Page 30 of Her Leading Lady

“And you’d rather be watched than known,” said Wren Halloran, point-blank, both barrels, the sentence she had been decent enough never to load in eleven years of knowing where it was kept. “The whole world at the exact distance of a stalls seat, that’s the entire engineering of you, that’s the flat with no photographs and the marriage that starved and the woman in Whitby you keep behind a dictionary. One person got inside the distance in thirty years and look at yourself, look at the state of you, at the first ambiguity you sprinted for the exits and started shelling the way back. You’d rather be watched than known, Celia, and God help me, even now, even tonight, you’re performing this. The exit’s already blocked. You’ve been hitting your marks since you walked in.”

Both lines were true. That was the atrocity of the minute: neither was a lie, neither was even an exaggeration. They were the two truest sentences either woman had ever spoken aloud, each aimed by a decade’s intimacy at the exact join in the other’s armour where the plate met the wound. And both landed, entirely, and both women watched the other take the hit, and both regretted it while the air still held the words, instantly, wholly, unsayably. And neither said so, because the wounds that had aimed the sentences also held the licences for apology, and had suspended them.

Wren left first. There was some traffic of coats and bags, conducted in silence, some final arrangement of the room’s small objects performed by hands needing employment. And at one in the morning, alone, Celia Marsh stood in the middle of Dressing Room One and looked down at the floor, at the ghost of the tape line, torn up weeks ago in some warm forgotten hour and never missed, and then she did not sleep in the building, whatever Reg’s kiosk log implied, but it was late, very late, when she left.

And on Monday, when Wren came in at the half, the line was back. Fresh gaffer, screaming yellow, wall to wall, dead down the old seam: past the daybed, under the rail, between the mirrors, relaid in the night by hands that would never admit to the work. Wren stood looking at it for a long time, and then stepped over it to her own side and said nothing, because there was a show, and there was always a show, and that, now, was all there officially was.

The strangest fortnight in the building’s memory followed, and the company watched it the way you watch weather too big to discuss.

They stopped speaking. Entirely: requests routed through Trish, schedules through the company office, the teas discontinued, the kettle standing on the border like a decommissioned checkpoint. And the show got better. That was the perversity that kept the crew up at night in the pub: the show got measurably, nightly, frighteningly better. The handover Wednesdays crackled. The confrontation scene, played by either of them against Sarah, arrived with a voltage the blocking had never held. And on the one handover night that put them briefly on the same stage at the walkdown, the house, sensing something it could not have named, roared like a Cup crowd. Grief, it turned out, was also fuel. Rage was also craft. They were, the both of them, professionals of the only church that takes everything as tithe, and everything was what there currently was.

The press smelled the smoke inside four days. WAR PAINT AT THE BELVEDERE, THE SEQUEL, ran the diary that had run it first, all those months ago: sources describe relations between the co-leads as arctic. Separate calls. Separate cars. The two-headed Constance, it seems, has bitten itself, and this time the sources were not one producer seeding weather. This time the sources were forty people with eyes. And this time Jonathan Wexler read the coverage in his office with his coffee going cold and did not enjoy it, because feud copy sells a rivalry, but what was in the building now did not photograph as rivalry. It photographed as a funeral, and funerals close.

And in the same week, in perfect secret symmetry, each woman killed her own dream rather than win this way.

Wren did it on the Tuesday, at her agent’s office, in four minutes, against forty minutes of increasingly desperate professional counsel. Maureen deployed everything in the nine-year arsenal: the mortgage argument, the moment argument, the there-are-forty-actresses-who-would-crawl-to-JFK argument, and finally, standing, the personal one, delivered with real anguish: “I’ve watched you wait ten years for a door, love. I was there for the years. You’re standing in the door. I’m asking you as someone who gave a decade to getting you here: why?” And Wren, at the window, watching the Soho rain, had given her the only answer in stock, which had the disadvantage of being incomprehensible and the advantage of being true: “Because I finally worked out what the waiting was for, Mo. And it isn’t on Sixth Avenue.” She declined the offer. Formally, irrevocably, in writing, her own eleven words in the reply where the exclamation-marked clauses had been: I’m grateful, and the answer is no. The role is a share. She signed nothing else, proposed nothing else, asked for nothing. She walked out onto the wet street and stood breathing like a woman who has finally set down a coal, and she did not tell Celia, because Celia would read it as strategy, the grand gesture as gambit, the understudy loving the part more cleverly. There was no message that silence had left deliverable.

Celia did it on the Thursday, by telephone, to Bunny, in one sentence that Bunny made her repeat because the line was bad or the world was: “Stand the New York pitch down, all of it, withdraw the deck, and tell them the dual model goes forward without me or not at all, no, you heard it right, without me, W-I-T-H, honestly, Bunny, and get them to give her whatever she asks.” She put the phone down on her agent’s protests and stood at the museum flat’s window, watching the city light itself one window at a time, having just, in eleven words of her own, dismantled the only version of the spring that had her name in it, for the sake of a woman she was not speaking to. She did not tell Wren, because Wren would read it as martyrdom, the fortress commissioning its own statue. There was no message that silence had left deliverable.

Two refusals, crossing in the dark like night boats, each woman scuttling her own fleet in secret to spare the other, each certain she alone had struck the colours. The ironic machinery of the third act now fully wound, ticking, and not one soul in London, not the company, not the agents, not the diarists, not Trish herself, in possession of both facts. And the yellow line ran wall to wall through the middle of everything, relaid by hands neither would admit to, holding a border between two people who had, that same week, each given the other the whole disputed country, and burned the deed, and told no one.

CHAPTER 25

The silence, by its third week, had furniture.

Nobody warned you that a room would keep house for both sides of a war. Each evening the dressing room testified against them in the language of objects. Wren’s kettle still held enough water for two cups, though one was never poured, or was poured away, or went cold unseen. Celia did not ask. She knew. Her good chair remained angled fifteen degrees from the mirror, the exact position from which she could watch Wren’s reflection run lines without turning her head. She noticed in the third week and did not move it. She despised herself for noticing and for leaving it there.

On the shared mirror, one last artefact survived the war’s hygiene. The lipstick notes had gone in the first week, scrubbed by whichever combatant reached the glass first, and the mirror stood clinical now except for the top left corner, where a single word in Arterial, always, the tail end of some longer vanished sentence, had somehow never been wiped. The cleaner had asked Trish once whether to do it. Trish had looked at the word for a moment and said leave it, it’s set dressing, and the word stayed, and both women dressed in front of it nightly, and neither ever acknowledged it or ever once sat where it wasn’t visible.

The hare faced Wren’s mirror still. Neither woman had moved him. Borders had shifted, treaties had burned, and the brass hare held his ground with his ears forward like the last neutral observer of a collapsed accord, on duty, unrelieved.

The company adapted to the cold front the way companies do, with rotas and black humour and a sweepstake. The crew’s book, run from the fly floor with the discretion of a Swiss bank, offered odds on reconciliation by closing night, by press night New York, by never. Trish, discovering it, confiscated the book on principle, was observed reading it at the prompt corner, and was widely reported to have placed, before returning it with a caution, a private tenner on a date she declined to disclose. Wardrobe, more tender-hearted, simply grieved: the dresser who had once laced two women into one interval said it was like watching your parents at opposite ends of a christening, and got a warning look from Trish and a chocolate biscuit from the wig room, both of which she felt she had earned.

They ran the war with full professional honours. Notes went through Trish, who had stopped edging her deliveries with commentary and now transported them with the flat face of a woman carrying munitions she disapproved of. Schedules were observed to the minute; covers were confirmed; on handover Wednesdays the costume passed between them via the dresser, folded, immaculate, like the flag of a country neither could visit anymore. In the wings they stood their watches on opposite sides now, and if each still watched the other’s Constance entire, every night, without exception, from the first line to the walkdown, that was nobody’s business but the dark’s.

The body kept its own ledger, and in week three it began calling in the debt.

Without the care system, the arithmetic of five shows a week reasserted itself with compound interest. The ice went unchanged at the intervals, or was changed by Celia herself, badly, one-handed, the towel never sitting right. The footstool had gone back to wherever footstools went when nobody moved them. The last flight to the stage door was taken alone now, at speed, pride versus banister, and pride was losing on points. The painkillers stayed scrupulously inside the label and increasingly outside the point. She was sleeping in the boot again. The nines were no longer reserved for special occasions.

On the fourth Wednesday it went public, or as public as she ever let anything go. The company call was at six. She took the stairs down from the stage with the schedule in one hand. The ankle, on the fourth step, simply declined, a white bolt from heel to knee. The world tipped. It was only the banister and thirty years of core control that turned a fall into what the three crew members at the bottom of the stairs saw, which was Miss Marsh pausing mid-flight to consult her paperwork with her hand resting, quite naturally, on the rail, and something wrong, unnameable, gone in a blink, about the colour of her face.

Trish saw it too, from the corridor, and Trish was not crew. Trish had watched this building’s bodies for twenty years. She said nothing, because the terms of her employment as the war’s courier forbade it. But that night, in the prompt corner, she wrote a private line in the margin of her own copy of the show report, undated, unattributed, in the personal shorthand no management would ever audit: 4th step again. Second time this wk. Somebody’s going to have to say it out loud soon, and God help whoever.

Fen resurfaced on the Sunday, at the Redgrave gala, wearing twenty-six years like a light coat.

Celia had accepted the invitation in October, in another geological era, because the gala honoured a director they had both served and refusal would have read as a statement. She had forgotten, in the way you forget a landmine’s serial number, that Fen was on the tribute bill. And then there she was at the reception, across a room of black tie and raised glasses: Fenella Wray, sixty now, the great mane gone iron-grey and worn like a verdict won on appeal, holding court by the windows with a glass of red she wasn’t drinking, and the sight of her did what it had always done, which was reorganise the room so that everything else in it became background.

They managed the public ten minutes flawlessly; they had both been trained by the same profession. It was later, on the smokers’ balcony where neither of them smoked, the London night laid out below in its wet glitter, that Fen set down her untouched glass and did the thing she had come, Celia understood too late, deliberately to do.

“I saw the show in November,” said Fen. “Both casts, before you ask; I’m old, not incurious. And I’ve read the diaries this month like everyone else.” She looked out at the city, giving Celia the mercy of a profile rather than a face. “So I’ll say my piece and then we’ll go in and be charming. I knew you at twenty-six, Celia. I have standing. Whatever’s happened between you and that woman, and I could see what there was to happen from row K, so don’t insult the balcony by denying it, I want you to hear one sentence from the only person who ever watched you do this before, from inside the blast radius.” She turned. The eyes were the same. That was the outrage of age: the eyes were always the same. “You always do the leaving before the being-left. Always, my darling. Nineteen ninety-four wasn’t me leaving you; consult the archive honestly for once. It was you, six weeks ahead of a blow that was never coming, burning the bridge from our side of the river and then standing in the ash calling it weather. You did it to me, you did it to that husband, I’d bet the house you’ve done it now, and I’m sixty and I loved you and here is the whole of what I know: the leaving-first feels like armour, Celia. It is the wound, walking. It is the injury doing your voice.”

The city glittered. Somewhere below, a bus sighed along Piccadilly, full of people with entirely different problems.

“She lied to me,” said Celia, at last, to the railing, in a voice with no register left on it at all.

“Possibly,” said Fen, gathering her wrap. “People do; you’ll have noticed you were holding several of your own at the time; the diaries were quite thorough about the New York itinerary.” And then, from the doorway, with the timing that had made her, delivered not cruelly, which was the worst part, delivered with the tenderness of a woman settling an old account in the only currency that had ever mattered between them: “For what it’s worth, from row K? Whatever that girl’s crimes are, watching wasn’t one of them. She looks at you the way you’ve spent thirty years directing whole rooms to. The difference is nobody directed her.”

The matinee happened on the following Thursday, and it was not, whatever Celia told herself in the taxi, an accident of scheduling.