Oscar Wilde and the Ring of Death (16 page)

‘Yes,’
answered Triggs, still not taking his eyes off Oscar. ‘Bradford Pearse is
customarily short of funds, but he’ll never be short of friends. When he’s
appearing at the Devonshire Park Theatre we allow him to use his dressing room
as his digs.’

‘Your
stage doorman permits this?’ murmured Oscar in amazement.

Mr
Standen Triggs nodded solemnly, wiping his eyes the while. ‘Such is the
standing of Bradford Pearse in his chosen profession,’ he said.

It cannot be pretended
that the professional standing of Mr Bradford Pearse was much enhanced by his
appearance in
Murder Most Foul.

‘This
is not bad enough to be good,’ Oscar whispered to me as the house lamps were
dimmed for the final act. ‘The word “tosh” was coined, I believe, in the year
1528.1 have long wondered why. Now I know. This play is tedious twaddle. No
wonder Mr Triggs is yawning at the back of the box. I do hope friend Pearse is
murdered sooner rather than later.’

It was
not to be. The last act of
Murder Most Foul
was the longest—or, at
least, so it seemed. In the drama, Pearse played the part of a cruel husband
and father, a ship’s captain, who neglects his wife and family when he is at
sea and beats and brutalises them without remorse whenever he returns home. In
the final moments of the play, his wife decides she can endure his cruelty no
longer and, using a pistol she has stolen from a passing stranger—a character
from the complex subplot: a Peruvian cattle rustler if I remember right!—she
shoots her husband in the back as, in a drunken rage, holding a bull-whip, he
turns away from her, his hand raised to beat their misshapen, cowering, blind,
consumptive daughter …

It was
Oscar who said, famously, ‘One must have a heart of stone to read of the death
of Little Nell without laughing.’ During the final moments of
Murder Most
Foul
I noticed my friend leaning over the edge of the royal box at the
Devonshire Park Theatre with his teeth clamped around his knuckles.

Sickert,
seated immediately behind Oscar, hissed: ‘What if the gun is loaded?’

Oscar
stifled a snigger. ‘If it is, we can shoot the author.’

Sickert
persisted: ‘Someone threatened Bradford’s life. If he’s to die, tonight’s the
night …’

Oscar
turned to Sickert. ‘Hush, man. Let him die in peace.’

As
Oscar spoke, on stage the gun exploded. The burst of noise was shocking. From
the sparsely filled auditorium, there were cries of ‘No!’

From
the back of the box, a freshly roused Standen Triggs muttered, ‘Realistic, eh?’

On
stage, the actress playing Pearse’s wife dropped the smoking pistol to the
ground and covered her eyes in anguish; the young girl playing Pearse’s
daughter looked, wild-eyed, towards her mother and let forth a piercing scream;
and Bradford Pearse himself, centre-stage, swung about to face the audience.
His chest and hands were crimson with blood; his eyes were closed, his face
contorted. He staggered, first to the left, next to the right; suddenly, he
stumbled forwards, towards the footlights; for a moment it seemed he might fall
into the orchestra pit; instead, with arms suddenly outstretched, he stepped
abruptly back and collapsed, like a dead-weight, onto the floor.

The
curtain fell.

‘Worth
waiting for, eh?’ exclaimed Mr Standen Triggs, leaping to his feet to lead the
standing ovation.

We
stood, too, and cheered and gazed down into the near-empty auditorium and saw
that others were also standing to offer their applause.

After
several moments—the applause was beginning to falter—the stage curtain rose
once more. There, behind the footlights, in line, side by side, hand in hand,
heads held high, ready to take their call, were all the members of the cast of
Murder
Most Foul
bar one. Bradford Pearse was nowhere to be seen.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

‘I FEAR THE WORST’

‘He’s milking it,’
chuckled Mr Standen Triggs. ‘He’ll make his entrance on the second call.’

‘I
wonder,’ murmured Oscar.

The
curtain fell and rose again. Still there was no sign of Bradford Pearse. As she
took her bow, the leading lady had her eyes cast towards the wings.

‘Here
he comes,’ announced an excited Mr Triggs.

‘I
think not,’ said Oscar, now sounding concerned. ‘Let us go backstage.’

As the
applause from the auditorium evaporated, the stage curtain fell for the second
time. Before it hit the ground—with a disconcerting clanking sound: its hem
must have been lined with metal weights—we saw the feet of the actors beneath
it breaking rank and moving swiftly off the stage.

‘Come!’
commanded Oscar.

‘Stay!’
countered Triggs, stepping to the front of the box and, with a trembling but
proud hand, indicating the orchestra pit below. ‘We’re in the royal box—this is
our moment,’ he declared. As he pulled himself smartly to attention, the five
elderly members of the Devonshire Park Theatre’s resident orchestra struck up
the National Anthem. They played as though their hands all trembled as much as
Triggs’s. Oscar stopped in his tracks and stood, stock still, facing the
auditorium, chest forward, head erect, face frozen. Though unbearded and thirteen
years younger and five inches taller, nonetheless he gave a passable impression
of the Prince of Wales.

The
moment the anthem was done, Oscar was galvanised. He turned to Sickert. ‘We
must find Pearse,’ he hissed.

‘Of
course,’ said Mr Triggs, taking Oscar by the elbow, ‘I hear you, but first …’
Beaming broadly, nodding happily, his face glistening with sweat, his eyes more
bulbous than ever, the theatre manager indicated the orchestra pit once more.
The conductor, his baton raised, looked up towards us and, graciously, inclined
his head. As Oscar bowed back (a mite less graciously), the quintet of ripe
virtuosi embarked on a selection of favourite melodies from the comic operas of
Gilbert and Sullivan.

‘Ah,
Patience!’
cried Oscar, closing his eyes.

‘In
your honour, Mr Wilde,’ gurgled Mr Triggs, ‘and they are raising the house
lights for us so that you can appreciate our domed ceiling. The cherubs and
caryatids are by Schmidt of Holloway. I know you will admire their finesse.’

‘I do!’
exclaimed Oscar, despairingly, gazing up towards the plasterwork. ‘But I am
also anxious about our friend, Bradford Pearse.’

‘Indeed,’
nodded Triggs, still smiling but now moist-eyed. ‘I understand.’

‘Forgive
me,’ said Oscar.

‘Follow
me,’ said Triggs. He waved from the box towards the orchestra pit. The
selection from Gilbert and Sullivan ceased abruptly. ‘Come, gentlemen. Let us
find friend Pearse. Most unlike him to miss his call, I agree.’

Moving
lightly, though breathing heavily, like an asthmatic pixie, Mr Triggs led us
out of the royal box and along a short curving corridor towards what he called
‘the pass door’. ‘This takes us directly to the dressing rooms,’ he explained.
‘We don’t have any of your West End comforts here, Mr Wilde, but by provincial
standards we don’t do too badly.’ As we passed through the door, it was as if
we had crossed a frontier. Instantly, we left behind the gilt and red-plush of
the land of plenty and found ourselves in a dark and barren country: the walls
were bare brick, the floors were bare boards, and the light so dim we could
barely see the way ahead.

‘Pearse’s
room is the first on the right,’ said Triggs. ‘Allow me to go ahead.’

‘Can
you see?’ asked Oscar.

Mr
Triggs appeared to be feeling his way along the wall. He laughed somewhat
nervously. ‘It takes my eyes a moment to adjust,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’ In the
gloom, I could see him peering at a name card fixed to the dressing-room door.
‘Here we are,’ he said. He knocked. There was no answer. He knocked again.

‘Go
in,’ instructed Oscar.

‘I fear
the worst,’ whispered Sickert.

Standen
Triggs felt for the door handle, found it and turned it slowly. ‘Visitors, Mr
Pearse,’ he called as he pushed open the door.

We
crowded around the doorway not knowing what to expect.

‘Is he
there?’ asked Oscar.

‘Bradford!’
shouted Wat Sickert, stepping forward into the room. We followed him in. ‘He’s
not here,’ said Sickert, turning to Oscar. ‘He’s gone.’

The
room was small and square, low-ceilinged, windowless and dank, like a prison
cell. With four of us standing in it, there was scarcely room to move. It was
lit by a solitary gas lamp fixed high up on the wall that faced the door. Below
the lamp was a dressing table covered with a half-torn piece of
towelling-cloth, littered with assorted sticks of theatrical make-up. On the
floor, below the dressing table, was a narrow palliasse that ran the length of
the room, with a navy-blue sailor’s blanket rolled up at one end to form a
bolster. To the right of the table was a small deal wardrobe, its door hanging
open. The wardrobe was quite empty. Thrown across the wooden chair that faced
the dressing table was Pearse’s costume: a pair of breeches, a coat and the
blood-soaked shirt he had worn in the final scene of the play. I noticed Oscar
dipping his fingers into the blood and bringing them to his lips to taste.

‘Look!’
cried Wat Sickert with a start. To the left of the dressing table stood a
cheval mirror, its amber-coloured glass mottled and pitted. Across the glass, at
eye height, scrawled in greasepaint, in large capital letters though barely
discernible in the gloom, was the single word: ‘FAREWEL’.

Oscar
peered at the looking glass and sniffed. ‘Bradford Pearse’s spelling’s as poor
as his punctuation.’ He turned sharply to the theatre manager. ‘We must be on
our way, Mr Triggs. Will you kindly escort us to the stage door?’

Perspiring
and trembling, Standen Triggs stood gazing at the mirror. ‘What is the meaning
of this?’ he asked.

‘It
means, I fear, that you should alert Mr Pearse’s understudy to the possibility
that he may be called before the mast tomorrow night.’

‘What
do you think has occurred, Oscar?’ asked Wat Sickert, his voice hoarse with
alarm. ‘Do you think it’s what we feared?’

‘What
you feared?’ echoed Mr Triggs, now breathing more heavily than ever. ‘What did
you fear?’ He looked at Oscar with his huge eyes full of tears. He seemed at
once both desolate and exultant.

‘Nothing,
Mr Triggs,’ said Oscar reassuringly. ‘We had hoped to see Mr Pearse tonight and
feared he might run off … that’s all. He worries about his creditors, you
know. Come, we must go. We’ll find him in one of the nearby public houses for
sure.’

Mr
Triggs escorted us from Pearse’s dressing room down a steep iron stairway to
the stage door. It can have been no more than fifteen minutes since the
melodrama ended and the curtain fell, but the theatre was already deserted. At
the stage door we found the leading lady—Miss Dolly Justerini, ‘another Eastbourne
favourite’—handing in her dressing-room key to the lugubrious doorman. When
Triggs presented us to her, she bobbed a cursory curtsy, but begged to be
excused. Her ‘walking gentleman’ had promised her a large glass of port at The
Devonshire Arms, and the price of port and the nature of men being what they
were, she was loath to keep either of them waiting.

Having
congratulated her on her performance in wildly over-exuberant terms that she
accepted entirely as her due, Oscar enquired: ‘Are we likely to find Mr
Bradford Pearse at The Devonshire Arms?’

‘I
doubt it,’ trilled Miss Justerini, over her shoulder as she disappeared into
the street. ‘Brad spends most of his time in hiding these days. He ran off
before the curtain call tonight. He’s probably locked himself into his dressing
room, naughty man. Goodnight, sweet princes. Goodnight, Harold.’ As we voiced
our goodnights, she was already gone. The stage doorkeeper belched softly but
said nothing.

‘Do you
think Pearse might still be somewhere in the theatre?’ asked Wat Sickert.

For the
first time, the doorman looked up from his newspaper. ‘He scarpered twenty
minutes ago,’ he said. ‘Maybe he knew you was coming.’

With a
pencil Oscar was writing something on the back of one of his visiting cards. He
looked towards Mr Triggs and smiled. ‘Does Mr Pearse have his own key to the
stage door?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’
said Standen Triggs, who appeared calmer and less heated now. ‘But he can only
get back into the building until midnight. That’s when Harold,’— he nodded towards
the doorkeeper without catching his eye—’turns in for the night. Mr Pearse has
a key to the main lock here, but at midnight Harold goes home and secures two
further locks before he departs. From midnight until eight in the morning the
building is impenetrable.’

‘Indeed,’
said Oscar.

‘Indeed,’
said Mr Triggs. He pulled open the stage door and let us out into the street.
The moon was pale and high; the air was mild; in the distance, a church clock
struck the hour; a seagull screeched in the darkness above us.