Stage Fright Read online

  I was still so caught up in the drama of the scene that for a moment I couldn’t understand what was happening. As soon as I did, the blood rushed to my face. A mobile phone was ringing. My mobile phone.

  ‘Cass!’ Stan hissed. She was the deputy stage-manager and was sitting next to me in the stalls with the script open on her lap. Kevin, the director, who in real life was married to Lady Isabel, or rather, Melissa, was sitting next to her. He got to his feet.

  ‘Just what the fuck is going on, Cassandra?’ he said pleasantly.

  I groaned aloud. ‘Sorry, sorry.’

  I rummaged around in my bag. Where the hell was it? The maddening sound trilled on and on. In desperation, I tipped everything out on to my lap. I grabbed the phone and cut off the ringing without answering the call.

  ‘You know the rule, Cassandra. No mobile phones at rehearsals,’ Kevin said.

  ‘I know, I know. I’m so sorry. Stephen’s got stuck at the airport. That’s why I had it on and then I forgot to switch it off…’ After all the rush the day before Stephen had rung me from the airport to tell me that there was a problem with air traffic control and the flight had been cancelled. He had spent the night at an airport hotel.

  ‘OK, OK, it was virtually the end of the scene anyway,’ Kevin said. He turned to the actors. ‘Pretty good, you guys. Just one or two points.’ He ran up the temporary steps to the stage two at a time. He was one of those men with a low centre of gravity: a longish body but short legs so that he didn’t look as tall as you expected when he stood up. He certainly made the most of what he did have. He was thickset and muscular, good-looking in a piratical way with that heavy black hair which goes straight from being glossy to oily. The old-fashioned swept-back hairstyle and the sideburns had been adopted for the role of the villainous Captain Levison, but they suited him.

  Clive and Melissa came forwards and the three of them conferred.

  Stan tapped me on the arm. ‘So, have you decided?’

  ‘Decided what?’

  ‘What you’re going to wear, of course. You can’t arrive at the first-night party looking like something the cat brought in. You are The Writer, after all.’

  ‘Well … adapter rather than writer.’

  ‘Whatever.’ She waved her hand impatiently. ‘You’ve got to look the part.’

  I groaned. ‘I’ve gone through everything in my wardrobe. Nothing’s really right. And nothing really fits, either, since I had Grace.’

  ‘Nothing for it, you’ll have to have something new.’

  ‘I hate shopping.’

  ‘That’s abundantly clear, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

  I glanced down at what I was wearing. My black T-shirt had a small but unmistakable milk-stain on the shoulder and it had been washed so many times that it wasn’t really black any more. My skirt had been smart five years ago. I looked at what Stan was wearing. She was about the same age as me, fortyish, with a tribe of children and an understanding husband somewhere in the background. Her real name was Constantia. She’d explained to me that she’d had to choose between Stan and Connie as a nickname and ‘I ask you, do I look like a Connie?’ Today she was wearing cropped black trousers and a black T-shirt that made no concessions to her spare tyre. Her dark hair was hennaed an improbable red and piled up on top of her head. She always wore scarlet lipstick and when she leaned back and stretched out her legs I saw that she had nail varnish on her toes to match. She looked great.

  ‘Less than a week to go,’ she said. ‘You don’t seem to be looking forward to it very much.’

  ‘Oh, I am really, it’s just – oh, well, Stephen’s buggered off to LA on business and I don’t think he’s going to be back in time.’

  ‘Oh dear dear, you’re not going to let that cramp your style, are you? Come on,’ she said, taking pity on me, ‘I’ll come shopping with you at lunch-time and help you choose something.’

  ‘You shall go to the ball, Cinders…’

  She grinned. ‘Damn right. Are we on?’

  ‘I won’t have all that long. I’ve got to pick Grace up from the nursery at two o’clock. Oh, well, go on, then. Let’s do it.’

  The conclave on the stage was breaking up. Kevin was nodding in satisfaction.

  ‘OK,’ I heard him say. ‘We’ll leave the proposal scene for now. We’ll go on to the scene where the first cloud appears on the horizon. Celia, I won’t need you any more this morning.’ He ran down the steps into the auditorium and took a seat on the end of the third row.

  I yawned and stretched. As I settled back in my seat, a curious sensation came over me, a kind of pressure between the shoulder blades. It was the conviction that someone was watching me. I turned and looked back. The light from the stage where the rehearsal was in progress accentuated the dimness. Rows of seats covered in dustsheets stretched back like frozen waves and darkness gathered under the overhang of the dress-circle. The only faces discernible in the gloom belonged to the cherubs and caryatids that were part of the exuberant Edwardian decoration. Had I heard some sound without consciously registering it? Or was it simply that I just wasn’t used to having so much empty space at my back? This was the first time we’d been able to use the theatre for rehearsals, and the chemical smell of paint and new carpets still hung in the air.

  I turned my attention back to the stage.

  ‘Isabel, you must believe me,’ Archibald was saying,’ You are my own dear wife and you have as much cause to be jealous of my sister as of Barbara Hare. I have never loved her, I swear to you, either before I married you or after.’

  ‘I will believe you, Archibald, it was just a foolish thought.’

  Archibald stood looking down at her, his face full of tenderness. Isabel lifted her arms to him. He moved closer, he bent his face towards her. The slightly hooded eyelids drooped, his lips parted.

  ‘My darling,’ he murmured, and then, ‘Hang on. This isn’t quite right.’ He turned to face the auditorium. ‘It’s the crinoline. I can’t get close enough.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem to be properly attached to my corset,’ Melissa said.

  Kevin turned to Stan. ‘Give me a hand, would you?’

  ‘Sure.’

  They went up on to the stage together and fiddled about with the laces of Melissa’s corset.

  ‘Look,’ Kevin said to Clive. ‘You take her by the waist? Like this. OK?’ He demonstrated. ‘You pull her towards you, and Melissa, darling, you lean forward…’

  The hoops swung back so that the bottom one touched the ground in front.

  ‘You’ve been married long enough to have three children and you’re both perfectly used to this contraption, this crinoline,’ Kevin said, ‘so you do it quite naturally, but Clive, I don’t want you to look too much at your ease, OK? Remember that you do have a secret, even though it’s not the one that Isabel thinks it is.’

  Clive nodded.

  ‘Let’s run through that a few times.’

  On stage Clive gathered Melissa into his arms again and again while Kevin and Stan looked on. There was another pause, a further readjustment of the crinoline.

  The play was shaping up well. There had been doubts about the choice of an old-fashioned Victorian melodrama like East Lynne. But it was the first play that had been performed when the Everyman had opened a hundred years ago, and it seemed a fitting choice for its reopening. More than that: to me it still seemed astonishingly contemporary: murder, adultery, divorce, a dysfunctional stepfamily, a decadent aristocracy, even a train crash. What could be more up to the moment than that?

  Kevin and Stan returned to their seats and the rehearsal trundled on. Again Archibald embraced Isabel. She left the stage and on came Barbara Hare, to ask Archibald’s advice: her brother, Dick, who is on the run, is hiding nearby, disguised as a stable-hand. Could Archibald, the family lawyer, advance her some money to give to him? Barbara was played by Belinda Roy, a young actress just beginning to make a name for herself. She was a robust creamy-skinned brunette, whose looks were
a good foil to Melissa’s more fragile blondness. At the end of the scene Clive and Belinda moved downstage and mimed talking quietly together.

  Kevin stood up and took from the seat next to him a frockcoat even more ancient than Clive’s. As he shrugged it on, his whole demeanour seemed to change. It was as if Captain Francis Levison had materialized in front of me. He swaggered up the steps on to the stage and I almost seemed to see shiny leather knee-boots, the flick of a riding-crop.

  Melissa came on from the right as Isabel.

  ‘What did I tell you, Lady Isabel?’ Levison said. ‘Even from here you can see how he whispers in her ear, how close his lips are to hers, speaking the loving words that should belong to you alone.’

  ‘I didn’t believe you and even now – surely it can’t be true…’

  ‘Alas, all too true. I overheard them arranging this tête-à-tête. How can you endure the sight of it, and not seek revenge? Never forget that there is one who has always loved you, has loved you constantly, and has suffered the pain of seeing you wronged and deceived.’

  Lady Isabel’s face was white and set, her shoulders rigid with tension.

  Levison gestured downstage. As they watched, Barbara laid a hand on Archibald’s arm. He inclined his head so that she could whisper in his ear.

  ‘Come with me,’ Levison urged Lady Isobel. ‘Come to a life of happiness with one who will devote his life to you. My carriage and horses are waiting.’

  I was surprised to see the gleam of a tear on Melissa’s face. I didn’t remember this from the last rehearsal. The silence stretched out. Had Melissa dried up?

  Stan clearly thought so. She looked up from the script.

  ‘Only prove this,’ she said in a low but distinct voice.

  ‘Sorry,’ Melissa said, in her own voice. ‘Sorry.’

  Stan got to her feet.

  ‘What the fuck…’ Kevin said.

  Tears were pouring down Melissa’s lace. For a couple of seconds she stood there, plucking at her breast. She gave a huge hiccuping sob. Then she turned and ran off the stage. For a few moments no one said a word. Kevin seemed too taken aback to respond. He hesitated, seemed about to speak, seemed to change his mind. Then he ran off the stage after Melissa, leaving the rest of us gaping.

  ‘I bet it’s that bloody corset.’ Stan said, getting to her feet. She ran up the steps on to the stage. On her way across she collided with someone who was rushing in from the wings.

  ‘For God’s sake, Jake!’ she said, ‘Can’t you look where you are going?’

  What was it about Jake that reminded me of the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland? Nothing as obvious as protruding teeth or bulbous eyes. No, it was more to do with his air of quivering, whisker-twitching alertness. Behind him trailed a man who was so different from him in appearance that the two of them looked like a comedy double act. Jake and Geoff: the eager young documentary-maker and his older, more jaundiced cameraman. While Jake was short and stocky, Geoff was tall and thin with hips so narrow that you wondered how his trousers stayed up. He was supporting a camera the size and shape of a ghetto-blaster on his shoulder.

  ‘What’s happened?’ Jake asked. ‘Have I missed something? I have, haven’t I?’ He looked from Stan to Clive to Belinda and back again. The camera on Geoff’s shoulder swivelled round as if it were attached to Jake by a string.

  ‘Yes,’ Belinda said.

  ‘No,’ Clive said.

  Stan overrode them both.

  ‘It was nothing, just a temporary glitch,’ she said firmly, ‘just a costume problem. Wait here, all of you. And that means you, too, Jake,’ she added as he made to follow her off the stage.

  Jake rolled his eyes in a parody of frustration. He turned back and began to interrogate Clive and Belinda.

  I didn’t want to get involved with this. I sunk down in my seat and got out my mobile phone to see who had rung me earlier. The call had been from a Cambridge number, not one that I recognized. If it was important, no doubt they’d ring back, but at least I knew it wasn’t Stephen. I looked at my watch. Twelve o’clock. He must surely be airborne by now. If only we’d had a chance to make things up properly …

  I thought about what he’d said about another baby. I loved Grace and I didn’t regret having her, not for a single moment, but the fact remained that she had been conceived by accident. We had accepted the pregnancy and made the best of it. To plan a second child was a very different thing. We weren’t even married, and Stephen still had his flat in Cambridge. True, I couldn’t remember when he had last spent a night there, but …

  Jake came clattering down the steps and flung himself into the seat next to me. Geoff followed him more slowly, camera on his shoulder. Clive and Belinda retreated upstage, where they sat down on the chaise-longue and chatted quietly to each other.

  ‘Oh, why did I choose this morning to interview the designer, Cassandra? I never seem to be in the right place at the right time.’ Jake gazed into my face. He had dark hair worn almost shoulder-length in tight corkscrew curls and unusually long eyelashes for a man. He was only about ten years younger than me but he was from a different generation, more like one of the students I taught at St Etheldreda’s College than one of my contemporaries. I found myself relenting and dropping into understanding tutor mode.

  ‘It must be difficult,’ I murmured.

  ‘Difficult!’ He heaved a sigh.

  Geoff had settled himself in the seat in front of Jake. He pulled out a paperback and started to read. Whereas Jake only stopped talking when the camera was running, Geoff rarely opened his mouth. Had I ever heard him say anything at all, I wondered? I shifted in my seat, trying to catch a glimpse of the title of his book. I’m always fascinated by other people’s reading habits. I’m shrewd at guessing what their tastes might be, but with Geoff it could be the latest Wilbur Smith or it could be Schopenhauer. I simply had no idea. Though the book didn’t look fat enough to be the latest blockbuster …

  ‘The first of six,’ Jake said.

  I realized that I’d missed something.

  ‘And the others?’ I prompted, hoping that this would give me a clue.

  ‘Not completely settled yet, but I’m hoping one of them will be set in a fertility clinic, and another one in a monastery. That one was very difficult to set up, I’m really excited about it.’

  ‘And when…?’

  Geoff turned over a page. I caught the glint of a wedding ring on his hand. Funny that I hadn’t registered that before. Even now it was something I automatically noted when I first met a man. What was he reading? I craned my neck.

  ‘That’s just what I was saying, Cassandra. They won’t happen at all if this one isn’t a success. This is the pilot.’

  The camp way he had of emphasizing his words had made me wonder when I first met him if he was gay, but mention of a girlfriend on a traineeship with a TV company in the north had dispelled that notion.

  ‘It’s my big break. If I can’t pull this off … I know Kevin was reluctant to let me into the theatre, but he needs me as much as I need him. He’d better remember that. You did know that his career’s on the skids…’

  ‘What?’ He’d got my attention now all right. I turned to look at him. ‘You’re not serious?’

  ‘But yes.’

  ‘Jake! He’s a household name!’

  ‘Used to be a household name. Can you think of anything he’s been in lately? He’s yesterday’s man, sweetie. What is he now, mid-forties? Forty-five, forty-six? He’s looking to directing for a fresh start and he’s got Melissa to thank for that. Management were very keen to get her and she and Kevin came as a package.’

  I thought this over. Kevin had starred in one of those cosy long-running TV dramas that people slump in front of on Friday evenings. He had played a minor fifties rock star who gets involved in solving murders: Agatha Christie meets Billy Fury. Half-Way to Paradise, it had been called. It had ended about five years ago and it was true that I couldn’t offhand remember anything he’d
done since. Could Jake be right? Geoff shifted in his seat, and turned another page of his book. I saw just enough to identify it as a black Penguin classic, but as to which one …

  Jake leaned towards me confidentially. ‘Rumour is, there’s a health problem, too. Something serious.’

  I hadn’t heard anything and I was taken aback. Surely Melissa would have let something slip to me? We’d got on pretty close terms when we’d been together with our babies in the premature baby unit. That was where I had first met Melissa – and Kevin, too. When he had discovered that I taught nineteenth-century literature at St Etheldreda’s College, he’d asked me to talk to the cast about the historical background to the play. One thing led to another and I’d got involved with rewriting the parts of the nineteenth-century dramatization that seemed especially stagey and artificial. In the end I’d rewritten the whole thing. I thought back over the last few months. It was hard to imagine that the ebullient Kevin was in anything but the best of health. He threw off energy like a wet dog throws off water.

  ‘I really can’t believe there’s anything seriously wrong,’ I told Jake.

  ‘He was taken very ill sometime last year. Nearly died. I know that for certain. I know someone who was there when he collapsed and was rushed to hospital.’