Night at the Vulcan (8 page)

“I believe she didn’t care for theatricals,” said Martyn. “She was my grandmother. The connection is really quite distant.”

“You might at least have mentioned it.”

“I preferred not to.”

“Too proud?”

“If you like,” she said desperately.

“Why did you come to England?”

“To earn my living.”

“As a dresser?” She was silent. “Well?” he said.

“As best I could.”

“As an actress? Oh, for God’s sake,” he added, “it’s damnably late and I’ll be obliged if you’ll behave reasonably. I may tell you I’ve spoken to Jacko. Don’t you think you’re making an ass of yourself? All this mystery act!”

Martyn got up and faced him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s a silly business but it’s not an act. I didn’t want to make a thing of it. I joined an English touring company in New Zealand a year ago and they took me on with them to Australia.”

“What company was this? What parts did you play?”

She told him.

“I heard about the tour,” he said. “They were a reasonably good company.”

“They paid quite well and I did broadcasting too. I saved up enough to keep me in England for six months and got a job as assistant children’s minder on a ship coming here. Perhaps I should explain that my father lost pretty well everything in the slump, and we are poor people. I had my money in traveller’s cheques and the day we landed they were stolen out of my bag, together with my letters of introduction. The bank will probably be able to stop them and let me have it back, but until they decide, I’m hard up. That’s all.”

“How long have you been here?”

“A fortnight.”

“Where have you tried?”

“Agencies. All the London theatres, I think.”

“This one last? Why?”

“One of them had to be last.”

“Did you know of this — connection — as you call it?”

“Yes. My mother knew of it.”

“And the resemblance?”

“I — we saw your pictures — people sometimes said—”

They looked at each other, warily, with guarded interest.

“And you deliberately fought shy of this theatre because you knew I was playing here?”

“Yes.”

“Did you know about this piece? The girl’s part?”

Martyn was beginning to be very tired. A weariness of spirit and body seeped up through her being in a sluggish tide. She was near to tears and thrust her hand nervously through her short hair. He made some kind of. ejaculation and she said at once: “I didn’t mean to do that.”

“But you knew about the part when you came here?”

“There’s a lot of gossip at the agencies when you’re waiting. A girl I stood next to in the queue at Garnet Marks’s told me they wanted someone at the Vulcan who could be made up to look like you. She’d got it all muddled up with yesterday’s auditions for the touring company in another piece.”

“So you thought you’d try?”

“Yes. I was a bit desperate by then. I thought I’d try.”

“Without, I suppose, mentioning this famous ‘connection’?”

“Yes.”

“And finding there was nothing for you in the piece you applied for the job of dresser?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” he said, “it’s fantastic, but at least it’s less fantastic than pure coincidence would have been. One rather respects you by the way, if it’s not impertinent in a second cousin once removed to say so.”

“Thank you,” she said vaguely.

“The question is, what are we going to do about it?”

Martyn turned away to the ranks of dresses, and with business-like movements of her trembling hands tweaked at the sheets that covered them. She said briskly: “I realize of course that I’ll have to go. Perhaps Miss Hamilton—”

“You think you ought to go?” his voice said behind her. “I suppose you’re right. It’s an awkward business.”

“I’m sorry.”

“But I’d like to — it’s difficult to suggest—”

“I’ll be perfectly all right,” she said with savage brightness. “Please don’t give it another thought.”

“Why, by the way, are you still in the theatre?”

“I was going to sleep here,” Martyn said loudly. “I did last night. The night-watchman knows.”

“You would be paid on Friday.”

“Like the actors?”

“Certainly. How much is there in the exchequer between now and Friday?” Martyn was silent and he said with a complete change of voice: “My manners, you will already have been told, are notoriously offensive, but I don’t believe I was going to say anything that would have offended you.”

“I’ve got two and fourpence.”

He opened the door and shouted “Jacko!” into the echoing darkness. She heard the Greenroom door creak and in a moment or two Jacko came in. He carried a board with a half-finished drawing pinned to it. This he exhibited to Poole. “Crazy, isn’t it?” he said. “Helena’s costume for the ball. What must I do but waste my beauty-sleep concocting it. Everybody will have to work very hard if it is to be made. I see you are in need of counsel. What goes on?”

“Against my better judgement,” Poole said, “I’m going to follow your advice. You always think you’re indispensable at auditions. Give me some light out there and then sit in front.”

“It is past midnight. This child has worked and worried herself into a complete
bouleversement
. She is as pale as a Pierrot.”

Poole looked at her. “Are you all right?” he asked her. “It won’t take ten minutes.”

“I don’t understand, but I’m all right.”

“There you are, Jacko,” Poole said and sounded pleased. “It’s over to you.”

Jacko took her by the shoulders and gently pushed her down on the chair. “
Attention
,” he said. “We make a bargain. I live not so far from here in an apartment house kept by a well-disposed French couple. An entirely respectable house, you understand, with no funny business. At the top one finds an attic room as it might be in a tale for children, and so small, it is but twice the size of its nice little bed. The rental is low, within the compass of a silly girl who gets herself into equivocal situations. At my recommendation she will be accommodated in the attic, which is included in my portion of the house, and will pay me the rent at the end of a week. But in exchange for my good offices she does for us a little service. Again, no funny business.”

“Oh, dear!” Martyn said. She leant towards the dressing-shelf and propped her face in her hands. “It sounds so wonderful,” she said and tried to steady her voice, “a nice little bed.”

“All right, Jacko,” Poole said. She heard the door open and shut. “I want you to relax for a few minutes,” his voice went on. “Relax all over like a cat. Don’t think of anything in particular. You’re going to sleep sound to-night. All will be well.”

The gas fire hummed, the smell of roses and cosmetics filled the warm room. “Do you smoke?” Poole asked.

“Sometimes.”

“Here you are.” She drew in the smoke gratefully. He went into the passage and she watched him light his own cigarette. Her thoughts drifted aimlessly about the bony structure of his head and face. Presently a stronger light streamed down the passage. Jacko’s voice called something from a great distance.

Poole turned to her. “Come along,” he said.

On the stage, dust-thickened rays from pageant-lamps settled in a pool of light about a desk and two chairs. It was like an island in a vague region of blueness. She found herself seated there at the desk, facing him across it. In response to a gesture of Poole’s she rested her arms on the desk and her face on her arms.

“Listen,” he said, “and don’t move. You are in the hall of an old house, beautiful but decaying. You are the girl with the bad heredity. You are the creature who goes round and round in her great empty cage like a stoat filled with a wicked little desire. The object of your desire is the man on the other side of the desk, who is joined to you in blood and of whose face and mind you are the ill reflection. In a moment you will raise your face to his. He will make a gesture and you will make the same gesture. Then you will say: ‘Don’t you like what you see?’ It must be horrible and real. Don’t move. Think it. Then raise your head and speak.”

There was a kind of voluptuousness in Martyn’s fatigue. Only the chair she sat on and the desk that propped her arms and head prevented her, she felt, from slipping to the floor. Into this defencelessness Poole’s suggestions entered like those of a mesmerist, and that perfection of duality for which actors pray and which they are so rarely granted now fully invested her. She was herself and she was the girl in the play. She guided the girl and was aware of her and she governed the possession of the girl by the obverse of the man in the play. When at last she raised her face and looked at him and repeated his gesture it seemed to her that she looked into a glass and saw her own reflection and spoke to it.

“Don’t you like what you see?” Martyn said.

In the pause that followed, the sound of her own breathing and Poole’s returned. She could hear her heart beat.

“Can you do it again?” he said.

“I don’t know,” she said helplessly. “I don’t know at all.” She turned away and with a childish gesture hid her face in the crook of her arm. In dismay and shame she let loose the tears she had so long denied herself.

“There, now!” he said, not so much as if to comfort her as to proclaim some private triumph of his own. Out in the dark auditorium Jacko struck his hands together once.

Poole touched her shoulder. “It’s nothing,” he said. “These are growing pains. They will pass.” From the door in the set he said: “You can have the understudy. We’ll make terms to-morrow. If you prefer it, the relationship can be forgotten. Good night.”

He left her alone and presently Jacko returned to the stage carrying her suitcase.

“Now,” he said, “We go home.”

When Martyn opened her eyes on the second morning of her adventure it was with the sensation of having come to rest after a painful journey. At first the events of the previous night seemed to be incorporated in the sleep that had followed them, and her happiness had something of the precarious and transitory quality of a remembered dream. It was difficult to believe that nine hours ago she had faced Adam Poole across a table on the stage of the Vulcan Theatre and had done so, for the moment at least, as an actress. The subsequent drive in a taxi with the unusually silent Jacko, their entrance into a sleeping house, creaking tiptoe up the stairs, the rapture of a hot bath and her subsequent oblivion — all these events flowed together in her memory and she felt she was as yet neither asleep nor fully wakened.

She lay quiet and looked about her. It was a bright morning and the sun came in at the attic window above her bed. The room had an air of great cleanliness and freshness. She remembered now that Jacko had told her he occasionally made use of it and indeed, tiny as it was, it bore his eccentric imprint. A set of designs for
Twelfth Night
was pinned to a wall-board. Ranged along the shelf were a number of figures dressed in paper as the persons in the play and on the wall facing her bed hung a mask of the fool, Feste, looking very like Jacko himself.

“There never was such a little room,” Martyn sighed, and began to plan how she would collect and stow away her modest belongings. She was filled with gratitude and with astonished humility.

The bathroom was on the next floor and as she went downstairs she smelt coffee and fresh bread. A door on the landing opened and Jacko’s clownish head looked out.

“Breakfast in ten minutes,” he said. “Speed is essential.”

Of all the amenities, it seemed to Martyn, a hot bath was the most beneficent, and after that a shower under which one could wash one’s hair quickly. “Lucky it’s short,” she thought, and rubbed it dry with her towel.

She was out again in eight minutes to find Jacko on the landing.

“Good,” he said. “In your woollen gown you are entirely respectable. A clean school-child. In.”

He marshalled her into a largish room set out in an orderly manner as a workshop. Martyn wondered why Jacko, who showed such exquisite neatness in his work, should in his person present such a wild front to the world. He was dressed now in faded cotton trousers, a paint-stained undervest and a tattered dressing-gown. He was unshaven and uncombed and his prominent eyes were slightly bloodshot. His manner, however, was as usual amiable and disarming.

“I propose,” he said, “that we breakfast together as a general rule. A light breakfast and supper are included in the arrangement. You will hand me your ration book and I shall shop with discretion. Undoubtedly I am a better cook than you and will therefore make myself responsible for supper. For luncheon you may return if you wish and forage ineffectually for yourself or make what other arrangement seems good to you. Approved?”

Martyn said carefully: “If you please, Jacko, I’m so grateful and so muddled I can’t think at all sensibly. You see, I don’t know what I shall be earning.”

“For your dual and unusual role of understudy and dresser, I imagine about eight pounds a week. Your rental,
demi-pension
, here is two.”

“It seems so little,” Martyn said timidly. “The rent, I mean.”

Jacko tapped the side of the coffee-pot with a spoon.

“
Attention
,” he said. “How often must I repeat. You will have the goodness to understand I am not a dirty old man. It is true that I am virile,” he continued with some complacency, “but you are not my type. I prefer the more mature, the more
mondaine
, the—” He stopped short, the spoon with which he had been gesticulating still held aloft. His eyes were fixed on the wall behind Martyn. She turned her head to see a sketch in water-colour of Helena Hamilton. When she faced Jacko again, he was grinning desperately.

“Believe me,” he said, “you are in no danger of discomfort from the smallest whisper of scandal. I am notoriously pure. This morning there are eggs and therefore an omelette. Let us observe silence while I make it”

He was gay, in his outlandish fashion, from then onwards. When they had finished their admirable breakfast she helped him wash up and he gave her what he called her orders for the day. She was to go down to the theatre with him, set about her work as a dresser, and at three o’clock she would be given a formal rehearsal as understudy. At night, for the second dress rehearsal, she would again take up her duties as Miss Hamilton’s dresser.

“An eccentric arrangement,” Jacko said. He groped in the bosom of his undervest and produced a somewhat tattered actor’s “part,” typewritten and bound in paper. “Only thirteen sides,” he said. “A bit-part. You will study the lines while you press and stitch and by this afternoon you are word-perfect, isn’t it? You are, of course, delighted?”

“Delighted,” Martyn said, “is not exactly the word. I’m flabbergasted and excited and grateful for everything and I just can’t believe it’s true. But it is a bit worrying to feel I’ve sort of got in on a fluke and that everybody’s wondering what it’s all about They are, you know.”

“All that,” Jacko said, with an ungainly sweep of his arm, “is of no importance. Gay Gainsford is still to play the part. She will not play it well but she is the niece of the leading lady’s husband and she is therefore in a favourable position.”

“Yes, but her uncle—”

He said quickly: “Clark Bennington was once a good actor. He is now a stencil. He drinks too much and when he is drunk he is offensive. Forget him.” He turned away and with less than his usual deftness began to set out his work-table. Finally, from an adjoining room he said indistinctly: “I advise that which I find difficult to perform. Do not allow yourself to become hag-ridden by this man. It is a great mistake. I myself—” His voice was lost in the spurt of running water. Martyn heard him shout: “Run off and learn your lines. I have a job in hand.”

With a feeling of unease she returned to her room. But when she opened her part and began to read the lines, this feeling retreated until it hung like a very small cloud over the hinterland of her mind. The foreground was occupied entirely by the exercise of memorizing and in a few minutes she had almost, but not quite, forgotten her anxiety.

She was given her moves that afternoon by the stage-manager, and at three o’clock rehearsed her scenes with the other two understudies. The remaining parts were read from the script. Jacko pottered about back-stage intent on one of his odd jobs: otherwise the theatre seemed to be deserted. Martyn had memorized her lines but inevitably lost them from time to time in her effort to associate them with physical movement. The uncompromising half-light of a working-stage, the mechanical pacing to-and-fro of understudies, the half-muted lines raised to concert-pitch only for cues, and the dead sound of voices in an empty house — all these workaday circumstances, though she was familiar enough with them, after all, laid a weight upon her: she lost her belief in the magic of the previous night. She was oppressed by this anti-climax, and could scarcely summon up the resources of her young experience to meet it.

The positions and moves had been planned with a vivid understanding of the text and seemed to spring out of it. She learnt them readily enough. Rather to her surprise, and, she thought, that of the other understudies, they were finally taken through her scenes at concert-pitch, so that by the end of the rehearsal the visual and aural aspects of her part had fused into a whole. She had got her routine. But it was no more than a routine: she spoke and paused and moved and spoke and there was no reality at all, she felt, in anything she did. Clem Smith, the stage-manager, said nothing about interpretation but, huddled in his overcoat, merely set the moves and then crouched over the script. She was not even a failure, she was just another colourless understudy and nothing had happened.

When it was over, Clem Smith shut the book and said: “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Eleven in the morning, if you please.” He lit a cigarette and went down into the auditorium and out through the front of the house.

Left alone on the stage, Martyn struggled with an acute attack of deflation. She tried to call herself to order. This in itself was a humiliating, if salutary, exercise. If, she thought savagely, she had been a Victorian young lady, she would at this juncture have locked herself away with a plush-bound journal and, after shedding some mortified tears, forced a confession out of herself. As it was, she set her jaw and worked it out there and then. The truth was, she told herself, she’d been at her old tricks again: she’d indulged in the most blatant kind of day-dream. She’d thought up a success-story and dumped herself down in the middle of it with half a dozen pageant-lamps bathing her girlish form. Because she looked like Poole and because last night she’d had a mild success with one line by playing it off her nerves she’d actually had the gall to imagine— Here Martyn felt her scalp creep and her face burn. “Come on,” she thought, “out with it.”

Very well, then. She’d dreamt up a further rehearsal with Poole. She’d seen herself responding eagerly to his production, she’d heard him say regretfully that if things had been different— She had even— At this point, overtaken with self-loathing, Martyn performed the childish exercise of throwing her part across the stage, stamping violently and thrusting her fingers through her hair.

“
Damn and blast and hell
,” said Martyn, pitching her voice to the back row of the gallery.

“Not quite as bad as all that.”

Adam Poole came out of the shadowed pit and down the centre-aisle of the stalls. He rested his hands on the rail of the orchestral well. Martyn gaped at him.

“You’ve got the mechanics,” he said. “Walk through it again by yourself before to-morrow. Then you can begin to think about the girl. Get the lay-out of the house into your head. Know your environment. What has she been doing all day before the play opens? What has she been thinking about? Why does she say the things she says and do the things she does? Listen to the other chaps’ lines. Come down here for five minutes and we’ll see what you think about acting.”

Martyn went down into the house. Of all her experiences during these three days at the Vulcan Theatre, she was to remember this most vividly. It was a curious interview. They sat side by side as if waiting for the rise-of-curtain. Their voices were deadened by the plush stalls. Jacko could be heard moving about behind the set and in some distant room back-stage, somebody in desultory fashion hammered and sawed. At first Martyn was ill at ease, unable to dismiss or to reconcile the jumble of distracted notions that beset her. But Poole was talking about theatre and about problems of the actor. He talked well, without particular emphasis but with penetration and authority. Soon she listened with single hearing and with all her attention to what he had to say. Her nervousness and uncertainty were gone, and presently she was able to speak of matters that had exercised her in her own brief experience of the stage. Their conversation was adult and fruitful. It didn’t even occur to her that they were getting on rather well together.

Jacko came out on the stage. He shielded his eyes with his hand and peered into the auditorium.

“Adam?” he said.

“Hullo? What is it?”

“It is Helena on the telephone to inquire why have you not rung her at four, the time being now five-thirty. Will you take it in the office?”

“Good Lord!” he ejaculated and got up. Martyn moved into the aisle to let him out.

He said: “All right, Miss Tarne. Work along the lines we’ve been talking about and you should be able to cope with the job. We take our understudies seriously at the Vulcan and like to feel they’re an integral part of the company. You’ll rehearse again tomorrow morning and—” He stopped unaccountably, and after a moment said hurriedly: “You’re all right, aren’t you? I mean you feel quite happy about this arrangement?”

“Yes,” she said. “Very happy.”

“Good.” He hesitated again for a second and then said: “I must go,” and was off down the aisle to the front of the house. He called out: “I’ll be in the office for some time, Jacko, if anyone wants me.”

A door banged. There was a long silence.

Jacko advanced to the footlights. “Where are you?” he asked.

“Here,” said Martyn.

“I see you. Or a piece of you. Where is the rest? Reassemble yourself. There is work to be done.”

The work turned out to be the sewing together of a fantastic garment created and tacked up by Jacko himself. It had a flamboyant design, stencilled in black and yellow, of double-headed eagles, and was made in part of scenic canvas. There was an electric sewing machine in the wardrobe-room, which was next to Mr. J. G. Darcey’s at the end of the passage. Here Jacko sat Martyn down, and here for the next hour she laboured under his exacting direction while he himself crawled about the floor cutting out further garments for the Combined Arts Ball. At half past six he went out, saying he would return with food.

Martyn laboured on. Sometimes she repeated the lines of the part, her voice drowned by the clatter of the machine. Sometimes, when engaged in hand-work, it would seem in the silent room that she had entered into a new existence, as if she had at that moment been born and was a stranger to her former self. And since this was rather a frightening sensation, though not new to Martyn, she must rouse herself and make a conscious effort to dispel it. On one of these occasions, when she had just switched off the machine, she felt something of the impulse that had guided her first attempt at the scene with Poole. Wishing to retain and strengthen this experience, she set aside her work and rested her head on her arms as the scene required. She waited in this posture, summoning her resources, and when she was ready raised her head to confront her opposite.

Gay Gainsford stood on the other side of the table, watching her.

Martyn’s flesh leapt on her bones. She cried out and made a sweeping gesture with her arms. A pair of scissors clattered to the floor.