Death Of A Hollow Man (3 page)

Fortunately, when he got home, everyone had gone to bed. He looked at himself in the kitchen mirror, surprised and a little disappointed at the modesty of his transformation. His face was pale and his eyes shone, but apart from that he looked pretty much the same.

But he was not the same. He sat down at the table and produced the glass, the flower, the streamer, and his free cast list. He smoothed the paper out and ran down the column of actors. Puck had been played by Roy Smith. Nicholas drew a careful ring around the name, washed and dried his glass carefully, put the rose and the paper and the streamer inside, then went to his room. He lay on his bed reliving every moment of the evening till daylight broke. The next day he went to the library, asked if there was a local drama group, and was given details of the Latimer. He went to the theater that same evening, told them he wanted to be an actor, and was immediately co-opted to help with the props for
French Without Tears.

Nicholas quickly discovered that there was theater and theater, and adapted philosophically. He had a lot (everything) to learn and had to start somewhere. He was sorry that none of the CADS, with the exception of Deidre, had been to see
The Dream,
but sensed very quickly that to attempt to describe it, let alone mention its effect on him, would be a mistake. So he made and borrowed props and ran about and made himself so useful that he was co-opted permanently. For the next play,
Once in a Lifetime,
he went on the book. He made a mess of prompting at first, bringing down on himself Esslyn’s scorn and Harold’s weary disdain, but he took the play home and read it over and over, absorbing the quick-fire rhythms, getting to sense the pauses, making himself familiar with exits and entrances, and became much better. He helped build the set for
Teahouse of the August Moon,
and Tim taught him basic lighting, letting him share the box and patting his bottom absentmindedly from time to time. He did the sound effects and music for
The Snow Queen,
and in
The Crucible,
he got a speaking part.

Nicholas learned his few lines quickly, and was always the first actor at rehearsals and the last to leave. He bought a cheap tape recorder and worked on an American accent, ignoring the amused glances between certain members of the cast. He made up an entire history for his character and listened and reacted with intense concentration to everything that went on around him onstage. Long before the first night he could think of nothing else. When it arrived and he was incompetently putting on too much makeup in the packed dressing room, he realized he had forgotten his lines. Frantically he sought a script, wrote them down on a piece of paper, and tucked it into the waistband of his homespun trousers. Waiting in the wings, he was overcome with a wave of nausea and was sick in the firebucket.

As he stepped onto the stage, terror struck him with hurricane force. Rows of faces swam into his line of vision. He looked once and looked away. He spoke his first line. The lights burned down, but he felt cold with exhilaration and excitement as, one after the other, the rest of his lines sprang to the forefront of his mind when needed and he experienced for the first time that strange dual grip that an actor must always keep on reality. Part of him believed in the Proctors’ kitchen in Salem with its iron pots and pans and crude furnishings and frightened people, and part of him was aware that a stool was in the wrong place and that John Proctor was still masking his wife and Mary Warren had forgotten her cap. Afterward in the clubroom he experienced a warm, close camaraderie (“Give me your hands, if we be friends”) that seemed fleetingly to surmount any actual likes and dislikes within the group.

In the pantomime he played the back legs of a horse, and then was offered the part of Danny in
Night Must Fall.

Rehearsals started six weeks before his “A” levels, and he knew he had failed the lot. The endless grumblings that had been going on at home for months about all the time he was spending at the Latimer erupted into a blazing row, and he walked out. Almost immediately Avery offered him the tiny room over the Blackbird bookshop. It was rent-free in exchange for dusting the shop every morning and cleaning Avery’s house once a week.

He had lived there now for nearly a year and subsisted, sometimes superbly (on Avery’s leftovers), but mainly on baked beans purloined from the supermarket where he worked. Nearly all his wages went on voice and movement classes—he had discovered an excellent teacher in Slough—and on theater tickets. Once a month he hitched up to London to see a show, determined to keep his batteries recharged by frequent injections of what he thought of as “the real thing.” (It was after an exhilarating performance of
The Merry Wives of Windsor
at the Barbican that he had chosen Ford’s Epicurean speech for his Central audition.)

He still didn’t know if he was any good. Brenda Leggat, first cousin to the Smys, reviewed the CADS productions in the local rag, and her perceptions were about as original as her prose. Every comedy was sparkling, every tragedy wrenched the heart. Performances, if not to the manner born, were all we have come to expect from this actor/ actress/soubrette/ingenue/cocktail cabinet. And Nicholas soon understood the group well enough to know that any direct questions regarding his performance would receive anodyne if not gushing reassurances. Plenty was said in the clubroom about absent friends, but it was almost impossible for an actor to get an honest opinion to his face. Everyone except Esslyn and the Everards (and Harold, of course) told Nicholas that he was marvelous. Harold rarely praised (he liked to keep them on their toes), except at first nights, when he behaved like a Broadway impresario, surging about hysterically, kissing everyone, distributing flowers, and even squeezing out a histrionic tear.

Nicholas finished his exercises, did a series of stretches and some more deep breathing, undressed, brushed his teeth, climbed into bed, and promptly fell into a deep sleep.

He dreamed it was the first night of
Amadeus,
and he stood in the wings dressed all in black with wrinkled tights and a skull under his arm, having learned the part
of Hamlet.

Rosa Crawley’s husband was waiting up, having spent the evening in the Cap and Bells with some fellow Rotarians and their polyestered spouses. He always tried to get home before his wife, not only because she hated finding the house empty but because he looked forward to hearing the continuing saga of theatrical folk that started almost the minute she came through the door. She never accompanied him to the pub, of course, and Earnest basked a little in her absence, knowing that his companions were aware that his wife had much more interesting fish to fry. Tonight he was home only minutes before her, and had just made his cocoa when she arrived. Earnest plumped up the sofa cushions, poured a double scotch on the rocks so that his wife could unwind, and sat back with his own drink, his face bright with anticipation.

Rosa sipped her whisky and watched Earnest pushing aside the wrinkled skin of his steaming cocoa a little enviously. Sometimes, especially on a night like this, she quite fancied a cup of cocoa but felt that it was surely (Slippery Elm Food apart) the least sophisticated drink in the entire world. Starting to take it of an evening could well be the first step on the sliding slope to coziness and a public admittance of middle age. Next thing she’d be padding around in a warm dressing gown and wearing thermal underwear. She slipped off her high-heeled shoes and massaged her feet. The shoes lay, vamp down, spiky four-inch heels stabbing the air.

She was a tiny woman, just over five feet tall with a Gypsyish appearance that she nurtured to an extreme degree. The black of her dark hair was regularly intensified, her fine dark eyes ringed with kohl and decorated with a double fringe of false lashes, while her coppery complexion spoke of the wind on the heath and a star to steer by. Her nose was larger than she would have liked, but she capitalized on this by hinting at a rather tragic immigrant Jewish background, a suggestion that would have horrified her grandparents, sturdy Anglo-Saxon farm workers from Lincolnshire. She nourished this vaguely Semitic Romany ancestry by wearing dark clothes with accessories that were so dazzling they seemed to be going off like fireworks rather than making a fashion point.

Looking over at Earnest placidly sipping his nightcap, she wondered anew at the strange fact of their marriage. It had been out of the question, of course, that she remain single after her divorce from Esslyn. Apart from the matter of pride, she couldn’t bear to be alone for more than five minutes. She had assumed that, with her looks and personality, men would come flocking out of the woodwork once word got around that she was available, but this had not been the case. Earnest Crawley, local builder, widower, and comfortable had been the only serious suitor.

He was a sweet man who knew his place, and she accepted him the first time he proposed. He was shy of and a little alarmed by the CADS, and apart from going to Rosa’s first nights and the closing night party, kept well away, perhaps sensing that this would please her best. Occasionally Rosa gave the leading lights in the company lunch, and then Earnest played mine host barricaded behind a trestle table and pouring out the Frascati. They all drank like whales, it seemed to him, and he was glad when it was all over and the hothouse atmosphere damped down to normal again. Now, he asked how it had gone tonight.

“Ach,” Rosa said exhaustedly, resting the back of her hand against her forehead, “quite horrendous. Joyce still hasn’t done a thing about my costume, David Smy is like an elephant loose on the stage, and the Everards—who play the Venticelli—are hopeless.”

Earnest finished his cocoa, picked up his pipe, and tamped it in contented anticipation. He had his own dramas at work, of course. Complaints from the foreman, rows in the hut, occasionally a serious accident. But there was something about the activities at the theater. Rosa relayed them with such panache that they rose far above the ordinary pettinesses of his working day.

“Harold says he’s going to strangle them.” (Rosa always opened her monologues with a flourishing bit of hyperbole.) “One at a time and very slowly, if they don’t pick up their cues.”

“Does he now?” Earnest made his response deliberately noncomittal. Rosa’s attitude to her director was variable. Sometimes her loathing and jeers at his aflectations knew no bounds: At others—usually when Harold had a clash with some supporting actress—he had all her sympathy. Then they were coevals, talent burnished bright, swimming in harness in a sea of mediocrity. This was clearly going to be one of those nights.

“The Venticelli open the show right? Just the two of them … quick fire … nonstop. Like Ros and Gil in that Stoppard play.”

“The Vend … what?”

“Venticelli. Italian for ‘little winds.’ They carry the news around.”

Earnest nodded sagely and waited for further juicy details about the Everards, whoever they might be. The poor buggers had obviously better get their skates on if they wanted to survive the course. But his wife had now moved on to Boris, who, she said, had painted his face up to the hilt and was playing the emperor Joseph as a mad Bavarian hausfrau.

The fact was that Rosa, like almost everyone else in the company, detested the Everards. Her tongue had no sooner alighted on their names than it winced and shrank away, as if tasting some noxious substance. They were well cast in
Amadeus,
for gossip was what they thrived on. They had been with the company six months, during which time they had dripped venom into more than one ear and mouthed spiteful tittle-tattle into many others. Esslyn alone escaped their rancor. They would slither and slide around him, their unforgiving eyes bright with admiration, like a pair of doting serpents.

“And Boris moves like a camel!” Rosa cried, flinging her hands in the air. “Dragging himself all over the place. He seems to think that being stately is the same thing as being practically immobile.”

Earnest nodded again and did a bit more tamping. And if it occurred to him to think it odd that never in the past two years, during which twelve plays had been produced, had Rosa’s tongue, so sharply dismembering performance after performance, ever once alighted on the name of her first husband, he wisely kept this observation to himself.

“Ruined, ruined!” Avery ran through the carpeted hall, pulling off his cashmere scarf and dropping it as he went. Gloves fell on the Aubusson, his coat on the raspberry satin sofa. Tim strolled along in the wake of all this turbulence, picking up Avery’s things and murmuring “Bad luck for some” when he came to the gloves. He stuffed one into each pocket of the coat and hung it up in the tiny hall next to his own, amused by the contrast between the Tattersall check with its garland of turquoise cashmere and little chestnut fingers sticking beseechingly up in the air, and his own somber dark grey herringbone and navy muffler.

Avery, already wrapped in his
tablier
and wearing his frog oven mitts, was pulling the le Creuset out of the oven. He put it down on a wooden trivet and eased the lid off a fraction of an inch at a time. While hurrying home, he had made a bargain with the Fates. He would not question Tim about the source and content of the previously mentioned phone calls if they would keep an eye on the
daube.
Avery, knowing the superhuman restraint that would be necessary to stick to his side of the agreement, had felt an almost magical certainty that the least the other party could do was to honor theirs. But running up the garden path, sure that he smelled a whiff of carbon on the cold night air, his certainties evaporated. And as he ran with quailing anticipation through the sitting room, he became firmly convinced that the bastards had let him down again. And so it proved to be.

“It’s got a crust on!”

“That’s all right.” Tim sauntered into the kitchen and picked up a bottle opener. “Aren’t you supposed to break that and mix it in?”

“That’s a cassoulet. Oh, God …”