Photo Finish

“For the moment,” said Troy, “don’t let’s think about what it all cost.”

They arrived at the bathing pool as eleven o’clock drinks were being served. Two or three guests had arrived at the same time as the quartet of players, who turned out to be members of a South Island regional orchestra. The musicians, three men and a lady, sticking tightly to each other and clearly overawed, were painstakingly introduced by Rupert. The Sommita, in white sharkskin with a tactful tunic, conversed with them very much de haut en bas and then engulfed the Alleyns, particularly Troy, whose arm and hand she secured, propelling her to a canopied double seat and retaining her hold after they had occupied it. Troy found all this intensely embarrassing but at least it gave her a good opportunity to notice the markedly asymmetric structure of the face, the distance between the corner of the heavy mouth and that of the burning eye being greater on the left side. And there was a faint darkness, the slightest change of color, on the upper lip. You couldn’t have a better face for Carmen, Troy thought.

The Sommita talked of the horrible letter and the touched-up photograph and what they had done to her and how shattering it was that the activities of the infamous photographer — for of course he was at the bottom of it — should have extended to New Zealand and even to the Island, when she had felt safe at last from persecution.

“It is only the paper, though,” Troy pointed out. “It’s not as though the man himself was here. Don’t you think it’s quite likely that now the tour of Australia is over he may very well have gone back to his country of origin, wherever that may be? Mightn’t the letter have just been his final effort? You had gone and he couldn’t take any more photographs, so he cooked up the letter?”

The Sommita stared at her for a long time and in a most uncomfortable ma

“But,” the Sommita was saying, “we must speak of your art, must we not? And of the portrait. We begin the day after tomorrow, yes? And I wear my crimson décolleté which you have not yet seen. It is by Saint Laurent and is dramatic. And for the pose — this.”

She sprang to her feet, curved her sumptuous right arm above her head, rested her left palm upon her thigh, threw back her head, and ogled Troy frowningly in the baleful, sexy ma

“I think,” Troy said, “the pose might be a bit exacting to maintain. And if it’s possible I’d like to make some drawings as a sort of limbering up. Not posed drawings. Only slight notes. If I could just be inconspicuously on the premises and make scribbles with a stick of charcoal.”

“Yes? Ah! Good. This afternoon there will be rehearsal. It will be only a preparation for the dress rehearsal tonight. You may attend it. You must be very inconspicuous, you understand.”

“That will be ideal,” said Troy. “Nothing could suit me better.”

“My poor Rupert,” the Sommita suddenly proclaimed, again fixing Troy in that disquieting regard, “is nervous. He has the sensitivity of the true artist, the creative temperament. He is strung like a violin.”

She suspects something, Troy thought. She’s pumping. Damn.

She said: “I can well imagine.”

“I’m sure you can,” said the Sommita with what seemed to be all too meaningful an emphasis.

“Darling Rupert,” she called to him, “if your friends are ready, perhaps you should show them—?”

The players gulped down the rest of their drinks and professed themselves ready.

“Come!” invited the Sommita, suddenly all sparkle and gaiety. “I show you now our music room. Who knows? There may be inspiration for you, as for us. We bring also our great diviner, who is going to rescue me from my persecutors.”

She towed Troy up to Alleyn and unfolded this proposition. Her ma

Troy hurried away to get her sketching block, charcoal, and conté crayon. Alleyn waited for her and together they went to the “music room.”

It was entered by double doors from the rear of the main hall. It was, as Mr. Ruby had once indicated, more like a concert chamber than a room. It were tedious to insist upon the grandiloquences of Waihoe Lodge: enough to say that the stage occupied one end of this enormous room, was approached from the auditorium by three wide steps up to a projecting apron and thence to the main acting area. Beautifully proportioned pillars were ranged across the back, flanking curtained doorways. The musicians were in a little huddle by a grand piano on the floor of the auditorium and in the angle of the apron. They were tuning their instruments, and Rupert, looking ill, was with them. The singers came in and sat together in the auditorium.

There was a change, now, in the Sommita: an air of being in her own professional climate and with no nonsense about it. She was deep in conversation with Rodolfo when the Alleyns came in. She saw them and pointed to chairs halfway down the auditorium. Then she folded her arms and stood facing the stage. Every now and then she shouted angry instructions. As if on some stage director’s orders, a shaft of sunlight from an open window found her. The effect was startling. Troy settled herself to make a drawing.

Now the little orchestra began to play: tentatively at first with stoppages when they consulted with Rupert. Then with one and another of the soloists, repeating passages, making adjustments. Finally the Sommita said, “We take the aria, darling,” and swept up to stage center.

Rupert’s back was turned to the audience and facing the musicians. He gave them the beat conservatively. They played and were stopped by the Sommita. “More authority,” she said. “We should come in like a lion. Again.”

Rupert waited for a moment. Troy saw that his left hand was clenched so hard that the knuckles shone white. He flung back his head, raised his right hand, and gave a strong beat. The short introduction was repeated with much more conviction, it reached a climax of sorts, and then the whole world was filled with one long sound: “Ah!” sang the Sommita. “A-a-a-h! and then, “What joy is here, what peace, what plen-titude!

At first it was impossible to question the glory, so astonishing was the sound, so absolute the command. Alleyn thought: Perhaps it hardly matters what she sings. Perhaps she could sing “A bee-eye-ee-eye-ee sat on the wall-eye-all-eye-all” and distill magic from it. But before the aria had come to its end he thought that even if he hadn’t been warned he would have known that musically it was no great shakes. He thought he could detect clichés and banalities. And the words! He supposed in opera they didn’t matter all that much, but the thought occurred that she might more appropriately have sung: “What joy is here, what peace, what platitude.”

Troy was sitting two seats in front of Alleyn, holding her breath and drawing in charcoal. He could see the lines that ran out like whiplashes under her hand, the thrown-back head, and the wide mouth. Not a bit, he thought remembering their joke, as if the Sommita were yawning: the drawing itself sang. Troy ripped the sketch off her pad and began again. Now her subject talked to the orchestra, who listened with a kind of avid respect, and Troy drew them in the graphic shorthand that was all her own.

Alleyn thought that if Rupert was correct in believing the players had rumbled the inadequacies of the music, the Sommita had ravished them into acceptance, and he wondered if, after all, she could work this magic throughout the performance and save poor Rupert’s face for him.