Swan Song. Edmund Crispin

Joan commented in a vehement whisper from the wings. ‘Contemptible ass. The wretched man’s beat is perfectly clear.’

      ‘If we have many more hold-ups,’ Adam replied gloomily, ‘we shall never get on to the third act at all. Not that I should be altogether sorry,’ he added as an afterthought. ‘I tried to sing a top A in my bath this morning, and nothing but a sort of whistling sound came out.’

      The music began again. Adam had heard it hundreds of times, but still it cast its warm enchantment over him. They reached the disputed passage. Shorthouse was dragging.

      ‘Now we shall see,’ said Joan.

      Peacock tapped with his baton and the orchestra faded into silence. ‘I’m afraid we were a little ahead of you. Mr Shorthouse,’ he said pointedly.

      ‘Oh, Lord,’ groaned Adam. ‘Not sarcasm. Not sarcasm, you fool.’

      The result was as he expected. There was a moment’s dead silence, and then: ‘If my efforts displease you, Mr Peacock,’ said Shorthouse, ‘I would be obliged if you would tell me so in a straightforward way, and not by means of cheap witticisms.’

      There was another silence. Peacock flushed scarlet. Then: ‘I think we’ll leave that passage for the moment,’ he said quietly, ‘and go on. We’ll take it from scene four – Eva’s entry. Are you ready, Miss Davis?’ he called.

      ‘Perfectly,’ Joan called back. ‘Even the pretence of flirting with Edwin,’ she said to Adam, ‘makes me shudder.’

      ‘Never mind. Perhaps he’ll object to something you do. Then you can give him hell.’

      ‘How nice that would be,’ said Joan dreamily. ‘But there’s not much hope of it. He only picks on the young and inexperienced, who can’t answer back … Here we go.’

      ‘Ta-ta,’ said Adam. ‘Meet you under the lime-tree, and don’t bring a friend.’ He returned to his reflexions.

      The situation was, in fact, worrying. There could be no doubt that Peacock was breaking up under the strain of incessant objections, interruptions, and superfluous requests for information about tempo, dynamics, and all the paraphernalia which should have been, and in fact had been, settled at the piano rehearsals; doing a complex, five-hour opera is labour enough without any member of the cast’s making a wilful nuisance of himself. What made it more objectionable was that where the opera management was concerned, Shorthouse could twist Peacock round his little finger, for Shorthouse was the box-office attraction, and Peacock virtually a nonentity; so that although nominally Peacock’s word was law …

      Adam sighed, took another piece of chewing-gum, and again caught the eye of Barfield, who was beginning to eat a tomato. Barfield grimaced and nodded meaningly at the stage. Adam grimaced back. It was a futile interchange. At the other side of the stage, Shorthouse and Joan chanted mellifluously at one another, while the orchestra tranquillized, with an occasional tender dissonance, in A flat. Adam noticed suddenly how exceptionally well they were playing, and his anger with Shorthouse rose afresh. To calm himself, he took a third piece of chewing-gum. It was a pity the stuff lost its taste so quickly, and became merely rubbery.

      A few moments later he was joined by Dennis Rutherston, the producer, and a dark, rather ill-looking young man whom he vaguely remembered as being the apprentice whose sole duty it is, in the first act, to explain (in two words) the absence of Niklaus Vogel from the Masters’ gathering.

      ‘It’s a trial,’ said Rutherston, ‘not being able to move people when they’re singing. A convention, if you ask me.’ He was a melancholy, youngish man who was never to be seen without a battered trilby hat on his head.

      ‘It sends one out of tune,’ Adam told him kindly.

      ‘And what a nuisance Shorthouse is being … The meadow scene’s going to be an unholy muddle,’ Rutherston prognosticated gloomily. ‘These damned apprentices will not stand still when they get to their places. They seem to imagine that if they shift about from foot to foot it produces an appearance of animation. Actually, it looks like a mass attack of incipient D.T.s.’

      Beyond them, the music ceased abruptly. ‘Hullo,’ muttered Rutherston. ‘What now?’

      ‘It seems impossible to rehearse this work for five minutes’ – Peacock’s voice was shaking – ‘without an obbligato of muffled altercation from the wings. Will you please be quiet!’

      ‘That’s us,’ said Rutherston, faintly surprised. ‘Well, anyway, I must be off.’ As the music started again, he drifted away, followed by the dark young man.

      ‘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