Slaying is Such Sweet Sorrow (18 page)

Roughly, she wiped away tears that had begun to seep from under her glasses and then took a long drink of water.

“I shall always remember those performances in our OUDS days,” Ann said quietly, “and however life changed her later on, I shall miss her.” She looked around the table. “Anyone else?”

“I don’t think there’s much point in the three of us speaking,” Peter said. “We didn’t know her well, and our relationships with Edgar were—complicated. Probably best if we keep quiet.” He threw a meaningful look at Tom, who nodded, and at Gemma who seemed to be preparing to burst forth with an encomium for Edgar.

She gave in and looked down at her plate, only murmuring, “None of you understood him!” Tom gave her shoulder a comforting pat.

“Do you know,” said Aubrey suddenly, “when my wife spoke of Perdita’s stage appearances long ago, it occurred to me that there is a way to give our younger colleagues, as well as our American guests, an idea what we mean when we speak of her talent—a sort of memorial evening, as well as a way of bringing to life our chosen field, which may indeed seem overly esoteric. The Globe in London—you’ve heard, of course, of the reproduction of Shakespeare’s theater, built near the spot where it stood?—is performing
The Knight of the Burning Pestle
for several more weeks. As it was Perdita’s most famous role, and a highly entertaining piece as well, why mightn’t we organize a theater party some evening?”

The English people responded enthusiastically. And when I heard Janet whining softly to Quin, “Oh, do we have to?” and saw that look of annoyance cross his face again, I leaned over the table and called to Cyril, “What a wonderful idea! I’ve always wanted to see that theater.”

It was quite true, although a chance of ruining another evening for her definitely increased my relish.

“I shall go over and speak to Geoffrey tomorrow,” Cyril Aubrey went on, beaming at the success of his inspiration. “If it’s presented to him as a commemoration of Perdita, he may be persuaded to come along. He can’t be allowed to stop at home brooding any longer.”

“That’s so true,” Emily said decidedly. “Bereavement issues can be very dangerous.”

“I’ll go with you,” Peter put in. “Between us, we should be able to persuade him.”

Ann had rung a little bell to summon her Eileen, a hefty Irish girl, and now over a creamy chicken soup—which she told me was called Queen Victoria’s Soup—followed by a crown roast of pork with brussels sprouts and chestnuts, a green salad and gooseberry fool, we discussed less depressing subjects, all but one of us cheered by the prospect of our outing. Ann and Cyril talked with great pride about their two grown sons, and I was interested to learn about the organization they had created and ran together, which set up and ran schools in developing countries. They were presently working in Biafra, and their parents were looking forward to their annual visit next week to attend “May Morning,” the Oxford spring ceremony. We finalized plans for the theater party, and Quin, to my surprise, said he and Janet would be coming along.

Aubrey brushed off the complaints of Peter and Tom about the college losing Edgar’s rare-book collection, as Perdita’s sister was determined to sell it to outside collectors. He was right, of course; they had no grounds for challenging the will, although I too thought it was a shame.

Of course there were a few apposite quotations from the Elizabethans and exchanges about their works—there was no way to exclude those boys from the gathering entirely, although Ann made sure their appearances were brief. Altogether, by the time the long, relaxing dinner was over, we all felt much closer and were looking forward to meeting again at the weekend. Except, of course, for Janet.

When we were getting our things together preparatory to leaving, I noticed that she had drawn Quin off to the side again and was whispering in his ear, her hand twined around his like wisteria choking a tree. Outwardly I was bidding Ann good-bye, but in my head I was imagining what that woman was saying to him—probably more of her trademark transparent flattery, or nagging to leave early and go back to New York, where she had the home-turf advantage.

And then, as I started down the five steps from the door to the pavement, I heard his voice right behind me again.

“Are you over Tyneford, Kit?”

I jumped and turned around. “I’m fine!” I exclaimed breathlessly.

The gray strands in his hair shone in the light from the door, and the lines at the corners of his eyes were deeper as they always were when he smiled. His gaze traveled over my face—maybe looking for signs of lingering distress—from my eyes to my mouth, and back again. The voices of the other guests called good night all around us and laughed at farewell witticisms. I smelled the Old Spice he had always put on for occasions like this, and my mind flashed on family gatherings, suppers with friends, birthday parties. I took a couple of steps back, away from him.

“I knew you were pretty bummed out,” he went on in a low voice. “I called you a couple of times to see how you were doing, and there was no answer.” He waited, but I said nothing, letting him know I didn’t have to account to him for my movements. “Okay—so you’re all over it, then?”

“I said I’m
fine
.”

“Great. So—a couple of days, I’ll see you again at this play.” He was dragging it out, as if he didn’t want to separate. “The plane tickets are for May second, you know—that’s only five more days.” He took a deep breath. “Look, why don’t I call you tonight, or tomorrow? We ought to talk before it’s too late—”

“No,” I cut in. “No. It’s already too late.”

“What’s going on?” Emily’s voice said brightly. She and Peter had joined us, and there was the hint of a hopeful smile on her face as she looked from one of us to the other.

Over his shoulder, I caught a glimpse of Janet standing in the doorway. Tom and Gemma were stepping around her with apologies. She was watching us so intently she didn’t even notice them.

“Nothing’s going on, Emily,” I said, bringing my eyes back to Quin’s face. I suddenly felt very sad. “Just saying good-bye.”

I thought I heard him start to speak as I turned away and walked toward my car, but if he did, I couldn’t hear what he said.

Speak, gentlemen, what shall we do today?

Drink some brave health upon the Dutch carouse?

Or shall we go to the Globe and see a play?

—Samuel Rowlands,
The Letting of Humours

I
t was the evening of the theater party, and I was doddering around, trying on my few pieces of jewelry in hopes of making something of the green dress. I was sick of staring at my wiry, flat-chested image in the long mirror, wondering why I’d ever bought a dress with a top low enough to show my wrinkled neck, in that “princess” shape that only looks good on somebody with hips and a bosom. I could hear Muzzle outside batting at the back doorknob, the teakettle had started shrieking on the Aga, I’d just decided to wash off the powder and rouge I’d bought from Enid that morning and admit defeat, when the phone started up.

I hadn’t answered it for the past two days, in case it was Quin. Now that I knew he’d been trying to reach me before, while I’d been out on those marathon walks, I was afraid to pick it up. I couldn’t stand to find myself trapped again in an anecdote about some moment we’d shared twenty-seven years ago. I figured if I made sure to see him only in a group, like tonight, he couldn’t get personal, and I told myself I was only agonizing over my appearance to avoid embarrassing Emily.

I went to open the kitchen door and let Muzzle in, took the kettle off the hottest part of the stove surface, and got out a mug and a bag of Earl Grey. The phone continued jangling while I poured on the water. Suddenly I couldn’t stand it anymore. I went into the parlor and picked it up, ready to cut him off with a pithy retort.

“My dear, I’ve been worrying over your dilemma,” said Fiona, starting out without a greeting as she always did, “and here’s what you must do. Although I know she’s simply glued to his side, you must make arrangements to meet him for a really good talk. It’s the only way, get things out in the open, find out for once in a way how
both
of you feel, before he’s gone.”

While I listened to her, I noticed Muzzle sitting in the doorway. Another dead mouse dangled by its tail from his mouth.

“Oh, damn it!” I cried. “Damn it, damn it, damn it!”

“There you are, any mention of the man and you go crackers! Doesn’t that tell you something? If he can still move you so much—”

“Fiona, I can’t talk right now! I’ll ring you tomorrow. And for heaven’s sake, stop worrying!”

I hurried out to the garden shed and came back with a shovel. Muzzle looked on quizzically while I scooped up my gift from the floor where he had dropped it. He followed me to the back garden and watched me dig the tiny grave. I buried today’s mouse next to the other one, in a spot at the side of the garden where I was pretty sure I wouldn’t acccidentally disinter them if I ever got a chance to dig in the perennial border again.

“This has got to stop!” I snapped as I passed him, stomping inside with stains from the wet grass on my suede shoes and a smudge of dirt on the hem of my dress. Putting water on that material would probably only make a more noticeable stain, so I convinced myself it was in an inconspicuous spot. I washed my hands thoroughly but refused to look in the mirror another time. He—or rather, Emily—would just have to put up with me as I was.

It hadn’t rained since early morning, but it was a typical overcast English afternoon with a chilly breeze. When I got to the Aubreys’ house by the river, Cyril showed me where to park. It seemed the theater party was to be divided among his car, Peter’s, and Tom’s.

“I hope you’ll ride with Ann and me,” he said confidentially, “as poor Geoffrey’s to do so, and he does like you. Dorothy always tends to put her foot in it, and of course your—er, Quin, and his—er—well, pretty much strangers to him in comparison, aren’t they? But I feel sure you’ll think of the right thing to say.”

I didn’t feel so sure. Geoffrey was already in the black Daimler, bent forward, his hands hanging between his knees, staring at the back of the front seat. He was an intimidating prospect for any comforter. His big, square face was drained of color, his eyes were red-rimmed, there was at least a day’s worth of stubble on his cheeks and chin. I certainly wasn’t going to tell him that things weren’t really so bad, or that he would feel better if he gave it some time. I’d always hated it when people had repeated such trite consolations to me.

But Aubrey, settling himself in the driver’s seat, did a donnish variation on them. “Remember, old fellow,” he said, “ ‘Things being at the worst begin to mend.’ ”

“Webster,
Duchess
,” Geoffrey murmured automatically.

“Quite right!” Aubrey exclaimed heartily.

I had managed to avoid Quin. Tom’s car pulled out first, Gemma beside him in the front seat and Dorothy in the rear. I watched Peter’s car leave the curb a little ahead of us, and I recognized Quin’s head through the back window, beside that woman’s. It was over an hour’s drive to London, so I could breathe a sigh of relief for the present and relax against the velvety seat covers.

“Do you want to talk about it, Geoffrey?” I asked hesitantly.

He shook his head, but a few minutes later he asked, as if it were being pulled out of him with pliers, “How did her face look? I mean to say, were there signs—signs of suffering?”

I could answer truthfully, “No, she had no expression at all on her face. I imagine she’d lost consciousness pretty early in the process.”

“I hope to God she had!” He put his hands over his face, and his shoulders shook. I saw Cyril Aubrey’s face in the rearview mirror watching him anxiously.

I didn’t know what to say after that. Tell him she was at peace, in a better place? I wanted it to be true, but I couldn’t claim any inside information. He’d never accept the only thing I
was
sure about, that he was better off without her. I tried to remember how I’d felt when my mother had died, but I’d been only a kid. A grown man who’d lost the woman he loved had to be in a whole different world of grief. So we just sat in gloomy silence while the car sped along the motorway in heavy traffic.

Eventually Ann and Cyril started telling me about the play and the new Globe Theatre, and soon we were in the London suburbs and then the city itself.

When we got out in a car park right behind the Tylers’ car, Emily stared at me. She pulled a tissue from her handbag and gave it to me, whispering, “Mother, you have a great brown
smudge
on your left cheek!”

I wiped at it until she gave a discreet nod, then shoved the tissue in my pocket. I felt, rather than saw, Quin and Janet on the other side of the car with Peter and Dorothy. The four of them walked toward the theater just ahead of Emily, the Aubreys and me, and Tom and Gemma joined them. I stole a glance at Janet’s latest fashion statement—a loose ankle-length black dress with a matching crocheted jacket long enough to cover those hips, accessorized by a long rope of what looked like small semiprecious stones.

“Mother,” Emily murmured, “whatever have you been doing? Your dress is all dirty, and your shoes are a mess. Don’t tell me you’ve been working in the garden in your good clothes!”

I resigned myself to feeling like a chimney sweep all evening.

Peter was telling them about the theater, gesturing right and left, and Quin was listening with interest while Janet kept her eyes fixed on him, looking worried.

“It was in point of fact a countryman of yours, an American actor named Sam Wanamaker, who provided the momentum to rebuild the Globe in the 1980s,” Cyril told me.

“It’s surprising nobody had tried to build a model of Shakespeare’s theater before that,” I remarked.

He frowned. “Well, you know, it wasn’t actually
Shakespeare’s
theater! He was only one shareholder in the acting company that owned the Globe, and the works of some of our fellows were produced there as well—”

“But he
was
the principal playwright of the Lord Chamberlain’s Company,” Ann put in, sharing with me a little smile at her husband’s competitiveness on behalf of his “fellows.” “And the Globe was their theater. At any rate, Beaumont and Fletcher wrote the play we’re going to see for the Globe.”

“Quite,” Cyril agreed. “Now, you must conceive of this part of London, Southwark”—he pronounced it “Suthuk,” to my amusement—“as a bustling, disorderly place in Elizabethan and Jacobean times, full of taverns and brothels, soap yards and breweries and prisons, but the home as well of an amazing community of artists. It was outside the city then, and in attending the theaters along the riverbank Londoners thought they were engaging in daring, even disreputable, behavior. Ironic, considering that the plays written for these theaters are now considered high culture!”

It was certainly not a disreputable area now. A neat brick walkway had been laid overlooking the Thames, St. Paul’s dome on the other side, and the church spires and attempts at skyscrapers that poked up here and there around it. Farther north along the walkway I could just catch a glimpse of London’s newest art museum, The Tate Modern, converted from a power plant, and the minimalist silver arch of the Millennium Bridge on which you can walk across the Thames.

Emily had joined Quin’s party, since I was safe under the Aubreys’ wing. She looked back and threw me an encouraging smile as they entered the small building adjoining the theater that houses the souvenir shop, restrooms, and other modern amenities.

“Of course, the theater is not
precisely
the same as the original,” Aubrey went on. “The average Elizabethan, for example, was ten percent smaller than a modern adult. It was suggested during the planning period that if the new theater were built to the same scale, it would accomodate only the shortest of actors playing to parties of schoolchildren! So it has been scaled up for the bulk of a modern audience.”

“And a very good thing too,” said Ann. “Come along, now, darling—the rest of the party have left us behind.”

We followed the crowd through the modern building and out the other side onto a brick-paved entrance courtyard to the theater, where Cyril rented cushions for all of us, assuring me it was not an extravagance when you would be sitting on oak benches for several hours. Then we climbed three long sets of stairs to the very top row of the theater. He’d explained that since he had reserved the tickets at the last minute, nothing lower was available. We were sitting right under the theater’s roof, which my close-up view revealed to be covered with thatch.

“How did they ever get away with that?” I asked. “Isn’t it dangerous? I’ve heard the original Globe burned down because of a thatch fire!”

“Oh, it involved quite a battle,” Cyril assured me with relish, “between the designers and the fire commissioners. The latter almost prevailed and forced them to install a tile roof. They didn’t care that in the 1613 fire there had been three thousand spectators in the place and every one of them had escaped unharmed. But while they were arguing, a new fire-retardant spray for thatched roofs came out, the first one insurance companies would accept. The fire brigade were finally convinced it would be quite safe if that were applied, the thatch laid over fire boards, and a sprinkler system incorporated into the roof.”

“So you needn’t worry about that, at any rate!” Ann said, laughing.

Dorothy, dressed in her usual black suit and sensible shoes, greeted us warmly, and Geoffrey muttered something as we sat down beside them. There were only three rows of benches on this level. Gemma and Tom were whispering together on the next row down, and Emily and Peter sat next to Quin at the front of the gallery, Janet still attached to his arm.

It was impossible not to watch them, even after the play started. In fact, I discovered that watching a play in the open and in daylight was completely different from watching one in the usual darkened indoor theater. There were so many distractions, like the pigeons that strutted around on the wooden roof of the stage, right in front of us, and the planes making their approach to Heathrow, drowning out whole lines of dialogue. The audience too was visible all the time, especially the “groundlings,” the crowd of cheap-ticket holders who had to stand on the ground in front of the stage, exposed to the elements and necessarily strong of limb—no umbrellas or folding seats being allowed. They were actually the most serious and attentive of the spectators, and I was glad for them that it didn’t rain that afternoon.

The play itself was hilarious, with action back and forth between the stage and the galleries, the actors playing the grocer and his wife emerging from among the spectators to take over an attempted production by the Globe players and insert their apprentice, the hapless Ralph, as leading actor. It was fascinating to imagine Perdita Stone in that part, and I could see how she could have brought it off. The audience was in gales of laughter most of the time.

But I couldn’t help looking down at Quin pretty often, watching how Janet insisted on whispering to him, laying her head on his shoulder, almost forcing him to look her way even though I could tell it annoyed him. That self-assured air I had noticed when I’d first met her was steadily slipping away. I realized that underneath she was insecure, afraid he might be starting to have second thoughts.

And was she right? Had she been only a midlife aberration, a year’s refuge from the relentless approach of old age? If I had been the one sitting beside him we would have been laughing together. She didn’t seem to understand that flattery and sex weren’t going to be enough for the long haul, that after a while a man as sharp as Quin was going to need a woman he could match wits with, a woman who presented a bit of a challenge.