No Laughing Matter (27 page)

The applause, as every night, was tremendous. Alma Grayson took four curtain calls on her own, one with the whole cast, and one with Rupert.

Eating his usual chicken sandwiches, drinking his regulation whisky and soda in Alma’s suite after the performance that night, Rupert wanted as always to burst into laughter at the absurd lavishness of the management’s idea of Louis XV – all these mirrors and satin ovals and little gilt tables and china bowls of rose petals. Such laughter was only relaxed nerves, of course. And the object it attached to varied from place to place. Here in Liverpool from the very first night his hilarity had fixed upon Alma’s excessively Pompadour setting. He had learnt by now not to release his laughter until he knew her mood; and to this, even after three months he never had the smallest reliable clue. ‘They’ve certainly put you in a profusion of Pompadour. It’s like a bad setting for
Monsieur
Beaucaire
.’
And he called her Lady Mary Carlisle, the Beauty of Bath. She had taken the joke up and nursed it with her strange cooing laugh, even saying when she came back from the lavatory, ‘My dear, the noise of that cistern. It must date from Pompadour’s days. Après moi le déluge.’ This with one of her rare coarse chuckles that so delighted by their contrast to her ethereal, lilylike grace.

But on another evening she had cut him off quickly with, ‘It’s the principal suite in the hotel. Everyone one’s ever heard of has stayed here at some time or other. But, of course, I oughtn’t to expect you to know that at your age.’ And yet again, she had revived the joke herself when they came back on the Wednesday night. ‘Are you reboff by Meestaire Nash, Monsieur Beaucaire?’ she asked. ‘I am no
Beaucaire, Lady Mary. I am a French gentleman. The hotel insult me with imitation French fashions. ‘But then swiftly turning against him, ’They’ve done their best. Look at these lovely sweet peas they’ve put in here for me, and this delicious fruit. It is never in very good taste to sneer when people have tried to be civil.’ Sometimes Hope
Merriman
gave him a little comradely smile to help keep up his spirits under Grayson snubbing, but she never said anything aloud and Ronald Rice always made a noise in his throat somehow indicative of support for Alma, it was only one of the many sounds that Rupert had christened his gentleman player noises. Not that she needed support, for every one – cast, management, stagehands, hotel staff – all united to line a cheering route for her, not a puddle uncloaked where she walked.

This evening, at full length of elegance with her feet up on the chaise longue, she said, ‘Heavens, how glad I shall be when Sunday comes along and we leave this grey, sad town.’ She smiled up at Rice who was pouring out her usual glass of Graves. ‘Dear Ronnie,’ she said. ‘Tho’ it isn’t the same. Now at the Cavendish at Eastbourne they give me white wine
and
oysters.’

‘Not, I hope,’ said Rupert, giving a teasing smile, for there was still time to charm her out of her mood, ‘in July.’

‘And why not in July? Oh, we are West End, aren’t we?’ She had put on what she called her knut’s voice. ‘“No oysters, dear boy, when the R’s in the month.” If you swallow much harder, to sound grand, Rupert, you’ll swallow your tonsils. Anyway I really can’t be
expected
to spend my time remembering what month it is. In good hotels they do that for me. Here I doubt if they know what season it is. Chicken mayonnaise on a chilly night like this. Even a bowl of soup would have … however, Liverpool’s the home of early closing and all those terrible bolshie things. But, I’m forgetting that Rupert loves it here. He finds all this heavy French furniture killingly funny for some reason. I never find ugliness funny. I wish I could. Cities like this must be one long laugh to him.’

‘I often think,’ Hope said, ‘that the great warm heart of the North of England is overrated.’

‘Do you, Hope dear, really? I’ve always found the greatest
kindness
in the North. But then people are what you make of them, aren’t they? North, South, East and West you’ll find that. Even Liverpool, tho’ it’s not my favourite town to play. After all, we’re all reflections
of the Divine Mind. What you give out, you receive back. And we’ve been giving them this horrid, ugly play.’

Ronnie, as always when the play was mentioned, shivered and said literally, ‘Brr!’

‘So how can there be an atmosphere of love?’ Alma asked them.

‘They’ve applauded the horrid ugly play loudly enough and filled the theatre,’ Rupert said.

‘No, darling, they’ve come to see me and they’ve applauded me. Oh, I don’t mean they haven’t had a lot else to applaud. Darling Ronnie who’s the most wonderful, dependable actor who never puts a foot wrong. Yes, you are, Ronnie. You’re always too modest. And Hope … I thought tonight, Hope dear, when you came on in the second act looking so perfectly lovely, that there ought to have been a round of applause just for that. And they’ve the excitement of the critics’ famous new find – Rupert Matthews. But now, darling, I’m going to talk to you seriously about those little bits of fussy business you’ve started putting in. They’ll be a disaster with the London critics. That you can be sure of. What you did to that poor play’s ending
tonight
! Surely, you can see that this is a moment of agony. She’s been rotten, God knows, and hard and thoughtless. It’s a horrid, cruel play. But at this moment the author does rise above his cynicism a little.’

She explained the play to them with characteristic little fluttering gestures of her left hand swivelling on a rigidly held wrist,
emphasizing
the important climaxes with nods of her head.

‘It’s a terrible moment for her when she sees that even her spineless, spoilt son has turned against her. The audience is riveted. They despise and dislike her, the author and I have seen to that. But then suddenly they can’t help pitying her. And we must play on that, Rupert, for all we’re worth. That moment of pity is the only excuse the play has. And you, dear boy, what do you do? What does he do? Hope, Ronnie, I appeal to you! He moves a wastepaper basket. The whole tension, the whole tension that both of us, Rupert, for up to this point you sustain the awful young man’s odiousness beautifully, the whole tension is broken by that stupid move of the wastepaper basket.’

‘But Alma, darling – I move the wastepaper basket as a deliberate refusal to take your misery seriously. We fixed all that with Gerald in Edinburgh.’

‘
You
may have done, darling, I never did. I should
never
have agreed to such a thing. One of the things you’ll learn as you have more
experience in the theatre is that we have very solemn obligations to our authors. Now, here’s this play, it’s cruel and clever and modern and everything else, but this young man has had one moment of tremendous insight into a woman’s essential loneliness. We can’t whatever we do let him down there. The London critics will be quick enough to see that the whole thing’s brittle, but if we can really put over that moment of sincerity, who knows, when the cleverness has worn off, we may be responsible for launching a new, a more solid Maugham. But we won’t if you move wastepaper baskets.’

‘But if I don’t I shall appear to be accepting my mother’s emotions at her own false valuation. We argued all that out with Gerald.’

‘You and Gerald never stop arguing. And it’s all very clever, no doubt. But I know one thing. And that is that you can’t fool around with a moment of sincerity. Audiences can tell. I felt it tonight. The applause was there, but the moment had been missed as surely as if you’d fluffed the lines.’

He was about to argue further, then, catching Hope’s eye, he said, ‘I’ll think it all through again.’

‘And now, darlings, I’m going to send you all off to bed. Apart from tomorrow night’s performance, we’ve all got to be very amusing and loving for Nina’s tea party tomorrow. Nina McKinley was a very great actress. Please, all of you remember that; now she’s old. Beyton’s a darling too, and very handsome. If she wanted to marry a peer she couldn’t have done better. Oh, dear, if our clever author could meet a few real aristocrats like Beyton, what much better and nicer plays he would write.’

Out on the terrace at Beyton, after admiring the heavenly roses and the quite glorious peacocks (how mad people were to be superstitious about any of God’s creatures, especially birds so lovely) Alma gathered rather more than three quarters of the Beyton’s houseparty around her to form her court. She told them how Lady Macbeth had to be played from a tiny, tiny little piece of hardness somewhere deep inside you, because, when anyone obstinately refuses to reflect God and all the beauty he has given us, hardness is all that is left – a little nugget of hardened will, a tiny patch of darkness that refuses to reflect the light. But for herself, she told them, she always preferred to play in comedy, for when the comic spirit came to life on the stage, it was like ships flashing signals to one another across the sea, signals of laughter and happiness, so that she fed the audience with her vitality and they fed
her back with their laughter. Playing in a successful comedy run one often seemed to need less food because of this feeding back and forth. And then more seriously she told them of those mysterious times when she had known for certain that the fun and the happiness she was giving out had been sustaining some particularly poor, unhappy love-starved soul in the audience; and how these intuitions had always been
confirmed
later. It was such things that made all the hard work seem worthwhile, for acting was, of course, mainly hard work – as old John Hare had taught her, thank goodness, work and work again, then work again. Here she broke off to tell Rupert that he ought not to be standing there idle.

‘You’ve heard all my stories before,’ she said. ‘Besides now that you are a celebrity you have to sing for your supper. Good Heavens, here you are in the same company as the great Nina McKinley and you’re not hanging on every word she says! Go and listen. That’s theatre history. She’s the giant. We, God help us, are the pygmies.’

Ronnie Rice was telling Lady Beyton of his century in the Actors
v.
Authors in the first year of peace.

‘I hadn’t touched a bat the whole time I was in Mespot and yet I played like an angel. I haven’t topped thirty-five since. Cricket’s a mysterious game.’

Lady Beyton gave him a mysterious smile, but she seemed pleased to change her devotee. To worship, Rupert found, was not altogether physically easy, for Lady Beyton, though flat and square as a playing card, was very short – the top of her head just above his crutch. Yet it was not a simple bend one must make to talk to her, for she held the world off with a very large square bosom. This was not all, for she wore an enormous floppy, rose-decked hat, the brim of which, from his height, appeared to be resting on her bosom. He took a step back, bent forward, then sideways, and from this agonizing position he confronted a very very old enamelled face out of which stared wildly two very round cornflower blue eyes. He took a listening position, but he was soon to learn that he was a courtier at a much more ancient court than Alma’s, one with different courtesy books.

‘Have you been looked after?’ she asked. ‘Good. The fig jam is our only real boast at Beyton. The trees are very old. Andrew’s great grandfather brought them back from the foot of Vesuvius. And they’ve always thanked us for rescuing them from lava by bearing
profusely. Now I want to know all about you. The young man the critics are raving about.’

There was no mockery in her voice, which indeed was all on one note, and her eyes begged for some message from the world outside to one so old.

As Rupert talked, he felt increasingly aware of the difference of these two generations – Alma’s so claiming, so loquaciously uncertain, Nina McKinley’s the great age of theatrical certainty, of kings and queens for all their ham and rabbits on the stage (or perhaps because of them). The great eyes looked up at him. Occasionally the famous voice said, ‘Oh, that’s so clearly put’ or ‘if you act as well as you talk, young man, you’ll go far.’ Quite soon he hardly felt the crick that had come into his back from bending so low.

‘And now, what of this part? What are you making of that?’ she asked abruptly while he was still speaking so that he wondered if he had been talking too much; but it was clear from her eager eyes that it was just an old woman’s impatience to keep up to date. All that he had forborne to say to Alma, all the points that he had left for Gerald to make at rehearsals, all that Hope or Ronnie would have been bored to hear, he now poured out to this famous yet sympathetic woman.

‘Technically it’s superb melodrama and many of the lines are really witty. But, of course, it’s not a great play. Only it is something absolutely fresh. Part of a new willingness to say what we really think, to face the fact that there’s something rotten about the smart set and that there’s a real hatred between the generations nowadays. Maugham got near to some of it with
Our
Betters
and, of course,
The
Vortex
;
last year was a real break through. But I think
Before
the
Weekend
is better because it’s truer and more bitter. More how my generation feels,’ he added with a boyish laugh, for he didn’t want to seem pompous, ‘And above all it’s got a great fat part for me.’

He stopped, for really he was doing all the talking. There was a silence for a moment and Lady Beyton still stared at him as though to make sure that he had finished.

‘Well, you mustn’t let them fob you off with a mingy part like that again. Who’s your agent? He’s the one to blame. But never mind, the critics have noticed you. That’s the main thing. My daughter was telling me before you arrived. She read something out to me about you from the
Morning
Post.
I don’t go to the theatre now much
myself 
because I’m a bit deaf. And they put on so many unpleasant things. Mothers and sons drunk and shouting abuse at each other, and now I hear it’s sons blackmailing their mothers. They’ll get nobody to come to see such things, of course.’