Page 2 of Her Leading Lady

And she was gone, back into the little room with the mismatched chairs, before Celia could decide which of the fourteen available replies would leave the deepest mark. Which was, Celia conceded, walking on toward the stage with her pulse absurdly loud, the most infuriating thing a person could ever do to her. She collected last words the way other women collected shoes.

The stage, when she finally stood on it, forgave everything, because it always did. The set was Marguerite Hale’s drawing room rendered in vermilion and shadow, the great window flown in and lit from behind with the amber of an invented sunset, and out beyond the smell of size and sawdust sat nine hundred and six seats in red plush, empty, waiting, hers.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the Vermilion company, this is your half-hour call. Thirty minutes, please.”

She stood in the false sunset and made the theatre the promise she had made at every first preview since she was twenty-two, and if her ankle throbbed inside its brace while she made it, that was between her and the building.

The performance, for two acts, went the way her performances went, which is to say the way sixty ranked and sold-out weeks a year had gone for three decades. The house was hot; previews always ran hot; they laughed at the lines the Chichester audiences had received in respectful silence and were silent where Chichester had coughed. She could feel the company lifting around her the way a crew feels a fair wind. Little Trish Adeyemi on the book in the prompt corner, headset glowing. Dougie Aird somewhere in the dark of row F with his notepad he never seemed to write in. And in the wings, stage left, in the shadow by the fly rail where the understudies were permitted to stand, a shape Celia did not look at and was aware of continuously, the way you are aware of a window behind you.

Then, six minutes into the letter monologue, in the silence of nine hundred people, the words went.

Not faded. Went. She reached the line about the unsent letter, the line she had spoken perhaps two hundred times since the first workshop, and where the line should have been there was a white room. Nothing in it. Not the word, not the shape of the word, not the memory that words existed. Constance stood at the great window with the letter in her hand, and inside Constance, in the white room, Celia Marsh looked at the vacancy and the vacancy looked back.

Three seconds. She counted them afterwards from the wing recording, three seconds, which on a stage is a geological age. The house never knew. Constance let the letter tremble, let her chin come up as though mastering feeling, and the pause read as the evening’s rawest moment; a critic at the second preview would later call it the bravest breath in London. On the fourth second the line came home, and Celia took the speech to its end on rails, and the applause at the curtain was long and standing.

But walking off through stage left she made the error of looking into the shadow by the fly rail, and the shadow was looking back. Wren Halloran, arms crossed, unreadable, and in her eyes not admiration, not even the usual insolence, but attention. Total, forensic, terrifying attention. The attention of the only person in the building who had heard the silence for exactly what it was.

Neither of them said anything. That was somehow the worst of it.

The notes session afterwards happened in the stalls bar, warm white wine and Dougie’s murmured half-sentences, the company draped over banquettes in the giddy exhaustion of a first preview landed. Celia sat with her back to the mirror pillar and her ankle, discreetly, on a stool.

Jonathan Wexler arrived at ten to midnight, because producers arrive when the work is over. He was a broad, silvering man who wore his cashmere like armour and had the trick, which Celia had watched him practise for twenty years, of saying the unforgivable thing in the tone of the reasonable one.

“Magnificent, darling. Truly. The monologue: that pause. People will talk about that pause.” He touched her shoulder, two fingers, a benediction. Then, to Dougie, at a volume calibrated to reach her: “We should look at the contingency schedule this week, while everything’s calm. Insurance are being tedious about it. Nothing sinister. Housekeeping.”

Contingency. In the trade of Jonathan Wexler, a whole sentence folded into a word: she is forty-nine, she is carrying an ankle, I have seen the physio invoices in the production accounts, and I am a man who insures things.

Celia smiled at him across the bar, her very best smile, the one that had closed the first act of three different plays.

“Jonathan,” she said, “I have never missed a performance in my life, and I intend to die having never missed one. Ideally onstage, in the light, mid-sentence, and long after you’ve retired.”

Laughter, the whole bar, on cue. He raised his glass to her. The moment passed, as she had built it to pass.

But in the taxi home through the wet black shine of Shaftesbury Avenue, with her ankle unbraced at last and pulsing like a second heart, Celia Marsh sat very still in the corner of the seat and made a private vow, the kind you make in the dark with all the sincerity of terror. Indestructible. She would be indestructible. She had a white room opening in her memory and a producer pricing her decline and an understudy in the wings who watched her the way archaeologists watch a tell, and it did not matter, none of it, because she would simply refuse. Refuse to slip, refuse to age, refuse to fall.

The city slid past, lit and indifferent. Somewhere behind her the Belvedere went dark, and the ghost light stood alone on the stage of Vermilion, burning all night at the centre of the set like a sentry, or a warning she had declined, for thirty years, to read.

CHAPTER 2

Wren Halloran woke at noon to the sound of Deb murdering a spin class in the sitting room, and lay for a moment in the particular grey of a Kentish Town ceiling, doing what she always did first: the day’s arithmetic.

Bar shift till three a.m., minus five hours’ sleep, carry the one. Understudy call at four. Show at seven thirty, which for her meant the wings at seven twenty-five, which meant nothing at all, which was the point of the arithmetic. Ten years of days that added up to standing in the dark.

Her phone offered her a text from her father in Athlone, which turned out, on inspection, to be for her brother. Nothing else.

She got up, because the alternative was thinking.

The mirror over the bathroom sink had a crack across the top corner that the landlord had promised to fix during the coalition government, and Wren had long ago stopped seeing it, the way you stop seeing your own nose. She brushed her teeth, spat, straightened, and met her own eyes, and without deciding to, the way other people hum, she began to run Constance.

“You’ll want the letter.” Beat, two, three. “Everyone wants the letter. It’s the wanting I mind, not the reading.”

The crack in the mirror cut across her forehead like a duelling scar. She ran the scene to its end, both parts, her own face doing Constance and the crack doing the visitor, and she did it word-perfect, because she had done it word-perfect for ten years in this exact spot, a private theatre with a full house of nobody, matinees daily, extended by popular demand.

“That’s the creepy one, isn’t it,” said Deb, materialising in the doorway in gym kit with a banana. “The one about the letter. I can tell because you do the thing with your chin.”

“It’s not creepy. It’s the most beautiful speech written for a woman since the war. A man in the Guardian said so.”

“You, alone, in a bathroom, doing a speech another woman gets paid to do, every day, for ten years.” Deb bit the banana. “I’m not saying it’s not art, babe. I’m saying it’s also creepy.”