The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories Read Free

London and Len, who was its representative, did not have the heart to forbid him the theatre. Though none of us admitted as much, we all found Howard’s decision to sleep at the Grand disquieting. A theatre is a place to visit and perform in; to live there is to inhabit a limbo. We would happily talk to him on the stairs or in the Green Room, but we avoided visiting him in his dressing room. The cause of our reluctance was the portrait.
    It was a three-quarter length of Ray as a young man at the zenith of his coarse good looks. There was a slight smile on his parted lips and a vacancy in the blue eyes which seemed to look out of the canvas, over the shoulder of a viewer, like a social climber at a cocktail party. With its gaudy flesh tones, confident brush strokes and bright blue background the painting was clearly the work of a journeyman artist of some accomplishment and no talent. Yet, for all its slick vacuity, the painting held one’s reluctant attention, perhaps because the manner of its execution so clearly complemented the nature of its subject. In its elaborate gilded frame it hung on the wall of Howard’s dressing room, presiding over his few sombre possessions.
    ‘He was the love of my life and I’ll never see him again,’ said Howard when he first showed me the picture. I tried hard to keep my prejudices in abeyance, but I found Ray’s domination over Howard’s thoughts even more repulsive in death than it was in life. Howard seemed to make no effort to work through his grief; he was held in suspension. His conversation, never lively at the best of times, trod the same dreadful circle of mourning and memory day after day. It was inevitable perhaps that some clairvoyant at his spiritualist church would vouchsafe him the information that Ray had passed safely over and was ‘watching over him’. Howard repeated this phrase to us with melancholy satisfaction, but we thought of the picture and shuddered.
    Some weeks went by during which I became used to Howard’s peculiar way of life and stopped worrying about it. I was young and the sun shone. The adventure of acting engrossed me and his tragedy became little more than the sombre shade which threw the hopeful colours of my existence into greater relief.
    Towards the end of July I began to notice that there was sometimes alcohol on Howard’s breath when I was on stage with him. This was disturbing in someone whose avowed rule was never to take a drink before a show, but, as his performance did not seem to suffer, I took little notice. One evening I came into the theatre early and heard voices coming from Howard’s dressing room, which was the one nearest the stage door entrance. One of the voices was Howard’s, the other—unintelligible—was a hissing whisper. I thought Howard might have been going through his lines, but the words he spoke were not from any play. Interspersed with the strange indecipherable whisper they were:
    ‘No . . . No, don’t . . . No, don’t say that . . . No don’t . . .’
    Feeling acutely embarrassed I turned back and shut the stage door loudly, coughing as I did so, to make Howard believe that I had just come in. The voice and the whisper stopped abruptly. Howard came out of his dressing room and asked me how I was. He did not seem unduly agitated, just a little dazed. Peering through his open door I noticed that the taps of his dressing room basin were on. The pipes hissed, and I reassured myself that this was the whispering I had heard.

    **

    My digs were not far from the theatre. I occupied a single roomed ‘holiday flatlet’ on the top floor of a block of similar rooms. My window looked down the street towards the Grand Theatre. One hot, airless night in early August it was open. I went to sleep to the familiar sounds of desultory traffic and the occasional late reveller; then at about two in the morning I awoke suddenly. I thought I had heard a cry of alarm, though it was hard to say of what kind because I had