Chapter 20
The Americans came to the Wednesday show, and they came the way American money comes: in good coats, in the house seats, visibly.
Wren clocked them from the wings before the half hour was called, because Trish, who missed nothing and tipped off whom she chose, had murmured “row G, the cashmere delegation” in passing.
She played that night’s Constance to nine hundred and four civilians and four producers.
She would have liked to report that she rose above the knowledge.
She had been in the profession too long to lie to herself about a house: she was brilliant, and she knew exactly for whom.
Afterwards they came backstage, shepherded by Jonathan, and the corridor by Dressing Room One filled with a warmth that had a current running under it, and the current’s direction was unmistakable.
Miss Halloran. Extraordinary. That fourth act.
New York is going to lose its mind for you, said the tallest coat, said it in the corridor, at volume, in front of the company, in front of wardrobe, in front, Wren realised with her stomach dropping through the Victorian floor, of Celia, who had come in for the evening as she now always did and stood six feet away holding two teas, having heard every word, wearing the serenity, the beautiful public serenity, like a coffin lid.
The weather of the building changed that week, room by room.
Wren felt it the way you feel a tide under a boat: deference arriving where the shrugs used to live.
The company manager began answering her emails first. A dresser asked, casually, terribly, whether Wren would be keeping her own dresser in New York.
The understudy dynamic had inverted, entire, in seven days, and the inversion had a nauseous familiarity to it, because Wren had spent ten years on the other side of exactly this arithmetic, and knew, none better in England, what the room’s weather did to the person it turned away from.
She went to Jonathan on Friday without an invitation and made her move.
“The transfer takes the role-share,” she said. “Both Constances, as built, as sold out, as reviewed. That’s my position, formally, before any paper moves. It’s the show. The show is the two of us.”
Jonathan looked at her for a moment with what appeared to be real regret, which was his most expensive expression, and then he laughed, not unkindly, which was worse.
“Broadway,” he said, “does not buy a time-share on a star. Their phrase, and I’ve come to admire it.
Wren. You’re asking me to sell New York a compromise London arrived at because of an ambulance.
They’re not buying the accident; they’re buying what walked out of it.
” He straightened a frame that was not crooked.
“There will be an offer, and it will have one name on it, and every actress in the English-speaking world knows whose. What you do when it lands is the whole of your career, arriving at once. I’d think less about positions, and more about whether you can afford the gesture you’re rehearsing. ”
“And her?”
“Celia,” said Jonathan Wexler, producer, “will be looked after with a generosity that will photograph extremely well.” He held the door for her. “Either or, Miss Halloran. The maths was never going to be kind. It was only ever going to be kind to somebody.”
The courtship escalated through the week with the crude efficiency of money in a hurry.
A gift basket arrived at the stage door addressed to THE NEXT GREAT brOADWAY CONSTANCE, which Wren left in the green room for the crew to strip like ants.
A profile writer requested access for a piece whose working title, helpfully disclosed, was The Understudy Ascendant.
And on the Thursday the tallest coat took her to breakfast at a hotel where the orange juice cost what Wren had earned per matinee in year three, and talked for forty minutes about her future in the second person singular, you, you, you, a grammar with no room in it for any other noun, while Wren ate the expensive eggs and heard, under every sentence, the door of the role-share being quietly, expensively, walled up.
The fight that evening was nominally about a blocking change.
It was Celia’s night. The confrontation scene.
Wren, watching from the wings, had seen her take the new proximity blocking and quietly re-open it, two steps of distance restored at the eighteen-inch mark, the orbit widened back toward the old cold geometry, unauthorised, unannounced, and unmistakable to an audience of one.
Dougie would have words on Tuesday. Wren had them at eleven, in the dressing room, before the cream had come off the makeup.
“You moved the mark.”
“I adjusted an untenable sightline. It’s my scene to adjust; I’ve the seniority, and the ankle gets a vote too, if we’re doing the full tribunal.”
“You put six feet back between the two of them because eighteen inches has got too honest for you.” The words came out ahead of all judgment, a week of tides behind them. “It’s the only place we still tell each other the truth, that scene, and you’ve re-blocked it. You’re re-blocking us.”
“There’s a phrase with no professional meaning whatsoever,” Celia said, cold as the cream jar.
Both women knew the escalation. The fight tore through blocking, seniority, whose show it had been and whose it was becoming.
For five minutes they fired at every target except the real one.
Then Wren reached for the point-blank question with the New York casing.
She hated herself even as she fired it. “If the Americans wanted one Constance, and it was you, would you take it?”
“If they came to you,” she said, “the Americans. If they wanted one Constance, and it was you. Would you take it?”
The room went very quiet. Celia looked at her in the mirror, not turning, the bulbs’ white border around her face like a verdict being framed, and Wren watched something pass behind the famous eyes, sixteen days of something, though she could not know that yet, and when the answer came it came in the armoured register, each word placed like a stone on a coffin.
“Take it,” said Celia Marsh. “I would.”
In the same heartbeat, Wren understood that she had failed the test. Celia had expected a grin and the answer, so would I.
That would have lanced the boil. Instead, Wren heard I would while carrying an unsent refusal in her pocket.
After a week of important coats and careful evasions, she took the words at face value and went white.
“Right,” said Wren. “Good to know the terms.”
“Wren.”
“No, it’s grand. It’s clarifying.” She was gathering her coat, her bag, the wreckage of the evening. “We’re professionals. Either or. The maths was only ever going to be kind to somebody.”
She heard Jonathan’s cadence come out of her own mouth and hated it, and left anyway.
Celia sat before her mirror in the emptied room, in the ringing silence after the door, and looked at the woman in the bulbs’ border, the one who had just been offered, at last, an open window into the whole poisoned fortnight, would you take it, the very question, served on a plate, and had answered it with a stone.
“Brava,” she said quietly, to the definite article. “House rose to it, I expect.”
Neither of them slept. At two in the morning, three miles apart, both compositions failed at the same hour, and what happened next happened at Wren’s door.
The knock came at ten past two. Wren opened it on Celia Marsh in the enormous parka from the Bond-film morning, hood down, rain in her hair, no stick, which meant the stairs had been taken on rage alone, and before Wren could assemble one syllable Celia said, in a voice stripped of every register but the last one:
“The answer I gave you was the answer of a woman I have spent thirty years building and four months trying to be spared of. I stand by nothing I said after eleven o’clock. May I come in.”
That was the night’s failure. The conversation stood between them with every door open: sixteen days of silence on one side and a draft refusal on the other.
Wren pulled Celia over the threshold by the parka collar instead.
The argument went into hands, mouths and the hallway wall.
Both women tried to win with their bodies what neither could afford to say aloud.
We just used it, she thought. The one unarmed room we had. We took the fight in there with us, and now it’s armed like everywhere else.
Beside her, Celia slept, or performed sleep magnificently.
Loving a great actress made the distinction impossible.
Wren lay awake with the secret. After the rain stopped, she rose for water and searched the floor for something to wear.
When she lifted Celia’s discarded bag, the accident that ended Wren’s belief in her own innocence occurred.
The bag tipped. Its contents slewed across the floorboards in the half-light, and Wren, kneeling, gathering lipstick and keys by feel, found her hands full of a thing that stopped her breath: a second ankle brace, heavier gauge than the one the building knew about, industrial, scuffed with use.
And beneath it, corner-bent from carrying, a small notebook, and she should not have opened it and opened it, and it was numbers.
Columns, in the fierce exact hand she knew from the margins of 1998: dates, performances, and against each one a score out of ten, and the column was headed, in full, PAIN, and there was no score below six anywhere in the last month, and the Wednesday of the Americans said nine.
Wren knelt on her own cold floor in the almost-dark, holding the secret ledger of what five shows a week was actually costing, hearing eight shows a week is a medical question in a producer’s reasonable voice, and understood that the woman asleep six feet away was in far worse trouble than anyone knew, and was hiding it, from the building, from the underwriters, from her, with a discipline that made every performance a forgery of health.
Wren’s heart, which had walked in on this war certain of at least its own side, did the thing that doomed the next month entire.
It chose protection. Silently, unilaterally, in the dark, with the ledger in its hands.
She can’t do eight shows, thought Wren. She may not see out five.
If I refuse New York and force the both-or-nothing, I force her broken ankle onto Broadway or I force the truth out of her ledger and into the insurance file, and either way I break her with my own gallantry.
The refusal has to wait. The truth has to wait.
I have to hold this alone until I can see the way through.
She put the ledger back. She put the brace back, exactly, corner to corner, spy-craft learned in one night.
And she climbed back into bed beside the woman she loved and lay guarding one more secret than she’d risen with, which made, by her own count, in that one bed, at that one hour, at minimum four.
And outside the window the London sky went the colour of iron, turning over toward morning, like something enormous rolling in its sleep.