Death Of A Hollow Man Read online

  It was a beautiful thing. The handle, an elegant curve of ebony, was engraved in gold: e.v. bayars. master cutler. (c.a.p.s.) Around this imprint was a wreath of acanthus leaves and tiny flowers inlaid in mother-of-pearl. The reverse side was plain except for three tiny rivets. The blade, its edge honed to a lethal certainty, winked and gleamed. Esslyn, mindful of its reason for being there, said, “Looks bloody sharp.”

  “As it must!” cried Harold. “Theatrical verisimilitude is vital.”

  “Absolutely,” seconded Rosa—rather quickly, some thought.

  “I don’t give a fairy’s fart for theatrical verisimilitude,” enjoined Esslyn, holding out his hand and gingerly taking the razor. “If you think I’m putting this thing within six inches of my throat, you can think again.”

  “Haven’t you ever heard of mime?” inquired Harold.

  “Yes, I’ve heard of mime,” replied Esslyn. “I’ve also heard of Jack the Ripper, Sweeney Todd, and death by misadventure.”

  “I’ll work something out by the next rehearsal,” Harold said reassuringly. “Don’t worry. Wrap it up again for now, Tim. I want to get on with Act Two, Deidre?” Pause. “Where is she now?”

  “Still washing up, I think,” said Rosa.

  “Good grief. I could wash up the crockery from a four-course banquet for twenty in the time she takes to do half a dozen cups. Well … to our muttons. Phoebe—you’d better go on the book.” Everyone dispersed to the wings and dressing rooms with the exception of Esslyn, who remained, still studying the razor thoughtfully. Harold crossed to his side. “Pas de problème,” he said. “You have to get used to handling it, that’s all. Look—let me show you.”

  He took the beautiful object and carefully eased the blade back toward the handle. Suddenly it sprang to forcefully, with a sharp click. Harold gave a little hiss of alarm, and Esslyn a longer one of satisfaction. “You don’t seem to have trained this very well, Tim,” called Harold, giving Esslyn a smile of rather strained jocularity. Then he put the razor down and took the other man’s arm companionably. “Now, when have you ever known me with a production headache I couldn’t put right? Mm? In all our years together?” Esslyn responded with a wary look, rife with disenchantment. “Believe me,” said Harold, spacing out his words and weighting them equally to emphasize the power of his conviction, “you are in safe hands. There is nothing whatsoever to worry about.”

  Dramatis Personae

  In his room over the Blackbird bookshop Nicholas lay on the floor doing his Cicely Berry voice exercises. He did them night and morning without fail, however late he was getting up or getting in. He had reached the lip and tongue movements, and rat-a-tat sounds filled the room. Fortunately the neighbors on both sides (Browns, the funeral parlor, and a butcher’s) were past caring about noise.

  Nicholas had been born nineteen years ago and brought up in a village midway between Causton and Slough. At school he had been regarded as just above average. Moderately good at games, moderately good at lessons, and, as he was also blessed with an amiable disposition, moderately good at making friends. He had been in the upper sixth and thinking vaguely of some sort of future in a bank or on the management side of industry when something happened that forever changed his life.

  One of the texts for his English “A” level was A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (Or, as he had since learned to call it, simply The Dream.) A performance of the play by the Royal Shakespeare Company was booked to take place in the vast gymnasium of Nicholas’s comprehensive school. Within two days of the announcement, the performance was sold out. Several of the sixth form went, Nicholas more for the novelty of the thing than anything else. He was intrigued by the site the company had chosen for their performance. He had always believed that theaters, like cinemas, had a stage at one end, curtains, and rows of seats, and was curious as to how the RSC was going to cope in the gym, which had none of these.

  When he arrived, there seemed to be hundreds of people milling about, and the place was transformed. There were rostrums and flights of steps, trestle tables, artificial green grass, and a metal tree with golden apples on it. Scattered about the floor were huge cushions made of carpet material. Five musicians were sitting on the vaulting horse.

  Overhead was an elaborate grid of metal with dozens of lights attached. Two of the gym ropes had been released, and swung gently to and fro. Then Nicholas noticed, at the other end of the hall on a dais, a stocky man in evening clothes with a broad red ribbon across his breast pinned with a jeweled star and medals. He was chatting to a woman in a dark green bustled dress wearing diamonds in her ears and a tiny crown. Suddenly he held out his arm, she rested her gloved hand on his wrist, and they stepped down from the platform. The lights blazed white and hard, and the play began.

  Immediately Nicholas was enthralled. The vigor and attack and intense proximity of the actors took his breath away. The brilliant costumes, their colors blurred by the quickness of the players’ movement and dance, dazzled him. He was caught up in the sweep and power of emotions that defied analysis. And they changed so quickly. He no sooner felt the most intense sympathy for Helena than he was compelled to laugh at her incoherent rage. The mechanicals, good for a snigger in his English class, moved him almost to tears as he saw how passionately, how urgently, they longed for their play to be performed. The scenes between Titania and Bottom were so sensual he felt his face burn.

  He had to move lots of times. Red ropes were set up at one point and, standing just behind them, he was a part of Theseus’s court. Then he got bundled onto the dais to watch Bottom carried shoulder high by a shouting, cheering mob to his nuptials. The ass’s head turned, and the yellow eyes glared at him as the man went by braying and raising one brawny arm in unmistakable sexual salute. And in the midst of this seemingly unstoppable splendid flux of dance and movement and energy and rhythm were remarkable points of stillness. Oberon and Titania, each spinning casually on a climbing rope, silk robes fluttering, swinging nearer and nearer to each other, exchanging glances of passionate hatred, unexpectedly stopped and shared a chaste ironic kiss. Pyramus’s grief at Thisbe’s death expressed simply but with such pain that all the court and audience too became universally silent.

  And then the wedding feast. After a great fanfare the court and servants threw plastic glasses into the audience, then ran around with flagons to fill them. Everyone toasted Theseus and Hippolyta. Balloons and streamers descended from the grid. Faery and human danced together, and the hall became a great swirling mass of color and light and melodious sounds. Nicholas climbed a flight of steps and stood watching, his throat closed and dry with excitement; then, as if on the stroke of midnight, all movement ceased, and Nicholas realized that Puck was standing next to him. So close their arms were touching. The actor spoke: “ ‘If we shadows have offended . .’ ”

  Then Nicholas realized that it was coming to an end. That the whole glorious golden vision was going to fade away and die … “no more yielding but a dream.” And he thought his heart would break. Puck spoke on. Nicholas studied his profile. He could feel the dynamic tension in the man, see it in the pugnacious tightness of his jaw and the rippling muscles of his throat. He spoke with tremendous force, emitting a small silver spray of saliva as he declaimed the closing lines. And then, on “Give me your hand, if we be friends,” he stretched out his left arm to the audience in a gesture that was all benevolence and, with his right, reached out to Nicholas and seized his hand. For the space of one more line they stood, the actor and the boy whose life would never be the same again. Then it was over.

  Nicholas sat down as the applause went on and on. When the company finally dispersed and the audience drifted away, he remained, clutching his glass, in a daze of passionate emotion. Then one of the stagehands took the steps away. Nicholas emptied his glass of the last spot of black currant, then spotted a red streamer and a pink paper rose on the floor. He picked them up and put them carefully in his pocket. The lighting grid was being lowered and he felt in the way, so
he took himself off with the deepest reluctance.

  Outside in the road were two large vans. Someone was loading the metal tree with golden apples. Several of the actors emerged. They set off down the road and Nicholas followed, knowing that tamely going home was out of the question. The group went into the pub. He hesitated for a while by the door, then slipped in and stood, a rapt observer, just behind the cigarette machine.

  The actors stood in a circle a few feet away. They were not dressed stylishly at all. They wore jeans, shabby afghans, sweaters. They were drinking beer; not talking or laughing loudly or showing off, and yet there was something about them… . They were simply different from anyone else there. Marked in some subtle way that Nicholas could not define. He saw Puck, a middle-aged man in an old black leather jacket wearing a peaked denim cap, smoking, waving the smoke away, smiling.

  Nicholas watched them with a degree of longing so violent it made his head ache. He wanted desperately to overhear their conversation, and was on the point of edging nearer when the door behind him opened and two teachers came in. Immediately he dodged behind their backs and into the street. Apart from feeling that he could not bear to be exposed so soon to the banalities of everyday conversation, Nicholas felt sure that the enthralling experience through which he had just passed must have marked him physically in some way. And he dreaded what he felt would be clumsy and insensitive questioning.

  Fortunately, when he got home, everyone had gone to bed. He looked at himself in the kitchen mirror, surprised and a little disappointed at the modesty of his transformation. His face was pale and his eyes shone, but apart from that he looked pretty much the same.

  But he was not the same. He sat down at the table and produced the glass, the flower, the streamer, and his free cast list. He smoothed the paper out and ran down the column of actors. Puck had been played by Roy Smith. Nicholas drew a careful ring around the name, washed and dried his glass carefully, put the rose and the paper and the streamer inside, then went to his room. He lay on his bed reliving every moment of the evening till daylight broke. The next day he went to the library, asked if there was a local drama group, and was given details of the Latimer. He went to the theater that same evening, told them he wanted to be an actor, and was immediately co-opted to help with the props for French Without Tears.

  Nicholas quickly discovered that there was theater and theater, and adapted philosophically. He had a lot (everything) to learn and had to start somewhere. He was sorry that none of the CADS, with the exception of Deidre, had been to see The Dream, but sensed very quickly that to attempt to describe it, let alone mention its effect on him, would be a mistake. So he made and borrowed props and ran about and made himself so useful that he was co-opted permanently. For the next play, Once in a Lifetime, he went on the book. He made a mess of prompting at first, bringing down on himself Esslyn’s scorn and Harold’s weary disdain, but he took the play home and read it over and over, absorbing the quick-fire rhythms, getting to sense the pauses, making himself familiar with exits and entrances, and became much better. He helped build the set for Teahouse of the August Moon, and Tim taught him basic lighting, letting him share the box and patting his bottom absentmindedly from time to time. He did the sound effects and music for The Snow Queen, and in The Crucible, he got a speaking part.

  Nicholas learned his few lines quickly, and was always the first actor at rehearsals and the last to leave. He bought a cheap tape recorder and worked on an American accent, ignoring the amused glances between certain members of the cast. He made up an entire history for his character and listened and reacted with intense concentration to everything that went on around him onstage. Long before the first night he could think of nothing else. When it arrived and he was incompetently putting on too much makeup in the packed dressing room, he realized he had forgotten his lines. Frantically he sought a script, wrote them down on a piece of paper, and tucked it into the waistband of his homespun trousers. Waiting in the wings, he was overcome with a wave of nausea and was sick in the firebucket.

  As he stepped onto the stage, terror struck him with hurricane force. Rows of faces swam into his line of vision. He looked once and looked away. He spoke his first line. The lights burned down, but he felt cold with exhilaration and excitement as, one after the other, the rest of his lines sprang to the forefront of his mind when needed and he experienced for the first time that strange dual grip that an actor must always keep on reality. Part of him believed in the Proctors’ kitchen in Salem with its iron pots and pans and crude furnishings and frightened people, and part of him was aware that a stool was in the wrong place and that John Proctor was still masking his wife and Mary Warren had forgotten her cap. Afterward in the clubroom he experienced a warm, close camaraderie (“Give me your hands, if we be friends”) that seemed fleetingly to surmount any actual likes and dislikes within the group.

  In the pantomime he played the back legs of a horse, and then was offered the part of Danny in Night Must Fall.

  Rehearsals started six weeks before his “A” levels, and he knew he had failed the lot. The endless grumblings that had been going on at home for months about all the time he was spending at the Latimer erupted into a blazing row, and he walked out. Almost immediately Avery offered him the tiny room over the Blackbird bookshop. It was rent-free in exchange for dusting the shop every morning and cleaning Avery’s house once a week.

  He had lived there now for nearly a year and subsisted, sometimes superbly (on Avery’s leftovers), but mainly on baked beans purloined from the supermarket where he worked. Nearly all his wages went on voice and movement classes—he had discovered an excellent teacher in Slough—and on theater tickets. Once a month he hitched up to London to see a show, determined to keep his batteries recharged by frequent injections of what he thought of as “the real thing.” (It was after an exhilarating performance of The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Barbican that he had chosen Ford’s Epicurean speech for his Central audition.)

  He still didn’t know if he was any good. Brenda Leggat, first cousin to the Smys, reviewed the CADS productions in the local rag, and her perceptions were about as original as her prose. Every comedy was sparkling, every tragedy wrenched the heart. Performances, if not to the manner born, were all we have come to expect from this actor/ actress/soubrette/ingenue/cocktail cabinet. And Nicholas soon understood the group well enough to know that any direct questions regarding his performance would receive anodyne if not gushing reassurances. Plenty was said in the clubroom about absent friends, but it was almost impossible for an actor to get an honest opinion to his face. Everyone except Esslyn and the Everards (and Harold, of course) told Nicholas that he was marvelous. Harold rarely praised (he liked to keep them on their toes), except at first nights, when he behaved like a Broadway impresario, surging about hysterically, kissing everyone, distributing flowers, and even squeezing out a histrionic tear.

  Nicholas finished his exercises, did a series of stretches and some more deep breathing, undressed, brushed his teeth, climbed into bed, and promptly fell into a deep sleep.

  He dreamed it was the first night of Amadeus, and he stood in the wings dressed all in black with wrinkled tights and a skull under his arm, having learned the part of Hamlet.

  Rosa Crawley’s husband was waiting up, having spent the evening in the Cap and Bells with some fellow Rotarians and their polyestered spouses. He always tried to get home before his wife, not only because she hated finding the house empty but because he looked forward to hearing the continuing saga of theatrical folk that started almost the minute she came through the door. She never accompanied him to the pub, of course, and Earnest basked a little in her absence, knowing that his companions were aware that his wife had much more interesting fish to fry. Tonight he was home only minutes before her, and had just made his cocoa when she arrived. Earnest plumped up the sofa cushions, poured a double scotch on the rocks so that his wife could unwind, and sat back with his own drink, his face bright with anticipation.r />
  Rosa sipped her whisky and watched Earnest pushing aside the wrinkled skin of his steaming cocoa a little enviously. Sometimes, especially on a night like this, she quite fancied a cup of cocoa but felt that it was surely (Slippery Elm Food apart) the least sophisticated drink in the entire world. Starting to take it of an evening could well be the first step on the sliding slope to coziness and a public admittance of middle age. Next thing she’d be padding around in a warm dressing gown and wearing thermal underwear. She slipped off her high-heeled shoes and massaged her feet. The shoes lay, vamp down, spiky four-inch heels stabbing the air.

  She was a tiny woman, just over five feet tall with a Gypsyish appearance that she nurtured to an extreme degree. The black of her dark hair was regularly intensified, her fine dark eyes ringed with kohl and decorated with a double fringe of false lashes, while her coppery complexion spoke of the wind on the heath and a star to steer by. Her nose was larger than she would have liked, but she capitalized on this by hinting at a rather tragic immigrant Jewish background, a suggestion that would have horrified her grandparents, sturdy Anglo-Saxon farm workers from Lincolnshire. She nourished this vaguely Semitic Romany ancestry by wearing dark clothes with accessories that were so dazzling they seemed to be going off like fireworks rather than making a fashion point.

  Looking over at Earnest placidly sipping his nightcap, she wondered anew at the strange fact of their marriage. It had been out of the question, of course, that she remain single after her divorce from Esslyn. Apart from the matter of pride, she couldn’t bear to be alone for more than five minutes. She had assumed that, with her looks and personality, men would come flocking out of the woodwork once word got around that she was available, but this had not been the case. Earnest Crawley, local builder, widower, and comfortable had been the only serious suitor.

  He was a sweet man who knew his place, and she accepted him the first time he proposed. He was shy of and a little alarmed by the CADS, and apart from going to Rosa’s first nights and the closing night party, kept well away, perhaps sensing that this would please her best. Occasionally Rosa gave the leading lights in the company lunch, and then Earnest played mine host barricaded behind a trestle table and pouring out the Frascati. They all drank like whales, it seemed to him, and he was glad when it was all over and the hothouse atmosphere damped down to normal again. Now, he asked how it had gone tonight.