Something else emerged as an insight into his make-up; the play being now launched, he clearly suffered a kind of spiritual anti-climax. He idled and became restless, flinging himself into occasional re-rehearsals as if in desperate intent to recapture something. During the nightly performances he would watch from the wings in a state of excitement mainly self-induced because he felt it his continuing duty to inspire and encourage, but the effort wore thin at times, and on the way home afterwards he was often morose until she had cheered him, as she always could and did.
Othello lasted twelve weeks and then ended not because of Foy’s insistence on a profit (as Paul wrote years later in a book of reminiscences, though it would not have been too unreasonable even if true), but because Paul himself had by that time received several offers to direct plays in the real West End and had already chosen one of them—with a part for Carey, of course. Foy sized up the situation shrewdly and was amiable enough to do so without resentment. It had been all right while it lasted, he told Carey, though he added: “You probably think Paul and I have got along pretty well, but actually there’ve been a few times when I’d have punched his nose if I hadn’t remembered that hitting a genius is like hitting a woman—except that they deserve it oftener.”
“So you’d call Paul a genius?”
“I wouldn’t dare deny it if someone else challenged me. Just watching him taught me more about the theatre in four months than I’d learned before in twenty years. He made me feel an amateur.”
She knew him almost well enough to reply: “That’s what he said you were”, but it would have been too much the sort of riposte that Paul himself could never have resisted. Yet there was, between her and Foy, and later between her and many other people, an awareness of Paul as a phenomenon to be discussed in a spirit of detached investigation, with no sense of personal disloyalty and little capacity to be startled or even hurt by what was revealed.
“So you see,” Foy added, “it’s been an experience for me and a stepping-stone for him—now he can push ahead and discover the facts of life, such as how many seats in the house, how much per seat, how much on the weekly salary sheet—that kind of thing. He’s so wonderful at everything else, he really ought to learn arithmetic… Anyway, I wish him well and I hope he scores a real hit with the new play.”
Paul didn’t. It was a flop—so instant and ignominious that he crossed the Atlantic immediately.
* * *
PART TWO
One day about six years later she was driving with Paul to the Pocono Mountains. Their play had closed down for the summer and it was a relief to escape from the heat of New York to the scarcely cooler but much more endurable countryside. They had a house near Stroudsburg and would spend July and August there; Carey loved the place, and if Paul treated it as a necessary boredom to be lived through from time to time, she was sure it did him good in many ways he would have strenuously denied. The servants from the apartment had gone on ahead and everything would be in order when they arrived—much more so, doubtless, than ever again during their stay, for Paul had a habit of disrupting household arrangements in town and country alike.
She had made this journey often enough for the Delaware Water Gap to have become a symbol of holiday, the mental border-line of work and relaxation. Now, as she saw it again, she could not restrain her delight. “Paul, it’s so good to be here at last—it makes me know how much I needed this.” The words and the way she spoke them sounded older than her looks, which were at the full radiance of twenty-four; but early success and early marriage had built in her an illusion of maturity that was at least as real as a part well played. She sometimes thought that the ways in which Paul had never grown up were compensated for by those in which she herself had done so fast and far.
Paul did not answer because he had fallen asleep. He was a little overweight (a long run always did that to him), and the drive had combined with a rather dull play script to make him drowsy. She gave him the warm yet wry scrutiny of a woman who had been married a number of years to a celebrity; that is, she enjoyed the spectacle of the hero unheroic— the large lolling head, papers crumpled under a finicky hand, the face dubiously sombre and far too pale. Enough of the world conceded now that Paul was a great stage director, including those who also thought she herself was a pretty good actress. She treasured that tottering compliment; it seemed to suit her private thesis that if she were even near good it was because she was near Paul.
As always when he was asleep he had that look of absence that sometimes scared her, making him ageless, so that it was odd, rather than hard, to realize he was only thirty-six. Probably he had only escaped being called a boy-wonder because in public he had never looked like a boy. But in this, as in so many other things, he ran to extremes—babyishness at moments, usually for her alone to witness and indulge; at other moments the air of being biblically, almost Mosaically old. Yet at all times in his work he wore the authority of one whose years had had no real meaning in his life. She often wondered what their children would have been—either geniuses or idiots, she told people, glossing over with a joke the fact that they could have no children.
She watched the familiar road as it curved alongside the river. Their house was half-way up a hillside a few miles ahead; fat maples surrounded it, which could have been why it was called Mapledurham, though there was a place in England of the same name that might have some connection. It was a pleasant house, old enough to have been worth an expensive modernizing; the rooms were large and cool to the eye; the gardens not too formal. And on their arrival there would be tea waiting, English style (coffee for Paul); Walter would have put on a white jacket and transformed himself from a caretaker to a butler of sorts, and his Airedale would break established rules by nibbling from her plate. All this to look forward to as the Packard covered the miles on a summer afternoon.
In sheer exuberance she chatted with Jerry during the last lap of the journey. He was a good-looking southern boy whom they had employed as chauffeur for several years and who had developed an affectionate tolerance for the habits of theatre people. He said now, offhand as usual: “Mr. Paul got another play in mind?”
She said no; the one they had been in all the year would be resumed in September.
“I just figgered he might have, though—he’s bin acting like he wanted one, these last few weeks.”
This alarmed her a little, for she had caught a whiff of the same misgiving herself. But she answered decisively, as if saying so could make it final: “He needs a rest, Jerry, and so do I. That’s what we’ve come here for. I don’t care how bored he is, he’s got to rest.”
It had happened before, and doubtless would do so again—that Paul, having launched a highly successful play, had tired of it after the first few months and was secretly longing for it to end, so that he could give his undivided attention to something else. Whereas Carey was always happy throughout a long run, because it meant comparative ease and assured prosperity—things she was human enough to enjoy as long as they would last. Of course Paul was comfortably off; they had both had luck during recent years, and a flop now and again could not harass them financially. But there was more than money in her reckoning. A new play was an ordeal, increasingly so as both Paul and the critics expected more of her; the weeks of rehearsal could become a nightmare of hard work and high tension— thrilling if it all ended in triumph, but no experience to be sought wantonly. And this wantonness was in Paul. It was not that he did not enjoy success himself—he worshipped it; but he was like a mountaineer who cannot relax on a summit to enjoy a smoke and the view, but must itch immediately to descend and climb another.
At Mapledurham not only the tea and the Airedale were duly waiting, but also, standing up as they entered the drawing-room, there was a tall slim young man who introduced himself as Malcolm Beringer. The name was unknown to her, and the elegant way he pronounced it did not remove her suspicion that he had no business there, or at least that his business was of a kind they didn’
t want to be bothered with on their first day in the country. “I hope you’ll excuse this intrusion…” he began smoothly, whereupon Paul looked him up and down and snapped: “You’re damned right it’s an intrusion. I don’t know you, and I don’t care who you are or what you’ve come for, you can’t see me or my wife without an appointment.”
Carey turned back into the hall where Jerry was dumping bags from the car. She hated scenes, and this was a type she could never get used to. She was usually torn between solicitude for Paul, who needed protection from all kinds of crackpots and time-wasters, and sympathy with the adventurers who wanted him to read their plays or give them acting jobs. But today she had no such sympathy; it seemed intolerable that a stranger should actually stalk them to their retreat. She sought out Walter. “Why on earth did you let that man in? What does he want? How long has he been here?”
“‘Bout an hour. I didn’t know whether to let him in or not, but he said he knew Mr. Paul would want to see him. Something about a play, he said.”
“Oh, Walter, how COULD you be so easily handled?… Well, we can expect to see him thrown out on his ear any moment now… you know what Paul’s like.” It was natural for her to speak of him as Paul to those within the household; they called him MR. Paul, with the Mister somehow a mark of deference to her rather than to him.
Ten minutes passed, and Paul’s voice from the adjoining room, at first upraised, had become mysteriously inaudible. Carey felt she must investigate; once a similar silence had been due to a young man fainting. She re-entered the drawing-room with the upset feeling that Paul’s behaviour so often caused her. Surprisingly, however, she found a quiet, almost a cosy conversation in progress, and when Paul turned to her there was the beam on his face that was usually reserved for a good performance at a final dress rehearsal. It disconcerted her now, and still more so when he called out briskly: “Oh, Carey, I’ve asked Mr. Beringer to stay to dinner. Will you tell Walter? And by the way… you remember I once said Wagner might have done Everyman as an opera, but he didn’t… Well, now, here’s this Mr. Beringer with another idea…”
Carey smiled wanly, murmuring something, and was glad of an excuse to get away. Oh God, she thought, OH GOD… For this sort of thing, too, had happened before.
She did not conceal her ill-humour when she joined them at the table a couple of hours later. It was maddening that this first evening at Mapledurham, which she had hoped to spend alone with Paul, chatting unimportantly, strolling in the garden with the dog and going to bed early, should be taken up by an outsider. During the meal the subject of Everyman did not crop up again, and she was heartily glad of that; she was in no mood for any kind of shop talk. She wondered if Mr. Beringer were canny enough to sense this, for once or twice he seemed to steer conversation away from the theatre when Paul was inching towards it. He was certainly an entertaining young man, if one had wanted to be entertained. As it was, she treated him with a minimum of warmth and excused herself as soon after the coffee as she decently could. Paul and he would doubtless discuss their precious Everyman when she had gone. Hours later, while she was still reading in bed, she heard the front door bang but no sound of a car starting. Then Paul came in. He was in the condition she often called ‘basking’; it occurred whenever contact with some new idea or personality swept the accumulated dust of boredom out of his mind.
“I told you, Carey, this fellow Beringer has an idea for Everyman.”
“Has he? Who is he, anyway?”
“A neighbour—he’s staying at Moat Farm. He walked over. Pity it was tonight when you were tired, but I suppose he was anxious to break the ice of a first meeting. You certainly gave him that… the ice, I mean.”
“And you bawled him out at the top of your voice.”
“Yeah, I did at first, didn’t I?” He laughed as if it were already a reminiscence of long ago, to be savoured with amazement. “Well, we’ll be seeing him again and you’ll probably like him better.”
There was no use opposing the inevitable. She said, summoning cheerfulness: “Darling, I’m sure I will, and if he’s going to be a friend of yours I’ll be specially nice to him next time.”
“Oh, you don’t have to put on any act. It’s me he wants to impress.”
He had the look in his eyes she knew so well and was afraid of, because it was both shrewd and guileless, so that in recognizing that the young man had sought to impress him he did not debar himself from a willingness to be impressed.
“What is it he wants you to do?” she asked quietly.
“He has an idea, that’s all. He thinks Everyman would make a motion picture.”
“And of course he wants to interest YOU in the project?”
“There is no project, but I AM interested in Everyman—you know that. Seems he read some piece I wrote about it years ago. That’s why he came to me rather than any of the picture people. He wanted my advice.”
“Only advice?”
“That’s all. I told him I knew nothing at all about motion pictures.”
“Then what kind of advice could you give him?”
“Oh, now, Carey, you’re splitting hairs. There’s all kinds of advice I can give a bright young man if he’s interested in something I’m interested in. You know I’ve always had an idea to do Everyman on the stage.”
She could see his face in the mirror; he was taking his tie off with a gesture she felt she would remember if she were to go blind and deaf and forget his looks and his voice. He had once told her, apropos of some discussion of ballet, that of all the movements incidental to male undressing, only the removal of a bow tie could be done with flair; the others, particularly the stepping out of pants, were banal… She said sleepily: “So long as you don’t get yourself stuck with anything, Paul. You promised you were going to take a real rest.”
He nodded. “I know, and if that damned play weren’t reopening in September… “
The implication was that if the play, their almost fabulously successful play, were not reopening in September he could have all the rest he needed; and this, she knew, was nonsense; only the play kept him from the far more arduous business of staging its successor. But it had got to the point now when the play was a scapegoat; he hated its guts, though towards the end of August he would order a few frantic corrective rehearsals in which he would behave as if it were a masterpiece. There was, of course, no compelling reason why he could not put on another play while the successful one was still running, but he shied away from this, partly because he wanted a part for Carey in everything he directed, but mainly because he shrank from proving that anything he had once started could possibly continue to exist without his constant attention. Nor could he tell himself rationally and mundanely that here was a harmless little comedy hit that might run another year, maybe longer—easy on audiences, because it didn’t make them think, easy on Carey because it was tailor-made for her, easy on the pay-sheet because there was just one set with a cast of five. True, it was a trifle, but since he had chosen to do it in the first place, why complain because it was making a small fortune for everyone connected with it, including himself?
She said: “Look, Paul, get to bed and don’t lie awake thinking about plays or anything else. I’m going to sleep the clock round, and then tomorrow…” She was about to say she would take a long walk, but that was one of the things he would not share with her, so she changed it to: “Tomorrow we’ll sit in the garden and pretend we haven’t a care in the world. Not much pretence needed, either. We’re very lucky people—doesn’t that ever occur to you?”
“Sure, but we mustn’t sit back and HOARD luck. That’s just the way to lose it.”
It seemed to her about the most disquieting answer he could have given.
* * * * *
Carey had received several offers from motion picture companies but had turned them down because she would not think of doing anything without Paul, and though Paul had received feelers himself, they had never in his case reached the point of a firm offer
because he had always made it clear that he would want complete control of everything—story, cast, direction, production, cutting, and music; and as he was prompt to add that he knew nothing about motion pictures and hardly ever saw them, the movie moguls were doubtless intrigued, but not enough to buy Carey at such a price. Actually all this was very much of a pose. He knew a great deal about motion pictures and had seen many. It was also a fact that shortly after their marriage he and Carey had lived in Hollywood for about a year. That year had been one of failure, and as if to propitiate obscure deities he would never talk of it, or even admit its existence. Carey had no such feeling herself, but she was aware of his, and made it one of her own secrets also. It was thus without any sense of untruth that Paul could indulge in one of his favourite confessions—that when once he had been stranded in Los Angeles for a few hours he had been curious enough to ask a taximan to drive him around Hollywood, but the expedition had covered such dreary territory that he could only (in fairness to such a world-famous name) conclude that the driver must have lost his way.
But now a few conversations with Malcolm Beringer, a young man of no particular standing or importance, were enough to effect a change— not, it is true, in his attitude towards Hollywood, but certainly in his angle of aloofness towards motion pictures in general. Perhaps Malcolm’s deficiencies were even an asset, for Paul was no respecter of big names and rather enjoyed the caprice of paying attention to the unknown, always provided they had qualities to attract him. Malcolm, moreover, was fey, and Carey, being Irish, was on her guard against this from the outset. After his second visit to Mapledurham, she tried to find out how far Paul was in danger of losing his normally keen judgment, but all she got was another discussion of Everyman. Then suddenly, to her direct question, Paul answered: “I’ll tell you one reason why I like him. It’s because he reminds me of myself at his age. No money, no name—just ideas and ambition.”