Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show (41 page)

It hadn’t worked, and now it was never going to work. With not a word to anybody, King Kelly and the gunman, whose name was Alec (and he
was
from Galway, but I didn’t discover that for years), turned away and quit the house through the open front door without a word to Sarah, who stood by, overwrought.

Mrs. Haas grabbed the edge of the table and took many deep breaths. Venetia looked at me, held up five fingers, and then pointed upward (she was a wonder at signs and gestures), and steered her mother to the staircase.
I closed my eyes and began to sway. Mrs. Haas grabbed me and opened the back door of the house, which led into a little garden. Outside she put her hand on my waist and bent me double several times.

If she intended that I throw up, she made a mistake. In my life I can never remember vomiting—food is much too important to waste like that. I did accept her glass of water—and then I came back indoors, sat down, and finished eating the second plate of food. To give you an idea of how long the incident lasted, the food hadn’t cooled at all.

Mrs. Haas began to mutter: “Dreadful man. Dreadful man.” Looking askance at me, as though unable to face me full on, she said in the same low mutter, “You don’t know what’s going on, you don’t know what’s going on.” And in her concluding remark before she rose and left the kitchen, she said, “Be brave, oh, be brave.”

I finished eating all the food, and went back upstairs to the little sitting room. There sat Sarah and Venetia. When I went in, Sarah reached out a hand to me and held it.

She said, “I’m so sorry. And you were so cool, Ben. I can’t believe that you’re so young.”

“Have they gone?” I asked.

Venetia said, “I’ve told Sarah that you’re now part of the company.”

Sarah looked into a distance that didn’t exist in that small room. Venetia rose and said, “I have to dry my hair,” and she beckoned to me with her head.

I followed her into the room in which we had slept, and as she closed the door behind us I heard Sarah outside sigh, rise, and go away.

A
nd so, at gunpoint so to speak, I became a member of the company of Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show. That very day, I took to the road. Even though I only carried spears or led a wooden horse or cow onstage, I became a traveling actor, part of a great tradition—the strolling player, descended straight from the troubadour, the minstrel, who wandered Europe singing roundelays beneath the windows of beautiful ladies. Shakespeare belonged to traveling companies. And perhaps I was descended from an even more wonderful figure: the strolling bard, the storyteller who came to the castle gates and that night, after the feast, entertained the King and his family and his nobles and his warriors with long and absorbing tales.

I have to say that Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show may have been a little different. I was introduced to them all, and they were more numerous than I had expected—she had a company of more than a dozen, yet it seemed to me that I’d seen only a total of perhaps six. There was Cwawfod, and he hadn’t appeared onstage; Graham, the neckless one; the old man who played the tuba—his name was Derek, and he had a staggeringly posh English accent that got ever more exaggerated when he drank,
meaning that it got very grand indeed. You’ve already met Michael, who played Bassanio, with many tumbles, in that “loose interpretation” so beloved of Miss Fay.

The girl who played the milkmaid and other saucy roles—she came from Dublin and had run away to escape a family that made her go to Mass every morning and, as she told me, “I’m a bit wilder than that, like, ya know, I like the romantic life. And yourself, are you romantic at all?”

Some of them rarely appeared onstage. Nasal Cwawfod, for instance, had no more than a factotum role; he drove vehicles, put out chairs, helped with scenery, such as it was. Behind the scenes also worked a man and woman—a husband and wife, Venetia told me, Martin and Martha.

They never spoke, at least not in my hearing—they never spoke to anybody, not even each other, that I ever saw or heard. They came from Belfast, one was Catholic, one Protestant, and they’d had to leave their homes because of their love affair and subsequent marriage. Long afterward, I found them—at least I found Martha, and discovered that both had been severe alcoholics.

And then there was Peter, the temperamental one. At the time I joined the show I had never seen Peter onstage—because Peter, though a very experienced actor, rarely went onstage.

“Temperament,” Venetia told me, smiling.

Peter, it transpired, believed every role beneath him, apart from, say, Hamlet or King Lear or Prospero or Othello.

“I simply cannot see the point of treading the boards in puny characterizations,” he would declare, when the company had assembled to put together the stage for a performance. By February 1932 he hadn’t made an appearance for more than six months.

And we had Timmy, three or four years older than me, rescued from a life of habitual imprisonment, and a gifted magician. Timmy had a pickpocket act that audiences loved; “art imitating life,” Venetia called it with a dry grin. Timmy could remove a man’s wristwatch, necktie, or shoelaces without the man knowing. Ladies returned to their seats having been onstage, and as they sat down Timmy gave them back their necklaces. Timmy had a red face for one so young, and a ferocious body odor—to this day I have no idea how he achieved it; he must have built it up in layers, like shale.

These “men and women merely players” were my new life.

A
s I look back over this document I realize that I may not have given as clear a picture of Venetia as I have of Sarah. That hasn’t come from any wish of not wanting to portray her, no selfishness of holding her to myself—it comes from inability; I simply can’t. The subject is too embedded in my heart, and I don’t wish to chisel it out; not from any lack of generosity—I’m simply not objective about her, not even now, so many decades later.

I can tell you—and already have to some degree—what she looked like, I can tell you how her skin felt, I can tell you how she walked, but I can’t describe her essence. I can tell you how she looked at me—as though I were the dearest person ever born, as she was to me.

Perhaps she’ll appear clearer to you through the company’s reactions. I observed them all when I became part of that group, and I’ve since then searched for and found as many of them as I could. They helped me to deepen and copper-fasten the impressions of Venetia that I can convey. And they confirmed for me how unusual she was; “quirky,” some said; “lonely,” said another; “a gift for doing the unexpected,” said somebody else.

They pointed to her diligence, the assiduous learning of her lines, her
passion to please her audiences. For instance—and I later saw this myself—when playing a new venue, she’d walk through the town and pick out some detail about the place to include in the show that night. It could be a statue, a notice of an auction, a local band. Blarney might then have a reference in his act, or one of the others would mention it in a jokey exchange.

I’ve assembled their impressions, and fed off them for years; here’s a sample. First, the men in the company. Now they were, in any language, misfitting and rough. None of them had gifts of hygiene or stability; they all stank to a greater or lesser degree, and they all had weeping fits or drinking jags or some other kind of outburst.

If they had anything in common with Venetia, it must have been a deep love of performance, and a relish of fine language. I stood with them many a night in the wings, and watched the starry beginnings of tears in their eyes at a wonderful Shakespeare line. I heard them murmur phrases from “Lochinvar” or
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
or “The Passing of Arthur” or whatever poem Venetia was using at the time to hold the show together—which is how she saw the function of that particular reading. It always came near the middle of the evening—this was a show without an interval—and it always proved a kind of emotional rallying point for both cast and audience.

And these men, these rough men, outcasts from their previous lives—they always stood up when Venetia walked in. They deferred to her; they fetched a chair for her; they poured her some of their truly awful tea—they themselves called it “the urine”—they’d say after some exertion or other, “A dose of the urine is needed.” And then, as she sat and sipped the tea, they stood around her like a ramshackle household guard, listening to every word she said as though she were their empress, which she was.

Many, many years after it all came to an end, with the show long folded, I found Peter, the temperamental one. He lived in a convent home run for indigents outside Waterford; when I met him he’d become immobile, but his personality remained intact.

He recognized me the moment I walked in—and he began to cry. Which took me aback, until he said: “I’d always hoped to hear from darling Venetia. Is she with you?”

I tried to explain, saw that he couldn’t cope with such a difficult burden, and instead asked him for his impressions of her.

“She took me in as though I were the brightest star in the theatrical firmament. I was on the heap, old boy. Rubbish. Useless. Over. On the skids. Every opportunity I had—and I knew the greats—I pissed away. I offended every manager who hired me, I was too grand, they were beneath me, I was too temperamental to act. I was an Actor.”

As I recalled it, he hadn’t done much acting for Venetia’s company either, and I put that to him gently. By now I was maturer and better able to couch things.

“No, old boy. And she knew why. She knew I was afraid, too worthless. So she gave me the job of being her Shakespeare coach. And I often chose the repertoire with her. I would never have had a life without her.”

Now the women. Mrs. Haas adored her, no need to remind you of that. Sarah, as you know, considered her daughter mythical. From the company, Martha, when I met her, told me that she herself had had two miscarriages on the road. All the medical arrangements—made by Venetia. The doctors—paid by Venetia. The emotional aftercare—Venetia.

“Before the house that you knew in Charleville, she had another house. She sent me to that house to recover, and she gave me a housekeeper to look after me. D’you remember her? That Mrs. Hiss? Terrible bitch, she treated me like I was a fool or a convict or both. And then Venetia’d come over to see me and everything’d be fine again. Did you know that the mother was dead jealous of her? She was an actress too, the mother.”

For a woman who never spoke when in the company of the show, Martha made up for lost time. I asked her whether, as a woman, she had liked Venetia. Martha thought, frowned, took her time, spoke slowly.

“She was two people, like. There was the warm side to her, that we all saw, I mean, friendly-like. And there was another side, distant-like, I don’t mean cold, no, she wasn’t cold. But she was away out of things, like. Yeh, distant-like. Yeh, cold, maybe. But we’d’a done anything for her.” She paused. “That distant thing. I think she was lonely-like.”

T
hat day, as she dried her hair, Venetia and I shook our heads in horror over the gun incident. She thought it no more than what she called “a stupid jape” by her grandfather. I believed that he meant something else and something stronger—but I hadn’t formulated my thoughts. Vaguely I felt that it had something to do with Mother and the farm, but I’d resolved not to discuss the matter of my own family’s problems with Venetia; I didn’t want to trouble her with them, and I’d decided to wait until I could talk to Sarah.