The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories (23 page)

The second act took place in a rocky glen by moonlight, depicted in a highly romantic German style, not unlike old set designs you see for the Wolf’s Glen Scene in
Der Freischütz
. The stage directions called for the effects of a thunderstorm. A light was to be flashed behind the backcloth and a small sheet of metal foil was to be shaken to provide tinny rolls of thunder. The second act figures of Conrad and Zamiel had changed slightly. Conrad was still attired in his improbable knickerbocker suit of green velvet but his hair was dishevelled and his eyes were hollower than they had been. His stance was a traditional melodramatic pose, leaning back, one leg extended, the other bent, his hands raised, palm outwards. It suggested fear, agitation, some sort of tension. The figure of Zamiel had become a little more grotesque. He sported a hat with a feather in it and the ingratiating smile he wore in the first act had become a malignant grin.

The scene which was to be enacted in this Gothic glen was one which I found enthralling. The action was simple: Zamiel in the guise of a magician conjured up seven visions for Conrad’s benefit: a beautiful woman, a mountain of food and drink, a luxurious bed, a vast mirror in which Conrad’s features were gigantically reflected, an emaciated figure wielding an axe in the middle of a raging fire, a chest spilling over with gold coins, and a curious glass tank in which various richly dressed figures paraded and disported themselves. There was hardly any dialogue in this scene, Zamiel merely announcing each apparition, luxuriantly depicted in coloured cardboard, with the words: ‘Lo! Here is yet another vision.’ Each of these visions could be made to rise from below the stage, by means of the little trap door.

The finale of this act was the strangest thing of all, and, though it delighted me then, it makes me shudder now. After some obscure banter between Zamiel and Conrad about what people most desired in the world, Zamiel conjured up a final vision, or it may have been a real event. On this the text was obscure. A cart was wheeled onto the stage on which, tied by all four limbs to a sloping wooden grid, was Father Silas being tormented by four demons. The stage directions in the book of the play called for ‘agonised screams of terror and pain from Father Silas.’

The final act, designated in the text as Act III, Scene 1, took place in the great hall of a deserted castle, mentioned in the previous act as ‘that castle yonder’. The two principal characters were again Zamiel and Conrad to which was added a third simply called Shadow. Shadow was a black draped, stooping figure, its face obscured by a black cowl. The only visible part of its body was a thin grey arm with long taloned fingers. There was no dialogue for Shadow, but stage directions indicated that while Conrad and Zamiel talked he entered and left several times for no explained reason. The dialogue between Conrad and Zamiel in this scene was the most arresting and the most worrying of the whole play. In it Conrad would ask for something, like food, or a fire to be lit, and Zamiel would prevaricate, subtly tormenting the boy with his own unfulfilled desires. When Conrad began to lose his temper and rant the Shadow would enter. His appearance would always subdue Conrad and prompt the horrified question: ‘What is that?’ to which no answer was given. The scene ended inconclusively with Zamiel leaving the stage and Conrad calling after him vainly. The final stage direction read:

After a short pause
SHADOW
enters. Curtain.

It puzzled me that having had an Act III, Scene 1 there was no Act III, Scene 2. The whole play was unresolved; nevertheless it filled me with enthusiasm and I was determined to perform it before an invited audience. I was not a natural exhibitionist, but from an early age I did have a strong desire to establish myself as a distinct and individual personality, and this play was to me the perfect opportunity to demonstrate my singularity.

I had a school friend called Willis—his Christian name was David, but we never used Christian names in those days—whom I could generally get to do what I wanted. He was slightly younger than I, slightly less academically proficient, and, like me, was the son of an Oxford don. I persuaded him that it would be a wonderful thing if we put on this play,
The Boy in Green Velvet
, before an audience of school friends with myself as producer and doing all the characters apart from the hero, while he acted as my assistant and was the voice of Conrad.

I don’t think I bullied him at first, because, though far from unintelligent, Willis was easily led and was willing to submit to the glamour of a more forceful imagination than his; but gradually, as we rehearsed, my taste for theatrical perfection grew. I became a martinet over the precise timings of entrances and exits, curtains, scene changes. I demanded from him the same degree of dedication that I was giving to the project. When he fell short of my exacting standards I was severe. I am amazed now that he tolerated this treatment.

I do not believe that my actions over
The Boy in Green Velvet
were entirely due to normal boyish egoism. I felt that something was reinforcing my natural desire to dominate and driving it in directions against which a part of me rebelled. This is not to excuse what happened; only to say that what happened was not characteristic of me and that there was something mysterious about it.

I became increasingly irritated by Willis for many things, but chiefly for his perplexity over the play itself. Quite reasonably he complained that
The Boy in Green Velvet
was odd and had no proper ending. I replied that it was an excellent play once you understood it properly (which, of course, I didn’t), but I was forced to concede that it was incomplete. If there was an Act III, Scene 1, there must perforce be an Act III, Scene 2, but no such scene existed in the text. I thought of writing to Uncle Alfred about it, but something held me back. Willis, partly, I think to flatter me, urged me to write the final scene of the play, but I could think of nothing. Instead I threw myself and him into even more intense and disciplined rehearsals of the truncated script.

I dreamed almost every night that I knew the ending of the play. I watched it played out to perfection on my miniature stage, but when I woke up I could remember nothing of it except the noise that brought the curtain down: that piercing scream which had woken me out of my dreams before. Then I began to dream that I had woken up and remembered the ending, only to wake up in actual fact and find that I had forgotten it.

Two days before my school friends were coming to the house to witness the performance I woke up to find that I had remembered the very end of the play. In my dream the characters were no longer cardboard cut-outs, manipulated by wires, but miniature three dimensional figures, like puppets, animated not by strings but by my own thoughts. The scene was set in a subterranean vault of the castle lit by the glare of torches. Conrad was on stage, his hair wild, his costume stained and torn. He seemed to be waiting for someone or something. Suddenly there was a tremendous sound as a door opened and something slid into the room quickly and scuttled across the floor. It was the Shadow which was now on all fours and moving rapidly. Conrad stood still. There seemed to be no more will in him to escape or resist. The Shadow circled him three times, then suddenly pounced on his back. Two long grey hands grasped Conrad’s throat and a mouth from inside the Shadow’s dark cowl began to suck at Conrad’s throat. At that moment I was no longer watching the play but taking part in it as Conrad. I felt the tightening grip of hands, all sinew and bone, I felt two cold lips on the back of my neck and the pin pricks of hundreds of tiny sharp teeth, then I woke up screaming.

On the morning of the performance a large envelope arrived for me from Uncle Alfred. It contained scenery and characters for the missing final scene of
The Boy in Green Velvet
. In addition, some ancient sheets of typescript held together by a rusty paperclip provided me with the dialogue for the last scene. This threw me into a frenzy. Willis was not due to come until an hour before we were to perform for our friends. There would be no time to rehearse it but I knew I had to include this last scene in our play, so I spent the morning cutting out the characters and arranging the scenery.

In this scene Conrad was shackled to the Shadow. Cursorily I read through the script. It took place, very much as I had dreamed it, in one of the castle vaults. It was evidently some sort of storeroom as various barrels and bales of wood were piled up around the walls. Conrad was beginning a melancholy soliloquy on his captive state when Zamiel enters to announce that ‘they’ have been seen on the horizon and are approaching rapidly. Who ‘they’ are is not specified, but it is implied that they are coming for Conrad and are to be feared. Zamiel keeps going out and returning to announce that ‘they’ are coming nearer. Conrad begins to cry out in fear, but Zamiel warns him that if he screams too loud he will set the castle on fire. Still Conrad screams and his screams mysteriously start a blaze. A quick, ingenious transformation of scenery and characters shows him just before the final curtain engulfed in flames. He is still attached by chains to the Shadow who is now crouched on his back and seems to be sucking the life out of him.

I accepted the ending as dramatically effective, never questioning its logic or propriety. Only later did I realise that the whole play was terribly strange. Its uncanny preconfigurings of the absurdist drama of Beckett, Ionesco and Pinter only heightens the oddity.

By the time Willis arrived an hour before the tea party where we were to perform our play I was in a strange state of exaltation and extreme nervous tension. I was convinced that my young audience (with a smattering of parents) would be as entranced by the play as I was. I have a notion that Willis and my mother tried to disillusion me, but I ignored them. I outlined the final scene that was to be included and was surprised by Willis’s extreme reluctance to perform it. He complained that we would be doing it without any real rehearsal, but I brushed all considerations aside.

It is hard even now to describe the sheer disaster of the occasion. My school friends arrived and, after a lavish tea, sat down on the floor of the drawing room to watch the play, very well disposed towards the forthcoming entertainment. My toy theatre stood securely on a stout table in the middle of the room with screens to the right and left of the table and a cloth upon it reaching down to the ground so that, as far as possible, our machinations could be concealed.

Very soon after the curtain had gone up I became aware that the drama was not enthralling its audience. The little sounds of restlessness, boredom and perplexity were all too easily identified. From the few adults present I heard murmurs of disapproval when, in a desperate bid to win back my friends’ attention, I began to caricature the prosing boredom of Father Silas, the priest. For the first time, I found myself looking at the play objectively and I began to realise that it was rubbish and, what was worse, nasty rubbish.

I should have abandoned the whole thing at the end of the first scene, but stubbornness, pride, perhaps even a forlorn hope that somehow all would be well kept me going. In my anxiety I began to rush things and this agitated my friend Willis. Mistakes were made, lines were fluffed, characters made unscheduled appearances. I became increasingly irritated by his clumsiness. We stumbled on until the last scene. At this point the show descended into chaos, Having no idea of the lines we were desperately reading from an old, poorly typed script, the scenery was in a muddle, and Willis, who had become progressively paralysed by embarrassment, was saying his lines in a whisper. As we were trying to contrive the final transformation scene in which the castle bursts into flames, Willis managed to make the entire set fall down. The audience laughed heartily for the first time, and the ugly rage which had been boiling up inside me at last erupted.

I have no personal recollection of what happened next. I know now from witnesses that it took several strong adults to tear me off poor Willis. I was roaring at the top of my voice and trying to strangle him. Another ten seconds, apparently, and I would have succeeded in killing him. There was even talk of sending for the police, but moderation prevailed. In the immediate aftermath I felt utter humiliation mixed with astonishment at my own behaviour. The following day my mother made a bonfire in the garden of my toy theatre and took me to see a child psychiatrist who had nothing constructive to offer except to recommend that I should be taken away from my present school and sent to a boarding school outside Oxfordshire. This was done.

Much to my surprise, my mother did not reproach me with the incident. Perhaps she realised that the shame I felt was sufficient punishment. The calm efficiency with which she dealt with its consequences did much to heal the wound. I only once saw that calm exterior crack when one morning a letter dropped onto the front door mat. It was addressed to me and written in Uncle Alfred’s familiar violet ink. Before I could get near it my mother had seized the letter and torn it into tiny pieces.

**

Time passed. After leaving university I took a course at the Courtauld and, fulfilling my mother’s direst prophesies, entered the world of art and antiques. When I first got a flat in London mother gave me the Boulle clock as a housewarming present. ‘It belonged to your father and I never much liked it anyway,’ she said characteristically. I liked it and decided to spend hard earned money on getting it restored. As Uncle Alfred had predicted, neglect and unsympathetic treatment had rendered it almost beyond repair. The brass inlay was coming away from the tortoiseshell and had been broken off in several places. The clock mechanism had never worked since I could remember, so I decided to have that restored as well.

One day I received a call from the restorer to say that he had found something in the clock which I ought to see. He had found a stiff piece of folded paper jammed into the mechanism which was the chief reason for its not working. Unfolded, the paper turned out to be a will made by my paternal grandfather only a week or so before he died in 1947, five years before I was born. It was witnessed by the two nurses who had been looking after him, and, revoking all other wills, it left his entire estate not to my Uncle Alfred, but to my father. It was the briefest of documents and gave no reason for this radical change of heart.