CHAPTER FIVE

Opening Night

FROM NOON UNTIL half-past six on the opening night of Dr Rutherford’s new play, the persons most concerned in its birth were absent from their theatre. Left to itself the Vulcan was possessed only by an immense expectancy. It waited. In the auditorium, rows of seats, stripped of their dust-cloths, stared at the curtain. The curtain itself presented its reverse side to Jacko’s set, closing it in with a stuffy air of secrecy. The stage was dark. Battalions of dead lamps, focused at crazy angles, overhung it with the promise of light. Cue-sheets fixed to the switchboard awaited the electrician, the prompt-script was on its shelf, the properties were ranged on trestle-tables. Everything abided its time in the dark theatre.

To enter into this silent house was to feel as if one surprised a poised and expectant presence. This air of suspense made itself felt to the occasional intruders: to the boy who from time to time came through from the office with telegrams for the dressing-rooms, to the girl from Florian’s and the young man from the wigmaker’s, and to the piano-tuner who, for an hour, twanged and hammered in the covered well. And to Martyn Tarne who, alone in the ironing-room, set about the final pressing of the dresses under her care.

The offices were already active and behind their sandblasted glass walls typewriters clattered and telephone bells rang incessantly. The blacked-out box-plan lay across Bob Grantley’s desk and stacked along the wall were rectangular parcels of programmes, fresh from the printer.

And at two o’clock the queues for the early doors began to form up in Carpet Street.

It was at two o’clock that Helena Hamilton, after an hour’s massage, went to bed. Her husband had telephoned, with a certain air of opulence which she had learnt to dread, that he would lunch at his club and return to their flat during the afternoon to rest.

In her darkened room she followed a practised routine and, relaxing one set of muscles after another, awaited sleep. This time, however, her self-discipline was unsuccessful. If only she could hear him come in it would be better: if only she could see into what sort of state he had got himself. She used all her formulae for repose but none of them worked. At three o’clock she was still awake and still miserably anxious.