lost ’em—one long recurring nightmare. I’d hang myself if my belt would hold.’
‘It’ll be better at the second show, when the audience is half-cut.’ Verrall pulled the script out of his pocket and a pencil from the ribbon of his bowler hat, made a few swift strokes and scribbled a note. ‘Lose the dining room bit, lose They raise chickens in the cellar, the guests are fond of dark meat. Too highbrow for this house.’
‘We’ll have to put the girl back in,’ East said.
‘She was knocking on my door all night, but there were complaints and I had to let her out—’ Verrall scratched.
‘Good, that’ll lead into There’s a dead girl in the other bed …’
‘Yes, but how did you find out she’s dead?’ Verrall said, accusing the imaginary guest. ‘Or do you think that’s going too strong?’
Bella was laughing too hard to talk, so exhilarated she could have turned right around and gone back out again; and the best of it was, she’d be able to do it again at the second show, and at the third, and then all this week! She put her fist over her mouth and made herself calm down so she would have something left for the next two shows.
An Artiste
Later in the bill, Clover slipped backstage again to watch Victor Saborsky. His act used a very complicated technical rigging which he checked and rechecked during the Old Soldiers’ performance, and right after the intermission Clover had seen him standing motionless at the very back of the stage behind the last olio drop, lost in thought, or in prayer.
‘A true artiste,’ Sibyl had whispered as they filed past him. ‘Nothing comes before performance, with him. You don’t often find that in this business, really, that kind of concentrated effort. People work hard—look at East and Verrall!—but he’s a maniac.’
Clover had not mentioned him to her sisters, and she went up alone into the wings to watch him. Her white skirt and waist would be too evident in the wings, she thought, so she wrapped herself in a grey shawl and stood like a modest ghost just outside the hemp-bed’s painted line. The blue light from the prompt box shone on her pale, pointed face and haloed her hair. Victor saw her and smiled, because she had come up for his turn, then looked quickly away.
He wore a great-collared black velvet dress-coat, threadbare and ornate—he might have stolen it from an opera wardrobe, or inherited it from Beethoven. High-waisted black trousers made his long legs twice as long; he wore elongated boots that flapped slightly but retained a worn elegance of line. Clover could see the pattern of soft cracks filled in with black polish. The lights dimmed, the music changed, and the curtain opened to reveal two.
A country road, a tree. Evening.
Tattered silk battens, blown gently by a stagehand on the wind machine, gave the appearance of mist drifting over the stage. The drop, keeping the stage in two, showed a blurred grey landscape with the suggestion of a moon hidden behind clouds. Victor wandered onstage as if he had walked for a long time in those long black boots, and began to talk to the people in front. Clover had never imagined anything so charming and easy (but it was not easy, she knew, to make them yours).
‘Long ago I was a boy, and all alone,’ Victor told them, confidingly. ‘My father having died, and my mother being lost. She went to the Fabians, you know, and from them to even stranger company …’ He was a portrait of sadness. ‘But one must not repine.’
His feet flicked in a low flutter of ecstatic dance, then stilled. The wind began to blow, small particles of paper scudding towards Victor in the wind machine’s draught, and he was blown askew, farther off gravity than ought to have been possible, before he turned to face the wind and was tumbled backwards into a slow-flurrying roll. He picked himself up and carefully brushed his coat.
‘Life is not without its difficulties,’ Victor said, and a sudden imaginary gust blew him back through three standing flips—his hands never moved from holding his coat, his body merely seeming to revolve on a still fulcrum. Lightning flashed in the blasted landscape. The thunder-sheet was directly across from where Clover stood—she could see the man yank mightily on the metal to make it crack, but jumped anyway when the thunder boomed out.
Victor staggered back again and hid behind the small tree, clutching