Final Curtain. Ngaio Marsh
for the fourth time he replied: ‘I’ll just see you off,’ and looked at his watch. Doors were slammed farther down the train. Troy leant out of the window. At last she was off. A man in uniform, peering frenziedly into carriage after carriage, was working his way towards her. ‘Nigel!’ Troy shouted. ‘Nigel!’
‘Oh, God, there you are!’ cried Nigel Bathgate. ‘Hallo, Thomas! Here! Troy! I knew I wouldn’t have time to talk so I’ve written.’ He thrust a fat envelope at her. A whistle blew. The train clunked, and Thomas said: ‘Well, good-bye; they will be pleased;’ raised his hat and slid out of view. Nigel walked rapidly along beside the window. ‘What a go! You will laugh,’ he said. ‘Is this a novel?’ Troy asked, holding up the envelope. ‘Almost! You’ll see.’ Nigel broke into a run. ‘I’ve always wanted to – you’ll see – when’s Roderick –?’ ‘Soon!’ Troy cried. ‘In three weeks!’ ‘Good-bye! I can’t run any more.’ He had gone.
Troy settled down. A young man appeared in the corridor. He peered in at the door and finally entered the already crowded carriage. With a slight twittering noise he settled himself on his upturned suitcase, with his back to the door, and opened an illustrated paper. Troy noticed that he wore a jade ring on his first finger, a particularly bright green hat and suede shoes. The other passengers looked dull and were also preoccupied with their papers. Rows of backyards and occasional heaps of rubble would continue for some time in the world outside the window pane. She sighed luxuriously, thought how much easier it would be to wait for her husband now that she was forced to paint, fell into a brief day-dream, and finally opened Nigel’s letter.
Three sheets of closely typed reporter’s paper fell out, together with a note written in green ink.
‘13 hours, G.M.T.,’ Nigel had written. ‘Troy, my dear, two hours ago Thomas Ancred, back from his visit to you, rang me up in a triumph. You’re in for a party but the G.O.M. will be grand to paint. I’ve always died to write up the Ancreds but can’t afford the inevitable libel action. So I’ve amused myself by dodging up the enclosed jeu d’esprit. It may serve to fill in your journey. N.B.’
The typescript was headed: ‘Note on Sir Henry Ancred, Bart., and his Immediate Circle.’ ‘Do I want to read it?’ Troy wondered. ‘It was charming of Nigel to write it, but I’m in for two weeks of the Ancreds and Thomas’s commentary was exhaustive.’ And she let the pages fall in her lap. At the same time the young man on the suitcase lowered his modish periodical, and stared fixedly at her. He impressed her disagreeably. His eyes suggested a kind of dull impertinence. Under the line of hair on his lip his mouth was too fresh, and projected too far above a small white chin. Everything about him was over-elegant, Troy thought, and dismissed him as an all-too-clearly-defined type. He continued to stare at her. ‘If he was opposite,’ she thought, ‘he would begin to ask questions about the windows. What does he want?’ She lifted the sheets of Nigel’s typescript and began to read.
II
‘Collectively and severally,’ Nigel had written, ‘the Ancreds, all but one, are over-emotionalised. Any one attempting to describe or explain their behaviour must keep this characteristic firmly in mind, for without it they would scarcely exist. Sir Henry Ancred is perhaps the worst of the lot, but, because he is an actor, his friends accept his behaviour as part of his stock-in-trade, and apart from an occasional feeling of shyness in his presence, seldom make the mistake of worrying about him. Whether he was drawn to his wife (now deceased) by the discovery of a similar trait in her character, or whether, by the phenomenon of marital acclimatisation, Lady Ancred learnt to exhibit emotion with a virtuosity equal to that of her husband, cannot be discovered. It can only be recorded that she did so; and died.
‘Their elder daughters, Pauline (Ancred played in The Lady of Lyons in ’96) and Desdemona (Othello, 1909), and their sons, Henry Irving (Ancred played a bit-part in The Bells) and Claude (Pauline’s twin) in their several modes, have inherited or acquired the emotional habit. Only Thomas (Ancred was resting in 1904 when Thomas was born) is free of it. Thomas, indeed, is uncommonly placid. Perhaps for this reason his parent, sisters, and brothers appeal to him when they hurt each other’s feelings, which they do punctually, two or three times a week, and always with an air of tragic astonishment.
‘Pauline, Claude, and Desdemona, in turn, followed their father’s profession. Pauline joined a northern repertory company, married John Kentish, a local man of property, retired upon provincial glories more enduring than those she was likely to enjoy as an actress, and gave birth to Paul and, twelve years later, Patricia (born 1936 and known as Panty). Like all Ancred’s children, except Thomas, Pauline was extremely handsome, and has retained her looks.
‘Claude, her twin, drifted from Oriel into the O.U.D.S., and thence, on his father’s back, into romantic juveniles. He married the Hon. Miss Jenetta Cairnes, who had a fortune, but never, he is fond of saying, has understood him. She is an intelligent woman. They have one daughter, Fenella.
‘Desdemona, Sir Henry’s fourth child (aged thirty-six at the time of this narrative), has become a good emotional actress, difficult to place, as she has a knack of cracking the seams of the brittle slickly drawn rôles for which West-End managements, addled by her beauty, occasionally cast her. She has become attached to a Group, and appears in pieces written by two surrealists, uttering her lines in such a heartrending manner that they seem, even to Desdemona herself, to be fraught with significance. She is unmarried and has suffered a great deal from two unhappy love affairs.
‘The eldest son, Henry Irving Ancred, became a small-part actor and married Mildred Cooper, whom his father promptly re-christened Millamant, as at that time he was engaged upon a revival of The Way of the World. Millamant she has remained, and, before her husband died, gave birth to a son, Cedric, about whom the less said the better.
‘Your friend, Thomas, is unmarried. Having discovered, after two or three colourless ventures, that he was a bad actor, he set about teaching himself to become a good producer. In this, after a struggle, he succeeded, and is now established as director for Incorporated Playhouses, Limited, Unicorn Theatre. He has never been known to lose his temper at rehearsals, but may sometimes be observed, alone in the stalls, rocking to and fro with his head in his hands. He lives in a bachelor’s flat in Westminster.
‘All these offspring, Pauline, Claude, Desdemona and Thomas, their sister-in-law, Millamant, and their children, are like details in a design, the central motive of which is Sir Henry himself. Sir Henry, known to his associates as the G.O.M. of the Stage, is believed to be deeply attached to his family. That is part of his legend, and the belief may be founded in fact. He sees a great deal of his family, and perhaps it would be accurate to say that he loves best those particular members of it of whom, at any given moment, he sees least. His wife he presumably loved. They never quarrelled and always sided together against whichever of their young had wounded the feelings of one or the other of them. Thomas was the exception to this, as he is to most other generalities one might apply to the Ancreds.
‘“Old Tommy!” Sir Henry will say. “Funny chap! Never quite know where you are with him. T’uh!” This scarcely articulated noise, “T’uh,” is used by all the Ancreds (except, of course, Thomas) to express a kind of disillusioned resignation. It’s uttered on a high note and is particularly characteristic.
‘Sir Henry is not a theatrical knight but a baronet, having inherited his title, late in life, from an enormously wealthy second cousin. It’s a completely obscure baronetcy, and, although perfectly genuine, difficult to believe in. Perhaps this is because he himself is so obviously impressed by it and likes to talk about Norman ancestors with names that sound as if they’d been chosen from the dramatis personæ in a Lyceum programme, the Sieur D’Ancred, and so on. His crest is on everything. He looks, as his dresser is fond of saying, every inch the aristocrat – silver hair, hook nose, blue eyes. Up to a few years ago he still appeared in drawing-room comedies, giving exquisite performances of charming or irascible buffers. Sometimes he forgot his lines, but, by the use of a number of famous mannerisms, diddled his audiences into believing it was a lesser actor who had slipped. His last Shakespearian appearance was as Macbeth on the Bard’s birthday, at the age of sixty-eight. He then developed a chronic gastric disorder