She had just pulled on the stockings and reas-sumed the blouse when Shonni ushered Gwilym inside, and Phryne stood up to leave.
‘I’ll wait outside,’ she said, and went.
The chorus’s dressing room was shrill with voices, and Phryne did not want to go in, but she knocked nonetheless.
‘Oh, Miss Fisher, who was it – who was it?’
demanded Melly.
‘Prompt – Miss Thomas.’
‘Prompt? It must have been an accident,’ decided Jessie. ‘No one could even get a word out of Prompt except in the way of business, I mean.
Well, that’s it, girls, I’m quitting.’
‘Me too, this is too dangerous,’ agreed several voices.
‘Think about it,’ said Phryne. ‘You’re on contract and you need the work, and the run at this theatre only lasts another week, then you’ll be off to New Zealand. I suggest that you all go home and have an early night and you can think about 144
it in the morning. What time is rehearsal?’
‘Eleven,’ said Marie-Claire doubtfully. ‘Yes, that is probably the best thing to do. Come along, Mel.
See you tomorrow, Miss Fisher.’
The chorus filed out, subdued. Phryne heard shrieking from Miss Esperance’s room and felt unequal to any more temperament tonight.
As she left the theatre with Gwilym Evans, she saw a Chinese man hovering at the corner, and stalked past him with determination. Anyone who attacked her tonight, she decided, would be a dead man.
No attack followed. The figure drew back into the shadows of the doorway and did not speak.
The Ritz Cafe´ was entered through a corridor lined with wine barrels. It smelt agreeably of roasting and garlic and Phryne took a deep sniff.
‘Back to life,’ commented Gwilym, seating himself on a bench and drawing her down beside him. ‘We need rare steak and mushrooms,’ he said to the waiter, smiling with automatic charm. ‘It’s been a long night, Miss Fisher.’
‘Call me Phryne. Yes, it has.’ She roused herself to conversation. ‘You gave a great performance tonight, Mr Evans.’
‘Since we have shared a blanket, I think you should call me Gwil,’ he grinned.
Phryne looked around. The Ritz was bohemian, fashionable, and nearly full, despite the lateness of the hour. Wine could not be legally purchased 145
after ten o’clock, but a polite fiction allowed late diners to have a bottle on the table, which the management would solemnly swear was opened before the designated hour. Waiters in evening clothes dashed through the maze of wooden tables, carrying plates with effortless ease. The room was low, dark and wood-lined, and although it did not precisely resemble the Tuscan farmhouse which the Management fondly imagined, it was warm and felt safe. Phryne began to thaw.
Gwilym had already melted under her praise.
‘Yes. I could feel it all coming together, I could feel it happening. Poor Robin finding out he is actually a wicked baronet and despairing. I felt his despair.’ The blue eyes fixed on Phryne like a blow-lamp. ‘That line, it’s pure opera, Sullivan must have been thinking of Hamlet.’ He sang, very sweetly and softly ‘Alas, poor ghost!’ and several diners swung around to look at him. Three recognised him and he smiled and bowed to his public.
‘And the music – it’s almost folk song, almost Elizabethan.’
‘But not quite. Sullivan must have known that authentic early music would be too much of a shock for his public,’ said Phryne, who had heard Dolmetch in London and numerous amateurs on crumhorn, a sound which she could not like. She had also had been taken entirely against her will and better judgement to several English Folk Song and Dance Society concerts. ‘The closest he dared get was Purcell.’
Gwilym Evans appeared a little taken aback.
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‘You’re well educated for a detective,’ he commented artlessly.
‘If we are going to make personal remarks, you’re a long way from home for a Welshman.’
‘Ah, yes, thousands of miles. I come from a little village half way up a slate mountain in the range the English call Snowdonia. You couldn’t even pronounce the name, Phryne. A long way indeed.
Have you ever heard of
hiraeth
?’ he asked, his eyes staring sadly across endless seas.
‘No, what is that?’
‘A Welsh thing, hard to translate. ‘‘Yearning’’, perhaps. ‘‘Longing’’ is more like it. All of us have it, however happy we are. The yearning for home, even if we shook the dust off our shoes in loathing and swore never to return to the cold damp streets and the cold narrow people and the flat beer and the chapels fulminating endlessly against sin.’
‘Are your parents still there?’
‘I never knew my parents. I’m a foundling. Shonni’s mother opened her door one morning and there I was on the doorstep, wrapped in someone’s apron and not another rag to my name. She had no children then, thought she was barren. She took me in and God rewarded her by giving her Shonni and Gwen and three others of her own after them.
So I was a gift to her; a present from heaven, for all the chapel folk called me a mark of shame. Call a child a mark of shame and a devil’s offspring, tell him he’s bound to be evil, and he will become a bad boy – a
mwchyn
, chasing after the little girls and stealing their hair ribbons, then trying the 147
drink and the weed and still singing like a bird.
They resented my voice, those chapel folk. Said that the devil had given his own more skill than all the dutiful little Mam’s boys.’
‘How did you get to the Savoy, then?’
‘Attracted the attention of the mine-owner, who thought it a pity that I should die choked with coal dust before I was thirty like the good boys. He sent me to London to be trained and I came here with the company. I like Australia so I stayed. But I never saw her again, my Mam. She died three years ago. Shonni went back when they told us that she was ill and stayed for the funeral but I had a part in a Sydney show and couldn’t leave it.
Oh, well,’ he said cheerfully, blinking away tears, and picked up his knife and fork as two steaks smothered in mushrooms arrived.
Phryne realised that she was famished and tucked in heartily. The Ritz cooked an excellent steak.
She was deciding between pavlova, airy and light as a sunset cloud, and a really excellent apple pie for dessert before the actor spoke again.
‘The food’s better here, too,’ he commented.
‘Australia has the best meat and the best fruit, and so cheap that no man need go hungry. This meal in London would cost me a prince’s ransom, and no one in Wales would ever see that much steak on one plate – it’s almost indecent. So you liked my Sir Ruthven?’
‘You must know it was brilliant, Gwil. Partly because you took him entirely seriously.’
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‘That’s the way to play G and S. Old Tom was telling me that he remembers hearing Gilbert rebuking George Grossmith the famous patter singer for adding a bit of business to his part.
‘‘The audience laughed,’’ said Grossmith, and the old man thundered, ‘‘So they would if you sat on a pork pie. Stick to the part, Mr Grossmith, and no embroidery.’’ Fascinating man, old Tom. But that’s not Gwilym’s end, coughing out his lungs on cheap port in a draught.’
‘What will your end be, then?’ asked Phryne, deciding on apple pie.
‘I’ll save,’ he said. ‘Every penny.’
‘Then you should stop taking people out to supper,’ said Phryne.
‘Next week. I’ll start next week, prompt,’
promised Gwil, and Phryne laughed, then remembered the dead Miss Thomas. It was clear that Gwilym had been struck by the same thought, for his hand met hers across the table, clasped and clung.
‘By God, I’d almost forgotten,’ he whispered.
‘God forgive me. Was it you or me, Phryne, what do you think? Who was he trying to kill?’
‘He or she, and I don’t know. Someone may not like my poking about in the theatre. One of the four ladies you have recently slighted may have decided to make an ex-actor out of you. Or it might have been the ghost.’
‘Dorothea? Tom’s been telling me about her.’
‘Did he know her?’
‘Yes. He was with the Savoy from 1881 to 1914, 149
when he went off to the Great War and never sang again. He was gassed. He started as a call boy and then went into the chorus. Voice wasn’t strong enough for a principal and he says he can’t act.
But he remembers Dorothea Curtis. Says she was very like Leila.’
‘Yes, that’s what Sir Bernard says.’ Phryne took a swallow of red wine to clear the aftertaste of fear out of her mouth. ‘What else does old Tom say about her?’
‘Says she threw a vase at him once in a tantrum and he’s still got the scar. I haven’t seen her, thank God.’
‘Why? Are you frightened of ghosts?’
‘Absolutely. And if you want to call me a coward you can go ahead. It’s only because I’d give anything to play Sir Ruthven that I’m not breaking the track record to Sydney this very moment. I’ve been terrified the whole time she’s been around. Leila saw her, says she was a bride.
I’ve been shooing Shonni out into the passage to see if she’s there before I leave the dressing room.’
‘You don’t think she’s a trick?’
‘Can’t see how. Don’t care, anyway. Leila’s really frightened of her, and she’s the only one who could play her. God, I’m shivering again.
That was so close, Phryne, so very close. And I’m not ready to die yet. Not till I’ve played Hamlet.
After that he can kill me, but not until then.’
He passed a shaking hand over his dark hair.
Phryne thought that he would make an unusual 150
but very attractive Hamlet, and the first one she had seen whom Ophelia could credibly fall in love with. The hand in hers was strong and beautifully formed, with long fingers only marred by chewed fingernails. He noticed what she was looking at and curled them under Phryne’s palm.
‘That’s what
Ruddigore
has done to me,’ he said self-consciously. ‘Haven’t chewed them in years and now I’ve nibbled them down to the nub again.
Will you come home with me tonight?’ he asked, staring pleadingly into Phryne’s eyes. ‘I don’t want to sleep alone.’
‘No,’ she said, fighting down a treacherous urge to say yes. ‘You’ve lovers enough, Mr Evans.’
‘Not one that loves me, though. Not one with any brains or courage. That society Ffoulkes woman, she’s been hounding me, wanting to make me the ornament of her salon – for a while. Otherwise my harem is composed of actresses clawing their way up in the profession who think me a useful stepping stone.’
‘And you think Leila useful for the same reason,’
Phryne released her hand, despite the pleasure of his touch. ‘It’s been a trying evening, Gwil. Don’t make me argue the case with you.’
‘Why not?’ the mouth turned down. Phryne was tired and tempted and her voice became sharp.
‘Because anyone so self-involved as an actor, Mr Evans, makes a bad lover. I don’t have the time to waste.’
‘Ah well, it was worth a try,’ he sighed, quite uncrushed. ‘But I’ll remember you in my dreams,’
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he added with a wicked grin. Phryne returned it with interest.
‘And you may well feature in mine.’
They finished dinner with small cups of black coffee and a mint each.
As Phryne walked with him to her car, parked in Bourke Street, she had a strong feeling that she was being followed. She turned abruptly once or twice but could see no one. The streets were empty, dry and cool, and a light wind blew dust into her eyes.
She dropped Mr Evans at his boarding house in Lygon Street, refused a pressing invitation to keep him company, and drove home to put herself to bed uncharacteristically early, sober, and alone.
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CHAPTER NINE
We’ve a first class assortment of magic And for raising a posthumous shade With effects that are comic or tragic There’s no cheaper house in the trade.
The Sorcerer
, Gilbert and Sullivan PHRYNE SETTLED back in her chair next to Bernard Tarrant in the front row of the stalls.
Eleven in the morning is not the ideal time to be in a theatre, she thought. It was cold, smelt stale, and the lights were sodium lamps which cast a bluish glare. This had the effect of making the tired faces of the company look deathlike, exaggerating every wrinkle and bleaching the pink out of even Miss Esperance’s complexion.
‘
The Pirates of Penzance
, Act 2,’ said Sir Bernard. ‘We seem unable to get away from Cornish fishing villages.’
A group of Cornish daughters were bidding a collection of lacklustre policemen to go and die in 153
combat. They seemed unimpressed with the chorus, who told them that every maiden would water their graves with tears.
‘No, no, no!’ shouted Bernard, leaping to his feet. ‘Terrible! Go back to the beginning, ‘‘Dry the glistening tear’’, and ladies, for God’s sake try and keep in tune. Police, you’re supposed to be marching, not dancing! I want to hear the thud of boots.
Mr Evans, try bringing Miss Esperance to the front, on ‘‘I will try, dear Mabel’’. I can’t hear a word out of her. Miss Esperance, are you well?’
Leila clutched at Gwilym Evans’ hands and nodded forlornly.
‘Then let’s get on!’ Sir Bernard resumed his seat, nodding to the orchestra leader. The musicians seemed nonabundant and Phryne wondered if this was just an effect of needing fewer players for rehearsal or whether a number of them simply had not turned up.
She noticed that the violinist was wearing a greatcoat, and that first trumpet was sniffing. The chorus managed to come in almost in unison, and Mabel talked to her father about being an orphan.
The cast appeared to know their lines, Phryne observed, wondering if the general vagueness of actors was produced by stuffing their heads full of someone else’s words as a profession.
‘Then Frederic,’ announced Selwyn Alexander,
‘Let your escort lion hearted be summoned to receive a general’s blessing, ere they depart on their dread adventure . . . Sorry – ere they depart
upon
their dread adventure.’
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Sir Bernard stirred but did not protest and a line of men came marching onstage. They were dressed in a collection of cast-offs. One was wearing a muffler and two were sucking cough drops and altogether they were the least likely collection of policemen that Phryne had ever seen.