Perfect Gallows (8 page)

On his way up the back alley he lifted the lid of Mrs Arlott's dustbin and stuffed them well in under the mess, then used a stick to rake a pile of potato peelings on top. Passing down Fawley Street he stopped and showed the bobby the brass dancer, which he'd taken for that purpose.

“Very nice,” said the bobby. “You got something to remember her by, then. Off to the station with you now.”

His voice was gruff with emotion. Andrew thanked him again, with a choke in his own voice. A couple of streets further on he tossed the dancer up into a static-water tank and heard it splash. No alliances, no obligations, no memories, no regrets. Clean.

He pushed through swing doors into the Woodbine-reeking fug of the police-station front office. Four or five people were waiting, crouched on hard benches in the long boredom of war. A woman wearing a fur coat and a pork-pie hat like a man's was at the counter watching the desk-sergeant write in a ledger. At the movement of the doors she turned.

“Andrew!” she said. “Oh, thank heavens!”

It was Cousin Brown. The sergeant stopped writing and looked up.

“Found him already?” he said. “There's service for you.”

“Oh, my poor boy,” said Cousin Brown. “How dreadful for you about your mother, but how wonderful that you are alive. Of course we believed that you must have been at home when the bomb fell but they had failed to find you. They had telephoned The Mimms, thinking you were still with us, so I came in to see what I could do. You will come home with me, won't you? There is no need to pay the slightest attention to what Father says—in the evenings, that is.”

Andrew shook his head. His dazedness was real. He felt exhausted, too feeble to summon the protective presence of Adrian to act for him.

“Half a mo, madam,” said the sergeant. “That's not how we do things in the police force. I'll have a few particulars from the young gentleman, if you don't mind.”

Fetching a fresh ledger he wrote with deliberate slowness. Andrew let Cousin Brown spell out the address of The Mimms as his new home, but as soon as they were out on the steps he said, “It's very kind of you, Cousin Elspeth, but actually I can't come back to The Mimms now.”

“Oh, but …”

“I've got a job. Acting. It's only Dopey in the panto, but it's something.”

“My dear boy! I quite understand. You have somewhere to live?”

“Mrs Habermas—she's the stage manager's aunt—she's got my ration-book so I can eat there. I'm sleeping under the stage.”

Cousin Brown stopped in her stride and turned to face him. It had started snowing again, crumbs of whiteness dribbling through the grey air. Her breath rose in a cloud. Her eyes glittered.

“How too lovely for you! And of course you cannot tell the authorities lest they try to prevent you. I shall not. I know you are doing precisely what you should. Perhaps I shall come and see the show this afternoon.”

“I suppose I'll need somewhere to live when the run ends. It'll be term again then. I don't want to swap schools—there's Higher Cert this summer.”

“I shall have to think about that. We have several connections in Southampton—old servants and so on. We shall look after the rent, of course, and I must talk to Mr Oyler about making you an allowance …”

“But …”

“Nonsense. You positively must have independence. Now, Andrew, I have a proposal to put to you. To anyone who did not think as we do it might seem heartless, raising such a matter so soon after your poor mother's death, but I know you will understand. I barely slept following our talk last week and was quite disappointed to discover when I rose that you had already left. The thing is, I have decided to revive the Players this summer. I shall put
The Tempest
on. I want you to help me.”

Andrew gazed at her, saying nothing. The feebleness which had overcome him in the police station was back, worse. He'd had two dry Bovril sandwiches between performances last evening, nothing since then except the orange tea in the dockers' den. He hadn't got to bed till quarter past four and Toby had come to sit on his mattress at seven. Mr Trinder's name hadn't had any effect, so he'd had to get up. He should've gone to Mrs Habermas for breakfast, but he'd wanted to get to Fawley Street and look for the tea-pot before anyone else found it. He'd seen Number 19 in rubble. He had spent other energies with the black girl. The croak and bark of the Dame echoed in his mind. He seemed now to understand what Cousin Brown was saying, but to have no feelings about it, no answer, either way.
The
Tempest
. They'd done scenes from it for School Play, two years back. He'd been Miranda, of course. The summer. Call-up. She'd done
The Tempest
before, she was saying, almost got Gielgud … Samuel had been first rate, most unusual, as Caliban. Was she giving him Ferdinand? All Ferdinand had to do was persuade an audience that Miranda wasn't stupid to keel over at the sight of him—Adrian could do that—any woman. Ariel? Come unto these yellow …

“It is a tremendous risk,” Cousin Brown was saying. “Anyone else would say you were far too young, but I am fully confident that you can take Prospero.”

Uncle Vole?

Out of the icy sky, unwilled, Adrian floated down and cloaked him round—not just a fantasy version of himself but a real person, definite, different. It had never happened before. Now Adrian smiled with his lips, spoke with his voice, serious, modest at the honour, confident in his powers.

“I'd love to try,” he said.

March 1986

T
he room was almost as famous as the face, designed for Adrian Waring by David Mlinaric, and therefore having featured regularly in all the glossier supplements and decor mags. Despite the fame it shared something of the face's willed anonymity, a lavish domestic setting for almost any male star from the more intellectual end of the spectrum. The logs that burnt in the wide fireplace were cedar, the Baksts were originals, the modern water-clock whispered and tinkled in a niche framed by a miniature proscenium arch—a fancy perhaps of the owner's, not the designer's, with its suggestion of time being as fluid and transient as a stage performance, and vice versa. Any actor might have had such a notion. The one element in the room that spoke of particular choices was contained in the niche that balanced the one with the water-clock. There the three shelves were crowded with a clutter of small objects, porcelain pigs and shepherdesses, souvenir mugs, glass knick-knacks, treen, a brown stoneware ink-bottle, a Japanese doll with a parasol, lace-makers' tools and so on. Not only the choice but the clutter of the arrangement seemed foreign to Adrian. He had his own knick-knacks, mostly mementoes of his career and other dramabilia, disposed about the room, but in a far more composed and orderly fashion.

Adrian, in a black tracksuit and training-shoes, was lolling in the corner of the immense white sofa, flipping to and fro through the pages of an elderly and rather battered book, its linen cover embossed with a picture of a Zulu warrior picked out in black and gold. The girl who had been with him at the preview came in wearing a blue butcher's apron, looking no less appealing in it than she had in her furs. She was carrying a saucer which she held in triumph under his nose.

“Olive oil,” she said. “You told me water but it kept sticking.”

On the saucer was a large round of butter embossed with the representation of a sheep.

“That was my Cousin May's,” said Adrian. “Elspeth's was a horse and old Arnold's a bull. No doubt Samuel had selected them as appropriate when rationing started.”

“Which was yours?”

“I never had one of these. The ration would not have filled them by the time I came on the scene. That's why Samuel made the little ones.”

She turned to the left-hand niche, probed with a spider's delicacy among the clutter and brought back one of the smaller moulds.

“You mean this is you?” she said, holding it out on the flat of her palm. He glanced at the whittled scrap and nodded.

“Was me,” he said. “Now, listen.”

As he started to read from the book his voice changed, became creaky, sing-song, intense. It was light in tone and without any apparent tricks or distortions was unmistakably African.

“Look now, my father! There on the plain far away is a place of the white men. It is called Stanger. There, where is the white man's town, stood the great kraal Duguza. I cannot see, for my eyes are dark; but you can see. Where the gate of the kraal was built there is a house; it is the place where the white man gives out justice; that is the place of the gate of the kraal, through which Justice never walked. Behind is another house, where the white men who have sinned against Him pray to the King of Heaven for forgiveness; there on that spot I have seen many a one who had done no wrong pray to a king of men for mercy, but I have never seen but one who found it.
Ou
! The words of Chaka have come true: I will tell them to you presently, my father. The white man holds the land, he goes to and fro about his business in peace where Impis ran forth to kill; his children laugh and gather flowers where men died in blood by hundreds; they bathe in the waters of the Imbozamo, where once the crocodiles were fed daily with human flesh; his young men woo the maidens where other maids have kissed the assegai. It is changed, nothing is the same, and of Chaka are left only a grave yonder and a name of fear.”

“Please stop,” she said. “I'm sorry, but it's horrible. I can smell the blood in your voice … What's wrong? I mean you can go on if you want. Of course you were doing it beautifully. Only …”

He closed the book and laid it aside, then put up his hand and took hers. She laid the saucer of butter on the floor and sat, snuggling in against him. His fingers caressed gently at her neck.

“How long have you known you had second sight?” he said. “I'm not sure I approve. Perhaps I shouldn't have taken you to the sale.”

“But I loved it!”

“Perhaps I shouldn't have gone myself.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I used to read
Nada
aloud to Samuel while he was whittling the moulds. He was illiterate, though he had a remarkable verbal memory.”

“Good as yours?”

“Different. When I revive a part I have to relearn it. We read through
The Tempest
before we started rehearsals. Samuel did Caliban from memory, having played the part once, some twenty years earlier. He scarcely needed a prompt.”

“What did you mean about second sight?”

“Samuel used to say that he could smell the blood in my voice. I don't think he can have been a Zululand Zulu—I gather that very few of them went to the diamond diggings—but Zulu was his language. He thought the voice I used appropriate, at any rate.
Nada
is a rum concoction—I didn't then realize how rum. No doubt as history it is very highly coloured—Richard III blacked up, and to something of the same effect. One thinks of Haggard as a writer of mildly mystical adventure yarns—
King Solomon's Mines
, and the rest nowhere.”

“Daddy read us that. The old witch gave me nightmares for weeks.”

“Gagool.
Nada
might be described as an attempt to tell a story from the point of view of a male Gagool.”

“Ghastly.”

“Successful, in my opinion, and also in old Samuel's. He can have been only a few years younger than my uncle, so the reign of Chaka would have been fairly recent history to him. He had come to the mines when he was sixteen, intending only to earn enough money to buy himself a gun and then go home, but my uncle got his claws into him and kept him, and eventually brought him back to England.”

“And he made this?” she said, taking the butter-mould out of the pocket of her apron. “I wish I could try it, but I haven't got a thingy to fit.”

“A cylinder. We should be able to find something of the right diameter—take it to Dowley and Dowley and beg an inch of plastic water-pipe off them. If nothing's right I'll get one made.”

“Darling A. I've a nasty feeling it's going to stick—it isn't the right wood.”

“Samuel managed, and he wouldn't have been able to get hold of olive oil. That must have been pretty well unobtainable.”

She half lay, leaning against him, moulding her body to his and responding with faint cat-like movements to the rhythm of his caress. Her own fingers turned the butter-mould to and fro to let her inspect every facet of the wizened little object.

“It is you, A.,” she said. “I can see. Are you cold? Shall I warm you up?”

Folding her hands together with the mould between the palms she blew gently into the hollow. Adrian reached out and wrenched her grip open.

“Ow!” she said.

“You must be more careful what you do and say, my dear.”

“Please don't call me that. It makes me think you might send me away.”

“Not unless you force me to. I have a particular talent which has enabled me to achieve what I have, and that is the most precious thing in the world to me. I am prepared to be entirely selfish about it, and to sacrifice anything and anyone in order to preserve it.”

“Oh, yes. I've always known that. Only …”

“Now, my dear …”

“Please, A.!”

“I am doing it deliberately, in order to force the lesson home. I am beginning to believe that you possess some kind of psychic knack, at least where I am concerned.”

“It's only because I love you so much.”

“Possibly, but it would make no difference. There are certain things …”

“Like Bluebeard?”

“In a sense.”

“All right. Only …”

“Be careful.”

“I'm trying—really I'm trying. Only I don't see how I can be careful when I don't know what I'm supposed to be careful about! You said you'd tell me, but …”

“Did I?”

“Well, you said perhaps.”

He took the mould from her, glanced at it and then pushed it out of sight in the pocket of her apron.

“When you were at the sale did you look out of the front windows?” he asked.

“Oh, yes! That peculiar little tower!”

“The dovecote. I found Samuel's body hanging there early one morning. The previous evening had seen our first performance of
The
Tempest
. Samuel was a naturally gifted actor. Given other circumstances he might well have been a major force in the theatre of his day. Even as it was I would number him among the handful I have worked with whom I regard as having talents equal to my own.”

“And he spent his whole life buttling!”

“Yes. He took a few minor parts in some of my cousin's other productions, and did a remarkable Caliban for her in the later Twenties, the role he repeated the night before he died.”

“What happened?”

“I was not at the inquest. I gave my evidence of finding the body by affidavit, because I had by then been called up. I believe other evidence was given of his having been depressed and at least partially estranged from his wife and the other servants in recent weeks. That was certainly the case. The final straw, it was thought, was that he had been dismissed for a piece of gross impertinence just as the performance was about to start. In the circumstances a verdict of suicide was pretty well inevitable.”

“He didn't, though, did he?”

“What do you mean?”

“Only I can't imagine you … whatever else was happening in your life … I mean after a good first night … you don't have to tell me, A …”

“What are you talking about?”

“Just the way you haven't said what you thought. I can feel you sort of pushing it all outside you …”

His fingers froze in their caress. His arm disentangled itself. With a slow but lithe movement, dance-like in its control of every muscle, he slid himself forward along the sofa, stood and turned. She had shrunk back against the sofa's arm and was staring up. It would have been impossible to tell whether his countenance of patriarchal sternness expressed real inward anger or some other emotion, or whether it was a further step in what he had called “forcing the lesson home”, or perhaps no more than a move in the game of dominance and submission on which their relationship to some extent depended. At any rate the pause before sentence was, for once, mistimed. He made his face blank and looked down at his right foot. She followed his glance.

“Ooh!” she squeaked. “I'm terribly sorry. I put it there. It's all my fault.”

Still in silence and still with the same muscular control he bent and standing on one leg unlaced his shoe, to which the saucer of butter now adhered. He peeled them apart and used the saucer's rim and the toe of the shoe to scrape each other and thus ease the main mass of butter into the fire—all of this with the calm movements of a priest at the altar, so that you would have thought he stood on a pat of butter every day of his life. The fire hissed and the butter began to burn at the edges with a soft unwavering flame. Watching it with his back to her he spoke, now clearly acting, indeed hamming.

“Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, the Gods themselves throw incense.”

“Is it all right?” she whispered. “Oh, A., I wish I understood you!”

He turned, shaking his head.

“And I do not wish you to make the attempt,” he said. “In fact, I forbid you to do so.”

“It's too difficult. I
can't
help thinking about you, can I?”

“Then you must think about me as I am now. I am going to put
Nada
away in a drawer. You may keep the butter-moulds, but you must not play with them any more.”

“But it was your idea going to the sale.”

“It turns out to have been a mistake. I thought … no, never mind what I thought. I now think it is time for bed.”

She rose and put her arms round him. They stood in front of the fire rocking gently to and fro, like a couple on a dance-floor too crowded for circulation.

“It's going to be all right, isn't it?” she whispered.

“How much butter was there in that saucer?”

“A bit over half a brick. It's surprising how much you can squidge in.”

“Five ounces, say. Almost three weeks' ration. That should be enough.”