The Mistress of Alderley (8 page)

Still the congratulations went on, and Caroline was struck by the sheer
pleasure
people felt at the emergence of a new voice. This was succeeded by a sense of the absurdity of their showering praise on her. She saw some of her little crowd nudge each other and nod their heads in the direction to her left. Looking that way Caroline saw Rick, hovering outside the group, which speedily evaporated to leave them alone. Very tactful, but just what she didn't want. Why, they probably thought Rick was her current bloke!

“Isn't it wonderful?” she said, to break the ice.

“Absolutely killing.”

“But a bit absurd that we get praise for it.”

“In point of fact I
wasn't
getting any praise for it, though if anyone—”

“All right,” said Caroline loudly to his petulant face. “That's not in dispute. If Olivia has got her singing voice from anyone, it's you.” She nearly added that she had got her morals from the same source, but felt it wasn't the time or place. Caroline had a strong sense of the suitability of different sorts of occasions.

“Your Marius mooted the idea of a meal afterwards,” said Rick, “but I'm not too sure.”

“I wouldn't be able to eat a thing.”

“I feel rather the same.”

“Anyway, there's the party afterwards—there'll be the usual things there if either of us develops a hunger. I'd rather be up there, soaking up all the excitement and enthusiasm.”

“Absolutely. We're theater people, you and me, Caroline.”

“Well, I
was.
”

“Are. It's like if the Jesuits get you. Once you're a theater person, that's what you are for life.”

Looking away, to dissociate herself from Rick's yoking of herself and him as similar animals, Caroline saw through the doors to the street a young girl very like Stella walk past, look at the time of the opera's end, then walk quickly on. How absurd young people were today—dressing and even looking so alike! Caroline had shut from her mind the era of the miniskirt. She turned back to Rick.

“So, no meal. We stay at the party and bask in the success of our offspring.”

“That's the ticket. We probably won't be able to get near her. You know, that soft singing at the end, that was just like something I've always done as Frederic in
The Pirates of Penzance
—”

“Good, God, surely Sullivan's wet-behind-the-ears heroes are a thing of the past for you, Rick.”

“Bitch. Well, as Nanky-Poo then. You don't have to look seventeen for him. In ‘Wandering Minstrel' I try to refine the sound down to almost nothing, exactly like Olivia just now. Rather strange, that, because she's never seen me do it. The
Manchester Evening News
said that I—”

Caroline switched off, then looked around rather desperately. She realized that she must have lost none of her ability to convey hidden emotions, because someone in the mass of people around her registered her desperation and came over to congratulate her and say that this was one of the most exciting opera evenings of his life. Caroline wondered whether she ought to introduce Rick, but decided he would only burble on about himself, so she kept the fan to herself for the rest of the interval. Where Rick went she neither knew nor cared.

 

Guy had sniffed early on that there was nothing doing at that hour in the clubs, and probably wouldn't be until well after the time fixed for their journey home. Ten-fifty he had to be back at the car. The young people seemed to go into pubs to get tanked up in advance, doubtless much more cheaply than in the myriad clubs that peppered the city center. Many of the pubs and clubs seemed to cluster around the top end of Briggate and Vicar Lane, but with the Grand Theatre being within yards of them Guy was afraid of meeting his father there: Marius's inability to sit through an opera or ballet was a joke in his own family. Guy chose a pub in a little alley off the middle stretch of Briggate where there seemed to be a big and raucous crowd of young people.

Oddly enough, for all his apparent confidence, Guy did not feel altogether at home with this rowdy bunch. Truth to tell, his mother and father had always kept him on a fairly tight rein. He really knew almost nothing about the club scene in London, nothing at all about that in Leeds. But he intended to learn. And he intended to get what he had come for.

Stella walked on past the Grand Theatre, having registered that the opera ended at ten-twenty, then past the turnoff to the Headrow, then down Briggate proper. She was trying to look ordinary, as if things were normal, but she knew they were not. What she really wanted was somewhere quiet, somewhere where she could come to terms with what she had seen.

It had been so odd, so disturbing. She had been to a little restaurant off Merrion Street—had a plate of spaghetti and coffee, but they hadn't helped. Now she knew she had two hours still to waste. She looked up the narrow alleyways that were like little mazes off the broad and traffic-free street. Many contained pubs, with noisy crowds of young people. One or two were just dead ends, dark and dank. She didn't fancy them. She lingered at the opening of one. There was a man with his back to her—a familiar back. She realized with a start it was Alexander. She wondered if he were peeing, but when his hand went up to his mouth she realized he was smoking. One of his little secrets. She was glad that for once she had found him out.

She lingered, though, because she would dearly have liked to confide in him what she had seen. But then she decided against it. He was not the only one who could nurse private secrets. She walked briskly on in search of a hamburger joint or pizza place. She preferred solitude among company to sordid back alleys.

 

It was ten o'clock, and the final scene of the opera was approaching. The tenor and the baritone were concluding the last of their big duets, which were a feature of the second half of
La Forza del Destino.
Big, healthy voices vowing eternal hatred—Caroline felt the appropriate surge of visceral excitement. Then in the darkness the permanent set shifted so that the shape, vaguely suggestive of a gun split at the center, where the trigger would be, made a narrow gap: Leonora's penitential cave. And as the last scene began, with Olivia emerging through the gap to sing her prayer for peace, Caroline settled into her seat to enjoy the lead-up to her daughter's triumph. Olivia had said she was aiming at a big, heavy voice for this role, but one that could be gentle or agile when the score called for such qualities. Caroline decided she was well on the way to it, if not quite there. At the aria's end the conductor pressed on, ignoring the beginnings of applause so that Leonora's fighting brother and lover could bring the long saga of predestined disaster to its conclusion. The mortally wounded brother stabbed his sister with his last burst of vengeful strength, and dying Leonora, her lover, and the Padre Guardiano commended their souls to a God who Caroline thought hadn't come out of the preceding action with much credit.

Cheers. The audience had decided early on that this was to be a triumphant evening, and the bravos (with “brava”s and “bravi”s from pedants) echoed round the theater, and Caroline wished she could decently join in cheering her own daughter. She had a slight sense of anticlimax rather than climax in any case, and decided it was because Olivia had not had enough to do in the last scene, that things had been wound up too quickly after her long absence from the action. But the cheers went on, and the curtain went up and down and up again. The conductor acknowledged the source of the enthusiasm by pushing Olivia forward to take personal calls three times. Then, at last, the lights went up.

Walking again up the aisle, and enjoying a fresh burst of undeserved congratulations, Caroline wished Marius had slipped back in as he had said for the end of the opera and the acclaim. He loved that kind of excitement. But perhaps he had been watching from the back. When the wave of people got out into the corridor, Caroline slipped into the empty bar. No point in trying to get up to the Grand Circle, where the party was, until the Grand Circle patrons had made their way down the staircase and out into the street. She could see no Marius, either lurking in the corridor or the bar. She listened to the ecstatic comments of the departing audience with pleasure. One woman agreed with her:

“If only Verdi had given her a bit more to do in that last scene.”

But there was no doubt it was a triumph. One didn't have to wait for the critics to know that. In fact, only a dog in a manger could dissent.

When the swell of departing audience abated she emerged and made her way up to the bar in the Grand Circle. “Tell her we thought she was magnificent,” a man she didn't know called to her. She smiled graciously and said that she would.

When she arrived at the Circle Bar she was taken under the wing of a member of the Opera North staff, who recognized her at once and fetched her a drink, as well as directing her to the trays with tempting eats on them.

“I couldn't eat a thing,” said Caroline.

“It is awfully exciting, isn't it?” said the woman. Caroline didn't tell her that what was preventing her regaining her appetite was not her daughter's triumph but worry about Marius.

“I'm Enid, by the way,” said the woman. “Call me over if there's anything you need.”

When Enid left, a little group started gathering around Caroline, but it parted as soon as Olivia made her entrance. She immediately spotted her mother and came darting over—getting me done first, said Caroline to herself, for she knew her daughter and knew theatrical priorities. The two of them folded each other in an embrace.

“Wonderful, darling,” said Caroline.

“Room for improvement, especially the last scene,” said Olivia, with a rueful grimace.

“I thought that was Verdi's fault.”

“Not much point in asking for a rewrite at this moment in time. Where's Marius?”

“Hasn't arrived yet. He may have got caught up in something at the Playhouse Courtyard Theatre that ends late.”

“Send him over when he comes, won't you? I don't want him to sneak away without talking to me.”

“Marius isn't the sneaking-away type. He'll want to be part of your triumph, even if he did only see the first scene.”

Olivia nodded, then went to talk to the people who mattered—the company administrator, the conductor and director, a few words to the secretary and the chairman of the Friends. All eyes were on her, as if she were visiting royalty. Clutching her drink Caroline enjoyed her daughter's poise and purpose, but felt rather out of it, especially when Rick arrived with Lauren Spender, still dressed as the nurse from
Loot.
She had come in a taxi from Bradford, where the play was being performed, and as she and Rick wafted past her on their way to pay their meed of tribute to Olivia, Lauren found the time to say, “Been stood up, darling? Don't men treat us girls
rotten
!”

Caroline simply turned away. But she realized that she must have been looking rather out of things, rather bereft. Without Marius that was exactly how she felt. Still, that wasn't something that should happen at her daughter's triumph. She was just looking round for someone to talk to when there was a voice at her elbow.

“Are you worried about your partner? Is there anything I can do to help?”

It was Enid, the woman from the Opera North staff.

“Well, I
am
a bit worried,” said Caroline. “Marius was so looking forward to the curtain calls and the party afterwards—he's not an opera person, I'm afraid. And it's not like him to promise to be somewhere and then miss it. He's a bit of a stickler that way. I wondered if he'd maybe got trapped at the Playhouse—maybe got a seat at something that goes on late.”

“Both things there end before ten—barring accidents, of course.” Enid noticed that Caroline flinched at the word and said, “Would you like me to ring the police and the hospital, just to make sure?”

“Oh, I
would
. I know I'm being silly, but…I mean, I'm not sure how I'm to get home if Marius
has
had an accident.”

“Do you need to? I could find you a hotel.”

“Oh, I really should. I've got children in their teens.”

By now they were backstage, and the woman said quietly to one of the scene-shifters, “Could you stand by in case you're needed?” Then Caroline and she went up to her office, and Enid rang the police, where she had contacts, and the hospital, where she had to go through a bank of bureaucracy before she got an answer out of the Accident and Emergency Department. Neither had any news for her. There had been the odd fracas after the Leeds United home game, but they had all involved young people. No serious car accident. No news at all about a middle-aged supermarket owner.

“In any case I don't think Marius would have taken the car,” said Caroline. “Perhaps if I could just check that he hasn't arrived at the party, and then if that nice stagehand
could
drive me home—Oh dear, I'm afraid I'll have to pay him by check.”