Death Of A Hollow Man Read online

  “My God—it’s the frog footman.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s Dandini.”

  “You’re both wrong,” mouthed Esslyn in a Restoration aside. “It’s the fairy Quasimodo.”

  “For heaven’s sake, get on with it!” cried Harold. “I’m putting on a play here, not running a bear garden.” He sat back in his seat, and the rehearsals rolled on. Amadeus was not an easy play, but Harold had never been one to shirk a challenge to his directorial skills, and the fact that it had a large cast and thirty-one scenes did not deter him. Six keen fifth-formers from the local comprehensive had been recruited to help onstage management, and Harold watched them now drifting vaguely on and off the set with an exasperated expression on his face. It was all very well for Peter Shaffer to suggest that their constant coming and going should by a pleasant paradox of theater be rendered invisible. He wasn’t lumbered with a crew of sleepwalking zombies who didn’t know their stage right from a 97 bus. And Esslyn, who was onstage throughout and could have been a great help, was worse than useless. Years ago, Harold had made the mistake of saying that when he was in the business, no actor of any standing would demean himself by touching either stick or stone during a performance. All that was strictly stage management. Since then their leading man had steadfastly refused to handle anything but personal props.

  “Deidre,” shouted Harold. “Speed this lot up. The set changes are taking twice as long as the bloody play.”

  “If he’d read the author’s notes,” murmured Nicholas to Deidre, who had been testing a pile of newly stacked furniture in the wings for rockability and was now back in the prompt corner, “he’d know you’re supposed to carry on acting through the changes.”

  “Oh, you won’t find Harold bothering with boring old things like author’s notes,” said Deidre, as near to malice as Nicholas had ever heard her. “He has his own ideas. I hate this scene, don’t you?”

  Nicholas, poised for his entrance, nodded briefly. The reason they both disliked The Abduction from the Seraglio was the lighting. Futilely, when Harold had asked for crimson gels, Tim had attempted one of his rare arguments. In reply, speaking very slowly as if to an idiot child, Harold explained his motivation.

  “It’s all about a seraglio. Right?”

  “So far.”

  “Which is another word for a brothel—right?”

  Tim murmured, “Wrong,” but could have saved his breath.

  “Which is another word for a red-light house. Ergo … surely I don’t have to further spell it out? I know it’s theatrical, Tim, but that’s the kind of producer I am. Bold effects are my forte. If what you want is wishy-washy naturalism, you should stay at home and watch the telly.”

  Nicholas was always glad when the scene was finished. He felt as if he were swimming in blood. He came offstage dissatisfied with his performance and irritated with himself. Avery’s secret was nagging at his mind. He wondered what on earth it could be. Probably some piddling thing. Nowhere near as scandalously interesting as Nicholas’s own secret. He wished they’d either told him at once or not mentioned it at all. Perhaps he could persuade them to cough it up at the intermission.

  Pausing only to give David Smy a very insinuating moue and a nudge in the ribs, Nicholas returned to the dressing room. Next time Colin came up from the paint shop, David approached his father and asked him if he thought Nicholas could possibly be gay.

  Three rehearsals later, the difficulties with the razor had still not been sorted out. When the moment arrived to wield it and David stood deferentially by holding his tray with the water, wooden bowl of shaving soap, and towel, the action ground to a halt. Esslyn moved downstage and stared challengingly at row C. The Everards, lizard lids aflicker, capered behind. Tim and Avery, sensing a possible fracas, left the lighting box, and the stage staff gathered round. Harold rose and, with an air of quite awesome capability, took the stage.

  “Well, my darlings,” he cried as he mounted the steps, “we have a wide-open situation here, and I’m offering it to the floor before I sound off with any of my own suggestions, which, I need hardly say, are myriad.” Silence. “Never let it be said that I’m not open to new ideas from whatever direction they may arise.” The silence took on an incredulous, slightly stunned quality, as if someone had thwacked it with a baseball bat. “Nicholas? You seem to be on the verge of suggestive thought.”

  “He always is,” said Avery.

  “Well…” said Nicholas, “I was wondering if it might not look very exciting done with Salieri’s back to the audience. An expansive movement”—he leaped to his feet to demonstrate—“like so—”

  “I don’t believe this,” retorted Esslyn. “Is there nothing you wouldn’t do to sabotage my performance? Do you really think you could persuade me to play the most exciting moment of my entire career facing upstage?”

  “What career?”

  “Of course, everyone knows you’re jealous—”

  “Me? Jealous? Of you?” The smidgen of truth in this assertion caused Nicholas to splutter like fat in a pan. “Hah!”

  “I should climb back into your swamp, Nicholas,” snickered a Venticelli. “Before you have yet another brilliant wheeze.”

  “Yes,” agreed his twin. “Back to the Grimpen Mire with you.”

  “It’ll be a funny old day,” snapped Nicholas, “when I take any notice of a pair of bloody bookends.”

  “Now, now,” beamed Harold. He adored displays of temperament by his actors, fatuously believing them to be sign of genuine talent. “Actually, Esslyn, you know it might look quite effective—”

  “Forget it, Harold.”

  Everyone sat up. Confrontation between the CADS director and his leading man was unheard of. Harold directed Esslyn. Esslyn went his own way. Harold ignored this intransigence. It had been ever thus. Now, every eye was on Harold to see what he would do. And he was worth watching. Various emotions chased over his rubicund features. Amazement, disgust, rage, then finally (after a great struggle), compliance.

  “Obviously,” he said, presaging the frankly incredible, “I would never force an actor to do something that was totally alien to his way of working. It would simply look wooden and unconvincing.” Then, quickly: “Does anyone else have any ideas?”

  “What happened about those bag things,” asked Rosa, “that we talked about earlier on?”

  “They didn’t work. Or rather,” continued Harold, evening the score, “Esslyn couldn’t make them work.”

  “You don’t pull off a trick like that the first time,” retorted Esslyn. “You have to practice, which I could hardly do with you yelling ‘Molto costoso ’ in my face every time I asked for another.”

  “Then you’ll have to mime streaming with blood,” said Rosa, smiling sweetly. “I’m sure if anyone can do it, you can.”

  “Ouch!” said Kitty, exchanging a rueful, collusive glance with her husband. It was a complicated glance, and managed to suggest not only that Rosa was jealous of her husband’s present happiness but also that she was not quite right in the head. The assistant director cleared her throat.

  “Whoops,” whispered Clive Everard. “Page the oracle.”

  “The problem’s as good as solved.”

  “Perhaps,” Deidre began hesitantly, “we could cover the blade with Scotch tape. I’m sure it wouldn’t show from the front.”

  There was a pause, then a deep sigh from Harold. “At last.” He nodded, a wry, reproachful nod. “I was wondering who would be the first to think of that. Got some here, I trust, Deidre?”

  “Oh, yes …” She took the razor from David’s tray, holding it carefully by the handle, and bore it off to her table. There she tipped her carrier bag onto its side. The tape rolled out, closely followed by a grudgingly provided bottle of milk. She saved the milk just in time, sat down beneath the anglepoise lamp, picked up the tape, and started scratching at it to find the ends. Then she cut off a strip and laid it lengthwise against the cutting edge. It was too short (she should have mea
sured before she started) as well as being too narrow to wrap over the steel completely. She hesitated, wondering if it was necessary to take the first piece off before trying again, and decided she wouldn’t dare come so close to that gleaming steel. Even at the thought, her hands started to sweat. She felt all hot and bothered, as if everyone was watching her, then glanced up and discovered she was right.

  “Shan’t be a sec,” she called cheerily. The tail of the tape had vanished, and she started scratching again. “More haste, less speed.”

  “I always find,” Rosa returned the call, “that folding the end bit over every time is a great help.”

  “Oh, what a good idea,” Deidre ground out, “I must remember that.” Holding the razor firmly, she attached the tape to the handle end and wound the reel round and round, up and down the blade until it was well and truly covered. Then she cut off the tape. The result was dreadful. Very uneven and bumpy, with half a dozen thicknesses in one place and two or three in others, all of which would be clearly visible from the stalls in that intimate theater. Oh, God, thought Deidre, what on earth am I going to do? The thought of trying to remove the tape again terrified her. Even supposing she could find the tag end.

  “What’s the problem, Deidre?” David Smy put his valet’s tray down and pulled up one of the little gold chairs.

  “It’s all gone wrong.” Deidre blinked hard behind her lenses thick as bottle glass. “I had a terrible job getting it on. Now, I’m frightened to try and take it off in case I cut myself.”

  “Let’s have a look.”

  “Be careful.” Deidre handed the razor over.

  “Got some scissors? No … smaller than those.’’ When Deidre shook her head, David produced a Victorinox Swiss army knife and eased out a tiny pair of clippers. Deidre watched his brown fingers tipped with clean, short nails, which had dazzlingly white half-moons. He handled things so precisely, almost gracefully, and without any floundering or wasted movements. Snip, snip, and the tape was off. Deidre unrolled more. David measured the blade against it, cut off two lengths, and, with Deidre holding the handle, folded them very carefully over the length of the blade, first one side, then the other. Then he ran the razor hard down the prompt copy. It fell apart. “That should do it.”

  “David. You mustn’t say that. Not even in fun. We’ll have to put some more on.”

  “If you insist.” His slow smile was reassuring. “I was only pulling your leg.”

  “I should hope so.” After a few moments she smiled rather nervously in return. David recovered the blade, and this time produced no more than a faint indentation when he pressed the page.

  “Come on, Deidre—chop-chop. We could all have cut our throats ten times over by now.”

  “Sorry, Harold.”

  “You go when you’re ready,” said David. “You don’t want to let that lot run you about. Load of wankers.” Then he added hastily, “Pardon my French.”

  “Oh, if it’s French,” Deidre murmured apologetically, “it’s right over my head, I’m afraid. Well … let’s see how this goes down.” She handed the razor to Esslyn, who received it warily. “You could try it out on your thumb first.”

  “I shall certainly try it out on someone’s thumb,” Esslyn replied crisply, handing it straight back. Obligingly Deidre illustrated its newly rendered bitelessness. Esslyn said, “Hm,” and sawed tentatively, then more firmly, back and forth across his knuckles. “Seems okay. Right … Harold?”

  Esslyn waited until everyone’s attention was on him, then stood, center stage, in a martyr’s pose, hands across his breast, eyes on a glorious horizon, looking for all the world, as Tim said later, like Edith Cavell in drag. He spoke loudly, in a doom-laden voice: . . and in the depth of your downcastness you can pray to me … And I will forgive you. Vi saluto!” Then, throwing his head back and holding the razor in his right hand, he drew it quickly across his throat. One sweeping dramatic movement from ear to ear. There was a terrible silence, then someone murmured, “My God.”

  “Works, does it?”

  “You could practically see the blood,” squawked Don Everard.

  “They’ll be carrying people out.”

  Esslyn smirked. He liked the idea of people being carried out. Harold swung around, letting his satisfied smile embrace them all. “I knew that would work,” he said, “as soon as I thought of it.”

  “I really believe that’s the secret of our success,” chipped in Nicholas, “an ideas man at the helm.”

  “Well, of course that’s not for me to say,” demurred Harold, who never stopped saying it.

  “Wasn’t it Deidre,” David Smy said loudly, “who thought of it?”

  “David,” whispered Deidre across the table, “don’t. It doesn’t matter.”

  “It was Deidre,” said Harold, “Who vocalized it. I thought of it weeks ago, when the production was in the planning stage. She simply caught my idea on the ether, as it were, and vocalized it. Now, if the stage management have stopped showing off, we really must get on …”

  But the rehearsal was further delayed by Kitty, who, whitefaced, was now clinging to her husband, her arms around his waist, her head buried in his chest… it looked so real…” she mewed, ‘‘I was fwightened …”

  ‘‘There, there, kitten.” Esslyn patted her as if soothing a fretful animal. ‘‘There’s absolutely nothing to be frightened about. I’m quite safe. As you can see.” He let loose a smug, apologetic look over her head.

  Now if she could act like that, thought Nicholas, when she’s onstage with me, I’d be a happy man. He glanced across at Kitty’s lover to see how he was reacting to this little display, but David was continuing his conversation with Deidre and affecting not to notice. Nicholas observed the rest of the company. Most were looking indifferent, one or two embarrassed, Boris ironical, Harold impatient. The Venticelli, to Nicholas’s surprise, appeared jealous. He was sure this was not romantic resentment. In spite of their affectations and flouncings and toadily awful obsequiousness, Nicholas did not believe they were sexually interested in Esslyn. In fact, they both struck him as almost asexual. Dry and detached and probably more interested in making mischief than in making love. No, Nicholas guessed they were simply peeved that the object of their sycophancy was being so crass and ungrateful as to show public affection for another.

  Then, eyes traveling on, Nicholas received a shock. Sitting a little behind the others and surely believing herself to be unobserved, Rosa was staring at Esslyn and his wife. Her face showed pure hatred. Not a muscle moved, and the emotion was so concentrated, so extreme, that she might have been wearing a mask. Then she noticed Nicholas’s gaze, dropped her rancorous eyes, and immediately became herself again. So much so that by the time, half an hour later, she made her usual flurried departure (trailing her scarf, dropping her script, whirling her Madame Ranevskaya coat about, and crying “Night-night, my angels”), he was almost convinced that he had imagined it.

  The book arrived about a week before the dress rehearsal. Deidre found a small parcel neatly wrapped in brown paper on the floor in the foyer. It was directly beneath the mail slot set in the wooden surround of the plate-glass doors. She turned the parcel over, frowning. On the front, hand-printed in small capital letters, were the words Harold winstanley. She laid it on top of her basket and made her way to the clubroom to unload her two bottles of milk and tea and sugar replenishments. As she entered, Riley hurried forward to greet her. She put the milk bottles in a pan of cold water, then bent down and rubbed his ears. He permitted this for as long as it took him to realize that she was not bearing gifts, then stuck his tail in the air and wandered off. Deidre watched him go sadly, wishing he were not so stingy with his affections. Only Avery got the full treatment—purring, rubbing round the legs, little mms of satisfaction—but then, only Avery dished up the dinner. He bought fish trimmings or “cheeks” for the cat, which Riley would remove from his dish to consume at his leisure.

  Deidre was always coming across the bluish-whi
te pearly wings of bone that remained.

  He was a handsome animal. White bib and socks, mixed whiskers, and a white tip to his tail. The rest of his coat, once black and gleaming like newly mined coal, now had a rusty tinge, which made him look a bit seedy. He was a full-blooded tom and had a hairless patch above one eye that was no sooner grown over than some old bold adversary clawed it back to its original glabrous state. He had brilliant emerald-green eyes, and when the theater was dark, you could see them walking about on their own between the lines of seats.

  No one knew how old he was. He had appeared two years ago, suddenly strolling across the set during a run-through of French Without Tears. The immense, almost magical theatricality of this appearance had at once appealed to everyone. He had got a round of applause, a piece of haddock, (Deidre having been sent to Adelaide’s), and had been adopted on the spot. This, although he had not been able to say so in so many words, had not been his intention. For Riley was looking for a more orthodox establishment. He had been vastly deceived in the sitting room of French Without Tears, which had disappeared shortly after he had made its acquaintance, only to reappear in a totally different guise several weeks later. This was really not his scene. He wanted an ordinary, even humdrum, home, where the furniture was fairly stable with at least one human being more or less constantly in worshipful attendance. He often tried to follow Avery when he left the theater, but had always been firmly brought back. Deidre, who had always longed for a pet, would have loved to have taken him home, but her father was allergic to both fur and feather.

  Now, having unpacked the tea and sugar and set out the cups, Deidre made her way to the auditorium to chalk up the stage for Act I. As Nicholas was already there going over his “opera” speech, she slipped silently into the back row to listen. It was a complicated piece, and Nicholas was making a mess of it. It started on a high point of anger, broke in the middle into giggling almost frenzied effusiveness, and ended on a note so elated as to be practically manic.