Pageant of Murder

sound, like they all have in Brayne, but he would have looked a dream all togged up in a Fauntleroy suit.”

“Did Shelley wear a Fauntleroy suit?”

“Oh, Dog, how on earth should I know? Anyway, it would have made this kid look like a late Victorian angel, and I was dead set on the idea. I’d even written the script for him, and also for Edward III.”

“Hard cheese, to use an outmoded expression. So we’re left with The Merry Wives. How much are they giving us?”

“A lot less than they wanted to. “By the time we’ve had the Tossington Tots, the two cross-talk merchants, the formation team, the ballet and the combined choirs,” I said to them, “you’ll get about twenty minutes, take it or leave it.” There was a lot of argument, of course, but I stuck to my guns, so now they’re giving us Falstaff in the laundry basket, and then him as the fat woman of Brentford, and that sort of low gag, and that’s about all. They don’t love me much. Besides, I’ve had to bowdlerise some of the script.”

“You’ve what?”

“Well, Shakespeare can be terribly coarse when he likes, Dog. Not at all a man to be trusted when there are teen-agers in the audience.”

“I shouldn’t think kids would understand Elizabethan bawdy, and, anyway, I don’t remember much of it in The Merry Wives.”

“As the mother of children of school age,” said Kitty primly, “I am not taking chances.”

“Are your offspring going to be present at the pageant, then?”

“No, thank goodness! I haven’t even told them we’re doing it. I shall send each of them a souvenir programme and a hamper of tuck, but only when everything is safely over.”

CHAPTER THREE

Town Hall Rehearsal

“…it would seem that there are good reasons for believing that Brentford was the scene of human activity at a very early period of civilisation.”

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The Town Hall rehearsal, which took place at half-past seven that same evening, had both a comic and a sinister aspect. The Tossington Tots’ manageress had demanded what the special sub-committee agreed was an unnecessarily high fee for allowing her charges to attend the rehearsal, and there had been an acrimonious correspondence and some frenzied telephone calls before the chairman had given in to what he regarded (and said so, in very plain terms) as extortion. The Tots themselves seemed happy enough but their manageress was haughty and tight-lipped to begin with, and then proceeded to find fault with the dressing-room and to comment acidly upon the primitive nature of the pulley which operated the curtain.

Even Kitty’s sunny good-temper was sorely tried and, when the Tots had left the Town Hall, and Laura remarked with candour, that she “would have dotted that woman one,” Kitty was compelled to admit that to have done so would have relieved her feelings to quite an appreciable extent.

The cross-talk comedians did not turn up. They had promised to send a script to be submitted to, and vetted by, the special sub-committee, but this had not been received. The woman member was in agreement with Kitty, who said she was sure that some of the jokes would have to be toned down or, preferably, left out altogether, but, as the chairman pointed out, this was not the B.B.C. Home Service; it was only what people would be used to. Brayne, he insisted, was not a mealy-mouthed town, and people liked a bit of a laugh, the rest of the programme being, he thought, suitable only for the egg-heads.

The formation dance team turned up in what Kitty particularised as dribs and drabs, but finally all arrived. They condemned the stage as being much too small, divided their numbers into two sets of eight, re-arranged their routine and took up so much of the time that the chairman looked several times at his watch and muttered that the hall was only booked until ten o’clock and that the caretaker would want to lock up and go home to his supper. The ballet, who had become very restive, cried off. They knew the stage and the hall, they said, and could not put up with any more hanging about. Kitty apologised charmingly for the delay and thanked them for coming. Their ballet-mistress, who had been screaming at them in Italian in the dressing-room, at this looked extremely disdainful, and withdrew her troupe in haughty silence. Kitty made an unseemly grimace behind the massive, Moomin-like back.

“What with the Tossington Tots and the frightful woman in charge of them, and that ghastly formation team hogging more than half the rehearsal time, and now this snooty lot, the only thing I’m thankful for is that we haven’t had the combined school choirs hanging about all the evening. Goodness knows what they’d have been up to by now,” she said. “Oh, well, there’s nothing to come but The Merry Wives. I suppose they’re still in their dressing-room. I’d better go and rout them out and tell them to get cracking. Twenty minutes dead, and not a second more, can they have.”

She went back-stage and returned with a typescript, which she turned over discontentedly.

“What’s this?” asked Laura.

“They say they may need a prompter, and don’t possess one.”

“Oh, Lord! That bodes no good. Can’t they prompt each other? I thought amateurs usually did.”

“I don’t know! Here, Dog, be an angel and do the prompting for me. You’ve a much quicker eye for words than I have. Anyway, there looks a lot more than twenty minutes here. If there is, they’ll have to cut it.”

Laura took the script. It was dog-eared and not too clean, and appeared to be the property of Falstaff, since his were the only stage directions pencilled in. There was a delay while the company put up the simple scenery which was to decorate their stage, and the hiatus lasted long enough for Kitty to go back-stage again and exhort them to be as quick as possible. The stage-manager, who was also taking one of the parts, snarled at her, and Falstaff’s small page Robin chose this moment to catch his foot in a piece of scenery and bring it down.

Kitty bit back an unladylike expression which she had picked up in her workrooms, but the stage-manager was less self-restrained, and cursed the child roundly. However, all was in position at last, and Kitty made a mental note