens.
“Middle for diddle?”
“They’re going to play 301,” said Forde. “Do you know—”
“I have sat in enough pubs,” said Anna, “over the last forty years or so—”
Thunk
Fair Isle managed a single 20.
Yellow Lens an outer bull.
Fair Isle performed a mock-bow and the Legion’s first player stepped up to the mark.
Thunk Thunk
Forde drifted off again.
“That man,” said Anna, “that one in the purplish shirt and suspenders. Do you know him?”
Forde shrugged. “Just to say hello.”
“There’ll be something wrong with him,” she said.
“What do you mean—wrong?”
“His trousers are hoicked-up round his ankles. It was Mary taught me that.”
“Nottingham Mary?”
“She said hitched-up trousers identified mentally disturbed people—infallible, she said—exhibitionists mainly, flashers.”
Forde made a would-you-believe-it! sort of face.
“Raincoats,” confirmed Anna.
“Now this guy, it’s weird,” said Forde. “Watch this! He’ll score a double 20 then a triple 20—bam-bam—but the third dart’s always in the 1 or 7 or some damn thing or winging off the lampshade.”
The last dart bounced off wire—told you—skittered across the floor.
Yellow Lens stepped up, stood at attention sideways to the board, turned his head to face it, threw like an automaton, threw, impossibly, across his body.
A red-headed man, sweat standing on his forehead, bent himself nearly double after each of his darts, pulling himself down by his bush of beard and groaning. Another raised his left leg off the floor in the held stance of a baseball pitcher.
Young men.
Loud.
Shove it up your ass.
Glass breaking.
Ah, shit la merde!
Forde tensed, then at a glance relaxed. He reached across the table and nudged Anna’s arm. She gave a start. His head urged her attention to the board.
A man stood at the metal strip, staring down at it with a strange intensity, an intensity that spread around him and stilled the chatter. He somewhat resembled Rasputin.
Forde whispered to Anna, “He can’t count.”
Slowly the head came up.
He stared at the board until it seemed that it was consuming him.
WHERE AM I?
143
WHAT DO I WANT?
treble 20
treble 17
double 8
Thunk Thunk
Oh, shit!
Tough nuggies, man.
Seeing it, perhaps, through Anna’s eyes, the game was beginning to look foreign, eccentric.
She seemed to have dozed off again.
He supposed that he ought really to call a taxi and get her back to the Lord Beaverbrook. This day had been crammed enough, but in the morning there would be the ceremony at the graveside, the recitation, possibly more than once, of:
Let me have a scarlet maple
For the grave-tree at my head,
With the quiet sun behind it
In the years when I am dead.
Plus more Childe Chauncy guff, President guff, canoe guff, Bishop-of-the-Anglican-Cathedral guff, interment of the non-ashes and chopped-up unicorn guff…
Thunk
Anna had mentioned a black hat with a veil.
Snow had been forecast.
Thunk
Umbrella spokes jabbing necks, eyes threatened.
Daily Gleaner guff.
Extreme danger of more Maliseet-Passamaquoddy-Algonquian guff.
Thunk
Pictured Tide, toothbrush, the slimy bubble of the morrow’s shirt.
In the midst of life we are in death: of whom may we seek for succour, but of thee, O Lord, who for our sins art justly displeased?
Oh, Fuck! thought Forde
And raising his weary head, inhaled, imbibed.
*
They were on the end game and a weariness had set in. Play was sloppy. Banter had died away. The table near the metal mark was crowded with empty pint glasses glinting, glasses lacy with the dried white residue of foam.
Fair Isle paused at their table on his way back from the bar bearing what he always called ‘a jar’; Forde had pegged him on first meeting as a ‘trad man,’ imagined him playing hoary trombone in a traditional jazz band of fellow expats, serving up renditions of “When the Saints Go Marching In” and “The Old Grey Mare She Ain’t What She used to be.”
“So, Skip,” said Forde. “This here’s a fine hows-yer-father!”
“Not a manjack of ‘em can make the bloody pick off. Still—small mercies—they’re getting them on the board as opposed to into the ceiling or wounding bystanders. Henry’s pissed as a newt, and Gordie—raised his chin indicating the sweaty, red-haired groaning man—” Gordie’s working up a nice little aneurysm and—Oh, God! Him again—”
The chatter and complaints died down, stilled.
The Rasputin man stared down at the metal strip.
In the deepening silence, a sudden chair screeched and clattered back.
Got to drain the snake