Page 7 of Her Leading Lady

Ray at the stage door stood up too fast when he saw her, started forward to help, and caught the look on her face in time to convert the movement into holding the door, which she rewarded with the warm voice, because Ray’s clumsiness at least came from the heart.

“Good to have you back, Miss Marsh.”

“Good to be back, Ray. Don’t say anything encouraging or I’ll have you moved to front of house.”

And then, six feet inside her own stage door, in the glass case where the poster lived, she saw it. A neat white strip, professionally printed, applied across the foot of the artwork like a plaster across a wound.

THE ROLE OF CONSTANCE WILL BE SHARED. SEE DAILY LISTINGS.

They hadn’t even waited for her.

She stood before it on her Swedish crutches, and a stagehand she didn’t know squeezed past with a coil of cable, murmuring sorry, love, and Celia Marsh looked at the eight words that reorganised her life and thought, with the cold part of her mind that never stopped working even when the rest of her was on fire: shared. Passive voice. Nobody did this; it merely became true. Jonathan’s grammar. You could dust the sentence for prints and find nothing.

The meeting in the production office was brief, because she had planned it brief; never fight long on ground you didn’t choose.

“I’ll walk,” she said, before sitting down, before the coffee, before Jonathan’s first paragraph. “Full withdrawal, medical grounds, the insurance pays out the run, and you can cast whoever the money likes. I’ve been offered the memoir, the National want me for autumn after next, and my ankle and I can spend the spring somewhere with no rake and no stairs. Tell me why I’m wrong.”

Jonathan didn’t blink, which she respected and expected. He turned a single page on the table to face her, and it was numbers.

“You’re wrong for two reasons, and the first is arithmetic.” He said the figures with real gentleness, which was the awful thing about Jonathan; the knife went in wrapped. If she withdrew fully, the insurance settled at a rate that closed the production inside a month; ninety people lost the winter. If she stayed at five shows, the run survived. “The second reason,” he said, “you know better than I do. Walk now, on this, and every headline says the same thing. Marsh forced off. The comeback narrative belongs to whoever’s onstage, darling. It never once in the history of this business belonged to the person who went home.”

The silence held. Somewhere below them a vacuum cleaner toiled up the dress circle.

“Five shows,” said Celia at last. “I keep opening nights of anything that matters. My physio signs off the schedule, not yours. And I am consulted on the alternate’s performances; continuity of production is a contractual term or I’m not in the building.”

“Consulted,” said Jonathan, meaning noted, and they both heard the exact width of the word, and signed around it.

The company received her in the corridor outside the office with an unplanned gauntlet of warmth. Wardrobe applauded from their doorway. The flymen offered gruff nods. The actor playing the visitor kissed her hand with a flourish she allowed because refusing would have meant feeling it. At the end of the line, Trish said only, “Your call sheet is on your table, Miss Marsh.” In the dialect of stage management, it was an aria of welcome.

She took the back corridor to the dressing rooms, because the back corridor had a rail. Eleven days she had spent imagining the door, her door, with its careful serif, and the imagining had been accurate: there it was at the end of the green corridor, and there beneath her own nameplate hung a second one, brass-bright, the paint barely dry on the screws.

WREN HALLORAN.

Level. Same size. Her own negotiation conducted against her from a hospital bed.

Celia stood in the corridor and allowed herself five seconds. Grief first. Rage beneath it. Deeper still lay the fear with the sharpest teeth. On the count of six she opened the door, because entrances mattered.

Her mirror, rail, good chair and brass hare were where they belonged. Beside them stood a symmetrical insurgency: a second table, a propped mirror rimmed with cheap stick-on bulbs and a rail of clothes that were not costumes. There was a kettle, two mugs, Barry’s tea and a pair of character shoes worn down on their outer heels. A crooked postcard of the Athlone waterfront was taped to the wall.

And in the middle of it, turning, caught unpacking a wash bag, in a jumper the colour of bottle glass: the woman from the wings.

For a moment neither of them said anything. The room was very small. It had always been the largest dressing room Celia had ever occupied, and it had become, in eleven days, very small, and it smelled, faintly and permanently, of unfamiliar soap, something with lemon in it, something cheap and clean and entirely, invasively alive.

“Miss Marsh.” Wren put down the wash bag. “I’d say welcome back, only it’s your room, so I suppose it’s me that’s the weather.”

“It was my room.” Celia crossed to her table, set the crutches against the wall with a click she wished had been quieter, and lowered herself into the good chair with her spine doing the work her leg couldn’t. “Now it’s a fire regulation.”

“They did offer me number two. I said I’d take it gladly the day you could climb the stairs to it, and funnily enough here we both are.” Wren pulled the second chair out and sat, mirroring her, the width of the room between them like a net. “I want to say a thing, and then you can start.”

“Start.”

“I didn’t do this.” The Irish came up in her voice when she was in earnest, Celia noted; the vowels widened. “I didn’t pray for it, I didn’t arrange it, and I’d have given the whole lot back plus interest to have got my shot some way that didn’t need you carried out through the dock. I know what this room is to you. I’ve been outside it for ten years.”

It was, Celia recognised, a good speech, honestly meant and cleanly made, and the honest meaning was precisely what she could not afford; the room was too small for it. Let one sincere sentence in and the walls came down, and behind the walls, eleven days deep, was a woman who had cried on a wet floor trying to reach her own kettle, and no one alive was going to meet that woman, least of all the one person in London capable of recognising her.

So Celia smiled her best first-act smile and reached for the armour, which fit better than anything else she owned.

“Ground rules, then, Miss Halloran. Mirror hours: I dress from the half on my nights, you’ll have the room to six. Music: none. Visitors: none. The kettle may stay; the tea is a controlled substance and I don’t want to smell it before noon. That rail is mine; yours is whatever survives. And the chair,” she touched its arm, “is load-bearing in ways you will never be asked to understand.”