Shadowplay

by Joseph O'Connor

  A handshake and she is gone. As though she was never there. Irving leans in to his desk, pretending to read a script.

  ‘Edible, ain’t she?’ he says. ‘Rather stirs the old lava.’

  ‘She is the highest-paid actress in England. How are we to afford her wages? We are already in dangerous debt.’

  ‘Perhaps you could sell your body? By the pound, not the hour.’

  ‘May I insist that you answer?’

  ‘Only you’re getting a little chubby lately. Wifey feeding you up?’

  ‘Levity will not run this theatre.’

  ‘A little of it might help.’

  ‘I am supposed to be General Manager here, to share in the decisions—’

  ‘Odd you say it, darling, you seem rather more interested in scribbling these tiresome stories of yours that nobody wants. Barring that idiot Shaw, of course. Might have known.’

  ‘That is unfair.’

  ‘You demand a share in my decisions while I play no part in yours? Nice bargain, Auntie.’

  ‘For once in your life, stop manipulating, can’t you.’

  ‘If it is your view as General Manager or Imperial ruddy Warlock or whatever it is you term yourself, that having the greatest leading lady in the world is a mistake, I shall be happy to cancel her contract, of course. Perhaps you would prefer to play Ophelia yourself? You would do well as a madwoman.’

  ‘I tell you, we cannot afford an addition such as this to the wages bill. One can’t get blood from a stone.’

  ‘Oh one can, darling. If one knows how to squeeze.’

  ‘You are being disingenuous.’

  ‘Pot and kettle, methinks. Shut the door on your way, there’s a love.’

  27 Cheyne Walk,

  Chelsea,

  London.

  2nd October, 1888

  My dearest and most excellent good man, Walt Whitman,

  Thank you for the postcard of the Brooklyn Naval Yard, which I have pinned above my desk at the Lyceum. I am gratified to know that you are keeping well and rallying after your recent cold. Some of the actors here at the theatre (who must keep infections at bay so as not to lose their voices) swear by the consumption of garlic. In wintertime it is their custom to hang the white flowers of that plant about the windows and doors of their dressing rooms.

  My own method of warding off illnesses is to lift the dumb-bells every morning, which I do at the Jermyn Street bathhouse near Covent Garden. A half-hour of vigorous lifting and squatting followed by a plunge in the frigidarium seems to set me up for the day, then I stand under a 56-gallon douche and I use the time to think.

  I hold warm memories of meeting you at Brooklyn during our American tour last summer, of the pleasant afternoon we spent together, of your golden hospitality.

  It had long been a hope of mine, as you know, to some day shake the hand that brought Leaves of Grass into the world. Your work has been sacred all my life as a man, but even as a child I believe I was waiting for it, as one waits for a sort of holiness, as the seed waits for sunlight. Little did I dream we might also sit together a few hours on the veranda at your home and talk in such a free and unguarded fashion of so many private things.

  For one of my sort, what was so frightening as a boy was to think one was alone, unfriendable, an outcast – and always would be – but then your verses quietly sang that there were others, many others, whose secret hearts were the same. No solitude is so terrible that it cannot be borne together.

  Happy the day I laid eyes on the wise, kind face of my lighthouse. In these dark times for London, one must fix on one’s consolations.

  My beloved adopted city quakes in chains of dread. You will no doubt have read of the spate of murders. Two misfortunate poor women were slaughtered on one night last week, the first in Berner Street, not thirty minutes from my place of work, the second in Mitre Square – both again with the most hideous mutilations imaginable. It is whispered – horrid thought – that cannibalism was done, and other acts too obscene to write. One poor girl had been brutalised with a wooden stake.

  The newspapers yesterday morning published excerpts from a terrifying note purporting to have been sent to police detectives by the author of these monstrous bloody deeds. It was signed ‘Jack the Ripper’.

  I enclose a copy.

  It is eerie to walk about at night, as I sometimes do for a few hours after the audience has gone home and the theatre has closed, since the air clears my mind and calms the sometime over-anxiousness I have suffered all my life.

  To know the killer is nearby, might be as close as one’s own shadow, has moved through the same air. It is polluting us.

  I see this church, that gallery, that street, this train station, and I say ‘he has walked here’ or ‘so he might’. I look out at the audience through a crack in the curtains and think ‘perhaps he is sitting in the balcony’. A bloodstained box was left on the Lyceum’s steps one morning when I was coming in to work. I swear, I was afraid to open it, was trembling as I did so. (It contained beefsteaks my employer had ordered.)

  This fear drains goodness and mercy. The map is splashed with gore. We feel joined to the brute as a twin, the something within that wants to kill. I do not know that I can ever see my London again.

  The great streets and avenues are deserted after nightfall. The people sorely frightened, the newspapers screaming. The other midnight I took a cab to Kensington and from there walked across Hyde Park to Porchester Square near Bayswater, and counted less than ten souls on my way, all of them police constables.

  In the East End, to which my walking often takes me, nightfall brings a miasma of terror, like an infestation of wasps. Many of the tenements have had improvised barricades put up outside, of old carts, scrap iron, broken furniture, whatever the poor can find. One macabre sight was that they had broken into an undertaker’s premises and stolen out the coffins. These they had stacked across the filthy entrance to their street, as a wall, if you will.

  One hears the people behind their flimsy curtains as one steals past in the darkness. But one may walk the three hours after midnight and see nobody.

  Matters here on the personal front, too, are troubled, I must own. The plain fact is that, to my great regret, my wife and I are living somewhat separately at present, indeed she and our son have returned to her people at Dublin. I write to her every night or two, and she does write back. Our terms are civil enough. I think we both are aware that, for the happiness of our boy, proprieties must be observed. But hopes have been hurt (on both sides) and there has been a cooling.

  As to the causes of the disharmony, they are several, some too complicated to enumerate, others one would shy from committing to paper. From our conversation, yours and mine, at Brooklyn, you will surmise what some of the difficulties are, but there are others no easier to bear, perhaps harder.

  My work at the Lyceum has not at all helped. Whilst it has brought security of one sort, in another way it has weakened defences. The hours are long and late, the demands unending, the responsibilities of the position seem to sprout like the tendrils of Jack’s beanstalk so that I never quite know what I am supposed to be doing but always know that I am supposed to be doing everything that someone else is not doing and to be doing it quicker, for less money.

  I am perpetually under a considerable strain, so that I have forgotten how to be at peace or ease with myself, and a man such as that is a torture to be married to. My employer, like many persons of the theatre, can be mercurial and difficult to please, expecting the most exalted of standards while not always living up to them, particularly in his dealings with subordinates. As with all sensitive people, or, should I say people who lead with this view of themselves, he can be a martinet with no feeling whatever for the sensitivities of others. At the same time, the remuneration is that much better than anything I could expect for clerking or hackwork. In any case I do not seem fitted for any other sort of employment. I am aged 41 now, as you know. I have left it too late.

  An
other difficulty, loath though I am to face it square, is the Antarctica of time that I have squandered on my writing. The few shillings this has earned over the years will not be sufficient to pay for a tombstone and have proven costly indeed, not only on the family battlefront – where much harm has been done by my absence – but in other, more private respects. When we are young we do not think that time is a currency. Then we notice the account running low.

  Bitterly I regret that I ever saw a book in my life and rue the day I ever permitted that horrid succubus, Ambition, to sharpen my pen.

  How I admire your own artistry, which is purer, cleaner, manlier. You write for the winds, uncorrupted by hope and untouched by hope’s sibling, despair. That sort of adamantine certitude and refusal to bother with nonsense reminds me of Chaucer, who must have felt, if ever he thought about it, that he should have no readers at all and who nevertheless persisted. But of late my own pilgrimage seems to lead down troubled roads, with no Canterbury at the end that I can see.

  One builds up one’s fortress as best one can, with bombproof walls no cannonball could burst, but even the tiniest balistraria will admit the occasional bullet. And where is the arrow-slit that will keep out the bees of envy? This book, that play, the other collection of tales – works which in all frankness seem mediocre or unambitious to me, although hand on heart I mean their authors no harm – set London and the world ablaze. One’s own efforts, meanwhile, fail to light a tuppenny candle. I feel as one who has cut open his veins only to find they contain sewer water. Perhaps I need garlic at my windows.

  There is nothing more contemptible than jealousy in a man who is able-bodied and has food and a bed in which to sleep, but alas, it can be compulsive and cancerous. I find that I am not able to turn to the literary pages of the newspapers any more, nor even to look at my bookshelf. As for the theatre, once my island of consolation, it is turned to a dungeon, for these days if I did not work in one, I could not bear to enter one; any play I commence to write seems mortifyingly worthless and turns to ash before the first soliloquy. You were correct in your gentle admonitions when we were strolling together at Brooklyn, your fatherly-brotherly arm on mine. How often I recollect the moment when your wise face turned to me and your twinkling eyes shone with experience as you told me the theatre is a place of illusions like the mirror-land in a carnival; it will do well for little children, not for men.

  There it is, my good Friend. I shall write happier and less self-pitiful words next time.

  If you pray, please will you remember me in your prayers so that I can shake myself out of this black and self-pitiful slough of mind? Let me remember those in London tonight who have lost everything they had to such evil.

  My loving wishes to you, most excellent oak-hearted man.

  WHAN that Aprille with his shoures soote

  The song of Whitman hath perced to the roote.

  P.S.: I enclose a supernatural tale of mine that was published recently in one of our little magazines. It has no merit but I suppose one must keep one’s hand in. Should there be a journal in New York silly enough to like it, they may have it for five or ten dollars, or even for nothing if they will send me three copies.

  It is about an exquisitely corrupt earl who refuses to die. I loathe almost everything about it.

  — XIV —

  The night-walking

  Rumours. Whisperings. Names scribbled on walls. An innocent butcher’s-apprentice is beaten by a crowd in Whitechapel.

  The ripper is ‘a Jew’, a banker, an Irishman, is being copied by another murderer, is an actor, a Hungarian, is a peer of the realm, is a vagrant. Every night, London closes, but he appears to roam at will, as a man made of fog in a novel.

  Walking along the Embankment from the ferry he takes into work, Stoker pauses at a news-stand, reads the headline of the latest atrocity but doesn’t buy the paper any more. He pushes on, towards the Strand, where, in a tiny shop on the corner of Southampton Row, an old man sells rare books that are fantastically expensive, but a bargain can sometimes be happened upon in the barrows out front. Anyhow, he can’t face the theatre just yet. Soothing to rummage the spines, faded morocco and calfskin, the consolation of greying frontispieces and redundant cartouches.

  People talk of the slaughtered women as though they are chapters of a disputed canon. Mary Ann was one of his, Elizabeth got done by another. Mark me, there’s two of ’em, you see if I’m wrong. Like a common-room disquisition about Shakespeare and Francis Bacon. How can they be so cold?

  ‘Good morning, Mr Stoker.’

  He turns but, for a moment, sees only the crimson sun behind her. After that moment he removes his hat.

  ‘Miss Terry.’

  ‘Checking that they have you?’

  He gives a short, embarrassed laugh. ‘It is my wife’s birthday soon. I had in mind to find her an old book. Of love poems.’

  ‘What a beautiful notion for a gift. You are a romantic beneath your proper exterior, I think.’

  ‘Don’t know about that. But she appreciates poetry.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘She has a fondness for Dante. She has read him in the original. Often we have promised one another to visit Florence some day.’

  ‘I should like to meet your wife. Does she come to the theatre much?’

  ‘She isn’t a night owl, I’m afraid.’

  ‘May I join you in the search? You’re not too busy?’

  ‘I was just finishing up and about to go to the office. Thence to the bank. I see you are not wearing your veil this morning.’

  ‘The people recognise me. Sometimes it’s a nuisance. Today I don’t seem to mind.’

  ‘Are you going to the Lyceum now?’

  ‘I am coming from the Lyceum, after a ruckus with the costume designer. She wished to dress me as Cleopatra in what appeared to be a pair of vicarage curtains. Some of the language I used was not ladylike, I’m afraid. She accused me of being vain.’

  ‘I am sorry to hear that. I shall have a word with her when I get in.’

  ‘Please don’t, on my account.’

  ‘As you wish, of course.’

  ‘Imagine such a thing, Mr Stoker. An actress, vain.’

  ‘Certainly it would be unusual.’

  Instead of smiling at his acknowledgement of her joke, she pops her eyes like a schoolchild in a magic mirror-maze. ‘Shall we walk a little if you’ve time, Mr Stoker? I was intending to go over the river. There’s a cloth merchant’s I rather like across by Waterloo.’

  She offers her arm and he links it.

  ‘A great artist is surely entitled to a moment of vanity,’ he says. ‘If that is what it is. Artists go by their own lights.’

  ‘Vanity makes women weak. Pride makes them strong. You know of my perfectly scandalous life, I imagine?’

  ‘I don’t read the sort of papers that spread gossip and falsehood. These days I don’t read any at all.’

  ‘No falsehood, I’m afraid. I am rather the fallen woman. Married at seventeen, my children have different fathers.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I always think it better to get my secrets out in the open when I meet a person towards whom I am drawn.’

  ‘A reputation is often a work of fiction, I have found.’

  ‘Reputation, faugh. I have had several of those, Mr Stoker, sometimes in the course of one evening.’

  Crossing the bridge, she looks down at the river and points out the seabirds but he is observing the passers-by elbowing each other as they notice her. A boy approaches, purple-faced, and asks her to sign his cuff with a nub of charcoal. A train-driver presents her with a posy of Sweet Williams he had been intending to give his mother for her birthday. A Scottish nurse in crisp whites actually curtsies. It is only the arrival of a police constable that disperses the gathering crowd and permits the stroll across the bridge to continue.

  ‘Do they often give you flowers?’ Stoker asks.

  ‘Quite often, if one lets them. Men in particular. Th
en the poetry starts coming, I do wish it wouldn’t.’

  ‘You are very beautiful, of course. I imagine you’ve been told so.’

  ‘Most women have. Usually late at night. I say, forgive me, my eyes are streaming rather, it’s this wretched cold sunlight.’

  ‘Sensitive people are affected by the weather.’

  ‘Do you smoke, Mr Stoker?’

  ‘Sometimes, yes.’

  ‘I like a feller who smokes. Have a snout now if you wish. In point of fact, might you spare one? Another secret vice of mine.’

  She accepts the cigarette from his case and cups his hands as she lights it. He is trying to rise above the thought I am smoking with Ellen Terry.

  ‘What is your own secret, Mr Stoker? A proper sort like yourself. So polite and so shy and so full of reserve. But your sentences boiling with rage.’

  ‘I don’t know that I have any secret.’

  She peers at him. ‘There is no person alive without a secret.’

  ‘I was often ill as a boy,’ he says. ‘Some sickness for which nobody seemed to have any name. Until I was seven years old I never knew what it was to walk or even stand.’

  ‘Polio?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you were lame?’

  ‘Whatever it was, my mother used to dose me with patent medications, which in those days were soused with cheap alcohol. I often think I spent most of my childhood drunk. She would read to me, in my bed, the Grimm stories and ghost tales. At other times, they tried leeches or cupping; my parents, I mean. It was a terrible feeling, of losing one’s lifeblood.’

  ‘Come now, Mr Stoker. We women endure it every month. My frankness doesn’t take you aback I see.’

  ‘Sometimes she and my father would pay a local man to carry me to the pantomime with them. I suppose I found it thrilling to be frightened in safety.’

  ‘Some of your work has frightened me.’

  ‘Me too.’

  She smiles, crushes out the cigarette, darts it into the Thames. ‘Harry – The Chief – tells me you took literature as your degree at the university in Dublin?’