Ngaio Marsh - Killer Dolphin

Jeremy duly appeared five minutes before the rehearsal ended and sat in the front stalls. When they broke, Destiny beckoned to him and he went up to the stage through the pass-door. Peregrine saw her lay her hands on Jeremy’s coat and talk into his eyes. He saw Jeremy flush up to the roots of his red hair and glance quickly at him. Then he saw Destiny link her arm in Jeremy’s and lead him upstage, talking hard. After a moment or two they parted and Jeremy returned to Peregrine.

“Look,” he said in stage Cockney, “Do me a favour. Be a pal.”

“What’s all this?”

“Destiny’s got a sudden party and she’s asked me. Look, Perry, you don’t mind if I go? The food’s all right at the studio. You and Emily can do very nicely without me: damn sight better than with.”

“She’ll think you’re bloody rude,” Peregrine said angrily, “and she won’t be far wrong, at that.”

“Not at all. She’ll be enchanted. It’s you she’s coming to see.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“Properly speaking, you ought to be jolly grateful.”

“Emily’ll think it’s a put-up job.”

“So what? She’ll be pleased as Punch. Look, Perry, I—I can’t wait. Destiny’s driving us all and she’s ready to go. Look, I’ll have a word with Emily.”

“You’d damn well better, though what in decency’s name you can find to say!”

“It’ll all be as right as a bank. I promise.”

“So you say,” Peregrine contemplated his friend, whose freckled face was pink, excited and dreadfully vulnerable. “All right,” he said. “Make your excuse to Emily. Go to your party. I think you’re heading for trouble but that’s your business.”

“I only hope I’m heading for something ,” Jeremy said. “Fanks, mate. You’re a chum.”

“I very much doubt it,” said Peregrine.

He stayed front-of-house and saw Jeremy talk to Emily onstage. Emily’s back was towards him and he was unable to gauge her reaction but Jeremy was all smiles. Peregrine had been wondering what on earth he could say to her when it dawned upon him that, come hell or high water, he could not equivocate with Emily.

Destiny was up there acting her boots off with Marcus, Harry Grove, and now Jeremy, for an audience. Marcus maintained a proprietary air, to which she responded like a docile concubine, Peregrine thought. But he noticed that she managed quite often to glance at Harry with a slight widening of her eyes and an air of decorum that was rather more provocative than if she’d hung round his neck and said: “Now.” She also beamed upon poor Jeremy. They all talked excitedly, making plans for their party. Soon they had gone away by the stage-door.

Emily was still onstage.

“Well,” Peregrine thought, “here goes.”

He walked down the aisle and crossed to the pass-door in the box on the Prompt side. He never went backstage by this route without a kind of aftertaste of his first visit to The Dolphin. Always, behind the sound of his own footsteps on the uncarpeted stairway, Peregrine caught an echo of Mr. Conducis coming invisibly to his rescue.

It was a slight shock now, therefore, to hear, as he shut the pass-door behind him, actual footsteps beyond the turn in this narrow, dark and widening stair.

“Hullo?” he said. “Who’s that?”

The steps halted.

“Coming up,” Peregrine said, not wanting to collide.

He went on up the little stairway and turned the corner.

The door leading onto the stage opened slightly, admitting a blade of light. He saw that somebody moved uncertainly as if in doubt whether to descend or not and he got the impression that whoever it was had actually been standing in the dark behind the door.

Gertrude Bracey said, “I was just coming down.”

She pushed open the door and went onstage to make way for him. As he came up with her, she put her hand on his arm.

“Aren’t you going to Destiny’s sinister little party?” she asked.

“Not I,” he said.

“Unasked? Like me?”

“That’s right,” he said lightly and wished she wouldn’t stare at him like that. She leaned towards him.

“Do you know what I think of Mr. W. Hartly Grove?” she asked quietly. Peregrine shook his head and she then told him. Peregrine was used to uninhibited language in the theatre but Gertrude Bracey’s eight words on Harry Grove made him blink.

“Gertie, dear !”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Gertie, dear. And Gertie dear knows what she’s talking about, don’t you worry.”

She turned her back on him and walked away.

“Emily,” Peregrine said as they climbed up Wharfingers Lane, “I hope you don’t mind it just being me. And I hope you don’t think there’s any skulduggery at work. Such as me getting rid of Jer in order to make a heavy pass at you. Not, mark you, that I wouldn’t like to but that I really wouldn’t have the nerve to try such an obvious ploy.”

“I should hope not,” said Emily with composure.

“Well, I wouldn’t. I suppose you’ve seen how it is with Jeremy?”

“One could hardly miss it.”

“One couldn’t, could one?” he agreed politely.

Suddenly for no particular reason they both burst out laughing and he took her arm.

“Imagine!” he said. “Here we are on Bankside, not much more than a stone’s throw from The Swan and The Rose and The Globe. Shakespeare must have come this way a thousand times after rehearsals had finished for the day. We’re doing just what he did and I do wish, Emily, that we could take water for Blackfriars.”

“It’s pleasant,” Emily said, “to be in company that isn’t self-conscious about him and doesn’t mistake devotion for idolatry.”

“Well, he is unique, so what’s the matter with being devoted? Have you observed, Emily, that talent only fluctuates about its own middle line whereas genius nearly always makes great walloping bloomers?”

“Like Agnes Pointing Upwards and bits of Cymbeline ?”

“Yes. I think, perhaps, genius is nearly always slightly lacking in taste.”

“Anyway, without intellectual snobbery?”

“Oh that, certainly.”

“Are you pleased with rehearsals, so far?”

“On the whole.”

“I suppose it’s always a bit of a shock bringing something you’ve written to the melting pot or forge or whatever the theatre is. Particularly when, as producer, you yourself are the melting pot.”

“Yes, it is. You see your darling child being processed, being filtered through the personalities of the actors and turning into something different on the way. And you’ve got to accept all that because a great many of the changes are for the good. I get the oddest sort of feeling sometimes, that, as producer, I’ve stepped outside myself as playwright. I begin to wonder if I ever knew what the play is about.”

“I can imagine.”

They walked on in companionship: two thinking ants moving eastward against the evening out-swarm from the City. When they reached Blackfriars it had already grown quiet there and the little street where Jeremy and Peregrine lived was quite deserted. They climbed up to the studio and sat in the window drinking dry martinis and trying to see The Dolphin on the far side of the river.

“We haven’t talked about the letter and the glove,” Emily said. “Why, I wonder, when it’s such a tremendous thing. You must have felt like a high-pressure cooker with it all bottled up inside you.”

“Well, there was Jeremy to explode to. And of course the expert.”

“How strange it is,” Emily said. She knelt on the window-seat with her arms folded on the ledge and her chin on her arms. Her heartshaped face looked very young. Peregrine knew that he must find out about her: about how she thought and what she liked and disliked and where she came from and whether she was or had been in love and if so what she did about it. “How strange,” she repeated, “to think of John Shakespeare over in Henley Street making them for his grandson. Would he make them himself or did he have a foreman-glover?”