Fault in the Structure

CHAPTER 16

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It’s a wise rabbit that stays in its own burrow.

The Saturday pre-dress rehearsal went as Laura had expected. It lasted until twelve-thirty on Sunday morning and was, in her words, a shambles. Nothing but the utter fatigue and ragged tempers of the players caused Denbigh to abandon it even at that hour. Then, to the cheers of the students, he said that he expected everybody to be back promptly at six-thirty on Monday evening. The rest of the cast groaned.

‘Well,’ said Laura, having, in the car on the way back to the Stone House, voiced her opinion of the company’s efforts, ‘if it goes anything like that on the night, people will be fighting round the box office demanding their money back. As for that wretched hangman’s cart which the students are so proud of, if you ask me it’s going to be far more nuisance than it’s worth and anyway it isn’t in the text. The opera ends in the condemned hold.’

‘I thought the piece of apparatus was very effective. As for Mr Crashaw with the noose around his neck, he seemed to me a right and proper candidate for the gallows. I recognised him, of course, in spite of the beard,’ said Dame Beatrice.

‘Recognised him? You mean he really is…?’

‘Yes, indeed. You were absent, if you remember, when he called on me two or three years ago, so you did not see him when he was known as Thaddeus E. Lawrence, but you did tell me of the man who is down in the programme as Rodney Crashaw. That, in my opinion, settles it.’

‘Why? – apart from your recognising him, I mean.’

‘Come, come! Is this the student who harassed her junior English lecturer with enquiries regarding the minor early seventeenth-century poets?’

‘Richard Crashaw, 1613 (perhaps) to 1649? R. Crashaw! So you do mean it’s Lawrence up to his old game of changing his name!’

‘Well, one cannot blame him for not wishing to go down to posterity as a jail-bird.’

‘Then our sumptuous blonde could be as we thought.’

‘If you mean the young woman who was greeted on stage as Molly Brazen, yes, that is the first Mrs Lawrence whom I met in Blackpool as Coralie St Malo.’

‘So, that’s settled, too, is it? Very interesting. Well, it seems that she and Lawrence, alias Crashaw, have teamed up again. I wonder why?’

‘It gives one furiously to think, does it not?’

‘It gives me a headache. Do you think they spotted you at the rehearsal?’

‘I have little doubt of that, but what of it? The truth is obvious.’

‘Coralie murdered the second Mrs Lawrence and Lawrence buried the body. Consequently they now have to keep the tabs on each other. That would account for their getting together again.’

‘This perspicacity is uncanny!’

‘But if they know you’ve seen them not only together but so obviously part of the same set-up, aren’t they going to ask themselves a few questions?’

‘Again, I say, what of it?’ The car slowed down to turn into the gateway of the drive up to the Stone House as she added, ‘ “He whom the gods love dies young.” I used to think that this referred only to one’s numerical age. I know better now, so let us cast care aside and repair to our beds “weary and content and undishonoured”.’

The car pulled up outside the front door and George saw his passengers out.

‘We shan’t need the car in the morning, George,’ said his employer, ‘so have your full quota of sleep. I am sorry to have kept you up so late.’ She and Laura passed on into the house where they were greeted by a clucking Célestine in her dressing-gown.

‘Henri has placed sandwiches and some wine in the dining-room, madame, and I am to make coffee.’

‘No, no,’ said Dame Beatrice peremptorily, for Célestine was known to be obstinate. ‘You go to bed. As for Mrs Gavin and myself, we shall probably make a night of it.’

Célestine made disapproving Gallic noises and took herself off to join her slumbering spouse. Dame Beatrice and Laura went into the dining-room, where Dame Beatrice took one sandwich and a glass of sherry and Laura drank whisky and wolfed the rest of the provender.

‘One thing,’ she said, ‘I suppose you’re right and that, after all this time, nobody, least of all Lawrence and Coralie, is going to rake up the past.’

‘I have an uneasy feeling,’ said her employer, ‘that the past is going to rake itself up.’

‘What makes you say that? I’m the one who gets these premonitions, not you – and I’m very often, although not always, wrong.’

‘This is not merely a premonition. I am uneasy on account of William Caxton.’

‘Good heavens, why?’

‘You told me that he came to one of the rehearsals with Mrs Blaine.’

‘What of it? – as you would say. It was like her cheek to turn up, considering that she’s done everything she can to sabotage our show.’

‘Do you remember that, some time ago, I queried the name William Caxton?’

‘Yes, but you gave me best over that, when I pointed out that it could be a common enough name.’

‘The murdered Mrs Lawrence had a brother named Bill.’

Laura, a sandwich poised halfway to her mouth, lowered it and stared wide-eyed at her employer.

‘You aren’t suggesting—?’ she said.

‘Mrs Lawrence’s maiden name was Caret,’ Dame Beatrice pointed out.

‘A bit unusual, perhaps, but that’s all.’

‘Unusual, perhaps, as a surname, but not unusual in the printing trade.’

‘In the printing —? Oh, that little upside down V or Y which means something has been left out and is to be inserted? You don’t suppose Caxton is proposing to insert a dagger into Lawrence, do you?’

‘I suppose, going on the evidence of his not infrequent visits to his sister, that Mr Caret was fond of her, and you and I, I recollect, once had a conversation on the relationship between brothers and sisters.’

‘But you think Coralie, not Lawrence, committed the murder. Lawrence only tried to cover it up by burying the body. That’s your theory, isn’t it?’

‘We once mentioned Macbeth. There is no doubt – there was none in the troubled mind of Lady Macbeth – that both husband and wife shared guilt over the murder of King Duncan. In the case under review, just as Duncan’s death was carried out at the instigation of the woman, but by the hand of the man, so the murder of Mrs Lawrence could have been at the instigation of the man, but carried out by the woman.’

‘Well, she’s strong enough, as we’ve said before, but you thought, after you’d met her in Blackpool, that she was one of these large, bonhomous women.’

‘Henry the Eighth, by all accounts, was a large, bonhomous man. It did not prevent him from turning into a monster when monstrous behaviour suited his purpose.’

‘And Coralie’s purpose?’

‘As I believe we have said before, after Sir Anthony’s death Lawrence had become a very wealthy man. I still think Lawrence wanted his wife out of the way because she knew – or he thought she knew – something about that death which, if it were told to the police, might incriminate him, and I think that Coralie wanted her out of the way…’

‘To clear a path to a re-marriage with Lawrence?’

‘If, indeed, they were ever divorced. We have only Coralie’s word that they were.’

‘No wonder, if Lawrence spotted Caxton at that rehearsal to which Clarice brought him, our Macheath refused to shave off his beard for the performances! I must sleep on this. You offer food for thought, dear Mrs Croc.’

Dame Beatrice did not attend the dress rehearsal proper. It went off so well that Denbigh was delighted, Laura filled with forebodings and the cast jubilant and self-congratulatory. There was only one hitch and that was merely temporary. The dressing-rooms at the town hall were at floor-level, not stage level. To reach the stage and its wings, therefore, the actors had to mount a short flight of stairs from the back of the O.P. side and pass the back-drop if their entrance was on the Prompt side.

Before the ingenious erection of carpentry and cardboard which represented the hangman’s cart had been put together, therefore, the width of these stairs had been carefully measured and a wooden ramp made so that the contraption, mounted on perambulator wheels, could be pushed up on to the stage without damage to its flimsy sides. The perambulator wheels were disguised by curtains of hessian on which large, tumbril-like wheels had been painted by the indefatiguable students, and the cart had no back to it, as only its front elevation would be seen from the auditorium. The ‘cart’ was kept off the stage until what should have been the last scene in the opera as John Gay wrote it.

In Denbigh’s production, between this last scene and the preceding one in which, confronted by four more of his wives – ‘Four women more, Captain, with a child apiece’ – Macheath announces that he is prepared to be executed – ‘Here, tell the Sheriff’s officers I am ready’ – the curtain was to come down and to rise again to show Macheath standing on the fatal cart with his arms pinioned, a white cap over his face and head and the rope (a loop without a running noose) already around his neck. At the announcement of the reprieve, white cap and noose were to be whipped off and his arms ceremoniously freed, although there actually would be no knots to untie, as that might hold up the action.

All this had been carefully rehearsed, but, as it was not quite finished, without the cart until the pre-dress rehearsal. As the reprieve marked the end of the opera except for the last song and dance, the final scene came so late in the evening, when the cast were almost blasphemous with exhaustion, that it had been run through ‘just for the sake of the motions’ as Laura put it, and the cart left on the stage, from which the stage-hands removed it during the College dinner-hour on the morning of the dress rehearsal proper. However, when the time came to get it on stage again for the dress rehearsal, there occurred an unseemly and maddening hitch, the more annoying in that, apart from it, the rehearsal went well.

‘Hey!’ said one of the volunteer stage-hands, a student who had helped to construct the cart. ‘Some funny ass has taken the wheels off! How are we going to trundle it on to the stage?’

‘Manhandle it, I suppose,’ said his friends.

‘Not on your life. No room at the sides of those stairs. We’d break it. Except for the actual platform where the bloke stands, the thing’s only made of cardboard, hessian and papier-mâché. Slip the word to the players. The chap will just have to stand at the right spot on the stage and imagine he’s on the cart.’

‘The noose won’t reach his neck and I don’t think we’ve got a longer piece of rope.’

‘He’ll have to do without a noose, then, won’t he? After all, this is only a rehearsal. We must make sure it’s all right on Thursday, though.’

‘He won’t mind about the cart. He’s always jibbed a bit at that rope round his neck. Think he’d got a guilty conscience or something, wouldn’t you?’

‘Well, let him know. I’ll have a scout round and see what’s been done with those wheels. I’d like to lay hands on the blighter who perpetrated the merry jest, that’s all.’

After the rehearsal Denbigh took the matter philosophically.

‘If we don’t find the wheels – and we’re certainly not going to turn the back of the stage and the dressing-rooms upside-down tonight,’ he said, ‘we’ve got Tuesday and Wednesday to find some more wheels and for you chaps to fix them on. If the worst comes to the worst, I can tip off the cast to go back to the original script and have the reprieve from the condemned hold instead of from the gallows. It isn’t, to my mind, such good theatre, but at least we should be carrying out the author’s intentions, and that, I suppose, is something.’

On the following morning he telephoned the town hall and was answered by the porter on duty. He requested that the missing wheels should be traced if the porter could spare the time. As Denbigh had conducted public concerts in the town hall on previous occasions and was known to be moderately generous with his pourboires, the porter promised to do his best and to ring the College if the missing wheels came to light. They did, and were found on the electricians’ gallery.

‘One of your students having a bit of a game, eh, sir?’ asked the town hall porter.

‘Possibly. Well, now you’ve found them, you might put the wheels in the principal dressing-room and lock the door, would you? The students who will call at about half-past one to put the wheels on again will show you my visiting-card. That will prove their bona fides. All right?’

‘Very good, sir.’

‘And perhaps you’ll just keep an eye on the cart when the students have re-affixed the wheels?’

‘I’ll do that, sir. In fact, I’ll do better than that, sir. If that prop – we call ’em props, sir, these gadgets and things as are needed on stage, sir – if that prop, when the wheels is on, will go up that ramp what covers the steps on to the stage, sir, that prop will go in my cubby ’ole. Suppose I was to wheel it in there when the young gents have put the wheels on it again, sir – it’s no height, so it won’t catch the top of my door – and lock the door on it when I ain’t in there, sir? How would that be?’

‘That would be excellent, but what if you go off duty?’

‘There’ll be somebody here with a key, sir. If it isn’t me, it will be my mate. I’ll give him the tip-off as nobody ain’t to touch that prop without they can perdooce your card.’

‘Fine. I’ll leave the whole thing in your hands, then, and, of course, I’ll see you – er—’

‘Thank you very much, sir.’

‘Funny thing about that hangman’s cart,’ said Laura to Sybil and Melanie, with whom she shared a dressing-room. ‘Who would play a daft trick like taking the wheels off it?’

‘One of those beetle-brained students, of course,’ said Melanie. ‘Thought it funny, I suppose. All boys of that age have a warped sense of humour. Personally, I’m glad there are wedges under those wheels as an extra precaution. The stage slopes forward quite a lot. It would scare me silly if I was blindfolded and that cart began to move.’

‘I never could abide Blind Man’s Buff myself,’ said Sybil. ‘You feel so helpless when you can’t see.’

‘But he can see,’ said Laura. ‘I tried the hood on to find out what it was like, and I could see through it quite easily. It’s only made of thin gauze. Anyway, thank goodness we don’t have to be made up just yet.’

Laura’s make-up took some time; Sybil’s was simpler; Melanie was not to be made up until the beginning of Act Two, when, during the interval, Laura would have removed her own make-up, or most of it, and changed out of Mrs Peachum’s costume in order to take over the prompter’s stool and Sybil would have her face expertly touched-up, ready for her next appearance. Melanie, therefore, was supposed to be alone in the dressing-room, or wherever else she chose to be, for the whole of the first Act.

This was because she had rebelled against assuming the office of prompter for that Act, asserting, with vehemence, that the versatile Laura could prompt, whether she was on or off the stage and that she herself was prone to catch cold if she sat in a draught. As there was no doubt, as had been pointed out when the choice of a play was under discussion, that the wings of the town hall stage were definitely – some said fiendishly – draughty, Denbigh had given the job to Hamilton Haynings who, like Sybil, did not come on until Act Two and was well upholstered in Lockit’s heavy costume.

Hamilton, whatever his private feelings about this particular chore, performed it faithfully for two nights, but on the Saturday evening nobody prompted at all, and as it became important, later on, to establish where everybody was and what he or she was doing at the beginning of the last scene of the play on the third and last night of the performance, these were Denbigh’s arrangements for all three nights of the show.

The Player and the Beggar, that is to say one of the students and Ernest Farrow, would be on stage in front of the curtain. Behind the curtain would be Macheath, in the person of Rodney Crashaw (alias Thaddeus E. Lawrence) already mounted on the hangman’s cart. Waiting in the wings would be the highwayman’s gang, mostly students but also including two members of the society, Geoffrey Channing and Robert Eames, who had the parts of Ben Budge and Matt o’ the Mint. On the other side of the stage and also waiting in the wings, would be Polly and Lucy (Sybil Gartner and Melanie Cardew), Filch (Mrs Blaine’s son Tom), the drawer (from the inn scene), the turnkey and the second jailer (Lockit’s assistants) and also the ladies of the town who included the blonde wardrobe mistress and Stella Walker, she who combined the parts of Jenny Diver and Diana Trapes. She had decided to revert to the costume of the former when she took her curtain calls, as she thought it far more attractive than that of the disposer of stolen property. The rest of the ‘ladies’ were students who had appeared also in the third Act as the women prisoners in Newgate gaol. These, having had their trial referred to the next sessions, were to celebrate this temporary reprieve with a dance, an activity in which the men students had declined to take part.

Behind all this rabble would be Peachum, in the person of James Hunty, and Laura, as Mrs Peachum, both waiting merely for curtain calls and both loitering in a short corridor on the O.P. side to be out of the draught which whistled on to the stage from the wings. Up to the end of the previous scene Laura would have been acting as prompter except on the third and last night, when she had announced her intention of abandoning this office after changing out of her stage costume, but retaining Mrs Peachum’s rather startling make-up so that she could change back again quickly for the curtain calls. Until then she was to join Dame Beatrice, where a seat had been kept for her in the auditorium.

Provided that no prompting had been required during the performances on the Thursday and Friday, Denbigh had agreed to this arrangement, and it was not until the Beggar and the Player were actually on stage in front of the curtain that she needed to slip away to get back into the Mrs Peachum costume and join James Hunty in the corridor. She expected to find Hamilton Haynings with him and, as the ‘rabble’ erupted on to the stage to perform the last dance before the final curtain, Laura supposed – rightly, as it turned out – that the three of them would retreat a little further into the confines of the sheltering corridor to be out of the way of the exits through which the rabble would pour when the curtain came down on the last Act.

Denbigh’s original arrangement had been that the hangman’s cart should be only just in view on stage to leave room for the dance when the reprieve should have been called and Macheath, in the words of the Beggar, ‘be brought back to his wives in triumph’.

Crashaw, however, would have none of this arrangement. He insisted upon having the cart trundled to the centre-back of the stage. From here, before he was reprieved, he was to make the speech which belonged somewhat earlier in the Act. The duet between Polly and Lucy, ‘Would I might be hang’d – and I would so, too! – to be hang’d with you – my dear, with you’, was to precede this speech instead of coming after it – another slight alteration to the text.

‘Like his damned conceit!’ growled Hamilton Haynings when, at the unsuccessful pre-dress rehearsal, this innovation was actually staged. Hamilton had never quite got over his resentful disappointment at having been passed over for the principal rôle, any more than Marigold Tench had ceased to regret her precipitate action in walking herself out of a part when the opera was first under consideration. Marigold had attended every rehearsal (which, as a fully paid-up member of the society and its one-time leading lady, she had every right to do) in the sick hope that one of the three principal women players would either fall down on the part or give it up, but this had not happened.

She spent the actual performances behind the scenes acting as unsolicited dresser and assistant wardrobe mistress. Nobody wanted or needed Marigold’s ministrations, but all accepted them in good part, sensing the frustration and disappointment which lay behind the seemingly kind actions.

The point of all this was that, as Laura pointed out later to Dame Beatrice, when the thing actually happened Marigold had been in as good a position as anybody else to overhear what Denbigh had said about the position of the hangman’s cart on the stage.

‘Apart from leaving more space for the last dance,’ he had said, ‘there’s the safety aspect. I had not realised until Saturday—’ (groans from the company which underlined their feelings about the long-drawn-out nightmare of that fiasco) ‘—I had not remembered that there is a rake on the stage down towards the footlights. By having the cart (it’s on wheels, remember!) sideways on and almost pushed into the wings, however, the rake of the stage will hardly matter. If anything did go wrong, the wheels would only run the cart slantingly towards the prompt side, where there are plenty of people waiting in the wings.’

‘Oh, rot!’ said Melanie, looking adoringly at Crashaw. “What can go wrong? He is the chief character! It would be absurd for him to make his last speech from the side of the stage and almost stuck out in the wings. He must be centre-stage. Stick those wedges under the wheels. That should fix them.’

Denbigh reluctantly gave in, only adjuring the students who were to act as stage-hands to make sure that the cart, as soon as it had been trundled up the ramp on to the stage, was securely anchored and the front wheels firmly wedged so that they could not revolve.

There was one other uncommitted person besides Marigold Tench who, at some point in the proceedings, was to be present. This was Mrs Blaine’s William Caxton. She had insisted that at each performance he was to be brought to the front of the stage by Denbigh and introduced to the audience in one of the intervals as the leader and chief protagonist in the Caxton procession which was to take place in the following week. As there were to be street collections, all the proceeds of which would be devoted to charity, Denbigh could hardly refuse to do as she wished.