Death Of A Hollow Man (33 page)

“And you can see why now, can’t you? How right I was. You said you were going to the post office.”

“I went there first. Don’t worry. All the books went
off
.”

“
I didn’t mean that
,” screamed Avery. “You know I didn’t.”

“It was of no importance,” said Tim quietly. “Not compared to us.”

“Then
why
? Why risk you and me … all this… ?” Avery gestured at the cozy sitting room with such vigor that he slid off his perch.

“God—you’re pixilated,” said Tim, helping him back up.

“I am not pissilated,” wept Avery. “I mean … if it wasn’t David in the box, I thought it might be Nico … or Boris. I never in a million years thought it could be you.”

“I don’t see why not. You know my sexual history.”

“But I thought you’d turned your back on all that,” said Avery. Then: “
Don’t laugh
.”

“Sorry.”

“And why Kitty, of all people?”

Tim shrugged, remembering the combination of fragile bones and tough, sly cherubinical smile that had briefly excited him. “She was pretty, and lean … quite boyish, really …”

“She won’t be boyish for long,” cut in Avery. “Very unlean and unpretty she’ll be.”

“I wouldn’t have wanted her for long,” said Tim. And for a second he looked so desolate that Avery forgot who was the guilty party and almost made a move to comfort him as he would have done before the betrayal. “If it makes you feel any better,” continued Tim, “it was Kitty who started it all. I think she regarded me as some sort of challenge.”

“Some people don’t seem to know the difference between a challenge and a bloody pushover.” Avery braced himself. “How long … how many… ?”

“Half a dozen times. At the most.”

“Oh, God!” Avery gasped as if from a body blow and covered his face with his hands. “And was she … I mean … has there been. …”

“No. No one else.”

“What shall I do?” Avery rocked from side to side on his stool. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Why should you do anything? It seems to me more than enough’s been done already. And don’t blubber.”

“I’m not.” Avery took his little butterball fists, shiny with moisture, from his teary eyes. His pale yellow curls, limp with sorrow, looked like a ring of scrambled egg. He choked out the next words. “I don’t know how you can be so heartless.”

“I’m not heartless, but you know how I hate these honky tonk emotions.” Tim tore a piece off the paper-towel roll and mopped Avery’s face, which was crisscrossed with rivulets of tears and mucous and sweat. “And give me that cup before it’s all over the floor.”

“Everything’s soiled … and … spoiled. I just can’t bear it anymore …”

“I don’t see how you can possibly know that until you try.” This cold, sinewy reasoning brought Avery to a fresh pitch of misery. “I mean it, Tim,” he cried. “You must promise me faithfully that you’ll never ever
ever
again—”

“I can’t do that. And you wouldn’t believe me if I did. Oh, you might now, because you’re desperate, but tomorrow you’d start to wonder. Any by the day after that…”

“But you
must
promise. I can’t go on with all this insecurity.”

“Why not? Everybody else has to. Your trouble is you expect too much. Why can’t we just muddle along like Mr. and Mrs. Average? You know … doing our best… picking each other up if we fall … making allowances … Cloud nine’s for retarded adolescents.” Tim paused. “I never promised you a rose garden, as the saying goes.”

“Well,” said Avery, with a flash of the old asperity. “If I’m not going to have a rose garden, I shan’t want all this shit, shall I?” Then, when Tim smiled his shadowy, introspective smile, Avery suddenly cried, “It’d be all right if I didn’t love you so much!”

“But if you didn’t love me so much, what on earth reason would I have for staying?”

Avery pondered this. Was such a remark a consolation? It seemed to imply that what he had to offer (the shop, the house, the meticulous and affectionate concern with which he went about his daily tasks) was not, after all, the reason why Tim stayed. Yet what else, worried Avery, did he have to offer? He turned the thought over. It seemed to him that the question had a catch in it somewhere, and he said so.

“There’s always a catch.” Tim moved back to the sitting room and collected the pieces of the Chinese bowl. “I must get some stuff tomorrow and fix this.”

“That’s right. Put the boot in.” But Avery felt his woozy unhappiness touched by a flicker of warmth. Perhaps Tim would not be packing his bags after all. Perhaps in the morning they could open the shop and check the till and tidy the books and carefully, like the walking wounded that they were, reach out to each other for comfort. Tim came back and put the painted fragments on the kitchen table.

“I’m sorry about the dish.”

“No, no. It’s what I’ve always wanted,” Tim said kindly. “A glued-together home.”

“Do you remember Cornwall?”

“To my dying day. I thought I’d never get you away from that Redruth fisherman.”

“Oh.” Avery turned a guilty countenance toward his lover. “I’d forgotten all about that.”

“I hadn’t. But … as you see … I’m still here.”

“Yes. D’you think”—Avery held out his hand—“we’ll ever be really happy again?”

“Stop living in some mythical future. You can’t invent happiness. It’s just a by-product of day-to-day plodding along. If you’re lucky.”

“We have been lucky, haven’t we, Tim?”

“We are lucky, you old tosspot. Best not to talk anymore now. I’m wacked.”

Tim went upstairs then, leaving Avery to finish his coffee. He felt like a punching bag once the belaboring has ceased. Still vibrating with the memory and bruised. Then, because the first terror had passed and because Tim had come home and was going to stay, the concentration of despondency that had obscured Avery’s fear lifted, and the cloud no bigger than a man’s lie returned.

Tim’s remark that he had first denied making then shrugged aside appeared suddenly to have developed an ominous gloss. For it seemed to Avery that to say “We shall certainly have to leave
now
indicated some secret knowledge. Surely it implied that, if Esslyn had not been killed, Avery and Tim, in spite of the lighting conspiracy, would have been able to stay? Now, to add to Avery’s alarm, was the information that Tim had been Kitty’s lover. And it was Tim who had supplied the razor. Had he really just gone down to the john in the interval of the play? And why go downstairs at all when there were two restrooms in the clubroom?

Tim called, “What’s keeping you? Come on …”

But for the first time ever Avery, even while experiencing the usual sting in the flesh, did not get up and hurry toward the source of his delight. He sat on in his disordered kitchen, getting colder and colder. And feeling more and more afraid.

It was the following day, and Harold was making one of his rare appearances at the lunch table. Usually he dined out, and Mrs. Harold, who put up the sandwiches, was quite thrown by this sudden change of plan. Her household budget was tiny, and any incursion at one point meant immediate retrenchment at another. She had found a Fray Bentos canned individual steak and kidney pudding at the back of the cupboard and had rushed out and bought some carrots out of her flower-seed money. But Harold had eaten so abstractedly that she felt she could well have given him her own lunch (boiled potatoes and two slices of luncheon meat) without him being any the wiser. Now, as he scraped up the last smear of gravy, she said, “It’s not like you to come home midday, Harold.”

“I’m taking the afternoon off. It’s Nicholas’s half day and we have to have a serious talk about his future.”

“Does he know you’re coming?” Harold looked blank. “I mean … have you made some arrangement?”

“Don’t be silly, Doris. I don’t make arrangements with junior members of the company.”

“Then he might not be in.”

“I can’t imagine where else he would be on a dreadful day like this.”

Doris looked out at the black rods of rain hammering against the kitchen window. “There’s a piece of cake for sweet, Harold. If you’d like it.”

Harold did not reply. He stared at his wife but did not see her yellowish-gray hair and shabby skirt and cardigan. His mind was full of his future leading man. He saw Nicholas striding the stage as Vanya and perhaps later as Tartuffe and later still as Othello or even Lear. Why not? Under Harold’s expert guidance, the boy could develop into a fine actor. Every bit as good as Esslyn. Perhaps even better.

Harold had not come to this decision easily. He had toyed with Boris and even Clive Everard who gave, in his quirky posturing way, quite an interesting performance. But he was aware that the potential of both was still nowhere near that of Nicholas. The only reason Harold had considered, even briefly, an alternative was because of a certain willfulness, an antic disposition, that he had sensed strongly in the boy during rehearsals for
Amadeus
. Several times he had felt Nicholas getting away from him and glimpsed flashes of prowling energy that were disturbing, to say the least. And of course Nicholas was very saucy.

But Harold was confident that he could handle it. After all, he had always managed to handle Esslyn.

“What are you going to see him about?” asked Doris.

“I’d have thought that was obvious. I have to find a replacement for Esslyn.”

Mrs. Harold dutifully saw her husband off the premises and waved as he squeezed his paunch into position behind the wheel of the Morgan and backed out of the garage. A replacement for Esslyn indeed, she thought as she put the plates and cutlery in the sink. Anyone’d think he was a door handle. Or a broken teapot.

She had been deeply shocked by the reaction of Harold and the rest of the CADS to the death of their leading actor. She knew he wasn’t popular (she hadn’t liked him much herself), but some tears should be shed somewhere by someone. She decided to go to the funeral, and left the dishes to soak while she went upstairs to look for something dark and respectable.

Meanwhile Harold zipped up Causton High Street and parked outside the Blackbird. He planned to kill two birds and was pleased to see that Avery, who returned his greeting in a very subdued manner, and his partner were both in the shop. Harold beckoned Tim grandly to the cubbyhole and said, “I’m holding auditions for
Vanya
on Friday evening. Dashing around and notifying everyone. Is Nico in?”

“Yes but he’s-”

“Good. Now—I’d be very interested to see any ideas you might have on lighting the play.” Ignoring Tim’s surprised and ironical glance, he continued, “Technically you’re very capable, and I think it’s high time you were given a chance to branch out.”

“Thank you, Harold.”

“Nothing too fancy. It’s Russia, don’t forget.” On this enigmatic note, Harold whisked aside the chenille curtain and heaved himself up the wooden stairs.

Nicholas was sitting on the floor declaiming. The gas fire was on, and the room was warm and cozy. Cully Barnaby was curled up on the bed drinking coffee. Play scripts littered the floor, and Nicholas was reading from the Harrison translation of the Aeschylus: “Down, down, down he goes, and falling knows nothing, nothing. A smother of madness clouds round the victim. The groans of old—” As Harold appeared in the doorway, Nicholas broke off, and he and Cully looked at the intruder rather coolly.

“Ah,” said Harold, missing the coolness but spotting the appellation. “I’d have expected to see you reading Uncle Vanya.“p>

“Why, Harold?”

“The auditions are on Friday.” Harold would have preferred this conversation without Tom Barnaby’s daughter sitting in. She had been, in his opinion, although quite a good actress, a nasty, self-opinionated little girl, and she didn’t improve with age. Harold cleared his throat.

“I’m sure you will be very proud … very excited to hear that I have chosen you out of all the company to succeed Esslyn as my leading man.” Harold could see from the expression on Nicholas’s face that he should perhaps have led up to this revelation more subtly. The boy looked deeply alarmed. Reassuringly Harold added, “You’re too young for Vanya, of course, but if you work hard, with my help I know you’ll be a great success.”

“I see.”

So overwhelmed was Nicholas with emotion that he choked out the words. Then he added something else, but the girl chose that precise moment to indulge in a fit of coughing, and Harold had to ask Nicholas to repeat himself. When he did so Harold, openmouthed with dismay, tottered to the nearest chair and fell into it.

“
Leaving?
”

“I’m going to Central.”

“Central what?”

“Central School of Speech and Drama. I want to go into the theater.”

“But … you’re
in
the theater.”

“I mean the real theater.”

The force of Harold’s response lifted him clean from his seat. He gave a great cry in which rage and incredulity and horror were equally intermingled. Nicholas paled and climbed hurriedly to his feet. Cully stopped coughing.

“How dare you!” Harold walked across to Nicholas, who stood his ground but only just. “How dare you! My theater is as real … as true … as fine as any in the country.
In the world.
Do you have any idea who you’re talking to? What my background is? I have heard the sort of applause for my work in what you are pleased to call the real theater that actors would sell their souls to achieve. Stars have clamored to work for me. Yes—stars! If it weren’t for circumstances completely beyond my control, do you think I’d be working in this place? With people like you?”

The final sentence was a tormented shout, then Harold stood, panting. He appeared bewildered and ridiculous, yet there was about him the tatters of an almost heroic dignity. He looked like a great man grown overnight too old. Or a warrior on whose head children have placed a paper crown.

“I’m … I’m sorry …” Nicholas stumbled into speech. “If you like, I could stay for
Vanya
… I don’t have to go to London immediately.”

“No, Nicholas.” Harold stayed the boy’s words by a simple gesture. “I would not wish to work with anyone who did not appreciate and respect my directorial gifts.”