Curtain Call by Anthony Quinn Read Free Book Online Page A

to amuse his dinner companions, who listened and smiled at one another as if to say, ‘Jimmy’s at it again.’
    His body was starting to fail, too. Corpulence had crept up on him, stealing away his once-compact figure. At night when he rolled over in bed he felt certain parts of him slower to turn than others. The manoeuvre now had to be executed, as it were, in stages. In the morning he struggled to crane himself forward to reach his feet, and had to lie in a foetal position just to put his socks on. His belt took an ever longer circuit around the rotunda of his stomach. He seemed to be going to the doctor more often, though Harley Street’s finest could discover nothing very wrong with him, aside from the usual wear and tear. (The last fellow, a Scot named McAlister, had suggested he cut his daily wine consumption from two bottles to one – Jimmy had privately dismissed him as a Presbyterian.) Morbid thoughts oppressed him; his vague fear of death had metamorphosed into a black butterfly of neurotic terror. The other day he had been browsing through the week’s letters from readers when he opened one from a correspondent named Philip D’Eath. He had dropped it as though he might a plague victim’s handkerchief. When his secretary later picked the letter off the floor and asked him how he wished to reply, Jimmy had refused to have anything to do with it.
    He peeked at his watch again. Quarter to nine. Though his attention had wandered he could sniff the interval approaching, like a gun dog picking up a scent. And here it came, a seemly diminuendo; the sense of a hiatus; the curtain’s slow descent. Applause. For this relief, much thanks . . . Jimmy was out of his seat and hurrying up the aisle before the lights had come on. The prospect of a drink always quickened his step. The white-jacketed barman fixed him a large whisky and soda, which he took to a corner table and set to work. He had a little notepad in which he’d jotted down his first paragraph, always the trickiest – that, and the last paragraph. He now had the play’s title in front of him:
Change of the Guard
. Even
that
was average.
    A good drama is as solidly constructed as a good house. The foundations should be hewn from realism, the ground floor from character and action, the upper floor from pattern and symbol. Within, its staircases and doorways should allow smooth passage from one part to another. Laurence Markwick’s
Change of the Guard
at the Duke of York’s follows these precepts with a rigorous competence. The materials are first-rate, the workmanship is sound. But is it a house one wishes to inhabit for longer than ten minutes? This story of a cuckoo in the marital nest offers careful observation of human frailty but nothing that resembles spontaneous feeling. There is not a line in it that surprises, nor a gesture that intrigues. The view from its windows is perfectly transparent – and perfectly trite.
    Jimmy read it through again. He loved the way his prose fell into place. He was also rather sick of it. Forty-odd years of theatre-going, at least thirty of them spent writing about it, was bound to blunt your edges. True, with experience had come a certain godlike assurance: it was impossible to avoid the feeling that his critical verdicts were consistently and remarkably
right
. What use in being a critic otherwise? The problem was in finding different ways of saying the same thing over and over again. He had played variations on the ‘good house’ analogy at least, oh, half a dozen times in the last ten years. Reading through the proofs of his latest collection of reviews he had been aghast at the way the same phrases – jokes – aperçus – infested his paragraphs like bothersome weeds. His secretary had spotted them too, and had entered polite notes in the margin:
Perhaps change this?
A list of repetitions was appended. Change? He would if he had the time. But he