Page 21 of Her Leading Lady

Then Celia laughed, and Wren stored the sound deepest. It was not the rationed bark she used in the dressing room. This laugh came from somewhere beneath the sternum, unpacked and unguarded. It broke over her disastrous darts, Marge the greyhound’s judgement and Mick’s verdict that her stance was very stagey, no offence. She laughed until she had to hold the bar and wipe her eyes. Wren watched with a half-pint in her hand and thought, with the clarity of plain chant: there she is. Whitby, 1996. She has been in there all along.

Kerry stood them a last round at the door with the lock-in’s benediction, no charge, come back when you’re less famous, and pressed on Celia, over all protest, a Rose of Athlone bar towel, on the grounds that everyone who broke the dartboard’s surround got one, it was the rules, she’d invented them that afternoon. It lived, afterwards, in the museum flat’s kitchen, folded by the kettle, an artefact from the republic of nobody, and Celia never once let the cleaner touch it.

They walked back along the canal at six, the water holding the last of the light, Celia’s stick clicking the towpath, gulls conducting their evening parliament over Camden Lock, and it was there, between one bridge and the next, that the theme of both their lives surfaced and said its name.

“Four hours,” said Celia, “and not one person looked at me twice. Do you know what I kept waiting for? The turn. The little turn of the head, the second look, thirty years I’ve navigated by it, and its absence was like a wall gone from a house. I kept reaching for it.” The stick clicked. “Everyone watches me, Wren. That has been the fact of my life since I was twenty-six. Everyone watches, and I arrange myself to be watched, and the arrangement is total, and this afternoon I stood in a pub being nobody and I understood something I’ve been declining to understand since roughly the soup.” She stopped walking. The canal went on with the light. “Everyone watches me. You’re the only one who looks.”

The towpath was empty. The distance between them had been closing all day at the rate of continental drift, and it closed now: Wren turned, and the stick stopped clicking. They were facing each other under the bridge’s shadow with the water lapping and thirty years and eleven days of never-happened between them and neither of them breathing. Celia’s eyes did the drop to her mouth, the sabotage her technique kept committing, and Wren leaned in.

“OH MY GOD,” said the hen party.

It arrived over the bridge like a weather system, eleven women in sashes and learner-plate deely boppers, and its forward scout had a phone already up: “It IS her, Kayleigh, I TOLD you, it’s the one from the thing, MUM loves you, can we get a picture, girls, GIRLS, it’s HER.”

Wren watched the wall return with a connoisseur’s despair. It rose in less than a second: the straightened spine, the gracious smile, the perfect tilt of the head. Celia materialised on the towpath like a portrait stepping into its frame. She posed with all eleven hens and wished the bride joy twice. The moment beneath the bridge lay trampled under deely boppers. By the time the party moved off towards Camden, chanting that Celia was so normal, the light had left the water. Both women had retreated behind their ironies. The towpath felt like the dressing room with the tape between them.

“Well,” said Celia, brittle, adjusting a glove. “The watching resumes.”

“It generally does,” said Wren, even, hands in pockets, and they walked on, twenty regulation inches apart, two soldiers back in the trenches, and the evening might have died there entirely, catalogued under near misses like the bar, like the canal now, a list getting long enough to have its own file.

Except that at the door of Wren’s building, as Celia’s taxi idled, Wren’s phone rang, and the screen said DA.

She nearly declined it; Sunday calls from Athlone were her stepmother’s operation, conducted on speaker, concerning weather and cousins. But some instinct made her answer, and it was him, alone, no speaker, and what he said, without preamble, in the flat Midlands voice she had been decoding her whole life, was: “Your aunt Noreen sent over the London paper. The big piece, the two of you side by side.” A pause, the length of a decade. “I saw the reviews, love. I read every one. They’re saying what I should’ve been saying this last ten years, so I’ll say the short version now before the phone card runs out or me nerve does: you were never wasting your time. Your mother always said you’d the real thing in you and I let her carry that belief alone, and I’m sorry for it, and I’m proud of you. That’s it. That’s the whole speech. How’s the weather down there.”

Wren got through the weather. She got through the goodbye. She got the phone back into her pocket, and then she sat down on her own front steps in the dark and came apart like wet paper.

She was aware of the taxi door. Of the fare being paid off. Of the stick on the pavement and then the considerable engineering of a woman with a rebuilt ankle lowering herself onto a Kentish Town doorstep in a good coat. And then Celia Marsh’s arms were around her, both of them, unhesitating. Wren cried ten years into her shoulder in the smell of wool and the dark and neither of them said one word. No wit. No armour. Celia held her the way you hold a thing you have decided is yours to hold, one hand moving slow between her shoulder blades, cheek against her hair, on a cold step, on a public street, for as long as it took, and it took a long time.

“He waited ten years,” said Wren at last, wrecked, furious, laughing, into the coat. “The whole speech. Forty seconds. I’d have settled for it any Tuesday of any year and he does it now, when it’s, when everything’s already, God, look at the state of me.”

“He did it now because now is when he managed it,” said Celia, into her hair, with a gentleness that had no precedent in the archive. “That is the whole dark comedy of your species, Wren. You’ll learn it about me too. The ones who watch from the wings for years, and then one day, with no warning the audience can detect, walk on.”

And Wren, raw and open on her own steps in the ruin of the evening, nearly told her then. The whole of it: Jonathan, the quiet table, New York in the spring, one Constance, be ready, keep it between us. The secret had been rising in her all day like water in a lock, and here was the gate, open, and the words actually assembled themselves, there’s a thing I’ve been carrying and you have to hear it from me before you hear it from that building.

They went up, in the end, because the step was cold and the evening refused to end itself, and what happened in the flat was small and Wren kept it forever: Celia Marsh made the tea. Uninvited, unguided, in a strange kitchen, opening the wrong cupboards with the borrowed fleece still on, while Wren sat at the table with her da’s forty seconds replaying, and produced two mugs, one builder’s-strong with three sugars, one plain, both correct, having apparently absorbed the orders across two months of a shared counter without once being told. She set them down, took the far chair, and said nothing at all for twenty minutes, which was, from a woman who had never in her life let a silence stand unmanaged, the most fluent thing she had ever said. Wren looked at her across the steam.

Not tonight, she thought. Tonight he finally said it and she finally held something in the open air. I’m not detonating this one good evening. Monday. I’ll tell her Monday.

“Thank you for today,” is what she said instead.

And the gun went back on the mantel, loaded, and the safety, though neither of them heard it, clicked off.

CHAPTER 17

The hundredth performance of Vermilion fell on a Saturday, Celia’s night, and the management marked it the way West End managements mark things: a cake in the green room shaped approximately like the set, warm prosecco in catering quantities, a speech from Jonathan containing the word family, delivered without apparent irony, and a company photograph on the stage that took forty minutes because the flymen kept doing rabbit ears.

Celia worked the party in the professional way, with a word for everyone. From the far side of the room, Wren watched with proprietary delight and tracked the small tells nobody else could read. Celia kept her weight off the right ankle by leaning against the buffet table. Her laugh ran at two-thirds strength. Every few minutes, her eyes swept across the company until they found Wren. Mine. Still there. Resume.

By half past midnight it had burned down to embers: the crew dispersed to night buses, the cake reduced to its structural marzipan, Trish gone home with the show report, and the building handed over to Reg the night man, who did his round at one and knew better than to hurry the last two names off the premises. Some people, Reg held, needed longer to leave a theatre than others, in rough proportion to what they had nowhere else to put.

Which is how it came to be that at a quarter to one in the morning, the two Constances had the stage of the Belvedere entirely to themselves: the set half-struck to its Sunday state, the ghost light already out on its brass pole, centre stage, one warm bulb holding the whole dark house at bay, and a bottle of the good champagne, Bunny’s hundredth-night gift, going flat between them on the prop table.

“One hundred,” said Celia, into the amiable silence. They were sitting on the edge of the stage, legs over the pit, like students, a thing she had not done in any theatre since the eighties. “Sixty-two of them mine, thirty-eight yours, and I know you know those numbers as well as I do, so don’t compose your face.”

“Sixty-one,” said Wren. “The handover show goes down as half each or I’m calling for a steward’s enquiry.”

“Sixty-one and a half.” Celia tipped the last of her glass toward the auditorium. “To the house, then. Nine hundred and six a night, times a hundred, is ninety thousand people, give or take, who now believe one of two entirely different things about Constance Villiers, depending which night they came.” She considered the dark stalls. “I keep wondering what would happen if we ever showed them the argument itself. The two Constances in one room. The scene Dougie rebuilt. Nobody’s ever seen it played by us.”

The sentence arrived somewhere neither of them had quite aimed it.