The Eye of the Storm (35 page)

Nor did the wine, or whatever the Jacka woman had poured, help him decide whether he had been speaking or dreaming. She had come and was sitting beside him on the couch, in a heap of drowsy pugs. She could have been smiling as she watched him, while stroking the rise and fall of a pug's exposed teats.

‘This screen—how it's continued cropping up. So solid and real—as real as childhood.' He laughed uneasily for his discovery. ‘I've built speeches round it, rehearsing parts which have worried me. It's always protected me from the draught.' He sniggered, sipping the drink which had let loose his confession. ‘This screen thing—it materializes again when you feel you're beginning to slip—in musty provincial theatres—a piece of disintegrating silk stretched on a ricketty, tottering frame. You're less than ever inclined to look behind it. And you're pretty sure that if it blows over, you're lost.'

His lips were almost paralysed. He was no longer aware of her as a face but as a smile beneath water. What else he told he could not have unravelled for sleep in a white dress streaming light from the top of the stairs. Did she touch his forehead?

Towards morning he needed to relieve himself, stumbled through the curtains of smoke and plush, and against a low, object-laden table, but reached the garden, where cold and a sprinkling of rain revived him. A sweet scent, cold too, rejoiced him as he did his business. This piercing scent of night flowers was threaded through the smell of damp rot which finally predominated.

Returning to the house, he looked up, and caught sight of Mitty Jacka seated by a naked light, in an upper room, either ‘hammering away', or, more likely, ‘locked': for the moment she was perfectly still, her expression desperate by that searching light.

He felt so sober burrowing back into the darkness where he had slept, it occurred to him to investigate the urn in which she had dropped her slip of paper. He made light, put in his hand, and skimmed the surface of an urnful of similar slips for what was
probably the most recent: there were traces of raw liver on it, as well as a bloody fingerprint or two.

Sceptical this morning, not to say cynical, he opened the folded paper to read:

… an actor tends to ignore the part which fits him best
his life
Lear the old unplayable is in the end a safer bet than the unplayed I …

His breath sharpened as the words blurred. He didn't have with him the glasses he used, not to read (he seldom did) but to study a part. So he held the paper at arm's length. After the first attempt to focus on words too perfectly formed in a severe, anachronistic hand, he saw he might as well give up. Depressing the way his sight had deteriorated: after shock for instance, or abusive letters, selfish performances by the vindictive young, and especially after alcohol. Considering how the Jacka had dosed him the night before, it was no wonder half the message was lost. He was glad to re-fold her squalid paper, and toss it back into the urn, where it couldn't remind him of physical decay.

Then he proceeded to arrange himself again on what had become an uncomfortable unsprung sofa. He drew himself into an appropriate form, only it wasn't: he realized he had taken on the shape of a prawn, and that it was too
TIGHT.
When sleep seeped back shallowly around he was lashing and kicking, more transparent than the words in which he was netted.

His hostess brought him a cup of coffee at a most untheatrical hour. After she had dragged the curtains back, a grey light touched their reunion with fatality. Even so, Mitty Jacka, all gooseflesh and shivers now that day had succeeded her elective night, would have liked to float on the surface.

She said too hastily, ‘Poor you—you must have been uncomfortable! The sofa's a disaster. It belonged to a great-aunt.'

She stood chafing thin and elderly arms; while he sat muttering approval of the sofa into his coffee. The cup, a once sumptuous Empire, had a brown chip as large as a thumbnail.

‘We'll keep in touch,' she predicted, looking out uneasily through the amorphousness of a wet garden, ‘because I know we're meant to write a play together.'

She had him at her mercy: she could attack him at the theatre where he was playing; whereas he had neither her number, nor address—nor did he want them.

‘Plays cost money,' he replied, showing her his smile, which she ignored.

‘It can always be raised from somewhere. What about this old rich invalid mother?'

What had he told her in the night? He wasn't aware he had mentioned Elizabeth Hunter.

‘She's pretty tight,' he mumbled, staring at his white knuckles. ‘Oh, she's generous enough, I must admit—in little handouts—from time to time.'

‘Wouldn't a personal appearance make a difference?'

‘Not worth it. Too many others waiting to jump in the moment you leave the West End.'

‘Money is worth it. Money is power, isn't it?'

‘Oh, but it's hers!' As though he believed.

‘Only if her life justifies her keeping it.'

‘Aren't the lives of beautiful women works of art? They deserve the fortunes men pay for them. And Elizabeth Hunter is a great—an incredibly beautiful woman.' Now he honestly believed in what he saw: himself as a youth deriving from this radiance.

‘She had a stroke.' Mitty Jacka sounded her coldest. ‘Mightn't she die?'

More than this voice, he had begun to detest himself. ‘Not on your life! Or anyway, not in a hundred years. Nothing will persuade Elizabeth Hunter to die.'

He must get up; he must move; or succumb to slow poisoning. He felt as though not a skerrick of live flesh had been left clinging to his thought-infested skull.

Mitty Jacka might have tried persuading him some more if her blue cat had not forestalled her. It strolled in out of the garden
flicking the tip of its tail, carrying in its jaws a folded thrush: a corpse judging by the lolling head, resigned eyelids, and a necklace of blood against otherwise decent feathers. The cat flattened itself and growled, to warn off possible intervention, then glided under the sofa.

The mistress had bared her teeth. ‘Ohhh!' she cried, whether distressed or elated by the enactment of her argument, it was difficult to tell. ‘There's nothing one can do. Isn't it natural,' she insisted, ‘that some should die for others to live?'

Holding forth in its rasping, high-pitched growl from under the sofa, the cat made it clear who should live, while its mistress remained only an aspiring murderess.

Seeing that the moment could provide him with a reason for his exit, the actor advanced firmly, professionally, on his hostess, and took her hands in his. ‘Thank you', he said, ‘for your hospitality—the ideas you've shared—and this memorable house.' Make it sound final. ‘I shan't forget any of it.'

There was a faint trembling, it seemed, in the cold unresponsive hands, till he realized it came from his own warmer, fleshier ones.

‘Next time,' she said as they were walking through the rooms towards the front door. ‘I'll tell you how I visualize this play.' Their shoulders collided in conspiracy: his well-cut, actor's sleeve, and her shabby, black silk, rustling kimono, with stains become part of its embroideries.

Mitty Jacka was still apparently speaking. ‘A man develops only one of his several potential lives. There's no reason why he shouldn't live them all—or at least act them out, if he can liberate himself. This is what I'd like for you: this nightly liberation instead of the cast-iron figures dragging themselves from one prescribed attitude to another.'

By now he had dragged his cast-iron, proven self as far as the front door, from which he could see, through foliage and boughs, the gate set in the flint-studded wall. The gate was still a long way off.

He replied cagily enough, ‘A lot would depend on who else was
available at the time; not forgetting a theatre. That's after we've raised the cash by whatever immoral means!'

‘In this case almost everything would depend on yourself; and aren't you a great actor, Sir Basil Hunter?'

This time he saw to it that she didn't raise a flicker out of his vanity. ‘I'm a man who's been bitten more than once, and who intends to go carefully.' In spite of long experience, he could not tell how his audience had reacted to this touch of false humility.

‘If it's a matter of life and death, wouldn't you choose life?'

At the moment he might have chosen death rather than go through another performance for Mitty Jacka. So he ignored her question.

Then, when retreating down the path, he remembered the convention in which he must behave, and looked back, not so much to raise, as re-tilt his Homburg with the right show of insouciance. She was standing on the step, an archaic figure in the black gown she had gathered around her with her arms, her face an expressionless white, except for a grey shadow of what could have been anxiety.

‘Don't forget to write to that old woman—your mother,' she called after him in practical tones. ‘You'd be surprised how many people are longing to be asked to collaborate. It gives them the illusion of living.'

The gate jingled, clicked; he was free, thank God.

His footsteps resounding down the hill, the sky awash with early morning colours above the telly grids and wet slates, restored his faith in himself as future. If he did fly home on a brief visit, it would be from his own choice, not a mentor's, his object not to bully an old woman into handing over a fortune even if it killed her, but to renew himself through bursts of light, whiffs of burning, the sound of trees stampeded by a wind when they weren't standing as still as silence. And mud: in spite of the pavement and his shoes, he could feel it almost, oozing upward, increasing, between the splayed toes of his bare feet.

Fortified by sensual realities such as these, it was easy to dismiss as hallucination the incident at wherever it was. Certainly the
woman made no attempt to get in touch. A week or two, and it began to surprise him; once or twice he caught himself resenting Mitty Jacka's neglect.

Then the notices went up. Though there had been rumours, the management (a second-rate, recent lot) hadn't so much as hinted that their miserable play was likely to close abruptly; and himself carrying the thing for weeks, in support of a young Geordie graduated overnight from bricklayer to leading man.

Well, that was the way nowadays. He belched at the sheet of paper pinned to the board.

‘We're off, I see,' he mentioned to Peggy Digby, her perky tits and jumper in a hurry down the corridor.

‘Yes. Didn't you know? Wadda
relief
! Now I guess I'll make the panto.'

He continued staring, not so much at the announcement on the board, as the brand-new drawing pins, and the image of that woman on the bus.

On the night of the fourth last performance he poured himself a tot purely to moisten his vocal chords. The walls of his dressing-room at the Delphic were painted poison green above a chocolate dado: both green and brown had blisters in them. He poured himself a second tot: the first had been thoughtlessly done, and weak.

But his voice stayed hoarse all that evening. Nothing he threw in—and God knows he performed—nothing helped them out of the doldrums in which they were stuck. Except in the second act, when the Geordie bricklayer bared his torso, a girl's voice nearly squealed the darkness down. The audience (mostly paper) laughed.

Taking off his make-up after the performance, which normally revived his spirits as much as putting it on in the beginning, he was nauseated by the smell of Cremine to the extent of trembling. And his disgusting old rag of a towel. Surely he wasn't becoming a professional trembler—or Parkinsonian?

He longed for somebody to come. He listened for the sound of a formal dress; he might have put up with his second ex-wife, the Lady Enid; even a worshipful, crushed macintosh wouldn't have
come amiss. But nobody appeared, and in the absence of visitors, he poured himself a tot. Walker handed him the Homburg.

He went out. In the green-and-chocolate corridor, Peggy Digby gave him a big, skilful kiss. ‘Promise to come up to Glasgow to see the panto. You'll find I'm the Number One Dandini.'

It was parky outside under an etiolated lamp-lit drizzle. He had no appetite for the meal he would eat in the corner of some stale Soho joint: no point in cutting a dash when he was on his own. He could have rung any number of bells, where groovy young pros or business swingers would have dragged him in raucously, and scooped out the
foie gras
and got him drunk, but he couldn't think of one who might satisfy his hunger—for what? For substance perhaps, for permanence. Friendship, as he saw it, was more and more like an ingenious farce with too much plot and too many characters all acting frenetically, in spite of which it closed after the routine run. (Marriage too; though that was a different sort of play.)

This was where Sir Basil felt the damp in his right foot, looked at his sole as soon as he reached a quiet lamp-post, and noticed that he needed mending. All right, simple enough: he wasn't on the rocks, only shortly out of a job. He had his experience, his title, his technique, his voice, and, it had been demonstrated, women were attracted to him.

What was the-Mitty Jacka! Of Golden Hill? Of Beulah!

He took the bus to Beulah Hill looking for signs of a disturbing presence: on the seats of an empty upper deck; at a flint-studded gatepost apparently much favoured by dogs; then along the path, slippery with snails, till he was again standing on her doorstep about that same hour of night.

‘I've come', he said, ‘to hear about the play you spoke of. Remember?' Perhaps it was his position on the lower step which made it sound suppliant.

The two pugs were poppopping at his ankles, while around hers curved an arc of luminous fur.

‘Yes,' she said. ‘I've been giving it thought. I'm glad you've decided.'