‘Now,’ he said, over their coffee, ‘I ask you my questions. If there is a secret you tell me so, and with difficulty I shut myself up. If not, you confide in me, because everybody in the Vulcan makes me their confidant and I am greatly flattered by this. In any case we remain friends, no bones broken, and we repeat our little outings. How old do you think I am?’
With some embarrassment, Martyn looked at his scrawny neck, at the thin lichen-like growth of fuzz on his head, and at his heavily scored and indented face. ‘Fifty-seven,’ she ventured.
‘Sixty-two,’ said Jacko complacently. ‘I am sixty-two years old, and a bit of a character. I have not the talent to make a character of myself for the people who sit in front, so instead I play to actors. A wheel within wheels. For twenty years I have built up my role of confidant and now, if I wanted to, I couldn’t leave off. For example I can speak perfect English, but my accent is a feature of the role of Papa Jacko, and must be sustained. Everybody knows it is a game and, amiably, everyone pretends with me. It is all rather ham and jejune, but I hope that you are going to play too.’
Martyn thought, ‘It would be pleasant to tell him: I’m sure he’s very nice and so why don’t I do it? I suppose it’s because he looks so very old.’ And whether with uncanny prescience or else by a queer coincidence, he said, ‘I’m not nearly as peculiar as I look.’
Martyn said tentatively, ‘But I honestly don’t know what you want me to tell you.’
On the opposite wall of the restaurant there was a tarnished looking-glass, upon the surface of which someone had half-heartedly painted a number of water-lilies and leaves. Among this growth, as if drowned in Edwardiana, Jacko’s and Martyn’s faces were reflected. He pointed to hers.
‘See,’ he said. ‘We rehearse a play for which it is necessary a secondary-part actress should resemble, strikingly, the leading man. We have auditions, and from the hundreds of anxious ingénues we select the one who is least unlike him, but she is still very unlike him. Incidentally,’ Jacko continued, looking Martyn very hard in the eye, ‘she is the niece of Clark Bennington. She is not very like him either which is neither here nor there and perhaps fortunate for her. It is her unlikeness to Adam that we must deplore. Moreover, although I am a genius with make-up, there is very little I can do about it. So we depend instead on reflected emotions and echoed mannerisms. But although she is a nice little actress with a nice small talent, she cannot do this very well either. In the meantime our author who is a person of unbridled passion where his art is in question, becomes incensed with her performance and makes scenes and everybody except her Uncle Bennington retires into corners and tears pieces of their hair out. The little actress also retires into corners and weeps and is comforted by her Uncle Bennington, who never the less knows she is no good.
‘Upon this scene there enters, in the guise of a dresser,’ he jabbed his finger at the fly-blown glass, ‘this. Look at it. If I set out to draw the daughter or the young sister of the leading man, that is what I should draw. Everybody has a look at her and retires again into corners to ask what it is about. Because obviously, she is not a dresser. Is she perhaps – and there are many excited speculations. “A niece for a niece?” we ask ourselves, and there is some mention of Adam’s extreme youth, you must excuse me, and the wrong side of the rose bush, and everybody says it cannot be an accident and waits to see, except Papa Jacko whose curiosity will not permit him to wait.’
Martyn cried out, ‘I’ve never seen him before, except in films in New Zealand. He knows nothing about me at all. Nothing. I came here from New Zealand a fortnight ago and I’ve been looking for a job ever since. I came to the Vulcan looking for a job, that’s all there is about it.’
‘Did you come looking for the job of dresser to Miss Hamilton?’
‘For any job,’ she said desperately. ‘I heard by accident about the dresser.’
‘But it was not to be a dresser that you came all the way from New Zealand, and yet it was to work in the theatre, and so perhaps after all you hoped to be an actress.’
‘Yes,’ Martyn said, throwing up her hands, ‘all right, I hoped to be an actress. But please let’s forget all about it. You can’t imagine how thankful I am to be a dresser, and if you think I’m secretly hoping Miss Gainsford will get laryngitis or break her leg, you couldn’t be more mistaken. I don’t believe in fairy tales.’
‘What humbugs you all are.’
‘Who?’ she demanded indignantly.
‘All you Anglo-Saxons. You humbug even yourselves. Conceive for the moment the mise en scène, the situation, the coincidence, and have you the cheek to tell me again that you came thirteen thousand miles to be an actress and yet do not wish to play this part. Are you a good actress?’
‘Don’t,’ Martyn said, ‘don’t. I’ve got a job and I’m in a sort of a trance. It makes everything very simple and I don’t want to come out of it.’
Jacko grinned fiendishly. ‘Just a little touch of laryngitis?’ he suggested.
Martyn got up. ‘Thank you very much for my nice dinner,’ she said. ‘I ought to be getting on with my job.’
‘Little hypocrite. Or perhaps after all you know already you are a very bad actress.’
Without answering she walked out ahead of him, and they returned in silence to the Vulcan.
II
Timed to begin at seven, the dress-rehearsal actually started at ten-past eight. Miss Hamilton had no changes in the first act, and told Martyn she might watch from the front. She went out and sat at the back of the stalls near the other dressers.
Suddenly the lights went up along the fringe of the curtain. Martyn’s flesh began to creep. Throughout the auditorium other little flames sprang up, illuminating from below, like miniature footlights, the faces of the watchers in front. A remote voice said, ‘OK. Take it away,’ a band of gold appeared below the fringe of the curtain, widened and grew to a lighted stage. Parry Percival spoke the opening line of Dr Rutherford’s new play.
Martyn liked the first act. It concerned itself with the group of figures Jacko had already described – the old man, his son, his son’s wife, their daughter and her fiancé. They were creatures of convention, the wife alone possessed of some inclination to reach out beyond her enclosed and aimless existence.
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