Killer Dolphin

FOUR Rehearsal

“Who is this comes hopping up the lane?”

“Hopping? Where? Oh, I see. A lady dressed for riding. She’s lame, Master Will. She’s hurt. She can’t put her foot to the ground.”

“She makes a grace of her ungainliness. There’s a stain across her face. And in her bosom. A raven’s feather in a valley of snow.”

“Earth. Mire. On her habit, too. She must have fallen.”

“Often enough, I dare swear.”

“She’s coming in at the gate.”

“Will! Where ARE you. WILL!”

“We’ll have to stop again. I’m afraid,” Peregrine said. “Gertie! Ask her to come on, will you, Charles?”

Charles Random opened the door on the Prompt side. “Gertie! Oh, dear.”

Gertrude Bracey entered with her jaw set and the light of battle in her eyes. Peregrine walked down the centre aisle and put his hands on the rail of the orchestral well.

“Gertie, love,” he said, “it went back again, didn’t it? It was all honey and sweet reasonableness and it wouldn’t have risen one solitary hackle. She must grate. She must be bossy. He’s looking down the lane at that dark, pale creature who comes hopping into his life with such deadly seduction. And while he’s quivering, slap bang into this disturbance of—of his whole personality—comes your voice: scolding, demanding, possessive, always too loud. It must be like that, Gertie. Don’t you see? You must hurt. You must jangle.”

He waited. She said nothing.

“I can’t have it any other way,” Peregrine said.

Nothing.

“Well, let’s build it again, shall we? Back to ‘Who is this,’ please, Marco. You’re off, please, Gertie.”

She walked off.

Marcus Knight cast up his eyes in elaborate resignation, raised his arms and let them flop.

“Very well, dear boy,” he said, “as often as you like, of course. One grows a little jaded but never mind.”

Marco was not the only one, Peregrine thought, to feel jaded: Gertie was enough to reduce an author-director to despair. She had after a short tour of the States become wedded to Method acting. This involved endless huddles with whoever would listen to her and a remorseless scavenging through her emotional past for fragments that could start her off on some astonishing association with her performance.

“It’s like a bargain basement,” Harry Grove said to Peregrine. The things Gertie digs up and tries on are really too rococo. We get a new look every day.”

It was a slow process and the unplotted pauses she took in which to bring the truth to light were utterly destructive to concerted playing. “If she goes on like this,” Peregrine thought, “she’ll tear herself to tatters and leave the audience merely wishing she wouldn’t.”

As for Marcus Knight, the danger signals for a major temperament had already been flown. There was a certain thunderous quietude which Peregrine thought it best to disregard.

Really, for him, Peregrine thought, Marco was behaving rather well, and he tried to ignore the little hammer that pounded away under Marco’s oval cheek.

“Who is this—”

Again they built up to her line. When it came it was merely shouted offstage without meaning and apparently without intention.

“Great Christ in Heaven!” Marcus Knight suddenly bellowed. “How long must this endure! What, in the name of all the suffering clans of martyrdom, am I expected to do? Am I coupled with a harridan or a bloody dove? My author, my producer, my art tell me that here is a great moment. I should be fed, by Heaven, fed: I should be led up to. I have my line to make. I must show what I am. My whole being should be lacerated. And so, God knows it is, but by what!” He strode to the door and flung it wide. Gertrude Bracey was exposed looking both terrified and determined. “By a drivelling, piping pea-hen!” he roared, straight into her face. “What sort of an actress are you, dear? Are you a woman, dear? Has anybody ever slighted you, trifled with you, deserted you? Have you no conception of the gnawing serpent that ravages a woman scorned?”

Somewhere in the front of the house Harry Grove laughed. Unmistakably, it was he. He had a light, mocking, derisive laugh, highly infectious to anybody who had not inspired it. Unhappily both Knight and Gertrude Bracey, for utterly opposed reasons, took it as a direct personal affront. Knight spun round on his heel, advanced to the edge of the stage and roared into the darkness of the auditorium. “Who is that! Who is it! I demand an answer.”

The laughter ran up to a falsetto climax and somewhere in the shadows Harry Grove said delightedly: “Oh dear me, dear me, how very entertaining. The King Dolphin in a rage.”

“Harry,” Peregrine said, turning his back on the stage and vainly trying to discern the offender. “You are a professional actor. You know perfectly well that you are behaving inexcusably. I must ask you to apologize to the company.”

“To the whole company, Perry dear? Or just to Gertie for laughing about her not being a woman scorned?”

Before Peregrine could reply Gertrude re-entered, looking wildly about the house. Having at last distinguished Grove in the back stalls, she pointed to him and screamed out with a virtuosity that she had hitherto denied herself: “This is a deliberate insult.” She then burst into tears.

There followed a phenomenon that would have been incomprehensible to anybody who was not intimately concerned with the professional theatre. Knight and Miss Bracey were suddenly allied. Insults of the immediate past were as if they had never been. They both began acting beautifully for each other: Gertrude making big eloquent piteous gestures and Marcus responding with massive understanding. She wept. He kissed her hand. They turned with the precision of variety artists to the auditorium and simultaneously shaded their eyes like comic sailors. Grove came gaily down the aisle saying: “I apologize. Marcus and Gerts. Everybody. I really do apologize. In seventeen plastic and entirely different positions. I shall go and be devoured backstage by the worm of contrition. What more can I do? I cannot say with even marginal accuracy that it’s all a mistake and that you’re not at all funny. But anything else. Anything else.”

“Be quiet,” Peregrine said, forcing a note of domineering authority which was entirely foreign to him. “You will certainly go backstage, since you are needed. I will see you after we break. In the meantime I wish neither to see nor hear from you until you make your entrance. Is that understood?”

“I’m sorry,” Grove said quietly. “I really am.” And he went backstage by the pass-door that Mr. Conducis had used when he pulled Peregrine out of the well.

“Marco and Gertie,” Peregrine said, and they turned blackly upon him. “I hope you’ll be very generous and do something nobody has a right to ask of you. I hope you’ll dismiss this lamentable incident as if it had never happened.”

“It is either that person or me. Never in the entire course of my professional experience—”

The Knight temperament raged on. Gertrude listened with gloomy approval and repaired her face. The rest of the company were still as mice. At last Peregrine managed to bring about a truce and eventually they began again at: “Who is this comes hopping up the lane?”

The row had had one startling and most desirable effect. Gertrude, perhaps by some process of emotive transference, now gave out her offstage line with all the venom of a fishwife.

“But darling,” reasoned Destiny Meade, a few minutes later, devouring Peregrine with her great black lamps. “Hopping. Me? On my first entrance? I mean—actually? I mean what an entrance! Hopping!”

“Destiny, love, it’s like I said. He had a thing about it.”

“Who did?”

“Sheakespeare, darling. About a breathless, panting, jigging, hopping woman with a white face and pitchball eyes and blue veins.”

“How peculiar of him.”

“The thing is, for him it was all an expression of sexual attraction.”

“I don’t see how I can do a sexy thing if I come on playing hopscotch and puffing and blowing like a whale. Truly.”

“Destiny: listen to what he wrote. Listen.

“That’s why I’ve made her fall off her horse and come hopping up the lane.”

“Was he sort of kinky?”

“Certainly not,” Marcus interrupted.

“Well, I only wondered. Gloves and everything.”

“Listen, darling. Here you are. Laughing and out of breath—”

“And hopping. Honestly!”

“All right,” said Marcus. “We know what you mean, but listen. You’re marvellous. Your colour’s coming and going and your bosom’s heaving. He has an entirely normal reaction, Destiny darling: you send him. You do see, don’t you? You send me.”

“With my hopping?”

“Yes,” he said irritably. “That and all the rest of it. Come on, darling, do. Make your entrance to me.”

“Yes, Destiny,” Peregrine said. “Destiny, listen. You’re in a velvet habit with your bosom exposed, a little plumed hat and soft little boots and you’re lovely, lovely, lovely. And young Dr. Hall has gone out to help you and is supporting you. Charles—come and support her. Yes: like that. Leave her as free as possible. Now: the door opens and we see you. Fabulous. You’re in a shaft of sunlight. And he sees you. Shakespeare does. And you speak. Right? Right, Destiny? You say—go on, dear.”

“Here I come upon your privacy, Master Shakespeare, hopping over your doorstep like a starling.”

“Yes, and at once, at that very moment, you know you’ve limed him.”

“Limed?”

“Caught.”

“Am I keen?”

“Yes. You’re pleased. You know he’s famous. And you want to show him off to W.H. You come forward, Marco, under compulsion, and offer your help. Staring at her. And you go to him, Destiny, and skip and half-fall and fetch up laughing and clinging to him. He’s terribly, terribly still. Oh, yes, Marco, yes. Dead right. Wonderful. And Destiny, darling, that’s right. You know? It’s right. It’s what we want.”

“Can I sit down or do I keep going indefinitely panting away on his chest?”

“Look into his face. Give him the whole job. Laugh. No, not that sort of a laugh, dear. Not loud. Deep down in your throat!”

“More sexy?”

“Yes,” Peregrine said and ran his hands through his hair. “That’s right. More sexy.”

“And then I sit down?”

“Yes. He helps you down. Centre. Hall pushes the chair forward. Charles?”

“Could it,” Marcus intervened, “be left of centre, dear boy? I mean I only suggest it because it’ll be easier for Dessy and I think it’ll make a better picture. I can put her down. Like this.” He did so with infinite grace and himself occupied centre stage.

“I think I like it better the other way, Marco, darling. Could we try it the other way, Perry? This feels false, a bit, to me.”

They jockeyed about for star positions. Peregrine made the final decision in Knight’s favour. It really was better that way. Gertrude came on and then Emily, very nice as Joan Hart, and finally Harry Grove, behaving himself and giving a bright, glancing indication of Mr. W.H. Peregrine began to feel that perhaps he had not written a bad play and that, given a bit of luck, he might, after all, hold the company together.

He was aware, in the back of his consciousness, that someone had come into the stalls. The actors were all on stage and he supposed it must be Winter Meyer or perhaps Jeremy, who often looked in, particularly when Destiny was rehearsing.

They ran the whole scene without interruption and followed it with an earlier one between Emily, Marcus and the ineffable Trevor in which the boy Hamnet, on his eleventh birthday, received and wore his grandfather’s present of a pair of embroidered cheveril gloves. Marcus and Peregrine had succeeded in cowing the more offensive exhibitionisms of Trevor and the scene went quite well. They broke for luncheon. Peregrine kept Harry Grove back and gave him a wigging which he took so cheerfully that it lost half its sting. He then left and Peregrine saw with concern that Destiny had waited for him. Where then was Marcus Knight and what had become of his proprietary interest in his leading lady? As if in explanation, Peregrine heard Destiny say: “Darling, the King Dolphin’s got a pompous feast with someone at the Garrick. Where shall we go?”

The new curtain was half-lowered, the working lights went out, the stage-manager left and the stage-door banged distantly.

Peregrine turned to go out by front-of-house.

He came face to face with Mr. Conducis.

It was exactly as if the clock had been set back a year and three weeks and he again dripped fetid water along the aisle of a bombed theatre. Mr. Conducis seemed to wear the same impeccable clothes and to be seized with the same indefinable oddness of behaviour. He even took the same involuntary step backwards, almost as if Peregrine was going to accuse him of something.

“I have watched your practice,” he said as if Peregrine were learning the piano. “If you have a moment to spare there is a matter I want to discuss with you. Perhaps in your office?”

“Of course, sir,” Peregrine said. “I’m sorry I didn’t see you had come in.”

Mr. Conducis paid no attention to this. He was looking, without evidence of any kind of reaction, at the now resplendent auditorium: at the crimson curtain, the chandeliers, the freshly gilt scrollwork, and the shrouded and expectant stalls.

“The restoration is satisfactory?” he asked.

“Entirely so. We shall be ready on time, sir.”

“Will you lead the way?”

Peregrine remembered that on their former encounter Mr. Conducis had seemed to dislike being followed. He led the way upstairs to the office, opened the door and found Winter Meyer in residence, dictating letters. Peregrine made a complicated but apparently eloquent face and Meyer got to his feet in a hurry.

Mr. Conducis walked in looking at nothing and nobody.

“This is our Manager, sir. Mr. Winter Meyer, Mr. Conducis.”

“Oh, yes. Good morning,” said Mr. Conducis. Without giving an impression of discourtesy he turned away. “Really, old boy,” as Mr. Meyer afterwards remarked. “He might have been giving me the chance to follow my own big nose instead of backing out of The Presence.”

In a matter of seconds Mr. Meyer and the secretary had gone to lunch.

“Will you sit down, sir?”

“No, thank you. I shall not be long. In reference to the glove and documents: I am told that their authenticity is established.”

“Yes.”

“You have based your piece upon these objects?”

“Yes.”

“I have gone into the matter of promotion with Greenslade and with two persons of my acquaintance who are conversant with this type of enterprise.” He mentioned two colossi of the theatre. “And have given some thought to preliminary treatment. It occurs to me that, properly manipulated, the glove and its discovery and so on might be introduced as a major theme in promotion.”

“Indeed it might,” Peregrine said fervently.

“You agree with me? I have thought that perhaps some consideration should be given to the possibility of timing the release of the glove story with the opening of the theatre and of displaying the glove and documents, suitably protected and housed, in the foyer.

Peregrine said with what he hoped was a show of dispassionate judgment that surely, as a piece of pre-production advertising, this gesture would be unique. Mr. Conducis looked quickly at him and away again. Peregrine asked him if he felt happy about the security of the treasure. Mr. Conducis replied with a short exegesis upon wall safes of a certain type in which, or so Peregrine confusedly gathered, he held a controlling interest

“Your public relations and press executive,” Mr. Conducis stated in his dead fish voice, “is a Mr. Conway Boome.”

“Yes. It’s his own name,” Peregrine ventured, wondering for a moment if he had caught a glint of something that might be sardonic humour, but Mr. Conducis merely said: “I daresay. I understand,” he added, “that he is experienced in theatrical promotion, but I have suggested to Greenslade that having regard for the somewhat unusual character of the type of material we propose to use, it might be as well if Mr. Boome were to be associated with Maitland Advertising, which is one of my subsidiaries. He is agreeable.”

“I’ll be bound he is,” Peregrine thought.

“I am also taking advice on the security aspect from an acquaintance at Scotland Yard, a Superintendent Alleyn.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Yes. The matter of insurance is somewhat involved, the commercial worth of the objects being impossible to define. I am informed that as soon as their existence is made known there is likely to be an unprecedented response. Particularly from the United States of America.”

There followed a short silence.

“Mr. Conducis,” Peregrine said, “I can’t help asking you this. I know it’s no business of mine but I really can’t help it. Are you—have you—I mean, would you feel at all concerned about whether the letters and glove stay in the country of their owner or not?”

“In my country?” Mr. Conducis asked as if he wasn’t sure that he had one.

“I’m sorry, no. I meant the original owner.”

Peregrine hesitated for a moment and then found himself embarked upon an excitable plea for the retention of the documents and glove. He felt he was making no impression whatever and wished he could stop. There was some indefinable and faintly disgusting taint in the situation.

With a closed face Mr. Conducis waited for Peregrine to stop and then said: “That is a sentimental approach to what is at this juncture a matter for financial consideration. I cannot speak under any other heading: historical, romantic, nationalistic or sentimental. I know,” Mr. Conducis predictably added, “nothing of such matters.”

He then startled Peregrine quite shockingly by saying with an indefinable change in his voice: “I dislike pale gloves. Intensely.”

Far one moment Peregrine thought he saw something like anguish in this extraordinary man’s face and at the next that he had been mad to suppose anything of the sort. Mr. Conducis made a slight movement indicating the interview was at an end. Peregrine opened the door, changed his mind and shut it again.

“Sir,” he said. “One other question. May I tell the company about the letters and glove? The gloves that we use on the stage will be made by the designer, Jeremy Jones—who is an expert in such matters. If we are to show the original in the front-of-house he should copy it as accurately as possible. He should go to the museum and examine it. And he will be so very much excited by the whole thing that I can’t guarantee his keeping quiet about it. In any case, sir, I myself spoke to him about the glove on the day you showed it to me. You will remember you did not impose secrecy at that time. Since the report came through I have not spoken of it to anyone except Meyer and Jones.”

Mr. Conducis said, “A certain amount of leakage at this stage is probably inevitable and if correctly handled may do no harm. You may inform your company of all the circumstances. With a strong warning that the information is, for the time being, confidential and with this proviso: I wish to remain completely untroubled by the entire business. I realize that my ownership may well become known—is known in fact, already, to a certain number of people. This is unavoidable. But under no circumstances will I give statements, submit to interviews or be quoted. My staff will see to this at my end. I hope you will observe the same care, here. Mr. Boome will be instructed. Good morning. Will you—?”

He made that slight gesture for Peregrine to precede him. Peregrine did so.

He went out on the circle landing and ran straight into Harry Grove.

“Hall-lo, dear boy,” said Harry, beaming at him. “I just darted back to use the telephone. Destiny and I—” He stopped short, bobbed playfully round Peregrine at Mr. Conducis and said: “Now, see what I’ve done! A genius for getting myself in wrong. My only talent.”

Mr. Conducis said: “Good morning to you, Grove.” He stood in the doorway looking straight in front of him.

“And to you, wonderful fairy godfather, patron, guiding light and all those things,” Harry said. “Have you come to see your latest offspring, your very own performing Dolphins?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Conducis.

“Look at dear Perry!” Harry said. “He’s stricken dumb at my misplaced familiarity. Aren’t you, Perry?”

“Not for the first time,” Peregrine said and felt himself to be the victim of a situation he should have controlled.

“Well!” Harry said, glancing with evident amusement from one to the other of his hearers. “I mustn’t double-blot my copybook, must I? Nor must I keep lovely ladies waiting.” He turned to Mr. Conducis with an air of rueful deference. “I do hope you’ll be pleased with us, sir,” he said. “It must be wonderful to be the sort of man who uses his power to rescue a drowning theatre instead of slapping it under. All the more wonderful since you have no personal interest in our disreputable trade, have you?”

“I have little or no knowledge of it.”

“No. Like vinegar, it doesn’t readily mix with Oil,” Harry said. “Or is it Shipping? I always forget. Doing any yachting lately? But I mustn’t go on being a nuisance. Goodbye, sir. Do remember me to Mrs. G. See you later, Perry, dear boy.”

He ran downstairs and out by the main door.

Mr. Conducis said: “I am late. Shall we—?” They went downstairs and crossed the foyer to the portico. There was the Daimler and, at its door, Peregrine’s friend the chauffeur. It gave him quite a shock to see them again and he wondered for a dotty moment if he would be haled away once more to Drury Place.

“Good morning,” Mr. Conducis said again. He was driven away and Peregrine joined Jeremy Jones at their habitual chop-house on the Surrey Side.

He told the company and Jeremy Jones about the glove before afternoon rehearsal. They all made interested noises. Destiny Meade became very excited and confused on learning that the glove was “historic” and persisted in thinking they would use it as a prop in the production. Marcus Knight was clearly too angry to pay more than token attention. He had seen Destiny return, five minutes late and in hilarious company with W. Hartly Grove. Gertrude Bracey was equally disgruntled by the same phenomenon.

When Harry Grove heard about the glove he professed the greatest interest and explained, in his skittish manner, “Someone ought to tell Mrs. Constantia Guzmann about this.”

“Who in earth,” Peregrine had asked, “is Mrs. Constantia Guzmann?”

“Inquire of the King Dolphin,” Harry rejoined. He insisted on referring to Marcus Knight in these terms, to the latter’s evident annoyance. Peregrine saw Knight turn crimson to the roots of his hair and thought it better to ignore Harry.

The two members of the company who were wholeheartedly moved by Peregrine’s announcement were Emily Dunne and Charles Random and their reaction was entirely satisfactory. Random kept saying: “Not true! Well, of course. Now, we know what inspired you. No—It’s incredible. It’s too much.”

He was agreeably incoherent.

Emily’s cheeks were pink and her eyes bright, and that, too, was eminently satisfactory.

Winter Meyer, who was invited to the meeting, was in ecstasy.

“So what have we got?” he asked at large. “We have got a story to make the front pages wish they were double elephants.”

Master Trevor Vere was not present at this rehearsal.

Peregrine promised Jeremy that he would arrange for him to see the glove as often as he wanted to, at the museum. Meyer was to get in touch with Mr. Greenslade about safe-housing it in the theatre and the actors were warned about secrecy for the time being, although the undercover thought had clearly been that a little leakage might be far from undesirable as long as Mr. Conducis was not troubled by it.

Stimulated perhaps by the news of the glove, the company worked well that afternoon. Peregrine began to block the tricky second act and became excited about the way Marcus Knight approached his part.

Marcus was an actor of whom it was impossible to say where hard thinking and technique left off and the pulsing glow that actors call star-quality began. At earlier rehearsals he would do extraordinary things: shout, lay violent emphasis on oddly selected words, make strange, almost occult gestures and embarrass his fellow players by speaking with his eyes shut and his hands clasped in front of his mouth as if he prayed. Out of all this inwardness there would occasionally dart a flash of the really staggering element that had placed him, still a young man, so high in his chancy profession. When the period of incubation had gone by the whole performance would step forward into full light “And,” Peregrine thought, “there’s going to be much joy about this one.”

Act Two encompassed the giving of the dead child Hamnet’s gloves on her demand to the Dark Lady: a black echo, this, of Bertram’s and Bassanio’s rings and of Berowne’s speculation as to the whiteness of his wanton’s hand. It continued with the entertainment of the poet by the infamously gloved lady and his emergence from “the expense of passion in a waste of shame.” It ended with his savage reading of the sonnet to her and to W.H. Marcus Knight did this superbly.

W. Hardy Grove lounged in a window seat as Mr. W.H. and, already mingling glances with Rosaline, played secretly with the gloved hand. The curtain came down on a sudden cascade of his laughter. Peregrine spared a moment to reflect that here, as not infrequently in the theatre, a situation in a play reflected in a cock-eyed fashion the emotional relationships between the actors themselves. He had a theory that, contrary to popular fancy, this kind of overlap between the reality of their personalities in and out of their roles was an artistic handicap. An actor, he considered, was embarrassed rather than released by unsublimated chunks of raw association. If Marcus Knight was enraged by the successful blandishments of Harry Grove upon Destiny Meade, this reaction would be liable to upset his balance and bedevil his performance as Shakespeare, deceived by Rosaline with W.H.

And yet, apparently, it had not done so. They were all going great guns and Destiny, with only the most rudimentary understanding of the scene, distilled an erotic compulsion that would have peeled the gloves off the hands of the dead child as easily as she filched them from his supersensitive father. “She really is,” Jeremy Jones had said, “the original overproof femme fatale. It’s just there. Whether she’s a goose or a genius doesn’t matter. There’s something solemn about that sort of attraction.”

Peregrine had said, “I wish you’d just try and think of her in twenty years’ time with china-boys in her jaws and her chaps hitched up above her lugs and her wee token brain shrunk to the size of a pea.”

“Rail on,” Jeremy had said. “I am unmoved.”

“You don’t suppose you’ll have any luck?”

“That’s right. I don’t. She is busily engaged in shuffling off the great star and teaming up with the bounding Grove. Not a nook or cranny left for me.”

“Oh, dear, oh dear, oh dear,” Peregrine had remarked and they let it go at that.

On this particular evening Peregrine himself had at last succeeded after several rather baffling refusals in persuading Emily Dunne to come back to supper at the studio. Jeremy, who supervised and took part in the construction and painting of his sets at a warehouse not far away, was to look in at The Dolphin and walk home with them over Blackfriars Bridge. It had appeared to Peregrine that this circumstance, when she heard of it, had been the cause of Emily’s acceptance. Indeed, he heard her remark in answer to some question from Charles Random: “I’m going to Jeremy’s.” This annoyed Peregrine extremely.

Jeremy duly appeared five minutes before the rehearsal ended and sat in the front stalls. When they broke, Destiny beckoned to him and he went up to the stage through the pass-door. Peregrine saw her lay her hands on Jeremy’s coat and talk into his eyes. He saw Jeremy flush up to the roots of his red hair and glance quickly at him. Then he saw Destiny link her arm in Jeremy’s and lead him upstage, talking hard. After a moment or two they parted and Jeremy returned to Peregrine.

“Look,” he said in stage Cockney, “Do me a favour. Be a pal.”

“What’s all this?”

“Destiny’s got a sudden party and she’s asked me. Look, Perry, you don’t mind if I go? The food’s all right at the studio. You and Emily can do very nicely without me: damn sight better than with.”

“She’ll think you’re bloody rude,” Peregrine said angrily, “and she won’t be far wrong, at that.”

“Not at all. She’ll be enchanted. It’s you she’s coming to see.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“Properly speaking, you ought to be jolly grateful.”

“Emily’ll think it’s a put-up job.”

“So what? She’ll be pleased as Punch. Look, Perry, I—I can’t wait. Destiny’s driving us all and she’s ready to go. Look, I’ll have a word with Emily.”

“You’d damn well better, though what in decency’s name you can find to say!”

“It’ll all be as right as a bank. I promise.”

“So you say,” Peregrine contemplated his friend, whose freckled face was pink, excited and dreadfully vulnerable. “All right,” he said. “Make your excuse to Emily. Go to your party. I think you’re heading for trouble but that’s your business.”

“I only hope I’m heading for something,” Jeremy said. “Fanks, mate. You’re a chum.”

“I very much doubt it,” said Peregrine.

He stayed front-of-house and saw Jeremy talk to Emily onstage. Emily’s back was towards him and he was unable to gauge her reaction but Jeremy was all smiles. Peregrine had been wondering what on earth he could say to her when it dawned upon him that, come hell or high water, he could not equivocate with Emily.

Destiny was up there acting her boots off with Marcus, Harry Grove, and now Jeremy, for an audience. Marcus maintained a proprietary air, to which she responded like a docile concubine, Peregrine thought. But he noticed that she managed quite often to glance at Harry with a slight widening of her eyes and an air of decorum that was rather more provocative than if she’d hung round his neck and said: “Now.” She also beamed upon poor Jeremy. They all talked excitedly, making plans for their party. Soon they had gone away by the stage-door.

Emily was still onstage.

“Well,” Peregrine thought, “here goes.”

He walked down the aisle and crossed to the pass-door in the box on the Prompt side. He never went backstage by this route without a kind of aftertaste of his first visit to The Dolphin. Always, behind the sound of his own footsteps on the uncarpeted stairway, Peregrine caught an echo of Mr. Conducis coming invisibly to his rescue.

It was a slight shock now, therefore, to hear, as he shut the pass-door behind him, actual footsteps beyond the turn in this narrow, dark and widening stair.

“Hullo?” he said. “Who’s that?”

The steps halted.

“Coming up,” Peregrine said, not wanting to collide.

He went on up the little stairway and turned the corner.

The door leading onto the stage opened slightly, admitting a blade of light. He saw that somebody moved uncertainly as if in doubt whether to descend or not and he got the impression that whoever it was had actually been standing in the dark behind the door.

Gertrude Bracey said, “I was just coming down.”

She pushed open the door and went onstage to make way for him. As he came up with her, she put her hand on his arm.

“Aren’t you going to Destiny’s sinister little party?” she asked.

“Not I,” he said.

“Unasked? Like me?”

“That’s right,” he said lightly and wished she wouldn’t stare at him like that. She leaned towards him.

“Do you know what I think of Mr. W. Hartly Grove?” she asked quietly. Peregrine shook his head and she then told him. Peregrine was used to uninhibited language in the theatre but Gertrude Bracey’s eight words on Harry Grove made him blink.

“Gertie, dear!”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Gertie, dear. And Gertie dear knows what she’s talking about, don’t you worry.”

She turned her back on him and walked away.

“Emily,” Peregrine said as they climbed up Wharfingers Lane, “I hope you don’t mind it just being me. And I hope you don’t think there’s any skulduggery at work. Such as me getting rid of Jer in order to make a heavy pass at you. Not, mark you, that I wouldn’t like to but that I really wouldn’t have the nerve to try such an obvious ploy.”

“I should hope not,” said Emily with composure.

“Well, I wouldn’t. I suppose you’ve seen how it is with Jeremy?”

“One could hardly miss it.”

“One couldn’t, could one?” he agreed politely.

Suddenly for no particular reason they both burst out laughing and he took her arm.

“Imagine!” he said. “Here we are on Bankside, not much more than a stone’s throw from The Swan and The Rose and The Globe. Shakespeare must have come this way a thousand times after rehearsals had finished for the day. We’re doing just what he did and I do wish, Emily, that we could take water for Blackfriars.”

“It’s pleasant,” Emily said, “to be in company that isn’t self-conscious about him and doesn’t mistake devotion for idolatry.”

“Well, he is unique, so what’s the matter with being devoted? Have you observed, Emily, that talent only fluctuates about its own middle line whereas genius nearly always makes great walloping bloomers?”

“Like Agnes Pointing Upwards and bits of Cymbeline?”

“Yes. I think, perhaps, genius is nearly always slightly lacking in taste.”

“Anyway, without intellectual snobbery?”

“Oh that, certainly.”

“Are you pleased with rehearsals, so far?”

“On the whole.”

“I suppose it’s always a bit of a shock bringing something you’ve written to the melting pot or forge or whatever the theatre is. Particularly when, as producer, you yourself are the melting pot.”

“Yes, it is. You see your darling child being processed, being filtered through the personalities of the actors and turning into something different on the way. And you’ve got to accept all that because a great many of the changes are for the good. I get the oddest sort of feeling sometimes, that, as producer, I’ve stepped outside myself as playwright. I begin to wonder if I ever knew what the play is about.”

“I can imagine.”

They walked on in companionship: two thinking ants moving eastward against the evening out-swarm from the City. When they reached Blackfriars it had already grown quiet there and the little street where Jeremy and Peregrine lived was quite deserted. They climbed up to the studio and sat in the window drinking dry martinis and trying to see The Dolphin on the far side of the river.

“We haven’t talked about the letter and the glove,” Emily said. “Why, I wonder, when it’s such a tremendous thing. You must have felt like a high-pressure cooker with it all bottled up inside you.”

“Well, there was Jeremy to explode to. And of course the expert.”

“How strange it is,” Emily said. She knelt on the window-seat with her arms folded on the ledge and her chin on her arms. Her heartshaped face looked very young. Peregrine knew that he must find out about her: about how she thought and what she liked and disliked and where she came from and whether she was or had been in love and if so what she did about it. “How strange,” she repeated, “to think of John Shakespeare over in Henley Street making them for his grandson. Would he make them himself or did he have a foreman-glover?”

“He made them himself. The note says ‘Mayde by my father.’ ”

“Is the writing all crabbed and squiggly like his signatures?”

“Yes. But not exactly like any of them. People’s writing isn’t always like their signatures. The handwriting experts have all found what they call ‘definitive’ points of agreement.”

“What will happen to them, Perry? Will he sell to the highest bidder or will he have any ideas about keeping them here? Oh,” Emily cried, “they should be kept here.”

“I tried to say as much but he shut up like a spring-trap.”

“Jeremy,” Emily said, “will probably go stark ravers if they’re sold out of the country.”

“Jeremy?”

“Yes. He’s got a manic thing about the draining away of national treasures, hasn’t he? I wouldn’t have been in the least surprised, would you, if it had turned out to be Jeremy who stole the Goya Wellington. Simply to keep it in England, you know.” Emily chuckled indulgently and Peregrine thought he detected the proprietary air of romance and was greatly put out. Emily went on and on about Jeremy Jones and his shop and his treasures and how moved and disturbed he was by the new resolution. “Don’t you feel he is perfectly capable,” she said, “of bearding Mr. Conducis in his den and telling him he mustn’t let them go?”

“I do hope you’re exaggerating.”

“I really don’t believe I am. He’s a fanatic.”

“You know him very well, don’t you?”

“Quite well. I help in their shop sometimes. They are experts, aren’t they, on old costume? Of course Jeremy has to leave most of it to his partner because of work in the theatre but in between engagements he does quite a lot. I’m learning how to do all kinds of jobs from him like putting old tinsel on pictures and repairing bindings. He’s got some wonderful prints and books.”

“I know,” Peregrine said rather shortly. “I’ve been there.”

She turned her head and looked thoughtfully at him. “He’s madly excited about making the gloves for the show. He was saying just now he’s got a pair of Jacobean gloves, quite small, and he thinks they might be suitable if he took the existing beadwork off and copied the embroidery off Hamnet’s glove onto them.”

“I know, he told me.”

“He’s letting me help with that, too.”

“Fun for you.”

“Yes. I like him very much. I do hope if he’s madly in love with Destiny that it works out but I’m afraid I rather doubt it.”

“Why?”

“He’s a darling but he hasn’t got anything like enough of what it takes. Well, I wouldn’t have thought so.”

“Really?” Peregrine quite shouted in an excess of relief. He began to talk very fast about the glove and the play and what they should have for dinner. He had been wildly extravagant and had bought all the things he himself liked best: smoked salmon with caviare folded inside, cold partridge and the ingredients for two kinds of salad. It was lucky that his choice seemed to coincide with Emily’s. They had Bernkasteler Doktor with the smoked salmon and it was so good they went on drinking it with the partridge. Because of Jeremy’s defection there was rather a lot of everything and they ate and drank it all up.

When they had cleared away they returned to the window-seat and watched the Thames darken and the lights come up on Bankside. Peregrine began to think how much he wanted to make love to Emily. He watched her and talked less and less. Presently he closed his hand over hers. Emily turned her hand, gave his fingers a brief matter-of-fact squeeze and then withdrew.

“I’m having a lovely time,” she said, “but I’m not going to stay very late. It takes ages to get back to Hampstead.”

“But I’ll drive you. Jeremy hasn’t taken the car. It lives in a little yard round the corner.”

“Well, that’ll be grand. But I still won’t stay very late.”

“I’d like you to stay forever and a day.”

“That sounds like a theme song from a rather twee musical.”

“Emily: have you got a young man?”

“No.”

“Do you have a waiting list, at all?”

“No, Peregrine.”

“No preferential booking?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Are you ever so non-wanton?”

“Ever so.”

“Well,” he sighed, “it’s original, of course.”

“It’s not meant to madden and inflame.”

“That was what I feared. Well, O.K. I’ll turn up the lights and show you my photographs.”

“You jolly well do,” said Emily.

So they looked at Peregrine’s and Jeremy’s scrap-books and talked interminable theatre shop and presently Emily stood up and said now she must go.

Peregrine helped her into her coat with rather a perfunctory air and banged round the flat getting his own coat and shutting drawers.

When he came back and found Emily with her hands in her pockets looking out of the window he said loudly: “All the same, it’s scarcely fair to have cloudy hair and a husky voice and your sort of face and body and intelligence and not even think about being provocative.”

“I do apologize.”

“I suppose I can’t just give you ‘a single famished kiss’?”

“All right,” said Emily. “But not too famished.”

“Emily!” Peregrine muttered and became, to his astonishment, breathless.

When they arrived at her flat in Hampstead she thanked him again for her party and he kissed her again but lightly this time. “For my own peace of mind,” he said. “Dear Emily, goodnight.”

“Goodnight, dear Peregrine.”

“Do you know something?”

“What?”

“We open a fortnight tonight.”

“You’ve been so very obliging,” Jeremy Jones said to the learned young assistant at the museum, “letting us have access to the glove and take up so much of your time, that Miss Dunne suggested you might like to see the finished copies.”

“That’s very nice of you. I shall be most interested.”

“They’re only stage-props, you know,” Jeremy said, opening a cardboard box. “But I’ve taken a little more trouble than usual because the front row of the stalls will be comparing them to the real thing.”

“And because it was a labour of love,” Emily said. “Mostly that, Jeremy, now, wasn’t it?”

“Well, perhaps. There you are.”

He turned back a piece of old silk and exposed the gloves lying neatly, side by side. The assistant bent over them. “I should think the front row of the stalls will be perfectly satisfied,” he said. “They are really very good copies. Accurate in the broad essentials and beautifully worked. Where did you get your materials?”

“From stock. A thread of silk here, a seed-pearl there. Most of it’s false, of course. The sequins are Victorian, as you see.”

“They fill the bill quite well, however, at a distance. I hope you never feel tempted,” the assistant said with pedantic archness, “to go in for antiquarian forgery, Mr. Jones. You’d be much too successful.”

“To me,” Jeremy said, “it seems a singularly revolting form of chicanery.”

“Good. I understand that a car will be sent here to collect the glove tomorrow. I am to deliver it at the theatre and to see it safely housed. I believe you have designed the setting. Perhaps you would call in here and we can go together. I would prefer to have someone with me. Unnecessarily particular, I dare say, but there’s been so much publicity.”

“I will be delighted to come,” said Jeremy.

“There is to be an observer at the theatre, I understand, to witness the procedure and inspect the safety precautions. Somebody from the police, I think it is.”

“So I hear,” said Jeremy. “I’m glad to know they are being careful.”

The Malaise of First Night Nerves had gripped Peregrine, not tragically and aesthetically by the throat but, as is its habit, shamefully in the guts.

At half past six on Thursday morning he caught sight of himself in the bathroom shaving-glass. He saw, with revulsion, a long, livid face, pinched up into untimely wrinkles and strange dun-coloured pouches. The stubbled jaw sagged and the lips were pallid. There was a general suggestion of repulsive pig-headedness and a terrible dearth of charm.

The final dress-rehearsal had ended five hours ago. In fourteen hours the curtain would rise and in twenty-four hours he would be quivering under the lash of the morning critics.

“Oh God, God, why, why have I done this fearful thing.”

Every prospect of the coming day and night was of an excursion with Torquemada: the hours when there was nothing to do were as baleful as those when he would be occupied. He would order flowers, send telegrams, receive telegrams, answer telephone calls. He would prowl to and fro and up and down all alone in his lovely theatre, unable to rest, unable to think coherently, and when he met anybody—Winty Meyer or the stage-director or the S.M. or some hellish gossip hound—he would be cool and detached. At intervals he would take great nauseating swigs from a bottle of viscous white medicine.

He tried going back to bed but hated it. After a time he got up, shaved his awful face, bathed, dressed, suddenly was invaded by a profound inertia and sleepiness, lay down and was instantly possessed of a compulsion to walk.

He rose, listened at Jeremy’s door, heard him snore and stole downstairs. He let himself out into London.

Into the early morning sounds and sights of the river and of the lanes and steps and streets. The day was fresh and sunny and would presently be warm. He walked to the gap where he could look across the Thames to Southwark. The newly painted stage-house and dome of The Dolphin showed up clearly now and the gilded flagpole glittered so brightly it might have been illuminated.

As he stared at it a bundle ran up and opened out into their new flag: a black dolphin on a gold ground. Jobbins was on his mark in good time. Big Ben and all the clocks in the City struck eight and Peregrine’s heart’s blood rose and pounded in his ears. The glory of London was upon him. A kind of rarefied joy possessed him, a trembling anticipation of good fortune that he was scared to acknowledge.

He was piercingly happy. He loved all mankind with indiscriminate embracement and more particularly Emily Dunne. He ran back to the flat and sang Rigoletto on his way upstairs.

“You look,” Jeremy said, “like the dog’s dinner and you sound like nothing on earth. Can you be joyful?”

“I can and I am.”

“Long may it last.”

“Amen.”

He could eat no breakfast. Even black coffee disgusted him. He went over to the theatre at nine o’clock. Jeremy was to come in at ten with Emily and the assistant from the museum to see the installation of the glove and documents. He, too, crackled like a cat’s fur with First Night Nerves.

When Peregrine arrived at The Dolphin it was alive with cleaners and florists’ assistants. As he went upstairs he heard the telephone ring, stop and ring again. The bar was in a state of crates, cartons and men in shirtsleeves, and on the top landing itself two packing cases had been opened and their contents displayed: a pair of wrought-iron pedestals upon which were mounted two bronze dolphins stylized and sleek. They were a gift from Mr. Conducis, who had no doubt commissioned Mr. Greenslade to go to “the best man.” This he might be said to have done with the result that while the dolphins were entirely out of style with their company and setting they were good enough to hold their own without causing themselves or their surroundings to become ridiculous.

Peregrine suggested that they should be placed in the circle foyer. One on each side of the steps from the sunken landing.

He crossed the foyer and went into the office.

Winter Meyer was behind his desk. He was not alone. A very tall man with an air of elegance and authority stood up as Peregrine entered.

“Oh Lord,” Peregrine thought. “Another of the Conducis swells, or is it somebody to check up on how we behave with the Royals? Or what?”

“ ’Morning, Perry old boy,” said Meyer. “Glad you’ve come in. Mr. Peregrine Jay, Superintendent Alleyn.”