‘Hi, Larry,’ he said. ‘My, don’t we look sulky.’
I picked up his suitcase, curtly. I had reason to be curt. He was three days late. I was also curt because I was so angry I didn’t know what I might not say. Also I very much disliked being called ‘Larry’.
‘How’s the play going?’ said Adam.
‘Extremely badly.’
‘Oh Lord, why?’
‘Because it’s impossible to have proper rehearsals if half the actors aren’t there. I should have thought that was obvious.’
‘Look, I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help it if I had the first opportunity in my life to spend a week-end with a real Roman princess, could I?’
‘You could have refused the invitation. Or at the least you could have postponed it. You seem to have felt free enough to postpone your visit here.’
‘Well, if that’s how you’re going to be, I think I’ll go right back to Italy, thank you.’
I thought about this for a moment. If I played Grizzle, I could redistribute the small parts easily enough. Perhaps it would be better if he didn’t stay.
I stopped by the station exit and waited for him to find his ticket. ‘It’s up to you,’ I said.
He took me by the arm, which I very much disliked, and said, ‘Oh, come on, let’s not take it all quite so hard, shall we?’
I shook his arm off and went to the car. I put his suitcase in the back seat and got in. He looked worried.
‘I didn’t know you could drive.’
‘Well you do now,’ I said, starting the engine. I’d passed my test at the beginning of the holidays. I felt as though I’d been driving all my life.
The reverse gear was a bit sticky, as usual, and Adam fidgeted nervously while I yanked at it. When we were on the road, he said, ‘I’m very sorry if I’ve caused you a lot of trouble.’
I shrugged. He had practically driven me mad, that was all. It was quite inexcusable behaviour and there was no point in denying it. If it hadn’t been for her, I’d’ve given the part to someone else a week earlier. But she was so sure he was typecast for it.
‘Nice country,’ he said a few minutes later.
‘These hills are called the Cotswolds,’ I said. I felt I had made it clear enough that he’d behaved extremely badly. I’d met him myself because I didn’t trust anyone else to give him the necessary jolt. ‘All the streams round here run into the Thames. They have trout in them. Until the industrial revolution this was a big sheep area, and very rich. Then everything went to Yorkshire. I can’t remember why. Coal, I think. Since then it’s been pretty much a backwater.’ Americans were always pleased to get a brief social history of the area from a local inhabitant. The village church and an afternoon in Chipping Camden usually reduced their week-ends to orgies of pretentious posturing about their English ancestors. I hated all that.
‘Quite the historian,’ said Adam. Of course, he was a sort of journalist and may have read it all up in advance. He used to write anonymous travel bits for his magazine, which was why he was always in Europe. ‘Who else is staying at Charncot?’
‘The Van Diemans—all of them. And——’
‘You mean even the kids?’
‘No, of course not. Emily, George and Marcia. Isn’t that enough?’
‘More than enough.’
‘And then there’s a school-friend of mine called Tim McCarthy, and his sister, Lucy. That’s all, Oh, and Martin, of course. He’s sort of permanent.’
‘How nice. Just like New York.’
‘Howard Auchinclos is coming. Or threatening to come. I don’t expect he’ll show up, thank goodness.’
‘Doesn’t he have a part in the play?’
‘Are you serious? Howard?’
‘Well, why do I have to have one, then?’
‘It’s her idea, not mine.’
‘Who’s “she”?’
‘My mother. Who did you think?’
‘I wasn’t sure.’ He looked at the scenery for a while. It was a rainy evening, and there was nothing much to see except damp meadows with wet cows standing about in them. ‘Is mine a very long part?’
‘None of the parts are very long.’
‘I never even heard of the play before. Who did you say wrote it?’
‘Henry Fielding. Martin knew about it somehow. It’s very funny. If only it’s done properly.’
‘Like father, like son,’ he said. People were always saying that. It was stupid. ‘Is your father here?’
‘Not yet. He’s supposed to arrive the day before the play—on Friday.’
‘Listen, you’re going to have to fill me in on everything.’ The view apparently no longer interested him. ‘Your mother’s phone call wasn’t exactly explicit. She just said you were doing this play and I had to come. Now, what’s going on?’
I told him. The roof of the village hall was falling in. A fête was being held to raise money to restore it—though it was of no architectural merit, and in my opinion they would have done much better to pull the whole thing down and start again. When asked to help with the fête, she decided it would be ‘more fun’ to do something ourselves than simply to man a couple of hoop-la stalls. A one-act farce in the hall itself would show our imaginative superiority to the neighbours and save us all from having to bowl for the pig and other horrors. The play we chose was Henry Fielding’s Tom Thumb. I was directing it.
‘And you’re performing it when—Saturday?’
‘Yes.’ We had four days, and the thought made me curt again. We’d relied on having a week to fit in the outsiders, but here was Adam arriving on the Tuesday night before we opened, and he hadn’t even read the play yet.
‘You’ll have to learn your lines jolly fast,’ I said.
‘I hope there aren’t too many of them. Who am I, and what do I have to do?’
‘You’re Lord Grizzle, the Court Chamberlain. You’re in love with the Princess Huncamunca—that’s Mom—and she can’t make up her mind between you and Tom Thumb, who’s Martin, on his knees. Really, she wants you both. There’s a scene when you find she’s gone and married Tom, and you’re furious. All she says is:
Oh! be not hasty to proclaim my doom!
My ample heart for more than one has room:
A maid like me Heaven form’d at least for two.
I married him, and now I’ll marry you.
But that only makes you more furious, and you say:
Ha! dost thou own thy falsehood to my face?
Think’st thou that I will share thy husband’s place?
Since to that office one cannot suffice,
And since you scorn to dine one single dish on,
Go, get your husband put into commission.’
‘Goodness,’ said Adam, ‘do you know the whole thing by heart?’
‘Pretty well. It’s quite short. And after you’ve gone on about that for some time, you stomp off to raise a revolt, and so there’s a huge battle in Act Three between you and Martin.’
‘Act Three? I thought you said this was a one-act farce.’
‘Oh, that’s just the way Fielding wrote it—it’s part of the send-up. It’s a parody of eighteenth-century poetic tragedy, you see.’
‘I’m not sure I do. How cultured do you have to be to appreciate the finer points?’
‘We’ve cut the bits we can’t understand,’ I said. ‘We’ve thrashed the whole thing out pretty thoroughly, Martin and I. It’s a great nuisance you weren’t here.’
‘And is that all? I mean, is the plot just your mother, Martin and me?’
‘Good heavens, no. The King and Queen are big parts—they’re Tim and Lucy—and Anne has a lovely time being Glumdalca. She’s a giantess that Tom Thumb’s captured, and she’s madly in love with him. Then George is Noodle, a sort of silly courtier, and we’ve squashed both the ladies-in-waiting into one for Marcia. They’re called Mustacha and Cleora, and she just changes hats for the two parts.’
‘Mustacha and Cleora?’ he said. ‘I don’t know why you aren’t doing Rochester’s Sodom, or The Quintessence of Debauchery while you’re about it.’
‘I don’t know that. Is it good?’
‘It’s not bad. How many more are there in your cast?’
‘Just some small parts. I’m doing them with David and Michael Bailey. They’re twins, and they live just over there.’ I pointed. ‘They’re only fourteen, but they pass as courtiers and bailiffs and people like that.’
‘And what is the relation between Huncadorey—what’s she called?’
‘Huncamunca is the daughter of the King and Queen, of course. She’s a princess. I told you. Perhaps if we’d told you earlier——’
‘I get your point.’
We came into Charncot and drove up past the church and over the little bridge to the drive. I pointed out the local landmarks. Adam didn’t seem interested. He leaned forward and wiped mist off the windscreen, though, as we approached the house. It was gloomy and dripping with rain, the stone not at its softest.
‘I thought it was an old house,’ said Adam.
‘It’s eighteenth century. How old do you want?’
‘I’ve just arrived from Rome, remember. I thought this was supposed to be medieval.’
‘It is, at the back. If you care to excavate the front lawn you’ll find the foundations of a nunnery. It was bought by some wool merchant from Thomas Cromwell in the 1530s, turned into a house which burnt down in 1734, and this is what they put up instead.’
‘That’s better,’ he said. Americans could be so snobbish about things which existed before their country was even thought of.
‘My great-great-grandfather bought it from a descendant of the builder of the present house in eighteen-flfty-something. Thank heavens he didn’t have enough money to pull it down and try again.’
‘Yes,’ said Adam, getting out of the car. ‘I guess he did the right thing.’
‘It was his son who did the rightest thing. He made all the money we live on.’
‘Well, someone has to do it every two or three generations, or families just disappear.’
I led the way into the house. Although it was still just August there was a big log fire in the drawing-room. Anne and Lucy were helping her sew a costume, and she didn’t get up, she just gave him her cheek to kiss and said, ‘Adam, dear, how nice you could come after all. Lawrence, show him his room and how to get down here again, then we’ll all have a drink.’
‘I had two on the train,’ said Adam.
‘Is that Merlin’s?’ I said, meaning the costume.
‘Yes, dear. Now take Adam away while we finish it.’
‘Well,’ he said, as we went upstairs. ‘And I thought I was doing you all a big favour by coming here. I’ve never had such a freezing reception in my life.’
‘We’re all extremely busy,’ I said.
*
Martin was quite the worst actor I had ever seen. He looked like an embarrassed St Bernard, crawling about on his knees, as he had to, and I sometimes wished he would bark. Anything would have been better than the lines, the way he delivered them. I told him over and over again that it was supposed to be a funny play. He should have known, after all—it was his suggestion. He was simply lugubrious. Eventually, I tried him saying the lines straight. It made just as much sense that way, with Thumb as a sort of honourable British officer, and everyone else crazy and surrealist around him. It was a stroke of genius. As soon as Martin said,
When I’m not thanked at all, I’m thanked enough.
I’ve done my duty and I’ve done no more.
in his normal voice, he sounded exactly like a junior lieutenant quietly acknowledging that he’s just won the battle of the Marne single-handed. And that was excellent. Only of course once I’d said how good he sounded like that, he couldn’t do it again. Still, the final result was infinitely better than his idea of parody blank verse speaking. I wasn’t able to do anything with his movements, though. I was just glad we had him on his knees—he was simply terrible when he was standing up, trying to look natural.
‘Would you mind looking at the person you’re supposed to be talking to?’ I said. We had to get his chin down somehow. He would stare over the tops of people’s heads, and when the head was Glumdalca’s he was staring right into the flies—not that we had any flies, of course. We’d strapped eighteen-inch boxes on Anne’s shoes, so that she towered over everyone else, particularly Martin, down there on the floor.
‘I’m afraid that if I look at anyone, I forget my lines,’ he said. ‘I’m very sorry.’
‘Well, can’t you look just below their eyes—so the actual expression won’t throw you?’
‘I’ll try.’
‘All right. And try and keep your voice completely natural, as though you’d spoken bad blank verse all your life as a normal thing.’
We’d practised speaking blank verse at dinner one night, but Mrs Van Dieman was so hopeless at it that it became embarrassing and we had to stop. She stopped a good deal. She only had to enter the summerhouse where we were rehearsing for everyone to stiffen up and forget his moves. She didn’t sit still at rehearsals, either, which was quite inexcusable.
‘Listen, Mom,’ I said one day, ‘can’t you keep that woman out of the summerhouse? Can’t you say something to George and Marcia? She’s the most appalling nuisance and I really can’t have it.’
‘Oh, can’t you?’ she said. ‘Bad luck.’
‘But you must do something. It’s disgraceful.’
‘I can’t do anything. She’s a guest. Anyway, what difference does it make whether she fidgeting or not? You walk up and down the whole time yourself.’
‘That’s quite different. I’m the director.’
‘Well, she’s an old lady, and you’ve got to get used to it. All great art is created under trying circumstances, surely you know that.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mom,’ I said.
‘And what’s all this “Mom” bit?’ she said. ‘Since when have I been called “Mom”?’
‘Since—Anne and I have decided we’re too old to call you anything else.’
She stared at me as though I was mad. ‘You’ve decided what?’
‘We’re too old to go on calling you ‘Mummy”. You know we are. It’s a childish word, and we’re not children any longer. Besides, it’s horribly embarrassing calling you that in public. I can’t keep saying “Mummy” while I’m directing you in front of other people. It’s just not on.’
‘But why “Mom”? It’s absolutely hateful.’
‘Well, what would you prefer? “Henrietta”?’
‘If you insist.’
‘I think that’s terribly pretentious and pseudo-advanced, calling your parents by their Christian names. It never sounds natural.’
‘What about “Mother”, then?’
‘Well, what about it?’
‘Why don’t you call me that? It’s no worse than “Mom”, in fact it’s a lot better. I loathe “Mom”. And you can imagine what your father will say about it.’
‘It matches “Pop”. It makes sense, doesn’t it?’
She just stared at me again.
‘Now,’ I said, ‘how are we going to keep Mrs Van Dieman out of the summerhouse? Have you any suggestions?’
‘You could try garrotting her, I suppose,’ she said, and went away. I think she was offended that we decided to call her ‘Mom’ without consulting her. Really, there just wasn’t an alternative.
‘What do you call your mother?’ I asked Tim later.
‘I try not to call her anything,’ he said. ‘“You” and “she” most of the time.’
So it became a sort of joke never to call her anything but ‘she’ and ‘her’ from then on. It saved everyone’s feelings, though we couldn’t keep it up when we were writing, because of course it led to confusion. I always wrote ‘Mom’, but I’m not sure about Anne.
The day after Adam arrived, we had a big session in the morning, walking him through his part and explaining what was going on. The play starts with Tom Thumb coming back triumphantly from the wars, with Glumdalca in tow as his captive. The King asks Tom what he wants for reward, and he says he wants Huncamunca, and because he’s so pleased about winning the war, the King says he can have her. All Adam had to do was react to this, really, and we could have done that quickly and got on. Only of course everyone wasn’t there, as usual. First of all Mrs Bailey wasn’t bringing the twins over till twelve o’clock, and no one had bothered to tell me. And second, we couldn’t find Martin anywhere. It turned out that he’d gone into the town with her to do the shopping, because I’d said I didn’t need her for Act One, which was mostly going to be Adam and Lucy having their big scene together. But I had not said I didn’t want Martin. In fact the whole thing was delayed half an hour till they returned. Of course, it meant we could get on with Lucy and Adam together, and that helped, but everyone else had to hang about. There’s nothing worse than a rehearsal room full of people who’ve arrived on time and then the whole thing has to be postponed because of one person’s selfishness. It’s quite inexcusable.
Martin was blushing when he did finally show up, and I deliberately ignored him till I’d finished plotting Adam and Lucy. She was quite right about Adam. He might have been late arriving, but he was jolly good in the role. He caught on at once to the kind of zaniness the play was supposed to have, and though he never did get his lines quite straight, he carried off his impromptu inventions with an almost professional confidence. The only trouble was he would keep corpsing. Lucy couldn’t keep her face even remotely straight. I had to pretend to get angry with him.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘The idea is not to have the actors in hysterics but the audience. It’s jolly unfair to make people laugh on stage. The whole point of this show is that you’re all sort of alienated. You know it’s ludicrous, but you act the parts without a smile.’
‘You know,’ said Adam, ‘if you hadn’t been brought up with a theatrical father, you’d make everything much easier for mere amateurs like us to understand. Now, what’s all this talk about being alienated?’
‘Never mind. I’ll explain it to you later.’
‘Would you like me to explain?’ said George.
‘Not now, thank you, we’ve got to get on.’
‘But I think you’re quite right. You see, Adam, Brecht’s theory is really only an extension, isn’t it, of what farce actors have been doing for centuries?’
‘Oh, Martin,’ I said. ‘So you’ve decided to come to rehearsals after all. We thought you must be ill. I mean, everyone knows how important this morning is for Adam, and you’re the only person to turn up late, so what else could we think? Are you feeling better now?’
Of course he just turned purple, and there was a sort of hush in the summerhouse, as though I was really being too awful, which I wasn’t. No one ever takes these things seriously enough. That’s why even professional comedy is usually so bad. They just don’t work at it as hard as they should.
While we were working on the opening, I suddenly had what I thought was a brilliant idea for Anne. She wasn’t at all bad, actually. I mean, she moved pretty well on her boxes, and she said the lines absolutely right, but unfortunately you could hardly hear them. She had a very small voice and really no projection at all. And I had this brainwave, which was to pre-record her speeches on tape, then slow them down so that they came out very deep, and then for her to mime them.
I explained it to her, telling her how splendid she was in every other way except vocally. She looked at me, with her hair hanging in front of one eye in that pretentious way she did it, and then she clumped to a chair and began to take off the special shoes with attached boxes.
‘What’s the matter?’ I said.
‘I know when I’m not wanted, thanks,’ she said.
‘What on earth are you talking about? Of course you’re wanted. I’ve just told you how good you are, except for this one thing.’
‘Jesus, Lawrence, I’m not a complete fool. I’m quite aware of what you’re going to think up next. You’ll suddenly decide it’d be much funnier to have someone taller than me wobbling about on these box things. I haven’t listened to Pop’s stories about the theatre all my life for nothing, you know. Once the director starts making drastic suggestions, you’ve had it. Everyone knows that.’
‘But I’m not going to cut the part,’ I said. ‘It’ll be longer, if anything.’ I was thinking what a good idea it would have been to have had someone taller, and wondering why I hadn’t thought about it before. But there wasn’t time to rearrange the casting, and anyway there was no other girl that much taller than Anne, so it wouldn’t have helped to change things round. Not at that stage.
‘I can tell,’ said Anne. She went on unlacing the shoes. ‘I’m quitting before I’m fired.’
There were giggles from the rest of the cast, notably from Adam. He would set the others off, even when he wasn’t acting.
‘Look, forget it,’ I said. ‘It was only an idea.’
‘It was a good idea, that was what was wrong with it.’
Honestly, you’d think that having a professional father would make the children less impossible.
‘Oh, come on,’ I said. ‘Please, Anne, really.’ And then I remembered it wouldn’t have worked anyway. The roof leaking had led to some sort of damage to the electrical circuits, and there’d been a row when the electric guitarist from the rhythm group in Chipping Camden had got a shock. He’d been playing at a dance the previous April, and the joke in the village was that he hadn’t stopped dancing since. ‘We couldn’t do it like that anyway. There aren’t any plugs left in the village hall to plug a tape-recorder into.’
Anne looked up. ‘Promise?’
‘Yes, I promise.’
‘If there aren’t any plugs,’ said George, ‘how are you going to fix the lights for the show?’
I hadn’t even thought about it. Nor had anyone else, of course. I looked round at a circle of appalled faces.
‘Well, someone must know about electricity,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t anyone?’
‘Tim does,’ said Lucy.
‘In that case,’ I said, ‘will you go up to the village hall, Tim, and take everyone with you except Mom and George and Adam. Who wants to go, that is. And will you inspect and report back as soon as possible? I’ll take Adam through his Act Two scenes. We’ll do the battle this afternoon.’
There was no point in panicking. The show was going to go on on Saturday evening, with or without lights, and since I knew nothing about them myself, it was obviously better to get on with the rehearsals and leave the electricity to electricians. I knew we should have had a proper stage manager, not David Bailey. He was quite good with props, but people would keep confusing him with Michael, and they were both too young to be given any real responsibility. Tom Thumb was becoming more and more a one-man show, behind the scenes.
We went on with the rehearsal, with Adam still corpsing like mad. He wanted to cut
Oh take me to thy arms, and never flinch,
Who am a man, by Jupiter! every inch.
I said the whole village was hoping there’d be sexy lines, and if we cut the few obvious ones they’d all be terribly disappointed. Mom did rather a good face when he said this, after we’d argued about it, looking sort of pleased and shocked at the same time. Although he was only reading it, and didn’t know what
To Doctors’ Commons for a licence I
Swift as an arrow from a bow will fly
and things like that meant, Adam was exactly right, and I was very pleased and said so. After a bit more argument, we changed ‘Doctors’ Commons’, which was rather obscure, to ‘Parson Graham’. He was the village parson.
‘Good,’ I said, ‘then that’s settled.’
By this time the Bailey twins had arrived, and they went into fits when they saw George trying not to laugh at Adam as he whipped himself into a fury about Huncamunca’s faithlessness. I said nothing at the time, just hoping the actors would get used to him as soon as possible. He had a terrible way of leering at whoever he was talking to as he finished a line. Though this was good and a bit like Groucho Marx, the others weren’t ready for it. And then of course they started giggling in expectation, when he wasn’t leering at them. Mrs. Van Dieman, who wandered in with her new dog, said it was all just too wonderful. Since she’d been very rightly refused permission to bring her ghastly Sealyham into England without six months’ quarantine, she’d bought another to take back to America with her. This one was a dog called Jenny, short for General Eisenhower, of all pretentious names.
I would have liked to have had Adam foam at the mouth at the end of the scene where he rushes off to raise an army to kill Tom Thumb, but we couldn’t think of a way we could guarantee the foam on cue. Anyway, I didn’t trust him not to use it earlier in the scene, just to get an extra laugh. It was odd how she was much better with Adam than she was with Martin. I suppose it shows how much one actor can make a difference to another. Martin lowered everyone’s spirits because he was so hopeless, Adam raised them. I wished I could think of some way of getting Adam to raise Martin’s.
After we’d finished the scene, I told them to go away and get Adam’s lines straight, and by that time Tim had come back from the village hall with the news about the lights. Basically, there weren’t any at all. There were a string of Christmas tree lights which may have been meant to be footlights, and some ordinary overhead lights, and that was all, and none of them worked because the electricity supply had been disconnected. Why no one had told us, I can’t think. Luckily, though, Tim had initiative, and he’d asked next door, and Mrs Wither had said of course we could plug in an extension from her power point. The real question was how we were going to light the stage beyond the coloured bulbs.
‘Is there nothing the audience can get in and out by?’ I said. ‘Is the whole place dark?’
‘I’m afraid so,’ said Tim.
‘It’s all right,’ said Lucy. ‘It’ll still be light outside, you know. They’ll be able to see.’
‘That’s quite out of the question,’ I said. ‘We must have the hall blacked out. That’s essential.’
Tim was very clever at mechanical things, and he said, ‘The thing to do is to get some car headlights and put them in each corner of the auditorium, pointing at the middle. That’ll fix that. But they won’t do for stage lighting, I don’t think.’
The grown-ups were horrified.
‘Where do you think you’re going to get the headlamps from?’ said Marcia.
‘Off cars, of course,’ I said.
‘Not off ours you won’t. George, you tell them that’s a crazy idea.’
‘Isn’t there any other way?’ said George. ‘I guess we haven’t explored all the avenues yet, have we? Have we really thrashed this problem out?’
Lucy said, ‘Can’t we borrow some lights from another village in the neighbourhood?’
‘Of course we can,’ I said. ‘You’re brilliant, Lucy. You’re the genius of the morning.’
I sent Martin to phone the amateur dramatic club in the town, and then it was lunchtime. There was so much to do and think about, I felt I hardly had time to eat.
*
Of course, Adam hadn’t learned a single line by the time we started in the afternoon, but it didn’t matter, as I wanted to rehearse the battle-scene, and that only had about twenty lines in it altogether. It was awfully difficult to create even a mock battle on a stage as small as ours. Basically what happened was that Adam and Martin swung swords at each other while David Bailey let off blank cartridges off-stage and the rest of the cast shrieked and yelled in the wings. I’d got some smoke to blow across the battle to give the impression of even more chaos than there actually was. The idea was that Adam would lose Martin in the fog (since he was so small) and come on Anne, towering above him, whom he would then kill. Then Martin came back out of the fog and killed him. It doesn’t sound very much, but it had to be elaborately foolish or it would have been terribly unfunny, and I considered my final plotting of it almost choreographic in its complexity. It took ages to work out, and everyone got very excited. Even Martin, thank goodness. He was awfully nice, Martin, and very intelligent and everything, but it was a monstrous piece of mis-casting. He did, though, find some lights, miles away at Cirencester, and he went off to fetch them with Tim. That was at five o’clock, and I was completely exhausted, especially with a run-through coming. It was supposed to start as soon as they got back from Cirencester. I went and lay down.
I liked to lie with my eyes open staring at the ceiling, which didn’t have any cracks in it if I shielded my right eye. It was like a cinema screen, and I could run any film I felt like, and yet I was far enough away from it not to feel that any of the fantasy was real. I was fantasticating about nothing when there was a knock at the door. I felt too tired to answer. I wanted just to lie there and rest. So I didn’t say anything.
Lucy opened the door slowly, saw I was there, and said, ‘Sorry, did I wake you up?’
I pretended to be half-asleep. ‘Wha? Somethin’ matter?’
‘You’re working so hard,’ she said.
‘Mmm,’ I said, closing my eyes.
The thing about Lucy was that though she was terribly nice in lots of ways, she was also a bit demanding. I mean, I’d put my arm round her a couple of times and even kissed her, but only in a sort of friendly way, and never where anyone could see us. She made me nervous in the house. I thought she wanted me to neck with her all the time, and what with the play and everything I just didn’t have a spare moment for all that. She was very well developed for her age, and I thought she needn’t have gone round making it so obvious to everyone, they could all see perfectly well for themselves. That sort of thing was very irritating in a girl.
She came and sat down on the bed and said, ‘I do wish I could help you in some way.’
‘You’re very helpful just as you are,’ I said.
‘Oh,’ she said, tossing her hair back from in front of her face in just the way that maddened me with Anne, ‘I just do what you tell me.’
‘Well, no one else does, except Tim.’
‘I know. Poor Lawrence. It must be terribly annoying for you. You’re doing so much, too.’
‘It wasn’t even my idea in the first place. It was hers.’
‘Whose?’
‘My mother’s.’
‘She’s awfully sweet, your mother.’
‘She’s whatever she feels like being. She likes you, so she makes you think she’s sweet.’
‘That’s a terrible thing to say, Lawrence. And you know it’s simply not true.’
‘What’s not true? That she likes you?’
‘Oh, she may or she may not. Though as a matter of fact, I think she actually does. But she’s always quite genuine. She doesn’t put things on, like you said. That was an awful thing to say.’
‘She’s my mother. I know her.’
‘Perhaps you’re too close to her to know her properly,’ she said, and smiled. I closed my eyes. Her smile was all wet along her lips, and I didn’t want to think about all that. It’s difficult enough being seventeen without having a girl smile with wet lips while she’s sitting on your bed and you’re trying very hard to think about a play you’re directing. She bent towards me, and even though I had my eyes firmly closed I could sense her breasts bending over with her.
‘Am I bothering you?’ she said. ‘Lawrence?’
I opened my eyes again and looked her in the breasts and said, ‘Of course not.’ Then I looked at her face. There were hints of tears in her eyes. I closed mine again hurriedly. ‘I’m just exhausted, that’s all. I was resting.’
‘Would you rather I went away?’
I sighed, because I couldn’t think what to say. If I said ‘Yes’, she’d probably walk out of the play, or at least act huffy for a day or two, and there simply wasn’t time for that. If I said ‘No’, then she’d stay, and she’d want me to kiss her, and generally to neck for a bit, and I didn’t feel like it. Not then and there, in my own bedroom. Not that I wasn’t interested in her and necking. In fact with her breasts hanging over me like that my interest was getting embarrassing and I was wishing I was under the bedclothes instead of on top of them. But it just wasn’t the right moment.
She began to stroke my forehead, and I sighed again, this time with a sort of phoney gratitude, as though I was enjoying it. I was enjoying it, actually, with part of me. The rest of me was all tense and ready to scream if she didn’t go away at once.
‘I’m sorry I disturbed you,’ she said.
‘That’s all right.’
I kept my eyes closed, and I felt the mattress shift as she got up and for a moment I thought she was going to come nearer, but she didn’t, she stood up and kissed me on the forehead, very chastely, and then she tiptoed out of the room. I didn’t open my eyes till I’d definitely heard the door close. I felt irritatingly awake and now I’d have to stay there, pretending to be asleep.
I put my hand on the blanket where she’d sat. It was very warm. I thought about whether I liked that or not, gazing at the blank piece of ceiling. Then I thought about the lights Martin was bringing from Cirencester, and whether they’d be any good. And then I began imagining the lights I’d’ve liked to have had, and the thunder and lightning effects which would have been splendid but which we couldn’t manage, and then I did go to sleep, so that I was late for my own rehearsal, which they didn’t let me forget. Naturally.
It wasn’t a great success, actually, because Adam not only didn’t know his lines yet, but had also forgotten most of the moves we’d been through earlier. The whole play kept stopping while he looked round and said, ‘Sorry, am I supposed to be here or here?’ And once one person starts doing that, so does everyone else. George was very useful, though, and kept helping him to his right positions. George was terribly accurate about things like that, and was always reminding me that the previous day I’d said the opposite of whatever I happened to be saying at the moment. However, I got an idea of the general shape of the thing, even though I was on and off the stage myself, from time to time—either pushing people into their right positions or playing Ghost and Parson. Ghost was rather a bore, and I’d cut a lot of my own lines, hoping this would make people not mind so much when I cut theirs, but it didn’t, of course. It was all terribly slow, naturally, with all the stops and starts, but it was clear what was going to be all right and what wasn’t, without a lot more work. This meant, basically, Martin.
He’d produced some excellent lights from Cirencester and Tim said they could easily be run off the same lead as the pseudo-footlights, so we’d be all right there. But it was pathetic the way Martin hoped that because he’d driven a few miles to fetch the lights I’d somehow be nicer about his acting. Of course it didn’t make the slightest difference to the fact that he was quite simply dreadful.
Afterwards I gave general notes, which most people accepted with good grace—I wasn’t always as tactful as I tried to be that evening, but with amateurs tact isn’t always the best way of getting decent performances. They have to be bullied and cudgelled, as she said, agreeing with me for once, rather than blandished and cajoled. It was a pity there wasn’t a better part for Marcia, because she really wasn’t bad as Mustacha and Cleora. I don’t mean she was good, just that she didn’t look embarrassed when she started acting. Mom had a kind of style, too, which worked, and Lucy, who I’d originally thought was going to be a disaster as the Queen, because the Queen’s drunk all the time and Lucy was really rather middle-class and sort of clean-looking, wasn’t at all bad by now, reeling round the stage saying,
Who but a dog, who but a dog
Would use me as thou dost?
And she was just splendid squirting at,
For, riding on a cat, from high I’ll fall,
And squirt down royal vengeance on you all.
Of course, she had some of the best lines. Anne was all right, except for being inaudible and wobbling sometimes on her boxes, and I had to keep telling her not to say ‘Whoops’ in the middle of a line, when she thought she was going to lose her balance. Tim was very solid and not very good, but he knitted his brows and said the lines with a frown which was OK for the King. George was very precise and finicky as Noodle, where I’d’ve liked more dash, but it was his own interpretation and he was very proud of it. If I tried to argue with him, he started burrowing in the character like a Stanislavsky actor. He’d’ve spent an hour on each line, if he’d had the chance. The Bailey twins were quite hopeless, but at least they remembered their words, and since they looked so alike everyone thought it was one person playing five roles, and that was funny in itself. I, naturally, was brilliant throughout.
Which left the hero. I didn’t know what to say just then, but since I’d been so tactful with everyone else, I decided to be tactful with him, too. So I just said, ‘I don’t think you’re looking very comfortable yet, Martin. I think we’d better go through a couple of scenes tomorrow, working on the movements. I know it’s terribly hard for you to turn round on this cramped stage, but it’s going to be just as cramped in the village hall, and we mustn’t have you falling into the audience or anything.’
‘I thought Adam was very good,’ said Mrs Van Dieman, her dog clasped in her arms.
I just managed to stop myself telling her it was none of her business.
‘I thought it was all just marvellous,’ she said. ‘And I know you’re not going to mind if I say just one little thing to you, Lawrence, dear.’
‘Look out, Lawrence, your turn,’ said David Bailey. His brother giggled.
‘It’s just when you’re being the—bishop, is it? When you’re marrying Tom and the princess. Is that right? Your mother, anyway. You’re fidgeting with the prayer-book. It’s very distracting the way you keep turning the leaves. Now I don’t expect you knew you were doing it, which is why I’m telling you. I guess someone has to tell the director about his own performance.’
I had, of course, done nothing of the sort, and so I said, ‘Thank you so much, Mrs Van Dieman. How are the programmes coming along?’
To shut her up, we’d put her in charge of the programmes—single sheets, we’d decided, in eighteenth-century type, if possible, with f’s for s’s and so on.
‘They’re getting along just fine,’ she said. ‘Don’t you worry about them. Just remember what I say, and keep your fingers still while you’re doing that marrying. It’s the happy couple we want to look at, not the preacher.’
I could have killed her. Instead I arranged for a general rehearsal—another run-through, in fact—for noon the next day. ‘Martin, I’d like you and Mom at ten o’clock, for a special rehearsal, and then Adam at eleven, with Mom and Martin and Anne and Tim.’
‘Can’t,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to go into the town and buy food.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, can’t someone else do it?’
‘The trouble is, I’m the only one who knows the shops.’
‘But you went shopping this morning, and delayed the rehearsal for hours.’
‘It’s no good being like your father,’ she said. ‘There are ten people staying in the house at the moment, Howard’s arriving tomorrow, and it’s Mrs Fuller’s day off, as you perfectly well know.’
‘Can’t she have a day on, for a change?’
‘If one knew how one’s children were going to turn out, one would never have them, would one?’ she said, smiling at Mrs Van Dieman. Mrs Van Dieman kissed her dog.
It was all quite hopeless. How did they expect me to get a decent show on when the people just weren’t available when they were supposed to be? Walking back to the house with Lucy, I said, ‘Did I really fidget with the prayer-book?’
‘I’m afraid you did. Just a little.’
‘I suppose I was too busy thinking about the others to pay any attention to what I was doing myself.’
‘I expect you were. You mustn’t wear yourself out before the first night.’
‘First night? There is only one.’
‘It’s a shame we cannot do it somewhere else as well. It seems such a waste, just doing it for Charncot. Couldn’t we take it round the neighbourhood?’
‘Let’s see if we can get it on here first,’ I said. But it was a good idea. All the local villages had halls. The trouble would be keeping the cast together, of course.
‘What sort of a village hall do you have at home?’ I said.
‘We don’t live in a real village,’ she said. The McCarthys came from somewhere in Surrey. ‘I suppose there must be a hall somewhere, though. I’ve never been there. I think it’s more for the British Legion and people.’
‘I wonder what they do, the British Legion.’
‘I don’t know. I think they’re men who got their legs shot off in the first world war. People like that.’
I shuddered. I had strong feelings about the parts of my body. They seemed very independent and quite capable of taking off on their own. I had to concentrate to keep them all together. I didn’t at all like the idea of having one of them forcibly removed.
‘You’re American, aren’t you?’ she said suddenly.
‘Yes and no. I was born here, actually. But I can decide when I’m twenty-one.’
‘Which way do you think you’ll go?’
‘I don’t know.’ I’d thought about it, of course. It seemed a pity to have to decide. Countries didn’t really matter. It was all very stupid and old-fashioned, worrying about patriotism and everything. ‘I don’t really mind. But I think I like Charncot more than anywhere, so I’ll probably choose England.’
‘Good show,’ she said.
‘I don’t like New York at all. But the West’s all right, in fact it’s terrific. You should go there. It’s—it’s just extraordinary. There’s nowhere like it.’
‘I don’t think I’m very interested in that,’ she said. ‘I don’t think girls are very interested in cowboys and Indians and everything. But I suppose one can ride out there.’
‘Good heavens, yes. And the people are awfully friendly, really they are. Very independent, but friendly.’
‘Your father is American, isn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
‘Won’t it feel rather odd, not taking his nationality?’
‘Oh, I don’t care about all that. I’m much more worried about getting the play into shape before he arrives. He can be terribly sarcastic about his family’s efforts.’
‘I hate that,’ she said.
‘Oh, he’s all right. As long as you don’t take him too seriously.’
‘You do say strange things about your own parents, Lawrence, really you do.’
In the hall, Mrs Bailey had come for the twins.
‘Were they good today?’ she said. She was a big, bosomy woman, who always wore a man’s dirty mackintosh and smelt rather offensively of wet wool.
‘They’re always good,’ I said.
‘Would it be all right if they don’t come tomorrow then?’ she said, thrusting her bosom out. ‘We’re supposed to go and see an aunt in Cheltenham.’
‘Oh no!’ I said. ‘It’s quite out of the question.’
‘Boys, get your macs on,’ she said to the twins. ‘It’s raining outside, and we’ve got to put the hens to bed when we get home.’
Then she pushed me towards the drawing-room, gripping my arm like a wheelbarrow-handle, and trundling. ‘She’s asked to see them,’ she said in a stage whisper. She nodded knowingly, as though I was supposed to understand what this meant.
‘So have I,’ I said, trying not to breathe too much wet wool. ‘And I think my claim comes first.’
She sighed impatiently. ‘She’s eighty. She’s dying, Lawrence. It’s probably their last chance to see her. And she’s asked for them.’ She looked over her shoulder. ‘I think she may have left them everything.’
I said I hoped it would be a lot, in that case, because only a great deal of money would justify the twins’ absence the next day. I left her in the drawing-room, unbosoming herself to Mom. It was quite incredible how many things seemed to gang up to block my efforts to produce something decent. I knew all the others thought I was taking it all too seriously. But it seemed to me there was no point in doing anything unless you did it as well as you could. The trouble was my cast was really all audience. They wanted to be entertained, not work for others’ entertainment. It was jolly hard trying to be an artist.
As I was going to bed that night, Anne came in in her dressing-gown and said, ‘I don’t think you’re paying enough attention to Lucy.’
‘And what business is that of yours?’
‘She expects to be looked after, not just ordered about by you, you know.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Anne, can’t you see that I’m practically going out of my mind trying to get this show on the road? I can’t be social as well. Lucy understands that, I’m sure.’
‘She doesn’t understand it at all. She told me so. She said she hoped she hadn’t offended you in any way. She likes you very much, but you’re very cold and stand-offish with her. I said you were offended simply that other people existed in the world as well as yourself, and not to worry. But you’ve just got to be nicer to her.’
‘Oh,’ I said. I wondered whether Lucy had sent her or whether she’d come of her own interfering accord. ‘Well, thanks very much for the message. What do you want me to do? Go to her room and rape her?’
‘Don’t be stupid, Lawrence.’
‘Well, it certainly sounds like it.’ I knew how girls always got cross when you started being basic and talking about sex. They always seemed to think that necking was an end in itself. I didn’t know a single boy who felt like that. We all thought necking was a great bore, because it stimulated, often in the most embarrassing way, without ever satisfying. The girls always made it quite clear that they weren’t going to satisfy us, whatever complaints we made. And they didn’t let us do very much, even when they pretended to be enjoying the necking enormously. The whole thing was exceedingly tiresome.
So I said, ‘Look, I’m tired, I’ll try and get round to sparing five minutes for sexual intercourse with Lucy tomorrow some time.’ It had just the effect I’d hoped for. It was always much more effective to say ‘sexual intercourse’ and things like that than to use the four-letter words.
‘God, you’re disgusting,’ Anne said. ‘That isn’t what I meant at all. You’re so crude.’
‘Well, what do you want me to do?’
‘Just behave like a civilised human being for a change, that’s all.’
I snorted, and she went away, banging the door. Not a very civilised exit, I thought. All that talk about sex annoyed me, especially Lucy using Anne as a sort of go-between, if she was doing that. It kept me awake, thinking about it, and I needed all the sleep I could get.
*
Howard turned up the next day. I never understood what people saw in him. I thought he was ugly and rather stupid. He was always trying to be very clever by saying things which were all implication and no fact, and half the time he had no idea what he meant himself. You were supposed to see him as a sort of mysterious figure with his finger in every pie and a knowing smile for everyone you’d ever heard of. But actually he just gave parties in New York in the winter, and travelled about in the summer, and was rather a bore. He was all right, really, I suppose; he just wasn’t as amusing as everyone said. Martin thought he was sinister, God knows why.
When he arrived, the first thing he did was to say ‘Hello, Martin’, with one of his knowing smiles, and Martin blushed at once, as though he’d been caught out doing something terribly wrong. He was very credulous, Martin.
Naturally, Howard had no intention of helping with the play at all. I wouldn’t have had him in it for anything, but I did think he might at least help put up the black-out and things like that. He was as stupid as Mrs Van Dieman about it, I thought, making unfunny little jokes which everyone laughed at nervously—because they were so unfunny, in my opinion.
‘What on earth do you see in Howard?’ I said to Martin, when I got him alone that morning. Howard had arrived by an improbably early train, having just got off a plane from somewhere—Ireland or Scotland, I think—at Birmingham. He was terribly pleased with himself for surprising everyone by turning up for breakfast.
‘Oh, he’s a—a sort of organiser,’ said Martin.
‘What does he organise, then?’
‘People. He knows everything that’s going on. He’s the spider at the centre of the web.’
‘Well, really,’ I said. ‘And what does he catch?’
Martin just shook his head.
‘I think that’s all rubbish,’ I said. ‘He’s just rich and lazy and has more time to spend gossiping on the phone than other people, that’s all.’ And I repeated something I’d heard Adam saying about him. ‘He doesn’t even write, like everyone else one knows.’
‘I believe he did work once,’ said Martin. ‘In some special kind of insurance. I’m not sure he doesn’t still go down to Wall Street two or three times a week.’
‘Two or three times a week! That’s not work, that’s simply taking exercise.’
‘He inherited a lot,’ said Martin, almost defensively. ‘I don’t see why rich people should pretend to work if they don’t want to.’
I wished I didn’t have the prospect of work looming over me. It ruined everything, knowing I had to start at about threepence a week somewhere soon, doing something stupid.
‘Right, now,’ I said, ‘About this play. Can’t you get a little more passion into it?’
‘I thought you said to do it straight,’ he said, blushing as though the mistake was his.
‘Yes, so I did. Sorry. Look, you don’t have to feel guilty about it. It’s really just a question of knowing what you want to do, and doing it. If you’re sure in your own mind, it’ll all follow.’ I didn’t believe it for a moment, but I thought it might encourage him.
‘It won’t, you know,’ he said, blushing even more. ‘Really, it just isn’t like that. I’ve tried doing it as you say, and nothing follows at all. I’m no good, Lawrence. I ought to be stage-manager or something. I’m much too shy to be an actor.’
He was always saying how he was no good at things. Usually he was quite wrong—he terribly under-rated himself, I thought. But this time, of course, he was right. It was too late, though, to recast the part. I thought I could have managed the lines all right, but my movements would have been all haywire.
‘You’re not that bad,’ I said. ‘And thinking you are will only make you worse.’
‘Thanks,’ he said.
‘You need to relax. Let’s forget about the lines for the moment and concentrate on the movements. You don’t look at all comfortable on those knee-pads yet.’
‘I’m not. They’re agony.’
‘Well, we must get them fixed. Of course you’re going to be all tense, if you’re worrying about hurting yourself all the time.’
And then we started on my secret plan to make Martin’s performance tolerable. The idea was to get him so self-conscious about his movements that he wouldn’t think about the lines, and it worked. After a quarter of an hour of making him really embarrassed about his arms and legs, he was speaking naturally and well.
*
The run-through—without the Bailey boys, who’d been allowed to go to Cheltenham to collect their inheritance, as Mom put it—was much better than the night before, and I was really quite pleased, except about Howard. He watched it, unfortunately, grinning in that irritating way of his, being smug and condescending. At the end he clapped three or four times, slowly, and said ‘Bravo’ in a very mocking voice. No one paid any attention to him, though, and luckily the phone rang as I began to give notes, and he was the only person free to answer it. He took rather a long time to come back, which was a relief to me, and when he did, he had a big jug of martinis, just as if it was New York. Like a fool, I thought what a good idea it was for everyone to have a drink and relax. I even helped myself.
Tim came fussing up to me about the sets.
‘What about them?’ I said. He was in charge of all that side of things, not me. One of the reasons I’d invited him was because he was so good at the mechanical side of things. He’d never been a particularly close friend of mine at school, but he had done the sets for two house plays.
‘I must have some volunteers to help with the painting,’ he said. ‘It’ll take ages to do them by myself.’
‘Everyone can help while we’re going slowly through the play this afternoon,’ I said. ‘There’ll be plenty of time. And if everyone’s painting while he’s not acting, I know where he is for a change.’
‘Thanks,’ said Tim. Then he announced it all very clearly, twice. He was that sort of person—very useful to have around.
When he heard that the flats were being painted down at the stables, Howard said, ‘It sounds like a Herculean labour,’ but no one even smiled, which gave me a certain amount of pleasure.
It was a lovely day for a change, and though the grass was still wet, we all sat out on ground sheets and chairs, eating cold things Mom had brought that morning. George tried to make hamburgers on a portable stove which he and Marcia had brought as a gift.
‘You really need hickory sticks, I’m afraid,’ he kept saying. ‘It’s all in the flavour of the smoke, you see.’
The hamburgers were pretty black at the edges by the time we got them, but they were all right. Lucy said she thought they were delicious. I offered her another, but she said, No, she was slimming.
‘Oh, all girls say that,’ I said. ‘All the time. It must be a miserable life, being a girl.’
‘You wouldn’t like it if I were fat,’ she said, showing which way her mind was running.
‘How do you know? Maybe I’m one of those people who love fat girls, like Rubens.’
‘Oh, Rubens,’ she said. It was obvious she didn’t know anything about him at all. That was the trouble with girls like Lucy, there was almost nothing you could talk to them about. I don’t expect she’d ever so much as been to the National Gallery, let alone the Tate. ‘Do you really think you’d like me fat?’
I pretended to run my eyes over her like a farmer at the cattle-market. She was really not bad looking. She had nondescript eyes, sort of blue and grey and nothing very much, and a rather bony nose, and a little mouth, with freckles on her upper lip. And she was well developed, as I said, below the neck. Perhaps she could lose a little weight, I decided, only that was my head talking. The rest of me wanted very much to see her just as she was only without the clothes on.
‘I can’t really say,’ I said, still kidding. ‘You can’t really judge flesh without seeing it, you know.’
She blushed scarlet, then. ‘You are awful,’ she said.
‘Wait till you know me better. I can be much more awful than that. I’m almost unspeakable at times. Worse—I’m untouchable. Are you untouchable?’
‘Do try not to be so disgusting,’ she said, in a sort of aunt’s voice. She was just like Anne. The first suggestion of anything real, and they always lifted their noses in the air and started sniffing.
‘What’s he on about now?’ said Anne, leaning across from the next ground-sheet.
‘I’m uttering foulness and obscenity,’ I said. ‘Have some more wine, Lucy.’
‘I think you’ve had quite enough,’ she said, and took the bottle away. I’d been just about to pour myself another glass. She had a nerve, treating me like that, considering the way she’d actually come into my bedroom. I knew what would have happened if I’d walked into hers without being invited.
‘Oh, he’s being like that, is he?’ said Anne. ‘I’d ignore him. What do you do with him at school, Tim?’
‘Oh, we all get along,’ said Tim. I don’t think he ever thought about people very much. He just accepted them as part of the furniture and got on with whatever happened to interest him. ‘Everyone’s pretty decent.’
‘But when he’s like this, just hopeless and silly?’
Tim looked puzzled. ‘What are you talking about? I wasn’t listening.’
I’m being terribly frank,’ I said, giggling slightly, because it all seemed quite ridiculous. I mean, there we all were, sitting about on ground-sheets on the wet grass, and if Lucy had actually been naked, then we’d’ve had the ‘Dejeuner sur l’Herbe’. Only I didn’t think she’d see the joke, so I didn’t tell anyone why I was giggling.
‘What are you being frank about?’ said Tim. He was chewing a chicken bone.
‘All I said was I couldn’t judge whether or not Lucy was fat unless she took all her clothes off.’
‘Well, I suppose that’s true,’ he said. ‘I mean, you never know what’s not going on under all those petticoats and things, do you?’
‘Petticoats!’ said Lucy. She and Anne began to laugh helplessly.
‘Scientifically speaking,’ I said, as gravely as possible, ‘I think it’s essential to have a clear look at the subject before hazarding a guess. Would you agree?’
‘It’s not scientific to hazard a guess at all,’ said Tim, finishing his bone and wiping his fingers with a napkin. He looked like a doctor scrubbing his hands after surgery, I thought, and that made me giggle again.
‘There,’ said Lucy. ‘Boo to you, Lawrence.’
It was a stupid scene. I couldn’t get rid of the thought of us all sitting there solemnly eating chicken and hamburgers, and Lucy stark naked in the middle of us, offering me the wish-bone. I wished I could tell someone about it, but there just wasn’t anyone who would have understood. So I went on giggling.
‘He’s ga-ga,’ said Anne. ‘Quite batty.’
It was nice to lie there and laugh, with Lucy naked under her clothes, quite close beside me. We went on getting sillier and sillier and laughing about less and less. It was very enjoyable.
At last I discovered it was ha If-past two, and we were late getting started for rehearsal again. The Bailey boys hadn’t come back yet, either.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Will George, Tim, Lucy and Adam please heave themselves towards the summerhouse? And will Mom and Martin please rehearse their scene together somewhere for fifteen minutes—just run it through. I shall want Martin in a quarter of an hour with Anne. Act Two people at three thirty.’
Adam didn’t get up, he just lay there with his eyes closed against the sun. ‘You go on ahead,’ he said. ‘I don’t speak for ages. I’ll arrive in time for my lines.’
‘That’s not the point,’ I said. ‘This is the last rehearsal for getting every detail of each scene right. Everyone is wanted whether he speaks or not.’
‘I want to rest,’ he said. ‘Can’t we have just five minutes?’
‘No. We’re late already.’
It started the afternoon very badly, all the drinking at lunch. Everyone was sleepy and forgetful and slow. I began to get a slight headache. Martin and Anne were late.
‘Have you been rehearsing with Mom, Martin?’
‘No. There was the washing-up to do. It’s Mrs Fuller’s day——’
‘Damn that. You were supposed to have got that scene up by yourselves.’
‘And you were supposed to have read Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews before the play came on. You haven’t started either of them yet, have you?’
For some reason Martin seemed to think he was in charge of my education. I was supposed to write a holiday essay for the English master at school. I had to read some author fairly thoroughly and then criticise him. Martin was always needling me about it. Because of the play I’d decided to do Fielding. But that wasn’t any of Martin’s business.
‘That has nothing whatever to do with your behaviour,’ I said, ‘which is quite inexcusable.’ I was curt.
‘Do just stop bullying everybody, for heaven’s sake,’ said Adam. ‘Let’s get on with the damned play, not quarrel all the time. Christ, I’d hate to be a boy at your school, Lawrence, if you ever get to be a prefect. You’re so picky.’
‘Not a very likely event,’ I said, meaning that no one would ever imagine Adam was a boy again. He didn’t like being reminded that he wasn’t as young as he thought he looked. But unfortunately he thought I meant it wasn’t very likely that I’d ever be a prefect.
‘I don’t understand it,’ he said, ‘with your talent for bossiness.’
‘Shall we get on now?’ said Tim. He didn’t like arguments. He was very sensible, really.
All this ill-temper naturally didn’t do anything to help the performances, and by the time we came to her scenes in Act Two there was a good deal of muttering and murmuring going on.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry if I’ve offended anyone, but the whole point of all this is to get the play as good as possible by Saturday evening. We don’t want people laughing at us, do we?’
‘I thought that was just what we did want,’ she said.
Everybody roared with laughter, of course. I got my own back when we came to the scene between her and Martin, though, because they hadn’t rehearsed by themselves at all. It’s a very short scene, with Glumdalca careering into it like a bat out of hell, but it’s important, because it’s the only place, apart from the wedding, where they’re together, and I produced it with a good deal of extra care. For instance, when Tom says
Where is my princess? where’s my Huncamunca?
Where are those eyes, those card-matches of love,
That light up all with love my waxen soul?
and so on, I had him do a sort of ballet round her, leaping up and down trying to reach her neck with his hands, but never tall enough, so it looked as though he was ripping bits off her dress. This was quite a successful piece of business, but it required careful timing, which is why I’d sent them off by themselves. Also, it required a special dress which came to pieces a little at the front. She’d made a splendid thing, all flounces and bits of old eiderdown, but Martin wasn’t very expert at the jumping part. It wasn’t very complicated, really, but it was the sort of thing which almost always goes wrong in amateur productions. At the end of the scene, after Huncamunca has said she’s promised to Grizzle, and she’s sorry, but it’s written in the book of fate, Tom says:
Then I will tear away the leaf
Wherein it’s writ; or, if fate won’t allow
So large a gap within its journal-book,
I’ll blot it out at least.
And I had Martin do a bigger leap than ever, whereupon half Huncamunca’s dress was supposed to come away in his hands.
Well, to start with she hadn’t brought the dress, though this was the first time it was to be properly tested. So we had to wait while she fetched it, and then wait again while she put it on. And then, of course, it didn’t work. The thread was too strong or Martin was too weak, or something. All that happened was he heaved at her and she fell over on top of him with the dress still in one piece.
‘Oh dear,’ she said, from the floor. ‘I wonder what went wrong.’
‘I can tell you,’ I said. ‘You didn’t rehearse.’
It was a thoroughly satisfactory moment from my point of view, and from then on the rehearsal seemed to go better. The Bailey twins came back from Cheltenham, looking no richer and rather solemn, and by six thirty we were all set for the next run-through. Then Howard arrived with another tray of Martinis. This time I said everyone must wait till after we’d finished.
There was a terrible row about that.
‘You’re inhuman,’ said Adam. ‘And you’re taking everything far too seriously. Give me one of those, Howard, for God’s sake.’
‘If you want to ruin your performance with drink, go ahead,’ I said, seeing it was impossible to keep the adults off the bottle. ‘But it seems a pity when everything was going so well.’
‘It’ll go better now,’ he said.
‘Don’t be so stuffy,’ she said, helping herself.
‘I am not being stuffy.’
‘Don’t you think that perhaps you’re being a little unfair?’ said Martin.
‘No I don’t. I saw what happened after lunch.’
‘You shouldn’t blame your own incapacity on others,’ said Howard. ‘Some of us can hold our liquor.’
‘Oh, let them drink,’ said Lucy. ‘They’re old, they need it.’
‘There!’ she said. ‘Someone who understands! Dear Lucy, how sweet you are, and how absolutely beastly Lawrence is.’ And she kissed her and put her tongue out at me. I just shrugged.
I got them all back on the stage eventually, and after a quick look at the Bailey twins’ scenes we started on the run-through. I don’t know why, but I suddenly thought the whole thing was quite dreadful. Everyone seemed just stupid, not funny at all. Instead of looking like people entertaining others, they seemed just a bunch of friends giggling at their own private jokes. Mrs Van Dieman laughed at everything she’d laughed at before, just as falsely as before. Howard didn’t laugh at all. Nor did I. I just got more and more depressed as it went on, and gradually I stopped caring. A very bad rehearsal is a great relief in one way. You can’t believe it’ll ever be so ghastly again. And since you’re completely committed to the play by that time, anyway, you feel sort of reckless. Desperate and reckless. I gabbled my own lines as fast as possible, just to get the thing over, and at the end I said, ‘Thanks, everyone, very much. It wasn’t bad at all. Now let’s have a complete break from it till tomorrow.’
Then I slipped quickly away, while they were saying, ‘I thought it went much better than this morning’ and things like that, and I went for a walk by myself. It was a beautiful evening, and I walked away from the house, along the fields towards the beechwoods. From the woods there was a big view down the valley over the top of the village. Everything was very green still, though it was September now. It had been a wet summer. The fields were full of puffballs, and I kicked them as I walked along. They were very satisfying, the way they flew to pieces as you kicked them, splaying out like cow-pats.
I came into the woods and walked slowly through them, enjoying the damp beechy smell, and then I came out again by the stile into the big field called The Leasows. Usually it was pasture, in fact I couldn’t remember it ever having been ploughed. But I hadn’t been through the woods, I realised, for ages. And now it was a wheat field, and not quite ripe yet. I’d meant to walk along The Leasows towards the village. I’d thought about going to the pub and having a drink and buying some cigarettes. It would have been nice to smoke them in the woods on the way back. But now I just sat on the stile and thought about nothing and everything—life and the play and the pointlessness of most things and the stupidity of most people. I wished I was back at school and dead and seven years old again and grown up. Most of all I wished I was grown up and free and could do what I wanted where people would take me seriously and listen to my ideas and not treat me like a child any more. I was sick of being a child, but not for the usual reasons. I didn’t want to drink and make a fool of myself, like most adults, in a childish way. I wanted to achieve something, to do something really big and important. And I couldn’t do that for years yet, and it was intolerable. I had to finish school and get into Cambridge and go to Cambridge and get through Cambridge and then learn whatever profession it was I decided on and it wouldn’t be till I was about forty, that I’d be able to do anything I really wanted. Or so it seemed, and I sat on the stile in terrible frustration that I wasn’t forty years old, and I don’t think there was anyone who would have understood me.
I could hear them shouting for me down at the house, but I didn’t answer. It was over half a mile away, but you could hear things very clearly. It was beautifully still. All the countryside was beautiful, I thought as I wandered back. But it wasn’t where one did things. The country didn’t do anything nowadays except provide food for people. It was nice to visit, too. But serious places were towns, like New York. And I hated New York.
As I came into the fields from the woods, Lucy was coming towards me. She hadn’t followed me, she said. She just wanted to be alone for a while.
‘So did I.’
‘They wanted you down at the house just now. Didn’t you hear them calling?’
‘Yes. I decided not to answer.’
I put my arm round her and we walked happily back to the house, not saying very much, just enjoying being together without any of the pretentiousness we usually created for each other.
‘It was awful this evening, you know,’ I said. ‘Could you tell?’
‘Oh yes,’ she said.
‘Well, don’t tell the others, will you?’
‘I think they probably noticed, too.’
‘They were all a bit tired. Of course, they’re only amateurs. We mustn’t expect too much.’
‘I think you do sometimes. I think you honestly do, Lawrence.’
‘Well, it’s a fault on the right side.’
We went into the house. Everyone was flopped about the drawing-room, waiting for dinner.
‘Gosh, where have you been?’ said Anne. ‘We thought you must have gone out and shot yourself because the play was so bad. Why didn’t you?’
‘Because it wasn’t that bad. Would you have liked me to commit suicide? Am I that awful about it?’
‘God, yes,’ she said. Anne was all right, really, so long as she wasn’t with her pretentious American friends.
After dinner we played word games for a bit, but I was too tired to stay up very late. As I was going to bed, Tim saw me and said, ‘I say, Lawrence, I’d quite forgotten about my holiday essay. What are you doing?’
‘I’m supposed to be doing Henry Fielding. It’s a mad idea, I’ll never get it done.’
‘Gosh, I haven’t even thought of a subject.’
‘Are you looking forward to your last year?’ I said.
‘Oh yes. Aren’t you?’
‘I don’t know. I think school’s pretty silly, honestly.’
He thought for a moment. ‘I know what you mean. The thing I can’t stand is the compulsory gym. I think that’s ridiculous. It’s not as though we don’t get quite enough exercise without that.’
‘I hate the way Old Granny pats your arse to see if you’re wearing underpants. I just loathe that. I’ll hit him if he does that to me again.’
Old Granny was Mr Grandidge, the chief gym instructor. For some unknown reason, an hour a week out of the classroom time-table was set aside for gym. We all thought it was quite idiotic.
‘Yes, that is bad,’ said Tim. ‘But I mind them taking it out of lessons most.’
‘Do you suppose we’ll be prefects next year?’
He blushed. ‘I’m going to be one next term. Didn’t I tell you?’
‘Bad luck,’ I said. I was terribly jealous. ‘Good night, Tim.’
‘Good night,’ he said. He seemed to want to apologise for my not being a prefect, so I went quickly into the bathroom.
*
I was first down to breakfast in the morning, and felt full of energy.
‘Hello,’ I said to Mrs Fuller. ‘Did you have a nice day off?’
‘Very nice, thank you,’ she said. ‘I went to see my sister.’ She always went to see her sister. It was one of the nice, regular things about her.
I’d finished breakfast before anyone else appeared. Then Tim, Lucy and Anne showed up, but there wasn’t a sign of a grown-up.
‘I think they all went to bed rather late,’ said Lucy. ‘I heard someone talking at four in the morning. I know it was four because I looked at my watch.’
I hadn’t planned to do very much rehearsing that morning—mainly just tidying up here and there. But even that much wasn’t possible without any actors. It was quite inexcusable, the day Pop was arriving and the day of the performance, to have almost the entire cast lying in bed till eleven o’clock. Eventually, I went to wake her while the others got on with painting the set.
‘Look, this just isn’t good enough,’ I said.
She was sitting up in bed, looking bleary. She said, ‘Oh Lawrence, do for heaven’s sake stop acting like Henry Irving or whoever it is. This is a joke play put on as a joke for our friends. Now go away and let me get up.’
‘The trouble all along,’ I said, ‘has been that some people have put entertaining themselves well above entertaining other people. All this drinking that goes on—how can I have proper rehearsals if everyone’s drinking all the time?’
‘You sound just like your father.’
‘Well, what’s so odd about that? I think you’re all behaving extremely badly.’
‘Go away,’ she said. ‘I’ll be down in half an hour.’
When I’d got everyone finally assembled, I said, ‘I don’t want to do very much today except get the dress rehearsal rehearsed, as it were. That’s to say, I want everyone to do one or two bits in costume before this evening.’ And then I listed the various scenes I wanted done, and when, and then we got the blackout in the village hall organised, and the carting of the flats up there, and the setting of the whole thing up.
The afternoon was very busy, with the women all sewing away like mad, and me not attempting to do more than suggest the slightly larger and funnier gestures which people could make now they had large and funny costumes. I must say she’d done a jolly good job on the costumes, with Marcia’s help. The only things which didn’t work properly were Martin’s knee-boots—the shoes he wore on his knees, I mean. And Huncamunca’s dress still didn’t rip right. So I sent them off to rehearse that by themselves, till they’d got the whole thing perfect.
There was so much to do that we’d all completely forgotten about Pop. At least, I had. So he’d taken the taxi from the station. The first I saw of him was when he came strolling across the lawn with his hands in his pockets and a big grin on his face.
