Death Of A Hollow Man Read online

  “That’s all we need,” murmured Van Swieten. “A little touch of Harry on the night.”

  “That man’s his own worst enemy.”

  “And when you think of the competition.”

  Boris made some tea in polystyrene cups, asking as he wielded the kettle, “D’you think I should make some for Esslyn and his crapulous cronies?”

  “Where are they, anyway?”

  “Last I saw, he was in the wings rubbishing Joycey yet again about the cakes. God, David—you messy devil—”

  “Sorry.” David Smy seized a paper-towel roll and mopped up his tea. “I didn’t know it was there.”

  “I saw them all go into the bog.”

  “Ooo…” Boris waved a limp wrist. “Troilism, is it? Bags I Cressida?”

  “Never. You can say all sorts about Esslyn, but I don’t think anyone seriously thinks he’s gay.”

  Just then the three subjects of their conversation appeared in the doorway. They stood very still, their shadows taking a dark precedence, and the overheated, stuffy place suddenly seemed chilly. It was immediately obvious that something was very wrong. The Everards wore looks of sly anticipation, and Esslyn, eyes glittering, darted his head forward in an avid, searching way. The head seemed to Nicholas to have become elongated and slightly flattened. A snake’s head. Then he chided himself for such exaggerated speculations. A trick of the light surely, that was all. Pure fantasy. As must be the idea that Esslyn was looking at him. Searching him out. Nevertheless, Nicholas’s throat was dry, and he sipped his tea gratefully.

  Esslyn sat down and started to retie his stock. Always self-contained, he now appeared almost clinically remote. But the overcareful movements of his hands, the tremor of his jaw only partially controlled by his clenched lips, and that terrible soulless glitter in his eye told their own tale. No one in the dressing room remained unaware that the company’s leading man was boiling with suppressed rage.

  Boris collected the cups in painstaking silence, and the odd remark, uneasily spoken, shriveled as soon as uttered. When the buzzer sounded, there was an immediate exodus, with everyone easing their way cautiously around Esslyn’s chair. As he left, Nicholas looked back and caught a following glance so malign he felt his stomach kick. Convinced now that his earlier perceptions were not merely imagination, he hurriedly away, but not before he noticed that Esslyn had removed all his rings.

  Why this should strike him as ominous, Nicholas could not understand. Perhaps it was simply that, given the man’s present volcanic mien, any slight deviation from the norm gave cause for concern. Nicholas joined the other actors in the wings and stood quietly, a little apart, running over his next scene and forcing his mind to reenter the eighteenth century.

  With seconds to go, Deidre peeped out into the auditorium. She had taken her father a cup of coffee and had toyed with the idea of putting a little brandy in it (he had seemed so tense and still quite cold) but, not knowing how it might interact with his tablets, had decided against the idea. Now, she watched him, staring eyes unnaturally bright, perched on the very edge of his seat as if preparing for imminent departure. What a terrible mistake it had been to allow him to come. She had almost called a taxi during the intermission to take him home, but feared for his safety if he was left alone in the house until eleven o’clock.

  Colin touched her arm and she nodded, her attention now all on the opening of Act II. Esslyn was already in position, a gray shape humped over the back of his chair. As she prepared to raise the curtain, he lifted his head and looked into the wings, and there was on his face an expression of such controlled ferocity that Deidre, in spite of the distance between them, automatically stepped back, bumping into Kitty. Then she cued Tim’s box, the house lights went down, and the play began.

  Esslyn turned to the audience and said, “I have been listening to the cats in the courtyard. They are all singing Rossini.”

  Silence. Not just lack of laughter. Or a stretch of time punctuated only by the odd cough or rustle or movement of feet, but absolute total silence. Esslyn stepped down to the footlights. His eyes, glittering pinpoints of fire, raked the audience, mesmerizing them, gathering them close. He spoke of death and hatred with terrible, thrilling purpose. In the back row Mr. Tibbs whimpered softly. His hair seemed to stir softly on his neck, although there was not the slightest breeze. In the wings knots of actors and stagehands stood still as statues, and Deidre rang the bell for Constanze’s entrance.

  Most actors love a good row onstage, and the argument between Mozart’s wife and Salieri had always gone well. Now, Kitty screamed, “You rotten shit!,” and belabored her husband with her fists. She had her back to Deidre, who was thus facing Esslyn and watching in mounting horror as he seized his wife by the shoulders and shook her, not with the simulated fury that he had shown in rehearsals but in a wild rage, his lips drawn back in a snarl. Kitty’s screams, too, became real as she was whirled round and round, her hair a golden stream whipping across her face, her head on its slender support snapping back and forth with such force it seemed impossible her neck would not break. Then he flung her so violently from him that she staggered across the stage and was only halted by smacking straight into the proscenium arch.

  Deidre, appalled, looked at Colin. Her hand hovered near the curtain release, but he shook his head. Kitty stood for a moment, winded, fighting for breath, then she sucked in air like a drowning man, took two steps, and fell into Deidre’s arms. Deidre led her to the only space in the crowded wings, next to the props table, and pulled up one of the little gilt chairs. She lowered the girl gently into it, handed her clipboard to Colin, and took Kitty’s hand in hers.

  “Is she all right?” Nicholas came up and whispered. “What the hell’s going on?”

  “It’s Esslyn. I don’t know … he seems to have had some sort of brainstorm. He just started throwing her about.”

  “Christ.”

  “Can you sit with her while I get some aspirin?”

  “I’m on in two secs.”

  “Get one of the ASMs, then. Kitty, I shan’t be a minute, okay?”

  “ . . my back … ahh … God …”

  Deidre ran to the ladies’ dressing room. The first-aid box kept always on the windowsill in the far corner behind the costume rail as not there. Frantically she started searching, pulling the actresses’ day clothes—Rosa’s fur coat, Joyce’s looped gray wool—flinging various dresses and skirts aside. She knelt down, hurling shoes and boots out of the way. Nothing. And then she saw it. Sticking out from behind Rosa’s wig stand. She grabbed the box and the aspirin, struggling with the screw top. It seemed impossibly stiff. Then she realized it was a “child proof” cap that you needed to push down first. Even as she shook out three tablets, she recognized the futility of what she was doing. Aspirins were for trivial ailments. A headache, a rise in temperature. What if Kitty’s spine was damaged? What if every second’s delay increased the dreadful danger of paralysis? At the least, she might be about to lose the baby … Deidre suddenly felt afraid. She should have ignored Colin and stopped the play. Asked if there was a doctor in the house. It would be her fault if Kitty never walked again. She forced this dreadful possibility from her mind and murmured, “Water … water.” There were various mugs and polystyrene beakers scattered about, all with dirty brown puddles in the bottom. Deidre seized the nearest mug, rinsed it out, half filled it with cold water, and ran back to the wings.

  The first thing she heard was Nicholas’s voice from the stage. This meant the first scene was over, the set change effected, and scene 2 well under way. She had been longer than she thought. She hurried over to the props table, but the chair where she had left Kitty was empty. Deidre crossed to Colin, who, on her mouthed “Where is she?” mouthed back “Toilet.”

  Kitty was walking up and down the tiled floor when Deidre entered. Walking stiffly, stopping every few steps to ease her shoulders, but still, thank God, walking. Deidre preferred the aspirin and the mug, only to be met with a flood of
invective the like of which she’d never heard in her life. The fact that it was aimed at Kitty’s husband and Deidre just happened to be in the firing line hardly lessened the shock. The language left her face burning, and she “sshh’d” in vain. Some of the words were familiar from the text of Amadeus, and one or two more from the odd occasion when Deidre had been compelled to use a public lavatory, the rest were totally unfamiliar. And they had a newly minted ring, as if normal run-of-the-mill abuse could not even begin to do justice to Kitty’s fury, and she had been compelled to create powerfully primed adjectives of her own.

  “Please …” cried Deidre in an urgent whisper. “The audience will hear you.”

  Kitty stopped then, adding just one more sentence in a very quiet voice. “If he lays a finger on me again,” she said, “I’ll fucking kill him.”

  Then, still moving slowly and stiffly, she went, leaving Deidre staring after her openmouthed, the three aspirins, already sweatily crumbling, in the palm of her hand.

  Barnaby and Troy, like the rest of the audience, were aware of the extraordinary change that had come over Amadeus in the second half. It seemed to them at the time that this was entirely due to the actor playing Salieri.

  In Act I he had given a capable if rather stolid performance. In Act II his whole body seemed alive with explosive energy, which it seemed to barely contain. You would not have been surprised, thought Barnaby, if sparks had flown when he clapped his hands or struck the boards with his heel. The very air through which he stalked, trailing clouds of inchoate rage, seemed charged. Maureen Troy thought she might not have missed Coronation Street for nothing, and Barnaby became aware that his daughter was now sitting up and leaning forward in her chair.

  Salieri’s startling transformation did not help the play as a whole. The rest of the cast, instead of interacting with him as they had done previously (albeit with varying degrees of convincingness), now seemed to have become quite disengaged, moving cautiously within his orbit and avoiding eye contact even when indulging in direct speech.

  Nicholas waited for his cue, gazing into the brilliantly lit arena. He was tense but not alarmed. He responded to the crackling energy that, even in the wings, he could feel emanating from Esslyn, in a very positive way. He felt his own blood surge in response. He knew he could match, even overmatch, the other man’s power. His mind was clear; his body trembled pleasingly with anticipation. He stepped onstage and did not hear Emperor Joseph whisper as he drifted by, “Watch him.”

  And if he had heard, Nicholas would have paid no mind. He had no intention of pussyfooting about. For him, always, the play came first. So he stepped boldly up to Salieri, and when Esslyn said, “I commiserate with the loser” and held out his hand, Nicholas gladly offered his own. Esslyn immediately stepped in front of the boy, masking him from the audience, gripped Nicholas’s hand in his own, and squeezed. And squeezed. Harder. And harder.

  Nicholas’s mouth stretched involuntarily wide in silent pain. His hand felt as if it were being wrapped in a bunch of savagely sharp thorns. Esslyn was smiling at him, a broad jackal grin. Then, just as Nicholas thought he might faint with agony, Esslyn suddenly let go and sauntered to the back of the stage. Nicholas gasped out a reasonable approximation of his next few lines and managed to get across to the piano and sit down. The Venticelli entered, and Mozart, who had no more to say, took this opportunity to examine his hand. It was already puffing up. He straightened the fingers gently one at a time. The back of the hand was worse than the palm. Covered in tiny blue bruises, with the skin actually broken in several places. The whole hand looked and felt as if someone had been trying to hammer thumbtacks into it. At the end of the scene he made his exit. Colin approached him in the wings. “Deidre thinks we ought to stop it.”

  Nicholas shook his head. “I can cope. Now I know.”

  “Let’s have a look.” Colin stared at the hand and drew in his breath sharply. “You can’t go on like that.”

  “Of course I can.” Nicholas, having got over the immediate shock of the attack, was now, despite the pain, rather relishing this opportunity to display his cool professionalism. He was a trouper. And troupers trouped no matter what. Deidre touched his arm and whispered, “What happened?”

  “His rings.” Nicholas held out his hand. “I thought he’d taken them off, but he’d just turned them round.”

  “Bloody hell,” muttered Boris, peering over Deidre’s shoulder. “You won’t play the violin again in a hurry.”

  “But why?” asked Deidre, and Nicholas shrugged his ignorance.

  Onstage Salieri shouted his triumph. “I filled my head with golden opinions—yes, and this house with golden furniture!” and the whole set was suffused with soft, rich amber light. Gilded chairs and tables were carried on. Beside Nicholas, Joyce Barnaby stood holding a three-tier cake stand painted yellow. Like everyone else, she looked anxiously at him.

  Nicholas nodded reassuringly back, attempting to appear both calm and brave. In fact, he was neither. He felt intensely excited, rather alarmed, and very angry. He strove to suppress the anger. The time to let that rip would be afterward. Now, he had to face the challenge of the next half hour. He would have more scenes alone with Salieri, but only one where they had physical contact (another handshake), and that handshake he would make sure to avoid. And the man could hardly do him any serious physical harm in front of a hundred people.

  In the audience, his exquisite daughter raptly attentive by his side, Barnaby’s nostrils widened and twitched. The smell in the theater was a smell he recognized. And so he should. It had been under his nose for a large part of his working life. A hot, burned smell, ferocious and stifling. The whole place stank of it. The smell of violence. He withdrew the larger part of his attention from the play and glanced about him. Everyone was still and quiet. He could see Harold’s profile, bulging with pleasure mixed with disbelief. His wife looked simply frightened. Others sat eyes wide, unblinking. One woman savaged her bottom lip, another had both fists knuckling her cheeks. Barnaby turned his head slightly. Not every gaze was out front. Sergeant Troy, alert—even wary—was also looking about him.

  Behind them in the back row Mr. Tibbs gripped the back of the seat in front of him and pushed away from it so hard that it seemed his backbone must impress the wall behind. His face showed terrible anticipation mixed with a craven appeal for mercy. He looked like a child, innocent of wrongdoing, who awaits harsh punishment.

  Barnaby redirected his attention to the stage and the source of his unease. Esslyn was like a man possessed. He seemed to be never still. Even when he withdrew to the back of the stage and rested in the shadows, energy seemed to pulse through and around him as if he stood on a magnetic field. Barnaby would be glad when the play was over. Although he could think of no reason why Joyce should be at risk, he would be happy to see Amadeus concluded and whatever raging grievance Esslyn had sorted out in the proper manner. It was obviously something to do with Kitty.

  She reentered now, bulkily pregnant, leaning heavily on Mozart’s arm. She looked neither crushed nor beaten. Her curtsey to Salieri was a mere ironic sketch, her mouth a hard line and her eyes flashing. When she said, “I never dream, sir. Things are unpleasant enough to me awake,” her voice, though raw and bruised, surged with acrimony. Barnaby glanced at his watch (about twenty minutes to go) and attempted to relax, giving himself up to the ravishing music of The Magic Flute. How entrenched, how impregnable must Esslyn’s malice be that it could remain undiminished in the presence of such glorious sound.

  Now, clad in a long gray cloak and hat, the top half of his face concealed by a mask, Salieri, harbinger of doom, moved stealthily across the stage to where Mozart, madly scribbling over sheets of paper, was working, literally, to a deadline, composing his own requiem.

  Nicholas worked in a cold fever of exhilaration. Even though he had spent the evening in a more or less constant state of anxiety, there had been enough luminous moments to convince him that, as far as Mozart was concerned, he
was on the right track. Whole sections had almost played themselves and seemed to be newly created moment by moment, as if the whole grinding discipline of rehearsal had never been. I can do it! Nicholas thought, dazed with jubilation. A dark figure moved in the doorway of his pathetic apartment and came to stand behind him.

  Afterward, recounting the scene for Barnaby’s benefit, Nicholas found it impossible to describe precisely the exact moment when the simulated terror with which he had acknowledged Salieri’s phantasmagoric appearance fled and the real thing took its place. Perhaps it was when Esslyn first laid a bony hand upon his shoulder and breathed searing, rancorous breath over his cheek. Perhaps it was when the other man cut their first move and flung aside a chair that Nicholas had cunningly re-sited as a possible barrier between them. Or was it when he whispered, “Die, Amadeus … die”?

  Automatically at this point Nicholas, as he had done at each rehearsal, dropped to all fours and crawled underneath the shrouded table that doubled as a writing desk and bed. The table was permanently set flush to the proscenium arch, and Colin had stapled the heavy felt cover to the floor on either side. So when Esslyn crouched at the entrance and his cloak blotted out the opening like great gray wings, Nicholas was trapped.

  He crawled back as far as he was able in the dark, tiny space. He felt suffocated. What air there was, was thick with the musty staleness of the cloth and the reek of jackal breath. Esslyn curled back his lips in a hideous parody of a smile. And Nicholas realized that his earlier conviction (that he could come to no harm under the gaze of a hundred assorted souls) was a false one. He believed now that Esslyn would not be bound by the normal man’s rational fear of discovery. Because Esslyn, Nicholas decided, was stark staring bonkers.