Night at the Vulcan (9 page)

“I’m sorry I startled you,” said Miss Gainsford. “I came in quietly. I thought you were asleep but I realize now — you were doing that scene. Weren’t you?”

“I’ve been given the understudy,” Martyn said.

“You’ve had an audition and a rehearsal, haven’t you?”

“Yes. I was so frightful at rehearsal, I thought I’d have another shot by myself.”

“You needn’t,” Miss Gainsford said, “try to make it easy for me.”

Martyn, still shaken and bewildered, looked at her visitor. She saw a pretty face that under its make-up was sodden with tears. Even as she looked, the large photogenic eyes flooded and the small mouth quivered.

“I suppose,” Miss Gainsford said, “you know what you’re doing to me.”

“Good Lord!” Martyn ejaculated. “What
is
all this? What have I done? I’ve got your understudy. I’m damn thankful to have it and so far I’ve made a pretty poor showing.”

“It’s no good taking that line with me. I know what’s happening.”

“Nothing’s happening. Oh,
please
,” Martyn implored, torn between pity and a rising fear, “
please
don’t cry. I’m nothing. I’m just an old understudy.”

“That’s pretty hot, I must say,” Miss Gainsford said. Her voice wavered grotesquely between two registers like an adolescent boy’s. “To talk about ‘any old understudy’ when you’ve got that appearance. What’s everyone saying about you when they think I’m not about? ‘She’s got the appearance!’ It doesn’t matter to them that I’ve had to dye my hair because they don’t like wigs. I still haven’t got the appearance. I’m a shoulder-length natural ash-blonde, and I’ve had to have an urchin cut and go black and all I get is insults. In any other management,” she continued wildly, “the author wouldn’t be allowed to speak to the artists as that man speaks to me. In any other management an artist would be protected against that kind of treatment. Adam’s worse, if anything. He’s so bloody patient and persistent and half the time you don’t know what he’s talking about.”

She drew breath, sobbed and hunted in her bag for her handkerchief.

Martyn said: “I’m so terribly sorry. It’s awful when things go badly at rehearsals. But the worst kind of rehearsals
do
have a way of turning into the best kind of performances. And it’s a grand play, isn’t it?”

“I loathe the play. To me it’s a lot of high-brow hokum and I don’t care who knows it. Why the hell couldn’t Uncle Ben leave me where I was, playing leads and second leads in fortnightly rep? We were a happy family in fortnightly rep; everyone had fun and games and there wasn’t this ghastly graveyard atmosphere. I was miserable enough, God knows, before you came but now it’s just
more
than I can stand.”

“But I’m not going to play the part,” Martyn said desperately. “You’ll be all right. It’s just got you down for the moment. I’d be no good, I expect, anyway.”

“It’s what they’re all saying and thinking. It’s a pity, they’re saying, that you came too late.”

“Nonsense. You only imagine that because of the likeness.”

“Do I? Let me tell you I’m not imagining
all
the things they’re saying about you. And about Adam. How you
can
stay here and take it! Unless it’s true.
Is
it true?”

Martyn closed her hands on the material she had been sewing. “I don’t want to know what they’re saying. There’s nothing unkind that’s true for them to say.”

“So the likeness is purely an accident? There’s no relationship?”

Martyn said: “It seems that we are very distantly related, so distantly that the likeness is a freak. I didn’t want to tell anyone about it. It’s of no significance at all. I haven’t used it to get into the theatre.”

“I don’t know how and why you got in but I wish to God you’d get out. How you
can
hang on, knowing what they think, if it isn’t true! You can’t have any pride or decency. It’s so cruel. It’s so
damnably
cruel.”

Martyn looked at the pretty tear-blubbered face and thought in terror that if it had been that of Atropos it could scarcely have offered a more dangerous threat. “Don’t!” she cried out. “Please don’t say that; I need this job so desperately. Honestly,
honestly
you’re making a thing of all this. I’m not hurting you.”

“Yes, you are. You’re driving me completely frantic. I’m nervously and emotionally exhausted,” Miss Gainsford sobbed, with an air of quoting somebody else. “It just needed you to send me over the borderr line. Uncle Ben keeps on and on and on about it until I think I’ll go mad. This is a beastly unlucky theatre anyway. Everyone knows there’s something wrong about it and then you come in like a Jonah and it’s the rock
bottom
. If,” Miss Gainsford went on, developing a command of histrionic climax of which Martyn would scarcely have suspected her capable, “if you have
any
pity at all,
any
humanity, you’ll spare me this awful ordeal.”

“But this is all nonsense. You’re making a song about nothing. I won’t be taken in by it,” Martyn said and recognized defeat in her own voice.

Miss Gainsford stared at her with watery indignation and through trembling lips uttered her final cliché. “You can’t,” she said, “do this thing to me,” and broke down completely.

It seemed to Martyn that beyond a facade of stock emotionalism she recognized a real and a profound distress. She thought confusedly that if they had met on some common and reasonable ground she would have been able to put up a better defence. As it was they merely floundered in a welter of unreason. It was intolerably distressing to her. Her precarious happiness died, she wanted to escape, she was lost. With a feeling of nightmarish detachment she heard herself say: “All right. I’ll speak to Mr. Poole. I’ll say I can’t do the understudy.”

Miss Gainsford had turned away. She held her handkerchief to her face. Her shoulders and head had been quivering but now they were still. There was a considerable pause. She blew her nose fussily, cleared her throat, and looked up at Martyn.

“But if you’re Helena’s dresser,” she said, “you’ll still be
about
.”

“You can’t mean you want to turn me out of the theatre altogether.”

“There’s no need,” Miss Gainsford mumbled, “to put it like that.”

Martyn heard a voice and footsteps in the passage. She didn’t want to be confronted with Jacko. She said: “I’ll see if Mr. Poole’s still in the theatre. I’ll speak to him now if he is.”

As she made for the door Miss Gainsford snatched at her arm. “Please!” she said. “I
am
grateful. But you will be really generous won’t you? Really big? You won’t bring me into it, will you? With Adam I mean. Adam wouldn’t underst—”

Her face set as if she had been held in suspension, like a motion picture freezing into a still. She didn’t even release her hold on Martyn’s arm.

Martyn spun round and saw Poole, with Jacko behind him, in the passage. To her own astonishment she burst out laughing.

“No, really!” she stammered. “It’s too much! This is the third time. Like the demon-king in pantomime.”

“What the devil do you mean?”

“I’m sorry. It’s just your flair for popping, up in crises. Other people’s crises. Mine, in fact.”

He grimaced as if he gave her up as a bad job. “What’s the present crisis?” he said and looked at Miss Gainsford, who had turned aside and was uneasily painting her mouth. “What is it, Gay?”

“Please!” she choked. “Please let me go. I’m all right, really. Quite all right. I just rather want to be alone.”

She achieved a tearful smile at Poole and an imploring glance at Martyn. Poole stood away from the door and watched her go out with her chin up and with courageous suffering neatly portrayed in every inch of her body.

She disappeared into the passage and a moment later the door of the Greenroom was heard to shut.

“It is a case of mis-casting,” said Jacko, coming into the room. “She should be in Hollywood. She has what it takes in Hollywood. What an exit! We have misjudged her.”

“Go and see what’s the matter.”

“She wants,” said Jacko, making a dolorous face, “to be alone.”

“No, she doesn’t. She wants an audience. You’re it. Get along and do your stuff.”

Jacko put several parcels on the table. “I am the dogsbody,” he said, “to end all dogsbodies,” and went out.

“Now, then,” Poole said.

Martyn gathered up her work and was silent.

“What’s the matter? You’re as white as a sheet. Sit down. What is all this?”

She sat behind the machine.

“Come on,” he said.

“I’m sorry if it’s inconvenient for you but I’m afraid I’ve got to give notice.”

“Indeed? As a dresser or as understudy?”

“As both.”

“It’s extremely inconvenient and I don’t accept it.”

“But you must. Honestly, you must. I can’t go on like this: it isn’t fair.”

“Do you mean because of that girl?”

“Because of her and because of everything. She’ll have a breakdown. There’ll be some disaster.”

“She doesn’t imagine you’re going to be given the part over her head, does she?”

“No, no, of course not. It’s just that she’s finding it hard anyway and the — the sight of me sort of panics her.”

“The likeness?”

“Yes.”

“She needn’t look, at you. I’m afraid she’s the most complete ass, that girl,” he muttered. He picked up a fold of the material Martyn had been sewing, looked absently at it and pushed the whole thing across the table. “Understand,” he said, “I won’t for a second entertain the idea of your going. For one thing Helena can’t do without you, and for another I will not be dictated to by a minor actress in my own company. Nor,” he added with a change of tone, “by anyone else.”

“I’m so terribly sorry for her,” Martyn said. “She feels there’s some sort of underground movement against her. She really feels it.”

“And you?”

“I must admit I don’t much enjoy the sensation of being in the theatre on sufferance. But I was so thankful—” She caught her breath and stopped.

“Who makes you feel you’re on sufferance? Gay? Bennington? Percival?”

“I used a silly phrase. Naturally, they all must think it a bit queer, my turning up. It
looks
queer.”

“It’d look a damn sight queerer if you faded out again. I can’t think,” he said impatiently, “how you could let yourself be bamboozled by that girl.”

“But it’s
not
all bamboozle. She really is at the end of her tether.”

Martyn waited for a moment. She thought inconsequently how strange it was that she should talk like this to Adam Poole, who two days ago had been a celebrated name, a remote legend, seen and heard and felt through a veil of characterization in his films.

“Oh, well,” she thought and said aloud: “I’m thinking of the show. It’s such a good play. She mustn’t be allowed to fail. I’m thinking about that.”

He came nearer and looked at her with a sort of incredulity. “Good Lord,” he said, “I believe you are! Do you mean to say you haven’t considered your own chance if she did crack up? Where’s your wishful thinking?”

Martyn slapped her palm down on the table. “But of course I have. Of course I’ve done my bit of wishful thinking. But don’t you see—”

He reached across the table and for a brief moment his hand closed over hers. “I think I do,” he said. “I’m beginning, it seems, to get a taste of your quality. How do you suppose the show would get on if you had to play?”

“That’s unfair,” Martyn cried.

“Well,” he said, “don’t run out on me. That’d be unfair, if you like. No dresser. No understudy. A damn shabby trick. As for this background music, I know where it arises. It’s a more complex business than you may suppose. I shall attend to it.” He moved behind her chair, and rested his hands on its back. “Well,” he said, “shall we clap hands and a bargain? How say you?”

Martyn said slowly: “I don’t see how I can do anything but say yes.”

“There’s my girl!” His hand brushed across her head and he moved away.

“Though I must say,” Martyn added, “you do well to quote Petruchio. And Henry the Fifth, if it comes to that.”

“A brace of autocratic male animals? Therefore it must follow you are ‘Kate’ in two places. And — shrewd Kate, French Kate, kind Kate, but never curst Kate — you will rehearse at eleven to-morrow, hold or cut bow-strings. Agreed?”

“I am content.”

“Damned if you look it, however. All right. I’ll have a word with that girl. Good day to you, Kate.”

“Good day, sir,” said Martyn.

That night the second dress rehearsal went through as for performance, without, as far as Martyn knew, any interruption during the action.

She stayed throughout in one or the other of Miss Hamilton’s dressing-rooms and, on the occasions when she was in transit, contrived to be out of the way of any of the players. In the second act, her duties kept her in the improvised dressing-room on the stage and she heard a good deal of the dialogue.

There is perhaps nothing that gives one so strong a sense of theatre from the inside as the sound of invisible players in action. The disembodied and remote voices, projected at an unseen mark, the uncanny quiet offstage, the smells and the feeling that the walls and the dust listen, the sense of a simmering expectancy; all these together make a corporate life so that the theatre itself seems to breathe and pulse and give out a warmth. This warmth communicated itself to Martyn and, in spite of all her misgivings, she glowed and thought to herself, “This is my place. This is where I belong.”

Much of the effect of the girl’s part in this act depended not so much on what she said, which was little, but on mime and on that integrity of approach which is made manifest in the smallest gesture, the least movement. Listening to Miss Gainsford’s slight uncoloured voice, Martyn thought: “But perhaps if one watched her it would be better. Perhaps something is happening that cannot be heard, only seen.”

Miss Hamilton, when she came off for her changes, spoke of nothing but the business in hand and said little enough about that. She was indrawn and formal in her dealings with her dresser. Martyn wondered uneasily how much Poole had told her of their interviews, whether she had any strong views or prejudices about her husband’s niece, or shared his resentment that Martyn herself had been cast as an understudy.