He took his chance to ask Gunilla if she were aware of this. “Oh, yes,” said the Doctor; “it was bound to happen. She must try everything, and Powell is an obvious mark for a young girl’s love.”
“But you don’t mind?”
“Why should I mind? The child is not my property. Oh, we have had merry hours, to the great scandal of that fat busybody Professor Raven, but that was a teacher-and-pupil thing. Not love. I have known love, Simon, and with men also, let me assure you, and I know what it is. I am not such a romantic as to think of it as the great educational force—broadening her experience, enlarging her vision, and all that nonsense—but it is something everybody feels who is not a complete cabbage. I must see that it doesn’t spoil her work; people seem to have forgotten that all this elaborate contrivance boils down to an examination exercise, and Hulda must get her degree, if there is not to be a great waste of money.”
Elaborate contrivance indeed it was. The company was lucky in having the theatre for the last three weeks of rehearsal. Not the stage; not yet. There was still a week of performances of a play which called for only one small set, but all the workrooms and both rehearsal rooms were now devoted to Arthur, and during the last two weeks the stage would be available to the singers when it was not wanted by the technicians.
The technicians bulked very large. It seemed to Darcourt that they almost swamped the opera. On huge paint-frames in one of the workrooms the scenery was being painted, for Powell wanted proper scenes, and not the usual wrinkled cyclorama, suggesting a sky that had shrunk and faded in the wash.
“In Hoffmann’s day there was no stage light, in our sense,” he said, “and anything like a lighting effect had to be painted on the scenery. And that’s how Dulcy is doing it.”
Dulcy Ringgold was not what Darcourt would have thought of as a theatrical character. She was small, she was shy, she laughed a great deal, and she seemed to regard her responsibilities as the best joke in the world.
“I’m really just a glorified dressmaker,” she said, through a mouthful of pins, as she draped something on Clara Intrepidi. “Just that nice little woman Miss Dulcy, who is so clever with her fingers.” She did something that made Miss Intrepidi look taller and slimmer. “There dear; if you can suck up your gut the teeniest bit that will do very nicely.”
“The gut is what I breathe with,” said Miss Intrepidi.
“Then we’ll drape this a little more freely,” said Dulcy, “and maybe put a wee thingy just here.”
At other times, Dulcy was to be seen with a filthy bandana wrapped around her head, on the bridge that swayed before the paint-frame, putting special touches on huge drop-scenes that were being painted from her carefully squared-off watercolour designs. Sometimes she was in the basement, where the armour was made, not with the ring of the sword-smith’s hammer, but with the chemical whiff of Plexiglas being moulded. It was here, too, that all the swords, and Arthur’s sceptre, and the crowns for Arthur and his Queen were made, and studded with foil-backed glass jewels that gave a splendidly Celtic richness to post-Roman Britain.
Dulcy was everywhere, and Dulcy’s taste and imagination touched everything.
“I hate theatre where the audience is told to use its imagination,” she said. “That’s cheap. The audience lays down its good money to rent imagination from somebody who has more than they ever dreamed of. Somebody like me. Imagination’s my only stock-in-trade.” She said this as she whisked off a brilliant little sketch for a fool’s head which was to be made in pretended metal and attached to the hilt of Sir Dagonet’s sword. But it was not all of her stock-in-trade.
Darcourt picked up a large book from her workbench.
“What’s this?” he said.
“Oh, that’s my darling and my deario, James Robinson Planché; his Encyclopaedia of Costume, a revolutionary book in stage design. He was the first man, believe it or not, who really cared if stage dress had any roots in the realities of the past. He designed the first King John that really looked like King John’s time. I don’t copy his pictures, of course. Strictly accurate historical costume looks absurd, as a usual thing, but dear Planché is a springboard for one’s imagination.”
“I don’t suppose even Planché knew what King Arthur wore,” said Darcourt.
“No, but he would have given a jolly well-informed guess,” said Dulcy, patting the two large books tenderly. “So I load up on dear Planché, and then I guess too. Lots of dragons; that’s the stuff for Arthur. I’m putting Morgan Le Fay in a dragon head-dress. Sounds corny, but it won’t be when I’ve finished with it.”
So: the omnicompetent Planché is going to have a finger in the pie, even if we don’t use his horrible libretto, thought Darcourt. He was—just a little—losing his heart to Dulcy, but so was every other man who came near her. It appeared, however, that Dulcy was somewhat of Gunilla’s way of thinking about sex, and although she flirted outrageously with the men, it was with Gunilla she went to dinner.
Here is a world where sex is not of first, second, or perhaps even third importance, thought Darcourt. How refreshing.
Sex was, however, rearing its wistfully domestic head with the unhappy Mabel Muller. The weather in Stratford proved to be just as hot as it was in Toronto, and Mabel’s legs swelled, and her hair drooped, and she bore her burden of posterity with visible effort. She tagged everywhere after Al, who was like a man possessed, making notes here, and taking photographs with an instant camera there, and getting in everyone’s way while making obstructive efforts to avoid doing precisely that. Not that Al forgot her or excluded her; he gave her his heavy briefcase to carry, and they always ate the sandwiches Mabel brought from a fast-food shop together, while he harangued—”extrapolated” was the fine word he used—on all that he had noted, or photographed.
“This is pure gold, Sweetness,” he would say from time to time. To Sweetness it was fairy gold, no sooner touched than lost.
It would be unjust to say that Al grudged the time needed to rush Mabel to the hospital when at last her pains became too much to be ignored. “They’re coming every twenty minutes now,” she whispered, tearfully, and Al made just one more essential note before seizing her by the arm and leading her out of the rehearsal room. It was Darcourt who found them a taxi and urged the driver to lose no time in getting them to the hospital. They had made no arrangements, had not even seen a doctor, and Mabel was admitted in Emergency.
“Something is not quite right with Mabel,” said Maria, later in the day, to Darcourt. “Her pains have stopped.”
“Al was back for the end of the rehearsal,” said Darcourt. “I thought everything must be going smoothly.”
“I’d like to brain Al,” said Maria. “That’s the trouble with these irregular unions. No guts when the going is rough. I’d hang around the hospital if I could, but Arthur has to get back to his office for a couple of days and I am going with him. New developments in the Wally Crottel affair. I’ll tell you later. There’s really nothing for us to do here. Geraint seems to feel that we’re underfoot.”