This was greeted by general cheers but marred by a single catcall.
Cynthia sat staring straight ahead, her lips pursed.
“Mr. Duncan has been seen most recently in Articles of War. And so without further ado, we welcome to Bishop’s Lacey two great luminaries of the screen, Miss Phyllis Wyvern, ably assisted by Mr. Desmond Duncan, in their world-famous interpretation of a scene from William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.”
There was no curtain to go up, but in its place, the lights were switched out, and for a few moments we sat in the dark.
Then a spotlight pierced the blackness, picking out a little grove of potted lemon trees. A lettered placard on a wooden tripod told us that this was Capulet’s orchard.
I twisted round far enough to see that the fierce white beam of light was coming from atop the scaffolding above the door, and that the figure hunched over one of the snouted spotlights was Gil Crawford.
Romeo, in the form of Desmond Duncan, came strolling into the grove to a smattering of applause. He was dressed in tan tights, over which was a peculiar pair of red velvet shorts which looked rather like inflated swimming trunks. He wore a white shirt of the peasant variety, all fancy ruffles of lace at the neck and sleeves, and his sporty flat hat was decorated with a pheasant’s tail feather.
He extended his open hands to the audience and took a series of elaborate little bows before speaking his first word.
Come on! I thought. Get on with it!
“He jests at scars that never felt a wound.”
Another pause, and another sprinkling of applause in recognition of that famous voice.
“But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks?”
A few sparse hand claps to show that they were familiar with the line.
“It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon …”
Again he paused, gazing up, his eyes fixed on Juliet’s balcony, which remained, beyond the spotlight’s beam, in utter blackness.
“Spot!” Phyllis Wyvern’s voice commanded loudly from somewhere above Romeo’s head.
The moment was frozen. It seemed to stretch on and on.
“Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon …” Desmond Duncan began again, still not quite Romeo.
You could have heard a pin drop in China.
“Spotlight, dammit!” snapped the voice of the fair Juliet from the darkness, and there came from behind me the most frightful crash, as if some metal object had fallen from the scaffold onto the tiles of the foyer.
“… the envious moon,” Desmond Duncan plowed on,
“Who is already sick and pale with grief,
That thou her maid art far more fair than she …”
There was a sudden rustling of silks as Phyllis Wyvern came swishing down the steps from the landing, her feet appearing first at the perimeter of Romeo’s spotlight, and then her dress.
Her costume was absolutely gorgeous, a fawn-colored creation, wide at the hem, tight as blazes at the waist, and shockingly low at the neck. The precious stones that lined the collar and sleeves glittered madly as she passed through the glare of Romeo’s spotlight, and a gasp went up from the audience at the unaccustomed splendor that had materialized so suddenly in their midst.
Into her braided hair was woven a chaplet of flowers—real flowers, by the look of them—and I bit my lip in admiration. How young and beautiful, and how timeless she seemed!
The real Juliet, if ever there was one, would have spit in envy.
Down and down she came, and at last onto the foyer floor, her pointed slippers making a menacing sound on the tiles: like a pair of snakes tiptoeing on their rib ends.
Ned Cropper shrank back a little as she swept past him towards the front door.
She’s leaving! I thought. She’s walking out!
I twisted round in my chair, fighting to remain seated, as Phyllis Wyvern, having reached the scaffolding, seized hold of the ladder, placed a delicately slippered foot on the first rung, and began to climb.
Up and up she went, her Elizabethan dress, even in the darkness, shooting off sparks of light like a comet ascending the heavens.
At the top, she stepped off onto the plank flooring and edged her way along to where Gil Crawford stood watching her approach, his mouth open.
Clinging to the scaffold’s railing with one hand, Phyllis Wyvern hauled off and, with the other, slapped Gil hard across the face.
The sharp crack of it echoed back and forth across the foyer, refusing to die.
Gil’s hand flew to his cheek, and even in the near darkness, I saw the flash from the whites of his terrified eyes.
She hitched up the hem of her dress and maneuvered back to the ladder, which she managed to climb down with surprising grace.
Looking neither to the right nor the left, Phyllis Wyvern processed—there’s no other word for it; she looked as if she were walking in state up the center aisle of Westminster Abbey—she processed across the foyer to the foot of the west staircase, which she climbed, skirt still hitched in one hand, to the landing, where she turned and struck a pose at the railing of her make-believe bedroom balcony.
After a heart-stopping pause, the second spotlight came on with an audible clack, catching her in its beam like some exotic moth.
She clasped her hands to her breast, took a shuddering breath, and spoke her first line:
“Ay me!” she said.
“She speaks!” said Romeo.
“O, speak again, bright angel!” he went on, rather hesitantly,
“For thou art as glorious to this night, being o’er my head,
As is a wingèd messenger of heaven
Unto the white-upturnèd wondering eyes of mortals that fall back to gaze on him …”
I couldn’t help thinking of Gil Crawford’s eyes.
“O Romeo, Romeo!” she cooed. “Wherefore art thou Romeo?”
And so on. The rest of the performance was just a lot of that moon-June-balloon stuff—a load of old mulch, really—and I found myself wishing they had chosen a more exciting scene from the play, one of those involving toxicology, for instance, which are the only really decent parts of Romeo and Juliet.
We had been made to listen to the play in its entirety on one of Father’s compulsory Thursday wireless nights, during which I had formed the opinion that while Shakespeare was good with words, he knew beans about poisons.
The difference between poisons and narcotics seems to have escaped him, and he was in an utter muddle when it came to those vegetable and mineral irritants that act upon the brain and spinal cord.
In spite of all the wordy hocus-pocus about gathering herbs by moonlight, Juliet’s symptoms indicated the use of nothing more mystifying than plain old hydrocyanic acid administered in drinking water.
For ever and ever, Amen.
By now, Phyllis Wyvern and Desmond Duncan were taking their bows. Joining hands like Hansel and Gretel, they took a couple of steps towards the audience, then backed away, and then advanced again, like waves lapping at the sands.
Flushed with pleasure, or something, they were both perspiring freely, their makeup, at close range, suddenly ghastly in the overhead lights.