Inspector Alleyn 3-Book Collection 6: Opening Night, Spinsters in Jeopardy, Scales of Justice

‘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 tonight. 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 in 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 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 of 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 set 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 tomorrow. If you prefer it, the relationship can be forgotten. Goodnight.’

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

‘Now,’ he said, ‘we go home.’

CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_156486cf-f2cb-5c33-a2be-6e6ca628780b)

Second Dress-Rehearsal (#ulink_156486cf-f2cb-5c33-a2be-6e6ca628780b)

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.

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 this 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 aloof. His eyes were fixed on the wall behind Martyn. She turned her head to see a sketch in watercolour 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. 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.

II

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 anticlimax, 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 had been at her old tricks again: she had indulged in the most blatant kind of day-dream. She had 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 had had a mild success with one line by playing it off her nerves she had 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 had dreamed up a further rehearsal with Poole. She had seen herself responding eagerly to his production, she had 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.