Tomato Cain and Other Stories Read online

There wasn’t much recognisable left of “Minuke”. But some of the bits were rather unusual. Knots in pipes, for instance - I buried what was left of the dog myself. Wood and brick cleanly sliced. Small quantities of completely powdered metal. The lath had been squashed flat, like tin foil. In fact, Pritchard was lucky to land the insurance money for his furniture.

  My professional problem, of course, remained. The plot where the wretched place had stood. I managed to persuade the owner it wasn’t ideal for building on. Incidentally, lifting those stones might reveal something to somebody some day - but not to me, thank you!

  I think my eventual solution showed a touch of wit: I let it very cheaply as a scrap-metal dump.

  Well? I know I’ve never been able to make any sense out of it. I hate telling you all this stuff, because it must make me seem either a simpleton or a charlatan. In so far as there’s any circumstantial evidence in looking at the place, you can see it in a moment or two. Here’s the coast road….

  The car pulled up at a bare spot beyond a sparse line of bungalows. The space was marked by a straggling, tufty square of privet bushes . Inside I could see a tangle of rusting iron: springs, a car chassis, oil drums.

  “The hedge keeps it from being too unsightly,” said the estate agent, as we crossed to it. “See - the remains of the gate.”

  A few half-rotten slats dangled from an upright. One still bore part of a chrome-plated name. “MI - “ and, a little farther on, “K”.

  “Nothing worth seeing now,” he said. I peered inside. “Not that there ever was much - look out!” I felt a violent push. In the same instant something zipped past my head and crashed against the car behind. “My God! Went right at you!” gasped the agent.

  It had shattered a window of the car and gone through the open door opposite. We found it in the road beyond, sizzling on the tarmac. A heavy steel nut, white-hot.

  “I don’t know about you,” the estate agent said, “but I’m rather in favour of getting out of here.”

  And we did. Quickly.

  END

  Chapter 5

  Clog Dance For a Dead Farce

  If I ever come on a copy of O, Frabjous Night still flaunting itself as a Comedy in Three Acts, it will be flushed away immediately. Once, in desperate moments, I used to dream of scattering it upon stormy seas, or burning it, page by page, but both these methods smack of drama, with which it had nothing to do.

  It was one of those shapeless attempts that are not comedy or farce because the author understands neither. Things without a naturally funny line, that make their actor-victims work like fiends to warm the corpse, and their audience-victims hate the seats they sit on. How this particular inanity achieved a West End showing will remain a secret: the hands that pulled the strings are probably stilled for ever, and the author’s suffering name has changed obloquy for oblivion.

  Possibly the thing is still performed occasionally by a broken and despairing repertory company, but this is how it died in the outer world.

  “I’ve lost Kangaroo!” old Arnie said when I got into the dressing room at seven o’clock. “He’s gone! I can’t find him.”

  Kangaroo was the name he gave his mascot: it was made of coloured pipe-cleaners and work, and it had always looked to me like some sort of dry fly.

  I helped him to search the waste basket and things, but it was no good. “Fell off his hook and the cleaners got him, probably,” I said. “They wouldn’t know what he was.”

  Arnold was cut up. “Doesn’t matter how it seemed to happen, boy,” he said. “There’s more in it. He’s gone, and it’s an opening night. First time since I’ve had him.”

  The opening night of out last week, he meant. We were the tour version, doing the provinces with the usual weaker and cheaper cast: the London show had folded up some weeks before.

  “Never listen to people who say mascots don’t mean anything.” Arnold had given up the search and was rubbing grease-paint on his bald head. “Keep your fingers crossed to-night, boy. Bang it out at them and take no chances.”

  “Okay,” I said. I’d never gone in for mascots, but I believe in ghosts.

  “Ah! I’ll plug the broken door-bell business at the start. Aah!” he said, colouring his neck. He always smothered himself in grease-paint: it was a point of pride. None of that mask-and-white-neck stuff for him.

  Most theatre people are failures. I don’t mean they starve: they get along, just as clerks and taxidermists and boilermakers do: but they aim higher and drop shorter. There are lots of sorts of failures; even successful ones, financially. But chiefly they make two classes: the self-deluders and the realists. The first kind never know they’re bad: they inhabit part of the same cuckoo world as the geniuses, only it’s the slum area. The realists, though, know the worst. They know they won’t enter the promised land, but they go right on, full of technique and guts and sometimes liquor. In spite of the mascot stuff, old Arnie was a realist.

  He had a key part in this opera. Heavy Low Comedian. It wasn’t a lead, but he was essential to such plot as there was, and had some of the best “business” - after he had invented it himself. I was a “juvenile”; which shows how long ago it was.

  Kangaroo’s warning was soon borne out. When I got down to the stage for “beginners,” I heard excited voices and a sort of moaning.

  It was the stage manager. Our own SM, who toured with us, a thin, jumpy type; he was all wrong for the job. Just now he was sitting on a prop bed in a terrible state.

  “She’s a devil,” he said to me. “Oh, my God! She’s the one that ought to be put away. My God! Having to hide like a rat in a trap!”

  I knew he was divorced. Now it turned out there was a man outside with a judgment summons for unpaid alimony. The stage doorkeeper had been primed to tell the tale about the show being on, but the man said he would wait. The doorkeeper had to give him a chair.

  “And she’s earning money!” the SM whined. “Nearly as much as I am! This’ll finish me. I can’t let them take me!”

  We tried to persuade him to go and accept the writ, but he wasn’t having any. He was so sure he was being arrested, he just sat and pitied himself.

  It was bad. The two assistant stage managers would be upset too. A young girl fresh from drama school - I looked round, but I couldn’t see her anywhere - and an unsavoury long-haired lad who never seemed to do anything.

  Old Arnie appeared, looking a bit off form. “Let’s get started,” he said. “Where’s Miss Lane?”

  The stage manager came partially to life. “She’s off,” he said.

  “What!”

  ”Sprained ankle on the stairs as she came in, Dolly’s going on for her.”

  Dolly was the missing assistant SM. She understudied as well.

  Arnie caught my eye.

  “Poor kid!” said somebody. We all pitied an understudy in that play. The thing had become so loaded with gags and comic business, it was like having to stand in for a member of a family acrobat team.

  “Thank heaven it’s a straightish part,” Arnie said, as she appeared. “Good luck, Dolly! We're all behind you, remember. We’ll see you through.” The usual remarks on these occasions.

  Everyone wished her luck and said things about it being her big chance. She didn’t seem to mind. She was either without nerves or half-paralysed with fright.

  “Now for heaven’s sake let’s go!” said Arnie.

  I came on quite near the beginning. After a few lines I lay back in a chair and pretended to go to sleep, which is an excellent position for studying the audience if you’re so inclined. Surprisingly, there were few empty seats. But something was odd.

  You hear a lot about how audiences vary. They do. The weather; or the news; or the proportion of kids; or local conditions; or the varying quality of the show itself; all these affect them. This lot seemed to be mostly women: old women. They sat in rigid silence.

  When I came off I whispered to Arnie, “Sticky house.”

  “Suffragettes ” he said.
The vote business had been settled a long time before this, of course; he used the word for description. “I’ll do my damndest with the door-bell.”

  It would be hard to describe Arnie’s business with the broken door-bell. He had invented and perfected it during the run, at a place where the script became sheer calamity. It was a little masterpiece of timing and agile mime. He made me laugh whenever I saw it from the side, and I'd seen it a good many times. The audiences loved it. Most of them broke into a spontaneous round.

  But not to-night.

  Once I thought I heard somebody titter, but it may have been boots squeaking. Otherwise, dead silence.

  I went on immediately after this. Arnie was insulted and furious at his stuff falling flat for the first time: it showed in the undercurrent in his voice, and the joyless way he was banging the stuff over. That’s fatal. I tried to help him back into a good humour by being relaxed myself. He just made drooling-idiot faces each time his back was turned to them. It got worse and worse: not a flicker of response from that audience. We weren’t as unfunny as all that, in spite of the play.

  Little Dolly came on.

  She was a pretty girl, excellent figure; but I saw the look her eyes held. It was fear all right.

  She got started. Several lines were fine. Then her voice went faint. She didn’t know it of course; she was seeing only the lines.

  On and on she went. Weaker and weaker. I could hardly hear it from the other side of the stage.

  I put in a move, and whispered to her as I went across to make it a bit louder.

  She tried, kept it up for a few lines; then it died again. Somebody out front started to cough. I was wondering wildly about jumping in ahead of cue, as a last resort, when Arnie spoke. He barked out, in character, “Speak up, my girl! Speak up!”

  And then he turned a look of loathing on the audience and said distinctly, and quite slowly, in his own voice, “Not that it’ll make a bloody bit of difference!”

  There was a gasp of horrified amazement; their first reaction of the evening.

  Arnie had turned his back on them.

  It was useless after that. We and the audience were sworn enemies.

  At the interval I found poor Dolly in hysterics. She had thought that Arnie meant that her acting was so bad that it would make no difference if she spoke loudly, and that he had told the audience so. She deserved rows of medals for carrying on with the scene, thinking that. Amie apologised and kissed her, and said she was wonderful, and explained how his hate of the audience and made him lose control, and how much he respected her self-possession. Then steadied her with brandy.

  One of the girls was looking through a split in the curtain. “They’re coming back for more,” she reported. “Must be curiosity.”

  “Been getting broken bottles in the bar, more likely!” someone else said.

  Act Two was quite short: too short to build any suspense, as normal second acts do. Our author had known every point to miss.

  The audience sat like jugs. It was uncanny, creepy, to act before them. As if they weren’t there at all. Even the coughs and little rustlings and the murmurs that fill every theatre had gone now. They were hating us.

  Little Dolly had improved. She was audible and forging along, not letting herself dry. Once she cut a page or two of script, but nobody was sorry to see it go.

  “Let’s get it over!” Arnie said at the second interval. “My God, they scare me now. Must be something in the water.”

  This interval was a busy one for the stage crew, unfamiliar as they were with our scenery. A new set had to be rigged, a double one. It consisted of a small scene, “Francesca’s bedroom,”which was hauled up into the flies during a short scene-drop, to reveal a larger exterior scene, “Outside the Chateau.” To complete this, a huge built-up centrepiece had to be wheeled into place at the back, representing the entrance to the Chateau. A stone doorway, with windows above.

  We reached this Scene change, and Francesca’s bedroom sailed aloft.

  Our nerves were wearing. It was like one of those dreams where you’re trying to make a frantic escape in something about as fast as a steamroller, or where your fingers stick to things you’ve thrown away.

  The curtain rose. “Outside the Chateau,” This was the big action scene. After a few fatuous misunderstandings, the characters crept about spying on each other. Gendarmes were called in, and nearly everybody managed to get arrested. An alleged dénouement followed in a short separate scene: “The same. Next morning.”

  Just before I went on, the stage manager said to me, “I can’t stand this! It’ll kill my mother!” The man was a wreck. I wondered what his mother had to do with it, and he said, “He’s still out there! Waiting!” I’d forgotten the process server.

  On stage, Arnie saddled up. He murmured, “Like a morgue. Somebody dropped a pin at the back of the gallery five minutes ago, and the echoes haven’t died yet!”

  The cast were hustling to get it over. The gendarmes - three burly supers - hurried in from the side, and up the two steps in the Chateau entrance at the back.

  “No! No! Here I am! Help!” Dolly, as Francesca, was dragged out of a side door by Arnie and one of the girls. This was the cue for the gendarmes to come rushing back from the Chateau. They always came in a lump, sticking in the doorway because it was supposed to be funny.

  Out they came, jammed according to plan, disentangled, ran down the two steps. Then I noticed the last of them hesitate and half turn back. I saw what he saw.

  The Chateau was moving!

  Very slowly, like a drunken duchess, the whole thing was tilting, tipping majestically over on to its face.

  The last gendarme spluttered and grabbed at his colleagues.

  Then we were all running to grab it. The thing was a light stricture of canvas and wood, and not really dangerous.

  We got the cracking monstrosity as it neared the ground, straining to support it. Myself and two of the gendarmes, that is. The third had his head stuck in a split in the canvas where it had hit him. The laths bent. The Chateau flopped most of its length on the stage.

  In the gap it left, surprised and stricken like insects under a lifted stone, stood the stage manager and three scene-shifters. I saw old Arnie too, bending as if he were holding something down. Behind them were ropes, ladders, prop plants. And the back wall.

  There was a strange noise.

  A swelling, terrible roar that drowned the anguished mutterings of the gendarmes and the whispers in the wings.

  The audience was laughing.

  A harsh, derisive bellow that they had been saving up all the evening. They might have known this would happen.

  I couldn’t turn round. The laugh went on without slackening while we heaved at the bulging framework. The third gendarme had untangled himself and was pushing too. As it rose, stage-hands pulled from behind.

  The Chateau was in place again, a bit crooked, and with part of the stone fabric flapping where the gendarme’s head had burst it. Why the curtain hadn’t been dropped as soon as the accident happened, I couldn’t think. But it hadn’t, and we could only struggle on.

  “I’ll stay and watch it,” whispered one of the gendarmes. He stood by the doorway, trying to look busy, while the rest of us moved down-stage.

  Of course he was spotted. The audience’s howl gathered fresh strength. I tried to beckon him unobtrusively and he came forward. They yelled even louder. Suddenly, whatever we did, they laughed: but at us, not at the characters we were playing.

  Other members of the cast were on stage now, bawling out their lines. Cues were lost in that appalling row out front.

  I slid out.

  “Take it down!” I said. Nobody seemed to be in charge. “It’s no use - we can’t hold them now!”

  The SM was on the point of collapse. Of course it was his fault that the Chateau hadn’t been properly braced. His brains were outside with the process server.

  “The old chap’s hurt!” he said. “His back. I’ve sent fo
r a doctor. What d’you think —?”

  “Get the curtain down!” I said.

  He did. The safety.

  I could still hear that blanketed, half-hysterical laughter as I went to find Arnie. They had laid him on the prop bed. Apparently one of the loose steel braces had strung around and hit him between the shoulders as he tried to grab the falling Chateau.

  He was deathly white and evidently thought he was done for.

  “They packed us up,” he said. “They got us in the end. Tell somebody to play the King, very loudly.”

  The SM managed to put the record on and it shook the nonsense out of them. There was peace after that.

  “Is the doctor on his way ?” I asked.

  Arnie opened his eyes. “I am dead, Horatio,” he said, and lifted one hand an inch or two. “Report me... and my cause aright to the unsatisfied.” I wouldn’t have thought Hamlet had been one of his parts, but you never know.

  The girls were sniffing, what with the fiasco on stage, and now this. The SM was chewing his fingers, blaming himself desperately.

  Arnie lay still. The grease-paint had been wiped off his face, but it still made his neck look ghoulishly healthy. The cast were all around him, hardly moving.

  “It’s as he would wish,” a voice near me breathed.

  Old Arnie was making a beautiful finish. He was just going into Hamlet’s dying words about the rest being silence, when the doctor came. We almost resented the intrusion.

  He got his coat off and spoiled the whole thing. In two minutes he had poor Arnold up and sitting and telling where it hurt most. The old lad had chipped a bit off his spine, it turned out, but he was as fit as a flea by the pantomime season, and went on for years after that.

  People trailed upstairs to remove make-up.

  Later we found the SM had stolen the doctor’s hat and coat and, with a prop bag to complete the disguise, had walked past the writ-server. So far as I know, he got clean away.

  Occasionally I still get a reminder. I run into one of the cast now and then, though we don’t talk about it. But where other people have nightmares about falling from heights, I get a vast craggy wall dropping on me, millions of tons of it, all crawling with gendarmes.