Ngaio Marsh: Night at the Vulcan

So she met the curiosity of the little dresser with an evasion. “It’d be wonderful,” she said, “if I did get the chance.”

A deep voice with an unusually vibrant quality called out on the stage. “Bob! Where the devil have you got to? Bob!”

“Cripes!” the little dresser ejaculated. “Here we are and in one of our tantrums. In here, sir! Coming, sir !”

He darted towards the doorway but before he reached it a man appeared there, a man so tall that for a fraction of a second he looked down over the dresser’s head directly into Martyn’s eyes.

“This young lady,” Bob Cringle explained with an air of discovery, “is the new dresser for Miss Hamilton. I just been showing her the ropes, Mr. Poole, sir.”

“You’d much better attend to your work. I want you.” He glanced again at Martyn. “Good morning,” he said and was gone. “Look at this!” she heard him say angrily in the next room. “Where are you!”

Cringle paused in the doorway to turn his thumbs down and his eyes up. “Here we are, sir. What’s the little trouble?” he was saying pacifically as he disappeared.

Martyn thought: “The picture in the Greenroom is more like him than the photographs.” Preoccupied with this discovery she was only vaguely aware of a fragrance in the air and a new voice in the passage. The next moment her employer came into the dressing-room.

An encounter with a person hitherto only seen and heard on the cinema screen is often disconcerting. It is as if the two-dimensional and enormous image had contracted about a living skeleton and in taking on substance had acquired an embarrassing normality. One is not always glad to change the familiar shadow for the strange reality.

Helena Hamilton was a blonde woman. She had every grace. To set down in detail the perfections of her hair, eyes, mouth and complexion, her shape and the gallantry of her carriage would be to reiterate merely that which everyone had seen in her innumerable pictures. She was, in fact, quite astonishingly beautiful. Even the circumstance of her looking somewhat older than her moving shadow could not modify the shock of finding her its equal in everything but this.

Coupled with her beauty was her charm. This was famous. She could reduce press conferences to a conglomerate of eager, even naïve, males. She could make a curtain-speech that every leading woman in every theatre in the English-speaking world had made before her and persuade the last man in the audience that it was original. She could convince bit-part actresses playing maids in first acts that there, but for the grace of God, went she.

On Martyn, however, taken off her balance and entirely by surprise, it was Miss Hamilton’s smell that made the first impression. At ten guineas a moderately sized bottle, she smelt like Master Fenton, all April and May. Martyn was very much shorter than Miss Hamilton but this did not prevent her from feeling cumbersome and out-of-place, as if she had been caught red-handed with her own work in the dressing-room. This awkwardness was in part dispelled by the friendliness of Miss Hamilton’s smile and the warmth of her enchanting voice.

“You’ve come to help me, haven’t you?” she said. “Now, that is kind. I know all about you from Mr. Grantley and I fully expect we’ll get along famously together. The only thing I don’t know, in fact; is your name.”

Martyn wondered if she ought to give only her Christian name or only her surname. She said: “Tarne. Martyn Tarne.”

“But what a charming name!” The brilliant eyes looked into Martyn’s face and their gaze sharpened. After a fractional pause she repeated: “Really charming,” and turned her back.

It took Martyn a moment or two to realize that this was her cue to remove Miss Hamilton’s coat. She lifted it from her shoulders — it was made of Persian lamb and smelt delicious — and hung it up. When she turned round she found that her employer was looking at her. She smiled reassuringly at Martyn and said: “You’ve got everything arranged very nicely. Roses, too. Lovely.”

“They’re from Mr. Grantley.”

“Sweet of him but I bet he sent you to buy them.”

“Well—” Martyn began and was saved by the entry of the young man in the red sweater with a dressing-case for which she was given the keys. While she was unpacking it the door opened and a middle-aged, handsome man with a raffish face and an air of boldness came in. She remembered the photographs in the foyer. This was Clark Bennington. He addressed himself to Miss Hamilton.

“Hullo,” he said, ‘I’ve been talking to John Rutherford.”

“What about?” she asked and sounded nervous.

“About that kid. Young Gay. He’s been at her again. So’s Adam.”

He glanced at Martyn. “I wanted to talk to you,” he added discontentedly.

“Well, so you shall. But I’ve got to change now, Ben. And look, this is my new dresser, Martyn Tarne.”

He eyed Martyn with more attention. “Quite a change from old Tansley,” he said. “And a very nice change, too.” He turned away. “Is Adam down?” He jerked his head at the wall.

“Yes.”

“I’ll see you later, then.”

“All right, but — yes, all right.”

He went out, leaving a faint rumour of alcohol behind him.

She was quite still for a moment after he had gone. Martyn heard her fetch a sigh, a sound half-impatient, half-anxious. “Oh, well,” she said, “let’s get going, shall we?”

Martyn had been much exercised about the extent of her duties. Did, for instance, a dresser undress her employer? Did she kneel at her feet and roll down her stockings? Did she unhook and unbutton? Or did she stand capably aside while these rites were performed by the principal herself? Miss Hamilton solved the problem by removing her dress, throwing it to Martyn and waiting to be inserted into her dressing-gown. During these operations a rumble of male voices sounded at intervals in the adjoining room. Presently there was a tap at the door. Martyn answered it and found the little dresser with a florist’s box in his hands. “Mr. Poole’s compliments,” he said and winked broadly before retiring.

Miss Hamilton by this time was spreading a yellow film over her face. She asked Martyn to open the box and, on seeing three orchids that lay crisp and fabulous on their mossy bed, sang “Darling!” on two clear notes. The voice beyond the wall responded. “Hullo?”

“They’re quite perfect. Thank you, my sweet.”

“Good,” the voice said. Martyn laid the box on the dressing-table and saw the card: Until to-morrow. Adam .

She got through the next half hour pretty successfully, she hoped. There seemed to be no blunders and Miss Hamilton continued charming and apparently delighted. There were constant visitors. A tap on the door would be followed by a head looking round and always by the invitation to come in. First there was Miss Gay Gainsford, a young and rather intense person with a pretty air of deference, who seemed to be in a state of extreme anxiety.

“Well, darling,” Miss Hamilton said, glancing at her in the glass. “Everything under strict control?”

Miss Gainsford said unevenly: “I suppose so. I’m trying to be good and sort of biddable , do you know, but underneath I realize that I’m seething like a cauldron. Butterflies the size of bats in the stomach.”

“Well, of course. But you mustn’t be terrified, really, because whatever happens we all know John’s written a good play, don’t we?”

“I suppose we do.”

“We do indeed. And Gay — you’re going to make a great personal success in this part. I want you to tell yourself you are. Do you know? Tell yourself.”