Full Dark House (23 page)

34

JUNO’S SON

It was still raining hard in Charing Cross Road. The deluge vibrated across the roof of the auditorium. Somewhere, water was dripping onto metal, like the beat of a drum. It was impossible to keep the weather out of a theatre as old as the Palace. There wasn’t a Victorian building in London that didn’t have a damp patch somewhere, and the cracks caused by the continuous bombing made it worse.

Stan Lowe and PC Crowhurst sat inside the Greek Street stage door, at the rear of the theatre, watching the rain fall. Spatters of water leaked over a handwritten sign that Bryant had made Lowe place on the wall. It read: ‘NO VISITORS AFTER HALF-HOUR CALL OR DURING SHOW. DO NOT LEAVE THIS DOOR OPEN FOR ANYONE YOU DO NOT RECOGNIZE.’

For the first few weeks of the Blitz Stan Lowe had allowed the well-protected stage door area to be used as a first-aid post, but now he had been forced to add chains and a padlock. Most of the cast, orchestra and backstage crew had been signed in for the technical run-through. Crowhurst had taken names and addresses from everyone. He had heard the same piece of music, something Jack referred to as the ‘Sleeping Chorus’, echo through the backstage areas over a dozen times now, and was growing mightily sick of it.

‘I suppose you know there’s a ghost,’ said Stan matter-of-factly, knocking out his pipe on the emulsioned brick wall at his back. ‘You ain’t got any tobacco to spare, have you?’

PC Crowhurst poked about in his jacket and produced a half-ounce of St Bruno Flake. ‘You can have that and welcome,’ he said. ‘What sort of ghost? Not Dan Leno?’

‘No, he haunts Drury Lane. Only time Leno’s ever appeared here is in a newsreel.’ He pushed a wad of tobacco into his pipe and returned the packet with a nod. ‘This is some old Shakespearean actor. You know them bleeding great china dogs on the stair landing? They was his. This old cove was playing Polonius, and he gets to the arras scene, only the Dane’s sword is missing its button, see, and when ‘Amlet runs him through, he really runs him through, only nobody realizes because he’s behind the bleeding curtain, isn’t he, so they play out the rest of the scene, and it’s only when he’s supposed to get off the stage that they notices. Well, a’course by that time it’s too late to do anything for the poor old bugger, so every time there’s a new play coming on, he turns up as Polonius in a bloodstained doublet and hose, wandering about backstage putting the willies up the carpenters.’

PC Crowhurst looked sceptical. ‘Miss Trammel says he looked deformed, like he’d done something terrible to his face,’ he pointed out. ‘She said it was like a mask of tragedy, you know, like a Greek mask. She was in a right state this morning.’

‘His face was contorted ‘cos he’d been run through with a bleedin’ epinard,’ said Lowe sagely. ‘Actresses suffer with their nerves. That’s why so many of ‘em take to the drink.’ He flicked out a match and drew hard on the pipe. ‘Anyway, he was a bleedin’ awful Polonius. I could shit a better lecture to Laertes than that.’

Onstage it was the beginning of act two, and the gods slumbered on Mount Olympus. Venus, Mars, Cupid and the chorus went through their paces, but there was no Jupiter. Geoffrey Whittaker, the stage manager, was on the company office telephone trying to organize transport to collect their new head of Olympus, who was stuck on the wrong side of a bombed railway line in East London.

Helena was tired and irritable. She wanted a break and needed a whisky, but Harry and Elspeth were tailing her around the building to make sure that she didn’t find a way of breaking her contract. The technical run-through was necessary at this point because an unusual amount of scenery had to be flown through the tableaux, and Mouse, Stan Lowe’s boy, had been appointed to transcribe the complex stage manoeuvres in a movement programme as they progressed.

It didn’t help that the performers were having to work around a central hole in the production. Few of the cast had known Charles Senechal very well, but his absence was acutely felt. The understudy baritone had been approved and cast at the same time as Senechal’s appointment, but he didn’t have the diction quality Helena required for the recitative passages, so she was anxious to give him extra coaching. Senechal’s wife and child were holed up in a quiet Holland Park hotel, and had been visited by Andreas Renalda, who had dispensed with pleasantries and instructed the distraught woman not to talk to journalists. Luckily for him she spoke little English, and her interpreter was employed by the company.

With the arrival of the auditor, the company secretary and the treasurer’s wife, Stan Lowe gave up trying to keep the area restricted. Happily, Helena remained professional. She’d coped with ranting producers, cheating financiers and lying managers, compared to which the gripes of cast members who found their dressing rooms too far away or their fellow performers impossible to deal with were frankly small potatoes. But, God, she wanted a drink.

Rachel Saperstein was just starting to cope with the idea of her son’s success. She was proud of him, even though the Saperstein family name was apparently not good enough for Miles any more. She had been up to the apartment the company had rented for him, and had found the meat-safe in his scullery completely empty except for a bottle of vodka, which would only ruin his stomach in later life. Now she was seated at the front of the upper circle, watching him perform on the London stage, and her heart swelled with pride as he sang each note.

In the balcony of the theatre, above her, a young man named Zachary Darvell fidgeted in his seat and refined the tip of his hand-rolled cigarette with finger and thumb. ‘Of course I’m proud of her,’ he whispered across the seats. ‘I couldn’t do what she does, night after night. Trouble is, she doesn’t think I can do anything.’

‘So where’s your father?’ asked his best friend, Larry.

‘He buggered off ages ago. He was selling defence bonds until the war started, and now he’s a black marketeer. She rehearses all the time, so they were never together. I saw more of the baby-sitter than either of my parents.’

‘Lucky boy.’

‘Yes, it was pretty damned good.’ He held sharp smoke in his lungs, then exhaled. ‘Have the rest of this, I know you’re down to your last Woodie. Try not to cough, I don’t want her looking up and seeing me.’

‘What do you care?’ asked Larry, accepting the cigarette.

‘If she sees me up here she’ll throw a tantrum. Especially if she finds me with you.’ Zachary was supposed to be in medical college, but he and Larry had cut classes, not that there were many to cut at the moment. Every student with the ability to hold a scalpel had been seconded to the local hospital unit, where their tasks largely consisted of helping to clean up bodies. Sometimes identifying marks had been so neatly blown off that the only way to tell if the victims were male or female was to check for a sciatic notch. Everyone smoked because it was the only way to get rid of the smell of dead bodies. Today the students had decided to hang out in the West End, cooling their heels on counter stools in a few bars, looking out of the windows, watching stockingless girls in tight business skirts dart through the rain.

Larry had asked where Zachary’s mother worked, and Zachary had suggested going to see her. He wanted to show Larry how he could breeze into a major theatre and be recognized. The pair had gone up to the balcony, standing at the rear, so close to the top of the building that you could hear the rain. Now they were sitting in its front row, smoking and watching. Below them, Barbara Darvell, soprano, wife of Jupiter, waited for her cue as a pair of stagehands struggled hopelessly with a prop cloud.

‘Must be peculiar, always being in buildings with no windows,’ said Larry, drawing on the last inch of the cigarette. ‘No night or day. You can’t even hear the traffic outside. At least there’s more room than in the shelters. I don’t know how people can be bothered to go down there. All those mewling infants. You’ve just as much of a chance staying under your stairs.’

‘My mother used to say that fire engines were the curse of the performer,’ said Zachary. ‘Now she’s had to add dogfights, bombs and sirens to her list of interruptions. She goes all over the world, but I don’t think she sees much outside because she’s either rehearsing or performing.’

‘Strange job.’ Larry checked his watch. ‘Let’s go.’

‘You haven’t heard her sing yet.’

‘I know what opera singers sound like, it’s unbelievably horrible, no offence to your dear mama. Come on.’

‘I just want to stay until she does her piece.’ Zachary didn’t want to make a grand thing out of it, and tried to sound offhand. ‘I’ll catch you up. Go over to the Spice and order me a gin and French. I’ll meet you in the saloon bar.’ He watched in annoyance as Larry threaded his way along the steep row to the exit. Back onstage, Juno rose to join in at the end of Mercury’s song, but the sight of her was obscured by a gauze-covered purple cloud.

Zachary pushed the seat back up and stood in the shadowed aisle at the front of the balcony. He wanted her to know he was there, but the idea embarrassed him. His mother preferred the company of her own friends, theatricals who talked endlessly about themselves to the exclusion of everyone else, behaving as if nobody else was worth a damn. He would come home to their overheated house in Chiswick and find the place filled with thespians slugging her whisky and getting excited about Euripides. Surely it was meant to be the other way round, with her accusing his friends of being layabouts? In a few months’ time he would be able to get to the front, then perhaps she would take notice of him.

Below, Juno was singing about making room for Mercury, a bouncy song but not exactly Henry Hall, and if Zachary leaned forward he could see his mother rolling her eyes at the rest of the cast and overacting wildly, except that it was an operetta so nobody seemed to mind.

Miles Stone’s mother thought the woman was overacting too. Why didn’t the director do something about it? It wasn’t fair that she couldn’t sit in the stalls. She had been told not to, because onlookers in the sightlines put the actors off. Juno was still shrieking away and waving her arms about like a demented windmill. Rachel felt like going down to the stage and giving her a slap. She was putting her son off his stride, anyone could see that. Rachel squinted back into the seats behind her, to see if anyone else had noticed, and her eye caught a glint of sharp light from the balcony above her head.

Zachary heard a sound behind him, a seat creaking, and turned as the occupant rose. At first he thought Larry had returned. Then he saw the hulking, twisted figure. The poor chap was deformed, and was trying to speak. His face was like something from an amusement-park mirror, a badly made-up villain from a melodrama. A terrible face, like one of the demons from the production below, hideously brought to life. Big hands, young hands.

‘What’s the matter? How can I—’

Zachary was going to ask him who he was. He wasn’t afraid, until he saw the slim shine of the cut-throat razor as it folded open. Then he jumped back. He raised his hands in protest when the blade flew past. For a moment nothing happened. Then the skin of his palms split like opening eyes. By now the razor was returning at a higher level, passing his left cheek, the bridge of his nose, slicing flesh and muscle and bone, stinging across his throat, cutting deeper at his thyroid cartilage. Other red mouths were opening all over his face and neck. He could not see. A thick caul of blood dropped over his eyes, obscuring his vision. The hand darted forward again, and Zachary felt a far more terrible pain at his throat. A three-pronged fork had been pushed into his windpipe, sealing it. He stumbled forward but was pushed back, over the step, and over the low wall of the balcony.

Miles Stone had half expected Rachel to turn up at the theatre, but he hadn’t counted on seeing her seated at the front of the upper circle watching his every move. It was enough to put him off his stride. They were halfway through the technical and Juno was upstaging him all over the place, and there was nothing he could do but ignore her and go on with his lines. Eve was watching from the wings. She knew that his mother was coming to town, although she had no idea that he had slept with Becky as recently as his Carnegie gala night in New York three weeks ago. It made sense for Miles to keep his mother and his new girlfriend apart—they would either be instant enemies or, worse still, form an alliance against him.

Stone could see his mother fidgeting in her seat. It didn’t help that she was wearing a preposterous hat. He tried to ignore her and carry on with his recitative, but from the corner of his eye he saw her twist round and look up. She didn’t appear to be watching the stage at all. Was it a criticism of his performance? He glanced back at Juno and realized that she had followed his glance to the upper circle. As he waited for the technicians to clip the cloud scrim back on its rollers, he looked over at his mother once more. She was still turned away from the stage. He was so intent on watching her that he missed his cue.

‘Miles, when you’re absolutely ready,’ called Helena. ‘I appreciate it’s been a long day but I hate to keep everyone waiting longer than necessary.’

‘Of course, sorry.’ They had cut Eurydice’s scene with Jupiter at the end of the third tableau and had skipped to the flight from Hell, but Public Opinion’s rowing boat was now stuck in the flies, and the orchestra seemed confused about their entry point.

Between the late arrival of two woodwinds and the total disappearance of Jupiter, who had been replaced in the run-through with a hobby horse tipped on its end, Anton Varisich was close to walking out. The sudden noise in the balcony made the conductor cut his orchestra off in mid-note, although someone had trouble stopping, because there was a piercing howl from one of the instruments. For a moment he thought that somebody had thoughtlessly banged the seats up again, and in an afternoon of stops and starts, Varisich’s legendary temper was about to make itself felt.

‘
Miss
Parole,’ he called to Helena, referring to her so formally that it showed disrespect, ‘would you be so good as to join me at the podium for a moment?’