‘Ah, there you are,’ she said, waving to this member of the audience and that, indiscriminately, it seemed, as Trubshawe noticed some of those waved-to staring back at her with a doubtful do-I-know-that-woman? expression on their faces.
‘Here’s your ticket. Why don’t you get yourself settled?’
‘Oh, but –’ replied Trubshawe in alarm, ‘where are you going?’
‘Don’t worry. I’ll be with you in a jiff. I just want to tell Cora to break a leg.’
‘You want to what?’
‘Theatre lingo, my dear,’ said the novelist. ‘I want to wish her well for the evening’s performance. So be a good chap and take your seat.’
Without letting him voice any further protest, clinging for dear life to her tricorne hat, she rushed off backstage. Meanwhile, stifling a sigh, Trubshawe was drawn forward by the garrulously whinnying mob of privileged humanity and immediately found himself inside the auditorium.
He walked down the aisle, kneading his tartan golf cap between his fingers. And it was only when he arrived at the very last – rather, the very first – row of the orchestra stalls and checked his ticket number that he realised with a start that he and Evadne Mount had been allocated seats just under the stage, seats from which they would be practically as visible to the rest of the audience as the actors themselves. Though he had never been a patron of the theatrical arts, he had certainly seen the odd play in his life, but to be seated in the very front row – this was a new experience for him.
He removed his overcoat, folded it neatly across his lap as he sat down, then opened the luxurious silver-embossed programme which had been handed him by an usherette on his entering the theatre. The first item on the bill, he saw at once, was Eeny-Meeny-Murder-Mo, starring Cora Rutherford as Alexis Baddeley and bearing the subtitle ‘A Lethal Squib by Evadne Mount’. Having scanned the names of the other cast members, none of whom were familiar to him, he took a last lingering glance round the auditorium and waited for Evadne herself to take her seat.
It was just seconds before the curtain rose that she reappeared, racing down the aisle to general amusement after everybody else had been seated. As Trubshawe observed, she was again blowing kisses left and right to various acquaintances. In fact, she made such a dramatic entrance into the hushed, now near-silent auditorium it was almost as though she were deliberately trying to render her arrival as obtrusive as possible.
Finally, she plumped herself down beside Trubshawe.
‘I was beginning to think you’d abandoned me,’ he said.
‘Apologies, apologies. I’m afraid I was detained longer than I expected to be. I was just given some really rotten news. Rotten for Cora, that is.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,’ Trubshawe said under his breath. ‘And only a few minutes before she’s due to go on stage. That must be the actor’s worst nightmare.’
‘It is. But she hadn’t yet heard the news herself and I forbore to tell her. It can wait till after the show.’
‘Not a death in the family, I trust?’
‘No, it concerns Alastair Farjeon.’
‘Alastair Farjeon?’
‘The great film director. It seems –’
But before she had time to elaborate, the lights dimmed. For Trubshawe, too, the explanation would have to keep.
When, a second or two later, the curtain rose, he could barely make out what was in front of his own eyes, the stage being nearly as dark as the auditorium. There was a hint – albeit not much more than a hint – of ceiling-high bookshelves, an enormous fireplace, two deep leather armchairs and, on the extreme left, a closed door under which a narrow blade of light provided the only source of illumination. Behind that door, apparently, some kind of a party was being held. Audible, inside the room supposedly adjacent to the dim, still unoccupied stage, were lots of gay, eupeptically high-pitched voices, the strains of syncopated Negro music and, every so often, the explosive plop of a champagne cork.
‘Scenery’s a bit underlit, isn’t it?’ the Chief-Inspector whispered to Evadne Mount. ‘Oughtn’t you to do something about it?’
‘Shhhh!’ she replied in a whisper three times as loud as his, her eyes glued to the stage.
At long last something happened. The closed door opened a sliver, causing the music’s already high decibel level to be turned up higher still, as brusquely as though on a gramophone. At the same time, a young man in evening dress stealthily tiptoed into the room, followed by an even younger woman in a white satin gown. Silently closing the door behind him, turning to face her, he put his index finger to his Ronald Colman moustache.
For a few moments they stood together on the unlit stage, neither of them saying a word, both of them listening intently to the muffled din from the next room. When it became obvious that, for now, their absence had gone undetected, the young man switched on the light.
All at once, their facial features having suddenly become visible, a tremendous salvo of applause swept through the auditorium, running the gamut from the vigorously genteel (in the stalls) to the downright raucous (from the gallery). If the Chief-Inspector alone failed to recognise either of the two faces, let alone attach names to them, even he could see on those faces that both stars, as he assumed them to be, were positively aching to step out of character, face the audience of their peers and gratefully acknowledge their accolade.
They resisted nevertheless and instead fell into one another’s arms.
Then, when she had finally unsealed her lips from her lover’s, the young woman cried out:
‘Oh, Harry! How perfectly frightful this evening’s been! I don’t think I can bear it a minute longer!’
‘I know, I know,’ he said.
He pummelled his right fist into the palm of his left hand.
‘He’s a brute, a swine! The way he kept taunting you in front of everybody. Oh, I wanted to kill him!’
‘What are we going to do?’
‘I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to run away together.’
‘Run away?’ she repeated tremulously. ‘But – but when?’
‘Tonight. Now.’
‘Heavens! Where will we go?’
‘Anywhere. Anywhere we please. I’m a rich man, Debo, a very rich man. I can take you anywhere you could ever want to go. I can give you anything your heart could ever desire. A Mediterranean villa, a yacht, a stable of polo ponies …’
‘Now, Harry’ – the first hint of a half-smile playing on her lips – ‘what on earth would I do with a stable of polo ponies?’
‘Debo darling, how naïve you are! How exquisitely naïve! One doesn’t do anything with polo ponies. One just has them. That’s what being rich is all about.’
‘I don’t give a fig about being rich. All I want is to be with you, as far away as possible from that beast.’
Just then – but one had to be paying very close attention, so surreptitious, so nearly invisible, was the stage business – the door behind them re-opened. The five fingers of a male hand slithered, one by one, around the frame, started groping for the light-switch and, finding it, flicked off the light again. Before either of the two characters already on stage had time to react to this new development, a nerve-jangling shot rang out. The door was immediately slammed shut, the woman named Debo screamed, the audience gave out a loud collective gasp and the young man, or rather his dimly illuminated silhouette, collapsed in a heap on the carpet.