Books of Blood (16 page)

     
Hammersmith looked up from the sheets of figures he was poring over.

‘Oh?’ his eyebrows were eruptions of wire-thick hair that seemed ambitious beyond their calling. They were raised high above Hammersmith’s tiny eyes in patently fake surprise. He plucked at his bottom lip with nicotine stained fingers.

      ‘Any idea who it was?’

      He plucked on, still staring up at the younger man; undisguised contempt on his face.

      ‘Is it a problem?’

      ‘I just want to know who was in looking at the rehearsal that’s all. I think I’ve got a perfect right to ask.’

      ‘Perfect right,’ said Hammersmith, nodding slightly and making his lips into a pale bow.

      ‘There was talk of somebody coming up from the National,’ said Galloway. ‘My agents were arranging something. I just don’t want somebody coming in without me knowing about it. Especially if they’re important.’

      Hammersmith was already studying the figures again. His voice was tired.

      ‘Terry: if there’s someone in from the South Bank to look your opus over, I promise you, you’ll be the first to be informed. All right?’

      The inflexion was so bloody rude. So run-along-little-boy. Galloway itched to hit him.

      ‘I don’t want people watching rehearsals unless I authorize it, Hammersmith. Hear me? And I want to know who was in today.’

      The Manager sighed heavily.

      ‘Believe me, Terry,’ he said, ‘I don’t know myself. I suggest you ask Tallulah — she was front of house this afternoon. If somebody came in, presumably she saw them.’

      He sighed again.

     
‘All right .. . Terry?’

      Calloway left it at that. He had his suspicions about Hammersmith. The man couldn’t give a shit about theatre, he never failed to make that absolutely plain; he affected an exhausted tone whenever anything but money was mentioned, as though matters of aesthetics were beneath his notice. And he had a word, loudly administered, for actors and directors alike: butterflies. One day wonders. In Hammersmith’s world only money was forever, and the Elysium Theatre stood on prime land, land a wise man could turn a tidy profit on if he played his cards right.

      Galloway was certain he’d sell off the place tomorrow if he could manoeuvre it. A satellite town like Redditch, growing as Birmingham grew, didn’t need theatres, it needed offices, hypermarkets, warehouses: it needed, to quote the councillors, growth through investment in new industry. It also needed prime sites to build that industry upon. No mere art could survive such pragmatism.

      Tallulah was not in the box, nor in the foyer, nor in the Green Room.

      Irritated both by Hammersmith’s incivility and Tallulah’s disappearance, Galloway went back into the auditorium to pick up his jacket and go to get drunk. The rehearsal was over and the actors long gone. The bare hedges looked somewhat small from the back row of the stalls. Maybe they needed an extra few inches. He made a note on the back of a show bill he found in his pocket:

      Hedges, bigger?

      A footfall made him look up, and a figure had appeared on stage. A smooth entrance, up-stage centre, where the hedges converged. Galloway didn’t recognize the man.

      ‘Mr Galloway? Mr Terence Galloway?’

     
‘Yes?’

      The visitor walked down stage to where, in an earlier age, the footlights would have been, and stood looking out into the auditorium.

      ‘My apologies for interrupting your train of thought.’

      ‘No problem.’

      ‘I wanted a word.’

      ‘With me?’

      ‘If you would.’

      Galloway wandered down to the front of the stalls, appraising the stranger.

      He was dressed in shades of grey from head to foot. A grey worsted suit, grey shoes, a grey cravat. Pisselegant, was Galloway’s first, uncharitable summation. But the man cut an impressive figure nevertheless. His face beneath the shadow of his brim was difficult to discern.

      ‘Allow me to introduce myself.’

      The voice was persuasive, cultured. Ideal for advertisement voice-overs: soap commercials, maybe. After Hammersmith’s bad manners, the voice came as a breath of good breeding.

      ‘My name is Lichfield. Not that I expect that means much to a man of your tender years.’

      Tender years: well, well. Maybe there was still something of the wunderkind in his face.

      ‘Are you a critic?’ Galloway inquired.

      The laugh that emanated from beneath the immaculately-swept brim was ripely ironical.

      ‘In the name of Jesus, no,’ Lichfield replied.

      ‘I’m sorry, then, you have me at a loss.’

      ‘No need for an apology.’

      ‘Were you in the house this afternoon?’

      Lichfield ignored the question. ‘I realize you’re a busy man, Mr Calloway, and I don’t want to waste your time.

     
The theatre is my business, as it is yours. I think we must consider ourselves allies, though we have never met.’

      Ah, the great brotherhood. It made Galloway want to spit, the familiar claims of sentiment. When he thought of the number of so-called allies that had cheerfully stabbed him in the back; and in return the playwrights whose work he’d smilingly slanged, the actors he’d crushed with a casual quip. Brotherhood be damned, it was dog eat dog, same as any over-subscribed profession.

      ‘I have,’ Lichfield was saying, ‘an abiding interest in the Elysium.’ There was a curious emphasis on the word abiding. It sounded positively funereal from Lichfield’s lips. Abide with me.

      ‘Oh?’

      ‘Yes, I’ve spent many happy hours in this theatre, down the years, and frankly it pains me to carry this burden of news.’

      ‘What news?’

      ‘Mr Galloway, I have to inform you that your Twelfth Night will be the last production the Elysium will see.’

      The statement didn’t come as much of a surprise, but it still hurt, and the internal wince must have registered on Calloway’s face.

      ‘Ah.. . so you didn’t know. I thought not. They always keep the artists in ignorance don’t they? It’s a satisfaction the Apollonians will never relinquish. The accountant’s revenge.’

      ‘Hammersmith,’ said Galloway.

      ‘Hammersmith.’

      ‘Bastard.’

      ‘His clan are never to be trusted, but then I hardly need to tell you that.’

      ‘Are you sure about the closure?’

      ‘Certainly. He’d do it tomorrow if he could.’

     
‘But why? I’ve done Stoppard here, Tennessee Williams

— always played to good houses. It doesn’t make sense.’

      ‘It makes admirable financial sense, I’m afraid, and if you think in figures, as Hammersmith does, there’s no riposte to simple arithmetic. The Elysium’s getting old. We’re all getting old. We creak. We feel our age in our joints: our instinct is to lie down and be gone away.’

      Gone away: the voice became melodramatically thin, a whisper of longing.

      ‘How do you know about this?’

      ‘I was, for many years, a trustee of the theatre, and since my retirement I’ve made it my business to — what’s the phrase? — keep my ear to the ground. It’s difficult, in this day and age, to evoke the triumph this stage has seen . . .‘

      His voice trailed away, in a reverie. It seemed true, not an effect.

      Then, business-like once more: ‘This theatre is about to die, Mr Galloway. You will be present at the last rites, through no fault of your own. I felt you ought to be .

      warned.’

      ‘Thank you. I appreciate that. Tell me, were you ever an actor yourself?’

      ‘What makes you think that?’

      ‘The voice.’

      ‘Too rhetorical by half, I know. My curse, I’m afraid. I can scarcely ask for a cup of coffee without sounding like Lear in the storm.’

      He laughed, heartily, at his own expense. Galloway began to warm to the fellow. Maybe he was a little archaic-looking, perhaps even slightly absurd, but there was a full-bloodedness about his manner that caught Galloway’s imagination. Lichfield wasn’t apologetic about his love of theatre, like so many in the profession, people who trod the boards as a second-best, their souls sold to the movies.

      ‘I have, I will confess, dabbled in the craft a little,’

Lichfield confided, ‘but I just don’t have the stamina for it, I’m afraid. Now my wife —‘

      Wife? Galloway was surprised Lichfield had a heterosexual bone in his body.

‘— My wife Constantia has played here on a number of occasions, and I may say very successfully. Before the war of course.’

      ‘It’s a pity to close the place.’

      ‘Indeed. But there are no last act miracles to be performed, I’m afraid. The Elysium will be rubble in six weeks’ time, and there’s an end to it. I just wanted you to know that interests other than the crassly commercial are watching over this closing production. Think of us as guardian angels. We wish you well, Terence, we all wish you well.’

      It was a genuine sentiment, simply stated. Galloway was touched by this man’s concern, and a little chastened by it. It put his own stepping-stone ambitions in an unflattering perspective. Lichfield went on: ‘We care to see this theatre end its days in suitable style, then die a good death.’

      ‘Damn shame.’

      ‘Too late for regrets by a long chalk. We should never have given up Dionysus for Apollo.’

      ‘What?’

      ‘Sold ourselves to the accountants, to legitimacy, to the likes of Mr Hammersmith, whose soul, if he has one, must be the size of my fingernail, and grey as a louse’s back. We should have had the courage of our depictions, I think. Served poetry and lived under the stars.’

      Galloway didn’t quite follow the allusions, but he got the general drift, and respected the viewpoint.

      Off stage left, Diane’s voice cut the solemn atmosphere like a plastic knife.

      ‘Terry? Are you there?’

      The spell was broken: Galloway hadn’t been aware how

hypnotic Lichfield’s presence was until that other voice came between them. Listening to him was like being rocked in familiar arms. Lichfield stepped to the edge of the stage, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial rasp.

      ‘One last thing, Terence—‘

      ‘Yes?’

      ‘Your Viola. She lacks, if you’ll forgive my pointing it out, the special qualities required for the role.’

      Galloway hung fire.

      ‘I know,’ Lichfield continued, ‘personal loyalties prevent honesty in these matters.’

      ‘No,’ Galloway replied, ‘you’re right. But she’s popular.’

      ‘So was bear-baiting, Terence.’

      A luminous smile spread beneath the brim, hanging in the shadow like the grin of the Cheshire Gat.

      ‘I’m only joking,’ said Lichfield, his rasp a chuckle now. ‘Bears can be charming.’

      ‘Terry, there you are.’

      Diane appeared, over-dressed as usual, from behind the tabs. There was surely an embarrassing confrontation in the air. But Lichfield was walking away down the false perspective of the hedges towards the backdrop.

      ‘Here I am,’ said Terry.

      ‘Who are you talking to?’

      But Lichfield had exited, as smoothly and as quietly as he had entered. Diane hadn’t even seen him go.

      ‘Oh, just an angel,’ said Galloway.

      The first Dress Rehearsal wasn’t, all things considered, as bad as Galloway had anticipated: it was immeasurably worse. Cues were lost, props mislaid, entrances missed; the comic business seemed ill-contrived and laborious; the performances either hopelessly overwrought or trifling. This was a Twelfth Night that seemed to last a year. Halfway through the third act Galloway glanced at his

watch, and realized an uncut performance of Macbeth (with interval) would now be over.

      He sat in the stalls with his head buried in his hands, contemplating the work that he still had to do if he was to bring this production up to scratch. Not for the first time on this show he felt helpless in the face of the casting problems. Cues could be tightened, props rehearsed with, entrances practised until they were engraved on the memory. But a bad actor is a bad actor is a bad actor. He could labour till doomsday neatening and sharpening, but he could not make a silk purse of the sow’s ear that was Diane Duvall.

      With all the skill of an acrobat she contrived to skirt every significance, to ignore every opportunity to move the audience, to avoid every nuance the playwright would insist on putting in her way. It was a performance heroic in its ineptitude, reducing the delicate characterization Galloway had been at pains to create to a single-note whine. This Viola was soap-opera pap, less human than the hedges, and about as green.

      The critics would slaughter her.

      Worse than that, Lichfield would be disappointed. To his considerable surprise the impact of Lichfield’s appearance hadn’t dwindled; Galloway couldn’t forget his actorly projection, his posing, his rhetoric. It had moved him more deeply than he was prepared to admit, and the thought of this Twelfth Night, with this Viola, becoming the swan-song of Lichfield’s beloved Elysium perturbed and embarrassed him. It seemed somehow ungrateful.

      He’d been warned often enough about a director’s burdens, long before he became seriously embroiled in the profession. His dear departed guru at the Actors’ Centre, Wellbeloved (he of the glass eye), had told Galloway from the beginning:

‘A director is the loneliest creature on God’s earth. He knows what’s good and bad in a show, or he should if he’s

worth his salt, and he has to carry that information around with him and keep smiling.’

      It hadn’t seemed so difficult at the time.

      ‘This job isn’t about succeeding,’ Wellbeloved used to say, ‘it’s about learning not to fall on your sodding face.’

      Good advice as it turned out. He could still see Well-beloved handing out that wisdom on a plate, his bald head shiny, his living eye glittering with cynical delight. No man on earth, Galloway had thought, loved theatre with more passion than Wellbeloved, and surely no man could have been more scathing about its pretensions.

      It was almost one in the morning by the time they’d finished the wretched run-through, gone through the notes, and separated, glum and mutually resentful, into the night. Galloway wanted none of their company tonight:

      No late drinking in one or others’ digs, no mutual ego-massage. He had a cloud of gloom all to himself, and neither wine, women nor song would disperse it. He could barely bring himself to look Diane in the face. His notes to her, broadcast in front of the rest of the cast, had been acidic. Not that it would do much good.

      In the foyer, he met Tallulah, still spry though it was long after an old lady’s bedtime.

      ‘Are you locking up tonight?’ he asked her, more for something to say than because he was actually curious.

      ‘I always lock up,’ she said. She was well over seventy:

too old for her job in the box office, and too tenacious to be easily removed. But then that was all academic now, wasn’t it? He wondered what her response would be when she heard the news of the closure. It would probably break her brittle heart. Hadn’t Hammersmith once told him Tallulah had been at the theatre since she was a girl of fifteen?

      ‘Well, goodnight Tallulah.’