Page 26 of Her Leading Lady

We just used it, she thought. The one unarmed room we had. We took the fight in there with us, and now it’s armed like everywhere else.

Beside her, Celia slept, or performed sleep magnificently. Loving a great actress made the distinction impossible. Wren lay awake with the secret. After the rain stopped, she rose for water and searched the floor for something to wear. When she lifted Celia’s discarded bag, the accident that ended Wren’s belief in her own innocence occurred.

The bag tipped. Its contents slewed across the floorboards in the half-light, and Wren, kneeling, gathering lipstick and keys by feel, found her hands full of a thing that stopped her breath: a second ankle brace, heavier gauge than the one the building knew about, industrial, scuffed with use. And beneath it, corner-bent from carrying, a small notebook, and she should not have opened it and opened it, and it was numbers. Columns, in the fierce exact hand she knew from the margins of 1998: dates, performances, and against each one a score out of ten, and the column was headed, in full, PAIN, and there was no score below six anywhere in the last month, and the Wednesday of the Americans said nine.

Wren knelt on her own cold floor in the almost-dark, holding the secret ledger of what five shows a week was actually costing, hearing eight shows a week is a medical question in a producer’s reasonable voice, and understood that the woman asleep six feet away was in far worse trouble than anyone knew, and was hiding it, from the building, from the underwriters, from her, with a discipline that made every performance a forgery of health. Wren’s heart, which had walked in on this war certain of at least its own side, did the thing that doomed the next month entire.

It chose protection. Silently, unilaterally, in the dark, with the ledger in its hands.

She can’t do eight shows, thought Wren. She may not see out five. If I refuse New York and force the both-or-nothing, I force her broken ankle onto Broadway or I force the truth out of her ledger and into the insurance file, and either way I break her with my own gallantry. The refusal has to wait. The truth has to wait. I have to hold this alone until I can see the way through.

She put the ledger back. She put the brace back, exactly, corner to corner, spy-craft learned in one night. And she climbed back into bed beside the woman she loved and lay guarding one more secret than she’d risen with, which made, by her own count, in that one bed, at that one hour, at minimum four. And outside the window the London sky went the colour of iron, turning over toward morning, like something enormous rolling in its sleep.

CHAPTER 21

The consultant’s rooms were in a Georgian terrace off Harley Street, and the consultant himself had the gentle, upholstered directness of a man who delivered bad news for a living at four hundred pounds the half hour.

“The scans are not what I hoped,” he said, turning the screen toward her, and Celia looked at the ghostly architecture of her own ankle, the bright seams and shadows of it, with the detached attention she gave to reviews in which she already knew the verdict. “The fracture’s consolidating, slowly. The ligament complex is not. At eight weeks I’d want to see organisation here, and here, and what I see instead is a joint under ongoing load behaving exactly as though someone is doing five theatrical performances a week on it.” He looked at her over his glasses, not unkindly. “The tissue doesn’t lie, Miss Marsh, even when the patient’s diary does.”

“And the trajectory?”

“On the current load, the honest word is career-modifying.” He said it the way the profession’s euphemisms are always said, in a kind voice, wearing its best suit. “There’s a surgical option, a reconstruction. Done soon, done properly, with a genuine off-season after it, the outcome’s good. Done late, after another insult to the joint, after, say, a season of eight shows a week on a New York stage,” he let the scan speak for a moment, “we are in different territory. Territory with a stick in it, on bad days, for good.”

“How long can I run as I am?”

“Medically? Weeks, not months. Actuarially?” A dry, terrible little smile. “I’d not insure you across the road.”

She thanked him, because she had been raised to, and she took the leaflets, because refusing them made a scene. She walked out into the Georgian afternoon and stood on the pavement among the brass plates, and made her decision in the time it took a taxi’s light to come round the square, which is to say that she did not make a decision at all. She consulted the engine that had driven her for thirty years, and the engine said what it always said: the show is sold. The light is yours. Nothing is wrong that discipline cannot conceal.

She doubled the painkillers, inside the licensed dose, she was scrupulous about the label, scrupulosity being the hypochondria of the disciplined, and she gave, that Friday, the performance of the run.

At the window, Constance held the burning letters. I find I have spent the great fortune of my life on the waiting room. Celia had once wept at the line from row H. Now she played it against a nine in the ledger and white heat climbing her leg on every crossing. She fed the pain through technique until it emerged as radiance. Nine hundred people saw none of it. One woman in the wings saw everything.

Wren stood in her spot with her arms wrapped round herself and watched the forgery of health win four curtain calls, and made, in the dark, her own arrangements.

She had tried, once, obliquely, to open the medical question by the only door the war’s borders left ajar: professionally. A Tuesday, the two of them briefly alone with the schedule, and Wren had said, neutral as a call sheet, “The restage has the diagonal running long on Fridays. If you wanted it shortened, Dougie would take it as a lighting note, no questions.” And Celia had looked at her for a moment with something that was almost gratitude and entirely refusal, and said, “The diagonal is fine, Miss Halloran,” and the door had clicked shut, courteously, on the fingers of the attempt. The armistice zone had a kettle in it, and ice, and silence. It did not, yet, have words.

The care system rebuilt itself without one word of negotiation. That was the strange tenderness of that fortnight, the thing neither of them would ever quite find the language for afterwards: two women at silent war across a field of stacked secrets, New York, the meeting, the ledger, the drafts folder, and in the middle of the field, nightly, undiscussed, a small demilitarised zone with a kettle in it. Wren simply resumed. Ice, appearing at the interval in its towel, placed at the right height without comment. The footstool migrating back to its station under the counter. The tea remade when it went cold, the crutch retrieved from where it had slid, the last flight of stairs to the stage door contrived, night after night, by unhurried conversational pacing, to be taken slowly, together, as though dawdling were a style and not a mercy.

And Celia let her.

It cost more than the performances. Letting Wren care for her was the hardest labour in the building. Celia had guarded her body like a state secret for thirty years. Her marriage had finally failed because she could not bear to be seen tired. Now she sat in the good chair while the woman she loved and fought knelt on the dressing-room floor and repositioned the ice around her ankle. Wren’s hands were gentle and exact. She asked for nothing. The lamplight rested on her bowed head.

On the second Friday of their unspoken armistice, the room went quiet and stayed that way.

The show had finished. The nine in Celia’s ledger had honestly been an eight. Wren changed the ice, then remained on her knees. Her thumb moved once along the arch of Celia’s foot beneath the swelling. It was a practical touch, warm and almost absent-minded. Celia heard herself speak in a voice she did not recognise.

“I can’t tonight. Be careful with me tonight. I’m held together with strapping and Radio 3.”

It was the first plea of its kind in her adult life. Not a refusal, because Celia had refused often and magnificently. This was disclosure. I cannot. Be careful. Me, unretouched. Wren looked up with nothing but attention on her face. “Then we go carefully. Or we go nowhere, and I stay here for a while. Either is a full evening in my book.”

They went carefully.

On the daybed, in the lamplight, Wren undressed her without hurry. She did not avoid the injured ankle or pretend not to notice it. She lifted Celia’s leg into her lap, unfastened the soft night brace and set it aside. The skin beneath was swollen and mottled. Wren studied it openly, without pity or alarm, then bent and kissed the worst of the bruising. “Right,” she said. “Now I know what I’m working with.”

She gave the same attention to the rest of Celia. Her mouth moved slowly up the uninjured leg. Her hands asked before they pressed, opened or entered. Here? Is this yes? Tell me how much. Celia could not perform ease after asking for care, so she stopped trying. Appetite rose beneath the fear, specific and undignified. She laughed twice. Then Wren’s mouth and fingers found the rhythm that broke her breath apart. Celia came without distance from herself, crying out and gripping the daybed. Afterwards, tears slid into her hair while Wren held her and asked for no explanation.

There was only one explanation, and Celia gave it to the ceiling at two in the morning.