Swan Song

‘God help us all,’ said Adam to himself, with some feeling. He had not liked the nerve-racked tone of Peacock’s voice, which suggested an imminent explosion. And he knew from experience that if one person loses control of himself at a rehearsal, the rest always begin to sulk, and the only thing to do is to pack up and go home. He devoutly hoped that Shorthouse would keep quiet for a while.

Magdalena trotted to the stage and held her brief colloquy with Eva. It occurred to Adam that he had better get upstage in readiness for his entry, and he affixed his chewing-gum providently to a piece of scenery. Damn Shorthouse, he thought, as he passed Beckmesser twanging faintly at his lute; damn the man.

In another moment Joan was rushing to greet him. ‘Hero, poet, and my only friend!’ she sang, embracing him, and added under her breath: ‘You smell revoltingly of peppermint.’

Very much to Adam’s surprise, the rest of the second act passed without untoward incident. The lovers attempted to elope and were foiled by Sachs: Beckmesser performed his ludicrous serenade and was chased by David amid a rout of apprentices and masters (‘Looks like a lot of fairies,’ said Rutherston with disapproval, ‘dancing a ballet’); sleepy-eyed, the night-watchman came on, intoned his formula, blew his horn; and to echoes of the summer-night motif and of Beckmesser’s serenade the music came to an end. But Adam suspected that Shorthouse, whose tactics in nuisance were subtle, was merely holding his fire until the third act: and events proved him to be right.

The cast gathered on the stage to hear the respective strictures of conductor, producer, and chorus-master. There followed a quarter-hour break, in which people drifted out to get a cup of tea. Adam joined Joan Davis and Barfield, who was eating an apple, in the stalls.

‘There are times,’ he said, ‘when I really think we ought to get together and raise Hades about Shorthouse.’

‘Calm before the storm,’ said Barfield indistinctly. ‘That’s all this is. But if you ask me, the management wouldn’t take it kindly.’

‘For the simple reason,’ Joan put in, ‘that they don’t realize what a marvel Peacock is with the orchestra. He makes that cynical old gang of scrapers and blowers sound positively beautiful.’

‘It’s youth,’ Barfield mumbled through his apple. ‘Emotional osmosis.’

‘Where is he, by the way?’ Adam asked. ‘Has he gone out?’

He stared about him. On the stage a number of unlikely objects which had been temporarily employed to represent a Nuremberg street were now being shifted about to represent a meadow. In his gallery at the back, the electrician was conversing with a couple of apprentices. And several members of the chorus were wandering dispiritedly up and down the gangways of the auditorium. But of Peacock there was no sign.

‘Having a heart-to-heart with Shorthouse, perhaps,’ suggested Barfield. ‘Poor devil.’ He took out a piece of cake and offered it perfunctorily to Adam and Joan; he was obviously relieved when they refused.

The dark young man whom Adam had seen with the producer crossed the back of the stage, talking to Judith Haynes. ‘Who’s that?’ Adam enquired generally.

‘The man?’ Joan sat up to get a better look. ‘Oh, Boris somebody. One of the apprentices.’

‘Isn’t the girl something to do with Shorthouse?’

‘As to that,’ said Joan rather definitely, ‘I couldn’t say. If so, I’m sorry for her. She’s a pretty child.’

‘Chorus?’

‘Yes. One of the boatload of maidens. It’s she who dances with David.’

‘Oh, yes, so it is.’ Adam considered. ‘I felt sure I’d seen her with Shorthouse, but she looks very much attached to that young man.’

‘Promiscuous probably,’ said Barfield, dropping cake-crumbs on to his knee. ‘Are we doing scene one of the last act? If so, I’ve time to go out and get a bite to eat.’

Joan shook her head. ‘No, only the second scene. Just as well, too. Everyone’s a bit worn.’

Barfield was staring at the door leading backstage, which now opened. ‘Cripes,’ he said. ‘Here’s Mephisto. Turn on the charm, everyone.’

Shorthouse came up to them, sat down, and heaved a sigh. He smelled, as usual, of gin.

‘Thank God the show’s in a week,’ he said. ‘I can’t stand much more of this. Peacock’s all right,’ – he spoke with such manifest insincerity that Adam started – ‘but he can’t make up his mind about anything.’

Joan said: ‘Are you deliberately trying to harry him into a nervous breakdown, Edwin?’

‘Good heavens, Joan’ – Shorthouse looked genuinely shocked – ‘what’s put that idea into your head? I’m sorry if I’ve been holding the production up, but I must understand what I’m supposed to be doing. Yet every time I ask, I get some kind of vulgar insult hurled at me … Not that I mind, personally – the man’s inexperienced and he’s obviously nervous. But I’m worried about the production as a whole. This is the first time Meistersinger’s been done since before the war, and it seems to me that for that reason it’s more than ordinarily important to get everything exactly right.’ He paused, and involuntarily a smile flitted across his face. ‘I’ve been considering going to the management and asking them to replace Peacock.’

‘Don’t be such a damned fool,’ said Adam, more sharply than he had intended. ‘He’s under contract.’

‘So am I,’ Shorthouse countered unpleasantly. ‘But that’s not going to stop me walking out if rehearsals continue on the present lines. I can assure you it isn’t a personal matter: it’s only Wagner I’m thinking of.’

The notion that Shorthouse might be thinking of anyone but himself was almost too much for Adam; he uttered an incoherent snorting sound. Barfield was unwinding a packet of chocolate. Pogner strode across the stage, muttering fiercely to himself, and Rutherston appeared, gesticulating at the electrician in his gallery. A horn-player in the orchestra pit was engaged in a prolonged Jeremiad about some infraction of Union rules.

Ten minutes later the rehearsal was under way again. The Guilds entered; the boatload of maidens arrived; the apprentices danced (‘like a Sunday School treat,’ Rutherston remarked); and last of all came the Mastersingers, headed by a banner bearing an effigy of David and his harp. The chorus sang in honour of Sachs; as the acclamation died away, all was ready for the moving response of the cobbler-poet.

Chapter Five

And that was when the real trouble started.

There was a minor hitch over positioning, followed by a misunderstanding as to the point in the score at which the music was to be recommenced. Shorthouse snapped at Peacock; Peacock snapped back at him, and then they went for one another, as Adam afterwards put it, ‘like a nationalization debate in the Commons’. Although it was an eruption which everyone had expected, the embarrassment was general, since the sight of two grown-up men bawling at one another like children is at the best of times dispiriting. No one, however, interfered; only, when Peacock finally stalked out, after smashing his baton on the conductor’s desk in an access of blind fury, Adam went quietly after him. He heard the murmur of released tension as he left the stage.

Peacock was in the rehearsal-room. He stood quite still, gripping the lid of the piano with both hands and struggling to control his emotions. His bony, irregular, sensitive features betrayed the strain he was undergoing, and his eyes were momentarily vacant and unseeing. Adam hesitated for an instant in the doorway; then said briefly:

‘You have my sympathy.’

There was a considerable pause before Peacock replied. At last he relaxed and said with great bitterness:

‘I suppose I should apologize.’

‘Technically, yes,’ Adam commented. ‘Humanly, no. You must realize that everyone is on your side. Edwin is behaving intolerably.’

Peacock muttered.

‘I ought to be able to control a situation like that. After all, it’s all part of my job …’ He considered. ‘You’ve more experience of these things than I … Should I resign?’

‘Don’t be a fool,’ said Adam warmly. ‘Of course not.’

‘Naturally, I realize’ – Peacock spoke with difficulty – ‘the line it’s desirable to take. Genial but firm … The trouble is, my nerves won’t let me do it. I suppose really I’m unfitted for this kind of work.’ He looked so haggard that Adam was shocked. ‘But I’ve simply got to make a success of it. One way or another, it’s going to affect the whole of my future career.’

There was a silence. ‘What about the rehearsal?’ Adam asked.

‘Tell them it’s over, will you? I can’t face people at present.’

‘It would be better if you—’

‘For God’s sake tell them it’s over!’

Peacock checked himself abruptly, and a spasm of shame passed over his face. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to shout.’

‘I’ll tell them,’ said Adam, and hesitated.

‘For the love of heaven don’t do anything rash,’ he added, and returned to the stage.

There he made his brief announcement. Shorthouse, he observed, was not present to hear it.

People drifted away, chattering in a subdued fashion. The orchestra began to dismantle and pack up their instruments. Joan Davis accosted Adam.

‘How is he?’ she asked.

‘I don’t like it,’ said Adam. ‘I don’t like it at all. Where’s Edwin?’

‘He left immediately after Peacock.’

Adam sighed. ‘Well, there’s no point in lingering here. Let’s go back to the hotel and get a drink.’

‘Do you think we should have a conference?’

‘A conference … I scarcely see what would come of it.’

Joan smiled wryly. ‘Nothing, in all probability. But it might clear the air.’

‘After dinner, then – preferably over a drink.’

‘I’ll arrange something.’ Joan nodded briskly, and went off to her dressing-room.

At the stage door Adam met Shorthouse on the point of leaving.

On a sudden impulse: ‘What the hell is the matter with you, Edwin?’ he demanded.

Shorthouse looked at him queerly, almost blankly. His thin grey hair was dishevelled, and there was sweat on his cheeks and forehead. It came to Adam, with a sudden twinge of horror, that the man might be growing insane. Irrationally, and quite unexpectedly, Adam had a feeling of pity.

But it was wiped away when Shorthouse spoke – thickly, as though the movement of his mouth were painful to him.

‘I shall telephone Levi,’ he said, ‘and get that little whipper-snapper kicked out.’

‘Don’t be a fool, Edwin.’ Adam spoke sharply. ‘Even if Levi agreed, it’d be the beginning of the end for you. You can’t antagonize people beyond a certain point without suffering for it.’

But Shorthouse, surprisingly, took no offence. ‘Suffering,’ he repeated dully. ‘People don’t realize how I suffer already …’ He paused: then, collecting himself, blundered out into the early darkness.

Adam followed him shortly afterwards.

Dennis Rutherston, the inevitable hat perched on the back of his head, leaned back and stared fixedly at the pale amber of the whisky in his glass.

‘Why worry?’ he said. ‘It’ll smooth itself out. These things always do.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Adam interposed with unwonted vigour. ‘But I don’t agree.’

They were in the bar of the Randolph Hotel, seated round a table near the door – Adam, Elizabeth, Joan, Rutherston, Karl Wolzogen, and John Barfield. It was eight o’clock of the same evening, and the after-dinner crowd had not yet collected. Nonetheless, a few persistent drinkers shared the room with them. At a neighbouring table, a tall, dark man with a green scarf round his neck was holding forth learnedly on the subject of rat-poisons to a neat middle-aged gentleman of military aspect and an auburn-haired youth with unsteady hands and a rose in his buttonhole. The place was predominantly blue and cream. It was blessedly warm after the cold outside. The clink of glasses, the angry fizzing of a beer-machine behind the bar, and the bell of the cash-register mingled agreeably with the hum of conversation.

Adam was argumentative. ‘This thing is cumulative,’ he stated, wagging his forefinger at them by way of warning. ‘It isn’t sporadic. And in Edwin’s case it seems to be complicated by self-pity. But what it amounts to in the end is this: that either Edwin or Peacock will have to go if we’re to open at all.’

‘… red squill,’ said the dark man at the next table. ‘It causes a very painful death.’

Rutherston sighed. ‘Well, what do you suggest?’ he asked. ‘A deputation to Levi?’

‘We’ve been over all this ground already.’ Joan Davis, whom the events of the afternoon had made a trifle reckless in the matter of smoking, lit a new cigarette from the end of the old. ‘Levi would never agree to getting rid of Edwin. Edwin’s still box-office, remember. No operatic management can afford to annoy him.’

‘Well, for that matter,’ said Adam irritably, ‘no operatic management can afford to annoy us.’

‘Dear Adam.’ Joan patted his hand affectionately. ‘Are you suggesting that we threaten to walk out if Edwin isn’t removed? Because I, for one, don’t feel much like dealing with an action for breach of contract.’

There was a silence, which was broken at last by Karl Wolzogen.

‘Ach!’ he snorted. ‘That fool! Art means nothing to him. The Meister means nothing to him. At the age of four I was presented to the Meister, in Bayreuth. It was the year before his death. He was abstracted, but kind, and he said—’

The others, though sympathizing with Karl’s enthusiasm for this elevating, if precocious experience, had all of them heard about it several times before. They hastened to bring the conversation back to the problem of Shorthouse.

‘Well, have you any views, John?’ Joan demanded.

Barfield, who was eating ginger biscuits from a paper bag on the table in front of him, choked noisily as a crumb lodged in his windpipe.

‘It seems to me that there’s only one answer,’ he announced when he had recovered. ‘And that is—’

‘Zinc phosphide,’ said the dark man at the next table. ‘A singularly effective poison.’

Barfield was momentarily unnerved by the appositeness of this.

‘I was going to say,’ he proceeded cautiously, ‘that we shall simply have to let Peacock go.’

There were cries of protest.

‘All right, all right!’ he added hastily. ‘I know it’s unjust. I know it’s detestable. I know the heavens will cry aloud for vengeance. But what other solution is there?’

‘Zinc phosphide,’ Elizabeth suggested. It was her first contribution to the discussion.

‘It would be nice,’ said Joan wistfully, ‘if we could poison him just a little – just so as to make him unable to sing.’

And perhaps it was at this point that the conference drifted away from the subject of Shorthouse. Certainly it had become apparent by then that no fresh light on the matter was forthcoming. At about nine the party broke up, and Adam walked back to the ‘Mace and Sceptre’ with Elizabeth and Joan.

It was after eleven when he discovered that his pocket-book was missing. Elizabeth was already in bed, and Adam was undressing. The process of disburdening his pockets revealed the loss, and he remembered that during the evening he had paid for drinks out of an accumulation of change.

‘Damn!’ he said, irresolute. ‘I believe I left it in my dressing-room at the theatre. I really think I’d better go and fetch it.’

‘Won’t tomorrow do?’ said Elizabeth. Adam thought that she looked particularly beautiful tonight, with her hair glowing like satin in the light of the bedside lamp.

He shook his head. ‘I really shan’t feel happy unless I go and get it. There’s rather a lot of money in it.’

‘But won’t the theatre be locked up?’

‘Well, it may be. But the old stage door keeper sleeps there, and he may not have gone to bed yet. I’ll try, anyway.’ He was dressing again as he spoke.

‘All right, darling.’ Elizabeth’s voice was sleepy. ‘Don’t be long.’

Adam went over and kissed her. ‘I won’t,’ he promised. ‘It’s only three minutes’ walk.’

When he got outside, he found that the moon was gibbous, very pale, and with a halo encircling it. Its light illuminated the whole of the south side of George Street, and at the end, at the junction with Cornmarket, he could see the steady green of the traffic signals. A belated cyclist pedalled past, his tyres crackling on the ice which flecked the surface of the road. Adam’s breath steamed in the cold air; but at least the wind had dropped.

He crossed Gloucester Green. There were still a few cars parked there, the pale moonlight on their metal roofs striped with the yellower rays of the street-lamps. It was very quiet, save for the persistent coughing of a belated wayfarer stationed ouside the little tobacconist’s shop on his left. Adam paused for a moment to read the concert announcements posted on a nearby wall, and then walked on into Beaumont Street.

He had no difficulty in entering the opera-house – indeed, the stage door stood wide open, though the little foyer inside, with its green baize notice-board and its single frosted bulb, was deserted. By about twenty-five past eleven he had retrieved his pocket-book and was preparing to depart.

His dressing-room was on the first floor, and his decision to go down in the lift must therefore be ascribed solely to enjoyment of the motion. He pressed the button, and the apparatus descended. He climbed in, and traversed the short distance to the ground floor. Then, feeling this short journey to be inadequate, he ascended again, this time to the second floor. Through the iron gates he could see the long, gloomy corridor of dressing-rooms, the gleam of the telephone fixed to the wall at the far end, and the rectangle of yellow light which came from the open door of the stage door keeper’s bedroom. After a moment, the stage door keeper himself shuffled out of it. He was an old man named Furbelow, with wispy hair and steel-rimmed spectacles. Adam, sensing perhaps that his presence required some explanation, opened the lift gates and greeted him.

‘Ah, sir,’ said the old man with some relief. ‘It’s you.’

Adam accounted dutifully for his late visit. ‘But I’m surprised,’ he added, ‘to find you still up.’

‘I’m always up till midnight, Mr Langley, and I keep the stage door open till then. But it’s cold down below, so I comes and sits up ’ere during the last part o’ the evening.’

‘I should have thought it was equally cold up here, if you keep the door of your room open.’

‘I as to do that, sir, when the electric fire’s on. Them things exude gases,’ said Furbelow a shade didactically. ‘You ’ave to ’ave ventilation when they’re alight.’

Adam, though doubting if there was much basis for this assertion, was not sufficiently interested in the stage door keeper’s domestic affairs to argue about it. He said goodnight and left the theatre. As he was walking away, a car drew up, and its occupant, a man, hurriedly entered the stage door. Adam experienced a mild curiosity, but he did not linger, and by the time he had arrived back at the hotel the incident was forgotten.

Meanwhile, in a dressing-room almost directly opposite to Furbelow’s open door, Edwin Shorthouse swayed a little in a cold draught. Now and again the rope creaked against the iron hook from which he was suspended, but that was the only sound.

Chapter Six

‘It argues a certain poverty of imagination,’ said Gervase Fen with profound disgust, ‘that in a world where atom physicists walk the streets unharmed, emitting their habitual wails about the misuse of science by politicians, a murderer can find a no more deserving victim than some unfortunate opera singer …’

‘You’d scarcely say that,’ Adam answered, ‘if you’d known Shorthouse. He will not be very much mourned.’

The three men paused on the kerb to let a lorry go by before crossing St Giles’. A little whirlwind of snow-flakes was swept among them by the wind.

‘All the same,’ Fen resumed when they were half-way across, ‘good singers are rare. And as far as I’m able to judge’ – his confident manner tended to nullify this reservation – ‘he was good.’

‘Certainly he was good. No one would have put up with him for two minutes if he hadn’t been … Is the snow going to lie, one wonders?’

‘It seems to me you’re overhasty in assuming it was murder,’ said Sir Richard Freeman, the Chief Constable of Oxford. He walked very upright, with short, rapid, determined steps. ‘Mudge implied that the circumstances suggested suicide.’ He frowned severely at this Jamesian hyperbole.

‘Mudge,’ Fen remarked with emotion. He buffeted his arms across his chest in the manner associated with taxi-drivers. ‘That hurts,’ he complained. ‘Anyway, if it was suicide, I scarcely see how it’s likely to interest me.’

‘Shorthouse. Any relation of the composer?’

‘Charles Shorthouse?’ said Adam. ‘Yes. A brother. Edwin sang in a good many of Charles’ operas, though as far as the normal repertory was concerned he specialized in Wagner. Wotan and Sachs. Mark. That chatterbox Gurnemanz. He was the obvious Sachs when they decided to put on Meistersinger here.’

They passed a public-house. ‘I should like a Burton,’ said Fen, gazing back at it with the lugubrious passion of Orpheus surveying Eurydice at hell-mouth. ‘But I suppose it’s too early. Shorthouse was hanged, wasn’t he?’

‘So it appears.’ Sir Richard Freeman nodded. ‘But not strangled. It seems to have been a kind of judicial hanging.’

‘You mean his neck was broken?’

‘Or dislocated. We shall get the full medical report when we arrive.’

‘It’s by no means a common way to commit suicide,’ Fen commented. His normally cheerful, ruddy face was thoughtful. ‘In fact, the arranging of it would involve a certain amount of knowledge and finesse.’ He buttoned at the neck the enormous raincoat in which he was muffled, and adjusted his extraordinary hat. He was forty-three years old, lean, lanky, with blue eyes and brown hair ineffectually plastered down with water. ‘I gather,’ he pursued as they turned up Beaumont Street by the Randolph Hotel, ‘that Shorthouse had been causing trouble at rehearsals.’

‘Trouble,’ said Adam grimly, ‘is an understatement. By the way’ – he turned to the Chief Constable – ‘I asked my wife along to the theatre this morning. I hope you don’t mind. You see, it’s rather in her line.’

‘Your wife,’ said Sir Richard, heavily, like one burdened suddenly with a dangerous secret. ‘I didn’t know you were married, Langley.’

‘Adam’s wife,’ Fen explained, ‘is Elizabeth Harding, who writes books about crime.’

‘Ah,’ said Sir Richard. ‘Nasty subject,’ he added rather offensively. ‘Yes, of course. By all means. Delighted to meet her.’

‘I rather think she wants to interview you, Gervase,’ Adam continued. ‘She’s doing a series on famous detectives for one of the papers.’

‘Famous detectives,’ said Fen with great complacency. ‘Oh, my dear paws. You hear that, Dick?’ he went on, banging the Chief Constable suddenly on the chest to make sure of his attention. ‘Famous detectives.’

‘Celebrated imbeciles,’ said Sir Richard crossly. ‘Ugh.’

‘Anyway,’ Adam put in, ‘here we are.’

Crossing the entrance to St John Street, they arrived at the opera-house, and made their way, Fen grumbling in quite a distressing way about the cold, to the stage door, which they found guarded by a constable. Nearby, a small group of seedy-looking men with instrument cases, their coat collars turned up against the biting wind and their fingers blue and numb, were conversing with a female harpist.

‘Morning, Mr Langley,’ said one of them. ‘Queer business, isn’t it? Shall we be getting a rehearsal, do you imagine?’

‘Not until the afternoon, anyway,’ Adam returned. ‘It depends on the police, I should say.’

‘They won’t cancel the production, will they?’

‘No surely not. We’ll get a new Sachs. But it’ll probably mean postponing the first show.’