Half Moon Street (31 page)

Pitt walked alone across the stage to Cecily Antrim.

“I apologize for interrupting you, but there is a matter I need to discuss which will not wait.”

“For God’s sake, man!” Bellmaine shouted in outrage, his voice raw-edged with tension. “Have you no soul, no sensibilities at all? The curtain goes up in two days! Whatever you want, it can wait!”

Pitt stood quite still. “No, Mr. Bellmaine, it cannot wait. It will not take a great deal of Miss Antrim’s time, but it will be even less if you permit me to begin straightaway, rather than stand here and argue about it.”

Bellmaine swore colorfully and without repeating himself, but he also waved his hands in dismissal, indicating the general direction of the dressing rooms. Tellman remained rooted to the spot, spellbound for the next scene.

Cecily Antrim’s room was filled with rails hung with velvets and embroidered satins. A second wig rested on a stand on the long table beneath the mirror amid a clutter of pots, brushes, bowls, powders and rouges.

“Well?” she asked with a wry smile. “What is it that is so urgent that you dare to defy Anton Bellmaine? I am consumed with curiosity. Even a live audience would not have kept me from coming with you to find out. I assure you, I still do not know who killed poor Delbert Cathcart, or why.”

“Nor do I, Miss Antrim,” he replied, digging his hands into his coat pockets. “But I know that whoever it was saw a particular photograph of you which is not available to most people, and it mattered to him very much.”

She was intrigued, and the smile on her mouth was too filled with amusement for him to believe she had any idea what he was going to show her. The laughter went all the way to her clear, sky-blue eyes.

“There are scores of photographs of me, Superintendent. My career is longer than I wish to admit. I couldn’t begin to tell you who has seen which.” She did not say he was naive, but her voice carried the implication quite plainly, and it entertained her.

He did not like what he had to do next. He pulled out the postcard with the Ophelia travesty and held it out.

Her eyes widened. “Good God! Where did you get that?” She looked up at him. “You are quite right . . . that is one of Delbert’s. You are never going to say he was killed for that. That’s preposterous. You can probably buy them from half a dozen back street shops. I certainly hope so. It will have been a lot of discomfort for nothing if you can’t. The wet velvet was revolting on the skin, and abysmally cold.”

Pitt was stunned. For a moment he could think of nothing to say.

“But it is effective, don’t you think?”

“Effective.” He repeated the word as if it was in an unfamiliar language. He looked at her vivid face with its fine, delicate mouth and wonderful bones. “Yes, Miss Antrim, I have never known a picture to have more effect.”

She heard the emotion in his voice.

“You disapprove, Superintendent. That may be just as well. At least you will remember it, and it might make you think. The image that has no power to disturb probably has no power to change either.”

“To change?” he asked, his voice a little hoarse. “To change what, Miss Antrim?”

She looked at him very steadily. “To change the way people think, Superintendent. What else is worth changing?” Her expression filled with disgust. “If the Lord Chamberlain had not taken off the play you came to, then Freddie Warriner might not have lost his nerve, and we would have started a bill to make the divorce laws more equal. We wouldn’t have succeeded this time, but maybe the next, or the one after. You must begin by making people care!”

He drew in breath to make a dozen replies, then saw her smile, and understood what she meant.

“If you can change thought, you can change the world,” she said softly.

He pushed his hands farther into his pockets, his fists clenched tight. “And what thought was it you intended to change with this picture, Miss Antrim?”

She seemed faintly amused. He saw the flicker in her eyes.

“The thought that women are content with a passive role in love,” she replied. “We are imprisoned in other people’s ideas of who we are and what we feel, what makes us happy . . . or what hurts. We allow it to happen. To be chained by your own beliefs is bad enough, heaven knows; but to be chained by other people’s is monstrous.” Her face was alight as she spoke. There was a kind of luminous beauty in her, as if she could see far beyond the physically jarring image on the paper to the spiritual freedom she was seeking, not for herself so much as for others. If it was a lonely crusade, she was prepared for it and her courage was more than equal to it.

“Don’t you understand?” she said urgently to his silence. “Nobody has the right to decide what other people want or feel! And we do it all the time, because it’s what we need them to want.” She was close to him. He could feel the warmth of her, see the faint down on her cheek. “We feel more comfortable, it feeds our preconceptions, our ideas about who we are,” she went on fiercely. “Or else it is what we can give them, so we decide it is what they want. They should be grateful. It is for their good. It is for somebody’s good. It is what is right or natural . . . or most of all, it is what God wants! What monumental arrogance that we should decide that what is comfortable for us is what Almighty God wants. And we should make it so.”

“All of the pictures?” Pitt asked with the very faintest sarcastic edge to his voice, but he had to struggle to find it. “Some of them seemed blasphemous to me.”

“To you?” Her marvelous eyes widened. “My dear, pedestrian Superintendent. Blasphemous to you! What is blasphemy?”

He jammed his hands farther still into his pockets, straightening his arms. He could not allow her to intimidate him because she was beautiful and articulate and supremely sure of herself.

“I think it is jeering at other people’s beliefs,” he replied quietly. “Making them doubt the possibility of good and making reverence appear ridiculous. Whose God it is doesn’t matter. It isn’t a question of doctrine, it’s a matter of trying to destroy the innate idea we have of deity, of something better and holier than we are.”

“Oh . . . Superintendent.” She let her breath out in a sigh. “I think I have just been bested by a policeman! Please don’t tell anyone . . . I shall never live it down. I apologize. Yes, that is what blasphemy is . . . and I did not mean to commit it. I meant to make people question stereotypes and look again at us as individuals, every one different, never again say ‘She’s a woman, so she feels this . . . or that . . . and if she doesn’t, then she ought to. Or ‘He’s a priest, he must be good, what he says must be right, he doesn’t have this weakness, or that passion . . . if he does he’s wicked.” Her eyes widened. “Do you understand me?”

“Yes, I understand you, Miss Antrim.”

“But you disagree with me. I can see it in your face. You think I shock people, and it is painful. I am breaking something, and you hate breakage. You are here to keep order, to protect the weak, to prevent violent change, or any change that is not by consent of the masses.” She spread her hands wide—strong, beautiful hands. “But art must lead, Superintendent, not follow. It is my work to upset convention, to defy assumptions, to suggest that disorder out of which progress is born. If you were to succeed . . . entirely . . . we would not even have fire, let alone a wheel!”

“I am all for fire, Miss Antrim, but not for burning people. Fire can destroy as well as create.”

“So can everything that has real power,” she responded. “Have you seen
A Doll’s House
?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Ibsen! The play—
A Doll’s House
!” she repeated impatiently.

He had not seen it, but he knew what she was talking about. The playwright had dared to create a heroine who had rebelled against everything that was expected of her, most of all by herself, and in the end left her husband and home for a dangerous and lonely freedom. It had created a furor. It was condemned passionately by some as subversive and destructive of morality and civilization. Others praised it as honest and the beginning of a new liberation. A few simply said it was brilliant and perceptive art, most particularly since it was written with such sensitivity and insight of a woman’s nature—by a man. Pitt had heard Joshua praise it with almost the same burning enthusiasm as Cecily Antrim now showed.

“Well?” she demanded, the light in her face fading with exasperation as she began to believe she was confusing him.

“There are some differences,” he said tentatively. “One chooses to go to the theatre. These pictures are on sale to the public. What if young people are there . . . boys who know no better . . .”

She waved it aside. “There are always risks, Superintendent. There can be no gain without a certain cost. To be born at all is to risk being alive. Dare it! Shame the devil of the real death . . . the death of the will, of the spirit! Oh . . . and don’t bother to ask me who saw that picture. I would tell you if I could . . . I am deeply sorry Delbert Cathcart is dead—he was a great artist—but I can’t tell you because I haven’t the slightest idea!” And with that she turned and walked out of the door, leaving it wide open behind her, and he heard her footsteps dying away along the passage.

He stood alone in the dressing room and looked around at the trappings of illusion, the paint and the costumes which help the imagination. They were wrought with skill, but they were a minuscule part of the real magic. That sprang from the soul and the will, the inner world created with such passion it poured through and no material aids were needed to make it leap from one mind to another. Words, movement, gesture, the fire of the spirit made it real.

He looked at the photograph again. How many people were chained by other people’s beliefs of them? Did he expect Charlotte to be something that was not her true nature or what she really wished? Then he thought back to his first meeting with Caroline. In some ways she had been imprisoned . . . but by family, society, her husband—or herself ? The prisoner who loves his bonds is surely also responsible for their continuance?

He would rather Jemima, with her sharp, inquisitive mind, did not ever see a picture like this . . . certainly not until she was at least Charlotte’s present age.

What kind of a man would she marry? That was a preposterous thought! She was a child. He could see her bright little face in his mind’s eye so easily, so vividly, her child’s slender body, but already growing taller, legs longer. One day she would marry someone. Would he be gentle with her, allow her some freedom, and still protect her? Would he be strong enough to wish her happiness in whatever path it lay? Or would he try to make her conform to his own view of what was right? Would he ever see her as herself, or only as what he needed her to be?

So much of him agreed with what Cecily Antrim was trying to do, and yet the picture offended him—not only because he had seen it mimicked in death but because of the innate violence in it.

Was that necessary in order to shatter complacency? He did not know.

But he would have to send Tellman to establish beyond doubt where Cecily Antrim had been on the night of Cathcart’s death, even though he did not believe she had killed him. There had been no fear in her, no shock, no sense of personal involvement at all.

He would also send Tellman to find out precisely where Lord Warriner had been that night, just in case his love for her was less casual than it appeared. But that was a formality, simply something not to be overlooked. She had posed willingly for the picture; in fact, from what she had said, it had been her idea. She wanted them sold. The last thing she intended was for such a performance to be without an audience.

He pushed the picture back into his pocket and went to the door. He found his way out past piled screens and painted trees and walls, and several pieces of beautifully carved wood, to the stage door.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Caroline returned home with new heart and went straight upstairs before she could think better of it. She knocked on the old lady’s door, and when there was no answer, she opened it and went in.

Mrs. Ellison was lying half reclined in bed. The curtains were pulled to keep the light out and she looked asleep. If Caroline had not seen her eyelids flicker she would have believed she was.

“How are you?” she enquired conversationally, sitting on the edge of the bed.

“I was asleep,” Mrs. Ellison replied coldly.

“No, you weren’t,” Caroline contradicted her. “Nor are you going to be until tonight. Would you like to come to the theatre with us?”

The old lady’s eyes flew open. “Whatever for? I haven’t been to the theatre in years. You know that perfectly well. Whatever should I do there?”

“Watch the play?” Caroline suggested. She smiled. “And watch the audience. Sometimes that can be more fun. The drama on the stage is seldom the only one.”

Mariah hesitated for just an instant. “I don’t go to the theatre,” she said sullenly. “It’s usually nonsense they are performing anyway: cheap, modern rubbish!”

“It’s Hamlet.”

“Oh.”

Caroline tried to remember Vespasia’s words.

“Anyway,” she said honestly, “the actress who plays the queen is very beautiful, talented and frightfully outspoken. I am terrified of her. I always feel as if I shall say something foolish, or naive, when I see her afterwards, which we will because Joshua is bound to go and congratulate her. They are great friends.”

The old lady looked interested. “Are they? I thought the queen in
Hamlet
was his mother. She’s hardly the heroine, is she!”

“Joshua likes older women. I thought you had appreciated that,” Caroline said dryly.

Mrs. Ellison smiled in spite of herself. “And you are jealous of her.” It was a statement, but for once there was no edge of unkindness to it, rather something that could even have been sympathy.

Caroline decided to tell the truth. “Yes—a little. She seems to be so certain of herself . . . of everything she believes in.”

“Believes in? I thought she was an actress!” Mariah hitched herself a little higher in the bed. “What can she believe in?”

“All sorts of things!” Caroline pictured in her mind Cecily’s passionate face, her vivid eyes and the fire in her voice. “The absolute evil of censorship, the freedom of the mind and will, the values of art. . . . She makes me feel terribly old-fashioned . . . and . . . dull.”

“Poppycock!” Mrs. Ellison said vehemently. “Stand up for yourself. Don’t you know what you believe in anymore?”

“Yes, I think so—”

“Don’t be such a milksop! There must be something you are sure of. You can’t live to your age without having at least one certainty. What is it?”

Caroline smiled. “That I don’t know as much as I thought I did. I gather facts and make judgments about people and things, and so often there is one thing more that I didn’t know, and if I had it I would have changed everything.” She was thinking of the old lady and Edmund Ellison . . . but there were other things too, stretching back over the years: issues, decisions, stories only half known.

Mrs. Ellison grunted, but some of the anger had drained out of her.

“Then you are wiser than this woman, who imagines she knows so much,” she said grudgingly. “Go and tell her so.”

Caroline did not ask again if the old lady would come. They both knew she would not, and to have made the offer again would have broken the fragile thread of honesty between them.

She stood up and went to the door. Her hand was on it when the old lady spoke again.

“Caroline!”

“Yes.”

“Enjoy yourself.”

“Thank you.” She turned away.

“Caroline!”

“Yes?”

“Wear the red dress. It becomes you.”

She did not look back and spoil the moment by making too much of it. “Thank you,” she accepted. “Good night.”

Caroline dressed very carefully for the first night of
Hamlet.
She hesitated some time before having her maid put out the red dress the old lady had mentioned. It was actually a rich wine color, very warm, but definitely dramatic. She was uncertain about being so conspicuous. She sat in the chair in front of her looking glass and stared at her own face while her maid dressed her hair. She was still slender—she had not lost her shape at all—but she knew all the signs of aging that were there, the differences between her skin now and how it had been a few years ago, the slight blurring of the smooth line of her jaw, the fine lines on her neck, not to mention her face.

She had not Cecily Antrim’s glowing vitality, the confidence inside which gave her such grace. That was not only youth, it was part of her character. She would always command attention, admiration, a kind of awe, because she carried part of the magic of life in her mind.

Caroline still felt dull compared with her, sort of brown . . . compared with gold.

She thought of what Vespasia had said, and Mariah Ellison. But it was the thought of Mariah’s despair which finally made her sit up with a straight back, almost jerking the pins out of the maid’s hands.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured, wincing.

“Did I hurt you, ma’am?”

“My own fault. I shall sit still.”

She was as good as her word, but her thoughts still raced, wondering how she should conduct herself, what she should say to be honest, generous and yet not gushing. She cringed inwardly at the picture of appearing to seek favor, push herself forward with too much wordiness in praise she could not mean because she did not really know what she was talking about. They would listen from good manners, wishing she would stop before she embarrassed everyone further. Her face was hot merely imagining it.

Every instinct was to retreat into quiet dignity, say very little. Then she would appear to be sulking, and make herself even more excluded.

Either way Joshua would be ashamed for her. And suddenly it was not about how she felt at all, but how miserable he would be that mattered, and how the change would spill over into all their lives afterwards.

The maid was finished. It was beautiful; Caroline had always had lovely hair.

“Thank you,” she said appreciatively. Now she was ready for the dress. She hated having to go alone, but Joshua’s own performance would not be over until shortly before the end. Thank goodness
Hamlet
was such a long play. He would be there in time for the last act.

The theatre was so crowded she had to push her way forward, nodding one way and another to people she knew or thought she recognized. She was quite aware, several times, of smiling graciously at complete strangers whose looks wavered in confusion for a moment, then dutifully smiled back.

She made the deliberate decision to treat that as a joke. She refused to be self-conscious.

She found her way to the box Joshua had reserved for her. It was far easier not to come too late and thus disturb no one else, even if she might feel rather more lonely sitting there so obviously by herself. She spent the time watching others arrive. It was such a parade of character. At a glance she could see status, income, social aspiration, confidence or lack of it, taste, and so often what a woman thought of herself. There were those who were diffident, dressed in somber colors, dark blues and greens, modest and well cut. She wondered if they would rather have been more daring, had they had the nerve. Was the sobriety their own choice, or due to fear of displeasing their husbands—or even their mothers-in-law? How much did anyone dress to conform with what others expected?

And there were those in vivid colors, aching to be noticed. Was her own red dress like that, a dramatic gown to disguise an undramatic woman?

No. As Vespasia had said, she was free to choose to be whatever she wished. If she were undramatic, overshadowed by Cecily Antrim, then that was her own decision to retreat, to conceal her beliefs in order to please others and conform to what they expected of her. There was no need to be offensive, too forceful; there was never excuse to be intentionally or carelessly unkind. But she could be true to her own values.

And she liked the red dress. It became her coloring and lent a certain glow.

And of course there were those young girls in pale colors, looking innocent and virginal, self-conscious, but fully intending to be looked at.

Almost everyone she saw was acting, in their own way, as much as most of the players would be. It was only that the story line was obscure. The onlooker saw only one scene.

The lights dimmed at last and there was a breathless expectation. The curtain rose on the battlements at Elsinore. Caroline found she was nervous for Orlando Antrim. This was by far the largest role he had ever played. But then Hamlet was surely the largest role anyone would play. Was it not every actor’s dream?

From the moment he entered in the second scene, she sat forward a little, willing him to succeed, to remember all his lines, to pour into them the passion and the grief and the confusion the role demanded.

At the very first he seemed hesitant. Her heart sank. Would he, as always, be overshadowed by his mother, who seemed to dominate every stage on which she stepped?

Then the others left, except Orlando. He stepped forward into the light. His face was pale, even haggard, although presumably it was from paint. But the gestures of his body no one else could have imposed upon him, nor the agony in his voice.

“ ‘O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,

Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew! . . .

Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d

His canon ’gainst self-slaughter!’ ”

He gave the whole speech without hesitation. It poured from him so naturally it sounded as if he must have been the first to say it, not as learned and rehearsed, not brilliant acting, but torn from a young man’s soul.

“ ‘But break, my heart—for I must hold my tongue!’ ”

For a moment after the curtain descended there was silence. The stalls forgot they were an audience; they had seemed more like unseen, individual intruders in someone else’s tragedy.

Then suddenly they remembered and the applause boomed like thunder roaring around the vast space, filling the high ceiling.

From then on there was an electricity in the air, a charge of emotion so high the entire performance was lifted. The tragedy unfolded relentlessly; the doomed relationships progressed from one step to the next as if no one had the power to prevent them. Hamlet’s pain seemed a palpable thing in the air; the king’s duplicity, Polonius’s wise counsel fell on deaf ears, but its words had become familiar down the ages, and Bellmaine’s marvelous voice filled the heart and the mind. For those moments he dominated the stage. Even Hamlet was forgotten.

“ ‘This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.’ ”

Ophelia drifted helplessly into madness and death, an innocent sacrifice to others’ ambition, greed or obsession. Joshua tiptoed in and sat down silently, merely touching Caroline’s shoulder. Queen Gertrude wrought her own fate, still blind to it to the very last sip of the poisoned cup.

In spite of the skill and the personality of every actor on the stage, Hamlet towered above them all. It was his pain, and in the end his light extinguished, which left them in darkness when the last curtain came down.

As Caroline rose to her feet to applaud, Joshua beside her, there were tears running down her cheeks and she was too full of emotion even to think of speaking.

When at last the applause had faded, the house lights were blazing again, and people began to gather themselves to leave, Caroline turned to Joshua.

There was a mixture of joy and sorrow in his face. The joy was by far the greater, the excitement and the admiration, but she saw the faint shadow also, and knew in her heart how he would love to have played Hamlet himself, to have had a gift that far transcended mere talent and soared to genius. He knew that he had not. His art lay in wit and compassion, in making people laugh, often at themselves, and feel a new gentleness toward one another. In years to come he might play Polonius, but he would never be Hamlet.

She tried to think what to say that was honest and held no trace of condescension. That would be unbearable for him, just as it was for her.

The silence needed words, and she could not find them.

“I feel as if I’ve never really seen
Hamlet
before,” she admitted. “I would never have thought anyone so young could have such a comprehension of—of betrayal. His rage with the queen was so raw . . . and so close to love as well. Disillusion can destroy you.” She thought of Mariah and Edmund Ellison. How does one go on when dreams are shattered so totally there is nothing left to rebuild? How does one continue living with things soiled beyond retrieval?

She longed to share that with Joshua. She knew, looking at his face now, that he would feel only tenderness for Mrs. Ellison—no judgment, no revulsion.

But was it a breaking of trust to speak of it? The old lady would certainly know, because she would see it in his eyes, hear it in his voice. And she would be looking for it. She would be waiting for Caroline to betray her.

Then Caroline must keep silent. Maybe one day she would allow it, and then it would be all right.

“Are you going to speak to Cecily?” she said aloud.

His face broke into a smile. “Oh yes! I wouldn’t miss it. She was good—but he was better! This is the first time she has been eclipsed by anyone, except perhaps Bellmaine—long ago, when she was just beginning. She will be feeling . . .” He lifted one shoulder very slightly. “A great mixture of pride in Orlando . . . surely one has to be proud of one’s children. . . .”

She remembered with a stab that he had no children, and he was far too young to regard either of her daughters in that light. He might have had children, if he had married someone younger. She forced that thought away. This was no time for pity of any sort, least of all self-pity, or for doubt where he had given her cause for none.