The Playmaker Read Free

miasmas that stung his eyes, she began to write, dipping the pen twice. There was some blotting, and when she had finished she waved the sodden paper back and forth, helping it to dry. Then she handed it to him. “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee,” she had written. He studied the succession of vowels, wondering how to get rid of her. Without warning she had her arms around him, threatening to crack his ribs with her maniac strength. Once, in another hemisphere, she’d beaten the wife of a coffee merchant so livid and swollen that members of the jury had wept when the victim gave evidence. In Meg Long’s arms, Lieutenant Clark understood how misused the woman must have been, and why Meg had been given a lifetime’s exile—what the convicts called a bellowser—to a distant star.
    He had only just collected himself to struggle with her when he saw a black face appear over her shoulder. A harmonious voice, marked by elements of French and Kentish and something irreducibly African, came from the face.
    â€œMa mère , you must let go that gentleman. Yes, chérie , in the name of the Fragrant One. Ease them little arms of yours. This gentleman is foko to me, is brother, so ease your arms, mammie.”
    Mad, shitty Meg Long let go of Lieutenant Clark and began to caress the black man’s face. His name was John Caesar. He came from Madagascar and invoked the Fragrant One, some sort of Madagascan god, endlessly. He was very dangerous—the strongest and hungriest of all the prisoners.
    â€œI have come here for the play, maître ,” he told Ralph, pushing Meg Long deftly to one side. “There was a black servant in every play I see in Maidstone.” He had been someone’s servant in Maidstone once. His great member was said to be renowned among the convict women, but not always welcomed by them, since he turned so easily to blows.
    Lieutenant Clark thought he had better not entertain Black Caesar’s artistic ambitions too much, since he had seen how dangerous it had been to give any space to Meg Long’s. “There are no black men at all in this play,” said Ralph, his head pulsing. Meg Long’s lunatic muscles had squeezed all the blood into his brain. “There are no black servants, Caesar.”
    â€œThere be always beaucoup black servants in every drama I see,” Black Caesar insisted, frowning.
    â€œNow do not argue with me,” said Ralph. “It is not down to me that there are not black roles in the play; it is down to George Farquhar, who wrote the play eighty years ago, before you were born, and who died of consumption before he was as old as you or me.”
    Now, in the lessening rain, there was a crowd of convict women, noisy but waiting to be invited in, at the flap of the tent. They displayed that delicacy which, apparently, Madagascans lacked. Ralph saw among the faces that of Liz Barber, who had once, aboard the convict transport Friendship , invited Captain Meredith to kiss her arse and called him a thief. Now she wanted, of course, to be first woman of the stage in this penal latitude. In her berserkly enthusiastic face, Ralph could tell what a grief this play, demanded by H.E. and Davy, might be for him.
    â€œI will take your name,” Lieutenant Clark told the Madagascan, and did so. “If we find we need a black servant, I shall send to the sawpits for you.”
    Oh what an axeman he was, the Madagascan! “By the Fragrant One,” said Black Caesar, almost gently, “you will need a black servant. Tout le monde needs a black servant for their play.”
    â€œI shall send to the sawpits,” Ralph Clark promised again, trying to keep out of his voice the hope that Caesar would return to his labour.
    The Madagascan went, but Meg Long sat for hours by the tent flap, just inside, listening without comment or movement as forty convicts, men and women, offered their halting readings to Ralph, some with nearly as