“But how do you know this much? Who told you?” The roan horse stretched his head, pulled the reins through my hands, rubbed his nose on the inside of his knee.
“I don’t remember. It was just something somebody said, ages ago, before you came.” Angel was desperately evasive. “You’ll just have to forget I said it. After all, it might not be true.”
I pulled the roan’s head up. It wasn’t that I minded if it was true. At least it would give me a part to get my teeth into, to prove that I could act. To prove to myself that I could act. It was just the way that Angel had dropped it, like a bombshell, in the middle of the lesson. And why did she know so much, when I knew nothing? Well, I thought grimly, tomorrow I am going to find out a few things about the script, about the part, and about ATC. We resumed the lesson.
I rode the roan horse with the white stockings along the rails and tried to retain his attention. It was not easy because my mind was no longer on the lesson and the roan had had enough of transitions.
At the far end of the paddock, the woods were dark and cool and inviting. Standing at the edge, beyond a shimmer of heat haze, Anthony stood, watching. Did he know? Did Ziggy know? Did everyone know except me?
It was no good. It was impossible to concentrate. I stopped the roan horse. At practically the same moment Anthony appeared coming from the direction of the stables, leading the brown horse he was training to be a faller. I looked across at the woods. It was impossible for a person to be in two places at once. Now there was nobody watching from beyond the heat haze.
“We shall have to stop the lesson,” I said to Angel. “I think the sun has got to my brain.”
“Get Angel. Tell her the mare’s foaling.”
Anthony’s terse command reached me as I was filling and weighing hay nets in the barn, speckled with seeds, doing my best not to sneeze. Dust from the hay swirled in the block of sunlight falling through the open doors.
I ran outside. “She isn’t here! She’s gone to the village!” Actually, she had gone to see Hender, but it was not quite the moment to divulge that. Nor had it been the moment to ring Richard, his office had informed me that he was not there and was not expected back all day. I was already feeling frustrated. Now there was this to contend with.
“Then it will have to be you, won’t it.” Anthony strode off with unmerciful steps towards the foaling box.
“Oh, but I can’t!” Yet I knew I should have to. Terrified, I ran after him, still stuck with wisps of hay, not knowing what I was supposed to be doing, thinking of towels and boiling water, forceps, swaddling clothes, all the usual impedimenta of a birth as practiced in the theatre, not knowing if any of it was applicable to horses.
In the foaling box, the mare was lying on her side with patches of sweat dark on her neck, her ribcage rising and falling with her heavy breathing. Her eyes were open and strained. Her nose wrinkled with distress and effort.
“Oh God,” I said, “I can’t help. I shall be useless.”
“Nonsense.” Anthony took my hand and pulled me inside. “If everything goes normally, you won’t have to do anything. We’re only here just in case.”
I didn’t want to be there just in case. I was frightened. The straw was wet and churned up. The mare gave a deep and gusting sigh.
“Let me wait outside,” I said. “If anything goes wrong you can call me.” I knew if he did call me I would go out like a light.
“Calm down, Grace Darling. Keep quiet. You’re supposed to be a calming influence on the mare. A comfort.”
I needed some comfort myself. I knelt at the mare’s head. With a hand that trembled I stroked the sweating neck.
“Steady girl,” I said. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
Anthony grinned. He moved towards her quarters. Towards her outflung tail. The mare went into a convulsion that almost turned her eye sockets inside out. I bit back a scream.
“The foal’s coming,” Anthony said. “Look.”
I couldn’t bear to look, but somehow I looked anyway. Two tiny hooves were emerging. Now I was petrified that the foal would not get out, there didn’t seem enough room. But as the mare raised her upper hind leg slightly and strained, lifting her head from the straw in the effort, a little black crinkled nose appeared, and a face, lying along impossibly long and slender forelegs, then a neck and a body, clothed in a silver membrane, and finally, with a last, gigantic effort which caused the mare to groan aloud, the whole perfect foal slid out on to the straw.
Now I knew why people said birth was a miracle.
The foal, still mostly encased in his silver sack, struggled in an exhausted fashion to free himself, striking out with his tiny hooves. Anthony helped, pulling the tough membrane away from him gently.
Now I was afraid that the mare didn’t want her foal.
“She hasn’t looked at him. She isn’t taking any notice!”
“She will. She’s just exhausted. They are both exhausted.”
The foal pulled up his legs and rested his nose on the straw. He did not look around at the amazing new world he had suddenly been projected into. His eyes looked blank, unfocussed.
“Is the foal a filly or a colt?”
“He’s a colt. A star is born.”
“Oh.” I had hoped for a filly. Now the mare lifted her head and looked round at the colt. She looked at him, it seemed, in curiosity, as if she wondered where he had come from. She drew up her legs and stretched out her neck. She gave him an experimental lick. The foal made a small sound. Unexpectedly and with a great commotion the mare struggled to her feet. Anthony and I instinctively moved away backwards to the side of the stable.
The mare stood and nuzzled the colt. After a while he made a feeble effort to get up but fell down immediately. He tried again on legs which wobbled furiously and collapsed once more. I wanted to rush forward to help, to hold him up, but I knew I must not interfere. I noticed that the mare seemed to be bleeding. I clutched at Anthony in dismay.
“It’s all right, Grace Darling. It’s the afterbirth. She has to get rid of it.”
This time I didn’t look. I turned away, feeling squeamish. When I looked back the foal was up, balancing on its impossibly long, clumsy legs, reaching out its head, perilously unsteady, towards the mare’s flank.
“Cross your fingers now,” Anthony whispered. “This is the crucial part.”
I held my breath as the foal nuzzled the mare’s flank. He didn’t seem to be able to see what he was after, it was a blindly instinctive search, but bumping and swaying he finally encountered a bulging teat and fastened on to it as if to a lifeline.
Anthony let out a long sigh of relief. “Thank the Lord for that. Now we can leave them in peace.”
“I can’t bear the thought of him being a faller.” I looked at the foal, wet, tiny, his knees threatening to buckle under him at any moment and I didn’t want him to grow up to be a stunt horse. I was afraid for him.
“He may not have to be. The brown horse is working well, and after all, Hender Copper has a pretty good faller.”
I could not believe I had heard it. I gaped at Anthony. Anthony kept his eyes on the foal. “Yesterday evening Hender and I had quite a long talk on the telephone. I think we shall come to some sort of arrangement. I think we shall have to. It seems my hand is forced. If I am honest, I have known it for a long time,” he said.
“You don’t mean…?”
“I mean, Grace Darling, that somehow I seem to have got myself a partner. And Angel has not gone to the village at all, has she?
“She’s gone to ask Hender to supper! To sell him the idea of a partnership!”
Anthony smiled one of his thin smiles. “How surprised she is going to be when she finds out that not only have I already sold him the idea, but that he has also accepted my invitation to supper!”
It was all too much for me. Racked with emotion, limp like a washed-out rag after the birth of the colt, I now had to cope with Anthony’s calm acceptance of a partnership with Hender, a
nd the relief of knowing the foal would not have to be a faller. I leaned back against the wall. I felt frighteningly weak. Tears I did not know I had shed ran down my cheeks.
“I always imagined actresses had to be paid to cry.”
Anthony lifted my chin, lowered his head, and put his lips on to mine.
I had never expected he could be gentle. With a horse maybe, but not with a person, certainly not with an actress.
When I opened my eyes I would not have been surprised if my whole consistency had changed, melted into something quite different, like a chocolate bar left too long in the sun.
But everything was just the same.
Apart from the fact that Richard was standing in the open doorway, looking into the stable with eyes as cold as a glacier.
“Richard, I promise you! It just happened on the spur of the moment! It has never happened before and it will never happen again! There was nothing to it!”
“There seemed to be quite a lot to it. It looked entirely premeditated to me. Entirely. You have never kissed me like that,” Richard said in an icy voice.
“But that’s absolute rubbish!”
“It wasn’t as if I was unexpected. You knew I would arrive at any moment.”
“I didn’t expect you at all!” Over the bonnet of the red Porsche 924 with the immaculate pin-stripe upholstery I gaped at him. “I had no idea you were coming this morning! You just turned up out of the blue! You said you would ring!”
“I did ring. I rang yesterday evening. I spoke to a girl who said you were busy collecting sticks I believe she said, although I find that hard to swallow – but she did promise faithfully to deliver the message.”
Angel. It must have been Angel. I gritted my teeth. It would have been Angel! “I was collecting sticks. The Aga had gone out. But I didn’t get the message, Richard, honestly!”
“So I wasn’t expected.”
“No.”
“I suppose that should make it easier, but somehow it doesn’t.” He opened the car door.
I could not let him leave. “Richard, please don’t go! I swear to you that Anthony isn’t in the least interested in me! You don’t even have to take my word for it – go and ask him!”
With his hand on the door handle, he looked at me in distaste. “I would prefer not to.”
“I’m sure you would. I suppose it would dent your dignity.”
“My dignity is already irredeemably dented.” He got into the driving seat. It seemed that desperate measures would have to be employed in order to prevent his departure. I tried to open the passenger door. It was locked. I ran round to his side of the car just in time to catch the door before it slammed shut. I wrenched it open again. “Richard! Please! Don’t GO! I need you! I have to get to London!”
Richards hand froze on the ignition key. He looked at me in disbelief. “I beg your pardon?”
Totally distraught, I poured it all out in a jumble; my anxiety about the non-appearance of the script, the unsuccessful attempts to contact Ziggy, my last telephone call to the Café Marengo, the disconnected signal, and the ensuing conversation with Directory Enquiries. How I was convinced that something had gone terribly wrong and my whole career might possibly be in ruins. How desperately I needed to get to Soho, and how he was the only person in the world who could help me.
Richard listened to all this with incredulous wonderment and at the end of it all his head dropped forward until it rested on the padded leather steering wheel with the Porsche insignia in the centre. I did not know if he was going to laugh or cry. Luckily he started to laugh.
“Grace, you are incredible! You never fail to amaze me! You tell me you want a cooling-off period, you ring me up to say you have changed your mind. I arrive to find you kissing another man, then you tell me it meant nothing and beg me not to leave – not because you are sorry, not even because of my charm and good looks – but because you want me to drive you to London!”
Put like that it did not show me in a very good light, but what could I say? What else could I do? “Richard, will you take me?”
He leaned back in the pin-stripe seat and sighed. “I don’t suppose you thought to ring the television company when your script failed to arrive?”
“I thought about it, but I had no idea who to ask for. Most of the producers and directors who make television programmes are freelance anyway. Only Ziggy knows who we are dealing with because he does all the negotiating, it’s his job to chase them, not mine.”
“And you say the Café Marengo has gone ex-directory?”
“According to Directory Enquiries, and I’ve checked twice.”
“I can’t believe it.”
“Neither can I.”
In an agony of suspense, I knelt by the car and looked at him imploringly. “Please Richard.”
“Grace,” he said eventually in a resigned voice, “if I am to drive you to London, I think you had better run and get changed. You will look a little bizarre, even in Soho.”
“Then you’ll take me!” I would have hugged him, but an outstretched hand held me off lest I soil the immaculate elegance of his cream cotton trousers, his black and cream striped Dunhill jersey – I was, after all, somewhat dirty and dishevelled, stuck with straw and stained with manure, my hair decorated with hayseeds. “Richard, you are a brick! I won’t be ten seconds!”
“I have always wanted to be a brick,” he said in a humourless tone as I raced off towards the farmhouse.
Something had happened at the Café Marengo.
As the car nudged its way along the narrow street between the strip clubs with a tout in every neon-lit doorway; past the dubious magazine shops, the non-stop film shows, the delicatessens whose windows were heaped with bread and freshly made pasta; skirting groups of tourists and noisy gangs of provincial youths, emboldened by numbers, who individually would have been too embarrassed to walk through Soho, we could see a crowd outside, their noses pressed to the window.
As usual, there was not a parking space to be had. Richard stopped amidst the bustle, waving off a swarthy woman who pushed a sprig of lucky white heather under his nose. “I shall have to drop you here and put the car in the multi-storey car park. I’ll come to you as quickly as I can.”
I ran along the pavement, dodging dawdling couples and determined ladies with shopping baskets heading for the fruit and vegetable market off Brewer Street. I had no idea what I was going to find, but I had a nasty feeling it was not going to be to my advantage.
A queue of people waited to enter the Café Marengo. I had no time to wait. I pushed my way past them, ignoring their protests. Inside, every seat was taken. The corner booth from which Ziggy had conducted his business was now occupied by an American family forking up pasta and gulping milk shakes. There was a new face behind the counter.
I squeezed myself into a space between people sitting on bar stools. “Please, where can I find Mr Vincinelli?” I was terribly afraid the new face would tell me he had no idea, that the Café Marengo was Under New Management.
But the new face looked up from the black cherry cheesecake he was serving and gestured towards the coffee machine at the end of the counter. Behind it, I found Mr Vincinelli looking dangerously overwrought, holding a jug of milk under the steam spout, waiting for the bubbles to rise with a fevered impatience.
I poked my head though the chrome. “Mr Vincinelli! It’s me, Grace Darling! I’m looking for Ziggy! What’s happened? Where have all these people come from! Why are they here?”
Mr Vincinelli looked at me in astonishment. “You mean you do not see the newspapers!” He shot milky froth on to several waiting cups of coffee and rushed them to the counter. Over the clatter of cups and saucers in preparation for the next batch he said in a passionate voice, “You want to know what has happened, Miss Grace Darling? I tell you what has happened. What has happened is that my business is overflown and I am become a nervous wreckage, that is what has happened!” With one hand he poured coffee into the cups and with the other
he produced a tabloid newspaper which he thrust at my face. “Here, I show you this! Then perhaps you understand better! You see the front page? Now you believe me when I tell you it is all the fault of Mr Stanislavski and the girl with the big voice who last time she was here frighten away all my customers! Now I have too many customers!” Mr Vincinelli thrust another jug of milk under the steam spout. Over the hissing and gurgling noise he said emotionally, “Before this happen, Miss Grace Darling, if you ask me do I want more customers, I tell you yes, because my business it is not so good, but now I have too much, is too many for me, when you see Mr Stanislavski you tell him that!”
I looked at the front page of the tabloid. The headlines leapt out. UNKNOWN GIRL PICKED TO STAR IN WEST END MUSICAL. Emma Hall wows Lloyd-Webber and snatches the part from established stars. ‘This bright, new talent with her astonishing voice is set for instant fame’ says our Special Theatrical Correspondent. The photograph under the headlines was of a face I recognized only too well. Emma Hall’s face. A face with large, clear eyes and a determined expression, framed with thick blonde hair sliced to the level of her ear lobes.
“Because of this newspaper, all day long I have the acting and singing girls asking for Mr Stanislavski! Because of this newspaper I have all these new customers – my old customers they take one look and they run! I tell you, Miss Grace Darling, it is too much for me! Even when I sleep I make the coffee, I serve the pasta, and when I wake up it is time to start again! Every day I have the people from the newspapers and they ask me questions. How do you like the new business they ask me, How do you like to be famous? How do you feel? Well, I tell you how I feel,” Mr Vincinelli said in a furious voice. “I feel tired to my death! That’s how I feel!”
I could not take my eyes away from the newspaper. Emma Hall had auditioned for Ziggy in the Café Marengo only three months ago. I had been here at the time. To Emma Hall Ziggy had said, ‘Go away. Go get a day job in a nice shop. Get singing lessons four nights a week. On the other three nights get dancing lessons. In your lunch hours get acting lessons.’ I had watched as the clear blue eyes had flooded with disappointment. ‘Oh rats,’ Emma Hall had said. ‘Am I that bad?’ To which Ziggy had replied, ‘You’re not as good as you got to be, and that’s a fact.’
Stars Don't Cry (The Silver Bridle Book 2) Page 8