The Daughter of Time

‘I haven’t come to stay, my dear. I’m on my way to the theatre. It’s matinée day, God help me. Tea trays and morons. And we’ve all got to the frightful stage when the lines have ceased to have any meaning at all for us. I don’t think this play is ever coming off. It’s going to be like those New York ones that run by the decade instead of by the year. It’s too frightening. One’s mind just won’t stay on the thing. Geoffrey dried up in the middle of the second act last night. His eyes nearly popped out of his head. I thought for a moment he was having a stroke. He said afterwards that he had no recollection of anything that happened between his entrance and the point where he came to and found himself half-way through the act.’

‘A black-out, you mean?’

‘No. Oh, no. Just being an automaton. Saying the lines and doing the business and thinking of something else all the time.’

‘If all reports are true that’s no unusual matter where actors are concerned.’

‘Oh, in moderation, no. Johnny Garson can tell you how much paper there is in the house while he is sobbing his heart out on someone’s lap. But that’s different from being “away” for half an act. Do you realise that Geoffrey had turned his son out of the house, quarrelled with his mistress, and accused his wife of having an affaire with his best friend all without being aware of it?’

‘What was he aware of?’

‘He says he had decided to lease his Park Lane flat to Dolly Dacre and buy that Charles The Second house at Richmond that the Latimers are giving up because he has got that Governor’s appointment. He had thought about the lack of bathrooms and decided that the little upstairs room with the eighteenth-century Chinese paper would make a very good one. They could remove the beautiful paper and use it to decorate that dull little room downstairs at the back. It’s full of Victorian panelling, the dull little room. He had also reviewed the drainage, wondered if he had enough money to take the old tiling off and replace it, and speculated as to what kind of cooking range they had in the kitchen. He had just decided to get rid of the shrubbery at the gate when he found himself face to face with me, on a stage, in the presence of nine hundred and eighty-seven people, in the middle of a speech. Do you wonder that his eyes popped. I see that you have managed to read at least one of the books I brought you if the rumpled jacket is any criterion.’

‘Yes. The mountain one. It was a godsend. I lay for hours looking at the pictures. Nothing puts things in perspective as quickly as a mountain.’

‘The stars are better, I find.’

‘Oh, no. The stars merely reduce one to the status of an amoeba. The stars take the last vestige of human pride, the last spark of confidence, from one. But a snow mountain is a nice human-size yard-stick. I lay and looked at Everest and thanked God that I wasn’t climbing those slopes. A hospital bed was a haven of warmth and rest and security by comparison, and The Midget and The Amazon two of the highest achievements of civilisation.’

‘Ah, well, here are some more pictures for you.’

Marta up-ended the quarto envelope she was carrying, and spilled a collection of paper sheets over his chest.

‘What is this?’

‘Faces,’ said Marta, delightedly. ‘Dozens of faces for you. Men, women, and children. All sorts, conditions, and sizes.’

He picked a sheet off his chest and looked at it. It was an engraving of a fifteenth-century portrait. A woman.

‘Who is this?’

‘Lucrezia Borgia. Isn’t she a duck.’

‘Perhaps, but are you suggesting that there was any mystery about her?’

‘Oh, yes. No one has ever decided whether she was her brother’s tool or his accomplice.’

He discarded Lucrezia, and picked up a second sheet. This proved to be the portrait of a small boy in late-eighteenth-century clothes, and under it in faint capitals was printed the words: Louis XVII.

‘Now there’s a beautiful mystery for you,’ Marta said. ‘The Dauphin. Did he escape or did he die in captivity?’

‘Where did you get all these?’

‘I routed James out of his cubby-hole at the Victoria and Albert, and made him take me to a print shop. I knew he would know about that sort of thing, and I’m sure he has nothing to interest him at the V. and A.’

It was so like Marta to take it for granted that a Civil Servant, because he happened also to be a playwright and an authority on portraits, should be willing to leave his work and delve about in print shops for her pleasure.

He turned up the photograph of an Elizabethan portrait. A man in velvet and pearls. He turned the back to see who this might be and found that it was the Earl of Leicester.

‘So that is Elizabeth’s Robin,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I ever saw a portrait of him before.’