Chapter 13
The voice consultant prescribed total rest, which for Celia Marsh meant a week of enforced silence, which Bunny described to the management as vocal husbandry and Celia, on the notepad she was reduced to, described as being buried alive with Wi-Fi.
The company adapted the schedule: Wren to six shows that week, the world not ending, a fact Celia noted from her flat with complicated feelings and no voice to complicate anyone else with.
She communicated by text and by the notepad, and, in the dressing room on the two evenings she came in anyway to sit through Wren’s shows from the wings, wrapped and wordless, doctor’s orders bent double but not technically broken, by eyebrow.
It turned out she had a vocabulary of eyebrow that ran to full paragraphs, and it turned out Wren Halloran read it fluently, which surprised them both.
The left brow, a fraction: you’re rushing the visitor again.
Both, with the head tilt: the house is dead tonight, it’s not you, spend nothing extra on them.
The long stare with the mouth corner: that was new, that thing you did with the letter, do it again tomorrow so I can decide whether to steal it.
Wren found herself performing to the eyebrow, checking it at the wings like a conductor, and found also, more alarmingly, that the checking had stopped feeling like audit and started feeling like the evening’s true applause.
On the Thursday, Wren came to the flat.
Nobody had asked her to come, and she had not asked permission.
Wren played the matinee, learned that Celia had developed a fever on top of the enforced silence and gone home.
She stood in her own kitchen for ten minutes, then did what people in her family did for the sick.
She cooked badly and at volume, and carried the result across London in a bag for life.
The recipe was her nan’s, in the sense that her nan had once shouted it through a bathroom door in Athlone while Wren’s mother sweated out a flu on the far side.
Chicken broth, whole cloves of garlic, more whiskey than any doctor would sanction, honey stirred in off the heat.
Her nan had held that the whiskey was for the throat, the honey was for the temper, and the chicken was for respectability, and that the whole thing worked mainly because someone had stood in a kitchen for an hour thinking about you.
Wren burned the garlic on the first attempt and started again.
Deb, drawn out of her room by the smoke alarm, watched the second attempt from the doorway with folded arms.
“You know what this is, don’t you,” said Deb.
“It’s soup.”
“It’s a two-hour round trip on a Sunday night with a bag for life,” said Deb, “for a woman who put tape on your floor.” She handed Wren the good thermos, the one that actually sealed, which was its own commentary. “It’s soup the way that speech in the bathroom is a warm-up.”
The address she got off Trish, who handed it over with a look that said several things, none of which either of them elected to voice.
Celia opened the door in a dressing gown, feverish, voiceless, furious, and stood blocking the threshold with her whole depleted body. Wren held up the bag.
“My nan’s remedy,” she said. “Chicken broth with enough whiskey and honey in it to make the chicken irrelevant. You can’t talk, which we’re all agreed is a tragedy, so you don’t have to ask me in; you just have to stand aside, and afterwards you can write me a formal complaint and I’ll frame it.”
Celia stood one further second in the doorway, and then, whether from fever or surrender or something with no medical name, stood aside.
The flat undid Wren, and she was careful not to show it.
She had imagined it for years without admitting to the imagining: something upholstered, she’d assumed, velvet and awards.
What it was, was a museum after hours. Beautiful, cold, curated to the inch: the framed posters ranked down the hall in date order, The Winter Guest to now.
The two Oliviers on a shelf lit like relics.
White walls, white sofa, a kitchen that had clearly never been cried in.
And nowhere, Wren clocked it room by room as she carried the soup through, nowhere, on any wall or shelf or sill, a photograph of a human being.
No family. No friends at a table. No Celia herself, other than in character: Constance, Hedda, the Duchess, a gallery of magnificent strangers wearing her face.
They sat at the kitchen island while Celia drank the broth, which was, the eyebrow conceded, medicinal at worst, and the whiskey in it did what Wren’s nan had always promised: unlocked things.
The tour of the flat, such as it was, happened because the soup needed twenty minutes on the hob and hosts must do something with guests, even hosts on enforced silence with guests they are at war with in the trade press.
Celia conducted it with the notepad and a raised eyebrow: kitchen, obviously.
Sitting room, the white sofa like an unsigned contract.
The awards shelf, at which Wren stood a properly reverent fifteen seconds and then wrote in the air with a finger, where’s the dust. Celia wrote on the pad, the dust is managed.
Wren laughed the laugh that was too big for the museum and watched the woman almost, almost, enjoy the size of it.
It was the notepad that did the talking, in the end.
Wren had wandered the front room, been drawn back down the poster corridor, all those faces of her face, and come to rest in front of the only shelf with no lighting: small, low, holding a single unframed photograph propped against the spine of a dictionary.
A girl of perhaps nineteen leaned on a railing above some grey northern seafront, hair savaged by wind, laughing so hard her eyes were shut, in a coat too big for her.
It took Wren a full ten seconds, and the shock of it was physical.
“That’s you,” she said, to the museum quiet.
And then, before she could stop the sentence, the question that had been assembling in her all evening, room by room, wall by wall: “Where are you, in all this? The whole flat. It’s her, and her, and her,” a hand at the corridor of magnificent strangers, “and there’s exactly one of you, and it’s hidden behind a dictionary, and it’s from before all of it. Where are you, Celia?”
The silence had a different texture than the medical one.
Then Celia picked up the notepad from the counter, and wrote for a while, longer than her usual verdicts, and turned it round.
That photograph is Whitby, 1996. Two weeks before the Winter Guest audition.
I have kept it because it is the last picture of a person I still recognise.
Everything on the walls came after, and the walls are honest: they are what I made instead of her.
You have now been in this flat for one hour and found the only thing in it.
I would ask you to consider that a security breach, except that you have spent ten years in a dark wing doing exactly this, and I appear to have stopped minding, which frightens me more than the fever.
Wren read it twice. Outside, London hummed. The radiators ticked like the theatre’s pipes.
“My turn, then,” she said, and sat down across the island, and paid a truth back for the truth she’d been given, because that was the economy now, they had both felt it change: the only currency this room took.
She told Celia what she had never told Deb or Trish and had shouted down in herself at four in the morning for a decade.
Not the noble version of apprenticeship at a master’s shoulder.
The truth. You begin by wanting the work.
Then the waiting teaches you to want the wanting, because the wanting is the only part that belongs to you.
Ten years of rehearsing a life in the dark had left her, she sometimes feared, better at rehearsal than living. Better at watching than being watched.
“The wanting’s gone feral on me,” she said. “Ten years feeding it in the dark. I don’t know if I could bring it to heel now if the thing I wanted stood right in front of me.”
The kitchen was very quiet.
Celia looked at her for a long time across the island, fever-bright, silenced, seen and seeing, and what she wrote on the notepad then she wrote slowly, and turned it around slowly, and it said:
For the record, since records are all I can keep this week: I have watched you across a dressing room for two months wanting things you think you hide.
You hide nothing. You are the worst-armoured person I have ever met in this profession, and I have begun to depend on it, the way one depends on the only unlocked door in a burning building.
The wanting has not bent you, Miss Halloran.
It has made you the only person I know who still points at things.
Wren read the words. The kitchen changed pressure, as rooms often did around them now. For a moment the island had the width of the dressing-room tape. Neither woman moved. The fever was real, the silence was medical, and both were still pretending that rules could contain what was happening.
She left at midnight. At the door, the goodbye ran long.
It ran two beats too long, then a third.
Celia stood in the doorway wrapped in the dressing gown, and Wren on the mat with her empty bag for life, close enough to feel the fever’s warmth arriving off her skin, and the corridor’s dim light did what dim light does, and every one of the fourteen available goodnights was wrong: the words too small, the nod absurd, the hand-touch a border no treaty covered.
In the end Wren simply looked at her, the way you look when the eyebrow language runs out, and said, “Drink the rest of it hot. I’ll see you at the theatre,” and made herself turn, and heard the door not close until she was all the way into the lift.
On the bus she told herself, with great firmness, that it had been soup for a sick colleague, a mercy visit, the done thing, and that the pressure change in the kitchen had been fever and whiskey and two tired women mistaking honesty for something else.
In the flat, Celia stood a long while in the corridor of magnificent strangers, and then took the Whitby photograph out from behind the dictionary and stood it, facing the room, in front.
Fever, she told the girl in the wind, who laughed on, eyes shut, unpersuaded. It’s the fever.
Neither woman convinced her audience. Both slept badly, three miles apart, in the same direction.