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

He was some time with Gay. They heard her shouting. ‘No. No. I won’t go on. No,’ over and over again like an automaton.

When he came out he went to Helena Hamilton’s room. She was dressed and made-up. Martyn, with an ashen face, stood inside the doorway.

‘I’m sorry, darling,’ Poole said, ‘but you’ll have to do without a dresser.’

The call-boy came down the passage chanting:

‘Half-hour. Half-hour, please.’

Poole and Martyn looked at each other.

‘You’ll be all right,’ he said.

CHAPTER 6 (#ulink_8db27e00-c5b4-5db4-8761-83d904b28cb0)

Performance (#ulink_8db27e00-c5b4-5db4-8761-83d904b28cb0)

At ten-to-eight Martyn stood by the entrance.

She was dressed in Gay’s clothes and Jacko had made her up very lightly. They had all wished her luck: J.G., Parry Percival, Helena Hamilton, Adam Poole, Clem Smith and even the dressers and stagehands.

There had been something real and touching in their way of doing this so that, even in her terror, she had felt they were good and very kind. Bennington alone had not wished her well but he had kept right away and this abstention, she thought, showed a certain generosity.

She no longer felt sick but the lining of her mouth and throat was harsh as if, in fact, she had actually vomited. She thought her sense of hearing must have become distorted. The actors’ voices on the other side of the canvas wall had the remote quality of voices in a nightmare whereas the hammer-blows of her heart and the rustle of her dress that accompanied them sounded exceeding loud.

She saw the frames of the set, their lashings and painted legends, ‘Act I, P. 2’ and the door which she was to open. She could look into the prompt corner where the ASM followed the lighted script with his finger and where, high above him, the electrician leaned over his perch, watching the play. The stage-lights were reflected into his face. Everything was monstrous in its preoccupation. Martyn was alone.

She tried to command the upsurge of panic in her heart, to practise an approach to her ordeal, to create, in place of these implacable realities, the reality of the house in the play and that part of it in which now, out of sight of the audience, she must already have her being. This attempt went down before the clamour of her nerves. ‘I’m going to fail,’ she thought.

Jacko came round the set. She hoped he wouldn’t speak to her and as if he sensed this wish, he stopped at a distance and waited.

‘I must listen,’ she thought. ‘I’m not listening. I don’t know where they’ve got to. I’ve forgotten which way the door opens. I’ve missed my cue.’ Her inside deflated and despair griped it like a colic.

She turned and found Poole beside her.

‘You’re all right,’ he said. ‘The door opens on. You can do it. Now, my girl. On you go.’

Martyn didn’t hear the round of applause with which a London audience greets a player who appears at short notice.

She was on. She had made her entry and was engulfed in the play.

II

Dr Rutherford sat in the OP box with his massive shoulder turned to the house and his gloved hands folded together on the balustrade. His face was in shadow but the stage-lights just touched the bulging curve of his old-fashioned shirt-front. He was monumentally still. One of the critics, an elderly man, said in an aside to a colleague, that Rutherford reminded him of Watt’s picture of the Minotaur.

For the greater part of the first act he was alone, having, as he had explained in the office, no masochistic itch to invite a guest to a Roman holiday where he himself was the major sacrifice. Towards the end of the act, however, Bob Grantley came into the box and stood behind him. Grantley’s attention was divided. Sometimes he looked down through beams of spot-lights at the stalls, cobbled with heads, sometimes at the stage and sometimes, sideways and with caution, at the doctor himself. Really, Grantley thought, he was quite uncomfortably motionless. One couldn’t tell what he was thinking and one hesitated, the Lord knew, to ask him.

Down on the stage Clark Bennington and Parry Percival and J.G. Darcey had opened the long crescendo leading to Helena’s entrance. Grantley thought suddenly how vividly an actor’s nature could be exposed on the stage: there was for instance a kind of bed-rock niceness about old J.G., a youthfulness of spirit that declaimed itself through the superimposed make-up, the characterization and J.G.’s indisputable middle-age. And Bennington? And Percival? Grantley had begun to consider them in these terms when Percival, speaking one of his colourless lines, turned down-stage. Bennington moved centre, looked at Darcey and neatly sketched a parody of Percival’s somewhat finicking movement. The theatre was filled with laughter. Percival turned quickly, Bennington smiled innocently at him, prolonging the laugh.

Grantley looked apprehensively at the doctor.

‘Is that new?’ he ventured in a whisper. ‘That business?’

The doctor didn’t answer and Grantley wondered if he only imagined that the great hands on the balustrade had closed more tightly over each other.

Helena Hamilton came on to a storm of applause and with her entrance the action was roused to a new excitement and was intensified with every word she uttered. The theatre grew warm with her presence and with a sense of heightened surprise.

‘Now they’re all on,’ Grantley thought, ‘except Adam and the girl.’

He drew a chair forward stealthily and sat behind Rutherford.

‘It’s going enormously,’ he murmured to the massive shoulder. ‘Terrific, old boy.’ And because he was nervous he added: ‘This brings the girl on, doesn’t it?’

For the first time, the doctor spoke. His lips scarcely moved. A submerged voice uttered within him. ‘Hence,’ it said, ‘heap of wrath, foul indigested lump.’

‘Sorry, old boy,’ whispered Grantley and began to wonder what hope in hell there was of persuading the distinguished author to have a drink in the office during the interval with a hand-picked number of important persons.

He was still preoccupied with this problem when a side door in the set opened and a dark girl with short hair walked out on the stage.

Grantley joined in the kindly applause. The doctor remained immovable.

The players swept up to their major climax, Adam came on and five minutes later the curtain fell on the first act. The hands of the audience filled the house with a storm of rain. The storm swelled prodigiously and persisted even after the lights had come up.

‘Ah, good girl,’ Bob Grantley stammered, filled with the sudden and excessive emotion of the theatre. ‘Good old Adam. Jolly good show!’

Greatly daring, he clapped the doctor on the shoulders.

The doctor remained immovable.

Grantley edged away to the back of the box. ‘I must get back,’ he said. ‘Look, John, there are one or two people coming to the office for a drink who would be –’

The doctor turned massively in his seat and faced him.

‘No,’ he said, ‘thank you.’

‘Well, but look, dear boy, it’s just one of those things. You know how it is, John, you know how –’

‘Shut up,’ said the doctor, without any particular malice. ‘I’m going back-stage,’ he added. He rose and turned away from the audience. ‘I have no desire to swill tepid spirits with minor celebrities among the backsides of sandblasted gods. Thank you, however. See you later.’

He opened the pass-door at the back of the box.

‘You’re pleased, aren’t you?’ Grantley said. ‘You must be pleased.’

‘Must I? Must I indeed?’

‘With the girl, at least? So far?’

‘The wench is a good wench. So far. I go to tell her so. By your leave, Robert.’