Distant Music Read online

  ‘Thank you, Clifton.’

  They had always kept up the pretence of not really being aware of each other in the presence of Plunkett Senior, and now, because he was very much aware of being an actor, Oliver revelled in this other form of acting, this real life acting, where it was vital to keep his face straight and his manner one of deference and filial piety.

  All the world was certainly a stage, and men and women merely players, and never more, it seemed to Oliver, than in the library at the Hall.

  So—’ his father began.

  Ever mindful of his tiny allowance, and on Cliffie’s instructions, Oliver had written to his father once a month. His letters were carefully penned to put himself in as good a light as possible, naturally, but never boastful. This was for two very good reasons. First of all his father would not approve of any kind of self-praise, and secondly he would never, not in a million years, understand how thrilled Oliver was at being cast in something, or how difficult it was to win even a paltry cup for verse speaking, how keen the competition, how earnest the competitors.

  Nothing like that would interest him, as why should it? He was much more interested in what Richard was doing in Africa with his regiment, or how the trade unions were running the country. These were the real things, and real things, like the price of tractors and people living off the state, or the Army being kept short of guns, were the only things that really interested John Plunkett. Mucking about at drama school would not be something which he would consider of the slightest worth, nor would it be something in which he could interest himself. Worse than that, he would not understand why anyone else would consider it in any other way. To him, drama school and the problems of actors would be like a foreign country that had never set eyes on a British flag. Neither it, nor they, would have any real relevance at all in his world.

  So, Oliver had confined his letters, which as a consequence seemed to take for ever to write, to trying to describe London, and minor events that his father might find amusing, news of family friends, and Coco’s films: small vignettes, well away from the complications of playing Hamlet, or trying to make sense of this strange character called Estragon.

  ‘So, how have you been doing, in London, that is?’

  ‘Quite well, thank you.’

  From nowhere, or more accurately from an LP of Coco’s that she had only recently played to Oliver, came Gertrude Lawrence’s voice in a Noel Coward play. The actress’s clear, exact, charmingly precise intonations floated into Oliver’s mind and acted as a kind of mental anaesthetic, numbing Oliver against the pain caused by the slow progress of his non-conversation with his father.

  There was a line that went

  I work in a bank.

  Quite high up in the bank, or just sitting in a little cage totting up things?

  How strange and marvellous it was that actresses, someone like a hall porter’s daughter from Putney, or wherever, actresses such as Gertie Lawrence, should come to represent, more than anyone else, more than the daughters of kings and princes, the elegance and beauty of an age, not just for their lifetime, but for the rest of time.

  Perhaps it was art’s way of mocking life, that the people who were most remembered as being beautifully themselves, ones whom other lesser mortals longed to imitate, were in fact mere artistic imitations of the real thing, no more real than the scenery against which they moved and spoke, yet somehow a great deal more real to more people than many so-called real human beings.

  ‘I said, “How is the work?”’

  His father was obviously repeating a question which Oliver had failed to answer, his thoughts taking off in another direction as the all too familiar and terribly unexciting exchange of dialogue limped along.

  ‘The work is fine.’

  ‘Have you got any?’

  ‘Have I got any what?’ Oliver was being deliberately obtuse.

  ‘Work.’

  ‘Not yet. But I have been cast in a great many productions, and one semi-professional Sunday night performance, playing Estragon in—’ Oliver stopped, realising that it would be ridiculous to explain that most famous of parts since his father would not know Samuel Beckett from Thomas à Becket. He skipped the next bit and ended hurriedly, ‘It was only a one-off, but very interesting, and I am due to play it again, in a student production, quite soon.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘I see. I don’t know that one.’ John Plunkett carefully licked the remains of the Dundee cake that he so enjoyed off his fingers. ‘No, I don’t know that one, I am afraid. Estragon? Is he a foreign playwright? I suppose he must be with a name like that.’

  ‘Estragon? No, no, he’s not the writer. He’s a character from Waiting for Godot. It’s a famous play, by Samuel Beckett. Samuel Beckett is an Irishman who lives in Paris. Probably the perfect combination – you know, being Irish, and living in Paris. The wit and the humour, the warmth, combined with the food and the Left Bank, le jazz hot, and the endless coffees drunk at pavement tables. Perfect really, wouldn’t you say?’

  Oliver had no idea why he had added all those extra pieces of information. The bits about Paris had nothing to do with anything really.

  After that there was a small pause, and then, ‘Ah yes, so many of our playwrights are Irish, are they not? Sheridan, Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, and now this fellow. What did you say he was called? Beckett. This play, or what you will, is it a hit? What’s it about, would you say?’

  Of a sudden, perhaps guided by guilt, it seemed that Plunkett Senior was making a huge effort to understand Oliver’s theatrical world. Oliver appreciated this, even felt vaguely moved by it, and yet explaining the nature of Samuel Beckett’s most famous play to his father was not an easy task.

  ‘What’s it about, this play?’ John Plunkett repeated, helpfully.

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘Yes, what is the plot?’

  ‘The plot. Um, yes. Yes, well. It’s, er, about, well, it’s about these – well, tramps really, and—’

  ‘Tramps?’

  ‘Yes, sort of tramps.’

  ’ ‘Sort of tramps. I see.’ John Plunkett reached forward and having sliced another piece of Dundee cake he started to eat it a great deal faster than he would perhaps normally, as if his hunger for knowledge had brought about a more real physical hunger, as if the cake would help him understand Oliver’s world better.

  ‘Yes, I suppose you would call them tramps, and they are waiting around for – well, God, I suppose, you would say. Yes, I think they are perhaps waiting for God. Yes.’

  Being a religious man Oliver thought this would please his father no end, but if it was meant as a palliative, it failed.

  ‘About tramps waiting for God. Doesn’t sound very amusing.’

  ‘No, no, I don’t think it is – very amusing.’

  Oliver cleared his throat. There was a long silence broken only by the sound of Plunkett Senior emasculating his cake.

  Oliver’s eyes slid to his wristwatch, half hidden under his eldest brother’s old shirt cuff. Still only half past four of a spring afternoon, and there were five more days to go. It was a moot point, out of the two of them, who would be more relieved to find that it was now time for them to part until drinks and dinner – his father, or Oliver. Perhaps sensing the new lull in the proceedings, Clifton once more entered the library and cleared his throat.

  ‘Someone on the telephone for you, sir, in the telephone room, Mr Plunkett.’

  His father shot out of the room, barely able to keep the look of relief from his face, leaving Oliver free to escape into the garden and light a cigarette.

  For once Oliver had truly managed to shock himself. He was shocked to ribbons at how bored he was in the company of his father. It was like being with a very tedious clergyman who you feared was about to lecture you on some of the finer points of the Bible. Not his father’s fault, of course, Oliver hastened to tell himself, it was quite obviously his fault – not his father’s fault, he thought, over and over again.
But no use denying the fact, Oliver was about as interested in being with his father as his father was in being with him. They had so little in common that really Oliver might as well be a Swahili native, and his father a missionary intent on trying to come to terms with a quite alien culture, trying to stop Oliver going around naked as nature intended, putting his Mother Hubbard on his head instead of around his loins, and all that kind of thing.

  Of a sudden Oliver found himself longing for Coco. He imagined himself telling her about the Waiting for Godot fiasco. He could see himself imitating himself stuttering out the word tramps, and Coco laughing and urging him on to do imitations of both of them. Coco would see just why the whole thing was so funny. Oliver on the train trying to practise alienation. Cliffie haring off for razors and putting him in lavender scented baths; the race to be in time for tea in the library. Coco would find it all hilarious, as Oliver did, really. It was just that on your own there was no one with whom to laugh. He had Cliffie, of course, but however close he was to Cliffie, Clifton was not Coco.

  Oliver frowned, staring ahead of him at the still wintry but immaculately maintained garden as some pretty wintry feelings settled around him. How he felt at that moment, with this awful distance between himself and his father, must be how his mother had felt. This must have been how far apart his parents had felt, as apart as anything could be. Good God! No wonder the poor woman had run off with Charley. He felt a warm rush of sympathy not just for his sainted mother, as Clifton always called her, but for his father too. Their life together must have been hell.

  Huis Clos, an existentialist play written on the theme that hell is other people, fairly sprang into Oliver’s mind. His parents must have been caged together, and while perhaps not hating each other all the time, certainly not understanding each other at all, while all the time acting, always acting that they were, in reality, the perfect upper-class couple. Living at the Hall, hunting and shooting, serving tea in the library, being kind in the village, but all the time not understanding, not really understanding a single word that each said to the other.

  Of a sudden Oliver made up his mind about something pretty important.

  It was at the exact moment that he found himself obsessively throwing away the stub of his Gauloise, while making sure to carefully cover it with earth with the heel of his half-boot, so that one of his father’s gardeners would not find it. It was at that precise moment that he made his resolution.

  He was never, ever, going to marry, not ever. He would not ever subject another human being to the awfulness of existence that his mother and father must have endured for the sake of their three sons. He would never ask another human being to do what he now knew his parents had done, to stick out an unhappy marriage for the sake of society and religion. Everyone did only pass this way once – Oliver had no time for reincarnation – and that being so it was criminal to expect human beings to soldier on in some man-made living hell, and for no better reason than to keep up appearances.

  He turned and walked back to the house. It had to be faced, the only person who would keep his spirits up, the only reason for his returning, was to see not his family, but Cliffie.

  ‘You realise that you have ruined my chances, Cliffie. Jumping on me at the station that way, forcing me to wash and brush up. Now I have no chance, no chance whatsoever, of delving deeper into experiencing that sensation of total alienation that I might have done when confronting my family looking as I did.’

  Clifton looked unimpressed.

  ‘Be that as it may, I don’t think you should play too many unshaven or whiskery parts, Master Oliver, really I don’t. Finally, producers and the like, they can’t see the actors for the whiskers, can they?’ Clifton spat judiciously into the boot polish tin and carefully made circles with his shoe brush in the result. ‘Not if you keep burying yourself beneath them. They won’t be able to see your real face for the hair, if you get my meaning, and that is no good. Stars must have faces, unless they happen to be rather plain like Alec Guinness, in which case they have to put on whiskers and make a feature of it. It’s just a fact. No, as I understand it, the grown-up moment in a young actor’s life is when they know they can abandon the whiskers and play, as it were, naked of face and limb. Make the audience see what is there, without its actually being there. That is the actor’s art. Sarah Bernhardt playing to packed houses, already old but playing young girls with such utter conviction, wooden leg and all, that it is said by those who saw her that she was able to convince her audiences that not only was she young, but that her body was whole. Now, that is acting.’

  There was a pause while Oliver considered this.

  ‘Even so, I bet you’re glad you didn’t have to see her, Cliffie?’

  Clifton ignored this mischievous remark, and Oliver’s droll expression. ‘She had monarchs in tears even in old age,’ he added, his own expression one of almost religious piety.

  Oliver looked sulky. ‘But I like making up, growing stubble and building false noses, and all that. That is so much what I like, about acting, I mean.’

  ‘Humph.’ Clifton looked across at his protégé. ‘Even so, the day must come when the whiskers go, or you will. Have a humbug.’ He passed Oliver the old-fashioned jar he always kept in the pantry, and Oliver took one in much the same manner as he had used to when he was a small boy, popping it eagerly into his mouth and sucking it rather too loudly.

  ‘Well, I suppose you’re right, Cliffie. After all, whatever anyone says, there is nothing better than acting bare-faced, as it were. It is the big one, isn’t it? The bare-faced acting bit, none of that striding on and hiding behind the nose putty. Oh, by the way, did I tell you? I’m not doing you so much now. I am growing into my new accent, which is to say, I am growing into my old one, bit by little bit – I am reassuming a public school accent, and getting so much praise from my teachers for it. It is really quite hilarious.’

  Clifton looked up from polishing, because this, after all, was very interesting. Much as he had inwardly applauded Master Oliver’s decision to adopt a working man’s accent and attitudes at his drama school, he had always known that it was, however small, nevertheless a risk. People might find out that he was not working class, and there would be sure to be a backlash. They would hate him more for being from a genteel background and pretending not to be, than if he had brazened it out in the first place.

  ‘No, you didn’t tell me. How is it going, Master Oliver?’

  ‘Really quite well, because the thing is, I am able, now, to do less of you, and more of me, improving my accent and all that, because of how well I am supposed to have learned to do a proper BBC standard accent in my voice classes, et cetera. So the classes have been nothing but good cover, and now I don’t have to do you any more. That is it. No more Cliffie.’ The expression on Oliver’s face was impish. ‘Do you mind, darling?’

  He uttered his last question in a purposely Noel Coward accent, and even Clifton, who rarely allowed amusement to disturb their talks, smiled.

  ‘So you can be more yourself, then?’

  ‘Yes, but I still have to remember to go back to being you whenever I’m in the coffee bar or the pub, savez? Can’t let too much show in my lunch hour, or after six o’clock at night.’

  Clifton nodded at the finished pair of now highly polished shoes. ‘That’s better. Not even Mr Richard would recognise them as his own now, they look that good.’ Clifton stared at the shoes with justifiable pride.

  ‘You do everything perfectly, don’t you, Cliffie?’

  Clifton did not reply, but sighed and for a second looked pensive. ‘Do you want to do a piece from your Hamlet for me, Master Oliver, just a bit before I have to run on and do dinner? I’d quite like to see a short audition piece, and then perhaps a piece from the Sheridan, that might be nice.’

  Clifton made the so-called pieces or play extracts sound as if he was ordering a nice slice of coffee cake, and a bourbon biscuit to follow.

  ‘Certainly.’

 
; They left the butler’s pantry and climbed up the stairs to Clifton’s suite on the top floor, and there the former batman listened in solemn silence as Oliver gave him a muted rendition of two of his latest roles.

  Muted or not Clifton found himself moved to reluctant tears by Master Oliver’s soliloquy from Hamlet. Without Oliver’s realising it, it was his youth that moved Clifton. Although his voice was good, and much improved with Melson’s lessons too, it was his surrender to the debate of living or dying that was so immensely touching, and all the more so for the speaker’s being not yet twenty-one. Seeing Cliffie’s eyes filled with tears thrilled Oliver, and having listened to a few notes, good ones at that, from Cliffie, he went downstairs to change for dinner in as happy a mood as he had known for many a week.

  His good humour was short-lived, however, and for a very good reason – namely one Captain Newell Gordon Plunkett, who was also home for Easter.

  Newell had always been Oliver’s least favourite brother since he had a line in laconic sarcasm and needling which made Oliver actively dread any encounter with him.

  ‘Why don’t you do any television? That’s where the money is, surely,’ he asked after only a few desultory exchanges in the library. ‘Afraid to sell your soul to the devil, is that it? Too grand! I bet that is it. Only interested in the classics, that would be you!’

  ‘No. I er – I am studying at the moment, hadn’t really thought ahead much. I mean, do you know if you want to be colonel of your regiment?’

  John Plunkett followed this exchange with the solemn and determinedly disinterested expression of a tennis umpire. The rally continued as the combatants moved from the library to the freezing cold dining room.