Perfect Gallows Read online

  Adrian, in a black tracksuit and training-shoes, was lolling in the corner of the immense white sofa, flipping to and fro through the pages of an elderly and rather battered book, its linen cover embossed with a picture of a Zulu warrior picked out in black and gold. The girl who had been with him at the preview came in wearing a blue butcher’s apron, looking no less appealing in it than she had in her furs. She was carrying a saucer which she held in triumph under his nose.

  “Olive oil,” she said. “You told me water but it kept sticking.”

  On the saucer was a large round of butter embossed with the representation of a sheep.

  “That was my Cousin May’s,” said Adrian. “Elspeth’s was a horse and old Arnold’s a bull. No doubt Samuel had selected them as appropriate when rationing started.”

  “Which was yours?”

  “I never had one of these. The ration would not have filled them by the time I came on the scene. That’s why Samuel made the little ones.”

  She turned to the left-hand niche, probed with a spider’s delicacy among the clutter and brought back one of the smaller moulds.

  “You mean this is you?” she said, holding it out on the flat of her palm. He glanced at the whittled scrap and nodded.

  “Was me,” he said. “Now, listen.”

  As he started to read from the book his voice changed, became creaky, sing-song, intense. It was light in tone and without any apparent tricks or distortions was unmistakably African.

  “Look now, my father! There on the plain far away is a place of the white men. It is called Stanger. There, where is the white man’s town, stood the great kraal Duguza. I cannot see, for my eyes are dark; but you can see. Where the gate of the kraal was built there is a house; it is the place where the white man gives out justice; that is the place of the gate of the kraal, through which Justice never walked. Behind is another house, where the white men who have sinned against Him pray to the King of Heaven for forgiveness; there on that spot I have seen many a one who had done no wrong pray to a king of men for mercy, but I have never seen but one who found it. Ou! The words of Chaka have come true: I will tell them to you presently, my father. The white man holds the land, he goes to and fro about his business in peace where Impis ran forth to kill; his children laugh and gather flowers where men died in blood by hundreds; they bathe in the waters of the Imbozamo, where once the crocodiles were fed daily with human flesh; his young men woo the maidens where other maids have kissed the assegai. It is changed, nothing is the same, and of Chaka are left only a grave yonder and a name of fear.”

  “Please stop,” she said. “I’m sorry, but it’s horrible. I can smell the blood in your voice … What’s wrong? I mean you can go on if you want. Of course you were doing it beautifully. Only …”

  He closed the book and laid it aside, then put up his hand and took hers. She laid the saucer of butter on the floor and sat, snuggling in against him. His fingers caressed gently at her neck.

  “How long have you known you had second sight?” he said. “I’m not sure I approve. Perhaps I shouldn’t have taken you to the sale.”

  “But I loved it!”

  “Perhaps I shouldn’t have gone myself.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I used to read Nada aloud to Samuel while he was whittling the moulds. He was illiterate, though he had a remarkable verbal memory.”

  “Good as yours?”

  “Different. When I revive a part I have to relearn it. We read through The Tempest before we started rehearsals. Samuel did Caliban from memory, having played the part once, some twenty years earlier. He scarcely needed a prompt.”

  “What did you mean about second sight?”

  “Samuel used to say that he could smell the blood in my voice. I don’t think he can have been a Zululand Zulu—I gather that very few of them went to the diamond diggings—but Zulu was his language. He thought the voice I used appropriate, at any rate. Nada is a rum concoction—I didn’t then realize how rum. No doubt as history it is very highly coloured—Richard III blacked up, and to something of the same effect. One thinks of Haggard as a writer of mildly mystical adventure yarns—King Solomon’s Mines, and the rest nowhere.”

  “Daddy read us that. The old witch gave me nightmares for weeks.”

  “Gagool. Nada might be described as an attempt to tell a story from the point of view of a male Gagool.”

  “Ghastly.”

  “Successful, in my opinion, and also in old Samuel’s. He can have been only a few years younger than my uncle, so the reign of Chaka would have been fairly recent history to him. He had come to the mines when he was sixteen, intending only to earn enough money to buy himself a gun and then go home, but my uncle got his claws into him and kept him, and eventually brought him back to England.”

  “And he made this?” she said, taking the butter-mould out of the pocket of her apron. “I wish I could try it, but I haven’t got a thingy to fit.”

  “A cylinder. We should be able to find something of the right diameter—take it to Dowley and Dowley and beg an inch of plastic water-pipe off them. If nothing’s right I’ll get one made.”

  “Darling A. I’ve a nasty feeling it’s going to stick—it isn’t the right wood.”

  “Samuel managed, and he wouldn’t have been able to get hold of olive oil. That must have been pretty well unobtainable.”

  She half lay, leaning against him, moulding her body to his and responding with faint cat-like movements to the rhythm of his caress. Her own fingers turned the butter-mould to and fro to let her inspect every facet of the wizened little object.

  “It is you, A.,” she said. “I can see. Are you cold? Shall I warm you up?”

  Folding her hands together with the mould between the palms she blew gently into the hollow. Adrian reached out and wrenched her grip open.

  “Ow!” she said.

  “You must be more careful what you do and say, my dear.”

  “Please don’t call me that. It makes me think you might send me away.”

  “Not unless you force me to. I have a particular talent which has enabled me to achieve what I have, and that is the most precious thing in the world to me. I am prepared to be entirely selfish about it, and to sacrifice anything and anyone in order to preserve it.”

  “Oh, yes. I’ve always known that. Only …”

  “Now, my dear …”

  “Please, A.!”

  “I am doing it deliberately, in order to force the lesson home. I am beginning to believe that you possess some kind of psychic knack, at least where I am concerned.”

  “It’s only because I love you so much.”

  “Possibly, but it would make no difference. There are certain things …”

  “Like Bluebeard?”

  “In a sense.”

  “All right. Only …”

  “Be careful.”

  “I’m trying—really I’m trying. Only I don’t see how I can be careful when I don’t know what I’m supposed to be careful about! You said you’d tell me, but …”

  “Did I?”

  “Well, you said perhaps.”

  He took the mould from her, glanced at it and then pushed it out of sight in the pocket of her apron.

  “When you were at the sale did you look out of the front windows?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes! That peculiar little tower!”

  “The dovecote. I found Samuel’s body hanging there early one morning. The previous evening had seen our first performance of The Tempest. Samuel was a naturally gifted actor. Given other circumstances he might well have been a major force in the theatre of his day. Even as it was I would number him among the handful I have worked with whom I regard as having talents equal to my own.”

  “And he spent his whole life buttling!”

  “Yes. He took a few minor par
ts in some of my cousin’s other productions, and did a remarkable Caliban for her in the later Twenties, the role he repeated the night before he died.”

  “What happened?”

  “I was not at the inquest. I gave my evidence of finding the body by affidavit, because I had by then been called up. I believe other evidence was given of his having been depressed and at least partially estranged from his wife and the other servants in recent weeks. That was certainly the case. The final straw, it was thought, was that he had been dismissed for a piece of gross impertinence just as the performance was about to start. In the circumstances a verdict of suicide was pretty well inevitable.”

  “He didn’t, though, did he?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Only I can’t imagine you … whatever else was happening in your life … I mean after a good first night … you don’t have to tell me, A …”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Just the way you haven’t said what you thought. I can feel you sort of pushing it all outside you …”

  His fingers froze in their caress. His arm disentangled itself. With a slow but lithe movement, dance-like in its control of every muscle, he slid himself forward along the sofa, stood and turned. She had shrunk back against the sofa’s arm and was staring up. It would have been impossible to tell whether his countenance of patriarchal sternness expressed real inward anger or some other emotion, or whether it was a further step in what he had called “forcing the lesson home”, or perhaps no more than a move in the game of dominance and submission on which their relationship to some extent depended. At any rate the pause before sentence was, for once, mistimed. He made his face blank and looked down at his right foot. She followed his glance.

  “Ooh!” she squeaked. “I’m terribly sorry. I put it there. It’s all my fault.”

  Still in silence and still with the same muscular control he bent and standing on one leg unlaced his shoe, to which the saucer of butter now adhered. He peeled them apart and used the saucer’s rim and the toe of the shoe to scrape each other and thus ease the main mass of butter into the fire—all of this with the calm movements of a priest at the altar, so that you would have thought he stood on a pat of butter every day of his life. The fire hissed and the butter began to burn at the edges with a soft unwavering flame. Watching it with his back to her he spoke, now clearly acting, indeed hamming.

  “Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, the Gods themselves throw incense.”

  “Is it all right?” she whispered. “Oh, A., I wish I understood you!”

  He turned, shaking his head.

  “And I do not wish you to make the attempt,” he said. “In fact, I forbid you to do so.”

  “It’s too difficult. I can’t help thinking about you, can I?”

  “Then you must think about me as I am now. I am going to put Nada away in a drawer. You may keep the butter-moulds, but you must not play with them any more.”

  “But it was your idea going to the sale.”

  “It turns out to have been a mistake. I thought … no, never mind what I thought. I now think it is time for bed.”

  She rose and put her arms round him. They stood in front of the fire rocking gently to and fro, like a couple on a dance-floor too crowded for circulation.

  “It’s going to be all right, isn’t it?” she whispered.

  “How much butter was there in that saucer?”

  “A bit over half a brick. It’s surprising how much you can squidge in.”

  “Five ounces, say. Almost three weeks’ ration. That should be enough.”

  March, April 1944

  ONE

  I say by sorcery he got this isle,” croaked Samuel Mkele. “From me he got it. If thy greatness will revenge it on him—for I know thou darest, but this thing dare not …”

  “Wake up, Stephano,” said Cousin Brown.

  “Me? Oh, sorry,” said the flabby bald young man one along from Andrew. “Dreadfully sorry. Where are we?”

  Andrew leaned across and pointed at the line.

  “Oh, yes. That’s most certain. What’s most certain? I do wish I understood what was going on.”

  “Caliban is persuading you to murder Prospero so that you can be king of the island,” said Cousin Brown. “He has just said that he is afraid to do it himself, but that you are not. You are drunk enough to agree.”

  “Roger. Like this? That’sh mosht shertain!”

  He glared at Cousin Brown with quivering jowls. She smiled encouragingly and nodded to Samuel to continue. The cast were new to each other as actors, though all, except Andrew, being local were at least acquainted in other ways. Cousin Brown was planning four open-air productions, two under the cedar on the vicarage lawn and two in a similar garden in a neighbouring village. There was no likelihood of attracting audiences the extra miles out to the stage in the garden at The Mimms. The read-through was taking place in the Village Institute, a barn-like hall used as a British Restaurant at mid-day and still smelling strongly of Woolton Pie and non-egg custard.

  Most of the readers were as dire as Andrew had expected, or worse, stumbling, wooden, uncomprehending. Stephano (available after being invalided out of the navy—his unhealthy look was the result of his illness, Cousin Brown had whispered) had just shown a flash of promise and Trinculo (the old boy who with his daughter kept the post office) had the right clown face, bunch-cheeked and gleaming. Miranda was a strapping, freckled land-girl with hair between mouse and ginger who read in a whispering monotone. The courtiers and sailors, apart from the bosun, were all going to be played by women, some of whom gave every appearance of having been press-ganged—indeed Antonio, cast no doubt for her permanent sulk, seemed already on the edge of mutiny. Cousin Brown was playing Gonzago, which she read with energetic clarity, and since she had not yet managed to cast a Ferdinand or an Ariel she took those parts too.

  The star turn was Samuel Mkele. He knew his lines, having played Caliban twenty years before and barely forgotten a word. When he was in a scene he rose from his chair and spoke with full energy, as though already on stage, accompanying the words with wild, expressive gestures. Andrew had intended to read his own part with some reserve, deliberately not committing himself to it. To do so, he felt, would be to fall in completely with Cousin Brown’s plans, to accept her idea that he should stay at The Mimms the whole of the Easter hols (today was their first Friday, and the read-through had been timed to coincide with the arrival of his bus from Southampton) and make a start on the immense series of rehearsals which she said were going to be necessary to “lick the cast into shape”. Since his first dazed acceptance of Cousin Brown’s proposal outside the police station that icy morning, the project had become more and more forbidding, in its absurdity, in its difficulty, but mostly in its boringness. She expected him out here not only all these hols, but almost every weekend of the summer term. Andrew had spent most of his bus-ride considering possible ways of explaining to Cousin Brown that he wasn’t going to do it. The problem boiled down to one question, whether or not to tell her about Lily Butt.

  Lily lived a few doors down from his new lodgings in Itchen Way. She was a bus conductress, a dyed blonde with green eyes, no chin, and a small mouth made up into a scarlet pout. She had a big bust and wide hips, and strapped her uniform belt in as tight as she could to show them off. Off duty she let her hair down over one eye, like Veronica Lake. Andrew had spotted her in the street almost as soon as he moved into Itchen Way. A week later the three-speed on Dad’s old bike had finally jammed so he’d had to take the bus to school. It had been Lily’s. He caught it the rest of the week, worked out the return times and caught them too. Thursday, standing on the platform, waiting for the stop, he’d asked her if she’d like to go to the Saturday hop with him. She’d stared and started to laugh. She was twenty-three and he didn’t look more than sixteen. But he’d laughed with her and her ton
e had changed. Later she swore that she’d only agreed as a way of getting into the hop and picking up a Yank—they wouldn’t let girls in alone so as to keep the tarts out—but he knew it wasn’t true. He had made it happen. He had made her see, not an optimistic little twerp, but what? … amusement, fun, fizz, novelty … Adrian. At any rate she had stayed with him all evening, dancing closer and closer and when the doors closed she had taken him into the bus depot by a side door and used the back seat of her bus. She’d obviously done it before, often, with lots of blokes, but he didn’t mind. Despite the cold and the smell of sweat and oil and Craven A it was much better than the brothel. Andrew had only gone back there twice more after that first time with the black girl before realizing that wasn’t what he wanted. Paying was cheating, cheating your own powers, your private magic, the magic that had made Lily say yes. Not that she wasn’t almost a tart herself. She wouldn’t have had much time for Andrew if he hadn’t been able to afford her tickets for the Saturday hops, and drinks and fags when you could get them, and visits to the flicks other evenings. He needed Cousin Brown’s allowance for that, which was one of the things that were going to make it difficult to explain. But he had come to the reading certain that he was going to back out of doing any more than he absolutely had to.

  In his opening scenes, with Miranda and then with Ariel, Andrew had expressed this lack of commitment in his voice, simply reading his lines in almost impersonal tones. But then he had called Caliban from his cave and everything had changed. Samuel had risen from his chair into a half crouch and with spread hands and bulging eyes had croaked his first curses with such energy that Andrew had been forced to respond, to rise too, and gesture and answer with equivalent power. The current had immediately flowed between them, that thrill of contact and response which Andrew had read about but only partly and faintly experienced in school plays when one of the other boys had been sparked by Andrew’s own energies to act above himself for a few lines, or even a whole scene. This was different. The energies didn’t have to be supplied, because they were there already. As Caliban had slunk back to his chair the rest of the cast clapped.