Death Of A Hollow Man (17 page)

“Please
…” cried Deidre in an urgent whisper. “The audience will hear you.”

Kitty stopped then, adding just one more sentence in a very quiet voice. “If he lays a finger on me again,” she said, “I’ll fucking kill him.”

Then, still moving slowly and stiffly, she went, leaving Deidre staring after her openmouthed, the three aspirins, already sweatily crumbling, in the palm of her hand.

Barnaby and Troy, like the rest of the audience, were aware of the extraordinary change that had come over
Amadeus
in the second half. It seemed to them at the time that this was entirely due to the actor playing Salieri.

In Act I he had given a capable if rather stolid performance. In Act II his whole body seemed alive with explosive energy, which it seemed to barely contain. You would not have been surprised, thought Barnaby, if sparks had flown when he clapped his hands or struck the boards with his heel. The very air through which he stalked, trailing clouds of inchoate rage, seemed charged. Maureen Troy thought she might not have missed
Coronation Street
for nothing, and Barnaby became aware that his daughter was now sitting up and leaning forward in her chair.

Salieri’s startling transformation did not help the play as a whole. The rest of the cast, instead of interacting with him as they had done previously (albeit with varying degrees of convincingness), now seemed to have become quite disengaged, moving cautiously within his orbit and avoiding eye contact even when indulging in direct speech.

Nicholas waited for his cue, gazing into the brilliantly lit arena. He was tense but not alarmed. He responded to the crackling energy that, even in the wings, he could feel emanating from Esslyn, in a very positive way. He felt his own blood surge in response. He knew he could match, even overmatch, the other man’s power. His mind was clear; his body trembled pleasingly with anticipation. He stepped onstage and did not hear Emperor Joseph whisper as he drifted by, “Watch him.”

And if he had heard, Nicholas would have paid no mind. He had no intention of pussyfooting about. For him, always, the play came first. So he stepped boldly up to Salieri, and when Esslyn said, “I commiserate with the loser” and held out his hand, Nicholas gladly offered his own. Esslyn immediately stepped in front of the boy, masking him from the audience, gripped Nicholas’s hand in his own, and squeezed. And squeezed. Harder. And harder.

Nicholas’s mouth stretched involuntarily wide in silent pain. His hand felt as if it were being wrapped in a bunch of savagely sharp thorns. Esslyn was smiling at him, a broad jackal grin. Then, just as Nicholas thought he might faint with agony, Esslyn suddenly let go and sauntered to the back of the stage. Nicholas gasped out a reasonable approximation of his next few lines and managed to get across to the piano and sit down. The Venticelli entered, and Mozart, who had no more to say, took this opportunity to examine his hand. It was already puffing up. He straightened the fingers gently one at a time. The back of the hand was worse than the palm. Covered in tiny blue bruises, with the skin actually broken in several places. The whole hand looked and felt as if someone had been trying to hammer thumbtacks into it. At the end of the scene he made his exit. Colin approached him in the wings. “Deidre thinks we ought to stop it.”

Nicholas shook his head. “I can cope. Now I know.”

“Let’s have a look.” Colin stared at the hand and drew in his breath sharply. “You can’t go on like that.”

“Of course I can.” Nicholas, having got over the immediate shock of the attack, was now, despite the pain, rather relishing this opportunity to display his cool professionalism. He was a trouper. And troupers trouped no matter what. Deidre touched his arm and whispered, “What happened?”

“His rings.” Nicholas held out his hand. “I thought he’d taken them off, but he’d just turned them round.”

“Bloody hell,” muttered Boris, peering over Deidre’s shoulder. “You won’t play the violin again in a hurry.”

“But why?” asked Deidre, and Nicholas shrugged his ignorance.

Onstage Salieri shouted his triumph.
“I filled my head with golden opinions—yes, and this house with golden furniture!”
and the whole set was suffused with soft, rich amber light. Gilded chairs and tables were carried on. Beside Nicholas, Joyce Barnaby stood holding a three-tier cake stand painted yellow. Like everyone else, she looked anxiously at him.

Nicholas nodded reassuringly back, attempting to appear both calm and brave. In fact, he was neither. He felt intensely excited, rather alarmed, and very angry. He strove to suppress the anger. The time to let that rip would be afterward. Now, he had to face the challenge of the next half hour. He would have more scenes alone with Salieri, but only one where they had physical contact (another handshake), and that handshake he would make sure to avoid. And the man could hardly do him any serious physical harm in front of a hundred people.

In the audience, his exquisite daughter raptly attentive by his side, Barnaby’s nostrils widened and twitched. The smell in the theater was a smell he recognized. And so he should. It had been under his nose for a large part of his working life. A hot, burned smell, ferocious and stifling. The whole place stank of it. The smell of violence. He withdrew the larger part of his attention from the play and glanced about him. Everyone was still and quiet. He could see Harold’s profile, bulging with pleasure mixed with disbelief. His wife looked simply frightened. Others sat eyes wide, unblinking. One woman savaged her bottom lip, another had both fists knuckling her cheeks. Barnaby turned his head slightly. Not every gaze was out front. Sergeant Troy, alert—even wary—was also looking about him.

Behind them in the back row Mr. Tibbs gripped the back of the seat in front of him and pushed away from it so hard that it seemed his backbone must impress the wall behind. His face showed terrible anticipation mixed with a craven appeal for mercy. He looked like a child, innocent of wrongdoing, who awaits harsh punishment.

Barnaby redirected his attention to the stage and the source of his unease. Esslyn was like a man possessed. He seemed to be never still. Even when he withdrew to the back of the stage and rested in the shadows, energy seemed to pulse through and around him as if he stood on a magnetic field. Barnaby would be glad when the play was over. Although he could think of no reason why Joyce should be at risk, he would be happy to see
Amadeus
concluded and whatever raging grievance Esslyn had sorted out in the proper manner. It was obviously something to do with Kitty.

She reentered now, bulkily pregnant, leaning heavily on Mozart’s arm. She looked neither crushed nor beaten. Her curtsey to Salieri was a mere ironic sketch, her mouth a hard line and her eyes flashing. When she said, “I never dream, sir. Things are unpleasant enough to me awake,” her voice, though raw and bruised, surged with acrimony. Barnaby glanced at his watch (about twenty minutes to go) and attempted to relax, giving himself up to the ravishing music of
The Magic Flute.
How entrenched, how impregnable must Esslyn’s malice be that it could remain undiminished in the presence of such glorious sound.

Now, clad in a long gray cloak and hat, the top half of his face concealed by a mask, Salieri, harbinger of doom, moved stealthily across the stage to where Mozart, madly scribbling over sheets of paper, was working, literally, to a deadline, composing his own requiem.

Nicholas worked in a cold fever of exhilaration. Even though he had spent the evening in a more or less constant state of anxiety, there had been enough luminous moments to convince him that, as far as Mozart was concerned, he was on the right track. Whole sections had almost played themselves and seemed to be newly created moment by moment, as if the whole grinding discipline of rehearsal had never been. I can do it! Nicholas thought, dazed with jubilation. A dark figure moved in the doorway of his pathetic apartment and came to stand behind him.

Afterward, recounting the scene for Barnaby’s benefit, Nicholas found it impossible to describe precisely the exact moment when the simulated terror with which he had acknowledged Salieri’s phantasmagoric appearance fled and the real thing took its place. Perhaps it was when Esslyn first laid a bony hand upon his shoulder and breathed searing, rancorous breath over his cheek. Perhaps it was when the other man cut their first move and flung aside a chair that Nicholas had cunningly re-sited as a possible barrier between them. Or was it when he whispered, “Die, Amadeus … die”?

Automatically at this point Nicholas, as he had done at each rehearsal, dropped to all fours and crawled underneath the shrouded table that doubled as a writing desk and bed. The table was permanently set flush to the proscenium arch, and Colin had stapled the heavy felt cover to the floor on either side. So when Esslyn crouched at the entrance and his cloak blotted out the opening like great gray wings, Nicholas was trapped.

He crawled back as far as he was able in the dark, tiny space. He felt suffocated. What air there was, was thick with the musty staleness of the cloth and the reek of jackal breath. Esslyn curled back his lips in a hideous parody of a smile. And Nicholas realized that his earlier conviction (that he could come to no harm under the gaze of a hundred assorted souls) was a false one. He believed now that Esslyn would not be bound by the normal man’s rational fear of discovery. Because Esslyn, Nicholas decided, was stark staring bonkers.

Now, the other man’s hand, knuckledustered with silver spikes and hard, violating stones, reached for Nicholas’s throat. And Nicholas, cutting the rest of the scene, yelled Kitty’s cue:
“Oragna figata fa! Marina gamina fa!”
He heard her footsteps on the other side of the cloth and her first line, “Wolfie?” Esslyn withdrew his hand, his arm, his shoulders, and, finally, his vile grimace. By the time Nicholas crawled out, Salieri had retreated once more to the shadows.

“Stanzerl …” Nicholas clung to Kitty. She supported him, helping him to climb onto the table, arranging his pillows. His death scene (his marvelous death scene on which he had worked so hard) went for nothing. He gabbled the lines, his eyes constantly straying over Kitty’s shoulder to the figure, furled all in gray, waiting in the dark. When Nicholas had died and been thrown without ceremony into his pauper’s grave (a mattress concealed behind the fireplace) he lay there for a few moments, then crawled off into the wings. He found his way to the chair by the props table and fell into it, resting his head against the wall.

Expecting instant attention and sympathy, he was surprised when no one paid him any mind, then realized that they could hardly have known what was going on beneath a covered table. Time enough to tell them afterward. He became aware that his other hand, or at least the thumb, was hurting like hell. He held it up, but the light was so dim that he could see only the outline. He hurried downstairs, on the way up passing Deidre, who cried, “Watch out!” and held a kettle of steaming water out of his way.

In the bright lights of the men’s dressing room, he discovered a great splinter rammed down the side of his nail. The surrounding flesh already had a gathered, angry look. He held it under the hot tap for a few moments, then looked around for a pair of tweezers. Occasionally an actor would have some for applying wisps of false hair or eyebrows. But he had no success. He tried next door, knocking first.

“Oh,” Rosa exuded kind concern. “You poor lamb. I’ve got some twizzies. Hang on.” She riffled in her box. “Have you put anything on it?”

“No. Just given it a rinse.”

“Here we are.” Rosa picked up some tweezers smeared with greasepaint. “Let’s have a look, then.”

Nicholas handed over his thumb while eyeing the surgical appliance with some disquiet. “Shouldn’t we sterilize them or something?”

“Good Lord, Nicholas. You want to enter the profession, you’ll have to learn to take something like this in your stride.”

Nicholas, who had never seen the willingness to embrace septicemia as one of the more obvious qualities a young actor might find useful, jibbed at this robust assertion.

“There.” Rosa extracted the splinter with surprising gentleness, then rummaged in her handbag, produced a grubby Band-Aid, and peeled off the shiny backing. “How did you come to pick it up, anyway?” Nicholas told her. “Oh, how you exaggerate.”

“I do not. He went straight for the jugular.” But even as he spoke, Nicholas was aware of a watering down of his conviction. The cozy air of normalcy in the dressing room and the fact that no one in the wings had noticed anything untoward were encouraging a slight feeling of unreality about his recollections. But there was one thing that was true and very real. Nicholas said, “And he shook the living daylights out of Kitty.”

“Did he?” Rosa smiled and wrapped the Band-Aid extra tenderly around her companion’s thumb. “Naughty boy.” Nicholas rightly assumed that this reproof was intended for Esslyn rather than himself, although it seemed astonishingly mild under the circumstances. “I expect he discovered,” continued Rosa creamily, “that she was having an affair.”

“Bloody hell! How did you know that?”

“Common knowledge, darling.”

Nicholas, swamped by guilt, sat contemplating his throbbing hand. This was all his fault. If he hadn’t told Avery and Tim, it would never have got out. So much for Avery’s promises. And for all he knew, Tim had blabbed as well. They were both as bad as the other. “Pair of gossipy old queens,” he muttered.

“Sorry?”

“Tim and Avery.”

“Well, really, darling,” continued Rosa, “if you feel like that about homosexuals, you may just be entering the wrong profession. I understand there’s at least one in every company.”

Nicholas stared at her severely, no longer grateful for the Band-Aid. How would she know what there was in every company? Swathed in her nylon wrapper with its collar of molting cerise ostrich feathers. Playing the leading lady, regurgitating chunks of past performances, trailing shreds of ersatz glamor as false and tawdry as last year’s tinsel. The Latimer, thought Nicholas savagely, was the perfect place for her, along with the other poseurs and has-beens and never-would-be’s and deadweights. Conveniently he forgot past kindnesses. The patience and encouragement shown to a neophyte who hadn’t known a claw hammer from a codpiece. The support and refuge offered when he had suddenly left home. He only knew that he was sick of the whole narcissistic bunch. He jumped up, startling Rosa.