The Sparks Fly Upward (42 page)

Aaron clung on to Makepeace's shoulder. ‘Sit down. He's gone.'

‘I'm going to slit his throat.'

‘You're not. Sit down.'

For the third time, the Marquis raised his baton and started the overture. Few heard it; the theater was in uproar. Some people were leaving. Most were staying to see if there was more fun to come.

Gradually, the music and then the dancers calmed things down a little but the auditorium was still restive when Polly Armitage came on to speak the prologue and he was given a hard time of it, especially by the Blanchard boxes.

By then Makepeace didn't care. Not content to take Philippa and Andrew away from her, the Lord was manifesting a dozen fists with which to knock her from one side of the arena to the other in punishment for stepping into it in the first place. She had wasted her money, her time and this sad company's efforts. In the flurry of the last weeks, she had forgotten their purpose. The slave and her child stood before her, real and stark, against the tawdry background she had prepared for them.

Aaron nudged her.

She was surrounded by silence. Blanchard's voice, amused, trying to urge his companions into jeers, was being ignored and trailing away. The curtain had drawn sideways and up in the effect Murrough had wanted and Jacques had achieved, so that she was looking at a picture, no, through the porthole of a ship taking her in to a foreign shore. The sunlight was not from lamps or an English summer, but a thicker, hotter light, infusing color into strange foliage.

The curtain was gone now, she was drawn in, the ship had landed her on scorching sand. Either her eyes were tricking her nose or Jacques had concocted a blend of aromatic grasses for his hot plates that sent out the smell of raffia and spices. From the depth of the jungle at the back of the beach came the wail of a pan-pipe and the insistent beat of a drum.

She was where she had never been before.

It was odd to hear English spoken, and the setting gave emphasis to the two young women—Chrissy, very pretty; Ninon, very dashing in young man's attire—in their plot to hunt out and capture husbands from the unsuspecting wildlife. It didn't matter that Ninon regretted in a French accent the fact that they'd had to leave their native London in order to do it. Here, everything was strangeness and expected to be so.

Makepeace heard Aaron draw in a deep breath. ‘That's my woman.'

Even when the Widow Lackitt hustled on, familiar in her sex-starved monstrosity and causing laughter, one was not allowed to forget that she wasn't the only man-eater in this wilderness and that other predators lurked in the grasses.

How have they done it? Makepeace wondered. Flat forgettable words on a page, a ridiculous plot, had been dilated into three dimensions and given substance. This was not a life reflecting hers nor anyone's in the audience but a glimpse of demigods and goddesses flirting and bickering and deceiving each other in a Caribbean Olympus.

And she had derided them.

Was that Polly Armitage, who fainted into the arms of his male lover in a pretence of overwork at the end of the day, this square-jawed, iron-headed bastard of a governor? Yes, it was—because he said he was. Could Dizzy, an inveterate gambler and pain in the backside, be dependable Blandford, that hero and friend to the slaves? Yet he was, because Dizzy said he was.

Here was skill, more than skill. Insubstantial dross was being transmuted into insubstantial gold. She was watching alchemy.

A pillar of ebony seven foot tall strode onto the stage and Makepeace knew that, like the Queen of Sheba at the sight of Solomon, behold, the half was not told her. A woman sitting behind her gasped, ‘Oh, my.'

A red robe had been wrenched off one shoulder showing gleaming black muscles, the creature's feet griped at the boards like prehensile hands as it paced restlessly back and forth on the end of its chain. It should not be chained; splendor like this was masterless.

Makepeace and Murrough had argued over the play. ‘It's not about slavery,' she'd said, ‘it's about one exceptional slave. Oroonoko's a prince, he's as contemptuous of his fellow slaves as any white man.'

‘He's the spirit of Africa,' Murrough had said. ‘It may not be the great play but, by God, I'll show our temerity in enslaving a continent. '

And by God he's doing it, Makepeace thought as she watched. Africa stood there on stage. The shame of capture was not Oroonoko's but that of the colorless pigmies who'd inflicted it on him.

From that moment the play was Murrough's, in his mouth uninspired lines became the deep cry from a million yoked throats. The laughter of the audience at the antics of Widow Lackitt was near frantic because it knew they were mere interludes in something terrible. Even in the romantic moments of Ninon and Chrissy and their swains, it was kept aware of the pulse of Oroonoko's blood by a barely audible but unceasing drumbeat.

And there was another continual presence, this time silent—a thin black woman and her child, unacknowledged by the other characters yet always onstage, sometimes driven by whips from one side of it to another, sometimes curled in a corner, never leaving hold of each other, watching tragedy and comedy with the same dull faces.

When Murrough had told her the Countess d'Arbreville and Henri were on the payroll at the highest rate, she'd demurred. ‘They don't have speaking parts.'

‘The loudest,' he'd said.

The audience wasn't allowed to forget the two figures; they were the heart of the matter. The broken heart. She couldn't bear to look at them.

At the interval Aaron turned on his sister with the greatest compliment of one impresario to another—envy. ‘They're doing you proud,' he said.

‘Shall I go to them?'

He shook his head. ‘Let 'em keep the bit between their teeth.'

Jenny said, ‘I can't bear it, Ma. What do they do to Oroonoko? What will happen to the woman and the little boy?'

‘They aren't in the script.'

They walked out to the foyer to listen for compliments. ‘Wonderful! ' ‘Isn't he magnificent?' ‘My dear, I've been transported!'

Makepeace thought of the letter in her pocket; even enchantment couldn't make problems go away.

In the street outside, a crowd had gathered to buy the half-price tickets for the rest of the performance and was growing as passersby were attracted to the unmistakable buzz of success. The doorman was bringing it up to date on the plot so far. ‘He may be a savage but he's more Christian than those what caught him. They've got his poor wife an'all, an' she's going to have a baby an' I don't know what's a-going to happen ...'

Snuffy Throgmorton was struggling through the crowd followed by a footman with a tray of ices for Blanchard's party. ‘Fine play, Mrs Hedley. Makes one sorry the pater ever invested in West Indies sugar.'

She glowed. ‘Does it? Does it really?'

‘Too late now, though.' He put his head down to hers. ‘No news of . . . I suppose?'

‘No.'

‘She'll be all right. Ffoulkes pushin' that end and Blanchard pullin' this end, can't fail.'

A little man was tugging at her sleeve; she couldn't think why her heart sank at the sight of him.

‘A fine musical entertainment, Mrs Hedley, a truly splendid concert. ' He winked at her and with the excitability of a convert tore across a piece of paper he had in his hand. ‘Had it been a play, I should have presented you with this, but no, no, the dancing . . . the songs . . . most musical, most musical. The Lord Chamberlain will be so informed.'

‘We're legal?'

‘Yes.'

He was lying, bless him; they both knew it. This was a play with songs and dances and Murrough had incorporated them in order to enhance the story, not interrupt it. A love song that had no purpose in the original script, where it had been inserted for its own sake, he'd given to Ninon to sing apparently as part of her seduction of Widow Lackitt, but in fact, achingly, to the man she'd fallen for. When the players exited, leaving the stage empty except for the figures of the slave and her child, dancers rose from the undergrowth like plants come alive and curled back into the grass when they came on again.

Makepeace went back to her place. Félicie, she saw, like the rest of the audience, was settling for the second half even before the third bell was rung.

Jacques's lanterns were darker now, the drum beat faster; the native Indians were becoming dangerous. Imoinda was reunited with her husband and again torn from him.

On paper, Makepeace had thought her a ninny. ‘She's always swooning or weeping. I'd have kicked that damn governor in his credentials. '

‘I've no doubt ye would,' Murrough said, ‘but you've never known slavery.'

Under his direction, Betty Jordan played Imoinda as a young Amazon, a bow in her hand, a quiver of arrows on her back, a princess of the forest, bewildered into naiveté by the disaster come upon her. Her scenes with Oroonoko widened the audience's eyes at the palpitating physicality of their love for each other. For this savage Romeo and Juliet, clothes were another enslavement they would have got rid of if they could.

‘Oh, my,' whispered Makepeace's neighbour as Imoinda struggled free of her captors to run across the stage and jump on Oroonoko, wrapping her legs around him and taking his face between her hands.

Aaron murmured, ‘Thanks be the Reverend Deedes ain't here.'

But Makepeace's shock was at the strong preference she felt at that moment for slitting Mrs Jordan's throat rather than the Reverend Deedes's.
Leave him alone. He's mine
.

Dear God, was that how she felt about him? An actor? An Irishman? Two unreliable personae rolled into one? Look at him; how could you feign passion like that? He was projecting the lust he showed in her bed. Or perhaps he feigned it there, too. Either way he was betraying her. Heilbron was right; capturing the audience's pity for the silent slave and her son was showmanship. It degraded the reality.

And I'm degrading me, she thought, sitting here and slavering for that swine. I am a middle-aged woman; I've been many things but a slut wasn't one of them. He's made me one.

Her husbands had been nice men; the excitement she'd experienced with them had been lambent in mutual trust, not this dark and unedifying dependence. In company, she was distant to him—a drunkard pretending to ignore the beckoning bottle. At nights she could hardly wait for him to open her bedroom door. He was her drug; when the ecstasy wore off, she foreswore it. Never again. Until the next time.

‘Nobody must know,' she'd say to him.

‘I know.' An answer that was equivocal, like everything else about him.

Of course he'd slept with Jordan,
look
at them.
Lay off, you bitch, you bitch. He's mine.

The light onstage flickered; a far-off roll of thunder was one of Jacques's cannonballs rolling down a chute with a lining of wool. She knew this; it was a trick; she'd seen it, but the approaching storm carried a menace that raised the hairs on her arms.

Then the terrible end came. Thunder cracked the ears. As Imoinda assisted Oroonoko's dagger into her belly and the child she carried in it, there was a whoosh of protest from the audience.

We've gone too far
, Makepeace thought.

But Oroonoko's grief held them.
‘Soft, lay her down, we will part no more
.
'
Nobody moved. There was another sigh—this time of good-riddance—when the evil governor fell to the same dagger.

Silence as Dizzy spoke the last lines over Oroonoko's body. Silence as the actors waited for applause on their corpse-strewn stage.

Silence as the curtain came down. Silence as Murrough came from behind it to give the epilogue. Which had been changed from the apologia Southerne had written for it to Cowper's poem, ‘The Negro's Complaint.'

‘It's doggerel,' she'd said.

‘Not the way I'll do it,' he told her.

 

In this mouth the hip-hopping lines became a howl of accusation. Behind him the slave mother and her son walked on quietly, hand in hand.

 

From the wings appeared two of the hooded slavers who had sailed Oroonoko and Imoinda from Africa to Surinam. One took the mother by the shoulder, the other took the child—quite gently, ritually—and led them off, the woman to the right, the little boy to the left. For a moment their black pleading arms could be seen stretching towards each other from the opposing wings before they disappeared.

Aaron told Makepeace later that it was almost a minute before the cheers began. She didn't notice. Neither did the woman next to her; she'd abandoned wiping her eyes and had spread her handkerchief over her chest to let the tears flow as they would.

There were twenty-two curtain calls, Aaron said, and fifteen of those broke with tradition when Murrough commanded the entire cast to come on rather than allowing the leading actors to hog the applause. Aaron said Countess d'Abreville and Henri, black mother, black child, who hadn't spoken a word, received the greatest cheer. People were still crying, he said.

‘Better now?' he asked her.