Dulcy Ringgold was not what Darcourt would have thought of as a theatrical character. She was small, she was shy, she laughed a great deal, and she seemed to regard her responsibilities as the best joke in the world.
“I’m really just a glorified dressmaker,” she said, through a mouthful of pins, as she draped something on Clara Intrepidi. “Just that nice little woman Miss Dulcy, who is so clever with her fingers.” She did something that made Miss Intrepidi look taller and slimmer. “There dear; if you can suck up your gut the teeniest bit that will do very nicely.”
“The gut is what I breathe with,” said Miss Intrepidi.
“Then we’ll drape this a little more freely,” said Dulcy, “and maybe put a wee thingy just here.”
At other times, Dulcy was to be seen with a filthy bandana wrapped around her head, on the bridge that swayed before the paintframe, putting special touches on huge drop-scenes that were being painted from her carefully squared-off watercolour designs. Sometimes she was in the basement, where the armour was made, not with the ring of the swordsmith’s hammer, but with the chemical whiff of Plexiglas being moulded. It was here, too, that all the swords, and Arthur’s sceptre, and the crowns for Arthur and his Queen were made, and studded with foil-backed glass jewels that gave a splendidly Celtic richness to post-Roman Britain. Dulcy was everywhere, and Dulcy’s taste and imagination touched everything.
“I hate theatre where the audience is told to use its imagination,” she said. “That’s cheap. The audience lays down its good money to rent imagination from somebody who has more than they ever dreamed of. Somebody like me. Imagination’s my only stock-in-trade.” She said this as she whisked off a brilliant little sketch for a fool’s head which was to be made in pretended metal and attached to the hilt of Sir Dagonet’s sword. But it was not all of her stock-in-trade. Darcourt picked up a large book from her workbench.
“What’s this?” he said.
“Oh, that’s my darling and my deario, James Robinson Planché; his Encyclopaedia of Costume, a revolutionary book in stage design. He was the first man, believe it or not, who really cared if stage dress had any roots in the realities of the past. He designed the first King John that really looked like King John’s time. I don’t copy his pictures, of course. Strictly accurate historical costume looks absurd, as a usual thing, but dear Planché is a springboard for one’s imagination.”
“I don’t suppose even Planché knew what King Arthur wore,” said Darcourt.
“No, but he would have given a jolly well-informed guess,” said Dulcy, patting the two large books tenderly. “So I load up on dear Planché, and then I guess too. Lots of dragons; that’s the stuff for Arthur. I’m putting Morgan Le Fay in a dragon head-dress. Sounds corny, but it won’t be when I’ve finished with it.”
So: the omnicompetent Planché is going to have a finger in the pie, even if we don’t use his horrible libretto, thought Darcourt. He was—just a little—losing his heart to Dulcy, but so was every other man who came near her. It appeared, however, that Dulcy was somewhat of Gunilla’s way of thinking about sex, and although she flirted outrageously with the men, it was with Gunilla she went to dinner.
Here is a world where sex is not of first, second, or perhaps even third importance, thought Darcourt. How refreshing.
Sex was, however, rearing its wistfully domestic head with the unhappy Mabel Muller. The weather in Stratford proved to be just as hot as it was in Toronto, and Mabel’s legs swelled, and her hair drooped, and she bore her burden of posterity with visible effort. She tagged everywhere after Al, who was like a man possessed, making notes here, and taking photographs with an instant camera there, and getting in everyone’s way while making obstructive efforts to avoid doing precisely that. Not that Al forgot her or excluded her; he gave her his heavy briefcase to carry, and they always ate the sandwiches Mabel brought from a fast-food shop together, while he harangued—“extrapolated” was the fine word he used—on all that he had noted, or photographed.
“This is pure gold, Sweetness,” he would say from time to time. To Sweetness it was fairy gold, no sooner touched than lost.
It would be unjust to say that Al grudged the time needed to rush Mabel to the hospital when at last her pains became too much to be ignored. “They’re coming every twenty minutes now,” she whispered, tearfully, and Al made just one more essential note before seizing her by the arm and leading her out of the rehearsal room. It was Darcourt who found them a taxi and urged the driver to lose no time in getting them to the hospital. They had made no arrangements, had not even seen a doctor, and Mabel was admitted in Emergency.
“Something is not quite right with Mabel,” said Maria, later in the day, to Darcourt. “Her pains have stopped.”
“Al was back for the end of the rehearsal,” said Darcourt. “I thought everything must be going smoothly.”
“I’d like to brain Al,” said Maria. “That’s the trouble with these irregular unions. No guts when the going is rough. I’d hang around the hospital if I could, but Arthur has to get back to his office for a couple of days and I am going with him. New developments in the Wally Crottel affair. I’ll tell you later. There’s really nothing for us to do here. Geraint seems to feel that we’re underfoot.”
“I’m sure not.”
“I’m sure yes. But Simon, will you be a darling and keep an eye on Mabel? She’s no concern of ours, but I’m concerned just the same. Will you get in touch if we should do anything?”
That was why Darcourt found himself in the comfortless waiting-room of the hospital’s maternity ward at four o’clock in the morning. Al had left at half past ten, promising to phone early next day. Darcourt was not alone. Dr. Dahl-Soot had also turned up, after Al’s departure.
“Nothing could be less in my line than this,” she said. “But that poor wretch is a stranger in a strange land, and so am I, so here I am.”
Darcourt knew better than to say it was very good of her.
“Arthur and Maria asked me to keep an eye on things,” he said.
“I like those two,” said the Doctor. “I didn’t greatly like them when we first met, but they grow better on acquaintance. They are a very solid pair. Do you think it’s the baby?”
“Partly the baby. A very fine baby. Maria is suckling it.”
“She is? That’s old style. But I believe very good.”
“I don’t know,” said Darcourt. “As we academics say, it’s not my field. But it’s a very pretty sight.”
“You are a softy, Simon. And that’s as it should be. I wouldn’t give a damn for a man who was not a softy in some ways.”
“Gunilla, do you think we single people are apt to be sentimental about love and babies and all that?”
“I am not sentimental about anything. But I have sentiment about many things. That’s an English-language difference that is very useful. Not to have sentiment is to be almost dead.”
“But you have taken—pardon me for saying so—a decidedly anti-baby-road.”
“Simon, you are too intelligent a man to be as provincial as you sometimes pretend. You know there is room in the world for everything and every kind of life. What do you think marriage is? Just babies and eating off the same fork?”
“God forbid! Because it’s either very early in the morning or very late at night, I’ll tell you what I really think. Marriage isn’t just domesticity, or the continuance of the race, or institutionalized sex, or a form of property right. And it damned well isn’t happiness, as that word is generally used. I think it’s a way of finding your soul.”
“In a man or a woman?”
“With a man or a woman. In company, but still, essentially, alone—as all life is.”
“Then why haven’t you found your own soul?”
“Oh, it isn’t the only way. But it’s one way.”
“So you think I might find my soul, some day?”
“I’d bet very heavily on it, Gunilla. People find their souls in all sorts of ways. I’m wri
ting a book—the life of a very good friend of mine, who certainly found his soul. Found it in painting. He tried to find it in marriage, and it was the most awful mess, because he was a soppy romantic at the time, and she was one of those Sirens who inevitably leave the man with a cup of Siren tears. Rather a crook, judged by the usual standards. But in that mess Francis Cornish found his soul. I know it. I have evidence of it. I’m writing my book about it.”
“Francis Cornish? One of these Cornishes?”
“Arthur’s uncle. And it’s Francis’s money that is supporting this fantastic circus we are engaged in now.”
“But you think this Arthur will find his soul in his marriage?”
“And Maria, too. And if you want to know, I think King Arthur found his soul, or a big piece of it, in his marriage to Guenevere—who was rather a crook, if you read Malory—and that is what a lot of this opera is about. Arthur of Britain, or The Magnanimous Cuckold. He found his soul.”
“But is this Arthur a magnanimous cuckold?”
Darcourt did not need to answer, for at this moment a doctor, in his white garment and cap, came into the room.
“Are you with Mrs. Muller?”
“Yes. What’s the news?”
“I’m very sorry. Are you the father?”
“No. Just a friend.”
“Well—it’s bad. The child is stillborn.”
“What was the trouble?”
“She seems not to have had any pre-natal advice whatever. Otherwise we’d have done a Caesarian. But when we found out the foetus had a disproportionately large head for the birth canal, it was already dead. Death from foetal distress, it’s called. We’re very sorry, but these things do happen. And as I say, she hadn’t had any previous medical attention.”
“May we see her?”
“I wouldn’t advise it.”
“Does she know?”
“She’s very groggy. It was a long labour. Somebody will have to tell her in the morning. Would you do that?”
“I’ll do that,” said Dr. Gunilla, and Darcourt was grateful to her.
(2)
WHEN DR. DAHL-SOOT VISITED the hospital the next morning she did not need to give the bad news. Al was with Mabel, who was hysterical.
“There was what the English call A Scene,” she told Darcourt. “You see Al, that odious pedant, had not even troubled to find out whether the child was a boy or a girl, and when Mabel demanded to see the child the head nurse explained that it was impossible. Why? Mabel wanted to know. Because the body was no longer available, said the nurse. Why not? said Mabel, very fierce. Because nobody had asked for the body to be reserved for burial by the parents, said the nurse. Mabel understood that. ‘You mean they’ve put my baby in the garbage?’ she said, and the nurse said that was not the way the hospital thought of what it had done, which was what was most often done with stillborns. But she wouldn’t give details, except that it was a boy and perfect except for an unusually big head. Not abnormal. Apparently it’s Mabel who is slightly abnormal. You know Mabel. A fool, and weak as water, but those people can make an awful hullabaloo when they are outraged, and she was ready to kill Al. And Al—really, Al ought to have been put in the garbage at birth—kept saying ‘Calm down, Sweetness, you’ll see it all differently tomorrow.’ Not a tender word, not a hug, not a thing to suggest that he was involved in the affair at all. I kicked Al out, and talked to Mabel for a while, but she’s in a very bad way. What are you going to do?”
“Me?”
“You seem to be the one who is expected to do something when real trouble comes up. Are you going to see Mabel?”
“I think I’d better see Al first.”
Al thought Mabel was being utterly unreasonable. She knew what a load of work he had, and how important it was to his career—which meant their joint career, if they stuck together. Hadn’t he gone to the hospital with her? And returned after dinner, as Darcourt well knew? Hadn’t the doctor said the baby might be held up for several hours because first babies were unaccountable? Was he supposed to sit there all night, and then do a day’s work that he had all planned, and that would need every ounce of energy and intellect he could muster? If there hadn’t been this accident—this stillbirth business—everything would have been absolutely okay. As it was, Mabel was raising hell.
The trouble, he assured Darcourt, was that Mabel had never really freed herself from her background. Very conventional, middle-brow people, with whom Al had never hit it off. They kept asking why he and Mabel didn’t get married, as if having somebody mumble a few words, etc. Al thought he had pretty well lifted Mabel above all that crap, but under stress—and Al admitted that the loss of the child amounted to stress—it all came flooding back, and Mabel was once again the insurance salesman’s child from Fresno. Wanted the baby given what she called “decent burial”. As if having somebody mumble a few words, etc., over a thing that had never lived could change anything. Al would be frank. He wondered if the arrangement with Mabel would weather this storm. He guessed he had to face it. People on two such different levels of education—though Mabel was majoring in sociology—would never really see eye to eye.
Al wanted to do the right thing, of course. Mabel wanted to go home. Wanted her mother. Can you figure that, in a woman of twenty-two? Wanting her mother? Of course the Mullers were what is called a very close family. But Al couldn’t swing it. His grant from Pomelo was enough for one, and damned tight for two, and the fare back to Fresno would screw him up. Could Darcourt persuade Mabel to take it easy for a few days, and probably see things differently?
Darcourt said he would look into the matter and do what seemed best.
That meant that he phoned Maria, in Toronto, and put the matter to her. “I’ll come at once,” said Maria.
It was Maria who fetched Mabel from the hospital, paid all the bills, set her up in a room near her own in a hotel, and gave Al a piece of her mind that astonished them both, so conventional was it in tone and content. It was Maria who sent Al to a druggist for a breast-pump, of which Mabel had dire need, and this was Al’s lowest moment. A breast-pump! He would willingly go into a drugstore and ask for condoms. That was dashing. But a breast-pump! The squalor of domesticity engulfed him. It was Maria who drove Mabel to the airport, when she was fit to travel, and bought her ticket to Fresno and mother. Coping with Mabel, who was sentimentally grateful and woman-to-woman, and bereft-mother-to-happy-mother, tried Maria very high, but she endured all, and never uttered a word of complaint or irony, even to Darcourt. Not even Mabel’s frequent, tearful hints that fate was certainly good to the rich, and tough on the poor, provoked her to any speaking of her mind. But to herself she said it was enough to turn her milk.
“You’ve behaved beautifully,” said Darcourt. “You deserve a reward.”
“Oh, but I’ve had a reward,” said Maria. “You remember I was hinting about Wally Crottel? The most wonderful luck—the book’s turned up!”
“But you said you had thrown it away.”
“So I did. But that was the original—you know, that crumpled, stained, interlined, grubby mess that Parlabane left. When I sent it to the publishers, one of them thought a ghost might be able to wrench a book out of it, so he had a Xerox made—quite indefensibly, but you know what publishers are—and sent it to his favourite ghost, who reported that it was pretty hopeless. But recently the ghost sent back the Xerox, which he had unearthed on his desk—obviously a ghost of the uttermost degree of literary messiness—and the publisher, belatedly, but honourably, sent it to me. And I’ve sent it to Wally.”
“But Wally’s in jail, awaiting trial.”
“I know. I sent it to Mervyn Gwilt, with a teasing, palavering letter, full of nifty bits of Latin. Told him to get it published if he could.”
“Maria! You may have committed yourself to some appalling legal claim!”
“Well—no. Not really. I showed the letter to Arthur, and he laughed a lot, but then he got one of his lawyers to rewrite it, and a fine juicele
ss job he made of it. Not a word of Latin. Lawyers are only half the fun they used to be when they knew Latin. But apparently it’s a watertight letter, admitting nothing, relinquishing nothing, but letting Wally have what he wanted, which was a peep at m’dad’s book.”
“And so that’s that.”
“As Wally seems likely to get seven years at least, that’s probably that.”
“Maria, you do have the Devil’s own luck!”
Al said no word of thanks to Maria about her part in his crisis. It did not occur to him, so engrossed was he in his Regiebuch, and if it had occurred to him, he would not have dared, for a woman who could talk to him as Maria had done was somebody best avoided. The musicologist in Al came uppermost; hadn’t there been an opera called All’s Well That Ends Well? He looked it up. Yes, there it was, by Edmond Audran, whose best opera was La Poupée, which meant The Baby, didn’t it? Remarkable how fate, and music, and life were all mixed up. It made you think.
(3)
DURING THIS INCIDENT, which did not impinge at all on the preoccupation of the company, preparations for the opera were going ahead rapidly. The play which had commanded the stage had finished its run of performances, and Powell and his forces had the full run of the theatre. Scenes were hung from the flies and all the forty-five sets of ropes that controlled them were adjusted and balanced for use. A splendid set of curtains was brought in from a rental warehouse and hung behind the proscenium, so that they could be swept aside and upward from the centre in the gloriously theatrical manner of the nineteenth century. Powell demanded, and got, a set of footlights installed. In vain did Waldo Harris demur that nobody used such things any more.
“Hoffmann’s theatre used ’em, and they are very becoming to the ladies,” said Powell. “We won’t make all the women look like skulls, with nothing but overhead light. And get that bloody rack of lamps taken down from in front of the proscenium; it’s totally out of character and we can do without ’em; the light from the front of the balcony will be quite enough.”