noon until half-past six on the opening night of Dr Rutherford’s new play, the persons most concerned in its birth were absent from their theatre. Left to itself the Vulcan was possessed only by an immense expectancy. It waited. In the auditorium, rows of seats, stripped of their dust-cloths, stared at the curtain. The curtain itself presented its reverse side to Jacko’s set, closing it in with a stuffy air of secrecy. The stage was dark. Battalions of dead lamps, focused at crazy angles, overhung it with the promise of light. Cue-sheets fixed to the switchboard awaited the electrician, the prompt-script was on its shelf, the properties were ranged on trestle-tables. Everything abided its time in the dark theatre.
To enter into this silent house was to feel as if one surprised a poised and expectant presence. This air of suspense made itself felt to the occasional intruders: to the boy who from time to time came through from the office with telegrams for the dressing-rooms, to the girl from Florian’s and the young man from the wig-maker’s, and to the piano-tuner who, for an hour, twanged and hammered in the covered well. And to Martyn Tarne who, alone in the ironing-room, set about the final pressing of the dresses under her care.
The offices were already active and behind their sandblasted glass walls typewriters clattered and telephone bells rang incessantly. The blacked-out box-plan lay across Bob Grantley’s desk and stacked along the wall were rectangular parcels of programmes, fresh from the printer.
And at two o’clock the queues for the early doors began to form up in Carpet Street.
II
It was at two o’clock that Helena Hamilton, after an hour’s massage, went to bed. Her husband had telephoned, with a certain air of opulence which she had learnt to dread, that he would lunch at his club and return to their flat during the afternoon to rest.
In her darkened room she followed a practised routine and, relaxing one set of muscles after another, awaited sleep. This time, however, her self-discipline was unsuccessful. If only she could hear him come in it would be better: if only she could see into what sort of state he had got himself. She used all her formulae for repose but none of them worked. At three o’clock she was still awake and still miserably anxious.
It was no good trying to cheer herself up by telling over her rosary of romantic memories. Usually this was a successful exercise. She had conducted her affairs of the heart, she knew, with grace and civility. She had almost always managed to keep them on a level of enchantment. She had simply allowed them to occur with the inconsequence and charm of self-sown larkspurs in an otherwise correctly ordered border. They had hung out their gay little banners for a season and then been painlessly tweaked up. Except, perhaps, for Adam. With Adam, she remembered uneasily, it had been different. With Adam, so much her junior, it had been a more deeply-rooted affair. It had put an end, finally, to her living with Ben as his wife. It had made an enemy of Ben. And at once her thoughts were infested with worries about the contemporary scene at the theatre. ‘It’s such a muddle!’ she thought, ‘and I hate muddles.’ They had had nothing but trouble all through rehearsals. Ben fighting with everybody and jealous of Adam. The doctor bawling everybody out. And that wretchedly unhappy child Gay (who, God knew, would never be an actress as long as she lived) first pitchforked into the part by Ben and now almost bullied out of it by the doctor. And, last of all, Martyn Tarne.
She had touched the raw centre of her anxieties. Under any other conditions, she told herself, she would have welcomed the appearance out of a clear sky and, one had to face it, under very odd circumstances, of this little antipodean: this throw-back to some forebear that she and Adam were supposed to have in common. Helena would have been inclined to like Martyn for the resemblance instead of feeling so uncomfortably disturbed by it. Of course she accepted Adam’s explanation but at the same time she thought it rather naïve of him to believe that the girl had actually kept away from the theatre because she didn’t want to make capital out of the relationship. That, Helena thought, turning restlessly on her bed, was really too simple of Adam. Moreover he had stirred up the already exacerbated nerves of the company by giving this girl the understudy without, until last night, making public the relationship.
There she went, thinking about last night’s scene: John Rutherford demanding that even at this stage Martyn should play the part, Gay imploring Adam to release her, Ben saying he would walk out on the show if Gay went, and Adam … Adam had done the right thing of course. He had come down strongly with one of his rare thrusts of anger and reduced them to complete silence. He had then described the circumstances of Martyn’s arrival at the theatre and had added in a voice of ice that there was and could be no question of any change in the cast. He finished his notes and left the theatre, followed by Jacko.
This had been the signal for an extremely messy row in which everybody seemed to come to light with some deep-seated grudge. Ben had quarrelled almost simultaneously with Parry Percival (on the score of technique), with Dr Rutherford (on the score of casting), with his niece (on the score of humanity) and, unexpectedly, with J. G. Darcey (on the score of Ben bullying Gay). Percival had responded to a witticism of the doctor’s by a stream of shrill invective which astonished everybody, himself included, and Gay had knitted the whole scene into a major climax by having a fit of hysterics from which she was restored with brutal efficiency by Dr Rutherford himself.
The party had then broken up. J.G. sustained his new role of knightly concern by taking Gay home. Parry Percival left in a recrudescence of fury occasioned by the doctor flinging after him a composite Shakespearian epithet (‘Get you gone, you dwarf; your minimus of hind’ring knot-grass made; you bead, you acorn’). She herself had retired into the wings. The stage-staff had already disappeared. The doctor and Ben finding themselves in undisputed possession of the stage had squared up to each with the resolution of all-in wrestlers and she, being desperately tired, had taken the car home and asked their man to return to the theatre for her husband. When she woke late in the morning she was told he had already gone out.
‘I wish,’ a voice cried out in her mind, ‘I wish to God he’d never come back.’
And at that moment she heard him stumble heavily upstairs.
She expected him to go straight to his room and was dismayed when he came to a halt outside her door and, with a clumsy sound that might have been intended for a knock, opened it and came in. The smell of brandy and cigars came in with him and invaded the whole room. It was more than a year since that had happened.
He walked uncertainly to the foot of the bed and leant on it – and she was frightened of him.
‘Hallo,’ he said.
‘What is it, Ben? I’m resting.’
‘I thought you might be interested. There’ll be no more nonsense from John about Gay.’
‘Good,’ she said.
‘He’s calmed down. I got him to see reason.’
‘He’s not so bad, really – old John.’
‘He’s had some good news from abroad. About the play.’
‘Translation rights?’
‘Something like that.’ He was smiling at her, uncertainly. ‘You look comfy,’ he said. ‘All tucked up.’
‘Why don’t you try and get some rest yourself?’ He leant over the foot of the bed and said something under his breath. ‘What?’ she said anxiously. ‘What did you say?’
‘I said it’s a pity Adam didn’t appear a bit sooner, isn’t it? I’m so extraneous.’
Her heart thumped like a fist inside her ribs. ‘Ben,
