Light Thickens ra-32 Page 21

  He and his colleagues left in a discreet procession by the stage door.

  MACBETH

  All Personnel

  Announcement Extraordinary

  Owing to unforeseen and most tragic circumstances this play will, as from now, be closed. The play The Glove by Peregrine Jay will replace it. Four of the leading parts are cast from the existing company. The remainder are open for auditions.

  The management thanks the company for its outstanding success and deeply regrets the necessity to close.

  Samuel Goodbody, Chairman Dolphin Enterprises

  At a respectable distance was a second announcement:

  Current Production

  The Glove. Auditions: Today and two following days,

  11 A.M.- 1 p.m., 2 P.M. - 5 p.m.

  Shakespeare: Mr. Simon Morten

  Ann Shakespeare: Miss Nina Gaythorne

  Hamnet Shakespeare: Master William Smith

  The Dark Lady: Miss Margaret Mannering

  Dr. Hall

  Joan Hart

  Mr. W.H.

  Burbage

  Books of the play obtainable at office.

  Peregrine came in and looked at the notices. Then he began to move chairs onto the stage, placing them facing back to back to mark the doorways into Shakespeare’s parlor and leaving a group of six as working props. He brushed against the skeleton still swinging from the gallows and pushed it offstage. Then he went into the stalls and sat down.

  I must pull myself together, he thought. I must go on as usual and I must whip up, from somewhere, enthusiasm for my own play.

  Bob Masters came onstage and peered into the auditorium.

  “Bob,” Peregrine said. “We’ll hold the auditions here in the usual way when everyone comes. Oh, and do put that skeleton somewhere else.”

  “Right,” said Bob. “Will do. People will be down in half an hour — Winty is settling the treasury.”

  “Okay.”

  From the shadows a lonely couple emerged and appeared onstage. William and his mother: she, tidy in a dark gray suit and white blouse, he, also in dark gray — a trouser suit — with white shirt and dark blue tie. He walked over to the board, looked at the notices, and turned to his mother. She joined him and put her hands on his shoulders. “I’m not sure,” he said clearly. “Don’t I have to audition?”

  “Hullo, William,” Peregrine called out. “You don’t, really. We’re taking a gamble on you. But I see you’ve got your book. Go and collect your treasury and come back here and we’ll see how you shape up. All right?”

  “Yes, thank you, sir.”

  “I’ll come back and wait for you outside,” said his mother. She had gone out by the stage door before Peregrine realized what she was up to.

  William went through the house to the offices and, for a short time, Peregrine was quite alone. He sat in the stalls and supposed that people like Nina had begun to say that the Dolphin was an unlucky theatre. And suddenly time contracted and the first production of his play seemed to have scarcely completed its run. He could almost hear the voices of the actors…

  William came back. He went through the opening scenes and Peregrine thought: I was right. The boy’s an actor.

  “You’ll do,” he said. “Go home and learn your lines and come down for rehearsals in a week’s time.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said William and went out by the stage door.

  “ ‘Yes, sir. No, sir. Three bags full, sir,’ ” said an unmistakable voice. It was Bruce Barrabell, at the back.

  Peregrine peered at him. “Barrabell?” he said. “Are you going to audition?”

  “I thought so. For Burbage.”

  He doesn’t come on until the second act, Peregrine thought. He would be good. And he felt a sudden violent dislike of Barrabell. I don’t want him in the cast, he thought. I can’t have him. I don’t want to hear him audition. I don’t want to speak to him. He thought of what Alleyn had told him, the evening before, of Barabell’s confession, if such it could be called.

  The part of Burbage was of a frantically busy man of affairs and an accomplished actor in the supposed Elizabethan manner. Silver-tongued, blast it, thought Peregrine. He’s ideal, of course. Oh, damn and blast!

  There was a bustle as the actors began to trickle in from the offices and Mrs. Abrams came down to take notes for Peregrine and say, “Thank you, darling. We’ll let you know.” The Ross auditioned for Dr. Hall. He read it nicely with a good appreciation of the medical man of his day and his anxious and lethal treatment of young Hamnet. The Gentlewoman tried for Joan Hart, the sister who was closest to the poet. That had been Emily’s part and Peregrine tried not to let himself be influenced by this. If he suggested she come back and play it she would say she was too old now.

  They plodded on.

  At the Yard, Alleyn was going through the statements. He put the regulation conclusion before himself and Mr. Fox, who remained, as it were, anonymous.

  “If all reasonable explanations fail, the investigation must consider the explanation which, however outlandish, is not contradicted?”

  “And what in this case is the outlandish explanation that is not contradicted?”

  “There is not enough time for the murder to be accomplished between the end of the fight and the appearance of Macbeth’s head on the claidheamh-mor, so it must have been done before the fight. But Macbeth spoke during the fight. True, his voice was hoarse and breathless.”

  Alleyn took his head in his hands and did his best to listen to the past. “… get thee back, my soul is too much charged with blood of thine already.” Sir Dougal had the slight but unmistakable burr of Scots in his voice. He had given it a little more room for the Thane: “too much changed.” A grievous sound. It drifted through his memory but his recollection held no personality behind it. Just the broken despair of any breathless, beaten fighter.

  He must look for a new place in the play where the murder could have been committed. It was Sir Dougal who fought and killed Young Siward. He wore his vizor pushed up, displaying his full face. His speech ended with his desperate recollection of the last of the witches’ equivocal pronouncements:

  “… weapons laugh to scorn

  Brandish’d by man that’s of a woman born”

  and there, suddenly, in his imagination, stood the actor. Up went the gauntleted hand and down came the vizor. He went off into the O.P. corner — and was murdered? Macduff came on. He had a soliloquy, broken by skirmishes and determined searches. Outbursts of fighting occurred, now here, now there. The Macbeth faction was dressed alike: black, gauntleted, some masked, others not. The effect was nightmarish. What if Macduff encountered a man uniformed like Macbeth — but not Macbeth? Pipes. Malcolm, with a group of soldiers, marched on. Old Siward greeted him and welcomed him to the castle. He made a ceremonial entry with pipes and drums. Cheering within. The masked “Macbeth” entered. Macduff came on. Saw him. Challenged him. They fought.

  “Yes,” Alleyn said, “It’s possible. It’s perfectly possible but does it throw a spanner in all our calculations and alibis? None of the ‘corpses’ are in position for the curtain call then. The Macduff, Simon Morten, could just, I suppose, have done it, but he’d have got a nasty shock when the dead man turned up to fight him. On the other hand, as Macbeth’s understudy he would know the fight. But he was already engaged in the fight himself. Damn. Barrabell? Gaston? Props? Rangi? All possible. But, wait a bit; all but one impossible. Unless we entertain the idea of a collaborator who understood the fight. Hold on. Let’s take any one of them regardless and see how it works out. Rangi.”

  “Rangi,” said Fox without enthusiasm.

  “He would do the murder at the earlier time. He’d wait till the last minute, then rush around to Gaston and say Sir Dougal’s fainted and he, Gaston, will have to go on for the fight with Macduff. All right so far?”

  “It’s all right,” said Fox, “as far as you’ve got. Motive, though?”

  “Ah. Motive. His great-grandfather k
new how to deal with this sort of nonsense. He told me in the nicest way imaginable. He cut off the other chap’s head and ate him.”

  “Really!” said Fox primly. “How very unpleasant. But I suppose he could have done a return to his greatgrandfather’s state of mind and killed Macbeth. You know, reverted to the Stone Age, sort of.”

  “Any of the others could have done the same thing.”

  “You don’t mean —”

  “I don’t mean the chopper and cooking-pot bit, and I’ll thank you not to be silly. I mean, could have gone to Gaston at the last moment and asked him to fight. The catch in that is, it’d be a damnable bit of evidence against him, later on.”

  “Yerse,” said Mr. Fox. “And whoever he was, he didn’t do it.”

  “I know he didn’t do it. I’m simply trying to find a way out, Fox. I’m trying to eliminate and I have eliminated.”

  “Yes, Mr. Alleyn. You have. When do we book the gentleman?”

  “I doubt if we’ve got a tight enough case, you know.”

  “Do you?”

  “Blast the whole boiling of them,” said Alleyn. He got up and walked about the room. “Do you know what they’re doing now? At this precise moment? Holding auditions for the replacement. A good play by Jay built around the death of Shakespeare’s young son and the arrival of the Dark Lady. So far they haven’t cast the murderer but there’s no guarantee they won’t. What’s more it’s the play they were doing with great success when this theatre reopened. There was a mess then. Remember?”

  “I remember,” said Fox. “Proper turn-up for the books, that one was.”

  “And a right proper young monster the boy was. This is altogether a different story. D’you know who this kid is?”

  “No. Ought I to? Not anything in our line of business, I suppose.”

  “No — well, that’s not quite true. He’s a nice, well-brought-up little chap and he’s the son of the Hampstead Chopper. He doesn’t know that and I’m extremely anxious that he won’t find out, Fox.”

  “Harcourt-Smith, wasn’t it?”

  “It was. His mother dropped the Harcourt. He knows his father’s in a loony-bin but not why.”

  “Broadmoor?”

  “Yes. A lifer.”

  “Fancy that, now,” Fox said shaking his head.

  “One of his father’s earlier victims was a Mrs. Barrabell.”

  “You’re not telling me —”

  “Yes, I am. Wife. Barrabell put those practical jokes together. He hoped the management would think the boy was responsible and give him the sack.”

  “Has he told you? Barrabell?”

  “Not in so many words but as-good-as.”

  “He’s a member of some potty little way-out group, isn’t he?”

  “The Red Fellowship. Yes.”

  “What do we know about them?”

  “The usual. Meeting once a week on Sunday mornings. Genuine enough. No real understanding of the extraordinary and extremely complicated in-fighting that goes on at sub-diplomatic levels. A bit dotty. He and his mates iron everything out to a few axioms and turn a blind eye to all that doesn’t fit. The terrible reality of Bruce Barrabell rests in the fact that his wife was beheaded by a maniac. I think he believes, or has brooded himself into believing, that the child has inherited the father’s madness and that sooner or later it’ll emerge and then it’ll be too late.”

  “I still don’t know where Sir Dougal fits in. If he does.”

  “Nor do I. Except that he was a far from subtle funster and Bruce came in for his share of the ragging. He was forever making snide references to leftish groups and so on.”

  “Hardly enough to make Bruce cut his head off.”

  “Not if we were dealing with anything like normal people. I’m beginning to believe there’s a stepped-up abnormality about the whole thing, Fox. As if the actors had become motivated by the play. That leads one to the proposition that no play should be as compulsive as Macbeth. Which is ridiculous.”

  “All right. So what, to get down to our weekly pay packet, do we do to earn it?”

  “Find a conclusive reason that will give us the time, as being immediately after Brandish’d by man that’s of a woman born. Find alibis for all but one of the company at that time and then face him with it. That’s the ideal, of course. Let’s tackle the alibis and see if we can do it with both feet on the ground. Now, the troops and all the extras and doubles are already engaged in battle. All the thanes; the doctor, disguised as one of Macbeth’s soldiers; Malcolm; Siward. Macduff’s out. That leaves Rangi, Gaston, and Banquo. The King. Props.”

  “He was in and out of the O.P. corner fixing the claidheamh-mor. And that’s all,” said Fox.

  “And we can cut out the King, I imagine.”

  “Why?”

  “Too silly,” said Alleyn. “And too elderly.”

  “All right. No King. How about Props? Any motive at all?”

  “Not unless something turns up. In a way he’s tempting, though. Nobody would pay any attention to him slipping into or out of the O.P. corner. He’d be there with the naked claidheamh-mor when Macbeth came off and could kill him and put his head on it.”

  “He’d have to give the phony message to Gaston, but I think it would hold up,” said Fox. “Gaston’s hanging about there and Props says to him, ‘For Gawd’s sake, sir, he’s fainted. You’ve got this one speech and the fight. You know it. You can do it.’ And later on when the body’s found he says it was so dark he just saw it lying there and realizing there was only a matter of minutes before Macbeth’s entrance for the fight he rushed out, found Gaston, and asked him. It hangs together. Except —”

  “No motive? Bloody hell, Fox,” shouted Alleyn, “we’ve lost our touch. We’ve gone to pieces. Gaston being told Macbeth’s fainted doesn’t work. It doesn’t work with anyone asking him to do it. He’d have told us. Of course he would. Back to square one.”

  There was a long silence.

  “No,” said Alleyn at last. “There’s only one answer.”

  “I suppose so,” said Fox heavily.

  The auditions were nearly over and the play almost fully cast from the present company. In the office, announcements for the press were being telephoned and Peregrine actually felt better. Whatever the outcome and whoever was arrested, they were doing their own thing. In their own theatre. They were doing what they were meant to do: getting on with a new piece.

  The discordant note was sounded, needless to say, by Gaston. He had not, of course, auditioned but there he was at the theatre. No sooner had an audition finished than he began. He buttonholed one nervous actor after another and his subject was the claidheamh-mor. He wanted it back. Urgently. They tried to shut him up, but he kept recurring like a decimal and complaining in an audible rumble that he would not be held responsible for anything that happened to anyone into whose care it had been consigned.

  He asked to see Alleyn and was told he and Fox were not at the theatre. Where had they gone? Nobody knew.

  At last Peregrine stopped Rangi’s audition and said he could not allow Gaston into the auditorium while they were working. What did he want?

  “My claidheamh-mor,” he roared. “How often must I say it! Are you an idiot, have you not been given sufficient evidence of what it can do if a desecrating hand is laid upon it? It is my fault,” he shouted. “I allowed it to become involved in this sanguinary play. I released its power. You have only to study its history to realize —”

  “Gaston! Stop! We are busy and it is no affair of ours. We have no time to listen to your diatribe and it is not within my sphere of activities to demand the thing’s return. In any case I wouldn’t get it. Do pipe down like a good chap. The weapon is perfectly safe in police custody and will be returned in due course.”

  “Safe!” he cried swinging his arms about alarmingly. “Safe! You will drive me demented.”

  “Not far to go,” remarked a splendid voice in the back stalls.

  “Who made that repulsive ob
servation?”

  “I did,” said Barrabell. “In my opinion you’re certifiable. In any correctly ordered state —”

  “Shut up, both of you,” Peregrine cried. “Good Lord! Haven’t we had enough to put up with! If you can’t pipe down both of you go out of earshot and get on with it in the yard.”

  “I shall bring this up with Equity. It is not the first time I have been insulted in this theatre —”

  “— my claidheamh-mor. I implore you to consider —”

  “Gaston! Answer me. Are you here to audition? Yes or no.”

  “I am here… no.”

  “Barrabell, are you here to audition?”

  “I was. I now see that it would be useless.”

  “In that case neither of you has any right to stay. I must ask you both to go. Go, for pity’s sake, both of you.”

  The doors into the foyer opened. Winty Meyer’s voice said: “Oh, sorry. I didn’t realize —”

  “Mr. Meyer, wait! I must speak with you. My claidheamh-mor! Mr. Meyer! Please!”

  Gaston hurried down the aisle and out into the foyer. The doors swung to behind him and he became a distant rumpus.

  Peregrine said: “I’m extremely sorry, Rangi. We’ll go on when I’ve settled this idiotic affair. Now then, Bruce.”

  He took Barrabell’s elbow and led him aside. “My dear chap,” he said and forced his voice into a warmth he did not feel. “Alleyn has told me of your tragedy. I couldn’t be sorrier for you. But I must ask you this. Don’t you feel that with young William in the company you would be most unhappy? I do. I —”

  Barrabell turned deadly white. He stared at Peregrine.

  “You little rat,” he said. He turned on his heel and left the theatre.

  “Whew!” said Peregrine. “Okay, Rangi. We’ll have an audition.”

  Chapter 9

  FINIS

  And now the theatre was almost rid of Macbeth. The units that from the audience had seemed solid but had silently revolved, showing different aspects of the scenery, had been taken apart and stacked against the walls.