Mrs Midnight and Other Stories (9 page)

My mind alternated between terror and a cool assessment of the facts. Very soon the comfortable lassitude of anaemia would begin to take over. I must decide now whether to submit or resist.

A sudden jerk which tore agonisingly at the tubes in my arms brought the operating table almost to the upright position. The light ceased to glare and I saw where I was. I was in a vast vaulted space which I took to be one of the cellars of the St Germain Palace Hotel. Into it, as far as my eyes could see, had been crammed a forest of wires, tubing, glass tanks and seething retorts that suggested something between a scientist’s laboratory and the den of an alchemist. Was there something else it brought to mind? More than ever I was beginning to feel as if I were inside the vivisected carcass of a giant beast that quivered and bubbled with life. Several times I blinked and tried to focus myself upon a more rational analysis of what I saw.

In the middle of it all and a little above me hung a thing which my brain was refusing to admit that my eyes had seen. It was a great face about twice, or possibly three times the size of my own, the skin of which had been clamped and stretched to increase its dimensions. Parts of the skin were stretched so tight as to be transparent and through it I could see a vast and bloated mushroom coloured object, suspended in a glass tank of pinkish liquid, connected to the face by innumerable tubes and wirings. It looked like a great cauliflower, or possibly—the thought occurred to me—a brain. From this face and brain were suspended a large number of organic objects that twitched, pulsated and throbbed, some like internal organs, some like limbs or other extremities such as noses, tongues, lips and eyes. All radiated outwards from the central brain and face which carried the distended but unmistakable features of Dr Mike Bachman, predatory, avian. Two huge circular glass lenses had been suspended over the eyes and magnified them considerably. The irises were a pale silver grey and the great black pupils within them suggested a vast, unyielding depth.

The lips, puffy and engorged with blood hung loose and dribbled. A long stringy drop of mucus began to extend downwards on an ever lengthening thread. I watched it fascinated. Just as it was about to fall away it was wiped off by a fat pink thing like a human arm with a sponge on the end of it.

The eyes were on me, though they seemed to register no feeling or interest, but the mouth was trying to form words. It began to babble. I could not make out the words but they seemed to me in my increasingly feeble state like a song that burbled in tune with the humming machinery and the vibration of the organs which hung around it. I thought it sung of the loss of all individuality, of the spirit subsumed into one great collective organism that throbbed and hummed and dribbled for ever and ever.

I heard a sudden sharp sound and then a voice I knew.

‘What goes on here? No. No. This cannot be. Stop this at once! I cannot have this!’ It was King Kyril. By this time the warmth of unconsciousness was beginning to encroach, but something told me to hang on at whatever cost. I heard the protesting yap of the Contessa di Bartori who, I was later told, had been receiving some of my blood via transfusion. Then there were murmurings from Fafner and Fasolt; then again the voice of the King.

‘No. No! This must not be. I cannot have it.’

The transfusion was stopped; the tubes were taken from my arms. I was half in and out of consciousness as they took me to hospital in Montreux. The story given out was that I had attempted suicide by severing two arteries in my arms, though the method by which I had achieved this had been a puzzle to the doctors. It took a week for me to recover sufficiently to be taken back to England. Princess Helen had come out to see her father and all three of us flew back together.

When we were on the plane I was able to ask King Kyril how he had come to rescue me.

‘After supper I went to an I.P.H. lecture and when I come back from it I find that the model tractor is missing from my room. My Massey Fergusson. Naturally I look for you to ask, but you are not there. So I make enquiries and I find that the Contessa has told Hans to take it from my room. My Massey Fergusson! She says it is distracting me from my work in the I.P.H. This is wrong. Very wrong indeed. Then late at night, as I am still looking, I see Hans so I follow him and I am finding you, and the Countess and that machine. This also is wrong.’

‘Did you find your tractor?’

‘No. I am sad about this, but in my life I have lost many things: my country Slavonia, my wife, my Massey Fergusson. It is my destiny.’

VII

Since our return to London, I have seen very little of Princess Helen, or King Kyril, though His Majesty has sent me one of his model tractors as a present, to help with my convalescence. I suppose I am no longer of use to them, but then I have not tried very hard to renew the acquaintance. I have troubles of my own.

A few days ago I happened to be in the London Library. I was alone in the History section, or so I thought, when I heard footsteps clanking on the metal slatted floor behind me. I knew even before I had turned around that it was the Contessa from the unequal tread of her surgical boot. She said nothing but stared at me with those hard, glittering eyes of hers, then swivelled round on her artificial foot and left. Yesterday I found a black Mercedes occupying my usual parking space outside the flat where I live in Fulham. In it sat the familiar bulk of Fasolt. He did not look at me directly, but made no effort to conceal himself.

This morning a note has been pushed through my letter box. It is written neatly in red ink on that curious ‘onion skin’ writing paper that hotels used to provide. There is no address however; it simply reads:

‘We are arranging for you to meet with Mike again. Then, we believe, you will truly give your heart to his Work.’

THE DANCER IN THE DARK

I

Dancer in the dark,

I’m just a dancer in the dark,

Oh, I’m having such a lark

Dancing in the dark.

Happy as can be

Like a little spark:

A dancer in the dark,

That’s me!

Against a black backdrop strewn with stars the silver figure in a long, floating dress sang and swirled, the little silk-shod feet mirrored in the polished black floor. Her voice trilled and swooped like an upper-class nightingale, with those odd strangulated vowels so alien to us today: ‘Heppy es cen be . . .’

On the last words—‘That’s me!’—the silvery creature on the television screen did an elegant little backward kick and glided off in a cloud of billowing chiffon. The gossamer tune meandered on for a few moments, and then? I don’t remember.

Apart from that moment when she sang the title song, the film
Dancer in the Dark,
made by Gaumont British in 1934
,
was eminently forgettable, a typically languid attempt by a British company to compete with the great Hollywood screen musicals. It had, I suppose, a certain faded charm, but that was not the reason why I had chosen to watch it one bored Sunday afternoon on a satellite movie channel. It was because I had once known its star, Billie Beverley.

Seeing
Dancer in the Dark
only last week took me back almost thirty years to July 1982. Britain had just won back the Falkland Islands, but I was not rejoicing. I was horribly out of work. My last acting job, a tour of
Journey’s End,
had given up the ghost in Sunderland the week the Argentineans had hoisted their flag over Port Stanley. When the Union Jack at last replaced it I was still out of work and seriously considering giving up the acting business. Then, late one afternoon the phone rang and it was my agent. Could I get down to the Prince Regent Theatre for an audition that evening? I could; I did.

‘The Prin’, as it is known by the profession, is in the Haymarket, a handsome theatre, built in the Regency period and subsequently meddled with by the Victorians. It still had an old fashioned air about it with its wooden staircases and its handsome dressing room suites for the stars. It was being run, too, on old fashioned lines, by Majestic Productions which put on repertoires of very traditional plays with starry casts.

All my agent had told me was that Majestic was in the middle of rehearsing a new play by Roger Carlton when one of the cast had ‘dropped out’. With only a two weeks before the opening night they needed an actor to replace him in the small rôle of Captain Lazenby, a young Guards officer. At the time I had the looks and the accent to play guards officers, and I was, in the theatrical jargon, ‘a quick study’. I was told there was to be a short West End season at the Prin, followed by a national tour.

To say that I was less than thrilled at the prospect of appearing in a new play by Roger Carlton might seem ungracious. Roger Carlton had had a string of successes in the late forties and early fifties with upper middle class drawing room comedies. By the late fifties the advent of Osborne and Pinter, abetted by the critical scorn of Kenneth Tynan, was beginning to make his work look decadent and feeble. By 1982 he was, in the words of one of my actor friends, ‘long past his sell-by’. This did not mean that he was not well in with the more conservative theatre managements like Majestic who were chiefly interested —as some audiences still were—in safe, well-made vehicles for favourite stars.

By the mid seventies Carlton had reluctantly recognised his redundancy, which is why his career had veered towards politics. He began to be employed as a speech writer for the Conservative Party, a position which had earned him a knighthood. The new play, I was told, was called
The Last of Lady Ashbrook
, a title which suggested elegiac regret for the good old days of class distinction. That was something else which rather tempered my excitement about the prospect of acting in a Carlton piece. Like most actors, my politics are vaguely leftish—albeit rather too vaguely for some of my friends—so I was a little dubious about appearing in what would inevitably be described as a ‘Thatcherite’ play.

I arrived at the stage door of The Prin and joined a group of rather glum looking candidates for the same rôle. It was a relief to find that none of them looked as much of a guardsman as I did. We were handed a script and directed to read through a particular scene. Before I had properly studied it I was ushered in to the Number 1 Dressing Room by an assistant stage manager who announced my name and closed the door behind me.

It is an ancient room, barely changed in its essentials since Buxton and Kean greased their faces in its mirrors. Its wood panelling is smeared and smoothed by countless slatherings of the same cream paint. The same old framed playbills hang on the walls. The outer part is a sitting room of sorts, carpeted, with two battered armchairs, a desk with a Windsor chair and other well-used furnishings. Through a door I could see a small inner room where bright bulbs surrounded a mirror: the dressing room proper. As I entered I had been confronted by three men in their sixties, all seated and facing me, like an examination board.

I recognised them at once, but the recognition involved shock, because I knew them from the youthful or discreetly touched up photographs with which they presented themselves to the public. What I actually saw were three wrinkled and slightly bloated caricatures of the familiar images.

Roger Carlton—I had to remember he was Sir Roger now—was seated by the desk on the Windsor chair. On the desk were his script and a tumbler half full of what looked like neat whisky. He did not move when I came in, but his eyes watched me closely. Barry Cudworth the director, big, fluffy and bald in a pink cashmere cardigan, rose from his chair, stepped forward and shook my hand with a show of geniality. He introduced me to the other two.

The third man, Talbot Wemyss, star of stage and film, extended his hand to be shaken but did not get up. He was still, I suppose, handsome in an old fashioned way, with a neatly clipped pencil moustache, and immaculately dressed. He looked as if he were making strenuous efforts to look half his age. He began to say something to me but Sir Roger looked at him with that beady tight-lipped gaze of his and he shut up. There was an unease in the room; but whether it existed between the three of them or was on account of me I could not tell.

I was asked about my career so far and I gave an account of myself. When I mentioned that I had once in rep played the juvenile lead in
The Double Duchess
, one of Carlton’s more successful comedies, Sir Roger gave a curt little nod like a schoolmaster to a pupil who has given the correct reply to an unimportant question. When this was over Cudworth asked me to read the scene I had barely looked over.

My part was that of the grandson of a rich and glamorous old lady (the eponymous Lady Ashbrook) and in the scene I was interviewing one of her elderly lovers who wanted to marry her. This was Talbot Wemyss’s rôle and he was there to read with me. The dialogue was adroit, the situation moderately amusing, but it seemed to me a tired piece of work. I could tell that Carlton and the others regarded it as a ‘bloody funny little scene’, so I did my best to play up to their illusions.

Sight reading for a part is a hit and miss affair. Sometimes the very fact that you barely understand what you are reading elicits a bright, purely instinctive rendition with a spontaneity that takes long hours of rehearsal to recapture. This was one of those occasions. I knew I had done well. When we began Wemyss was reading listlessly; by the end he was reacting to me with some enjoyment.

I was sent out of the room for a few minutes, then recalled and offered the job on the spot.

The happiest moments in life are those of promise rather than fulfilment. I walked the whole way back from the Prince Regent to my flat in Tufnell Park, daydreaming of future stardom. I had not forgotten the slightly sinister impression made on me by those three old men, but that only added an exciting element of drama and darkness to my sunny fantasies. I did wonder why the previous ‘Captain Lazenby’ had left or was pushed; and I knew I would have to watch myself with ‘the oldies’, as I was already calling them.

My rehearsals were to begin on Monday, so I had the whole weekend to get to know the script. I was on my own at the time. A relationship had just finished, wearily, without too much acrimony, so I had nothing else to do. On Saturday morning my agent rang me with the details of my engagement. I asked her why the previous Captain Lazenby had left.

‘I have no idea,’ she said. ‘And I advise you not to enquire too closely. Majestic is notoriously clam-like about that sort of thing. Don’t look a bloody gift horse in the mouth, darling.’ Like all agents, she spoke as if the gift horse in question had been hers to bestow.

After this call I expected no others and none came until the Sunday afternoon by which time I thought I had roughly mastered my lines and could afford a can of lager or two from the fridge, even a doze in front of the television. It may be a retrospective invention, but I am fairly sure that when I heard the phone ring I felt a distinct frisson of apprehension.

‘Is that Allan Payne?’

‘It is. Who’s that please?’

‘Steve Winter.’

‘Who?’

‘Steve Winter. You know dam’ well who I am.’ I had to think for a moment. In the script I had been given there was a cast list. On it a name had been crossed out: the name opposite that of Captain Lazenby. It was ‘Stephen Winter’.

‘The ex-Captain,’ I said.

‘Right.’

‘How the hell did you find me?’

‘Long story. The company stage manager at the Prin told me your name, then a friend of a friend in the business . . . you know. Does it matter?’

‘Look, I’m sorry, but it’s nothing to do with me. I was just offered the job.’

‘I know that. I just wanted to warn you.’

‘Why? What happened?’

‘I can’t explain. It’s too complicated; anyway you wouldn’t believe me. But watch those bloody old men.’

‘Which ones?’

‘Carlton, Cudworth and Wemyss of course. And the whole arsehole Majestic set-up. They’re poison. Don’t trust them. Most of the company are Okay. Sophie’s all right but she’s completely ditzy and Billie’s a sport. But I think they’re out to get Billie. She’s next on the list.’

‘Billie Beverley, who plays Lady Ashbrook?’

‘Not for much longer.’

‘What the hell do you mean?’

‘Never trust old men in a hurry. You have been warned!’ He hung up.

I opened a can of lager; then I opened another. I almost managed to persuade myself that the conversation hadn’t happened.

II

On the top floor of the Prin, above the dressing rooms there is a kind of attic which, since anyone can remember and long before, has been a rehearsal room. I arrived a good quarter of an hour before I had been summoned that Monday morning.

On its wooden floorboards the plan of the set (‘Lady Ashbrook’s drawing room in Belgravia’) had been set out in coloured tape. There was some furniture and a drinks tray. I had intentionally come early so I could acclimatise myself to the situation. Only the stage management was there, checking props with clipboards. The most junior of them, a little dumpy girl in jeans called Rebecca, offered me coffee or tea. I smiled and introduced myself, but detected unease, perhaps even hostility.

Others in the cast, when they arrived, were friendly. Barry Cudworth sat behind a table and eased me into my scenes with uninspired competence. Sir Roger Carlton, sat some distance away, sipping weak, milky tea, saying little. When Rebecca brought him a fresh brew during a break, I noticed that Sir Roger sent it back twice, commanding her to make it weaker and milkier. A fleck of white foam on his long thin lips suggested that he suffered from a gastric complaint and took milk of magnesia tablets for it.

During the first tea break I talked to the girl who played my fiancée. Her name was Sophie Arnell. She seemed gawky and rather flat-chested, but there was an appealing
gamine
quality about her and she was already something of a ‘name’.

‘Sorry I’ve been sprung on you like this,’ I said quietly. It was a lame opening but it would do. She touched my arm and led me to a corner where we could not be heard by the others.

‘Oh, God, Blimey,’ she said, ‘ it’s not your fault. I only got to know for certain Steve was going when he rang me up on Friday night. We’re like mushrooms here as far as Majestic is concerned. You know, kept in the dark and have shit shovelled onto us at regular intervals.’

‘Have you any idea why he went?’

‘I don’t know really. Everything seemed fairly Okay. Steve’s a good actor and all that. He was a bit tricky about lines sometimes. Used to say: “I can’t say that.” A lot actually. Of course he was right. Lines like: “I’m taking her to a fab disco tonight, Grandma.” You just don’t talk like that now.’

‘And he told Sir Roger?’

‘I call him Old Stinky. Have you had a whiff of his breath yet? Stinky
poos
! Not a brilliant plan of Steve’s: telling a distinguished playwright he can’t write convincing lines for young people any more. Rog was bristling with fury. I could tell, but Steve never noticed. He could be an arrogant sod.’