11

 

 

‘Okay, everybody. Break now. See you back at—uh—ten to two.’

‘Break, he says,’ Ida stage-whispered with Maria Marten force. ‘Me, I’m broken already. Foof!’

Murray drew a deep breath and let it go slowly, feeling the tension ooze out of him. He made a sort of mental check on a calendar in his head. Thursday: the first time Sam Blizzard gives the order to break instead of Delgado. Maybe we’re really going to have a play.

There was even a title now. Nobody had picked it—just suddenly it had been used. Upstream. Not bad. He tried his tongue on it.

We have a set of characters. It’s moving. We have Gerry out the back somewhere making canvas flats with his ideas on them …

His subvocal recital of the items on the credit side of the ledger stopped abruptly. His eyes had wandered to the back of the auditorium and spotted a figure in shadow alongside the projection booth.

Heather. Good God—she isn’t in here yet. She hasn’t even been up to the stage this morning.

He jumped down from the stage and went up the aisle to the exit in the wake of Rett Latham, who was putting a debatable point to Adrian with all the emphasis he could muster. He and Adrian both passed Heather with only a nod. Murray stopped, facing her.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Where’ve you been?’

She forced a smile and raised her right arm to show a smear of blue paint on the sleeve of her grey sweater. ‘Oh, I went to give Gerry a hand.’

Half the story, Murray decided. The rest of it was in the redness of her eyes. Been having a quiet private mourn. No, this definitely was not fair. Now he cast his mind back, it struck him that no one had made any attempt to draw Heather into either discussions or the extemporization sessions—not even Ida, who might have done it to impress—and her rather appealing shyness would understandably have turned to misery.

‘Why?’ he said finally.

‘Well—you know!’ She gave a thin laugh. ‘I seem to be sort of surplus to requirement at the moment.’

‘What surplus? You were hired, weren’t you? So it’s your business to remind us that you’re here, not dodge off to help Gerry. If he wants help, let him ask for it.’

‘I’m terribly sorry. I didn’t—’ Her mouth . compressed, and she looked alarmed.

‘Oh, grief,’ Murray muttered. ‘I’m not trying to snap at you. Just advising you to push a bit harder. Come on, let’s go and have lunch.’

‘No—uh—no, I don’t feel very hungry. I think I’m going out for a breath of air instead.’

‘You know, that’s not a bad idea,’ Murray said. ‘In fact, it’s a damned good idea. How about killing two birds? We’ve got’—he checked his watch—’three-quarters of an hour at least. Let’s go and have a sandwich in a pub. The atmosphere here is getting a bit claustrophobic.’

The girl brightened a little. ‘Oh, I’d love to! If you’re sure I’m not being a nuisance?’

Murray laughed and took her arm. They had just reached the exit when Ida caught them up.

‘Well, well!’ she exclaimed. ‘Is this a private party, or can anyone come? Going to lunch, Heather honey?’

‘Ah …’ Self-consciously, the girl freed her arm. ‘Murray suggested going out to a pub for a sandwich, actually.’

‘In his two-seater car, no doubt.’ Ida tossed her dark-red hair. ‘Watch yourself with him, sweetie. Don’t you know what happens to Murray’s women?’

There was a brief electric silence. Murray turned to face Ida, his hands folding into fists like rocks, his belly suddenly taut as a drumhead.

‘I’d beat the hell out of you if you were a man, Ida,’ he said at last. ‘But you don’t carry things quite that far, do you?’

Again, silence. It was clear to Ida that she’d overstepped the mark, and she was afraid to reply in case she added a last straw. She compromised by pushing between Murray and Heather and going out.

He said nothing further till he excused himself in the hall to fetch his wallet and key ring from his room. When he came back, Heather was waiting with a thoughtful look on her face.

‘Murray, can I ask you something?’

He knew what it was going to be, but he nodded permission as he opened the front door.

‘What did Ida mean?’

‘Ida is a bitch,’ he snapped. ‘You don’t have to pay attention to everything she says.’

‘But—’ She bit her lip. ‘Murray, I don’t want to be nosey. But what she said hurt. You couldn’t hide it. I didn’t want to say anything by mistake which might upset you. So if I do, it won’t be deliberate. Uh—I sound silly, don’t I?’

He paused, opening the door of the car for her to get in. She met his eyes for a moment before complying. She was a little flushed, as though surprised at what she had said.

He went around the car and got in himself. After inserting the ignition key, he sat for a few seconds in silence. Then, staring at the dashboard, he shrugged.

‘What’s the good of kidding myself? It’s no secret. It’s been gossiped about for ages. Everyone knows.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘My wife went out of her mind. She walked off one night when I was at the theatre. They found her two weeks later in a house in Poplar with a couple of tarts and one of London’s most prosperous pimps. The only blessing was that she’d given an invented name. She’s in a bin, and she’ll never come out. Are you satisfied?’

‘Oh, my God.’ There was no voice behind the words—just the sound of breath. ‘Murray, I didn’t know! Was that why you—?’

‘Why I drank?’ Murray turned the ignition key and the engine started. ‘No. Not really. I started drinking to quiet my conscience. If I hadn’t treated her like a wilful child when what she needed was psychiatric help, she might be well by now. Murray Douglas is a first-class bastard. Better bear that in mind.’

He slammed the car into reverse, spun the wheels on the gravel so that stones rattled under the body like hail, and accelerated down the drive as though fleeing the echo of his own words. At the gate, where he pulled up to let a farm-tractor lumber by, he spoke again.

‘And my other bad characteristic is self-pity. Suppose we change the subject, okay?’

 

Yet by five that afternoon he was prepared to thank her for bringing the matter up. Paradoxically, the old bitterness had coloured his mind during the rest of the day’s work—two run-throughs of what was shaping into a complete first act. During the lunch break, Gerry had carried in four flats, the paint still wet on them, and had arranged chairs and tables into a passable sketch for his projected two-level set. He was covered in paint, but grinning like an ape; his exhilaration, in fact, was astonishing to Murray because he had not come to ask for a shot of his drug since Monday night.

He wasn’t the only one feeling good. Murray began the first run-through unaware of how his mood was colouring his performance; then he started to catch on, because he was in turn stimulating Ida. During his first few minutes off-stage, he took a grip on himself and planned deliberate exploitation of this hint of bitterness. It felt right. It didn’t belong to him, Murray Douglas, but to the man he was creating.

He was expecting a possible word of praise from Delgado after the first climax, and he thought the others were too. It had been a tremendous advance on anything earlier. The cast was coming to believe in itself, and the atmosphere was tense. But when Blizzard looking pleased, turned to Delgado and gave him a questioning look, the only comment he received was brusque.

‘Again, from the start. Cherry, let me see your notes.’

So they went back to first positions. During the repeat, Murray’s mind began to drift away from his body, something that seldom happened to him before a run had reached the point where everything was automatic and the character had taken over his face, voice and gestures. Now, he could already look on with detachment. He could roam away from this first act and consider lines of development for the second and last.

Add, this … There are fifty similarities and not one hint of identity. Nothing derivative. Hints of Miller, Tennessee Williams—transmuted! Naturalistic opening in a symbolic set with this man, me, Arch Wilde, this curious allusive way his family is a microcosm—of course, it’s the two brothers his sons, Al and Rett, which suggests Miller—of a corrupt world when there’s not one single word to make corruption explicit, only situations and statements which any audience will recognize and yet the whole, the completed pattern will turn their stomach.… Subtler than Williams; no actual impotence, actual perversion, but this nagging feeling of something being wrong. Like nightmare. Yes, as intangible as nightmare. God, it’s frightening.

The inside of Delgado’s mind. But he couldn’t stop to consider what it must be like. He didn’t dare.

Never thought I’d be glad to look so much older than I am, but to have two sons that age, Arch Wilde/me must be forty-five and I haven’t had to think myself ahead those dozen years, I’ve grown into them. … It’s crying out for overt nightmare now, a Bloomsday treatment with the real characters assuming grotesque proportions and we can use Heather somewhere. … Hell of a note if just because she doesn’t push herself her first big chance goes phffft. … Now, I’m over-compensating: But it’s true. A few passes from Ida is no substitute for—

‘Stop!’

What? Incredulous, everyone looked at Delgado. Blizzard was the first to find his tongue; he, after all, had not been snatched back from probably the deepest level of character-identification anyone on stage had ever achieved.

‘Manuel, why in heaven’s name—?’

The sallow author was outwardly composed, but there was a veneer of savagery on his voice when he answered.

‘I said stop. That’s enough. You are beginning to have some idea of the way I want you to take, so tomorrow we will begin again and make the real play.’

‘Now just a moment!’ Blizzard got up, fuming. There was a chorus of support; Murray raised a hand to still it, and the others complied. Blizzard was obviously going to say what they all had in mind. ‘Manuel, you can’t mean to throw away a week’s work when we’re running as smooth as butter!’

‘You think so?’ Delgado’s lidless-seeming eyes lifted with contempt to Blizzard’s purpling face. ‘There is nothing in it worth keeping. This Murray Douglas you sold to me with such fine words is betraying the concept—not feeling, but acting. He is a shell, and the effect is a piece of buffoonery, not a play.’

‘Well, that’s a damned lie for a start!’ Astonishingly, it was Ida who spoke out hotly. She strode to the front of the stage and planted her hands on her hips, glowering at Delgado. ‘Jesus, I’m not exactly in love with Murray, but he’s turning in the best performance I’ve ever seen from him, and you bloody well know it. What’s the idea? Are you poking pins in us to make us squirm?’

‘You are touchingly loyal,’ Delgado said with a sneer. ‘But if you’re insensitive to what I’m talking about, then apparently you are not fitted to my needs either. Tomorrow, maybe, when you’ve recovered from your tantrums, we can get down to some work. Right now—Cherry, your papers, please.’

The girl handed him the thick file in which all the notes and drafts for the script had accumulated; they were still working from memory and a prompt copy, but there hadn’t been a single line fluffed this afternoon.

‘So!’ Delgado said, getting up. ‘You see I am serious.’

He took the file, which held by now a good hundred sheets of paper, in both hands. With no discernible effort he tore it in half, put the halves together and tore them. In spite of everything, those watching gasped at this display of unexpected strength.

‘All right. Now go away,’ Delgado said, letting the scraps fall in a white shower around his feet. He whirled and strode up the aisle to the exit.

After a few seconds’ stunned silence, Blizzard hurried after him, shouting, and vanished from sight. Murray looked around.

‘Anybody got a cigarette?’ he said.

‘Think he does mean it?’ Adrian said nervously, offering a packet.

‘Of course he means it,’ Murray snapped. ‘And the hell of it is, there’s not one of us here who can afford to spit in his face and walk away. Is there? God damn the man!’