Sing Like You Know the Words by martin sowery Read Free Book Online Page A

descending the stairs in a
stream of silvery laughter”. I ask you, how can I make that seem
real?
    Now Matthew was smiling.
    -I really don’t believe it’s all
that complicated, he replied. If I was you, I would learn the lines
as well as you can, and just say them as if Clara was just a silly
misguided girl with no substance. I’m positive that is all that Mr
Shaw would expect of you. Clara is a stock character that his
audience would recognize. It’s true that he undercuts the
stereotype in the back story that follows on from the play, but
that’s for the reader not for the theatre. Stories and plays;
they’re different. You know, Shaw would have written novels if he’d
had the patience. That was his first ambition.
    -So you think that really it’s
just a trivial part, written to move the business of the drama
along?
    -Exactly, yes. Nothing to worry
about at all.
    He was so pleased at having
easily cleared up Patricia’s little difficulty that he could not
understand why David was staring daggers at him.
    -It’s based on a Greek myth you
know, said David, sounding a little desperate, for some reason.
Pygmalion was the statue brought to life by magic, like Eliza.
    Matthew was happy to clear that
up.
    -Oh, no, Pygmalion is the name
of the man who brings the statue to life, like Higgins.
    -Ah.
    -I’ll leave you to it then, now
you’re sorted. Good luck with Clara, Pat.
    Patricia gave him a look that
did not seem quite as full of gratitude as he might have expected,
but Matthew was oblivious to such subtleties.
     
    ***
     
    When David’s father first heard
from his son that he was planning to marry, he didn’t say too much.
Inwardly his response was similar to what Matthew and Tim had told
David. Mr Thomas had only met the girl three times. That he hardly
knew her was not important, but knowing David and how he jumped at
things, his father thought it probable that David didn’t know her
that well either.
    Mr Thomas’s only comfort was to
hear that, in spite of David regarding the matter as settled, he
had not said anything about it to Patricia as yet. He did not see
his son often and sometimes he believed that he did not know the
boy at all. But not to know what was going through David’s mind at
a time like this; that was just another worrying part of the
business.
    It was not that Mr Thomas was
against early marriages in general. David was not much younger than
he’d been when he married David’s mother. But by then he’d been
working for a few years and he knew a little bit about the world.
David had done nothing yet and sometimes he acted like he’d not
even begun to grow up. As for the girl, Mr Thomas thought he liked
her well enough, from what little he’d seen, but there was
something about her that made him doubtful so far as marriage was
concerned. She was pretty and she seemed good natured, but you
could see that she had some odd ideas. There was something under
the surface that made him uneasy.
    For a start, they’d had not had
Catholics in the family up to now, so far as he knew. He didn’t
have anything against Catholics except that some of them seemed to
take religion seriously. This girl wasn’t exactly churchy.
According to David she hardly went to mass, though that could
easily change over the years. Even now, she seemed to find little
ways to let you know that faith meant something to her.
    He’d come across that sort
before, even in people you only knew from work you’d see it. They
seemed normal, then one little thing that an ordinary person
wouldn’t even think about would turn out to hold all manner of
superstitious importance for them.
    There would be complications
about the ceremony and later about the children too, but the worst
thing about people like that was that they changed as they got
older. She might become devout, or worse, one of those women who
obsessed about going to church every day and telling other people
how they should live.
    Mr Thomas senior thought