Page 3 of Her Leading Lady

There was one thing in the bathroom that was hers alone, and Deb knew better than to mention it. Taped inside the cabinet door, gone soft at the corners, was a theatre flyer eleven years old: Three Sisters, directed by Marta Reyes. Wren had stood through it twice from the restricted-view seats in her first month in London, and had walked home to Kentish Town afterwards because sitting on a bus felt wrong. The promise she had made herself that night had nothing to do with Celia Marsh, and she had never once said it aloud, not even to Deb. Someday, new writing, a part nobody had ever played, that woman in the room. No ghost to be measured against. A role with no previous owner. She looked at the flyer most mornings the way other people looked at saints.

The Coach and Crown had been kind about the matinee-day swap. Soho’s last unrenovated pub kept faith with its strays. Wren had pulled pints there for eleven years, between productions and during them. The regulars had stopped asking how the acting was going, as people do when they learn where the bruise is. Only old Stefan, who claimed he had been coming in since the Blitz, still raised his Guinness on press nights and told her the good ones always laughed last. Twice, the sheer faith of it had sent her into the cellar to cry among the barrels.

The 134 into town smelled of rain and other people’s headphones. Wren stood, because you could feel the day’s shape better standing, and watched London assemble itself outside the glass: Camden, Mornington Crescent, the long grey slide of Hampstead Road. Ten years of this bus. She had done the maths once, at the bar, on a napkin, for a man who hadn’t asked: three productions understudying Celia Marsh, at eight shows a week, forty-odd weeks a year, came to something over two thousand performances watched or waited through, and the number of times Wren Halloran had stepped onto a professional stage in the role she was paid to know was zero.

Two thousand nights in the waiting room. You could raise a child in that. You could do a medical degree.

The understudy call was at four, on the set, which was a courtesy of Dougie’s. Most directors ran covers in a rehearsal room with tape on the floor, but Dougie Aird believed understudies should know the rake under their feet, and Wren would have followed him into the sea for it.

At four fifteen she stood in the false sunset of the great window and played the letter monologue to nine hundred and six empty seats.

And she was good. She could never say it aloud, not at the bar, not to Deb, not to her da and least of all to the company. In the empty theatre, under half-raised working lights, she knew it as surely as she knew her own blood. She took the speech fast because Hale’s typescript carried no tempo mark and grief, in Wren’s experience, did not stroll. It hit like a bus you had stopped waiting for. She let the letter shake. Her voice went into the dark and came back changed, the way it only did on a real stage. For six minutes the waiting room dissolved, and she became exactly what she had spent a third of her life trying to be.

The creative team sat in row F for the duration of her call. Casting’s deputy scrolled her phone. The associate director wrote one note, which Wren later learned was about the flying schedule. Nobody looked up.

That was standard. That was the arrangement. Covers were insurance, and nobody watches insurance being good.

At the five o’clock break Trish Adeyemi found her at the tea urn in the green room, which was Trish’s way; the stage manager moved through the building like weather, and where she rained, you were generally glad of it.

“You,” said Trish, “were cooking out there. That speech.”

“Twelve empty rows disagree.”

“Twelve empty rows weren’t looking. I was on the book. I’m paid to look.” Trish filled her mug, eyeing her sideways. “Ten years you’ve been at this woman’s shoulder. Three shows. I did the last two of them with you. You know what I’ve never once seen you do?”

“Go on.”

“Coast.” She clinked her mug against Wren’s like a toast at a funeral. “Which is either the saddest thing I’ve seen in this business or the hardest, and I genuinely can’t decide.”

Deb’s question caught up with her at the half, the way Deb’s questions did, hours late and suddenly urgent, while Wren sat in the understudy room lacing the character shoes she wore to stand in the wings, shoes for a part she would not be playing, which was its own kind of prayer or madness.

Why do you stay?

She had given Deb the usual inventory the night before, over the washing up. Because it’s Celia Marsh, and there are maybe three people alive you can learn that much from at this range. Because the money, such as it was, was theatre money, and theatre money beat bar money by exactly enough to matter. Because eleven months ago a casting director had said your time’s coming, and eleven months was not yet long enough to know it for a lie. Because leaving in year ten made years one through nine a joke you’d told about yourself.

All true. None of it the answer, and Wren knew it, and hid the knowledge in the same place she hid the speech in the bathroom mirror. The truth had no dignity to it at all. The truth was that at seven twenty-five she would walk to the dark spot by the fly rail, stage left, the exact spot, her spot, chalk-marked in her body after two thousand nights, and stand where she could see the down-left quarter of the stage and the wing mirror that caught the rest, and she would watch Celia Marsh work.

And there was nowhere on earth she would rather stand.

That was the sickness. Ambition was clean. You could put ambition on a CV. This was harder to name. She watched a woman do the only work Wren had ever wanted and measured herself against that brilliance every night. She wanted to be Celia, beat her and be seen by her in roughly equal parts. She had never managed to untangle which desire carried the rest. Ten years. Her da thought she was mad. Deb thought she was a saint. Trish, who missed nothing, could not decide whether it was sad or formidable.

Wren laced the second shoe and thought, as she thought every night at this exact eyelet: one more year. Then done.

That night the house was hot again and Celia Marsh was better than she had been at the first preview, which Wren would have said was not possible, and hated her for cheerfully, from the dark. She mouthed the lines with her, all of them, a silent second Constance in the wings; the crew had stopped noticing years ago. She watched the way Celia banked the laugh in the seduction scene and spent it two lines later, watched her hold the house in the palm of her hand through the letter monologue, slower than the speech wanted, wrong, magnificent, and Wren’s lips moved with hers like a woman at mass.

And then it happened again.

Three seconds. The white pause. The visitor’s cue delivered and answered with nothing, nothing, nothing, and the hair went up on Wren’s arms, because from the front it read as danger and daring, but Wren Halloran had watched this actress from this spot for two thousand nights and knew her rhythms the way a sailor knows water, and that was not a pause.

That was a hole.

And before pity, before fear, before any of the decent feelings, the thing that leapt in Wren’s chest, hot and immediate and shameful, was hope.

She stood in the dark with her heart going like a fist on a door. Second time in two nights. If it was happening twice it was happening; if it was happening, then somewhere in the actuarial weather over this production a door was beginning to open, and behind it: the stage, the letter, the light. Everything. Her whole waiting life called to the desk at last.

The hope lasted three full seconds, one for each second of the hole, and then the shame arrived, so physical she had to grip the fly rail. Jesus, Mary and the entire management structure. Wishing a hole in the head of Celia Marsh. That was what ten years in the dark did to you; that was the deformity you couldn’t show at the tea urn. You waited so long that your wanting went feral, and one night it slipped the lead and you felt it pull, hard, toward the worst thing, and you learned what you were capable of hoping.

Onstage, Celia had taken the speech home flawless. The applause came down like weather.