Shadowplay

by Joseph O'Connor

  ‘Still,’ I said. ‘One must give an example.’

  After she had retired, with all my thanks, I came up here to my bed. That was an hour ago. Sunrise is coming.

  Still unable to sleep, I read in a book I borrowed from the public library here in Whitby a few years ago and forgot to return. Brought it along this time in order to give it back, for a book thief is a bad sort and brings ill luck on himself. Bloody old yarn, quite the half of it made up. Removed a page of notes I had scribbled. Wilkinson’s Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia. Must get a copy of my own when we return to London. Try Hatchard’s. Chapter entitled ‘Vlad D’.

  His snarling, vicious, mineral eyes. His way of coming in through the locks.

  Late at night, when the theatre is closed, and the ghostlight lit, Mina comes down from her loft and blows about the aisles, a draught in an empty playhouse.

  She is present in the dust that appears on the seats, in the scrabble of mice, the whistling of loose slates, in the muskiness you might think is traces of expensive perfume remaining in the Dress Circle boxes when the duchesses have gone home.

  She is present in the glow of the ghostlight itself, a flickering, ardent, gold-yellow-gold the colour of August apricots.

  Time is different for her sort. A second can last a century. A decade might pass in one breath. Every night she sees every play that was ever performed on that stage and every play that will ever grace it in the future. The fools, the lovers, the harlequins and monsters, the queens and kings laid low.

  The wraiths and costumed animals, the thundering prophets. The magnificent armies and their blood-soaked banners. Among them, the storyteller walks.

  The same man, the lonely one, who used to come to her attic, worn low by his secrets, a part played too long, who toiled at his word-machine as though it were a cathedral organ and he must play an impossible cantata. He stands quietly downstage, candle in a glass, staring at the hundreds of Lady Macbeths who seethe at the empty darkness. ‘I would,’ they chorus, ‘while it was smiling in my face, have plucked my nipples from his boneless gums …’

  She is able to go into his veins, to rove the meadows of his mind, to see the volcano of molten hopes. She feels pity for all his species, they are so lost, so unknowing. The bleats they call language can say nothing worth saying, it is like trying to pour the Atlantic into a thimble made of steam. And still the chimps persist.

  Sweat dripping onto pages. The weird runes he scrawls. His heroine in a coffin, writhing in bliss, stake penetrating her heart.

  Harder. Slower. O gentler. I die.

  Now his overlord, his chief, comes processing from backstage, with a woman who is the queen of England. The chief kneels on a cushion, the queen touches his shoulder with a sword; the audience pretends something magical has happened.

  The pretender is the first of his profession on whom the honour has been bestowed, although everyone who has ever received it, or ever will, is an actor, as is the woman bestowing it, who never asked for her role, whose costume includes a crown, whose part was written by another, and whose props include an Empire where the sun is afraid to set.

  ‘Queen Victoria’ is her role. ‘Sir Knight’ is now his.

  From this tragicomedy the word-miner turns his apelike gaze. Candle burning in a bottle. His nights run long. He stands, paces, sounding the words to himself, as though reading them aloud could anger their embers, which it does. From below he hears the applause, but he pays no attention.

  The castle. Of Dracula. Stood out. Against. The sun. As we looked. Came an explosion. A terrible. Convulsion. That brought us. Weeping. To our knees.

  In the streets, words are gathering, blazed in black on front pages. The storybooks called newspapers shriek at the storm.

  WILDE GUILTY OF INDECENCY

  “WORST CASE I EVER TRIED”, JUSTICE WILLS.

  PLAYWRIGHT IMPRISONED AT HARD LABOUR

  Now the smoke of ten thousand fires starts to rise, as all over London the caches of letters are burnt, from Islington to Greenwich, from Richmond to Bethnal Green, a crucifix of compass points over the spider of the city, the binding-ribbons fraying and purpling in the flame, the scorched leaves wilting away.

  New letters, old letters, notes unseen in forty years, stashed between the pages of a volume of Baudelaire’s poems or stowed in a secret drawer in Papa’s study. Silver cigarette-cases are tossed into the Thames; their private inscriptions darken as they succumb to the ooze. The night-train to Paris is crammed to the gunwales. Marriages are hurriedly arranged.

  Mina watches it all. How can it have happened? Once the city was a forest, a knot of shadowed pathways, backwoods everyone knew about and nobody minded all that much; if they did, they could always look the other way. In one night, that is over. A moat is dug around London. How they stare, the flint-eyed crocodiles.

  —XIX—

  In which notice of legal summons is served

  Attention of Bram Stoker, criminal libeller.

  Lyceum Theatre.

  London.

  Sir,

  I must address you on a matter which, with no small urgency, shall have grave legal implications for you.

  Some time ago there arrived here at my mountain home in Transylvania a set of galley proofs of your recent composition about my person, Exhibit A, a book entitled The Undead or Dracula.

  How these came the thousand miles from London to my hand is of little import. Suffice to say, when one has a colony of bats and the ghost of a headless postman in one’s employ, matters are expedited with efficiency.

  I was surprised, indeed taken aback, that you would compose a piece about my humble personage, especially that you would do so sans my agreement. I am not sure what I can have done to have wronged you so severely that I deserve this libellous retort.

  I do not care for the proposed binding (as mentioned in the cover letter). Yellow? Holy hellfire. You wrap me in mustard. But it is agreeable, at least, to see you attempt to appeal to a colour-blind readership.

  Turning, if I may, to the contents of your book, I must say that I was saddened and, presently, outraged. The evocation of my homeland is vivid, the dialogue is toothsome, but you have been harsh and unsympathetic in your portrayal of me and have been unstinting in your efforts to rob me of my name. In plain truth, I found it difficult to recognise myself.

  As the embodiment of evil bloodlust, I do understand that the challenges of capturing me on the page are not inconsiderable. But ought you to have stressed the negative?

  I will have you know, sir, that being a vampire is not easy. The hours are unsociable. The clothes are old-fashioned. Opportunities to meet girls are limited.

  If one is at all a gregarious type, the vocation can be burdensome, since, when misunderstood, it can have the effect of making people give one a wide berth. One does not receive invitations to many house parties or picnics, for example. Last summer I purchased (at not inconsiderable expense, even for a gentleman of my uncontrollable wealth) a set of the wonderful new ‘roller skates’ but they remain in their box, unused, for no one has asked me to accompany him to the ice rink and one doesn’t like to stick out by tootling along alone. People can be insensitive. I shan’t lie, it hurts one’s feelings.

  If I may say so, the clouds of prejudice and disapproval in which we, the undead, must try to rub along as best we can are not at all dissipated by books such as yours. Sir, a little tolerance of others goes a long way. One wonders if your mother never told you that manners cost nothing. Do you not feel it would be a better use of the talents g*d gave you if you wrote a good old girl-meets-chap sort of story?

  In particular, I was upset by the joke you make on page 37, that ‘the Count would have made a good lawyer’.

  I hope that I am a good sport, but that is a horrid thing to say about anyone.

  You have left me with no recourse but to engage the firm of Messrs Klopstock, Leutner and Billreuth, a trio not to be tangled with. (If you doubt me, try pronouncing the f
irm’s name after a third glass of claret.) I have instructed them to sue the britches off you.

  When first you and I met – how long ago was that? – I suppose that I liked you well enough, with your wondrous beard and your twinkly Irish eyes. But soon you became – I shall be frank, sir – a persistent nuisance. Calling on me without notice any hour of the night or day, interrupting my leisure, remarking on my appearance, constantly poking about at me and refusing to let me alone, looking at me in a queer manner and writing down my every utterance. In short, you had little respect for my privacy. How would you like it had I written a book about YOU? Perhaps one day I shall.

  During all the many hundreds of hours that you and I have spent together (a good number of which I found exhausting and detrimental to my skin), I was forming the impression that at least you and I were friends and understood one another’s little ways. But now I see that your opinion of me is low. The fact that a chap commands wolves and knocks about with lascivious ghouls does not mean that he is a bad egg. Have a heart, can’t you. It is not easy for those of us who work at night.

  You will by now have noticed that this letter is in the handwriting of my assistant and amanuensis, Miss Ellen Terry. She is terrifically fond of you and proud of you for having written this wondrous book, which scared the skirts off her so much that she had to sit up all night in bed.

  She sends you her deepest love and her fondest embraces. Indeed she says you are a genius as well as an utter darling who should be shouldered, strewn with garlands, through the streets.

  I, on the other hand, am not so easily impressed.

  Sir, Yours,

  Disappointed of Transylvania

  The Chief, in the Royal Box, is watching rehearsals for Twelfth Night, dog at his boots, bottle of rough gin on an ottoman. In the months since Wilde’s sentencing, a pallor has greyed him. He has been absent from meetings, preoccupied, dishevelled, sleeping on a shakedown mattress kept in an old outbuilding for the understudies. His fingernails, untended, are becoming an embarrassment.

  He doesn’t turn when Stoker speaks but pours himself a measure, hand shaking.

  ‘You’ve written what?’ he says, at last.

  ‘A supernatural tale.’

  ‘Christ, not another. What is this one called?’

  ‘The Un-Dead.’

  He utters a quiet scoff. ‘The Un-Read, more like.’

  ‘I have made a play of it so that it can be performed and the copyright protected.’

  ‘You foresee torrents of interest in the copyright of this masterpiece, do you? Great hordes of the unscrupulous bent on pirating your characters?’

  ‘One can never be too careful.’

  ‘One can.’ He drains his glass, gives a wince, with his teeth unfastens a cuff. ‘Tell me, where did you intend performing this towering masterwork?’

  ‘Here, I had supposed. I am a little taken aback by your question. And your attitude.’

  ‘I cannot permit amateur works by part-timers to be performed at the Lyceum. We are not a bloody Music Hall, we have standards.’

  ‘Obviously I am aware of that, since I have striven to raise them.’

  ‘Then you see the position. There is no need for further discussion.’

  ‘There is need for you to be reasonable. I will insist.’

  ‘This latest efflorescence of your artistry, what is it about?’

  ‘It is a vampire story.’

  ‘Christ help us.’

  ‘Why would that be a difficulty?’

  ‘Vampires have been done to death. As it were.’

  ‘It includes what I hope is a strong male lead. Would you read it, perhaps?’

  ‘You expect Sir Henry Irving to play a bogeyman in a potboiler? Shouldn’t think so, old love.’

  ‘As a favour.’

  ‘Use the Lyceum, if you must. Me, you don’t use.’

  ‘That is your last word?’

  ‘You are meddling with matters you do not understand.’

  ‘It is a story. That is all. Will you at least watch the performance?’

  ‘I am busy, can you leave? Make certain I am not disturbed again today.’

  ROYAL LYCEUM THEATRE

  Sole Lessee and Manager: Sir Henry Irving

  18th May, 1897

  DRACULA

  Or

  THE UN-DEAD

  10.15 a.m.

  One performance only

  The morning is fine, London’s air sweetened by drifts of apple blossom from the parks. A new flower-market has opened at Covent Garden. Workmen on turrets of scaffolding are whitewashing the frontage of the Opera House. A great tenor is coming from Italy, a soprano from Chicago. Banners flourish from palaces; guards parade up the Mall. Shop windows gleam like lake water in sun.

  Boys dawdling late to school would scarcely notice the overcoated man who is suffering an unseasonal head cold as he hands out a stock of badly printed playbills. He goes back into the lobby and waits.

  Early summertime in London. Butterflies in Piccadilly. A morning when hope is hard to kill.

  He thinks of Wilde in prison. Tries to send him a thought. He thinks of the women who were murdered by the Ripper. What he himself is facing this morning is small, almost nothing. It doesn’t deserve this fear.

  For a staging to qualify as a copyright performance at least one ticket must be sold; money needs to change hands. He waits an hour, watching the street. The exchange is not going to happen.

  Harks comes quietly from the auditorium and says the time has come to start, the players are making their way down from the Green Room. There will be no music, no make-up, no costumes, no scenery, the curtain will remain up, for safety. She crosses to the Box Office, buys a ha’penny seat in the gods.

  ‘Done,’ she says. ‘We’re legal.’

  ‘Dear girl, thank you. I’ll smoke one cigarette and come in.’

  ‘Right you be, Auntie,’ she says, letting him alone.

  Outside, the light changes, a flock of swifts comes swooping down Exeter Street and a woman’s silhouette has darkened the doorway.

  ‘Florrie,’ he says, surprised. ‘My love.’

  ‘You don’t mind?’

  ‘Heaven sake, how could I mind? You’re not too busy? I didn’t expect you.’

  She comes to him, looking a bit lost, as though intimidated by the gilt and crystal of the foyer, the strangeness of being in a theatre in daylight. Their brief and spousal kiss is noted by the portraits on the walls.

  ‘I’m afraid it shall be something of an intimate performance,’ he says.

  ‘That can be the best kind. Break your legs.’

  He leads her up the staircase, through the heavy doors to the back of the stalls. The house lights are up and will remain so. On the stage, the players have gathered in a ragged attempt at a circle. Their scripts are bundles of pages torn from galleys of the book, marked up in coloured pencil, glued hastily together. There is a confusion about who is meant to start; the actors exchange quiet laughs.

  Seated on a beer-crate in Stage Left, the prompter calls ‘beginners’. Dracula puts aside the Times crossword and clears his throat. Quietness comes down. ‘Curtain,’ announces the prompter, out of habit. But no curtain rises or falls. The words are uttered into the air.

  Dracula is hungover, scarcely knows where he is. He is reading, not playing, the lines. No voice in the history of stagecraft has transmitted less feeling; he’s like a bookie naming the horses that fell at the fourth, a priest rushing through Monday morning early Mass. ‘YesIamthecountmycuriousfriendNeverinviteavisitortocrossmythreshold.’ Harks provides the wolf-howl, reducing the younger players to gulps and mutual elbowings as the trilby-wearing, raincoated Count drones on through his yawns, ‘thechildrenofthenightwhatbeautifulmusictheymake.’

  From time to time, the stagehands and flymen pause a moment to watch, availing of the opportunity to light pipes or chomp sandwiches. An upholsterer glances up from the stalls. Behind the actors, mechanics are attempting to install the
new hydraulic gantry; throughout the performance they jemmy open the crates that the cogs and chains came in, discuss the schematic drawings, disagree, mutter curses. Mop-women are swabbing the stepway down to the pit, which is empty but for a blind piano-tuner who is impatient for the nonsensical distraction to cease.

  ‘My master is coming,’ squawks the actor playing the lunatic, Renfield. ‘I shall catch him all the flies. I do only my master’s bidding.’

  As the embarrassment creaks to a close, a messenger boy arrives from the publishers with two twined-up parcels of books. Each player receives a copy of the inelegant tome, cholera-yellow cover, title printed in blurry red. Platitudes and pretended thanks are offered to the author, whose mortified wife has already returned home.

  Ablaze with the special shame of the playwright who has watched his work fail, the burden of having to keep the hot face straight, he cracks jokes and pucks shoulders, accepts unmeant congratulations, lost in the maelstroms of false glee. All the ardour that the players didn’t bother putting into their performances, he ardently puts into his own.

  The show must go on. You must not let them see when you are hurt. And none of it matters, because what’s happening is only an observance of decency, a wake at which it would be bad form to speak ill of the deceased. In a little while it will be forgotten, the poor thing will be permitted to die. As though it had never been born.

  It is Harks who comes to take him by the elbow, put an end to the agony. As she leads him backstage they see the Chief, smoking beneath the staircase. The wise thing, the only course, would be to ignore him, keep walking. Do not offer the sword. It will be used. But there are those whose childhoods bequeath them an addiction to pain.

  ‘Then you watched the performance after all?’ Stoker asks. ‘What did you think?’

  There is silence. He smokes. The dog appears behind him. Still not too late to go, to hurry out into the street, to find a room in which to weep alone ten years.