6

 

 

But Blizzard wasn’t in the dining room. There were two young men he knew by sight sitting together at the far end of the long table, but everyone else appeared to have finished except Heather, who sat by herself near the door. There was an unused place-setting next to her. Murray hooked out the chair from it and sat down, and the black-suited man waiting by the sideboard picked up a glass of orange juice to place before him.

‘Morning,’ Murray said. ‘Seen Blizzard?’

‘Oh—oh, good morning, Murray.’ She had been preoccupied and only now noticed who had joined her. ‘I was—uh—going to keep that place for Ida. She asked me.’

She would. ‘Skin Ida,’ Murray said. ‘Have you seen Blizzard?’

‘Well … Yes, he’s already finished breakfast. Went out a few minutes ago.’ She hesitated. ‘Is something wrong?’

‘Yes. Never mind, it’s nothing to do with you.’ He gulped down the orange juice, and for a moment in his imagination it filled his nose and throat with the hotness of whisky. He put the glass down and said under his breath, ‘God damn.’

‘Well, well! Morning, Murray!’ With acid sweetness, Ida’s voice came from behind him. ‘Is that the place you were going to keep for me, Heather darling?’

‘I’m sorry, Ida. I didn’t have a chance to—’

‘Oh, never mind. There’s one opposite, I see.’ On stage as ever, Ida swept around the end of the table. She had put on black jeans and a black sweater and wound her throat with a chain of enormous gilded links. She looked tired. ‘My own fault for being late, I guess. Thank you’—to the bringer of orange juice. ‘I’ll just have some dry toast after this, and about a gallon of black coffee. What’s up with you, Murray? Hangover?’

The glass before Murray was deftly exchanged for a plate of cornflakes. He picked up his spoon and didn’t say anything.

‘Not funny?’ Ida said brightly. ‘Never mind, Murray, you’ll be over it by lunchtime.’

‘Stow it,’ Murray said. ‘I’m on the wagon and you know it.’

‘So you were telling us last night. That’s why I thought it was so peculiar when I passed your room just now. The door was open and one of these vampiric valets they keep here was clearing up some kind of mess. And there was a stink of Scotch you could cut with a knife.’

She smiled with honey and venom. At his side, Murray was aware of Heather looking at him, horrified. His desire for food vanished like a flame blown out.

‘This place isn’t a country club,’ he said, pushing back his chair. ‘It’s a lunatic asylum. Or if we go on like this for four solid weeks we’re going to turn it into one. Don’t let me interfere with your new romance, will you, Ida?’ he ended savagely as he spun on his heel.

She deserved that for the crack about a hangover. But I wish Heather didn’t have to be there and hear me.

Nine-thirty, and astonishingly everyone was present, on time, in the miniature theatre—except, once again, for Delgado and Blizzard. Last of the other arrivals was Lester Harkham, the lean, fortyish lighting expert who almost always worked on Blizzard’s productions. He came from backstage when the rest had settled down, jumped to the auditorium floor, and, before dropping into a seat next to Gerry Hoading, announced that Delgado and Blizzard would be with them in a few minutes.

Murray looked around. There was a piano with an electronic keyboard at one side of the stage, and Jess Aumen was sitting on its stool, moving one hand idly over the keys but not making them sound. He was a sleek young man with the artificially polished good looks of a male model, but he was a good composer, undoubtedly.

Lester, Jess, Blizzard himself and Gerry if he could be kept on the rails: that was as good a supporting team as you could hope for. Then why in heaven’s name hadn’t he lined up more talent to put on stage? Apart from those with whom Murray had worked before, there were only the two young men who had been finishing breakfast when he arrived—Rett Latham and Al Wilkinson—and a girl called Cherry Bell, about whom he knew nothing. She was sitting with Rett and Al in the front row.

People were tensed up. You could feel it without following their conversation.

Then Blizzard and Delgado appeared from backstage, Blizzard carrying one chair and dragging another which made scraping and bumping sounds on the floor. He set them facing the others over the footlights, and he and Delgado sat down.

The author took out, with theatrical deliberation, another of his king-size cigarettes and lit it with a flourish. Today he had put on a sharkskin jacket and fawn trousers, and there was a pearl the size of a pellet of buckshot on his tie.

‘Okay, let’s get on,’ Blizzard said after a general nod to his listeners. ‘First—’

‘First, Sam!’ Murray hauled himself to his feet and planted both hands, palm down, on the back of the seat before him. ‘I’d have raised this with you privately, but you’ve been generating your aura of mystery and busy-ness, and I’ve not been able to get at you. I want you to tell me why the devil you’ve been telling your slimy creature Valentine to scatter bottles of liquor all over my room.’

There was an endless-seeming silence. During it, Delgado’s calculating dark eyes fixed on Murray and stayed there. An expression of interest developed very slowly around those eyes, like an image appearing on a photographic film.

‘You must be crazy, Murray,’ Blizzard said at length. ‘I know damned well why you’re on the wagon, and I wouldn’t do anything to push you off. I suppose what you mean is that I told Valentine to leave some drinks in everybody’s rooms and forgot to warn him to skip yours. I did forget to tell him. I’m sorry and it won’t happen again.’

‘Not good enough, Sam.’ Murray hunched forward. ‘There were bottles left openly on a shelf along with glasses and some soda, and that’s okay—I had those taken out. But I want to know why another bottle was put in the medicine cabinet and another hidden at the bottom of my travelling bag.’

There was another silence. Delgado raised a finely drawn eyebrow, and Murray could hear the tumblers clicking in Blizzard’s mind. The director scowled at length.

‘I don’t know anything about them, Murray. And I think it would be a damned good idea if you shut up and sit down before I tell you the only way I can think of for a bottle to get into your bag.’

Murray looked around him. Everyone else was regarding him steadily. Ida Marr was smiling a little, but the others were sullen or worried. He hesitated, calling himself every kind of a damned fool for not waiting till he could get Blizzard alone.

‘No, don’t sit down, Douglas!’

The words came softly from Delgado. The author had stirred and was leaning forward with a speculative expression now. ‘You begin to be interesting. You suggest a theme. A persecution. If I understand, you are saying that someone is attempting to make you drink again when you are forbidden to.’

‘I’m saying nothing of the sort,’ Murray snapped, and dropped back into his seat.

‘Now consider this.’ As though the denial hadn’t been spoken, Delgado took a large pad of paper and a pen from the side pocket of his jacket, and poised it to make notes. ‘Cherry, come up here.’

The girl about whom Murray knew nothing obeyed. She moved to the edge of the stage near Delgado’s feet, turned around and hoisted herself up with legs swinging. She put a shorthand pad on her knee, produced a pen of her own, and slipped a pair of horn-rimmed glasses on.

Oh. Murray had assumed she was a member of the cast. But you would need someone to fix the suggestions as they were made and to type up draft scripts; that must be her assignment.

‘Consider forms of persecution,’ Delgado was saying. ‘By advertisement, for instance—you don’t have a particular gewgaw, you’re a slob.’

‘Chasing people who already have serviceable objects to replace them with flashy new ones,’ Constant put in. ‘That’s a kind of persecution, if you’re looking at it your way.’

‘Right. More?’

 

It grew. It grew incredibly. By lunchtime it had taken such a grip on them that they barely dragged themselves away to the dining room. Even Murray was forced out of his angry withdrawal, and the air began to smell of electricity. By afternoon they had stepped through half a scene, about forty extemporized exchanges that served to delineate a pair of characters, and Jess Aumen was improvising angular modern chords. Also improvising, in his own way, was Gerry Hoading. He had clearly got his supply of dope from somewhere; his face was flushed and his voice kept sliding up the scale towards shrillness. But his imagination was working double time, and before they stepped through the brief action he chalked out the stage for them and laid out with gestures an entire two-level set which in itself implied further possibilities of action.

At five o’clock Delgado abruptly stopped everything, told Cherry to go away and type up her notes, and taking Blizzard’s arm, disappeared backstage. The tension dropped but didn’t disappear; the effect was that of a punctured tyre with a safety reserve cushioning the collapse.

They drifted back to the lounge, arguing at the tops of their voices, and the arguments went on all evening.

It was a long, long time since Murray had seen enthusiasm of this order generated so quickly. And it was due to Delgado, no one else. The mind was keen and darting; even though he was working in a foreign language his ear was sharp enough to catch and correct the least infelicity in a proposed line, and his corrections were so transparently right that not even Ida had tried to contradict him.

How long would it last? They were going to work again tomorrow. By this time next week, Murray judged, tiredness would be competing with enthusiasm. But then they might have a complete outline, and presumably it would take Delgado a couple of days to organize and edit his script. Oh, it was beginning to look feasible.

Tonight, nobody had the bad taste to try and make him take a drink, so that was all right. When the talk lost its intensity and one or two people—Heather, Jess Aumen—had drifted to bed, he decided he’d better do the same.

Getting up, he tossed a casual good night to the others and made for the door. Behind him, someone else rose, and in the hallway he heard his name called. He turned back. Gerry Hoading was coming out of the lounge.

‘Murray, mind if I have a private word with you?’

‘No, surely—go ahead.’

‘Let’s keep walking. I’m turning in, too.’ Gerry waved towards the winding stairs. ‘Uh—I don’t quite know how to put this, but I’ve got to say it. Look, you know my trouble, don’t you? We’ve worked together before, so I guess you must.’

‘Yes, I know about it. Why?’

The young designer put his hands together, twisted them so that the knuckles cracked and let them fall to his sides. ‘Well, I—I have enough of the stuff to keep me going. I don’t know where the hell Sam got it from, but I found it in my room when I got here, the way you found the liquor you were talking about this morning, and I wasn’t complaining. I’ve been taken off the stuff once, and it nearly killed me, and it certainly was going to kill me professionally, so I’m stuck with it.’

He was sweating, and his low voice shook a little. They reached the head of the stairs and turned back into the new wing.

‘This is my room—number ten,’ he went on, stopping and fishing for a key. ‘I figure I must be just about over the middle row of seats in the theatre. Crazy thing to find, isn’t it? A private theatre equipped like that! No, come in, Murray, I haven’t finished.’

He stood aside and gestured for Murray to go in. The room was very much like Murray’s, apart from the colour of the bedcover and curtains.

‘Look, what I’m trying to say is this.’ Gerry shut the door and stood twisting the key between his hands. ‘You must have some kind of guts that I don’t have. I hardly even have the guts to ask you what I am going to ask. But I know I’ve got to, if you follow me. Here!’

He spun on his heel and pulled out a drawer from a chest under the window; from the drawer he produced a two-ounce jar almost full of fine white dust.

‘I’ve never seen so much of it in my life at one time,’ he almost whispered. ‘A thousand pounds’ worth? Heaven knows how much it must have cost! Because it isn’t cut, you see—it’s simon-pure heroin. And if I—well, when things—oh, God damn! Murray, will you take charge of it for me? Right now I have enough self-control to ask you, but I may not pluck up the courage again. Things have gone damned well today. Too well, maybe. I don’t know. If they turn sour, I know from experience that I won’t have the patience to load myself and wait for the stuff to hit. I’ll go crazy waiting and take on a second load, and I’ll probably make it a bigger one, if I have this much of the stuff ready to hand. And when I do that I’ll kill myself. I know perfectly well I will. Here!’

He thrust the jar towards Murray as though terrified he might change his mind in the next minute. ‘Keep it for me, will you? Don’t tell me where you’re hiding it. Lock it up if you can.

Never let me take more than three grains at one go, have you got that? Not even if something goes wildly wrong, and the project looks like breaking down, and I come crying to you for more, don’t for God’s sake let me take more than three grains!’

Murray nodded, hefted the little jar in his hand and turned towards the door. As he reached for the handle, Gerry spoke again.

‘Murray, I—I’m very grateful, I swear. I haven’t any right to ask you to do this for me. If there’s anything I can do in return, just let me know, won’t you?’

‘Sure,’ Murray muttered and went out.