‘Delighted,’ Martyn said, ‘is not exactly the word. I’m flabbergasted and excited and grateful for everything and I just can’t believe it’s true. But it is a bit worrying to feel I’ve sort of got in on a fluke and that everybody’s wondering what it’s all about. They are, you know.’
‘All that,’ Jacko said with an ungainly sweep of his arm, ‘is of no importance. Gay Gainsford is still to play the part. She will not play it well but she is the niece of the leading lady’s husband and she is therefore in a favourable position.’
‘Yes, but her uncle –’
He said quickly: ‘Clark Bennington was once a good actor. He is now a stencil. He drinks too much and when he is drunk he is offensive. Forget him.’ He turned away and with less than his usual deftness began to set out his work-table. From an adjoining room he said indistinctly: ‘I advise that which I find difficult to perform. Do not allow yourself to become hag-ridden by this man. It is a great mistake. I myself –’ His voice was lost in the spurt of running water. Martyn heard him shout: ‘Run off and learn your lines. I have a job in hand.’
With a feeling of unease she returned to her room. But when she opened her part and began to read the lines this feeling retreated until it hung like a very small cloud over the hinterland of her mind. The foreground was occupied entirely by the exercise of memorizing and in a few minutes she had almost, but not quite, forgotten her anxiety.
II
She was given her moves that afternoon by the stage-manager and, at three o’clock, rehearsed her scenes with the other two understudies. The remaining parts were read from the script. Jacko pottered about back-stage intent on one of his odd jobs; otherwise the theatre seemed to be deserted. Martyn had memorized her lines but inevitably lost them from time to time in her effort to associate them with physical movement. The uncompromising half-light of a working-stage, the mechanical pacing to and fro of understudies, the half-muted lines raised to concert pitch only for cues, and the dead sound of voices in an empty house: all these workaday circumstances, though she was familiar enough with them, after all, laid a weight upon her: she lost her belief in the magic of the previous night. She was oppressed by this anticlimax, and could scarcely summon up the resources of her young experience to meet it.
The positions and moves had been planned with a vivid understanding of the text and seemed to spring out of it. She learnt them readily enough. Rather to her surprise, and, she thought, that of the other understudies, they were finally taken through her scenes at concert pitch so that by the end of the rehearsal the visual and aural aspects of her part had fused into a whole. She had got her routine. But it was no more than a routine: she spoke and paused and moved and spoke and there was no reality at all, she felt, in anything she did. Clem Smith, the stage-manager, said nothing about interpretation but, huddled in his overcoat, merely set the moves and then crouched over the script. She was not even a failure, she was just another colourless understudy and nothing had happened.
When it was over, Clem Smith shut the book and said: ‘Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Eleven in the morning if you please.’ He lit a cigarette and went down into the auditorium and out through the front of the house.
Left alone on the stage, Martyn struggled with an acute attack of deflation. She tried to call herself to order. This in itself was a humiliating if salutary exercise. If, she thought savagely, she had been a Victorian young lady, she would at this juncture have locked herself away with a plush-bound journal and after shedding some mortified tears, forced a confession out of herself. As it was, she set her jaw and worked it out there and then. The truth was, she told herself, she had been at her old tricks again: she had indulged in the most blatant kind of day-dream. She had thought up a success story and dumped herself down in the middle of it with half a dozen pageant-lamps bathing her girlish form. Because she looked like Poole and because last night she had had a mild success with one line by playing it off her nerves she had actually had the gall to imagine – here Martyn felt her scalp creep and her face burn. ‘Come on,’ she thought, ‘out with it.’
Very well, then. She had dreamed up a further rehearsal with Poole. She had seen herself responding eagerly to his production, she had heard him say regretfully that if things had been different … She had even … At this point overtaken with self-loathing Martyn performed the childish exercise of throwing her part across the stage, stamping violently and thrusting her fingers through her hair.
‘Damn and blast and hell,’ said Martyn, pitching her voice to the back row of the gallery.
‘Not quite as bad as all that.’
Adam Poole came out of the shadowed pit and down the centre aisle of the stalls. He rested his hands on the rail of the orchestral well. Martyn gaped at him.
‘You’ve got the mechanics,’ he said. ‘Walk through it again by yourself before tomorrow. Then you can begin to think about the girl. Get the layout of the house into your head. Know your environment. What has she been doing all day before the play opens? What has she been thinking about? Why does she say the things she says and do the things she does? Listen to the other chaps’ lines. Come down here for five minutes and we’ll see what you think about acting.’
Martyn went down into the house. Of all her experiences during these three days at the Vulcan Theatre, she was to remember this most vividly. It was a curious interview. They sat side by side as if waiting for the rise of curtain. Their voices were deadened by the plush stalls. Jacko could be heard moving about behind the set and in some distant room, back-stage, somebody in desultory fashion hammered and sawed. At first Martyn was ill at ease, unable to dismiss or to reconcile the jumble of distracted notions that beset her. But Poole was talking about theatre and about problems of the actor. He talked well, without particular emphasis but with penetration and authority. Soon she listened with single hearing and with all her attention to what he had to say. Her nervousness and uncertainty were gone and presently she was able to speak of matters that had exercised her in her own brief experience of the stage. Their conversation was adult and fruitful. It didn’t even occur to her that they were getting on rather well together.
Jacko came out on the stage. He shielded his eyes with his hand and peered into the auditorium.
‘Adam?’ he said.
‘Hallo? What is it?’
‘It is Helena on the telephone to inquire why have you not rung her at four, the time being now five-thirty. Will you take it in the office?’
‘Good Lord!’ he ejaculated and got up. Martyn moved into the aisle to let him out.
He said: ‘All right, Miss Tarne. Work along the lines we’ve been talking about and you should be able to cope with the job. We take our understudies seriously at the Vulcan and like to feel they’re an integral part of the company. You’ll rehearse again tomorrow morning and –’ He stopped unaccountably and after a moment said hurriedly: ‘You’re all right, aren’t you? I mean you feel quite happy about this arrangement?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Very happy.’
‘Good.’ He hesitated again for a second and then said: ‘I must go,’ and was off down the aisle to the front of the house. He called out: ‘I’ll be in the office for some time, Jacko, if anyone wants me.’ A door banged. There was a long silence.
Jacko advanced to the footlights. ‘Where are you?’ he asked.
‘Here,’ said Martyn.
‘I see you. Or a piece of you. Where is the rest? Reassemble yourself. There is work to be done.’
The work turned out to be the sewing together of a fantastic garment created and tacked up by Jacko himself. It had a flamboyant design, stencilled in black and yellow, of double-headed eagles and was made, in part, of scenic canvas.