Page 8 of Her Leading Lady

Wren looked at her for a long moment, and something happened in her face that Celia had not planned for: the sympathy went out of it, and what replaced the sympathy was not hurt but a kind of relieved, sardonic recognition, two fencers discovering the other means it, and underneath, unmistakably, the flicker of enjoyment.

“Grand,” said Wren. “My terms. I don’t perform to a tribunal: on my nights you can watch from the wings, since I can’t legally stop you, but you’ll not give me notes in this room unless I ask. I’ll ask. That’s the frightening thing for both of us, I’ll actually ask. Music: I run lines to Radio 3 at the half, quietly, and if that kills you the obituary will at least be classy. And the tape,” she produced a roll of company gaffer from her table drawer, the yellow of hazard signage, “is so we never have to have this conversation again.”

“Tape.”

Wren was already on her knees on the floor between them, pulling a line of screaming yellow from wall to wall, bisecting the room with the confident violence of a border commission: past the end of the daybed, under the costume rail, dead between the two mirrors. She smoothed it down, sat back on her heels, and surveyed the partition of the only territory Celia had left.

“There,” she said. “Yours, mine. The hare can stay your side; he has a trustworthy face. Anything crosses the line, we negotiate at gunpoint like civilised women.”

It was outrageous. It was kindergarten. It was, Celia would admit to no one, the first thing in eleven days that had made her want to laugh, and the want frightened her more than the ankle had, so she killed it in the crib and said, glacially, “The hare has been in that spot since 1997. He predates you by a decade, which on this production makes two of us.”

“And yet,” said Wren, standing, brushing her knees, insufferable, alive, “we both got the same size letters on the door.”

The Radio 3 clause was tested within the hour. At the half, from the far side of the line, came the opening of some cello thing, at a volume calibrated to be technically defensible, and Celia sat at her mirror deciding whether to object on principle. She discovered two problems. The first was that the piece was the Elgar, which she had used herself, years ago, before a run of Hedda, and had stopped using when Nigel left because it had become his side of the bed in musical form. The second problem was that the girl was not listening to it. She was using it, the way you use weather: running her silent lines against the cello’s long phrases, breath matched to bowing, a technique Celia had believed until that moment she had invented. She said nothing about the volume. That night, and every night after, the Elgar played at the half, and neither woman ever mentioned it, which was the first treaty either of them actually kept.

They dressed that evening in silence otherwise, on their two sides of the yellow line, for the performance Celia would give and Wren would watch. In the mirror’s white border Celia assembled Constance over the boot and the brace, and behind her, in the other mirror, she could see the alternate’s reflection running silent lines at herself, lips moving, and it was like being haunted in advance.

She was luminous that night, on five shows a week and Swedish crutches to the wings. She was luminous because the alternative was unthinkable, and only she knew what the staircase cost, rebuilt now into a slow descent on Dougie’s restaged diagonal, sold to the house as majesty.

It was close to midnight when she came back to the empty room, and the theatre had gone to its ghost light, and Wren’s side of the yellow line stood in darkness, kettle cold, the crooked postcard catching the corridor light through the open door.

Celia sat before her unlit mirror and studied the shadows of two nameplates on the door. In the only unwitnessed hour of her day, she finally named the fear.

It was not replacement. She had rehearsed replacement. Every career ended, and sensible women chose their exits and the wall where the portrait would hang. This fear was smaller and worse. It was the second mirror. It was another woman ten feet away, the age Celia had been when the world was still appetite, watching with the most educated eyes in England as Celia did what she had never allowed an audience to see. Decline. Age. Fail by increments, in good light.

Witnessed. That was the word. The wanting of witnesses had built her whole life, and now it would be the thing that took it apart.

She sat in the dark a long time. On the way out she paused at the yellow line, and with the rubber foot of one Swedish crutch, precisely, she nudged the brass hare two inches across the border, into Wren Halloran’s territory, facing the second mirror.

Sentry duty, she told herself. Or an insult. She would decide in the morning which she had meant.

CHAPTER 6

The first time Wren Halloran was legally entitled to walk onto the stage of the Belvedere Theatre as Constance Villiers, in front of a paying house, with her name on the board outside, was a wet Wednesday, and Celia Marsh was in the wings by the quarter, installed on a chair Trish had placed with visible reluctance, wrapped in grey cashmere like a resting weapon system, contractually observing for continuity.

Deb was in the house, fourth row of the dress circle, in a seat that had appeared out of nowhere on a sold-out night. Wren had mentioned the problem once, in passing, at the stage door. Trish had said nothing, and the next morning there was a ticket in an envelope marked HALLORAN PLUS ONE, and beneath the printed details, in stage-management capitals: TELL YOUR FLATMATE NO WHOOPING. Deb had texted back through Wren within the hour: tell her no promises, and also that I like her already. Wren had passed neither message on. Both women had somehow received them anyway.

“She’s actually going to sit there,” said Wren to her reflection, at the half, on her side of the yellow line. Her hands were doing the eyeliner unaided; some deep bar-trained steadiness ran the body while the mind span. “Ten feet off my entrance. For the whole show.”

“Consulted on the alternate’s performances,” said Trish’s voice on the tannoy in her memory, and what the word consulted was worth. Wren had played two thousand performances of this role in a bathroom mirror and twelve empty rows, and the first real one came with the reigning Constance auditing it from a folding chair.

Beginners was called. In the wings the dark smelled of dust and hot gel, the smell of every wing she had ever waited in, and Wren stood on her mark with her heart trying the door of her ribs, and looked, because she couldn’t help it, into the shadow by the fly rail where a chair now sat where she had stood for ten years.

Celia looked back. Nodded once. Nothing in the nod you could arrest; a chairman’s nod, opening proceedings.

Then the lights, and the sunset, and the first line took the house, and Wren Halloran fell into the role she had waited a third of her life to fall into, and the falling held for exactly four minutes, until Constance crossed to the bureau to take out the letters, second drawer, ten years of watching, two thousand rehearsed openings of that drawer, and the drawer was empty.

The letters were in the third drawer. She found them on the beat, covered with a look, played on; nobody in the house could have seen a seam. But two scenes later the decanter that lived downstage of the window had migrated upstage of it, six feet of blocking rewritten on the fly around a prop in the wrong hemisphere, and by the interval Wren came off with her blood ringing and went, radiating intent, in search of the woman in grey cashmere.

She found her at the quick-change corner, and had the sense, barely, to keep her voice at hiss.

“Is this how it’s to be? My presets walking about the set on my nights? Because if the great Celia Marsh needs me to fail, she can come out and say so, and we’ll have it out on the stage like professionals.”

Celia looked up at her, and Wren watched something pass across her face, surprise, worked out fast, arriving somewhere that was almost, damn her, amusement.

“You think I moved your props.”

“I think it’s a coincidence with excellent timing.”