Tallulah was not in the box, nor in the foyer, nor in the Green Room.
Irritated both by Hammersmith’s incivility and Tallulah’s disappearance, Calloway went back into the auditorium to pick up his jacket and go to get drunk. The rehearsal was over and the actors long gone. The bare hedges looked somewhat small from the back row of the stalls. Maybe they needed an extra few inches. He made a note on the back of a show bill he found in his pocket: Hedges, bigger?
A footfall made him look up, and a figure had appeared on stage. A smooth entrance, up-stage centre, where the hedges converged. Calloway didn’t recognize the man.
“Mr. Calloway? Mr. Terence Calloway?”
“Yes?”
The visitor walked down stage to where, in an earlier age, the footlights would have been, and stood looking out into the auditorium.
“My apologies for interrupting your train of thought.”
“No problem.”
“I wanted a word.”
“With me?”
“If you would.”
Calloway wandered down to the front of the stalls, appraising the stranger.
He was dressed in shades of grey from head to foot. A grey worsted suit, grey shoes, a grey cravat. Piss-elegant, was Calloway’s first, uncharitable summation. But the man cut an impressive figure nevertheless. His face beneath the shadow of his brim was difficult to discern.
“Allow me to introduce myself.”
The voice was persuasive, cultured. Ideal for advertisement voice-overs: soap commercials, maybe. After Hammersmith’s bad manners, the voice came as a breath of good breeding.
“My name is Lichfield. Not that I expect that means much to a man of your tender years.”
Tender years: well, well. Maybe there was still something of the wunderkind in his face.
“Are you a critic?” Calloway inquired.
The laugh that emanated from beneath the immaculately swept brim was ripely ironical.
“In the name of Jesus, no,” Lichfield replied.
“I’m sorry, then, you have me at a loss.”
“No need for an apology.”
“Were you in the house this afternoon?”
Lichfield ignored the question. “I realize you’re a busy man, Mr. Calloway, and I don’t want to waste your time. The theatre is my business, as it is yours. I think we must consider ourselves allies, though we have never met.”
Ah, the great brotherhood. It made Calloway want to spit, the familiar claims of sentiment. When he thought of the number of so-called allies that had cheerfully stabbed him in the back; and in return the playwrights whose work he’d smilingly slanged, the actors he’d crushed with a casual quip. Brotherhood be damned, it was dog-eat-dog, same as any over-subscribed profession.
“I have,” Lichfield was saying, “an abiding interest in the Elysium.” There was a curious emphasis on the word abiding. It sounded positively funereal from Lichfield’s lips. Abide with me.
“Oh?”
“Yes, I’ve spent many happy hours in this theatre, down the years, and frankly it pains me to carry this burden of news.”
“What news?”
“Mr. Calloway, I have to inform you that your Twelfth Night will be the last production the Elysium will see.”
The statement didn’t come as much of a surprise, but it still hurt, and the internal wince must have registered on Calloway’s face.
“Ah… so you didn’t know. I thought not. They always keep the artists in ignorance don’t they? It’s a satisfaction the Apollonians will never relinquish. The accountant’s revenge.”
“Hammersmith,” said Calloway.
“Hammersmith.”
“Bastard.”
“His clan are never to be trusted, but then I hardly need to tell you that.”
“Are you sure about the closure?”
“Certainly. He’d do it tomorrow if he could.”
“But why? I’ve done Stoppard here, Tennessee Williams—always played to good houses. It doesn’t make sense.”
“It makes admirable financial sense, I’m afraid, and if you think in figures, as Hammersmith does, there’s no riposte to simple arithmetic. The Elysium’s getting old. We’re all getting old. We creak. We feel our age in our joints: our instinct is to lie down and be gone away.”
Gone away: the voice became melodramatically thin, a whisper of longing.
“How do you know about this?”
“I was, for many years, a trustee of the theatre, and since my retirement I’ve made it my business to—what’s the phrase?—keep my ear to the ground. It’s difficult, in this day and age, to evoke the triumph this stage has seen…”
His voice trailed away, in a reverie. It seemed true, not an effect.
Then, business-like once more: “This theatre is about to die, Mr. Calloway. You will be present at the last rites, through no fault of your own. I felt you ought to be… warned.”
“Thank you. I appreciate that. Tell me, were you ever an actor yourself?”
“What makes you think that?”
“The voice.”
“Too rhetorical by half, I know. My curse, I’m afraid. I can scarcely ask for a cup of coffee without sounding like Lear in the storm.”
He laughed, heartily, at his own expense. Calloway began to warm to the fellow. Maybe he was a little archaic-looking, perhaps even slightly absurd, but there was a full-bloodedness about his manner that caught Calloway’s imagination. Lichfield wasn’t apologetic about his love of theatre, like so many in the profession, people who trod the boards as a second-best, their souls sold to the movies.
“I have, I will confess, dabbled in the craft a little,” Lichfield confided, “but I just don’t have the stamina for it, I’m afraid. Now my wife—”
Wife? Calloway was surprised Lichfield had a heterosexual bone in his body.
”—My wife Constantia has played here on a number of occasions, and I may say very successfully. Before the war of course.”
“It’s a pity to close the place.”
“Indeed. But there are no last-act miracles to be performed, I’m afraid. The Elysium will be rubble in six weeks’ time, and there’s an end to it. I just wanted you to know that interests other than the crassly commercial are watching over this closing production. Think of us as guardian angels. We wish you well, Terence, we all wish you well.”
It was a genuine sentiment, simply stated. Calloway was touched by this man’s concern, and a little chastened by it. It put his own stepping-stone ambitions in an unflattering perspective. Lichfield went on: “We care to see this theatre end its days in suitable style, then die a good death.”
“Damn shame.”
“Too late for regrets by a long chalk. We should never have given up Dionysus for Apollo.”
“What?”
“Sold ourselves to the accountants, to legitimacy, to the likes of Mr. Hammersmith, whose soul, if he has one, must be the size of my fingernail, and grey as a louse’s back. We should have had the courage of our depictions, I think. Served poetry and lived under the stars.”
Calloway didn’t quite follow the allusions, but he got the general drift, and respected the viewpoint.
Off stage left, Diane’s voice cut the solemn atmosphere like a plastic knife.
“Terry? Are you there?”
The spell was broken: Calloway hadn’t been aware how hypnotic Lichfield’s presence was until that other voice came between them. Listening to him was like being rocked in familiar arms. Lichfield stepped to the edge of the stage, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial rasp.
“One last thing, Terence—”