Page 22 of Her Leading Lady

“Run it,” said Wren.

“It’s one in the morning.”

“It’s the only hour it could ever happen.” Wren was already up, pulling her shoes off, and her voice had gone quiet and reckless together. “No director, no book, no Sarah, no wings full of eyes. One run. No notes. The Act Two confrontation, you and me, the way it’s been trying to get itself played since he rebuilt it. You brought it up; you don’t bring things up, Celia, you deploy them; some part of you walked us both here, so.” She stood into the ghost light’s circle, centre stage, and held out her hand for an imaginary cue. “Run it with me.”

And Celia Marsh looked up at her from the stage’s edge for a long moment, and then rose, unhurried, stick and all, the way she rose when a decision had been taken somewhere below the negotiating levels, and stepped into the light.

They ran the scene.

Afterwards, if either had been the sort to say it aloud, they would have agreed: it had never once been about hate. Dougie had known. The blocking had known. The tightening orbit, the eighteen inches, the tight special: the scene had been rebuilt by a shrewd Scot around what was actually in the room, and now, at one in the morning, with no one to perform for, the text finally gave up its disguise. I know what you are, said Celia’s Constance at eighteen inches, and it was not an accusation, it had never been an accusation, it was the oldest sentence in the world with a fresh coat of paint. Then you know more than most, said Wren’s, and the softness wasn’t sabotage now, it was the line as written, as meant, as Marguerite Hale, whoever she’d loved and never said, had surely written it in 1968 and hidden it inside a quarrel where it could live. And the five pages spent themselves, and the last line went, and the scene ended where the blocking had always been pointing, dead centre, in the ghost light’s small kind circle, no distance left at all.

Neither of them called the next cue. There wasn’t one. The play was over; the disguise was spent; what stood in the light was only Wren, and only Celia, and the whole dark house holding its breath.

“No notes,” said Celia, barely.

“None,” said Wren. “It was perfect. Nothing in it to fix.”

“Nothing in it to fix,” Celia repeated, and the terror and the homecoming arrived in her in the same breath, indistinguishable at last, one thing. She reached up and put her hand along Wren Halloran’s jaw, deliberate, sober, witnessed by nine hundred empty seats, and kissed her, centre stage, under the ghost light, in the one theatre in England where every previous certainty of her life had been built, and felt every one of them come quietly, gratefully, off its moorings.

This time nobody was running on adrenaline. This time it was a decision, and they both made it, and went on making it: slow, and entire, her hand in Wren’s hair, Wren’s arms around her like the answer to a question thirty years out for review, the ghost light burning its one warm bulb beside them like a witness bribed into silence, and when they finally broke, forehead to forehead, breathing each other’s breath in the great dark of the house, neither performed anything at all. There were no jokes. That was how Wren knew the world had actually changed: the two most defended women in London stood in a spotlight with nothing deployed.

“Dressing room,” said Celia, against her mouth. It was not a suggestion; it had the simple grammar of a stage direction. “Not a corridor this time. Not an accident this time. I want the door with both our names on it.”

The room, when they reached it, was dim and warm, one mirror’s bulbs left burning, and this time there was no frantic silence, no roughness racing the return of sense. This time Celia locked the door herself, and turned, and let herself be looked at.

“You’ve watched me for ten years,” she said. “I’d like, once, to actually be seen. Slowly. I warn you, I don’t know how it’s done.”

“I do,” said Wren. “I’ve had the longest apprenticeship in the profession.”

Wren undressed her without hurry, laying good wool and silk over the chair. When she reached the ankle, Celia stiffened. The brace and swelling stood exposed in the mirror’s clear light, the body’s betrayal visible at last. Wren paused, met her eyes and waited until Celia nodded.

Celia came with Wren’s name stripped of every performance. Afterwards she pulled Wren over her and returned the attention, slowly at first and then without mercy. Wren ended gripping the daybed frame and swearing in two languages. At some point, an unidentified hand turned the brass hare towards the wall in the interests of neutrality.

A long time later they lay tangled under Celia’s good coat in the half-dark, Wren’s head on her chest, the building ticking its pipes around them like a great settling animal.

“I keep waiting for the fear,” said Celia, to the ceiling, wonderingly. Her hand moved in Wren’s hair, unhurried. “It’s the strangest thing. I’ve an entire fear apparatus, Wren, decades of it, load-rated, regularly serviced, and I keep sending down for it and nothing comes up. There’s just,” she searched, and gave up, and said it plainly, “you. The room. This absurd hour. I appear to be happy. I’m forty-nine years old and I genuinely cannot remember the procedure.”

“There’s no procedure.” Wren’s voice was blurred against her collarbone. “That’s the whole thing about it. First thing I ever learned that had no procedure. Terrifying. You’ll love it.”

“Mm.” A silence, warm. Then, because she was still Celia Marsh: “This changes nothing at work, you understand.”

Wren lifted her head. Celia Marsh, the definite article of the English stage, lay wrecked and radiant on a dressing-room daybed beneath a shared coat. It was half past three in the morning, and she had just claimed with a straight face that this changed nothing at work. Wren began to laugh. Celia joined her. They laughed at the lie, at its magnificence and at the tape line six feet away, still dividing two women wrapped in one coat. At last, they were laughing at the same joke.

“Nothing whatsoever,” Wren agreed, wiping her eyes. “Miss Marsh.”

“Miss Halloran,” said Celia, gravely, and pulled her back down.

They left through the stage door at some hour with no name, the street empty and rinsed with earlier rain, and Reg the night man glanced up from his kiosk as they passed, the two of them a foot apart and not touching and entirely given away by everything else, and said only, “Morning, ladies. Mind how you go,” in the tone of a man who had known for weeks and considered it none of the management’s business.

They stood on the wet pavement in the streetlight, under the poster with the two names the same size.

“What happens now?” said Wren, echo of a corridor, a lifetime ago, eleven days ago.

And Celia Marsh, who had rehearsed what to feel for thirty years and had, at some point in the last three hours, stopped, looked up at the poster, and then at the woman, and said: “I have no idea. None. I’ve gone entirely off script, and I’m told,” her hand found Wren’s on the empty street, in the open air, and held it, “that’s where the interesting work is.”

CHAPTER 18

The secret relationship, being conducted by two of the most disciplined professionals in the West End, immediately developed a liturgy.