Deidre, appalled, looked at Colin. Her hand hovered near the curtain release, but he shook his head. Kitty stood for a moment, winded, fighting for breath, then she sucked in air like a drowning man, took two steps, and fell into Deidre’s arms. Deidre led her to the only space in the crowded wings, next to the props table, and pulled up one of the little gilt chairs. She lowered the girl gently into it, handed her clipboard to Colin, and took Kitty’s hand in hers.
“Is she all right?” Nicholas came up and whispered. “What the hell’s going on?”
“It’s Esslyn. I don’t know … he seems to have had some sort of brainstorm. He just started throwing her about.”
“Christ.”
“Can you sit with her while I get some aspirin?”
“I’m on in two secs.”
“Get one of the ASMs, then. Kitty, I shan’t be a minute, okay?”
“ .. my back … ahh … God …”
Deidre ran to the ladies’ dressing room. The first-aid box kept always on the windowsill in the far corner behind the costume rail as not there. Frantically she started searching, pulling the actresses’ day clothes—Rosa’s fur coat, Joyce’s looped gray wool—flinging various dresses and skirts aside. She knelt down, hurling shoes and boots out of the way. Nothing. And then she saw it. Sticking out from behind Rosa’s wig stand. She grabbed the box and the aspirin, struggling with the screw top. It seemed impossibly stiff. Then she realized it was a “child proof” cap that you needed to push down first. Even as she shook out three tablets, she recognized the futility of what she was doing. Aspirins were for trivial ailments. A headache, a rise in temperature. What if Kitty’s spine was damaged? What if every second’s delay increased the dreadful danger of paralysis? At the least, she might be about to lose the baby … Deidre suddenly felt afraid. She should have ignored Colin and stopped the play. Asked if there was a doctor in the house. It would be her fault if Kitty never walked again. She forced this dreadful possibility from her mind and murmured, “Water … water.” There were various mugs and polystyrene beakers scattered about, all with dirty brown puddles in the bottom. Deidre seized the nearest mug, rinsed it out, half filled it with cold water, and ran back to the wings.
The first thing she heard was Nicholas’s voice from the stage. This meant the first scene was over, the set change effected, and scene 2 well under way. She had been longer than she thought. She hurried over to the props table, but the chair where she had left Kitty was empty. Deidre crossed to Colin, who, on her mouthed “Where is she?” mouthed back “Toilet.”
Kitty was walking up and down the tiled floor when Deidre entered. Walking stiffly, stopping every few steps to ease her shoulders, but still, thank God, walking. Deidre preferred the aspirin and the mug, only to be met with a flood of invective the like of which she’d never heard in her life. The fact that it was aimed at Kitty’s husband and Deidre just happened to be in the firing line hardly lessened the shock. The language left her face burning, and she “sshh’d” in vain. Some of the words were familiar from the text of Amadeus, and one or two more from the odd occasion when Deidre had been compelled to use a public lavatory, the rest were totally unfamiliar. And they had a newly minted ring, as if normal run-of-the-mill abuse could not even begin to do justice to Kitty’s fury, and she had been compelled to create powerfully primed adjectives of her own.
“Please …” cried Deidre in an urgent whisper. “The audience will hear you.”
Kitty stopped then, adding just one more sentence in a very quiet voice. “If he lays a finger on me again,” she said, “I’ll fucking kill him.”
Then, still moving slowly and stiffly, she went, leaving Deidre staring after her openmouthed, the three aspirins, already sweatily crumbling, in the palm of her hand.
Barnaby and Troy, like the rest of the audience, were aware of the extraordinary change that had come over Amadeus in the second half. It seemed to them at the time that this was entirely due to the actor playing Salieri.
In Act I he had given a capable if rather stolid performance. In Act II his whole body seemed alive with explosive energy, which it seemed to barely contain. You would not have been surprised, thought Barnaby, if sparks had flown when he clapped his hands or struck the boards with his heel. The very air through which he stalked, trailing clouds of inchoate rage, seemed charged. Maureen Troy thought she might not have missed Coronation Street for nothing, and Barnaby became aware that his daughter was now sitting up and leaning forward in her chair.
Salieri’s startling transformation did not help the play as a whole. The rest of the cast, instead of interacting with him as they had done previously (albeit with varying degrees of convincingness), now seemed to have become quite disengaged, moving cautiously within his orbit and avoiding eye contact even when indulging in direct speech.
Nicholas waited for his cue, gazing into the brilliantly lit arena. He was tense but not alarmed. He responded to the crackling energy that, even in the wings, he could feel emanating from Esslyn, in a very positive way. He felt his own blood surge in response. He knew he could match, even overmatch, the other man’s power. His mind was clear; his body trembled pleasingly with anticipation. He stepped onstage and did not hear Emperor Joseph whisper as he drifted by, “Watch him.”
And if he had heard, Nicholas would have paid no mind. He had no intention of pussyfooting about. For him, always, the play came first. So he stepped boldly up to Salieri, and when Esslyn said, “I commiserate with the loser” and held out his hand, Nicholas gladly offered his own. Esslyn immediately stepped in front of the boy, masking him from the audience, gripped Nicholas’s hand in his own, and squeezed. And squeezed. Harder. And harder.
Nicholas’s mouth stretched involuntarily wide in silent pain. His hand felt as if it were being wrapped in a bunch of savagely sharp thorns. Esslyn was smiling at him, a broad jackal grin. Then, just as Nicholas thought he might faint with agony, Esslyn suddenly let go and sauntered to the back of the stage. Nicholas gasped out a reasonable approximation of his next few lines and managed to get across to the piano and sit down. The Venticelli entered, and Mozart, who had no more to say, took this opportunity to examine his hand. It was already puffing up. He straightened the fingers gently one at a time. The back of the hand was worse than the palm. Covered in tiny blue bruises, with the skin actually broken in several places. The whole hand looked and felt as if someone had been trying to hammer thumbtacks into it. At the end of the scene he made his exit. Colin approached him in the wings. “Deidre thinks we ought to stop it.”
Nicholas shook his head. “I can cope. Now I know.”
“Let’s have a look.” Colin stared at the hand and drew in his breath sharply. “You can’t go on like that.”
“Of course I can.” Nicholas, having got over the immediate shock of the attack, was now, despite the pain, rather relishing this opportunity to display his cool professionalism. He was a trouper. And troupers trouped no matter what. Deidre touched his arm and whispered, “What happened?”