In Pursuit Of The Proper Sinner

In loving memory of my father

ROBERT EDWIN GEORGE

and with gratitude for

roller-skating, on Todd Street

trips to Disneyland

Big Basin

Yosemite Big Sur

air mattress rides on Big Chico Creek

the Shakespeare guessing game

the raven and the fox

and most of all

for instilling in me

a passion for our native language

How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is

To have a thankless child!

—King Lear

What David King-Ryder felt inside was a kind of grief and a secondary dying. He felt overcome by a gloom and despair completely at odds with his situation.

Below him on the stage of the Agincourt Theatre, Horatio was reprising Hamlet's “Divinity That Shapes Us” while Fortinbras countered with “O Proud Death.” Three of the four bodies were being borne off the stage, leaving Hamlet lying in Horatio's arms. The cast—thirty strong—were moving towards one another, Norwegian soldiers coming from stage left, Danish courtiers coming from stage right, to meet up-stage from Horatio. As they began the refrain, the music swelled and the ordnance—which he'd initially argued against because of the risk of begging comparisons to the 1812—boomed out in the wings. And at that precise moment, the stalls began rising beneath David's box. They were followed by the dress circle. Then the balconies. And over the music, the singing, and the cannons, thundered applause.

This was what he had craved for more than a decade: a complete vindication of his prodigious talent. And by God, he had it before him. He had it below him and everywhere round him as well, for that matter. Three years of mind-crushing, body-numbing labour were at this moment culminating in the standing ovation that had been denied him at the conclusion of his two previous West End productions. For those extravaganzas, the nature of the applause and what followed the applause had said it all. A polite and perfunctory recognition of the cast members had preceded a hasty exodus from the theatre, which itself had been followed by an opening night party not unlike a wake. After that, the London reviews had finished what the first night word-of-mouth had begun. Two hugely expensive productions sank like concrete battleships. And David King-Ryder had the dubious pleasure of reading countless analyses of his creative decline. Life Without Chandler was the sort of headline he'd read from the reviews of the one or two theatrical critics possessing an emotion akin to sympathy. But the rest of them—the types who crafted vituperative metaphors over their morning Weetabix and spent months waiting for the opportunity to plug them into a commentary more noted for its vitriol than its information—had been merciless. He'd been called everything from an “artistic charlatan” to a “vessel buoyed by past glories,” with those glories ostensibly burgeoning from a single source: Michael Chandler.

David King-Ryder wondered if other musical partnerships had undergone the scrutiny that his collaboration with Michael Chandler had. He doubted it. It seemed to him that musicians and lyricists from Gilbert and Sullivan to Rice and Lloyd-Webber had bloomed, had faded, had risen to prominence, had flourished, had failed, had vanquished critics, had stumbled, and had gloried all without the accompanying baying of the jackals that had snapped at his own heels.

The romance of his association with Michael Chandler had called for this analysis, naturally. When one partner of a team who mounted twelve of the West End's most successful productions dies in such a ghastly stupid way, then a legend is going to be born from that dying. And Michael had died just that sort of death: becoming lost in an underwater Florida cave that had claimed three hundred other divers, violating every rule of diving by going alone, going at night, going inebriated, and leaving only an anchored fifteen-foot boat to mark the spot where he'd entered the water. He left behind a wife, a mistress, four children, six dogs, and a partner with whom he'd dreamed of fame, fortune, and theatrical success from their shared childhood in Oxford, sons of assemblymen at the Austin-Rover plant.

So there had been a logic to the interest that the media had displayed in David King-Ryder's emotional and artistic rehabilitation following Michael's untimely death. And while the critics had battered him for his first solo attempt at pop opera five years later, they'd used fleece-covered clubs as if in the belief that a man who lost both his longtime partner and his lifelong friend in one fell swoop deserved at least a single opportunity to fail without being publicly humiliated in his effort to find the muse by himself. These same critics hadn't been so merciful upon his second failure, however.

But that was over now. That was the past.

Next to him in the box Ginny cried out, “We did it! David! We bloody well did it!” as she doubtless realised that—all charges of nepotism be damned when he'd chosen his wife to direct the production—she'd just risen to the sort of heights occupied by artists like Hands, Nunn, and Hall.

David's son Matthew—as his father's manager, knowing only too well how much they had at stake in the production—grabbed David's hand hard and said gruffly, “Damn. Well done, Dad.” And David wanted to warm to those words and to what they implied, a firm withdrawal of the initial doubts that Matthew had expressed when told of his father's intention to turn Shakespeare's greatest tragedy into his own musical triumph. “You're sure you want to do this?” he'd asked, and the rest of his remarks had remained unspoken: Aren't you setting yourself up for a final deadly fall?

He was indeed, David had confirmed at the time, if only to himself. But what other option did he really have than to try to restore his name as an artist?

He'd managed to do just that: Not only were the audience on their feet, not only were the cast members ecstatically applauding him from the stage, but the critics—whose seat numbers he had memorised, “the better to blow them up,” Matthew had noted sardonically—were also standing, making no move to depart, and joining in the sort of approbation that David had come to fear was as lost to him as was Michael Chandler.

That approbation only grew in the ensuing hours. At the opening night party at the Dorchester, in a ballroom creatively converted into Elsinore Castle, David stood at his wife's side, at the end of a receiving line comprising the production's leading actors. Along that line stepped London's foremost glitterati: Stars of stage and screen gushed over their colleagues and privately gnashed their teeth to conceal their envy; celebrities from all walks of life pronounced King-Ryder Productions’ Hamlet everything from “top notch” and “just fab, darling” to “kept me on the absolute edge of my seat;” It girls and Sloanes—slinkily attired, displaying an astonishing degree of cleavage, and famous either for being famous or for having famous parents—declared that “someone finally made Shakespeare fun”; representatives from that notable drain on the nation's imagination and economy—the Royal Family—offered their best wishes for success. And while everyone was pleased to press the flesh of Hamlet and his thespian cohorts, and while everyone was happy to congratulate Virginia Elliott for her masterful direction of her husband's pop opera, everyone was particularly eager to talk to the man who'd been vilified and pilloried for more than a decade.

So there was triumph to be felt in spades, and David King-Ryder wanted to feel it. He was starved for a sensation that would tell him life was opening before him instead of closing. But that was the feeling that he couldn't escape. It's over boomed in his ears like the cannon.

If he had been able to talk to her about what he had been going through since the curtain call, David knew that Ginny would tell him his feelings of depression, anxiety, and despair were normal. “It's the natural letdown after opening night,” she would have said. She would have pointed out that she had far more reason to be let down than he had anyway. As director, her job was over now. True, there were various components of the production to be tweaked—”It would be satisfying if the lighting designer would cooperate and get the last scene right, wouldn't it?”—but by and large, she had to let go, to begin the process all over again on another production of another play. In his case, the morning would bring a flood of congratulatory phone calls, requests for interviews, and offers to mount the pop opera all over the world. Thus, he could dig into another staging of Hamlet or go on to something else. She didn't have that option.

If he had confessed that he just didn't have it in him to go on to anything else, she would have said, “Of course, you haven't at the moment. That's normal, David. How could you right now? Give yourself some leeway to recover, won't you? You need time to refill the well.”

The well was the wellspring of creativity, and if he'd pointed out to his wife that she never seemed to need to refill her own supplies, she would have argued that directing was different from creating the product in the first place. She, at least, had raw materials to work with—not to mention a score of fellow artists with whom to knock heads as the production took shape. He had only the music room, the piano, endless solitude, and his imagination.

And the world's expectations, he thought morosely. They would always be there as the price of success.

He and Ginny left the Dorchester as soon as they were able to manage it surreptitiously. She'd protested at first when he'd indicated that he wanted to leave—as had Matthew, who, always his fathers manager, had argued that it wouldn't look good for David King-Ryder to depart the party before the party's end. But David had claimed exhaustion and strung-out nerves and Matthew and Virginia had accepted that self-diagnosis. After all, his complexion was jaundiced, and his demeanour throughout the production—alternating between standing, sitting, and pacing in their box—strongly suggested a man whose personal resources had finally been depleted.

They rode from London in silence, David with a vodka curved into his palm and his thumb and forefinger pressed into his eyebrows, Ginny making several attempts to draw him into conversation. She suggested a holiday as a reward for their years of endeavour. Rhodes, she mentioned, Capri, and Crete.

The jolly-hockey-sticks tone of her voice told David that she was becoming increasingly concerned with her failure to reach him. And considering their history together—she'd been his twelfth mistress before he'd made her his fifth wife—there was good reason for her to suspect that his condition had nothing to do with first-night nerves, letdown after triumph, or anxiety about critical reaction to his work. The past few months had been rough on them as a couple, and she knew quite well what he'd done to cure himself of the impotence he'd experienced with his last wife, since he'd done it by moving on to Ginny herself. So when she finally said, “Darling, it happens sometimes. It's nerves, that's all. It'll all come right at the end of the day,” he wanted to reassure her. But he didn't have the words.

He was still trying to find them when their limousine entered the tunnel of silver maples that characterised the woodland in which they lived. Here, not an hour from London, the countryside was thickly grown with trees, and footpaths trod by generations of foresters and farmers disappeared into an undergrowth of ferns.

The car turned between the two oaks that marked their drive. Twenty yards along, an iron gate swung open. The road beyond curved beneath alders, poplars, and beeches, skirting a pond where the reflection of stars made a second sky. It climbed a slight rise, swung past a row of silent bungalows, and pooled out into the alluvial fan of the entrance to the King-Ryder mansion.

Their housekeeper had laid out supper for them, assembling an array of David's favourite foods. “Mr. Matthew did phone,” Portia explained in her quiet, dignified voice. A runaway from the Sudan at the age of fifteen, she'd been with Virginia for the last ten years and she had the melancholy face of a beautiful, sorrowing black Madonna. “My warmest congratulations to both of you,” she added.

David thanked her. He stood in the dining room, where the windows stretched from floor to ceiling and reflected all three of them in the glass. He admired the epergne that spilled white roses onto plaits of ivy. He fingered one of the thin silver forks. He used his thumbnail against a drip of candle wax. And he knew he wouldn't be able to force a crumb of food past the constriction in his throat.

So he told his wife that he needed a bit of time alone to unwind from the evening. He would join her later, he said. He just needed a while to decompress.

One always expected an artist to retreat to the heartbeat of his artistry. So David went to his music room. He flipped on the lights. He poured another vodka and placed the tumbler on the unprotected top of the grand piano.

He realised as he did it that Michael would never have done such a thing. Michael had been careful that way, understanding the value of a musical instrument, respectful of its boundaries, its dimensions, its possibilities. He'd been careful about most of his life as well. It was only on one crazy night in Florida that he'd got careless.