Chapter Two
Sasha
waited on the fire escape. He could have stayed in the dressing
room, or anywhere else out of the way of theatrical traffic he
chose. Laurie’s orders to security were always strict in that
regard, and Sasha found a welcome backstage and in the green rooms
of whichever playhouse his lover was working.
Greatly
as he appreciated the privilege, once those theatres were no longer
intimate studios and hundred-seater locals but vast bejewelled
caverns like the Queen’s—combination rabbit-warren and cruise ship
under full sail—Sasha preferred invisibility. On a warm city night
it was a pleasure to clamber up into the black wrought-iron forest
of emergency stairs that filled the alley between the Queen’s and
the rival Marlowe that backed onto it. Like slipping between the
spines of two great slumbering beasts...
He was
almost at roof level. He’d used a drop ladder to get up here, which
he supposed wasn’t becoming for a suited office worker with a
satchel full of Council files, but the satchel had a strap he could
sling across his chest and shoulders to leave his hands free. When
Laurie had wanted to buy him a briefcase, that was what Sasha had
asked for. One of Laurie’s myriad beauties was that Sasha never had
to explain to him such things—why free hands were important, why a
second-hand, scuffed leather satchel appealed more than a sleek
attaché.
Sasha
sat watching the remains of a late summer sunset, just a glowing
green-gold aura to the west, outshone from below by earthly lights.
He could let his bone-marrow gently vibrate to the bass thudding up
from the nightclubs on Soho Street, and pick up strands of
multilingual chatter as they drifted to him on the updrafts. A
clash of ragged consonants caught his ear. Romani? He homed in on
the sound, picked out from the scatter of passersby on Shaftesbury
Avenue a brightly dressed group, all of them dark-haired as he was,
cheerful but watchful in the crowd. No—Hungarian, close enough to
tug at his roots, sufficiently different to leave them
aching.
Roma or
Magyar, illegal or of good status, the gaudy little group would no
longer recognise Sasha as one of their own. He’d done his best, in
all his work for the IGC, to identify with his clients, not the
establishment. But he knew that on first sight, until he had
introduced himself and spoken to whichever weary, hypothermic piece
of displaced humanity had just been dragged from a container ship
at Dover, to them he was part of the problem, a brick in the wall.
A suit and a tie on the far side of a desk.
The tie
was long gone. Vaguely Sasha wondered where he’d left it today.
Laurie gently scolded him for the trail of them he left around the
city, but kept them coming—dove grey, charcoal, unassuming but of
lovely make. Considering this, Sasha asked himself if he were
becoming more thoroughly assimilated than he’d known. The boy who
had lived hand-to-mouth on the streets of this glittering town
would never have left a tie behind, if he’d had a use for one. He’d
have hung on to every stitch on his back.
A burst
of voices, vivid as sunflowers, startled him out of his thoughts.
He looked down through the branches of his forest. The stage doors
were disgorging a lovely cascade, young men and women more gaudily
dressed for their own lives than they had been for Shakespeare’s.
Kenneth’s production had kept their costumes sober, underlining the
contradictions in the play between majesty and base cruelty,
military heroism and domestic dirt. Released to their evening’s
entertainment, the cast were resplendent in coloured faux furs,
ground-trailing skirts, Desigual jackets patched all over with
gold-threaded rags. Sasha smiled. All this boho chic must cost a
fortune, and from here they looked like a bunch of Roma gypsies
ready to dance round the fire.
Already
dancing. The fire in question was Laurie Fitzroy. They were
shifting about him as if in response to a gravitational force,
jockeying for close position. Laurie, poised and quiet in a plain
leather coat and jeans, hardly seemed aware of them.
Sasha didn’t wait for Laurie to miss him, to start to look
around. After two years in a partnership, surrounded by other young
couples, gay and straight, Sasha had begun to accept the behaviours
displayed by some of their friends, the chances they took with one
another. Tell me you love me in front of
your friends. Fetch me a beer. If you really give a damn about me,
you won’t go out tonight. These things had
astounded him at first. He wasn’t concerned whether or not the beer
would be fetched, the public declaration of passion made. What
scared him was the risk. If you had someone, a lover to call your
own, why on earth would you challenge him, put him through such
trivial tests?
It was
okay to understand such errors in others, not to commit them
himself. He made his way down the fire escape as quietly as he had
climbed it. Silently he joined the periphery of the
crowd.
Laurie
saw him. A gap in his universe filled. He tuned out the static of
the chatter around him and took his fix on Sasha’s beacon, signal
coming strongly through the noise. “Sash! Where the hell were
you?”
“Communing with the pigeons.” Sasha wouldn’t test, but he was
glad enough to take Laurie’s outstretched hand when it was there,
to be reeled in through the rabble. The older members of the cast
had gone home to their beds, though Kenneth and Parolles were
there, oblivious to the generation gap and with bright eyes fixed
on the main chance. Gem was sharing a joint with the virginal Diana
of Florence. The only missing face was that of Alison Jones,
Laurie’s most devoted friend and follower from the Rayne’s.
“Where’s Allie tonight?”
“Arnold said she went home sick. I dunno. I think I might’ve
done something to upset her.”
“You? You’re her saint and angel. You can do no
wrong.”
“I’m not so sure about that.” Laurie shivered in the warm night
air. Maybe he could do no wrong, but Bertram could think of a thousand ways
to hurt a girl, a thousand neglects and betrayals. Bertram coiled
and twitched in Laurie’s mind, a cold ghost, persistent despite
Sasha’s exorcism. “Speaking of Arnold, let’s get out of here before
he catches me up. I don’t want to hear he’s already traded me off
to play a loveable, sexy Goneril in King Lear.”
“Too late.” Sasha had observed more than just pigeons and
Hungarians from his roost. “I think he’s cut us off at the
pass.”
Sure
enough, here he came, cannoning back down the alley towards them.
“Right!” he yelled. “Laurence, it’s all right. Your cab will meet
you here.”
Laurie
frowned in bewilderment. “I can hail my own cab.”
“Not on Shaftesbury tonight, darling. Don’t know if it’s
last-night fever or just your pheromones, but there’s a whole
cattery of yowling girls blocking your exit. You ought to get a
car.”
“Where would I park it?”
“And a driver,
darling.”
“Oh, for God’s...” Laurie gave it thought—not the absurd
concept of a chauffeur, which was a thing from his father’s
vanished world—but the girls. He had no problem signing theatre
programmes, chatting to a handful of kids about how they liked
Shakespeare and whether or not they’d catch the last Tube home.
“How many cats go to make up a cattery?”
“Fifteen at least. Twenty, maybe.”
Well, that was more than a handful. Whoops of mocking
admiration began to arise from the All’s
Well players. Even the starriest among them
seldom pulled down more than a dozen, not here in the restrained
theatrical West End. Laurie waved the racket away, grinning. “Okay.
I’ll take the cab. I’m a bit disappointed, though, Arnie—all
queens? No toms?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Am I only attracting girls with my pheromones?”
A shadow
of displeasure crossed Arnold’s face. It was so brief that neither
Laurie nor Sasha had time to analyse it, covered an instant later
by his usual agreeable mask. “Yes, and a damn good thing. In those
circumstances, the toms would be queens too, if you see what I
mean.”
It was
so blatant that, for a moment, Laurie didn’t see at all. Then he
noticed that Kenneth had stopped in mid-arrangement of his fuchsia
satin scarf and was staring at the manager in disbelief. Laurie
liked Kenneth. He liked, for that matter, most of the forty percent
of cast and crew he was fairly sure were gay, and best of all he
liked Sasha, whose face had acquired that peculiar Romani stillness
which meant he was startled but still processing, willing to give
the offender the benefit of the doubt.
Laurence, son of Baronet William Fitzroy, never gave anyone
the benefit of anything, not where civil liberties were concerned.
He drew himself up. In the crisp accents he normally reserved for
JB Priestley roles—his own by nature, though he tended to mute
them, not wishing to sound like a caricature of his class— he
enquired of Arnold, “Was that a joke?”
Arnold
paled. Laurie had hired him only a few months ago, when Equity had
finally convinced him that so promising a career needed
professional guidance and nurturing. Arnold was aware that he had
been chosen based on the first business card Laurie had seen. Easy
come, easy go... And where the devil had that blue-eyed,
blue-blooded knight of the realm sprung from? “Er, no,” he replied,
then when Laurie’s expression darkened further still, corrected
himself hastily. “I mean yes, of course. And a very bad one. No
offence, everyone.”
Theatre
people were harder to offend than that. Laurie, unless his blood
was running sapphire in his veins, was hard to offend at all, and
he promptly broke into a grin. “None taken, I’m sure. Sash, do you
forgive him?”
“Perhaps my poor English prevented me from getting the joke at
all.”
Laurie
snorted and shot him an appreciative look. Then, to Sasha’s
astonishment, he wrapped an arm tight round his waist, pulled him