Page 12 of Her Leading Lady

Whatever this was, it had stopped being study.

The Saturday brace failure nearly took the choice away from everyone.

Celia’s Saturday evening, the heaviest house of the week. Wren was in, off rota, watching from the fly rail, a habit that no longer even pretended to have a reason. Act Two, the window seat, the long cross on the diagonal, and Wren saw it happen: the fourth step, the half-inch, and then not the half-inch, the strap of the brace letting go inside the boot, the ankle taking true weight for the first time in six weeks, and the whole coastline of that body, known to Wren like sailed water, went wrong by three degrees.

Celia did not fall. She converted the buckle into a sway, the sway into a lean on the bureau, downstage, in light, and stood there marooned with four lines still to speak and the next cross unwalkable, and only one person in the building read the seafront correctly.

Wren was moving before she decided to. Round the back of the flat at a dead sprint, soft-footed, to the prompt corner; a word in Trish’s ear; and the visitor’s knock, the knock that belonged forty seconds later in the scene, came early. Constance turned to the sound. The audience read the turn as the scene. The lines rearranged themselves around the interruption, Celia rode the new order like a woman who had rehearsed it for a month, the scene ended two beats short with nobody in the house any the wiser, and the curtain came in on an ovation.

Wren was back at the fly rail before it hit the deck, heart slamming, watching the woman in the wings’ blue half-light being unstrapped by the duty first-aider, and across the forty feet of backstage dark, over the heads of the crew, Celia Marsh looked up and found her.

She knew. Of course she knew; she had heard the knock’s grammar, counted the missing forty seconds, understood in real time exactly what had been done for her and by whom and at what speed. For a moment the two of them looked at each other across the traffic of the scene change, and then Celia, pale as paper, still in Constance’s silk, raised her right hand to her brow and gave Wren Halloran a salute: slow, precise, unironic, the acknowledgment of one soldier by another across a border neither had chosen, and public, in front of the entire crew, which was the part Wren couldn’t get over. The woman guarded her privacies like a dragon on coin. And she had spent one, deliberately, on that.

“What was that,” said Deb, when Wren described it, badly, at one a.m., having woken her to describe it, which itself was entered in the file.

“I don’t know,” said Wren. “In the army it means respect.”

“You’re not in the army, babe.”

“No,” said Wren, staring at the ceiling, the salute replaying on it like projection. “I’m starting to wonder what I am in.”

CHAPTER 9

The envelope was thick as a wedding, hand-delivered to the stage door, and Celia knew what it was before she opened it, the way you know a telegram in wartime.

The Society of London Theatre requests the honour… a Gala Evening celebrating the career of CELIA MARSH… a Living Legend of the British Stage… tributes, performance excerpts, presentation… the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, one Sunday hence.

She read it twice at her mirror, put it down among the first-night cards, and said, aloud, to the brass hare across the room, since no one else was in:

“They’ve started the obituary.”

The hare, a diplomat, said nothing.

She knew how these evenings worked; she had sat through a dozen of them applauding other monuments. You wore the good dress and sat in a box while the profession queued up to describe you in the past tense with love. Career, that was the operative word, a career was a thing with a shape, and shapes were what you drew around finished things. Nobody threw a living legend gala for a woman they expected to be dangerous next season. It was a laurel, and a laurel, examined botanically, is what you put on things that have stopped moving.

Bunny Feld took her to lunch about it at the club, which was itself a symptom; Bunny fed her clients before difficult conversations, on the principle that nobody storms out mid-fishcake.

“You’ll do the gala,” said Bunny, seventy-one, magnificent, lipstick like a verdict. “It’s not a funeral, darling, it’s leverage. All of casting in one room being reminded you exist at scale.”

“They need no reminding I exist. I’m at ninety-six per cent on my nights.”

“Your nights.” Bunny let it sit. “Five a week. Celia, I’ve had three calls this month I haven’t returned, and I’m returning them at this table. There’s the memoir: real money, dignity, control of your own account before some diarist writes it for you. There’s the National: Volumnia in the spring after next, it’s practically a coronation. And there’s the television: the matriarch in the big adaptation, four months in Scotland, above the title.” She speared a potato. “Three offers, one theme. Do you hear the theme?”

“Transition,” said Celia, making the word sound like something found at the back of a fridge.

“Graceful transition. The two most expensive words in my vocabulary, and I’m spending them on you because I’ve loved you thirty years. The ankle’s changed the map, darling. There’s a version of the next decade that’s glorious, and it starts with you walking toward it on your own legs instead of being carried there feet first by a casting meeting. The gala’s the door. Walk through it smiling.”

“And Constance?”

“Constance,” said Bunny, gently, terribly, “is a role for a woman who can do eight shows a week, and you and I are both paying her physio.”

Celia walked back through Soho afterwards instead of taking the car, which was the ankle’s enemy and the mind’s requirement, and the flashback ambushed her on Wardour Street, the way the big ones always did, out of nothing, out of a shop window’s angle of light.

She remembered the last civilised dinner of her marriage, in a restaurant they had both pretended to like for eleven years. Nigel Forsythe, QC, had cross-examined cabinet ministers without raising his pulse. That evening he folded his napkin with unusual care. “I want you to understand that it is not another woman. It is not the schedule, and it is not anything you have done. You have done everything flawlessly for eleven years.”

She had said something magnificent and true and beside the point, because magnificent and true and beside the point was the house style. She had gone to the theatre that same evening and given, the archive insisted, one of her great Heddas. And the review that weekend had used, in innocence, the word untouchable. She had read it at this exact corner of Wardour Street twenty years ago and stood very still, as she was standing now, letting the ordinary shopping crowd break around her like water round a post.

The wound under all the armour. Not that he had left. That he had been right.