Dance and Skylark (18 page)

As for the Grand Finale, Shakespeare had a word for it; and when, long past midnight, Stephen went back to the shop, he took down from his shelves a grubby copy of
The Tempest
—the reflection that almost all his books were in
that condition only slightly deepened his depression—and turned the pages until he came to the Masque of the Goddesses. Shakespeare, evidently as sick of Masques as Stephen himself was, had sensibly given the whole thing up and written:

“Enter certain NYMPHS. … Enter certain Reapers, properly habited; they join with the NYMPHS in a graceful dance … after which,
to a strange and confused music, they heavily vanish!”

Having underlined these words, and placed the book on Faith's desk because he thought it would amuse her, Stephen went to bed. For most of the night, half-sleeping, half-waking, he wove the Pageant into a dreadful fantasy in his mind. Odo and Dodo, mounted on donkeys, galloped across the field shouting “Five to one bar!” Cavaliers in plumed hats intruded into the Wars of the Roses; Dame Joanna wagged her finger at Bloody Mary and severely commanded her, “Get thee to a nunnery”; Councillor Noakes, still dressed as Shakespeare, declaimed bawdy passages from
The Memoirs of a Lady oj Pleasure
. A little before dawn, as at last he composed himself to sleep, he thought rationally: “This is the consequence of being overtired; I shall feel better about it in the morning.”

But in the morning he didn't. When Virginia rang up to say that she already had full houses for six performances out of seven, his only reaction was one of horror that so many people would witness his shame. Nor, for once, did Faith have any encouragement to offer him; she refrained from mentioning the rehearsal and made no comment upon the book he had put on her desk. In any case there was no
time for talk this morning. A series of large and lesser crises filled the hours between nine and twelve. Inspector Heyhoe had discovered at the last moment an insoluble parking problem; for it was the day of the All Midlands Angling Competition, the car parks would be full of charabancs, the streets must be kept clear for the Carnival Procession, so where, therefore, would the visitors to the official opening put their cars? “Trouble, trouble, all around us trouble,” said Inspector Heyhoe; and Stephen heartily agreed. For the chinchilla lady was complaining of a mass escape of rabbits from the hutches at her abominable Exhibition, and Sir Almeric brought a catalogue of eleven horses which were suffering from splints, spavins, thoroughpins, kicks on the hocks, and a complaint called the staggers which Stephen had never heard of. The lighting-man announced that the flood water had got into his main cable and caused a short which had blown all his lamps; and the programmes, needless to say, had not yet arrived from the printers. While Stephen dealt as best he could with all these troubles, what seemed to him a positive spate of telegrams arrived one after another in the office. Faith opened them smiled, added them to the growing pile on her desk, but made no comment. There was one, however, which did not cause her to smile. She brought it across to Stephen and laid it in front of him. It was from the town's M.P. who had promised to judge the Beauty Competition. It said:

Deeply regret must fail you owing to pressing business in House
.

“Cold feet,” said Faith. “He's got cold feet.”

“I don't blame him,” said Stephen. “What now?”

“No
local
person would dare to take it on.”

“Better tell the Mayor. It's his affair more than ours.”

But as Faith went back to her desk to telephone to the Mayor a new crisis arose. Followed by a number of her pupils, the lady from the School of Drama burst into the room. In the background, huge and fleshy, loomed Councillor Noakes. The Wardrobe Mistress, with a face of stone, followed. The Drama Lady explained incoherently that her Chorus had just put on for the first time the dresses which Robin had designed for them. They had then paraded on the Bloody Meadow before a Press photographer, and as they did so the sun had come out from behind a cloud. The muslin dresses had proved to be transparent.
But transparent!
said the Drama Lady. Everything showed through!
But everything!
And what, she asked, would be the effect of floodlights at night?
But unthinkable!
Her girls, she observed, were Ladies. They did not belong to a Pantomime. She had not understood that the Pageant was a branch of the
Folies Bergères
. Something would have to be done about it immediately.

“Slips,” said Faith shortly.

The Wardrobe Mistress interposed:

“I always said there'd have to be slips. He doesn't understand materials. How can we make twelve slips in eight hours
and
do all the other last-minute jobs to the costumes?”

Everybody started talking at once. The girls who had
been taught verse-speaking enunciated with great clarity, “Pink knickers, my dear!” “And a most extra-ordinary bra!” The Drama Lady wailed “Indecent!
But indecent!”
The Wardrobe Mistress called heaven to witness that in the midst of this crisis the so-called Dress Designer had gone fishing. A post-office messenger pushed his way through the crush and handed Stephen a bundle of telegrams, which he unthinkingly stuffed into his pocket without opening them. One of the verse-speakers with beautiful elocution said: “My sweet, I felt like a Circassian in a slave-market being Eyed.” Only Faith remained silent, a small oasis of quietude in a howling wilderness.

Councillor Noakes, steering himself through the crowd of girls with gentle but well-directed pushes and prods, reached Stephen's desk at last and stood before him.

“This is serious,” he said.

How in the world had Noakes contrived to mix himself up in this? He had probably been hanging about on the Bloody Meadow waiting to see the young women have their photographs taken. The pink knickers must have pleased him, thought Stephen grimly.

“We must particularly guard against any scandal,” Noakes went on, as if it had been Stephen's fault. “I rely on you, my boy.
Sans reproche
, remember. Our Festival must be
sans reproche”

The telephone rang and Faith answered it.

“Bloody Mary's got a rash,” she said shortly. “She thinks it's measles.”

Nobody took any notice, and Councillor Noakes continued:

“These are young girls, Stephen. Young girls. We are, in a sense,
in loco parentis
. It is unthinkable that we should cause them to make an exhibition-—”

Suddenly Stephen felt that he couldn't stand Councillor Noakes for one minute longer. A sense of the fatuous absurdity of the Festival and all its works utterly overwhelmed him. He had been subject, ever since he was a child, to such flurries of unreasonable panic. As a small boy he would sometimes rush out of the house and carry the burden of some secret fear or shame into the woods, desiring only to hide himself, running blindly until he tripped and fell. Later he had learned to rationalise and control these impulses. But to-day he was overtired and overworried, and when the sudden panic came it caught him off his balance.

So he fled: not precipately, as he had done in childhood, but with dignity and decorum. A bad headache and a touch of the heat, he explained; a few minutes in the fresh air and he would be all right again. He bowed to the Drama Lady, smiled at Faith, brushed aside Councillor Noakes' solicitous arm, and got himself to the door. He closed it gently behind him and set off up the street. He walked very fast, despite his lame leg, not caring which way he went, seeking only solitude; and as he walked he tried to calm himself with a childish formula that had lain half-buried in his memory for thirty years or so: “Whatever happens, they can't shoot me.” As a boy of seven, reluctantly trudging towards the day-school which he loathed and feared, he had invented the formula and found it extremely effective. At sixteen, out first ball in his first
house-match, he had gleaned some crumbs of comfort from it as he walked back seven leagues or so towards the pavilion in which the prefects sat with pitiless faces. The last time he had used it was in the air over Thessaly in the moment before he dropped through the hole in the floor of the aeroplane. “Whatever happens, they can't shoot me.” And then suddenly he had realised that they could, and probably would. The joke seemed so funny that he had laughed aloud, and with the laughter dying on his lips had plunged into the dark night. Polly, who followed him, had been immensely impressed by his laughter, and Stephen had never told him the reason for it. “Of all the crazy guys,” said Polly. “Say, what were you laughing at? Was it you thought maybe your chute wouldn't open, or were you thinking of mine? Of all the crazy guys!”

But now the formula was valid once more. They couldn't shoot him, whatever happened on Monday night.

Stephen was calm again when he encountered Mr. Handiman: calm enough to wonder what had thrown the little man into such a state of agitation and to notice with surprise his haggard expression and tormented eyes.

“Oh, Mr. Tasker, please, can you help me? You haven't seen Mr. Oxford anywhere? Or Mr. Timms? It's most important.”

“I haven't seen them,” said Stephen. “But I can make a pretty good guess where they'll be. The Ramping Cat or the Lamb or the Red Lion.”

“Oh, dear,” said Mr. Handiman.

“The Lamb's likeliest, at this time of day.”

“Oh, dear. You see I don't—well, to tell the truth I've never—never actually gone into a bar,” said Mr. Handiman. “But it's urgent, so I suppose I'll have to. The Lamb, you think? Well, thank you very much.”

“And if they're not there try the Lion.”

“Thank you.” Mr. Handiman toddled off towards the Lamb, which was just round the corner in a side street. Stephen, now quite recovered from his foolish panic, decided that he needed a drink before he risked any further discussion of young women's underwear with Councillor Noakes; so he turned into the cobbled courtyard of the Red Lion.

Florrie was decorating her bar with bunches of balloons, which John Handiman had given her, and with red and white roses, which she had paid for out of her own pocket. Her questing glance darted to and fro about the room as if she were a bird in spring-time examining an unpromising thicket to see where it could build a nest. Her actions were like a bird's too, as she plucked a spray of white rambler roses from the pile on the counter, fluttered round the room with it, and finally set it up behind the notice which said, THE PASSING OF BETTING-SLIPS IN THIS BAR IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN. Timms, meanwhile, though not exactly passing betting-slips, was extracting them from his pockets and sorting them into neat little heaps on the counter, while Mr. Oxford leaned back in his corner and discoursed with Florrie on the subject of kindness to animals.

“One can become very attached to a dumb brute,” he was saying, as Stephen came in; although, to tell the truth,
the only dumb brutes he was attached to were exceedingly abstract, being represented by symbols such as “5/- Doub. S.P. Urst Park 2.30” in his little black notebook.

“I was real sorry for that poor old lady,” said Florrie. “Good morning, Mr. Tasker. We was talking about that donkey in the paper this morning. ‘Bashful Toto Scorned Fame,' it says. Real pathetic. Half-pint for you, sir?”

Stephen felt in need of something stronger than beer, so he ordered a large pink gin. As she mixed it, Florrie continued:

“My first husband, now, grew very fond of a lioness, but it turned treacherous, and one night at a circus it went for him and had to be destroyed. Believe it or not, Mr. Tasker,
although
it had tried to bite his head off, when they shot that lioness my husband cried like a little child. And though we was only just married by no means could I console him.”

While she was speaking, Old Screwnose came slinking into the bar, and as a matter of form Timms concealed the betting-slips with his elbows. Screwnose looked at the balloons and sniffed. “Making the place look like a pally de dance,” he said, and immediately began to cross-examine Florrie about the loss of a whole batch of ashtrays which, it appeared, had mysteriously and simultaneously disappeared from her bar a week ago.

“You don't tell me they had wings and flew,” he said nastily.

“They was only little bits of tin, anyhow,” said Florrie, as if this made them more airworthy.

“It was those Buffaloes,” said Screwnose, edging towards
the door; for he always made certain of his line of retreat before risking an argument with Florrie. “I feel quite sure in my mind it was that Buffaloes' Outing which came in a charabanc last Wednesday. And to-day it's the fishermen, and all next week it's the Festival. Mark my words, by Saturday you won't have an ashtray left.”

He withdrew, and Florrie, shrugging her shoulders at his departing back, observed with large tolerance:

“It takes all sorts to make a world. It's not drinking, I dare say, that makes him so miserable.”

“Never a drop has passed his lips, they tell me,” said Mr. Oxford, not without awe.

Florrie nodded gravely.

“None of my husbands were what you'd call moderate men,” she said. “Ambrose—that was his professional name —slipped into the habit of fortifying himself against the lions, and George used to say he could understand horses and stars better when he'd had a few, and my last, Bertie, he used to punish the whisky something dreadful. And yet, if I had my time over again, I'd never marry a teetotaller. There's something slinky about teetotallers; you can't hear 'em coming upstairs.”

She looked up from the glass she was polishing and it was clear from her expression that you could have knocked her down with a feather, for on the threshold of her bar, with the door just closing behind him, stood a notorious teetotaller indeed. The expression on Mr. Handiman's face was that of a city-dweller who finds himself by some strange chance set down in a savage jungle. He glanced to right and left as if he expected to be assailed by the arm'd rhinoceros
and the Hyrcan tiger; or at least as if he expected to witness scenes of devilment and debauchery. The quiet decorum of the place seemed to surprise him, and after a moment's hesitation he advanced more confidently towards the bar.