If never, yet that Time himself doth say
He wishes earnestly you never may.’
With this, the figure shuffled back to the wings and two stage hands rolled out a backdrop painted to resemble the nave of a chapel, with real velvet curtains hung across a niche. Four men and two women, one quite old, the other rather beautiful, took the stage in a jumble of togas, tunics, capes, stockings, sandals and elfin shoes. The largest of the men in the finest of the garments also wore a crown of some heavy metal to which only the last flakes of gilt still clung.
‘O grave and good Paulina,’ the king began, ‘the great comfort that I have had of thee!’
He took the older woman’s hand and she spoke to him reverently as they strolled along the stage, the other actors in tow. In front of the curtained niche, the king stopped and spoke solemnly:
‘Your gallery have we pass’d through, not without much content in many singularities; but we saw not that which my daughter came to look upon, the statue of her mother.’
The actress playing Paulina began to describe the statue of the queen, the way the likeness exceeded anything the ‘hand of man hath done’, before pulling back the curtain. The actors gasped as a woman completely in white, posing on a short pedestal, was revealed. The audience murmured. Perhaps they saw an echo of Sandow’s statue—the white powdered face, one hand held up to support a veil of white lace, the other down by her hip.
The actors marvelled at the supposed statue. Kemp thought the use of a veil unwise as the light material showed every movement. He considered the possibility of constructing a new window display based on this scene. He scanned the audience for The Carpenter, who might not be able to deliver such a scene as quickly as him, but would most certainly trump his queen (and that of the poor actress on the pedestal). Yes, there he was, leaning forward in his seat, craning his neck, thinking the very same thoughts.
The king, Leontes, scrutinised the queen’s face.
‘But yet, Paulina,’ he said, ‘Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing so aged as this seems.’
‘So much the more our carver’s excellence,’ Paulina responded, ‘which lets go by some sixteen years and makes her as she lived now.’
Kemp watched Hermione blinking and wondered if it was possible to train the eyelids to behave.
Leontes continued to admire the statue, oblivious to its blinking. The younger actress, clearly the king’s daughter both in life and in the play, knelt at the foot of the statue. ‘Dear queen, that ended when I but began, give me that hand of yours to kiss.’
Kemp felt behind him for the wall and was glad of its support.
Would a statue of Louisa be a fitting tribute or another painful failure?
When his focus returned to the play, Leontes was saying to another man, ‘See, my lord, would you not deem it breathed? And that those veins did verily bear blood?’
Paulina made to draw the curtain on the statue, but Leontes stopped her.
‘I am sorry, sir,’ Paulina said, ‘I have thus far stirr’d you: but I could afflict you farther.’
‘Do, Paulina,’ Leontes said, ‘for this affliction has a taste as sweet as any cordial comfort. Still, methinks, there is an air comes from her: what fine chisel could ever yet cut breath?’
Kemp looked at The Carpenter again, squeezed into the stalls, straining to see over the heads of those in front of him. It seemed an unlikely place for a recluse. But if Begg was to be believed, he’d been on hand to secure Sandow’s statue when it arrived at the train station the day before.
‘If you can behold it,’ Paulina was now saying, ‘I’ll make the statue move indeed, descend and take you by the hand; but then you’ll think—which I protest against—I am assisted by wicked powers.’
Leontes begged her to continue and Paulina, facing the audience directly, said, ‘It is required you do awake your faith.’
Stirring music began from the orchestra pit as Paulina urged the statue to come to life. With evident relief the actress playing Hermione began to stir. She reached out for the king’s hand and stepped down from her pedestal.
‘O, she’s warm!’ proclaimed Leontes. ‘If this be magic, let it be an art lawful as eating.’
The couple embraced and after one last speech from the king the players all left the stage, returning to receive their applause and take their bow.
The master of ceremonies returned, rubbing his hands together greedily.
‘And now, fine people of Maru-maru,’ he said, pronouncing the town’s name as if it were two separate words, ‘the time has come for the pinnacle of the performance, the strength of the show. But first I must beg your patience as the stage is prepared for the many feats the Great Sandow will perform.’
The same two stage hands who had rolled The Winter’s Tale’s background onstage came and rolled it off, though this time they were garbed in white togas and Roman sandals. Joined by four more men similarly attired—two of whom had been in the previous vignette—they began placing wooden crates on the stage in a deliberate fashion. When the boxes were all arranged, the mock Romans removed items with brief flourishes—dumbbells, barbells, chains, large bands of elastic, lengths of wood—the audience gasping with each revelation. The two strongest-looking men, possibly disciples of Sandow, each carried a large basket on stage and held them still as a third man fixed a steel rod between them. When everything had been arranged the men left and the curtain was lowered.
Kemp took this moment, while the rest of the crowd murmured with excitement, to consider again the challenge of a Winter’s Tale window display: the spirals of artifice of having a wooden mannequin standing in for an actress pretending to be a marble statue (possibly enchanted) of the queen. How he longed for Louisa to be his sounding board, his collaborator. To sketch the scene he saw in his head so that he might see the flaws in the arrangement of the figures. But it would flounder, he realised, without the perfect Hermione. Such a mannequin was beyond his capabilities. He looked at his bandaged forefinger, which began to throb on cue.
The curtain began to rise and the theatre fell silent. At first only the wooden crates at the foot of the stage were visible, then a revolving platform—he tried in vain to see how it might be powered—and inch by inch a man wearing only a leopard skin loincloth was revealed against a purple backdrop.
Though Kemp had seen—had scrutinised—the plaster statue in the window of Hercus & Barling, he had still expected the real Sandow to be more imposing. What spun slowly before the people of Marumaru was a fair-headed, clean-limbed man of medium height somewhere in his mid-thirties. The orchestra began to play a swift, upbeat tune. Sandow’s clear skin glowed pink under the stage lights. The pose he held—his hands clasped behind his head, his feet at right angles with one heel lifted slightly, his torso in the contrapposto of classical sculpture—showed the development and balance of his muscles, the perfect symmetry of his form. Most striking to Kemp was the man’s back. It was as if it had been moulded by the hands of a loving god, each muscle distinct and purposeful. It was a tactile thing, begging to be touched. Beautiful in a way that was beyond man or woman, beyond art or life, even beyond the figures that emerged from The Carpenter’s gouges.
After two or three slow revolutions of the pedestal, Sandow lowered his arms, making fists of his hands, dropped his head almost until his chin touched his chest and rearranged his pose, making new abdominal muscles prominent that had previously lain flat. It was as if serpents were pulsing beneath the man’s skin and he had managed to charm them into performing in unison. Despite the stillness of each pose, he seemed on the edge of being burst open should the charm wear off.
Sandow began to alter his poses more quickly, working up to the pace of the orchestra’s accompaniment and giving Kemp less than half a turn to absorb each new perfection before it was erased by another.
In the grief,