Page 13 of Her Leading Lady

Celia returned to the theatre at four with the afternoon dark inside her. Instead of going to her mirror, she went to the wings. On a night that was not hers, she sat in the observation chair and watched Wren’s half-hour call. The former understudy crossed the empty set in work clothes, talking to herself, alive as a struck match. Twenty years of road opened ahead of her. Celia watched with an admiration so pure it behaved like grief.

The gala, when it came, was exactly as advertised, which was the whole horror of it.

Drury Lane dressed to the ceiling. Six hundred of the profession in black tie. A younger actress performed a scene Celia had originated, beautifully, wrongly. Clips played on a screen four storeys high: herself at twenty-six in The Winter Guest, at thirty-three at the Almeida, the first Olivier speech, the second, and the applause after each clip had the specific warmth you give to things that are safely over.

Sir Something rose and called her the last of the great stage animals. The word last did more work in that sentence than he knew.

Between the tributes she sat in the box with her spine at ceremonial pitch and conducted, behind the attending face, a private census of the room. Casting directors: eleven that she could see, every one of whom had rung Bunny in the past decade, none in the past year. Three artistic directors, two of whom owed her buildings. The young actress who had performed the excerpt, radiantly wrong, now being photographed at the rail of the dress circle, twenty-eight and lit from within by the assumption, which Celia could read at forty feet because she had worn it herself like skin, that time was a resource that renewed. And scattered through the stalls, the generation of critics who had made her, greyer now, kinder now, kindness being what critics extended to finished things. It was a warm room, a loving room, and it was a room dividing the estate: she watched it happen in real time, the profession filing her, tribute by tribute, under achievement, that beautiful past-tense word, and she smiled at each speaker in turn and thought, with the part of her that never stopped working: I am forty-nine. Vanessa played Prospero at eighty. What is being buried tonight is not my career. It is your need to keep imagining it.

She gave them, in return, twelve minutes of Celia Marsh at full command: the anecdotes in the right order, the gratitude, the wicked story about the Chichester dresser, the closing turn, wet-eyed and iron-spined, about the theatre as the last room in England where strangers agree to feel the same thing at the same time in the dark. Standing ovation. Six hundred people on their feet for a woman most of whom believed they were lovingly seeing off.

Three miles north, the gala was also being watched at the Coach and Crown, where the arts channel’s coverage played on the corner telly with the sound down because Kerry’s cousin was minding the bar and had a soft spot for Wren. Wren, off shift, elbow on the counter, watched the twelve minutes with old Stefan beside her providing commentary. He approved of the frock. He approved of the Chichester story, which he could not hear and invented for himself, better. At the closing turn, the last room in England where strangers agree to feel the same thing at the same time in the dark, the pub’s noise happened to dip, and the line came through in the presenter’s recap, and Stefan raised his Guinness at the screen. “That one,” he said, with the certainty of a man who had backed horses since the Blitz, “isn’t finished. They’re clapping like it’s a send-off. Look at her eyes, girl. That’s a woman planning something.” Wren looked. He was right, and it did something complicated to her chest that she put down to the lateness of the hour.

She was home by eleven, and couldn’t stay there.

The flat was silent in its museum way, posters lit, no photographs of people, and at half past eleven she summoned the car back and did the inexplicable thing, or the only explicable thing: she went to the theatre. Her theatre, dark on a Sunday, and she let herself in through the stage door with the key thirty years had earned, and stood in the wings of the empty Belvedere, and found it wasn’t empty.

The ghost light stood centre stage, a bare bulb on a brass pole, and in its small kind circle of yellow sat Wren Halloran, cross-legged on the boards in a hoodie, script open on her knee, unbothered, unwatched, at midnight on her night off, working.

Celia stood in the dark of the wings, leaning on one crutch, in a gala gown worth more than the girl’s monthly rent, and watched.

Wren was running the fourth act. Not performing it. Excavating it, the way Celia herself had excavated at that age, when the work was still the whole sky, stopping, muttering, marking the script, trying a line four ways at a whisper, is this true, is any of this true, and the ghost light held her in its circle like a sentence held in brackets, and the nine hundred empty seats listened.

And standing there unseen, forty-nine years old, freshly eulogised, Celia Marsh felt something move through her that she could not, for a long moment, put a name to. It had grief in it, for the woman with the whole sky still overhead. It had envy in it, clean envy, the professional kind. But the rest of it, the bulk of it, the part that made her grip the crutch, was neither of those and would not answer to any of the names she tried, and the names she tried were themselves the clue, because she was reaching for them the way you reach for railings.

The girl on the stage laughed suddenly at something in the text, alone, delighted, a laugh Celia had never once heard in the dressing room, and the sound went through the dark theatre and through Celia Marsh like weather through an open house.

Oh, she thought, standing very still.

Oh, no.

She left without a sound, the way thirty years teaches you to leave a wing, and sat in the back of the car through the wet lit city, and did not name it, would not name it, filed it, in the cabinet where she kept the fire, under further study, and looked out the window the whole way home like a woman being driven past her own life.

Behind her, in the empty theatre, the ghost light burned on over the girl and the script, sentry to the only two secrets in the building: that the legend they had toasted at Drury Lane was falling, in every sense available to the word, and that no one, least of all the two women concerned, had the faintest idea yet what to do about it.

CHAPTER 10

Marta Reyes came to the Wednesday matinee, and Wren didn’t know until after, which Trish said afterwards was God being merciful for once.

Wren knew the name the way you know a lighthouse. Marta Reyes had run the Iron Belt seasons at the Court; her productions arrived like verdicts; actors spoke of her rehearsal rooms the way survivors speak of weather, with awe and a changed face. The flyer inside Wren’s bathroom cabinet was eleven years old now, soft at the corners, looked at most mornings. The promise on it predated everything else in her London life.

The note came to the stage door in the interval of the evening show, handwritten, on the back of a rehearsal call sheet.

Miss Halloran. Your Act One this afternoon. The drawer, and what you did with the word forgiveness. I’m developing a new play at the Court for spring after next. I’d like you to come and read for me. No script in advance; bring nothing. Thursday, 11 a.m. M.R.

New writing. A part nobody had ever played. That woman, in a room, asking for her. Wren read it four times in the wings with her heart going like a kick drum, and told no one.

She rang nobody, texted nobody, and stood at the fly rail through the whole second half with the call sheet folded into quarters in her back pocket, taking it out twice to confirm it had not evaporated. On the night bus home she composed and deleted four messages to Deb, on the grounds that saying it out loud might wake whatever committee of fates handled the withdrawing of miracles. The flyer was still inside the bathroom cabinet when she got in. She stood in front of it with the call sheet in her hand, eleven years between the two pieces of paper, and did not tape the new one up beside it. Not yet. Some promises you don’t show each other until they’re kept.

That lasted fourteen hours.

“You’ve had news,” said Celia, at noon the next day, from her side of the tape, without turning from her mirror. She was in early for a costume refit; Wren was in early because lately Wren was always in early, a fact neither of them examined. “You’ve been holding it since you walked in. You’re holding it now. You hold good news like a stolen thing, Miss Halloran; it’s the single most Irish thing about you.”

“I’ve no idea what you mean.”

“Your lines this morning were perfect and your kettle discipline has collapsed. You’ve filled it twice and poured nothing.” Celia turned, and her eyes went over Wren’s face like a customs light. “Casting? No. Bigger. A director.” A pause, one beat, terrible. “Reyes was in on Wednesday. Front of house logged her. It’s Reyes.”

“It’s a reading,” said Wren, giving up. “It’s one reading, for a play that doesn’t exist yet, in a year that hasn’t happened. It’s nothing.”