“Cook says ‘better belly bust than good stuff be lost’,” she observed. “She said it when Carrie had to come in and clean up the floor after Edmund.”
“I was sick,” said Edmund.
“No, you weren’t. You were naughty. He was only two,” explained Rosamund, turning to Laura, “but he was naughty. He said, ‘You gave me too much’, and he threw his plate of stewed fruit and custard on the floor.”
“Well, that was one way of dealing with the surplus,” said Dame Beatrice.
“Yes, but then he wanted a banana and Daddy said no, and Mummy said, ‘He knows what he wants’, and let him have one and he kept looking at Daddy and eating the banana so fast he got it all over his face and up into his hair, but he ate it all, so Mummy was right. Yolanda’s mummy was going to look after us for a fortnight when we go home, but they are having Mr Rinkley to stay with them while his flat is being done up, and he won’t be gone before we get back and they have only one spare room. I don’t like Mr Rinkley.”
“Because he is bagging the spare room?” asked Laura.
“No. He kept picking me up and throwing me in the air and catching me like he does Yolanda, and Auntie Deb said, ‘Please don’t do that. Rosamund doesn’t like it’, so then Mr Rinkley laughed and did it again, and Uncle Jon said, ‘You heard my wife, you oaf’—what’s an oaf?”
“A person of low origin and few manners.”
“So Uncle Jon punched Mr Rinkley in the stomach and Auntie Deb said, ‘Oh, please!’ and Mr Bourton said, ‘Play around with girls your own size, Rinkley, and leave small kids alone’, and Mr Yorke said, ‘Steady on, Bourton’, and Mr Rinkley went outside and was sick.”
“My, my! You do have fun at your rehearsals!” said Laura.
“Yes, so Mr Rinkley didn’t come to the next rehearsal, but it’s all right now. Mr Rinkley said, ‘I’m sorry I upset your dignity, little lady’, and I said, ‘I’m sorry I don’t like you’, and everybody laughed, but afterwards Mr Bourton said to Mr Woolidge, ‘What a swine that fellow is! I wish Yorke would kick him out of the play. He’s a something child mole-star’. What’s a something child mole-star?”
“A man who tosses little girls into the air when he has been told they don’t like it. Incidentally, did Cook ever remark that little pitchers have long ears?” asked Laura, anxious to change the subject. Rosamund considered the question, then shook her head and turned to other matters of interest, as Laura intended that she should.
“We have the rehearsals at our house now,” she said, “so people can get used to talking out of doors. They do our fairy scenes first and then we are sent upstairs, but Yolanda and I come down again and hide and listen. When Yolanda’s daddy gets cross he calls everybody ‘darling’. That’s how they know he is cross with them. He said, ‘Rinkley, darling boy, do you have to put your arm round Flute’s waist? Miss Hythe is supposed to be your fellow workman, not a girl you’re trying to chat up’. So Mr Rinkley said a lot of it went on in Shakespeare’s time and anyway he was only building up to the Pyramus and Thisbe scene when Miss Hythe really would be a girl, but Mr Yorke—that’s Yolanda’s daddy—he said, ‘Cut it out, darling boy, just to please me. Back to “Answer as I call you ”, everybody, please, and, Robina, darling, do try to look as though you’re taking an interest in what the others are saying, and Caroline, darling, I know Starveling is a tailor, but it isn’t necessary for you to play the whole scene pretending to be stitching or else waving your arms in the air’, and Miss Frome said, ‘Sorry. It will look better when we can use the “props”. It’s supposed to be my tailoring shears I’m waving,’ and Mr Yorke said, ‘You wouldn’t have brought your shears to the workmen’s rehearsal. Be more imaginative, darling, and, anyway, you mustn’t distract attention from the person who is actually speaking. It’s an old ham’s trick and you are not to use it’.”
“You must be learning a great deal about play-acting from Mr Yorke,” said Dame Beatrice. “Shall we adjourn? I see that George is bringing the dogs out for their run.”
“I wish they were little tiny ponies,” said Rosamund.
“I hadda little pony his name was Dappergay I lent him to a lady to ride-a-mile-away she stroked him she fed him she hadda lovely ride, she brought him backateventime a-walking by his side,” said Edmund, finishing up breathless.
“We don’t let him know the real words because of kindness to animals,” said Rosamund.
“Ought one to point out to that all-too-intelligent infant that she ought not to listen-in to the rehearsals when she is not supposed to be present?” asked Laura, when the children had gone out.
“It would be wrong to saddle her with a guilty conscience when she listens in next time, as, of course, she will, whether we point out her error of taste or not.”
“Do you think she represses Edmund too much?”
“From what we have heard, he seems capable of asserting himself when he feels it necessary. Besides, in a few years’ time his innate aggressiveness and his masculine ego will provide self-assertion enough and to spare, I fancy.”
“I wish I didn’t enjoy listening to Rosamund’s disclosures. Things seem to be hotting up nicely, don’t they? What with the women being ticked off for attempted scene-stealing, the ‘angel’s’ wife being referred to as a silly moo, and Jonathan punching Rinkley in the stomach and making him sick, I should say that this Dream is hardly as Shakespeare intended it, and that Thalia, up there on Mount Olympus, or Parnassus, or wherever she is, must be finding this a better comedy than the one The Bard wrote. All the same, though, I don’t like the sound of that man Rinkley. What he did with Rosamund seems harmless enough, although, as Jonathan pointed out to him, he should have desisted when asked, but to label a man a molester of children isn’t very pretty, is it? I wonder the Yorkes put him up when they had a nine-year-old girl in the house.”
“I think the epithet may have referred to an incident in Rinkley’s past; one that he had hoped was either unknown to the company or forgotten by them. That it was not, may have given him the shock which made him vomit.”
“Anyway, I’m glad Jonathan punched him in the stomach.”
“In the interests of the play it may have been better to punch him there, rather than to have given him a black eye or a broken nose or jaw. Jonathan is the most belligerent of all my relatives. I hoped Deborah would have tamed him by now,” said Dame Beatrice.
“I expect she has, except when she herself is involved,” said Laura. “It was because he’d laughed at Deborah that he got the punch in the stomach.”
Chapter 4
Retractable Blade
“… we will do no harm with our swords.”
« ^ »
You know, old boy,” said Rinkley to Brian Yorke, “that last scene needs all the aid it can get.”
“How can you say that, when it’s got yours?” asked Donald Bourton unpleasantly.
“No need to be sarky, old boy. I wasn’t meaning myself, but the supporting cast.”
“Meaning me, I suppose,” said Susan Hythe. “It might help if you didn’t breathe whisky fumes into my face through the supposed chink in the wall.”
“Not whisky fumes; the ardour of love, dear.”
“We’re all doing our best for you,” said Caroline Frome. “Nobody can make Wall really funny, so it isn’t my fault if I can’t get laughs.”
“You need not try to stick your finger in my eye when you make the chink. It’s wasted, anyway. The audience won’t spot it from the distance they’ll be away from us. As for Robina alternately dropping her dog and her lantern when she’s doing Moonshine, it’s abysmal.”