by Bruce Barber
bending or breaking, although Keyes knew him to be some years over sixty. There were, to be sure, signs of fraying around the edges, such as the paunched belly and the reading glasses, but somehow O’Reilly managed to carry such things as badges of courage and honour. And, Keyes admitted to himself, he was glad to see the old fraud.
“You’re in my spot!” O’Reilly announced, placing his chair and himself under his favourite panel in the extraordinary mural paintings that were the principal decoration of The Jester’s Bells. In the passage that O’Reilly favoured, a giantess reclined in voluptuous languor. The old actor’s shaggy head appeared to lie almost in her lap, which was the way he liked it. He set before him on the table a jigger-glass that had recently contained Bushmill’s Irish whiskey. Beside it rose a pint of Guinness, at which he nibbled from time to time.
“Hello, Seamus,” Keyes said. “I was planning on calling you a little later. How have you been?”
“Since when do you give a tinker’s tit, you cowardly disgrace to the profession? All you’re worried about is that I live long enough for you to get everything you need for your damned book! And that I will die as soon as you’ve finished it so you don’t have to pay me... What’s that – ginger-ale? Drink for cub scouts!” The big head lifted and swung about like a gun turret in search of something to blow out of the water. His melodramatic eyes fixed on the waitress.
“Julia!” he bellowed, and his fingers snapped beneath the table with an explosive report that almost knocked the poor dreamer off her chair.
“What?” said the waitress, looking frantically around; she had been a tad slow in bringing Keyes his pitiful soft drink earlier, but arrived now as if on roller-blades almost before O’Reilly had finished his Celtic war-cry, looking for all the world like a handmaiden breathless with the honour of providing libations for some deity. O’Reilly was many things, Keyes thought, but not one of those things was small; and the world he magnanimously allowed to surround him had bloody well better realize that fact.
“Yes, sir. Do you want something from the bar?”
“Madam, I do,” O’Reilly intoned in the ironical voice that he usually reserved for the sinister roles: Creon, Claudius, or Cenci. “Two Bushmill’s, if you would be so very kind.”
The head bartender, Bruno by name, was more watchful than his assistant or his waitress, and had the drinks ready on the bar. Bruno was a tall lean man of indeterminate age and angular features. The bones in his face seemed almost to have been honed to their sharpness. It was a piratical face, the face of a Breton filibustier of the seventeenth century or a Chicago gangster of the Roaring Twenties.
Julia picked up the drinks, and took a moment arranging them on her tray while she got into character, then returned to her customers.
“There you go,” she crooned. “Enjoy.”
O’Reilly half-bowed with a fragment of good humour.
“Madam, we shall do our best to ‘enjoy,’ but in this age of betrayals...”
Keyes laughed. “This what? Betrayals?”
O’Reilly scowled, downed his whiskey, sipped his Guinness, then stared at the drink he had purchased for Keyes as if a ful1 glass was some kind of Satanist abomination.
“Well?!” he said, lowering his voice to a decibel or two below a full orchestra. “Are you going to drink that, or write about it?”
Keyes took a small sip, then a slightly larger one, as a knot of young actors came through the door. Each smiled toward O’Reilly, heads all but bowed in reverence... except for the dark-haired, lithe, grinning man who brought up the rear. He made a point of not acknowledging the Grand Old Man of Stratford. O’Reilly himself seemed to have missed the bravado performance, but Keyes knew better.
“What’d you do to that kid?” he asked. “Steal his lunch-money, or his girl?”
O’Reilly glared at Keyes, glared his most tyrannical glare, the one he reserved for his great roles, or his Great Roles, as he tended to think of then, Oedipus, Tamerlane, Lear... Then he rolled his eyes toward the ceiling, as if Keyes’ words were rapiers piercing him, or the daggers of a pack of conspirators.
Keyes was amused by his preposterous friend, and intrigued.
“Come on, Seamus. What’s going on?”
“I don’t want to discuss it.”
“Sure you do.”
O’Reilly filled his mouth and gullet with Guinness, then wiped foam from his moustache.
“Him,” he said, inclining his head after the disrespectful young man. “That troglodyte, Alan Wales. Some evening – some evening soon, I suspect – I shall have to tear him limb from limb.”
“As bad as that, is it?”
“Worse. I shall have to rip him from his guggle to his zatch.”
“Wales has a zatch?”
O’Reilly grinned wickedly, nodded wisely. “Oh, he has a zatch all right... for the time being... but soon... soon, when I get through with him...”
“What did he do?” Keyes persisted. “Upstage you?”
O’Reilly grew in his chair, swelling visibly into a creature almost twice the size he had been only seconds before. He also changed colour, or at least his face did. It went from the fine healthy red of freshly cut beef-steak to the empurpled ox-blood of old field boots.
“Upstage me!” he roared. “Me?”
Keyes retreated from this unwise suggestion as rapidly as possible.
“Sorry. How could I have imagined anything so stupid?”
“How indeed?” The colour of O’Reilly’s face remained fierce.
“I said I was sorry. What did he do?”
“He tried – tried, mind you – to upstage me, but it’s not for a trifle like that I intend to draw and neatly quarter him. Ha!”
“I see,” Keyes said. His voice was grave now, as full of concern as if he were listening to a tale of atrocity, lynching, or mass murder. “When did all this happen?”
“When? It happens every time that swivel-arsed cannibal is allowed onstage, most foully in Twelfth Night!”
“I haven’t seen it yet.”
“It had a chance... oh, yes, an excellent chance. It might have been the best of all the Stratford Twelfth Nights, of all the century’s Twelfth Nights. It might have been superb. My Sir Toby, if I do say so...”
“I’ve been looking forward to seeing it,” insisted Keyes, which was true enough.
“Forget it,” the old actor groaned. “He’s ruined the play. He’s pulled it all down into a shambles... shambles...”
“He plays Sebastian?”
“Sebastian? Good Lord, no. A Sebastian might almost get away with dancing about like a go-go girl...”
Keyes giggled. “A go-go girl? 1 haven’t heard that expression since I was a kid.”
“Scratching his arm-pit,” O’Reilly continued, “adjusting his crotch...”
“Not Orsino, surely.”
O’Reilly frowned as if Keyes were being purposely very stupid or obtuse.
“No, not Orsino,” he said with a patient look that was exaggerated almost to saintliness. O’Reilly was used to playing across footlights. Even his small expressions were larger than life. “He’s cast as Feste. I have no idea what he’s playing, nor does he. He’s wriggling his arse, that’s all.”
“That has been done before...” Keyes mused. “But Feste? I haven’t seen the play in years... since I played Orsino, as a matter of fact. You think Feste is important?”
“Important? The action depends absolutely on Feste.”
“Does it?”
“He’s the one who understands, you see,” O’Reilly explained. “The only one who understands everything.”
“But he’s a clown.”
“Exactly... the supreme clown. What’s Twelfth Night about?”
It was Keyes’ turn to frown. “I said I haven’t seen it recently.”
“It’s about love, you twit. It’s about physical, sexual love.”
“You say that about all the plays, Seamus.”
“And I’m right, Claude... most o
f the time, anyway.” He finished his drink and glanced toward the waitress. This time Julia was ready for him.
“Two more,” she said, right on cue.
“Not for me,” Keyes said. “It’s the middle of the afternoon.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?” O’Reilly said.
“Aren’t you playing tonight?”
“I am and I shall. Tonight is not this afternoon.” He looked again at the waiting waitress. “Just one, please, Madam. My cousin is not well.”
Julia nodded and retreated.
“I still don’t get it About Feste, I mean.”
“I will make everything clear as soon as my cup is refreshed,” O’Reilly said. He leaned back in his chair to stare at the ceiling until this condition had been fulfilled. Upon the waitress’ return, O’Reilly scooped the tiny glass directly from her tray into his large fist and sipped a sixteenth of an inch of liquid off the top of it.
“Ah...” he looked soulfully at Julia. “Thank you, my dear Hebe. You may withdraw.”
She hesitated. “Should I run a tab?”
“By all means,” O’Reilly said. “Run...” he rolled the “R” mightily. “Run... a tab.”
“No problem,” she said, and exited, scribbling.
“Where was I?”
“Feste?” Keyes suggested.
“Love,” O’Reilly corrected. “Everybody in the play is in love.”
“Everybody?”
“Think about ii.”
But Keyes didn’t have to think about it because O’Reilly launched immediately into an explication of the text.
“Orsino loves Olivia, right?”
“Ye…es.”
“Of course he does. That’s all he talks about. And Olivia, too, is in love. Not with Orsino, the poor sod, but with her brother,