Death Of A Hollow Man Page 11

  They were late. Harold had rather ostentatiously looked at his watch, shaken it, lifted one of his earflaps, and listened, then started to pace tubbily up and down, looking like a cross between Diaghilev and Winnie the Pooh. The pigeon, perhaps thinking a spot of exercise might warm up the feathers, left the doorway and joined him. Harold was very much aware that people were noticing him, and favored the occasional passerby with a gracious nod. Most of them would know who he was—he had, after all, been the town’s theater director for many years—the others, as became plain from their glances and whispered comments, recognized his quality. For Harold walked in an aura of barnstorming splendor. In him the strenuous creative struggle of rehearsal, the glamor of first nights, and the glittering aftermath of post-performance soirees were made manifest.

  Sometimes, to underline the extraordinary superiority of his position, Harold would torture himself, just a little, with one of his most magnetic and alarming daydreams and, to pass the time, he slipped into it now. In this dream he would fantasize, rather like Marie Antoinette milk-maiding about at the Trianon, that he was living in Causton as a nonentity. Just another middle-aged dullard. He saw himself at the Rotarians with other drearies, pompously discussing local fund-raising or, worse, serving on the parish council, where an entire evening could be frittered away delving into the state of the drains. Activities generating a self-righteous glow while filling in an abyss of boredom. On Sunday he would clean the car (a Fiesta), and in the evening there would be television with programs of interest noted well in advance. After this would come the writing of a why-oh-why letter to the Radio Times, pointing out some faulty pronunciation or error in period costume or setting, and a temporary leg up, status-wise, in the community if it was actually printed.

  It was usually at this point that Harold, his face sheened with the cold sweat of terror, stopped the panorama, leaped down from the tumbril, and hotfooted it back to reality. Now, he was helped on his way by the sight of a shabby Citroen 2CV parking at the corner of Carradine Street on a double yellow line. He collected himself and hurried forward.

  “You can’t stop there.”

  “Mr. Winstanley?”

  “Oh.” Harold adjusted his hat and facial expression. He said, disbelievingly, “Are you from the Observer?” She hardly looked old enough to be in charge of a paper route, let alone a feature column.

  “That’s right.” Ramona Plume pointed at the windshield as she scrambled out. A large disc was stamped PRESS. “I’m okay for a few minutes, surely?”

  “A few …” Harold led the way to the Latimer’s glass doors. “The story I have to tell, my dear, will take a lot longer than a few minutes.”

  As the girl followed him into the foyer, she laughed and said, “Is he with you?” jerking her head at the pigeon. Harold tightened his lips. Ms. Plume opened a small leather case slung on a thin strap across her chest. Harold, who had assumed this to be a handbag, watched disconcertedly as she undid a flap, pressed a button, and started a tape. He leaped into speech. “I first thought of producing Ama—”

  “Hang on. Just rewinding.”

  “Oh.” Miffed, Harold strolled over to the photograph board and stood in a proprietorial stance, one arm draped across the top. “I thought—when your colleague turns up— the first set of photographs might be here?”

  “No piccies.”

  “What!”

  “It’s Saturday. Nobody free.” She tossed back a long fall of blond hair. “Weddings. Dog Shows. Pudding and Pie. Scouts’ Xmas Fair.”

  “I see.” Harold bit back a sharp rejoinder. It never did to antagonize the press. And he had plenty of stills, including a recent one of himself wreathed in a Davidoffian haze directing Nicholas in Night Must Fall.

  Ms. Plume poked a microphone not much bigger than a toothbrush at him, saying, “I understand from your letter that this is the Latimer’s ninetieth production?”

  Harold smiled and shook his head. There was an awful lot of ground to be covered before they discussed the precise place of Amadeus in the Winstanley pantheon. He took a deep breath. “I always knew,” he began, “that I was destined for—”

  “Just a sec.” She dashed into the street, looked up and down, and dashed back. “They’re getting very sniffy at the office about paying fines.”

  “As I was saying—”

  “Are the programs done yet?”

  ‘‘What for?”

  “Amadeus, of course.”

  “I should hope so. It’s the first night on Monday.”

  “Could I have one?”

  “What … now?”

  “In case I have to zip off. Get the names right—that’s the main bit, isn’t it? With Amdram.”

  Amdram! Harold went to the filing cabinet, feeling sourly that the way things were going it might be a good idea to skip his formative years. He took two first night tickets from the cash box and slipped them into a program, saying, “I don’t know if you’re familiar with the play at all?”

  “I’ll say. Saw it at the National. That Simon Callow. Amaayzing.”

  “Well, of course Peter Hall and I do approach the text from an entirely different—”

  “Did you see Chance in a Million?”

  “What?”

  “On the telly. Simon Callow. And Faust. Totally in the nudies at one point.”

  “I’m afraid I-”

  “Amaayzing.”

  “You seem very young,” said Harold acerbically, “to be a reporter.”

  “I’m their cub.” The cuddliness of the noun did not mollify, especially when she added, “I always get the short straw.”

  “Look. If we could go on to my next—”

  A black and yellow shape peered through the doors. The girl gave a piercing squeal and flew across the carpet. “I’m coming . . . Don’t book me … please . . . Press. Press!” She waved her microphone at the phlegmatic profile and disappeared into the street. Harold hurried after and caught up with her as she climbed back into the car. She wound the window down. “Sorry it was a bit rushed.”

  “There’s some tickets inside the program.” He dropped it into her lap as she took first gear. “Front row. Do try to come. …”

  On the way back to Slough the Observer’s cub drew into a rest area, changed her tape of Bros for the Wedding Present, and checked her appointments list. In half an hour Honey Rampant, the TV personality, was opening a garden center. There’d probably be snacks and munchies, so Ms. Plume decided to drive straight there instead of stopping for a sandwich. Before driving off again, she tore up the front-row tickets for Amadeus and threw the fragments out of the car window.

  PLAYBILL

  AMADEUS by PETER SHAFFER

  THE VENTICELLI: Clive Everard

  Donald Everard

  VALET TO SALIERI: David Smy

  COOK TO SALIERI: Joyce Barnaby

  ANTONIO SALIERI: Esslyn Carmichael

  TERESA SALIERI: Rosa Crawley

  JOHANN KILIAN VON STRACK: Victor Lacey

  COUNT ORSINI-ROSENBERG: James Baker

  BARON VAN SWIETEN: Bill Last

  CONSTANZE WEBER: Kitty Carmichael

  WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART: Nicholas Bradley

  MAJOR-DOMO: Anthony Chailis

  JOSEPH II, EMPEROR OF AUSTRIA: Boris Kent

  KATHERINA CAVALIERI: Sarah Pitt-Keighley

  CITIZENS OF VIENNA: Kenney Badel, David smy, Sarah Pitt-Keighley, Joyce Barnaby, Kevin Latimer, Noel Armstrong, Alan L Hughes, Lucy Mitchell, Guy Catchpole, Phoebe Glover

  DESIGN: Avery Phillips

  LIGHTING: Tim Young

  WARDROBE: Joyce Barnaby

  STAGE MANAGER: Colin Smy

  ASSISTANT STAGE MANAGER: Deidre Tibbs

  DIRECTED BY Harold Winstanley

  First Night

  Everything was ready. Checked and counterchecked. Deidre sent her young assistants up to the clubroom for some orangeade or a cup of coffee, leaving Colin to set the pianoforte. It was already past the half, and a buzz of excited co
nversation came up from the dressing rooms.

  “I shall come in on a wing and a prayer,” Boris was informing everyone.

  “I thought you were an atheist.”

  “No one’s an atheist on first nights, darling.”

  “Where’s Nicholas?”

  “He’s always here hours before anyone else.”

  “Someone’s pinched my eyebrow pencil.”

  “I’ve forgotten every line. You’ll all have to cover for me.

  “Has anyone seen my stockings?”

  “I hear Joyce’s daughter’s coming.”

  “Oh, God. Well, I hope she keeps her opinions to herself. I can still remember what she said about Shop at Sly Corner. ”

  “I thought Harold was going to go into orbit.”

  “I mean—no one minds constructive criticism.”

  “You’ve got my stockings.”

  “No, I haven’t. They’re mine!”

  “If any of the furniture collapses tonight, I shall dry up completely.”

  “They are not yours. Look—here’s the stain where I upset my wet-white.”

  “We’ve got an almost full house.”

  “Oh, the master will be pleased. ‘A bum on every seat, my loveys.’ ”

  “ ‘And mass genuflection.’ ”

  “It’s nearly the quarter. Where on earth can Nicholas be?”

  Nicholas was late for the most thrilling of reasons. Tim and Avery had just told him their secret, and he had been so excited and alarmed that he had stayed in the lighting box questioning them until the very last minute. The facts were these. Tim always designed his own lighting for each production, working at home with a model of the set. He was especially pleased with his plan for Amadeus, amber and rose for Schonbrunn, grays behind the whispering Venticelli, crepuscular violet when Mozart died. Harold, as always, would have none of it. (“Just who is directing this epic? No—I’m serious. I really want to know.”) That same night Tim carried out Harold’s lighting plot for the first time, and when he and Avery got home, Avery burst into tears, saying his beautiful set looked as if it were part of a sewer after its star product hit the fan.

  It was then that Tim decided that he had had enough and put forward his proposition. It was simply that, on the first night, he would light the play from his own original plan. Once the curtain was up, there would be nothing Harold or anyone else could do about it, and he would hardly wish to make a scene during intermission. Of course, it would mean the end of their time at the Latimer, but both were prepared to face that and had already put out feelers toward a group in Uxbridge. They had sneaked into the theater on Sunday afternoon to reset everything and run through the new plot.

  Now, Nicholas entered the dressing room bursting with suppressed information and squeezed into the only remaining space. Around him actors were nearly all in costume. Von Strack was pulling on white stockings, David Smy struggled with his cravat, the Venticelli—caped and masked and looking more like bats than grasshoppers— whirled about with seedily sinister affection. The air smelled of powder, after-shave, and hair spray. Nicholas got into his lace-trimmed shirt, picked up a tube of Kamera Klear, and rubbed some in, watching his pallid complexion turn a warm apricot. He wore very little makeup now, and looked back to his debut in The Crucible, where he sported heavy lake wrinkles and wisps of crinkly snow-white hair with not a little condescension.

  On the other side of the room Esslyn was shaking powder onto his wig, and Nicholas, seeing in his mirror the other man’s reflection, was uncomfortably reminded of his own loose-lippedness. Behind Nicholas, the emperor Joseph, heavy in white satin and jeweled decorations, paced slowly up and down like a great glittering slug. Nicholas imagined the small rouged lips pushed forward and whispering what had once been his own secret into the collective company ear.

  Esslyn, apparently unaware of his invisible horns, was looking especially pleased with himself, like a cat that has swallowed a particularly succulent canary. He lifted his hands and adjusted his wig, and Nicholas saw his rings sparkle. He wore six. Most were encrusted with stones, and one had short, savage spines and perched on his finger like an embattled baby porcupine. Now, he pushed a tin of Cremine that had had the temerity to stray onto his turf smartly aside and began to speak.

  Even as he tuned in, Nicholas knew he would not like what the other man was going to say. There was relish in his voice; it curled with spite. He was talking about Deidre. Relaying something that she had told him in confidence but that he felt was too delightful not to pass on. Apparently she had received a telephone call at work last week from the police. It seemed her father had wandered off from the day center in the rain without a coat or even a jacket, and had been found half an hour later attempting to direct the traffic at the junction of Casey Street and Hillside.

  “So I said,” continued Esslyn, “trying to keep a straight face at the thought of that senile old fool out in the pouring rain, ‘How dreadful.’ And she said, ‘I know’— he paused then, giving them the benefit of his immaculate timing—‘he doesn’t know that area at all.’ ”

  Spontaneously they nearly all roared. Nicholas included. True, he laughed less long and heartily than the others, but still, he did laugh. A moment later Deidre appeared in the doorway.

  “A quarter of an hour, everyone.”

  There was an immediate chorus of overloud and falsely grateful thank you’s. Only Esslyn, carefully applying lip liner, said nothing. It was hard to tell, thought Nicholas, whether she had overheard or not. Her high color would conceal a blush, and as her expression was always riddled with anxiety, this gave no clue, either. She stood poised in the doorway for all the world, as the Everards said the second she’d disappeared, as if she was about to break into a gallop. To do the dressing room credit, there was no laughter this time.

  Someone got up and followed her out, and Nicholas nearly got up and followed him, he was so sick of them all. He felt he should try to make amends, and pictured himself approaching Deidre in the wings. But what could he say? I wasn’t one of those who laughed? Deeply embarrassing as well as untrue. I’m sorry, Deidre, I didn’t mean to be hurtful and I’m really sad about your father? Even stickier, and what if she hadn’t overheard at all? In that case, putting her so firmly in the picture would simply cause unnecessary pain. Then, to make himself feel better, he started to feel irritated with her. Honestly, he thought, for someone always dependent on the kindness of strangers, she could certainly pick her confidants. A callous sod like Esslyn was the last person she should be opening her heart to. What else did she expect? But shifting a fair proportion of his guilt onto Deidre’s already bowed shoulders made him feel even worse. He became aware that he was furious with Esslyn for catapulting him into this emotional distraction when all his thoughts should be channeled toward Act I, scene 1. Almost before he knew he meant to, he spoke.

  “You know your trouble, Esslyn?” Esslyn’s hands were still. He looked inquiringly into his glass. “You’re too full of the milk of human kindness.”

  There was an immediate hush. Blanched faces turned exaggeratedly to each other. Boris stopped pacing and stared aghast at the back of Nicholas’s head. Van Swieten said, “You fool.” Nicholas stared back at them all defiantly. This respect for Esslyn could be taken too far. He may have been the company’s leading man for fifteen years, but that didn’t make him God Almighty.

  “Do you know what you’ve done?” asked Boris.

  “I’ve spoken my mind,” said Nicholas. “Anyone’d think it was a hanging matter.”

  “You’ve quoted from The Scottish Play.”

  “What?”

  “ ‘Yet I do fear thy nature,’ ” quavered Boris. “ ‘It is too full of the milk of human kindness—’ ”

  “Shut up!” yelled Orsini-Rosenberg. “You’ll make it worse.”

  “That’s right,” said Clive Everard. “Nicholas did it unknowingly.”

  “It’s Boris who’ll bring trouble on our heads.”

  “You
must both go out and turn round three times and come back in,” said Von Strack.

  “I’ll do nothing of the sort,” said Nicholas, but hesitantly. After all, if he was going to enter the profession, he should (longed to) embrace all its myths and mysteries. “It’s not as if I did it on purpose.”

  “Come on.” Boris was already in the doorway. Nicholas hovered half out of his seat. “It’s the only way to avert disaster.”

  “That’s true, Nicholas. There are terrible stories about what happens if you quote The Scottish Play and don’t put it right.”

  “Oh … if you say so.” Nicholas joined Boris at the door. “Which way do we turn? Clockwise or anticlockwise?”

  “How should I know?”

  “I don’t suppose it matters.”

  “It matters terribly,” called Van Swieten.

  “In that case, we’ll turn three times each way.”

  “But”—Boris had almost chewed off all his carmine lip rouge in his anxiety—“won’t that mean they cancel each other out?”

  Colin had finished setting the pianoforte, and now disappeared behind his superb fireplace to check that the struts and weights that held it secure were firmly in position. Crouching down, he heard footsteps and, looking through the huge space beneath the mantel, saw Deidre almost run through the wings opposite. A second person followed and disappeared into the toilet, coming out again almost immediately. Colin was about to stand up and call across the stage when he was struck by something intensively furtive about the figure. It stood very still looking round the deserted wings, then it moved to the dark area at the back of the props table and bent down. A minute later it straightened up, glanced around once more, and hurried back into the bathroom. Colin crossed the stage and approached the table, but he had no time for more than a quick check (it all looked perfectly in order) when Deidre returned from the clubroom shepherding her giggling gaggle of assistants. She crossed to him and said, “Oh, Colin, would you call the five please? My father’s taxi’s due in a minute, and I have to get him to his seat.”