Death Of A Hollow Man Read online

  He had been going over it at home every night the previous week, and was agonizingly conscious that it wasn’t working. Now, he pumped amazement into his voice: “Astonishing device. A Vocal Quartet!” Following up with forced excitement: “On and on, wider and wider-all sounds multiplying and rising together …’’He plowed on, ending with an empty rhetorical shout: “… and turn the audience into God!”

  Despair filled him. Nothing but ranting. But what was he to do? If emotion wasn’t there, it couldn’t be turned on like a faucet. A dreadful thought lurking always in the back of his mind leaped to the fore. What if he felt dry and stale like this on the first night? Without technique, he would be left clinging desperately to the text like an ill-equipped mountaineer on a rock face. He almost envied Esslyn his years of experience; his grasp of acting mechanics. It was all very well for Avery to describe their leading man’s performance as “just like an Easter egg, darling. All ribbons and bows and little candied bits and pieces with a bloody great hollow at the center.” Nicholas was not comforted, being only too aware that when his emotions let him down, he could offer neither ribbon nor bow, never mind anything as fancy as a candied trimming. Deidre came down the aisle.

  “Hi,” said Nicholas morosely. “Did you hear all that?”

  p> “Mm,” said Deidre, putting her basket on the edge of the stage and climbing up.

  “I just can’t seem to get it right.”

  “No. Well—you haven’t got the feeling, have you? And you’re just not experienced enough to put it over without.”

  Nicholas, who had expected some anodyne reassurance, stared at Deidre, who crossed to the prompt corner and started to unpack her things. “If I could make a suggestion … ?”

  “Of course.” He followed her around the stage as she crouched to re-mark the entrances and exits smudged or quite erased at the previous rehearsal.

  “Well … first you mustn’t take the others into account so much when you’re speaking. Salieri … Van Swieten … they matter in Mozart’s life only so far as they affect income. They mean nothing to him as people. Mozart’s a genius—a law unto himself. You seem to be trying to relate to them in this speech, which is fatal. They are there to listen, to absorb. Perhaps to be a little afraid… .”

  “Yes … yes, I see … I think you’re right. And God-how do you think he sees God?”

  “Mozart? He doesn’t ‘see’ God as something separate, like Salieri does. Music and God are all the same to him. As for the delivery, you’re working the wrong way round. That’s why it sounds stale before you’ve even half got it right—”

  “I know!” Nicholas smote his forehead. “I know. ”

  “If you stop thinking about the words and start listening to the music—”

  ‘‘There isn’t any music.”

  “—in your head, silly. If you’re making a passionate speech about music, you have to hear music. Most of the other set pieces either have music underneath them or just before. This is very … dry. So you must listen to all the tapes and see what evokes the emotion you need, then marry it in your mind to the lines. I don’t mean ‘must,’ of course”—Deidre blushed suddenly—“only if you like.”

  “Oh, but I do! I’m sure that would … it’s a terrific idea.”

  “You’re in the way.”

  “Sorry.”

  Nicholas looked down at Deidre’s bent head and chalky jeans. He had not, unlike most of the rest of the company, underestimated her proficiency behind the scenes. But he had never talked to her about play production, and although he was aware of her ambitions in that direction, had thought (also like the rest of the company) that she would be no better at it than Harold was. Now, he gazed at her rather as men gazed at girls in Hollywood films after they had taken off their glasses and let their hair down. He said, “It’s a wonderful play, don’t you think?”

  “Very exciting. I saw it in London. I’ll be glad when it’s over, though. I don’t like the way things are going.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, nothing specific. But there’s not a nice feeling. And I’m dying to get on to Vanya. I do love Chekhov, don’t you, Nicholas?” She regarded him with shining eyes. “Even The Cherry Orchard, after all Harold managed to do to it … there was still so much left.”

  “Deidre.” Nicholas followed her around in the wings, where, clipboard in hand, she started to check the props for Act I. “Why on earth … I mean … you should be with another company. Where you can really do things.”

  “There isn’t one. The nearest is Slough.”

  “That’s not far.”

  “You need your own transport. At night, anyway. And I can’t afford to run a car. My father’s— He can’t be left alone. I have to pay someone to sit with him on theater evenings. …”

  “Oh, I see.” What he did see—a sudden yawning abyss of loneliness, creative imagination starved of expression, and stifled, unrealized dreams—made him deeply, ashamedly embarrassed. He felt as if he were with one of those awful people who, uninvited, hitch up their clothes and show you their operation scar. Aware of the unfairness of this comparison and the banality of his next remark, Nicholas mumbled, “Bad luck, Deidre,” and retreated to the stage. Here, more for the sake of bridging an awkward moment than anything else, he picked up the parcel. “Someone sending Harold a bomb?”

  “Heavily disguised as a book.” Nicholas eased the brown paper lightly Scotch-taped folds and attempted to peer inside.

  “Don’t do that,” called Deidre. “He’ll say someone’s been trying to open it. And he’s bound to blame me.”

  But Harold seemed to notice nothing untoward about his parcel. He arrived rather later than usual and was changing into his monogrammed directing slippers when Deidre gave him the book. There had been a time when Harold had always removed his footwear during rehearsals, explaining that only by doing so could he arrive at the true spirit of the play. Then he had seen a television interview with a famous American director during which the great man had stated that people who took off their shoes to direct were pretentious pseuds. Harold, naturally, did not agree, but just in case other members of the same company had also been viewing, he covered up his feet forthwith. As he took the parcel, Rosa, noticing, called out, “Oohh, look … Harold’s got a prezzie.” And everyone gathered around.

  The “prezzie” proved to be a bit of a letdown. Nothing unusual or exciting. Nothing to do with Harold’s only real passion in life. It was a cookbook. Floyd on Fish. Harold gazed at it blankly. Someone asked who it was from. He spun the pages, turned the book upside down, and shook it. No card.

  “Isn’t there something written inside?” nudged an Everard. Harold turned the first few pages and shook his head. “How extraordinary. ”

  “Why on earth should anyone send you a recipe book?” asked Rosa. “You’re not interested in cooking, are you?” Harold shook his head.

  “Well, if you’re going to start,” said Avery, “I shouldn’t start with that. The man’s basically unsound.”

  “Gosh, you are a snob,” said Nicholas.

  “Right, young Bradley. That’s the last time you sit down at my table.”

  “Oh! I didn’t mean it, Avery—honestly.” Half-frantic, half-laughing, Nicholas continued, “Please. I’m sorry …”

  “I shall think of it,” said Harold, “as a gift from an unknown admirer. And now we must get on. Chop-chop, everyone …”

  He put the parcel inside his hat. The momentary warmth that its appearance had engendered (it had been years since anyone had given him a present) had vanished. In its place was a faint unease. What a peculiar thing for anyone to do. Spend all that money on a book, then send it anonymously to someone for whom it could be of no interest whatever. Ah, well, thought Harold, he certainly didn’t have time to ponder on the mystery at the moment. The mystery of the theater—that was his business. That was what he had to kindle. And plays did not produce themselves.

  “Right, my darlings,” he cried,
“from the top. And please … lots and lots of verismo. Nicholas, you remember— Where is Nicholas?”

  Mozart stepped out from the wings, “Here I am, Harold. ”

  “Don’t forget the note I gave you on Monday. Resonances. Okay? That’s what I want—plenty of resonances. You’re looking blank.”

  “Sorry, Harold?”

  “You know the meaning of the word ‘resonances,’ I assume?”

  “Um… Don Quixote’s horse, wasn’t it?”

  “Oh, God!” cried Harold. “I’m surrounded by idiots.”

  A week passed. None of the rehearsals went well, and the first couple of run-throughs were absolutely dreadful. But it was at the dress rehearsal (so everyone later told Barnaby) that things really came to a head.

  As Esslyn strode around the stage with his spring-heeled tango dancer’s walk in his blue-and-silver coat, so his performance grew in glossy fraudulence. He had stopped acting with—indeed, he hardly even looked at—his fellow players and strutted and posed in splendid isolation. Backed up by his myrmidons, he continued to snipe at David and Nicholas.

  Nicholas was coping with all this very well. His earlier talk with Deidre had been the first of several, and he was now groping his way toward what he believed would be a truthful, intelligent, and lively rendering of the part of Mozart. He was halfway through the opening scene and playing to the back of Salieri’s neck when Esslyn suddenly stopped what he was saying and strolled down to the footlights.

  “Harold?” Harold, his face marked with surprise, climbed out of his seat and walked forward. “Any particular stress on che gioia?”

  “What?”

  “Sorry. To be frank, my problem is … I’m not quite sure what it means.” Silence. ‘‘Perhaps you could enlighten me?” Long pause. “I’d be most grateful.”

  “Now who’s being cattivo, ” murmured Clive.

  “Don’t you know?” said Harold.

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Do you mean to tell me that you’ve been saying those lines over and over again for the last six weeks and you don’t know what they mean?”

  “So it appears.”

  “And you call yourself an actor?”

  “I certainly call myself as much of an actor as you are a director.”

  An even longer pause. Then, softly on the air, it seemed to everyone present, came a feint reverberation, like the roll of distant drums. Harold said, very quietly, “Are you trying to wind me up?”

  “Didn’t think it was necessary,” muttered Donald. “Thought he ran on hot air.”

  “Of course not, Harold. But I do think—”

  “I’m not going to translate it for you. Do your own homework.”

  “Well, that seems a bit—”

  “All right, everyone. Carry on. And no interval. We’ve wasted enough time as it is.”

  Esslyn shrugged and sauntered back to his previous position, and the reverberations rippled away into a silence shot with disappointment. The second confrontation, you could almost see everyone thinking, and it’s over before it really gets going. But their frustration was short-lived, for a few minutes later Esslyn stopped again, saying, “Do you think it’s true he’s never really laid a finger on Katherina?”

  “Of course it’s true!” shouted back Harold. “Why on earth should he tell himself lies?”

  Then there was a query on court etiquette, on the timing of the Adagio in the library scene, and on the position of the piano-forte. Harold once more made his way to the footlights, this time with a savage tic in one eyelid.

  “If you’ve noticed all these hiccups before,” he said icily, “may I ask why you left it till this late stage to say so?”

  “Because I’m not in charge. I was waiting for you to pick them up. As you’re obviously not going to, I feel, for the good of the play and the benefit of the company, I have to say something.”

  “The day you have any concern for the rest of the company, Esslyn, will be the day pigs take to the skies.”

  After this, as if the earlier interruptions had been just appetizers, the merest titillations, things started to go more splendidly wrong. Kitty’s padding would not stay up. The more it slid about, the more she grabbed at it. The more she grabbed at it, the more she giggled, until Harold stood up and yelled at her when she promptly burst into tears.

  “It’s not so easy,” she wept, “when you’re already pregnant in the first place.”

  “How many places are there, for godsake?” retorted Harold. “Wardrobe!” He stood tapping his foot and sucking his teeth until Joyce had secured Baby Mozart. Then the manuscript paper was not in its place on the props table. Or the quill pen. Or Kitty’s shawl. Deidre apologized and swore they had been there at the start of rehearsal. Salieri’s wheelchair jammed, and gold railings, not quite dry, imprinted themselves on the emperor Joseph’s white satin suit.

  But the most dramatic, alarming, and ultimately hilarious contretemps was that the trestle table holding the bulk of the audience for the first night of The Magic Flute collapsed. It was piled high with sausage-chewing, pipe smoking Viennese rabble. Belching, joshing, pushing each other about, and generally overacting, all this to the loud accompaniment of rustic accents. These were mainly “Zummerset,” but one conscientious burgher who had really done his homework kept shouting, “Gott in Himmel!”

  Then, as the glorious “Heil sei euch Geweihten” soared above their heads, the trestle creaked, groaned, and gave way, tumbling the by now hysterical peasantry into a large heap in the center of the stage. Everyone except Harold thought this wondrously droll. Even Esslyn jeered with cold delicacy into his lace cuff. Harold rose from his seat and smoldered at them all.

  “I suppose you think that’s funny?”

  “Funniest thing since the Black Death,” replied Boris.

  “Right,” said his director. “Colin. ” A helpful soul repeated the cry, as did someone in the wings followed by someone in the dressing rooms, then finally a faint echo was heard under the boards of the stage.

  “Good grief,” grumbled Harold as he stomped down yet again, “it’s like waiting for the star witness at the Old Bailey.”

  Colin arrived with a woodshaving curt on his shoulder as if to designate rank, a hammer in his hand, and his usual air of a man dragged away from serious work to attend to the whims of playful children.

  “You knew how many people this table had to hold. I thought you said you were going to reinforce it.”

  “I did reinforce it. I nailed a wooden block in each corner where the struts go in. I’ll show you.” Colin picked his way over the still-supine actors, lifted the table, then said, “Stone me. Some silly sod’s taken them out again.”

  “Ohhh, God!” Harold glared at his actors, one or two of whom were still weeping quietly. “You have no right to be in a theater, any of you. You’re not fit to sweep the stage. Better make some more, Colin. Now, please, let us get on.”

  He was walking back to his seat when Clive Everard, hardly bothering to lower his voice, said, “That man couldn’t direct his piss down an open manhole.”

  Harold stopped, turned, and replied forcefully into the shocked silence, “I hope you don’t see yourself appearing in my next production, Clive.”

  “Well … I did rather fancy Telyegin… .”

  “Well,” repeated Harold, “I suggest you start fancying yourself in an entirely different company. Preferably on an entirely different planet. Now, I want to get to the end of the play with—no—more—interruptions.”

  And they just about did. But by this time nerves were in shreds. Umbrage had been given and taken and returned again with interest. More props had erred and strayed in their ways like lost sheep. The scenery had learned the wisdom of insecurity, and at least one door left the set almost as smartly as the actor who had just pulled it to behind him. As the final great funeral chords of music died away, actors gathered onstage, drifting into despondent clumps. Harold, after making one grand gesture of despair, flinging
his arms above his head like an imperial bookmaker, joined them.

  “There’s no point in giving notes,” he said. “I wouldn’t know where to start.” This admission, the first such that had ever passed his lips, seemed to shake Harold as much as his companions. “You’re all as bad as one another, and a disgrace to the business.” Then he left, striding out into the winter night in his embroidered directing slippers, not even waiting to put on his coat.

  No sooner had he left than the atmosphere lightened. And as tension was released, laughter broke out, and some healthy moaning on the lines of who did Harold think he was, and it was only a bit of fun, for heaven’s sake, it’s not as if we’re getting paid.

  “Personally,” said Boris, “I’m sick of saying ‘Heil, Harold.’ ”

  “No one can do a thing right it seems to me,” said Rosa. “We might as well be in the Kremlin.”

  “I wouldn’t mind if he were competent,” whispered a Venticelli.

  “Quite,” agreed the other. Then, aside to Esslyn: “The peasants are revolting.”

  There was a bit more Bolshevik rumbling, then Riley strolled down the aisle and jumped onto the stage. Several of the fifth-formers who didn’t know his nasty little ways, and Avery, who did, said, “Aahhh …”

  The cat took a crouching position. His haunches quivered, his shoulders contracted, then started to jerk. He made several loud gulping noises and a strangulated cough, then deposited a small glistening heap of skin and bones and fur and blood on the boards and walked off. There was a long pause broken by Tim.

  “A critic,” he said. “That’s all we need.”

  “Ah, well,” said Van Swieten, “let’s look on the bright side. Everyone knows a bad dress rehearsal means a good first night.”

  Entr’acte (Saturday Morning, Causton High Street)

  Causton was a nice little town, but small. People who could not adequately function without their Sainsburys or Marks and Spencers had to travel to Slough or Uxbridge. But those who stayed at home were capably if unadven-turously served. In the main street were a supermarket and a fishmonger’s, a dairy, a bakery, and a very basic greengrocer. Two butchers (one first class who hung his meat properly and could prepare it the French way), Mc-Andrew’s Pharmacy, which also sold perfumes and cosmetics, two banks, and a hairdresser’s, Charming Creations by Doreece. There were two funeral parlors, a bookshop, the wine merchant’s and post office, and a small branch library.