Rehearsals were well under way in the drawing room by the time I joined the company. Georgiana was directing operations, with old Venables sticking his oar in at every other line.
The scene she’d chosen was the one in which the rude mechanicals rehearse their play in the presence of the sleeping Titania, queen of the fairies. She awakes to see Bottom in an ass’s head and, because Puck has done his stuff with the potion, at once falls in love with him; the scene ends as she leads him off hand in hand to the merriment of all. The good thing was that there was a line or two for everyone with only Bottom and Titania having much to learn.
It was clear that old Etringham had sat up all night swotting his lines and had done a pretty good job of it. His work, however, lacked snap. His Bottom sounded less like a workman on a beano than an archdeacon giving a Lenten address. You couldn’t help wondering if he’d ever actually met a weaver.
Mrs Tilman made an admirable Puck, but Amelia lacked the ethereal quality that the part of Titania demands; her performance had a bit too much of the tennis girl about it: her court coverage was good, but there was little sense of gossamer wings.
Bed linen was to form the basic Athenian costume, with the addition of the odd jerkin or waistcoat, chisel and hammer; there was an outsize ass’s head for Bottom and wings for Puck and Titania that had been fetched from a costumier in Dorchester the day before. This was all quite satisfactory; it was the acting that was a cause for concern.
‘Sir Henry,’ said Mrs Tilman. ‘Could I make a suggestion?’
‘Certainly, Mrs T,’ said Sir Henry, who had landed the part of Quince the carpenter.
‘Suppose Miss Georgiana and Miss Amelia was to swap parts? So Miss Amelia was Starveling the tailor and Miss Georgiana was the fairy queen?’
After a fair bit of ‘No, I can’t’ and ‘Yes, you must’ between the girls, Sir Henry settled the matter by giving his blessing to the switch.
‘All right, I’ll learn the lines at lunchtime,’ said Georgiana. ‘Are you quite sure you don’t mind, Ambo?’
‘No, I’ve always wanted to play Starveling,’ said Amelia – pretty sportingly, you’d have to say. Woody visibly swelled with pride.
‘Bertie,’ said Georgiana, ‘I think it would be a good idea if you and Mr Venables rehearsed your crosstalk act now. Perhaps you could go into the library.’
‘Right ho,’ I said.
‘I’ve got a script for you, young man,’ said old Vishnu, holding out a piece of paper. ‘But I warn you, I like to extemporise as we go along.’
As we walked down the hall I glanced down at the paper in my hand. I saw the following words. ‘Feed: “I say, I say, what do you make of the Melbury Ladies’ Sewing Circle?” SV: “I found them most amusing. They had me in stitches.”’
It was going to be a long day.
The Melbury-cum-Kingston parish hall was ten minutes away in the two-seater. A red-brick, rectangular building designed by a chap who liked to keep things simple, it was set back from the road behind a blackthorn hedge. The date carved above the lintel was 1856 and one couldn’t help wondering which village worthy had stumped up for it. Or perhaps there had been a subscription to mark the end of the Crimean War; I briefly wondered how many sons of Melbury-cum-Kingston had died at Sevastopol.
There were twenty minutes before kick-off, but the peasantry was already filing in by twos and threes. These sons of toil looked like men who knew what they liked, and I doubted whether bellows-menders or fairies came high on that list.
During a solitary luncheon in the sunken garden, I had more or less mastered the lines old Venables had thrust on me and I glanced down now at the papers in my sweating palm. I breathed in deeply.
‘Very well, Jeeves. Let’s get it over with. Into the valley of death …’
I pushed open the door and levered myself out of the car. Since I was not billed to go on until the second half, I decided to place myself at the rear of the hall, among the rougher element, to get a sense of what lay in store. From this vantage point I at once saw why so many of them had arrived early. It is normal practice for a village hall to have some sort of makeshift bar with cider and beer by the barrel, but this was an elaborate affair that took up half a side wall; its selection of beverages would not have disgraced a West End hotel, though the prices were such that any ploughman could keep plodding his weary way back for more. And plod they did.
The general whiff in the village hall, of damp plaster and dead chrysanthemums, was rapidly being replaced by the smell of warm yeomanry, pipe smoke and alcohol. In other circumstances I don’t deny that I might have found it congenial. The two-bob seats filled rapidly with the local gentry, and I noted listlessly that Vishnu and I should be playing to a full house. A stiffish brandy and soda followed its twin down the hatch – and at that price, who could wonder that a third came close behind.