New Albion (2 page)

Speaking of Earnshaw, this new novel,
Wuthering Heights
, was the latest installment produced by Sophie’s homespun troupe. The story of Heathcliffe and Catherine has made the rounds of almost every female inhabitant of the household, only excluding little Susan who cannot yet read at that level. There has been much discussion around the dinner table of Edgar and Hareton and the Grange; my daughters have lived with these characters and places as though they were not mere fabrications but realities. It was only a matter of time before they found their way into the oeuvre of Sophie’s theatrical enterprise.

I witnessed the finished production of
Wuthering Heights
last Sunday evening. Hortense, who is thirteen now, was given the role of Heathcliffe because, as Sophie told her, she is taller than her sisters and of darker complexion. “Why do I always have to be the man in the play?” she complained, rather loudly, as they were preparing for the event. “Why can’t father sometimes be the man?”

I was in the parlour at the time, but I heard Sophie’s reply. “Because father works too hard to take part in entertainments.”

“What about Davina?” came Hortense’s quick retort. “She could play the man.”

“She’s playing all the other parts,” Sophie said. “Besides, she’s too short.” Davina, the nine year-old peace maker, said nothing.

There was a great sigh. “Why can’t I be Catherine then?” said Hortense.

“Because my dress befits Catherine best.”

“Well, I won’t do it!” was Hortense’s impassioned response.

“Please, please, just this once,” Sophie pleaded. “Next time, I’ll let you be the heroine.”

“You always say that!”

They nattered back and forth for some time in that vein, and at last Sophie lost her patience. “Oh, don’t be a spoiled child,” she scolded, her voice now harder and sounding like her mother.

“Yes, Hortense,” six year-old Susan piped up, “don’t be a spoiled child. If you won’t play Heathcliffe, then I can’t be young Catherine. And the play will not go on.”

There was a brief silence, during which the fate of the drama hung on gossamer threads or, rather, on Hortense’s slender shoulders. “Well, I will do it this once,” Hortense said finally. “But I will not be the man again.”

The play was produced without a hitch after that contentious negotiation. In the first scene, Mr. Lytton interviewed Amelia, and the rain clouds gathered ominously. Wuthering indeed! Hortense was aptly sullen as Heathcliffe, her hair pulled back under an old beaver hat of mine. She is quite tall and slender now, having lost her baby fat almost magically in the last six months, and my greatcoat hung from her shoulders like a militia man’s tent. I wonder, if her dear mother Jane could see her now, what would she think?

O dear dear Jane! How I have missed you these five years! How I have spent every long dark night with your image before me! Our bed is a marble sepulcher. I read until my eyes burn and the candles
sputter and wane. I inhabit this house like a ghost in one of Mr. Dickens’ novels, wandering from room to room, stopping to peer out the windows into the dimly lit street, thinking that I might see you again coming up the walk.

I have tried to be a good father for these daughters of ours, but it has been difficult. I am not father and mother both. I do not know how to speak to them in their own language. They have humoured me by trying to speak in mine. They mother each other. Sophie mothers more than the rest, but Hortense and Davina and Susan are mothers too.

And I have failed you in many other ways.

Our old Norwegian clock chimes thrice, and I know that I must sleep. I pray for sleep to come, for the happy circumstance that I may see you in my dreams.

Monday, 9 September 1850

I was delighted to inform Mr. Farquhar Pratt of his rise in commission for each new play he writes. He seemed to be expecting the news that he would no longer be playing his traditional line of business on our boards as well, and he accepted it with stifled resignation. We were standing by my desk at the stage-left arch after the other actors had gone downstairs. Pratty seemed smaller than usual. He was never a large man, but with his waistcoat off and his trousers pulled high over his faded white shirt he appeared no more than five feet tall.

He was looking at the scuffed stage floor as though searching for some lost article. “But who will play the old men?”

I cleared my throat and tried to find an innocuous phrasing. “The suggestion was that Mr. Simpson might be able to do it.”

There was a shadow of hurt in the old man’s face for a moment – theatre people are such open books! “Kean was wise enough to die early,” he murmured. “Have I told you about my time with the eminent Kean?”

“I seem to have heard something about it,” I said. Indeed I had heard many parts of it, almost ad nauseam, nearly every day for the last six months. How Kean used to gauge his performances by the number of females who fainted in the stalls. How he would deliver Lear in a ranting singsong fit to crack the cheeks of the storm on one evening and how he would be performing back flips as Arlecchino the next.

“An enormous talent,” Pratty began in reverentially hushed tones, “but he drank himself to death.” I must confess that I had not heard this part of the story before or anything that could be said to be critical of the great thespian. Farquhar Pratt’s face was as craggy as the inside of those Roman caves at Chiselhurst. “I had often thought what a great waste of genius that had been,” he went on, “but now I begin to understand that it is preferable to die young than to grow old in this business.”

Fourteen years in a London theatre have taught me that one can never go wrong by stroking the egos of artistes. “You have many many years in front of you, Mr. Farquhar Pratt,” I said, “as the well-respected playwright that you are.”

He studied the scratched hardwood again with searching eyes until, at last, he said, “What’s to be done then, Mr. Phillips? I cannot complain that this is unexpected.” He chuckled morosely, the way I would imagine that a condemned man chuckles before the gibbet. “What’s to be done then, eh?” he repeated, but he did not wait for an answer. “We shall simply have to make a go of it, I suppose, shan’t we?” He laughed again, softly. His grey eyes met mine for an instant, and then he turned and picked his way down the stairs to the dressing room.

Tuesday, 10 September 1850

Another milestone
in the changing of the guard. Mr. August Levy retired from the theatre today. I believe he saw his future before him when Ernest Holman was hired, some months ago, direct from Bath and with excellent references, to play the comic gentlemen opposite Elias Bancroft. These were the parts that Mr. Levy used to play with such abandon in his heyday. Well I remember, six short years ago, during the Shakespeare Festival and a performance of a butchered version of
Hamlet
, when he and Mr. Bancroft as gravediggers removed innumerable waistcoats in preparation for their labours and danced a final somber hornpipe on Ophelia’s grave when their scene was finished.

Mr. Levy had chosen to go out of his own volition and on his own terms, unlike Mr. Farquhar Pratt who seems to be hanging on at all costs. “I’m seventy-two years old,” Mr. Levy said to me the other day. “I get winded going up the stairs from the Green Room.”

For his part, Mr. Wilton has tried to do right by a man who has given his soul to the theatre. When arthritis began crippling Mr. Levy, making it impossible for him to go on stage with regularity, Mr. Wilton kept him on the payroll for several months. I think Mr. Wilton has been hoping that Mr. Smith might also be retiring soon, in which case Mr. Levy might have served as prompter. But the venerable Mr. Smith has showed no signs of slowing down. Mr. Wilton also offered Mr. Levy a posting in the front of house, which Mr. Levy declined. “What?” he said. “And give up the smell of the greasepaint?”

There was a small fête for Mr. Levy this afternoon in the rehearsal hall. Many glorious speeches were made about how Mr. Levy had had an efficacious effect upon the future of the national drama. Mrs. Wilton gave Mr. Levy a gift of ten pounds, collected from the actors and stagehands, “as a small token of our appreciation for the many years of service” he had given to this theatre.

Still I cannot help but wonder at Mr. Levy’s decision to retire. Is he simply taking the high road and refusing the charity of his colleagues? He was always a proud man. How will he fend for himself now that he is no longer employed at the New Albion? “Do not worry about me, Phillips,” he said blithely. “My good wife has come into an inheritance.”

I watched him leave the theatre after a final goodbye from Mr. Wilton and the rest. He marched resolutely down the cobblestones in the direction of the Angel, where he resides. He did not look back.

* Chapter Two *

Wednesday, 11 September 1850

A meeting with Mr. Borrow
in the Lord Chamberlain’s office this afternoon and not a particularly pleasant one either. It is said that one needs a long spoon to dine with the devil, and Mr. Borrow is the Devil Incarnate. He stands approximately seven feet tall, with arms that seem to reach across an entire room at you when he offers to shake your hand. His fingers are long, bony, and cold. His face is long as well, his cheek bones high, and his grey hair is plastered to his cadaver-like skull with pomade. When he sits behind his desk in his little office at Stable Yard, he has the appearance of a slender giant riding the child’s carousel in Green Park.

He beckoned Mr. Wilton and me to sit down in the hard wooden chairs opposite him. To an objective eye, we would have looked like errant schoolboys in the headmaster’s office. The discussion focused on Mr. Farquhar Pratt’s new play
Kerim the Bastard Buccaneer
. “It is highly desirable,” Mr. Borrow intoned, his voice as thin as his patience, “that the minor theatres of London encourage moral uprightness in their audiences.”

Mr. Wilton knew what was coming and he interrupted early. “The New Albion, sir,” he said, “has promoted virtuous behaviour at every turn. Did we not have Mr. Farquhar Pratt, as you recommended, pen a speech about Christly virtue for the Christmas extravaganza last year?”

Mr. Borrow’s lips turned up in a grimace or a smile or perhaps both. He peered down his long nose at Mr. Wilton. “One speech per year on Christly virtue is hardly a serious effort to promote moral uprightness among the denizens of
Whitechapel,” he said, “where, I might add, moral uprightness is in short supply.”

“And in the new year,” Mr. Wilton said evenly, refusing to take the bait, “we willingly replaced
Table Rapping
with another play you had suggested. At some considerable cost to our establishment since costumes and settings had been created.”

“Y-e-e-e-s,” Mr. Borrow replied, stretching the one vowel in the word almost to its breaking point, “and since then you have visited my office…what?” – he was peering at some scribbled notes on a piece of paper before him –” three times, by my count. All to do with the work of your resident playwright Mr. Farquhar Pratt.”

I wanted to ease the growing tension in the room, and so I smiled and said something like “Well, you know, Mr. Farquhar Pratt loves to create some publicity for himself now and then, but he is one of London’s most accomplished playwrights.”

Mr. Borrow snorted and a flake of dry snot appeared in one cavernous nostril. I instantly found myself looking everywhere in the room but at Mr. Borrow. “He is hardly Oliver Goldsmith, is he?” Mr. Borrow said. He pulled a white handkerchief, almost the size of a bed sheet, from his trousers pocket and thankfully wiped his nose clean. “Or even Collie Cibber.”

“He has written a great many plays,” Mr. Wilton said bluntly. “We are not prone to snubbing him now that he has grown old.”

Mr. Borrow smiled or grimaced again. His colourless lips seemed to stretch to the ears on both sides. “That is a highly commendable sentiment,” he said. “Now, to the matter at hand.
Kerim the
–” he paused before he pronounced the words and then gave the plosives excessive force –
“Bastard Buccaneer.”

“We have been very careful,” I said, “to eliminate the subplot of Kerim’s daughter –”

“Ah yes,” Mr. Borrow said wryly, “the young lady who masquerades as a boy sailor and who finds gainful employment aboard ship, until she becomes involved in a relationship with the young quartermaster.” Mr. Borrow peered up at the ceiling for a long moment. “A relationship that has the faint odour of homoeroticism about it.”

There was no arguing the point. “Yes,” I said, “we’ve eliminated that subplot.”

Mr. Borrow cleared his throat and went on. His long fingers were clenched in front of him on the desk; his knuckles had turned white. “But you have not persuaded Mr. Farquhar Pratt to eliminate his ceaseless references to current events in France?”

It was my turn to smile, at least inwardly. “The events are hardly current,” I said. “The play is set in 1795.”

Mr. Borrow leant back in his undersized chair, looking for a way to stretch the knot of tension out of his oversized body. He sighed audibly. “You are well aware, Mr. Phillips, that events pertaining to the Terror are a sore spot for monarchies across Europe. And for the monarchy here in England.”

“The play does not touch on monarchy,” Mr. Wilton interjected. “It is about common people.”