A Circle of Friends Page 8

  ‘Is there nothing the audience can get in and out by?’ I said. ‘Is the whole place dark?’

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ said Tim.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Lucy. ‘It’ll still be light outside, you know. They’ll be able to see.’

  ‘That’s quite out of the question,’ I said. ‘We must have the hall blacked out. That’s essential.’

  Tim was very clever at mechanical things, and he said, ‘The thing to do is to get some car headlights and put them in each corner of the auditorium, pointing at the middle. That’ll fix that. But they won’t do for stage lighting, I don’t think.’

  The grown-ups were horrified.

  ‘Where do you think you’re going to get the headlamps from?’ said Marcia.

  ‘Off cars, of course,’ I said.

  ‘Not off ours you won’t. George, you tell them that’s a crazy idea.’

  ‘Isn’t there any other way?’ said George. ‘I guess we haven’t explored all the avenues yet, have we? Have we really thrashed this problem out?’

  Lucy said, ‘Can’t we borrow some lights from another village in the neighbourhood?’

  ‘Of course we can,’ I said. ‘You’re brilliant, Lucy. You’re the genius of the morning.’

  I sent Martin to phone the amateur dramatic club in the town, and then it was lunchtime. There was so much to do and think about, I felt I hardly had time to eat.

  *

  Of course, Adam hadn’t learned a single line by the time we started in the afternoon, but it didn’t matter, as I wanted to rehearse the battle-scene, and that only had about twenty lines in it altogether. It was awfully difficult to create even a mock battle on a stage as small as ours. Basically what happened was that Adam and Martin swung swords at each other while David Bailey let off blank cartridges off-stage and the rest of the cast shrieked and yelled in the wings. I’d got some smoke to blow across the battle to give the impression of even more chaos than there actually was. The idea was that Adam would lose Martin in the fog (since he was so small) and come on Anne, towering above him, whom he would then kill. Then Martin came back out of the fog and killed him. It doesn’t sound very much, but it had to be elaborately foolish or it would have been terribly unfunny, and I considered my final plotting of it almost choreographic in its complexity. It took ages to work out, and everyone got very excited. Even Martin, thank goodness. He was awfully nice, Martin, and very intelligent and everything, but it was a monstrous piece of mis-casting. He did, though, find some lights, miles away at Cirencester, and he went off to fetch them with Tim. That was at five o’clock, and I was completely exhausted, especially with a run-through coming. It was supposed to start as soon as they got back from Cirencester. I went and lay down.

  I liked to lie with my eyes open staring at the ceiling, which didn’t have any cracks in it if I shielded my right eye. It was like a cinema screen, and I could run any film I felt like, and yet I was far enough away from it not to feel that any of the fantasy was real. I was fantasticating about nothing when there was a knock at the door. I felt too tired to answer. I wanted just to lie there and rest. So I didn’t say anything.

  Lucy opened the door slowly, saw I was there, and said, ‘Sorry, did I wake you up?’

  I pretended to be half-asleep. ‘Wha? Somethin’ matter?’

  ‘You’re working so hard,’ she said.

  ‘Mmm,’ I said, closing my eyes.

  The thing about Lucy was that though she was terribly nice in lots of ways, she was also a bit demanding. I mean, I’d put my arm round her a couple of times and even kissed her, but only in a sort of friendly way, and never where anyone could see us. She made me nervous in the house. I thought she wanted me to neck with her all the time, and what with the play and everything I just didn’t have a spare moment for all that. She was very well developed for her age, and I thought she needn’t have gone round making it so obvious to everyone, they could all see perfectly well for themselves. That sort of thing was very irritating in a girl.

  She came and sat down on the bed and said, ‘I do wish I could help you in some way.’

  ‘You’re very helpful just as you are,’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, tossing her hair back from in front of her face in just the way that maddened me with Anne, ‘I just do what you tell me.’

  ‘Well, no one else does, except Tim.’

  ‘I know. Poor Lawrence. It must be terribly annoying for you. You’re doing so much, too.’

  ‘It wasn’t even my idea in the first place. It was hers.’

  ‘Whose?’

  ‘My mother’s.’

  ‘She’s awfully sweet, your mother.’

  ‘She’s whatever she feels like being. She likes you, so she makes you think she’s sweet.’

  ‘That’s a terrible thing to say, Lawrence. And you know it’s simply not true.’

  ‘What’s not true? That she likes you?’

  ‘Oh, she may or she may not. Though as a matter of fact, I think she actually does. But she’s always quite genuine. She doesn’t put things on, like you said. That was an awful thing to say.’

  ‘She’s my mother. I know her.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re too close to her to know her properly,’ she said, and smiled. I closed my eyes. Her smile was all wet along her lips, and I didn’t want to think about all that. It’s difficult enough being seventeen without having a girl smile with wet lips while she’s sitting on your bed and you’re trying very hard to think about a play you’re directing. She bent towards me, and even though I had my eyes firmly closed I could sense her breasts bending over with her.

  ‘Am I bothering you?’ she said. ‘Lawrence?’

  I opened my eyes again and looked her in the breasts and said, ‘Of course not.’ Then I looked at her face. There were hints of tears in her eyes. I closed mine again hurriedly. ‘I’m just exhausted, that’s all. I was resting.’

  ‘Would you rather I went away?’

  I sighed, because I couldn’t think what to say. If I said ‘Yes’, she’d probably walk out of the play, or at least act huffy for a day or two, and there simply wasn’t time for that. If I said ‘No’, then she’d stay, and she’d want me to kiss her, and generally to neck for a bit, and I didn’t feel like it. Not then and there, in my own bedroom. Not that I wasn’t interested in her and necking. In fact with her breasts hanging over me like that my interest was getting embarrassing and I was wishing I was under the bedclothes instead of on top of them. But it just wasn’t the right moment.

  She began to stroke my forehead, and I sighed again, this time with a sort of phoney gratitude, as though I was enjoying it. I was enjoying it, actually, with part of me. The rest of me was all tense and ready to scream if she didn’t go away at once.

  ‘I’m sorry I disturbed you,’ she said.

  ‘That’s all right.’

  I kept my eyes closed, and I felt the mattress shift as she got up and for a moment I thought she was going to come nearer, but she didn’t, she stood up and kissed me on the forehead, very chastely, and then she tiptoed out of the room. I didn’t open my eyes till I’d definitely heard the door close. I felt irritatingly awake and now I’d have to stay there, pretending to be asleep.

  I put my hand on the blanket where she’d sat. It was very warm. I thought about whether I liked that or not, gazing at the blank piece of ceiling. Then I thought about the lights Martin was bringing from Cirencester, and whether they’d be any good. And then I began imagining the lights I’d’ve liked to have had, and the thunder and lightning effects which would have been splendid but which we couldn’t manage, and then I did go to sleep, so that I was late for my own rehearsal, which they didn’t let me forget. Naturally.

  It wasn’t a great success, actually, because Adam not only didn’t know his lines yet, but had also forgotten most of the moves we’d been through earlier. The whole play kept stopping while he looked round and said, ‘Sorry, am I supposed to be here or here?’ And once one person starts doing
that, so does everyone else. George was very useful, though, and kept helping him to his right positions. George was terribly accurate about things like that, and was always reminding me that the previous day I’d said the opposite of whatever I happened to be saying at the moment. However, I got an idea of the general shape of the thing, even though I was on and off the stage myself, from time to time—either pushing people into their right positions or playing Ghost and Parson. Ghost was rather a bore, and I’d cut a lot of my own lines, hoping this would make people not mind so much when I cut theirs, but it didn’t, of course. It was all terribly slow, naturally, with all the stops and starts, but it was clear what was going to be all right and what wasn’t, without a lot more work. This meant, basically, Martin.

  He’d produced some excellent lights from Cirencester and Tim said they could easily be run off the same lead as the pseudo-footlights, so we’d be all right there. But it was pathetic the way Martin hoped that because he’d driven a few miles to fetch the lights I’d somehow be nicer about his acting. Of course it didn’t make the slightest difference to the fact that he was quite simply dreadful.

  Afterwards I gave general notes, which most people accepted with good grace—I wasn’t always as tactful as I tried to be that evening, but with amateurs tact isn’t always the best way of getting decent performances. They have to be bullied and cudgelled, as she said, agreeing with me for once, rather than blandished and cajoled. It was a pity there wasn’t a better part for Marcia, because she really wasn’t bad as Mustacha and Cleora. I don’t mean she was good, just that she didn’t look embarrassed when she started acting. Mom had a kind of style, too, which worked, and Lucy, who I’d originally thought was going to be a disaster as the Queen, because the Queen’s drunk all the time and Lucy was really rather middle-class and sort of clean-looking, wasn’t at all bad by now, reeling round the stage saying,

  Who but a dog, who but a dog

  Would use me as thou dost?

  And she was just splendid squirting at,

  For, riding on a cat, from high I’ll fall,

  And squirt down royal vengeance on you all.

  Of course, she had some of the best lines. Anne was all right, except for being inaudible and wobbling sometimes on her boxes, and I had to keep telling her not to say ‘Whoops’ in the middle of a line, when she thought she was going to lose her balance. Tim was very solid and not very good, but he knitted his brows and said the lines with a frown which was OK for the King. George was very precise and finicky as Noodle, where I’d’ve liked more dash, but it was his own interpretation and he was very proud of it. If I tried to argue with him, he started burrowing in the character like a Stanislavsky actor. He’d’ve spent an hour on each line, if he’d had the chance. The Bailey twins were quite hopeless, but at least they remembered their words, and since they looked so alike everyone thought it was one person playing five roles, and that was funny in itself. I, naturally, was brilliant throughout.

  Which left the hero. I didn’t know what to say just then, but since I’d been so tactful with everyone else, I decided to be tactful with him, too. So I just said, ‘I don’t think you’re looking very comfortable yet, Martin. I think we’d better go through a couple of scenes tomorrow, working on the movements. I know it’s terribly hard for you to turn round on this cramped stage, but it’s going to be just as cramped in the village hall, and we mustn’t have you falling into the audience or anything.’

  ‘I thought Adam was very good,’ said Mrs Van Dieman, her dog clasped in her arms.

  I just managed to stop myself telling her it was none of her business.

  ‘I thought it was all just marvellous,’ she said. ‘And I know you’re not going to mind if I say just one little thing to you, Lawrence, dear.’

  ‘Look out, Lawrence, your turn,’ said David Bailey. His brother giggled.

  ‘It’s just when you’re being the—bishop, is it? When you’re marrying Tom and the princess. Is that right? Your mother, anyway. You’re fidgeting with the prayer-book. It’s very distracting the way you keep turning the leaves. Now I don’t expect you knew you were doing it, which is why I’m telling you. I guess someone has to tell the director about his own performance.’

  I had, of course, done nothing of the sort, and so I said, ‘Thank you so much, Mrs Van Dieman. How are the programmes coming along?’

  To shut her up, we’d put her in charge of the programmes—single sheets, we’d decided, in eighteenth-century type, if possible, with f’s for s’s and so on.

  ‘They’re getting along just fine,’ she said. ‘Don’t you worry about them. Just remember what I say, and keep your fingers still while you’re doing that marrying. It’s the happy couple we want to look at, not the preacher.’

  I could have killed her. Instead I arranged for a general rehearsal—another run-through, in fact—for noon the next day. ‘Martin, I’d like you and Mom at ten o’clock, for a special rehearsal, and then Adam at eleven, with Mom and Martin and Anne and Tim.’

  ‘Can’t,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to go into the town and buy food.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, can’t someone else do it?’

  ‘The trouble is, I’m the only one who knows the shops.’

  ‘But you went shopping this morning, and delayed the rehearsal for hours.’

  ‘It’s no good being like your father,’ she said. ‘There are ten people staying in the house at the moment, Howard’s arriving tomorrow, and it’s Mrs Fuller’s day off, as you perfectly well know.’

  ‘Can’t she have a day on, for a change?’

  ‘If one knew how one’s children were going to turn out, one would never have them, would one?’ she said, smiling at Mrs Van Dieman. Mrs Van Dieman kissed her dog.

  It was all quite hopeless. How did they expect me to get a decent show on when the people just weren’t available when they were supposed to be? Walking back to the house with Lucy, I said, ‘Did I really fidget with the prayer-book?’

  ‘I’m afraid you did. Just a little.’

  ‘I suppose I was too busy thinking about the others to pay any attention to what I was doing myself.’

  ‘I expect you were. You mustn’t wear yourself out before the first night.’

  ‘First night? There is only one.’

  ‘It’s a shame we cannot do it somewhere else as well. It seems such a waste, just doing it for Charncot. Couldn’t we take it round the neighbourhood?’

  ‘Let’s see if we can get it on here first,’ I said. But it was a good idea. All the local villages had halls. The trouble would be keeping the cast together, of course.

  ‘What sort of a village hall do you have at home?’ I said.

  ‘We don’t live in a real village,’ she said. The McCarthys came from somewhere in Surrey. ‘I suppose there must be a hall somewhere, though. I’ve never been there. I think it’s more for the British Legion and people.’

  ‘I wonder what they do, the British Legion.’

  ‘I don’t know. I think they’re men who got their legs shot off in the first world war. People like that.’

  I shuddered. I had strong feelings about the parts of my body. They seemed very independent and quite capable of taking off on their own. I had to concentrate to keep them all together. I didn’t at all like the idea of having one of them forcibly removed.

  ‘You’re American, aren’t you?’ she said suddenly.

  ‘Yes and no. I was born here, actually. But I can decide when I’m twenty-one.’

  ‘Which way do you think you’ll go?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I’d thought about it, of course. It seemed a pity to have to decide. Countries didn’t really matter. It was all very stupid and old-fashioned, worrying about patriotism and everything. ‘I don’t really mind. But I think I like Charncot more than anywhere, so I’ll probably choose England.’

  ‘Good show,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t like New York at all. But the West’s all right, in fact it’s terrific. You should
go there. It’s—it’s just extraordinary. There’s nowhere like it.’

  ‘I don’t think I’m very interested in that,’ she said. ‘I don’t think girls are very interested in cowboys and Indians and everything. But I suppose one can ride out there.’

  ‘Good heavens, yes. And the people are awfully friendly, really they are. Very independent, but friendly.’

  ‘Your father is American, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Won’t it feel rather odd, not taking his nationality?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t care about all that. I’m much more worried about getting the play into shape before he arrives. He can be terribly sarcastic about his family’s efforts.’

  ‘I hate that,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, he’s all right. As long as you don’t take him too seriously.’

  ‘You do say strange things about your own parents, Lawrence, really you do.’

  In the hall, Mrs Bailey had come for the twins.

  ‘Were they good today?’ she said. She was a big, bosomy woman, who always wore a man’s dirty mackintosh and smelt rather offensively of wet wool.

  ‘They’re always good,’ I said.

  ‘Would it be all right if they don’t come tomorrow then?’ she said, thrusting her bosom out. ‘We’re supposed to go and see an aunt in Cheltenham.’

  ‘Oh no!’ I said. ‘It’s quite out of the question.’

  ‘Boys, get your macs on,’ she said to the twins. ‘It’s raining outside, and we’ve got to put the hens to bed when we get home.’

  Then she pushed me towards the drawing-room, gripping my arm like a wheelbarrow-handle, and trundling. ‘She’s asked to see them,’ she said in a stage whisper. She nodded knowingly, as though I was supposed to understand what this meant.

  ‘So have I,’ I said, trying not to breathe too much wet wool. ‘And I think my claim comes first.’