in anything she did. Clem Smith, the stage-manager, said nothing about interpretation but, huddled in his overcoat, merely set the moves and then crouched over the script. She was not even a failure, she was just another colourless understudy and nothing had happened.
When it was over, Clem Smith shut the book and said: ‘Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Eleven in the morning if you please.’ He lit a cigarette and went down into the auditorium and out through the front of the house.
Left alone on the stage, Martyn struggled with an acute attack of deflation. She tried to call herself to order. This in itself was a humiliating if salutary exercise. If, she thought savagely, she had been a Victorian young lady, she would at this juncture have locked herself away with a plush-bound journal and after shedding some mortified tears, forced a confession out of herself. As it was, she set her jaw and worked it out there and then. The truth was, she told herself, she had been at her old tricks again: she had indulged in the most blatant kind of day-dream. She had thought up a success story and dumped herself down in the middle of it with half a dozen pageant-lamps bathing her girlish form. Because she looked like Poole and because last night she had had a mild success with one line by playing it off her nerves she had actually had the gall to imagine – here Martyn felt her scalp creep and her face burn. ‘Come on,’ she thought, ‘out with it.’
Very well, then. She had dreamed up a further rehearsal with Poole. She had seen herself responding eagerly to his production, she had heard him say regretfully that if things had been different … She had even … At this point overtaken with self-loathing Martyn performed the childish exercise of throwing her part across the stage, stamping violently and thrusting her fingers through her hair.
‘Damn and blast and hell,’ said Martyn, pitching her voice to the back row of the gallery.
‘Not quite as bad as all that.’
Adam Poole came out of the shadowed pit and down the centre aisle of the stalls. He rested his hands on the rail of the orchestral well. Martyn gaped at him.
‘You’ve got the mechanics,’ he said. ‘Walk through it again by yourself before tomorrow. Then you can begin to think about the girl. Get the layout of the house into your head. Know your environment. What has she been doing all day before the play opens? What has she been thinking about? Why does she say the things she says and do the things she does? Listen to the other chaps’ lines. Come down here for five minutes and we’ll see what you think about acting.’
Martyn went down into the house. Of all her experiences during these three days at the Vulcan Theatre, she was to remember this most vividly. It was a curious interview. They sat side by side as if waiting for the rise of curtain. Their voices were deadened by the plush stalls. Jacko could be heard moving about behind the set and in some distant room, back-stage, somebody in desultory fashion hammered and sawed. At first Martyn was ill at ease, unable to dismiss or to reconcile the jumble of distracted notions that beset her. But Poole was talking about theatre and about problems of the actor. He talked well, without particular emphasis but with penetration and authority. Soon she listened with single hearing and with all her attention to what he had to say. Her nervousness and uncertainty were gone and presently she was able to speak of matters that had exercised her in her own brief experience of the stage. Their conversation was adult and fruitful. It didn’t even occur to her that they were getting on rather well together.
Jacko came out on the stage. He shielded his eyes with his hand and peered into the auditorium.
‘Adam?’ he said.
‘Hallo? What is it?’
‘It is Helena on the telephone to inquire why have you not rung her at four, the time being now five-thirty. Will you take it in the office?’
‘Good Lord!’ he ejaculated and got up. Martyn moved into the aisle to let him out.
He said: ‘All right, Miss Tarne. Work along the lines we’ve been talking about and you should be able to cope with the job. We take our understudies seriously at the Vulcan and like to feel they’re an integral part of the company. You’ll rehearse again tomorrow morning and –’ He stopped unaccountably and after a moment said hurriedly: ‘You’re all right, aren’t you? I mean you feel quite happy about this arrangement?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Very happy.’
‘Good.’ He hesitated again for a second and then said: ‘I must go,’ and was off down the aisle to the front of the house. He called out: ‘I’ll be in the office for some time, Jacko, if anyone wants me.’ A door banged. There was a long silence.
Jacko advanced to the footlights. ‘Where are you?’ he asked.
‘Here,’ said Martyn.
‘I see you. Or a piece of you. Where is the rest? Reassemble yourself. There is work to be done.’
The work turned out to be the sewing together of a fantastic garment created and tacked up by Jacko himself. It had a flamboyant design, stencilled in black and yellow, of double-headed eagles and was made, in part, of scenic canvas. There was an electric sewing-machine in the wardrobe-room which was next to Mr J. G. Darcey’s at the end of the passage. Here Jacko sat Martyn down and here, for the next hour, she laboured under his exacting direction while he himself crawled about the floor cutting out further garments for the Combined Arts Ball. At half-past six he went out, saying he would return with food.
Martyn laboured on. Sometimes she repeated the lines of her part, her voice drowned by the clatter of the machine. Sometimes, when engaged in hand-work it would seem, in the silent room, that she had entered into a new existence, as if she had at that moment been born and was a stranger to her former self. And since this was rather a frightening sensation, though not new to Martyn, she must rouse herself and make a conscious effort to dispel it. On one of these occasions, when she had just switched off the machine, she felt something of the impulse that had guided her first attempt at the scene with Poole. Wishing to retain and strengthen this experience she set aside her work and rested her head on her arms as the scene required. She waited in this posture, summoning her resources, and when she was ready, raised her head to confront her opposite.
Gay Gainsford stood on the other side of the table, watching her.
III
Martyn’s flesh leapt on her bones. She cried out and made a sweeping gesture with her arms. A pair of scissors clattered to the floor.
I’m sorry I startled you,’ said Miss Gainsford. ‘I came in quietly. I thought you were asleep but I realize now – you were doing that scene. Weren’t you?’
‘I’ve been given the understudy,’ Martyn said.
‘You’ve had an audition and a rehearsal, haven’t you?’
‘Yes. I was so frightful at rehearsal, I thought I’d have another shot by myself.’
‘You needn’t,’ Miss Gainsford said, ‘try to make it easy for me.’
Martyn, still shaken and bewildered, looked at her visitor. She saw a pretty face that, under its make-up, was sodden with tears. Even as she looked the large photogenic eyes hooded and the small mouth quivered.
‘I suppose,’ Miss Gainsford said, ‘you know what you’re doing to me.’
‘Good Lord!’ Martyn ejaculated, ‘what is all this? What have I done? I’ve got your understudy. I’m damn thankful
