Final Curtain. Ngaio Marsh
the smell of canvas and glue and the feeling that this was a place where people worked. In the little theatre even Cedric improved. He was knowledgeable and quickly responsive to her suggestions, checking Paul’s desire to flood the set with a startling display of lighting and getting him to stand in position while he himself focussed a single spot. ‘We must find the backcloth discreetly,’ he cried. ‘Try the ground row.’ And presently a luminous glow appeared, delighting Troy.
‘But how are you going to see?’ cried Cedric distractedly. ‘Oh, lawks! How are you going to see?’
‘I can bring down a standard spot on an extension,’ Paul offered. ‘Or we could uncover a window.’
Cedric gazed in an agony of inquiry at Troy. ‘But the window light would infiltrate,’ he said. ‘Or wouldn’t it?’
‘We could try.’
At last by an ingenious arrangement of screens Troy was able to get daylight on her canvas and a fair view of the stage.
The clock – it was, of course, known as the Great Clock – in the central tower struck eleven. A door somewhere backstage opened and shut, and dead on his cue Sir Henry, in the character of Macbeth, walked onto the lighted set.
‘Golly!’ Troy whispered. ‘Oh, Golly!’
‘Devastatingly fancy dress,’ said Cedric in her ear, ‘but in its ridiculous way rather exciting. Or not? Too fancy?’
‘It’s not too fancy for me,’ Troy said roundly, and walked down the aisle to greet her sitter.
II
At midday Troy drove her fingers through her hair, propped a large charcoal drawing against the front of the stage and backed away from it down the aisle. Sir Henry took off his helmet, groaned a little, and moved cautiously to a chair in the wings.
‘I suppose you want to stop,’ said Troy absently, biting her thumb and peering at her drawing.
‘One grows a trifle stiff,’ he replied. She then noticed that he was looking more than a trifle tired. He had made up for her sitting, painting heavy shadows round his eyes and staining his moustache and the tuft on his chin with water-dye. To this he had added long strands of crêpe hair. But beneath the grease-paint and hair his face sagged a little and his head drooped.
‘I must let you go,’ said Troy. ‘I hope I haven’t been too exacting. One forgets.’
‘One also remembers,’ said Sir Henry. ‘I have been remembering my lines. I played the part first in 1904.’
Troy looked up quickly, suddenly liking him.
‘It’s a wonderful rôle,’ he said. ‘Wonderful.’
‘I was very much moved by it when I saw you five years ago.’
‘I’ve played it six times and always to enormous business. It hasn’t been an unlucky piece for me.’
‘I’ve heard about the Macbeth superstition. One mustn’t quote from the play, must one?’ Troy made a sudden pounce at her drawing and wiped her thumb down a too dominant line. ‘Do you believe it’s unlucky?’ she asked vaguely.
‘It has been for other actors,’ he said, quite seriously. ‘There’s always a heavy feeling offstage during performance. People are nervy.’
‘Isn’t that perhaps because they remember the superstition?’
‘It’s there,’ he said. ‘You can’t escape the feeling. But the piece has never been unlucky for me.’ His voice, which had sounded tired, lifted again. ‘If it were otherwise, should I have chosen this rôle for my portrait? Assuredly not. And now,’ he said with a return of his arch and over-gallant manner, ‘am I to be allowed a peep before I go?’
Troy was not very keen for him to have his peep, but she took the drawing a little way down the aisle and turned it towards him. ‘I’m afraid it won’t explain itself,’ she said. ‘It’s merely a sort of plot of what I hope to do.’
‘Ah, yes!’ He put his hand in his tunic and drew out a pair of gold-rimmed pince-nez and there, in a moment, was Macbeth, with glasses perched on his nose, staring solemnly at his own portrait. ‘Such a clever lady,’ he said. ‘Very clever!’ Troy put the drawing away and he got up slowly. ‘Off, ye lendings!’ he said. ‘I must change.’ He adjusted his cloak with a practised hand, drew himself up, and, moving into the spot-light, pointed his dirk at the great naked canvas. His voice, as though husbanded for this one flourish, boomed through the empty theatre.
‘“Well, may you see things well done there: adieu!
Lest our old robes sit easier than our new!”’
‘“God’s benison go with you!”’ said Troy, luckily remembering the line. He crossed himself, chuckled and strode off between the monoliths to the door behind the stage. It slammed and Troy was alone.
She had made up her mind to start at once with the laying out of her subject on the big canvas. There would be no more preliminary studies. Time pressed and she knew now what she wanted. There is no other moment, she thought, to compare with this, when you face the tautly stretched surface and raise your hand to make the first touch upon it. And, drawing in her breath, she swept her charcoal across the canvas. It gave a faint drumlike note of response. ‘We’re off,’ thought Troy.
Fifty minutes went by and a rhythm of line and mass grew under her hand. Back and forward she walked, making sharp accents with the end of her charcoal or sweeping it flat across the grain of the canvas. All that was Troy was now poured into her thin blackened hand. At last she stood motionless, ten paces back from her work, and, after an interval, lit a cigarette, took up her duster and began to flick her drawing. Showers of charcoal fell down the surface.
‘Don’t you like it?’ asked a sharp voice.
Troy jumped galvanically and turned. The little girl she had seen fighting on the terrace stood in the aisle, her hands jammed in the pockets of her pinafore and her feet planted apart.
‘Where did you come from?’ Troy demanded.
‘Through the end door. I came quietly because I’m not allowed. Why are you rubbing it out? Don’t you like it?’
‘I’m not rubbing it out. It’s still there.’ And indeed the ghost of her drawing remained. ‘You take the surplus charcoal off,’ she said curtly. ‘Otherwise it messes the paints.’
‘Is it going to be Noddy dressed up funny?’
Troy started at this use of a name she had imagined to be Miss Orrincourt’s prerogative and invention.
‘I call him Noddy,’ said the child, as if guessing at her thought, ‘and so does Sonia. She got it from me. I’m going to be like Sonia when I’m grown up.’
‘Oh,’ said Troy, opening her paint box and rummaging in it.
‘Are those your paints?’
‘Yes,’ said Troy, looking fixedly at her. ‘They are. Mine.’
‘I’m Patricia Claudia Ellen Ancred Kentish.’
‘So I’d gathered.’
‘You couldn’t have gathered all of that, because nobody except Miss Able ever calls me anything but Panty. Not that I care,’ added Panty, suddenly climbing onto the back of one of the stools and locking her feet in the arms. ‘I’m double jointed,’ she said, throwing herself back and hanging head downwards.
‘That won’t help you if you break your neck,’ said Troy.
Panty made an offensive gargling noise.
‘As you’re not allowed here,’ Troy continued, ‘hadn’t you better run off?’
‘No,’ said Panty.
Troy squeezed a fat serpent of Flake White out on her