At first Thomas remained aware of the other spectators and his mother, wrapped up in a shawl on the seat beside him, as Macbeth met the three witches who hailed him as the future king. But soon he lost all sense of his surroundings as Macbeth began to argue with his wife about whether to kill King Duncan while he slept in the guest bedroom of their castle.
Thomas loved Macbeth, the brave chieftain who spoke so magically, and he willed him not to commit the crime even though he knew that Macbeth could not escape his fate.
Then at last the stage became almost completely dark and a hush fell over the evening as Macbeth crept into the King’s room and stabbed him through the heart. Now Thomas hated Macbeth, and he hated him more as Macbeth went on to kill all those who stood in his way. Then at last King Duncan’s son, Malcolm, returned to Scotland with an army, and Thomas’s heart went out once more to the murderer, Macbeth, as he faced up to his own death with courage.
As the play ended with a fanfare of trumpets and the characters turned back into actors bowing to the audience’s loud applause, Thomas felt almost drunk with the roller coaster of emotions that he had endured during the preceding two hours.
“Oh, Mum, wasn’t it extraordinary?” he said suddenly in the taxi on the way home as his enthusiasm overflowed.
“Yes, I suppose so,” replied Lady Anne coolly. Macbeth was not one of her favorite plays, and she’d had quite enough blood for one day.
Back at the house they found Sir Peter and Greta sitting upstairs in the living room with files of papers on their laps and glasses of red wine in their hands. Work never seemed to stop for his father, thought Thomas, as he dutifully bent down and kissed him on his upturned cheek. These greetings always seemed to Thomas to have nothing to do with affection and everything to do with acknowledging his father’s superior status in the family. There was something quasi-military about them.
“So, have you had a good evening?” asked Sir Peter.
“Yes, we saw Macbeth at the Globe,” replied his wife. “I got a little cold toward the end, but Thomas enjoyed it. Didn’t you, darling?”
Thomas nodded. Words couldn’t describe the wonder of his experience.
“Oh, you’re so lucky,” said Greta, joining in the conversation with sudden passion. “It’s my favorite play. I love Macbeth. The character, I mean. Not just the play.”
“Do you?” said Lady Anne frigidly. She already had her doubts about whether the Tower of London and Macbeth had been the best way to entertain Thomas when he was already so clearly in such an excited state. The last thing she wanted now was a ringing endorsement of Macbeth’s murderous qualities from her husband’s personal assistant.
But Greta failed to be put off by Lady Anne’s forbidding tone.
“I remember when I first saw the play. I was at university, and I’d never seen anything like it before. Macbeth has the most amazing lines. Do you remember when he sees the imaginary dagger in the air before he goes off to kill the King?”
Greta held her hand up in front of her as if to take hold of a weapon and started to recite:
“Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?”
Greta spoke the words well, conveying Macbeth’s final uncertainty before he murders Duncan, and Thomas warmed to her. She seemed to him at that moment like a kindred spirit. He felt that he’d misjudged her in the past.
However, her performance had the opposite effect on Lady Anne, who could not hide her irritation. Coming upon Peter and Greta sitting so intimately together in the living room had brought all her suppressed resentment to the surface, and now she wanted to lash out, put green-eyed Greta in her place.
“Grand words,” she said in a tone that implied she thought the opposite. “They’re all very well, but you can’t hide behind them. Macbeth killed the King, who was a guest in his own house. Stabbed him in cold blood with a real dagger. Isn’t it hard to think of anything more mean and cowardly?”
“His wife drove him to it,” said Greta. “His wife and the witches.”
“You’re just looking for excuses. He was a bloodthirsty little man, who got exactly what he deserved.”
“Maybe, but why then does the audience sympathize with him at the end and not with boring Malcolm?”
Thomas longed to say how much he agreed with Greta, but he held his tongue. He instinctively realized that there was more at stake between his mother and Greta than two different interpretations of Shakespeare.
It was Sir Peter who intervened in the argument. He seemed to have no idea of his wife’s underlying resentments.
“You’re a revolutionary, Greta,” he said. “That’s what you are.” There was an unmistakable note of fondness in his voice, which irritated Lady Anne still further.
“I sincerely hope she isn’t,” said Lady Anne. “I don’t hold with revolution. People ought to know their place.”
Immediately Lady Anne wanted to apologize, to take the words back, but something inside prevented her from doing so. It was the same resentment and anger that had possessed her in the House of the Four Winds three months earlier, on the night when the fisherman drowned in Flyte Bay and Peter took Greta down to the harbor to find Christopher Marsh. Not her but Greta. Always Greta.
She’d said almost the same thing then, she remembered. It was as if those words, “know your place,” were always lurking there just beneath her consciousness, ready to fly out. As if she knew that they would be the most likely to inflict the deepest wound on her enemy. Judging from Greta’s twisted expression, it looked to Lady Anne as if she had more than succeeded this time.
There was an awkward silence, which no one seemed able to fill until Lady Anne spoke again, this time to her husband: “How were your constituents?”
“Okay, although I could’ve done with Greta being there. She always has all the difficult ones eating out of her hand.”
Lady Anne frowned. Her husband had as usual found a way of expressing his support for his personal assistant rather than his wife.
“I thought you were going up there together.”
“No, Greta had to change her plans. Her mother was unwell and so she had to go and stay up in Manchester for the night.”
“I’m sorry, Greta,” said Lady Anne. “Is she okay?” There was real concern in her voice. She felt guilty now about lashing out.
“Yes, she’s fine, thank you,” said Greta. It hadn’t taken her long to recover her self-possession. “It’s just the arthritis. She gets depressed and a visit cheers her up.”
“I’m sure it does,” said Lady Anne, getting up from the sofa. “Well, I’m for bed; and Thomas, you better go up too. You’ve got another long day ahead of you tomorrow, and you need your sleep. I don’t want you looking like you did this morning again.”
“What was wrong with him this morning?” asked Sir Peter.
“Great black circles under his eyes. I don’t think he slept a wink. Too excited about being in London, I imagine. Come on, Thomas. Bedtime.”
Thomas went over to his father, provided him with another dutiful kiss, then hesitated in the middle of the room. He didn’t know whether to kiss Greta or not.
She made his mind up for him, getting up from her chair and walking over to him. She kissed him warmly on the cheek, resting her arm on his shoulder for a moment as she did so.
“Good night,” she whispered, and as Thomas turned to go, summoned again by his mother to follow her up to bed, she added, “I’m glad you liked the play.”
Fifteen minutes later Thomas lay in bed gripped by a turmoil of conflicting emotions.