4

 

 

It had occurred to him as he was telling Valentine to get rid of the liquor from his room that it might be difficult to withstand the offer of a drink to celebrate when everyone came together for dinner. By half past eight, when dinner was over and the dozen-odd members of the company had moved to the big lounge for what Valentine had called the introductory discussion, he was really tempted to drown his sorrows.

Somehow, he managed to distract himself as Valentine and his two aides—equally silent, identically garbed—moved in response to calls for drinks. The bar in the corner had been opened before dinner, and its stock was visibly lower now. The air was getting thick with smoke; someone had found records and put them on the player in the corner, and the chatter was loud and bright. It was more like the early stages of a party than a business meeting.

Only Murray sat sombrely by himself in a deep wing chair, his big-knuckled hands cradling a glass of limejuice and soda. His brows were ferociously drawn together as he looked and listened.

Most of the talk concerned the usual commonplaces—backbiting, sickly praise, the disgusting habits of critics. No one had said anything about Murray’s own assault on Pat Burnett, and he was glad. Probably Heston-Wood had talked his colleague out of taking the matter further. It would get to people as gossip sooner or later, but at least it hadn’t been in the evening papers.

Occasionally, there was a fierce burst of argument concerning a subject of real interest: the profitability of this whole idea and the value of collecting improvisation as a basis for a play. That was a point Murray had given much thought to in the past few days, and he’d expected to be discussing it seriously by now. But he didn’t have the heart. He’d seen whom else Blizzard had collected, and he felt contaminated.

Blizzard himself and Delgado hadn’t been at the dinner table. Valentine had conveyed, in answer to repeated questions, that they wanted to talk over some business matters and settle last-minute problems, so they were dining in another room. That rang false to Murray. It seemed more probable that Delgado was trying to build a phony aura of mystery around himself. No one here had seen him yet.

Not that anybody appeared to mind. They were quite contented with excellent food and inexhaustible liquor thrown into the deal. ‘All expenses paid’ was an understatement.

His eyes roamed the room. The noisier of the two small groups into which they had sorted themselves, numbered five, and included four people with whom he had previously worked. There was Ida Marr, red-haired, still slim but showing her age around her eyes and on her throat; she was posing consciously—but then, she was never really off-stage. On one side of her sat Gerry Hoading, looking incredibly boyish, younger even than his actual age of twenty-four, his fair hair untidy and his thin face propped on one upturned hand. Hoading presumably was going to be their designer; he had considerable talent, undoubtedly, but …

On the other side of Ida was Adrian Gardner, running a little to fat, blowing his large nose frequently into a red silk handkerchief. Murray had worked with him in Skeleton and knew he was a good average actor. Again—but …

He’d worked with Constant Baines in rep, nearly ten years ago. Constant was sitting beside Adrian, not saying much. He had stayed in rep when Murray had reached the West End; it had been something of a shock to meet him here, and their greeting had not been cordial.

And the last one of the five. Ida made a crack which Murray failed to catch, they all laughed, and the girl sitting on a cushion at Ida’s feet looked up. Ida caught the movement and put her red-nailed hand on the girl’s hair for a quick caress.

Her latest conquest, presumably. Shame. Murray’s scowl deepened. He didn’t know the girl and imagined she must be from a provincial rep somewhere; at dinner he had heard her addressed as Heather. She would be no older than twenty, he guessed. Her hair was raven black and her face was just imperfect enough to be piquant. In a plain red dress, her figure was extremely interesting.

Shame.

Murray shrugged. There was a stir and a break in the conversation, and he realized the door had opened and Blizzard had come in, followed by a sallow man who could only be the celebrated Manuel Delgado himself.

Blizzard, portly, dark-suited, waving an immense cigar, plunged forward, distributing greetings like largesse. ‘Ida darling, delighted! Why, Murray! I’m so glad you could be with this venture of ours! And little Heather—how you doing so far, sweetie?’

But no one paid more than mechanical attention. They were staring at Delgado.

Makes a change, Murray thought cynically. A cat may look …

There was a cold expression on the author’s face. Like a snake’s? Yes, Murray decided after a second’s hesitation. A sort of reptilian tautness, as though his dark eyes were lidless. He was of medium height, medium build; his hair was dark, and he wore a dark blue jacket, charcoal trousers, and a grey and white tie secured by a gold bar. He held himself easily. One might have taken him more readily for an actor than—say—Constant Baines, who looked like an unsuccessful clerk.

For a long moment Murray’s eyes met those peculiar snake-like dark ones. Murray felt as though he were being weighed in a balance. Then the man’s stare moved on, and Murray saw he was doing the same thing to each person in turn—locking eyes with them, waiting, looking away.

Murray felt another pang of disillusionment. The word for this wasn’t phony. It was cheap.

‘All right, everybody!’ Blizzard had moved to a table at the side of the room and parked himself on a large chair behind it, where he could face the others. ‘Manuel?’

Delgado nodded and walked around the table to another chair beside Blizzard’s. He went gracefully. A thought crossed Murray’s mind, and he glanced sidelong at Adrian Gardner. As he’d thought, Ade’s eyes were following that graceful walk.

Murray wanted to laugh for the first time since his arrival. He managed to suppress the impulse, just as Blizzard beamed on the gathering and launched his spiel.

‘Well, I bet you think this is a crazy setup. Hey?’

A nervous giggle from the girl Heather and some incomprehensible crack from Adrian.

‘I suspected as much.’ Blizzard’s beam vanished. ‘Right! As of now, you stop thinking so. This place may still look like a country club, but it isn’t. It just happens to be the ideal place for our venture. How many of you have seen the theatre in the new wing? I thought you would have, Murray—you have a trouper’s nose.’

‘Next week: Murray Douglas in Osborne’s Entertainer,’ muttered Constant. Nobody laughed.

‘Only Murray looked over the theatre so far? Jesus.’ Blizzard stubbed his cigar. ‘Go and take a look after this discussion, will you? You’ll be impressed. Okay, let’s get on.

‘You all know what we’re going to try and do. We’re going to try out something that isn’t easy, but that Manuel here has done two or three times with—do I have to say it?—the kind of success some people get once in a lifetime and die happy.’

‘Jean-Paul Garrigue?’ Constant murmured. He timed the words perfectly. Everyone heard them, and everyone turned to look at him.

‘Constant, that isn’t funny,’ Adrian said in a strained voice.

‘I didn’t mean it to be,’ Constant grunted.

Had anyone found it funny? Murray glanced around. On the thin lips of Delgado he caught the last trace of a vanishing smile. He suddenly found he was looking forward to hearing what Delgado had to say for himself.

‘I’m sorry about that, Manuel,’ Blizzard was saying under his breath. Delgado now pulled himself forward on his chair. From the inside pocket of his dark blue jacket he extracted a large gold cigarette case; from the case, a king-size cigarette which he lit with a gold lighter.

‘Am I supposed to mind?’ he said. His voice was low and his English accent good, with tantalizing traces of Argentine-Spanish and generalized United States overlaid on that. ‘Make no mistake, if Jean-Paul had not already been on the edge of suicide he would not have made Trois Fois the—the success it became.’

Smoke wreathed from his nostrils. He cocked his head, a little more like a reptile yet. ‘You know nothing about me, any of you. There is a reputation, of course and some of you have perhaps seen a film I made. None of you have seen Trois Fois. If you had, you would not be here. I am uninterested in repeating myself. I am interested in one thing only. Listen and I will tell you what it is, and when I say listen I order you to listen because this is what you are going to live.’

It wasn’t the words. It was the manner of their delivery—the fantastic conceit, the weight of meaning he managed to load on a single syllable every time he said ‘I’—which took their attention.

Murray hunched forward on his chair, his scalp prickling. He had been in the presence of competence all his working life, talent more times than he could remember, and arrogant genius perhaps half a dozen times in all. Add one. This was a man with dynamite behind his eyes.

‘All the time and everywhere there is one thing that we are told, and we know it is true. It is said in learned articles, in long books, in church sermons and philosophy seminars. We, are in a period of decay. Not decadence—decay. Here is a man in this age which prides itself that the individual is respected, important, unique.’ The thin upper lip curled and sarcasm pointed the words. ‘This man is a dummy, and inside he is foul. Do you know him? He has no goal. He is made an individual by decree, and he is soft crumbling dirt inside, and he is ashamed to want what he wants which is relief from the unceasing need to make up his own mind. He will clutch at anything—he will copy his neighbours to save making a decision of his own, he will take his neighbour’s wife to bed to save mending his marriage which like a complicated machine has gone wrong and grinds and sheds metallic powder on the floor. He will have children because in them he sees some hope of rescuing a shadow of himself from the wreck of his youth, and he will drive them to wreck their youth in turn. In the end he will resort to drink’—he looked at Murray, and Murray felt like a small boy who has misbehaved in school.

‘Or drugs! Or the lying consolation of religion which tells him when he dies he will be rewarded for being a creep. And he is not alone, this man. There are a thousand million of him in the world at the moment, surrounded by armour of washing-machines, shod with three-hundred-horsepower winged sandals, drowning his mind in an endless delusion of other places and other times. He is Phaëthon, so conceited he has stolen the sun’s chariot. He is Andromeda’s father, so proud of his daughter’s beauty that the gods are made angry and compel him to chain her to a rock for a sea monster to devour, while he wrings his foolish hands and moans—“what did I do, what did I do?”’ His voice slid up to a parody-falsetto on the repeated question.

‘He makes me sick, and he makes you sick. Everyone knows him and nobody understands him, so nothing is done about him. That is what interests me, and for the next four weeks—and as long afterwards as the play runs in London or anywhere else—that is what is going to interest you. I make myself clear?’

He tapped the ash from his cigarette and leaned back, his snake’s eyes darting from face to face as though inciting a challenge.

There was a long silence. Finally Ida stirred and spoke.

‘Are we to take it, Mr Delgado, that the form you wish to give the result of our—our collectively developed work is that of social criticism?’

‘If you mean: will it contain a plea for reform, then the answer is no.’ Delgado spoke quite calmly. ‘I am an artist, not a doctor. My speciality is cancer and gangrene, at the stage where the disease is past hope of cure.’

He looked at his cigarette with some distaste and stubbed it out. Then he pushed back his chair and rose.

‘We will assemble for preliminary thematic discussion at nine-thirty tomorrow morning. Good night.’