Mrs Midnight and Other Stories (22 page)

I had absolutely no desire to become involved in any of Charles’s schemes, especially as my own career as a portrait artist was beginning to take off. I began to make excuses, but Charles sounded desperate. He almost pleaded with me. Eventually, I agreed to drive down for the day. I am afraid in the end I was more motivated by curiosity than by pity or sympathy.

It was a wild, windy October day. As I drove down, wet yellowing leaves flattened themselves onto my windscreen and had to be scraped off with the wipers. When I turned into the Stanhill drive it was drizzling. The Guiting Yellow Cotswold stone of Stanhill Manor looked sickly under a grey and white sky. The green lawns were littered with dead leaves which twitched uneasily in the wind.

The front door was open, so I walked in. Mahalia was in the hall sitting very upright at the big round rent table under the oriel window. There was no fire in the hearth and the hall felt damp and chilly, but Mahalia seemed impervious to the cold. On the table she was laying out Tarot cards in a formation known, I believe, as the Circle of Thoth. She was as slender and perfectly shaped as ever, but there were little wriggles of white in her black frizzy hair, like wisps of smoke coiling up a black chimney. Her bronze skin was beginning to be scratched by dark wrinkles, especially round the eyes. She barely looked up when I came in.

‘Chaz is upstairs in his old room,’ she said. ‘I’m trying out a new deck. It’s the Egyptian Tarot.’

‘Ah. The Crowley pack.’

‘So! You know a little something about it, Mr Artist?’

‘ “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” ’

‘A-men!’ There was a pause while she turned a card over, then she said: ‘Run along now. Don’t keep my husband waiting.’

I knew where Charles’s bedroom was, though I had never been inside it. As I climbed the stairs I noticed that there were cracks in the plastered walls. The house, never very well kept up, seemed more run down than before. In the passageway leading to Charles’s room a picture had fallen from its hook, its wire cord rusted away. It was propped disconsolately up against the wall. I bent down to examine it. Through the grime of age, a face peered out at me, oddly reminiscent of Charles with the same slightly crooked smile: evidently an ancestor.

I knocked on his door and received a feeble summons to enter.

I came into a big, oak panelled room, dominated by a great four poster bed. There were only two pictures on the walls: my sanguine drawings of Charles and Gloria, identically framed and mounted side by side on the panelling. They looked all wrong there: they had been hung far too close together.

The hangings of the bed were of red damask and had once been very fine but age had faded the edges where they met the light and had torn parts of them to fluttering ribbons of silk. Couched in the bed, propped up on mountainous pillows and wrapped in a profusion of quilts and rugs was Charles.

To say he did not look well would be an understatement. He was pale and sweaty. He looked shrunken, though this may have been an illusion created by the size of his bed, but at the same time his face had puffed out. The auburn curls, now thinner, clung lankly to his forehead. His eyes, deeper set, with a bluish tinge to the lids and sockets, wandered restlessly.

But the thing that struck me most was the smell. The room smelt of sweat and decay and, as I thought, old men. I was reminded of when, as a child of seven or eight, I was taken to see my grandfather for the last time. He was lying in bed in the room at the top of our house, and what I remember most, apart from the vacancy of his rolling eyes, was the smell which ever since I have associated with senescence, decay and death. It was a smell of organic matter stale and curling at the edges, or slowly turning sour on a neglected window sill. It was there in Charles’s room.

‘Robert! Great to see you!’ he said. ‘Tell me all your news.’ For a while my presence animated him and he seemed genuinely interested in what I had to tell him. He appeared particularly gratified when I informed him that Jenny and I were undergoing a trial separation.

‘Marriage is no good for artists. I’m not talking about Mahalia. She’s different.’ There was a pause while Charles breathed heavily, as if the act of listening to my gossip had exhausted him. Finally he beckoned to me to come closer to him on the bed. I approached reluctantly.

‘Robert, look, I want you to do me a favour. I want you to get me out of here.’ He was speaking in a lower voice, as if afraid of being overheard.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean get me out of this room. Get me into another. Any other. I can’t do it by myself, I’m too weak, and Mahalia for some reason won’t help.’

‘What’s wrong with it? Hasn’t this always been your room?’

‘Yes, yes! But didn’t you know? This was where Gloria took her overdose. She died in here. Robert, I’m shit scared. You must get me out of here.’

‘Are you afraid of her ghost or something?’

‘What? Good God, no! I don’t believe in all that rubbish.’

‘Then there’s nothing to be afraid of.’

‘Exactly! Nothing! That’s what I’m afraid of. Gloria isn’t here. Nothing’s here!’

‘Then why are you afraid?’

‘Christ, are you thick or something? I don’t know why I’m afraid! I just am. Bloody Ada, do you need a reason to be terrified? Get me out of here! If I don’t get out, I’ll die here. Isn’t that reason enough? For fuck’s sake, get me out of here!’

Charles put an arm around my shoulder and I eased him out of bed. Almost immediately his legs buckled under him, so that I was supporting his entire weight. I sat him on the bed while I found his slippers and dressing gown. Once again I was conscious of that old man smell of sweat and decay, only more intensely. I took his arm again and we started slowly, unsteadily towards the door. We were half way between the bed and the exit when the door opened. Mahalia stood on the threshold, the top of her head almost touching the lintel of the Georgian door frame.

She said: ‘What in hell are you doing?’

‘Moving Charles to another room,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t seem to like this one.’

‘Did I say you could do that?’

During the silence that followed Charles, unassisted, staggered back into bed, white and shaking. It would not have surprised me if I had known then that this was the last time I was to see him alive.

She said: ‘He does not leave this room till I say so.’

‘But he can’t stand it in here.’

‘Why? He’s got nothing to fear. You said so yourself.’ Had she been listening at the door?

‘So you’re just going to keep him here, against his will?’

‘You bet your ass,’ said Lady Mahalia Purefoy.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE DAMNED

There was a time before the Great War when Petropol was the most fashionable resort in the Crimea. If you arrived by steamer, you would have disembarked onto a stone jetty that extended a long grey arm into the oily smooth waters of the Black Sea. Having made your way along this you would have encountered a row of open carriages awaiting you on the broad esplanade which curved in an elegant parabola around the bay. Before conducting you and your baggage to your hotel, their drivers, unless expressly ordered not to do so, would have taken you on a tour of the town of which they were justifiably proud.

Petropol had been laid out somewhat in the French style, with wide, tree-lined boulevards. Princes and Archdukes owned high-walled villas by the sea while their yachts rode at anchor in the bay. The poorer districts lay in the foothills behind the town where no-one but the poor needed to visit them. There was a little casino, like a miniature palace made out of pink sugar, a monumental and severely classical town hall and the famous Botanical Gardens whose collection of rare plants was said to have been unmatched east of the Carpathians. Lovers of pleasure might resort to the celebrated—some would say notorious—Turkish Bath House; and lovers of the arts would undoubtedly be directed to the Imperial Opera House in St Basil’s Square. This was an imposing neo-Baroque construction faced with white marble whose green copper dome was surmounted by a gilded statue of winged Victory.

All these features were still there in 1919, but they had lost their lustre, and some of their function. The elegant promenades and gardens were no longer thronged with fashionable leisure-seekers, aristocrats and the higher grades of the Imperial Russian Civil Service with their families on holiday. Those happy and prosperous times had existed little more than five years before, but already they were beginning to seem like a generation away.

They certainly did to Asmatov, the manager of the Imperial Opera House, so much so that he sometimes wondered half seriously if the good times had been a figment of his imagination. Then he would look round his office and see the posters. Here was a visit from the Mariensky Opera Company in
Carmen
and
Boris Godunov
; there was the Bolshoi with
The Nutcracker
or
Swan Lake
. Ismailov had played Hamlet here; and the great Eleonora Duse herself had once appeared on his stage as D’Annunzio’s La Gioconda. She had played the rôle of course in her native Italian; nevertheless the citizens of Petropol had packed the theatre and shown their sophistication by declaring her performance ‘exquisite’.

In 1919 no European theatre company would have ventured within a hundred miles of Petropol. Companies from the great cities of Moscow or Petersburg (or was it now Petrograd?) were not venturing this far south if they were venturing at all. A civil war whose politics and strategies baffled the citizens of Petropol was raging. For some months the town had been nominally in the hands of the White Russians but nobody had troubled to inform the Petropolitans and they had been reluctant to enquire too deeply into the matter. They tried to go about their business as normally as possible and waited for events in the larger world to take them wherever the larger world wanted them to go.

Meanwhile the Imperial Opera House stood there in St Basil’s Square like a great white wedding cake waiting to be eaten, and the Petropolitans needed to be entertained from time to time. Asmatov did his best with the very limited pool of local talent among singers, musicians and performers at his disposal, but they were not a great success. He made some money by hiring out the theatre to political rallies and meetings of one kind or another. One by one he had to dismiss his faithful staff so that by the beginning of November of that year he was left only with his faithful Matriona, who ran the ticket office, and old Sivorin, keeper of the stage door and general factotum.

Asmatov was a smallish, stout, bald man with no obviously remarkable outward qualities. He dressed neatly; he kept his moustache in order; he was scrupulously punctual and polite. He was, above all, a man who believed in preserving his self respect, even, and indeed especially, in these times of uncertainty. Every morning, having breakfasted with his wife and daughter in their apartment opposite the Opera House, he would take himself across the square to his office in the theatre. The citizens of Petropol, seeing his neat, round figure in its black swallow tailed coat, as he strutted across St Basil’s Square, felt reassured. They knew they could set their watches by him and that, as soon as he had mounted the steps of the theatre and touched the door handle of the great glass panelled front portals, the hour of nine would strike. And so it did that morning in November of the year 1919.

Inside the foyer Asmatov found Matriona, as usual, tickling with a feather duster the marble bust of Melpomene which stood on a plinth to the right of the great staircase which led up to the Grand Tier and his office. Asmatov and Matriona exchanged cordial greetings and he told her, as he often did, that she reminded him of Shakespeare because, like him, she served Melpomene, the Muse of Tragedy, so faithfully and well. It was a pleasantry which never failed to please.

Having mounted the stairs he turned to his right and opened a door, thereby leaving behind the gilded plaster and marble of the main building. The corridor he entered was panelled in wood and lit only by a window at one end. About halfway down this corridor was the entrance to his office, but Asmatov never called it ‘his’ office, always ‘The Manager’s Office’, as if he were only its temporary occupant. He had inherited from his itinerant Jewish forbears a sense of impermanence, of being a ‘passer-by’. This feeling, far from troubling him, was, he felt, his natural condition and defined his peculiar sense of self.

A figure was standing in the corridor just outside the office. Despite the dimness he recognised the figure of old Sivorin standing, cap in hand. Asmatov wondered if he was about to hand in his resignation. Sivorin had been paid—Asmatov had seen to that—but his duties had become both more onerous and increasingly menial as his underlings had been dismissed.

‘Begging your pardon, sir,’ said Sivorin.

‘Come in to the office, my dear fellow.’

‘No, I have only this to say, honoured sir. There is a gentleman called who wishes to see you. He came earlier when you were out and left his card.’

Sivorin handed him the card with a quick movement as if he had been anxious to be rid of it. Asmatov felt the pasteboard and noted that the words on it had been engraved not printed. He felt the slight roughness as the ink from the lettering stood proud of the card, black and shiny. He studied the words.

COUNT BELPHAGORE

And his Company of

Apocalyptic Comedians

Notable for Tragedy, Comedy,

Tragicomedy, Farce and Operatic Mime
.

What on earth was ‘operatic mime’? thought Asmatov. The man was clearly a charlatan. ‘Did he say what he wanted?’ he enquired.

‘No, master, only that he would call again once you were here.’

‘I see.’

Sivorin shuffled off towards his own territory back stage. He had almost welcomed the diminution of the theatre’s staff, being one of those people who are quite content to work harder provided that they can work alone.

Asmatov entered the office, sat down heavily in his chair, and contemplated the prospect of entertaining a possible lunatic for the rest of the morning. Then he reflected ruefully that at least it was preferable to staring at the ceiling or the ever mounting pile of unpaid bills on his desk.

Five minutes later there was a sharp knock at Asmatov’s door. Asmatov gave the abrupt order to enter and rose to greet his visitor.

Anyone familiar with the theatrical world at the beginning of the twentieth century would have instantly guessed the profession of the man who stood in the doorway. He seemed to be the very archetype of the impresario, as depicted in the illustrated magazines. There was the Homburg hat, the coat with the astrakhan collar draped with apparent nonchalance over the shoulders, the pair of lemon-coloured kid gloves flapping in his right hand, the silver-topped ebony cane, the diamond stick pin. The man was dressed with the kind of opulence that is deliberately calculated to demonstrate wealth and success, and can therefore be deceptive. Asmatov felt a glow of familiarity: he knew how to handle such men; it was his business.

‘Count Belphagore?’ he enquired. The man nodded.

Yet, even as Asmatov helped to relieve the Count of his astrakhan coat, he began to feel some slight prick of doubt. It was as yet nothing that he could define to himself, but his unease was no less real for that. The nearest he came to an articulate objection—though it was hardly rational—was in the matter of hair.

Count Belphagore had red hair, and a great deal of it. He had a full head of it though its redness was relieved by a curious white streak just above the left temple. Was this a conscious homage to the famous ‘white flash’ of the great Diaghilev, Asmatov wondered? The Count sported substantial side whiskers too, of the kind that had been the fashion twenty or thirty years before, but were now rarely seen, other than on the cheeks of elderly military men. Red hair almost like fur sprang from the man’s immaculate white cuffs and stretched its fine orange tendrils across the back of his hands. Count Belphagore’s complexion was pink and white, his green eyes under bushy eyebrows brightly protuberant; he might have been in his mid-thirties, or a little older. He had the look of a fresh-faced satyr. For all his smartness, there was something disconcertingly antique about the Count’s appearance.

After the initial courtesies had been exchanged the Count explained that his company was in the vicinity, having been stranded by the vagaries of war and was anxious to secure a temporary engagement at a theatre. He said that Mr Asmatov’s Opera House had been highly recommended to him.

Asmatov, who was used to this kind of self-serving flattery, merely nodded and enquired of the Count what kind of entertainment he had to offer the citizens of Petropol. Asmatov added that while the Petropolitans valued high culture; they were particularly fond of the latest fashion for English musical comedy. A production of
The Geisha
had recently enjoyed considerable success there. The Count nodded.

‘My little company,’ he said, ‘is, I dare venture to say, one of the most variedly talented in Europe. I am surprised that a man of wide culture and theatrical expertise such as yourself, Signor Asmatov, has not heard of us.’ Asmatov made a little deprecating gesture and urged the Count to continue.

‘We can offer you the most diffuse variety of material. Comical, musical, dramatic, balletic, pastoral, “scene individable or poem unlimited”, as the English bard Shakespeare has it. We accommodate all tastes from the trivial to the profound. One thing I must specify at the outset, however. All the material that we use is our own. It is devised entirely by and within my company. Our production in your theatre will be an altogether new drama entitled
The Philosophy of the Damned
. Then, if that enjoys success, we may return with other, even rarer
divertissements
.’

Asmatov remarked mildly that
The Philosophy of the Damned
did not appear to him to be a very appealing title for a play. The Count seemed quite indifferent to Asmatov’s objections. He merely smiled blandly.

‘We have the bill material prepared. We cannot change the title now. I can assure you of a first rate production in all particulars, full of course of the most astonishing effects. It is, I can assure you, a truly outstanding piece of theatre which has been admired by many of the crowned heads of Europe.’

‘There are a good deal fewer of those these days,’ remarked Asmatov drily.

‘And some of them might have retained both their crowns and their heads, had they paid heed to the voices of my actors, I assure you!’ said the Count. All Asmatov’s suspicions were now confirmed: the man was a charlatan, and not a very convincing one at that. But then, the theatre was a profession for charlatans, and, besides, what choice did he have?

‘I shall offer your theatre initially three performances on three successive nights. Shall we open on Thursday next? Would that be satisfactory?’

The Count rose and offered his hand, but Asmatov had not been shaken from his customary caution.

‘One moment, my dear Count! We have yet to discuss terms. You must understand that in these difficult times I am unable to offer you a guarantee. My best offer is a division of the box office takings: twenty percent for your company and eighty for the house, as we say.’

At this the Count seemed somewhat taken aback, as if he were unused to such mercenary transactions. Whether this was a pose or not was hard to tell. There then followed a long discussion at the end of which a seventy five, twenty five split in the theatre’s favour had been agreed upon. Asmatov had been prepared to take only seventy, but he had maintained his firm yet courteous demeanour throughout and, he flattered himself, had outfaced his opponent. All the same, he reflected ruefully, he was still purchasing
un chat en poche
, as the French say, or ‘a pig in a poke’, as the English have it. Moreover Asmatov did not even know whether the animal in question would be a cat, a pig, or some other still more exotic creature.