Death and the Chaste Apprentice Read online

  “Tell this stupid peasant to take his fat hand off my knee,” said Natalya Radilova in Russian.

  “Ah—she understood me. What did she say?”

  “She asked you to take your hand off her leg,” said Peter diplomatically.

  Des Capper burst out into a chilling mine-host laugh.

  “Well, well, well. No offense meant and none taken, I hope. I know they’re a little puritanical still in these Iron Curtain countries. Me, I believe in being broad-minded. There’s more than one kind of partnership, eh, sir?” Des gave a broad and repulsive wink at Brad. “If you ask me, the Russkies could take a few tips from your country, young man,” he added, turning to Singh, who was lost in rapturous contemplation of the mirror image of himself sipping sweet sherry.

  “Singh is English,” breathed Mallory.

  “The Indians know a thing or two about sexual tricks, eh? Not that we were in a position to cast the first stone as far as moral habits were concerned. We, the Raj, the ruling class, I mean. As I was saying at the next table, I was there in ’46-7, aide-de-camp to the Viceroy—”

  “Aide-de-camp, now?”

  “That’s right. And some of the goings-on and permutations and possibilities that I saw while I was with the Mountbattens you wouldn’t believe. Still, when you went out among the natives—as I did, because I’ve got what you might call an inquiring mind, as you may have noticed—you saw things you’d never even read about. Even an old soldier like me had his eyes opened, I can tell you. Ever since then India has always exercised—”

  “A fatal fascination?”

  “It has. It’s been calling me back—”

  “Please. That chair. Madam—you are my soprano?”

  The voice—clipped, exact, icy—seemed to come from a great height. The young man was no more than six feet, but he seemed as high as the Matterhorn, and as daunting. He took Natalya Radilova’s hand and, bending over, implanted on it a kiss, much as if he were stamping her passport.

  “Gunter Gottlieb,” murmured Brad Mallory with a pretense of enthusiasm.

  It was a name more often breathed with devotion, even fanaticism, but that was always by people who did not know him, or need to. Orchestral musicians usually crossed themselves as they uttered the name or spat. Gunter Gottlieb had only recently become a name to conjure with in British musical life. He had been appointed conductor of the Midland Symphony Orchestra at the early age of twenty-seven. It was not, then, an orchestra with a great name. Mahler said that tradition is slovenliness; with the Midland Symphony Orchestra slovenliness was a tradition. Not any more. In a matter of months that mediocre band had been transformed by a mixture of sackings, threats, taunts, hectoring, and rehearsals that became torture sessions lasting well beyond the limits of endurance.

  Now Gunter Gottlieb’s concerts had become the talk of the Midlands and beyond. London critics traveled to Coventry and said that the young Austrian’s Mahler was definitive for his generation. Old men wept at his Brahms and Schumann. Young girls waited outside the studios and concert halls for his autograph, undeterred by the open contempt with which he treated them. One or two of them would be selected for brief and violent couplings with the great man by one or other of the two thugs who, in imitation of more established conductors, comprised his embryonic entourage. Already the first records were in the pipeline. He was the talk of the musical world. It was a pity, everybody said, that he was such an unadulterated swine, but his music—!

  Gunter Gottlieb had been in Ketterick a week. Des Capper—even Des Capper—knew his man. Without a word he vacated his seat and evaporated. Gunter Gottlieb sat down, knowing the chair would be there. His attendant heavy fetched him a drink and stood behind the chair looking menacing, though no more menacing than his master. Gottlieb sat in his chair, his back straight as a Victorian spinster’s, his body seemingly bent by two perfect right angles at the knees and the buttocks. He fixed Natalya Radilova with his glassy, inquisitorial stare.

  “You know your part?”

  “Yes,” said Natalya after translation.

  “Perfectly? Including my embellishments for the cabalettas?”

  “Yes,” said Natalya.

  “You are late,” accused Gottlieb, tight-lipped and schoolmasterly.

  “Natalya, as you know,” put in Mallory with an expression of tired courtesy, “was called in to save some performances of Norma in Cologne.”

  “Performances at Köln are no concern of mine. The production of Adelaide is. I was not consulted about your late arrival. Next year, when we perform La Straniera, I shall be in charge of everything: schedules, sets, costumes, production—and singers. Especially singers.” He smiled his sunset-over-the-gulag smile. “No production can be perfect unless one man has total control. I have made it clear to the committee that I must have that control.”

  “I have no doubt you will get it,” Brad said with a sigh.

  “Is that quite understood? Now let us turn to your aria di sortita in the first act. . . .”

  He bent forward an inch or two, apparently in a gesture of intimacy, and went into lengthy instructions on how to phrase, project, and act during the heroine’s opening aria. Any idea that this was hardly the time or place did not seem to occur to him. Peter Fortnum’s powers as interpreter were taxed to the limit. Natalya listened with every appearance of attention. She was used to the ways of totalitarianism.

  At the bar the gaunt, exhausted woman with the pulled-back hair, who incidentally was Des Capper’s wife, was up to her eyes in orders. Des, however, was not in the business of helping behind any bar. He stopped by the table where Gillian Soames and Ronnie Wimsett were still deep in the entrancing business of character assassination. Nowhere, except perhaps the House of Commons, offers more scope for that sport than the theater, and they were set fair to continue until the call for last drinks.

  “Everything all right here?” Des asked, clearly intending to muscle in. “Anything I can do for you?”

  Gillian Soames raised her head, clearly about to say, “Yes—piss off.” But Ronnie Wimsett, a peaceable young man, took her hand in his, gazed adoringly into her eyes in the manner of a second-rate tenor in Act I of Bohème, then turned to Des and sighed. “No—everything is just wonderful.”

  There was nothing Des could do but leave them to themselves. He threw some orders at his drudge of a wife, then pottered off to his little office behind Reception, convinced that that pair were resuming an affair of long standing. It was one of a series of assumptions, some true, some false, that Des Capper made about his artistic guests. These assumptions soon attained in his mind the status of facts, as the many harebrained theories he read about in magazines did. They were stored up and gloated over, for Des was convinced in his mind that knowledge was power. It never occurred to him that knowledge was also danger.

  Chapter 3

  Open Stage

  THE NATURE of Jason Thark’s directorial gloss on that year’s Ketterick Arts Festival play became clear to Gillian the next day. On the way down to breakfast on that, her first morning of rehearsals, she stopped to study a large poster in Reception detailing all the major events and the backup arrangements. Among these latter was a lunchtime lecture on The Chaste Apprentice, to be given by the lecturer in Gay Studies at the local polytechnic.

  Whether the chaste apprentice of the play was gay in the modern sense of the word was open to question. That he was dreary in any sense of the word was incontrovertible. Gillian mentally reserved her position on whether the gloss could be made to work.

  Behind the grand apron stage, now finally assembled, lay the magnificent and sprawling kitchens of the Saracen’s Head as well as a couple of private dining rooms. When the festival began, the actors would take over the dining rooms as well as a good half of the kitchens. Until then the actors tended to lounge around in the yard as the play was being rehearsed or camp in the dining rooms where they could talk and laugh and quarrel with more freedom. Today was the first full stage rehearsal, and Gi
llian experienced the familiar lift of the heart when Clarissa Galloway, as Lady Melinda Purefoy, came on with Peter Fortnum as Peter Patterwit to begin the play:

  MELINDA: A private word, Sir, nothing else.

  PETER PATTERWIT: You shall fructify in that which you came for: your pleasure shall be satisfied to your full contention: I will (fairest tree of generation) watch when our young friend is erected (that is to say up) . . .

  The authorship of The Chaste Apprentice of Bowe was a matter of some lethargic scholarly dispute. It was variously attributed to Dekker and Chapman, to Beaumont and Marston, to Beaumont and Massinger, and to Heywood and Middleton. It was generally agreed that two hands were discernible in it, though only half a brain.

  At the lower level of the play the story line concerns the attempts of two apprentices, Peter Patterwit and Matthew Cotter (who is really Sir James Cotterel in disguise), to persuade the third apprentice, Simon Clear, to lose his virginity. At the same time, Sir James is being sought by his true love, Lady Melinda Purefoy, whom a family feud is preventing him from marrying. On the other level, the apprentices’ master, Ralph Greatheart, the goldsmith, is resisting his wife’s attempts to marry off their daughter, Alison (Gillian’s part, and a lousy one), to an elderly aristocratic roué, Sir Pecunius Slackwater. At the end of the play the chaste apprentice loses his virginity to a whore in Deptford, Matthew is unmasked as Sir James (much to the chagrin of Mistress Greatheart, who would have consigned her daughter to him had she known), and Alison is given in marriage to Peter Patterwit, who is thus much too well rewarded for all his dreadful jokes in the course of the play.

  Jason Thark’s notion of how to ginger up the play was evident from the moment Ronnie Wimsett took to the stage as the chaste apprentice. He had been instructed to deck out his performance with every gesture from the camp repertoire: the fluttering hands, the swooping voice, the wiggled bottom, the mincing walk. It was pure sixties camp, an exercise in behavioral archaeology: Thus are homosexuals not played on stage today, and thus do they not behave. But Ronnie was a superb comedian, and the performance in itself was a riot. Gillian could see Ronnie making a great effect with it, which he could never have done with the lines as they appeared on the printed page:

  SIMON CLEAR: Why sure, Madam, I will do it straight

  was no great shakes as a line, yet said with a spaniel wiggle, a lewd gesture unseen by his mistress, and with vocal leaps worthy of a Mozart soprano, it was a surefire laugh getter.

  Gillian also saw, of course, that as an interpretation it was open to several objections: The apprentice was supposed to be a dull young man, so that every other line Ronnie spoke and half the things that were said about him by others were contradicted by his physical performance; this young man might be innocent of the knowledge of women, but chaste he could not conceivably be. In Jason Thark’s reinterpretation the crowning episode with the whore of Deptford became no more than a brief shift of allegiance. Not that it mattered much; this was no masterwork. But homosexuals were these days as sensitive about their image as other minority groups. They could take against the production, and—remembering the usual makeup of the festival’s audience—Gillian could imagine them banding together to form a fair-sized picket.

  The idea that there might be some element of exaggeration and stereotyping in this performance got through even to Des Capper. On the second day of stage rehearsals he oozed up behind Gillian and Ronnie, while up on stage Carston Galloway, as Ralph Greatheart, was having a tremendous row with his (stage) wife. Having so much experience with his real one, Carston was making a great thing of it, and Gillian and Ronnie were talking in their normal voices when Des came up behind them and thrust himself uninvited into their conversation.

  “That’s a real little gem of a performance you’re giving there,” Des nasaled out, clapping Ronnie on the shoulder. “Got all the mannerisms fit to kill. I was pissing myself laughing back there.”

  “Thank you,” said Ronnie briefly, unwilling to be rude to a man in his own courtyard.

  “I wonder—don’t mind me saying this, do you?—whether you’ve quite got at the psychology of the bloke. I wonder whether you’re really living inside him yet, understanding what makes him tick. Ever heard of Stanislavski?”

  “Didn’t he compose The Rite of Spring?” said Ronnie brusquely, and marched backstage. Des nodded sagely.

  “I think I got through to him,” he said with grotesque complacency. “You could see he got my point. Though I think it was a quite different Stanislavski wrote The Rite of Spring.”

  As the days of rehearsal flew by and the play took shape, both Gillian and Peter saw enough of the Galloways to wonder whether the balance of power—was that the word? of strength? of influence?—was quite as it had seemed to them on the day of their arrival. Gillian had seen the situation then as pretty much the same as when she had acted with them in a Haymarket revival of The Rivals, or two years previously here in Ketterick in The Faire Seducer; Peter, new to them, had seen it as the classic henpecked husband situation, though with a strong element of fighting back. Now they began to revise their opinions.

  The first thing they noted was that Carston Galloway was giving a superb performance as Ralph Greatheart: warm, crusty, independent, salty. This was light-years away from the elegant, youngish man, cigarette holder in one hand, White Lady in the other, which was how the theatergoing public had hitherto seen him. Galloway was making the transition to being a good character actor. And like most actors, he knew his worth. Peter heard him one day when he took Jason Thark aside.

  “Oh, Jason, that understudy to little Soames—is that still going begging?”

  “Yes, we haven’t got anybody.”

  “Then give it to Susan, will you? Susan Fanshaw. She’s not really stretched by all these fiddling stage-management jobs.”

  Jason paused only for a second. “All right, Carston—gladly. Will you tell her?”

  “If you like,” said Carston, winking.

  Whether Clarissa would ever make the transition to successful character actress could only be a matter for guesswork. What was sure was that she was not willing to make it yet. That really was the trouble: Melinda Purefoy was young love, she was romantic interest, she was dewy-fresh virgin. The actor playing Sir James Cotterel, with whom she was in love, was a public-school smoothie of twenty-six. Whereas Clarissa was—what? The reference books differed, or rather most of them kept silent, having no wish to give currency to Clarissa’s blatant untruths. But the record of her career was public knowledge: She had made her West End debut in an H. M. Tennent revival of Present Laughter in 1962. Put her beside her supposed lover in the cruel light of day—which, after all, was what they would be acting under, with some blessed softening of evening light—and the gulf between them was brutally apparent. Put her, on the other hand, beside Constance Geary, a gin-ridden old bag whom everybody loved, who was giving a great performance as Old Lady Sneer, and you saw at once what Clarissa would become. Both were mature ladies at different stages of maturity. They were sisters under the gin.

  Why she wanted to play the part was obvious—to prove she could still convincingly manage young women. It was as unwise an ambition as could be conceived, and how she had got the part was far from obvious. Gillian and Peter never saw any great evidence that her bedding with Jason Thark brought her tangible rewards in the way of added prominence or any shielding from his wrath. Could it be, then, that she had got the part because they wanted Carston for Ralph? Quite the reverse, in fact, of how she wanted people to see the situation.

  Clarissa, however, was not to be underestimated, and she retained her unrivaled power of fuss making, which was legendary in theaters the length and breadth of the country. On Gillian’s fifth day of rehearsals, during the midmorning break when everybody was in the little private dining room drinking coffee or something stronger, Clarissa burst in on them in a manner that certainly did not suggest she was going to ask whether anyone was for tennis. She used, in fact, he
r standard stage manner for delivering disastrous news or staggering developments.

  “Really! It’s too bad! Jason, you’ll have to do something.”

  Jason was going over business with Ronnie Wimsett. He merely turned and raised a coolly inquiring eyebrow.

  “It’s that appalling Capper person. I’ve just been up to my bedroom—”

  “Which one, darling?” inquired Carston languidly. “Ours or Jason’s?”

  “Ours, pig. And I found this . . . antipodean monstrosity poking around in my drawers.”

  “Underwear fetishist, would you say?”

  Clarissa drew her hand across her brow. “God! Don’t trot out all those ancient jokes, Carston. In the drawers of my dressing table. Actually poking and prying in them.”

  “Did you catch him in the act?” inquired Jason.

  “Well, not quite,” admitted Clarissa with a sigh designed to be heard in the dress circle. “One of those damned floorboards creaked just as I was opening the door. He’d got the drawer shut by the time I’d got into the room.”

  “What did he say?” Carston asked.

  “He said he was just checking up on the maid’s work.” She put on a hideously nasal stage Australian accent. “ ‘She’s new to the job, y’see, and I’d like to be sure she’s up to the high standards we set ourselves at the Saracen.’ ”

  Jason shrugged. “Seems a fairly foolproof explanation.”

  “Oh, does it? Well, let me tell you, the maid who does our room every day, including this morning, was here two years ago when we were in The Faire Seducer. I count her as an old friend. She’s just thrilled by anything to do with the theater. I gave her a pair of my stockings when we finished here last time—they do so appreciate something personal, these people.”

  This artless revelation of Clarissa’s rather blunted the impact of her indignation. The assembled company was so staggered that the Galloways apparently tipped the hotel staff with items of their castoff clothing that they were unable for a moment to focus their minds on Des Capper’s iniquities.