Page 4 of Her Leading Lady

At the stage door afterwards Wren waited for her bus in the crowd because it was raining and the awning was the only dry ten metres on the street. The fans pressed in a warm, damp mass, programmes out, phones up, and past Wren they streamed as though she were street furniture, which, professionally speaking, she was. She watched Celia Marsh work the line: gracious, luminous, untouchable, a masterclass in eleven minutes, every fan sent away feeling personally seen, nothing of herself given away at all. It was, Wren thought, the best performance of her evening, and it wasn’t close.

Then, at the car, with the driver holding the door, Celia looked back. Found Wren against the wall as though she had known exactly where she was standing the whole time. Of course she had. The woman missed nothing that happened in a theatre; that was the terror and the education of her.

“Still here, Miss Halloran?” The voice carried, bright and carved, pitched for the wet street the way she pitched for the upper circle. “Devotion, is it? Or surveillance?”

The fans laughed, delighted, a free extra scene. The car door shut on her before Wren’s mouth could find a word, any word, and the tail lights slid off into the rain toward Covent Garden.

Wren stood under the awning with two thousand nights in her chest and rain coming off the canvas in a cold string onto her neck.

“Both,” she said, to nobody, too late, which was the story of her entire career.

One more year, she promised the departed car, the wet street, the crack in tomorrow’s mirror, the ache she refused to name. One more year, and then done.

She had been making that promise annually for four years. But this time, though she could not have known it, the year had other plans; the year had, in fact, about seventy-two hours.

CHAPTER 3

The physio’s name was Priya, she was thirty-one, and she had the gentle relentlessness of all people whose job is telling other people what they do not want to hear.

“I’d like you to give up the staircase.”

“You’d like me to give up the staircase,” Celia repeated, as though translating from a distant language. “The descent is the entrance, Priya. Constance comes down into the room like judgment. It’s in the reviews. It’ll be on the poster for the next revival after I’m dead.”

They were in the treatment room above the rehearsal studios on a matinee day, ten thirty in the morning, Celia’s ankle between Priya’s hands like evidence. Outside the window, Soho was hosing down its pavements.

“The rake is one in eighteen,” Priya said. “The staircase is eleven steps with no rail on the offstage side, and you’re taking it in a floor-length costume you can’t see your feet in, twice on Wednesdays and Saturdays. The tendon’s inflamed and the strapping can only do so much. I’m not saying never. I’m saying not this week.”

“It’s the first week of previews.”

“I know.”

“The critics come Tuesday.”

“I know,” said Priya, and pressed her thumb into the swelling with tender, awful precision, and Celia looked at the ceiling and said nothing at all, because the ceiling, unlike everyone else in her life at present, had no opinion on her durability.

She kept the staircase. Of course she kept the staircase. She informed Priya that they would revisit the question after press night, the way you’d promise a child a dog at Christmas, and she went down the eleven steps at the matinee like judgment itself, and if the landing sent a wire of white heat up the outside of her right leg, then that was information belonging to her and the brace and no one else.

Pride, her mother used to say, will carry you further than talent, and then it will drop you somewhere talent can’t reach you.

Jonathan was waiting in her dressing room between shows, which he knew she hated, sitting in the good chair, which he knew she hated more, with two coffees and the expression of a man about to be reasonable.

“Breakfast television,” he said. “Thursday. Sofa spot, four minutes, you and the lovely presenter whose name I’ll text you. Clips package, warm questions, home before eleven.”

“We open Tuesday. I don’t do sofas in a working week, Jonathan, you’ve known that for twenty years.”

“I have. And for nineteen of them I’ve been able to sell out a Celia Marsh run on the name alone.” He let that rest exactly one second too long, the timing immaculate; he’d have made an actor. “We’re at ninety-one per cent for the first month. It’s a wonderful figure, darling, and it’s four points shy of where we budgeted, and the difference is a demographic that doesn’t read the Sunday reviews. They watch sofas. I want them to see you while you’re still the draw.”

The room went very quiet, in the way rooms did when a word landed somewhere its speaker hadn’t aimed.

“Still,” said Celia.

“Figure of speech.”

“You produce eleven shows a year, Jonathan. You don’t have figures of speech. You have positions.”

He smiled at her then, and to his credit, the smile contained something almost like apology, which from Jonathan Wexler was practically an aria of remorse. “Do the sofa, Celia. Help me sell the last four points, and I’ll never again say a word to you that begins with s.”

She did not throw Jonathan out. One did not throw Jonathan out. One released him. When the door clicked shut, Celia sat before the mirror and studied the flawless woman inside its border of bulbs. The word still lay on her chest. It stayed through the half, beginners and the first act. It was there in Act Two when everything in her life folded like a paper city.