“Yes?”
“Your Viola. She lacks, if you’ll forgive my pointing it out, the special qualities required for the role.”
Calloway hung fire.
“I know,” Lichfield continued, “personal loyalties prevent honesty in these matters.”
“No,” Calloway replied, “you’re right. But she’s popular.”
“So was bear-baiting, Terence.”
A luminous smile spread beneath the brim, hanging in the shadow like the grin of the Cheshire Cat.
“I’m only joking,” said Lichfield, his rasp a chuckle now. “Bears can be charming.”
“Terry, there you are.”
Diane appeared, over-dressed as usual, from behind the tabs. There was surely an embarrassing confrontation in the air. But Lichfield was walking away down the false perspective of the hedges towards the backdrop.
“Here I am,” said Terry.
“Who are you talking to?”
But Lichfield had exited, as smoothly and as quietly as he had entered. Diane hadn’t even seen him go.
“Oh, just an angel,” said Calloway.
The first Dress Rehearsal wasn’t, all things considered, as bad as Calloway had anticipated: it was immeasurably worse. Cues were lost, props mislaid, entrances missed; the comic business seemed ill-contrived and laborious; the performances either hopelessly overwrought or trifling. This was a Twelfth Night that seemed to last a year. Halfway through the third act Calloway glanced at his watch, and realized an uncut performance of Macbeth (with interval) would now be over.
He sat in the stalls with his head buried in his hands, contemplating the work that he still had to do if he was to bring this production up to scratch. Not for the first time on this show he felt helpless in the face of the casting problems. Cues could be tightened, props rehearsed with, entrances practised until they were engraved on the memory. But a bad actor is a bad actor is a bad actor. He could labour till doomsday neatening and sharpening, but he could not make a silk purse of the sow’s ear that was Diane Duvall.
With all the skill of an acrobat she contrived to skirt every significance, to ignore every opportunity to move the audience, to avoid every nuance the playwright would insist on putting in her way. It was a performance heroic in its ineptitude, reducing the delicate characterization Calloway had been at pains to create to a single-note whine. This Viola was soap-opera pap, less human than the hedges, and about as green.
The critics would slaughter her.
Worse than that, Lichfield would be disappointed. To his considerable surprise the impact of Lichfield’s appearance hadn’t dwindled; Calloway couldn’t forget his actorly projection, his posing, his rhetoric. It had moved him more deeply than he was prepared to admit, and the thought of this Twelfth Night, with this Viola, becoming the swan-song of Lichfield’s beloved Elysium perturbed and embarrassed him. It seemed somehow ungrateful.
He’d been warned often enough about a director’s burdens, long before he became seriously embroiled in the profession. His dear departed guru at the Actors’ Centre, Wellbeloved (he of the glass eye), had told Calloway from the beginning:
“A director is the loneliest creature on God’s earth. He knows what’s good and bad in a show, or he should if he’s worth his salt, and he has to carry that information around with him and keep smiling.”
It hadn’t seemed so difficult at the time.
“This job isn’t about succeeding,” Wellbeloved used to say, “it’s about learning not to fall on your sodding face.”
Good advice as it turned out. He could still see Wellbeloved handing out that wisdom on a plate, his bald head shiny, his living eye glittering with cynical delight. No man on earth, Calloway had thought, loved theatre with more passion than Wellbeloved, and surely no man could have been more scathing about its pretensions.
It was almost one in the morning by the time they’d finished the wretched run-through, gone through the notes, and separated, glum and mutually resentful, into the night. Calloway wanted none of their company tonight: no late drinking in one or others’ digs, no mutual ego-massage. He had a cloud of gloom all to himself, and neither wine, women nor song would disperse it. He could barely bring himself to look Diane in the face. His notes to her, broadcast in front of the rest of the cast, had been acidic. Not that it would do much good.
In the foyer, he met Tallulah, still spry though it was long after an old lady’s bedtime.
“Are you locking up tonight?” he asked her, more for something to say than because he was actually curious.
“I always lock up,” she said. She was well over seventy: too old for her job in the box office, and too tenacious to be easily removed. But then that was all academic now, wasn’t it? He wondered what her response would be when she heard the news of the closure. It would probably break her brittle heart. Hadn’t Hammersmith once told him Tallulah had been at the theatre since she was a girl of fifteen?
“Well, goodnight Tallulah.”
She gave him a tiny nod, as always. Then she reached out and took Calloway’s arm.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Lichfield…” she began.
“What about Mr. Lichfield?”
“He didn’t like the rehearsal.”
“He was in tonight?”
“Oh yes,” she replied, as though Calloway was an imbecile for thinking otherwise, “of course he was in.”
“I didn’t see him.”
“Well… no matter. He wasn’t very pleased.”
Calloway tried to sound indifferent.
“It can’t be helped.”
“Your show is very close to his heart.”
“I realize that,” said Calloway, avoiding Tallulah’s accusing looks. He had quite enough to keep him awake tonight, without her disappointed tones ringing in his ears.
He loosed his arm, and made for the door. Tallulah made no attempt to stop him. She just said: “You should have seen Constantia.”
Constantia? Where had he heard that name? Of course, Lichfield’s wife.
“She was a wonderful Viola.”
He was too tired for this mooning over dead actresses; she was dead wasn’t she? He had said she was dead, hadn’t he?
“Wonderful,” said Tallulah again.
“Goodnight, Tallulah. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
The old crone didn’t answer. If she was offended by his brusque manner, then so be it. He left her to her complaints and faced the street.
It was late November, and chilly. No balm in the night-air, just the smell of tar from a freshly laid road, and grit in the wind. Calloway pulled his jacket collar up around the back of his neck, and hurried off to the questionable refuge of Murphy’s Bed and Breakfast.
In the foyer Tallulah turned her back on the cold and dark of the outside world, and shuffled back into the temple of dreams. It smelt so weary now: stale with use and age, like her own body. It was time to let natural processes take their toll; there was no point in letting things run beyond their allotted span. That was as true of buildings as of people. But the Elysium had to die as it had lived, in glory.
Respectfully, she drew back the red curtains that covered the portraits in the corridor that led from foyer to stalls. Barrymore, Irving: great names and great actors. Stained and faded pictures perhaps, but the memories were as sharp and as refreshing as spring water. And in pride of place, the last of the line to be unveiled, a portrait of Constantia Lichfield. A face of transcendent beauty; a bone structure to make an anatomist weep.
She had been far too young for Lichfield of course, and that had been part of the tragedy of it. Lichfield the Svengali, a man twice her age, had been capable of giving his brilliant beauty everything she desired; fame, money, companionship. Everything but the gift she most required: life itself.