Джеймс Хилтон - Morning Journey

At Mapledurham not only the tea and the Airedale were duly waiting, but also, standing up as they entered the drawing-room, there was a tall slim young man who introduced himself as Malcolm Beringer. The name was unknown to her, and the elegant way he pronounced it did not remove her suspicion that he had no business there, or at least that his business was of a kind they didn’t want to be bothered with on their first day in the country. “I hope you’ll excuse this intrusion…” he began smoothly, whereupon Paul looked him up and down and snapped: “You’re damned right it’s an intrusion. I don’t know you, and I don’t care who you are or what you’ve come for, you can’t see me or my wife without an appointment.”

Carey turned back into the hall where Jerry was dumping bags from the car. She hated scenes, and this was a type she could never get used to. She was usually torn between solicitude for Paul, who needed protection from all kinds of crackpots and time-wasters, and sympathy with the adventurers who wanted him to read their plays or give them acting jobs. But today she had no such sympathy; it seemed intolerable that a stranger should actually stalk them to their retreat. She sought out Walter. “Why on earth did you let that man in? What does he want? How long has he been here?”

“‘Bout an hour. I didn’t know whether to let him in or not, but he said he knew Mr. Paul would want to see him. Something about a play, he said.”

“Oh, Walter, how COULD you be so easily handled?… Well, we can expect to see him thrown out on his ear any moment now… you know what Paul’s like.” It was natural for her to speak of him as Paul to those within the household; they called him MR. Paul, with the Mister somehow a mark of deference to her rather than to him.

Ten minutes passed, and Paul’s voice from the adjoining room, at first upraised, had become mysteriously inaudible. Carey felt she must investigate; once a similar silence had been due to a young man fainting. She re-entered the drawing-room with the upset feeling that Paul’s behaviour so often caused her. Surprisingly, however, she found a quiet, almost a cosy conversation in progress, and when Paul turned to her there was the beam on his face that was usually reserved for a good performance at a final dress rehearsal. It disconcerted her now, and still more so when he called out briskly: “Oh, Carey, I’ve asked Mr. Beringer to stay to dinner. Will you tell Walter? And by the way… you remember I once said Wagner might have done Everyman as an opera, but he didn’t… Well, now, here’s this Mr. Beringer with another idea…”

Carey smiled wanly, murmuring something, and was glad of an excuse to get away. Oh God, she thought, OH GOD… For this sort of thing, too, had happened before.

She did not conceal her ill-humour when she joined them at the table a couple of hours later. It was maddening that this first evening at Mapledurham, which she had hoped to spend alone with Paul, chatting unimportantly, strolling in the garden with the dog and going to bed early, should be taken up by an outsider. During the meal the subject of Everyman did not crop up again, and she was heartily glad of that; she was in no mood for any kind of shop talk. She wondered if Mr. Beringer were canny enough to sense this, for once or twice he seemed to steer conversation away from the theatre when Paul was inching towards it. He was certainly an entertaining young man, if one had wanted to be entertained. As it was, she treated him with a minimum of warmth and excused herself as soon after the coffee as she decently could. Paul and he would doubtless discuss their precious Everyman when she had gone. Hours later, while she was still reading in bed, she heard the front door bang but no sound of a car starting. Then Paul came in. He was in the condition she often called ‘basking’; it occurred whenever contact with some new idea or personality swept the accumulated dust of boredom out of his mind.

“I told you, Carey, this fellow Beringer has an idea for Everyman.”

“Has he? Who is he, anyway?”

“A neighbour—he’s staying at Moat Farm. He walked over. Pity it was tonight when you were tired, but I suppose he was anxious to break the ice of a first meeting. You certainly gave him that… the ice, I mean.”

“And you bawled him out at the top of your voice.”

“Yeah, I did at first, didn’t I?” He laughed as if it were already a reminiscence of long ago, to be savoured with amazement. “Well, we’ll be seeing him again and you’ll probably like him better.”

There was no use opposing the inevitable. She said, summoning cheerfulness: “Darling, I’m sure I will, and if he’s going to be a friend of yours I’ll be specially nice to him next time.”

“Oh, you don’t have to put on any act. It’s me he wants to impress.”

He had the look in his eyes she knew so well and was afraid of, because it was both shrewd and guileless, so that in recognizing that the young man had sought to impress him he did not debar himself from a willingness to be impressed.

“What is it he wants you to do?” she asked quietly.

“He has an idea, that’s all. He thinks Everyman would make a motion picture.”

“And of course he wants to interest YOU in the project?”

“There is no project, but I AM interested in Everyman—you know that. Seems he read some piece I wrote about it years ago. That’s why he came to me rather than any of the picture people. He wanted my advice.”

“Only advice?”

“That’s all. I told him I knew nothing at all about motion pictures.”

“Then what kind of advice could you give him?”

“Oh, now, Carey, you’re splitting hairs. There’s all kinds of advice I can give a bright young man if he’s interested in something I’m interested in. You know I’ve always had an idea to do Everyman on the stage.”

She could see his face in the mirror; he was taking his tie off with a gesture she felt she would remember if she were to go blind and deaf and forget his looks and his voice. He had once told her, apropos of some discussion of ballet, that of all the movements incidental to male undressing, only the removal of a bow tie could be done with flair; the others, particularly the stepping out of pants, were banal… She said sleepily: “So long as you don’t get yourself stuck with anything, Paul. You promised you were going to take a real rest.”

He nodded. “I know, and if that damned play weren’t reopening in September… “

The implication was that if the play, their almost fabulously successful play, were not reopening in September he could have all the rest he needed; and this, she knew, was nonsense; only the play kept him from the far more arduous business of staging its successor. But it had got to the point now when the play was a scapegoat; he hated its guts, though towards the end of August he would order a few frantic corrective rehearsals in which he would behave as if it were a masterpiece. There was, of course, no compelling reason why he could not put on another play while the successful one was still running, but he shied away from this, partly because he wanted a part for Carey in everything he directed, but mainly because he shrank from proving that anything he had once started could possibly continue to exist without his constant attention. Nor could he tell himself rationally and mundanely that here was a harmless little comedy hit that might run another year, maybe longer—easy on audiences, because it didn’t make them think, easy on Carey because it was tailor-made for her, easy on the pay-sheet because there was just one set with a cast of five. True, it was a trifle, but since he had chosen to do it in the first place, why complain because it was making a small fortune for everyone connected with it, including himself?