Killer Dolphin (6 page)

“A year ago,” Peregrine thought, “I stood in this very spot on a February morning. The sun came out and gilded the stage tower of the injured Dolphin and I lusted after it. I thought of Adolphus Ruby and wished I was like him possessed. And here I am again, as the Lord’s my judge, a little jumped-up Cinderella-man in Mr. Ruby’s varnished boots.”

He looked at the restored caryatids, the bouncing cetaceans and their golden legend, and the immaculate white frontage and elegance of ironwork and he adored them all.

He thought: “Whatever happens, this is, so far, the best time of my life. Whatever happens I’ll look back at today, for instance, and say: ‘Oh
that
was the morning when I knew what’s meant by bliss.’ ”

While he stood there the man from Phipps Bros, came out of Phipps Passage.

“Morning, guvnor,” he said.

“Good morning, Jobbins.”

“Looks a treat, dunnit?”

“Lovely.”

“Ah. Different. From what it was when you took the plunge.”

“Yes: indeed.”

“Yus. You wouldn’t be looking for a watchman, I suppose? Now she’s near finished-like? Night or day. Any time?”

“I expect we
shall
want someone. Why? Do you know of a good man?”

“Self-praise, no recommendation’s what they say, ainnit?”

“Do you mean you’d take it on?”

“Not to deceive yer, guvnor, that was the idea. Dahn the Passage in our place, it’s too damp for me chubes, see? Somethink chronic. I got good references, guvnor. Plenty’d speak up for me. ’Ow’s it strike yer? Wiv a sickening thud or favourable?”

“Why,” said Peregrine. “Favourably, I believe.”

“Will you bear me in mind, then?”

“I’ll do that thing,” said Peregrine.

“Gor’ bless yer, guv,” said Jobbins and retired down Phipps Passage.

Peregrine crossed the lane and entered the portico of his theatre. He looked at the framed notice:

It hung immediately under the tattered Victorian playbill that he had seen on his first remarkable visit.

When the painters cleaned and resurfaced the façade Peregrine had made them work all round that precarious fragment without touching it. “It shall stay here,” he had said to Jeremy Jones, “as long as I do.”

He opened the front doors. They had new locks and the doors themselves had been stripped and scraped and restored to their original dignity.

The foyer was alive. It was being painted, gilded, polished and furbished. There were men on scaffolds, on long ladders, on pendant platforms. A great chandelier lay in a sparkling heap on the floor. The two fat cherubim, washed and garnished, beamed upside-down into the resuscitated box-office.

Peregrine said good morning to the workmen and mounted the gently curving stairs.

There was still a flower-engraved looking-glass behind the bar, but now he advanced towards himself across shining mahogany, framed by brass. The bar was all golden syrup and molasses in colour. “Plain, serviceable, no tatt,” Peregrine muttered.

The renovations had been completed up here and soon a carpet would be laid. He and Jeremy and the young decorator had settled in the end for the classic crimson, white and gilt, and the panelling blossomed, Peregrine thought, with the glorious vulgarity of a damask rose. He crossed the foyer to a door inscribed management and went in.

The Dolphin was under the control of “Dolphin Theatres Incorporated.” This was a subsidiary of Consolidated Oils. It had been created, broadly speaking, by Mr. Greenslade, to encompass the development of The Dolphin project. Behind his new desk in the office sat Mr. Winter Meyer, an extremely able theatrical business manager. He had been wooed into the service by Mr. Greenslade upon Peregrine’s suggestion, after a number of interviews and, Peregrine felt sure, exhaustive inquiries. Throughout these preliminaries, Mr. Conducis had remained, as it were, the mere effluvium: far from anxious and so potent that a kind of plushy assurance seemed to permeate the last detail of renaissance in The Dolphin.

Mr. Meyer had now under his hand an entire scheme for promotion, presentation and maintenance embracing contracts with actors, designers, costumiers, front-of-house staff, stage-crew and press agents and the delicate manipulation of such elements as might be propitious to the general mana of the enterprise.

He was a short, pale and restless man with rich curly hair, who, in what little private life belonged to him, collected bric-a-brac.

“Good morning, Winty.”

“Perry,” said Mr. Meyer as a definitive statement rather than a greeting.

“And joy?”

Mr. Meyer lolled his head from side to side.

“Before I forget. Do we want a caretaker, watchman, day or night, stage-door keeper or any other lowly bod about the house?”

“We shall in a couple of days.”

Peregrine told him about Mr. Jobbins.

“All right,” said Mr. Meyer. “If the references are good. Now, it’s my turn. Are you fully cast?”

“Not quite. I’m hovering.”

“What do you think of Harry Grove?”

“As an actor?”

“Yes.”

“As an actor I think a lot of him.”

“Just as well. You’ve got him.”

“Winty, what the hell do you mean?”

“A directive, dear boy: or what amounts to it. From Head Office.”

“About
W. Hartly Grove
?”

“You’ll probably find something in your mail.”

Peregrine went to his desk. He was now very familiar with the look of Mr. Greenslade’s communications and hurriedly extracted the latest from the pile.

When Peregrine read this note he was visited by a sense of misgiving so acute as to be quite disproportionate to its cause. In no profession are personal introductions and dearboymanship more busily exploited than in the theatre. For an actor to get the ear of the casting authority through an introduction to régisseur or management is a commonplace manoeuvre. For a second or two, Peregrine wondered with dismay if he could possibly be moved by jealousy and if the power so strangely, so inexplicably put into his hands had perhaps already sown a detestable seed of corruption. But no, he thought, on consideration, there were grounds more relative than that for his reaction, and he turned to Meyer to find the latter watching him with a half-smile.

“I don’t like this,” Peregrine said.

“So I see, dear boy. May one know why?”

“Of course. I don’t like W. Hartly Grove’s reputation. I try to be madly impervious to gossip in the theatre and I don’t know that I believe what they say about Harry Grove.”

“What do they say?”

“Vaguely shady behaviour. I’ve directed him once and knew him before that. He taught voice production at my drama school and disappeared over a weekend. Undefined scandal. Most women find him attractive, I believe. I can’t say,” Peregrine added, rumpling up his hair, “that he did anything specifically objectionable in the later production and I must allow that personally I found him an amusing fellow. But apart from the two women in the company nobody liked him.
They
said
they
didn’t but you could see them eyeing him and knowing he eyed them.”

“This,” said Meyer, raising a letter that lay on his desk, “is practically an order. I suppose yours is, too.”

“Yes, blast it.”

“You’ve been given a fabulously free hand up to now, Perry. No business of mine, of course, dear boy, but frankly I’ve never seen anything like it. General management, director, author — the lot. Staggering.”

“I hope,” Peregrine said with a very direct look at his manager, “staggering though it may be, I got it on my reputation as a director and playwright. I believe I did. There is no other conceivable explanation, Winty.”

“No, no, old boy, of course not,” said Winter Meyer in a hurry.

“As for W. Hartly Grove, I suppose I can’t jib. As a matter of fact he would be well cast as Mr. W.H. It’s his sort of thing. But I don’t like it. My God,” Peregrine said, “haven’t I stuck my neck out far enough with Marcus Knight in the lead and liable to throw an average of three dirty great temperaments per rehearsal? What have I done to deserve Harry Grove as a bonus?”

“The Great Star’s shaping up for trouble already. He’s calling me twice a day to make difficulties over his contract.”

“Who’s winning?”

“I am,” said Winter Meyer. “So far.”

“Good for you.”

“I’m getting sick of it,” Meyer said. “Matter of fact it’s on my desk now.” He lifted a sheet of blotting paper and riffled the pages of the typewritten document he exposed. “Still,” he said, “he’s signed and he can’t get past that one. We almost had to provide an extra page for it. Take a gander.”

The enormous and completely illegible signature did indeed occupy a surprising area. Peregrine glanced at it and then looked more closely.

“I’ve seen that before,” he said. “It looks like a cyclone.”

“Once seen never forgotten.”

“I’ve seen it,” Peregrine said, “recently.
Where
, I wonder.”

Winter Meyer looked bored. “Did he sign your autograph book?” he asked bitterly.

“It was somewhere unexpected. Ah, well. Never mind. The fun will start with the first rehearsal. He’ll want me to rewrite his part, of course, adding great hunks of ham and corn and any amount of fat. It’s tricky enough as it is. Strictly speaking, a playwright shouldn’t direct his own stuff. He’s too tender with it. But it’s been done before and by the Lord I mean to do it again. Marco or no Marco. He looks like the Grafton portrait of Shakespeare. He’s got the voice of an angel and colossal prestige. He’s a brilliant actor and this is a part he can play. It’ll be a ding-dong go which of us wins but by heaven I’m game if he is.”