Curtain Call (6 page)

He peeked at his watch again. Quarter to nine. Though his attention had wandered he could sniff the interval approaching, like a gun dog picking up a scent. And here it came, a seemly diminuendo; the sense of a hiatus; the curtain's slow descent. Applause. For this relief, much thanks . . . Jimmy was out of his seat and hurrying up the aisle before the lights had come on. The prospect of a drink always quickened his step. The white-jacketed barman fixed him a large whisky and soda, which he took to a corner table and set to work. He had a little notepad in which he'd jotted down his first paragraph, always the trickiest – that, and the last paragraph. He now had the play's title in front of him:
Change of the Guard
. Even
that
was average.

A good drama is as solidly constructed as a good house. The foundations should be hewn from realism, the ground floor from character and action, the upper floor from pattern and symbol. Within, its staircases and doorways should allow smooth passage from one part to another. Laurence Markwick's
Change of the Guard
at the Duke of York's follows these precepts with a rigorous competence. The materials are first-rate, the workmanship is sound. But is it a house one wishes to inhabit for longer than ten minutes? This story of a cuckoo in the marital nest offers careful observation of human frailty but nothing that resembles spontaneous feeling. There is not a line in it that surprises, nor a gesture that intrigues. The view from its windows is perfectly transparent – and perfectly trite.

Jimmy read it through again. He loved the way his prose fell into place. He was also rather sick of it. Forty-odd years of theatre-going, at least thirty of them spent writing about it, was bound to blunt your edges. True, with experience had come a certain godlike assurance: it was impossible to avoid the feeling that his critical verdicts were consistently and remarkably
right
. What use in being a critic otherwise? The problem was in finding different ways of saying the same thing over and over again. He had played variations on the ‘good house' analogy at least, oh, half a dozen times in the last ten years. Reading through the proofs of his latest collection of reviews he had been aghast at the way the same phrases – jokes – aperçus – infested his paragraphs like bothersome weeds. His secretary had spotted them too, and had entered polite notes in the margin:
Perhaps change this?
A list of repetitions was appended. Change? He would if he had the time. But he was too busy attending the plays, or reading the books, or writing half a dozen other articles at once to finesse every last word. Deadlines massed overhead each week, like ravens pecking on the roof. His memory, capacious as it was, couldn't always identify the same amusing
jeu d'esprit
he had essayed six months before.

He would tot up his aggregate of words published each year and note it in his diary. His total for the previous twelve months had come to 432,000, either written by his own hand or dictated to his secretary. Nearly half a million words . . . He sometimes had the sense of being a stoker, shovelling his words into a furnace whose white-hot maw kept consuming, demanding, consuming. As fast as he wrote them they vanished into the flames. No amount would ever satisfy it. The only escape he could conceive, his only respite from feeding the fire, was death. And he didn't want to think about that.

A shadow had fallen across his table. He looked up to find a large lady favouring him with a shy but hopeful simper. Her floral dress was straining across her voluminous bust and backside. Jimmy was already writing a
Punch
caption in his head: ‘A steatopygous matron from the provinces, excited by her night out in London's fashionable West End, encounters a Renowned Theatrical Personage' . . . He sighed, and put down his pen.

‘Madam, you're standing in my light,' he said, his expression unsmiling.

The lady took an apologetic step sideways. ‘Ooh, I am sorry. I just wanted to ask . . . if you were enjoying the play?'
Ply
, she pronounced it. Her accent carried the unmistakable flat drone of Brum, sharpening his irritation.

He took a deep breath. ‘In the theatre I never allow myself to succumb in the smallest degree to the arbitrary and unreliable sensation you are pleased to call “enjoyment”. That is a word to be used strictly in relation to such pleasures as pâté de foie gras, vanilla ices or Scotch whisky – the last of which I
had
been lately enjoying.'

She blinked her bewilderment at him. ‘So . . . you don't like it then?'
Loik eet
.

‘For the sake of argument, let us say: it is giving me the pip.'

She nodded, brightening at the colloquialism. Somewhat emboldened, she leaned towards him again and said, sotto voce, ‘Are you who I think you are?'

Jimmy capped his pen, pocketed his notebook, and stood up. ‘I most certainly am not,' he said curtly, and turned on his heel. Behind him he heard her gasp, and felt exhilarated by his rudeness. What a pest, barging in on him without so much as a by-your-leave. The look on her silly face as he crushed her! That would keep him going through the second half. He strolled back into the auditorium, nodding at this or that fellow scribbler – it was press night, so they were all in. He was about to return to his seat when a hearty hand clapped him on the back.

‘Erskine! How are you?'

He turned to find a tall fellow with a florid face and an unnerving dark gaze fixed upon him. His projecting voice and wide-lapelled chalkstripe suit bespoke a boisterous confidence. Jimmy had absolutely no idea who he was. But he sensed he ought to know him, and muttered a
hullo
.

‘I was talking about you only the other day,' the man continued, ‘with my old friend Stephen Wyley. I'm organising a dinner to raise funds for the Marquess – we hope to relaunch the place. Your presence would be a tremendous boon to us.'

Dipping his hand into a breast pocket he took out a business card and handed it to Jimmy. It was embossed with the House of Commons portcullis, beneath which was printed: GERALD CARMODY, MP. So that's who he was. Jimmy had no memory of meeting him before, though he knew his type: the varsity swagger, the entitlement, the bullying familiarity with men whose acquaintance he had never previously enjoyed.

‘You're a friend of Stephen Wyley?' said Jimmy, pouncing on the only bit of information that interested him. He owned one of his paintings, and nurtured a secret longing to have his portrait done by him.

‘Ye-e-ers, we were at Oxford together. He's pledged his support. It should be a grand occasion – no trash!'

Jimmy nodded approvingly. ‘Well, if it's not a press night I'm sure I could see my way to attending. Call the
Chronicle
and ask for my secretary's number – he looks after my diary.'

‘Splendid!' boomed Carmody, his eyes glittering. He shot out a meaty hand, which Jimmy felt obliged to take. ‘Toodle-oo.'

Jimmy had reached his seat when he noticed the man in the row behind glaring at him. What on earth was
his
gripe? His eyes slid along to the woman sitting next to him – and then he knew. It was the Brum matron he had recently put in her place. She looked merely embarrassed; he – the husband, presumably – looked furious, clearly having taken umbrage on his lady's behalf. Oh dear, just his luck to be sitting in front of them . . . He drooped in his seat, feeling the man's eyes burning into his neck. The lights went down, mercifully, and he was once more enfolded in the smothering competence of the painted people onstage.

St Martin's Lane was aswarm with the theatre crowds just emerging from their evening's entertainment, the pavements thronged with men carrying the odour of sixpenny cigars and women wearing fake pearls and implausible hats. Brilliant traffic was bunching and growling, spurting and halting in broken processions, eager for a way out. Jimmy, despairing of a cab, hurried through Seven Dials and thence into Shaftesbury Avenue. While everyone else was heading for the late-night Tube and bus, his own evening was just beginning. He lived round the corner from the British Museum in Princess Louise Mansions, whose grimy terracotta facade belied the furnishings of his own bachelor rooms within. Extravagant in most things, where his flat was concerned he was positively Babylonian. A huge art deco mirror greeted his entrance into the hallway, where his shoes clacked pleasingly on the varnished parquet. Prints and paintings covered almost every inch of the living-room wall. On the chimney piece stood a marble bust of Irving next to a Lalique vase, the expense of which put him in a cold sweat even now. On top of the drinks cabinet a gramophone's brass horn flared like a huge petalled flower. The cream-coloured carpets were lamb-soft, and the very devil to keep clean: Mrs Pargiter, his char, was often on her hands and knees scrubbing them. At his desk, where he now installed himself, certain literary treasures were laid out. An inkstand bought at an auction of Oscar Wilde's personal effects; a blotter that had once belonged to Balzac; a fountain pen presented to him at an awards lunch by Kipling. He had attended Kipling's funeral at the Abbey in January, and had surprised himself by weeping.

From the kitchen he had brought a plate of cold partridge and half a bottle of sparkling hock, his fuel for the task. He had been rehearsing the second and third paragraphs of his review during the play's interminable last act; another one would push it over halfway, then with any luck momentum would see him to the end. Sometimes he would spend an hour trying to get a sentence right; at others, he could cuff a paragraph into shape within ten minutes. He wrote as if he were composing music, testing each line over and over for harmony, phrasing, rhythm. His method entailed so much crossing out, with so many revisions and embellishments, that a page of his longhand prose would end nearly blackened. He would then make a fair copy of the text on his typewriter, and set to work on that, amending, tinkering, cutting. If his secretary was about he would give it him to read and make suggestions; he tended to curb Jimmy's more baroque flights of fancy. Come to think of it, where
was
he tonight?

The excitement of the evening ahead lent speed to his composition. By 11.15 p.m. he had it done, typed and ready to go. Eight hundred words in forty minutes: not bad. He telephoned for a taxi, and by quarter to midnight he was slouching in a chair by his editor's desk at the
Chronicle
's office. The latter was a cove named Gideon Lambert, who smoked Woodbines and seemed to take pleasure in never praising anything. Jimmy thought the man didn't pay him quite the respect he was due, but he knew him to have influence ‘upstairs' and so didn't make a fuss.

Having read through Jimmy's copy in silence, Lambert looked up. ‘What's this – “his steatopygous form” . . .?'

‘From the Greek,' said Jimmy, ‘meaning excessive flesh on the buttocks.'

‘I don't think our readers will know the word.'

‘Then they need only consult a dictionary.'

Lambert was shaking his head. Jimmy sighed and said, ‘Would our readers prefer “fat-arsed”, d'you suppose?'

For answer the editor scored a line through it. A short telephone call followed, consisting mostly of grunted
hmm
s and
yuh
s. Lambert rang off and shot a look of amused resignation across the desk.

‘That was subs. They have to cut ten lines from it,' he said, nodding at the review.

‘You're joking.' Lambert tweaked his mouth in a languid way that Jimmy found rather maddening. ‘Odd, isn't it, how one's deathless prose becomes in a subeditor's hands so very mortal. Can you imagine a painter bringing in his canvas and the frame-maker telling him he must cut two inches off the foreground to make it fit?'

Lambert spread his palms wide. ‘Either you can do it, or they will.'

Jimmy clicked his tongue in annoyance. ‘Tell them to send up a proof.'

While they waited Jimmy parked himself on the office's horsehair couch and leafed through the paper's late edition. His eye stopped at a headline on page three:
SCOTLAND YARD RELEASE SKETCH OF TIEPIN KILLER
. Alongside the story was a pencil portrait of a man's face, apparently drawn by a member of the public who may have seen him at the hotel. Rather a professional job too, almost an artist's impression. The identity of the second victim had been confirmed; she had just started working at the Imperial as a chambermaid.

‘My God, they're not even
tarts
he's murdering . . .'

‘What's that?' said Lambert, lighting another cigarette.

‘The girl who got strangled last week. Lived with her mother in Bayswater – perfectly respectable family.'

Lambert didn't bat an eyelid. ‘We thought he might be another Ripper. I think everyone here's a bit disappointed.'

‘Charming,' said Jimmy, quietly shocked.

He was of an age to have lived through the Ripper murders. In the autumn of 1888 he was a schoolboy in Birmingham, though news of Whitechapel prostitutes being brutally slaughtered was not slow to catch on in the provinces. Jimmy had first read of them in his father's
Daily Telegraph
, and could recall his fascinated revulsion on learning precisely what the word ‘disembowelled' meant. Also the word ‘prostitute', come to think of it.

‘Well, at least this sketch gives them something to go on,' Lambert was saying as he studied the page. A short silence intervened, and Jimmy looked round to find Lambert staring at him through the smoke. ‘That's an interesting pin you're wearing, by the way . . .'

Jimmy snorted his amusement at the implication, fingering the gold pin that speared his tie. ‘I use it only for its designated purpose.'

But Lambert was enjoying himself. ‘You even
look
rather like him,' he mused, squinting between Jimmy and the sketch. ‘Can you account for your whereabouts on the evening in question?'