Killer Dolphin (5 page)

“What the hell does that matter? You place far too much importance upon personal relationships. Look at the fatuous way you go on about your women. And then suspecting poor Mr. Conducis of improper intentions when he never wants to look upon your like again!”

“Do you suggest that I accept his gorgeous apparel?” Peregrine asked on an incredulous note.

“Certainly, I do. It would be rude and ungenerous and rather vulgar to return it with a po-faced note. The old boy wants to give you his brand new clobber because you mucked up your own in his dirty great well. You should take it and not slap him back as if he’d tried to tip you.”

“If you had seen him you would not call him an old boy. He is the uncosiest human being I have ever encountered.”

“Be that as it may, you’d better posh yourself up and wait upon S. Greenslade on the stroke of eleven-thirty.”

Peregrine said, after a pause, “I shall do so, of course. He says nothing about the letter and glove, you observe.”

“Nothing.”

“I shall urge S. Greenslade to get it vetted at the V. and A.”

“You jolly well do.”

“Yes, I will. Well, Jer, as you say, why make a thing? If by some wild, rapturous falling-out of chance, I could do anything to save the life of The Dolphin, I would count myself amply rewarded. But it will, of course, only be a rum little interlude and in the meantime, here’s the latest batch of bills.”

“At least,” Jeremy said, “There won’t be a new one from your tailors for some time to come.”

Mr. S. Greenslade was bald, pale, well-dressed and unremarkable. His office was quietly sumptuous and he was reached through a hinterland of equally conservative but impressive approaches. He now sat, with a file under his hand, a distinguished painting behind him, and before him, Peregrine, summoning all the techniques of the theatre in order to achieve relaxation.

“Mr. Jay,” Mr. Greenslade said, “you appreciate, of course, the fact that your meeting yesterday with Mr. Conducis has led to this appointment.”

“I suppose so. Yes.”

“Quite. I have here a digest, as it were, of a—shall I say a suggestion you made to Mr. Conducis as he recollects it. Here it is.”

Mr. Greenslade put on his spectacles and read from the paper before him.

“Mr. Jay proposed that The Dolphin Theatre should be restored to its former condition and that a company should be established there performing Shakespeare and other plays of a high cultural quality. Mr. Jay suggested that The Dolphin is a building of some cultural worth and that, historically speaking, it is of considerable interest.”

Mr. Greenslade looked up at Peregrine. “That was, in fact, your suggestion?”

“Yes. Yes. It was. Except that I hate the word culture.”

“Mr. Jay, I don’t know if you are at all informed about Mr. Conducis’s interests.”

“I—no—I only know he’s—he’s—”

“Extremely wealthy and something of a recluse?” Mr. Greenslade suggested with a slight, practiced smile.

“Yes.”

“Yes.” Mr. Greenslade removed his spectacles and placed them delicately in the centre of his writing pad.

Peregrine thought he must be going to make some profound revelation about his principal. Instead he merely said “Quite” again and after a dignified silence asked Peregrine if he would be good enough to tell him something about himself. His schooling, for example, and later career. He was extremely calm in making this request.

Peregrine said he had been born and educated in New Zealand, had come to England on a drama bursary and had remained there.

“I am aware, of course, of your success in the theatrical field,” said Mr. Greenslade and Peregrine supposed that he had been making some kind of confidential inquiries.

“Mr. Jay,” said Mr. Greenslade, “I am instructed to make you an offer. It is, you may think, a little precipitant: Mr. Conducis is a man of quick decisions. It is this. Mr. Conducis is prepared to consider the rehabilitation of the theatre, subject, of course, to favourable opinions from an architect and from building authorities and to the granting of necessary permits. He will finance this undertaking. On one condition.” Mr. Greenslade paused.

“On one condition?” Peregrine repeated in a voice that cracked like an adolescent’s.

“Exactly. It is this. That you yourself will undertake the working management of The Dolphin. Mr. Conducis offers you, upon terms to be arrived at, the post of organizing the running of the theatre, planning its artistic policy, engaging the company and directing the productions. You would be given a free hand to do this within certain limits ot expenditure which would be set down in this contract I shall be glad to hear what your reactions are to this, at its present stage, necessarily tentative proposal.”

Peregrine suppressed a frightening inclination towards giving himself over to manic laughter. He looked for a moment into Mr. Greenslade’s shrewd and well-insulated face and he said: “It would be ridiculous of me to pretend that I am anything but astonished and delighted.”

“Are you?” Mr. Greenslade rejoined. “Good. In that case I shall proceed with the preliminary investigations. I, by the way, am the solicitor for a number of Mr. Conducis’s interests. If and when it comes to drawing up contracts I presume I should negotiate with your agents?”

“Yes. They are—”

“Thank you,” said Mr. Greenslade. “Messrs. Slade and Oppinger, I believe?”

“Yes,” said Peregrine, wondering if at any stage of his tipsy rhapsody he had mentioned them to Mr. Conducis and rather concluding that he hadn’t.

“There is one other matter.” Mr. Greenslade opened a drawer in his desk and with an uncanny re-enacting of his principal’s gestures on the previous morning, withdrew from it the small Victorian writing-desk. “You are already familiar with the contents, I understand, and expressed some anxiety about their authenticity.”

“I said I wished they could be shown to an expert.”

“Quite. Mr. Conducis has taken your point, Mr. Jay, and wonders if you yourself would be so obliging as to act for him in this respect.”

Peregrine, in a kind of trance, said: “Are the glove and documents insured?”

“They are covered by a general policy, but they have not been specifically insured since their value is unknown.”

“I feel the responsibility would be—”

“I appreciate your hesitation and I may say I put the point to Mr. Conducis. He still wishes me to ask you to undertake this mission.”

There was a short silence.

“Sir,” said Peregrine, “why is Mr. Conducis doing all this? Why is he giving me at least the chance of undertaking such fantastically responsible jobs? What possible motive can he have? I hope,” Peregrine continued with a forthrightness that became him very well, “that I’m not such an ass as to suppose I can have made an impression in the least degree commensurable with the proposals you’ve put before me and I—I—” He felt himself reddening and ran out of words.

Mr. Greenslade had watched him, he thought with renewed attention. He now lifted his spectacles with both hands, held them poised daintily over his blotter and said, apparently to them: “A reasonable query.”

“Well—I hope so.”

“And one which I am unable to answer.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. I will,” said Mr. Greenslade, evenly, “be frank with you, Mr. Jay. I am at a loss to know why Mr. Conducis is taking this action. If, however, I have interpreted your misgivings correctly I can assure you they are misplaced.” Suddenly, almost dramatically, Mr. Greenslade became human, good-tempered and coarse. “He’s not that way inclined,” he said and laid down his spectacles.

“I’m extremely glad to hear it.”

“You will undertake the commission?”

“Yes, I will.”

“Splendid.”

The expert folded his hands and leaned back in his chair.

“Well,” he said, “I think we may say with certainty this is a glove of late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century workmanship. It has, at some time, been exposed to salt-water but not extensively. One might surmise that it was protected. The little desk is very much stained. Upon the letters H.S. inside the gauntlet I am unable to give an authoritative opinion but could, of course, obtain one. As for these two really rather startling documents: they can be examined and submitted to a number of tests—Infra-red, spectrography and so on—not in my province, you know. If they’ve been concocted it will certainly be discovered.”

“Would you tell me how I can get the full treatment for them?”

“Oh, I think we could arrange that, you know. But we would want written permission from the owner, full insurance and so on. You’ve told me nothing, so far, of the history, have you?”

“No,” Peregrine said. “But I will. With this proviso, if you don’t mind: the owner, or rather his solicitor on his behalf, has given me permission to disclose his name to you on your undertaking to keep it to yourself until you have come to a conclusion about these things. He has a—an almost morbid dread of publicity which you’ll understand, I think, when you learn who he is.”

The expert looked very steadily at Peregrine. After a considerable silence he said: “Very well. I am prepared to treat the matter confidentially as far as your principal’s name is concerned.”

“He is Mr. Vassily Conducis.”

“Good God.”

“Quite,” said Peregrine, doing a Greenslade. “I shall now tell you as much as is known of the history. Here goes.”

And he did in considerable detail.

The expert listened in a startled manner.

“Really, very odd,” he said when Peregrine had finished.

“I assure you I’m not making it up.”

“No, no. I’m sure. I’ve heard of Conducis, of course. Who hasn’t? You do realize what a—what a really flabbergasting thing this would be if it turned out to be genuine?”

“I can think of nothing else. I mean: there they lie—a child’s glove and a letter asking one to suppose that on a summer’s morning in the year 1596 a master-craftsman of Stratford made a pair of gloves and gave them to his grandson, who wore them for a day and then—”

“Grief filled the room up of an absent child?”

“Yes. And a long time afterwards—twenty years—the father made his will—I wonder he didn’t chuck in a ghastly pun—Will’s Will—don’t you? And he left his apparel to his sister Joan Hart. And for her information wrote that note there. I mean—
his
hand moved across that bit of paper. If it’s genuine. And then two centuries go by and somebody called M.E. puts the glove and paper in a Victorian desk with the information that her great-great-grandmother had them from J. Hart and her grandmother insisted they were the Poet’s. It
could
have
been
Joan Hart. She died in 1664.”

“I shouldn’t build on it,” the expert said dryly.

“Of course not!”

“Has Mr. Conducis said anything about their value? I mean—even if there’s only a remote chance they will be worth—well, I can’t begin to say what their monetary value might be, but I know what
we’d
feel about it, here.”

Peregrine and the expert eyed each other for a moment or two. “I suppose,” Peregrine said, “he’s thought of that, but I must say he’s behaved pretty casually over it.”

“Well,
we
shan’t,” said the expert. “I’ll give you your receipt and ask you to stay and see things safely stowed.”

He stopped for a moment over the little dead, wrinkled glove. “If it were true!” he murmured.

“I know, I know,” Peregrine cried. “It’s frightening to think what would happen. The avid attention, the passionate greed for possession.”

“There’s been murder done for less,” said the expert lightly.

Five weeks later Peregrine, looking rather white about the gills and brownish under the eyes, wrote the last word of his play and underneath it:
Curtain.
That night he read it to Jeremy, who thought well of it.

There had been no word from Mr. Greenslade. The stage-house of The Dolphin could still be seen on Bank-side. Jeremy had asked at the estate agents for permission to view and had been told that the theatre was no longer in their hands and they believed had been withdrawn from the market Their manner was stuffy.

From time to time the two young men talked about The Dolphin, but a veil of unreality seemed to have fallen between Peregrine and his strange interlude: so much so that he sometimes almost felt as if he had invented it.

In an interim report on the glove and documents, the museum had said that preliminary tests had given no evidence of spurious inks or paper and so far nothing inconsistent with their supposed antiquity had been discovered. An expert on the handwriting of ancient documents, at present in America, would be consulted on his return. If his report was favourable, Peregrine gathered, a conference of authorises would be called.

“Well,” Jeremy said, “they haven’t laughed it out of court, evidently.”

“Evidently.”

“You’ll send the report to the man Greenslade?”

“Yes, of course.”

Jeremy put his freckled hand on Peregrine’s manuscript.

“What about opening at The Dolphin this time next year with
The Glove
, a new play by Peregrine Jay?”

“Gatcha!”

“Well—why not? For the hell of it,” Jeremy said, “let’s do a shadow casting. Come on.”

“I have.”

“Give us a look.”

Peregrine produced a battered sheet of paper covered in his irregular handwriting.

“Listen,” he said. “I know what would be said. That it’s been done before. Clemence Dane for one. And more than that: it’d be a standing target for wonderful cracks of synthetic Bardery. The very sight of the cast. Ann Hathaway and all that lot. You know? It’d be held to stink. Sunk before it started.”

“I for one don’t find any derry-down tart in the dialogue.”

“Yes: but to cast ‘Shakespeare.’ What gall!”

“
He
did that sort of thing. You might as well say: ‘Oo-er! To cast Henry VIII!’ Come on: who
would
you cast for Shakespeare?”

“It sticks out a mile, doesn’t it?”

“Elizabethan Angry, really isn’t he? Lonely. Chancy. Tricky. Bright as the sun. A Pegasus in the Hathaway stable? Enormously over-sexed and looking like the Grafton portrait. In which I entirely believe.”