Authors: Barry Maitland
There was a murmur of approval for this.
“I’d like to hear what Stafford thinks,” Vicky said. “It’s his play.”
All eyes turned to the producer, who took an interminable dramatic moment to raise his eyes to meet theirs. He let the tension build, then, softly, “Thank you, Vicky. But no, it is not my play. It belongs to all of us, equally. And it would not be for me to prolong it for one single second beyond its useful life. If it does represent, as the Chief Inspector so sensibly suggests, a danger to us, then we must bring it to an end immediately.
“Of course, Edward makes a strong argument against that view.”
“He’s doing Mark Antony,” Ruth hissed in Kathy’s ear.
“I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.”
“Edward rightly points out that stopping the play doesn’t really solve anything. But the Chief Inspector is a professional man, all his colleagues are professional men . . .”
“Oh Stafford!” Ruth hissed. “Shame on you!”
“The Chief Inspector naturally does not understand what the play means to us. For him it is no more than a social diversion. And this is entirely understandable and sensible. But the truth is that it is not for Edward, nor for me, nor even for the Chief Inspector and his colleagues, to say what we should do. They are not at risk. It is the women of the company who are at risk. For my part, I would not extend their risk by one second, if by killing the play stone dead now I could avoid it.
“Vicky, my dear. It is you and your sisters who must decide.”
Before Vicky could respond, Ruth was on her feet. “It’s perfectly clear what we should do. The police have given us their professional advice, and we’d be fools to ignore it. We can easily postpone the play until another time. There’s no point in trying to take on a madman.”
She sat down to cautious nods of agreement.
“Ruth, darling”—now Vicky took her cue, smoothly—“he’d have to be mad to take you on. But seriously, I for one think we’ve all invested too much of ourselves in this to give it up at the eleventh hour. And as a woman, I resent the implication that we should rearrange our lives and our priorities because some man decides to terrorize us. I suppose the police would be delighted if all the women in South London locked themselves indoors for the next six months.”
Coming from Vicky, the most attractive potential victim in the room, it was an argument that Ruth couldn’t easily counter. She shook her head in dismay as the company voted overwhelmingly by show of hands to continue with the play.
Stafford took control of the room immediately, asking non-actors to clear the floor. As the majority made for the door and the saloon bar below, he called out, “One other thing, everyone. To make us all feel much safer, Sergeant Kathy Kolla has kindly agreed to be our new prompt, since Hazel is clearly not going to be well enough to resume her duties.”
To Kathy’s embarrassment, there was a scattering of applause.
Brock ambled over, looking not at all put out by the decision.
“Don’t you mind?” Kathy asked.
“Well, it was a bit stagey for my taste, but at least we got the right outcome.”
“The right outcome?” Kathy looked at him in surprise, wondering suddenly if Brock had manoeuvred them all into this position.
“Well, Kathy, as Mr. Quinn so eloquently pointed out, at least we now have some kind of deadline we can anticipate and plan for. Was that your idea, about becoming part of their team?”
“Stafford asked me. I thought it might be useful.”
“Did he? Did he indeed? He seems to be taking quite an interest in you, Kathy. But yes, it may be useful.”
There was a loud rapping of keys on Stafford’s formica-topped table. “End of act two, please. Let’s get it right, finally, then on to the beginning of act three.” The conciliatory tone had gone. People scurried off the floor.
“Laura and the Captain. Kathy, give Vicky the line, from the top of the last page of act two. Come along!”
It took her a moment to find it, during which Stafford drummed his fingers impatiently.
“What do you mean by all this?”
“I realize that one of us must go under in this struggle.”
Edward picked up the cue.
“Which?”
Laura asked her husband defiantly.
“The weaker, of course.”
“And the stronger will be in the right?”
“Naturally, since he has the power.”
“Then,”
she threw at him,
“I am in the right!”
Not for the first time, Kathy felt an odd and elusive resonance between the lines of the play and the events shaping up around it. Her eye moved down the page, following the actors’ words until they reached the end of the act, with Laura, backing towards the door at stage left, accusing her husband of insanity. At this point the Captain reached forward for a rolled newspaper, representing a lighted lamp according to Kathy’s script, and tossed it at Laura’s feet.
“NO! NO! NO! NO!” Stafford stormed forward, his face livid. He snatched up the newspaper and advanced on Edward, waving it in his face. “This is a lighted paraffin lamp, you ninny! You are
not throwing a bunch of daffodils at the woman! You are hurling a Molotov cocktail at her, for God’s sake! YOU ARE TRYING TO KILL HER!”
He glared at Edward for a furious moment, then turned on his heel and hurled the newspaper at Vicky, missing her head by inches. He then marched back to his table. Edward looked shaken. He glanced over at Vicky, who shrugged and rolled her eyes.
“Look, Stafford,” he tried, “this scene is impossible. I simply can’t see how that action is supposed to work. I know it’s meant to be some kind of mid-point climax, but it just seems totally bizarre and unconvincing to me.”
“Nobody gives a turkey’s fart how it seems to you, Edward,” Stafford retorted brutally. “We’re not asking you to write a critique of the bloody play, only to portray one of the characters, and to do that as if you meant it. Not as if it were a way of filling in time until you can go downstairs for a glass of ale. My God, man! When are you going to start taking this seriously?”
Everyone was staring in shock at Stafford. Edward looked as if he might crumple. Yet he still found the words to come back one more time. “If I do as you say, Stafford,” he said stiffly, with as much dignity as he could gather, “and throw it at the wall, it either
will
kill Vicky, or it’ll bring the set down.”
“Well, hooray! At least we’ll get one performance where you’re not all
half
-dead.”
“It’s extraordinary,” Ruth said afterwards. “I’ve never seen him like that before. Normally he’s the only one who keeps his head. I find it rather frightening. You’d think his life depended on it.”
THE FOLLOWING EVENING, KATHY
and her aunt were sitting in the flat, reading. Mary was studying illustrations of nineteenth-century costumes in the collection of the V and A, trying to decipher collar designs, while Kathy sat opposite her, reading
collections of plays—Noël Coward, Neil Simon, Peter Shaffer, and August Strindberg.
The phone rang, and when she lifted it Kathy heard the mid-Atlantic accent of her cousin, Mary’s daughter, on the line.
“Hello, Di,” she said, watching the alarm appear on Mary’s face. She raised an eyebrow at her aunt, who shook her head vigorously.
“Kathy, is my mother there with you?”
“Yes. Do you want to speak to her?”
“No. What I want you to do is put her on the next available train back to Sheffield. How long has she been there with you?”
“I think it must be two weeks now.”
“Two weeks! What has she told you she’s doing?”
“I rather think she’s left your father, Di.”
“That’s utterly crazy! Is she out of her mind?”
“Actually, she’s a lot calmer than when she first arrived. She seems quite sane to me.”
“But . . . there must be something wrong with her. They’ve been together for fifty years. She can’t walk out on him now. It’s just perfectly grotesque.”
“She’s quite serious about it, Di.”
“What about him? How is he going to survive?”
“Perhaps it’ll be good for him.”
“Don’t be ridiculous!”
“How is he making out, do you know?”
“The cousins have been doing their best to cope, I understand, with the help of a neighbour—someone called Effie—and the Social Services people have been round. But that’s no solution. You have to persuade her to go home, and make it up with Pop, and just stop being so . . . so absurd.”
“She won’t do it, Di. I’ll tell you what. Maybe I could take her down to Heathrow tomorrow and put her on a plane to Toronto. I’m sure the airline would look after her for the transfer to Calgary.”
There was silence on the line. Aunt Mary’s eyes widened in consternation.
“Or would a Vancouver flight be better? It probably would, wouldn’t it?”
“Kathy . . . that wouldn’t do any good at all. I mean it isn’t going to help her think any straighter. And besides . . . Don and I are going through a difficult time right now. I don’t think having Mom around the place would be a good idea at all.”
“Ah.”
“Look, I’ll give this some more thought. Please do what you can to make her see sense, Kathy. I mean, it’s just all so . . . embarrassing.”
Kathy replaced the receiver. “Di sends her love. She and Don are going through a difficult time right now, otherwise they’d love to have you over there.”
Mary said nothing, returning her attention to her book, although Kathy noticed that the pages didn’t turn. After several minutes the old lady said, “I’ve been imposing on you, Kathy. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be daft. I’ve been eating better than I have for years. And Ruth and her friends would have been lost without you.”
“Ruth thinks we’ll have finished the costumes by Thursday,” Mary said cautiously. “I would have liked to stay to see the play . . .”
“Of course you must.”
“Do you mean that? Well, but when the play is over . . . I’ll have to decide what to do.”
“Do you miss him?”
“I feel numb, Kathy. I try not to think.”
THE INDIAN SUMMER REFUSED
to die. At the end of each hot, dusty day, after knocking at the doors of empty houses or interviewing women keen for a good chat, Kathy would look forward to her evenings at the Three Crowns. She would step
thankfully into the cool of the saloon, order her half of lager among the last of the hot, homecoming commuters and the first of the freshly showered evening crowd, and then climb the stairs to the rehearsal room.
A change had come over the whole company since Stafford’s outburst over the lamp-throwing scene. The earlier casual good humour was replaced by a mood of tense purpose. Edward had abandoned his temperamental games with Vicky along with his book. They were now having a full run-through every night, and since the Captain was on stage for about three-quarters of the whole play, the extent of Edward’s lack of mastery of his lines was painfully clear, putting everyone else in a state of acute anxiety. Kathy, however, enjoyed it. She found she could pick up the hint of hesitation just before he was going to dry, and was learning to give him the minimum prompt necessary to get him started again.
A change had come over Stafford too. He seemed to have withdrawn from the company, standing apart from their conversations and gossip. Leaning forward over his table like a brooding vulture, he would rap out instructions and harry them until they complied precisely.
Kathy could see that Ruth was concerned for him, but he ignored her attempts to help him. Strangely, he was polite, almost excessively so, to just one person, Aunt Mary. Several times, during the breaks, Kathy noticed them in conversation, and the radiant expression on Mary’s face as they talked.
“He’s so caring,” the old lady said as they drove home on the Tuesday night. “He thinks about every detail. Tomorrow he’ll be coming round to Ruth’s to help us make the strait-jacket.”
“Is the battle of the bustle resolved?”
“Oh yes. Stafford won. He is the producer, after all. He explained that sometimes you have to sacrifice an attractive detail for the sake of the big idea.”
Her euphoria evaporated when they reached home and discovered that she had lost her keys, including the key which Kathy had given her, to the flat. “I had them at the rehearsal,” she moaned, as she emptied her bag on to the kitchen table. “I remember they were tangled up in the tape measure.”
Kathy frowned. She had noticed the tape measure beside Mary’s chair, but there had been no keys. There seemed no point in making a big thing of it, and she said lightly, “They probably fell out of your bag in the rehearsal room. We’ll get them tomorrow.”
BREN CALLED IN TO
the rehearsal on his way home the following evening. It was late, and they were already well into the third and final act when he slipped quietly into the room. Kathy grinned at him, and he winked back and took the seat beside her, then frowned as he tried to make sense of the scene in the room.
Stafford had stopped them, and was standing clutching his forehead as if suffering some private agony. The Captain was lying across the seats which represented the sofa, his arms bound in the strait-jacket which his old Nurse had tricked him into putting on—another highly improbable action in Edward’s opinion over which he and Stafford had almost come to blows. His wife stood over him.
“Go back to the ‘all my enemies’ speech, Edward,” Stafford sighed. “It’s coming apart at that point. It’s not shocking enough. You should be raging against the world, and instead you’re merely whining. Shock us, Edward! Chant the lines, the way I told you, for God’s sake. This is your credo, your Nicene Creed. Do it like that. Kathy, give us Laura’s line.”
“
Do you believe that I’m your enemy?
” she said.
“
Yes, I do!
” Edward replied. “
I believe that you’re all my enemies. My mother, who didn’t want to bring me into the world because my birth would bring her pain, she was my enemy: she starved my
unborn life of its nourishment, till I was nearly deformed. My sister was my enemy, when she taught me to be her vassal. The first woman I took in my arms was my enemy, for she gave me ten years’ illness in return for the love I gave her. My daughter became my enemy, when she had to choose between me and you. And you, my wife, you were my mortal enemy, for you never let me be till you had me lying dead.
”