Page 18 of Her Leading Lady

For the record, since records are all I can keep this week: I have watched you across a dressing room for two months wanting things you think you hide. You hide nothing. You are the worst-armoured person I have ever met in this profession, and I have begun to depend on it, the way one depends on the only unlocked door in a burning building. The wanting has not bent you, Miss Halloran. It has made you the only person I know who still points at things.

Wren read the words. The kitchen changed pressure, as rooms often did around them now. For a moment the island had the width of the dressing-room tape. Neither woman moved. The fever was real, the silence was medical, and both were still pretending that rules could contain what was happening.

She left at midnight. At the door, the goodbye ran long. It ran two beats too long, then a third. Celia stood in the doorway wrapped in the dressing gown, and Wren on the mat with her empty bag for life, close enough to feel the fever’s warmth arriving off her skin, and the corridor’s dim light did what dim light does, and every one of the fourteen available goodnights was wrong: the words too small, the nod absurd, the hand-touch a border no treaty covered. In the end Wren simply looked at her, the way you look when the eyebrow language runs out, and said, “Drink the rest of it hot. I’ll see you at the theatre,” and made herself turn, and heard the door not close until she was all the way into the lift.

On the bus she told herself, with great firmness, that it had been soup for a sick colleague, a mercy visit, the done thing, and that the pressure change in the kitchen had been fever and whiskey and two tired women mistaking honesty for something else.

In the flat, Celia stood a long while in the corridor of magnificent strangers, and then took the Whitby photograph out from behind the dictionary and stood it, facing the room, in front.

Fever, she told the girl in the wind, who laughed on, eyes shut, unpersuaded. It’s the fever.

Neither woman convinced her audience. Both slept badly, three miles apart, in the same direction.

CHAPTER 14

Jonathan Wexler booked the quiet table at the back of the members’ club, which was how Wren knew before the water arrived that whatever was coming was radioactive.

“I’ll speak plainly,” he said, which from Jonathan announced the opposite, and then, over forty minutes and two courses Wren mostly didn’t eat, he laid it out. New York. The producers he’d flown out to see in October, the ones the company thought had been about the musical. A Broadway transfer of Vermilion in the spring: the Barrow, eight hundred seats, limited season, the sort of dates that turned a London success into an American career. Serious money already circling. One thing, and one thing only, still unresolved.

“The role-share doesn’t travel,” said Jonathan, aligning his knife with the table’s edge. “Broadway doesn’t buy a time-share on a star; their words, not mine, though I’d defend the underlying maths. They want one Constance, eight shows a week, name above the title. And so the question becomes which Constance, and I want you to hear, in this room, from me, that it is a genuinely open question. That’s not a thing I say often, and I never say it twice.”

“She built this production,” said Wren. “It transfers because of her.”

“It transfers because of what the two of you turned it into, and you know it.” He let the waiter clear, timing his sentences round the interruptions like a man who rehearsed at tables. “But eight shows a week is a medical question as much as an artistic one, and the insurance market has a long memory and no poetry in it whatsoever. I’m told her recovery has plateaued. I’m told a New York underwriter looks at a forty-nine-year-old ankle with a metal appointment in its future and prices accordingly.” He looked at her then, direct, almost kind, which was the most frightening register he had. “Nothing is decided. The Americans come over in the new year to see the show, both casts. All I’m asking of you tonight is this: be ready. Keep your Mondays clean, keep your representation close, and keep this conversation between us. Can you do that?”

And Wren Halloran, who had waited ten years for a man at a table to say words in this family, heard herself say neither yes nor no. She said, “I hear you,” which she would spend the next six weeks discovering was the most expensive sentence of her life, and walked out into Soho with the whole city tilted five degrees off true.

Be ready. Keep it between us. She stood at the crossing on Old Compton Street and did the sums she couldn’t unsee: one Constance. A plateaued recovery. An underwriter’s cold arithmetic. And on the other side of the scales a woman in a museum flat who had written you are the only unlocked door in a burning building on a notepad and turned it round with fever-bright eyes.

The secret went to work on everything, exactly the way secrets do.

It was in the dressing room by the next evening, invisible, structural, like damp. Wren heard herself go careful. The banter still ran but she was watching it now, editing in transit, because every second sentence led somewhere mined: Celia mentioned the spring and Wren changed lanes. Celia, running the schedule, wondered aloud what Jonathan was plotting, he’s too quiet, that man’s silences have line items, and Wren laughed one beat late and felt the laugh come out counterfeit, and saw, in the mirror’s edge, the flicker of Celia clocking it.

Celia, who missed nothing in a theatre, read the withdrawal within days and, being Celia, ran it through the only decryption she owned: fault. Her own. The flat, the notepad, the unlocked door; she had shown too much, the girl had been kind about it, and the kindness had curdled into this new careful distance the way kindness did. Too much, said the old voice, with Nigel’s cadence. You showed her the vacancy and she’s begun politely backing toward the exits. So Celia re-armoured, one plate at a time: the tape-line jokes came back with edges; the eyebrow language went formal; the mirror hours were suddenly enforced like statute, and each woman watched the other recede and catalogued it as confirmation.

Deb, receiving the nightly dispatches from the front, put down her tea one evening and said: “So let me get the shape of it. You’ve a secret you can’t tell her, and to keep from telling it you’ve gone weird, and she’s clocked the weird, and she thinks the weird is about her, and her fix for that is going full Snow Queen, and your fix for that is going weirder. Babe, I’ve seen this play. You made me watch it. It’s the one where everyone dies in the last act because nobody sent one text.”

“That’s Hamlet, more or less.”

“It’s yours if you keep this up,” said Deb, “more or less.”

A scenery wall slipped on a Thursday at eleven forty at night.

Wren’s show had finished and the crew were carrying out their weekly post-show checks. The stage was almost empty. Two carpenters were working behind the set, Trish was signing paperwork at the corner, and the two Constances were crossing the deck together. A temporary brace gave way with a crack. One of the tall vermilion flats lurched off its chocks and slammed onto the deck six feet from them. Wren felt the impact in her sternum for a week.

Silence followed. Then the carpenters shouted and Trish’s voice rose above them, taking control.

Wren moved before thought caught up. She seized Celia with both hands and swung them into the shadow of the proscenium. Now Celia’s back was against the cold iron frame of the safety curtain. Wren’s fists were full of grey cashmere. Six inches separated their faces, and both women breathed like sprinters.

“You’re all right,” said Wren. It wasn’t a question, and her voice came out wrong, low and shaking. “You’re all right.”

“The flat,” said Celia, with magnificent irrelevance, “was nowhere near my ankle.” Then she stopped. Six inches was not enough space for either of them to perform, and they realised it together.

The falling scenery had burned away the fog. Every careful sentence of the previous fortnight, every evasion and every counterfeit laugh, vanished. Only the truth remained. It stood six inches from Wren in grey cashmere, a pulse beating visibly in its throat.

Trish ordered everyone off the stage until the carpenters had secured the set and the duty engineer had inspected it. Incident forms were waiting in the office. The working lights went out in banks. Wren and Celia stepped apart, walked off like professionals and made it as far as the wardrobe corridor.

Afterwards, neither could say who turned first. Wren remembered the dark corridor and the adrenaline still racing through her. Celia stopped at the wardrobe-room door, began a sentence about incident forms and abandoned it. Then the six inches closed. Their mouths met hard enough to erase the question of who had begun it. Inside the wardrobe room, among the hanging rails, Wren locked the door with the hand that was not already in Celia’s hair. “Tell me to stop and I’m stopped.”