The Skull Beneath the Skin Read Online Free PDF Page A

Baggot who was always, I’m afraid, rather inclined to complain at the end of the day. And the island itself, so beautiful and varied, and such peace. Low cliffs, woods, fields and marshes. It’s like England in miniature.”
    “Darlings, I was actually in the theatre when she dried, Clarissa Lisle, I mean. It was ghastly. It wasn’t just that she forgot the lines, though I don’t see how anyone can forget Lady Macbeth, the part practically speaks itself. She dried completely. We could hear the prompter positively shrieking at her from where Peter—he was my friend—and I were sitting. And then she gave a kind of gasp and ran offstage.” Bevis’s outraged voice recalled Miss Maudsley from her happy recollection of Orpen portraits and William Morris tapestries.
    “Poor woman! How terrible for her, Bevis.”
    “Terrible for the rest of the cast. For us, too. Altogether shame-making. After all, she is a professional actress with something of a reputation. You don’t expect her to behave like a hysterical schoolgirl who’s lost her nerve at her first amateur performance. I was amazed when Metzler offered her Vittoria after that
Macbeth
. She started all right and the notices weren’t that bad, but they say that things got pretty dodgy before it folded.”
    Bevis spoke as one who had been privy to all the negotiations. Cordelia had often wondered at the assurance which he assumed whenever they spoke of the theatre, that exotic world of fantasy and desire, his promised land, his native air. He said: “I’d love to see the Victorian theatre on Courcy Island. It’s very small—only a hundred seats—but they say it’s perfect. Theoriginal owner built it for Lillie Langtry when she was mistress to the Prince of Wales. He used to visit the island and the house party would amuse themselves with amateur theatricals.”
    “How do you get to know these things, Bevis?”
    “There was an article about the castle in one of the Sundays soon after Mr. Gorringe had completed the restoration. My friend showed it to me. He knows I’m interested. The auditorium looked charming. It even has a royal box decorated with the Prince of Wales feathers. I wish I could see it. I’m madly envious.”
    Cordelia said: “Sir George told me about the theatre. The present owner must be rich. It can’t have been cheap, restoring the theatre and the castle and collecting the Victoriana.”
    Surprisingly, it was Miss Maudsley who replied: “Oh, but he is! He made a fortune out of that bestseller he wrote.
Autopsy
. He’s A. K. Ambrose. Didn’t you know?”
    Cordelia hadn’t known. She had bought the paperback, as had thousands of others, because she had got tired of seeing its dramatic cover confronting her in every bookshop and supermarket and had felt curious to know what it was about a first novel that could earn a reputed half a million before publication. It was fashionably long and equally fashionably violent and she remembered that she had indeed, as the blurb promised, found it difficult to put down, without now being able to remember clearly either the plot or the characters. The idea had been neat enough. The novel dealt with an autopsy on a murder victim and had told at length the stories of all the people involved, forensic pathologist, police officer, mortuary attendant, family of the victim, victim and, finally, the murderer. You could, she supposed, call it a crime novel with a difference, the difference being that there had been more sex, normal and abnormal, than detection and that the book had attemptedwith some success to combine the popular family saga with the mystery. The writing style had been nicely judged for the mass market, neither good enough to jeopardize popular appeal nor bad enough to make people ashamed of being seen reading it in public. At the end she had been left dissatisfied, but whether that was because she had felt manipulated or because of a conviction that the pseudonymous A. K. Ambrose could have