by Bruce Barber
deeply. An hour later they were drinking still, although no longer from the first bottle – drinking and talking. All the uneasiness between them had disappeared. Only a lovely sort of tension remained, for Keyes at least, an edge of expectancy, the function of questions yet to be asked and answers fervently desired. He was about to attempt the first of these when Sandra suddenly rose and left the room.
“’We’d better have something to eat,” she called over her shoulder as she went.
The tray she brought back was loaded with dishes of this and that, nothing that could be called a meal, but random delicatessen.
“I rarely cook nowadays,” she explained, setting the tray on a table near Keyes.
He could not remember that she ever had, but he was careful not to say so.
“You don’t have the time,” he murmured.
“Actually I often have too much time, but that was well said, my gracious lord.” Her voice changed in the middle of the sentence, became that of the old-fashioned Shakespearean player, fruity and affected. “Although the fare be poor, ’twill fill our stomachs – please you eat of it.”
Keyes helped himself to a slice of smoked salmon and a wedge of lemon.
“Lemons,” he said dreamily, “lemons...”
He thought for a moment, then tried his own remnant of a stage voice. “Ah, Flaminia! Your lemons!”
Sandra looked pleased, almost tender.
“You remember that?” she said softly.
“The Goldoni? Of course I do. You were terrific.”
“It’s an odd thing to remember.”
“You were terrific,” he insisted.
She needed no further prompting, then quite miraculously, it seemed to Keyes (despite his own knowledge of the craft of acting), she was transformed. Sandra was gone; Alessandra Edel was gone. In her place stood Flaminia, the soubrette of the Commedia dell’ Arte – leering, bawdy
Flaminia, gesturing extravagantly, hopping from one foot to the other, thrusting out her breasts, grinding her pelvis...
“And your meat, Arlecchino!” she crowed, making the name itself sound lewd. “Dear Arlecchino!”
Keyes clapped, and clamoured for more.
She laughed, bowed, and sank into a chaise longue. “That makes me feel almost young.”
She reached for her glass. They drank again, then returned to talking of the theatre, or Sandra’s corner of it anyway. Other parts she had played were evoked, especially those from her early years. She reminisced about her Charmian, her Maeve, her Amala, her Pirate Jenny. They even talked about her Vittoria.
“You were never better,” Keyes said, “than as Vittoria.”
She said nothing but he could see that this pleased her.
“You should do it again. Someone should revive it for you.”
She looked at him as if he were a child, fondly but from a great height.
“Are you serious? The White Devil? Who would do a play like that? Most directors don’t even know it.”
“Why not? It’s famous enough – a classic, as they say.”
She laughed. “You have been away, haven’t you, darling? You hang out in libraries, but directors don’t. Directors don’t read. They just attend plays done by other directors, then do
the plays again in different places.”
“Like Romeo and Juliet.”
“Exactly.”
She drained her glass and turned again to the window, looked out at the towers of her neighbourhood’s old houses. They talked less about the stage after that, more about themselves, about the things they had done together.
“Do you remember the day we went to...?”
“Do you remember the party at..?”
“Do you remember the night...?”
“What’s become of Grazia?”
“Have you heard anything from Edward?”
“Where do you suppose Daphne is?”
“Where’s Boris?”
“David?”
“Caroline?”
“Fitz?”
Eventually they reached that point in the evening when Keyes boozily came to the conclusion that the script required him to suggest they go to bed together.
“It’ll be like old times,” he said.
There was a solemn moment. Sandra looked at Keyes, appraising him almost as if she were sober. Then she cast a quick glance at a small gilt frame. Keyes followed her gaze with his own. A very pretty face grinned from the frame, the face of the dark-haired young actor O’Reilly disliked so much, Alan Wales.
“I don’t think so, darling,” Sandra said at last. “Nothing else is like old times.”
Keyes was not so drunk that he failed to see the truth in what she said.
“There’s someone else,” he said after a moment of foggy rumination.
Sandra nodded. “There’s always someone else, isn’t there?”
“I suppose there is, one way or another,” he agreed sadly. Then he struggled to his feet, kissed her almost paternally on the forehead.
“In that case I must go to bed alone,” he said, trying to make it sound easy.
Keyes moved off toward the door. When he got there he turned and looked back.
“You should turn in, too,” he said in a proprietary voice that echoed back to their years of cohabitation. “You must be as bushed as I am.”
“Do I look... bushed?”
Drunk as he was, Keyes avoided the trap and managed a final gallantry: “You look splendid!”
“Of course I do. Now run along. I’ve got to think about Juliet’s nurse.”
She rummaged through a heap of books and papers on the floor beside the chaise longue until she found a script. Without looking his way again, she opened it and began to read.
Keyes left her to her script. He turned, stumbled, and fell heavily among the hat boxes.
Sandra was beside him before he could get up. “You’re drunk, darling. Did you hurt yourself?”
He hadn’t but he had made such a spectacle of himself that Sandra refused to let him leave.
“There’s a bed in the little room, darling. You have a nap and then you can go home.”
Keyes did as he was told. Because of the wine he fell immediately asleep. Also because of the wine he did not stay asleep. Less than an hour after he lay down, he was up again, suffering from a terrible thirst. He went into the hall. Somewhere, he told himself, there has to be a kitchen, and in it the solace of cool, clear water.
But before he found the kitchen, he came to the door of the room in which he had left Sandra. At the bottom of that door there was a ribbon of light, faint and roseate. A lamp had been left burning in the big room.
How like her, he thought to forget the lights. She still needs a keeper, or a slave.
He was about to go inside and tidy up after her, as he had done often enough in the past, when he was stopped by the sound of her voice.
“... Do thy office in right form,” he heard Sandra say, although the words coning through the door were muffled and imprecise.
Juliet’s nurse, Keyes told himself, she’s still working on her lines. He put his shoulder to the door and pushed it open.
Once again Sandra was beside the window looking out into the night. She had changed her clothes. Now she wore a dress of dark velvet, which Keyes took to be a nightgown, until he saw how elaborately it was cut – high-bodiced, full-skirted, with padded shoulders and slashed sleeves. She was wearing a Renaissance dress in fact, or some stage-person’s idea of one.
She had changed her hair as well, put it up in coils and braids, fixed it with bright-headed pins and fancy combs. Jewels gleamed at her throat, on her hands, her wrists.
“I am too true a woman,” she said, her voice smouldering. “Conceit can never kill me...”
With the door ajar, he could hear her perfectly. Her voice was so full, so perfectly controlled that it seemed operatic. It was a voice for playing high tragedy, or high melodrama.
Juliet’s nurse? Keyes asked himself, knowing that i
t could not be.
“I will not in my death shed one base tear. Or if look pale, for want of blood, not fear...”
At last he knew. Of course it wasn’t Juliet’s nurse there by the window. It was Vittoria Corombona. Sandra was staging her own revival of The White Devil, playing it with all her heart to the night, or to the lights of Stratford, those that remained on at this late hour... lights that rose tier on tier like the loges in a theatre.
“My greatest sin lay in my blood: now my blood pays for it…”
With a burglar’s stealth Keyes put out his hand and pulled the door toward him.
“My soul, like a ship in a black storm...”
The door closed silently, ending the performance – for Keyes at least. Once more he made his way along the corridor toward the kitchen. When he found it, he drank as deeply of water as earlier he had of champagne. Before he left the kitchen on his way home, he carefully tore a blank page from the back of his notebook, scribbled briefly on it, and left it on the counter.
You were never better, the note said. Brava!
From the notebook of Jean-Claude Keyes:
It’s been some years since I had a hangover as memorable as the one precipitated by my reunion with Sandra – the last time was also in Stratford, on the night Sandra decided we should pursue our roles in life on separate stages.
Luckily, Stratford’s layout is fairly congenial to children, fools, tourists, and drunks, since everything essential is about eight feet from everything else, and thus my journey homewards from Sandra’s was not so fraught with terror as it might have been in Toronto, although I did almost fall in the river once. The police were nowhere in evidence, also to my benefit... I’m sure my tipsy state was as obvious as Mae West’s libido.
It was good to see Sandra... and good to know she would forgive me my