The Master Read Free Page B

shaking. He had never allowed himself to imagine beyond that point. It was the closest he had come, but he had not come close at all. He kept his vigil that night in
the rain until the light in the window faded. He waited for a while longer to see if something else would happen, but the windows remained dark, they gave nothing away. Then he walked slowly home.
He was on dry land again. His clothes were soaking, his shoes had been destroyed by the rain.
    H E LOVED THE dress rehearsals and allowed himself to picture the potential play-goers in each seat in the theatre. The lighting, the extravagant and
opulent costumes, the ringing voices filled him with pride and pleasure. He had never, in all the years, seen anyone purchase or read one of his books. And even if he had witnessed such a scene, he
would not have known the effects of his sentences. Reading was as silent and solitary and private as writing. Now, he would hear people in the audience hold their breath, cry out, fall silent.
    He placed friends, familiar faces, and then, in all the seats near him and in the gallery above, and this was the most risky and exciting prospect, he placed strangers. He imagined bright,
intelligent eyes in a man’s sensitive face, a thin upper lip, soft, fair skin, a large frame that was carried with ease. Tentatively, he placed this figure in the row behind him, close to the
centre, a young woman beside him, her small, delicate hands joined, the tips of her fingers almost touching her mouth. Alone in the theatre – the costume-makers were still backstage –
he watched his imaginary, paying theatre-goers as Alexander, playing Guy Domville, appeared. It became clear what the core of the conflict on the stage would be. He kept an eye on the audience he
had conjured behind him as the play proceeded, noting how the woman’s face lit up at the gorgeousness of Mrs Edward Saker’s costume, the elaborate elegance of a hundred years ago,
noting then how serious and still the face of his thin-lipped supporter became when Guy Domville, despite his vast wealth and golden future, decided to renounce the world and devote himself to a
life of contemplation and prayer in a monastery.
    Guy Domville was still too long and he knew that there was disquiet among the actors about the discrepancies between act one and act two. Alexander, his steadfast director, told him to
pay no attention to them, they had merely been stirred up by Miss Vetch, who had no role to speak of in act two and barely reappeared in act three. Nonetheless, he knew that in a novel it could not
be risked: a character, once established, must remain in the narrative, unless the character were minor, or died before the story closed. What he would never have tried in a novel, he was trying in
a play. He prayed that it would work.
    He hated making the cuts, but he knew that he could not complain. At the beginning he had grumbled a great deal – indeed expressed a pained amazement – until he had made himself less
than welcome in Alexander’s offices. He knew that there was no point in claiming that if the play had needed cuts he would have made them before he finished it. Every day now he made
excisions, and he thought it strange that after a few hours he remained the only one who noticed the gaps, the missing moments.
    During the rehearsals he had little to do. He was both thrilled and disturbed by the idea that only half the work was his, the other half belonged to the director, the actors and the
scene-makers. Overseeing the work was the element of time and that was new to him. Over the proscenium arch there was an immense, invisible clock to whose ticking the playwright must attend, its
hands moving inexorably on from eight thirty, as precise as the audience’s patience. In that busy period of two hours, if the two intervals were taken into account, he must present and solve
the problem he had set himself, or be doomed.
    As the play came to seem more distant from him,