Chapter 14
Jonathan Wexler booked the quiet table at the back of the members’ club, which was how Wren knew before the water arrived that whatever was coming was radioactive.
“I’ll speak plainly,” he said, which from Jonathan announced the opposite, and then, over forty minutes and two courses Wren mostly didn’t eat, he laid it out.
New York. The producers he’d flown out to see in October, the ones the company thought had been about the musical.
A Broadway transfer of Vermilion in the spring: the Barrow, eight hundred seats, limited season, the sort of dates that turned a London success into an American career.
Serious money already circling. One thing, and one thing only, still unresolved.
“The role-share doesn’t travel,” said Jonathan, aligning his knife with the table’s edge.
“Broadway doesn’t buy a time-share on a star; their words, not mine, though I’d defend the underlying maths.
They want one Constance, eight shows a week, name above the title.
And so the question becomes which Constance, and I want you to hear, in this room, from me, that it is a genuinely open question.
That’s not a thing I say often, and I never say it twice. ”
“She built this production,” said Wren. “It transfers because of her.”
“It transfers because of what the two of you turned it into, and you know it.” He let the waiter clear, timing his sentences round the interruptions like a man who rehearsed at tables.
“But eight shows a week is a medical question as much as an artistic one, and the insurance market has a long memory and no poetry in it whatsoever. I’m told her recovery has plateaued.
I’m told a New York underwriter looks at a forty-nine-year-old ankle with a metal appointment in its future and prices accordingly.
” He looked at her then, direct, almost kind, which was the most frightening register he had.
“Nothing is decided. The Americans come over in the new year to see the show, both casts. All I’m asking of you tonight is this: be ready.
Keep your Mondays clean, keep your representation close, and keep this conversation between us. Can you do that?”
And Wren Halloran, who had waited ten years for a man at a table to say words in this family, heard herself say neither yes nor no.
She said, “I hear you,” which she would spend the next six weeks discovering was the most expensive sentence of her life, and walked out into Soho with the whole city tilted five degrees off true.
Be ready. Keep it between us. She stood at the crossing on Old Compton Street and did the sums she couldn’t unsee: one Constance.
A plateaued recovery. An underwriter’s cold arithmetic.
And on the other side of the scales a woman in a museum flat who had written you are the only unlocked door in a burning building on a notepad and turned it round with fever-bright eyes.
The secret went to work on everything, exactly the way secrets do.
It was in the dressing room by the next evening, invisible, structural, like damp.
Wren heard herself go careful. The banter still ran but she was watching it now, editing in transit, because every second sentence led somewhere mined: Celia mentioned the spring and Wren changed lanes.
Celia, running the schedule, wondered aloud what Jonathan was plotting, he’s too quiet, that man’s silences have line items, and Wren laughed one beat late and felt the laugh come out counterfeit, and saw, in the mirror’s edge, the flicker of Celia clocking it.
Celia, who missed nothing in a theatre, read the withdrawal within days and, being Celia, ran it through the only decryption she owned: fault.
Her own. The flat, the notepad, the unlocked door; she had shown too much, the girl had been kind about it, and the kindness had curdled into this new careful distance the way kindness did.
Too much, said the old voice, with Nigel’s cadence.
You showed her the vacancy and she’s begun politely backing toward the exits.
So Celia re-armoured, one plate at a time: the tape-line jokes came back with edges; the eyebrow language went formal; the mirror hours were suddenly enforced like statute, and each woman watched the other recede and catalogued it as confirmation.
Deb, receiving the nightly dispatches from the front, put down her tea one evening and said: “So let me get the shape of it. You’ve a secret you can’t tell her, and to keep from telling it you’ve gone weird, and she’s clocked the weird, and she thinks the weird is about her, and her fix for that is going full Snow Queen, and your fix for that is going weirder.
Babe, I’ve seen this play. You made me watch it.
It’s the one where everyone dies in the last act because nobody sent one text. ”
“That’s Hamlet, more or less.”
“It’s yours if you keep this up,” said Deb, “more or less.”
A scenery wall slipped on a Thursday at eleven forty at night.
Wren’s show had finished and the crew were carrying out their weekly post-show checks.
The stage was almost empty. Two carpenters were working behind the set, Trish was signing paperwork at the corner, and the two Constances were crossing the deck together.
A temporary brace gave way with a crack.
One of the tall vermilion flats lurched off its chocks and slammed onto the deck six feet from them.
Wren felt the impact in her sternum for a week.
Silence followed. Then the carpenters shouted and Trish’s voice rose above them, taking control.
Wren moved before thought caught up. She seized Celia with both hands and swung them into the shadow of the proscenium.
Now Celia’s back was against the cold iron frame of the safety curtain.
Wren’s fists were full of grey cashmere.
Six inches separated their faces, and both women breathed like sprinters.
“You’re all right,” said Wren. It wasn’t a question, and her voice came out wrong, low and shaking. “You’re all right.”
“The flat,” said Celia, with magnificent irrelevance, “was nowhere near my ankle.” Then she stopped. Six inches was not enough space for either of them to perform, and they realised it together.
The falling scenery had burned away the fog. Every careful sentence of the previous fortnight, every evasion and every counterfeit laugh, vanished. Only the truth remained. It stood six inches from Wren in grey cashmere, a pulse beating visibly in its throat.
Trish ordered everyone off the stage until the carpenters had secured the set and the duty engineer had inspected it.
Incident forms were waiting in the office.
The working lights went out in banks. Wren and Celia stepped apart, walked off like professionals and made it as far as the wardrobe corridor.
Afterwards, neither could say who turned first. Wren remembered the dark corridor and the adrenaline still racing through her.
Celia stopped at the wardrobe-room door, began a sentence about incident forms and abandoned it.
Then the six inches closed. Their mouths met hard enough to erase the question of who had begun it.
Inside the wardrobe room, among the hanging rails, Wren locked the door with the hand that was not already in Celia’s hair. “Tell me to stop and I’m stopped.”
“If you stop,” said Celia Marsh, with the last coherent breath either of them managed for some time, “I will have you replaced.”
It was frantic and it was wordless after that, ten years of watching detonating all at once in a dark room that smelled of steam and starch.
There was nothing graceful in it. Celia’s back against the shelving, costumes swinging on their rails; Wren’s mouth at her throat, her jaw, the cashmere shoved off her shoulders and Celia’s hands, those precise, famous hands, dragging Wren’s shirt free with a roughness that undid her completely.
When Wren got a thigh between hers Celia made a sound no stage had ever heard, raw and shocked and hungry, and Wren pulled back just far enough to look at her, pinned and open-mouthed in the dark, the definite article of the English stage coming apart against a wardrobe shelf, and said, wonderingly, “There you are,” and went to her knees.
Celia came with a fist in Wren’s hair and a cry buried against her own arm.
She hauled Wren upright and returned the pleasure with interest. Her hands slid beneath Wren’s waistband, deft and merciless, until Wren shook against her.
Wren pressed her face to the throat she had watched deliver monologues for a decade and said her name over and over, with no Miss or Marsh attached.
Then the two of them stood among the rails in the dark, holding each other up, hearts slamming, the theatre silent around them except for the tick of the pipes, and sense came back into the room the way cold comes under a door.
They dressed in silence. That was the terrible comedy of it. Wren hunted for her shirt among the fallen costumes while Celia rebuilt herself in the dark, cashmere and composure restored piece by piece. By the time she spoke, the armour was almost complete.
“That never happened,” she said.
“Agreed,” said Wren. “Never happened. Won’t happen again. Freak rigging accident, adrenaline, well documented in the literature.” She buttoned her shirt one hole out of true. “For the record, though, and then I’ll never say it again: I don’t want to be your rival anymore.”
The silence went on long enough that Wren looked up. Celia was watching her across the dark room, and the eyes had not reassembled with the rest of her; the eyes were all the way open.
“Then we have a problem. Rivalry is the only intimacy I have ever mastered. I can survive it because it comes with a blade in each hand and a scoring system. What happened in here had neither.” Celia unlocked the door.
The corridor light caught a face that did not believe in freak accidents.
“It was unarmed, Wren. I have spent thirty years making certain nobody ever got me alone in a room with that.”
“And now?”
“Now,” said Celia Marsh, stepping out into the corridor with her coat immaculate and her voice not quite level, “we are going to say goodnight, and go home in separate taxis, and agree that this never happened, and I am going to spend the hours until morning discovering whether I am still capable of believing my own performances. Goodnight, Wren.”
It was the first time she had ever used the name. They both heard it. Neither of them believed a word of the rest.