Page 1 of Her Leading Lady

CHAPTER 1

The Belvedere Theatre smelled of fresh paint and old money, and Celia Marsh had loved it for thirty years the way you love a difficult parent: without illusion, without cure.

She arrived at the stage door at five o’clock exactly, because the half was at six twenty-five and Celia Marsh did not scurry. Ray at the door stood up when he saw her, which he had done every working day of the eleven productions they had shared, and which still, privately, she noted and banked.

“First preview, Miss Marsh.” He held the door as though the building itself were being presented to her. “House is sold out. They’ve been queuing for returns since four.”

“Of course they have, Ray. Where else would they be?”

It came out warm, and he laughed, and the exchange cost her nothing, which was the point of having done a thing for thirty years. You learned where the free warmth was kept.

Then she saw the poster.

It had gone up that afternoon in the glass case beside the door, the redesign the marketing department had been promising all summer. VERMILION, in letters the colour of arterial blood. By Marguerite Hale. And there, above the title, because above the title was contractual: CELIA MARSH.

Smaller.

Not dramatically smaller. Nothing you could take to a lawyer. A point size, perhaps two, surrendered to the swollen title treatment, to the director’s credit, to the quote from the Sunday feature. The kind of adjustment a designer would defend with a straight face and a word like balance.

Celia stood in front of the case for precisely as long as it would take a passer-by to think she was admiring it, and then she went inside.

The corridor to the dressing rooms ran beneath the stage, past props tables, fire buckets and a noticeboard crowded with rotas, takeaway menus and a postcard from an actor who had left for Sydney in June. Victorian brick walls were painted the green of institutional calm. Pipes ticked along the ceiling like a house settling. Beneath the noise of the get-in and the tannoy’s static breath, the building had a pulse you could stand inside. She had missed it through the summer workshops, technical rehearsals and press days. A theatre was only alive when an audience was coming.

Dressing Room One stood at the end, her name on the door in the company’s careful serif. Inside: the long mirror with its border of bare bulbs, the daybed the stage management team called the fainting couch, her costumes on the rail in their calico shrouds, the good chair she had brought from home in 1997 and taken to every theatre since, like a hermit crab dragging its shell.

She locked the door. That was first. Then the ritual, unchanged in thirty years, and never once described to another living soul.

Cards from the first: read, ordered, stood on the shelf below the mirror. The little brass hare from her dresser on Amphitryon, positioned to face the door, ears forward. The text of the play, read aloud, only the first line and the last, because the first line was a promise and the last was a destination and everything in between was tonight’s business, not yet earned. Then her face, taken off and put back on, the woman removed and Constance Villiers assembled in the mirror piece by piece, and somewhere in the middle of that transaction, always, the moment of vacancy: the thirty seconds in which the mirror held nobody at all, neither the woman nor the role. Celia Marsh, if pressed, would have admitted that those thirty seconds were the closest thing she had to a religion.

Her hands were trembling.

She watched them do it with clinical interest, the way you would watch weather. First preview. Hands were entitled to an opinion. But it was not only the hands, and she knew it was not only the hands, because under the dressing table, out of sight of the mirror even with nobody there to see, her right ankle was strapped into the support brace her physio had prescribed in August after the tendon flared in the tech for the Chichester transfer. Costume covered it. The floor-length rust silk of Constance’s first entrance covered a multitude of sins, which, Celia had observed to the designer, was the only kind of costume worth having at her age. The designer had laughed. The designer was twenty-nine.

The body was keeping score now. Nobody put that truth of forty-nine in the profiles. The face could be managed. The face was a professional matter between herself and the lighting designer. The body was different. The ankle noticed the rake. The knee counted the staircase. A two-show day drained her stamina to the silt. She ran her thumb along the edge of the brace beneath the silk, as though touching a tooth that had begun to ache in the night.

Then she stood, because it was five forty, and she wanted the stage to herself before the house opened.

She did not get it.

She heard the voice before she reached the wings: down the corridor from the understudy room, pitched low, running lines at speed, and Celia knew the speech before she knew the speaker, because the speech was hers. Constance, Act Two, the letter monologue. Six minutes alone on stage, the aria the whole revival hung from, the reason the Belvedere had come begging to her agent last spring.

Coming from the mouth of Wren Halloran it sounded like a knife being sharpened.

Celia stopped in the corridor, which she despised herself for, and listened for four lines, which was worse. The girl was fast. Not gabbling: fast the way a good driver is fast, all the corners still there but taken on the true line, no ornament, no reverence. Ten years, Celia thought. Ten years the woman had been folded into the back of her career like a bill you decline to open. Three productions. Never on. Never once on, because Celia Marsh did not miss performances; the last time she had missed a performance there had been a Labour government and her marriage had still, technically, been alive.

She walked on. The understudy-room door stood open, and as Celia passed it the voice stopped, mid-sentence, on the word forgiveness.

“That speech is marked andante, Miss Halloran. You take it like a getaway car.”

Wren Halloran leaned into the doorway with the text nowhere in sight. Thirty-four; Irish; a face all cheekbone and challenge; ten years of Soho bar shifts in the forearms. Her eyes had the settled insolence of a person with nothing left to lose by being right.

“It’s marked andante in your copy,” she said. “Hale’s 1968 typescript has no tempo note at all. The andante was pencilled in by the original director because his Constance was sixty and slowing. You’re quoting a compromise.”

The corridor did what corridors do: it emptied of air.

“You’ve read the sixty-eight typescript.”

“I’ve read everything.” She said it without heat, a bricklayer stating the wall. “Break a leg tonight, Miss Marsh.”