Light Thickens

‘It’s electrical. I get pins and needles. I can’t help it.’

Ascendant thunder, startling, close, everywhere, rolled up to a sharp definitive crack. Blondie screamed.

‘Sorry!’ she said. She put her fingers in her ears. ‘I can’t help it. Truly. Sorry.’

‘Never mind, child. Come over here,’ said Maggie. She held out her hand. Blondie, answering the gesture rather than the words, ran across and crouched beside her chair.

Rangi said: ‘It’s true, she can’t help it. It affects some people like that.’

Peregrine looked up from his notes. ‘What’s up?’ he asked and then, seeing Blondie: ‘Oh. Oh, I see. Never mind, Blondie. We can’t see the lightning, can we, and the whole thing’ll be over soon. Brace up, there’s a good girl.’

‘Yes. OK.’

She straightened up. Maggie patted her shoulder. Her hand checked and then closed. She looked at the other players, made a long face, and briefly quivered her free hand at them.

‘Are you cold, Blondie?’ she asked.

‘I don’t think so. No. I’m all right. Thank you. Ah!’ she gave a little cry.

There was another roll of thunder; not so close, less precipitant.

‘It’s moving away,’ said Maggie.

It died out in an indeterminate series of three or four thuds and bumps. Then, without warning, the sky opened and the rain crashed down.

‘Overture and Beginners, please,’ Dougal quoted and got his laugh.

By the time, about an hour later, Peregrine had finished his notes and recapped the faulty passages, the rain had stopped almost as abruptly as it began and the actors left the theatre on a calm night with stars shining: brilliant, above the rain-washed air. London glittered. A sense of urgency and excitement was abroad and when Peregrine whistled the opening phrase of a Brandenburg Concerto it might have been a whole orchestra giving it out.

‘Come back to my flat for an hour, Maggie,’ said Dougal. ‘It’s too lovely a night to go home on.’

‘No, thank you, Dougal. I’m tired and hungry and I’ve ordered a car and here it is. Good night.’

Peregrine saw them all go their ways. Still whistling, he walked downhill and only then noticed that a little derelict shed on the waterfront lay in a heap of rubble.

I hadn’t realized it had been demolished, he thought.

Next morning, a workman operating a scoop-lift pointed to a black scar on one of the stones.

‘See that,’ he said cheerfully to Peregrine. ‘That’s the mark of the Devil’s thumb, that is. You don’t often see it. Not nowadays you don’t.’

‘The Devil’s thumb?’

‘That’s right, Squire. Lightning.’

II

Simon Morten had taken the part of Macduff by storm. His dark good looks and dashing, easy mockery of the porter on his first entrance with Lennox, his assertion of his hereditary right to wake his king, his cheerful run up the stairs whistling as he went into the bloodied chamber while Lennox warmed himself at the fire and talked cosily about the wild intemperance of the night, all gave him an easy ascendancy.

Macbeth listened, but not to him.

The door opened. Macduff stumbled on stage, incoherent, ashen-faced, the former man wiped out as if by the sweep of the murderer’s hand. The stirred-up havoc, the alarum bell, the place alive suddenly with the horror of assassination. The courtyard filled with men roused from their sleep, nightgowns hastily pulled on, wild and dishevelled. The bell jangling madly.

The scene ends with the flight of the King’s sons. Thereafter, in a short final scene, Macduff, already suspicious, decides not to attend Macbeth’s coronation but to retire to his own headquarters at Fife. It is here that he will make his fatal decision to turn south to England, where he will learn of the murder of his wife and children. From then on he will be a man with a single object: to return to Scotland, find Macbeth and kill him.

Once Banquo has been murdered, Macduff moves forward and the end is now inevitable.

Morten had now become enamoured of the fight, which he continued to rehearse with Dougal. At Gaston’s suggestion they both began to exercise vigorously, apart from the actual combat, and became expert in the handling of their weapons, twirling and slashing with alarming dexterity. The steel replicas were ready and they used them.

Peregrine came down to the theatre early one morning for a discussion on costumes and found them hard at it. Blue sparks flew, the claymores whistled. The actors leapt nimbly from spot to spot. Occasionally they grunted. Their shields were tightly strapped to their left forearms, leaving the hand free for the double-handed weapon. Peregrine gazed upon them with considerable alarm.

‘Nimble, aren’t they?’ asked Gaston, looming up behind him.

‘Very,’ Peregrine agreed nervously. ‘I haven’t seen them for a fortnight or more. I – I suppose they are safe. By and large. Safe,’ he repeated on a shriller note, as Macduff executed a downward sweep which Macbeth deflected and dodged by the narrowest of margins.

‘Absolutely,’ Gaston promised. ‘I stake my reputation upon it. Ah. Excuse me. Very well, gentlemen, call it a morning. Thank you. Don’t go, Mr Jay. Your remark about safety has reminded me. There will, of course, be no change in the size and position of the rostra? They are precisely where they will be for the performance?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. To the fraction of an inch, I hope? Their footwork has been rehearsed with the greatest care, you know. Like a dance. Let me show you.’

He produced a plan of the stage. It was extremely elaborate and was broken up into innumerable squares.

‘The stage is marked – I dare say you have noticed – in exactly the same way. Let me say I am asking the Macduff to deliver a downward sweep from right to left and the Macbeth is to parry it and leap to the lower level. I shall say – ‘ and here he raised his voice and shrieked: ‘Mac-d. Right foot at 13b. Raise claidheamh-mor – move to 90 degrees. Sweep to 12. Er-one. Er-two. Er-three. Meanwhile…’

He continued in this baffling manner for some seconds and then resumed in his normal bass: ‘So you will understand, Mr Jay, that the least inaccuracy in the squares might well lead to – shall we say? – to the bisection of the opponent’s foot. No. I exaggerate. The crushing would be more appropriate. And we would not want that to happen, would we?’

‘Certainly not. But my dear Gaston, please don’t misunderstand me. I think the plan is most ingenious and the result – er – breathtaking, but would it not be just as effective, for instance – ‘

He got no further. He saw the crimson flush rise in Gaston’s face.

‘Are you about to suggest that we employ a “fake”?’ Gaston demanded, and before Peregrine could reply said: ‘In which case I leave this theatre. For good. Taking with me the weapons and writing to The Times to point out the ludicrous aspects of the charade that will inevitably be foisted upon the audience. Well? Yes or no?’

‘Yes. No. I don’t know which I mean but I implore you not to go waltzing out on us, Gaston. You tell me it’s safe and I accept your authority. I’ll get the insurance people to cover us,’ he added hurriedly. ‘You’ve no objection to that, I hope?’

Gaston waved his hand grandly and ambiguously. He went up on stage and collected the weapons which the users had put into felt containers.

‘I wish you good morning,’ he said. And, as an afterthought: ‘I will take charge of the claidheamh-mors, and will return them tomorrow. Again, good morning.’

‘Good morning, Gaston,’ Peregrine said thankfully.

III

Peregrine had to admit, strictly to himself, that a change had come over the atmosphere in the theatre. It was not that rehearsals went badly. They went, on the whole, very well, with no more than the expected clashes of temperament among the actors. Barrabell, the Banquo, was the most prominent where these were concerned. He had only to appear on stage for an argument to begin about the various movements of the actors. But Peregrine was, for the most part, a patient and sagacious director and he never let loose a formidable display of anger without considering that the time had come for it and the result would be salutary. He had never encountered Barrabell before but it didn’t take him long to suspect a troublemaker and this morning he had confirmation of it. Barrabell and Nina Gaythorne arrived together. He had dropped his beautifully controlled voice to its lowest level, he had taken her arm, and in her faded, good-natured face there appeared an expression that reminded Peregrine of a schoolchild receiving naughty but absorbing information upon a forbidden subject.

‘Most unexpected,’ the Voice confided. ‘I wasn’t here, of course, but I happened to look out…’ It sank below the point of audibility. ‘…concentrated…most extraordinary…’

‘Really?’