Killer Dolphin (9 page)

“
Who is this comes hopping up the lane
?”

“
Hopping? Where? Oh, I see. A lady dressed for riding. She’s lame, Master Will. She’s hurt. She can’t put her foot to the ground.
”

“
She makes a grace of her ungainliness. There’s a stain across her face. And in her bosom. A raven’s feather in a valley of snow.
”

“
Earth. Mire. On her habit, too. She must have fallen.
”

“
Often enough, I dare swear.
”

“
She’s coming in at the gate.
”

“
Will! Where
ARE
you.
WILL!”

“We’ll have to stop again. I’m afraid,” Peregrine said. “Gertie! Ask her to come on, will you, Charles?”

Charles Random opened the door on the Prompt side. “Gertie! Oh, dear.”

Gertrude Bracey entered with her jaw set and the light of battle in her eyes. Peregrine walked down the centre aisle and put his hands on the rail of the orchestral well.

“Gertie, love,” he said, “it went back again, didn’t it? It was all honey and sweet reasonableness and it wouldn’t have risen one solitary hackle. She
must
grate. She
must
be bossy. He’s looking down the lane at that dark, pale creature who comes hopping into his life with such deadly seduction. And while he’s quivering, slap bang into this disturbance of—of his whole personality—comes your voice: scolding, demanding, possessive, always too loud. It
must
be like that, Gertie. Don’t you
see
? You must hurt. You must jangle.”

He waited. She said nothing.

“I can’t have it any other way,” Peregrine said.

Nothing.

“Well, let’s build it again, shall we? Back to ‘
Who is this,
’ please, Marco. You’re off, please, Gertie.”

She walked off.

Marcus Knight cast up his eyes in elaborate resignation, raised his arms and let them flop.

“Very well, dear boy,” he said, “as often as you like, of course. One grows a little jaded but never mind.”

Marco was not the only one, Peregrine thought, to feel jaded: Gertie was enough to reduce an author-director to despair. She had after a short tour of the States become wedded to Method acting. This involved endless huddles with whoever would listen to her and a remorseless scavenging through her emotional past for fragments that could start her off on some astonishing association with her performance.

“It’s like a bargain basement,” Harry Grove said to Peregrine. The things Gertie digs up and tries on are really
too
rococo. We get a new look every day.”

It was a slow process and the unplotted pauses she took in which to bring the truth to light were utterly destructive to concerted playing. “If she goes on like this,” Peregrine thought, “she’ll tear herself to tatters and leave the audience merely wishing she wouldn’t.”

As for Marcus Knight, the danger signals for a major temperament had already been flown. There was a certain thunderous quietude which Peregrine thought it best to disregard.

Really, for him, Peregrine thought, Marco was behaving rather well, and he tried to ignore the little hammer that pounded away under Marco’s oval cheek.

“
Who is this
—”

Again they built up to her line. When it came it was merely shouted offstage without meaning and apparently without intention.

“Great Christ in Heaven!” Marcus Knight suddenly bellowed. “How long must this endure! What, in the name of all the suffering clans of martyrdom, am I expected to
do
? Am I coupled with a harridan or a bloody dove? My author, my producer, my
art
tell me that here is a great moment. I should be fed, by Heaven, fed: I should be led up to. I have my line to make. I must show what I am. My whole being should be lacerated. And so, God knows it is, but by what!” He strode to the door and flung it wide. Gertrude Bracey was exposed looking both terrified and determined. “By a drivelling, piping pea-hen!” he roared, straight into her face. “What sort of an actress are you, dear? Are you a woman, dear? Has anybody ever slighted you, trifled with you, deserted you? Have you no conception of the gnawing serpent that ravages a woman scorned?”

Somewhere in the front of the house Harry Grove laughed. Unmistakably, it was he. He had a light, mocking, derisive laugh, highly infectious to anybody who had not inspired it. Unhappily both Knight and Gertrude Bracey, for utterly opposed reasons, took it as a direct personal affront. Knight spun round on his heel, advanced to the edge of the stage and roared into the darkness of the auditorium. “Who is that! Who is it! I demand an answer.”

The laughter ran up to a falsetto climax and somewhere in the shadows Harry Grove said delightedly: “Oh dear me, dear me, how very entertaining. The King Dolphin in a rage.”

“Harry,” Peregrine said, turning his back on the stage and vainly trying to discern the offender. “You are a professional actor. You know perfectly well that you are behaving inexcusably. I must ask you to apologize to the company.”

“To the
whole
company, Perry dear? Or just to Gertie for laughing about her not being a woman scorned?”

Before Peregrine could reply Gertrude re-entered, looking wildly about the house. Having at last distinguished Grove in the back stalls, she pointed to him and screamed out with a virtuosity that she had hitherto denied herself: “This is a deliberate insult.” She then burst into tears.

There followed a phenomenon that would have been incomprehensible to anybody who was not intimately concerned with the professional theatre. Knight and Miss Bracey were suddenly allied. Insults of the immediate past were as if they had never been. They both began acting beautifully for each other: Gertrude making big eloquent piteous gestures and Marcus responding with massive understanding. She wept. He kissed her hand. They turned with the precision of variety artists to the auditorium and simultaneously shaded their eyes like comic sailors. Grove came gaily down the aisle saying: “I apologize. Marcus and Gerts. Everybody. I really
do
apologize. In seventeen plastic and entirely different positions. I shall go and be devoured backstage by the worm of contrition. What more can I do? I cannot say with even marginal accuracy that it’s all a mistake and that you’re not at all funny. But anything else. Anything else.”

“Be quiet,” Peregrine said, forcing a note of domineering authority which was entirely foreign to him. “You will certainly go backstage, since you are needed. I will see you after we break. In the meantime I wish neither to see nor hear from you until you make your entrance. Is that understood?”

“I’m sorry,” Grove said quietly. “I really am.” And he went backstage by the pass-door that Mr. Conducis had used when he pulled Peregrine out of the well.

“Marco and Gertie,” Peregrine said, and they turned blackly upon him. “I hope you’ll be very generous and do something nobody has a right to ask of you. I hope you’ll dismiss this lamentable incident as if it had never happened.”

“It is either that person or me. Never in the entire course of my professional experience—”

The Knight temperament raged on. Gertrude listened with gloomy approval and repaired her face. The rest of the company were still as mice. At last Peregrine managed to bring about a truce and eventually they began again at: “
Who is this comes hopping up the lane
?”

The row had had one startling and most desirable effect. Gertrude, perhaps by some process of emotive transference, now gave out her offstage line with all the venom of a fishwife.

“But
darling
,” reasoned Destiny Meade, a few minutes later, devouring Peregrine with her great black lamps. “
Hopping
. Me? On my first entrance? I mean—actually? I mean what an
entrance
!
Hopping
!”

“Destiny, love, it’s like I said. He had a thing about it.”

“Who did?”

“Sheakespeare, darling. About a breathless, panting, jigging, hopping woman with a white face and pitchball eyes and blue veins.”

“How peculiar of him.”

“The thing is, for him it was all an expression of sexual attraction.”

“I don’t see how I can do a sexy thing if I come on playing hopscotch and puffing and blowing like a whale. Truly.”

“Destiny: listen to what he wrote. Listen.

“That’s why I’ve made her fall off her horse and come hopping up the lane.”

“Was he sort of kinky?”

“Certainly not,” Marcus interrupted.

“Well, I only wondered. Gloves and everything.”

“Listen, darling. Here you are. Laughing and out of breath—”

“And hopping.
Honestly
!”

“All
right
,” said Marcus. “We know what you mean, but listen. You’re marvellous. Your colour’s coming and going and your bosom’s heaving. He has an entirely normal reaction, Destiny darling: you
send
him. You do see, don’t you?
You
send
me
.”

“With my hopping?”

“
Yes
,” he said irritably. “That and all the rest of it. Come on, darling, do. Make your entrance to me.”

“Yes, Destiny,” Peregrine said. “Destiny, listen. You’re in a velvet habit with your bosom exposed, a little plumed hat and soft little boots and you’re lovely, lovely, lovely. And young Dr. Hall has gone out to help you and is supporting you. Charles—come and support her. Yes: like that. Leave her as free as possible. Now: the door opens and we see you. Fabulous. You’re in a shaft of sunlight. And
he
sees you. Shakespeare does. And you speak. Right? Right, Destiny? You say—go on, dear.”

“
Here I come upon your privacy, Master Shakespeare, hopping over your doorstep like a starling
.”

“Yes, and at once, at that very moment, you know you’ve limed him.”

“Limed?”

“Caught.”

“Am I keen?”

“
Yes
. You’re pleased. You know he’s famous. And you want to show him off to W.H. You come forward, Marco, under compulsion, and offer your help. Staring at her. And you go to him, Destiny, and skip and half-fall and fetch up laughing and clinging to him. He’s terribly, terribly still. Oh,
yes
, Marco, yes. Dead right. Wonderful. And Destiny, darling, that’s
right
. You know? It’s right. It’s what we want.”

“Can I sit down or do I keep going indefinitely panting away on his chest?”

“Look into his face. Give him the whole job. Laugh. No, not that sort of a laugh, dear. Not loud. Deep down in your throat!”

“More sexy?”

“Yes,” Peregrine said and ran his hands through his hair. “
That’s
right. More sexy.”

“And then I sit down?”

“Yes. He helps you down. Centre. Hall pushes the chair forward. Charles?”

“Could it,” Marcus intervened, “be left of centre, dear boy? I mean I only suggest it because it’ll be easier for Dessy and I
think
it’ll make a better picture. I can put her down. Like this.” He did so with infinite grace and himself occupied centre stage.

“I think I like it better the other way, Marco, darling. Could we try it the other way, Perry? This feels false, a bit, to me.”

They jockeyed about for star positions. Peregrine made the final decision in Knight’s favour. It really was better that way. Gertrude came on and then Emily, very nice as Joan Hart, and finally Harry Grove, behaving himself and giving a bright, glancing indication of Mr. W.H. Peregrine began to feel that perhaps he had not written a bad play and that, given a bit of luck, he might, after all, hold the company together.

He was aware, in the back of his consciousness, that someone had come into the stalls. The actors were all on stage and he supposed it must be Winter Meyer or perhaps Jeremy, who often looked in, particularly when Destiny was rehearsing.

They ran the whole scene without interruption and followed it with an earlier one between Emily, Marcus and the ineffable Trevor in which the boy Hamnet, on his eleventh birthday, received and wore his grandfather’s present of a pair of embroidered cheveril gloves. Marcus and Peregrine had succeeded in cowing the more offensive exhibitionisms of Trevor and the scene went quite well. They broke for luncheon. Peregrine kept Harry Grove back and gave him a wigging which he took so cheerfully that it lost half its sting. He then left and Peregrine saw with concern that Destiny had waited for him. Where then was Marcus Knight and what had become of his proprietary interest in his leading lady? As if in explanation, Peregrine heard Destiny say: “Darling, the King Dolphin’s got a pompous feast with someone at the Garrick. Where shall we go?”

The new curtain was half-lowered, the working lights went out, the stage-manager left and the stage-door banged distantly.

Peregrine turned to go out by front-of-house.

He came face to face with Mr. Conducis.

It was exactly as if the clock had been set back a year and three weeks and he again dripped fetid water along the aisle of a bombed theatre. Mr. Conducis seemed to wear the same impeccable clothes and to be seized with the same indefinable oddness of behaviour. He even took the same involuntary step backwards, almost as if Peregrine was going to accuse him of something.

“I have watched your practice,” he said as if Peregrine were learning the piano. “If you have a moment to spare there is a matter I want to discuss with you. Perhaps in your office?”

“Of course, sir,” Peregrine said. “I’m sorry I didn’t see you had come in.”

Mr. Conducis paid no attention to this. He was looking, without evidence of any kind of reaction, at the now resplendent auditorium: at the crimson curtain, the chandeliers, the freshly gilt scrollwork, and the shrouded and expectant stalls.

“The restoration is satisfactory?” he asked.