Bryant & May 01; Full Dark House

∨ Full Dark House ∧

13

LIVES IN THE THEATRE

Elspeth Wynter had spent her whole life, or rather the thirty-two years she had so far experienced, in the theatre. She came from a long line of theatre folk. Her grandfather had been a Shakespearean, once spoken of in the same breath as Burbage, Garrick or Keane. His wife had been cast in his shows as a perennial parlourmaid, and in true theatrical tradition had borne him a son in the rear of the stalls. Eight years into the new century, that son fathered his only child, Elspeth. Although his wife survived a pelvic fracture when she fell from the stage of Wyndham’s Theatre, she ignored her doctor’s warnings about the perils of motherhood in order to bear a daughter. The birth killed her.

Elspeth’s father took the King’s shilling for the Great War, but grisly memories of Ypres wrought changes in his life from which he never fully recovered. Prevented from returning to the front by the state of his nerves, he resumed the family profession. In the twenties he delivered a shaky baritone in countless threadbare Gilbert and Sullivan revivals, but the shows closed as unemployment began to bite and the cinema became affordable to the lower classes who had filled the music halls.

Elspeth’s father could not look after himself, let alone a teenage girl. He had no family beyond his colleagues in the theatre, and drink coarsened his acting. Elspeth was raised by sympathetic ushers and nursed from fretfulness while her papa performed in the twicenightlies. As they trooped from one cold auditorium to the next, shivering in damp dressing rooms, shaking the fleas from lodginghouse beds, playing in faded costumes to dwindling audiences, this daughter of the stage looked about her moth-eaten, mildewed world and began to wonder if the possession of theatrical blood was really the gift that her father’s boozy friends claimed it to be.

Elspeth knew from an early age that although she was not destined for the boards, she would always be a part of the theatre; watching her father declaim each night from the box kept empty and permanently reserved for royalty – there seemed to be one in every playhouse – she watched the painful changes time wrought on his performances. The twenties were uncertain years, but not as lean as the thirties. Her father drank more as the audiences dried up. He too dried on stage, nightly forgetting his lines, relying on prompts, booed by an unforgiving audience weaned on cinema newsreels. The new medium had no truck with forgetfulness. Celluloid eradicated variable performances. To no one’s surprise, he finally died in make-up and costume, during a trouser-dropping farce in which he had already been dying nightly.

Elspeth did not attend his funeral; there was a matinee. She had graduated from programme seller to bar cashier to ASM, through the various stressful stages of management until she suffered a nervous collapse and returned to front-of-house work. She was a West End girl, one of theatre’s dedicated personnel, invisible to audiences but essential to everyone who worked there. As one show closed, another began rehearsals, and each run marked the periods of her life more completely than any calendar notation.

She had experienced a moment of passion just once, at the age of fifteen: pushed into a dressing room at the Palace and thrust into by a man she had only ever seen from the aisle of the stalls. He was playing the villain in a revival of Maria Marten, or The Murders in the Red Barn, and had barely paused to peck her on the cheek and pull up his trousers before returning to catch his entrance cue. While her seducer ranted across the boards, twitching his moustaches, his shirtsleeves flecked with Kensington Gore, she too bled and suffered, and burrowed away in the crimson darkness to forget the world outside.

The theatre held no terrors for her. It was home, and filled with secrets, just like any family. It encompassed every happy moment in her life. As Elspeth paced the indistinct aisles of the Palace, its pervasive calm seeped into her. She could tell when the half-hour call was coming without looking at her watch. She sensed the rising tension of backstage activity, even though she was stationed in the front of the building.

♦

Geoffrey Whittaker was also dedicated to the theatre, as invisible and essential as a spark plug to a car. He too was the latest – and the last, it turned out – in a long theatrical line. As stage manager to the incumbent company, he was in charge of the administration, the set, the lighting, the props, the health and safety of his audience, the scene changes, the laundry mistresses, the wardrobe people and the carpenters. He knew how to get scorch marks out of a starched collar, how to fix a cellulose filter over a follow-spot, how to unjam the springs on a star trap and how to keep bills unpaid until the receipts were in.

Like Elspeth, he was unmarried and probably unmarriageable, because his career constituted a betrothal of sorts. Unlike Elspeth, he had a sex life, rather too much of one. In addition to dating girls in the shows, he made visits to a private house in the East End, where for a reasonable fee his needs were taken care of. This abundance of sexual activity allowed him to concentrate on his job without becoming distracted by the dancers’ bodies during rehearsals. He had grown up in the Empires and Alhambras, helping his parents prepare for the night’s performance, and could imagine no other world. Colours were duller outside, and the skies were not painted but real, which made them untrustworthy. In the theatre, you always followed the script. Beyond this world there were only unrehearsed moves, mistimed entrances, lines spoken out of turn.

The start of the second great war brought unwelcome transitions to Geoffrey’s hermetic world. Venues were changing hands, falling empty, getting bombed. Philanthropy had been replaced by the desire for quick profit. Boxing matches and coarse variety acts moved in to entertain a new type of audience: commoner, louder, one that lived from moment to moment. Now there was something less comforting in the atmosphere before a show, something contaminated by the urgent, hysterical laughter that nightly rang from the stalls. Theatres were more frenetic, and companies diminished as the most able-bodied men went off to war. The Shaftesbury was bombed, the Strand and Sadler’s Wells went dark. It was like a game of musical chairs, and nobody knew when the music might suddenly stop.

But Elspeth and Geoffrey still heard the audiences of their childhoods above the sound of hot water gurgling in the pipes, still listened to the ticking of the warm-air conduits, the backstage footfalls of departing painters. They were still the sounds of home.

And something had irreversibly changed. Elspeth had sensed it first at the outbreak of the war, a creeping disquiet that felt wholly out of place between the gaudy vermilion aisles of the Palace Theatre. She was alive to the smallest changes around her, and could detect any eddy of emotion in the silent building.

Late one night, closing up after a performance, she had suffered a terrible premonition, and her life had passed before her eyes. She told no one about the dark, scarred thing that stalked behind her in the rufescent rows of the dress circle, creeping down the vertiginous steps of the balcony. She experienced a sense of panic more with each passing performance, never knowing at what hour it might strike, for there is no day and night in a theatre. She only knew that it was there, watching and waiting, that it meant harm, and that something wicked had to happen.

Anxious to escape, she slipped out of the building and into the blackout, following the white stripes that had been painted on the paraffin lamps hanging from the protection boards around the front wall of the theatre. The Palace was her habitat, but she was lately being driven from it. She stopped and looked up at the entresol windows, and glimpsed the terrible visage, a pale oval peering out of the smoking salon at her, its features so distorted that it could barely be considered human.

Geoffrey had seen the faceless creature too, scurrying between the rows of the balcony, loping across a distant corridor, but he had not believed his senses. It was the war, he told himself, shaking his head. The constant fear played tricks on you. Last month a bomb had fallen through the roof of St Paul’s Cathedral, destroying the high altar. For many it had seemed like a blow struck against God himself. If Hitler was the devil kept at bay, perhaps his acolytes were already here, moving among them, and wouldn’t they choose such a godless place as a theatre from which to corrupt the innocent?

Geoffrey Whittaker sat in his office on Sunday evening and smoked, but his hands shook. Nothing could drive him from the only world he understood. He told himself that, at forty-six, he was too old for an attack of nerves. There were men out there less than half his age fighting to preserve his freedom, even though he did not want to be free. He was a willing prisoner of the theatre, its plans and strictures. His life was patterned on the stage directions of a dog-eared script. But something had crept inside his world that had no place in the production. His trembling fingers pulled another cigarette from the pack and inserted it between his lips.

Outside the Palace, Elspeth Wynter ran on into the blackout, through the empty city streets, her breath ragged behind her ribs, daring herself to go forward into darkness, frightened to return. But the home that had nurtured her for so many years could not be left so easily. It too was her domain, and beyond it, beyond the blackouts, there was no structure, no control, only the terrible light of freedom.

For Elspeth and Geoffrey, and hundreds like them, theatres were the last repose of stasis and sanity in a world hurtling beyond sense. But even they would be touched by the bloody hand of madness.