Page 20 of Her Leading Lady

“Since,” she said at last, “I don’t know what it is. That’s the truth, Bunny, and you may have it because you paid thirty years for it: I don’t know what it is. There’s been one incident and one thousand adjacent ones. It has no name yet. And before you ask the professional question underneath, no. I don’t know what I’d do if it acquired one.”

Bunny studied her for a long moment, and what came into the old agent’s face was not strategy but something gentler and infinitely more alarming.

“Well,” she said. “Thirty years I’ve waited to hear you say I don’t know about anything. I’d order champagne if it wasn’t going to be such a catastrophic quarter.” She put the envelope away. “I’ll kill the picture desk with the feud-healed line for now. But Celia: these things acquire names on other people’s schedules. Decide on yours.”

The fight about visibility happened that night, in the dressing room, and it was the first fight they’d ever had as whatever-they-were rather than as rivals, which meant neither knew the rules, which meant it drew real blood.

It began with Celia relaying Bunny’s envelope, as operational intelligence, in the armoured register: assets, exposure, containment. And Wren, who had listened with her arms folding tighter by the sentence, said at the end, quietly, “You’re aware I’m out. I’ve been out since I was twenty-three. My da found out from a newspaper piece on a play I was in that called me an openly gay actress in the fifth paragraph. That’s how out arrives in Athlone. I lived it, and it cost what it cost, and here I still am. So all this containment. I need you to say plainly what’s being contained. The photographs? Or me?”

“That is not fair.”

“No, it probably isn’t, and I’m asking anyway.”

“I am not ashamed of you.” Celia’s voice came out low and shaking, off the armoury register entirely. “Whatever else you take from this room tonight, you will take that. I have been bisexual since before you could read, Wren. I have known it the way you know a room in your house you keep locked. And exactly one person in my life ever had the key, and her name was Fen, and when it ended, in 1994, in a fashion I will tell you about some other year, I locked the room and I put the profession in front of the door, and the profession has been standing there for thirty years, and it is very good at its job.” Her hands were flat on the counter, steadying. “So this is not shame. This is a woman who watched the one uncontained thing in her life burn down, deciding never to hold anything flammable again, and it worked, it worked entirely, until an Irish understudy with no armour whatsoever moved a kettle into my dressing room. There is no us I’m ashamed of. There is an us I don’t know how to survive.”

The word sat in the room, enormous.

“You said us,” said Wren.

“Inside a denial. It’s the only container I had to hand.”

“It’s still the first time you’ve said it.” Wren looked at her across the yellow line, and the anger had gone somewhere else, transmuted. “I’ll take it. God help me, that’s the state of me now: I’ll take an us in a denial, from you, and call it a good Wednesday.”

Celia watched Wren’s show on the Friday from the house.

Not the wings. She bought a seat, or had Bunny buy one, row H, on the aisle, under another name, and sat among the civilians in the dark like a spy in her own country, and watched Constance Villiers played by Wren Halloran from the front, whole, framed, the way the world saw her, for the first time.

And in the fourth act, at the line Celia had spoken two hundred times herself, Constance at the window, the visitor gone, the letters burning: I find I have spent the great fortune of my life on the waiting room, and the play was in the next room all along. Celia Marsh, who had delivered that line to two hundred houses dry-eyed and been praised for the restraint, sat in row H in the dark, unrecognised, and wept.

Not at the play. At the sentence, arriving after thirty years, with her name on it.

By the curtain she had stopped, repaired, applauded with the rest. But walking out through the foyer crowd, past the poster with the two names the same size, she had decided something, and she carried the decision home through the wet lit city the way you carry something bought at auction, terrified and certain, not yet knowing where in the house it will hang.

Not tonight, she told it, in the cab’s dark, and was answered from the back of her own skull in a voice that might have been the girl at Whitby, or Fen’s, or wholly her own, entirely unimpressed: then soon. You heard the line. The waiting room’s on fire.

CHAPTER 16

The Sunday came up rare and shared: no show for either of them, no calls, a whole unallocated day sitting in the schedule like a field, and Wren, standing at the kettle on the Saturday night, heard herself say, “Come to Mass with me tomorrow.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Figure of speech. Come north. There’s a pub does a lock-in Sunday afternoons, my local, the Rose of Athlone off the Kentish Town Road, and before you make the face, it’s not an outing, it’s the opposite of an outing. Nobody in that pub has been to a theatre since the Pope was an altar boy. Nobody will know you. That’s the entire gift of the place, that’s what I’m offering: four hours in a room where you’re not the definite article. You can have a half of Guinness and lose at darts and be absolutely nobody, and I’d put money you’ve not been absolutely nobody since 1996.”

Celia opened her mouth to decline on principle, and what came out, from somewhere behind the principles, was: “I haven’t held a dart since drama school.”

“That,” said Wren, “will be extremely obvious extremely quickly.”

The disguise question occupied Celia for most of Sunday morning, by phone, with a seriousness Wren found almost unbearably endearing. Sunglasses read as celebrity. A headscarf read as celebrity in a headscarf. Wren’s counsel, delivered while eating toast, was that the pub had no working assumptions that needed defeating: “You’re overthinking the tradecraft. Wear a fleece. Nobody in the history of that pub has looked twice at a woman in a fleece.” There was a silence on the line, and then Celia Marsh said, in the tone of a woman agreeing to appear nude, “I don’t own a fleece,” and Wren laughed so hard she had to sit down on the kitchen floor, and brought her one of Deb’s, navy, bobbled at the cuffs, and the reigning grande dame of the West End wore it all afternoon and was, Wren would swear to this for the rest of her life, visibly reluctant to give it back.

The Rose of Athlone was low-ceilinged, horse-brassed, and loyal, its Sunday congregation consisting of Kerry the landlady, two dominoes schools, a greyhound called Marge, and a shifting parliament of men named variously Mick, and when Wren came through the side door at two with a tall Englishwoman on a walking stick, the parliament looked up once, established that neither of them was the VAT man, and went back to the dominoes.

Nobody knew her. Wren watched it land, watched Celia scan the room on entry out of thirty years’ habit, reading for recognition the way sailors read for weather, and find none, none at all, and watched something in the woman’s shoulders come down half an inch that Wren suspected had been up since the nineties.

What followed was four hours Wren stored away entire, knowing even as they happened that she was storing them.

Celia drank Guinness in halves and became catastrophically bad at darts. She approached every throw with the full apparatus: stance addressed like Gertrude, dart inspected like a disappointing script. Twice she hit the surround, once a beam and once, to parliamentary uproar, the dominoes table. Kerry confiscated the darts on public-safety grounds and bought her another half for services to entertainment.

Somewhere in the third hour, the dominoes parliament adopted her. Mick the elder needed a fourth player when Mick the younger’s phone rang, and the tall Englishwoman was nearest. From behind the bar, Wren watched Celia learn dominoes badly from three retired men who had no idea they were addressing two Oliviers. They heckled her. She gave it back. She argued over a disputed spinner in her full Court voice until the table roared. Mick the elder told her gravely that she had a good head but needed patience. Celia replied that he was the first director in twenty years to give her a useful note. Kerry sent chips. Marge the greyhound put her head on Celia’s famous knee and was allowed to leave it there for an hour.