Shadowplay
Page 33
‘I shall do no such thing, darling. Subject closed.’
‘You’ll come stay with me a while at Smallhythe. I have oodles of room. Do say you will, what a hoot we should have together. Plain good food and God’s fresh air and we could flirt and talk maliciously of old friends in the evenings.’
‘That does sound enticing but I’m not one for the countryside, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh you stubborn old owl. How you madden me.’
‘I’d rather forgotten how much fun maddening you can be. You look even more radiant when you’re maddened.’
‘So you’ll come?’
‘No, I shan’t come, darling. I’m set in my ways. Wander a mile from the Thames and I break out in pimples. I say, this lamb is good.’
‘Tell me, why did you go to the appalling old auction, darling? For auld lang syne?’
‘No, I wanted to get a gift for my Florrie, a sketch of Noel as a little fellow. It’s her birthday coming up soon. But it wasn’t there.’
‘Shame.’
‘Odd, it was listed in the catalogue. “Portrait of a Boy”. I suppose it was lost. Never mind.’
‘Wretched pity. Things are never what they seem, are they, mon ange?’
‘Things not being what they seem is what things do best, don’t you find? Like that time with the guns and the water.’
‘What time was that?’
‘You know. In Norfolk. The day you held my hand.’
‘I don’t recall?’
‘But you must.’
‘I have never been to Norfolk, I don’t think. Have I, Bram?’
‘We’d gone there, the three of us and the children, to be away from London for a bit. Edy was there, and Gordy and Noel. Some kerfuffle or another was going on, problems at the bank, I think it was. The reporters had been snuffling about, sifting the trash outside his rooms, all of that. So off we toddled to Burnham for an August weekend.’
‘Did we? How lovely. Can you tell me the rest?’
‘The children were visiting a farm for the day. We were out in a little rowboat, Henry, you and I. Off Holkham beach. Near Wells-next-the-Sea. One of those golden autumn afternoons in England where the air smells like linen and white wine. We were singing, or trying to, you were teaching us a harmony. Believe Me if All Those Endearing Young Charms. And lazily trying to fish but catching nothing.’
‘Oh dear. What a shame.’
‘Henry started mucking about, saying he’d satanically summon them from the deep. He was merry after a good lunch. Making us chuckle. Oars into the oarlocks. Whips off his cap. Screwing up his eyes like a witch in the Grimms. And out with it, then, this great stream of cod Latin or some dashed thing, lots of “orums” and forming the crucifix with his fingers.’
‘The crucifix.’
‘The crucifix, yes, with his fingers. And snarling.’
‘There weren’t – horses by any chance?’
‘Do you know, darling, there were.’
‘I seem to remember horses in the sea. Is that possible, Bram?’
‘Darling, Burnham is where they send the cavalry horses from Buckingham Palace in the summer for a break. They’re exercised on Holkham Beach, the soldiers ride them into the bay. You do remember.’
‘Good heavens. Great black stallions? I mean majestic sort of fellows? Irish Draft Cross thoroughbreds or some such beauties. Sixteen hands high if an inch.’
‘Black as the night. Splashing away up to their necks in the waves. One of the noblest sights I ever saw.’
‘What happened then?’
‘We were laughing so hard at Henry, I almost fell out of the boat, you hauled me back in by the collar. But rot me if a minute or two later the fish don’t start galloping up to the surface. Hundreds of the beggars. Thousands. Armfuls. We were scooping them out by the bucketful. Remember that part?’
‘Crikey O’Reilly. No, I don’t.’
‘What happened – we only discovered it later, back on the dock – we’d strayed near a section of the bay that the navy use for torpedo practice. They’d loosed off a ruddy torpedo a moment before Henry’s incantation and up popped our finned friends in their multitudes.’
‘To pay homage to the commander of the deep.’
‘That exactly. He enjoyed it no end, the great fraud.’
‘I daresay, the vain devil. What a chump.’
‘Back ashore, we got him up the stairs and put him into his bed – he was still a bit sozzly – and then you and I walked the prom near the Strand for an hour. Arm in arm. Funny thing, we didn’t speak. Not so much as a syllable. There was a carousel there and we watched it a while. The painted horses turning. A Wurlitzer waltz. The sun had burned me a little. We had to collect the younglings from the farm. And – just for a second or two – you held my hand. Then you kissed it. I kissed yours. And we walked back to the hotel.’
‘How strange, darling, not to remember something so delightful. I wish I did.’
‘Now you do.’
‘Weren’t those horses magnificent?’
‘Like creatures of myth, you said. You were right.’
‘I shouldn’t have let your hand go, darling. I should have held it for ever.’
‘Of course you should.’
‘You know I was terribly in love with you I expect.’
‘Yes you were. For a week and a half.’
She laughs.
‘I see now that we were all of us a little in love with everyone,’ he says. ‘Which isn’t the worst, when one’s young.’
‘Or old.’
‘Or old. Yes indeed. Here’s to folly.’
OUTSIDE A NURSING HOME ON BRICKFIELDS TERRACE
The church clock is striking eleven. It won’t toll again before morning.
He asks the cabbie to leave him on the corner of Bishop’s Bridge Road and assist with the wheelchair. A clear, cold night, the sky alive with turquoise stars. Past the closed Turkish Baths, the shuttered-up library. A lovely last cigarette before bedtime.
He had intended to smoke only four today, is into tomorrow’s allowance. Oh well. Special occasion. Who’d have thought?
He pushes himself down the terrace, looks up at the ruined townhouse. Moonlight in the windows. Wild flowers sprouting from the walls.
The weekend will be pleasant. Good of her to invite him. Perhaps a day or two in the country, she has good fishing and shooting. Many years since he shot. Never truly liked it. But a little time together, to talk and to laugh. Perhaps go motoring down to Folkestone with her, would be lovely to see her drive. An image of him in his wheelchair beneath her pear trees arises, confetti of blossom, an old man in a blanket. Someone is playing Chopin.
The faintest prickle of electricity seems to sparkle through his cheekbones and the bones of his scalp. Now comes pain behind the eyes, shocking, snaketooth-angry, hands of granite grip his throat but he is unable to cry out and the pain vanishes like the heat of a forge-reddened sword thrust into a quench of iced water.
Glancing up, he sees the piano teacher approaching through the smuts of ashy cold, hands outstretched towards him in sisterly gentleness. It is as though some layer that was previously around her has been scorched away by his pain; he sees her clearly, like a man coming out of a cave seeing light for the first time. Her smile is like music. He notices she is barefoot.
‘Bhfuil tú réidh?’ she asks. Are you ready?
Somehow he is able to answer, he doesn’t understand how. He knows barely any Irish. But English is leaving him. It is as though they are conversing in starlight. There are things he will need for the journey, he tells her. Might we pop up to my room and fill a bag? She answers that there is no need, where they’re going, everything is ready. He takes her hand and attempts to rise. It is easier than he thought.
The door of the ruined townhouse is opened by a bearded old mariner who might be a nightwatchman in a Rembrandt. Like the girl, he is barefoot. His eyes glitter like polished cents.
‘Stoker,’ he exclaims. ‘My excelle
nt fellow.’
‘Whitman, dear man. How was your crossing?’
‘Come in from the cold, step right up, you fond rascal. Everyone’s longing to see you. We’re putting on a little play. I seem to be appearing as Homer.’
Ice is forming on the steps. The piano teacher assists him. The hall is warm and dark; the doorways aglow. In the mirror he sees the face of a mild-eyed boy.
His sisters. His parents. A brother he never knew. Ophelia is here, with Desdemona and Juliet, conversing with Wilde about Paris. Prospero and Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw are chinking slim glasses of bubbles. Macbeth is showing Jane Eyre a portrait of Mary Shelley. In the firelight, the Little Match Girl plays marbles with Puck. Every room is full of friends, pushing forward to shake his hand, embrace him. Dead stagehands and steamfitters, lovers half-forgotten, lost sinners encountered in shadow now aglow in the limelight, a man he once saved from drowning, but new, seen as for the first time, as though with the names that belong to them, the long pseudonyms shed.
There is music in some strange scale he never knew existed, strong and yet fragile, impossibly beautiful. The windows are open to the night, the birds are speaking Greek.
‘If you’ll come upstairs with me now? Someone’s waiting to see you.’
‘Let him wait,’ says Stoker. Turning towards the rooms. Drunk on the beauty of moonlight.
26 St George’s Square,
Pimlico,
London.
April 20th, 1912
Dear Miss Terry, dear Ellen, if I may,
You and I do not know one another well, having met so infrequently and hurriedly down the years at the odd First Night or gala, a matter of immense regret to me. But I thought you should want to know the sad news that, having suffered a stroke on Friday evening last, from which he never regained consciousness, early this morning my husband Bram died.
Noel and I are heartbroken. The only relief, for which I thank God, is that he was spared great pain at the end and that Noel and I were at his bedside, holding his hand and cradling him.
Bee and I were not entirely happy together, as you will have gathered; but we had what these days seems the rather unconventional arrangement that is a conventional marriage. Like the woman he married, Bee was by any measure not a saint. He could be sullen, for example, and overly private. And I was impatient, sometimes angry. But he was the only person I have known who did feel in every grain of his being that love is not love which alters when it alteration finds. He was utterly, patiently, endlessly loyal, incapable of purposely letting down a loved one or anyone to whom he had given his word. He was a funny, dependable, clever and gracious man, with a womanly heart full of mercy. What happy times we had were happy indeed. He was a person of fierce kindness, a loving, strong and besotted father. I am so blessed to have my son. He means that Bee will never truly go.
Bee spoke of you often, with great tenderness and love. When in recent times you and he did not see each other as often, as can happen between people what with the busyness and drift of life, he missed you. He took pride in all your artistic and professional success, and in the special and particular friendship you and he had once had. Proud, too, of his close and long loving friendship with H.I., as who would not be. I felt often that each of them was the healing to a wound the other had been hurt by. Or perhaps it was that they discovered, in their particular combination of solitudes, that not all wounds must be healed.
Bee would always have been brave. It was how his flames tempered him. But we women have so many kinds of bravery where those poor creatures, men, have only two. He could so easily and forgivably have become one of those narking old leather-skinned fellows who bore on about youngsters and take to poultices and Knowing Better and smashing the ice on Christmas morning so as to swim in the Thames in order to make everyone around them feel second-rate. But that was not my Bee. I am glad he escaped himself. To me, he will always be the intrepid and handsome boy running down towards the surf, whom I first saw when he and I were seventeen.
He wrote in his Dracula: ‘There is a reason that all things are as they are’. I do not think so. But now he knows. What I can say is that the life he found at the theatre brought him great solace and purpose, as I hope you understand. He had a painful, lonely childhood and did not find the happy marriage that he perhaps was not made for, but was entirely devoid of self-pity or even self-consideration. It was his theatre-life that gave him the courage to face his many disappointments, which he bore, like his illness, with such stoicism and dignity. I am very thankful to you for all your close kindness and love for my Bee.
There are many kinds of love. I know that. He did, too.
Sincerely yours,
Mrs Bram Stoker.
Florence
Caveat, Bibliography, Acknowledgements
Shadowplay is based on real events but is a work of fiction. Many liberties have been taken with facts, characterisations and chronologies, even with the publication dates of Stoker’s lesser-known works. All sequences presenting themselves as authentic documents are fictitious. Readers in search of reliable material are directed to the following works and to the bibliographies they contain:
Edward Gordon Craig, Ellen Terry and Her Secret Self; Michael Holroyd, A Strange Eventful History: the Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their Remarkable Families; Jay Melville, Ellen Terry; David J. Skal, Something in the Blood: the Untold Story of Bram Stoker, and Stoker’s own Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving.
The text of Shadowplay contains many references to Stoker’s masterpiece, Dracula, as well as allusions to some of his other writings. The reference in the closing pages to the birds speaking Greek is borrowed from a letter written by Virginia Woolf.
In 1922, ten years after Stoker’s death, a German company, Prana Film, produced Nosferatu, a pirated screen version of Dracula, which, like Stoker’s other books, had been almost forgotten. Unfortunately for Prana, not by everyone. The redoubtable Florence Stoker sued and won, establishing her rights of ownership and important principles of copyright. All authors owe her a debt of gratitude.
Since then, Dracula has sold tens of millions of copies, been translated into more than a hundred languages and been filmed 200 times. Bram Stoker would be astounded by the immortality of his character. The Count’s afterlife is proving long and unique.
Sir Henry Irving’s ashes are interred in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey, near the Shakespeare memorial. Forty thousand Londoners watched his funeral procession. In 1963, an admirer who for sixty years had placed roses on Irving’s tombstone on the anniversary of his death made a gift to the Abbey: Irving’s crucifix.
Ellen Terry’s unparalleled career lasted seven decades. In 1911, she recorded five scenes from Shakespeare for the Victor Recording Company. She later appeared in a number of films. In 1922 she received an honorary doctorate from St Andrew’s University and in 1925 she was made a Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire. Her grand-nephew, John Gielgud, performed Hamlet at the Lyceum in 1939. The surnames of Terry, Stoker and Irving are engraved on the Burleigh Street exterior wall of the Lyceum, in commemoration of three remarkable artists.
I thank my editor, Geoff Mulligan, everyone at Secker and at Vintage, Isobel Dixon, Conrad Williams and the team at Blake Friedmann Literary, TV and Film Agency, Paul McGuigan of BBC Northern Ireland for suggesting the Henry–Bram relationship to me as a screenplay and Stephen Wright who directed my adaptation of that screenplay for BBC Radio 3. I thank my friends and University of Limerick colleagues, the fine writers Donal Ryan and Sarah Moore Fitzgerald, for enabling me to write this book, and I thank the University for granting me leave.
One of the reasons why I would like life after death to be more than a story is that I would like to see the dedicatee of this novel again. Carole Blake was my friend and literary agent for twenty-five years. If the otherworld does exist, I know she will have found a very good restaurant there, with an excellent wine list, and, on a neighbouring clou
d, a designer shoe shop. The medieval choral music she loved will be playing. And she will be arguing with a publisher on behalf of her latest client, God, who is not receiving sufficient royalties for the Bible.
As ever, my greatest debt is to Anne-Marie Casey and our sons, James and Marcus, for their love, kindness and support.
JO’C, 2018
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