‘As you can see, the lower levels are crowded with chariot cuts and sloat cuts. Sloats are cut-out pieces of scenery. There’s a chariot and pole system for the wing flats, but it’s all too elaborate even for grand opera, and no one has ever really used it to the full extent for which it was designed. There’s the grave trap and the revolve, the star traps, and lots of other little doors. It’s terribly over-elaborate.’
‘What powers it all?’ asked May, peering uncomfortably into the darkness.
‘In nineteen hundred and seven they started producing their own electricity from three coal-fired boilers which drove the steam turbine engines.’
May tried to imagine the hellish scene below, with stagehands stoking glowing furnaces, and felt sicker than ever.
‘I wonder how they managed to top up the engines with water,’ Bryant mused, fascinated by the chaotic machinery of beams, cogs, wires, pulleys and rods.
‘Oh, there’s an artesian well down here too,’ Elspeth explained, pointing out the eerie green shimmer of water reflected on the distant bricks opposite. ‘The pump is under the orchestra pit. They’re supposed to keep the hatch cover on the well because it’s very deep and hard to see in the dark.’
‘Can we go back up?’ asked May, wiping his forehead.
‘I say, are you all right?’ Bryant shot him a look of concern. ‘Feeling shut in?’
‘I hope it’s helped you get the lie of the land,’ said Elspeth, returning to her box office.
‘Absolutely,’ Bryant told her enthusiastically, but all she had shown him was how easy it would be for a murderer to hide in such a building and never be found.
19
THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD
‘Ten minutes, everyone,’ warned Helena Parole. ‘We’ve still got a lot of work ahead of us tonight.’ She rose and gathered her notes from the seat next to her. ‘Harry, where are you?’
‘Over here, Helena,’ called her assistant. ‘I wonder if I could talk to you for a moment.’ He was standing at the back of the stalls with Olivia Thwaite, the show’s costume designer. Olivia’s wardrobe designs had graced enough Noel Coward productions to inspire new fashions at the Café Royal, but the Blitz had forced her family back to their country home in Wiltshire, and she was now thinking of retiring. She intended to make Orpheus her swan song, and would not settle for anything less than perfection. Consequently, the costume manufacture was running late, which at least kept this aspect of the production in step with everything else, even though it was giving Harry heart failure.
‘It’s about Eurydice’s first-act costume,’ he explained as Helena strode up to him. ‘Olivia would like to double the amount of flowers sewn on her dress.’
‘I know the material’s in short supply,’ said Olivia. ‘I promise you it’s entirely necessary. The bodice is transparent, and since you specified no undergarments, her breasts and buttocks will clearly be seen beneath the lights. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that the Lord Chamberlain’s rules forbid nudity except in motionless tableaux under special lighting arrangements and a special licence, a licence I understand we do not have.’
‘I assure you there will be no vulgarity,’ promised Helena. ‘The semblance of nudity is entirely as I intended.’
‘But not as Miss Noriac intends.’ Harry spoke for Olivia. It was something he was in the habit of doing whenever possible. It allowed him to defuse tension between stage personnel by rephrasing overheated arguments into the semblance of reasonable conversations. ‘She is concerned that as a woman with a voluptuous figure, she will not look her best if the audience can see her entire body.’
Eve Noriac had joined the production on loan from the Lyon Opera House, and represented a heavy investment as their Eurydice. It was important to keep her happy in order to maintain courteous relations with the prestigious French company.
‘She’s somewhat on the portly side, but she has a marvellous poitrine and should be proud of it. Olivia, can’t you make her see that?’
‘I don’t see that it’s my job to tell your female lead that she has to appear in the buff before one and a half thousand people every night,’ reasoned Olivia.
‘I think Olivia would like to add flowers in the top half of her costume for the sake of decorum,’ said Harry gently.
‘I don’t want her to go on looking like a walking advertisement for the Kensington Roof Gardens, thank you, Harry. Go and talk to her, would you? Tell her I’m not having daffodils sewn over her nipples just because she can’t leave spuds alone.’