Ha'penny (4 page)

“I can’t say exactly. It’ll be done by tomorrow morning for sure, you’ll be able to go around it then.”

“Thank you,” Carmichael said.

Curry nodded generally and stumped off around the house, glass crunching loudly under his feet.

“Well, time for us all to start getting organized,” Carmichael said. “I think the first thing would be to get hold of the servants and see what they know. Do you have their names, sergeant?”

Griffith shook his head. “They’ll be on file in the station, but not here. The lady’s maid was Mercedes, like the car, I do remember that.”

“Well, find out their names, and round them up,” Carmichael said. “If there’s even a slight possibility that one of them planted the bomb, we have every right to take them all into custody if it comes to that. The neighbors’ servants may know about days off and so on. If it is their day off, they’ll be coming back presently as normal and we can collect them then. Which reminds me—why is the street closed off?”

“We were afraid there might be another bomb,” Jacobson said. “Captain Curry has checked thoroughly now, and there’s no reason not to reopen it.”

“Do that, but bring the bobby to the bottom of the steps, to keep the reporters out,” Carmichael said. “They’ll be crawling all over otherwise, safe or not, and we don’t want that. Better be on the safe side and leave a man on guard here as well, which is going to mean two men on night duty. Damn the press. I’d better go and give them something to keep them quiet.”

“Will you need anything on her career?” Jacobson asked, eager.

“They’ll have that on file already,” Carmichael said, gently discouraging. “I’ll go and tell them she’s dead, it was a bomb, and it wasn’t the same kind of explosive used in the Campion bomb, or anything left from the Blitz. I won’t tell them the bomb was definitely inside the house. That ought to keep them going for now.”

“They’re not ravening beasts, surely?” Jacobson said.

“I think you’ll find they are in a case of this nature,” Carmichael said. “I think I’d better come to your station, after I’ve given my statement, to get the names of the servants. Then, unless they’ve turned up to be questioned, I’ll head down to the Yard and get some investigations going there. Tomorrow morning, we should all meet up here to go through the house. Curry should have the results of his tests by then, which will let us know more about the bomb.”

3

I
suppose it sounds awfully cold-hearted when I’d just been told Lauria Gilmore was lying dead, but I went home and read
Hamlet.
I started learning lines and thinking my way into the part. I’d always done this, ever since I was a child and first started to dream of acting. I read the play all through, then I read my part separately and thought about why I was saying this. By the time I’d been all through
Hamlet,
I’d quite come round to thinking that Antony was right, the whole indecisive thing did make more sense for a girl, who wouldn’t expect to inherit automatically. A son and heir being usurped would be a fool to do nothing about it, whether or not his father had been murdered, but a daughter was different. My father had always wanted a son, which is why he had six daughters rather than stopping sensibly after two or three. Hamlet had been to Wittenberg, which was a university. He was there when his father died, and he’d just come back from there with his best friend, Horatio. For a girl to go there must have been rather like when my sister Olivia insisted on going to Oxford. Mamma and Pappa didn’t like it, even though we lived close enough that she could drive herself in and out and didn’t have to live at college. They’d never have allowed that.

Hamlet’s family lived in Elsinore, which must have been like living way up in the north of Scotland. I went there once, Scotland, not Elsinore, to stay with Lord and Lady Ullapool. The journey took forever, and when you were there, nothing but hills and sea and desolation, beautiful in a bleak sort of way. There was nothing to do except stalk deer, ugh, and the rest of the house party were all as dull as ditchwater, and the house big enough I was always afraid of getting lost between my room and the drawing room. No wonder Hamlet took Horatio back with him. I’d been invited because the Ullapools’ son Edward wanted a chance to propose, and thought it more likely I’d agree if I had a chance to see his wide acres first. I went because Mamma absolutely forced me. Even that year when I was doing what she told me to I utterly loathed country house parties and wearing tweeds.

I was surprised to find out in the gravedigger scene that Hamlet was thirty. I’d been thinking of her as much younger, twenty-two or -three, the age my sister Rosie was when she wanted to steeplechase. Thirty, only two years younger than I was. She must have got her degree. Not even a Ph.D. would take that long. Maybe she’d stayed on at Wittenberg to teach. Maybe she thought she’d never have to go home to horrible Elsinore. Then her father died. Would I go home if my father died? Would I even know if he died? Well, yes, it would be in the papers. Mrs. Tring would tell me. And even before that one of the others would be sure to phone me, even if Mamma didn’t. I suppose if there were a memorial service in London I’d go. But I’d never go to Carnforth. Still, it wasn’t the same. Mamma would have the others, or anyway most of the others. I wasn’t the heir. Hamlet was an only, which must have made a huge difference. I find it very hard to imagine what it must be like not having sisters.

I was in a kind of dream, thinking about Elsinore and Ullapool Castle and the fight Hamlet must have had to get away to college and the fights my parents had with us about all the things my sisters and I wanted to do, when Mrs. Tring came in. She knocked first, and then walked straight in and sat down on the end of my bed. I was standing at the window at that moment, looking out at the darkening sky, what I could see of it over the rooftops and chimney pots.

“Sorry to interrupt when I can tell by the muttering you’re learning lines,” she said. “Mollie tells me you’re going to play Hamlet.”

“I know you don’t approve of the cross-casting, and I don’t either, really, but this is different. It isn’t silly sex stuff done to get a laugh, it’s practically only Hamlet who’s reversed, and in a way it makes more sense of the play.”

Mrs. Tring laughed. “If it made more sense, you can trust that Shakespeare would have written it that way round first off and saved a lot of trouble. What I wanted to ask you was whether you’d be needing me to dress you.”

“I don’t know. Antony didn’t say. I hope so. It’s in the Siddons, you know, and it starts in two weeks. Two weeks’ rehearsal, for
Hamlet
!”

“I can do it, if you need me. But I’d like to know. Be nice to have a couple of ha’pennies to rub together.”

We’d been living together for eight years. For me they were years in which I’d gone from playing Cecily to playing Hamlet, but for Mrs. Tring nothing had changed; she’d been a theatrical dresser then and was a theatrical dresser now. She was two years younger than I was and looked ten years older.

“I’d love to have you if it works out,” I said. “I’ll ask Antony on Monday.”

Mollie tapped on the door. “These have arrived for you,” she said. “Sent round by messenger. I caught him just as I was on my way out.”

Antony had sent round the script, which was very good of him, and a big bunch of roses, which was just his way of being polite.

“I’ll put them into a vase,” Mrs. Tring said, getting up at once.

“Three vases,” I called after her. It was a long-standing rule of the flat that when we got flowers we shared them. Mrs. Tring, who, naturally enough, never got sent flowers herself, was always inclined to pretend to forget and give them to the person who had been sent them. Mollie and I had once discussed, safely away from her, why she never had boyfriends. “Her hea-aart is in the gra-aaave with her husband,” Mollie had wavered in the tones of the banshee in
The Curse of the Caledons.
We’d laughed, but I think on the whole it was true.

“Are you off anywhere special?” I asked Mollie, who was lingering in the doorway. She was dressed rather splendidly in a red velvet coat over a long black skirt.

“LDG,” she replied, meaning Loathsome Daily Grind, or in other words, an audition for a part she didn’t especially want. “Susan in Marmaduke’s revival of that Rattigan thing,” she elaborated.

“I can’t remember, is Susan the wife or the other woman?” I asked.

“What does it matter, they’re all the same,” she said. I looked at her, surprised.

“It’s all very well for you, you have a part and a plum of a part, but I don’t have anything and if I do it’ll be in some dreary nonsense nobody wants to see anyway. I’m getting old, and there are no parts for old women, and even if I manage to get the ones there are, people’s comic mothers and Lady Bracknell and Lady Macbeth—put your mother in there and you’d have the three witches, rather, wouldn’t you—it’ll all end up in being blown sky-high like poor Lauria.”

This, without the last comment, wasn’t an unfamiliar chorus from poor Mollie these days. In the last eight years her stock had definitely fallen. She was thirty-nine and looked older.

“I can’t say that’s exactly a common end for actors,” I said. “Oh Moll, you’ll be all right. Something will turn up. Maybe Antony will want you for his Player King, Queen, and we’ll be together.”

“Did he mention anything?” she asked, her face brightening.

“He said he wanted a woman, that’s all,” I said, hating to disillusion her. “I could suggest you.”

“He probably has someone by now,” she said, sinking down to the bed in the attitude of mourning for Adonis. “I’m sorry to be such a drip.”

Mollie was really good to me when I was just starting out and didn’t know which end was up in the theater. She could have laughed at me like all the others, that would have been the easy thing, but she helped me when I really needed it. I met her when I was the maid on the tour—the third-rank tour—of
Buttered Toast,
and she was Lucinda. We laughed together on a lot of those ghastly cross-country train trips.

“I’ll ring Antony right now and thank him for the flowers and suggest you,” I said. “It’s nothing, really.”

The telephone was in the hall on a little table. It was a perfectly normal phone like everyone else’s, but one of Mollie’s boyfriends had lacquered it red, which made it seem rather dashing. I dialed Antony’s number, and waited. For a wonder, he was in, and for another, he was glad to hear from me.

“Viola! Darling! Did you get the script?” he asked.

“I was just ringing to thank you for it,” I said. “And for the lovely flowers too.”

“Have you heard about Lauria? Blown to bits, absolutely blown to bits. Nobody’s safe in their beds. Thank God for Mr. Normanby and his stern measures or it would all be as bad as the war.”

“Do you have any idea why they might have wanted to kill Lauria?” I asked.

“Probably the communists don’t want me to be able to do my
Hamlet,
” Antony said.

I laughed, though he sounded absolutely sincere. “I was going to ask you what you thought about Mollie Gaston,” I said.

“Is she old enough?” Antony asked, dubiously. “The last time I saw her she was a bright young thing in something or other. Lovely expressive voice, of course, great range. Wonderful sobbing.”

“Old enough?” I asked, and then I twigged.

“Yes, Gertrude has to be old enough to be your mother,” he went on. “Particularly with you being female, there has to be a real contrast. Lauria would have been simply perfect.”

“I think Mollie could look old enough.” Mollie, standing in the door to my room, looked absolutely aghast, and in that instant old enough to have played Hecuba. I went on, “Besides, she’s got to be young enough to be sexy, young enough that Claudius finds her attractive. It isn’t a marriage of convenience. Hamlet’s disgusted with how sexual they are. Paddling in her neck.” I’d just been reading that, so I could quote it confidently. “And age is largely a matter of body language, and that Mollie can do. The rest can be managed with makeup.” I happened to know that Antony was mad keen on body language, because he’d once, in rehearsals for
The Seagull,
told Pat to walk on in such a way that it was clear to the audience that he was thinking about shooting himself. I don’t think Pat ever managed it, or that anyone else could either, but the point is that Antony was sure he should have been able to.

“She could sob over Polonius. And then that speech after Ophelia drowns. She has a dark brown voice, which would suit that speech very well. But we shouldn’t count chickens. She probably isn’t free,” Antony said. Mollie was making the most awful faces at me.

“I happen to know she is at the moment, she told me she’s been offered a part but she hadn’t accepted yet,” I said. “I don’t want to rush you, but she’s here right now, would you like to speak to her?”

Mollie’s faces redoubled in urgency; she shook her head violently. “I don’t know.” It had been the wrong thing to say, now Antony sounded as if he thought I was pushing him into something he didn’t want.

“If you decide she’s too young for Gertrude you could try her as the Player Queen,” I said.

Mollie went quite still and leaned on the door frame. Mrs. Tring came out of the kitchen with a vase of roses in each hand and stood there, looking at us, puzzled. “I suppose I could,” Antony said. “Ask her if she can come and see me at the theater in the morning. First thing—ten o’clock.”

“I’ll do that,” I said. “Thank you for listening to me, Antony, I really appreciate that.” Mrs. Tring took one of the vases into her own room and came past me with the other towards mine.

“We all want to keep the actors happy,” he said. “Good-bye now, Viola, see you on Monday, and make sure you know your lines.”

“You know I always do,” I said. “Good-bye, Antony.”

“What did he say?” Mollie asked.

“He immediately thought I meant you for Gertrude, because his mind’s full of Lauria being blown up, and he thought you’d be wonderful at the sobbing. He must have seen you in
Dunkirk,
you cried a lot in that, didn’t you? But he was afraid you weren’t old enough. I tried to say that Gertrude has to be sexy as well as old enough to be my mother, so he wants to see you tomorrow, even though it’s Sunday. He likes your voice. I’d try to look mature but sexy, if I were you.”