Inspector Alleyn 3-Book Collection 6: Opening Night, Spinsters in Jeopardy, Scales of Justice. Ngaio Marsh
and professionally. The piratical Mr Poole.’
Poole muttered, ‘If you are not too drunk to think, we’ll go on,’ and pitching his voice, threw out a line of dialogue: ‘If you knew what you wanted, if there was any object, however silly, behind anything you say or do, I could find some excuse for you – ‘
Martyn heard Helena Hamilton catch her breath in a sob. The next moment she had flung open the door and made her entrance.
III
Through the good offices of Jacko, Martyn was able to watch the rest of the act from the side. Evidently he was determined she should see as much as possible of the play. He sent her round a list, scribbled in an elaborate hand, of the warnings and cues for Miss Hamilton’s entrances and exits and times when she changed her dress. ‘Stand in the OP corner,’ he had written across the paper, ‘and think of your sins.’ She wouldn’t have dared to follow his advice if Miss Hamilton, on her first exit, had not said with a sort of irritated good nature: ‘You needn’t wait in the dressing-room perpetually. Just be ready for me: that’s all.’
So she stood in the shadows of the OP corner and saw the one big scene between Adam Poole and Gay Gainsford. The author’s intention was clear enough. In this girl, the impure flower of her heredity, the most hopelessly lost of all the group, he sought to show the obverse side of the character Poole presented. She was his twisted shadow, a spiritual incubus. In everything she said and did the audience must see a distortion of Poole himself, until at the end they faced each other across the desk, as in the scene that had been photographed, and Helena Hamilton re-entered to speak the line of climax: ‘But it’s you, don’t you see? You can’t escape it. It’s you,’ and the curtain came down.
Gay Gainsford was not good enough. It was not only that she didn’t resemble Poole closely; her performance was too anxious, too careful a reproduction of mannerisms without a flame to light them. Martyn burnt in her shadowy corner. The transparent covering in which, like a sea-creature, she had spent her twenty-four hours’ respite, now shrivelled away and she was exposed to the inexorable hunger of an unsatisfied player.
She didn’t see Bennington until he put his hand on her arm as the curtain came down, and he startled her so much that she cried out and backed away from him.
‘So you think you could do it, dear, do you?’ he said.
Martyn stammered: ‘I’m sorry. Miss Hamilton will want me,’ and dodged past him towards the improvised dressing-room. He followed and with a conventionally showy movement, barred her entrance.
‘Wait a minute, wait a minute,’ he said. ‘I want to talk to you.’
She stood there, afraid of him, conscious of his smell of greasepaint and alcohol and thinking him a ridiculous as well as an alarming person.
‘I’m so angry,’ he said conversationally, ‘just literally so angry that I’m afraid you’re going to find me quite a difficult man. And now we’ve got that ironed out perhaps you’ll tell me who the bloody hell you are.’
‘You know who I am,’ Martyn said desperately. ‘Please let me go in.’
‘M’wife’s dresser?’
He took her chin in his hand and twisted her face to the light. Poole came round the back of the set. Martyn thought: ‘He’ll be sick of the sight of me. Always getting myself into stupid little scenes.’ Bennington’s hand felt wet and hot round her chin.
‘M’wife’s dresser,’ he repeated. ‘And m’wife’s lover’s little by-blow. That the story?’
The edge of Poole’s hand dropped on his arm. ‘In you go,’ he said to Martyn, and twisted Bennington away from the door. Martyn slipped through and he shut it behind her. She heard him say: ‘You’re an offensive fellow in your cups, Ben. We’ll have this out after rehearsal. Get along and change for the third act.’
There was a moment’s pause. The door opened and he looked in.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
‘Perfectly, thank you,’ Martyn said and in an agony of embarrassment added, ‘I’m sorry to be a nuisance, sir.’
‘Oh, don’t be an ass,’ he said with great ill-humour. The next moment he had gone.
Miss Hamilton, looking desperately worried, came in to change for the third act.
IV
The dress-rehearsal ended at midnight in an atmosphere of acute tension. Because she had not yet been paid, Martyn proposed to sleep again in the greenroom. So easily do our standards adjust themselves to our circumstances that whereas on her first night at the Vulcan the greenroom had been a blessed haven, her hours of precarious security had bred a longing for a bed and ordered cleanliness, and she began to dread the night.
In groups and singly, the actors and stage-staff drifted away. Their voices died out in the alley and passages, and she saw, with dismay, that Fred Badger had emerged from the door of his cubby-hole and now eyed her speculatively. Desolation and fear possessed Martyn. With a show of preoccupation, she hurried away to Miss Hamilton’s dressing-room which she had already set in order. Here she would find a moment’s respite. Perhaps in a few minutes she would creep down the passage and lock herself in the empty room and wait there until Fred Badger had gone his rounds. He would think she had found a lodging somewhere and left the theatre. She opened the door of Miss Hamilton’s room and went in.
Adam Poole was sitting in front of the gas-fire.
Martyn stammered, ‘I’m sorry,’ and made for the door.
‘Come in,’ he said and stood up. ‘I want to see you for a moment.’
‘Well,’ Martyn thought sickly, ‘this is it. I’m to go.’
He twisted the chair round and ordered rather than invited her to sit in it. As she did so she thought: ‘I won’t be able to sleep here tonight. When he’s sacked me I’ll get my suitcase and ask my way to the nearest women’s hostel. I’ll walk alone through the streets and when I get there the hostel will be shut.’
He had turned his back to her and seemed to be examining something on the dressing-shelf.
‘I would very much rather have disregarded this business,’ he said irritably, ‘but I suppose I can’t. For one thing, someone should apologize to you for Bennington’s behaviour. He’s not likely to do it for himself.’
‘It really didn’t matter.’
‘Of course it mattered,’ he said sharply. ‘It was insufferable. For both of us.’
She was too distressed to recognize as one of pleasure the small shock this last phrase gave her.
‘You realize, of course, how this nonsense started,’ he was saying. ‘You’ve seen something of the play. You’ve seen me. It’s not a matter for congratulation, I dare say, but you’re like enough to be my daughter. You’re a New Zealander, I understand. How old are you?’
‘Nineteen, sir.’
‘You needn’t bother to pepper your replies with this “sir” business. It’s not in character and it’s entirely unconvincing. I’m thirty-eight. I toured New Zealand in my first job twenty years ago, and Bennington was in the company. That, apparently, is good enough for him. Under the circumstances I hope you won’t mind my asking you who your parents are and where you were born.’
‘I’ve no objection whatever,’ said Martyn with spirit. ‘My father was Martyn Tarne. He was the son and grandson of a high-country run-holder – a sheep-farmer – in the South Island. He was killed on Crete.’
He turned and looked directly at her for the first time since she had come into the room.
‘I see. And your mother?’
‘She’s the daughter of a run-holder in the same district?’