“Such as me,” said Tofu.
Miss Harmony smiled tolerantly. “You can certainly act, Tofu, dear,” she said. “But all of us can act, I think. Hiawatha, for example. You can act, can’t you, Hiawatha?”
“He can act a stinky part,” said Tofu. “He’d do that well.”
“Tofu, dear,” said Miss Harmony. “That is not very kind, is it? How would you like it if somebody said that about you.”
“But my socks don’t stink,” said Tofu. “So they wouldn’t say it.”
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Miss Harmony sighed. This was not an avenue of discussion down which she cared to go. It was certainly true that Hiawatha appeared to wear his socks for rather longer than might be desir-able, but that was no excuse for the awful Tofu to say things like that. Tofu was a problem; she had to admit. But he would not be helped to develop by disparaging him, tempting though that might be. Love and attention would do its work eventually.
“Now then,” she said brightly. “I have been thinking about what play we should do. And do you know, I think I’ve found just the thing. I’ve decided that we shall do The Sound of Music.
What do you think of that, boys and girls? Don’t you think that will be fun?”
The children looked at one another. They knew The Sound of Music and they knew that it would be fun. But the real issue, as they also knew, was this: who would be Maria? There were seven girls in the class and only one of them wanted Olive to be Maria. That one was Olive herself. And as for the boys, and the roles available to them, every girl in the class, but especially Olive, hoped that Tofu would not be Captain von Trapp. And yet that was the role that Tofu now set his heart on. He would do anything to get it, he decided. Anything.
53. The Sybils of Edinburgh
The effect of Miss Harmony’s announcement that Bertie’s class was to perform The Sound of Music was, in the first place, the descent of silence on the room. If the teacher had expected a buzz of excitement, then she must have been surprised, for no such reaction occurred. Nobody, in fact, spoke until a good two minutes had elapsed, but during that time a number of glances were exchanged.
Bertie, whose desk was next to Tofu’s, looked sideways at his neighbour, trying to gauge his reaction. He knew that Tofu wished to dominate everything, and that the class play would be no exception. In the last play that they had performed, a truncated version The Sybils of Edinburgh 165
of Amahl and the Night-Visitors, for which the music had been provided by the school orchestra, Tofu had resented being cast as a mere extra and had made several unscripted interventions in an attempt to raise the profile of the character whom he was playing (a sheep). This had caused even Miss Harmony, normally so mild, to raise her voice and threaten to write to Mr Menotti himself and inform him that the performance had been ruined by the misplaced ambition of one of the sheep.
When Bertie glanced at him, he saw that Tofu’s expression gave everything away. He was smiling, his lips pressed tight together in what could only be pleasure at the thought of the dramatic triumphs that lay ahead. Bertie looked down at his desk. There was something else for him to think about now.
Whereas all the other children had seen the film of The Sound of Music, he had not been allowed to do so by his mother, who disapproved of it on principle.
“Pure schmalz,” she had explained to Bertie, when he had asked if they might borrow a tape of it and watch it one Saturday afternoon, after yoga. “Singing nuns and all the rest. I ask you, Bertie! Have you ever encountered a singing nun? And all those ghastly songs about lonely goatherds and raindrops on roses and the rest of it! No, Bertie, we don’t want any of that, do we?”
It occurred to Bertie that it might be rather fun to listen to songs about goatherds, and that anyway his mother appeared to know rather a lot about the film. Had she seen it herself? In which case, was it fair that she should prevent him from seeing it? That, to his mind, sounded rather like hypocrisy, the definition of which he had recently looked up in Chambers Dictionary.
“But you must have seen it yourself, Mummy,” he said. “If you know all that much about it, you must have seen it yourself.”
Irene hesitated. “Yes,” she said eventually. “I did see it. I saw it at the Dominion Cinema.”
Bertie thought for a moment. “So you must have walked out,”
he said.
“Walked out? Why do you ask me whether I walked out, Bertie?”
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“Because you disapproved of it so much,” said Bertie. “If you hated it, then why did you stay to the end?”
Irene looked out of the window. Now that she came to think about it, she had seen The Sound of Music twice, but she could not possibly tell Bertie that, as he would hardly understand that one might see such a film in a spirit of irony. So the subject was dropped, and The Sound of Music was not mentioned again. Irene had, of course, attended the production of Amahl and had been very critical, both of the choice of the opera and the production itself. “I don’t know why schools insist on choosing the same old thing time after time,” she observed to Stuart as they drove back along Bruntsfield Place.
“I thought it was rather touching,” said Stuart, but then added:
“Or maybe not.”
“Definitely not,” said Irene. “Young children are perfectly capable of doing more taxing drama.”
“Such as?” asked Stuart.
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? ” said Irene lightly. “I’ve always liked Albee.”
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In the back seat, Bertie listened intently. He had heard his mother talk about Virginia Woolf before and he had looked her up in a book he had found on her shelves. Mrs Woolf, he read, had been married to Mr Woolf, and had written a number of books. Then she had filled her pockets with stones and had jumped into a river, which Bertie thought was very sad. He was not sure if he would enjoy a play about a person like that, and he was worried that his mother would suggest it to Miss Harmony. But then he had gone on to think what one should do if one saw a person with stones in his pockets jump into a river. Bertie was sure that he would try to rescue such a person, and that would raise the question of whether one should take the stones out of the pockets before trying to drag him or her to the shore. Perhaps it would depend on the depth of the river.
If somebody filled his pockets with stones and jumped into the Water of Leith, it would be easy to save him, as the Water of Leith was a very shallow river and one would probably not sink very far, even with stones in one’s pockets. One would just sit in the mud until help arrived.
Bertie knew about the Water of Leith because Irene had taken him for a walk along the river one day, after yoga, and they had stopped to look at the Temple of St Bernard’s Well.
“That, Bertie,” said Irene, “is a Doric temple. Nasmyth designed it after the Temple of the Sybil in Tivoli.”
Bertie had looked at the stone columns and the statue of the woman within. “Who were the Sybils, Mummy?” he asked.
Irene smiled. “We’d call them pundits today,” she said. “They were prophetesses who were associated with particular shrines.
There was the Sybil of Delphi. She sat on a tripod over a sacred rock. Rather uncomfortable, I would have thought. And the Romans wanted their own Sybil – they were very envious of the Greeks, Bertie – so they appointed one at Tivoli. The Sybil of Tibur. They made pronouncements. On everything.”