Page 19 of Her Leading Lady

“If you stop,” said Celia Marsh, with the last coherent breath either of them managed for some time, “I will have you replaced.”

It was frantic and it was wordless after that, ten years of watching detonating all at once in a dark room that smelled of steam and starch. There was nothing graceful in it. Celia’s back against the shelving, costumes swinging on their rails; Wren’s mouth at her throat, her jaw, the cashmere shoved off her shoulders and Celia’s hands, those precise, famous hands, dragging Wren’s shirt free with a roughness that undid her completely. When Wren got a thigh between hers Celia made a sound no stage had ever heard, raw and shocked and hungry, and Wren pulled back just far enough to look at her, pinned and open-mouthed in the dark, the definite article of the English stage coming apart against a wardrobe shelf, and said, wonderingly, “There you are,” and went to her knees.

Celia came with a fist in Wren’s hair and a cry buried against her own arm. She hauled Wren upright and returned the pleasure with interest. Her hands slid beneath Wren’s waistband, deft and merciless, until Wren shook against her. Wren pressed her face to the throat she had watched deliver monologues for a decade and said her name over and over, with no Miss or Marsh attached.

Then the two of them stood among the rails in the dark, holding each other up, hearts slamming, the theatre silent around them except for the tick of the pipes, and sense came back into the room the way cold comes under a door.

They dressed in silence. That was the terrible comedy of it. Wren hunted for her shirt among the fallen costumes while Celia rebuilt herself in the dark, cashmere and composure restored piece by piece. By the time she spoke, the armour was almost complete.

“That never happened,” she said.

“Agreed,” said Wren. “Never happened. Won’t happen again. Freak rigging accident, adrenaline, well documented in the literature.” She buttoned her shirt one hole out of true. “For the record, though, and then I’ll never say it again: I don’t want to be your rival anymore.”

The silence went on long enough that Wren looked up. Celia was watching her across the dark room, and the eyes had not reassembled with the rest of her; the eyes were all the way open.

“Then we have a problem. Rivalry is the only intimacy I have ever mastered. I can survive it because it comes with a blade in each hand and a scoring system. What happened in here had neither.” Celia unlocked the door. The corridor light caught a face that did not believe in freak accidents. “It was unarmed, Wren. I have spent thirty years making certain nobody ever got me alone in a room with that.”

“And now?”

“Now,” said Celia Marsh, stepping out into the corridor with her coat immaculate and her voice not quite level, “we are going to say goodnight, and go home in separate taxis, and agree that this never happened, and I am going to spend the hours until morning discovering whether I am still capable of believing my own performances. Goodnight, Wren.”

It was the first time she had ever used the name. They both heard it. Neither of them believed a word of the rest.

CHAPTER 15

Dougie Aird called the rehearsal for noon on Tuesday, both Constances, the visitor, and Trish on the book, and stood in the stalls with his arms folded looking at the Act Two confrontation the way a man looks at a wall he intends to move.

“The scene’s changed,” he said. “Youse have changed it. I watch it Wednesdays, I watch it Fridays, and it’s outgrown the blocking either way. Two women circling a room saying hate with all this other weather underneath. I want the weather in the staging. We’re taking the furniture out of your way.”

For two hours he rebuilt the confrontation around what he called proximity logic, which meant, in practice, that where the old blocking had kept Constance and her visitor’s wife the width of the drawing room apart, the new one wound them closer by degrees, orbit tightening, until the scene’s last accusation was delivered at eighteen inches, face to face, dead centre, in a single tight special.

The scene, as it happened, was played by Celia and the visitor’s wife was played by a perfectly nice actress called Sarah. But it was rehearsed, for cover purposes, in every combination, and so at ten past two, in front of the director, the stage management team, and God, Celia Marsh and Wren Halloran stood on the last mark of the new blocking, eighteen inches apart, in the tight special, and played five pages of text that said hate you, leave this house, I know what you are, while five days of never-happened stood between them like a third performer.

“Closer,” said Dougie, after the first run, and walked between them adjusting nothing visible, a water-diviner working a field. “The orbit tightens on the accusations, no on the retreats. When she advances, you hold. Holding’s the provocation. And the last line,” to Celia, “you’re delivering it like a verdict. It’s not a verdict. A verdict ends something. This,” he stepped back into the dark, “ends nothing, that’s the entire play, away you go again.”

“Better,” said Dougie, from the dark, at the end of the second. “Again.”

They ran it four times. By the third, Trish had stopped looking up from the book, on the principle, she said later, that some weather you don’t stare at. The text said hate and the eighteen inches said everything else. Celia delivered I know what you are with her eyes dropping, for half a syllable, to Wren’s mouth, an act of pure sabotage her own technique committed against her. Wren answered then you know more than most with a softness that had no business anywhere near the line and turned it, in the special’s white circle, into something whispered across a pillow. And in the dark of row F, Dougie Aird watched his two leads set fire to five pages of Marguerite Hale, and said, at the end, in the tone of a man confirming a delivery date:

“That’s the scene now. Sarah, you’ll take the new blocking. Youse two: whatever that is, keep it exactly where I can use it.”

Sarah, gathering her script, paused at Wren’s shoulder on the way out. She was a company veteran of the unglamorous, indispensable kind, four West End decades in supporting parts, and she had watched the four runs from the wings with her glasses pushed up into her hair. “I’ll take the blocking,” she said, at a volume calibrated for exactly one listener. “I’m not taking whatever else was in that special, because it isn’t transferable and the both of you know it.” She patted Wren’s arm once, a professional blessing. “Thirty years I’ve stood next to scenes like that one. Word of advice from the supporting artist: they don’t keep, love. Play it while it’s running.”

Whatever that is. Celia sat in her dressing room afterwards, at her mirror, and had it out with herself in the only room she trusted.

Symptom one: she had checked the wings, tonight and every night since Thursday, for a particular shape at the fly rail, and played to it when found. She knew this behaviour. She had catalogued it in younger colleagues for decades with amused contempt: performing for an audience of one, the classic instrument-flutter of an actor in love, and she was doing it at forty-nine with the eyes of the profession on her.

Symptom two: the never-happened was not holding. It was not holding at the half, when the kettle went on and two mugs came out and their hands managed the small choreography of the counter without incident, each avoidance its own touch. It was not holding at the eighteen-inch mark, demonstrably, in front of witnesses. It was above all not holding at two in the morning, in the museum flat, where Celia Marsh lay awake being visited in high definition by a dark room full of hanging rails, a voice saying there you are, the ruin of thirty years of counter-insurgency in eleven frantic minutes. She, who had made a religion of the seen and the unseen, had been seen, fully, at last. The world had failed to end, and the failure of the world to end was the most destabilising event of her adult life.

The tabloid arrived on Wednesday, in the person of Bunny Feld, who came to lunch with a manila envelope and the face she used for contract disputes and deaths.

“A picture desk rang me this morning,” said Bunny. “Fishing, but with good bait. They have photographs, darling. Nothing indecent, don’t spill anything, but specific: Miss Halloran leaving your building at midnight with a bag for life, three weeks ago. You, admitting her at the door, in a dressing gown. Time-stamped.” She let the envelope lie on the cloth between them, unopened, radiating. “Their working headline has the word cosy in it. They’re deciding between feud healed, which sells tickets and dies in a day, and something juicier, which does not die in a day. What they decide depends partly on what we feed them. So I am asking you, as your agent of thirty years and one of the four people alive who actually knows you: what, precisely, would they be photographing if they kept at it?”

“Soup,” said Celia. “That night, it was soup.”

“And since?”

And Celia Marsh looked at the envelope on the white cloth, and found that she, whose whole apparatus existed for exactly this moment, the deniable phrasing, the graceful reroute, could not for a full five seconds make the apparatus start.