Epilogue
Four Months Later
Harriet pulled open the ornate glass-and-gilt doors of the theater and breathed in the heady scent of hyacinths carried on the fresh spring breeze. The long winter had hung around like a guest who’d outstayed their welcome, but this morning the sun was out, and the daffodils and tulips planted in the theater garden shone iridescent in its golden beams. She fastened the doors open to let the air through and made her way into the auditorium.
Dress rehearsals were well under way for the Easter performance of The Sound of Music , and the energy was the kind of pure unadulterated chaos that only the Winter Players could encompass.
As part of her mission to make the Winter Theater not only vital again in its own right but also a valuable local resource, Harriet had liaised with schools and community groups, and now the stage was in almost constant use for everything from debate teams to music and dance clubs, design technology apprenticeship schemes, and of course theater groups. Ticketed performances were booked in every two weeks almost until December, showcasing ballet recitals, jazz nights, and all things in between. All of which brought in a healthy revenue that could be plowed back into community projects.
Harriet still had to pinch herself that this was her job now: chief executive of the Winter Theater. It was a lot of responsibility, but she relished being in control of the theater’s destiny and her own. And thanks to a very generous trust fund left by Evaline in her will, she didn’t need to skimp on the infrastructure that would make the theater a safe space for anyone who needed it, which had included opening it up as an emergency winter shelter during the coldest February in decades.
She had worried at first about leaving the kids on the “list” back at the school, but she needn’t have. Via one route or another, almost all of them ended up spending time at the theater, where she could keep an eye on them, and when they were at school, Ali—who had taken over her role in pastoral care—was their fierce protector. She wasn’t good at relinquishing control, but she trusted Ali implicitly, and he reminded her constantly that she needed to calm the flock down, which helped enormously.
She had a lovely spacious office in the attic with a window overlooking the high street, but most often she brought her work and a small reading lamp down with her and settled at the back of the auditorium, just in case anyone needed her.
The Sound of Music was the first production by the Winter Players since A Christmas Carol , and anticipation was high; tickets had sold out in the first week of sale.
Backstage, actors and stagehands bustled to and fro in preparation. Out in the auditorium, Gideon—in a cape lined in a tulip-patterned fabric—bellowed the ten-minute call until curtain up.
Grace emerged from her dressing room wearing a dirndl and a cropped blond wig. Even the astonishingly thick stage makeup couldn’t hide the fact that at sixty-five Grace made for a somewhat mature Maria, but then Josef was no spring chicken as Captain Von Trapp either. Sid—cast as little Kurt Von Trapp—walked beside her chattering.
“And Tess said the holiday house looks over the sea and that they have palm trees everywhere in Torquay. I’ll share a room with Billy, which he’s well cross about, but you get your own room, Grace, and we can all have breakfast together every morning. Arthur is going to teach me how to catch crabs with a bucket on a line. Have you been to Torquay before?”
“A long time ago, when I was about your age. I’m looking forward to going back. Now where is your brother?”
“He’s still helping Hesther in the cocktail lounge.”
Grace nodded. “Well, you’d best go retrieve him before Gideon bursts a blood vessel.”
With James’s help, Tess, Arthur, and Grace had been awarded joint guardianship of Billy and Sid. The boys spent half the week at each house, and once a week they all had family dinner together.
Gideon’s voice echoed around the backstage corridors. “For the love of Shakespeare, I need my script writer! Where in Chaucer’s name is Billy? Could we have the orchestra settled, please. Mallory, where is my Austrian dancing troupe? This is a professional theater, people, let’s shake a tail feather!”
Ricco was seething in the left wing in a brown waistcoat and lederhosen, and Carly, who was playing Liesl, couldn’t stop laughing at him.
“I look ridiculous!” he complained.
“I think it’s cute,” Leo offered, earning himself a scowl.
“Hold still!” Isabel admonished as she tried to adjust his braces.
“Seriously, you chose this month to start hitting the gym?” asked Carly, laughing.
“Excuse me for wanting to be buff!” Ricco replied testily.
“I like it,” said Leo dreamily, and Carly rolled her eyes.
“What time did we say for dinner tonight?” Lyra called across to Maisy as she attached ropes to the pulley on one end of a backcloth depicting Austrian hills. Working on the same task at the other end of the backcloth, Maisy replied, “I think Mum said she’d booked the bistro for seven p.m.”
The two had become easy friends, and Lyra had quickly been assimilated into their family and into the theater as a guest set designer, helping Leo and Farahnoush to bring their creative visions to fruition. Maisy would be leaving for university in September, and, though the thought of it still speared Harriet’s chest with shards of melancholy, she was ready to embrace this next stage of her life. She would ensure that she nurtured herself and cherished her time alone and would then be fully ready to celebrate the long holidays with Maisy.
Harriet looked up as Billy strode—head down, hands in pockets as was his way—down the middle aisle to where Gideon was expostulating loudly about the tightness of Douglas’s trousers.
“Kingsley, my dear man, is there anything we can do about those lederhosen? I don’t think we need to assault our audience with quite such a vivid outline of Douglas’s bratwurst!” Kingsley scurried onto the stage with a tape measure dangling over his shoulder and shuffled a rather proud-looking Douglas into the wings. “Billy, my boy!” Gideon beamed. “Do you have the latest rewrites for the party scene?”
“Yep,” said Billy, handing over two sheets of printed paper.
Gideon took them greedily, his eyes darting left to right as he scanned the page, a smile growing across his face. “Marvelous, simply marvelous, we will miss your writing talents when you leave us for the bright lights of London.”
Billy was the first recipient of the Evaline Winter Playwriting Scholarship. He would be heading off to Goldsmiths next year.
“Cheers,” said Billy, shrugging.
“It never ceases to amaze me how one so taciturn in real life can be so unreserved on the page.”
Billy shrugged again and said dryly, “I’m an enigma.”
Harriet bobbed her head down to hide her giggle.
“I thought I’d find you here,” said James, moseying his way along the seats to reach her.
“It’s too quiet in my office.”
“Is that code for you don’t want to miss anything that’s going on down here?” he asked. He bent to kiss her before shifting some of her papers to the free seat on the other side of her and sitting down.
She smiled. “You seem to have the measure of me.”
“Intimately.” He waggled his eyebrows at her.
“I still have a few secrets,” she said archly.
“Which I’m sure I’ll wheedle out of you once you move in with me.” He grinned.
“Er, you mean when you move in with me,” she countered.
“My flat is bigger.”
“My flat is more conveniently situated and infinitely cozier.”
“Hey, I like my flat.”
“I like your flat too, but I like mine more.”
“You are unconscionably stubborn.”
Variations on this discussion had been ongoing since February and went round in a complete circle, neither of them budging an inch.
Harriet laughed.
“I guess we’ve both been set in our own ways for too long.”
“Perhaps we need to employ an intermediate phase to ease our transition from stubborn independence to—”
Harriet held up a finger to interject. “If you’re going to say ‘dependence’ you can stop right there. I will never be dependent on anyone.”
“If you’ll allow me to finish,” he said, a knowing smile tugging his mouth. “I was going to say to ease our transition from stubborn independence to mutual independence.”
She narrowed her eyes and chewed the inside of her cheek, wondering if this was a trap.
“Okay, I’m listening.”
“Let’s become neighbors.”
“You’re bananas.” She burst out laughing, earning herself a disapproving glare from Gideon.
“I’m serious.” James shifted to face her, taking one of her hands in his. “Let’s wait for two neighboring cottages or two flats in the same building to come up for rent and…see what happens. We get to be close and have our own space.”
Harriet considered. It did seem like a good idea. “Neighbors with benefits,” she said, chewing the tip of her pen.
“Exactly.”
“You know.” Harriet was thoughtful. “Mr. Parker in flat two was telling me that he might be relocating to Dubai with work in the autumn.”
James’s eyes twinkled in the light of her reading lamp as he leaned in close to kiss her.
“Then I guess I’ve got till autumn to pack,” he whispered against her lips.
The introduction to “The Lonely Goatherd” song plink-plonked on the piano by Prescilla broke their kiss and made them look at the stage. Isabel, playing the puppet of the “girl in the pale pink coat,” and Ricco, playing the goatherd, danced jerkily on the stage, while the rest of the cast sang and yodeled the lyrics in the wings. They were soon joined onstage by Destiny and the Lonely Farts Club, who unwittingly resembled demonic ventriloquist dummies with their puppet makeup and moved haltingly about the stage like the dead girl climbing out of the well in The Ring .
“That’s going to scare small children,” said James, as Destiny, with two red circles for cheeks, grinned maniacally out at the stalls and Winston sneezed his false teeth out onto the stage.
Harriet winced and nodded. “I’ll have a word with Gideon,” she said.
“What I would have given for a haven like this when I was a horrible teenager.” James’s tone was thoughtful.
“Me too,” she laughed. “Maybe we would have been less horrible if we’d had one.”
James quirked his head to one side. “No,” he concluded. “I’d still have been horrible. Come on.” He took her hand and brought it his lips, laying a kiss across her knuckles. “I’ll treat you to a coffee in the cocktail lounge. The chef is making mini simnel cakes; I reckon we could bargain ourselves a couple of testers.” He flashed her a devilish grin, and Harriet wondered how any woman could deny him anything ever.
“In that case, lead the way,” she said, discarding her work for the moment. She could allow herself a coffee break.
Holding hands, they made their way down the grand staircase into the bustling foyer. Sunlight flooded in through the open doors as members of the various community groups scurried to and from meetings held in the many spaces within the theater buildings.
Harriet and James crossed the foyer and pulled open the double doors that led up to the restaurant and cocktail lounges. A familiar explosion of noise and smells spilled over them in a bright wave of nursery rhymes and pealing laughter, all wrapped neatly in scents of mixed spice. They smiled at one another as they surrendered themselves to the tide of mayhem.
Hanging above the door in a gilt frame was the portrait of Evaline Winter that had been completed just before her death. Her smile was comfortingly wry, and her straight-backed posture attested to her matriarchal status. But in her eyes the artist had captured what only those closest to her would have witnessed in those last few months of her life: mischief, of course, but also a twinkle of contentment that told of a woman who had found a way to free herself at last from the ghosts that had haunted her.
Harriet hoped the same freedom waited for every soul who walked through the doors of the Winter Theater.