Fault in the Structure

‘Unusual, perhaps, as a surname, but not unusual in the printing trade.’

‘In the printing —? Oh, that little upside down V or Y which means something has been left out and is to be inserted? You don’t suppose Caxton is proposing to insert a dagger into Lawrence, do you?’

‘I suppose, going on the evidence of his not infrequent visits to his sister, that Mr Caret was fond of her, and you and I, I recollect, once had a conversation on the relationship between brothers and sisters.’

‘But you think Coralie, not Lawrence, committed the murder. Lawrence only tried to cover it up by burying the body. That’s your theory, isn’t it?’

‘We once mentioned Macbeth. There is no doubt – there was none in the troubled mind of Lady Macbeth – that both husband and wife shared guilt over the murder of King Duncan. In the case under review, just as Duncan’s death was carried out at the instigation of the woman, but by the hand of the man, so the murder of Mrs Lawrence could have been at the instigation of the man, but carried out by the woman.’

‘Well, she’s strong enough, as we’ve said before, but you thought, after you’d met her in Blackpool, that she was one of these large, bonhomous women.’

‘Henry the Eighth, by all accounts, was a large, bonhomous man. It did not prevent him from turning into a monster when monstrous behaviour suited his purpose.’

‘And Coralie’s purpose?’

‘As I believe we have said before, after Sir Anthony’s death Lawrence had become a very wealthy man. I still think Lawrence wanted his wife out of the way because she knew – or he thought she knew – something about that death which, if it were told to the police, might incriminate him, and I think that Coralie wanted her out of the way…’

‘To clear a path to a re-marriage with Lawrence?’

‘If, indeed, they were ever divorced. We have only Coralie’s word that they were.’

‘No wonder, if Lawrence spotted Caxton at that rehearsal to which Clarice brought him, our Macheath refused to shave off his beard for the performances! I must sleep on this. You offer food for thought, dear Mrs Croc.’

Dame Beatrice did not attend the dress rehearsal proper. It went off so well that Denbigh was delighted, Laura filled with forebodings and the cast jubilant and self-congratulatory. There was only one hitch and that was merely temporary. The dressing-rooms at the town hall were at floor-level, not stage level. To reach the stage and its wings, therefore, the actors had to mount a short flight of stairs from the back of the O.P. side and pass the back- drop if their entrance was on the Prompt side.

Before the ingenious erection of carpentry and cardboard which represented the hangman’s cart had been put together, therefore, the width of these stairs had been carefully measured and a wooden ramp made so that the contraption, mounted on perambulator wheels, could be pushed up on to the stage without damage to its flimsy sides. The perambulator wheels were disguised by curtains of hessian on which large, tumbril-like wheels had been painted by the indefatiguable students, and the cart had no back to it, as only its front elevation would be seen from the auditorium. The ‘cart’ was kept off the stage until what should have been the last scene in the opera as John Gay wrote it.

In Denbigh’s production, between this last scene and the preceding one in which, confronted by four more of his wives – ‘Four women more, Captain, with a child apiece’ – Macheath announces that he is prepared to be executed – ‘Here, tell the Sheriff’s officers I am ready’ – the curtain was to come down and to rise again to show Macheath standing on the fatal cart with his arms pinioned, a white cap over his face and head and the rope (a loop without a running noose) already around his neck. At the announcement of the reprieve, white cap and noose were to be whipped off and his arms ceremoniously freed, although there actually would be no knots to untie, as that might hold up the action.

All this had been carefully rehearsed, but, as it was not quite finished, without the cart until the pre-dress rehearsal. As the reprieve marked the end of the opera except for the last song and dance, the final scene came so late in the evening, when the cast were almost blasphemous with exhaustion, that it had been run through ‘just for the sake of the motions’ as Laura put it, and the cart left on the stage, from which the stage-hands removed it during the College dinner-hour on the morning of the dress rehearsal proper. However, when the time came to get it on stage again for the dress rehearsal, there occurred an unseemly and maddening hitch, the more annoying in that, apart from it, the rehearsal went well.

‘Hey!’ said one of the volunteer stage-hands, a student who had helped to construct the cart. ‘Some funny ass has taken the wheels off! How are we going to trundle it on to the stage?’

‘Manhandle it, I suppose,’ said his friends.

‘Not on your life. No room at the sides of those stairs. We’d break it. Except for the actual platform where the bloke stands, the thing’s only made of cardboard, hessian and papier-mache. Slip the word to the players. The chap will just have to stand at the right spot on the stage and imagine he’s on the cart.’

‘The noose won’t reach his neck and I don’t think we’ve got a longer piece of rope.’

‘He’ll have to do without a noose, then, won’t he? After all, this is only a rehearsal. We must make sure it’s all right on Thursday, though.’

‘He won’t mind about the cart. He’s always jibbed a bit at that rope round his neck. Think he’d got a guilty conscience or something, wouldn’t you?’

‘Well, let him know. I’ll have a scout round and see what’s been done with those wheels. I’d like to lay hands on the blighter who perpetrated the merry jest, that’s all.’

After the rehearsal Denbigh took the matter philosophically.

‘If we don’t find the wheels – and we’re certainly not going to turn the back of the stage and the dressing- rooms upside-down tonight,’ he said, ‘we’ve got Tuesday and Wednesday to find some more wheels and for you chaps to fix them on. If the worst comes to the worst, I can tip off the cast to go back to the original script and have the reprieve from the condemned hold instead of from the gallows. It isn’t, to my mind, such good theatre, but at least we should be carrying out the author’s intentions, and that, I suppose, is something.’

On the following morning he telephoned the town hall and was answered by the porter on duty. He requested that the missing wheels should be traced if the porter could spare the time. As Denbigh had conducted public concerts in the town hall on previous occasions and was known to be moderately generous with his pourboires, the porter promised to do his best and to ring the College if the missing wheels came to light. They did, and were found on the electricians’ gallery.