Page 5 of Her Leading Lady

The matinee house was a Wednesday house, coach parties and school groups and the retired, and she gave them full weight anyway, because the contract in her head had never distinguished between audiences, only between nights she was alive and nights she was not, and there had not, in thirty years, been one of the latter. Between shows she ate half an omelette in her dressing room with her leg up on the daybed, against the physio’s standing advice to actually rest it, and answered three of Bunny’s emails, and declined to nap, napping being for the elderly. At the evening half she strapped the brace herself, tighter than Priya sanctioned, and did the ritual, and noted with distant clinical interest that her hands were not trembling at all tonight, which she chose to read as vindication.

In the wings before beginners, Trish gave her the nightly weather: house full, two critics’ assistants in unallocated seats, the stage lift sluggish on the pre-show checks but signed off by the duty engineer. “It’s been temperamental all week with the damp,” said Trish. “We’ve cued the rise two counts early to give it room. You’ll feel it come up slower under you; it’s nothing, just don’t rush your mark.” Celia thanked her, filed it with the evening’s forty other operational facts, and thought no more about it, which was, in every retelling she afterwards attempted at three in the morning, the hinge the whole year swung on: it’s nothing, don’t rush your mark, two professionals in the dark trading the sentence that was about to end the world, both of them nodding, neither of them warned.

The stage lift was a Victorian survivor, refitted in the eighties, temperamental in wet weather, and used in Vermilion for exactly one effect: the great window’s platform rose eighteen inches during the storm scene so Constance stood above the room, framed against the lightning like a figurehead. Celia’s mark was the platform’s downstage edge. She had hit it two hundred times.

Tonight the lift stuck at nine inches.

Afterwards, the enquiry would establish all of it: the seized bearing, the tripped limiter, the ASM’s shout on the cans, Trish calling the hold a full second faster than the manual required. None of it would matter to Celia’s body, which knew only this: the platform was not where the platform had always been, the floor arrived under her right heel half a step early in the dark of the lightning flash, the heel caught the platform lip. The ankle, the strapped, braced, inflamed, overruled ankle, took the whole falling weight of her at an angle God never intended, and something inside it went with a sound she felt in her teeth.

The pain was extraordinary. It was architectural. It rose around her like a building.

She would never manage to explain why she finished the scene. Not to the surgeon, not to Bunny and not even to Wren, who came closest to understanding without explanation. Constance had four lines left. Celia delivered them from inside the burning structure of her ankle, pitched to the back wall and held on the breath. Sweat broke through her costume paint. Nine hundred people heard a storm scene for the ages.

She even got herself into the wings on the crossfade before her leg stopped answering.

Then the world went sideways: Trish’s arms and the deputy’s, the terrible bright chatter of the cans, someone shouting for the curtain, the working lights slamming on with their dreadful honesty, faces over her, the ceiling ropes swinging. Somewhere beyond the iron, front of house was making an announcement in the voice reserved for bomb scares and royalty. She heard the words twenty minutes and Miss Halloran and be ready, and even through the pain, through the grey coming in at the edges like stage smoke, some ancient administrative corner of Celia’s brain registered: they’re sending on the understudy, and then, with the last of the evening’s available irony: she’ll be word-perfect.

The pain did strange things to time after that. She was on the floor of the wings and then she was on the daybed in her dressing room with a paramedic’s green gloves at her ankle and no memory of the distance between. Trish was crouched at her eyeline saying her name in the special stage-management register that made no allowance for rank, Celia, look at me, stay with my voice, the ambulance is at the dock. And somewhere behind Trish, in the doorway, for one clear frame between other people’s shoulders, was Wren Halloran, half into Constance’s understudy costume, dresser’s hands still at the fastenings, stopped, staring, and their eyes met across the chaos for the length of one held breath. Celia never afterwards found a satisfactory word for what was in the look. It was not triumph; even that night, even at the bottom of the pain, she knew better than to file it as triumph. It was more terrible than triumph. It was fear, on her behalf, naked and specific, from the one person in the building contractually positioned to profit from the evening, and Celia closed her eyes against it, because of everything the night had broken, being feared for by Wren Halloran was somehow the one thing she could not carry.

Then the trolley, the dock doors, the rain on her face for four seconds between the building and the ambulance, the last performance the Belvedere’s stage door would see from her for eleven days played to an audience of two paramedics and a wet street: she made a joke about the reviews, apparently. She had no memory of it. The crew quoted it back to her for months.

They did not send Wren on. The duty engineer closed the stage, the storm effect was struck and the performance was cancelled from the curtain. Nine hundred people were refunded into the rain. Celia left her theatre strapped to a chair and was carried through the dock doors like a damaged piece of the set.

The hospital was the one on the Fulham Road where they take the knees of footballers. At two in the morning a consultant surgeon with cold hands and a kind voice stood at the end of her bed with the scan glowing behind him and told her the truth, which is what she paid privately for, the truth on demand and no waiting list for it.

A high-grade sprain with partial tearing of the lateral ligaments. A small avulsion fracture that had probably begun as a stress injury weeks earlier. Bracing and immobilisation were certain. Surgery would depend on how stable the joint proved once the swelling settled. Then he answered the only question she asked. She lifted her chin and used her stage voice, as though enquiring about train times.

“Eight shows a week? No. Not for months, Miss Marsh. A carefully reduced schedule may be possible once you can bear weight safely, but the joint decides. Not the diary.”

He left. The registrar left. The nurse dimmed the lights to a compassionate amber not unlike a cheap sunset effect, and left.

Bunny arrived at half past two in a coat over what were unmistakably pyjamas, having talked her way past three separate members of staff on pure velocity. She did not ask how Celia was, which was one of the ten thousand reasons the two of them had lasted thirty years. She pulled the chair to the bed, took out a notebook, and said, “Right. Statement for the morning, before the diaries write it for us. Then I’ll sit here till you sleep, and we’ll both pretend I’m here for the statement.” She stayed until four. The statement took nine minutes. Neither of them mentioned the rest of the visit again, in the way of Englishwomen of their generation, which is to say it was never once forgotten by either.

Celia Marsh, forty-nine, twice Olivier’d and never once off in her life, lay flat in a foreign bed with her leg sealed inside a boot. She stared at the ceiling tiles. Four nights earlier, the first pebble of an avalanche had dropped beside the stage-door poster. Now the whole slope was moving. The billing, the dressing room, the role and the citadel of her indestructibility were all about to change.

In the ward’s deep silence she could hear, very faintly, a tannoy calling someone else’s name.

CHAPTER 4

By ten the next morning the company WhatsApp had achieved a state of pure information soup, and Wren, who had slept ninety minutes, stood in the theatre’s green room watching the rumour mill grind with the detached interest of a woman whose entire future was in the hopper.

Closing notice, said the ASMs. Recast, said the wardrobe department, and named two film actresses, both wrong. Insurance job, said the flymen, darkly, who said this about everything including the weather.

At noon, Gary the company manager took Wren into the little office behind the noticeboard and, with the pastoral tenderness of a man laying off a zero-hours workforce, walked her through what he called the likely shape of things. The production would suspend; the insurance would engage; the company would be released on two weeks’ pay while management assessed options.

“Released,” said Wren.

“It’s the standard term.”

“I know the term, Gary. I’ve been released before. I’m fairly sure I’ve been released by you before.”

“There’s every chance of remounting once the situation’s clearer,” said Gary, to his folder, and Wren went out through the green room, where the company sat in the particular silence of people doing salary arithmetic, and stood in the scene dock among the flats of Constance’s drawing room, all that vermilion stacked in the half dark like a dismantled heart, and let herself feel it: the trapdoor under the waiting room. Ten years, and the ending wasn’t even a no. It was a shrug and a fortnight’s money.

She rang her agent from the scene dock, whispering among the flats like a woman in church. Maureen had repped her for nine years on a commission that had bought, by Wren’s arithmetic, roughly one good coat, and had stayed anyway, which made her family. “They’ll release you,” said Maureen, flat. “It’s what the paper allows and it’s what managements do. I’m sorry, love. I’ll start ringing round in the morning; there’s a telly thing casting; you’d hate it, but it’s four months’ rent.” And Wren stood in the dock with her forehead against a vermilion flat, hearing the decade being wound up like an estate, item by item, at two weeks’ pay, and said, “Give it till Friday before you ring anyone. I’ve a feeling.” She had no feeling. She had ten years of knowing the building’s plumbing, and a stubbornness with nowhere else to live.

The call came at four. Not Gary. Jonathan Wexler’s assistant, honey-voiced: could Wren come up to the production office. Now, ideally.

The production office lived above the front of house, all sash windows and framed posters of the theatre’s greatest hits, and Wren had been inside it exactly twice in three productions, both times to sign things. Jonathan sat at the long table flanked by the general manager and a woman introduced as being from the insurers, which, Wren would think afterwards, was like being introduced to weather as being from the sky.