Ten Days of Christmas: The classic post-war family Christmas novel by GB Stern

Author:GB Stern [Stern, GB]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: nativity play, family Christmas, poignant Christmas story, 1940s family, 1940 christmas, The Matriarch, post-war
Publisher: Corazon Books
Published: 2015-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

Listening, Terry thought: Lal can’t do that speech; he’s terribly bad in it; he doesn’t mean his humility. Lal’s wonderful as Joey ‒ so amusing and so sure of himself, just like a gipsy boy who steals chickens and gets away with it. But ‒ doesn’t Jonathan see? Isn’t he going to say something?

Jonathan did say something, coldly: ‘You always forget your cue, Terry. If you don’t call Joseph at that point, he can’t get his exit.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry, Jonathan. I was thinking. I ‒’

‘Your scene with Elizabeth is all very fine, but you needn’t get above yourself; you’re rotten lately in all the rest. Now then, we won’t rehearse the Shepherd and the Lady over and over again. Start with “Joseph is supporting Mary”.’

As always since Christmas Eve, Lal and Terry looked obdurate and did not budge from where they stood.

Terry dreaded too much the tenderness, the confident trust with which Mary would have to turn to Joseph a little farther on.

Lal did not dread it, he simply did not wish to do it, after the way Terry had blackguarded him. He enjoyed more than ever, since then, swaggering through Joey; but from this scene onwards, his part was nearly all Joseph. He suggested carelessly to the producer that the Joey half of it was ever so much more important: ‘Can’t we cut out some of Joseph?’

Joey more important that Joseph? More important than Mary’s spouse? And Lal had actually dared to say ‘Cut out some of Joseph’? … Terry held her breath and waited for a thunderclap from an ink-dark Heaven.

Only Judy, who had several times after rehearsal heard her brother speak strong and straight on the subject of his company’s deficiencies, their ruddy obstinacy, their infernal conceit in refusing to accept direction over scenes ‒ only Judy knew how he felt over the deadlock of Lal and Terry; how helpless in face of their black antagonism. Helpless was not a word usually to be found in Jonathan’s vocabulary, but their hate was stronger than he; he could do nothing except rehearse unnecessarily the scenes of the play where they did not appear together, and hope from day to day that the cause for this lethal hold-up might disappear as mysteriously as it came. Had he listened to Erica’s wisdom from the very beginning of trouble, had he listened to any of them but particularly to Erica (who had done her best to bring about a council of appeasement) then at least nothing would be mysterious, and he would have known what he was up against. But from first to last, Jonathan had not a remote notion, not a glimmer of why Terry and Lal had stiffened into wood. Secretly he was astonished how inflexible they remained alike to his threats and to his commands.

Erica now reminded him that since the first day (when they had been allowed to read their parts) not once had they gone through the last scenes of all, with the three kings

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