Death and the Chaste Apprentice (22 page)

Brad Mallory looked disconcerted. “It
is
,” he said. “But that's one of the penalties one pays for the artistic temperament.”

Iain Dundy sat down and gave him a hard look. “Mr. Mallory,” he said. “I'm not going to beat about the bush or get into little sparring bouts with you. And I wish you'd drop this performance.”

“Performance?”

“It seems to me you're giving a
performance
as an aesthete, practically a parody of one. You remind me of a character in a not very good detective story from the twenties. You also seem to me to be giving a parody performance of a homosexual.”

“Like the chaste apprentice in the play,” put in Charlie. “He's doing a parody of the
Carry On
homosexual, and you're doing the quivering aesthete one.”

“I really don't think you understand the
feelings
of someone who—”

Iain Dundy leaned forward in his chair. “Come off it, old cock. You're a bloody singers' agent. If Singh was such a triumph at the concert the other night, your job
was to remain there and talk to the important people you'd invited to hear him. Natalya Radilova was something of a hit, too, and she couldn't rub more than two words of English together. Your job was to stay down there, and you'd have to be a bloody bad agent not to do it. I don't believe you're that. Why did you come away?”

Brad's voice came feebly, hardly penetrating the pepped-up jollities of
Mary Poppins
from the next room.

“I've told you: Singh is something very
special
to me. His singing affected me profoundly.”

“Codswallop! If you were that knocked all of a heap emotionally, why did you look in at the Shakespeare before you went up to your room? You were looking for someone. And I may as well tell you that you were seen knocking on Des Capper's door at twenty past eight.”

Brad Mallory's jaw dropped, and he gave out a little squawk, like a strangled chicken.

“No! No!”

“Oh, yes. I tell you, you were
seen.
And I've thought all along your story wasn't worth a bean. I think you came back because of something Des Capper said to you as you left the Saracen on your way to the Town Hall.”

Again there was this little squawk, and Brad Mallory writhed in his chair as if he were sitting on hot coals. Then quite suddenly he went still, sagging down into the chair like a half-empty sack of potatoes—small, pathetic, tired. He had dropped the mannerisms, but it was as if the mannerisms had become his self and there was nothing remaining. His eyes stared ahead, the most lively things about him. He was calculating how much he could tell.

“Since you know . . .” he said in a low voice, hesitating as he chose his revelations with care. “Yes, he did say something to me as I was leaving to go to the concert. . . . He'd already said something loaded in the bar about always meaning what he said. Then when I left he caught
up with me in the foyer. . . . I won't say what he said. It's not relevant. . . . By the time I got to the concert, my mind was in turmoil! Absolute turmoil!” He caught Dundy's eye and dropped the mannerism. “I was greeting everyone I knew, everyone I'd asked there, and I was casting around in my mind what I could do. I tried to phone him before the concert started, but there was no answer. . . . He was in the courtyard, watching the play, I believe. . . . I went in for the first half of the concert. Luckily I had an aisle seat at the back. I couldn't settle, couldn't concentrate on anything. . . . During the letter scene, Natalya's aria, just before Singh's pieces, I slipped out and rang him again. This time he was in. I said I had to see him, and at once. I said there was an interval coming up in the concert and that I'd come up to the Saracen at about a quarter or twenty past eight.”

“What was his reaction?”

“Very genial . . . in his dreadful way. . . . Gloating, really. But before he rang off, he said: ‘Not that it will do you any good, Mr. Mallory, but I'm quite happy to have a natter about it.' ”

“Right,” said Dundy, stretching his legs. “Well, that's clear enough so far. Except, of course, that you've skated over the little matter of what Capper was threatening you with.”

“It's not rele—”

Dundy held up his hand. There was no reason why Mallory should be allowed to get off this particular hook.

“There's no way this discussion is going to make any sense unless the whole thing is brought into the open. For the moment, this will be among ourselves. What would need to come out at any future trial I can't possibly say as yet. May I suggest that what Des said to you as you were leaving for the Town Hall—”

“
No!
Please, no!”

“—was something like: ‘So you're off to see your little castrato performing, are you, Mr. Mallory?' ”

Nettles blinked. So that
was
it! The little bundle in the chair, after a brief spasm of life, collapsed again. He looked like Grandmother Smallweed, needing to be shaken up. At last he said:

“Actually what he said was ‘Give my best wishes to your pet castrato.' ”

“Right,” said Dundy, still refusing to let Mallory off the hook. “I'm sure we're all better off for having that out in the open. Now, I think you'd better explain to us all exactly what a castrato was—
is
—don't you?”

Brad Mallory swallowed and thought. When he spoke, it was very low, as if he were reading to himself from a dictionary of music.

“It was a man who had been castrated just before puberty to preserve his high singing voice. They chose boys with beautiful voices, of course, and as it developed, it became something quite unique—full, brilliant, agile. They used the castrati in the papal choir right up to the end of the nineteenth century, but in opera they more or less died out early in the nineteenth century. The practice had become . . . unacceptable. The castrati were very spoiled, demanding, capricious, vain, and people got tired of their whims. They also became very fat, so they became ridiculous in heroic parts. But a lot of operas
need
that kind of voice: Handel, Gluck, early Mozart, early Rossini. Nowadays they use women for the parts, or countertenors, but it's not right.”

“A countertenor, as I understand it,” said Dundy, “is a choirboy who keeps his voice high by a big effort, right?”

“Something like that. The trouble is, the castrato roles call for brilliance and volume, and a countertenor voice is too weak; it won't fill a modern opera house. And a woman's voice is quite different, too, and she always looks
like a woman in men's clothes.” He cast them a look of feeble cunning. “It's a problem nobody has been able to solve.”

“Until you came along,” said Dundy quietly. “Until you decided to fill a long-felt want.”

Brad Mallory sparked up a little. “It's not as though there weren't any eunuchs around! People talk as if you couldn't do that today. That's just ignorance. It's being done all over the world—Turkey, India . . .”

“Yes, indeed: India. How did you come to know about the survival of the practice in India?”

Brad Mallory looked down into his lap and again spoke low. “I went there often when we used to arrange a World Theater Festival in London. I was one of the directors. I got to know all the major Indian troupes and some of the lesser—”

“These would have been some of the lesser, wouldn't they?” Dundy shook his head. “This was something that Des Capper also proved to be expert in, wasn't it?”

“Damn the man! Damn the bloody little know-it-all! . . . Yes, I suppose so. We never talked about
how
he came to know. Part of his Indian experiences, presumably.”

“Yes, it must have been. Of course, he'd never done most of the things he claimed to have done, but he had been there. This is what I think happened. Des came along to the rehearsal of
Adelaide,
and he happened to come backstage at the moment when you and Singh had gone onstage to comfort or reassure Natalya Radilova. He'd always assumed that Singh was ‘an operatic gentleman,' in his words, and this confirmed him in his mistake.”

“I can't think what part he imagined he played.”

“Ah, but remember that the version of
Adelaide
that is being played here is Donizetti's rewrite from the 1830s, which was only discovered last year. When he went to the standard work on Donizetti, all he found was an account
of the
original
opera of 1825, written for the castrato Velluti. So he assumed that Singh was playing Velluti's part of Robert the Bruce. What was actually going on onstage during the bit of rehearsal he saw meant little to him, because it was in Italian, and he hadn't then done a great deal of homework on the opera. He was looking for some way of getting revenge on Gottlieb, particularly later, after the scene in the Green Room. He didn't have much luck with Gottlieb's taste in young girls, because his minder was being careful. So when he got the idea that you had got hold of a
real
castrato for the Velluti part, he got the notion of getting at Gottlieb by turning his operatic triumph into a scandal and disaster that the popular press would seize on like vultures over carrion.”

“That's something I don't quite understand, sir,” said Nettles. “Would they have been that interested? Opera's pretty much of a minority interest.”

“Oh, but they would, they would.” Dundy turned to Mallory. “I'm sure you realized that throughout.”

Mallory nodded sadly. “Oh, yes. I always knew the public would never stand for a castrated male if they knew. Imagine what the
Daily Grub
would make of the sick tastes of”—his voice took on an Australian twang—“ ‘so-called culture vultures.' Think of the great mountain of pretended outrage and vulgar ridicule they would pile up. They would have a field day. If it were known, Singh could never perform in public again. People would be sickened.”

“And Gottlieb's opera would be a disaster. He would be buried in sludge. Except, of course, that unknown to Des Capper, Singh had nothing to do with
Adelaide.
It would have been you who was buried.”

“So what we think happened,” put in Charlie, “is that Capper saw the rehearsal, went away and read about Donizetti writing the opera for a castrato, and something
clicked in his mind, something he remembered from his Indian experiences.”

“That's it,” resumed Dundy. “India has been in everybody's minds recently, what with
Jewel in the Crown, Gandhi, A Passage to India,
and the rest. No doubt Des bored his saloon-bar regulars with his superior knowledge of the place each time one of them was shown on television. But knowledge he did have, and some reading, too, and when he thought of the subject of eunuchs, he remembered the hijras. He not only remembered them. There was a note in his little book of useful bits of information: HAD 9. He'd remembered that they appeared in
Heat and Dust
and had gone away and looked them up.”

“I still don't understand who or what the hijras were,” said Nettles. “Or
are
.”

“Are, definitely. Perhaps you could tell him, Mr. Mallory,” said Dundy. “I presume it was from them, or through them, that you—what shall we say?—acquired Singh?”

Brad Mallory flinched. His voice was still low, as if he were a great distance away. “They are bands of traveling entertainers. They perform on the streets, at stag parties and suchlike occasions. Probably it would have been at a stag party that Capper saw them. They're hermaphrodites and eunuchs, and their act is scabrous, very sexual, really rather horrible. There is a religious basis somewhere—they have a shrine in Gujarat—but it's not very strong. In fact, for the ordinary Indian they're the next thing to outcasts, though they're very often beautiful, weirdly so, and sometimes talented. Sometimes they buy children; sometimes they kidnap them. Then they castrate them.”

“As you knew from your visits to India.”

“Yes. I saw a troupe of them the very first time I went there. They fascinated me. They planted a seed in the back of my mind. And when early operas became more
and more popular, I thought:
That's
what is needed. Only that sort of voice can really do justice to the music.”

“And probably you were right. As we can see from these reviews.” Dundy tapped the already pasted in collection of reviews. “They all exclaim how
different
Singh's voice is from the usual countertenor—so much more powerful and brilliant. They guess it's something to do with his being Indian. None of them guesses the real reason. It's interesting that Des Capper did. I wonder what gave him the clue.”

“I don't know. I always insisted that Singh was English,” said Brad Mallory. “I think I overdid it and gave him the first clue.”

“Yes, and I suspect that he was puzzled by your homosexual performance. I suppose you did that to give Singh some kind of sexual identity?”

“Yes. I adopted them gradually, as if I was changing my . . . my sexual orientation. It was a preparation for when I would bring Singh forward, launch him on his career.”

“But I suspect that Des learned from the room maids here that there didn't seem to be anything going on between you. ‘Where do they do it?' he asked in his little book. . . . But you haven't told us how you procured Singh.”

“If you're suggesting that I had him . . .
done,
you're mistaken,” said Brad with a brief spurt of fire. “He was twelve when I saw him and had already been . . . operated on. I listened to several of the boys, heard their singing voices, chose the one that seemed most beautiful and most Western. Then I arranged for the boy to be adopted by an Indian couple that I knew in this country. He had no obvious parent or protector, so it was quite easy. From the day he came here he has been having music lessons. Everything has been geared towards his
debut. . . . The man who will show us how Handel opera should be sung. . . .”