The Twist of a Knife (Hawthorne and Horowitz Investigate #4)(8)

It’s going to be OK, I told myself. It’s going to be fine. Audiences loved it in York and Southampton. Why shouldn’t they love it here?

‘Are you all right?’ my wife asked.

‘Yes,’ I lied.

We went in.





3


First Night





The Vaudeville is such a beautiful theatre. The Victorians really wanted you to enjoy your evening so they went crazy with the gilt and the red plush, the mirrors and the chandeliers, making sure that the sense of drama would begin long before you sat down. It’s strange that they were less concerned about leg room, sight lines and toilets, but I suppose you can’t have everything.

The lobby was already packed with people milling about in different directions: to the stalls, the circles, the bar, the box office to pick up their tickets. It was a tortuous process, making our way through the labyrinth that the foyer had become, but as we continued, step by step, I made out a few familiar faces. There was Ahmet, wearing a black double-fronted jacket with loops instead of buttons. As always, Maureen was with him, weighed down with costume jewellery and with some long-dead animal draped around her neck. Ahmet had never mentioned having a wife or family and I had often wondered if he and Maureen had a relationship that extended beyond the office.

There were a couple of actors I knew but whose names I couldn’t remember: they were presumably friends of the director or the cast. I glimpsed Ewan Lloyd disappearing down the staircase to the stalls. He seemed to be on his own. I continued to look through the crowd and although I wouldn’t have wanted to admit it, I was wondering if Hawthorne might surprise me and turn up after all. He wasn’t there.

We made our way down to the auditorium, where we had seats in the middle of the stalls, and as we squeezed past the people who had arrived before us, I had the strange sensation that I was, briefly, the centre of attention. It wasn’t true, of course. I doubt if many people had recognised me, but at the same time, I felt trapped. The theatre was going to be full tonight: almost seven hundred people on three levels. I could see them all around me, many of them in the shadows, diminished by the distance between us. They were no longer individuals. They were an audience … perhaps even a jury. My stomach was still churning. I felt like the condemned man.

And then I saw them: my real judges.

The critics.

They were scattered across the stalls, easily recognisable by their blank faces and, in some cases, the notebooks they were already balancing on their knees. Michael Billington from the Guardian, Henry Hitchings, the Standard, Libby Purves, The Times, Harriet Throsby, the Sunday Times, Dominic Cavendish, the Telegraph. Many of them were familiar to me from my time at the Old Vic, where I had recently joined the board. They had been deliberately placed apart from each other and seemed to be avoiding each other’s eyes. They weren’t exactly rivals but nor, I thought, were they friends. They sat alone.

Was I afraid of them?

Yes.

I have never worried about the critics who write about books and TV. They can be harsh, but it’s open to question how much influence they have over what people watch or read. And anyway, they can’t hurt me. They’re reviewing something I wrote a long time ago – in the case of a TV drama it could be years – and I’ve signed my next contract. I’m employed on a new project. They can tell the whole world I’m useless, but it’s already too late.

These critics were different. Here they were, some of them in the same row as me. Their reviews could, quite simply, shut us down. Sitting there with the curtain about to rise, I began to have second thoughts about what I’d written. Would they find that joke funny? What would they make of the attack on Nurse Plimpton at the end of the first act? Had it been a mistake, raising the question of Dr Farquhar’s sexuality? A moment ago, I had been worrying about the first-night audience. But they weren’t the ones that mattered, and anyway, they were on my side. Most of them had been given free tickets, for heaven’s sake! It was the critics who held my fate in their hands.

My wife touched my arm. ‘It’s starting late,’ she said.

I looked at my watch and my heart missed a couple of beats. She was right. Seven thirty-five. So what had happened? Had Tirian failed to turn up? Was somebody ill? I looked around me. So far so good. Nobody else seemed to have noticed. I waited, sweatily, for the play to begin.

At last, the house lights dimmed. I took a deep breath. The curtain went up.





ACT I


The action of the play takes place in the office of Dr Alex Farquhar at Fairfields, an experimental hospital for the criminally insane. The office is cosy and old-fashioned. It seems to belong to the sixties, perhaps to the world of Hammer Horror.

A large, cluttered desk dominates the room. A window looks out onto fields, trees and a low wall. On the other side, a door opens into a cupboard. Incongruously, a complete human skeleton stands on a frame in one corner.

Sitting in the chair in front of the desk is Mark Styler, a writer in his early thirties. Casually dressed, his face is pale and his haircut is a little odd … otherwise he’s the archetypal ‘expert’, as seen on TV.

He’s been kept waiting. He looks at his watch, then takes out a digital recorder and switches it on. He records.



STYLER: Recording. Six fifteen. Thursday. July twenty-second.