17

 

 

‘If you stop and think about it,’ Murray told the air, ‘you’ll see that there are no end of things—about this place and about us—which are peculiar. Only …’

He let his voice trail away, uncomfortably aware that he was alone in his room and that if he was going to start talking to himself he would make the situation even worse than it was. He drew on his cigarette and let the smoke out in a ragged cloud that drifted towards the blank back of the TV set.

Maybe it was irrational, but he’d turned the set to the wall. Remembering what Lester had said about it being live all the time, he couldn’t escape the sensation of being watched by its blank eye of a screen.

Am I going crazy? Am I crazy already?

He forced himself to tackle the question, not for the first time, and came to the same answer as before: there was someone involved who wasn’t sane, and the only other candidate for the title was Delgado. The very idea of the man made his flesh creep now—and yet he hadn’t been driven to the point at which he had the guts to walk out. There were too many concrete reasons for staying which outweighed the indefinable terrors he had to wrestle with.

He compelled himself to order his thoughts, and went back all the way to the beginning of the affair.

At first, there had been the suspicion that the venture was absurd: collecting the company under one roof to sweat out the play. Against that, Delgado had a reputation as a successful, even though unorthodox, playwright; Sam Blizzard thought it could be made to work, and he was closer to Delgado than anyone else in Britain; and Murray Douglas needed any job he could get.

The last item still held good. The one before that—ditto. Until this morning, Murray had been inclined to doubt it, but he realized now he had been over-hasty in assuming that Blizzard was completely dazzled by Delgado. The director must be keeping his head to some extent; he knew perfectly well the difference between a fit of bad temper on the part of the author and a real crisis of artistic principle. Today’s work, which had gone like a bomb and carried them into a first-class symbolic nightmare of a second act, was proof enough that Sam Blizzard cared about getting out a worthwhile play.

For Murray, though, it was also—not quite proof but—grounds for suspecting that Delgado didn’t.

Why was he suffering this absurd inchoate anxiety? No one else was taking Delgado at other than face value. Lester Harkham, for example, was ready to dismiss his electronic peculiarities as quasi-mystical mumbo-jumbo not worth a second thought. Blizzard didn’t seem to have an inkling that he was dealing with anything but a conventionally temperamental creative personality. Gerry Hoading was taking Murray’s view seriously for the moment, but you could account for that by invoking the violent emotional shock of nearly killing himself and being saved by Murray’s intervention. Compare Constant’s near-affability of last night with his return today to his habitual sarcastic intolerance.

No, there was no single item of evidence to support Murray’s supicions. There was only a list of cumulative subtleties.

People’s behaviour, for instance. Thinking about the TV set had brought one point to mind. Murray hadn’t turned on the set in his room once since his arrival—not even to catch a news bulletin. He knew why; the additional circuitry hidden inside frightened him. But that didn’t tell him why no one else had mentioned seeing any programme on TV since coming here.

And as to news: no newspapers. No one had troubled to order a paper as far as he could tell. No one read anything at breakfast. Why on earth not?

Phone calls. It was probable that the company had been picked partly because they had no domestic ties—well, fair enough; if it was part of the plan to have everyone thrown together around the clock, you wouldn’t want people in a hurry to drive home at quitting time or risk them being delayed in the morning by a crisis in the family.

By itself, it meant nothing that everybody here was either single or separated or divorced. But that didn’t exclude all personal ties. So why had no one been called to the phone in Murray’s hearing? In his own case: why hadn’t Roger Grady, for instance, rung up to inquire how things were going? Granted he had no really close friends at the moment, because he had been deliberately avoiding people since leaving the sanatorium; was this a reason why everybody else should receive no calls?

No letters, either. There was a board in the hall next to the room where Blizzard had his office. Murray couldn’t remember seeing anyone check it for mail. He hadn’t done so himself specifically—he’d glanced at it in passing, but he wasn’t expecting letters, and not until now had the point struck him as significant.

There were at least five cars here: besides his own, there were Sam’s Bentley, Ida’s flame-red Corvette, Lester’s Rover, and a Ford drophead that he thought was Jess Aumen’s. The rest either didn’t own cars, or had left them at home because they didn’t expect to be using them much. Nonetheless, five was plenty—surely! Yet no one had suggested going up to town for a show, or a party, or dinner. Like children in a boarding school, the entire company had developed the habit of reporting regularly for every meal, sitting around in the lounge in the evening and having a few drinks, playing records, behaving in short as though they were retired and settled down for the twilight of their days in a quiet residential hotel.

Murray slapped the arm of his chair and jumped to his feet. No, this whole situation was preposterous! How in God’s name could you condition a pernickety, temperamental bunch of theatre folk into a placid routine like that?

Oh, true enough: the service which Valentine and his weird aides provided was conducive to comfort—there were no petty problems to distract the mind, like organizing one’s laundry or going out for cigarettes. Everything was attended to in a way which a hotel might envy. The food was of high quality, the rooms were indisputably comfortable … And it didn’t figure.

Murray paced back and forth in the space between his bed and the door. At last he had it! This was the source of his worst—though least-defined—anxiety. It had taken a long time to put a finger on it, precisely because it was so vague. Now he could add to the list indefinitely. Tomorrow was Saturday, and at quitting-time this evening it had not been questioned that they should work through the weekend on the same schedule as hitherto. Another oddity. And he remembered the way he had gone out to explore the grounds on his arrival, and the shed full of sports equipment he had found, and the woods at the back of the house. You’d expect a couple of young men like Rett and Al to be interested in the sports hut. The weather had been cool and often showery, but it hadn’t been so bad that one had to huddle indoors. There was a hard tennis court, wasn’t there? There was the swimming pool—neglected, with leaves floating in it, but certainly not foul or stagnant yet. It wasn’t ideal bathing weather, but it wasn’t midwinter.

Nobody going out walking. As far as he could recall, the occasion when he took Heather to that local pub for a sandwich lunch was the last on which any member of the company had got in his car and driven out of the front gate—apart of course from his later panicky visit to Dr Cromarty.

Why?

And, thinking of Heather: she, Cherry Bell, who hardly counted because she spent most of her evenings typing up the day’s material for Delgado, and Ida, were the only three women here. Everyone knew about Ida. But that didn’t stop Heather being very pretty indeed. He had his own reasons for not making up to her; Ade had his, and Gerry’s drug-addiction had left him with an eerie near-sexlessness. That still left Rett, Al, Jess Aumen, Lester Harkham—who, though nearly double Heather’s age, was handsome and had something of a reputation as a womaniser. Sam Blizzard himself, come to that, with his three—or was it four?—unsuccessful marriages behind him. Not to mention Constant, who had always been chasing girls in the days when Murray and he worked together in rep.

No shortage of susceptible men. Yet because of their apparent total lack of interest in Heather he had been able to formulate the absurd idea that she was laid on for Ida as Gerry had his heroin, Constant his pornography, and perhaps others of the company things that he didn’t know about.

In memory, the vivid picture arose of Gerry spitting at Ade this morning. An endless supply of pretty little boys?

His head was spinning. This place was sick, with a kind of all-pervading nastiness copied directly from a Delgado play. It was one thing to see it, quintessential on the boards; it was altogether different to be living it knowing that there was no automatic escape at curtain time, back to the familiar world of long-standing friendships and outside interests.

He checked his pacing and turned to look at the enigmatic squat black shape of the telephone on the bedside table. It had rung for him only once a day since his arrival: each morning at a little before eight, when Valentine’s smooth voice reminded him of the time.

Who was Valentine, anyway? His attempts to convey the impression that Blizzard had hired him specially had failed, as far as Murray was concerned. He had a very close connexion with Delgado, probably going back years. Was that clear to Blizzard, or did the director still think Valentine had been his own discovery? And how had it come about that the steward was engaged anyway? A recommendation by Delgado somehow felt like too obvious an explanation—

Murray clenched his fists, his heart hammering. No good letting this thing run away with him. Any minute now he’d be a raving paranoiac, at this rate. Determined to do something either to allay or actualize his fears, he went to the phone and picked it up.

In a moment, there was an answer: not Valentine, but one of the other stewards.

‘Yes, Mr Douglas?’

‘Get me a call to London.’ Murray pulled open the drawer of the table under the phone in which he had put some of his personal effects. He found his address book and turned up the page which bore Roger Grady’s home number.

When he had read it over the phone, the steward said, ‘Very good, sir. I’ll call you as soon as I get through.’

You do that, Murray adjured him silently and put down the phone.

His last cigarette had burned out, forgotten in an ashtray. He lit another, his hands shaking with his absurd nervousness.

Suppose the call doesn’t go through? I write a letter, I guess—no, two letters. I think I have stamps somewhere. And I give one to Valentine to mail and send the other myself and ask Roger to call me and let me know if he gets both …

What a lunatic predicament! For a moment he was suddenly doubtful of his own stability; he had felt this way when he was first in the sanatorium, and the alcohol-hunger grew unbearable, so that he devised elaborate schemes for smuggling drink in.

But that was over, he reminded himself sternly. Somehow, he’d achieved a balance. Now he was too frightened of what drink could do to him to yield to the occasional desire which tormented him—this very moment, indeed, a wave of despair crested, with a demon in an eggshell riding it. The ache was there, God, yes! But so long as the fear of consequent disaster was dominant, he was safe.

And since Delgado’s trick this morning, he knew the fear was stronger than ever.

The phone shrilled. He snatched at it.

‘Roger?’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Douglas. There is no reply from the number you gave me.’

Liar—? Murray checked his watch. A quarter to eleven. No, it was entirely possible that Roger was out. He dared not assume persecution without impregnable evidence.

‘All right, thank you,’ he said in a dull voice and lowered the phone.

What now? Write that letter? It wouldn’t arrive till Monday, of course. Better to try another call—say in an hour. Roger wasn’t an early bird. He could put up with …

There was a knock on the door of his room, and his mouth went so dry that he was barely able to choke out a question as he swung to face the blank panels.

‘Yes? Who is it?’