Death on the High C's Page 12

  ‘Basta!’ said Giulia Contini again to Signor Pratelli who was still in full flood.

  ‘Si, si, carina,’ he said placatingly.

  Simon Mulley was now coming to the centre of the stage to bait the Countess’s husband, but Nichols tore his attention regretfully from the stage.

  ‘You didn’t quarrel with Miss Ffrench yourself, did you?’ he said to Giulia.

  ‘I not quarrel with nobodys,’ said Giulia. ‘I come, I play few performances, I go—is nothing to me. I ignore. She try to make friends, but I ignore. Was vulgar, brutta, stupida.’ She curled her mouth round the words, and her face, heavy with stage make-up, seemed to crease up with exaggerated disgust. ‘Is others I was sorry for. To work with ’er, weeks and months. Impossibile!’

  ‘You were coming among these people for the first time,’ said Nichols. ‘Would you say that relationships were so bad that you could understand Miss Ffrench being murdered?’

  Giulia thought for a bit, then turned to Signor Pratelli and launched into a long conversation in which Nichols distinguished the words ‘brutto affaro’, ‘infame’ and ‘atroce’ and had twice to protect himself from flailing hands. Finally Giulia Contini turned back to him.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  Nichols waited for her to go on, but she didn’t.

  ‘Why do you say no?’ he finally asked.

  ‘Because ordinary pipples, they doesn’t murders,’ she said. ‘Is needing more—what you say?—motives. If I murders everybodies I dislikes in opera companies—Dio mio!’ She grinned ecstatically, but when Signor Pratelli interjected what seemed to be a caution, she turned on him with a look which suggested that his name would probably be included on her list of victims.

  ‘Tacete!’ she hissed.

  It seemed as well to let them go. The scene had changed, the Duke’s palace had vanished into the flies, and they were now outside Rigoletto’s house. Soon Giulia would be wanted as Gilda, and Nichols gestured her towards the stage. Signor Pratelli trotted in her wake, for all the world as if he was intending to play her confidante. On stage Raymond Ricci was offering his service as hired assassin to Simon Mulley as Rigoletto. His oily, insinuating deportment was as cleverly repulsive as ever, and his saturnine appearance as menacing. At the crucial moment in the scene when the offer is made he began fingering the edge of his short sword, as an earnest of his abilities with the knife. Was it Nichols’s imagination, or did he detect in Raymond Ricci’s acting at this point a certain hesitancy? A certain embarrassment? And could it possibly be the result of a certain memory?

  • • •

  ‘Mr Ritchie?’ said Raymond Ricci’s landlady, on her doorstep in her hair-curlers, her eyes glazed with housework, and looking the dead spit of the unfortunate Florrie Capp. ‘Yes, that’s right, he was away on Wednesday night. Got an engagement somewhere abroad. I remember because I’d done him some spaghetti, him being Italian, and I’d just put on the potatoes to go with it when ’is brother came in and told me—they’re both with me, you know, but the other doesn’t eat, like, does for himself, more independent. So he’d already gone off, by plane to wherever it was, one of these places, you know, and so it was a bit wasted, like.’

  PC Lyme, one of several policemen footslogging around Manchester on the impossible task of checking up alibis, nodded his pleasant middle-aged head and asked: ‘Is Ricci a good type of lodger?’

  “Ee, they’re nice as pie, both of ’em. No trouble at all. Course they’re close. To each other, like. They’re Italians, really, aren’t they? And they are that way—clannish, you know. I like to see it myself. It’s not like my kids: my Syd won’t speak to my Daphne, they’re at sixes and sevens every time they come round, mind you, I blame Syd’s wife . . . ’

  ‘So you’ve no complaints?’ put in PC Lyme quickly.

  ‘Bless you, no. I mean, if there’s a woman now and then it’s only human nature, and rather that than something else, and we’re not in the nineteeth century, are we? Let ’em have a bit of fun, I say, because it’s no fun being married, not in my experience. I’m all for theatre people myself. They bring a bit of life into the house, don’t they?’

  Or a bit of death, thought PC Lyme.

  • • •

  Jim McKaid perched on the back of the stalls seat, his feet on the row in front. He didn’t look casual, but casualness was obviously his aim. Before long he would be called to kidnap Gilda from her father’s house, but now the voices of Simon Mulley and Giulia Contini were flooding through the theatre, contrasting oddly in their fullness with the pinched, cynical, bored-tolerant expression on the face of McKaid.

  ‘Of course I realize that being in bed with Gaylene at the time of the gas-attack is hardly what you’d call an alibi,’ he said, twisting his mouth into a man-to-man smile at Nichols. ‘Still, I assure you the experience was so nasty—the gassing, I mean, of course—nasty and bad for the voice, that when I do decide to kill somebody in that way I’ll make sure I don’t stay around.’

  Nichols made the instant appraisal of McKaid that almost everyone made—that there was something about him he didn’t like. He tried to keep the thing as businesslike as possible.

  ‘It’s perhaps as good an alibi as any in some ways,’ he said. ‘What about for the night before she died . . . I see from your card that you were on stage here.’

  ‘That’s right. Alfonso in Così. Mozart, you know. Lovely little piece. Alfonso is the best part in the whole opera, really, though the lovers get all the fireworks. I’m rather surprised Mr Turner entrusts me with it.’ Again the lopsided smile.

  ‘And after the performance?’

  ‘Had a drink to toast Bridget. Because really she is a very promising little singer. Then I went home. Alone. And to bed, alone. Sorry—I’m alibi-less.’

  ‘Did you say good night to Sergeant Harrison on the way out?’

  ‘If he was at the stage-door I probably did. Not the kind of thing one would remember, is it? Especially after a glass or two.’

  ‘Going back to the previous attempt—the gas: what exactly happened? You woke up, I suppose, and the room was full of gas?’

  ‘That’s right. I started coughing and spluttering, woke, realized something was wrong, and rolled over towards Gaylene. We both staggered up and threw the windows open.’

  Would you have said you woke in the nick of time?’

  ‘Wouldn’t know. It’s not the sort of thing one acquires experience of, being gassed. But it’s an old house, draughty, so I’d guess it would take a fair while. I suspect it was done in the early morning and that it would have taken another hour or so before we handed in our cards. Probably more with Gaylene—she had a marvellous pair of lungs. Or would that make it quicker?’

  ‘At any rate, you were both all right after a bit?’

  ‘A bit groggy, but not too bad. She was spared to raise merry hell for a few days more, and I was spared to adorn the vital and distinguished role of Marullo, whom everyone forgets as soon as the curtain falls. To which part I must return.’

  And as he leapt over the seat and strolled towards the stage, as Giulia Contini, alone on the stage and making one of the little gestures with the left hand which were her tribute to dramatic art, was emitting the tentative shakes that passed for the trills that should adorn the aria ‘Caro nome’. Even as McKaid walked, he seemed to carry his grudge crouching like a malignant monkey on one shoulder.

  • • •

  PC Lyme had watched Hurtle alternately jogging and sprinting around the seemingly infinite length of the running track where he was training, and finally come not to rest, but to a settled position a hundred or so yards away, where he first ran energetically up and down on the spot, then with sweeping, swooping movements like a hulking bird threw his right hand over his head and brought it down to touch his left toe, and then did the same for his left hand and right toe. As PC Lyme approached him he seemed oblivious of his presence, and commenced a series of motions apparently designed to break his back, motions whi
ch made it very difficult for PC Lyme to decide whether to approach him from behind or in front, and suggested to him that only by his doing a handstand could they manage to talk with both their heads up the same way.

  ‘Mr Marwick?’ he said finally, as Hurtle’s face appeared between his legs and seemed to register Lyme’s blue serge legs.

  ‘Call me Hurtle,’ said Hurtle, in what seemed a Pavlovian response. Then he stretched up to the heavens and began twisting around the upper-half of his trunk in a bewildering snake-like way, making any attempt to meet him face to face out of the question.

  ‘I have a message from Superintendent Nichols,’ shouted Lyme.

  ‘Chappie I sent the times and dates to,’ said Hurtle, not seeming at all winded, but putting one hand on a hip and lurching to the right to touch the ground from the side. ‘Hope it was all OK. ’Fraid there wasn’t anything much they could check on. We don’t get about much when we’re in training.’ He swooped once more down towards his toes, which were taking a terrible punishment. ‘’Course, when the tour’s over, it’ll be different.’ He grinned briefly in passing into PC Lyme’s face. ‘London’ll never be the same again, that’s for sure!’

  Giving up the useless task of trying to address him head on, PC Lyme shouted in his most stentorian policeman’s voice: ‘Nichols would like to see you. Tonight.’

  ‘Can’t be done,’ said Hurtle, taking to running on the spot again. ‘Got a game—kick-off at seven-thirty?’

  ‘Could you make half past five? At the theatre?’ shouted Lyme, resisting the temptation to jog in unison.

  ‘Do me level,’ said Hurtle. ‘Want to do all I can to help. ’Course, you see his point of view—chappie who did it. But still, she was a Coona girl. No Pom’s going to do in a Coona girl and get away with it, not if I can help it!’

  And he took off at an unmatchable speed around the track, shouting over his shoulder: ‘Tell Nichols she’ll be right. Five-thirty on the dot.’

  • • •

  The dress rehearsal was nearing its end. Nichols, who had kept half an eye on it throughout his questioning, was now riveted by the interplay of personalities, on stage and off. Owen, until now, had tried to interrupt the action as little as possible, generally confining himself to pep-talks after each scene, thus acknowledging that at least parts of the action had passed out of his control. Nichols was fascinated to hear the tone of the pep-talk—bluff, jocular, friendly, chiding, but with an undertone of sarcasm, bullying, contempt—so that suddenly one saw under the thick protective shell of the producer in full command the traces of some strange emotional wound whose cause and nature one could only guess at.

  Now the last act was beginning, and Owen announced in advance that he might have to interrupt more in the course of the act, since Barbara Bootle ‘might have some difficulties fitting herself in to the new production’. It might have been tactfully meant. One never knew with Owen how far he was conscious of the undertones in what he said, how far he could anticipate the sort of reactions his words would arouse. But certainly they had the effect of making Barbara more nervous still, and she stood in the wings a ridiculous spectacle—a heavy, substantial girl in a blue funk.

  After the stifled opening exchanges of Rigoletto, and Gilda, Calvin produced a ‘La donna è mobile’ of supreme elegance and wicked charm. It did not lighten the heart of Barbara, for this was her moment. She walked on to the stage and over it as if she were going before a firing squad, with an unconvinced show of defiance. She was attempting to swing her hips, as she had been told to do many times, but the motion resembled more a convulsive jerk. It was only when she opened her mouth that one had the idea that there might be anything in her at all to counterbalance the hideous embarrassment of her stage presence. Shut your eyes, Nichols thought to himself, and this girl might really be something. Even then, though, the impression was mixed: for a couple of phrases the voice would ring out rich, clear and characterful; then it would seem as if she had drawn a heavy velvet curtain over it and it would lose all its immediacy—no doubt it was the vocal equivalent of the heavy velvet curtain she heartily desired could separate the audience from her acting performance.

  Calvin did his best: when he clasped her hand passionately he put his body between her and a good three-quarters of the auditorium, though he hoped that on the first night she would not allow the remaining quarter to see the very obvious expression of gratitude on her face. As the seduction advanced towards the moment where the great quartet begins he, by arrangement, managed to push her further down on to the rough inn bench, so that the audience could see little more of her than her legs giving kicks of mock protest. It was odd how unconvincing Barbara could make even a kick. When they got to the quartet Owen stopped them.

  ‘Very nice, Calvin, very nice,’ he said, with that geniality that froze gratitude. ‘Now, Barbara, your problem is the beginning isn’t it?—getting on to the stage. We all realize your problem, all of us here, because the first time is never easy. You’ve got to learn to let your body go, not to . . . well, never mind. I want you to do it from the beginning again, and I want you to relax your whole body in the wings, completely relax, then walk over naturally—naturally, forget the seductive walk for the moment—then stand by the table with your hand on your hip. You can do a three-quarters turn away from the audience if it makes you feel any easier. Then Calvin can get you down on the bench as before. OK, Barbara?’

  Barbara nodded miserably. Everyone went back to first positions, and Mike began the scene again. It had been perfectly sensible advice as far as it went, but the patience was exaggerated, and as Barbara stood in the wings she remembered only that ‘well, never mind’, and she mulled over to herself the variety of wounding phrases it could have been designed to hide. She was a Lancashire girl, and she hated sarcasm, as she hated condescension, and she stiffened with resentment. When her moment came she marched purposefully forward, which at any rate came nearer to a natural walk than her whore’s wiggle, took up her station by the table, and put her hand stiffly but firmly on her hip. At that moment Owen’s high, irritated voice rose over the scurrying strings:

  ‘Seductively, for God’s sake. Do it seductively. You look like an arthritic charwoman.’

  The orchestra continued, Calvin continued, but there was a blank in the mezzo line. Gradually all the music faded away, and a large, rich Lancashire voice was heard:

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said do it seductively,’ said Owen, his own voice rising and containing notes of the now familiar tantrums.

  ‘After that. What did you say after that?’

  ‘I said you looked like an arthritic charwoman,’ said Owen, his anger totally getting the better of his caution.

  Barbara Bootle blushed a violent red, and turned on him.

  ‘That was bloody rude. You’ll take that back. I know I’m no good, and I’d rather die than do this part, but you make me twice as bad because you’re such a bully and make me feel such a worm, and I’m not putting up with any more of your sneers, or any of your snide insinuations—nor any of your condescension for that matter.’

  Barbara was transformed. For the moment everyone in the theatre forgot the lumpy, self-conscious body and noted only the glint in the eye and the set of the shoulders. It was the voice of indedependent Lancashire they had been hearing, the sort of voice whose dogged unreason echoed through Trade Union Congresses and caused little quakes of panic in the hearts of Ministry of Labour conciliators. But it was clear that Owen was not bent on conciliation.

  ‘Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?’ he shouted, his voice beginning to bray, as it always did when he felt himself challenged. ‘And who the hell do you think you are? I’m running this rehearsal and it’s my job to get some sort of performance out of you.’ He paused, and then suddenly seemed to throw his whole body at her, as if totally possessed by his own rage, ‘AND I MEAN TO GET IT IF I HAVE TO KNOCK IT IN TO YOU.’ His face was red, his eyes protruding, his hands gest
iculating jerkily. Barbara’s courage seemed to be failing her a little, though it had by no means deserted her.

  ‘You won’t get any kind of performance out of me by behaving like a pig,’ she said stoutly.

  ‘A pig!’ bellowed Owen. ‘What the hell kind of language is that? I’m the producer of this damned opera, and I’ve had nothing but opposition and arguments the whole time—all through rehearsals—not an ounce of cooperation or willingness, and now you come along, you bloody little incompetent, and you turn in the sort of performance that would make a village concert-party cringe to look at you, and then you have the hide to turn around on me and . . . ’

  ‘Pig—si!’ said a voice suddenly from the back of the stage. ‘Gran’ bestia! Fascist! Piccalo Mussolini! E brrrrutto! No mi piace qui! E finito per me!’

  Mike Turner, from his podium, looked aghast at the plump little form of Giulia Contini, which had come to the front of the stage hands on hips, shoulders heaving, looking for all the world like a Neapolitan housewife whose butcher has sold her horse-meat for beef. Giulia was livid with a quite disinterested rage, a primitive sort of female chivalry. It was clear that her last words were a threat of departure. Mike saw himself losing the star of his show, and all the money already paid to her. Mike, for all his smoothness, was very good in an emergency. He turned to Owen.

  ‘You’re fired,’ he said. ‘As of now.’

  Owen, who had been frozen into an apoplectic posture by the interruption, suddenly crumpled down into his seat, his head forward on the back of the row in front, his hands over his head, cradling it. His shoulders started to heave, and to the intense embarrassment of everybody, loud, wild sobs started heaving from his body, strange cries of abandonment and desolation, hopeless appeals for companionship and compassion.