Pageant of Murder

CHAPTER THREE

Town Hall Rehearsal

“…it would seem that there are good reasons for believing that Brentford was the scene of human activity at a very early period of civilisation.”

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The Town Hall rehearsal, which took place at half-past seven that same evening, had both a comic and a sinister aspect. The Tossington Tots’ manageress had demanded what the special sub-committee agreed was an unnecessarily high fee for allowing her charges to attend the rehearsal, and there had been an acrimonious correspondence and some frenzied telephone calls before the chairman had given in to what he regarded (and said so, in very plain terms) as extortion. The Tots themselves seemed happy enough but their manageress was haughty and tight-lipped to begin with, and then proceeded to find fault with the dressing-room and to comment acidly upon the primitive nature of the pulley which operated the curtain.

Even Kitty’s sunny good-temper was sorely tried and, when the Tots had left the Town Hall, and Laura remarked with candour, that she “would have dotted that woman one,” Kitty was compelled to admit that to have done so would have relieved her feelings to quite an appreciable extent.

The cross-talk comedians did not turn up. They had promised to send a script to be submitted to, and vetted by, the special sub-committee, but this had not been received. The woman member was in agreement with Kitty, who said she was sure that some of the jokes would have to be toned down or, preferably, left out altogether, but, as the chairman pointed out, this was not the B.B.C. Home Service; it was only what people would be used to. Brayne, he insisted, was not a mealy-mouthed town, and people liked a bit of a laugh, the rest of the programme being, he thought, suitable only for the egg-heads.

The formation dance team turned up in what Kitty particularised as dribs and drabs, but finally all arrived. They condemned the stage as being much too small, divided their numbers into two sets of eight, re-arranged their routine and took up so much of the time that the chairman looked several times at his watch and muttered that the hall was only booked until ten o’clock and that the caretaker would want to lock up and go home to his supper. The ballet, who had become very restive, cried off. They knew the stage and the hall, they said, and could not put up with any more hanging about. Kitty apologised charmingly for the delay and thanked them for coming. Their ballet-mistress, who had been screaming at them in Italian in the dressing-room, at this looked extremely disdainful, and withdrew her troupe in haughty silence. Kitty made an unseemly grimace behind the massive, Moomin-like back.

“What with the Tossington Tots and the frightful woman in charge of them, and that ghastly formation team hogging more than half the rehearsal time, and now this snooty lot, the only thing I’m thankful for is that we haven’t had the combined school choirs hanging about all the evening. Goodness knows what they’d have been up to by now,” she said. “Oh, well, there’s nothing to come but The Merry Wives. I suppose they’re still in their dressing-room. I’d better go and rout them out and tell them to get cracking. Twenty minutes dead, and not a second more, can they have.”

She went back-stage and returned with a typescript, which she turned over discontentedly.

“What’s this?” asked Laura.

“They say they may need a prompter, and don’t possess one.”

“Oh, Lord! That bodes no good. Can’t they prompt each other? I thought amateurs usually did.”

“I don’t know! Here, Dog, be an angel and do the prompting for me. You’ve a much quicker eye for words than I have. Anyway, there looks a lot more than twenty minutes here. If there is, they’ll have to cut it.”

Laura took the script. It was dog-eared and not too clean, and appeared to be the property of Falstaff, since his were the only stage directions pencilled in. There was a delay while the company put up the simple scenery which was to decorate their stage, and the hiatus lasted long enough for Kitty to go back-stage again and exhort them to be as quick as possible. The stage-manager, who was also taking one of the parts, snarled at her, and Falstaff’s small page Robin chose this moment to catch his foot in a piece of scenery and bring it down.

Kitty bit back an unladylike expression which she had picked up in her workrooms, but the stage-manager was less self-restrained, and cursed the child roundly. However, all was in position at last, and Kitty made a mental note of the arrangements and suggested that on the morrow she should get a couple of Council workmen to put up the scenery, so that the company might reserve all their energies for the actual play. This helpful notion received curt thanks, the curtain went up, and an excerpt from The Merry Wives of Windsor took the boards.

Laura, following the script and only looking up as often as it seemed safe to do so—the play was not one with which she was particularly familiar—could not help wondering why the drama club had chosen it. Mistress Ford and Mistress Page lacked any of the sparkle necessary to their parts, Falstaff ranted unbecomingly and was the reverse of a figure of fun, the jealous Ford was merely a clod, and Laura formed the impression that Page, Evans and Caius had been given parts for the simple reason that there was nobody else available. Little Robin, the page, was attractive to look at, but recited his lines without expression. Obviously he understood very little of what he or anyone else was saying. In one respect only did the company shine. They did not require any prompting, but gabbled away as though they knew they were pressed for time.

Kitty, accustomed, in her own workrooms and salon, to keeping her ear to the ground, soon realised that other matters, apart from shortage of time and talent, were in operation. There was an undercurrent of exasperation and disillusionment. Nobody was prepared to be prompted for fear of suffering loss of face and of promoting the ill-concealed joy of rivals, for rivalry was certainly in the air. There was no team spirit among the players. Their aim and object, it began to be apparent, was to outplay and discredit one another, so much so that a most uncomfortable and supercharged atmosphere prevailed.

Mistress Ford and Mistress Page did not merely lack sparkle. One was sullen; the other giggled nervously. Falstaff was ranting because he also was nervous—not only nervous about his acting, Kitty deduced, but full of darker fears. What he was afraid of she did not know. He seemed a harmless little man who was hardly likely to have offended anybody except inadvertently, but she thought that, in both the mental and physical sense, he was too much of a light-weight for the part in which he had been cast.

She wondered who had been responsible for the casting. No producer had been forthcoming and, in the absence of this central authority, there might have been bickering, backbiting and general ill-feeling over the allotment of the parts. Page, Evans and Caius, almost more than the others, gave the impression of being anxious to get the scene over and done with as soon as possible, and Kitty came to the conclusion that the oafish Ford was even more disgruntled than the rest of the cast. She noticed that, although Page was wearing a sword as part of his costume, Ford was without one. She wondered whether the one sword had been a bone of contention and silently cursed the firm from which the club had hired the costumes. Players, she knew, were touchy concerning the props and accessories, especially where these were non-existent.

“We could do without most of this,” she muttered to Laura. “However much more is there of it?” She applauded loudly when the gentlemen followed Falstaff and the clothes-basket off the stage, only to find that, after a very short exchange of speeches between Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, the gentlemen came on again and remained until the end of the scene, after which they took a couple of curtain calls.

“Oh, well, I suppose they want to rehearse the curtains as much as themselves,” said Kitty. She applauded vigorously until she discovered from Laura that there was more to come. There also was an ominous amount of thumping behind the curtain.

“I think they must be changing the scenery,” Laura observed. “The next bit I’ve got here indicates a room in the Garter Inn.”

“Oh, Lord! They can’t do any more! There isn’t time!” cried Kitty. She disappeared behind the scenes again, leaving the chairman to confide to Laura that the caretaker had been standing in the doorway for the past five minutes and must be allowed to lock up and go home.

After a short time, Kitty re-appeared with the stage manager, who was still in costume, presented him before the chairman and said wearily, “Would you mind speaking to Mr Collis? He refuses to listen to me when I tell him they must go home.”

“Look here, old man,” said Topson awkwardly, “sorry and all that, but, honestly, you really must pack up now. We’ve only got the hall until ten, and it’s well past that already.”

“But we’ve only done half of it! It isn’t our fault the other rehearsals hogged so much of the time! I demand to be allowed to do the rest of our item,” said the stage-manager.

“Well, you’ll have to do it in the dark, then, and behind locked doors until the caretaker lets you out tomorrow morning,” said Councillor Topson. “I know it’s bad luck on your mob, but it’s just one of those things.”

At this moment Mistress Page took the floor, and so did the caretaker, meaningly jingling his keys.

“Yes, yes, O.K., John,” said Topson hastily. “The drama club are just about to pack up.”

“Of course we are,” said Mistress Page, fixing the stage-manager with a stony eye. “I’ve got to get young Tony home. It’s ever so long past his bedtime. His mother will be having a fit.”

Assailed thus on all sides, the stage-manager gave way.

“Oh, all right,” he sullenly agreed. “If it wasn’t for disappointing the public, I’d withdraw my lot from the bally show altogether.”

“Well!” said Kitty, an hour or so later, when she and Laura had returned to the flat. “That’s that, that was! Some of these people would drive you to drink!”

“An excellent idea,” said her husband. “You two relax and I’ll start pouring. On the whole, how did it go, though?”

“Ghastly,” Kitty replied. “Wasn’t it ghastly, Dog?”

“Well, I must admit that a few temperaments seem to have been thrown, but these last-ditch rehearsals are always dodgy.”

“There’ll be murder done among the members of the drama club if temperaments are thrown tomorrow,” said Kitty. “I suppose they’re all a bit on edge, but when I went behind the scenes to hurry them up with their changing, what with the caretaker breathing out smoke and fire and all that, there was no reason for Mistress Page to claim that Mistress Ford spoilt her longest speech by butting in on it just before the end and robbing her of the words “or bid farewell to your good life for ever.” Of course, the silly woman did butt in, Dog, if you noticed, but there was a lot of tension all the way through.”

“I don’t see why any anxiety. None of them fluffed.”

“No, they were determined not to. I’ve experienced a lot of temperament-throwing in my various establishments, Dog, and I should say that that lot were all at each other’s throats. Of course, you were glued to the script, but I was watching, and it seemed to me they were all in a state of angry nerves, and as for poor little Falstaff-what a choice for the part! Anyway, to smooth things over, I’ve agreed that there will be a ten-minute interval tomorrow night while their second scene is got ready, and I’m going to put them on before the ballet. That’s per programme. Oh, and there were high words passing between Ford and Page, by the way. One of the property swords got lost, and both wanted to claim the one that was left. In the end, Page managed to snitch it, but both were plainly peeved.”

“Good Lord!” said her husband. “How childish can one get?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Kitty. “Don’t you remember how you created at the time of that fancy dress ball we went to, when the hirer people had forgotten to pack you a pair of Cavalier boots and you had to wear your riding ones?”

“That was different. The lack of those boots ruined the costume, as I jolly well pointed out to them when I sent the stuff back.”

“Well, they knocked ten shillings off the bill.”

“As though that made up for a spoilt evening!”

“Oh, go on with you! You know jolly well that, half-way through, you went to the cloakroom and changed into your dancing pumps, which you’d treacherously taken with you without my knowing.”

“Well, I wasn’t the only one, so what?”

Laura laughed.

“Let’s hope the missing sword turns up all right,” she said. “And talking of weapons, what price that battleaxe who runs the Tossington Tots?”

“And the very Italian lady who bosses the ballet?” said Kitty, giggling.

“And that bad-tempered lot in the formation team! Still, I did have quite a lot of sympathy there. With eight of them doing half the routine and the other eight doing the rest of it, it won’t be nearly as spectacular as they intended.”

“I’m worried about those damned comedians,” said Kitty.

“Three times have I ’phoned them for that script and still it hasn’t turned up. Why won’t they send it, unless their jokes are blue round the edges?”

“I don’t suppose they’ll be too blue for the audience,” said her husband.