comedy but I’m just bloody well furious when you so grossly underestimate my intelligence. When was it? On his New Zealand tour in 1930?’
‘What is this nonsense!’ she said breathlessly.
‘Sorry. How are you managing tonight? You and Adam?’
‘My dear Ben!’
‘I’ll tell you. You’re making shift with me for once in a blue moon. And I’m not talking about tonight.’
She recognized this scene. She had dreamt it many times. His face had advanced upon her while she lay inert with terror, as one does in a nightmare. For an infinitesimal moment she was visited by the hope that perhaps after all she had slept and if she could only scream, would awaken. But she couldn’t scream. She was quite helpless.
III
Adam Poole’s telephone rang at half-past four. He had gone late to rest and was awakened from a deep sleep. For a second or two he didn’t recognize her voice and she spoke so disjointedly that even when he was broad awake he couldn’t make out what she was saying.
‘What is it?’ he said: ‘Ella, what’s the matter? I can’t hear you.’
Then she spoke more clearly and he understood.
IV
At six o’clock the persons in the play began to move towards the theatre. In their lodgings and flats they bestirred themselves after their several fashions: to drink tea or black coffee, choke down pieces of bread and butter that tasted like sawdust, or swallow aspirin and alcohol. This was their zero hour: the hour of low vitality when the stimulus of the theatre and the last assault of nerves was yet to come. By a quarter past six they were all on their way. Their dressers were already in their rooms and Jacko prowled restlessly about the darkened stage. Dr John James Rutherford, clad in an evening-suit and a boiled shirt garnished with snuff, both of which dated from some distant period when he still attended the annual dinners of the BMA, plunged into the office and made such a nuisance of himself that Bob Grantley implored him to go away.
At twenty past six the taxi carrying Gay Gainsford and J. G. Darcey turned into Carpet Street. Darcey sat with his knees crossed elegantly and his hat perched on them. In the half light his head and profile looked like those of a much younger man.
‘It was sweet of you to call for me, J.G.,’ Gay said unevenly.
He smiled, without looking at her, and patted her hand. ‘I’m always petrified myself,’ he said, ‘on first nights.’
‘Are you? I suppose a true artiste must be.’
‘Ah, youth, youth!’ sighed J.G., a little stagily perhaps, but, if she hadn’t been too preoccupied to notice it, with a certain overtone of genuine nostalgia.
‘It’s worse than the usual first-night horrors for me,’ she said. ‘I’m just boxing on in a private hell of my own.’
‘My poor child.’
She turned a little towards him and leant her head into his shoulder. ‘Nice!’ she murmured and after a moment: ‘I’m so frightened of him, J.G.’
With the practised ease of a good actor, he slipped his arm round her. ‘I won’t have it,’ he said. ‘By God, I won’t! If he worries you again, author or no author –’
‘It’s not him,’ she said. ‘Not the doctor. Oh, I know he’s simply filthy to work with and he does fuss me dreadfully but it’s not the doctor really who’s responsible for all my misery.’
‘No? Who is then?’
‘Uncle Ben!’ She made a small wailing noise that was muffled by his coat. He bent his head attentively to listen. ‘J.G., I’m just plain terrified of Uncle Ben.’
V
Parry Percival always enjoyed his arrival at the theatre when there was a gallery queue to be penetrated. One raised one’s hat and said: ‘Pardon me. Thanks so much,’ to the gratified ladies. One heard them murmur one’s name. It was a heartening little fillip to one’s self-esteem.
On this occasion the stimulant didn’t work with its normal magic. He was too worried to relish it wholeheartedly.
Ben, he thought hotly, was insufferable. Every device by which a second-leading man could make a bit-part actor look foolish had been brought into play during rehearsals. Ben had upstaged him, had flurried him by introducing new business, had topped his lines and, even while he was seething with impotent fury, had reduced him to nervous giggles by looking sideways at him. It was the technique with which a schoolmaster could torture a small boy, and it revived in Parry hideous memories of his childhood.
Only partially restored by the evidence of prestige afforded by the gallery queue he walked down the stage-door alley and into the theatre. He was at once engulfed in its warmth and expectancy.
He passed into the dressing-room passage. Helena Hamilton’s door was half-open and the lights were on. He tapped, looked in and was greeted by the smell of greasepaint, powder, wet-white and flowers. The gas-fire groaned comfortably. Martyn, who was spreading towels, turned and found herself confronted by his deceptively boyish face.
‘Early at work?’ he fluted.
Martyn wished him good evening.
‘Helena not down yet?’
‘Not yet.’
He hung about the dressing-room, fingering photographs and eyeing Martyn.
‘I hear you come from Down Under,’ he said. ‘I nearly accepted an engagement to go out there last year but I didn’t really like the people so I turned it down. Adam played it in the year dot, I believe. Well, more years ago than he would care to remember, I dare say. Twenty, if we’re going to let our back hair down. Before you were born, I dare say.’
‘Yes,’ Martyn agreed. ‘Just before.’
Her answer appeared to give him extraordinary satisfaction. ‘Just before?’ he repeated. ‘Really?’ and Martyn thought: ‘I mustn’t let myself be worried by this.’
He seemed to hover on the edge of some further observation and pottered about the dressing-room examining the great mass of flowers. ‘I’ll swear,’ he said crossly, ‘those aren’t the roses I chose at Florian’s. Honestly that female’s an absolute menace.’
Martyn, seeing how miserable he looked, felt sorry for him. He muttered: ‘I do so abominate first nights,’ and she rejoined: ‘They are pretty ghastly, aren’t they?’ Because he seemed unable to take himself off, she added with an air of finality: ‘Anyway, may I wish you luck for this one?’
‘Sweet of you,’ he said. ‘I’ll need it. I’m the stooge of this piece. Well, thanks, anyway.’
He drifted into the passage, halted outside the open door of Poole’s dressing-room and greeted Bob Cringle. ‘Governor not down yet?’
‘We’re on our way, Mr Percival.’
Parry inclined his head and strolled into the room.
