CHAPTER 1
'I was always thought, as a young person, to have a rather fine voice,' Miss Teresa Glencosset was saying in the well-rounded tones familiar to her students. 'There was talk of my undertaking a singing career. But it was considered by my parents to be a hazardous future for a young woman, and common-sense prevailed.'
She directed her wolfish smile swiftly around the company assembled in the Green Room. 'So my little annual foray into G and S is for me a small acknowledgement of "what might have been".'
'What would you have sung if you had turned pro?' someone asked. Miss Glencosset raised thoughtful eyebrows and regarded a poster of last year's Pirates absently.
'Opera, I think. I always felt I had the presence for it.'
'Makes a bloody formidable Katisha, anyway,' Stephen Harcourt muttered to his neighbour. 'I blench every time she advances on me. Never know whether she's going to embrace me or swallow me.'
Jasper Spenlow stretched his arms above his head and yawned. A general sense of movement replaced the inertia that had itself replaced an outpouring of energy on stage throughout the evening. After a week of rehearsals, Jasper felt that musically, at least, Mikado was progressing according to schedule. Little Dulcet Merridew collected the coffee cups (that was Dulcet for you, always the willing slave), and carted them off to the tiny kitchen; Jasper's wife, Maggie, picked up scripts and vocal scores and strode out again on to the stage to make sure that nothing of value had been left.
He watched her; no amount of activity, no rehearsal traumas, ever seemed to recue that nervous energy to the level at which most people existed. She would be that way until bedtime; and then, as her head hit the pillow, she would be off into sleep, storing up more energy for what the morrow might bring. He envied her.
The Reverend Charles Culbert, vicar of this parish of St Edmund, gave out a sigh and rose from the depths of the one comfortable chair. With his long, angular legs and a perpetually solemn expression, he was rather too like a praying mantis to be taken seriously out of his usual milieu. In the pulpit he had a certain distant charm, as if by being physically lifted above the common people in the pews below he had somehow achieved a sort of spiritual loftiness; why he found the annual romp of the Gilbert and Sullivan production so attractive, Jasper had never understood. On the face of it he was no actor. But something clicked once the costume and the grease paint were on; then the Rev Mr Culbert came to life, and there was something about the sight of their vicar representing the morally devious Pooh-Bah that gave the groundlings particular pleasure.
Culbert looked across the room to where Molly de Vance was discussing costumes with Mary Harcourt, whose nimble fingers came into their own at performance time. Molly was standing with her back towards him, and after a moment he turned, nodded to Jasper and the others who were preparing to leave, and went out into the night.
He walked slowly towards the rectory, which would be clammy and unwelcoming because he had forgotten to build up the wood stove, and because there would be no one there to greet him. It was a matter of astonishment to him that after a lifetime spent in almost monastic seclusion (of his own choice, for he was basically a solitary man) he should recently have developed a strange craving for human company.
The evening was pleasantly cool; but it is likely that he would not have noticed had icicles hung by the wall. For the Rev Charles was prey to emotions until now unknown to him. There had been (he recalled this dimly as down a long corridor of time) a young lady, earnestly bespectacled, for whom he had felt affection during his final university year. They had drunk coffee together, walked a couple of times across the campus, and then — why, he could not now remember — lost touch with each other. But that gently warm, wholly chaste relationship had nothing to do with the extraordinary and highly alarming sensations now consuming him in a most improper manner.
O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stars, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice ...' he yearned. But the night was silent, give or take a strident red wattle bird or two, and the roar of Dave Shafto's motor bike as it sped away from the theatre.
Young Shafto's mind, like all Gaul, was divided three ways. In one compartment were the pages and pages required to be learnt before he could claim to have the role of Nanki-Poo under his belt; in another he maintained a kind of human computer that listened to the volume of sound coming from his vehicle and analysed it, piston-stroke by piston-stroke; and in the third was a dark cloud of foreboding that he tried hard to ignore, but which was coming closer, growing ever more threatening, reducing him to frightened, shaming apprehension.
In defiance, shaking a metaphorical finger at fate, he revved the engine and shot through the sleepy town at full speed, avoiding a confrontation with the police by seconds.
Simon Lee, product of an English mother and Chinese father, locked the theatre door and shook it to make sure. As president of the society this year he took his duties very seriously. He opened his car door, singing in a pleasant baritone voice Three little girls from school are we ...' It struck him as quite odd that this mock-Japanese comedy, relating back to a time when the Japanese were simply people who lived a long way away and wore funny clothes, should still be popular in a society that had seen its fill of the horrors of a militaristic regime storming down through the islands of the Pacific.
He switched to 'to make the punishment fit the crime ...' and remembered, briefly, his father, whose contact with the Japanese had involved punishment where no crime had been committed. Mr Lee senior had died of it.
Stephen and Mary Harcourt walked home. It was only five minutes, door to door, and it had been a long and busy day. Mary did complicated calculations in her head, five metres of this, ten of that, and a good length of something for the sashes — 'obis' they called them. Mary did crossword puzzles, so she knew the word well. 'Light blue on purple looks rather nice,' she said, but Stephen didn't answer.
He was engrossed in his own thoughts. This was a bad time for 'Mikado' and his business interests to collide. He enjoyed the part of Koko (saw something of his own duplicity in it, if he was honest), but with this big property development just coming to the boil it was a nuisance to have to give a part of his mind to the frivolity of a Savoy Opera. 'Tit-willow,' he hummed; 'tit-willow ... tit-willow!'
'The girls are good,' Mary said as they pushed open the garden gate. She meant the school-girl trio. 'Pattie's a natural, don't you think?'
He grunted. 'Not so keen on the Percy girl. Sings sharp.'
'That's just nerves. She'll do well. And Corinne ...'
'Pretty girl! Sympathetic. Should go far.' He based his knowledge of her on a brief encounter backstage during last year's Pirates when she had taken seriously the blackened nail — gained through a too hearty effort with the scenery — which Mary had failed to coo over.
As they closed the door behind them an ancient utility clattered past, loaded beyond good sense with the bower bird collection...
