He walked down the aisle and crossed to the pass-door in the box on the Prompt side. He never went backstage by this route without a kind of aftertaste of his first visit to The Dolphin. Always, behind the sound of his own footsteps on the uncarpeted stairway, Peregrine caught an echo of Mr. Conducis coming invisibly to his rescue.
It was a slight shock now, therefore, to hear, as he shut the pass-door behind him, actual footsteps beyond the turn in this narrow, dark and widening stair.
“Hullo?” he said. “Who’s that?”
The steps halted.
“Coming up,” Peregrine said, not wanting to collide.
He went on up the little stairway and turned the corner.
The door leading onto the stage opened slightly, admitting a blade of light. He saw that somebody moved uncertainly as if in doubt whether to descend or not and he got the impression that whoever it was had actually been standing in the dark behind the door.
Gertrude Bracey said, “I was just coming down.”
She pushed open the door and went onstage to make way for him. As he came up with her, she put her hand on his arm.
“Aren’t you going to Destiny’s sinister little party?” she asked.
“Not I,” he said.
“Unasked? Like me?”
“That’s right,” he said lightly and wished she wouldn’t stare at him like that. She leaned towards him.
“Do you know what I think of Mr. W. Hartly Grove?” she asked quietly. Peregrine shook his head and she then told him. Peregrine was used to uninhibited language in the theatre but Gertrude Bracey’s eight words on Harry Grove made him blink.
“Gertie, dear!”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Gertie, dear. And Gertie dear knows what she’s talking about, don’t you worry.”
She turned her back on him and walked away.
“Emily,” Peregrine said as they climbed up Wharfingers Lane, “I hope you don’t mind it just being me. And I hope you don’t think there’s any skulduggery at work. Such as me getting rid of Jer in order to make a heavy pass at you. Not, mark you, that I wouldn’t like to but that I really wouldn’t have the nerve to try such an obvious ploy.”
“I should hope not,” said Emily with composure.
“Well, I wouldn’t. I suppose you’ve seen how it is with Jeremy?”
“One could hardly miss it.”
“One couldn’t, could one?” he agreed politely.
Suddenly for no particular reason they both burst out laughing and he took her arm.
“Imagine!” he said. “Here we are on Bankside, not much more than a stone’s throw from The Swan and The Rose and The Globe. Shakespeare must have come this way a thousand times after rehearsals had finished for the day. We’re doing just what he did and I do wish, Emily, that we could take water for Blackfriars.”
“It’s pleasant,” Emily said, “to be in company that isn’t self-conscious about him and doesn’t mistake devotion for idolatry.”
“Well, he is unique, so what’s the matter with being devoted? Have you observed, Emily, that talent only fluctuates about its own middle line whereas genius nearly always makes great walloping bloomers?”
“Like Agnes Pointing Upwards and bits of Cymbeline?”
“Yes. I think, perhaps, genius is nearly always slightly lacking in taste.”
“Anyway, without intellectual snobbery?”
“Oh that, certainly.”
“Are you pleased with rehearsals, so far?”
“On the whole.”
“I suppose it’s always a bit of a shock bringing something you’ve written to the melting pot or forge or whatever the theatre is. Particularly when, as producer, you yourself are the melting pot.”
“Yes, it is. You see your darling child being processed, being filtered through the personalities of the actors and turning into something different on the way. And you’ve got to accept all that because a great many of the changes are for the good. I get the oddest sort of feeling sometimes, that, as producer, I’ve stepped outside myself as playwright. I begin to wonder if I ever knew what the play is about.”
“I can imagine.”
They walked on in companionship: two thinking ants moving eastward against the evening out-swarm from the City. When they reached Blackfriars it had already grown quiet there and the little street where Jeremy and Peregrine lived was quite deserted. They climbed up to the studio and sat in the window drinking dry martinis and trying to see The Dolphin on the far side of the river.
“We haven’t talked about the letter and the glove,” Emily said. “Why, I wonder, when it’s such a tremendous thing. You must have felt like a high-pressure cooker with it all bottled up inside you.”
“Well, there was Jeremy to explode to. And of course the expert.”
“How strange it is,” Emily said. She knelt on the window-seat with her arms folded on the ledge and her chin on her arms. Her heartshaped face looked very young. Peregrine knew that he must find out about her: about how she thought and what she liked and disliked and where she came from and whether she was or had been in love and if so what she did about it. “How strange,” she repeated, “to think of John Shakespeare over in Henley Street making them for his grandson. Would he make them himself or did he have a foreman-glover?”
“He made them himself. The note says ‘Mayde by my father.’ ”
“Is the writing all crabbed and squiggly like his signatures?”
“Yes. But not exactly like any of them. People’s writing isn’t always like their signatures. The handwriting experts have all found what they call ‘definitive’ points of agreement.”
“What will happen to them, Perry? Will he sell to the highest bidder or will he have any ideas about keeping them here? Oh,” Emily cried, “they should be kept here.”
“I tried to say as much but he shut up like a spring-trap.”
“Jeremy,” Emily said, “will probably go stark ravers if they’re sold out of the country.”
“Jeremy?”
“Yes. He’s got a manic thing about the draining away of national treasures, hasn’t he? I wouldn’t have been in the least surprised, would you, if it had turned out to be Jeremy who stole the Goya Wellington. Simply to keep it in England, you know.” Emily chuckled indulgently and Peregrine thought he detected the proprietary air of romance and was greatly put out. Emily went on and on about Jeremy Jones and his shop and his treasures and how moved and disturbed he was by the new resolution. “Don’t you feel he is perfectly capable,” she said, “of bearding Mr. Conducis in his den and telling him he mustn’t let them go?”
“I do hope you’re exaggerating.”
“I really don’t believe I am. He’s a fanatic.”
“You know him very well, don’t you?”
“Quite well. I help in their shop sometimes. They are experts, aren’t they, on old costume? Of course Jeremy has to leave most of it to his partner because of work in the theatre but in between engagements he does quite a lot. I’m learning how to do all kinds of jobs from him like putting old tinsel on pictures and repairing bindings. He’s got some wonderful prints and books.”
“I know,” Peregrine said rather shortly. “I’ve been there.”
She turned her head and looked thoughtfully at him. “He’s madly excited about making the gloves for the show. He was saying just now he’s got a pair of Jacobean gloves, quite small, and he thinks they might be suitable if he took the existing beadwork off and copied the embroidery off Hamnet’s glove onto them.”
“I know, he told me.”
“He’s letting me help with that, too.”
“Fun for you.”
“Yes. I like him very much. I do hope if he’s madly in love with Destiny that it works out but I’m afraid I rather doubt it.”
“Why?”
“He’s a darling but he hasn’t got anything like enough of what it takes. Well, I wouldn’t have thought so.”
“Really?” Peregrine quite shouted in an excess of relief. He began to talk very fast about the glove and the play and what they should have for dinner. He had been wildly extravagant and had bought all the things he himself liked best: smoked salmon with caviare folded inside, cold partridge and the ingredients for two kinds of salad. It was lucky that his choice seemed to coincide with Emily’s. They had Bernkasteler Doktor with the smoked salmon and it was so good they went on drinking it with the partridge. Because of Jeremy’s defection there was rather a lot of everything and they ate and drank it all up.