Swan Song (4 page)

‘No, you mustn't.' Judith spoke with surprising vehemence. ‘I should be so ashamed if people knew . . .'

Being above all a practical woman, Joan was momentarily puzzled. ‘Ashamed? But you're not to blame, child. Why on earth –?'

‘It's just – oh, I don't know. But please –
please
promise.' Joan shrugged her shoulders and smiled. ‘Of course, if you want it that way. Where do you live? If it isn't too far, I'll walk home with you.'

‘It's awfully kind, but you really needn't bother . . .'

‘Nonsense,' said Joan. ‘I should like to. It's half an hour yet before my dinner-time.'

Judith was recovering her self-possession slowly. ‘What about' – she nodded towards Shorthouse – ‘him?'

‘We'll leave him,' said Joan cheerfully. ‘Edwin is unfortunately one of those people who always recover from things . . . Have you got a coat? Then let's make a move.'

On the way to Judith's lodgings in Clarendon Street Joan learned a little more about it. It appeared that Shorthouse had been making some kind of advances ever since rehearsals began, and that Judith, though repulsing these, had been too shy of his professional eminence to be actively rude to him. Moreover, there was a young
man – also in the chorus – who had aspirations as a composer of opera, and Judith had thought that Shorthouse might be able to help or advise him.

‘I'll advise him, my dear.' said Joan. ‘And so will Adam, on pain of instant excommunication. But as to helping – well, virtually the only way to get a new opera put on is to be a multi-millionaire.'

She was very thoughtful as she walked back to the ‘Mace and Sceptre'. Edwin Shorthouse plainly was heading for a shipwreck from which not even his voice and his artistry would save him. It was a pity, Joan thought, that she could not assist in propelling him on to the rocks by publicizing this evening's occurrence, but a promise was a promise. That she was obliged at least to break it was due to circumstances which few people could have foreseen.

PRESENTLY THE ORCHESTRAL
rehearsals began, and with them, trouble.

Adam sighed windily, took out a packet of Spearmint chewing-gum, and placed part of its contents slowly in his mouth. His gaze, roving over the auditorium, came to rest on John Barfield, who was slumped in one of the front stalls, gobbling a ham sandwich and dropping the crumbs down the front of his waistcoat. The rapid and rhythmical movement of his jaws was obscurely fascinating. Adam stared until Barfield looked up sharply and caught his eye; then turned, with some dignity, to reconsider what was going on on the stage.

Or rather, what was not going on. ‘It is extraordinary,' thought Adam, ‘that Edwin is able to find something wrong even when he's only sitting still, singing a monologue.' The cause of the present stoppage had eluded Adam in the first instance, but it appeared from the logomachy that was now in progress that it had something to do with tempo. ‘Naturally I defer to you absolutely, Mr Peacock,' Shorthouse was saying without a hint of deference across the footlights. ‘It's simply that I've not been used to such a marked accelerando at that point, and I felt that Sachs' dignity was rather lessened by it.'

George Peacock fidgeted with his baton and looked harassed. And well he might, Adam reflected: rehearsing
Die Meistersinger
with Edwin Shorthouse in the cast had unnerved many an older and more experienced
conductor. It was really all a great pity; Peacock was an able young man; this production would certainly be important to his career; and after four weeks' nagging by Edwin Shorthouse he might easily make a mess of the actual show. Moreover – Adam glanced at his watch – time was getting on; they still had the third act to get through that afternoon.

‘Why, in the name of God,' he whispered to Joan Davis, ‘can't Edwin shut his trap for ten minutes at a time?'

Joan nodded briskly. ‘Inelegantly put,' she returned, ‘but I could scarcely agree with you more. I'm very sorry for that young man. It's just the greatest pity in the world that Edwin happens to be so good.'

‘He wouldn't have lasted five minutes if he hadn't been,' said Adam. ‘And I'm inclined to think that someone may stick a knife in him yet.'

‘. . . So if you've got no objection,' Peacock was saying from the rostrum, ‘we'll keep it as it was. I think the extra impetus is wanted at that point.'

‘Of course,' said Shorthouse. ‘Of course. I must try to follow your beat more closely. If I might have a more definite down-stroke at “springtime's behest” –'

‘Ass,' Joan commented in a vehement whisper from the wings. ‘Contemptible ass. The wretched man's beat is perfectly clear.'

‘If we have many more hold-ups,' Adam replied gloomily, ‘we shall never get on to the third act at all. Not that I should be altogether sorry,' he added as an afterthought. ‘I tried to sing a top A in my bath this morning, and nothing but a sort of whistling sound came out.'

The music began again. Adam had heard it hundreds of times, but still it cast its warm enchantment over him. They reached the disputed passage. Shorthouse was dragging.

‘Now we shall see,' said Joan.

Peacock tapped with his baton and the orchestra faded
into silence. ‘I'm afraid we were a little ahead of you. Mr Shorthouse,' he said pointedly.

‘Oh, Lord,' groaned Adam. ‘Not sarcasm.
Not
sarcasm, you fool.'

The result was as he expected. There was a moment's dead silence, and then: ‘If my efforts displease you, Mr Peacock,' said Shorthouse, ‘I would be obliged if you would tell me so in a straightforward way, and not by means of cheap witticisms.'

There was another silence. Peacock flushed scarlet. Then: ‘I think we'll leave that passage for the moment,' he said quietly, ‘and go on. We'll take it from scene four – Eva's entry. Are you ready, Miss Davis?' he called.

‘Perfectly,' Joan called back. ‘Even the pretence of flirting with Edwin,' she said to Adam, ‘makes me shudder.'

‘Never mind. Perhaps he'll object to something you do. Then you can give him hell.'

‘How nice that would be,' said Joan dreamily. ‘But there's not much hope of it. He only picks on the young and inexperienced, who can't answer back . . . Here we go.'

‘Ta-ta,' said Adam. ‘Meet you under the lime-tree, and don't bring a friend.' He returned to his reflexions.

The situation was, in fact, worrying. There could be no doubt that Peacock was breaking up under the strain of incessant objections, interruptions, and superfluous requests for information about tempo, dynamics, and all the paraphernalia which should have been, and in fact
had
been, settled at the piano rehearsals; doing a complex, five-hour opera is labour enough without any member of the cast's making a wilful nuisance of himself. What made it more objectionable was that where the opera management was concerned, Shorthouse could twist Peacock round his little finger, for Shorthouse was the box-office attraction, and Peacock virtually a nonentity; so that although
nominally
Peacock's word was law . . .

Adam sighed, took another piece of chewing-gum, and
again caught the eye of Barfield, who was beginning to eat a tomato. Barfield grimaced and nodded meaningly at the stage. Adam grimaced back. It was a futile interchange. At the other side of the stage, Shorthouse and Joan chanted mellifluously at one another, while the orchestra tranquillized, with an occasional tender dissonance, in A flat. Adam noticed suddenly how exceptionally well they were playing, and his anger with Shorthouse rose afresh. To calm himself, he took a third piece of chewing-gum. It was a pity the stuff lost its taste so quickly, and became merely rubbery.

A few moments later he was joined by Dennis Rutherston, the producer, and a dark, rather ill-looking young man whom he vaguely remembered as being the apprentice whose sole duty it is, in the first act, to explain (in two words) the absence of Niklaus Vogel from the Masters' gathering.

‘It's a trial,' said Rutherston, ‘not being able to move people when they're singing. A convention, if you ask me.' He was a melancholy, youngish man who was never to be seen without a battered trilby hat on his head.

‘It sends one out of tune,' Adam told him kindly.

‘And what a nuisance Shorthouse is being . . . The meadow scene's going to be an unholy muddle.' Rutherston prognosticated gloomily. ‘These damned apprentices
will not
stand still when they get to their places. They seem to imagine that if they shift about from foot to foot it produces an appearance of animation. Actually, it looks like a mass attack of incipient D.T.s.'

Beyond them, the music ceased abruptly. ‘Hullo,' muttered Rutherston. ‘What now?'

‘It seems impossible to rehearse this work for five minutes' – Peacock's voice was shaking – ‘without an obbligato of muffled altercation from the wings. Will you please be quiet!'

‘That's
us
,' said Rutherston, faintly surprised. ‘Well, anyway, I must be off.' As the music started again, he drifted away, followed by the dark young man.

‘God help us all,' said Adam to himself, with some feeling. He had not liked the nerve-racked tone of Peacock's voice, which suggested an imminent explosion. And he knew from experience that if one person loses control of himself at a rehearsal, the rest always begin to sulk, and the only thing to do is to pack up and go home. He devoutly hoped that Shorthouse would keep quiet for a while.

Magdalena trotted to the stage and held her brief colloquy with Eva. It occurred to Adam that he had better get upstage in readiness for his entry, and he affixed his chewing-gum providently to a piece of scenery. Damn Shorthouse, he thought, as he passed Beckmesser twanging faintly at his lute; damn the man.

In another moment Joan was rushing to greet him. ‘Hero, poet, and my only friend!' she sang, embracing him, and added under her breath: ‘You smell revoltingly of peppermint.'

Very much to Adam's surprise, the rest of the second act passed without untoward incident. The lovers attempted to elope and were foiled by Sachs: Beckmesser performed his ludicrous serenade and was chased by David amid a rout of apprentices and masters (‘Looks like a lot of fairies,' said Rutherston with disapproval, ‘dancing a ballet'); sleepy-eyed, the night-watchman came on, intoned his formula, blew his horn; and to echoes of the summer-night motif and of Beckmesser's serenade the music came to an end. But Adam suspected that Shorthouse, whose tactics in nuisance were subtle, was merely holding his fire until the third act: and events proved him to be right.

The cast gathered on the stage to hear the respective strictures of conductor, producer, and chorus-master. There followed a quarter-hour break, in which people drifted out to get a cup of tea. Adam joined Joan Davis and Barfield, who was eating an apple, in the stalls.

‘There are times,' he said, ‘when I really think we ought to get together and raise Hades about Shorthouse.'

‘Calm before the storm,' said Barfield indistinctly. ‘That's all this is. But if you ask me, the management wouldn't take it kindly.'

‘For the simple reason,' Joan put in, ‘that they don't realize what a marvel Peacock is with the orchestra. He makes that cynical old gang of scrapers and blowers sound positively beautiful.'

‘It's youth,' Barfield mumbled through his apple. ‘Emotional osmosis.'

‘Where is he, by the way?' Adam asked. ‘Has he gone out?'

He stared about him. On the stage a number of unlikely objects which had been temporarily employed to represent a Nuremberg street were now being shifted about to represent a meadow. In his gallery at the back, the electrician was conversing with a couple of apprentices. And several members of the chorus were wandering dispiritedly up and down the gangways of the auditorium. But of Peacock there was no sign.

‘Having a heart-to-heart with Shorthouse, perhaps,' suggested Barfield. ‘Poor devil.' He took out a piece of cake and offered it perfunctorily to Adam and Joan; he was obviously relieved when they refused.

The dark young man whom Adam had seen with the producer crossed the back of the stage, talking to Judith Haynes. ‘Who's that?' Adam enquired generally.

‘The man?' Joan sat up to get a better look. ‘Oh, Boris somebody. One of the apprentices.'

‘Isn't the girl something to do with Shorthouse?'

‘As to that,' said Joan rather definitely, ‘I couldn't say. If so, I'm sorry for her. She's a pretty child.'

‘Chorus?'

‘Yes. One of the boatload of maidens. It's she who dances with David.'

‘Oh, yes, so it is.' Adam considered. ‘I felt sure I'd seen
her with Shorthouse, but she looks very much attached to that young man.'

‘Promiscuous probably,' said Barfield, dropping cake-crumbs on to his knee. ‘Are we doing scene one of the last act? If so, I've time to go out and get a bite to eat.'

Joan shook her head. ‘No, only the second scene. Just as well, too. Everyone's a bit worn.'

Barfield was staring at the door leading backstage, which now opened. ‘Cripes,' he said. ‘Here's Mephisto. Turn on the charm, everyone.'

Shorthouse came up to them, sat down, and heaved a sigh. He smelled, as usual, of gin.

‘Thank God the show's in a week,' he said. ‘I can't stand much more of this. Peacock's all right,' – he spoke with such manifest insincerity that Adam started – ‘but he can't make up his mind about anything.'

Joan said: ‘Are you deliberately trying to harry him into a nervous breakdown, Edwin?'

‘Good heavens, Joan' – Shorthouse looked genuinely shocked – ‘what's put that idea into your head? I'm sorry if I've been holding the production up, but I must understand what I'm supposed to be doing. Yet every time I ask, I get some kind of vulgar insult hurled at me . . . Not that I mind, personally – the man's inexperienced and he's obviously nervous. But I'm worried about the production as a whole. This is the first time
Meistersinger's
been done since before the war, and it seems to me that for that reason it's more than ordinarily important to get everything exactly right.' He paused, and involuntarily a smile flitted across his face. ‘I've been considering going to the management and asking them to replace Peacock.'