Perfect Gallows (29 page)

“Yes, of course. You do not even wish to be introduced as Andrew Wragge?”

“If that's all right.”

“I will try to remember.”

She left. Andrew worked on in a dream, glad now of the Italian's silence and surliness. The long repetitive hours, stooking over the crunching silvery stubble, were just right for his mood—not that he spent the time being Prospero or repeating his lines or thinking about the play, though occasionally some little nuance of tone, some pause, would involuntarily float into his mind and he would then consider it briefly before rejecting it. That was all settled. Better not mess around now. Mostly, though, his mind stayed blank, so that by the end of the morning he wouldn't have been able to remember a single definite idea that had been there.

He went back to the house for luncheon. With the harvesters breaking off at noon and the cousins not lunching till one, he ate alone. Again, that was best.

His Italian had persuaded one of the others to swap places for the afternoon, and the new man wanted to be friendly, but Andrew rebuffed him, so he spent his social energies shouting to whichever of the other two was nearer, clearly relying on the privacy of language to tease his friends with earthy remarks about the women, who themselves joined in by asking with less than innocence what he was saying. In the end the one who had been working with Andrew all morning came striding over and embarked on a face-to-face quarrel with gloriously Italian gestures and poses. At any other time Andrew would have watched, absorbing each detail, but now he blanked the scene out and stooked on alone. The quarrel ended with his morning's companion returning to work with him in welcome sullenness.

Halfway through the afternoon the binder broke down, more seriously than usual, so that the stookers reached the point where there were no more sheaves for them to stack and Dave was still wrenching and cursing at the innards of the machine.

The other two Italians, apparently a little ashamed of their behaviour, made a peace move by calling to Andrew's partner to come and join them where they sat with the women. He scowled but went over. Andrew stood alone, staring over the half-cut barley, with the stubble in the foreground and then the wall of bare stalks and the browner heads sloping smoothly away towards the dovecote. Footsteps crackled to his left. He turned to see Jean striding towards him. He made his smile welcoming but purely social.

“I've got to talk to you,” she said. “There isn't time now. He's almost got it going.”

“Can we leave it a few days? Till the play's over?”

“Don't be stupid, darling. You'll be going away straight after. Something's happened. I mean it hasn't.”

“I'd …”

“Listen. I know it's no use before tonight. I can cope with that. And I don't want to muck things up if I can help it. But you can't expect me to …”

She paused, staring at him, her chin set. Beyond her Dave straightened from the binder and began to wipe the grease off his forearms with a twist of straw.

“I'll come up tonight,” he said. “Usual sort of time?”

“You'll still be too worked up. You'd better sleep on it. You know what it's about, don't you?”

“I suppose you're sure?”

She gazed at him, not angry, hardly hurt. Almost amused, in fact—studying him, the sort of person who, knowing her so well, could still ask a question like that. He realized that she had stopped loving him. Anyway, she was sure. You could set the calendar by her, she had said last time.

“Listen,” she said. “I'll get the milking done early tomorrow and not clean up. I'll be free by half past six.”

“OK. At the stile?”

Dave turned. His unarticulated shout floated across the stubble. She shook her head, then nodded it towards the dovecote.

“Down there,” she said. “Quarter to seven. Don't be late.”
She turned and ran back to the binder. The tractor-engine roared, the blades clattered and the sheaves came tumbling out on to the stubble. Andrew slotted himself back into his job, using its rhythm to blank his mind once more so that the energies could go on gathering into the well of his inner self. At half past four Cousin Brown came down again to make sure that Mrs Althorp didn't try to keep her cast at work a minute longer than the agreed time.

SEVEN

A hazed August evening. Bodies still sweaty with harvest, aching with the long day, tender with the scratch of thistly sheaves. From beyond the yew hedge the voices of the audience, their main note clearly American, restless, an irritable patch in the smooth calm of beechwoods and the sweep of unmown lawns. Everything weary, leaves still green but with a deadish hue, the tussocks of grass half fallen, stems pale, seed shed. A kind of ache in the air, in the slant dull light, a yearning to have all this world over and swept away by the scour of winter.

“Did you hear?” someone whispered. “We've taken Paris. It was on the six-o'clock.”

Cousin Brown had decided to begin her production with Ariel beckoning the whole cast to cross the stage in procession. Those needed for the opening scene were to peel off and take up their positions. Prospero, who was to remain on stage throughout the performance—sometimes asleep, sometimes watching in trance the action on stage, sometimes conducting or reacting to it—crossed to his cave down right while Caliban, his entrance concealed by the procession of courtiers, huddled invisible among the weed-covered rocks down left. The mariners posed in their mime of ship-work while the rest of the procession passed out of sight. Prospero summoned Ariel and mimed the transfer of powers that would allow him to wake the tempest, Jack rattled his thunder-sheet. The mariners woke into movement and the play would begin.

Sweltering in his heavy robe, with his tome under his arm, Andrew waited by the fresh-clipped arch. He had been first dressed because he needed to be alone, out of the fret and dither of the Green Room hut, away from the postmaster's tedious wishes of good luck and Charles wittering round searching for his missing hose. The rest of the procession started to line up, the courtiers in velvets and golds, the mariners drabber, Trinculo in motley—Cousin Brown had amassed a biggish wardrobe over the years. Jean came and stood beside him, wearing a pale green floating tunic with a gold ribbon crossing between her breasts. Cousin Brown had erased her freckles, making her pink-and-white, with crimson half-pouting lips.

“You're going to get some whistles,” he whispered.

She nodded, unperturbed.

“You're still coming?” she said.

“Yes.”

She accepted his promise by practising her Miranda face at him, demure but eager. He smiled and turned away. She would understand he didn't want to talk.

The next ten minutes were crucial. He had to get them right. It wasn't only a matter of making a good impression on Mr Oakley—that was something practical, possibly useful, more likely a dead end. A career was certain to be full of people who could have helped but were too blind or busy to see their chance. The main thing was different but far more vital. It was already announced, clear and unchangeable on the playbills, in the programmes. “Prospero: Adrian Waring.”

Tonight he was born.

In conversation he had been casual about it—might as well start some time—but inwardly it had become all-important. No more come-and-go of Adrian at need, to outface problems, to get girls and other things he wanted. Now he was going to take his place before the world and become real. For this birth he must prepare so that he would walk on stage filled with his energies, robed with his powers. There would be hundreds, thousands of other performances through the years, but they all depended on getting this one right. The jeering note of the GIs' chatter was a threat but also a test, exhilarating. If he got it right they would be silent for him.

Self-absorption did not mean unawareness—quite the opposite. He was conscious of everything, the itches and scratches of his skin and the ache of muscles, the silence of woods and lawns, the nervous gathering of the cast, the need to warn Jean about the whistles. If he had chosen he could have tuned his hearing and picked out the voice of a single soldier beyond the hedge, caught every syllable, understood not just the present meaning but all that had happened to cause that present, far back into some small-town boyhood.

He heard a muffled yelp and turned to see the door of the Men's Green Room bang open and Charles burst out, half dressed, clutching the waistband of his hose at knee-level. At least he'd found them. He dropped his cloak and circlet on to the grass and finished pulling the hose up over his shirt-tails. His attitude expressed outrage, shock, fright. All the cast had turned at his yell and were watching, so they all saw Caliban come sidling out behind him. Impossible to think of him as Samuel, he was already so invested with his part, the grimaces, the gestures, the crab-like scuttlings. Cousin Brown was going over to speak to Charles. Caliban rushed past her, beyond his proper place in the procession and up to its head, where he seized Andrew by the arm and tried to drag him aside. Andrew resisted. The dark brown skin under its monster make-up seemed to be suffused almost purple. The eyes bulged. Andrew turned his head away. Cousin Brown was speaking to Charles. Charles said something, contrived a half-smile. Cousin Brown picked up the coronet and cloak and waited to help him dress.

“Baas! Baas!”

At least he kept his voice low. It was not his butler tone, nor Caliban's, but the nigger-talk he had used with Uncle Vole.

“Not now,” muttered Andrew.

“You are the heir. You promise me. Send and fetch the wife.”

Andrew did not hesitate, did not even choose. The voice was already in his mouth, as it had been the morning he had killed Uncle Vole. He looked coldly down.

“Be quiet. You can tell me tomorrow.”

The contorted mouth opened to plead again, but now from beyond the hedge came a rasp of crackles, a magnified cough, a voice through a loudspeaker.

“Now, men, hear this. It is a great privilege, a very great privilege, for us to be here. Time to time you fellows get bitching about this war we're fighting. You ask your pal what the hell good we're doing over here, right?”

“Right, lieutenant,” called a voice. Others laughed.

“OK, guys, take it easy. Now I read some place how Bill Shakespeare who wrote this great play spoke the same way we do, with a good American accent. That doesn't prove he was an American, but it shows he wasn't only an Englishman. He was both. And this play of his …”

Caliban—Samuel—had not moved but still stood pleading, a violent­ agonized pose, the half-gripped hands held forward as if about to rip their way in, through the role of Prospero, through the public presence of Adrian to the inmost cave where Andrew had his secret being. Let him in, pay any attention at all, acknowledge his right to plead, and the focused powers would start to scatter. Andrew pivoted his own head away and allowed his body to follow it round. He felt fingers grip the elbow that held the tome against his side. Without looking down he raised his other hand and prised them loose. The cast were watching, mostly baffled but Charles now warily, out of the corners of his eyes. Cousin Brown marched up the line, took Samuel by the hand and led him to his place. Andrew faced the empty arch, seeing and hearing nothing and everything. The alien voice crackled to its peroration.

He waited for his long-planned life to start.

EIGHT

After seven weeks' practice his fingers and toes knew the route from Florrie's linen-room without conscious thought. The only strangeness was to be climbing down in the dawn, not up. The sash slid without a sound. Elbows on sill, reach with right foot for hopper-head of rainwater down-pipe, stretch right arm round corner to decorative bobble, swing body sideways and round into vertical slot, chimney down that, reach with right foot again—a blind bit, this—out and round for sill of Samuel's pantry.

What?

Slither. The crackle of something plummeting into bushes. Craning, he could see where the leaves still trembled in the shrubbery below. He reached with his foot again, found the place, but wrong—greasy and unsafe. Retracting the foot and holding his body in tension he peered down at the tilted sole. A yellow smear. Even before he had reached down to touch it and then sniffed at his fingertip he had guessed what it was. Last night at the party … Cousin Blue's lost treasure. The missing butter.

Very peculiar. Somebody must have put it there. After Samuel had closed the shutters, or he'd have seen. He'd have done that just before the play and there'd have been people in and out of the pantry after. One of the other servants, taking the below-stairs schism into new areas of spite? Cousin Blue herself, so as to be able to berate Samuel and thus remind him of his place after his triumph as Caliban? Wouldn't she have done that more publicly? They'd been in the pantry when Andrew had rushed in for a wet cloth—Charles had spilt his wine over Jonny Price's beautiful pale blue suit—God knows how many coupons. Cousin Blue with her back to him, low-voiced but vehement.

“… stolen by one of these strangers,” she was saying. “Nevertheless I
will
have butter …”

And then she'd stopped until Andrew had scurried out, cloth in hand.

He shook his head, refusing the mystery. It was part of the past, nothing to do with him any more. He eased the shoe off, gripped the laces in his teeth and with one bare foot climbed on. Round on to the sill, down on to elbows, reach with left foot for hopper-head of sink outlet, and down that pipe into the shrubbery. He could see the butter dish lying upside down a few feet down the slope, but he left it there. Perhaps on his way back he would retrieve it and take it to Samuel, give the old boy a chance to explain what he'd been so upset about last night. That was another bit of the past, but worth tidying up in order to be shot of it. Same with Jean.

He walked up the steep path to the front terrace and then immediately right down the stone stair that led towards the woodland garden. As he sat on the lowest step to put his shoe back on the air changed. Sunlight caught the topmost branches of the trees and moved steadily down. Dawn became day.