1
Enter The Prologue
“NO!” roared Mac. “STOP!”
Everybody obediently stopped. In fact some
of the fairies—Vicki Austin chief amongst them, she was a ringleader if ever there
was one, and if she and her sister hadn’t been so damn pretty, Mac would never
have had them in the thing—sat down and started eating junk food produced from
the pockets of their jeans.
“I said TRIP LIGHTLY!” roared Mac. “TRIP—LIGHTLY!”
Everybody looked bored. They had been
tripping lightly.
“And
you lot,” said Mac evilly to the rustics: “SHUT UP! And stop playing with those
fucking bladders— GIVE me that!” He snatched a silver bladder out of a rustic’s
hairy paw. The rustics, or non-speaking male chorus, were mostly engineering
students and had been chosen for their shambling hideousness and general air of
rustic thickness, and now Mac was duly reaping the rewards of this decision. He
knew it, but this didn’t help. As for the bladders—well, they were going to look
bloody good when the lights were on and everybody was made up and in costume.
But in the meantime they were more trouble than they were fucking well worth,
and come to think of it, they’d been that Vicki kid’s idea, too! He stopped
glaring generally and gave her a specific glare but Vicki didn’t notice and
merely continued munching on an apricot-nougat muesli bar.
“Right, now LISTEN!” roared Mac. “This over
here is your entrance! SEE?” The fairies looked bored, they knew that. “You
come in tripping lightly. TRIPPING LIGHTLY, not like a herd of elephants! And the
next fairy I see wearing bloody jandals is out of the fucking show! Geddit? Out
of the fucking show!”
One or two fairies obligingly removed their
rubber flip-flops, looking bored.
“And don’t come in in flaming ROWS, it’s
not the Folies Bloody Bergère!” roared Mac.
“Last time he told us not to come in in a
bunch like a mob of sheep,” said the fairy sitting on the stage next to Vicki.
“Yeah,” agreed Vicki without interest. “Wanna
bit?”
“Ta,” said the other fairy, accepting a bit
of apricot-nougat muesli bar.
“Right!” decided Mac. “Now when I say ‘now’,
you all come in.”
“Tripping ligh’ly,” muttered the fairy
sharing Vicki’s muesli bar through the muesli bar.
“Yesh,” agreed Vicki sourly.
“Now— GET UP!” roared Mac.
The fairies struggled reluctantly to their
feet.
“Now—hang on, where’s that fat fairy?” he
said.
There was a bit of shuffling and shoving.
Finally a fat male fairy was pushed to the front.
“I
know you can’t trip lightly, dear,” said Mac to him in an acid voice: “but when
I say ‘trip lightly’, just try not to pound. Geddit?”
“Righto,” said the fat fairy obligingly.
“Right. Now, places, everybody!” cried Mac
optimistically. “PLACES!” he bellowed. “Get into FORMATION!” he screamed.
The fairies shuffled and bumped a bit.
“When are we gonna get off this stupid
stage and do it in the real place?” grumbled the fairy who’d shared Vicki’s
muesli bar.
“Dunno,” replied Vicki.
“Where is it that we’re gonna do it,
anyway?” asked the fairy in a puzzled voice.
“Um—dunno,” replied Vicki.
“Right—now!” decided Mac. “NOW!” he
shouted.
The fairies tripped on. Lightly. Well, as
lightly as they could, considering that most of them were in jeans, they’d
already tripped on fifty times this morning, and the temperature was pushing twenty-five,
with a humidity reading of eighty-two percent, and if anyone thought that was fun,
they’d never got themselves involved in a University Drama Club midsummer production
of guess what, the Dream, in a streaming northern New Zealand summer.
“This is vile,” noted Jill Davis of the
French Department in a dry, detached voice from the main door of the hall.
It was all right for Jill: she wasn’t in the
horrible thing, and she was due to go on holiday down the South Island in two
days’ time, far, far away from humid hell-holes where idiots that couldn’t
stand up to their H.O.D.s had let themselves be conned into agreeing to help
out with the stupid annual outdoor Shakespeare production.
“Yes,” agreed Georgy Harris of the English
Department sourly.
“Come down to the Franz Josef with me and
Gretchen!” suggested Jill with a laugh in her voice. “Sun, ice—bit of snow,
maybe—”
“Push
off, Jill,” said Georgy in a hard voice.
“We thought we might do a bit of
rock-scrambling—Gretchen knows a bloke from the German Department down in Dunedin,
he—”
“I’ll—kill—you,” said Georgy through
her teeth.
“Well, come to lunch, for God’s sake,” said
Jill, desisting.
“I can’t, Mac might want me to—um—hold the
book, or something,” said Georgy glumly.
“Isn’t he capable of holding his own book?”
replied Jill blankly.
“No, you clot!” she hissed. “Prompt!”
“Eh? Oh! Well, they’re not reading lines,
they’re doing this galumphing stuff,” pointed out Jill.
Georgy
gulped. “Mm. But he’s supposed to be rehearsing the—um, I forget: one of those
boring scenes with those idiot lovers, I forget which pair, in about”—she
looked at her watch—“half an hour ago,” she discovered.
“The
whole thing’s boring, if you ask me. Almost as boring as Mac’s lectures on it,
from all I’ve heard.”
“Ssh!” hissed Georgy, scowling at her and
glancing frantically up the hall. However, it was all right, Mac was still
sweating and screaming at his fairies.
“Well, isn’t it?”
“Um—well, I did once see a production on TV
that was quite good,” said Georgy in a weak voice. “I think it had Helen Mirren
in it. –I think,” she added dubiously. “Or was that that thing with
Whatsisname?”
“Probably,” said Jill, sounding extremely
bored.
“That tall one, that thinks he’s funny. He
was quite good, though. But he gives me the creeps.”
“Illuminating, Harris,” noted Jill, leaning
heavily on the door jamb.
“John Something. Wasn’t he in that
Cambridge Circus thing you were telling me about?” said Georgy, who was a New
Zealander, in a rather small voice to Jill, who was English and had done a
degree at Cambridge.
“Oh! Good grief! Him!”
“Mm.”
“We are talking about Measure For
Measure, aren’t we?” said Jill with a laugh in her voice.
“I think so,” replied Georgy uncertainly. “The
lady was called Isabella, I do remember that.”
“No-one would ever think Eng. Lit. was your
subject, Harris,” noted Jill kindly.
“It isn’t: Anglo-Saxon is. –And Shakespeare
certainly isn’t!” Georgy added with spirit.
Mac flung an impatient look over his
shoulder at the noise by the door, and she cringed.
“Why do you let him bully you like this?”
asked Jill on a resigned note.
“Because he’s a bully, and I’m a doormat, I
suppose. –I go all sick inside, Jill,” she said miserably.
Jill sighed. “Well, I hope you’re not
deluding yourself you’ll get tenure out of this little lot: because if it’s a choice
between you and that blonde Angela bint he’s been up in his spare time for the
last few years—”
“I know. Don’t be horrid,” said Georgy in a
stifled voice.
“Gretchen’s right,” she said heavily: “you
do need to come to Assertiveness Training.”
“I’ve tried,” said Georgy sadly. “I can
hear it all in my head—you know; and I—I admit the—the justice of
everything they say: only when it’s a real person, I just can’t do it!”
“No,” agreed Jill resignedly. “Well, I’d
better go, Gretchen’s keeping a leathery filled-roll warm for me in the S.C.R.,
might as well make use of the bloody place while it’s still open. I’ll be seeing
ya. And if you change your mind about the South Island in the next two days,
you know where we live.”
“Thanks. Only I can’t. I’ve promised,” said
Georgy sadly.
Jill sighed, and departed.
Georgy went on hovering in the doorway,
waiting for Mac to bellow at her to come and hold the book, or show fairies how
to trip, or take silver bladders on sticks off huge engineering students who terrified
her. None of them, in fact, would have laid a finger on her: for one thing, in
spite of the carefully cultivated macho hoonish surfaces they were nice boys
from decent homes, for another thing she was quite little and shy, and for
another thing, she was A Lecturer.
The rehearsal wound on its weary way.
Fairies tripped—or galumphed, depending on whether you were behind or before
the footlights that might have been there if they’d been going to do the actual
production in the hall. Mac sweated and shouted. The two pairs of lovers and the
Puck understudy, perched on uncomfortable wooden benches against one wall, got
up a desultory game of poker. The rustics fought amongst themselves—at least,
the usual sort of shuffling, bumping, and general body contact of male of
engineering students only halfway through their degrees looked like that to the
timid Georgy from her position by the door. The Oberon understudy sulked and
looked endlessly at his watch. The Titania understudy alternately sulked and glared
at Mac. –Pointlessly: she would never have got the part even if he hadn’t had
some beastly Pommy female (the understudy’s expression) coming out to play it, another
blonder and much more buxom female student would have. But that student, on
being told she’d have to be the understudy but could do a couple of the matinées
for schoolkids, had slapped Mac’s face for him and walked off the stage and out
of his life. In fact she’d gone straight down to the Registry, so incensed was
she, and told them that she knew she’d pre-enrolled for English Honours next year
but she’d changed her mind, she wanted to do French Honours instead. At the
Registry they’d told her in shocked tones that she couldn’t change her course here,
this was the Registry! And that she’d have to wait until Enrolment Week
and change it then. Which she fully intended to do.
After quite some considerable time Mac got the
chorus of fairies off the stage and sent them to lunch. Georgy watched them go enviously.
He gave the chorus of rustics a brief stretch of coming on rustically, tore his
hair, and sent them to lunch. Georgy watched them go enviously. Then he started
rehearsing two of the lovers, looked round angrily, and bellowed: “Georgy!
Get up here!”
Georgy came up meekly and sat down to
prompt on the prompt side. She had more to say, really, than the actual lovers:
there being two of them and neither of them being able to remember half their
lines.
“Get OFF, get OFF, get OFF!” screamed Mac
finally. “No—wait: you,” he said evilly to the male lover: “get back
there.”
The
boy got, looking cowed.
“Georgy! called Mac. “GEORGY!” he bellowed
furiously. “—Oy: cummere!” He grabbed the female lover as she was about to
sneak off to lunch.
Georgy’s face appeared cautiously at the
prompt side. “What?”
“Get out there and show this moron how to
read this part,” ordered Mac.
“Um—righto,” said Georgy. “Where shall I
start?”
“At—the—beginning,” said Mac in an
evil voice.
“Oh—righto. Um—‘Fair love, you faint with
wandr’ing in the wood—’”
“NO!” bellowed Mac. “You’re the WOMAN!”
“Am I?” said Georgy in astonishment.
“YES!” bellowed Mac. “Give her the line,
you cretin! –YOU! Give her the LINE!”
“Oh. Um—blow, where am I?” fumbled the male
lover.
“‘Fair love,’” prompted Georgy kindly.
“Oh—yeah. –Hang on, can I look at your
script, Georgy?’’
“JEE-SUS!” bellowed Mac, tearing his hair
with both hands. He had to hurl his script to the floor in order to do this,
but he managed that all right, too.
The lover gave Georgy the line. Georgy replied
obediently in the voice of Hermia: “‘Be it so, Lysander: find you out a bed.
For I upon this bank will rest my head.’”
They played the little scene through.
Hermia came over as a young woman of great good sense, considerable sense of
humour, and much tenderness. Very much in love with a young man who was not the
weedy specimen in the jeans torn artfully at the knees who stood awkwardly
before Georgy on the stage of the University Hall, but a rather more splendid young
man altogether.
“See?” said Mac nastily to the
unfortunate female lover. “She’s in love with him—geddit? In—love. She
doesn’t look at him as if he’s a piece of wood, or a turd, or a stone, she’s in
LOVE with him, DAMN IT!”
“I can’t do it!” wailed the female lover,
suddenly bursting into floods of tears.
Mac immediately changed tack. “Of course
you can, my lovely,” he purred, putting his arm round the heaving shoulders. “Oy—you
lot: clear off: go to lunch: back by two-fifteen!” he bellowed at the rest of
them.
They shot off before he could change his
mind.
“Now, then,” he purred, leading his sobbing
victim away, “come on, you tell old Mac all about it!”
“It’s—too—hard!” she sobbed.
“Not for a bright little thing like you,”
cooed Mac, as they vanished in the general direction of the garden. Or possibly
the casting-couch in Mac’s office, thought Georgy, who had no illusions either about
her boss, even if she couldn’t stand up to him, or about the sexual willingness,
indeed over-eagerness, of many of the female students, even though she'd never
been like that herself as a student.
“Um—whadd’ll we do?” croaked the
unfortunate Lysander.
“Go to lunch; I am,” replied Georgy,
walking off the stage.
Lysander hesitated, then he belted after
her. “Um—Georgy?” he panted.
“Yeah?”
“Um—could you help me with my lines?” he
panted, going very pink.
It didn’t dawn on Georgy that this was not
merely pinkness as of shy student to lecturer, or as of shy rotten actor to
assistant producer. –She’d be down as that in the programme, but a better name
was Dogsbody, as all who’d ever been associated with any of Mac’s productions
over the last twenty-five years were well aware.
“Yeah, righto. Only I’m starving, shall we
go over to the Caff?” she replied.
“Um—it’s closed!” he gulped. “I mean, they’re
only selling Mars Bars and Fanta and stuff!”
“Ugh. Um—well, come on, let’s go down that
coffee bar down the road, it’s not too bad. I think I’ve got some cash,” she
added, feeling in her jeans pocket.
“I have!” gasped Lysander, retrieving his
satchel and stumbling back to her side, pinker than ever.
“Good. Well, I’ll pay you back if I haven’t
got enough,” replied Georgy blithely.
“Righto!” he gasped.
They went out.
Silence fell in the big, hot, dusty hall.
After a while an engineering student who
was of sufficient eminence to do actual lighting came in, looked round in a
puzzled way at finding nobody, and went out again.
The hall dozed on in the hot afternoon.
It was only the nineteenth of December, and
those who had realized that the University Drama Club’s summer productions
never started until the first week of Term (that was, the first week in March) might
perhaps have felt some confusion at Mac’s evident state of sweaty desperation.
That was, if they hadn’t also known that all his student actors (who’d only
stayed on after exams finished in early November to audition and rehearse)
would vanish to their far-flung homes as of tomorrow, or thereabouts, and rehearsals
would cease totally until well into January, when they would straggle back. In
order to rehearse and take up their holiday jobs, which were designed to help
them feed themselves throughout the coming academic year, and which incidentally
would prevent quite a large proportion of them from turning up to rehearsals
when they were supposed to. By which time Mac’s choruses of fairies and rustics
would have forgotten all their moves, and the so-called actors would have
forgotten all their lines. With any luck, however, the electricians, led by
Professor Michaels of the Engineering Department, who was a fanatic—some merely
said a madman—would not have forgotten their lighting sequences. Or Bill
Michaels’s computer wouldn’t have.
There was an outdoor Shakespeare production
every year, and Mac went through these hassles every year, but somehow he went
on doing it. Glutton for punishment, his colleagues had decided. Most of them
usually went, though. There wasn’t much entertainment on offer in New Zealand,
so they took what they could get. On one or two years out of the last
twenty-five the Drama Club’s production had actually formed the dramatic and
intellectual highlight of the year. Everyone remembered the Hamlet, that
was years and years ago—whatever had become of that boy? Mac had been
furious, so it was said, because the boy had bleached his hair the day before
the first night, and it made him look as if he was copying Laurence Olivier in
the film, which he wasn’t supposed to be doing; but it had made the “To be or not
to be” scene out in the cloisters in the dark with the spotlight awfully
effective.
Some
years, however, the production was frankly awful. Jill Davis of the French
Department claimed to have actually slept through Twelfth Night, but
everyone knew that was apocryphal: those wooden benches they always put up in
the quad were too ruddy uncomfortable to sleep on for five minutes, let alone
for an interminable Twelfth Night. The cognoscenti brought cushions, but
the benches were still agony.
This year’s production had Mac even more
frazzled than usual, because he had three Big Stars coming out from England for
it. Well, one big star, one minor light in the firmament, and one excellent
character actor of whom most of New Zealand (amongst whom were not numbered,
however, Jill Davis and Georgy Harris) had never heard.
The big star hadn’t been a big star for all
that long, as far as the New Zealand film-going public was concerned. He’d only
recently played the leading rôle in that action movie, hadn’t he been good,
wasn’t he sexy? He could act, too. With that new actress—you know. She
had one of those foreign names, but she was good, too.
New Zealand didn’t know that the big star
despised himself for having accepted that stupid rôle in that shoot-em-down,
blow-’em-up piece of sexist nonsense, despised the money he’d made from it, despised
his own enjoyment of the adulation he’d received on account of it, and had
refused point-blank to do the sequel. In spite of being offered enough money to
support him in idleness for the rest of his life. Nor would New Zealand have
understood if it had known.
The only reason that the big star was going
to act in Mac’s piddling little Drama Club production—in piddling little New Zealand—was
that he was Mac’s nephew, and his parents, who were both New Zealanders but had
lived in England for years, had now settled up the Hibiscus Coast at rather
charming and rather up-market Kowhai Bay for Christopher Black’s well-earned
retirement. And the star wasn’t very good at standing up to hectoring uncles—Mac,
on his mother’s side—or charming, cajoling uncles with a twinkle in the azure
eyes he shared with them—Maurice Black, on his father’s side. Or to a teasing
mother with a gurgle in her voice, who’d said long-distance: “Darling, I know
poor Mac’s frightful, but he’s due to retire in a couple of years, and it’d be the
highlight of his career! Truly!” Or to a frighteningly clever physicist father,
who disapproved of his chosen career but who’d said: “Look, do it, Adam, for
Christ’s sake, or your mother’ll never let me hear the last of it.” Long-distance.
So Adam Black, who called himself Adam
McIntyre because at the time he’d incensed his father by chucking in his degree
to go into a grimy little repertory company the name “Adam Black” had sounded too
much like a pop star, had given in. Since he was coming out for a holiday,
anyway.
Thousands of hopeful Antipodean entrepreneurs
had immediately seized on him with predatory claws and tried to get him to act
in their productions. These ranged from a slick professional “Lay Mizz” that
Adam wouldn’t have crossed the street to see, not to mention the fact that he
couldn’t sing, in Melbourne, to a modern-dress Lear in Christchurch (their
University Drama Club), where Adam, regardless of the fact that he was not yet
forty, could have had the leading rôle. Adam referred them all firmly to his
agent, Clem Smith, who was a tower of strength in his life and the only reason
he had stayed relatively sane through the awful years of his struggles to get
on his feet in the theatre; his struggles not to be absorbed into the R.S.C.; his
struggles not to get typecast as something that wasn’t his type at all on
British television; his struggles to fend off predatory and rapacious females
once he did get established; his struggles to hold his marriage together once
he did get established and his wife found he still had to be away from home a
lot for the sake of his career; his messy divorce—she’d gone off in a blaze of publicity
with his best friend, also an actor, so Adam couldn’t follow the “away from
home” bit at all and came to the bitter conclusion he was a rotten husband, a
rotten lover, and a weak person all round; his struggles not to get trapped in
the Hollywood thing; and, most recently, his struggles not to get engaged to
one, Livia Wentworth—not actually all that hard, she was good in bed but he
couldn’t stand her personality.
Clem turned down all the Australasian offers
but one. A decent rôle in an interesting play with a respectable little company
in Sydney. Did Adam want it? Before he answered that, did he want to know what
it would do to his tax position? Adam didn’t. But he did think the rôle sounded
interesting, so he agreed to do it. For two weeks. So long as it was after the
bloody Dream, he couldn’t face it with Uncle Mac’s bloody spangled
tights hanging over his head.
Clem had choked, agreed it was after, and
got an iron-clad contract for two weeks for him. Not to say a booking in a quiet
Sydney hotel. Adam often thought that if only Clem had been a woman, instead of
a thin, ugly, energetic man in his mid-forties, he’d have married him years
ago.
On the
nineteenth of December, late afternoon, London time, Clem turned from his
contemplation of the rain streaming down the sitting-room window of Adam’s flat,
and said nastily: “Looking forward to your trip to the Antipodes?”
Adam
glared at him, and sneezed convulsively.
Joel Thring, who was the character actor
who was going to do Puck, immediately said: “See! He’ll never be able to go on tonight!”
Adam blew his nose and glared at him.
“I’ll get on to them,” said Clem, strolling
over to the phone.
Adam said thickly: “Well, at least it won’t
be bloody brass-monkey weather out there!”
“No: according to your own report, dear
boy,” chirped Joel, perching on the arm of a large chair and looking at him
with his clever, ugly, gnome-like head on one side, “it’ll be stinking humid.”
Adam sneezed again. “Probably,” he said balefully.
Joel preened himself. “Those of us who were
born in semi-tropical Bognor Regis will be able to take it.”
Clem looked up briefly from his phone call,
and smiled. Adam glared over his paper handkerchief.
“Where was La Livia born?” added Joel airily.
“Look, it wasn’t my idea!” said Adam
angrily.
“Save the voice, dear,” recommended Joel. “—No,
one gathers it was hers, but why did you agree?”
“She was here when my uncle dropped in,”
said Adam irritably. He sneezed again, and muttered: “Christ.”
“Lemon juice with whisky is indicated,”
said Joel to Clem as he hung up.
“Yes. –Bob’s telling young Tony he’s got to
go on,” he said to Adam. Adam shrugged.
“The poor audience!” said Joel with a
shudder.
“He knows the lines,” said Adam.
“Oh, certainly he knows the lines,
dear boy,” agreed Joel an acid note.
“He’s quite pretty, the ladies in the
audience won’t be disappointed,” said Clem briefly. “Have you got any lemons?”
“Kidched,” said Adam thickly. “God!” he
gasped as he sneezed again.
“That was the most unkindest cut of all,”
murmured Joel as Clem’s thin back disappeared.
“Oh, Clem’s got no opinion of my so-called
talent,” murmured Adam. He gasped, but failed to sneeze.
“Dear boy! No opinion of your lady audiences’
appreciation of your talent, certainly!” protested Joel.
“Drop it,” said Adam tiredly.
Joel eyed him a trifle warily. “Well, to
return to our muttons, Adam o’ mine, why are we having La Livia inflicted on us
for the duration of this Anty-podean tour?”
“It isn’t a—blast—tour!” gasped Adam,
sneezing again. “I told you: the bitch was here! And my uncle—”
“Tut! Uncle me no uncles!” protested Joel.
“You’ve been busting to work that one off
on me, haven’t you, Joel?” said Adam kindly.
Joel winked. “True, oh king. No, but why did
you agree?”
“I didn’t! I never got a word in edgeways!
The bitch heaved the tits at Uncle Maurie and he was off and running! –Dirty
old dog,” he added sourly.
“I thought this Anty-podean uncle was called
Mac,” said Joel in confusion.
“He is—the one that’s producing it. This
was Uncle Maurie, he’s a retired history professor, he was over on some damned
historians’ jamboree, and he came round and— Well, anyway, I’d more or less
agreed to do Oberon, Ma had already rung me. But Livia turned up and— Well,
Uncle Maurie’s a ladies’ man from back—mind you, he must be a hundred and two, but
that doesn’t seem to have stopped him. And you know Livia, she can scent ’em.”
“Scent what?” asked Clem, coming back with
a steaming jug and three glasses on a tray.
“Thank God!” muttered Adam. “Uh—bloody
stupid males that she can wind round her little finger; what else?”
“You ought to know,” said his agent mildly.
“I do, I was just saying,” said Adam tiredly.
“She—well, seduced, there’s no other word for it—she seduced Uncle Maurie into
agreeing to persuade Uncle Mac to let her do Titania.”—Joel swallowed
involuntarily.—“And old Maurie did speak to Mac, but of course there was no
persuading about it, the whole of New Zealand seems to have seen her in that
bloody soapie she did last year. Mac leapt at her.”
Joel accepted a hot toddy gingerly—even
though Clem had thoughtfully wrapped a paper napkin round it. “Thanks. –Well, a
nude Sloane-Ranger Titania with a lisp’ll be something different, all right.”
“Will the locals even notice, though?”
asked Clem.
Adam set his glass down hurriedly and
sneezed again. “No!” he gasped. He blew his nose hard. “Besides, they’ll be
disappointed if she doesn’t do the Sloane Ranger and the lisp, it’s what
they’ll all be waiting for, after that ruddy soap.”
They
both smiled; but then Joel said uncertainly: “In the Bard?”
Adam
shrugged.
“Look, why in God’s name did he agree to do
it, if that’s how he feels about it?” said Joel to Clem with some heat.
“Don’t ask me, I only get in on the
act if there’s cash money involved.”
“Liar!” gasped Adam through another sneeze.
“Well, he did consult me,” said Clem with a
little smile. “I told him it’d be frightfully good for the image—charity-wise
and intelligent-sensitive-intellectual-wise—and he threw my own biro at me.”
Joel grinned. The resemblance to a malicious
hobgoblin or possibly gargoyle noticeably increased. Although he was nothing
like Mac’s original conception of Puck, Mac was going to be thrilled with him.
“All is explai’d,” said Adam thickly. He
sipped toddy cautiously. “I can’t taste any whisky in this,” he grumbled.
“That is because you have a cold,”
said Joel very slowly and clearly.
“Did
you put any in it?” Adam asked Clem, ignoring Joel.
“Yes. –How did you get in on the
act?” he said to Joel.
“I was going out there anyway: joining up with
that foul tour of old Piggy-Whiskers’s in late March—surprized you didn’t see
me and him being interviewed by dear Michael about it only the other day.”
Clem objected: “But Piggy-Whiskers is only
going to Australia, isn’t he?”
“Isn’t that the same?” said Joel confusedly
to Adam.
Adam threw a cushion at him which he caught
neatly, one-handed. “It was old Aunty Emmy, actually,” said Joel, setting the
cushion neatly on the seat of the chair on whose arm he was perching.
“Very clear,” sighed Clem.
“The one in Bognor Regis, Clem, haven’t you
been listening?” asked Adam with a grin. Before he could finish the grin he was
overtaken by another sneeze. “Hell! Sorry!” he gasped. He extracted yet another
tissue from the huge box on the little table at his left.
Clem looked at him. Adam just blew his nose.
He looked at Joel. Joel’s gargoyle face was quite blank as he sipped toddy
slowly. Clem sighed.
Adam sipped his toddy, glanced at Clem and
said with a smile in his voice: “This aunt is also the aunt—or possibly the great-aunt,
but I don’t think it matters—of some female cousin—or possibly second cousin,
or first cousin once removed, but I don’t think it matters—of Joel’s.”
“God,” muttered Clem.
“No—hang on: all will become blindingly
clear when I tell you that this cousinish person lives in New Zealand. Very
near Mother and Dad, I think, from the address.”
“Cow-something Bay,” contributed Joel.
“Kowhai Bay,” corrected Adam impatiently. “Well,
there you are!” he said brightly to Clem.
“I hope that ruddy cold chokes you,”
replied Clem, draining his glass and standing up.
“Mercy, Adam: mercy even for Pooh-Bah!”
squeaked Joel.
Adam smiled a little. “Well, coincidentally,
at about the time Joel’s Aunty Emmy in Bognor was getting Australia and New
Zealand hopelessly confused, I was having my arm twisted to do Uncle Mac’s
bloody Oberon. I happened to mention it to Joel and he confessed to a norful
repressed desire to play Puck.” He raised his eyebrows. “Et voilà!”
“Don’t do that,” said Clem, wincing. “I suppose
he might as well play Puck to your Oberon, you’ve got that sort of relationship
anyway, haven’t you?” He went over to the door. “I’ve got to go: some of us
have work to do. If you’ve got any sense, Adam—I know you haven’t, don’t bother
to tell me—you’ll stay home, preferably in bed, until you’ve got rid of that cold,
and let bloody Bob Andrews go hang.”
He went out on this minatory note.
“Have we?” said Joel, rolling his eyes in
horror.
Adam blew his nose. “I didn’t think so. How
many things have we done together, anyway?”
They knit their brows.
“There was that foul time in rep,” offered
Joel.
“Yes, well, rep in Manchester does create a
bond... Was that the time I had to play Edgar with a strained knee and you were—um,
I forget.”
“The Fool, you fool!” choked Joel.
“Oh, yes, I remember,” said Adam in a
strange voice.
“That was in me fey faerie phase,” noted
Joel in fey faerie tones.
“Don’t,” warned Adam.
“We did that radio thing,” recalled Joel.
“Ugh!”
“Quite.”
“Um—that revival of The Admirable Crichton!”
choked Adam.
“God, were you in that? You must have been
about fifteen!”
Adam sneezed. “Damn, I thought I’d stopped
this blasted sneezing for a moment, there. Um—no,” he said, blowing his nose: “About
twenty-two, I think.”
“Christ,” said Joel in awe.
“There was that thing with Piggy-Whiskers,”
said Adam with a laugh in his voice. “Unforgettable, actually!”
Joel
shut his eyes.
Adam said, in a very creditable imitation
of Piggy-Whiskers’s fruity voice, considering he had a foul cold—though on second
thoughts, thought Joel, maybe that was helping: “Prr-ray do not attempt to
upstage Me, little man: you will come a foul crr-ropper, I assure you.”
“I never realized the sod meant it
literally,” said Joel, rubbing his right knee and wincing in remembered agony.
“Mm. That was before he did that bloody
telly series as that bloody vicar—irascible but loveable, as if—and got all
famous and people started offering him Anty-podean tours, too,” marvelled Adam.
“What in God’s name is he going to be like now?”
“Unbearable. But I have an iron-clad
contract, and accident insurance,” replied Joel on a grim note.
“Good!”
choked Adam.
“Anyway, I don’t know that I give a damn if
he upstages me all over the Anty-podes,” added Joel thoughtfully.
“No.” Adam drained his toddy. “That was
about it. Apart from this thing.”
“Mm.” Joel looked at his watch and made a
face. “I’d better go, that make-up’s a sod. And little Tony may need to hold me
hand and sob his little heart out because it’s his Big Chance!”
“You should be so lucky. See ya. –And if he
falls flat on his face, I don’t wanna know.”
Joel went over to the door but paused with
his hand on the doorknob and said naughtily: “And if he’s a raving success, do
you want to know, dear?”
Adam just sneezed madly and waved him away.
Joel went out whistling. Danny Boy. He
probably thought it was a New Zealand folksong.
Adam smiled a little at this thought. Then
he thought of Livia Wentworth inflicting herself on him out there and giving
embarrassing interviews about the two of them to all the local media, who would
all be embarrassingly naive enough to believe her...
Oh, God.