Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [76]
Adams’s face showed small pleasure at the prospect of the encounter. On Erasmus, watching the director approach, waiting these final moments before speaking, the white gravel of the walk, the clipped green walls of the hedges, made an impression of neatness and order almost dizzying.
‘A word with you, sir, if you will be so good.’ He encountered the insolently languishing dark eyes. This was perhaps the first time he had seen the director’s face completely in repose, the first time certainly they had spoken together outside of the rehearsals.
‘Your servant, sir,’ the director said. ‘I am awaited, as you know.’
‘It will not take long.’ He paused still, however, seeking to control his breathing. Adams’s face at close range and in the intimacy of this narrow space had brought back with a rush all his detestation, which for a while had been submerged in the business of contriving the encounter. This suddenly renewed sense of the other man’s physical being, the eyes, the pimple converted into a beauty spot, the smell of attar of roses and ingested wine, confirmed, touch by touch, lechery, treachery, all sins.
‘Well, what is it?’ Adams was impatient. It was hot there, in the enclosure of the hedges. ‘You might do better to be practising your lines. You have some way to go, sir, yet, before you can be deemed proficient in them.’
‘These lines I have rehearsed,’ Erasmus said, and even smiled a little. ‘I am perfect in them.’
Adams failed altogether to catch the emphasis of these words or hear the faint tremor of control underlying them. He was not a man who noticed others much, unless it was in the way of business. Moreover he was at present rendered somewhat distrait with wine, as he might himself have put it. He had observed the unnatural straightness and stiffness of Erasmus’s posture and the fixity of his regard; but these he was familiar with already, they were characteristic of the young man in his role of Ferdinand, mere aspects, to the director, of Erasmus’s general uncouthness and lack of talent as an actor. ‘Well, I am glad of it,’ he said. ‘Is that what you waited here to tell me? But there is more to it than being able to recite your lines. There is the whole management of your movement on stage. There is the language of the body. This is between ourselves, my young sir, but I swear I never saw an actor so block-like in performance, so little in command of himself, and by God I have seen some inept performers in my time. It is not a matter of the state you are in beforehand. There is Mr Keith, presently at the Queen’s Theatre – he was recently in a trifle of my own – you will not get him to go on at all without a pint of Burgundy inside him, but an immaculate performance, sir, immaculate. Why, I remember Mrs Bellamy, she would shake all over with nerves like a damn jelly but cool as ice the moment she was on the boards. Dead now, alas, a great loss to the stage. But you, sir, if you will forgive me, you are a well-fashioned fellow and you have a good face, but you might as well be made of wood. You can’t walk on with any grace, you don’t know what to do with your hands, you don’t know which way to look. Tell me, have you not thought of resigning from the play?’
‘I may not know what to do with my hands as Ferdinand, but I shall know well enough what to do with them as Erasmus Kemp, if you cannot learn to keep your own hands to yourself.’ This, now that he had finally come out with it, he felt to be well phrased; and the feeling did something to lessen his fury at the director’s humiliating criticisms.
‘I beg your pardon?’ For a moment or two Adams was slack-jawed with astonishment. Then he drew himself up. ‘Here are rustic manners indeed,’ he said. ‘We have awaked the boorish