Death Of A Hollow Man

Curtain Raiser

“You can’t cut your throat without any blood.”

“Absolutely. People expect it.”

“I disagree. There wasn’t any blood in the West End production.”

“Oh, Scofield,” Esslyn murmured dismissively. “So mannered.”

The Causton Amateur Dramatic Society (CADS) were taking a break during a rehearsal of Amadeus. The production was fairly well advanced. The Venticelli were finally picking up their cues, the fireplace for the palace at Schonbrunn was promised for the weekend, and Constanze seemed at long last to be almost on the point of starting to learn at least one or two of her lines, while remaining rather hazy as to the order in which they came. But the sticky question as to how Salieri should most effectively cut his throat had yet to be solved. Tim Young, the only member of the company to shave the old-fashioned way, had promised to bring his razor along that very evening. So far, there was no sign of him.

“You … um … you can get things, can’t you? That make blood? I remember at the Royal Shakespeare Company—”

“Well, of course you can get things, Deidre,” snapped Harold Winstanley. (He always reacted very abrasively to any mention of the RSC.) “I don’t think there are many people present who are unaware of the fact that you can get things. It’s just that I do try to be a tiny bit inventive … move away from the usual hackneyed routine. Comprenez?” He gazed at the assembled company, inviting them to admire his superhuman patience in the face of such a witless suggestion. “And talking of routine—isn’t it time we had our coffee?”

“Oh, yes, sorry.” Deidre Tibbs, who had been sitting on the stage hugging her corduroyed knees in a rather girlish way, scrambled to her feet.

“Chop-chop, then.”

“If you think Scofield was mannered,” said Donald Everard, picking up Esslyn’s put down, “how about Simon Callow?”

“How about Simon Callow?” shrilled his twin.

Deidre left them happily trashing their betters and made her way up the aisle toward the clubroom. Deidre was the assistant director. She had been general dogsbody on dozens of productions until a few weeks ago, when, fortified by a couple of sweet martinis, she had shyly asked the committee to consider her promotion. To her delight they had voted, not quite unanimously, in her favor. But the delight was short-lived, for it seemed that her role vis-à-vis the present state of play at the Latimer was to be no different from that at any time previously. For Harold would brook no discussion (his own phrase) on points of production, and her few tentative suggestions had either been ignored or shot down in flames. In the clubroom she took the mugs from their hooks and placed them very carefully on the tray to avoid clinkage, then turned on a thin thread of water and filled the kettle. Harold, quick to describe himself as a one-man think tank, found the slightest sound disturbing to his creative flow.

Of course, as a director, Deidre admitted sadly to herself, he had the edge. Twenty years earlier, before settling down in the little market town of Causton, he had acted at Filey, produced a summer season at Minehead, and appeared in a Number One Tour (Original West End Cast!) of Spider’s Web. You couldn’t argue with that sort of experience. One or two of them tried, of course. Especially newcomers, who still had opinions of their own and hadn’t divined the pecking order. Not that there were many of these. The CADS were extremely selective. And Nicholas, who was playing Mozart while darkly awaiting the results of an audition from the Central School of Speech and Drama. He argued sometimes. Esslyn didn’t argue. Just listened attentively to everything Harold said, then went his own unsparkling way. Harold consoled himself for this intransigence by directing everyone else to within an inch of their lives.

Deidre spooned cheap powdered coffee and dried milk into the mugs and poured on boiling water. One or two little white beads bobbed to the surface, and she pushed them down nervously with the back of a spoon, at the same time trying to remember who took sugar and who was sweet enough. Best take the packet and ask. She went cautiously back down the aisle, balancing her heavy tray. Esslyn had got onto Ian McKellen.

“So—quite against my better judgment—I allowed myself to be dragged along to this one-man effort. Nothing but showing off from start to finish.”

“But,” said Nicholas, his gray eyes innocently wide, “I thought that’s what acting was.”

The Everards, poisonous brown-nosers to the company’s leading man, cried, “I know exactly what Esslyn means!”

“So do I. McKellen has always left me stone cold.” Deidre slipped in her question about the sugar.

“Heavens, you should know that by now, poppet,” said Rosa Crawley. “Just a morceau for me.” She dragged the words out huskily. She was playing Mrs. Salieri, and had never had such a modest role, but in Amadeus it was the only mature feminine role available. Obviously servants and senior citizens were beneath her notice. “You’ve been keeping us sustained through so many rehearsals,” she continued. “I don’t know how you do it.” There was a spatter of mechanical agreement in Deidre’s direction, and Rosa trapped a small sigh. She knew that to be gracious to bit players and stage management was the sign of a real star. She just wished Deidre would be a bit more responsive. She accepted her chipped mug with a radiant smile. “Thank you, darling.”

Deidre parted her lips slightly in response. Really, she was thinking, with a waistline like a Baleen whale, even one morceau was one too many. To add to her annoyance, Rosa was wearing the long fur coat she (Deidre) had bought from Oxfam for The Cherry Orchard. It had disappeared after the closing-night party, and wardrobe had never been able to lay hands on it again.

“Oh, my God!” Harold glared into his mug, blue glazed with h.w. (dir) on the side in red nail polish. “Not those bloody awful ferret droppings again. Can’t somebody produce some real milk? Please? Is that too much to ask?”

Deidre handed out the rest of the mugs, following up with the sugar bag, avoiding Harold’s eye. If real milk was wanted, let someone with a car bring it. She had enough stuff to lug to rehearsals as it was.

“I’m a bit worried about the idea of a razor at all,” said Mozart’s Constanze, returning to the point at issue, “I don’t want a fatherless child.” She made a face into her mug before leaning back against her husband’s knee. Esslyn smiled and glanced around at the others as if asking them to excuse his wife’s foolishness. Then he drew the nail of his index finger delicately across her throat, murmuring, “A biological impossibility surely?”

“One of the problems about a lot of blood,” said Joyce Barnaby, wardrobe mistress/keeper of the cakes/singing noises off, “is getting Esslyn’s shirt washed and ironed for the next night. I hope we’re going to have more than one.”

“Molto costoso, my darling,” cried Harold. “You all seem to think I’m made of money. The principals’ costumes cost a bomb to hire as it is. All very well for Peter Shaffer to ask for ten servants all in eighteenth-century costume …”

Joyce sat back placidly in her seat, picked up Katherina Cavalieri’s braided skirt, and continued turning up the hem. At least once during the rehearsals of any production, Harold railed about how much they were spending, but somehow, when things were urgently needed, the money was always there. Joyce had wondered more than once if it came out of his own pocket. He did not seem to be a wealthy man (he ran a modest import-export business), but threw himself so completely into the theater, heart, body, mind, and spirit, that none of them would have been surprised, if he had thrown his profits in as well.

“I don’t envy Sarah the weight of that skirt,” Rosa clucked across at Joyce. “I remember when I was playing Ranevskaya—”

‘‘Will my padding be ready soon, Joyce?” asked the second Mrs. Carmichael, collecting many a grateful glance by this intercession. When Rosa started on her Ranevskaya, everyone ran for cover. Or her Mrs. Alving. Or even, come to that, her Fairy Carabosse.

“And the music?” asked Nicholas. “When are we having the music?”

“When I get a forty-eight-hour day,” came back Harold, whippet quick. “Unless”—he positively twinkled at the absurdity of the idea—“you want to do it yourself.”

“Okay.”

“What?”

“I don’t mind. I know all the pieces. It’s just a question of-”

“It’s not ‘just a question of’ anything, Nicholas. The stamp of any director worth his salt must be on every single aspect of his production. Once you start handing over bits here and pieces there for any Tom, Dick, and Harry to do as they like with, you might as well abdicate.” It was an indication of Harold’s standing within the company that the verb struck no one present as inappropriate. “And rather than worry about your padding, Kitty, I should start worrying about your lines. I want them spot on by Tuesday. Dead-Letter Perfect. Got that?”

“I’ll try, Harold.” Kitty’s voice just hinted at a lisp. Her d’s were nearly t’s. This pretty affectation plus her tumble of fair curls, smooth, peachy complexion, and exaggerated Cupid’s bow mouth created an air of childlike charm so appealing that people hardly noticed how at variance it was with the sharp gleam in her azure eyes. As she spoke, her delicious bosom rose and fell a shade more rapidly, as if indicating an increased willingness to please.

Harold regarded her sternly. It was always a complete mystery to him when anyone connected with the CADS declined to commit his every waking moment to whatever happened to be the current production, in deed while at the theater and in thought while absent. Avery had once said that had it been within his power, Harold would have ordered them to dream about the Latimer. And Kitty, of all people, Harold was now thinking, had enough time on her hands. He wondered what she found to do all day, then realized he had wondered aloud. Kitty demurely lowered her glance, as if the question had been faintly naughty.

Deidre started to reclaim the mugs. Several still held coffee, but no one insisted on a divine right to full rations. She looked elsewhere when collecting Kitty’s, for Esslyn had now stopped caressing his wife’s throat and had slipped his fingers into the neck of her drawstring blouse, where they dabbled almost absentmindedly. Rosa Crawley also looked elsewhere at this evidence of her onetime husband’s insensitivity, and blushed an ugly crimson. Harold, oblivious as always to offstage dramas, called across to his designer, “Where on earth is Tim?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, you should know. You live with him.”

“Living with someone,” riposted Avery, “doesn’t give you psychic powers. I left him filling in the Faber order, and he said he’d only be half an hour. So your guess is as good as mine.” Although he spoke stoutly, Avery was, in fact, consumed with anxious fears. He couldn’t bear not to know where Tim was and what he was doing and whom he was doing it with. Each second spent in ignorance of this vital information seemed like a year to him. ‘‘And don’t expect me to stay late,” he added. “I’ve got a daube in the oven.”

“Daubes pay for a long simmer,” suggested wardrobe. Fortunately her husband was not present, or he might well have choked to hear the casual way in which Joyce, whose culinary disasters went from strength to strength, claimed kinship with a man whose cooking was legendary. Every member of the CADS had angled and wangled and hinted and nudged their way toward a possible invitation to dine chez Avery. Those who succeeded ate at humbler tables for weeks afterward, recreating their triumphs and doling out gastronomic recollections a crumb at a time to make them last. Tom Barnaby, a Detective Inspector in the Causton CID, would listen with increasing wistfulness as his wife regaled him with such tales of haute cuisine.

Now, Avery replied crisply, “Long simmers, Joycey darling, must stop at precisely the right moment. The line between a wonderful, cohesive stew with every single item still quite separate yet relating perfectly to the whole and a great sloppy mess is a very narrow one indeed.”

“Bit like a theatrical production, really,” murmured Nicholas, lobbing a subversively winning smile across at his director. Catching the smile but quite missing the subversion, Harold nodded pompously back.

“Well …” Colin Smy got to his feet and struck a no-nonsense pose as if to emphasize both his importance to and difference from the surrounding actors. “Some of us have got work to do.” Having thrown his dart, he gave it a moment to sink in, standing chunkily on slightly bowed legs. He wore jeans and a tartan shirt and had rough, wiry hair cut very short. Tufts of it stuck up here and there, and this, combined with a great deal of snapping energy, made it, someone had once said, like having a rather ferocious fox terrier charging around the place. Now, he disappeared into the wings, calling pointedly over his shoulder, “If I’m wanted, you’ll find me in the scene dock. There’s plenty going on down there, if anyone’s interested.”

No one seemed to be, and the hammering that shortly reached their ears remained aggrievedly solitary. Over their heads Deidre turned on hot water and scrubbed at the mugs, clattering them crossly and adding yet more chips. Not a single person ever came up to give her a hand, with the exception of David Smy, who was often waiting around to drive his father home. She knew this was her own fault, for not putting her foot down long ago, and this made her crosser than ever.

“Well, I think we should give Tim five more minutes,” Emperor Joseph was saying back in the stalls, “and then get on.”

“No doubt you do,” replied Esslyn, “but I have no intention of ‘getting on’ until we have this practical problem solved. It’s all very well to say these things can be left till the last second …”

“Hardly the last second,” murmured Rosa.

“… but I’m the one who’s going to be out there facing the serried ranks.” (Anyone’d think, observed Nicholas to himself, that we were going on at the Barbican.) “It’s horrendous enough, God knows, a part that size.” (What did you take it on for, then?) “But after all, Salieri’s attempted suicide is the high point of the play. We’ve got to get it not only right but brilliantly right.”

Nicholas, who had always regarded Mozart’s death as the high point of the play, said, “Why don’t you use an electric razor?”

“For Christ’s sake! If this is the sort of—”

“All right, Esslyn. Simmer down.” Harold soothed his fractious star. “Honestly, Nicholas—”

“Sorry.” Nicholas grinned. “Sorry, Esslyn. Just a joke.”

“Stillborn, Nico,” said Esslyn loftily, “like all your jokes. Not to mention your …” He buried his lips in the golden fronds tenderly curling on Kitty’s neck, and the rest of the sentence was lost. But everyone knew what it might have been.

Nicholas went very white. He said nothing for a few moments, then spoke overcalmly, picking his words with care. “It might not seem like it, but I am concerned about this problem. After all, if Esslyn doesn’t have enough time to get used to handling what’s going to be a very vital prop, the whole business is going to look completely amateurish.” There was a crescendoed hum, and breaths were held. Harold got to his feet and fixed his Mozart with a rabid eye.

“Don’t you ever so much as breathe that word in my presence, Nicholas—Okay? There is never anything amateurish about my productions.”

In so boldly refuting the adjective, Harold was being a mite economical with the truth. The whole company was proud of what it fondly regarded as its professional standards, but let a breath of adverse criticism be heard, and suddenly they were only amateurs, mostly with full-time jobs, and really, it was a miracle any of them found time to learn their lines at all, let alone get a show on the road. Now, Nicholas, having drawn blood all around, appeared mortified at his clumsiness. But before he could open his mouth to make amends, the auditorium doors swung open, and Tim Young appeared. He walked quickly toward them, a tall man in a dark Crombie overcoat and Borsalino hat carrying a small parcel.

“Sorry I’m late.”

“Where have you been?”

“The paper work seemed to take forever … then the phone started. You know how it is.” Tim spread his answer around the group rather than replying directly to Avery, who then said, “Who? Who phoned?”

Tim slipped off his overcoat and started to undo his parcel. Everyone gathered around. It was very carefully wrapped. Two layers of shiny brown paper, then two of soft cloth. Finally the razor was revealed. Tim opened it and laid it across his palm.

It was a beautiful thing. The handle, an elegant curve of ebony, was engraved in gold: e.v. bayars. master cutler. (c.a.p.s.) Around this imprint was a wreath of acanthus leaves and tiny flowers inlaid in mother-of-pearl. The reverse side was plain except for three tiny rivets. The blade, its edge honed to a lethal certainty, winked and gleamed. Esslyn, mindful of its reason for being there, said, “Looks bloody sharp.”

“As it must!” cried Harold. “Theatrical verisimilitude is vital.”

“Absolutely,” seconded Rosa—rather quickly, some thought.

“I don’t give a fairy’s fart for theatrical verisimilitude,” enjoined Esslyn, holding out his hand and gingerly taking the razor. “If you think I’m putting this thing within six inches of my throat, you can think again.”

“Haven’t you ever heard of mime?” inquired Harold.

“Yes, I’ve heard of mime,” replied Esslyn. “I’ve also heard of Jack the Ripper, Sweeney Todd, and death by misadventure.”

“I’ll work something out by the next rehearsal,” Harold said reassuringly. “Don’t worry. Wrap it up again for now, Tim. I want to get on with Act Two, Deidre?” Pause. “Where is she now?”

“Still washing up, I think,” said Rosa.

“Good grief. I could wash up the crockery from a four-course banquet for twenty in the time she takes to do half a dozen cups. Well … to our muttons. Phoebe—you’d better go on the book.” Everyone dispersed to the wings and dressing rooms with the exception of Esslyn, who remained, still studying the razor thoughtfully. Harold crossed to his side. “Pas de problème,” he said. “You have to get used to handling it, that’s all. Look—let me show you.”

He took the beautiful object and carefully eased the blade back toward the handle. Suddenly it sprang to forcefully, with a sharp click. Harold gave a little hiss of alarm, and Esslyn a longer one of satisfaction. “You don’t seem to have trained this very well, Tim,” called Harold, giving Esslyn a smile of rather strained jocularity. Then he put the razor down and took the other man’s arm companionably. “Now, when have you ever known me with a production headache I couldn’t put right? Mm? In all our years together?” Esslyn responded with a wary look, rife with disenchantment. “Believe me,” said Harold, spacing out his words and weighting them equally to emphasize the power of his conviction, “you are in safe hands. There is nothing whatsoever to worry about.”