In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner (Inspector Lynley, #10)(2)
He was indeed, David had confirmed at the time, if only to himself. But what other option did he really have than to try to restore his name as an artist?
He'd managed to do just that: Not only were the audience on their feet, not only were the cast members ecstatically applauding him from the stage, but the critics—whose seat numbers he had memorised, “the better to blow them up,” Matthew had noted sardonically—were also standing, making no move to depart, and joining in the sort of approbation that David had come to fear was as lost to him as was Michael Chandler.
That approbation only grew in the ensuing hours. At the opening night party at the Dorchester, in a ballroom creatively converted into Elsinore Castle, David stood at his wife's side, at the end of a receiving line comprising the production's leading actors. Along that line stepped London's foremost glitterati: Stars of stage and screen gushed over their colleagues and privately gnashed their teeth to conceal their envy; celebrities from all walks of life pronounced King-Ryder Productions’ Hamlet everything from “top notch” and “just fab, darling” to “kept me on the absolute edge of my seat;” It girls and Sloanes—slinkily attired, displaying an astonishing degree of cleavage, and famous either for being famous or for having famous parents—declared that “someone finally made Shakespeare fun”; representatives from that notable drain on the nation's imagination and economy—the Royal Family—offered their best wishes for success. And while everyone was pleased to press the flesh of Hamlet and his thespian cohorts, and while everyone was happy to congratulate Virginia Elliott for her masterful direction of her husband's pop opera, everyone was particularly eager to talk to the man who'd been vilified and pilloried for more than a decade.
So there was triumph to be felt in spades, and David King-Ryder wanted to feel it. He was starved for a sensation that would tell him life was opening before him instead of closing. But that was the feeling that he couldn't escape. It's over boomed in his ears like the cannon.
If he had been able to talk to her about what he had been going through since the curtain call, David knew that Ginny would tell him his feelings of depression, anxiety, and despair were normal. “It's the natural letdown after opening night,” she would have said. She would have pointed out that she had far more reason to be let down than he had anyway. As director, her job was over now. True, there were various components of the production to be tweaked—”It would be satisfying if the lighting designer would cooperate and get the last scene right, wouldn't it?”—but by and large, she had to let go, to begin the process all over again on another production of another play. In his case, the morning would bring a flood of congratulatory phone calls, requests for interviews, and offers to mount the pop opera all over the world. Thus, he could dig into another staging of Hamlet or go on to something else. She didn't have that option.
If he had confessed that he just didn't have it in him to go on to anything else, she would have said, “Of course, you haven't at the moment. That's normal, David. How could you right now? Give yourself some leeway to recover, won't you? You need time to refill the well.”
The well was the wellspring of creativity, and if he'd pointed out to his wife that she never seemed to need to refill her own supplies, she would have argued that directing was different from creating the product in the first place. She, at least, had raw materials to work with—not to mention a score of fellow artists with whom to knock heads as the production took shape. He had only the music room, the piano, endless solitude, and his imagination.
And the world's expectations, he thought morosely. They would always be there as the price of success.
He and Ginny left the Dorchester as soon as they were able to manage it surreptitiously. She'd protested at first when he'd indicated that he wanted to leave—as had Matthew, who, always his fathers manager, had argued that it wouldn't look good for David King-Ryder to depart the party before the party's end. But David had claimed exhaustion and strung-out nerves and Matthew and Virginia had accepted that self-diagnosis. After all, his complexion was jaundiced, and his demeanour throughout the production—alternating between standing, sitting, and pacing in their box—strongly suggested a man whose personal resources had finally been depleted.
They rode from London in silence, David with a vodka curved into his palm and his thumb and forefinger pressed into his eyebrows, Ginny making several attempts to draw him into conversation. She suggested a holiday as a reward for their years of endeavour. Rhodes, she mentioned, Capri, and Crete.
The jolly-hockey-sticks tone of her voice told David that she was becoming increasingly concerned with her failure to reach him. And considering their history together—she'd been his twelfth mistress before he'd made her his fifth wife—there was good reason for her to suspect that his condition had nothing to do with first-night nerves, letdown after triumph, or anxiety about critical reaction to his work. The past few months had been rough on them as a couple, and she knew quite well what he'd done to cure himself of the impotence he'd experienced with his last wife, since he'd done it by moving on to Ginny herself. So when she finally said, “Darling, it happens sometimes. It's nerves, that's all. It'll all come right at the end of the day,” he wanted to reassure her. But he didn't have the words.
He was still trying to find them when their limousine entered the tunnel of silver maples that characterised the woodland in which they lived. Here, not an hour from London, the countryside was thickly grown with trees, and footpaths trod by generations of foresters and farmers disappeared into an undergrowth of ferns.