Elizabeth George: In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

So there was triumph to be felt in spades, and David King-Ryder wanted to feel it. He was starved for a sensation that would tell him life was opening before him instead of closing. But that was the feeling that he couldn't escape. It's over boomed in his ears like the cannon.

If he had been able to talk to her about what he had been going through since the curtain call, David knew that Ginny would tell him his feelings of depression, anxiety, and despair were normal. “It's the natural letdown after opening night,” she would have said. She would have pointed out that she had far more reason to be let down than he had anyway. As director, her job was over now. True, there were various components of the production to be tweaked-”It would be satisfying if the lighting designer would cooperate and get the last scene right, wouldn't it?”-but by and large, she had to let go, to begin the process all over again on another production of another play. In his case, the morning would bring a flood of congratulatory phone calls, requests for interviews, and offers to mount the pop opera all over the world. Thus, he could dig into another staging of Hamlet or go on to something else. She didn't have that option.

If he had confessed that he just didn't have it in him to go on to anything else, she would have said, “Of course, you haven't at the moment. That's normal, David. How could you right now? Give yourself some leeway to recover, won't you? You need time to refill the well.”

The well was the wellspring of creativity, and if he'd pointed out to his wife that she never seemed to need to refill her own supplies, she would have argued that directing was different from creating the product in the first place. She, at least, had raw materials to work with-not to mention a score of fellow artists with whom to knock heads as the production took shape. He had only the music room, the piano, endless solitude, and his imagination.

And the world's expectations, he thought morosely. They would always be there as the price of success.

He and Ginny left the Dorchester as soon as they were able to manage it surreptitiously. She'd protested at first when he'd indicated that he wanted to leave-as had Matthew, who, always his fathers manager, had argued that it wouldn't look good for David King-Ryder to depart the party before the party's end. But David had claimed exhaustion and strung-out nerves and Matthew and Virginia had accepted that self-diagnosis. After all, his complexion was jaundiced, and his demeanour throughout the production-alternating between standing, sitting, and pacing in their box-strongly suggested a man whose personal resources had finally been depleted.

They rode from London in silence, David with a vodka curved into his palm and his thumb and forefinger pressed into his eyebrows, Ginny making several attempts to draw him into conversation. She suggested a holiday as a reward for their years of endeavour. Rhodes, she mentioned, Capri, and Crete.

The jolly-hockey-sticks tone of her voice told David that she was becoming increasingly concerned with her failure to reach him. And considering their history together-she'd been his twelfth mistress before he'd made her his fifth wife-there was good reason for her to suspect that his condition had nothing to do with first-night nerves, letdown after triumph, or anxiety about critical reaction to his work. The past few months had been rough on them as a couple, and she knew quite well what he'd done to cure himself of the impotence he'd experienced with his last wife, since he'd done it by moving on to Ginny herself. So when she finally said, “Darling, it happens sometimes. It's nerves, that's all. It'll all come right at the end of the day,” he wanted to reassure her. But he didn't have the words.

He was still trying to find them when their limousine entered the tunnel of silver maples that characterised the woodland in which they lived. Here, not an hour from London, the countryside was thickly grown with trees, and footpaths trod by generations of foresters and farmers disappeared into an undergrowth of ferns.

The car turned between the two oaks that marked their drive. Twenty yards along, an iron gate swung open. The road beyond curved beneath alders, poplars, and beeches, skirting a pond where the reflection of stars made a second sky. It climbed a slight rise, swung past a row of silent bungalows, and pooled out into the alluvial fan of the entrance to the King-Ryder mansion.

Their housekeeper had laid out supper for them, assembling an array of David's favourite foods. “Mr. Matthew did phone,” Portia explained in her quiet, dignified voice. A runaway from the Sudan at the age of fifteen, she'd been with Virginia for the last ten years and she had the melancholy face of a beautiful, sorrowing black Madonna. “My warmest congratulations to both of you,” she added.

David thanked her. He stood in the dining room, where the windows stretched from floor to ceiling and reflected all three of them in the glass. He admired the epergne that spilled white roses onto plaits of ivy. He fingered one of the thin silver forks. He used his thumbnail against a drip of candle wax. And he knew he wouldn't be able to force a crumb of food past the constriction in his throat.

So he told his wife that he needed a bit of time alone to unwind from the evening. He would join her later, he said. He just needed a while to decompress.

One always expected an artist to retreat to the heartbeat of his artistry. So David went to his music room. He flipped on the lights. He poured another vodka and placed the tumbler on the unprotected top of the grand piano.

He realised as he did it that Michael would never have done such a thing. Michael had been careful that way, understanding the value of a musical instrument, respectful of its boundaries, its dimensions, its possibilities. He'd been careful about most of his life as well. It was only on one crazy night in Florida that he'd got careless.

David sat at the piano. Without thinking or planning, his fingers sought out an aria he loved. It was a melody from his most auspicious failure- Mercy -and he hummed as he played it, trying and failing to recall the words to a song that had once held the key to his future.

As he played, he let his gaze travel the walls of the room, four monuments to his success. Shelves held awards. Frames enclosed certificates. Posters and playbills announced productions that even to this day were mounted in every part of the world. And photographs by the silver-framed score documented his life.

Michael was there among them. And when David's glance fell on his old friends face, his fingers shifted-of their own accord-from the aria he'd been playing to the song he knew was destined to be the hit of Hamlet. “What Dreams May Come” was its title, taken from the prince's most famous soliloquy.

He played it only halfway through before he had to stop. He found that he was so monumentally tired that his hands fell from the keys and his eyes closed. But still he could see Michael's face.

“You shouldn't have died,” he told his partner. “I thought a success would make everything different, but it only makes the prospect of failure worse.”

He took up his drink again. He left the room. He tossed back the vodka, set the tumbler next to a travertine urn in a recessed alcove, and didn't notice when he failed to push the glass in far enough and it fell to the carpeted floor.

Above him in the enormous house, he could hear a bath running. Ginny would be soaking away the stress of the evening and the tension of the months that had preceded it. He wished that he could do the same. It seemed to him that he had so much more cause.

He allowed himself to relive those glorious moments of triumph a final time: the audience rising to its feet before the curtain call had begun, the cheers, the hoarse shouts of “bravo.”