Authors: Barry Maitland
At these appropriate words, Stafford’s expression underwent a profound change. His head jerked forward, mouth open, and he glared, astounded, at Bettina’s nose. The Nurse, about to make her entrance, saw his look and hesitated. Like everyone else in the room she realized what Stafford had finally noticed. Eventually, after what seemed like several minutes of pained silence, she asked, “Shall I come on, Stafford?”
Stafford turned his gaze on her, raised his eyebrows in an expression of disbelief, and sank back on to his chair.
The Nurse waited, and when no instructions came, she moved tentatively forward and began her line.
“Mr. Adolf! What are you doing?”
She got no further. From the producer’s chair came a low growling sound. Stafford was talking, head down, apparently to himself. Everyone stared at him as the words became louder, and gradually more distinct. “. . . night after night . . . for no other reason than a joke . . . is that what you think . . . ?” His head was up now, his huge eyes wide, fixed on Bettina. “Nothing but a joke! Is that what you think?” Suddenly he was screaming at her, his whole body trembling violently,
“Is that what you think?”
Bettina was stunned at first. She blinked rapidly several times as the waves of his anger battered her. And then, unbelievably to those who looked on, her lip curled up in a smile of contempt, her eyes bright, and she folded her arms.
“All right”—Ruth was on her feet—“we’ll take five minutes, everyone. Edward!” She nodded her head at Stafford, then grabbed Bettina’s arm and bustled her out of the room.
Edward and a couple of the other men hurried over to Stafford, who was slowly subsiding into his chair. He was very pale, and when they spoke to him he looked up at them, bewildered. His expression reminded Kathy of someone waking from an epileptic fit.
After a few minutes Ruth returned with Bettina, her nose unadorned. She was trying to maintain her air of defiance, but Kathy saw that her eyes were puffy, lashes damp.
Stafford remained seated, making no further interruptions to the rehearsal, which came to a rapid but irresolute end. It was left to Ruth to try to wind things up on a positive note.
“Well done, everybody,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll enjoy a well-earned break tomorrow, but on Sunday we need all the help we can with erecting the set. Can I have volunteers to help the set crew, please? Big strong men especially, and people who can use a paint brush.”
A few unenthusiastic arms were raised.
“We start the technical dress rehearsal sharp at 7:00 on Monday. Don’t be late. Everything will be ready for you at the theatre. We’ll make any last-minute adjustments to your costumes then. All right? Well then, the last and most important thing, we still have lots of unsold tickets for Thursday and Friday nights, and a few for Wednesday and Saturday as well. Come on, everyone! One last big effort with tickets, please!”
There was a general groan, and the rehearsal broke up.
“When is Chief Inspector Brock going to call a halt to this, Kathy?” Ruth said as they watched the room empty. “Surely he’s not going to let us go through with it?”
Kathy gave a weary shrug. “Special patrols are being organized for this coming week, and everyone will be taking extra precautions.”
On her way out she met Bettina coming out of the loo, wiping her nose with a small, grubby handkerchief. Kathy smiled at her. “Hi.”
Bettina sniffed and turned to go.
“Can I ask you something?”
“What?”
“Do you think I’d look better with brown hair?”
Bettina stared at her blankly. “I dunno.”
“I think I wouldn’t. Somebody suggested it. You’d look stunning, though.”
“Eh?”
“With brown hair. There’s a shade called ‘auburn glow.’ It’d suit your skin colouring, you see. But not mine. Too bad.”
KATHY AND MARY DROVE
back down to Shortlands on the Sunday afternoon, Kathy’s aim being to check on any outsiders helping with the set construction who might not have appeared
on their lists, Mary’s to check on the delivery of her precious costumes to the theatre dressing-rooms. The front doors of the theatre were locked, and they made their way round to the stage door at the rear. A narrow, twisting corridor smelling of talcum powder led past the two dressing-rooms, toilets, and some crowded storerooms and finally came out at a black-painted door marked with a red sign, “Silence: Stage Area.” Everything on the other side of the heavy door was painted black—bare walls, steel beams, an electrical switch-box, a steel ladder leading up into the black void above. The sound of hammering came from the other side of black curtains, which suddenly were swept aside as a large, sweaty man came striding through, brandishing a hammer.
“ ’Scuse us, ladies,” he called, slamming through the exit door.
Beyond the black curtains lay a congested labyrinth of wooden braces holding up the backs of the canvas flats which formed the walls of the set. The braces were held in place by large iron weights on the floor, and care was necessary to step over these to get around the back of the set from stage right to stage left. Several gaps remained in the flats, painted on their audience side to represent the wallpapered walls of a late Victorian sitting-room. Kathy was amazed at how makeshift and flimsy it all seemed at close hand, yet when they found the steps in the front corner of the stage leading down into the auditorium, and took a seat to see the effect from the audience side, it looked remarkably convincing. What had seemed crude swirls of rough paintwork now came into focus as a decorative frieze, a marble fireplace, a panelled timber shutter.
“What do you think?” Ruth sat down beside Kathy.
“It’s good. Are you happy with progress?”
“Oh, there are the usual problems with getting the doors in the flats to work properly, and the sofa still hasn’t arrived, but on the whole it’s going all right.”
“Is Stafford around?”
“He came for an hour, had a row with the lighting designer, and stormed off. I think it’s much better if he stays away. I was really worried about Stafford on Friday night, Kathy,” Ruth went on. “He looked to me as if he might be heading for another breakdown.”
“Yes. He looks very stressed, doesn’t he?”
“You lot didn’t help, dragging him off like that on Thursday. What did you want, anyway? He refused to talk to me about it afterwards.”
“We just needed to check a few things with him. The constable got the wrong end of the stick.”
“I think Stafford’s house made him nervous, to tell the truth.”
“Probably. Not surprising really. Tell me, you said that Stafford and his wife never had children, Ruth, but there were toys in the house—an old rocking-horse, and a clockwork train set in the attic.”
“Those would be his own, when he was a child. He grew up in that house.”
STAFFORD WAS ALREADY AT
work in the theatre when Kathy arrived on the Monday evening for the technical dress rehearsal. He was standing down at the front aisle of the auditorium, the edge of the stage chest-high in front of him, talking to someone high up on a pair of tall stepladders. The man swore, and a blue spotlight filter gel fluttered down to the stage, to join half a dozen others.
Stafford looked gaunt and pale, but in control of himself.
“Are we really going to need all these blues, Stafford?” the man up among the lighting tracks called down.
“Yes, Peter, we are. We’ve been into all this weeks ago. It’s winter. Their clothes are winter clothes, they have coats and hats.
In the first act, the daylight should be cold and wintry. After that, the lamplight needs to be warm, but claustrophobic, like a house snowed in at night. Right? Remember now?”
The set was finished, the furniture stacked to one side to allow the lighting designer to move about the stage. After an hour he was satisfied enough with the position and colour of his lights to begin the rehearsal. Two stage-hands arranged the furniture and the cast were called out on to the set. They moved awkwardly in their unfamiliar costumes, experimenting with gestures and movements to see how they might be inhibited by the heavy folds of fabric. Kathy was impressed. Even the recalcitrant Bettina had been transformed by Aunt Mary’s handiwork into a Victorian innocent, in striped pinafore and hair ribbons.
“All right!” Stafford clapped his hands for their attention. “Quickly! I’m only interested in your movements, for the lighting, so we’ll cut the static passages. Act one, Pastor and Captain, in position. Everyone else off the stage.”
They shuffled away, those not required for a while coming down into the auditorium to watch, the rest taking up positions off-stage for their entrances.
“House lights! Curtain!”
As they worked their way through the active passages of the play, Kathy had the feeling that the cast were responding to Stafford as to an invalid, walking on eggshells. No one argued or did anything else remotely likely to provoke him. In fact they avoided speaking to him altogether, although they carried on endless nervous whispered conversations among themselves throughout the evening. Stafford was oblivious to them, entirely focused on bringing about the atmosphere of light and sounds he required to breathe life into his production.
The biggest challenge was the lamp-throwing scene, which involved the perfect timing and simultaneous actions of actors,
stage-hands, sound, and lights. Edward was to hurl the lamp to a precise spot to one side of Vicky, where it would be caught by a stage-hand standing waiting behind the side curtain. At the exact moment when it would have struck the side wall, a sound effect of smashing glass would coincide with the abrupt dimming of the general set lighting and the switching on of an explosive orange light effect also hidden behind the side curtain, to simulate the burning paraffin. This would shine dramatically into Vicky’s horrified face. The action would freeze for precisely three long seconds, then the set lights would fade to darkness, leaving only the paraffin light flickering over the set as the act two curtain came down.
It took almost an hour to perfect this single action. By the time they were finished, the flickering light had been tried in every position in the corner of the set, the breaking glass played at every level of volume and combination of speakers, and Edward had mastered both his lines and his throwing style. When Stafford finally allowed that it was good enough, the whole cast heaved a huge sigh of relief and relaxed.
Kathy drove back slowly, keeping an eye on her rear-view mirror for anything like a blue Cavalier.
“This is a new way home,” Mary chirped. She’d had a good night, seeing her costumes paraded together for the first time.
“I just wanted to make sure Stafford got home safely,” Kathy said. “He looked all in by the time we finished.”
His old Citroën was parked against the garage doors at the end of the drive; a light was on in the hall window. Kathy imagined him returning alone to this place, discovering new little signs of disturbance made by the intrusion of the police searchers and their dogs as he moved around the silent interior.
As they watched, light appeared in the attic windows in the steep slate roof.
“I wonder what he’s doing up there?” Mary said, and gave a little shudder. “Poor man.”
THE DRESS REHEARSAL ON
the following evening was a complete catastrophe. As it unfolded, one crisis lurching into the next, members of the cast muttered to Kathy with increasing desperation that this was exactly as it should be, that all the best first nights were preceded by disastrous dress rehearsals, though, admittedly, perhaps not usually on this scale.
The first problem was the doors. After weeks of low humidity, a thunderstorm during the night had created a damp atmosphere, causing the wooden frames of the canvas flats to swell. The result was that every entrance and exit was accompanied by a nerve-racking tugging and shaking of the canvas walls as actors struggled to open the doors while remaining grimly in character. For the small audience of technical people the effect was magnified by the apprehension which visibly grew on the actors’ faces as their exit lines approached.
When the curtain came down at the end of act one, five minutes of feverish sawing and planing cured the problem of the doors, but the psychological damage was done. Kathy had never had to give so many prompts, with every scene in the second act accompanied by a major dry. People who had dependably rattled off their lines through weeks of rehearsal now had mental blocks over the simplest sentence constructions. At one point Vicky forgot the name of the Nurse, and came out with the memorable line, “
Yes, that would be better, then . . . old whatshername, the Nurse, can sit here
,” which corpsed the Doctor completely.
Kathy wasn’t immune to the general panic, and caused a major difficulty in the second act by turning two pages together and giving a prompt from a wildly different scene. But the crowning
disaster was the lamp-throwing episode over which everyone had worked so hard. Everything—the light and sound effects, the timing, the actors’ moves and expressions—worked perfectly, except that Edward threw the lamp a couple of degrees to the right, so that instead of landing in the waiting hands of the stage hand behind the curtain, it flew out in front of the curtain and bounced, loudly and unbroken, down the auditorium steps, while up above, the stage inexplicably reverberated with crashing glass and exploding flames.
Stafford sat silently through it all. From the safety of the wings, members of the cast peered through the tiny pinholes which earlier actors had made to observe the mood of their audience, and watched the solitary figure in the middle of row H observe it all, impassive, unflinching. At the end of act three he got to his feet, clapping loudly, and then instructed them as to how they should take their curtain call. They practised this, again accompanied by his solitary applause, and when the curtain dropped for the last time, and the house lights came on, he was gone.
KATHY FOUND IT DIFFICULT
to deal with everyone else’s complacency at work the next day. She had been able to sell a surprising number of tickets to her colleagues, so many in fact that she suspected that Orpington CID were going to be the financial salvation of SADOS. But for the rest of them this was just another working day; they moved around, chatting casually, taking problems in their stride, indifferent to the crisis whose approach she measured with every tick of the clock. She felt like a condemned prisoner whose cell looks out into a normal street, busy with oblivious people going about their ordinary lives.