A Circle of Friends Read online

  ‘Good heavens, no. The King and Queen are big parts—they’re Tim and Lucy—and Anne has a lovely time being Glumdalca. She’s a giantess that Tom Thumb’s captured, and she’s madly in love with him. Then George is Noodle, a sort of silly courtier, and we’ve squashed both the ladies-in-waiting into one for Marcia. They’re called Mustacha and Cleora, and she just changes hats for the two parts.’

  ‘Mustacha and Cleora?’ he said. ‘I don’t know why you aren’t doing Rochester’s Sodom, or The Quintessence of Debauchery while you’re about it.’

  ‘I don’t know that. Is it good?’

  ‘It’s not bad. How many more are there in your cast?’

  ‘Just some small parts. I’m doing them with David and Michael Bailey. They’re twins, and they live just over there.’ I pointed. ‘They’re only fourteen, but they pass as courtiers and bailiffs and people like that.’

  ‘And what is the relation between Huncadorey—what’s she called?’

  ‘Huncamunca is the daughter of the King and Queen, of course. She’s a princess. I told you. Perhaps if we’d told you earlier——’

  ‘I get your point.’

  We came into Charncot and drove up past the church and over the little bridge to the drive. I pointed out the local landmarks. Adam didn’t seem interested. He leaned forward and wiped mist off the windscreen, though, as we approached the house. It was gloomy and dripping with rain, the stone not at its softest.

  ‘I thought it was an old house,’ said Adam.

  ‘It’s eighteenth century. How old do you want?’

  ‘I’ve just arrived from Rome, remember. I thought this was supposed to be medieval.’

  ‘It is, at the back. If you care to excavate the front lawn you’ll find the foundations of a nunnery. It was bought by some wool merchant from Thomas Cromwell in the 1530s, turned into a house which burnt down in 1734, and this is what they put up instead.’

  ‘That’s better,’ he said. Americans could be so snobbish about things which existed before their country was even thought of.

  ‘My great-great-grandfather bought it from a descendant of the builder of the present house in eighteen-flfty-something. Thank heavens he didn’t have enough money to pull it down and try again.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Adam, getting out of the car. ‘I guess he did the right thing.’

  ‘It was his son who did the rightest thing. He made all the money we live on.’

  ‘Well, someone has to do it every two or three generations, or families just disappear.’

  I led the way into the house. Although it was still just August there was a big log fire in the drawing-room. Anne and Lucy were helping her sew a costume, and she didn’t get up, she just gave him her cheek to kiss and said, ‘Adam, dear, how nice you could come after all. Lawrence, show him his room and how to get down here again, then we’ll all have a drink.’

  ‘I had two on the train,’ said Adam.

  ‘Is that Merlin’s?’ I said, meaning the costume.

  ‘Yes, dear. Now take Adam away while we finish it.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, as we went upstairs. ‘And I thought I was doing you all a big favour by coming here. I’ve never had such a freezing reception in my life.’

  ‘We’re all extremely busy,’ I said.

  *

  Martin was quite the worst actor I had ever seen. He looked like an embarrassed St Bernard, crawling about on his knees, as he had to, and I sometimes wished he would bark. Anything would have been better than the lines, the way he delivered them. I told him over and over again that it was supposed to be a funny play. He should have known, after all—it was his suggestion. He was simply lugubrious. Eventually, I tried him saying the lines straight. It made just as much sense that way, with Thumb as a sort of honourable British officer, and everyone else crazy and surrealist around him. It was a stroke of genius. As soon as Martin said,

  When I’m not thanked at all, I’m thanked enough.

  I’ve done my duty and I’ve done no more.

  in his normal voice, he sounded exactly like a junior lieutenant quietly acknowledging that he’s just won the battle of the Marne single-handed. And that was excellent. Only of course once I’d said how good he sounded like that, he couldn’t do it again. Still, the final result was infinitely better than his idea of parody blank verse speaking. I wasn’t able to do anything with his movements, though. I was just glad we had him on his knees—he was simply terrible when he was standing up, trying to look natural.

  ‘Would you mind looking at the person you’re supposed to be talking to?’ I said. We had to get his chin down somehow. He would stare over the tops of people’s heads, and when the head was Glumdalca’s he was staring right into the flies—not that we had any flies, of course. We’d strapped eighteen-inch boxes on Anne’s shoes, so that she towered over everyone else, particularly Martin, down there on the floor.

  ‘I’m afraid that if I look at anyone, I forget my lines,’ he said. ‘I’m very sorry.’

  ‘Well, can’t you look just below their eyes—so the actual expression won’t throw you?’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘All right. And try and keep your voice completely natural, as though you’d spoken bad blank verse all your life as a normal thing.’

  We’d practised speaking blank verse at dinner one night, but Mrs Van Dieman was so hopeless at it that it became embarrassing and we had to stop. She stopped a good deal. She only had to enter the summerhouse where we were rehearsing for everyone to stiffen up and forget his moves. She didn’t sit still at rehearsals, either, which was quite inexcusable.

  ‘Listen, Mom,’ I said one day, ‘can’t you keep that woman out of the summerhouse? Can’t you say something to George and Marcia? She’s the most appalling nuisance and I really can’t have it.’

  ‘Oh, can’t you?’ she said. ‘Bad luck.’

  ‘But you must do something. It’s disgraceful.’

  ‘I can’t do anything. She’s a guest. Anyway, what difference does it make whether she fidgeting or not? You walk up and down the whole time yourself.’

  ‘That’s quite different. I’m the director.’

  ‘Well, she’s an old lady, and you’ve got to get used to it. All great art is created under trying circumstances, surely you know that.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mom,’ I said.

  ‘And what’s all this “Mom” bit?’ she said. ‘Since when have I been called “Mom”?’

  ‘Since—Anne and I have decided we’re too old to call you anything else.’

  She stared at me as though I was mad. ‘You’ve decided what?’

  ‘We’re too old to go on calling you ‘Mummy”. You know we are. It’s a childish word, and we’re not children any longer. Besides, it’s horribly embarrassing calling you that in public. I can’t keep saying “Mummy” while I’m directing you in front of other people. It’s just not on.’

  ‘But why “Mom”? It’s absolutely hateful.’

  ‘Well, what would you prefer? “Henrietta”?’

  ‘If you insist.’

  ‘I think that’s terribly pretentious and pseudo-advanced, calling your parents by their Christian names. It never sounds natural.’

  ‘What about “Mother”, then?’

  ‘Well, what about it?’

  ‘Why don’t you call me that? It’s no worse than “Mom”, in fact it’s a lot better. I loathe “Mom”. And you can imagine what your father will say about it.’

  ‘It matches “Pop”. It makes sense, doesn’t it?’

  She just stared at me again.

  ‘Now,’ I said, ‘how are we going to keep Mrs Van Dieman out of the summerhouse? Have you any suggestions?’

  ‘You could try garrotting her, I suppose,’ she said, and went away. I think she was offended that we decided to call her ‘Mom’ without consulting her. Really, there just wasn’t an alternative.

  ‘What do you call your mother?’ I asked Tim later.

  ‘I try not to
call her anything,’ he said. ‘“You” and “she” most of the time.’

  So it became a sort of joke never to call her anything but ‘she’ and ‘her’ from then on. It saved everyone’s feelings, though we couldn’t keep it up when we were writing, because of course it led to confusion. I always wrote ‘Mom’, but I’m not sure about Anne.

  The day after Adam arrived, we had a big session in the morning, walking him through his part and explaining what was going on. The play starts with Tom Thumb coming back triumphantly from the wars, with Glumdalca in tow as his captive. The King asks Tom what he wants for reward, and he says he wants Huncamunca, and because he’s so pleased about winning the war, the King says he can have her. All Adam had to do was react to this, really, and we could have done that quickly and got on. Only of course everyone wasn’t there, as usual. First of all Mrs Bailey wasn’t bringing the twins over till twelve o’clock, and no one had bothered to tell me. And second, we couldn’t find Martin anywhere. It turned out that he’d gone into the town with her to do the shopping, because I’d said I didn’t need her for Act One, which was mostly going to be Adam and Lucy having their big scene together. But I had not said I didn’t want Martin. In fact the whole thing was delayed half an hour till they returned. Of course, it meant we could get on with Lucy and Adam together, and that helped, but everyone else had to hang about. There’s nothing worse than a rehearsal room full of people who’ve arrived on time and then the whole thing has to be postponed because of one person’s selfishness. It’s quite inexcusable.

  Martin was blushing when he did finally show up, and I deliberately ignored him till I’d finished plotting Adam and Lucy. She was quite right about Adam. He might have been late arriving, but he was jolly good in the role. He caught on at once to the kind of zaniness the play was supposed to have, and though he never did get his lines quite straight, he carried off his impromptu inventions with an almost professional confidence. The only trouble was he would keep corpsing. Lucy couldn’t keep her face even remotely straight. I had to pretend to get angry with him.

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘The idea is not to have the actors in hysterics but the audience. It’s jolly unfair to make people laugh on stage. The whole point of this show is that you’re all sort of alienated. You know it’s ludicrous, but you act the parts without a smile.’

  ‘You know,’ said Adam, ‘if you hadn’t been brought up with a theatrical father, you’d make everything much easier for mere amateurs like us to understand. Now, what’s all this talk about being alienated?’

  ‘Never mind. I’ll explain it to you later.’

  ‘Would you like me to explain?’ said George.

  ‘Not now, thank you, we’ve got to get on.’

  ‘But I think you’re quite right. You see, Adam, Brecht’s theory is really only an extension, isn’t it, of what farce actors have been doing for centuries?’

  ‘Oh, Martin,’ I said. ‘So you’ve decided to come to rehearsals after all. We thought you must be ill. I mean, everyone knows how important this morning is for Adam, and you’re the only person to turn up late, so what else could we think? Are you feeling better now?’

  Of course he just turned purple, and there was a sort of hush in the summerhouse, as though I was really being too awful, which I wasn’t. No one ever takes these things seriously enough. That’s why even professional comedy is usually so bad. They just don’t work at it as hard as they should.

  While we were working on the opening, I suddenly had what I thought was a brilliant idea for Anne. She wasn’t at all bad, actually. I mean, she moved pretty well on her boxes, and she said the lines absolutely right, but unfortunately you could hardly hear them. She had a very small voice and really no projection at all. And I had this brainwave, which was to pre-record her speeches on tape, then slow them down so that they came out very deep, and then for her to mime them.

  I explained it to her, telling her how splendid she was in every other way except vocally. She looked at me, with her hair hanging in front of one eye in that pretentious way she did it, and then she clumped to a chair and began to take off the special shoes with attached boxes.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I said.

  ‘I know when I’m not wanted, thanks,’ she said.

  ‘What on earth are you talking about? Of course you’re wanted. I’ve just told you how good you are, except for this one thing.’

  ‘Jesus, Lawrence, I’m not a complete fool. I’m quite aware of what you’re going to think up next. You’ll suddenly decide it’d be much funnier to have someone taller than me wobbling about on these box things. I haven’t listened to Pop’s stories about the theatre all my life for nothing, you know. Once the director starts making drastic suggestions, you’ve had it. Everyone knows that.’

  ‘But I’m not going to cut the part,’ I said. ‘It’ll be longer, if anything.’ I was thinking what a good idea it would have been to have had someone taller, and wondering why I hadn’t thought about it before. But there wasn’t time to rearrange the casting, and anyway there was no other girl that much taller than Anne, so it wouldn’t have helped to change things round. Not at that stage.

  ‘I can tell,’ said Anne. She went on unlacing the shoes. ‘I’m quitting before I’m fired.’

  There were giggles from the rest of the cast, notably from Adam. He would set the others off, even when he wasn’t acting.

  ‘Look, forget it,’ I said. ‘It was only an idea.’

  ‘It was a good idea, that was what was wrong with it.’

  Honestly, you’d think that having a professional father would make the children less impossible.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ I said. ‘Please, Anne, really.’ And then I remembered it wouldn’t have worked anyway. The roof leaking had led to some sort of damage to the electrical circuits, and there’d been a row when the electric guitarist from the rhythm group in Chipping Camden had got a shock. He’d been playing at a dance the previous April, and the joke in the village was that he hadn’t stopped dancing since. ‘We couldn’t do it like that anyway. There aren’t any plugs left in the village hall to plug a tape-recorder into.’

  Anne looked up. ‘Promise?’

  ‘Yes, I promise.’

  ‘If there aren’t any plugs,’ said George, ‘how are you going to fix the lights for the show?’

  I hadn’t even thought about it. Nor had anyone else, of course. I looked round at a circle of appalled faces.

  ‘Well, someone must know about electricity,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t anyone?’

  ‘Tim does,’ said Lucy.

  ‘In that case,’ I said, ‘will you go up to the village hall, Tim, and take everyone with you except Mom and George and Adam. Who wants to go, that is. And will you inspect and report back as soon as possible? I’ll take Adam through his Act Two scenes. We’ll do the battle this afternoon.’

  There was no point in panicking. The show was going to go on on Saturday evening, with or without lights, and since I knew nothing about them myself, it was obviously better to get on with the rehearsals and leave the electricity to electricians. I knew we should have had a proper stage manager, not David Bailey. He was quite good with props, but people would keep confusing him with Michael, and they were both too young to be given any real responsibility. Tom Thumb was becoming more and more a one-man show, behind the scenes.

  We went on with the rehearsal, with Adam still corpsing like mad. He wanted to cut

  Oh take me to thy arms, and never flinch,

  Who am a man, by Jupiter! every inch.

  I said the whole village was hoping there’d be sexy lines, and if we cut the few obvious ones they’d all be terribly disappointed. Mom did rather a good face when he said this, after we’d argued about it, looking sort of pleased and shocked at the same time. Although he was only reading it, and didn’t know what

  To Doctors’ Commons for a licence I

  Swift as an arrow from a bow will fly

  and things like that meant, Adam was exactl
y right, and I was very pleased and said so. After a bit more argument, we changed ‘Doctors’ Commons’, which was rather obscure, to ‘Parson Graham’. He was the village parson.

  ‘Good,’ I said, ‘then that’s settled.’

  By this time the Bailey twins had arrived, and they went into fits when they saw George trying not to laugh at Adam as he whipped himself into a fury about Huncamunca’s faithlessness. I said nothing at the time, just hoping the actors would get used to him as soon as possible. He had a terrible way of leering at whoever he was talking to as he finished a line. Though this was good and a bit like Groucho Marx, the others weren’t ready for it. And then of course they started giggling in expectation, when he wasn’t leering at them. Mrs. Van Dieman, who wandered in with her new dog, said it was all just too wonderful. Since she’d been very rightly refused permission to bring her ghastly Sealyham into England without six months’ quarantine, she’d bought another to take back to America with her. This one was a dog called Jenny, short for General Eisenhower, of all pretentious names.

  I would have liked to have had Adam foam at the mouth at the end of the scene where he rushes off to raise an army to kill Tom Thumb, but we couldn’t think of a way we could guarantee the foam on cue. Anyway, I didn’t trust him not to use it earlier in the scene, just to get an extra laugh. It was odd how she was much better with Adam than she was with Martin. I suppose it shows how much one actor can make a difference to another. Martin lowered everyone’s spirits because he was so hopeless, Adam raised them. I wished I could think of some way of getting Adam to raise Martin’s.

  After we’d finished the scene, I told them to go away and get Adam’s lines straight, and by that time Tim had come back from the village hall with the news about the lights. Basically, there weren’t any at all. There were a string of Christmas tree lights which may have been meant to be footlights, and some ordinary overhead lights, and that was all, and none of them worked because the electricity supply had been disconnected. Why no one had told us, I can’t think. Luckily, though, Tim had initiative, and he’d asked next door, and Mrs Wither had said of course we could plug in an extension from her power point. The real question was how we were going to light the stage beyond the coloured bulbs.