Death Of A Hollow Man (12 page)

“Obviously. What other reason would anyone have for wearing a hat like that?”

“D’you know,” said Avery approvingly, “I think we shall make something of this boy yet. Would you like a little wine, Nico?”

“If it’s not too much trouble.”

“Oh, don’t be so
silly,”
retorted Avery, splashing the Chablis into three large tumblers. “I hate people who say things like that. They’re always the sort who never mind how much trouble they give you. She came in the other day prosing on—”

“Who did?”

“Her out there. Came rushing up and asked me what I knew of the Wars of the Spanish Succession. I said absolutely nothing. I hadn’t stirred from the shop all day.” Avery looked at his companions. “Laugh, I thought they’d never stop.”

“Start.”

“Start what?”

“The joke is,” Nicholas explained patiently, “laugh, I thought they’d never start.”

“You’re making it up.” Nicholas reached out for a second roll and got his fingers slapped. “And don’t be such a pig.”

“Don’t mention pigs to me. Or meat of any kind.”

“Oh, God—he’s turned vegetarian.” Avery blanched. “I knew all those beans would go to his head.”

“That would make a change,” said Tim. “What’s up, Nicholas?”

“The first-night frantics, I’ll be bound,” said Avery. “If you’re worried about your lines, I’ll hear them after we close.”

Nicholas shook his head. He knew his lines and no longer feared (as he had in
The Crucible)
that they would vanish once and for all the moment he stepped onstage. What was disturbing him were his pre-first night dreams. Or rather dream. He was now quite used to having some sort of nightmare before the opening of a play, and had discovered most of his fellow actors had similar experiences. They dreamed they had learned the wrong part or their costume had vanished or they stepped onstage into a completely strange drama or (very common) they were in a bus or car that went past the theater again and again and refused to stop. Nicholas’s dream fell into this last category, except that he was traveling under his own steam to the Latimer. On roller skates. He was late and flying along, down Causton High Street, knowing he would only just make it, when his feet turned into the butcher’s shop. No matter how hard he fought to carry straight on, that is where they would go.

Inside the shop everything had changed. It was no longer small and tiled with colorful posters, but vast and cavernous; a great warehouse with row after row of hanging carcasses. As Nicholas skated frantically up and down the aisles trying to find a way out, he passed hundreds of slung-up hares with their heads in stained paper bags, lambs with frills around newly beheaded necks, and huge sides of bright red marbled meat rammed with steel hooks. Sweating with fear, he would wake, the reek of blood and sawdust seemingly in his nostrils. He had had this dream now every night for a week. He just hoped to God once the first night was over, he never had it again.

He described it lightheartedly to his companions, but Tim picked up the underlying unease. “Well,” he said, “there’s only two more to go. And don’t worry about Monday, Nico. You’re going to be excellent.” Nicholas looked slightly less wan. “Avery was in my box last night, and he cried at your death scene.”

“Ohhh.” Nicholas’s face was ecstatic. “Did you really, Avery?”

“That was mostly the music,” said Avery, “so there’s no need to get above yourself. Although I do think, one day, if you work very hard, you are going to be quite good. Of course, appearing opposite Esslyn, anyone would look like the new Laurence Olivier. Or even the old one, come to that.”

“He’s so prodigiously over the top,” said Tim. “Especially in the
Don Giovanni
scene.”

“Absolutely,” cried Nicholas, and Tim watched with approval as some color returned to his cheeks. “That’s my favorite. ‘Makea this one agood in my ears. Justa theesa one …’ ” His voice throbbed with exaggerated Italianate fervor. “ ‘Granta thees to me.’ ”

“Oh! Can I play God?” begged Avery. “
Please?
.”

“Why not?” said Tim. “What’s different about today?”

Avery climbed onto a stool and pointed a chubby Blakean finger at Nicholas. “‘No … I do not need you, Salieri. I have …
Mozart!’”
Demon-king laughter rang out, and he climbed down holding his sides. “I’ve missed my vocation—no doubt about it.”

“Didn’t you think,” said Nicholas, “that there was something funny about the whole dress rehearsal?”

“Give that man the Barbara Cartland prize for understatement.”

“I mean funny peculiar. I can’t believe all those upsets were accidental, for a start.”

“Oh, I don’t know. One sometimes has glorious evenings like that,” said Tim. “Remember the first night of
Gaslight?’’

“And the Everards. They’re getting more and more contemptuous,” continued Nicholas. “That remark about the manhole cover. I don’t know how they dare.”

“They dare because they’re under Esslyn’s protection. Though what he sees in them is an absolute mystery.”

“Don’t talk to me,” said Nicholas, sulkily sidetracked, “about mysteries.”

“You’re not going to start on that again,” said Avery. “I’m sorry, but I don’t see why I should let it drop. You promised if I told you my secret, you’d tell me yours.”

“And I will,” said Tim. “Before the first night.”

“It’s before the first night
now. ”

“We’ll tell you on the half, honeybun,” said Avery. “And that’s a promise. Just in case you tell someone else.”

“That’s ridiculous. I trusted you, and you haven’t told anyone else … have you?”

“Naturally not.” Tim was immediately reassuring, but Avery said nothing. Nicholas looked at him, eyebrows raised interrogatively. Avery’s watery pale blue eyes wavered and slid around, alighting on the remaining crumbs of cheese, the walnuts, anything, it seemed, but Nicholas’s direct gaze. “Avery?”

“Well …” Avery gave a shamefaced little smile, “I haven’t really
told
anyone. As such.”

“Oh, Christ—what do you mean, ‘as such’?”

“I did sort of hint a bit… only to Boris. He’s the soul of discretion, as you know.”

“Boris? You might as well have had leaflets printed and handed them out in the High Street!”

“There’s no need to take that tone,” Avery shouted, equally loudly. “If people don’t want to be found out, they shouldn’t be unfaithful. And anyway, you’re a fine one to talk. If you hadn’t passed it on in the first place, no one else would know at all.”

This was so obviously true that Nicholas could think of nothing to say in reply. Furiously he pushed back his chair and, without even thanking them for the lunch, clattered back upstairs.

“Some people,” said Avery, and looked nervously across the table. But Tim was already stacking the glasses and plates and taking them over to the sink. And there was something about the scornful set of his shoulders and his stiff, repudiating spine that warned against further overtures.

Poor Avery, cursing his careless tongue, tidied and bustled and kept his distance for the rest of the afternoon.

Colin Smy was replacing the blocks of wood in the trestle table, and Tom Barnaby was painting the fireplace. It was a splendid edifice, which Colin had made from a fragile frame of wooden struts covered with thick paper. It had then been decorated with whorls and loops and arabesques and swags made from heavily sized cloth. It now looked, even without the benefit of lighting, superb. Tom had mixed long and patiently to find exactly the right faded brickish red, which, together with swirls of cream and pale gray, gave a beautiful marbled effect. (In the Penguin
Amadeus
the fireplace had been described as golden, but Harold hoped he had a bit more about him than to slavishly copy other people’s ideas, thank you very much.)

Although Barnaby ritually grumbled, there had been very few productions over the past fifteen years that he hadn’t spent at least an hour or two on, sometimes even tearing himself away from his beloved garden. Now, looking around the scene dock, he remembered with special pleasure a cutout garden hedge, all silver and green, which had represented the forest in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
and how it had shimmered in the false moonshine.

Barnaby derived great nourishment from his twin leisure activities. He was not greatly given to self-analysis, believing the end result, given man’s built-in capacity for self-deception, to be messy and imprecise, but he could not but observe, and draw conclusions from, the contrast the fruitfulness of his off-duty time and the aridity of much of his working life. Not that there was no call for imagination in his job: The best policemen always had some (not too much) and knew how to use it. But the results when it was applied were hardly comparable to those of his present occupation.

If he failed, the case would be left as a mass of data awaiting a lucky cross-reference from some future keen eyed constable eager for promotion. If he succeeded, the felon would end up incarcerated in some institution or other, while Barnaby would experience a fleeting satisfaction before facing once more, for the umpteenth thousandth time, the worst humanity had to offer, which, if you caught it on a bad day, could be terrible indeed.

So was it any wonder, he now reflected, that in what little spare time he had, he painted pictures or stage scenery or worked in his garden? There, at least, things grew in beauty, flowered, withered, and died all in their proper season. And if freakish Nature cut them down before their allotted span, at least it was without malice aforethought. “You’ve done a grand job there, Tom.”

“Think so?”

“Our
Fuehrer
will be pleased.”

Barnaby laughed. “I don’t do it for him.”

“Which of us does?”

They worked on in a companionable silence surrounded by fragments from alien worlds. There was the bosky world (spotted toadstools from
The Babes in the Wood),
the chintzy (fumed oak from
Murder at the Vicarage),
and the world of pallid chinoiserie
(Teahouse of the August
Moon—paper screens). Barnaby glanced up and caught the shy eye of a mangy goose peering through the frame of a french window
(Hay Fever).

Colin finished hammering four new blocks into the trestle, then upended it, saying, “That’ll do it. They can dance on that with hobnail boots and it should hold.”

“Who do you think took the others out?” said Tom, Joyce having described the scene to him.

“Oh, some silly bugger. I shall be glad when this play’s over and done with. Every rehearsal something goes wrong. Then it’s Colin do this, Colin fix that. …” Barnaby selected an especially fine brush for one of the curlicues and stroked the paint on carefully. Colin’s automatic grumbling flowed peacefully around his ears. The two men had worked together, on and off, for so long that they had now reached the stage of feeling that really they’d said all they had to say and, apart from certain ritualistic remarks, kept a silence as comfortable as a pair of old slippers.

Barnaby knew all about his companion. He knew that Colin had brought up his son, motherless since the age of eight. And that he was a gifted craftsman who carved delicate, high-stepping animals full of lively charm. (Barnaby had bought a delightful gazelle for his daughter’s sixteenth birthday.) And that Colin loved David with a protective devotion that had not grown less as the boy developed into a young man more than capable of taking care of himself. The only time Barnaby had seen Colin lose his temper was on David’s behalf. He thought how fortunate it was that Colin was rarely in the wings at rehearsal and so missed most of the sniping that David was having to put up with. Now, knowing of the younger Smy’s reluctance to perform, Barnaby said, “I expect David’ll be glad when next Saturday comes.”

Colin did not reply. Thinking he had not heard, Barnaby repeated his remark, adding, “At least he hasn’t got any lines this time.” Silence. Barnaby took a sideways look at his companion. At Colin’s stocky frame and tufty hair, black when they had first met, now brindled silver like his own. Colin’s usual expression of sturdy self-containment was slightly awry, and a second, much less familiar, lurked beneath. Barnaby said, “What’s up?”

“I’m worried about him.” Colin looked sharply at Barnaby. “This is just between us, Tom.”

“Naturally.”

“He’s got involved with some girl. And she’s married. He hasn’t been himself for some time. A bit … quiet … you know?” Barnaby nodded, thinking that David was so quiet anyway, it would take a father to spot the silence deepening. “I thought it might be that,” continued Colin. “I’d be really delighted to see him settled—after all, he’s nearly twenty-seven. So I said, ‘Bring her home then and let’s have a look at her,’ and he said she wasn’t free. He obviously didn’t want to talk about it.”

“Well … I suppose there isn’t a lot of point.”

“Not what you hope for them though, is it, Tom?”

“Oh,” said Barnaby, “I shouldn’t worry too much. Things might still work out.” He smiled. “They don’t mate for life these days, you know.”

“I pictured him going out with some nice local girl. A bit younger than himself, perhaps courting in the front room on the settee like me and Glenda used to. And grandchildren. What man our age hasn’t pictured his grandchildren?” Colin sighed. “They never turn out like you think, do they, Tom?”

Barnaby pictured his little girl, now nineteen. Tall, clever, malicious, stunningly attractive, with a heart of purest platinum. He could not help being proud of her achievements, but he knew what Colin meant.

“That they don’t,” he said. “Nothing at all like you think.”

Earnest Crawley was carving the joint. He worked like a surgeon, unemotionally but with great precision and a certain amount of eclat, wielding the long, shining knife like a scimitar and laying the slices of meat tenderly on the hot plates.

Rosa browned the potatoes on top of the stove. She wore a loose, flowing garment, the cuffs of which sailed dangerously close to the fragrant, spitting fat.

“How are them fellas getting on with their part then, love?”