‘You will be there when I set the record. You and our son.’ He is crouching down to speak to her. ‘I will make sure of that. But conditions are not suitable for you to stay there, as I’ve discovered for myself.’
He wants to describe his restless night, but she is looking away. So he asks, as though it had just occurred to him: ‘What did you do last night?’
‘Mr Audran kindly invited me to dine with him.’
‘Dinner with the manager? Quite an honour, I’d say. When I see him next I should thank him for being so … so solicitous.’
‘He passed on your message then invited me, knowing I would be free.’
‘Of course!’ Harry responds. ‘I would never want you to feel stranded.’
A warm breeze stirs the curtains.
‘I need more.’
She hadn’t planned to say this. It forces itself out, like a champagne cork.
‘More? He looks puzzled. ‘Surely not more flowers – or coins.’
She gets up before replying, ‘More involvement. I’m just another spectator at your shows. And now your flying machine is taking you even further away.’
‘Well, you shall come to admire it soon,’ he says, throwing his arms around her from behind and hoping she will press back into him. ‘We could make it a grand day out. Have Audran provide us with refreshments—’
‘There’s another thing,’ she responds, staying stiff in his arms. ‘I want to perform again at the theatre, even if it’s only once or twice.’
Harry steps away so he can face her.
‘Perform? As my assistant? I thought you’d sworn off the stage forever.’
‘I did. But I’m curious to see how it feels now.’ She gestures around herself. ‘All I have is this. There are only so many letters and lists I can write for Mayer Samuel.’ Her gaze falls on the impassive doll, which she has placed sitting upright on the end of her bed. It is facing them, as if trying to follow their conversation.
‘I also thought of him last night,’ Harry responds. ‘I imagined our son at the controls of the Voisin.’ He hugs her once, firmly, then releases her. ‘We shall do it. We. I like the sound of that. The flying-field, the Opera House. Both can happen. Both will happen. Franz, for one, will be delighted to see you on stage again. Now, what’s the time? I must prepare for tonight’s performance. Will you help me, my love?’
SHE helps him. She always helps him. He relies on her so much, especially when his mother is on the other side of the world. He removes the flowers from the bathroom basin and drops them carelessly on the tiled floor. While he shaves, scything off lather from his cheeks with confident sweeps of his razor, she runs a bath for him. And when he is in the tub, naked and pink and relaxed, she rubs yellow soap into a flannel and rubs his shoulders, his neck, and finally the insides of his ears. He submits like a child. The bathwater takes on a brown tinge from the dirt.
Yet even as she cleans him her mind is on another man – his eyes; his smell; his gentle touch in the dark on the roof. It strikes her as strange that her husband has not asked more questions about her dinner the previous night. Hasn’t even asked if anyone other than Audran was present. But she is not unhappy about this, as she is unsure what she might have told him.
28
THE ‘Greatest Necromancer of The Age’ is into the fourth week of his Opera House season and Harry Rickards has stuffed the program like a Christmas pudding full of peel. Fred Bluett is off the bill – sent on his way after exposing himself with a hopeful sigh to Decima McLean, one of the Australian Dartos. Bluett leaves without fuss, less concerned by his dismissal than the prospect of another encounter with Decima’s brothers Teddy and Roy. Before performing their celebrated Apache Dance, the McLean boys make it clear to Bluett that his bloodied scalp could only add verisimilitude to their act. Three shows, including a matinee, pass before the worsening smell leads to the discovery of Bluett’s sheep’s head by the Harmonious Huxhams, a singing quartet being trialled by Rickards.
His main attraction, the Mysteriarch himself, now barely bothers to stay familiar with all the warm-up acts. The line-up is constantly changing: in the wings and backstage corridors he recognises only stayers such as Frank Curran the comedian and the bouncing Brothers Martine. Harry has settled into a routine. When he has been up at Diggers Rest he can arrive at the theatre after the 8pm starting time confident that Kukol and Vickery will have everything ready for him – the handcuffs and chains and padlocks and straightjackets as well as props like the false-sided cabinet and the milk-can big enough to hold a man and twenty-two buckets of water.
Harry is constantly tinkering with his act. He likes to think that nobody paying to see him more than once will walk away feeling blasé about predictable routines. More than that, he needs to keep himself fully engaged by incorporating new challenges or adding something different to an established stunt. On this oppressive Thursday night – the air outside is leaden, heavy with rain yet to fall – three musicians set up their instruments near the front of the stage, off to one side, even as Kukol prepares the milk-can for the show’s climax. Harry has decided that musicians will provide an extra element to his most baffling escape. He doesn’t realise it yet, and Rickards certainly won’t tell him, but this pair of violinists and a cello player have come cheap. They are local men with little professional experience, more accustomed to sawing away at Town Hall receptions.
After Harry has been sealed into the milk-can, the curtains are closed, and the second hand on the large clock begins its inexorable circuits, the musicians start playing from sheet-music supplied to them: ‘Asleep in the Deep’ and ‘Sailor, Beware’. If the curtains have still not been opened, their instructions are to play a hymn: Harry suggests ‘Abide With Me’. But these men do not have the music and so, after a muttered consultation, they launch into their version of a popular aria from an Italian opera. Because their playing is inexpert, it takes Bess, in her usual seat near the front, almost half a minute to recognise the tune. When she does, she feels a shiver of secret pleasure. She must tell Puccini about this, she thinks. Must.
Harry is not familiar with the music. After freeing himself from the can he stays hidden a little longer than usual because this audience has been attentive. And when, suddenly, he is there again – exultant, dripping, both arms raised – the acclamation is so thunderous he cannot hear the hired performers. Harry will never know that, after the assigned nautical themes, they have been trying to play the love duet from Act One of La Boheme.
THE composer is locked in his room at the Hotel Metropole. He has closed the curtains to shut out all distractions, including the rumbling of distant thunder. His Edison machine is silent. He seldom likes to listen to recordings of his own music: performances always seem imperfect and the sound quality of the fragile cylinders becomes poorer every time. Puccini certainly does not wish to hear anything by Verdi. In his present mood, music by the master could plunge him into despair.
He is unshaven. His skin is sallow. He cannot recall the last time he felt sun on his face. Scattered over the top of the piano at which he sits are a plate with the remnants of a poor dinner of cheese and bread, a glass, a near-empty carafe of French claret (heavier than the chianti he would have preferred), a small bottle of ink, a pen, a noisome ashtray, and pages and pages of composition paper covered with his scrawl. There are cross-outs, annotations, isolated punctuation marks, and notes – hundreds of notes. Everything rests on all these crotchets and quavers quivering with infinite possibilities, yet he is unsure which of the notes in this pile of pages represent false starts and which seemed, even fleetingly, to ring true in his head. His handwriting has always been dreadful – one of his first operatic compositions was disqualified from a contest because judges could not decipher it – and is now growing worse with every passing year.
He is toiling on the last scenes of La Fanciulla Del West. Everyone is still waiting for him to finish: Ricordi, his publisher; Kahn, the chairman, and Toscanini, the conductor, at the Metropolitan Opera; Caruso, who has never before sung in the premiere of one of his works. He is close to the end, needing just one last memorable melody, but it is proving as elusive as a cool breeze. Everything about this opera now seems clumsy and contrived. What can these miners, outlaws, gamblers, card-sharps and a saloon-keeper with a tender heart teach anyone about love? He should have persisted with one of his original ideas: the life of Marie Antoinette, certainly a doomed heroine. He can no longer even recall why he settled on this western story by Belasco, who also penned the Butterfly stage play.
He rubs his aching eyes, lights another cigarette, thinks about his poor Butterfly and the bitter poison critics served to her. Never before has a new work come so slowly to him. Six years of pain and doubt separate Butterfly and Minnie, his Girl of the Golden West. He tries to picture her. The face he now sees has limpid eyes looking up at him in the darkness.
Beatrice. Be-a-trice. He savours the sound of the name: the name of the love of the peerless Dante Alighieri. All great poetry and opera is about love, he thinks. There can be no argument about this. He yawns, dips his pen in the ink, finds a clean sheet of composition paper and begins again. Outside, the first large warm drops of rain start to fall.
RICKARDS can’t hear the rain. His office at the Opera House is a small room off the foyer, behind the refreshment stand and beneath the banked stalls seats. He can judge the progress of a show by the noise. The more noise there is, the happier he feels, unless it is the hoots and whistles and catcalls that brought an end to Happy Tom Parker’s appearances. Unless anything sounds unusual, or there is a distinguished guest to entertain, he prefers to stay in his office, counting takings and attending to paperwork.
Tonight he planned to assess the musicians his feature attraction insisted he engage. But this is secondary to his main task: writing another Challenge To Houdini that he will send to the editors of both The Argus and The Age. Kukol, the taciturn Austrian, has shown him examples clipped from overseas newspapers. But Rickards knows what is required. He is pleased with this latest challenge. It has, he believes, a more exotic flavour than the last one, issued in the name of local carpenters and joiners:
As experienced seamen we will secure Houdini by a method employed on mutinous crews in the old days. Firstly, we will place a round stick behind his knees, and tie his wrists to this stick, one on each side. In this condition he will be placed on his back and thoroughly secured by strong ropes to a seven-foot plank, with his feet upwards. We sailors will then weave a network of sash cord around the thick ropes. Houdini must not cut any of the ropes, and his release must be attempted in full view of the audience.
He is even more proud of his next effort, on a separate sheet of paper, written with a broader nib and – most would judge – a different hand. This will be delivered to the newspaper editors a day after the seamen’s missive:
Sir – Next Friday evening the celebrated ‘escapologist’ is to be bound, with much detailed intricateness, by four seafaring men who have challenged that visiting artist to escape from their entanglements. But the names and addresses given for these sailors are not in accord with known listings. In two instances, the stated thoroughfares do not even exist. These facts may enhance the interest which these ‘challenges’ invariably arouse.
Yours &c, A Sceptic.
‘Blooming masterpiece,’ he mutters to himself. Above his head he hears the creaking of seats as hundreds of people shift in their places to get a better view of the stage, then the discordant strains of his newly-hired orchestra butchering ‘Asleep In The Deep’. The milk-can routine is underway. This letter from the aggrieved Sceptic will surely be published, perhaps with a reprint of the original challenge. Two for one – at no cost to himself! It should guarantee more ticket sales for the last fortnight of the season. Then comes Sydney, and a further five weeks of shows. Plus an added extra: Aviation Week. The escaper flying daily over the Rosehill Racecourse. Admittance to track and stands one shilling. Not too steep.
Rickards had sneered when the Tait brothers, his theatrical rivals, tried something similar back in December. Their Flying Fortnight was a dismal failure. The pilot they’d engaged, an Englishman named Defries in a Wright machine imported by a local headmaster, couldn’t fly. His machine had to be towed behind a motor car. When it finally got off the ground, to ironic cheers, it came down again, hard, in less than six seconds.
From above there is shouting and the stamping of feet. The milk-can has amazed them again. Listening to the applause, Rickards recalls how excited Houdini was on Monday afternoon when he told him about Defries and his public humiliation three months earlier. Houdini insisted it was the same machine he’d seen crash again near Diggers Rest that very morning. And when Rickards mentioned the headmaster – ‘A windbag who writes letters to papers denouncing inappropriate public entertainments’ – his visiting star leapt around his office like a kangaroo.
