“Of course. Only too glad. Thanks a lot, Dr Delahague. Oh, damn! Oh, damn!” he added softly when Jeanne-Marie, all beaming smiles, had gone with Deborah upstairs to collect her sons. “That’s the sort of complication I’ve been dreading. I knew something like this would happen when the dress-rehearsal went so well. Rao can’t know Rinkley’s in the cast, so what do I say to him?”
“Well,” said Donald Bourton, “can’t you plead the lateness of the hour, the cold night air—that sort of thing—if you want to put Rao off?”
“A highly-educated, sensitive and very intelligent Hindu would see through those sort of reasons before they were out of my mouth. After all, we’ve got other kids in the show who aren’t all that much older than Sharma. Narayan would simply think I didn’t want him and his son—and you know what Indians think about sons, particularly the first-born.”
“What is the trouble about Rinkley?” asked Jonathan.
“A law-suit about a car-accident. Nothing much, but judgment was given against Rao and in Rinkley’s favour.”
“Tell Rao simply and straightforwardly that Rinkley is in the play, then. Make no comment, and leave the rest to Rao. Look here, I know the chap personally, and a very charming fellow he is. Would you like me to put it to him?” asked Tom Woolidge.
“I say! Would you?”
“Well, you know, I don’t think Rao would come within a mile of the play if he knew Rinkley was in it,” said Bourton. “If he did come, not knowing, and they ran into one another, as they might quite easily do—well, night is night, and woods are woods, and (not to put too fine a point on it) we don’t want murder, instead of two fake suicides, to end the play, do we?”
“It wouldn’t end the play,” said Yorke, with a nervous smile. “It ends with Puck making friends with the audience.”
“Yes, but in Puck’s last speech it says that the midnight owl puts the wretch that lies in woe in remembrance of a tomb. A lot of that last speech is macabre in the extreme.”
“Anyway,” said Yorke, “to talk a different kind of shop, that retractable dagger worked a treat, didn’t it? I know it worked in the other rehearsals, so I betted something would go wrong with it tonight. What did you think of that scene now it’s in costume, Donald?”
“Don’t know. I was up here for nature’s purposes while that bit was being played. I galloped back only just in time to go on for the ending of the play. How did Rinkley’s new bit of business go?”
“I still think it’s a mistake, but Lynn, as Quince, seems to like it and what pleases him has to please the rest of us. They bring a stretcher on and plant Pyramus on it. I wonder whether that’s rather inartistic. If the scene has to be done their way, I’m sure it would be better to have Quince take the shoulders and Lion the feet, and lug the body off that way.”
“Why did they change the scene, anyway?” asked Bourton.
“They both wanted more ‘business’ attached to that bit. Quince, after that idiotically punctuated speech as Prologue, doesn’t get much of a look-in, and, of course, Rinkley dearly likes being put on the stretcher and carried off in stately fashion. He has even contrived to add to the comedy by modestly straightening his tunic as his supposed corpse is being carried off to the sound of the Dead March rendered by the Ladies’ Orchestra. Then the stretcher also pleases young David Lester. He said he barred taking up Rinkley’s legs and having Pyramus’s buskins kicking him in the face. Rinkley and Lynn made another small amendment, too.”
“Oh? What’s that?”
“Well, in the earlier rehearsals it hadn’t crossed my mind or, I’m sure, Rinkley’s, that, as Pyramus, he would be wearing body armour and the dagger couldn’t be expected to pierce it.”
“All part of the fun to pretend it could, I should have thought.”
“Well, perhaps, but it seems the dagger itself didn’t take to the idea. Rinkley told me that he had experimented by laying the armour on the table and striking it with the dagger, but apparently the thing wouldn’t work on metal. It folded back into itself all right, but then, he said, it just fell over. On the wooden table-top it was all right and when he tried it (rather gingerly) on himself without the armour it worked like a charm, and so it did at the dress rehearsal itself, although I’ve told him to put still more force behind it—or, at least, pretend to.”
“So I suppose he came on in the armour and when he found Thisbe’s ‘mantle good, all stained with blood’, he made a great business of divesting himself of the armour before committing suicide.”
“Oh, my word, yes. He and Lynn between them made almost an extra scene for themselves and I must say it was quite amusing. Lynn is so pleased with his share in it that I can’t very well tell them to cut it shorter.”
“Oh, well, if it amuses the audience, I suppose it’s all right to let them get away with it.”
“The play takes quite long enough as it is. We don’t want people slipping away before the end because they have trains to catch or something of that sort. Nothing is more unnerving than to see your audience sneaking off before the end of the show.”
“Not to worry. They won’t. In these days of the ubiquitous automobile, very few people have trains to catch and the local buses don’t run as late as the play does, anyway. Let it rip. If those two can get some fun out of Shakespeare’s clowning, good luck to them, says I.”
“You’ll speak to Narayan Rao, then?”
“Of course I will. In any case, he may have forgiven Rinkley by this time.”
“I doubt it. These motoring cases can be the very devil when a cross-summons is brought. After all, Rao only lost on a technicality. I don’t know the details, but I believe it was touch and go how the verdict went.”
“But it was the court’s decision, not Rinkley’s. Surely Narayan realises that.”
“I don’t suppose it compensates him, any more than it compensated Rinkley in the other case he was involved in, that wretched charge of molesting a child, although he got off.”
“One thing, it doesn’t matter two hoots whether we have a little changeling boy on stage or not. I should think the signora would be thankful not to have another small child to look after, particularly one she doesn’t know.”
“Dr Jeanne-Marie has committed us now, I’m afraid, if Narayan agrees.”
“Oh, well, I’ll speak to Narayan. That will settle it one way or the other. It will be up to him to bring the kid or to opt out.”
“See that you make quite sure to mention Rinkley. But I do wish Dr Jeanne-Marie hadn’t stuck her oar in. I’ve got enough problems without having a race-relations squabble on my hands.”
“Narayan’s case would have had just the same result if Narayan had been an Englishman, you know.”
“I doubt very much whether Narayan sees it quite like that. The ethnic minorities are very sensitive, I believe.”
“Anyway, I’ll talk to him and see how it goes. He’s a nice chap. I don’t suppose he bears Rinkley any real malice.”
“That’s your guess, not mine.”
“What does Marcus think of the play? Has he said anything—made any comments?”
“He seems well satisfied, I think. He has certainly done us proud over the whole production. Your supposedly diamond dewdrop get-up looked fantastic under the lights. Now our only query seems to be the weather. Fate must have something up its sleeve. That dress rehearsal went ever so much too well.”
Chapter 5
All Right on the Night
“And we will do it in action as we will do it before the duke.”
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Marcus Lynn was well satisfied with all the arrangements. To his mind, simple in all its workings except where finance and sheer business acumen were concerned, nothing could have been more pleasing than the woodland setting for the production, the splendid (albeit very expensive) designs the theatrical dressmakers had contrived for the costumes, the lighting and sound effects and the few but important theatrical properties which had been provided to augment the swords and daggers he had brought.