The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories (32 page)

‘Why?’

I was amazed that he should ask, but somehow I could not tell him the true reason. The name of Marden would have stuck to my lips. Instead I reminded him of the theatrical etiquette which stipulated that if an actor was going to wear something radically different from his normal garb on stage, he should go round the dressing rooms and show his fellow performers beforehand. At this Fisher merely nodded, patted me on the back and went off in the direction of Miss Manville’s dressing room.

About half a minute later I was standing in the backstage corridor when I heard a woman scream. I arrived outside Miss Manville’s dressing room to find her being revived by her dresser with smelling salts. She had her hysterics but by the time the curtain went up she had recovered and, like the trouper she was, gave the usual admirable performance. However, she never again spoke a single word to Mr Fisher other than on stage.

Something else of note happened at Derby. Towards the end of the week news reached us that the body of a man had been found floating in a backwater of the Slowbridge Canal. There were signs that the body had been weighted down with stones, but that these weights had come loose and the corpse had floated to the surface. No watch or pocket book was found on the body to identify him, but the clothes were similar to the ones Marden had been wearing on the day he disappeared. Certain identification was impossible because of one dreadful fact: the head was missing. Indeed, despite extensive draggings of the canal and other searches, it was never found.

Our next few weeks were the most successful so far of the tour. The wig seemed to give Fisher a confidence he had never known before so that he managed to combine his own subtlety with some of Marden’s dash. He became a firm favourite with the public, but off stage he remained his old subdued and introspective self.

One oddity about him that I noticed was that he would never let the wig out of his sight. Once the performance was over he would place the wig on its block, into the cardboard box and take it back to his lodgings. Sometimes he would wear it during the day. One morning I saw him from the back walking down Acker Street in Manchester. For a moment I could have sworn it was Marden. When I asked him who had made this wonderful wig for him he gave an evasive reply, and on looking for the label on the top of the cardboard box I noticed that it had been carefully removed.

I also began to notice something strange happening during the performance. There were moments when it seemed to me that Fisher’s lines were spoken by two people at once. This was particularly the case during the third act which I have described. There were nights when that great curtain line ‘I give the lie myself!’ seemed to have an odd echo in the theatre, an echo which did not quite correspond with Fisher’s intonation of the line. On one of these occasions I saw that Fisher too had noticed the echo. A split second before he crashed dramatically onto the mess table a terrible look of fear and rage passed across his face.

Fisher started to have an aversion to being alone and, when we reached Castleford, he asked me to rent with him what is known in theatrical parlance as a ‘combined chatsby’, a sitting room with two adjoining bedrooms. I was reluctant, but he seemed very anxious that I should join him, and his gratitude when I agreed was effusive and pathetic. In those days the landladies used to come to meet the theatrical Sunday trains to tout for custom on the platform. Fisher spent some time haggling with a number of these women before deciding on one of them.

We settled in to our digs late that morning and the landlady served us a passable Sunday dinner in our shared sitting room. After dinner Fisher urged me to accompany him on a walk, so we went out to tramp dully about the town. Though he seemed to need me to be with him, he was not much of a companion: his conversation was desultory and monosyllabic. He led the way but in no particular direction as if bent only on filling the time strenuously between dinner and tea. I noticed also, rather to my relief, that he had given up wearing the wig during the day, settling for a grey bowler alone to cover his baldness.

By the time we had returned from our walk I was exhausted, but Fisher was still imbued with nervous energy. On entering the sitting room, Fisher, ahead of me, said, apparently to no one in particular: ‘What did you do that for?’

Thinking he must mean me, I asked what he meant. He started, as if he had forgotten I was there. Then he pointed to the mantelpiece on which stood the copper wig on its wig block. It had its back to us, and it occurred to me that the thing could have been mistaken for a severed head.

‘Did you put that there?’ he asked me, but I knew that he knew that I hadn’t. He did not wait for my denial but immediately went to the fireplace, snatched the wig off the mantelpiece and took it into his room. I was reminded irresistibly of a mother carrying a fractious child off to bed. From the bedroom I could hear what sounded like muttered scoldings. Fortunately at this moment our landlady came in with the tea. I began to wish devoutly that I had never accepted his offer of a combined chatsby.

My bedroom looked onto the street and on my first morning there I remember being woken before dawn by the clatter of clogs on cobbles as the mill workers went to the factory. It did not disturb me; in fact it gave me the selfish pleasure of knowing that I could turn over deliciously in bed and not think about work until the evening. I was warm and drowsy, safe in the knowledge that I would soon be asleep again, but something was preventing me. In my half-woken state it took me some time to identify the disturbance. It was voices, one clear, the other muffled, which seemed to come from the sitting room, or from Fisher’s bedroom, which opened onto it. I tried to ignore the voices but I could not because there was something familiar about their rhythm and pace which tortured me. It was like hearing a tune that for the life of you you can’t quite place. I crept to the door of my bedroom and opened it a crack.

The sitting room was empty, but Fisher’s bedroom door was open and it was from there that the voices emanated. The clearer of the two voices was Fisher’s. What he was saying was still indistinct, but I could recognise it because I knew it so well. It was Roger Tremaine’s great speech from the last act of
The Honour of the Tremaines
:

I say to you, Hubert, that a man’s honour is like a precious jewel: once shattered it is never repaired. If a man has honour he will hold it dearer than life itself: for he gives it away at the cost of his immortal soul. Be he the poorest of the poor, the humblest of the humble, if a man has honour, he is a prince among men. But if he has lost it, then, be he as rich as Croesus, as mighty as a king, I declare him to be the vilest dog on earth.

Quite why Fisher should be rehearsing a speech he both knew and performed to perfection was a mystery. But the second voice was an even greater mystery. It seemed to be repeating the speech, though at times it anticipated Fisher. The sound of it was like a muffled groan, only the cadences of the speech being identifiable. It was as if someone or something was struggling to speak with a gag in its mouth. Who was it? What was happening? I put on my dressing gown and entered the sitting room. As soon as I did so the voices stopped and the door of Fisher’s bedroom was slammed shut.

I heard those voices more than once during our week at Castleford, always at our digs, sometimes late at night, sometimes very early in the morning. I wondered at times whether I was dreaming them. Certainly they wove their way into my dreams which were of nameless things, things that were trying to struggle out of miserable dark holes into our world, things which even now I would give all my worldly goods to forget.

As for Fisher, I frankly avoided him. We had no quarrel; I took my meals with him at the digs, but even then I contrived to be reading a book or otherwise occupied, so that I would not be obliged to exchange too many words with him. I cannot altogether explain my feelings: it was nothing so simple as an aura of wickedness which repelled me. I can best express it by saying that Fisher seemed to me to be living in a different world to ours while still existing in this one. His eyes seemed to focus on points in empty space. He would suddenly address words to no-one in particular. They were often strange words belonging to a language of his own, ugly words of loathing and despair.

The easy explanation would be to say that Fisher had gone mad, whatever that may mean, but this would not cover all the facts. In the first place he gave an impeccable performance every night, and if one did speak to him on any subject he would answer as soberly and rationally as ever he did. Only his air of abstraction gave away the fact that a part of him was not attending to you at all.

And so we come to the last fateful night in Castleford. It began for me on a hopeful note. The matinee had been well received by a capacity house and I was beginning to look forward to the last week of our tour at Darlington, where I was determined at all costs not to share digs with Fisher.

After the matinee and before the evening performance I walked out of the theatre to get some fresh air. Fisher had gone out just ahead of me and I saw him walking along the narrow alleyway which led from the stage door to the street, head bowed, muttering something to an invisible presence below him and to his right. He might have been talking to an imaginary dog that trotted by his side. If it was so, the dog was clearly not behaving itself at all well. I waited to see which way he turned into the street, then I took the opposite route.

I returned to the theatre perhaps a little later than I intended, but refreshed, mainly, I think, because I had not seen Fisher. For the first time that week, I felt positively light-hearted. Then, as I walked down the dressing room corridor I became aware of a noise coming from Fisher’s dressing room. It was that mumbling gagged voice again which had accompanied Fisher’s recitation at the digs. It stopped me in my tracks, and all the unspoken horrors of that week threatened to return. I was determined not to let it. I would go and see Fisher and confront him. But with what? That I had not decided.

The dressing room door was ajar, I knocked and, receiving no response, I entered. All was silent and the room was empty, but on the table beside the mirror, its back towards me, was the copper wig on the wig block. I looked around more thoroughly and called Fisher’s name, but there was no one there. A sensation of moist coldness crept over my skin. My eyes were drawn again to the wig. There were tiny beads of water on it that glistened like diamonds in the gaslight and it seemed almost imperceptibly to be trembling, as if shivering like me from the cold. Yet I could detect no other vibration to account for the movement. I watched transfixed as the wig shuddered almost like a living thing. Then it began to turn around towards me, as an object on a vibrating surface will turn, slowly, hesitantly at first, then with increasing deliberation. Suddenly I felt that of all the things in the world I did not want to see, I did not want to see the blank ‘face’ side of the wig block. I turned and ran from the room.

That was only the first of many strange happenings that night. Before curtain up Miss Manville had hysterics in her dressing room, claiming that she had seen Marden’s disembodied head smiling at her in her dressing room mirror. During the performance Fisher seemed distracted. He was constantly adjusting his wig as if it gave him discomfort, and between the second and third acts I saw him drain a large glass of brandy and water in the wings. Not unusual for an actor, you may say, but Fisher was the most abstemious of men and never drank during a show.

We reached the last scene of the third act. There are moments on stage when one feels that a scene is not simply being played, but somehow lived by both actors and audience. This was such a moment. I felt as if I were actually in the officer’s mess of the Loamshires at Bangrapore. I must have risen to the occasion because my line ‘To any man who says that Roger Tremaine is a blackguard I give the lie!’ was more than usually well received. Normally Fisher made his entrance as Tremaine with immaculate timing, just as the applause for my line was fading away, but on this night there was a hiatus before he staggered on in his tattered uniform. The pause before Fisher entered seemed horribly long to us on stage, but was probably barely noticed by the audience. ‘I give the lie myself!’ he cried, receiving the usual ovation. Then, instead of crashing dramatically onto the table, Fisher began reeling about clutching at his head. Something had gone hideously amiss. He seemed in agony and his eyes were starting from their sockets. I realised that he was desperately trying to tear his wig off, but to no avail. Little streams of blood began to pour from his temples just where the wig joined Fisher’s head. He screamed in agony and, as he did so, a great torrent of blood gushed from under the wig join covering his face, hands and several nearby supers in gore. As he finally crashed onto the table and the curtain fell a great roar of applause burst from the audience. It was Fisher’s last and greatest ovation. He never heard it because I am convinced he was dead before he had hit the table.

The last act of the play was cancelled that night and the Guv’nor went before the curtain to announce that upon application at the box office customers’ money would be returned. Surprisingly few theatregoers took up this offer, however. As one of them remarked to me in the street the following morning in his blunt Northern way, he had got his shilling’s worth.

No explanation could be discovered for the extraordinary and horrific death of Mr Fisher by either the men of science or of the law. The top of his skull had simply been crushed to a pulp as if it had been a rotten apple. At the inquest a verdict of Death by Misadventure was brought in. The only clue—if it can be called a clue—to the tragedy resided in a crumpled piece of paper found in the jacket Fisher was wearing on the day of his death. It was a bill, the tradesman in question being one, ‘Jabez Wheeler, Superior Wig Maker of 12 Dock Street, Bermondsey’. No figures had been written on the bill side of the document, but on the reverse, the following had been scrawled in pencil: