Stage Fright

by Christine Poulson

  It dawned on me what Jake must be talking about.

  ‘Kevin does not have a serious illness!’ I said. ‘He has a nut allergy. That’s quite different. Melissa told me about it. He was at a party and ate something that had traces of nut in it. But he did not collapse and he was not rushed to hospital. He’s fine as long as he takes his adrenaline, and he always carries it with him. If you’re going to be a half-decent documentary-maker, you’ll need to have more respect for the truth.’

  ‘Oh.’ It was Jake’s turn to be taken aback.

  ‘And I hope you haven’t been spreading this around,’ I continued.

  ‘Of course not,’ he said hastily.

  I didn’t believe him. Neither of us spoke for a while, then Jake sighed and looked at his watch.

  ‘I bet they won’t be starting the rehearsal again. What are you doing for the rest of the day, Cass?’

  ‘Stan’s taking me to buy a new dress for the opening night.’

  Jake’s face lit up, ‘She’s giving you a make-over? Great, can I…?’

  ‘Oh, no, no, no. Certainly not.’

  His face fell. ‘Oh, please!’

  ‘You really think your viewers would enjoying seeing a middle-aged, out-of-shape academic struggling in and out of clothes in a cramped changing-room?’

  He nodded fervently. ‘Of course … human interest…’

  ‘Out of the question, Jake. It’s a treat they’ll just have to forgo.’

  He looked at me with spaniel eyes. ‘OK, OK, but how about this? We don’t see you inside the shop, but we shoot you going in and then we shoot you coming out with a whole load of carrier bags.’

  All too soon, when East Lynne had opened and my maternity leave was over, I’d have to go back to my real life as head of English in a Cambridge college, and I could just imagine what the response among my colleagues and students would be. And anyway, I wasn’t at all sure that I could trust Jake not to make me look a fool.

  ‘Sorry, Jake. I have my academic credibility to maintain. I’d never hear the last of it.’

  ‘Oh, well, it was worth a try.’

  I looked at Geoff’s shoulders. For a moment I’d had the impression that they were shaking ever so slightly, but he still appeared to be engrossed in his book – whatever it was. I tilted my head to get a better view. Yes! I could see the first line of the title. It was Thus—

  ‘That’s all for today, folks,’ Stan said. I jerked my head up. I hadn’t noticed that she’d reappeared on the stage. ‘You’ll remember that we weren’t going to rehearse this afternoon anyway. Kevin’s got to go to London. The next call is 9.30 tomorrow.’

  ‘How’s Melissa?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s OK now. But Kevin and I think she needs a bit of rest, poor lamb. I’m rejigging the rehearsal schedules so that she doesn’t have to come in until after lunch. So please check the board, everyone.’

  ‘Can I go up and see her?’ This was Jake.

  ‘Certainly not. But, Cassandra, she’d like you to pop up, if you wouldn’t mind.’

  Jake gave an ostentatious sigh and tapped Geoff on the shoulder. ‘Come on, let’s see what’s going on with wardrobe and set design.’

  Geoff closed his book and slid it back into his jacket pocket, allowing me to glimpse the title at last.

  I don’t know what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche.

  Chapter Three

  THE bare lightbulb shed a dim light on the brick walls painted in peeling cream paint and the narrow concrete staircase. There was something familiar about the echoing quality of the uncarpeted floors and the smell of cheap pine disinfectant mixed with a whiff of sweatiness. I realized what it was. It was like the changing-rooms in the dilapidated comprehensive school where I’d been educated, and in the college where I now worked.

  I made my way up past the public telephone on the first floor, glancing at the board next to it, which was covered in announcements of flats to let, B&Bs, and train timetables. On this floor there were rooms for storing and ironing costumes. Another flight of stairs led to the dressing-rooms, and here some natural light filtered down from the top floor where there was a light well that opened on to the fly gallery. There were only three dressing-rooms. No.1 was for the leading lady, No.2 was for all the other women, No.3 was for the men. It certainly wasn’t glamorous backstage: in fact, it was scarcely even comfortable. The Everyman theatre is squashed on to a such narrow site on the Newmarket Road, that the workshops and offices have to be housed in an office block down the street.

  I paused on the landing outside Melissa’s door. It was half open and she was lying back in the only easy-chair in the room. She didn’t seem to be aware of her surroundings. Her face was undefended and sad. The fine lines incised round her eyes and the little marks like parentheses on either side of her mouth seemed deeper than usual. She looked all of her thirty-three years. She had changed out of her rehearsal clothes into a red silk kimono. I hadn’t seen that since our days in hospital together.

  I knocked at the door. Melissa started and looked round. When she smiled at me, the sadness vanished and the years fell away. And she’d managed to cry without getting red eyes. Perhaps that’s a trick of the trade.

  I’ve read somewhere that actors can be divided into two types, personalities and chameleons. Melissa was definitely a chameleon. She wasn’t one of those actors who seem larger than life off stage, and she wasn’t quite beautiful. It was that not-quite beauty which drew the eye back to her again and again to work out exactly how she fell short. It also made her a very versatile actress. The long, rather wispy blonde hair framed a face that might have been insipidly pretty if it hadn’t been for the stronger modelling of her lower face: the firm mouth and rather square jaw.

  ‘Come in, why don’t you?’ she said, sitting up and pushing her glasses up her nose. The narrow black frames reminded me of those photos of Marilyn Monroe reading James Joyce when she was married to Arthur Miller. Though Melissa wasn’t just pretending to be smart. And, come to think of it, maybe Marilyn Monroe wasn’t pretending either …

  As I stepped over the threshold, I caught a whiff of scent, something very familiar to which I couldn’t quite put a name. I sat down next to her in the fold-up plastic chair which was the only other seat in the room.

  ‘Are you feeling better now?’ I asked.

  ‘Much better thanks. Shouldn’t have had that corset so tight. Not when I’m still breastfeeding.’

  I winced sympathetically. ‘Ouch!’

  ‘How on earth did women manage in those days?’

  ‘They had wet nurses.’

  ‘The other thing is that I’m just so tired.’

  ‘Me, too. Grace hasn’t slept through once yet.’

  ‘Agnes is the same.’ She yawned.

  That set me off, as it so often does. I yawned so widely that my jaw clicked. Melissa laughed ruefully.

  ‘What a pair we are.’ She reached over and squeezed my arm.

  I caught again a whiff of scent.

  ‘What’s that perfume? No, don’t tell me. It’s so familiar. Something old-fashioned…’

  ‘Oh, do you think so? Good. It’s lavender-water. Will it do?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘For Lady Isabel.’

  ‘Oh, for your character. Let me think…’

  ‘I know you said that a respectable Victorian woman wouldn’t have been wearing perfume, but I thought lavender-water … Wouldn’t that be OK? I always like to choose a perfume for my character and wear it right through the production. Not always possible of course, if it’s someone who just wouldn’t. But you can usually come up with something.’

  ‘It’s quite good. But I suppose I’ve always thought of it as a little old lady scent, and Isabella is so young and fresh and innocent when the play starts, isn’t she?’

  ‘Yes, she is. Hang on.’ Melissa delved about at the side of her chair and brought up a book bound in red and bristling w
ith paper markers.

  I rummaged about in my bag and brought out one exactly the same, except that it was even more densely packed with strips of paper.

  ‘Snap,’ I said.

  Melissa grinned and opened her copy at the first marker.

  ‘A light, graceful, girlish form,’ she read aloud, ‘neck and shoulders smooth as a child’s…’ She flipped over the pages to another marker. ‘She looked so young, so innocent, so childlike in her pretty morning dress, her fair face shaded by falling curls.’

  ‘You are doing your homework.’

  ‘It’s helping me to fill out my idea of her. There’s so much more in the novel than you could possibly have got into in the script.’ She shot a shrewd glance at me. ‘Some people might think this is a lot of trouble to go to over someone who doesn’t really exist.’

  I thought about this. ‘Well, I don’t. Because, for just a few hours every evening, in a way she will exist, won’t she? At least for the audience.’

  ‘Yes, that’s it. That’s exactly it.’ She sat back in her chair and closed her eyes as if there was nothing more to be said.

  A thought popped into my head. ‘How about rose-water? She wouldn’t wear scent as such but something as light and simple as that…’

  Melissa opened her eyes. ‘Perfect. Yes, rose-water. Just right.’

  ‘Melissa ..‘

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘Was that all it was? At the rehearsal, I mean. Tiredness and sore tits?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I just wondered – I didn’t find it easy to write, maybe it’s not an easy part to play,’ I said.

  ‘You’re right,’ she said slowly. ‘It’s really taking it out of me. Of course you have to identify with your role to some extent. You have to try to – well,’ she hesitated, ‘it’s not easy to explain but you have to kind of … squeeze the gap, I suppose. The gap between yourself and the part you’re playing. You never close it completely, because then you’d start thinking that you really were Lady Macbeth, or Cleopatra, or whoever. But you have to get as close as you can.’

  ‘And that’s difficult with Lady Isabel?’

  ‘It’s tough.’ She fumbled in the pocket of her kimono and brought out a packet of cigarettes. She tapped one out, looked at it and grimaced. She put it back in the packet and chucked the packet in the wastepaper basket. ‘And it’s worse when I’m playing Madame Vine. That scene with the dying child! My God!’

  In the second half of East Lynne, after being disfigured and left for dead in a railway accident, Lady Isabel returns to her old home disguised as Madame Vine to be governess to her own children in the household of her former husband and his new wife.

  ‘I found myself in tears when I was writing that,’ I admitted. ‘I’ve got a completely different take on the novel now that I’m a mother myself.’

  ‘Me, too. Sometimes I just want to howl at the thought of it all! Raging hormones, I suppose. On the other hand, that could add something to my performance. If I can keep it under control. No good whingeing, is it? Fancy a cup of tea?’

  I nodded.

  Melissa squatted down, shook the kettle to see if there was enough water in it, and plugged it into a socket near the skirting-board. The kettle was virtually her only gesture towards making her dressing-room more homely. The tools of her trade – make-up box, wig stand, magnifying mirror on a stand, were neatly aligned on the dressing-table, but there was little of the clutter of the other dressing-rooms. The only personal thing was a collage of photographs, overlapping each other in a silver picture-frame: there was Agnes, a few hours old – she’d been born the same day as Grace, Kevin, looking very dashing in a doublet with slashed sleeves, a holiday snap of a middle-aged couple standing in front of a patisserie – Melissa’s parents, I guessed.

  Melissa was rocking back on her heels and frowning.

  ‘There’s something I want to ask you,’ she said.

  ‘About the play?’

  ‘No, not the play. Now where … oh yes.’ She reached over for a sheet of paper and an envelope that lay on the dressing-table. ‘Have a read and tell me what you think.’

  I looked at the envelope. It had a first-class stamp and an address label typed with Melissa’s name and the address of their cottage. It looked innocuous enough.

  I read what was on the sheet of paper:

  So, we’ll go no more a-roving

  So late into the night,

  Though the heart be still as loving,

  And the moon be still as bright.

  For the sword outwears its sheath,

  And the soul wears out the breast,

  And the heart must pause to breathe,

  And love itself have rest.

  Though the night was made for loving,

  And the day returns too soon,

  Yet we’ll go no more a-roving

  By the light of the moon.

  from The King of Cups

  The signature had been printed upside down. The poem had obviously been word-processed and I recognized the font in which the signature had been written: Old English Text. It’s quite common and I’d got it on my own computer. I turned the sheet of paper over to see if there was anything on the back.

  There wasn’t.

  ‘Do you recognize the poem?’ she asked. ‘I get the feeling it’s written by someone well-known. It rings a faint bell.’

  ‘Sure I recognize it. I mean, it’s my job to recognize it. I do teach nineteenth-century poetry, after all.’

  ‘Let me guess. I thought, maybe, Thomas Hardy?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Masefield?’

  ‘Getting colder.’

  ‘Colder? Oh, I see. Further back, then. One of the romantic poets? Wordsworth?’

  ‘Close. It’s Byron actually. In a rare mood of sexual restraint. It’s a strange thing to send to someone. It doesn’t mean anything to you?’

  ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘And the signature? And why is it upside down? Who is the King of Cups?’

  She shook her head. ‘No idea. I get quite a lot of fan letters and it’s not unusual for fans to come to all your performances and get a bit hung up on you. We seem rather glamorous,’ she gestured ironically at her surroundings and made a droll face, ‘but the letters aren’t usually like this.’

  It struck me that it was the kind of thing someone might write at the end of an affair. But in that case, Melissa would surely have guessed the identity of the sender and she wouldn’t have shown the letter to me. I stole a glance at her. She was crouching by the kettle putting a tea-bag in each of the mugs.

  ‘Could it be someone from the past?’ I said. ‘An old boyfriend?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ She poured hot water into the mugs. ‘I’ve racked my brains. I can’t think of anyone. But you’re right, I do get the feeling that whoever it is expects me to understand the significance of it.’

  ‘It’s not really sinister, is it? I mean, nothing you’d report to the police. What does Kevin think?’

  ‘I haven’t mentioned it to him. He’s absolutely at full stretch with this production. He’s already got too much on his plate.’ Melissa poured some milk into one of the mugs and handed it to me. ‘And there’s probably nothing to worry about.’

  ‘But you are worried.’

  ‘Well, you see, what I can’t understand…’

  The door of the dressing-room swung open and hit the wall with a bang.

  ‘Sorry, sweetie,’ Kevin said to Melissa. ‘Didn’t mean that to happen.’ He made a pantomime of closing the door quietly behind him.

  Melissa caught my eye and gave me the tiniest possible shake of the head. I slipped the letter out of sight. Melissa and I were occupying the only two chairs. Kevin crossed to the dressing-table and leaned on it. I wondered what it was that Melissa had been going to say about the letter – and why she hadn’t told Kevin about it.

  If Melissa was the chameleon type of actor, Kevin was defin
itely the personality type. He seemed to stretch the little room at the seams by simply stepping into it. I found myself wanting to push my chair back. When he spoke it was recognizably in an actor’s voice, deep, flexible, and slightly ironic as though he was never a hundred per cent committed to what he was saying.

  ‘Feeling better, sweetie?’ He looked fondly into Melissa’s face.

  She nodded. ‘Much.’

  He leaned over and stroked the hair back from her forehead.

  ‘All the same, I don’t feel happy about leaving you tonight. I don’t have to stay in London. I can get a late train back.’

  She smiled up at him. ‘I’ll be fine, honestly, darling. You stay over at the flat. I don’t mind, really I don’t. I shall just go home and get as much sleep as Agnes will let me.’

  ‘I’m only just across the fields if she wants me,’ I said. ‘Just give me a ring if you need anything, Melissa.’

  ‘Well, if you’re sure…’ Kevin said.

  ‘Quite sure,’ Melissa said.

  Kevin turned to me. ‘Cass, while you’re here, can I have a word about the opening scene – the one we rehearsed this morning? Can we make it a bit more, oh … a bit more…’ He gestured vaguely.

  ‘A bit more what?’

  ‘A bit more sexy?’

  ‘Sexy?’

  ‘Archibald might embrace Lady Isabel, put an arm round her waist, that sort of thing?’

  ‘But they’re not even engaged,’ I said, realizing that I sounded like a Victorian chaperon. ‘And anyway, there’s also the class thing. He only feels he can dare to approach her when he finds out she’s been left without a penny.’

  Kevin leaned back, bracing himself by grasping the dressing-table. He nodded thoughtfully.

  ‘Look, we’ve agreed that the play absolutely seethes with repressed sexuality, haven’t we?’

  ‘Well, yes, but that’s the whole point, it is repressed, so it’s that much more shocking when it finally erupts and Isabel runs off with Levison.’

  ‘But we don’t want to underplay it too much, do we? I know East Lynne’s a classic of its kind, but we don’t want to be too reverential. I’m thinking of some of the telly adaptations.…’

  ‘Pride and Prejudice … Colin Firth … a wet shirt … a glimpse of manly chest?’