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

‘Not quite as bad as all that.’

Adam Poole came out of the shadowed pit and down the centre aisle of the stalls. He rested his hands on the rail of the orchestral well. Martyn gaped at him.

‘You’ve got the mechanics,’ he said. ‘Walk through it again by yourself before tomorrow. Then you can begin to think about the girl. Get the layout of the house into your head. Know your environment. What has she been doing all day before the play opens? What has she been thinking about? Why does she say the things she says and do the things she does? Listen to the other chaps’ lines. Come down here for five minutes and we’ll see what you think about acting.’

Martyn went down into the house. Of all her experiences during these three days at the Vulcan Theatre, she was to remember this most vividly. It was a curious interview. They sat side by side as if waiting for the rise of curtain. Their voices were deadened by the plush stalls. Jacko could be heard moving about behind the set and in some distant room, back-stage, somebody in desultory fashion hammered and sawed. At first Martyn was ill at ease, unable to dismiss or to reconcile the jumble of distracted notions that beset her. But Poole was talking about theatre and about problems of the actor. He talked well, without particular emphasis but with penetration and authority. Soon she listened with single hearing and with all her attention to what he had to say. Her nervousness and uncertainty were gone and presently she was able to speak of matters that had exercised her in her own brief experience of the stage. Their conversation was adult and fruitful. It didn’t even occur to her that they were getting on rather well together.

Jacko came out on the stage. He shielded his eyes with his hand and peered into the auditorium.

‘Adam?’ he said.

‘Hallo? What is it?’

‘It is Helena on the telephone to inquire why have you not rung her at four, the time being now five-thirty. Will you take it in the office?’

‘Good Lord!’ he ejaculated and got up. Martyn moved into the aisle to let him out.

He said: ‘All right, Miss Tarne. Work along the lines we’ve been talking about and you should be able to cope with the job. We take our understudies seriously at the Vulcan and like to feel they’re an integral part of the company. You’ll rehearse again tomorrow morning and –’ He stopped unaccountably and after a moment said hurriedly: ‘You’re all right, aren’t you? I mean you feel quite happy about this arrangement?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Very happy.’

‘Good.’ He hesitated again for a second and then said: ‘I must go,’ and was off down the aisle to the front of the house. He called out: ‘I’ll be in the office for some time, Jacko, if anyone wants me.’ A door banged. There was a long silence.

Jacko advanced to the footlights. ‘Where are you?’ he asked.

‘Here,’ said Martyn.

‘I see you. Or a piece of you. Where is the rest? Reassemble yourself. There is work to be done.’

The work turned out to be the sewing together of a fantastic garment created and tacked up by Jacko himself. It had a flamboyant design, stencilled in black and yellow, of double-headed eagles and was made, in part, of scenic canvas. There was an electric sewing-machine in the wardrobe-room which was next to Mr J. G. Darcey’s at the end of the passage. Here Jacko sat Martyn down and here, for the next hour, she laboured under his exacting direction while he himself crawled about the floor cutting out further garments for the Combined Arts Ball. At half-past six he went out, saying he would return with food.

Martyn laboured on. Sometimes she repeated the lines of her part, her voice drowned by the clatter of the machine. Sometimes, when engaged in hand-work it would seem, in the silent room, that she had entered into a new existence, as if she had at that moment been born and was a stranger to her former self. And since this was rather a frightening sensation, though not new to Martyn, she must rouse herself and make a conscious effort to dispel it. On one of these occasions, when she had just switched off the machine, she felt something of the impulse that had guided her first attempt at the scene with Poole. Wishing to retain and strengthen this experience she set aside her work and rested her head on her arms as the scene required. She waited in this posture, summoning her resources, and when she was ready, raised her head to confront her opposite.

Gay Gainsford stood on the other side of the table, watching her.

III

Martyn’s flesh leapt on her bones. She cried out and made a sweeping gesture with her arms. A pair of scissors clattered to the floor.

I’m sorry I startled you,’ said Miss Gainsford. ‘I came in quietly. I thought you were asleep but I realize now – you were doing that scene. Weren’t you?’

‘I’ve been given the understudy,’ Martyn said.

‘You’ve had an audition and a rehearsal, haven’t you?’

‘Yes. I was so frightful at rehearsal, I thought I’d have another shot by myself.’

‘You needn’t,’ Miss Gainsford said, ‘try to make it easy for me.’

Martyn, still shaken and bewildered, looked at her visitor. She saw a pretty face that, under its make-up, was sodden with tears. Even as she looked the large photogenic eyes hooded and the small mouth quivered.

‘I suppose,’ Miss Gainsford said, ‘you know what you’re doing to me.’

‘Good Lord!’ Martyn ejaculated, ‘what is all this? What have I done? I’ve got your understudy. I’m damn thankful to have it and so far I’ve made a pretty poor showing.’

‘It’s no good taking that line with me. I know what’s happening.’

‘Nothing’s happening. Oh, please,’ Martyn implored, torn between pity and a rising fear, ‘please don’t cry. I’m nothing. I’m just any old understudy.’

‘That’s pretty hot, I must say,’ Miss Gainsford said. Her voice wavered grotesquely between two registers like an adolescent boy’s; ‘to talk about any old understudy when you’ve got that appearance. What’s everyone saying about you when they think I’m not about? “She’s got the appearance!” It doesn’t matter to them that I’ve had to dye my hair because they don’t like wigs. I still haven’t got the appearance. I’m a shoulder-length natural ash-blonde and I’ve had to have an urchin cut and go black and all I get is insults. In any other management,’ she continued wildly, ‘the author wouldn’t be allowed to speak to the artistes like that man speaks to me. In any other management an artiste would be protected against that kind of treatment. Adam’s worse if anything. He’s so bloody patient and persistent and half the time you don’t know what he’s talking about.’

She drew breath, sobbed and hunted in her bag for her handkerchief.

Martyn said: ‘I’m so terribly sorry. It’s awful when things go badly at rehearsals. But the worst kind of rehearsals do have a way of turning into the best kind of performances. And it’s a grand play, isn’t it?’

‘I loathe the play. To me it’s a lot of highbrow hokum and I don’t care who knows it. Why the hell couldn’t Uncle Ben leave me where I was, playing leads and second leads in fortnightly rep? We were a happy family in fortnightly rep; everyone had fun and games and there wasn’t this ghastly graveyard atmosphere. I was miserable enough, God knows, before you came but now it’s just more than I can stand.’

‘But I’m not going to play the part,’ Martyn said desperately. ‘You’ll be all right. It’s just got you down for the moment. I’d be no good, I expect, anyway.’

‘It’s what they’re all saying and thinking. It’s a pity, they’re saying, that you came too late.’

‘Nonsense. You only imagine that because of the likeness.’

‘Do I? Let me tell you I’m not imagining all the things they’re saying about you. And about Adam. How you can stay here and take it! Unless it’s true. Is it true?’

Martyn closed her hands on the material she had been sewing. ‘I don’t want to know what they’re saying. There’s nothing unkind that’s true for them to say.’

‘So the likeness is purely an accident? There’s no relationship?’

Martyn said: ‘It seems that we are very distantly related: so distantly that the likeness is a freak. I didn’t want to tell anyone about it. It’s of no significance at all. I haven’t used it to get into the theatre.’

‘I don’t know how and why you got in but I wish to God you’d get out. How you can hang on knowing what they think, if it isn’t true! You can’t have any pride or decency. It’s so cruel. It’s so damnably cruel.’

Martyn looked at the pretty tear-blubbered face and thought in terror that if it had been that of Atropos it could scarcely have offered a more dangerous threat. ‘Don’t!’ she cried out. ‘Please don’t say that, I need this job so desperately. Honestly, honestly you’re making a thing of all this. I’m not hurting you.’

‘Yes, you are. You’re driving me completely frantic. I’m nervously and emotionally exhausted.’ Miss Gainsford sobbed with an air of quoting somebody else. ‘It just needed you to send me over the border-line. Uncle Ben keeps on and on and on about it until I think I’ll go mad. This is a beastly unlucky theatre anyway. Everyone knows there’s something wrong about it and then you come in like a Jonah and it’s the rock bottom. If,’ Miss Gainsford went on, developing a command of histrionic climax of which Martyn would scarcely have suspected her capable, ‘if you have any pity at all, any humanity, you’ll spare me this awful ordeal.’

‘But this is all nonsense. You’re making a song about nothing. I won’t be taken in by it,’ Martyn said and recognized defeat in her own voice.

Miss Gainsford stared at her with watery indignation and through trembling lips uttered her final cliché. ‘You can’t,’ she said, ‘do this thing to me,’ and broke down completely.

It seemed to Martyn that beyond a façade of stock emotionalism she recognized a real and a profound distress. She thought confusedly that if they had met on some common and reasonable ground she would have been able to put up a better defence. As it was they merely floundered in a welter of unreason. It was intolerably distressing to her. Her precarious happiness died, she wanted to escape: she was lost. With a feeling of nightmarish detachment she heard herself say: ‘All right. I’ll speak to Mr Poole. I’ll say I can’t do the understudy.’

Miss Gainsford had turned away. She held her handkerchief to her face. Her shoulders and head had been quivering but now they were still. There was a considerable pause. She blew her nose fussily, cleared her throat, and looked up at Martyn.

‘But if you’re Helena’s dresser,’ she said ‘you’ll still be about.’

‘You can’t mean you want to turn me out of the theatre altogether.’