Shadowplay

by Joseph O'Connor

  ‘Wretch,’ she whispers. ‘You have made me cry and ruined my make-up.’

  ‘You are lovelier without it. Dry your eyes. Here’s my handkerchief.’

  ‘I have something difficult to do this morning. Do you think you might come with me? As a favour?’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Please, won’t you?’

  ‘Really no. I mustn’t.’

  On the train from Charing Cross down to Sevenoaks, she falls into a doze. He reads over a bundle of bills, from the silk merchants, the printer, the firm of carpenters who refurbished the pit. She murmurs in her sleep, seems disconsolate, fighting something away. One of her gloves falls from her lap, he picks it up, the ivory lacework still warm. When he replaces it on her blanket, she grasps it without awakening, her long fingers twisting, now tugging at the wrist-button. Leave me, she whispers. I am not for this test.

  Arrived at the station, they find a pony-and-trap by the portico. The driver says he’s been sent to collect them.

  The leafy lanes dapple. Clean air from the meadows, the mellow grey sky over haycocks. She names every field as they pass, every hillock. He pictures her as a child, dancing these very cart-tracks, brambling and roving and coming the tomboy, wassailing with the carollers at Christmastime.

  Through high cast-iron gates, the gloomily solid mansion looms up, the time-blackened chimney-stacks and belfry and turrets giving it the appearance of a birthday cake in a nightmare. The brass plate on the pillar, DR MANCHESTER’S PRIVATE ASYLUM FOR IDIOTS AND THE INFIRM, is at first the only sign that the house is an institution, but, as they enter the elm-lined, neatly gravelled driveway, they notice teams of inmates at supervised work in the orchards.

  ‘You lived here?’ Stoker says. ‘What in heavens was that like?’

  ‘Rather more peaceful than the Lyceum.’

  In the porch, the current proprietor, a Dr Mansfield, is waiting. In his thirties, Hispanically handsome, a bit damp with excitement, he stumbles down the steps, hands clenching and unclenching, as one about to begin a dance number in a show. His is a sort of professional patience, a tendency to over-enunciate, to go slowly. It becomes clear that he has a favourite word.

  ‘Miss Terry, capital to meet you. You are most welcome back to Dr Manchester’s.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And your mother was the cook here, how capital.’

  ‘Not certain she always found it so. But it is good of you to see me.’

  ‘Oh the honour is mine, Miss Terry, it is mine entirely. I have seen you play many times, it is always so … capital. May I dare to venture that you are even more strikingly beautiful off stage, in the daylight?’

  ‘Flattering of you.’

  ‘When I proposed to my fiancée, do you know what I said? “If Ellen Terry won’t have me, perhaps you would.” ’

  ‘How too divine.’ He turns to indicate the door. She sticks her tongue out at him. He turns back.

  ‘This gentleman is Mr Stoker, my great friend,’ she says.

  By now they are walking a stone-flagged corridor lined with barred cells, in which inmates are sewing oakum or mumbling in strait-waistcoats and chains. Orderlies wielding truncheons stand about or pace. The reek of old meat arises through grates in the floor, with a woman’s high, broken wail. In one cell, an inmate is pouring water from a jug into an identical jug and back again, over and over, singing gibberish to herself. In another, an old man is standing to attention in long johns, his beard in three plaits, to his navel.

  ‘There was a particular reason for your visit, Miss Terry?’

  ‘I am to play Ophelia again soon.’

  ‘So I saw in the Pall Mall Gazette. You shall do it capitally, capitally.’

  ‘For this reason I thought it should be useful for me to see people who are mad.’

  ‘We have an abundance of them here, of every condition, as you’ll see.’ He has something of the salesman about him, a grubby pride in the merchandise. ‘Burners, catatonics. Religious melancholics.’

  ‘And what is Ophelia’s condition, would you say, Dr Mansfield?’

  ‘Capital question, there has been a good deal of scholarship on the point. The verdict would appear to be that she is a sufferer of what is called erotomania. Often brought on by an extreme shock, although we’re not sure precisely how.’

  ‘How would you characterise it?’

  ‘If one may speak frankly?’

  ‘Please do.’

  ‘It is an intensely delusional state, the false belief that one is desired sexually.’

  ‘I have known a good many middle-aged actors suffer from this particular ailment.’

  The doctor looks at her a moment too long.

  ‘Quite,’ he says. ‘If you’ll follow me through here? Be careful not to approach the cells.’

  At the end of the passageway, a metal door leads to an anteroom in which stand three large cages, two unoccupied. In the third, on a metal chair, a tall, completely bald man in full evening dress is playing a flute sombrely, large head bobbing, long-lashed eyes shut.

  ‘A gentleman I should like you to meet,’ says the doctor. ‘How are we today, Mr Mulvey?’

  The patient shows no sign of noticing the intruders, his long frail fingers nimble on the keys as the melody doubles back on itself like a tern in flight.

  ‘Patrick is what is known as a zoophagous maniac, Miss Terry. This means that he fixates on killing animals and devouring them. We started with insects and spiders, then mice, on to rats. Then I’m afraid we went a good deal further.’

  ‘Why would he want to do that?’

  ‘Again forgive my frankness, it is partly that he sexually enjoys seeing them suffer, or has convinced himself that he does, which is not quite the same thing, then there’s another aspect to it, too. He believes consuming them will extend his own life, perhaps render it eternal. The higher the creature, the longer the life. Some would say it’s a common enough delusion, seen in certain religious practices. Eating the body, drinking the blood, so on.’

  ‘Is it usual for a patient here to be dressed in that way?’

  ‘Patrick has an intense dislike of uncleanliness, it distresses him greatly. We arrange that he is given fresh clothing every six hours, without fail. And he is bathed twice daily, which soothes him. He prefers to be attired formally, in the manner you see there. We do our best for his comfort. It is an effort.’

  ‘Poor, dear soul. How can any creature making such music be all evil?’

  ‘We find music is of great benefit to many of our patients here, Miss Terry. We are proud of our Lunatic Orchestra, the first in Great Britain. They perform on Saturday evenings, it is rather popular with the local people, the children especially. Unfortunately there is no performance today.’

  ‘He is a member of the orchestra?’

  ‘He conducts it.’

  ‘Shall he ever be cured and released, do you think?’

  ‘Alas, his condition is of a character that makes it uncontrollably progressive. Spiders to birds, to cats, so on. In the incident which resulted in his coming here some years ago, he stabbed a cab-horse in the throat and killed it. Often fancy he’s licking his lips a bit when a guard happens past, eh, Patrick?’

  The man ceases playing. Places his flute across his knees. Adjusts the pleats in his trousers. Straightens his necktie. Stares at his hands as though they have only recently been sutured onto his arms and he is not certain what they are or whose they were. Gaze crinkling in confusion, he slackens his neck so that his chin comes to rest on his collarbone. He is so bald that the dome of his head reflects the cold sunlight from the tiny cruciform window across the way. His murmurs are scarcely audible – an enervated lilt, like a spell.

  ‘Patrick, these are important visitors, they have come down from London, will you say good morning? Miss Terry is our most celebrated actress. Mr Stoker is her colleague at the Lyceum Theatre.’

  Evincing no sign of having heard the invitation, the patient attempts to sta
nd. They now see that he is chained by his ankles to heavy iron hoops in the floor. He glares up at the roof of the cage, brandishes his flute at it. Whipping around, he glares at the interlopers. When he opens his mouth, the sounds are back-of-the-throat guttural, studded with weird plosives and clucks.

  ‘It appears to calm him,’ the doctor explains, ‘to babble away in his baby-talk like that. I suppose we’d all do it if we could, must reduce the strain, one imagines. We let him do it at any rate. Perhaps you’d like to follow me this way?’

  ‘Might I shake his hand?’ Stoker asks. ‘Before we go.’

  ‘I wouldn’t advise that, sir.’

  ‘If I am willing to take the risk?’

  ‘Bram, don’t. Please?’

  ‘He is my brother human being, I do not feel he shall harm me.’

  The patient approaches the bars. His knuckles whiten as he grasps them.

  ‘I say, Stoker,’ the doctor says. ‘I must insist you stand away. Patrick bit off half a warden’s face last October. The man lost his sight. Patrick, sit.’

  His utterance erupts again, a tumble of strangled syllables. Saliva drips from his mouth and falls on the bars. He thrusts out his bony hand, the skeletal wrist tattooed with anchors, his gaping, tortured face like a map of forgotten islands. Beckoning, yammering, pleading with his eyes.

  ‘I can solve one mystery for you, doctor,’ Stoker says, being led away, shaking, from the chamber. ‘What he is speaking is Connemara Gaelic.’

  — XVIII —

  A journey

  17th March, 1895

  St Patrick’s Day.

  Last night I resumed work on the story that has been digging into me like a tick. However I attempt to be rid of it, the damn thing returns, so that it haunts my dreams as bloodily as my days.

  I am entitling this draft ‘The Unkillable’. Please god let it be the last, I want rid of it, exorcism. Saint of Ireland, if you exist, come drive it away like the snakes.

  I should be relieved to see the blasted thing die.

  It opens at an asylum in the countryside, near Dublin. The year is 1847, the famine is raging. A peasant has been brought there in desperate condition, by the police. Emaciated, wild-eyed, unable to speak, he scribbles down the frightful experience he has recently lived through at the hands of [there follows a 79-word paragraph that has proven indecipherable].

  … of the nightmares. Heavily sweating.

  But today, Sunday, we had a pretty time at the theatre, all the pleasanter for being unexpected. Florence being away at her sister’s in Limerick, I brought Noel in with me to see Harks’s scene-painting workshop.

  Journeyed in by ferry. Wind from off the river blew my terrors away.

  The dear girl came in especially, which was good of her on a Sunday. Theatre people can be remarkable in their kindliness.

  She showed N the great brushes, which shipbuilders use, and paint-pots, the giant canvases and how they are unrolled from their spools, told him the pretty names of the colours. Gave him a turn at the tinting on the new Gothic Castle she is doing up, he choosing the silver for the edges of the clouds. A heart-warming surprise was that, presently, E came in with her own children, and then the Chief happened in with his son.

  The children, who are all within a few years of each other, enjoyed a wonderfully rowdy and jump-about afternoon, the Chief performing conjuring tricks for them, pulling candies and pennies from their hair, E frying up sausages in backstage and teaching them to dance, Harks all the while making funny caricatures and chalking their faces for their delight, then a many-hued gang of soldiers did battle with the grown-ups.

  The children announced after a time that they should like to put on ‘our own play’, and so, following a rummage with Harks in the old baskets up in the Dress Department, they did, capering about the Lyceum stage like knickerbockered dervishes. A more amusing sight one never saw, each of the nippers imitating a mortified parent. Noel’s ‘me’ was quite hilarious, he puffing out his cheeks and stomping about officiously as he brandished his wooden scimitar and cried ‘to bed with you all bejaypers!’ in his best attempt at a preposterous Dublin brogue. I thought Len would die of laughter.

  Her children are clever, careful talkers, well-spoken, considerate, a markedly bright intelligence and seriousness in their way of going on. The boy, Gordy, already knows many of the Shakespeare plots and is able to talk about them structurally. His sister has something of her mother’s wisdom and wry watchfulness.

  The Chief’s lad is quieter, a little given to over-sensitivity and seeing slights. Worked himself into a funk when he thought the others had teased him, which perhaps they had. But a nice boy. Gentle. Eyes the size of saucers. A couple of candied fruits and all were friends again. Ellen sang ‘Where E’er You Walk’ and ‘Believe Me if all those Endearing Young Charms’, the Chief gave a recitation of the ‘Morte d’Arthur’. Harks sang an innocently naughty song of the cockneys, learned from her brother, a soldier.

  ‘I loves the girls what says they will and them what says they won’t.

  I loves the girls what says they does and them what says they don’t.

  But of all the girls I ever loved, one girl was heart’s delight

  And that’s the girl what says she don’t but looks as though she might.’

  Ellen’s boy brought the house down when he remarked with episcopal solemnity, ‘I do not believe that this song is quite suitable for young people.’

  At five o’clock, we all sauntered out in a body to Claridge’s for high tea on the Chief, which, for four peckish grown-ups and four ravening youngsters, must have cost him a sultan’s ransom. Ellen had persuaded Harks into a simple fern-green gown and put her hair in diamanté beads and the dear girl looked quite lovely, turning many a head. She, Harks, adored it there and insisted on sending a postcard to her mother (two miles away in Bow) from the Post Office in the lobby. To see the high-and-mighty waiters having to tolerate our paint-stained crew was naughty and jolly. Amazons of lemonade and ginger pop were caused to flow, great peaks of ices and Eton Mess scaled and demolished by our ragged mountaineers, while their guardians enjoyed a bottle of Krug, a Château Latour ’42, oysters, a side of venison and hot salmon sandwiches with pickle, then, stuffed to stupefaction, the happy party ended with a huzzah for St Patrick and a groan of disparagement for the snakes. The maître d’ was glad to see us go.

  A golden sort of day, to see everyone so happy, like one single noisy family of a different sort than is usual. If only every Sunday could be like that.

  18th March, 1895

  Alas, yesterday’s light-heartedness faded pretty quickly. I came in at about 11 for a meeting regarding next season’s costumes, to find no playful battle roiling away on the stage but an unpleasant and difficult scene.

  John Stokely, the tailor, a gentleman hailing from Edinburgh and never letting you forget it, was standing at the stage table, sketchbooks and portfolios before him. ‘Sir,’ – he was addressing the Chief – ‘really, one must protest. There is a long-established way of doing the dresses for Macbeth.’

  ‘Don’t talk such bilge will you,’ the Chief replied curtly. He appeared in surly humour as he brushed away the contracts I had brought for his signature.

  ‘These costumes have proven most successful in the past, sir,’ said Stokely. ‘Changing how it is done would be a grave error.’

  ‘Bugger the past. The Lyceum is the future.’

  ‘But sir, these tartans are authentic.’

  ‘I do not give a tosspot feather for authenticity. Neither does the audience. Bad enough that we must endure real life without paying to see it in a playhouse.’

  ‘Sir, I am not accustomed to being spoken to in this manner.’

  ‘I imagine you are more accustomed to it than you realise.’

  At this point, he, the Chief, snapped his fingers a bit imperiously. Harks came onto the stage looking uneasy. Accompanying her were two of the young stagehands whose names I have forgotten. They were all three clad i
n what I can only term Viking warrior apparel, horned helmets, leather trews, bearskin breastplates, furred leggings. The effect, if I am honest, was somewhat disconcerting.

  ‘I have had these specimens made up,’ the Chief said briskly. ‘From my own design. I want Iceland. Thor. The cold north. Slaughter. This is a tale of blood and savagery, a play about violence, not a box of damp shortbread in an old maid’s drawers.’

  ‘But I was told by Mr Stoker that you would be using the existing costumes, modified, for reasons of economy.’

  ‘My cock to what you were told by Mr Stoker. I am telling you now. So whip out your little needles and get stitching like a seamstress, else be gone and toss your caber while you’re about it.’

  Here was where I committed an error. Perhaps I was tired.

  Angered at not being consulted, inflamed by a coven of Monday-morning resentments, I found myself questioning him, and in front of the staff.

  ‘Have you any idea what these costumes will cost?’

  He turned to me. ‘Here comes the clerk.’

  ‘The clerk that runs this theatre.’

  In a moment he was on his feet and into my eyes. ‘You do NOT run this theatre, drill it into your skull, sir. It is my name over that door. Every day. Every night. You are nothing but a surplus population.’

  The Chief is one of those men who is able to use the word ‘sir’ as an insult.

  ‘My point is that I have the responsibility of imposing order on our accounts,’ I insisted. ‘If that is not done, we might as well throw our hats at the thing and shut shop. If I have told you the once, I have told you a thousand times. We cannot go on with productions of Napoleonic flamboyance, the bank is at our throat every day.’

  ‘Then GO,’ he roared, stabbing his finger towards the auditorium. ‘Get out! Or stay! The lukewarm I shall spew from my mouth.’

  This was apt scripture to be quoting, for by now he was frothing with rage. I could see that some of the players and stagehands were upset. Harks was being held back by a trio of steamfitters. I attempted to keep my composure but would not stand still to be bullied.