NGAIO MARSH
Opening Night

DEDICATION

To The Management and Company of The New Zealand Student Players of 1949 in love and gratitude

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Cast of Characters

1. Martyn at the Vulcan

2. In a Glass Darkly

3. First Dress-Rehearsal

4. Second Dress-Rehearsal

5. Opening Night

6. Performance

7. Disaster

8. After-Piece

9. The Shadow of Otto Brod

10. Summing Up

11. Last Act

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

CAST OF CHARACTERS

OF THE VULCAN THEATRE |
Martyn Tarne |
Bob Grantley | Business Manager
Fred Badger | Night Watchman
Clem Smith | Stage Director
Bob Cringle | Dresser to Adam Poole
Adam Poole | Actor-manager
Helena Hamilton | Leading Lady
Clark Bennington | Her husband
Gay Gainsford | His niece
J. G. Darcey | Character actor
Parry Percival | Juvenile
Jacques Doré | Designer and assistant to Adam Poole
Dr John James Rutherford | Playwright
OF THE CID NEW SCOTLAND YARD |
Chief Detective-Inspector Alleyn |
Detective-Inspector Fox |
Detective-Sergeant Gibson |
Detective-Sergeant Bailey | Fingerprint expert
Detective-Sergeant Thompson | Photographer
PC Lord Michael Lamprey |
Dr Curtis |

CHAPTER 1

Martyn at the Vulcan

As she turned into Carpet Street the girl wondered at her own obstinacy. To what a pass it had brought her, she thought. She lifted first one foot and then the other, determined not to drag them. They felt now as if their texture had changed: their bones, it seemed, were covered by sponge and burning wires.

A clock in a jeweller’s window gave the time as twenty-three minutes to five. She knew, by the consequential scurry of its secondhand, that it was alive. It was surrounded by other clocks that made mad dead statements of divergent times as if, she thought, to set before her the stages of that day’s fruitless pilgrimage. Nine o’clock, the first agent. Nine thirty-six, the beginning of the wait for auditions at the Unicorn; five minutes past twelve, the first dismissal. ‘Thank you, Miss–ah–Thank you, dear. Leave your name and address. Next, please.’ No record of her flight from the smell of restaurants but it must have been about ten-to-two, a time registered by a gilt carriage-clock in the corner, that she had climbed the stairs to Garnet Marks’ Agency on the third floor. Three o’clock exactly at the Achilles where the auditions had already closed, and the next hour in and out of film agencies. ‘Leave your picture if you like, dear. Let you know if there’s anything.’ Always the same. As punctual as time itself. The clocks receded, wobbled, enlarged themselves and at the same time spread before their dials a tenuous veil. Beneath the arm of a bronze nude that brandished an active swinging dial, she caught sight of a face: her own. She groped in her bag and presently in front of the mirrored face, a hand appeared and made a gesture at its own mouth with the stub of a lipstick. There was a coolness on her forehead, something pressed heavily against it. She discovered that this was the shop-window.

Behind the looking-glass was a man who peered at her from the shop’s interior. She steadied herself with her hand against the window, lifted her suitcase and turned away.

The Vulcan Theatre was near the bottom of the street. Although she did not at first see its name above the entry, she had, during the past fortnight, discovered a sensitivity to theatres. She was aware of them at a distance. The way was downhill: her knees trembled and she resisted with difficulty an impulse to break into a shamble. Among the stream of faces that approached and sailed past there were now some that, on seeing hers, sharpened into awareness and speculation. She attracted notice.

The stage-door was at the end of an alleyway. Puddles of water obstructed her passage and she did not altogether avoid them. The surface of the wall was crenellated and damp.

‘She knows,’ a rather shrill uncertain voice announced inside the theatre, ‘but she mustn’t be told.’ A second voice spoke unintelligibly. The first voice repeated its statement with a change of emphasis: ‘She knows but she mustn’t be told,’ and after a further interruption added dismally: ‘Thank you very much.’

Five women came out of the stage-door and it was shut behind them. She leant against the wall as they passed her. The first two muttered together and moved their shoulders petulantly, the third stared at her and at once she bent her head. The fourth passed by quickly with compressed lips. She kept her head averted and heard, but did not see, the last girl halt beside her.

‘Well, for God’s sake!’ She looked up and saw, for the second time that day, a too-large face, over-painted, with lips that twisted downwards, tinted lids, and thickly mascaraed lashes.

She said: ‘I’m late, aren’t I?’

‘You’ve had it, dear. I gave you the wrong tip at Marks’s. The show here, with the part I told you about, goes on this week. They were auditioning for a tour: ‘That’ll be all for today, ladies, thank you. What’s the hurry, here’s your hat. For what it’s worth, it’s all over.’

‘I lost my way,’ she said faintly.

‘Too bad.’ The large face swam nearer. ‘Are you all right?’ it demanded.

She made a slight movement of her head. ‘A bit tired. All right, really.’

‘You look shocking. Here: wait a sec. Try this.’

‘No, no. Really. Thank you so much but –’

‘It’s OK. A chap who travels for a French firm gave it to me. It’s marvellous stuff: cognac. Go on.’

A hand steadied her head. The cold mouth of the flask opened her lips and pressed against her teeth. She tried to say: ‘I’ve had nothing to eat,’ and at once was forced to gulp down a burning stream. The voice encouraged her: ‘Do you a power of good. Have the other half.’

She shuddered, gasped and pushed the flask away. ‘No, please!’

‘Is it doing the trick?’

‘This is wonderfully kind of you. I am so grateful. Yes, I think it must be doing the trick.’

‘Gra-a-a-nd. Well, if you’re sure you’ll be OK …’

‘Yes, indeed. I don’t even know your name.’

‘Trixie O’Sullivan.’

‘I’m Martyn Tarne.’

‘Look nice in the programme, wouldn’t it? If there’s nothing else I can do …’

‘Honestly. I’ll be fine.’

‘You look better,’ Miss O’Sullivan said doubtfully. ‘We may run into each other again. The bloody round, the common task.’ She began to move away. ‘I’ve got a date, actually, and I’m running late.’

‘Yes, of course. Goodbye, and thank you.’

‘It’s open in front. There’s a seat in the foyer. Nobody’ll say anything. Why not sit there for a bit?’ She was halfway down the alley. ‘Hope you get fixed up,’ she said. ‘God, it’s going to rain. What a life!’

‘What a life,’ Martyn Tarne echoed and tried to sound gay and ironic.

‘I hope you’ll be all right. ’Bye.’

‘Goodbye and thank you.’

The alley was quiet now. Without moving she took stock of herself. Something thrummed inside her head and the tips of her fingers tingled but she no longer felt as if she was going to faint. The brandy glowed at the core of her being, sending out ripples of comfort. She tried to think what she should do. There was a church, back in the Strand: she ought to know its name. One could sleep there, she had been told, and perhaps there would be soup. That would leave two and eightpence for tomorrow: all she had. She lifted her suitcase, it was heavier than she had remembered, and walked to the end of the alleyway. Half a dozen raindrops plopped into a puddle. People hurried along the footpath with upward glances and opened their umbrellas. As she hesitated, the rain came down suddenly and decisively. She turned towards the front of the theatre and at first thought it was shut. Then she noticed that one of the plate-glass doors was ajar.

She pushed it open and went in.

The Vulcan was a new theatre, fashioned from the shell of an old one. Its foyer was an affair of geranium-red leather, chromium steel and double glass walls housing cacti. The central box-office marked ‘Reserved Tickets Only’ was flanked by doors and beyond them, in the corners, were tubular steel and rubber-foam seats. She crossed the heavily carpeted floor and sat in one of these. Her feet and legs, released from the torment of supporting and moving her body, throbbed ardently.

Facing Martyn, on a huge easel, was a frame of photographs under a printed legend: ‘Opening at this Theatre on Thursday, May 11th: Thus to Revisit, a New Play by John James Rutherford.’ She stared at two large familiar faces and four strange smaller ones. Adam Poole and Helena Hamilton: those were famous faces. Monstrously enlarged, they had looked out at the New Zealand and Australian public from hoardings and from above cinema entrances. She had stood in queues many times to see them, severally and together. They were in the centre and surrounding them were Clark Bennington with a pipe and stick and a look of faded romanticism in his eyes, J. G. Darcey with pince-nez and hair en brosse, Gay Gainsford, young and intense, and Parry Percival, youngish and dashing. The faces swam together and grew dim.

It was very quiet in the foyer and beginning to get dark. On the other side of the entrance doors the rain drove down slantways half blinding her vision of homeward-bound pedestrians and the traffic of the street beyond them. She saw the lights go on in the top of a bus, illuminating the passive and remote faces of its passengers. The glare of headlamps shone pale across the rain. A wave of loneliness, excruciating in its intensity, engulfed Martyn and she closed her eyes. For the first time since her ordeal began, panic rose in her throat and sickened her. Phrases drifted with an aimless rhythm on the tide of her desolation: ‘You’re sunk, you’re sunk, you’re utterly sunk, you asked for it, and you’ve got it. What’ll happen to you now?’

She was drowning at night in a very lonely sea. She saw lights shine on some unattainable shore. Pieces of flotsam bobbed indifferently against her hands. At the climax of despair, metallic noises, stupid and commonplace, set up a clatter in her head.

Martyn jerked galvanically and opened her eyes. The whirr and click of her fantasy had been repeated behind an obscured-glass wall on her left. Light glowed beyond the wall and she was confronted by the image of a god, sand-blasted across the surface of the glass and beating at a forge under the surprising supervision, it appeared, of Melpomene and Thalia. Farther along, a notice in red light: ‘Dress Circle and Stalls’, jutted out from an opening. Beyond the hammer-blows of her heart a muffled voice spoke peevishly.

‘… Not much use to me. What? Yes, I know, old boy, but that’s not the point.’

The voice seemed to listen. Martyn thought: ‘This is it. In a minute I’ll be turned out.’

‘… Something pretty bad,’ the voice said irritably. ‘She’s gone to hospital.… They said so but nobody’s turned up.… Well, you know what she’s like, old boy, don’t you? We’ve been snowed under all day and I haven’t been able to do anything about it … auditions for the northern tour of the old piece … yes, yes, that’s all fixed but … Look, another thing: The Onlooker wants a story and pictures for this week … yes, on stage. In costume. Nine-thirty in the morning and everything still in the boxes.… Well, can’t you think of anyone? … Who? … O, God, I’ll give it a pop. All right, old boy, thanks.’

To Martyn, dazed with brandy and sleep, it was a distortion of a daydream. Very often had she dreamt herself into a theatre where all was confusion because the leading actress had laryngitis and the understudy was useless. She would present herself modestly: ‘I happen to know the lines. I could perhaps …’ The sudden attentiveness, when she began to speak the lines … the opening night … the grateful tears streaming down the boiled shirts of the management … the critics … no image had been too gross for her.

‘Eileen?’ said the voice. ‘Thank God! Listen, darling, it’s Bob Grantley here. Listen, Eileen, I want you to do something terribly kind. I know it’s asking a hell of a lot but I’m in trouble and you’re my last hope. Helena’s dresser’s ill. Yes, indeed, poor old Tansey. Yes, I’m afraid so. Just this afternoon, and we haven’t been able to raise anybody. First dress-rehearsal tomorrow night and a photograph call in the morning and nothing unpacked or anything. I know what a good soul you are and I wondered … O, God! I see. Yes, I see. No, of course. Oh, well, never mind. I know you would. Yes. ’Bye.’

Silence. Precariously alone in the foyer, she meditated an advance upon the man beyond the glass wall and suppressed a dreadful impulse in herself towards hysteria. This was her daydream in terms of reality. She must have slept longer than she had thought. Her feet were sleeping still. She began to test them, tingling and pricking, against the floor. She could see her reflection in the front doors, a dingy figure with a pallid face and cavernous shadows for eyes.

The light behind the glass wall went out. There was, however, still a yellow glow coming through the box-office door. As she got to her feet and steadied herself, the door opened.

‘I believe,’ she said, ‘you are looking for a dresser.’

II

As he had stopped dead in the lighted doorway she couldn’t see the man clearly but his silhouette was stocky and trim.

He said with what seemed to be a mixture of irritation and relief: ‘Good Lord, how long have you been here?’

‘Not long. You were on the telephone. I didn’t like to interrupt.’

‘Interrupt!’ he ejaculated as if she talked nonsense.

He looked at his watch, groaned, and said rapidly: ‘You’ve come about this job? From Mrs Greenacres, aren’t you?’

She wondered who Mrs Greenacres could be? An employment agent? She hunted desperately for the right phrase, the authentic language.

‘I understood you required a dresser and I would be pleased to apply.’ Should she have added ‘sir’?

‘It’s for Miss Helena Hamilton,’ he said rapidly. ‘Her own dresser who’s been with her for years – for a long time – has been taken ill. I explained to Mrs Greenacres. Photograph call for nine in the morning and first dress-rehearsal tomorrow night. We open on Thursday. The dressing’s heavy. Two quick changes and so on. I suppose you’ve got references?’

Her mouth was dry. She said: ‘I haven’t brought –’ and was saved by the telephone bell. He plunged back into the office and she heard him shout ‘Vulcan’ into the receiver. ‘Grantley, here,’ he said. ‘Oh, hallo, darling. Look, I’m desperately sorry, but I’ve been held up or I’d have rung you before. For God’s sake apologize for me. Try and keep them going till I get there. I know, I know. Not a smell of one until –’ the voice became suddenly muffled. She caught isolated words. ‘I think so … yes, I’ll ask … yes … Right. ’Bye, darling.’

He darted out, now wearing a hat and struggling into a raincoat. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘Miss –’

‘Tarne.’

‘Miss Tarne. Can you start right away? Miss Hamilton’s things are in her dressing-room. They need to be unpacked and hung out tonight. There’ll be a lot of pressing. The cleaners have been in but the room’s not ready. You can finish in the morning but she wants the things that can’t be ironed – I wouldn’t know – hung out. Here are the keys. We’ll see how you get on and fix up something definite tomorrow if you suit. The night-watchman’s there. He’ll open the room for you. Say I sent you. Here!’

He fished out a wallet, found a card and scribbled on it. ‘He is a bit of a stickler: you’d better take this.’

She took the card and the keys. ‘Tonight?’ she said.

‘Now?’

‘Well, can you?’

‘I – yes. But –’

‘Not worrying about after-hours, are you?’

‘No.’

For the first time he seemed, in the darkish foyer, to be looking closely at her. ‘I suppose,’ he muttered, ‘it’s a bit –’ and stopped short.

Martyn said in a voice that to herself sounded half-choked: ‘I’m perfectly trustworthy. You spoke of references. I have –’

‘Oh, yes, yes,’ he said. ‘Good. That’ll be OK then. I’m late. Will you be all right? You can go through the house. It’s raining outside. Through there, will you? Thank you. Goodnight.’

Taking up her suitcase, she went through the door he swung open and found herself in the theatre.

She was at the back of the stalls, standing on thick carpet at the top of the ramp and facing the centre aisle. It was not absolutely dark. The curtain was half-raised and a bluish light filtered in from off-stage through some opening – a faintly-discerned window – in the scenery. This light was dimly reflected on the shrouded boxes. The dome was invisible, lost in shadow, and so far above that the rain, hammering on the roof beyond it, sounded much as a rumour of drums to Martyn. The deadened air smelt of naphthalene and plush.

She started off cautiously down the aisle. ‘I forgot,’ said Mr Grantley’s voice behind her. She managed to choke back a yelp. ‘You’d better get some flowers for the dressing-room. She likes roses. Here’s another card.’

‘I don’t think I’ve –’

‘Florian’s at the corner,’ he shouted. ‘Show them the card.’

The door swung to behind him and, a moment later, she heard a more remote slam. She waited for a little while longer, to accustom herself to the dark. The shadows melted and the shape of the auditorium filtered through them like an image on a film in the darkroom. She thought it beautiful: the curve of the circle, the fan-like shell that enclosed it, the elegance of the proscenium and modesty of the ornament – all these seemed good to Martyn, and her growing sight of them refreshed her. Though this encouragement had an unreal, rather dream-like character, yet it did actually dispel something of her physical exhaustion so that it was with renewed heart that she climbed a little curved flight of steps on the prompt side of the proscenium, pushed open the pass-door at the top and arrived back-stage.

She was on her own ground. A single blue working-light, thick with dust, revealed a baize letter-rack and hinted at the baton and canvas backs of scenery fading upwards into yawning blackness. At her feet a litter of flex ran down into holes in the stage. There were vague, scarcely discernible shapes that she recognized as stacked flats, light bunches, the underside of perches, a wind machine and rain box. She smelt paint and glue-size. As she received the assurance of these familiar signs she heard a faint scuffling noise, a rattle of paper, she thought. She moved forward.

In the darkness ahead of her a door opened on an oblong of light which widened to admit the figure of a man in an overcoat. He stood with bent head, fumbled in his pocket and produced a torch. The beam shot out, hunted briefly about the set and walls and found her. She blinked into a dazzling white disc and said: ‘Mr Grantley sent me round. I’m the dresser.’

‘Dresser?’ the man said hoarsely. He kept his torchlight on her face and moved towards her. ‘I wasn’t told about no dresser,’ he said.

She held Mr Grantley’s card out. He came closer and flashed his light on it without touching it. ‘Ah,’ he said with a sort of grudging cheerfulness, ‘that’s different. Now I know where I am, don’t I?’

‘I hope so,’ she said, trying to make her voice friendly. ‘I’m sorry to bother you. Miss Hamilton’s dresser has been taken ill and I’ve got the job.’

‘Aren’t you lucky,’ he said with obvious relish and added: ‘Not but what she isn’t a lady when she takes the fit for it.’

He was eating something. The movement of his jaws, the succulent noises he made and the faint odour of food were an outrage. She could have screamed her hunger at him. Her mouth filled with saliva.

‘He says to open the star room,’ he said. ‘Come on froo while I get the keys. I was ’avin’ me bitter supper.’

She followed him into a tiny room choked with junk. A kettle stuttered on a gas-ring by a sink clotted with dregs of calcimine paint and tea leaves. His supper was laid out on a newspaper: bread and an open tin of jam. He explained that he was about to make a cup of tea and suggested she should wait while he did so. She leant against the door and watched him. The fragrance of freshly brewed tea rose above the reek of stale size and dust. She thought: ‘If he drinks it now I’ll have to go out.’

‘Like a drop of char?’ he said. His back was turned to her.

‘Very much.’

He rinsed out a stained cup under the tap.

Martyn said loudly: ‘I’ve got a tin of meat in my case. I was saving it. If you’d like to share it and could spare some of your bread …‘

He swung round and for the first time she saw his face. He was dark and thin and his eyes were brightly impertinent. Their expression changed as he stared at her.

‘’Allo, ’allo!’ he said. ‘Who gave you a tanner and borrowed ’alf a crahn? What’s up?’

‘I’m all right.’

‘Are you? Your looks don’t flatter, you, then.’

‘I’m a bit tired and –’ Her voice broke and she thought in terror that she was going to cry. ‘It’s nothing,’ she said.

‘’Ere!’ He dragged a box out from under the sink and not ungently pushed her down on it. ‘Where’s this remarkable tin of very perticerlar meat? Give us a shine at it?’

He shoved her suitcase over and while she fumbled at the lock busied himself with pouring out tea. ‘Nothing to touch a drop of the old char when you’re browned off,’ he said. He put the reeking cup of dark fluid beside her and turned away to the bench.

‘With any luck,’ Martyn thought folding back the garments in her case, ‘I won’t have to sell these now.’

She found the tin and gave it to him. ‘Coo!’ he said, ‘looks lovely, don’t it? Tongue and veal and a pitcher of sheep to show there’s no deception. Very tempting.’

‘Can you open it?’

‘Can I open it? Oh, dear.’

She drank her scalding tea and watched him open the tin and turn its contents out on a more than dubious plate. Using his clasp knife he perched chunks of meat on a slab of bread and held it out to her. ‘You’re in luck,’ he said. ‘Eat it slow.’

She urged him to join her but he said he would set his share aside for later. They could both, he suggested, take another cut at it tomorrow. He examined the tin with interest while Martyn consumed her portion. She had never before given such intense concentration to a physical act. She would never have believed that eating could bring so fierce a satisfaction.

‘Comes from Australia, don’t it?’ her companion said, still contemplating the tin.

‘New Zealand.’

‘Same thing.’

Martyn said: ‘Not really. There’s quite a big sea in between.’

‘Do you come from there?’

‘Where?’

‘Australia.’

‘No. I’m a New Zealander.’

‘Same thing.’

She looked up and found him grinning at her. He made the gesture of wiping the smile off his face. ‘Oh, dear,’ he said.

Martyn finished her tea and stood up. ‘I must start my job,’ she said.

‘Feel better?’

‘Much, much better.’

‘Would it be quite a spell since you ate anything?’

‘Yesterday.’

‘I never fancy drinking on an empty stomach, myself.’

Her face burnt against the palms of her hands. ‘But I don’t … I mean, I know. I mean I was a bit faint and somebody … a girl … she was terribly kind …’

‘Does your mother know you’re aht?’ he asked ironically and took a key from a collection hung on nails behind the door. ‘If you must work,’ he said.

‘Please.’

‘Personally escorted tour abaht to commence. Follow in single file and don’t talk to the guide. I thank you.’

She followed him to the stage and round the back of the set. He warned her of obstructions by bobbing his torchlight on them and, when she stumbled against a muffled table, took her hand. She was disquieted by the grip of his fingers, calloused, and wooden, and by the warmth of his palm which was unexpectedly soft. She was oppressed with renewed loneliness and fear.

‘End of the penny section,’ he said, releasing her. He unlocked a door, reached inside and switched on a light.

‘They call this the greenroom,’ he said. ‘That’s what it was in the old days. It’s been done up. Guvnor’s idea.’

It was a room without a window, newly painted in green. There were a number of armchairs in brown leather, a round table littered with magazines, a set of well-stocked bookshelves and a gas-fire. Groups of framed Pollock’s prints decorated the walls: ‘Mr Dale as Claude Amboine’, ‘Mr T. Hicks as Richard I’, ‘Mr S. French as Harlequin’. This last enchanted Martyn because the diamonds of Mr French’s costume had been filled in with actual red and green sequins and he glittered in his frame.

Above the fireplace hung a largish sketch – it was little more than that – of a man of about thirty-five in medieval dress, with a hood that he was in the act of pushing away from his face. The face was arresting. It had great purity of form being wide across the eyes and heart shaped. The mouth, in particular, was of a most subtle character, perfectly masculine but drawn with extreme delicacy. It was well done: it had both strength and refinement yet it was not these qualities that disturbed Martyn. Reflected in the glass that covered the picture she saw her own face lying ghost-wise across the other; their forms intermingled like those in a twice-exposed photograph. It seemed to Martyn that her companion must be looking over her shoulder at this double image and she moved away from him and nearer to the picture. The reflection disappeared. Something was written faintly in one corner of the sketch. She drew closer and saw that it was a single word: ‘Everyman’.

‘Spitting image of him, ain’t it?’ said the doorkeeper behind her.

‘I don’t know,’ she said quickly; ‘is it?’

‘Is it! Don’t you know the guvnor when you see ’im?’

‘The governor?’

‘Streuth, you’re a caution and no error. Don’t you know who owns this show? That’s the great Mr Adam Poole, that is.’

‘Oh,’ she murmured after a pause and added uneasily, ‘I’ve seen him in the pictures, of course.’

‘Go on!’ he jeered. ‘Where would that be? Australia? Fancy!’

He had been very kind to her but she found his remorseless vein of irony exasperating. It would have been easier and less tedious to have let it go but she found herself embarked on an explanation. Of course she knew all about Mr Adam Poole, she said. She had seen his photograph in the foyer. All his pictures had been shown in New Zealand. She knew he was the most distinguished of the younger contemporary actor-managers. She was merely startled by the painting, because … But it was impossible to explain why the face in the painting disturbed her and the unfinished phrase trailed away into an embarrassed silence.

Her companion listened to this rigmarole with an equivocal grin and when she gave it up merely remarked: ‘Don’t apologize. It’s the same with all the ladies: ’E fair rocks ’em. Talk about ’aving what it takes.’

‘I don’t mean that at all,’ she shouted angrily.

‘You should see ’em clawing at each other to get at ’im rahnd the stage-door, first nights. Something savage! Females of the speeches? Disgrace to their sexes more like. There’s an ironing-board etceterer in the wardrobe-room farther along. You can plug in when you’re ready. ‘Er Royal ’Ighness is over the way.’

He went out, opened a further door, switched on a light and called to her to join him.

III

As soon as she crossed the threshold of the star dressing-room she smelt greasepaint. The dressing-shelf was bare, the room untenanted, but the smell of cosmetics mingled with the faint reek of gas. There were isolated dabs of colour on the shelves and the looking-glass; the lamp-bulbs were smeared with cream and red where sticks of greasepaint had been warmed at them and on a shelf above the wash-basin somebody had left a miniature frying-pan of congealed mascara in which a hair-pin was embedded.

It was a largish room, windowless and dank, with an air of submerged grandeur about it. The full-length cheval-glass swung from a gilt frame. There was an Empire couch, an armchair and an ornate stool before the dressing-shelf. The floor was carpeted in red with a florid pattern that use had in part obliterated. A number of dress-boxes bearing the legend ‘Costumes by Pierrot et Cie’ were stacked in the middle of the room and there were two suitcases on the shelf. A gas-heater stood against one wall and there was a caged jet above the wash-basin.

‘Here we are,’ said the doorkeeper. ‘All yer own.’

She turned to thank him and encountered a speculative stare. ‘Cosy,’ he said, ‘ain’t it?’ and moved nearer. ‘Nice little hidey-hole, ain’t it?’

‘You’ve been very kind,’ Martyn said. ‘I’ll manage splendidly now. Thank you very much indeed.’

‘Don’t mention it. Any time.’ His hand reached out clumsily to her. ‘Been aht in the rain,’ he said thickly. ‘Naughty girl.’

‘I’ll soon dry off. I’m quite all right.’

She moved behind the pile of dress-boxes and fumbled with the string on the top one. There was a hissing noise. She heard him strike a match and a moment later was horribly jolted by an explosion from the gas-heater. It forced an involuntary cry from her.

‘’Allo, ’allo!’ her companion said. ‘Ain’t superstitious, are we?’

‘Superstitious?’

He made an inexplicable gesture towards the gas-fire. ‘You know,’ he said, grinning horridly at her.

‘I’m afraid I don’t understand.’

‘Don’t tell me you never ’eard abaht the great Jupiter case! Don’t they learn you nothing in them anti-podes?’

The heater reddened and purred.

‘Come to think of it,’ he said, ‘it’d be before your time. I wasn’t here myself when it occurred, a-course, but them that was don’t give you a chance to forget it. Not that they mention it direct-like but it don’t get forgotten.’

‘What was it?’ Martyn asked against her will.

‘Sure yer not superstitious?’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘You ain’t been long in this business, then. Nor more am I. Shake ’ands.’ He extended his hand so pointedly that she was obliged to put her own in it and had some difficulty in releasing herself.

‘It must be five years ago,’ he said, ‘all of that. A bloke in number four dressing-room did another bloke in, very cunning, by blowing dahn the tube of ’is own gas-fire. Like if I went nex’ door and blew dahn the tube, this fire’d go aht. And if you was dead drunk like you might of been if this girl friend of yours’d been very generous with ’er brandy you’d be commy-toes and before you knew where you was you’d be dead. Which is what occurred. It made a very nasty impression and the theatre was shut dahn for a long time until they ’ad it all altered and pansied up. The guvnor won’t ’ave it mentioned. ’E changed the name of the ’ouse when ’e took it on. But call it what you like the memory, as they say, lingers on. Silly, though, ain’t it? You and me don’t care. That’s right, isn’t it? We’d rather be cosy. Wouldn’t we?’ He gave a kind of significance to the word ‘cosy’. Martyn unlocked the suitcases. Her fingers were unsteady and she turned her back in order to hide them from him. He stood in front of the gas-fire and began to give out a smell of hot dirty cloth. She took sheets from the suitcase, hung them under the clothes pegs round the walls, and began to unpack the boxes. Her feet throbbed cruelly and, with a surreptitious manipulation, she shuffled them out of her wet shoes.

‘That’s the ticket,’ he said. ‘Dry ’em orf, shall we?’

He advanced upon her and squatted to gather up the shoes. His hand, large and prehensile, with a life of its own, darted out and closed over her foot. ‘’Ow abaht yer stockings?’

Martyn felt not only frightened but humiliated and ridiculous: wobbling, dead tired, on one foot. It was as if she were half caught in some particularly degrading kind of stocks.

She said: ‘Look here, you’re a good chap. You’ve been terribly kind. Let me get on with the job.’

His grip slackened. He looked up at her without embarrassment, his thin London face sharp with curiosity. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘No offence meant. Call it a day, eh?’

‘Call it a day.’

‘You’re the boss,’ he said and got to his feet. He put her shoes down in front of the gas-fire and went to the door. ‘Live far from ’ere?’ he asked. A feeling of intense desolation swept through her and left her without the heart to prevaricate.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to find somewhere. There’s a women’s hostel near Paddington, I think.’

‘Broke?’

‘I’ll be all right, now I’ve got this job.’

His hand was in his pocket: ‘’Ere,’ he said.

‘No, no. Please.’

‘Come orf it. We’re pals, ain’t we?’

‘No, really. I’m terribly grateful but I’d rather not. I’m all right.’

‘You’re the boss,’ he said again, and after a pause: ‘I can’t get the idea, honest I can’t. The way you speak and be’ave and all. What’s the story? ’Ard luck or what?’

‘There’s no story, really.’

‘Just what you say yourself. No questions asked.’ He opened the door and moved into the passage. ‘Mind,’ he said over his shoulder, ‘it’s against the rules but I won’t be rahnd again. My mate relieves me at eight ack emma but I’ll tip ’im the wink if it suits you. Them chairs in the greenroom’s not bad for a bit of kip and there’s the fire. I’ll turn it on. Please yerself a-course.’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘could I? Could I?’

‘Never know what you can do till you try. Keep it under your tifter, though, or I’ll be in trouble. So long. Don’t get down’earted. It’ll be all the same in a fahsand years.’

He had gone. Martyn ran into the passage and saw his torchlight bobbing out on the stage. She called after him:

‘Thank you – thank you so much. I don’t know your name – but thank you and goodnight.’

‘Badger’s the name,’ he said, and his voice sounded hollow in the empty darkness. ‘Call me Fred.’

The light bobbed out of sight. She heard him whistling for a moment and then a door slammed and she was alone.

With renewed heart she turned back to her job.

IV

At ten o’clock she had finished. She had traversed with diligence all the hazards of fatigue: the mounting threat of sleep, the clumsiness that makes the simplest action an ordeal, the horror of inertia and the temptation to let go the tortured muscles and give up, finally and indifferently, the awful struggle.

Five carefully ironed dresses hung sheeted against the walls, the make-up was laid out on the covered dressing-shelf. The boxes were stacked away, the framed photographs set out. It only remained to buy roses in the morning for Miss Helena Hamilton. Even the vase was ready and filled with water.

Martyn leant heavily on the back of a chair and stared at two photographs of the same face in a double leather case. They were not theatre photographs but studio portraits and the face looked younger than the face in the greenroom: younger and more formidable, with the mouth set truculently and the gaze withdrawn. But it had the same effect on Martyn. Written at the bottom of each of these photographs, in a small incisive hand, was ‘Helena from Adam. 1950’. ‘Perhaps,’ she thought, ‘he’s married to her.’

Hag-ridden by the fear that she had forgotten some important detail, she paused in the doorway and looked round the room. No, she thought, there was nothing more to be done. But as she turned to go she saw herself, cruelly reflected in the long cheval-glass. It was not, of course, the first time she had seen herself that night; she had passed before the looking-glasses a dozen times and had actually polished them, but her attention had been ruthlessly fixed on the job in hand and she had not once focused her eyes on her own image. Now she did so. She saw a girl in a yellow sweater and dark skirt with black hair that hung in streaks over her forehead. She saw a white, heart-shaped face with smudges under the eyes and a mouth that was normally firm and delicate but now drooped with fatigue. She raised her hand, pushed the hair back from her face and stared for a moment or two longer. Then she switched off the light and blundered across the passage into the greenroom. Here, collapsed in an armchair with her overcoat across her, she slept heavily until morning.

CHAPTER 2

In a Glass Darkly

Martyn slept for ten hours. A wind got up in the night and found its way into the top of the stagehouse at the Vulcan. Up in the grid old back-cloths moved a little and, since the Vulcan was a hemp-house, there was a soughing among the forest of ropes. Flakes of paper, relics of some Victorian snowstorm, were dislodged from the top of a batten and fluttered down to the stage. Rain, driven fitfully against the theatre, ran in cascades down pipes and dripped noisily from ledges into the stage-door entry. The theatre mice came out, explored the contents of paste-pots in the sink-room and scuttled unsuccessfully about a covered plate of tongue and veal. Out in the auditorium there arose at intervals a vague whisper and in his cubby-hole off the dock Fred Badger dozed and woke uneasily. At one o’clock he went on his rounds. He padded down corridors, flicking his torchlight on framed sketches for décor and costumes, explored the foyer and examined the locked doors of the offices. He climbed the heavily carpeted stairs and, lost in meditation, stood for a long time in the dress-circle among shrouded rows of seats and curtained doorways. Sighing dolorously he returned back-stage and made a stealthy entrance on to the set. Finally he creaked to the greenroom door and impelled by who knows what impulse furtively opened it.

Martyn lay across the chair, her knees supported underneath by one of its arms and her head by the other. The glow from the gas-fire was reflected in her face. Fred Badger stood for quite a long time eyeing her and scraping his chin with calloused fingers. At last he backed out, softly closed the door and tiptoed to his cubby-hole, where he telephoned the fire-station to make his routine report.

At dawn the rain stopped and cleaning vans swept the water down Carpet Street with their great brushes. Milk carts clinked past the Vulcan and the first bus roared by. Martyn heard none of them. She woke to the murmur of the gas-fire, and the confused memory of a dream in which someone tapped gently at a door. The windowless room was still dark but she looked at her watch in the fire-glow and found it was eight o’clock. She got up stiffly, crossed the room and opened the door on grey diffused daylight. A cup of tea with a large sandwich balanced on it had been left on the floor of the passage. Underneath it was a torn scrap of paper on which was scrawled: ‘Keep your pecker up matey see you some more.’

With a feeling of gratitude and timid security she breakfasted in the greenroom, and afterwards explored the empty passage, finding at the far end an unlocked and unused dressing-room. To this room she brought her own suitcase and here, with a chair propped under the door handle, she stripped and washed in icy water. In clean clothes, with her toilet complete, and with a feeling of detachment, as if she herself looked on from a distance at these proceedings, she crossed the stage and went out through the side door and up the alleyway into Carpet Street.

It was a clean sunny morning. The air struck sharply at her lips and nostrils and the light dazzled her. A van had drawn up outside the Vulcan and men were lifting furniture from it. There were cleaners at work in the foyer and a telegraph boy came out whistling. Carpet Street was noisy with traffic. Martyn turned left and walked quickly downhill until she came to a corner shop called Florian. In the window a girl in a blue overall was setting out a large gilt basket of roses. The door was still locked, but Martyn, emboldened by fresh air and a sense of freedom and adventure, tapped on the window and when the girl looked up, pointed to the roses and held up Mr Grantley’s card. The girl smiled and, leaving the window, came to let her in.

Martyn said: ‘I’m sorry to bother you but Mr Grantley at the Vulcan told me to get some roses for Miss Helena Hamilton. He didn’t give me any money and I’m afraid I haven’t got any. Is this all very irregular and tiresome?’

‘That will be quayte OK,’ the girl said in a friendly manner. ‘Mr Grantley has an account.’

‘Perhaps you know what sort of rose I should get,’ Martyn suggested. She felt extraordinarily light and rather loquacious. ‘You see, I’m Miss Hamilton’s dresser but I’m new and I don’t know what she likes.’

‘Red would be quayte in order, I think. There are some lovely Bloody Warriors just in.’ She caught Martyn’s eye and giggled. ‘Well, they do think of the weirdest names, don’t they? Look: aren’t they lovelies?’

She held up a group of roses with drops of water clinging to their half-opened petals. ‘Gorgeous,’ she said, ‘aren’t they? Such a colour.’

Martyn, appalled at the price, took a dozen. The girl looked curiously at her and said: ‘Miss Hamilton’s dresser. Fancy! Aren’t you lucky?’ and she was vividly reminded of Fred Badger.

‘I feel terribly lucky this morning,’ she said and was going away when the girl, turning pink under her makeup, said: ‘Pardon me asking but I don’t suppose you could get me Miss Hamilton’s autograph. I’d be ever so thrilled.’

‘I haven’t even seen her yet but I’ll do my best.’

‘You are a ducks. Thanks a million. Of course,’ the girl added, ‘I’m a real fan. I never miss any of her pictures and I do think Adam Poole – pardon me, Mr Poole – is simply mawvellous. I mean to say I just think he’s mawvellous. They’re so mawvellous together. I suppose he’s crazy about her in real life, isn’t he? I always say they couldn’t ect together like that – you know – so gorgeously – unless they had a pretty hot clue on the sayde. Don’t you agree?’

Martyn said she hadn’t had a chance of forming an opinion as yet and left the florist in pensive contemplation of the remaining Bloody Warriors.

When she got back to the theatre its character had completely changed; it was alive and noisy. The dock-doors were open and sunlight lay in incongruous patches on painted canvas and stacked furniture. Up in the grid there was a sound of hammering. A back-cloth hung diagonally in mid-air and descended in jerks, while a man in shirt sleeves shouted, ‘Down on yer long. Now yer short. Now bodily. Right-oh. Dead it. Now find yer Number Two.’

A chandelier lay in a heap in the middle of the stage and, above it, was suspended a batten of spotlights within reach of an elderly mechanist who fitted pink and straw-coloured mediums into their frames. Near the stage-door a group of men stared at a small empire desk from which a stage-hand had removed a cloth wrapping. A tall young man in spectacles, wearing a red pullover and corduroy trousers, said irritably: ‘It’s too bloody chi-chi. Without a shadow of doubt, he’ll hate its guts.’

He glanced at Martyn and added: ‘Put them in her room, dear, will you?’

She hurried to the dressing-room passage and found that here, too, there was life and movement. A vacuum-cleaner hummed in the greenroom, a bald man in overalls was tacking cards on the doors, somewhere down the passage an unseen person sang cheerfully and the door next to Miss Hamilton’s was open. These signs of preparation awakened in Martyn a sense of urgency. In a sudden fluster she unwrapped her roses and thrust them into the vase. The stalks were too long and she had nothing to cut them with. She ran down the passage to the empty room, and reflected as she rootled in her suitcase that she would be expected to having sewing materials at hand. Here was the housewife an aunt had given her when she left New Zealand but it was depleted and in a muddle. She ran back with it, sawed at the rose stems with her nail-scissors and when someone in the next room tapped on the wall, inadvertently jammed the points into her hand.

‘And how,’ a disembodied voice inquired, ‘is La Belle Tansey this morning?’

Sucking her left hand and arranging roses with her right, Martyn wondered how she should respond to this advance. She called out, tentatively: ‘I’m afraid it’s not Miss Tansey.’

‘What’s that?’ the voice said vaguely, and a moment later she heard the brisk sound of a clothes-brush at work.

The roses were done at last. She stood with the ends of the stalks in her hand and wondered why she had become so nervous.

‘Here we go again,’ a voice said in the doorway. She spun round to face a small man in an alpaca coat with a dinner jacket in his hands. He stared at her with his jaw dropped. ‘Pardon me,’ he said. ‘I thought you was Miss Tansey.’

Martyn explained.

‘Well!’ he said. ‘That’ll be her heart, that will. She ought to have given up before this. I warned her. In hospital, too? T’ch, t’ch, t’ch.’ He wagged his head and looked, apparently in astonishment, at Martyn. ‘So that’s the story,’ he continued, ‘and you’ve stepped into the breach? Fancy that! Better introduce ourselves, hadn’t we? The name’s Cringle but Bob’ll do as well as anything else. I’m ’is lordship’s dresser. How are you?’

Martyn gave him her name and they shook hands. He had a pleasant face covered with a cobweb of fine wrinkles. ‘Been long at this game?’ he asked and added: ‘Well, that’s a foolish question, isn’t it? I should have said: will this be your first place or are you doing it in your school holidays or something of that sort.’

‘Do you suppose,’ Martyn said anxiously, ‘Miss Hamilton will think I’m too young?’

‘Not if you give satisfaction she won’t. She’s all right if you give satisfaction. Different from my case. Slave meself dizzy, I can, and if ’is lordship’s in one of ’is moods, what do I get for it? Spare me days, I don’t know why I put up with it and that’s a fact: But she’s all right if she likes you.’ He paused and added tentatively: ‘but you know all about that, I dare say.’ Martyn was silent and felt his curiosity reach out as if it was something tangible. At last she said desperately: ‘I’ll try. I want to give satisfaction.’

He glanced round the room. ‘Looks nice,’ he said. ‘Are you pressed and shook out? Yes, I can see you are. Flowers too. Very nice. Would you be a friend of hers? Doing it to oblige, like?’

‘No, no. I’ve never seen her. Except in the pictures, of course.’

‘Is that a fact?’ His rather bird-like eyes were bright with speculation. ‘Young ladies,’ he said, ‘have to turn their hands to all sorts of work these days, don’t they?’

‘I suppose so. Yes.’

‘No offence, I hope, but I was wondering if you come from one of these drama schools. Hoping to learn a bit, watching from the side, like.’

A kind of sheepishness that had hardened into obstinacy prevented her from telling him in a few words, why she was there. The impulse of a fortnight ago to rush to somebody – the ship’s captain, the High Commissioner for her own country, anyone – and unload her burden of disaster, had given place almost at once to a determined silence. This mess was of her own making, she had decided, and she herself would see it out. And throughout the loneliness and panic of her ordeal, to this resolution she had stuck. It had ceased to be a reasoned affair with Martyn: the less she said, the less she wanted to say. She had become crystallized in reticence.

So she met the curiosity of the little dresser with an evasion. ‘It’d be wonderful,’ she said, ‘if I did get the chance.’

A deep voice with an unusually vibrant quality called out on the stage. ‘Bob! Where the devil have you got to? Bob!’

‘Cripes!’ the little dresser ejaculated. ‘Here we are and in one of our tantrums. In here, sir! Coming, sir.’

He darted towards the doorway but before he reached it a man áppeared there, a man so tall that for a fraction of a second he looked down over the dresser’s head directly into Martyn’s eyes.

‘This young lady,’ Bob Cringle explained with an air of discovery, ‘is the new dresser for Miss Hamilton. I just been showing her the ropes, Mr Poole, sir.’

‘You’d much better attend to your own work. I want you.’ He glanced again at Martyn. ‘Good morning,’ he said and was gone. ‘Look at this!’ she heard him say angrily in the next room. ‘Where are you!’

Cringle paused in the doorway to turn his thumbs down and his eyes up. ‘Here we are, sir. What’s the little trouble?’ he said pacifically, and disappeared.

Martyn thought: ‘The picture in the greenroom is more like him than the photographs.’ Preoccupied with this discovery she was only vaguely aware of a fragrance in the air and a new voice in the passage. The next moment her employer came into the dressing-room.

II

An encounter with a person hitherto only seen and heard on the cinema screen is often disconcerting. It is as if the two-dimensional and enormous image had contracted about a living skeleton and in taking on substance had acquired an embarrassing normality. One is not always glad to change the familiar shadow for the strange reality.

Helena Hamilton was a blonde woman. She had every grace. To set down in detail the perfections of her hair, eyes, mouth and complexion, her shape and the gallantry of her carriage would be to reiterate merely that which everyone had seen in her innumerable pictures. She was, in fact, quite astonishingly beautiful. Even the circumstance of her looking somewhat older than her moving shadow could not modify the shock of finding her its equal in everything but this.

Coupled with her beauty was her charm. This was famous. She could reduce press conferences to a conglomerate of eager, even naïve, males. She could make a curtain-speech that every leading woman in every theatre in the English-speaking world had made before her and persuade the last man in the audience that it was original. She could convince bit-part actresses playing maids in first acts that there, but for the grace of God, went she.

On Martyn, however, taken off her balance and entirely by surprise, it was Miss Hamilton’s smell that made the first impression. At ten guineas a moderately sized bottle, she smelt like Master Fenton, all April and May. Martyn was very much shorter than Miss Hamilton but this did not prevent her from feeling cumbersome and out of place, as if she had been caught red-handed with her own work in the dressing-room. This awkwardness was in part dispelled by the friendliness of Miss Hamilton’s smile and the warmth of her enchanting voice.

‘You’ve come to help me, haven’t you?’ she said. ‘Now, that is kind. I know all about you from Mr Grantley and I fully expect we’ll get along famously together. The only thing I don’t know, in fact, is your name.’

Martyn wondered if she ought to give only her Christian name or only her surname. She said: ‘Tarne. Martyn Tarne.’

‘But what a charming name!’ The brilliant eyes looked into Martyn’s face and their gaze sharpened. After a fractional pause she repeated: ‘Really charming,’ and turned her back.

It took Martyn a moment or two to realize that this was her cue to remove Miss Hamilton’s coat. She lifted it from her shoulders – it was made of Persian lamb and smelt delicious – and hung it up. When she turned round she found that her employer was looking at her. She smiled reassuringly at Martyn and said: ‘You’ve got everything arranged very nicely. Roses, too. Lovely.’

‘They’re from Mr Grantley.’

‘Sweet of him but I bet he sent you to buy them.’

‘Well –’ Martyn began and was saved by the entry of the young man in the red sweater with a dressing-case for which she was given the keys. While she was unpacking it the door opened and a middle-aged, handsome man with a raffish face and an air of boldness came in. She remembered the photographs in the foyer. This was Clark Bennington. He addressed himself to Miss Hamilton.

‘Hallo,’ he said, ‘I’ve been talking to John Rutherford.’

‘What about?’ she asked and sounded nervous.

‘About that kid. Young Gay. He’s been at her again. So’s Adam.’

He glanced at Martyn. ‘I wanted to talk to you,’ he added discontentedly.

‘Well, so you shall. But I’ve got to change, now, Ben. And, look, this is my new dresser, Martyn Tarne.’

He eyed Martyn with more attention. ‘Quite a change from old Tansey,’ he said. ‘And a very nice change, too.’ He turned away. ‘Is Adam down?’ He jerked his head at the wall.

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll see you later, then.’

‘All right, but – yes, all right.’

He went out, leaving a faint rumour of alcohol behind him.

She was quite still for a moment after he had gone. Martyn heard her fetch a sigh, a sound half-impatient, half-anxious. ‘Oh well,’ she said, ‘let’s get going, shall we?’

Martyn had been much exercised about the extent of her duties. Did, for instance, a dresser undress her employer? Did she kneel at her feet and roll down her stockings? Did she unhook and unbutton? Or did she stand capably aside while these rites were performed by the principal herself. Miss Hamilton solved the problem by removing her dress, throwing it to Martyn and waiting to be inserted into her dressing-gown. During these operations a rumble of male voices sounded at intervals in the adjoining room. Presently there was a tap at the door. Martyn answered it and found the little dresser with a florists’ box in his hands. ‘Mr Poole’s compliments,’ he said and winked broadly before retiring.

Miss Hamilton by this time was spreading a yellow film over her face. She asked Martyn to open the box and, on seeing three orchids that lay, crisp and fabulous on their mossy bed, sang ‘Darling!’ on two clear notes.

The voice beyond the wall responded. ‘Hallo?’

‘They’re quite perfect. Thank you, my sweet.’

‘Good,’ the voice said. Martyn laid the box on the dressing-table and saw the card: ‘Until tomorrow. Adam.’

She got through the next half-hour pretty successfully, she hoped. There seemed to be no blunders and Miss Hamilton continued charming and apparently delighted. There were constant visitors. A tap on the door would be followed by a head looking round and always by the invitation to come in. First there was Miss Gay Gainsford, a young and rather intense person with a pretty air of deference who seemed to be in a state of extreme anxiety.

‘Well, darling,’ Miss Hamilton said, glancing at her in the glass: ‘Everything under strict control?’

Miss Gainsford said unevenly: ‘I suppose so. I’m trying to be good and sort of biddable, do you know, but underneath I realize that I’m seething like a cauldron. Butterflies the size of bats in the stomach.’

‘Well, of course. But you mustn’t be terrified really, because whatever happens we all know John’s written a good play, don’t we?’

‘I suppose we do.’

‘We do indeed. And Gay – you’re going to make a great personal success in this part. I want you to tell yourself you are. Do you know? Tell yourself.’

‘I wish I could believe it.’ Miss Gainsford clasped her hands and raised them to her lips. ‘It’s not very easy,’ she said, ‘when he – John – Dr Rutherford – so obviously thinks I’m a misfit. Everybody keeps telling me it’s a marvellous part but for me it’s twenty sides of hopeless hell. Honestly, it is.’

‘Gay, what nonsense. John may seem hard –’

‘Seem?’

‘Well, he may be hard, then. He’s famous for it, after all. But you’ll get your reward, my dear, when the time comes. Remember,’ said Miss Hamilton with immense gravity, ‘we all have faith in you.’

‘Of course,’ said Miss Gainsford with an increased quaver in her voice, ‘it’s too marvellous your feeling like that about it. You’ve been so miraculously kind. And Uncle Ben, of course. Both of you. I can’t get over it.’

‘But, my dear, that’s utter nonsense. You’re going to be one of our rising young actresses.’

‘You do really think so!’

‘But yes. We all do.’ Her voice lost a little colour and then freshened. ‘We all do,’ she repeated firmly and turned back to her glass.

Miss Gainsford went to the door and hesitated there. ‘Adam doesn’t,’ she said loudly.

Miss Hamilton made a quick expressive gesture toward the next dressing-room and put her fingers to her lips. ‘He’ll be really angry if he hears you say that,’ she whispered and added aloud with somewhat forced casualness: ‘Is John down this morning?’

‘He’s on-stage. I think he said he’d like to speak to you.’

‘I want to see him particularly. Will you tell him, darling?’

‘Of course, Aunty Ella,’ Miss Gainsford said rather miserably and added, ‘I’m sorry. I forgot. Of course, Ella, darling.’ With a wan smile she was gone.

‘Oh, dear!’ Miss Hamilton sighed and catching Martyn’s eye in the looking-glass made a rueful face. ‘If only –’ she began and stopped unaccountably, her gaze still fixed on Martyn’s image. ‘Never mind,’ she said.

There was a noisy footfall in the passage followed by a bang on the door, and, with scarcely a pause for permission, by the entry of a large, florid and angry-looking man wearing a sweater, a leather waistcoat, a muffler and a very old duffel coat.

‘Good morning, John darling,’ said Miss Hamilton gaily and extended her hand. The newcomer planted a smacking kiss on it and fixed Martyn with a china-blue and bulging pair of eyes. Martyn turned away from this embarrassing regard.

‘What have we here?’ he demanded. His voice was loud and rumbling.

‘My new dresser. Dr Rutherford, Martyn.’

‘Stay me with flagons!’ said Dr Rutherford. He turned on Miss Hamilton. ‘That fool of a wench Gainsford said you wanted me,’ he said. ‘What’s up?’

‘John, what have you been saying to that child?’

‘I? Nothing. Nothing to what I could, and, mark you, what I ought to say to her. I merely asked if, for the sake of my sanity, she’d be good enough to play the central scene without a goddam simper on her fat and wholly unsuitable dial.’

‘You’re frightening her.’

‘She’s terrifying me. She may be your niece, Ella –’

‘She’s not my niece. She’s Ben’s niece.’

‘If she was the Pope’s niece she’d still be a goddam pain in the neck. I wrote this part for an intelligent actress who could be made to look reasonably like Adam. What do you give me? A moronic amateur who looks like nothing on God’s earth.’

‘She’s extremely pretty.’

‘Lollypops! Adam’s too damn easy on her. The only hope lies in shaking her up. Or kicking her out and I’d do that myself if I had my way. It ought to have been done a month back. Even now –’

‘Oh, my dear John! We open in two days you might remember.’

‘An actress worth her salt’d memorize it in an hour. I told her –’

‘I do beg you,’ she said, ‘to leave her to Adam. After all, he is the producer, John, and he’s very wise.’

Dr Rutherford pulled out of some submerged pocket a metal box. From this he extracted a pinch of snuff which he took with loud and uncouth noises.

‘In a moment,’ he said, ‘you’ll be telling me the author ought to keep out of the theatre.’

‘That’s utter nonsense.’

‘Let them try to keep me out,’ he said and burst into a neighing laugh.

Miss Hamilton slightly opened her mouth, hardened her upper lip, and with the closest attention, painted it a purplish red. ‘Really,’ she said briskly, ‘you’d much better behave prettily, you know. You’ll end by having her on your hands with a nervous breakdown.’

‘The sooner the better if it’s a good one.’

‘Honestly, John, you are the rock bottom when you get like this. If you didn’t write the plays you do write – if you weren’t the greatest dramatist since –’

‘Spare me the raptures,’ he said, ‘and give me some actors. And while we’re on the subject I may as well tell you that I don’t like the way Ben is shaping in the big scene. If Adam doesn’t watch him he’ll be up to some bloody leading-man hocus-pocus and by God if he tries that on I’ll wring his neck for him.’

She turned and faced him. ‘John, he won’t. I’m sure he won’t.’

‘No, you’re not. You can’t be sure. Nor can I. But if there’s any sign of it tonight, and Adam doesn’t tackle him, I will. I’ll tickle his catastrophe, by God I will. As for that Mongolian monstrosity, that discard from the waxworks, Mr Parry Percival; what devil – will you answer me – what inverted sadist foisted it on my play?’

‘Now, look here, John –’ Miss Hamilton began with some warmth and was shouted down.

‘Have I not stipulated from the beginning of my disastrous association with this ill-fated playhouse that I would have none of these abortions in my works? These Things. These foetid Growths. These Queers.’

‘Parry isn’t one.’

‘Yah! He shrieks it. I have an instinct, my girl. I nose them as I go into the lobby.’

She made a gesture of despair: ‘I give up,’ she said.

He helped himself to another pinch of snuff. ‘Hooey!’ he snorted. ‘You don’t do anything of the sort, my sweetiepie. You’re going to rock ’em, you and Adam. Think of that and preen yourself. And leave all the rest – to me.’

‘Don’t quote from Macbeth. If Gay Gainsford heard you doing that she really would go off at the deep end.’

‘Which is precisely where I’d like to push her.’

‘Oh, go away,’ she cried out impatiently but with an air of good nature. ‘I’ve had you. You’re wonderful and you’re hopeless. Go away.’

‘The audience is concluded?’ He scraped the parody of a regency bow.

‘The audience is concluded. The door, Martyn.’

Martyn opened the door. Until then, feeling wretchedly in the way, she had busied herself with the stack of suitcases in the corner of the room and now, for the first time, came absolutely face to face with the visitor. He eyed her with an extraordinary air of astonishment.

‘Here!’ he said. ‘Hi!’

‘No, John,’ Miss Hamilton said with great determination. ‘No!’

‘Eureka!’

‘Nothing of the sort. Good morning.’

He gave a shrill whistle and swaggered out. Martyn turned back to find her employer staring into the glass. Her hands trembled and she clasped them together. ‘Martyn,’ she said, ‘I’m going to call you Martyn because it’s such a nice name. You know, a dresser is rather a particular sort of person. She has to be as deaf as a post and as blind as a bat to almost everything that goes on under her very nose. Dr Rutherford is, as I expect you know, a most distinguished and brilliant person. Our Greatest English Playwright. But like many brilliant people,’ Miss Hamilton continued in what Martyn couldn’t help thinking a rather too special voice, ‘he is eccentric. We all understand and we expect you to do so too. Do you know?’

Martyn said she did.

‘Good. Now, put me into that pink thing and let us know the worst about it, shall we?’

When she was dressed she stood before the cheval-glass and looked with cold intensity at her image. ‘My God,’ she said, ‘the lighting had better be good.’

Martyn said: ‘Isn’t it right? It looks lovely to me.’

‘My poor girl!’ she muttered. ‘You run to my husband and ask him for cigarettes. He’s got my case. I need a stimulant.’

Martyn hurried into the passage and tapped at the next door. ‘So they are married,’ she thought. ‘He must be ten years younger than she is but they’re married and he still sends her orchids in the morning.’

The deep voice shouted impatiently: ‘Come in!’ and she opened the door and went in.

The little dresser was putting Poole into a dinner jacket. Their backs were turned to Martyn. ‘Yes?’ Poole said.

‘Miss Hamilton would like her cigarette-case, if you please.’

‘I haven’t got it,’ he said and shouted: ‘Ella!’

‘Hallo, darling?’

‘I haven’t got your case.’

There was a considerable pause. The voice beyond the wall called: ‘No, no. Ben’s got it. Mr Bennington, Martyn.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ Martyn said, and made for the door, conscious of the little dresser’s embarrassment and of Poole’s annoyance.

Mr Clark Bennington’s room was on the opposite side of the passage and next to the greenroom. On her entrance Martyn was abruptly and most unpleasantly transported into the immediate past – into yesterday with its exhaustion, muddle and panic, to the moment of extreme humiliation when Fred Badger had smelt brandy on her breath. Mr Bennington’s flask was open on his dressing-shelf and he was in the act of entertaining a thickset gentleman with beautifully groomed white hair, wearing a monocle, in a strikingly handsome face. This person set down his tumbler and gazed in a startled fashion at Martyn.

‘It’s not,’ he said, evidently picking up, with some difficulty, the conversation she had interrupted, ‘it’s not that I would for the world interfere, Ben, dear boy. Nor do I enjoy raising what is no doubt a delicate subject in these particular circumstances. But I feel for the child damnably, you know. Damnably. Moreover, it does rather appear that the doctor never loses an opportunity to upset her.’

‘I couldn’t agree more, old boy, and I’m bloody angry about it. Yes, dear, wait a moment, will you?’ Mr Bennington rejoined, running his speeches together and addressing them to no one in particular. ‘This is my wife’s new dresser, J.G.’

‘Really?’ Mr J. G. Darcey responded and bowed politely to Martyn. ‘Good morning, child. See you later, Ben, my boy. Thousand thanks.’

He rose, looked kindly at Martyn, dropped his monocle, passed his hand over his hair and went out, breaking into operatic song in the passage.

Mr Bennington made a half-hearted attempt to put his flask out of sight and addressed himself to Martyn.

‘And what,’ he asked, ‘can I do for the new dresser?’ Martyn delivered her message. ‘Cigarette-case? Have I got my wife’s cigarette-case? God, I don’t know. Try my overcoat, dear, will you? Behind the door. Inside pocket. No secrets,’ he added obscurely. ‘Forgive my asking you. I’m busy.’

But he didn’t seem particularly busy. He twisted round in his chair and watched Martyn as she made a fruitless search of his overcoat pockets. ‘This is your first job?’ he asked. She said it was not and he added: ‘As a dresser, I mean.’

‘I’ve worked in the theatre before.’

‘And where was that?’

‘In New Zealand.’

‘Really?’ he said as if she had answered some vitally important question.

‘I’m afraid,’ Martyn went on quickly, ‘it’s not in the overcoat.’

‘God, what a bore! Give me my jacket then, would you? The grey flannel.’

She handed it to him and he fumbled through the pockets. A pocket-book dropped on the floor, spilling its contents. Martyn gathered them together and he made such a clumsy business of taking them from her that she was obliged to put them on the shelf. Among them was an envelope bearing a foreign stamp and postmark. He snatched it up and it fluttered in his fingers. ‘Mustn’t lose track of that one, must we?’ he said and laughed. ‘All the way from Uncle Tito.’ He thrust it at Martyn. ‘Look,’ he said and steadied his hand against the edge of the shelf. ‘What d’you think of that? Take it.’

Troubled at once by the delay and by the oddness of his manner Martyn took the envelope and saw that it was addressed to Bennington.

‘Do you collect autographs?’ Bennington asked with ridiculous intensity –’or signed letters?’

‘No, I’m afraid I don’t,’ she said and put the letter face down on the shelf.

‘There’s someone,’ he said with a jab of his finger at the envelope, ‘who’d give a hell of a lot for that one in there. A hell of a lot.’

He burst out laughing, pulled a cigarette-case out of the jacket and handed it to her with a flourish. ‘Purest gold,’ he said. ‘Birthday present but not from me. I’m her husband you know. What the hell! Are you leaving me? Don’t go.’

Martyn made her escape and ran back to Miss Hamilton’s room where she found her in conference with Adam Poole and a young man of romantic appearance whom she recognized as the original of the last of the photographs in the foyer – Mr Parry Percival. The instinct that makes us aware of a conversation in which we ourselves have in our absence been involved, warned Martyn that they had been talking about her and had broken off on her entrance. After a moment’s silence, Mr Percival, with far too elaborate a nonchalance, said: ‘Yes: well there you have it,’ and it was obvious that there was a kind of double significance in this remark. Miss Hamilton said: ‘My poor Martyn, where have you been?’ with a lightness that was not quite cordial.

‘I’m sorry,’ Martyn said: ‘Mr Bennington had trouble in finding the case.’ She hesitated for a moment and added, ‘Madam.’

‘That,’ Miss Hamilton rejoined, looking at Adam Poole, ‘rings dismally true. Would you believe it, darling, I became so furious with him for taking it that, most reluctantly, I gave him one for himself. He lost it instantly of course and now swears he didn’t and mine is his. If you follow me.’

‘With considerable difficulty,’ Poole said, ‘I do.’

Parry Percival laughed gracefully. He had a winning, if not altogether authentic air of ingenuousness, and at the moment seemed to be hovering on the edge of some indiscretion. ‘I am afraid,’ he said ruefully to Miss Hamilton, ‘I’m rather in disgrace myself.’

‘With me, or with Adam?’

‘I hope not with either of you. With Ben.’ He glanced apologetically at Poole, who did not look at him. ‘Because of the part, I mean. I suppose I spoke out of turn, but I really did think I could play it – still do for a matter of that, but there it is.’

It was obvious that he was speaking at Poole. Martyn saw Miss Hamilton look from one man to the other before she said lightly, ‘I think you could too, Parry, but as you say, there it is. Ben has got a flair, you know.’

Percival laughed. ‘He has indeed,’ he said, ‘he has had it for twenty years. Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Honestly, I am sorry.’

Poole said, ‘I dislike post-mortems on casting, Parry.’

‘I know, I do apologize.’ Percival turned ingratiatingly, and the strong light caught his face sideways. Martyn saw with astonishment that under the thin film of greasepaint there was a system of incipient lines, and she realized that he was not, after all, a young man. ‘I know,’ he repeated, ‘I’m being naughty.’

Poole said, ‘We open on Thursday. The whole thing was thrashed out weeks ago. Any discussion now is completely fruitless.’

‘That,’ said Miss Hamilton, ‘is what I have been trying to tell the doctor.’

‘John? I heard him bellowing in here,’ Poole said. ‘Where’s he gone? I want a word with him. And with you, Parry, by the way. It’s about that scene at the window in the second act. You’re not making your exit line. You must top Ben there. It’s most important.’

‘Look, old boy,’ Mr Percival said with agonized intensity, ‘I know. It’s just another of those things. Have you seen what Ben does? Have you seen that business with my handkerchief? He won’t take his hands off me. The whole exit gets messed up.’

‘I’ll see what can be done.’

‘John,’ said Miss Hamilton, ‘is worried about it too, Adam.’

Poole said: ‘Then he should talk to me.’

‘You know what the doctor is.’

‘We all do,’ said Parry Percival, ‘and the public, I fear, is beginning to find out. God, there I go again.’

Poole looked at him. ‘You’ll get along better, I think, Parry, if you deny yourself these cracks against the rest of the company. Rutherford has written a serious play. It’d be a pity if any of us should lose faith in it.’

Percival reddened and made towards the door. ‘I’m just being a nuisance,’ he said. ‘I’ll take myself off and be photographed like a good boy.’ He made an insinuating movement of his shoulders towards Miss Hamilton, and fluttered his hand at her dress. ‘Marvellous,’ he said, ‘a triumph, if the bit-part actor may be allowed to say so.’

The door shut crisply behind him, and Miss Hamilton said: ‘Darling, aren’t you rather high and grand with poor Parry?’

‘I don’t think so. He’s behaving like an ass. He couldn’t play the part. He was born to be a feed.’

‘He’d look it.’

‘If all goes well Ben will be it.’

‘If all goes well! Adam, I’m terrified. He’s –’

‘Are you dressed, Ella? The cameras are ready.’

‘Shoes, please, Martyn,’ said Miss Hamilton. ‘Yes, darling. I’m right.’

Martyn fastened her shoes and then opened the door. Miss Hamilton swept out, lifting her skirts with great elegance. Martyn waited for Poole to follow, but he said: ‘You’re meant to be on-stage. Take make-up and a glass and whatever Miss Hamilton may need for her hair.’

She thanked him and in a flurry gathered the things together. Poole took the Persian lamb coat and stood by the door. She hesitated, expecting him to precede her, but found that he was looking at the cheval-glass. When she followed his gaze it was to be confronted by their images, side by side in the glass.

‘Extraordinary,’ he said abruptly, ‘isn’t it?’ and motioned her to go out.

III

When Martyn went out on the stage she was able for the first time to see the company assembled together, and found it consisted, as far as the players were concerned, of no more than the six persons she had already encountered: first in their fixed professional poses in the show-frame at the front of the house, and later in their dressing-rooms. She had attached mental tags to them and found herself thinking of Helen Hamilton as the Leading Lady, of Gay Gainsford as the Ingénue, of J. G. Darcey as the Character Actor, of Parry Percival as the Juvenile, of Clark Bennington regrettably, perhaps unjustly, as the Drunken Actor, and of Adam Poole – but as yet she had found no label for Poole, unless it was the old-fashioned one of ‘Governor’, which pleased her by its vicarious association with the days of the Victorian actor-managers.

To this actual cast of six she must add a number of satellite figures – the author, Dr John Rutherford, whose eccentricities seemed to surpass those of his legend, with which she was already acquainted, the man in the red sweater who was the stage-manager, and was called Clem Smith, his assistant, a morose lurking figure, and the crew of stage-hands who went about their business or contemplated the actors with equal detachment.

The actors were forming themselves now into a stage ‘picture’, moving in a workmanlike manner, under the direction of Adam Poole, and watched with restless attentiveness by an elderly, slack-jointed man, carrying a paint pot and brushes. This man, the last of all the figures to appear upon the stage that morning, seemed to have no recognizable job but to be concerned in all of them. He was dressed in overalls and a tartan shirt, from which his long neck emerged, birdlike and crapulous, to terminate in a head that wobbled slightly as if its articulation with the top of the spine had loosened with age. He was constantly addressed with exasperated affection as Jacko. Under his direction, bunches of lights were wheeled into position, cameramen peered and muttered, and at his given signal the players, by an easy transition in behaviour and appearance, became larger than life. A gap was left in the middle of the group, and into this when all was ready floated Helena Hamilton, ruffling her plumage, and becoming at once the focal point of the picture.

‘Darling,’ she said, it’s not going to be a flash, is it, with all of you looking like village idiots, and me like the Third Witch on the morning after the cauldron scene?’

‘If you can hold it for three seconds,’ Adam Poole said, ‘it needn’t be a flash.’

‘I can hold anything, if you come in and help me.’

He moved in beside her. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘let’s try it. The end of the first act,’ and at once she turned upon him a look of tragic and burning intensity. The elderly man wandered across and tweaked at her skirts. Without changing pose or expression, she said, ‘Isn’t it shameful the way Jacko can’t keep his hands off me.’ He grinned and ambled away. Adam Poole said ‘Right,’ the group froze in postures of urgency that led the eye towards the two central figures and the cameras clicked.

Martyn tried, as the morning wore on, to get some idea of the content of the play but was unable to do so. Occasionally the players would speak snatches of dialogue leading up to the moment when a photograph was to be taken, and from these she gathered that the major conflict of the theme was between the characters played by Adam Poole and Clark Bennington and that this conflict was one of ideas. About a particular shot there was a great deal of difficulty. In this Poole and Gay Gainsford confronted each other and it was necessary that her posture, the arrested gesture of her hand and even her expression should be an exact reflection of his.

To Martyn, Poole had seemed to be a short-tempered man, but with Gay Gainsford he showed exemplary patience. ‘It’s the old story, Gay,’ he said, ‘you’re overanxious. It’s not enough for you to look like me. Let’s face it,’ he hesitated for a moment and said quickly, ‘we’ve had all this, haven’t we – but it’s worth repeating – you can’t look strikingly like me, although Jacko’s done wonders. What you’ve got to do is to be me. At this moment, don’t you see, you’re my heredity, confronting me like a threat. As far as the photograph is concerned, we can cheat – the shot can be taken over your shoulder, but in the performance there can be no cheating, and that is why I’m making such a thing of it. Now let’s take it with the line. Your head’s on your arms, you raise it slowly to face me. Ready now. Right, up you come.’

Miss Gainsford raised her face to his as he leaned across the writing-desk and whispered: ‘Don’t you like what you see? At the same moment there was a cascade of laughter from Miss Hamilton. Poole’s voice cracked like a whiplash, ‘Helena, please,’ and she turned from Parry Percival to say, ‘Darling, I’m so sorry,’ and in the same breath spoke her line of dialogue: ‘But it’s you, don’t you see, you can’t escape from it, it’s you.’ Gay Gainsford made a hopeless little gesture and Poole said: ‘Too late, of course. Try again.’

They tried several times, in an atmosphere of increasing tension. The amiable Jacko was called in to make an infinitesimal change in Gay’s make-up, and Martyn saw him blot away a tear. At this juncture a disembodied voice roared from the back of the circle: ‘Sister, have comfort. All of us have cause to wail the dimming of our shining star.’

Poole glanced into the auditorium. ‘Do shut up like a good chap, John,’ he said.

‘Pour all your tears! I am your sorrows nurse And I will pamper it with la-men-ta-ti-ons.’

The man called Jacko burst out laughing and was instantly dismissed to the dressing-rooms by Poole.

There followed a quarter of an hour of mounting hysteria on the part of Gay Gainsford and of implacable persistence from Adam Poole. He said suddenly, ‘All right, we’ll cheat. Shift the camera.’

The remaining photographs were taken with a great deal of trouble. Miss Gainsford, looking utterly miserable, went off to her dressing-room. The man called Jacko reappeared and ambled across to Miss Hamilton. There was an adjustment in make-up while Martyn held up the mirror.

‘Maybe it’s lucky,’ he said, ‘you don’t have to look like somebody else.’

‘Are you being nice or beastly, Jacko?’

He put a cigarette between her lips and lit it. ‘The dresses are good,’ he said. He had a very slight foreign accent.

‘You think so, do you?’

‘Naturally. I design them for you.’

‘Next time,’ she said gently, ‘you’d better write the play as well.’

He was a phenomenally ugly man but a smile of extraordinary sweetness broke across his face.

‘All these agonies!’ he murmured, ‘and on Thursday night everyone will be kissing everyone else and at the Combined Arts Ball we are in triumph and on Friday morning you will be purring over your notices. And you must not be unkind about the play. It is a good play.’ He grinned again, more broadly. His teeth were enormous and uneven. ‘Even the little niece of the great husband cannot entirely destroy it.’

‘Jacko!’

‘You may say what you like, it is not intelligent casting.’

‘Please, Jacko.’

‘All right, all right. I remind you instead of the Combined Arts Ball, and that no one has decided in what costume we go.’

‘Nobody has any ideas. Jacko, you must invent something marvellous.’

‘And in two days I must also create out of air eight marvellous costumes.’

‘Darling Jacko, how beastly we are to you. But you know you love performing your little wonders.’

‘I suggest then, that we are characters from Chekhov as they would be in Hollywood. You absurdly gorgeous, and the little niece still grimly ingénue. Adam perhaps as Vanya if he were played by Boris Karloff. And so on.’

‘Where shall I get my absurdly gorgeous dress?’

‘I paint the design on canvas and cut it out and if I were introduced to your dresser I would persuade her to sew it up.’ He took the glass from Martyn and said, ‘No one makes any introductions in this theatre, so we introduce ourselves to each other. I am Jacques Doré, and you are the little chick whom the stork has brought too late, or dropped into the wrong nest. Really,’ he said, rolling his eyes at Miss Hamilton, ‘it is the most remarkable coincidence, if it is a coincidence. I am dropping bricks,’ he added. ‘I am a very privileged person but one day I drop an outsize brick, and away I go.’ He made a circle of his thumb and forefinger and looked through it, as though it were a quizzing glass, at Martyn. ‘All the same,’ he said, ‘it is a pity you are a little dresser and not a little actress.’

IV

Between the photograph call and the dress-rehearsal, which was timed for seven o’clock, a state of uneven ferment prevailed at the Vulcan. During the rare occasions on which she had time to reflect, Martyn anticipated a sort of personal zero hour, a moment when she would have to take stock, to come to a decision. She had two and fourpence and no place of abode, and she had no idea when she would be paid, or how much she would get. This moment of reckoning, however, she continually postponed. The problem of food was answered for the moment by the announcement that it would be provided for everyone whose work kept them in the theatre throughout the play. As Miss Hamilton had discovered a number of minor alterations to be made in her dresses, Martyn was of this company. Having by this time realized the position of extraordinary ubiquity held by Jacko, she was not surprised to find him cooking a mysterious but savoury mess over the gas-ring in Fred Badger’s sink-room.

This concoction was served in enamel mugs, at odd intervals, to anyone who asked for it and Martyn found herself eating her share in company with Bob Cringle, Mr Poole’s dresser. From him she learnt more about Mr Jacques Doré. He was responsible for the décor and dressing of all Poole’s productions. His official status was that of assistant to Mr Poole but in actual fact he seemed to be a kind of superior odd-job man. ‘General dogsbody,’ Cringle gossiped, ‘that’s what Mr Jacko is. “Poole’s Luck” people call him, and if the guvnor was superstitious about anything, which ’e is not, it would be about Mr Jacko. The lady’s the same. Can’t do without ’im. As a matter of fact it’s on ’er account ’e sticks it out. You might say ’e’s ’er property, a kind of pet, if you like to put it that way. Joined up with ’er and ’is nibs when they was in Canada and the guvnor still doing the child-wonder at ’is posh college. ‘E’s a Canadian-Frenchy, Mr Jacko is. Twenty years ago that must ’ave been, only don’t say I said so. It’s what they call doglike devotion, and that’s no error. To ’er, not to ’is nibs.’

‘Do you mean Mr Bennington?’ Martyn ventured.

‘Clark Bennington, the distinguished character actor, that’s right,’ said Cringle drily. Evidently he was not inclined to elaborate this theme. He entertained Martyn, instead, with a lively account of the eccentricities of Dr John Rutherford. ‘My oaff,’ he said, ‘what a daisy! Did you ’ear ’im chi-ikeing from the front this morning? Typical! We done three of ’is pieces up to date and never a dull moment. Rows and ructions, ructions and rows from the word go. The guvnor puts up with it on account he likes the pieces and what a time ’e has with ’im, oh, dear. It’s something shocking the way doctor cuts up. Dynamite! This time it’s the little lady and ’is nibs and Mr Parry Profile Percival ’e’s got it in for. Can’t do nothing to please ’im. You should ’ear ’im at rehearsals. “You’re bastardizing my play,” ’e ’owls. “Get the ’ell aht of it,” ’e shrieks. You never seen such an exhibition. Shocking! Then the guvnor shuts ’im up, ’e ’as an attack of the willies or what-have-you and keeps aht of the theaytre for a couple of days. Never longer, though, which is very unfortunate for all concerned.’

To Martyn, held as she was in a sort of emotional suspension, the lives and events enclosed within the stage walls and curtain of the Vulcan Theatre assumed a greater reality than her own immediate problem. Her existence since five o’clock the previous afternoon when she had walked into the theatre, had much of the character and substance of a dream with all the shifting values, the passages of confusion and extreme clarity which make up the texture of a dream. She was in a state of semi-trauma and found it vaguely agreeable. Her jobs would keep her busy all the afternoon and tonight there was the first dress-rehearsal.

She could, she thought, tread water indefinitely, half in and half out of her dreams, as long as she didn’t come face to face with Mr Adam Poole in any more looking-glasses.

CHAPTER 3

First Dress-Rehearsal

‘I wish,’ Martyn said, ‘I knew what the play was about. Is it really a modern morality and do you think it good?’

‘All good plays are moralities,’ said Jacko sententiously, and he leant so far back on the top of his step-ladder that Martyn hurriedly grasped it. ‘And this is a good play with a very old theme.’ He hesitated for a moment and she wondered if she only imagined that he looked worried. ‘Here is a selected man with new ideas in conflict with people who have very old ones. Adam plays the selected man. He has been brought up on an island by a community of idealists; he represents the value of environment. By his own wish he returns to his original habitat, and there he is confronted by his heredity, in the persons of his great uncle, who is played by J. G. Darcey, his brilliant but unstable cousin, who is played by Clark Bennington, this cousin’s wife, who is Helena, and with whom he falls in love, and their daughter who is freakishly like him, but vicious and who represents therefore his inescapable heredity. This wretched girl,’ Jacko continued with great relish, looking at Martyn out of the corner of his eyes, ‘is engaged to a nonentity but finds herself drawn by a terrible attraction to Adam himself. She is played by Gay Gainsford. Receive again from me the pink pot, and bestow upon me the brown. As I have recited it to you so baldly, without nuance and without detail, you will say perhaps if Ibsen or Kafka or Brecht or even Sartre had written this play it would have been a good one.’

Inexplicably, he again seemed to be in some sort of distress. ‘It has, in fact,’ he said, ‘a continental flavour. But for those who have ears to hear and eyes to see, it has a wider implication than I have suggested. It is a tale, in point of fact, about the struggle of the human being in the detestable situation in which from the beginning he has found himself. Now I descend.’ He climbed down his step-ladder, groaning lamentably. ‘And now,’ he said, ‘we have some light and we see if what I have done is good. Go out into the front of the house and in a moment I join you.’

By the time Martyn reached the sixth row of the stalls the stage was fully illuminated, and for the first time she saw the set for Act II as Jacko had intended it.

It was an interior, simple in design and execution, but with an air of being over-civilized and stale. ‘They are,’ Jacko explained, slumping into a seat beside her, ‘bad people who live in it. They are not bad of their own volition, but because they have been set down in this place by their heredity and cannot escape. And now you say, all this is pretentious nonsense, and nobody will notice my set except perhaps a few queers who come to first nights and in any case will get it all wrong. And now we wash ourselves and go out to a place where I am known, and we eat a little, and you tell me why you look like a puppy who has found his tail but dare not wag it. Come.’

The restaurant where Jacko was known turned out to be hard by the theatre, and situated in a basement. He insisted on paying for a surprisingly good meal, and Martyn’s two and fourpence remained in her pocket. Whereas the curiosity of Fred Badger and Bob Cringle, and in some degree of the actors, had been covert and indirect, Jacko’s was unblushing and persistent.

‘Now,’ he said, over their coffee, ‘I ask you my questions. If there is a secret you tell me so, and with difficulty I shut myself up. If not, you confide in me, because everybody in the Vulcan makes me their confidant and I am greatly flattered by this. In any case we remain friends, no bones broken, and we repeat our little outings. How old do you think I am?’

With some embarrassment, Martyn looked at his scrawny neck, at the thin lichen-like growth of fuzz on his head, and at his heavily scored and indented face. ‘Fifty-seven,’ she ventured.

‘Sixty-two,’ said Jacko complacently. ‘I am sixty-two years old, and a bit of a character. I have not the talent to make a character of myself for the people who sit in front, so instead I play to actors. A wheel within wheels. For twenty years I have built up my role of confidant and now, if I wanted to, I couldn’t leave off. For example I can speak perfect English, but my accent is a feature of the role of Papa Jacko, and must be sustained. Everybody knows it is a game and, amiably, everyone pretends with me. It is all rather ham and jejune, but I hope that you are going to play too.’

Martyn thought, ‘It would be pleasant to tell him: I’m sure he’s very nice and so why don’t I do it? I suppose it’s because he looks so very old.’ And whether with uncanny prescience or else by a queer coincidence, he said, ‘I’m not nearly as peculiar as I look.’

Martyn said tentatively, ‘But I honestly don’t know what you want me to tell you.’

On the opposite wall of the restaurant there was a tarnished looking-glass, upon the surface of which someone had half-heartedly painted a number of water-lilies and leaves. Among this growth, as if drowned in Edwardiana, Jacko’s and Martyn’s faces were reflected. He pointed to hers.

‘See,’ he said. ‘We rehearse a play for which it is necessary a secondary-part actress should resemble, strikingly, the leading man. We have auditions, and from the hundreds of anxious ingénues we select the one who is least unlike him, but she is still very unlike him. Incidentally,’ Jacko continued, looking Martyn very hard in the eye, ‘she is the niece of Clark Bennington. She is not very like him either which is neither here nor there and perhaps fortunate for her. It is her unlikeness to Adam that we must deplore. Moreover, although I am a genius with make-up, there is very little I can do about it. So we depend instead on reflected emotions and echoed mannerisms. But although she is a nice little actress with a nice small talent, she cannot do this very well either. In the meantime our author who is a person of unbridled passion where his art is in question, becomes incensed with her performance and makes scenes and everybody except her Uncle Bennington retires into corners and tears pieces of their hair out. The little actress also retires into corners and weeps and is comforted by her Uncle Bennington, who never the less knows she is no good.

‘Upon this scene there enters, in the guise of a dresser,’ he jabbed his finger at the fly-blown glass, ‘this. Look at it. If I set out to draw the daughter or the young sister of the leading man, that is what I should draw. Everybody has a look at her and retires again into corners to ask what it is about. Because obviously, she is not a dresser. Is she perhaps – and there are many excited speculations. “A niece for a niece?” we ask ourselves, and there is some mention of Adam’s extreme youth, you must excuse me, and the wrong side of the rose bush, and everybody says it cannot be an accident and waits to see, except Papa Jacko whose curiosity will not permit him to wait.’

Martyn cried out, ‘I’ve never seen him before, except in films in New Zealand. He knows nothing about me at all. Nothing. I came here from New Zealand a fortnight ago and I’ve been looking for a job ever since. I came to the Vulcan looking for a job, that’s all there is about it.’

‘Did you come looking for the job of dresser to Miss Hamilton?’

‘For any job,’ she said desperately. ‘I heard by accident about the dresser.’

‘But it was not to be a dresser that you came all the way from New Zealand, and yet it was to work in the theatre, and so perhaps after all you hoped to be an actress.’

‘Yes,’ Martyn said, throwing up her hands, ‘all right, I hoped to be an actress. But please let’s forget all about it. You can’t imagine how thankful I am to be a dresser, and if you think I’m secretly hoping Miss Gainsford will get laryngitis or break her leg, you couldn’t be more mistaken. I don’t believe in fairy tales.’

‘What humbugs you all are.’

‘Who?’ she demanded indignantly.

‘All you Anglo-Saxons. You humbug even yourselves. Conceive for the moment the mise en scène, the situation, the coincidence, and have you the cheek to tell me again that you came thirteen thousand miles to be an actress and yet do not wish to play this part. Are you a good actress?’

‘Don’t,’ Martyn said, ‘don’t. I’ve got a job and I’m in a sort of a trance. It makes everything very simple and I don’t want to come out of it.’

Jacko grinned fiendishly. ‘Just a little touch of laryngitis?’ he suggested.

Martyn got up. ‘Thank you very much for my nice dinner,’ she said. ‘I ought to be getting on with my job.’

‘Little hypocrite. Or perhaps after all you know already you are a very bad actress.’

Without answering she walked out ahead of him, and they returned in silence to the Vulcan.

II

Timed to begin at seven, the dress-rehearsal actually started at ten-past eight. Miss Hamilton had no changes in the first act, and told Martyn she might watch from the front. She went out and sat at the back of the stalls near the other dressers.

Suddenly the lights went up along the fringe of the curtain. Martyn’s flesh began to creep. Throughout the auditorium other little flames sprang up, illuminating from below, like miniature footlights, the faces of the watchers in front. A remote voice said, ‘OK. Take it away,’ a band of gold appeared below the fringe of the curtain, widened and grew to a lighted stage. Parry Percival spoke the opening line of Dr Rutherford’s new play.

Martyn liked the first act. It concerned itself with the group of figures Jacko had already described – the old man, his son, his son’s wife, their daughter and her fiancé. They were creatures of convention, the wife alone possessed of some inclination to reach out beyond her enclosed and aimless existence.

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