Wakefield hall, p.7
Wakefield Hall, page 7
“Still, the depression continued, deepened, began to intrude on every aspect of her life.” He paused, his thoughts turned inward, as if he were held in thrall by one particular recollection. “It is one morning that I remember so vividly, with an awful aching sharpness, a year or so after the birth of the child. I was directing Joanna in a double bill that season, and a rather difficult one at that—Rosalind in As You Like It, and as Medea. The daughter in one, the wife and mother in the other. I had chosen the Euripides partly because it was such a marvelous way to showcase Joanna—a logical successor to her Lady Macbeth. She had come to be fascinated by the Greeks.
“She had had a great success as Clytemnestra a year or so before, as I mentioned, in a superb modern—dress production of Ipighenia. Very Third Reich, actually. This was after the war, of course, and Nuremberg was very much on everyone’s mind—private conscience versus public duty, so to speak. She was simply unforgettable in the scene where she pleads with Agamemnon not to sacrifice their child. A young, quite moving Clytemnestra she was, though the part had caused her some anxiety.”
“Why?”
He paused, as if reluctant to answer. “Because she could not cry on cue,” he said slowly, furrowing his brow. “She envied other actors that ability—Gielgud, most of all. But she never learned to, and it troubled her, as if it were a failure of discipline or technique—”
“Or nerve,” I suggested quietly.
“No,” he admonished me. “Not that at all.”
“The Medea,” I said, prodding him.
He lit another cigarette. “We had had, Joanna and I, rather an intense relationship during rehearsals that season. It had always been so, but …”
“Go on.”
“She had come to depend on me almost …” he hesitated again,
“ … almost unhealthily for one of her talent. She would ring me up in the middle of the night to ask about the delivery of a line or a question about a character’s motivation. This was not totally out of the ordinary. I had always been aware of her tendency to intellectualize the more she feared a part, as a means of avoiding the difficult emotional work. I had been very patient, very understanding in my role of midwife so to speak, especially in the light of the painful affair with Desmond and the loss of the child. But there came a moment when I had to distance myself for her own good—when we moved from the rather more intimate ambience of the rehearsal room to the theater itself. Joanna had always found this a more difficult transition than most actors—the separation from the director, that is. I had prided myself that it was because of our special rapport. But no, I think that crucial step in bringing to birth a new character was simply painful for her. She would alternately cling to me, then be deeply resentful.
“In rehearsal, as Rosalind in the Shakespeare, she was superb—no one has been a more sprightly or touching Rosalind than Joanna, striding the stage in her hose and doublet! But even there I began to see a change—the fear of forgetting her lines or a cue. An almost unnatural calm would come over her as she waited to go onstage—
“The day I remember so vividly was a Saturday in early spring, a week before the final dress rehearsal. We had rehearsed As You Like It in the morning with the company. Joanna had asked me to stay and work with her, alone, on the difficult scenes of Medea, in the afternoon. Christina was at the theater as well—the two had become rather close, as I’ve mentioned. Christina would prompt Joanna with her lines or, during that period at least, help with her rehearsal costumes and props. Joanna’s dresser had fallen ill, as I recall.
“The three of us had a bite to eat after the Shakespeare run through. I remember Joanna ate nothing, that she complained—as she had during that period—of nausea, of dizziness, of fatigue. I didn’t think much of it, quite honestly, because doing the two plays running back to back was of course taxing. We returned to the theater, and Joanna to her dressing room, where she changed into the long purple gown she used for rehearsals of Medea. We were to run through that most difficult of scenes, the scene where Medea appears, carrying the children, her children, she has killed.
“I sat in the darkened theater and spoke Jason’s lines, waiting for Joanna. I waited and waited—perhaps five minutes or so—before Joanna finally staggered onto the stage. And then I waited once more—an eon, it seemed—for her to speak. She stood up, her expression harrowing, and mumbled a few words. Then she stopped, as if frozen in terror, and crumpled to the ground. I waited again, but still she was silent. Finally, I climbed up to the stage and knelt down to speak with her. She looked at me bizarrely and said, shaking her head, ‘I can’t do this—I don’t know if I can speak. The words. My memory. The two don’t—’ she paused, ‘—mesh.’ To this day I remember precisely how eerily she pronounced that word—mesh—almost hissing it, and how it alarmed me. Then she looked out to the darkened theater and dug her fingers into my hand. ‘Out there,’ she said with frightened eyes. ‘They look hungry tonight. They’ll eat me up.’ I continued to hold her hand and reassure her that there was no one out there, no one in the audience, no one for her to be frightened of. I called to Christina, who had been waiting in the wings. She hurried over, as startled as I, and the two of us helped Joanna back to her dressing room. ‘My legs are stiff,’ Joanna repeated again and again in that queer voice. ‘My legs.’
“We went to her dressing room. Christina helped her out of the long dress and into a robe. I remember that Christina was angry, that she looked at me and said in that accusing voice of hers, ‘Don’t you see—the two plays together, it’s too much of a strain. You were wrong even to suggest it.’ I told her this was nonsense, that Joanna had managed far more difficult seasons—but to this she was silent, a way of rebuking me, I suppose. I remember Christina kneeling by the trunk with the rehearsal costumes as she put away the trousers for Rosalind, the gown for Medea, how methodically she folded them. I pulled up a chair to the couch where Joanna lay and took her hand; we began to talk. ‘I can’t do it,’ she murmured. ‘The words, the words—” I explained to her that all actors experience attacks of stage fright. Only the talentless never do. A truly splendid performance is the result of rushing headlong into danger, isn’t it, finally? She merely smiled in that listless, disconcerting way. At this point I stood up, feeling I could do no more. Christina, who had made Joanna a cup of tea, took my place.
“I paced about a few minutes, unsure whether to leave or stay. It was only then that I noticed how Joanna’s dressing room had been transformed. How cluttered, almost homelike it had become. It was filled with books and objects from Joanna’s apartment—pillows, photographs, jewelry. The jewelry I rather disapproved of, I might add, from men, from her admirers. But most of all I noticed the walls, which were covered in mirrors of all styles and shapes. I asked Christina about this. ‘She insists upon it,’ she told me. ‘During the day she covers them with scarves, but as the performance draws near, the scarves come off.’
“The following Monday we resumed rehearsals. I tried my best not to show my own nervousness, my fear that Joanna would suffer a relapse of this strange siege. She did continue, of course, and made it through both plays in bravura performances, but at great personal cost. In Medea especially, the suffering, the fear of forgetting her lines, her fear that the audience would be indifferent—all of this was acute. Many nights she experienced nausea—it was necessary to keep a bucket in the wings in the event she vomited.”
He paused, his hand to his temple, his brow furrowed. “Something else occurred during this run,” he began. “Joanna simply could not be onstage alone without knowing that someone she knew and trusted stood in the wings—myself or a fellow actor. Or Christina. She came, during that time, to rely quite heavily on Christina—Christina to help her with the costumes, Christina to prompt her on the lines …” He gave a sad sigh and shook his head, murmuring, “Christina was always there.” Then, directly to me: “And Desmond Kerrith, but only rarely.”
I asked whether Desmond Kerrith had encouraged the friendship between the two women.
“At the beginning, very much so,” he replied. “Partly because it seemed to absolve him of responsibility, I suppose. Christina would be there if he chose not to be. Desmond would come to watch Joanna perform, but never told her when he did. For it became quite apparent that his presence could trigger the stage fright.”
“And so,” I said, “the relationship between Joanna and Desmond had by that time ended …”
“As lovers, yes. The deathknell of their passion was of course the pregnancy. That he had seen her bear his child closed like an iron gate across the physical part of their relationship. They still continued to see one another, but as friends, friends who knew each other’s foibles and idiosyncrasies. Joanna began to turn to him for advice on her career—what role to play, the approach to a play—almost as much, or indeed as much, as she had to me. Occasionally, I felt a slight jealousy in that regard—that had been my domain, after all! But it touched me that Desmond was so proud of her career, so proud of her artistry, even though he no longer desired her as a mistress.
“Desmond grew restless. The excuses began. He was seen with his wife more frequently. He traveled abroad—alone, he said, but doubt—less accompanied by some beautiful woman. About this Joanna was philosophical, or at least seemed so. She was almost amused by his philanderings. ‘That’s Desmond,’ she would say. ‘I would never expect him to behave otherwise!’ Whether she actually believed this or whether this was a brave front, I never knew—for there was a part of Joanna that I never knew. I suspect it could only have hurt her.
“I ran into him about this time in Monte Carlo once, in the casino.
With him was a dark Mediterranean beauty, extremely poised and graceful. We said hello, had a drink. I remember the instant when, looking at her as she held the chips, I saw a number tatooed on her arm—the number from a concentration camp. It was so strange! That sublime face, that ugly number seared into her flesh! I shall never forget it.” He shook his head.
“What happened to him since?” I asked.
“He is an old man now,” replied Patrick with a sigh. “An old man confined to the rooms at Thistleton that paying visitors never see. He had a stroke not long after Joanna died. There are moments when he is lucid, others when he is not. An old man in a wheelchair, surrounded by nurses, dogs, and yellowing copies of The Economist and Apollo. I had tea with him earlier this year and came away unutterably depressed, although I was told he was in relatively good form that day. He asked about Joanna, of course—it seems not to have penetrated his consciousness that she is dead. Pathetic, isn’t it? ‘She hasn’t written me for ages,’ he told me in a pitiful, querulous voice.” Then, leaning forward, Patrick added, “You see, she continued to write him for years afterward, until the end of her life, telling him her news or about books she had read, exhibitions she had seen.” A pause. “Perhaps you didn’t know that letter writing was one of her passions. ‘All the joys of intimacy without all the other nuisances!’ was how she once described it.” He looked wistful as he added, “I rather think Desmond had come to a point where he lived for her letters.
“But I’ve gotten away from my story—where were we? Yes …
She continued to work very hard, exhausting herself by the end of the season. Going out a great deal, much too much. She saw many men, men she sensed I would probably disapprove of. The following year she bought a new flat, with a lovely small garden. She was very keen on decorating it, all with Christina’s help, I think. A good sign, it seemed to me. ‘Teach me about furniture,’ she would say to me, and so I did, taking her about to the auction houses and antique shops—at first heartened by her interest, then alarmed by her reckless spending. Clothes, objects, furs, paintings—her life seemed glutted suddenly by the lot. I cautioned her against it—thinking, in my puritanical way, that this acquisitiveness was somehow not suitable for an artist, but knowing all the while that there was within her an ungovernable, possessive strain. And that she longed for roots, even as she seemed to fight them! Everything about her seemed to be tinged with a dangerous excessiveness.” He paused reflectively. “In retrospect, I blame a great deal of this on Christina’s influence.”
“They were about the same age?”
“Yes, though Christina appeared considerably older.” He paused to light another cigarette, shielding its flame from the breeze that had come up—a gesture I had come to recognize as signaling a new twist in his recollections. “Christina had always worshiped the theatre, and artists in general—so they had this in common, you see, and other things as well.
“I had encouraged their friendship initially, thinking it would be beneficial, that it would somehow bring some order to Joanna’s life. And I was right, as it turned out. Joanna seemed to take possession of herself again—her house was better run, her clothes taken care of, her agenda organized. Joanna began to have small dinners—quite simpatico, really—for Christina had found someone to cook occasionally. And it became quite the thing, within the company, to attend those suppers.”
Then he stopped abruptly, looking troubled for the first time, as if he were wrestling with another disturbing memory. I said nothing, only praying he would continue—which he did, finally, in a quiet, intense voice. “At the end of one such evening, Joanna asked me to go upstairs with her, ostensibly to see a Regency chair she had just purchased. But when we entered her bedroom, she closed the door behind her in such a dramatic way that I nearly began to laugh. It was then I realized something was wrong: She stood with her back pressed against the door, her face white and full of pain. ‘Patrick, I’m suffering from such guilt, I can’t bear to live with myself any longer!’ she said in a choked voice. I asked what it was that could possibly have brought this on. She lit a cigarette and paced the room, then sat on the bed, twisting her hands as she looked up at me. ‘Do you see that trunk?’ she said, motioning to an antique leather case to one side of the room. Then, in a voice so low that I could barely hear her, she said, ‘Inside it there are letters.’ I looked puzzled. ‘Letters from my mother,’ she continued. ‘That you’ve saved?’ I asked. ‘Oh no! Letters that I’ve never opened!’ she cried. ‘For years she has been writing to me, and I haven’t been able to bring myself to read them, to even acknowledge them. And now look how they’ve mounted up—’ She flung open the trunk so I could see how, inside, it was filled with letters and more letters. ‘How awful I am! But I don’t need her to make me feel guiltier!’ Joanna’s voice rang with such passionate self-hate that it took me aback. “I haven’t seen her for many years, you know. She lives in America. The last time she visited I was at RADA. And then after she returned to the States, she began to write me more frequently—when I was in Scotland. And after Scotland …’ ”
Patrick shook his head slightly, his eyes seemingly focused on a distant object. “I shall never forget her expression then—her face drained of color, her eyes haunted. Finally, Joanna said to me, ‘You must understand, Patrick. As long as I can remember, I’ve been trying to invent another mother!’ I tried to calm her down, and told her, after a moment, that it was very simple—steel herself and read the letters and then respond, if she could find the courage. But she told me she would never find the courage, that it had gone too far to turn back. That she must simply rid them from her life. I cautioned her against it, but it was too late. She had begun to fling the letters into the fire, mesmerized as she watched them turn into smoke and ashes. It was only with the greatest difficulty that I was able to restrain her from destroying them all.”
He stopped; a disquieting silence pressed upon us as I dwelled on that last chilling image.
It was Patrick who finally broke the silence and said, in a disarmingly casual voice, “But you are looking tired, dear girl. Perhaps I should go and leave you in peace? I’ve talked your ear off, I know.” He glanced at his watch, adding, “You’re to meet Rosalind any moment, and I ought to return home.” He stood up, crushed out his cigarette, and muttered, “Houseguests and the usual country house imbroglio. They must be wondering where on earth I’ve gone!”
Together we walked across the terrace, toward the french doors, through the house, and then down the grand stone steps of the portico toward his car, a vintage black Bentley. We said goodbye. I stood on the steps, still feeling preoccupied by Patrick’s recollections and vaguely melancholy at his departure. He climbed into the car and started the motor. I had begun to walk slowly up the steps to the house when he poked his head through the window, as if reluctant to leave without a final, witty exiting line: “ ‘Once more unto the breach,’ ” he exclaimed; and then, with a saucy wave, he left.
8
It had grown very warm, still unseasonably hot, after lunch. After saying goodbye to Rossiter, I returned to my room, ostensibly to take an aspirin, though I also intended to make a few notes.
The bedroom had reassumed its immaculate persona: the linens were fresh, the pillows cool and creaseless. I lay down for a moment, thinking of Rossiter’s stories as I gazed at the spinning pattern of the marquetry floor: Joanna paralyzed by stage fright; the dressing-room mirrors covered with scarves; the tower at the edge of Thistleton’s medieval “ruins” …
