Stories (68 page)

He found Hetty, apparently asleep, wrapped loosely in a blanket, propped sitting in a corner. Her head had fallen on her
chest, and her quantities of white hair had escaped from a scarlet woollen cap, and concealed a face that was flushed a deceptive pink—the flush of coma from cold. She was not yet dead, but she died that night. The rats came up the walls and along the planks and the cat fled down and away from them, limping still, into the bushes.

Hetty was not found for a couple of weeks. The weather changed to warm, and the man whose job it was to look for corpses was led up the dangerous stairs by the smell. There was something left of her, but not much.

As for the cat, he lingered for two or three days in the thick shrubberies, watching the passing people and beyond them, the thundering traffic of the main road. Once a couple stopped to talk on the pavement, and the cat, seeing two pairs of legs, moved out and rubbed himself against one of the legs. A hand came down and he was stroked and patted for a little. Then the people went away.

The cat saw he would not find another home, and he moved off, nosing and feeling his way from one garden to another, through empty houses, finally into an old churchyard. This graveyard already had a couple of stray cats in it, and he joined them. It was the beginning of a community of stray cats going wild. They killed birds, and the field mice that lived among the grasses, and they drank from puddles. Before winter had ended the cats had had a hard time of it from thirst, during the two long spells when the ground froze and there was snow and no puddles and the birds were hard to catch because the cats were so easy to see against the clean white. But on the whole they managed quite well. One of the cats was female, and soon there were a swarm of wild cats, as wild as if they did not live in the middle of a city surrounded by streets and houses. This was just one of half a dozen communities of wild cats living in that square mile of London.

Then an official came to trap the cats and take them away. Some of them escaped, hiding till it was safe to come back again. But Tibby was caught. He was not only getting old and stiff—he still limped from the rat’s bite—but he was friendly, and did not run away from the man, who had only to pick him up in his arms.

“You’re an old soldier, aren’t you?” said the man. “A real tough one, a real old tramp.”

It is possible that the cat even thought that he might be finding another human friend and a home.

But it was not so. The haul of wild cats that week numbered hundreds, and while if Tibby had been younger a home might have been found for him, since he was amiable, and wished to be liked by the human race, he was really too old, and smelly and battered. So they gave him an injection and, as we say, “put him to sleep.”

O
r rather, perhaps, a condition of the mud which nurtures? Flowers, of course—but that isn’t the point. No, definitely not an effluent, a by-product. Accurate as well as charitable to see it all as a kind of compost, the rich mad muck which feeds those disciplined performances, exactly the same night after night, that we see and marvel at and which might even cause us to exclaim—if we haven’t entirely lost that naivety which I for one maintain the theatre needs as dreams need sleep, and could not exist without for one moment: How can he/she bear to be someone else so entirely and devotedly every blessed night and two afternoons a week for hours at a stretch! Even with intervals for orange juice or Scotch. Possibly for months at a time. If the play finds favour, as they say.

Those two, for instance: household names, or at least in those households (one per cent of the population) which prefer to give room to these rather than to the more vigorous performers, football players, or horses or dogs—those two, having rehearsed for a month a play which called for a slow progress towards a bed, made of the bed itself a stage for—not at all for the guilt-ridden and eventually murderous lusts which the play incorporated, but for innocence.

It was an innocence so immaculate that words like “mud”
and “compost” perhaps need looking at again. If, that is, we do not want to examine innocence.

It so happened—and no chance either, I feel—that both he (well call him John) and she (Mary will do) were involved during the period of rehearsal with some pretty savage moments in their private lives. He was in trouble with his marriage; and she, having been divorced, had reached that point with a possible new husband when she must decide whether to marry him or not. On the whole she felt not. At any rate, it wasn’t at all that either could look forward, after a day of rehearsing passions not their own, to loving tranquillity. Far from it, and on the contrary, both returned to scenes, reproaches and torments not very different—and they even said so, with that appropriate good trouper’s laugh used by actors to dismiss their private lives when engaged on their real business—from those they were developing during rehearsals. Well, one night Mary found herself, when everybody had left the darkened theatre, backstage and by the great bed which was such a feature of the play. It was made up, but for economy’s sake not more than was essential. She sat by the bed on the little stool which was also part of the set and found herself shedding a tear, though for what she could not have said (her words when describing the experience). Through blurred vision she saw a figure approaching from the dressingrooms: no ghost or burglar, but the handsome John, whose feet, or at least, some impulse, had brought him here, also in the belief that the building was deserted. No need, she said, for words. He sat on the companion stool on the other side of the bed. He offered her a cigarette. Between them stretched the crumpled sheet on which they had spent at least four hours that day of steady, grindingly repetitive rehearsal locked in each other’s arms, apparently in the extremes of passion. They left half an hour later, without even the casual theatre kiss that by custom they would have offered each other on parting. Next evening, and without arranging it, they met again. For a week these two rolled, morning and afternoon and some evenings, in torments of simulated lust and its associated emotions, and at night met, chaste and tender, for a half hour before returning to their tumultuous private lives. They were too shy, as she explained, to touch each other. As in a first love, the lighting of a cigarette, the accidental meeting of a hand, were exquisitely painful—indeed, more than enough.
That nightly half hour was filled with restoring breaths of air from lost horizons. Finally their affaire (so she always pronounced it) culminated in a kiss so delicate, so exquisite, that its poetry was enough to decide her not to marry her possible husband, and him to leave his wife. No, that kiss was not on the first night, but after the dress rehearsal. The first night being successfully accomplished in the usual ritual crescendo of shared tension, flowers, champagne, congratulations and the theatre emptying backstage into darkness as it had an hour ago in front, the two found themselves on their way out, by the bed, a slight detour and a temporary shedding of their first-night visitors being necessary. Looking at the pillow case, which should have been put on fresh for the just-completed performance, she noted a smear of lipstick—hers, from the dress rehearsal. “Really,” she said, irritably, “I do think they might have remembered to put on a clean pillow case for the first night.” “I quite agree,” he said, cool, and with precisely the same degree of professional irritation at incompetence, “that lipstick must have been visible from half-way up the stalls.” With which they kissed each other, comradely and brisk, as is customary, said goodnight, and parted, she to reaffirm to her lover that no, she would not marry him, and he to disagree with his wife, who was saying that really, as responsible and adult people, they should try again.

Or take that well-known playwright, now dead, whose dissatisfaction with his wives was not so much proclaimed—they were all damned fine women, he told the newspapers—as demonstrated by the fact that he dismissed them one after another, usually about four years after marrying them. He was on his sixth wife when she met, by chance, wives five and four, and confessed that things were not as they ought to be. Remarks were made that caused them to contact previous wives. Six women, five ex-wives and the present incumbent, met one afternoon—not, they said, in any spirit of anger, but from a scientific desire for psychological clarity. In each of this man’s plays (we will call him John) appeared a woman, sometimes in a leading part, sometimes not, who was wise, witty, warm, tender, beautiful and all-forgiving, the last quality being the most valuable, in life if not theatrically, as each of these women had discovered. They were all actresses and all had played this woman, presented under different names, in different clothes
and in different epochs. The first wife had played her in his first-performed play as a suburban school-teacher; the current wife had played her, evolved into full flower, four years ago in the shape of an Italian princess. They all had had the same experience, an uneasiness, which developed even during those first rapturous days of an at-last-discovered perfect love, that made them feel—and all of them said they had felt it—as if they were not themselves, as if, in life, they were being forced into a role, and even, as one of them put it, as if there were always a third person present—a ghost. The ghost, of course, of the stage woman. And each one had experienced that moment when, betrayed, wounded, knifed to the heart by reality, their John had shouted (and with such conviction of betrayal that there was nothing at all to be said): “Why don’t you behave like …? You aren’t like her at all!”—using the name for whichever incarnation of his “she” that she had in fact played. And this was the moment when, giving her a look of disgusted dismissal, he had gone off into his study to begin the new play which would incorporate, in minor or major part, the new version of this woman who must continually be recreated in art since she did not exist in life. Which play, when it was put on, would infallibly lead to her—the present wife’s—divorce. Because, although she did not know it, was perhaps still a half-tried girl waiting for her big chance, the new wife was already blue-printed, summoned. And from that moment, about a week after the rehearsals started, when she approached the great man shyly, her beautiful eyes shining with the effort it was costing her, and said: “I must say this, I really must, forgive me, but thank you for letting me play this beautiful part in your beautiful play”—nothing was more certain than that he would marry her, and then divorce her the moment he finally understood that she was, after all, only Mary, who might sulk, complain, or cry just like any woman.

Or take the case of Mary X—this time a female writer. It was when she was well on her career that her husband pointed out, and with rancour, that in almost everything she wrote occurred the same figure, male, though that was not the point, because he was for all practical purposes sexless, being a slight wry clown or harlequin figure, on whose face was printed the same grimace whatever he was actually doing, whether playing the flute, dancing, or being—apparently—a normal person, a
smile that could not be distinguished from the contractions of the muscles which indicate pain or sorrow. Once having understood the truth of her husband’s accusation, she searched through every word she had ever written. Sure enough, there he was, right from the beginning, even in those apprentice pieces written decades before and now filed away. The point was, who was he? Where did he come from? Her father? No. Her brothers? No. Her husband? Certainly not, nothing of the Petrouchka about him, and besides, the demon lover (her husband’s name for him) had predated the husband by years. Her sons? She sincerely hoped not. Her mother, then?—since such figures from the underworld are no respecters of sex. No. Who? Who, possibly? No one. There was nobody she could think of, no matter how far back she went in her childhood, who could possibly have stood in for or inspired this ambiguously enticing wraith. But she did know, in the present, one, two, perhaps three of him. Pursuing this discovery, she made the new one that while until the performance of her first play, twelve years ago now, she had not met once, not once, any person, male or female, who incarnated the sad clown, since then and starting with the actor who had played the part (nicknamed Pierrot by the company even before her play was known by them) briefly, a friend before he had faded, as befitted his character, into a wry offstage existence on the fringes of her life, she had known several; she was never without him. The fact was, then, that the making flesh and blood of her—but her what? fantasy? a figure from her nightdreams?—on stage had had the power to bring him finally towards her? Well if so, it is not a thought a sensible person could enjoy. Particularly not a writer. She contents herself, when, meeting a man who turns that unmistakable face towards her, with saying to herself, never to her husband, who so strangely and obdurately resents this rival who could never be one, Here he is again, and with the secret contraction of the heart, the laugh that is half a shudder, which are the tributes we pay to the dark of our natures.