Chapter 8
The rhythm arrived the way rhythms do, without a vote.
Mondays and Wednesdays and matinees the board said WREN HALLORAN; the other nights it said CELIA MARSH; the returns queue learned the difference and traded on it like a currency.
The magazine shoot happened on the first Monday of the month, in a studio in Shoreditch, and it was the first time the two of them had ever been in a room together with nothing to perform except each other.
The concept, the photographer explained, was duellists.
Back to back, faces to camera, swords optional.
Celia listened to the brief the way she listened to bad notes, with total courtesy and no intention of complying.
“We’ll stand back to back,” she said, “because you’ve hired the backdrop. But no swords, no crossed arms, and nobody scowls. Scowling photographs as fear at my age and as ambition at hers, and neither is the story.”
“What is the story?” said the photographer, humouring her.
“Two women who share a job,” said Wren, from the makeup chair. “Terrifying. No one’s ever survived it.”
The shoot ran two hours. Somewhere in the second hour the photographer stopped getting what he’d been sent for and started getting something better, though he wouldn’t understand what until the contact sheets came back: frame after frame of two women failing to keep straight faces, Celia’s chin lifting at something Wren had muttered, Wren caught mid-retort, the duellists’ poses collapsing by degrees into something the picture desk would struggle to caption.
The frame the magazine eventually ran was the only usable one, both faces finally composed.
The out-takes were better. One of them, though neither woman knew it yet, would sit framed on a long table in New York inside two years.
Inside the building, the two-sided dressing room developed customs neither woman acknowledged: the kettle boiled at the half whichever name was on, two mugs out, one never commented on.
Radio 3 stayed low. The brass hare remained on Wren’s side, facing her mirror, unexplained and undiscussed, like a hostage both parties had decided was happier where he was.
The press office, riding the diary item’s wave with Jonathan’s blessing, booked what it called the summit: a joint feature, both Constances, one photographer, the Sunday magazine.
COMPARE AND CONTRAST, the working title.
Wren read the email twice and took it next door to the only person who’d understand.
“They want us fighting,” she said. “On the record, in good lighting.”
“Of course they do.” Celia didn’t look up from her script.
“Two women, one role: the oldest cage in the business. They’ll pose us back to back like duellists, ask us each three questions about the other, and print whichever answers bleed.
” She turned a page. “We’ll give them nothing.
Compliments with no handles on them. It’ll sell worse and cost less. ”
“Look at us,” said Wren, “agreeing twice in one calendar month,” and went to tell Deb, who had opinions about the back-to-back pose and wanted to know what Wren would wear, and the conversation that followed lasted forty minutes, of which, Deb pointed out afterwards, doing the washing up, roughly thirty had been about Celia Marsh.
“It’s a work feature. She’s the work.”
“Babe. You said her name eleven times before I stopped counting. You did her voice. You do her voice now, the way you used to do your one-woman Constance in the bathroom, only it’s not Constance anymore, it’s her, the actual woman, you’ve upgraded.
” Deb passed her a wet plate. “Ten years you’ve studied this woman for a living.
I’m only asking: has anyone checked what the studying turned into? ”
“It turned into a job. It’s on a board with lights.”
“Right,” said Deb, in the tone of a woman shelving a file she fully intended to reopen.
The trouble with Deb’s file was that it acquired evidence at speed.
Item: the Tuesday Wren caught her own hand, mid-scene, making Celia’s gesture.
The letter speech, the half-turn at the window, and her right hand rose wrist-first the way Celia’s rose, a lift Wren had watched two thousand times and absorbed like weather into rock, and the recognition went through her onstage like a wire: I am wearing her.
She cut the gesture that night, violently, mid-arc, and replaced it with stillness, and the stillness read better, and that was somehow worse.
Item: the fight about the meaning of the play, which began as a line run.
A cold Thursday, both of them in at four for separate calls, and Wren, running the reconciliation scene on her side of the tape, made a choice with the word forgiveness, and Celia, who was not being consulted, said from her mirror: “She doesn’t forgive him in that scene. ”
“She says I forgive you. I’ve the typescript. It’s one of the few lines Hale ever wrote in the front door.”
“She says it to end the conversation. It’s a payment, not a pardon. Constance forgives no one in this play, least of all herself; that’s the entire fourth act.”
“It’s a payment she can’t afford, then,” said Wren, not looking up from her own script, which was how their arguments began now, sidelong, like weather fronts.
“That’s my whole point. You play it solvent.
Your Constance forgives him the way a bank forgives a debt it’s written off already, nothing moving in the accounts.
Mine’s writing a cheque she knows will bounce, and the audience should hear the pen shake. ”
“The audience should hear the play, which is constructed, if you’d consult the architecture instead of the plumbing, as a withholding.
Hale gives Constance forty-one lines of direct address and not one of them discloses; the whole part is a locked house with the lights on; and you want to hand them the key in act three because it feels warmer. ”
“That’s your Constance.” Wren was up now, script rolled in her fist like a relay baton.
“Your Constance is a fortress and the play’s about the siege.
Fine. It’s a great reading, it’s been keeping the roof on this building since September.
But it’s not the only room in the house.
My Constance means the forgiveness and finds out in act four she can’t afford it.
She’s not a fortress, she’s a payer of debts, and the play’s about what it costs, and both of us are right, which is why this production is the first interesting thing to happen to that script since 1968. ”
The dressing room rang with it. They had ended up either side of the yellow line like counsel at a bench, close enough that Celia could see the pulse in the younger woman’s throat, and what Celia felt, under the argument’s joy, and the argument was joy, she hadn’t fought about a text like this since drama school, people agreed with Celia Marsh now, that was the tax on the name, was the small precise terror of being met.
Fully, frontally met, on her own deepest ground, by a mind that had read everything and conceded nothing and stood there blazing in a bottle-green jumper eighteen inches away with rain in her hair.
“Both right,” Celia said at last, judiciously, “is not a concession I make on the record.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it. I’ll leak it to the diaries.”
And they had laughed, both of them, at the same instant, one short bark each, and stopped at the same instant, as though the same authority had entered the room, and found urgent business on their own sides of the tape.
Item, the last, filed even by Wren herself: the script.
She found it on the shared costume rail on a Friday, sitting on the rail’s end like a parcel left by a retreating army: a French’s acting edition of The Winter Guest, 1998, spine broken white, and inside, on the flyleaf, C.
MARSH, ROYAL COURT, and every margin of every page dense with pencil.
The breakout. The performance that had made her, twenty-six years old, the one the profiles still called the arrival of the great stage animal of her generation.
Wren stood holding it for a full minute before she understood there was no note because the loan was the note.
She read it that night till three, in bed, like contraband.
It was not an actor’s script; it was the seabed of one.
Beat maps in a fierce young hand. Lines of Chekhov copied sideways in the margins for parallax.
Arguments with the director, dated. Doubt, everywhere, doubt like weather, is this true, is any of this true, I don’t believe her here, and then, on the last page, under the curtain call, in pencil gone soft with age: They stood. I have no idea who they think I am.
Wren closed the script in the dark and lay with her hand flat on its cover like a woman taking an oath, and admitted, at last, into the silence of the Kentish Town night, the finding Deb had been building toward for a month.
Whatever this was, it had stopped being study.
The Saturday brace failure nearly took the choice away from everyone.
Celia’s Saturday evening, the heaviest house of the week.
Wren was in, off rota, watching from the fly rail, a habit that no longer even pretended to have a reason.
Act Two, the window seat, the long cross on the diagonal, and Wren saw it happen: the fourth step, the half-inch, and then not the half-inch, the strap of the brace letting go inside the boot, the ankle taking true weight for the first time in six weeks, and the whole coastline of that body, known to Wren like sailed water, went wrong by three degrees.
Celia did not fall. She converted the buckle into a sway, the sway into a lean on the bureau, downstage, in light, and stood there marooned with four lines still to speak and the next cross unwalkable, and only one person in the building read the seafront correctly.
Wren was moving before she decided to. Round the back of the flat at a dead sprint, soft-footed, to the prompt corner; a word in Trish’s ear; and the visitor’s knock, the knock that belonged forty seconds later in the scene, came early.
Constance turned to the sound. The audience read the turn as the scene.
The lines rearranged themselves around the interruption, Celia rode the new order like a woman who had rehearsed it for a month, the scene ended two beats short with nobody in the house any the wiser, and the curtain came in on an ovation.
Wren was back at the fly rail before it hit the deck, heart slamming, watching the woman in the wings’ blue half-light being unstrapped by the duty first-aider, and across the forty feet of backstage dark, over the heads of the crew, Celia Marsh looked up and found her.
She knew. Of course she knew; she had heard the knock’s grammar, counted the missing forty seconds, understood in real time exactly what had been done for her and by whom and at what speed.
For a moment the two of them looked at each other across the traffic of the scene change, and then Celia, pale as paper, still in Constance’s silk, raised her right hand to her brow and gave Wren Halloran a salute: slow, precise, unironic, the acknowledgment of one soldier by another across a border neither had chosen, and public, in front of the entire crew, which was the part Wren couldn’t get over.
The woman guarded her privacies like a dragon on coin.
And she had spent one, deliberately, on that.
“What was that,” said Deb, when Wren described it, badly, at one a.m., having woken her to describe it, which itself was entered in the file.
“I don’t know,” said Wren. “In the army it means respect.”
“You’re not in the army, babe.”
“No,” said Wren, staring at the ceiling, the salute replaying on it like projection. “I’m starting to wonder what I am in.”