介绍:
Three
ACCORDING TO the poster in the hallway, the date of the first performance of The Trials of
Arabella was only one day after the first rehearsal. However, it was not easy for the
writer-director to find clear time for concentrated work. As on the preceding afternoon, the
trouble lay in assembling the cast. During the night Arabella’s disapproving father,
Jackson, had wet the bed, as troubled small boys far from home will, and was obliged by
current theory to carry his sheets and pajamas down to the laundry and wash them himself, by
hand, under the supervision of Betty who had been instructed to be distant and firm. This
was not represented to the boy as a punishment, the idea being to instruct his unconscious
that future lapses would entail inconvenience and hard work; but he was bound to feel it as
reproof as he stood at the vast stone sink which rose level to his chest, suds creeping up
his bare arms to soak his rolled-up shirtsleeves, the wet sheets as heavy as a dead dog and
a general sense of calamity numbing his will. Briony came down at intervals to check on his
progress. She was forbidden to help, and Jackson, of course, had never laundered a thing in
his life; the two washes, countless rinses and the sustained two-handed grappling with the
mangle, as well as the fifteen trembling minutes he had afterward at the kitchen table with
bread and butter and a glass of water, took up two hours’ rehearsal time.
Betty told Hardman when he came in from the morning heat for his pint of ale that it was
enough that she was having to prepare a special roast dinner in such weather, and that she
personally thought the treatment too harsh, and would have administered several sharp smacks
to the buttocks and washed the sheets herself. This would have suited Briony, for the
morning was slipping away. When her mother came down to see for herself that the task was
done, it was inevitable that a feeling of release should settle on the participants, and in
Mrs. Tallis’s mind a degree of unacknowledged guilt, so that when Jackson asked in a small
voice if he might please now be allowed a swim in the pool and could his brother come too,
his wish was immediately granted, and Briony’s objections generously brushed aside, as
though she were the one who was imposing unpleasant ordeals on a helpless little fellow. So
there was swimming, and then there had to be lunch.
Rehearsals had continued without Jackson, but it was undermining not to have the important
first scene, Arabella’s leave-
taking, brought to perfection, and Pierrot was too nervous about the fate of his brother
down in the bowels of the house to be much in the way of a dastardly foreign count; whatever
happened to Jackson would be Pierrot’s future too. He made frequent trips to the lavatory
at the end of the corridor.
When Briony returned from one of her visits to the laundry, he asked her, “Has he had the
spanking?”
“Not as yet.”
Like his brother, Pierrot had the knack of depriving his lines of any sense. He intoned a
roll call of words: “Do-you-think-you-can-escape-from-my-clutches?” All present and
correct.
“It’s a question,” Briony cut in. “Don’t you see? It goes up at the end.”
“What do you mean?”
“There. You just did it. You start low and end high. It’s a question.”
He swallowed hard, drew a breath and made another attempt, producing this time a roll call
on a rising chromatic scale.
“At the end. It goes up at the end!”
Now came a roll call on the old monotone, with a break of register, a yodel, on the final
syllable.
Lola had come to the nursery that morning in the guise of the adult she considered herself
at heart to be. She wore pleated flannel trousers that ballooned at the hips and flared at
the ankle, and a short-sleeved sweater made of cashmere. Other tokens of maturity included a
velvet choker of tiny pearls, the ginger tresses gathered at the nape and secured with an
emerald clasp, three loose silver bracelets around a freckled wrist, and the fact that
whenever she moved, the air about her tasted of rosewater. Her condescension, being wholly
restrained, was all the more potent. She was coolly responsive to Briony’s suggestions,
spoke her lines, which she seemed to have learned overnight, with sufficient expression, and
was gently encouraging to her little brother, without encroaching at all on the director’s
authority. It was as if Cecilia, or even their mother, had agreed to spend some time with
the little ones by taking on a role in the play, and was determined not to let a trace of
boredom show. What was missing was any demonstration of ragged, childish enthusiasm. When
Briony had shown her cousins the sales booth and the collection box the evening before, the
twins had fought each other for the best front-of-house roles, but Lola had crossed her arms
and paid decorous, grown-up compliments through a half smile that was too opaque for the
detection of irony.
“How marvelous. How awfully clever of you, Briony, to think of that. Did you really make it
all by yourself?”
Briony suspected that behind her older cousin’s perfect manners was a destructive intent.
Perhaps Lola was relying on the twins to wreck the play innocently, and needed only to stand
back and observe.
These unprovable suspicions, Jackson’s detainment in the laundry, Pierrot’s wretched
delivery and the morning’s colossal heat were oppressive to Briony. It bothered her too
when she noticed Danny Hardman watching from the doorway. He had to be asked to leave. She
could not penetrate Lola’s detachment or coax from Pierrot the common inflections of
everyday speech. What a relief, then, suddenly to find herself alone in the nursery. Lola
had said she needed to reconsider her hair, and her brother had wandered off down the
corridor, to the lavatory, or beyond.
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