Death at the Dolphin Page 6

  ‘I hope,’ Peregrine said with a very direct look at his manager, ‘staggering though it may be, I got it on my reputation as a director and playwright. I believe I did. There is no other conceivable explanation, Winty.’

  ‘No, no, old boy, of course not,’ said Winter Morris in a hurry.

  ‘As for W. Hartly Grove, I suppose I can’t jib. As a matter of fact he would be well cast as Mr W. H. It’s his sort of thing. But I don’t like it. My God,’ Peregrine said, ‘haven’t I stuck my neck out far enough with Marcus Knight in the lead and liable to throw an average of three dirty great temperaments per rehearsal? What have I done to deserve Harry Grove as a bonus?’

  ‘The Great Star’s shaping up for trouble already. He’s calling me twice a day to make difficulties over his contract.’

  ‘Who’s winning?’

  ‘I am,’ said Winter Morris. ‘So far.’

  ‘Good for you.’

  ‘I’m getting sick of it,’ Morris said. ‘Matter-of-fact it’s on my desk now.’ He lifted a sheet of blotting paper and riffled the pages of the typewritten document he exposed. ‘Still,’ he said, ‘he’s signed and he can’t get past that one. We almost had to provide an extra page for it. Take a gander.’

  The enormous and completely illegible signature did indeed occupy a surprising area. Peregrine glanced at it and then looked more closely.

  ‘I’ve seen that before,’ he said. ‘It looks like a cyclone.’

  ‘Once seen never forgotten.’

  ‘I’ve seen it,’ Peregrine said, ‘recently. Where, I wonder.’

  Winter Morris looked bored.

  ‘Did he sign your autograph book?’ he asked bitterly.

  ‘It was somewhere unexpected. Ah, well. Never mind. The fun will start with the first rehearsal. He’ll want me to rewrite his part, of course, adding great hunks of ham and corn and any amount of fat. It’s tricky enough as it is. Strictly speaking a playwright shouldn’t direct his own stuff. He’s too tender with it. But it’s been done before and by the Lord I mean to do it again. Marco or no Marco. He looks like the Grafton portrait of Shakespeare. He’s got the voice of an angel and colossal prestige. He’s a brilliant actor and this is a part he can play. It’ll be a ding-dong go which of us wins but by heaven I’m game if he is.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Morris. ‘Live for ever, dear boy. Live for ever.’

  They settled at their respective desks. Presently Peregrine’s buzzer rang and a young woman provided by the management and secreted in an auxiliary cubby-hole said: ‘Victoria and Albert for you, Mr Jay.’

  Peregrine refrained from saying: ‘Always available to Her Majesty and the Prince Consort.’ He was too apprehensive. He said: ‘Oh yes. Right. Thank you,’ and was put into communication with the expert.

  ‘Mr Jay,’ the expert said, ‘is this a convenient time for you to speak?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘I thought it best to have a word with you. We will, of course, write formally with full reports for you to hand to your principal but I felt – really,’ said the expert and his voice, Peregrine noticed with mounting excitement, was trembling, ‘really, it is the most remarkable thing. I – well, to be brief with you, the writing in question has been exhaustively examined. It has been compared by three experts with the known signatures and they find enough coincidence to give the strongest presumption of identical authorship. They are perfectly satisfied as to the age of the cheverel and the writing materials and that apart from salt-water stains there has been no subsequent interference. In fact, my dear Mr Jay, incredible as one might think it, the glove and the document actually seem to be what they purport to be.’

  Peregrine said: ‘I’ve always felt this would happen and now I can’t believe it.’

  ‘The question is: what is to be done with them?’

  ‘You will keep them for the time being?’

  ‘We are prepared to do so. We would very much like,’ said the expert and Peregrine caught the wraith of a chuckle in the receiver, ‘to keep them altogether. However! I think my principals will, after consultation, make an approach to – er – the owner. Through you, of course and – I imagine this would be the correct proceeding – Mr Greenslade.’

  ‘Yes. And – no publicity?’

  ‘Good God, no!’ the expert ejaculated quite shrilly. ‘I should hope not. Imagine!’ There was a long pause. ‘Have you any idea,’ the expert said, ‘whether he will contemplate selling?’

  ‘No more than you have.’

  ‘No. I see. Well: you will have the reports and a full statement from us within the next week. I – must confess – I – I have rung you up simply because I – in short – I am as you obviously are, a dévoté.’

  ‘I’ve written a play about the glove,’ Peregrine said impulsively. ‘We’re opening here with it.’

  ‘Really? A play,’ said the expert and his voice flattened.

  ‘It isn’t cheek!’ Peregrine shouted into the telephone. ‘In its way it’s a tribute. A play! Yes, a play.’

  ‘Oh, please! Of course. Of course.’

  ‘Well, thank you for telling me.’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  ‘What? Oh, yes. Of course. Goodbye.’

  Peregrine put down the receiver and found Winter Morris staring at him.

  ‘You’ll have to know about this, Winty,’ he said. ‘But as you heard – no publicity. It concerns the Great Person so that’s for sure. Further it must not go.’

  ‘All right. If you say so: not an inch.’

  ‘Top secret?’

  ‘Top secret as you say. Word of honour.’

  So Peregrine told him. When he had finished, Morris ran his white fingers through his black curls and lamented. ‘But listen, but listen, listen, listen. What material! What a talking line! The play’s about it. Listen: it’s called The Glove. We’ve got it. Greatest Shakespeare relic of all time. The Dolphin Glove. American offers. Letters to the papers: “Keep the Dolphin Glove in Shakespeare’s England.” “New fabulous offer for Dolphin Glove!’ Public subscriptions. The lot! Ah Perry, cherub, dear dear Perry. All this lovely publicity and we should keep it secret!’

  ‘It’s no good going on like that.’

  ‘How do you expect me to go on? The Great Person must be handled over this one. He must be seen. He must be made to work. What makes him work? You’ve seen him. Look: he’s a financial wizard: he knows. He knows what’s good business. Listen: if this was handled right and we broke the whole story at the psychological moment: you know, with the publicity: the right kind of class publicity…Look – ’

  ‘Do pipe down,’ Peregrine said.

  ‘Ah! Ah! Ah!’

  ‘I’ll tell you what my guess is, Winty. He’ll take it all back to his iron bosom and lock it away in his Louis-the-Somethingth bureau and that’s the last any of us will ever see of young Hamnet Shakespeare’s cheverel glove.’

  In this assumption, however, Peregrine was entirely mistaken.

  II

  ‘But that’s all one,’ Marcus Knight read in his beautiful voice. ‘Put it away somewhere. I shall not look at it again. Put it away.’

  He laid his copy of Peregrine’s play down and the six remaining members of the company followed his example. A little slap of typescripts ran round the table.

  ‘Thank you,’ Peregrine said. ‘That was a great help to me. It was well read.’

  He looked round the table. Destiny Meade’s enormous black eyes were fixed on him with the determined adulation of some mixed-up and sexy medieval saint. This meant, as he knew, nothing. Catching his eye, she raised her fingers to her lips and then in slow motion, extended them to him.

  ‘Darling Perry,’ she murmured in her celebrated hoarse voice, ‘what can we say? It’s all too much. Too much.’ She made an appealing helpless little gesture to the company at large. They responded with suitable if ambiguous noises.

  ‘My dear Peregrine,’ Marcus Knight said (and Peregrine thought: ‘his v
oice is like no other actor’s). ‘I like it. I see great possibilities. I saw them as soon as I read the play. Naturally, that was why I accepted the role. My opinion, I promise you, is unchanged. I look forward with interest to creating this part.’ Royalty could not have been more gracious.

  ‘I’m so glad, Marco,’ Peregrine said.

  Trevor Vere whose age, professionally, was eleven, winked abominably across the table at Miss Emily Dunne who disregarded him. She did not try to catch Peregrine’s eye and seemed to be disregardful of her companions. He thought that perhaps she really had been moved.

  W. Hartly Grove leant back in his chair with some elegance. His fingers tapped the typescript. His knuckles, Peregrine absently noted, were like those of a Regency prizefighter. His eyebrows were raised and a faint smile hung about his mouth. He was a blond man, very comely, with light blue eyes, set far apart, and an indefinable expression of impertinence. ‘I think it’s fabulous,’ he said. ‘And I like my Mr W. H.’

  Gertrude Bracey, patting her hair and settling her shoulders said: ‘I am right, aren’t I, Perry? Ann Hathaway shouldn’t be played unsympathetically. I mean: definitely not a bitch?’

  Peregrine thought: ‘Trouble with this one: I foresee trouble.’

  He said cautiously: ‘She’s had a raw deal, of course.’

  Charles Random said: ‘I wonder what Joan Hart did with the gloves?’ and gave Peregrine a shock.

  ‘But there weren’t any gloves, really,’ Destiny Meade said, ‘were there, darling? Or were there? Is it historical?’

  ‘No, no, love,’ Charles Random said. ‘I was talking inside the play. Or out of wishful thinking. I’m sorry.’

  Marcus Knight gave him a look that said it was not usual for secondary parts to offer gratuitous observations round the conference table. Random, who was a very pale young man, reddened. He was to play Dr Hall in the first act.

  ‘I see,’ Destiny said. ‘So I mean there weren’t really any gloves? In Stratford or anywhere real?’

  Peregrine looked at her and marvelled. She was lovely beyond compare and as simple as a sheep. The planes of her face might have been carved by an angel. Her eyes were wells of beauty. Her mouth, when it broke into a smile, would turn a man’s heart over and although she was possessed of more than her fair share of common sense, professional cunning and instinctive technique, her brain took one idea at a time and reduced each to the comprehensive level of a baby. If she were to walk out on any given stage and stand in the least advantageous place on it in a contemptible lack of light and with nothing to say, she would draw all eyes. At this very moment, fully aware of her basic foolishness, Marcus Knight, W. Hartly Grove and, Peregrine observed with dismay, Jeremy Jones, all stared at her with the solemn awareness that was her habitual tribute while Gertrude Bracey looked at her with something very like impotent fury.

  The moment had come when Peregrine must launch himself into one of those pre-production pep-talks upon which a company sets a certain amount of store. More, however, was expected of him, now, than the usual helping of: ‘We’re all going to love this so let’s get cracking’ sort of thing. For once he felt a full validity in his own words when he clasped his hands over his play and said:

  ‘This is a great occasion for me.’ He waited for a second and then, abandoning everything he had so carefully planned, went on. ‘It’s a great occasion for me because it marks the rebirth of an entrancing playhouse: something I’d longed for and dreamed of and never, never thought to see. And then: to be given the job I have been given of shaping the policy and directing the productions and – as a final and incredible bon-bouche – the invitation to open with my own play – I do hope you’ll believe me when I say all this makes me feel not only immensely proud but extremely surprised and – although it’s not a common or even appropriate emotion in a directorplaywright – very humble.

  ‘It might have been more politic to behave as if I took it all as a matter of course and no more than my due, but I’d rather, at the outset, and probably for the last time, say that I can’t get over my good fortune. I’m not the first dramatist to have a bash at the man from Warwickshire and I’m sure I won’t be the last. In this piece I’ve – well you’ve seen, I hope, what I’ve tried to do. Show the sort of combustion that built up in that unique personality: the terrifying sensuality that lies beyond the utterly unsentimental lyricism: gilded flies under daisies pied and violets blue. His only release, his only relief, you might say, has been his love for the boy Hamnet. It’s his son’s death that brings about the frightful explosion in his own personality and the moment when Rosaline (I have always believed the Dark Lady was a Rosaline) pulls Hamnet’s glove on her hand is the climax of the entire action. The physical intrusion and his consent to it brings him to the condition that spewed up Timon of Athens and was seared out of him by his own disgust. I’ve tried to suggest that for such a man the only possible release is through his work. He would like to be an Antony to Rosaline’s Cleopatra, but between himself and that sort of surrender stands his genius. And – incidentally – the hard-headed bourgeois of Stratford which, also, he is.’

  Peregrine hesitated. Had he said anything? Was it any good trying to take it further? No.

  ‘I won’t elaborate,’ he said. ‘I can only hope that we’ll find out what it’s all about as we work together.’ He felt the abrupt upsurge of warmth, that is peculiarly of the theatre.

  ‘I hope, too, very much,’ he said, ‘that we’re going to agree together. It’s a great thing to be starting a playhouse on its way. They say dolphins are intelligent and gregarious creatures. Let us be good Dolphins and perform well together. Bless you all.’

  They responded at once and all blessed him in return and for the occasion, at least, felt uplifted and stimulated and, in themselves, vaguely noble.

  ‘And now,’ he said, ‘let’s look at Jeremy Jones’s sets and then it’ll be almost time to drink a health to our enterprise. This is a great day.’

  III

  Following the reading there was a small party, thrown by the Management and thrown with a good deal of quiet splendour. It was held in the circle foyer with the bar in full array. The barman wore a snowy white shirt, flamboyant waistcoat and gold albert. There was a pot-boy with his sleeves rolled up to his shoulders like the one in Our Mutual Friend. The waiters were conventionally dressed but with slightly Victorian emphasis. Champagne in brassbound ice buckets stood along the mahogany bar and the flowers, exclusively, were crimson roses set in fern leaves.

  Mr Greenslade was the host. Apart from the Company, Jeremy, Winter Morris, the publicity agents and the stage director and his assistant, there were six personages of startling importance from the worlds of theatre finance, the Press and what Mr Morris, wide-eyed, described as ‘the sort you can’t, socially speaking, look any higher than.’ From a remark let fall by Mr Greenslade, Peregrine was led to suppose that behind their presence could be discerned the figure of Mr Conducis who, of course, did not attend. Indeed it was clear from the conversation of the most exalted of the guests that Mr Conducis was perfectly well-known to be the presiding genius of The Dolphin.

  ‘A new departure for V. M. C.’ this personage said. ‘We were all astonished,’ (who were ‘we’?) ‘Still, like the rest of us, one supposes, he must have his toys.’

  Peregrine wondered if it would have been possible for him to have heard a more innocently offensive comment.

  ‘It’s a matter of life and death to us,’ he said. The personage looked at him with amusement.

  ‘Is it really?’ he said. ‘Well, yes. I can see that it is. I hope all goes well. But I am still surprised by the turn of V. M. C.’s fancy. I didn’t think he had any fancies.’

  ‘I don’t really know him,’ said Peregrine.

  ‘Which of us does?’ the personage rejoined. ‘He’s a legend in his own lifetime and the remarkable thing about that is: the legend is perfectly accurate.’ Well-content with this aphorism he chuckled and passed superbly on leaving
an aftermath of cigar, champagne and the very best unguents for the Man.

  ‘If I were to become as fabulously rich as that,’ Peregrine wondered, ‘would I turn into just such another? Can it be avoided?’

  He found himself alongside Emily Dunne who helped in Jeremy’s shop and was to play Joan Hart in The Glove. She had got the part by audition and on her own performance, which Peregrine had seen, of Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She had a pale face with dark eyes and a welcoming mouth. He thought she looked very intelligent and liked her voice which was deepish.

  ‘Have you got some champagne?’ asked Peregrine, ‘and would you like something to eat?’

  ‘Yes and no, thank you,’ said Emily. ‘It’s a wonderful play. I can’t get over my luck, being in it. And I can’t get over The Dolphin either.’

  ‘I thought you looked as if you were quite enjoying it. You read Joan exactly right. One wants to feel it’s a pity she’s Will’s sister because she’s the only kind of woman who would ever suit him as a wife.’

  ‘I think before they were both married she probably let him in by the side-window when he came home to Henley Street in the early hours after a night on the tiles.’

  ‘Yes, of course she did. How right you are. Do you like cocktail parties?’

  ‘Not really, but I always hope I will.’

  ‘I’ve given that up, even.’

  ‘Do you know, when I was playing at The Mermaid over a year ago, I used to look across the river to The Dolphin and then, one day, I walked over Blackfriars Bridge and stood in Wharfingers Lane and stared at it. And then an old, old stagehand I knew told me his father had been on the curtain there in the days of Adolphus Ruby. I got a sort of thing about it. I found a book in a sixpenny rack called The Buskin and the Boards. It was published in 1860 and it’s all about contemporary theatres and actors. Terribly badly written, you know, but there are some good pictures and The Dolphin’s one of the best.’