Free A Marriage of Convenience by Tim Jeal Page B

up more reasons than money for their attraction.’
    Clinton stepped forward menacingly.
    ‘Are you speaking of Miss Lucas?’
    ‘I spoke generally, my lord,’ replied Hawtrey with mocking deference.
    ‘That’s fortunate, Mr Hawtrey. In future anything said touching her will be my personal concern. You may tell Captain Folliat that.’ With a slight nod to Hawtrey, Clinton turned on his heel.
    What point pretending after that? he asked himself, as the hall porter opened the door for him. He was no freer than any of the others and he might as well accept it. The code allowed no exemptions even to the proudest, since pride itself was its cornerstone.
    *
    From a box in the second tier, Clinton looked down at the assembling audience. Not a regular visitor to the respectable theatre, he was surprised to see that the old pit benches had been pushed back under the balcony to make way for expensive orchestra stalls. Preferring popular melodramas, burlesques and extravaganzas to polite sentimental comedy, the composition of the audience at the Princess’s Theatre did not please him. Many of the men were in dress coats and the women wearing tulle, velvet and silk evening dresses; clothes which Clinton considered appropriate for the opera but not in an ordinary playhouse. Used to the mixture of classes at the Surrey and the Standard, where the pit and gallery were always filled to bursting by a boisterously enthusiastic orange sucking crowd of mechanics, dock labourers and costermongers in greasyfustian and corduroy, Clinton found the refined impassivity of predominantly middle class audiences as lifeless as the plays they watched—purged of sexual suggestion, politics and low comedy. The plays of Congreve and Vanbrugh, which he had often enjoyed with his father, were now rarely performed except in bowdlerised versions.
    But with his special reason for being there, Clinton was perfectly content to admire the decorative improvements made during Charles Kean’s long management: the gold leaf framing the boxes, the sparkling chandeliers and the blue empyrean above, where painted gods floated in clouds. Helped on by a bottle of Clos Vougeot and a cigar, he was soon caught up in the pleasantly expectant mood which filled the house with the first squawky dissonant chords of the orchestra tuning up. Within minutes the heavy curtain rollers began to turn with a faint creaking and the richly swagged draperies lifted to reveal a romantic painted drop with a blue lake, bosky trees and a distant eighteenth century house. Clinton was now impatient for the orchestra to finish their brief introductory piece, after which their role would be limited to musical backing at moments of high emotional crisis.
    The play, Masks and Faces, by the spectacularly successful team of Tom Taylor and Charles Reade, had been frequently revived since its first performance ten years earlier. And though an artificial sentimentalization of theatrical life in the previous century, it had a strange effect on Clinton almost from the beginning. Very loosely based on the life of Peg Woffington, who had started life as a Dublin watercress seller to find later fame acting with Garrick at Covent Garden, the action was inevitably more concerned with Peg’s goodness of heart than her violent temper and numerous affairs. The theme of a woman with a doubtful reputation and a heart of gold was anything but new, and yet for other reasons Clinton became quickly involved.
    Theresa Simmonds, in real life an actress living with a rich man, was playing the part of an actress facing the dilemma of whether to do just that. After several scenes of indecision, Peg high-mindedly rejects wealthy Sir Charles Pomander, instead falling for a simple country gentleman, who later turns out to be married to a sweet young wife. Angry and wounded though she is, Peg heroically sacrifices her own feelings, and after some gentle ridicule of her deceitful swain, brings about a reunion between him and