by Hazel Osmond
Everyone seemed to love Matt Harper. And Matt Harper had a worrying tendency to love everyone back.
At rehearsal he had wrapped his arms around Doug and given him a spontaneous hug when Finlay had congratulated them on how well their scenes had gone. In fact, he found himself smiling like an idiot as the rehearsal had progressed and the cast had worked through the last act. There were still fluffs and pauses, but for the first time there was continuity; more cues picked up, pace injected; some real character development. Ten days before they were due on stage and they were starting to pull this play together.
As the days passed, he became more and more aware that he was a person pretending to be another person pretending to be an Elizabethan young man. He feared he was going to unravel.
He was in danger of unravelling with Jennifer as well, he knew that. Watching her sitting with the prompt book he couldn’t keep his mind from the beach and the way her body had felt against his. He sensed she was thinking of it too. There was none of the chin-down avoidance of the early days, but a certain sweet shyness, as though she did not trust herself not to nick his socks and shoes again.
He told himself he could handle it and he did. They bumped along, going for coffee, sitting by each other in the pub. He even accepted the odd lift home, and she had fed him little snippets of news from America: Rory was still wooing; Cress prevaricating and knitting.
At the rehearsal exactly one week before the first performance, things got more disorientating. Finlay was taking him and Jocelyn through their scenes again and Mack could only sympathise with Finlay’s worried look. They made for a chilling couple: Mack found it impossible to hide his animosity and Jocelyn had obviously tuned in to his true feelings. In retaliation she had begun calling him ‘Brogue Male’ (which he found funny), or ‘Mr Jumble-Sale-Wurzle Head’ (which he didn’t). She also liked to point out loudly that there was only one letter dividing wankers from walkers. Matt Harper smiled placidly.
When they had played their scenes together before, Mack had got into the habit of thinking about Lisa to get some warmth going. This time when he went to conjure her up, remembering her on her knees in front of him in that alleyway, he felt a sharp stab of panic: the head he was now looking down on was blonde.
He needed Cressida to do something soon – fall for Rory, have wild sex with the director, run off with one of the lighting crew, anything, but make it soon.
He tried to put Mack Stone firmly back in control, and when Doug knocked on his door that Saturday and asked if he’d help get the set ready, his mind told him not to get involved; his body shrugged on his fleece and went and sat in Doug’s car. He determined that he would only stay a couple of hours but, seduced by the sense of community and warmth in the hall, he was there until the end of the day, putting up flats and steadying the long ladders while members of the backstage crew hung lights.
When Jennifer appeared he tried to be hearty and dorky and not notice what she was wearing and how she moved and that soft laugh of hers. The strain gave him a thumping headache.
Next day he lay low in Newcastle, only speaking to O’Dowd, who, when Mack gave him the latest updates, told him he’d soon be out of there. He said it was just a matter of time before Cress gave in to Rory and then all Hell was going to break loose. Married man, American icon – Mack could almost hear O’Dowd salivating into the phone.
When Mack arrived for rehearsal on the Monday he told himself he didn’t care whether the set was half finished and looked like a dog’s breakfast. He didn’t care about these people, or the play. Except when his eyes saw the set, finished and a credible approximation of an Italian palace courtyard, complete with two box hedges in long stone pots, a genuine ‘Wow’ escaped from his lips.
‘It is pretty good,’ Gerry said, screwing up his eyes. ‘Not as good as for the Scottish play, mind you. We had a thrust stage for that and a smoke machine.’
‘Doesn’t matter what it looks like,’ Doug said morosely, ‘everything will go tits up when we get on it.’
Four hours later Mack understood what Doug had meant and suddenly he was caring about the play and the people again. They were all in it together, and ‘it’ was a shambles.
Faced with the finished set, the cast had gone into a collective nervous spasm: actors had come on too early in some scenes and failed to come on at all in others. Angus had dried up repeatedly and stood blinking into the lights; Neale only had two volumes: whisper or bellow; and Doug and Mack had morphed into back-slapping dunderheads. Even Jocelyn appeared rattled and delivered most of her lines upstage. Best comedy moment had been when Gerry had got himself entangled in one of the box hedges, but by that point no one was laughing. Just before the end the whole hall had been plunged into darkness.
‘Sorry,’ a tremulous voice had said from the lighting desk.
‘Don’t be,’ Jennifer said, ‘it’s something of a blessing.’
Marjorie, who had come along, as always, simply to offer her opinion, was slumped down in her seat, either asleep or in a coma. Finlay leaped to his feet, a big wedge of notes in his hand.
‘Not bad, not bad at all,’ he said with real enthusiasm, and the cast looked at each other as if Finlay had been watching a different play. ‘I love the way you’re pacing yourselves, holding back on those big performances I know you’re all capable of. Just remember there isn’t one scene in this play that we haven’t done brilliantly at some time. All we have to do is knit them all together into a continuous whole. Wait until the dress rehearsal tomorrow … whoosh.’ Finlay did some big sweeping motions with his hands.
Mack saw backs begin to straighten and smiles return.
Finlay was still roaming around. ‘So, onwards and upwards, and don’t forget, in costume tomorrow by six thirty ready for the photographer from the Courant. OK, I have notes for you all. Read them and come back to me tonight if you don’t understand anything.’ He waved the bundle of papers. ‘Form an orderly queue.’
Jennifer did not know how Finlay kept a straight face. At some points they were all over the place with the script and she had felt as if she were watching a piece of wood being turned over and over by the current and not knowing if she should leap in and set it straight. Poor Matt, he had been one of the worst – leaden in his scenes with Jocelyn and then playing Stan Laurel to Doug’s Oliver Hardy. She looked across at him and caught his eye and looked away. Every time she saw him she remembered being held upside down, the way his body had felt against hers. She knew he was remembering it too. It was just a question of waiting for that spark to happen again. She was sure it would. She felt something knot low down in her belly at the prospect.
‘The thing is, with Shakespeare …’ she heard Marjorie say, advancing groggily towards her, and Jennifer hurriedly picked up her phone.
‘Sorry, Marjorie, I’ve got to do something backstage. Will you excuse me?’ She slipped through the door at the side of the stage and walked down the corridor towards the large room that for the duration of the play would be where the cast changed and sat quietly until they were ‘on’. Clothes rails had already been moved into it and two large screens erected to create separate dressing areas for the men and women. In a few days’ time it would be a jumble of costumes and people and nerves. Now there were only a few costumes hanging up, some hats in a box and a tangled ball of tights on a table.
She moved to the women’s side, put her phone on a table and started sorting through the make-up box and arranging its contents along the windowsill, surreptitiously sniffing one of the tubes of make-up and feeling the memories of past performances rise and drift.
When the sound of a goat broke into her thoughts, she snatched up the phone again and waited for Cressida to speak. Cressida’s voice sounded fevered. Wrong.
‘OK, Jen,’ she said, ‘something weird has happened. There have been developments.’
‘Developments?’
‘Yes.’
‘This sounds ominous, Cress, are you all right?’
&n
bsp; ‘It’s not ominous, sweetie, sorry, didn’t mean to scare you. It’s more … unforeseen.’ Cress went quiet and then said, stumbling, ‘I’m a little shell-shocked.’
‘Take it slowly.’
‘Right. You know that red Hermès bag I had?’
‘Y-e-s.’
‘I lost it.’
Jennifer took a moment to absorb the news. ‘Lost it?’
‘Yes. Totally. I mean there have been plenty of times I thought I’d lost it, but I’d only mislaid it for a while. This time I’ve really lost it.’
‘Just like that?’
Weeks before Cressida had gone to America, she and Jennifer had worked out a number of code words for things that must not be discussed openly. Cressida’s blood-red Hermès bag was her heart.
‘One minute it was there and then the next it wasn’t.’
‘God, Cress. It’s a big thing to have … stolen. Didn’t you notice it … going?’
‘No. I didn’t in a million years think the person responsible would … well, I wouldn’t have expected it. I’d arranged to meet them, just for coffee and a chat. Then POW! Bag gone.’
‘So he—’
‘Please Jen; I need to think this through … I’m sitting tight and doing nothing at the moment. I’ve made that clear to the person who … who took the bag. They’re not going to shout it from the rooftops either – the fallout for them will be much worse than for me. I know, I know, this won’t make sense, but just give me a few days, just to sort it out in my mind.’
‘Cress, hang on a minute,’ Jennifer said suddenly aware of a noise from the men’s section of the room. She got up and peered around the screen. The ball of tights which had been on the table was now on the floor.
‘Sorry, Cress, carry on, just something falling down. Look …’ She chose her words carefully. ‘This person who took the bag, did you know them already? Why will it be tricky?’
There was no response, and then, ‘Jen, just tell me whatever happens, you’ll still love me.’ A thick vein of pleading ran through the words, and Jennifer felt her curiosity shift into something more anxious.
‘What? Of course I’ll still love you, what on earth are you talking about?’
‘Whoever this person is?’
Jennifer floundered around until she could think how to fit what she wanted to say into this blasted code. ‘Cress, if you’re happy, I’ll be happy. Just … make sure it’s not a temporary loss that you’re getting out of proportion. Just promise me that. God, listen to me, I sound ancient.’
‘Jen. I have to go … I’m sorry; I haven’t asked anything about the play, about Matt … all right, all right, I’m coming. Talk later, Jen. Bye. Love you.’
Jennifer looked at the phone in her hand as if she wasn’t sure she’d really had that conversation or whether it had been in her head. She had learned to weather the ups and downs of Cressida’s love life, her tendency to be besotted one minute and ripping up love letters the next, but this sounded different. Cressida had always seemed to be in control, perhaps a little more enamoured of the idea of being madly in love than actually feeling it. The way she had just been talking sounded as if she was in the grip of something monumental.
Mack got back out into the hall, just as Finlay had finished with Doug and now only had one set of notes left in his hand.
‘Ah, there you are, Matt,’ he said, ‘well done, well done.’
Mack listened to his heart thumping and pretended to scan his notes, glad that he did not have to talk to anyone right at that moment. When he had calmed down enough to be able to read what Finlay had written he was amazed that there was nothing about being ‘a wooden-tongued, numb-faced, passionless dolt’. The comments were upbeat, only touching lightly on the negatives.
You are a cunning bugger, Finlay. Now there’s part of me that wants to please you even more, though that other part of me is hoping I’m not even here for your damn play. You’re as skilled a manipulator as O’Dowd, in your way.
And talking of O’Dowd … from Jennifer’s overheard replies it was obvious Cressida had been in a right old flap. What had Jennifer said? ‘It’s a big thing to have stolen.’ If only those bloody tights hadn’t hit the deck. Did Jennifer mean ‘big’ as in ‘large’ or ‘big’ as in ‘important’? Mack felt suddenly panicky. What if some journalist had nicked her diary or something else personal and was just about to splash it over the papers?
No, hang about. You’re getting ahead of yourself. Jennifer’s the one Cress is confiding in, not some diary. Whatever someone’s nicked, it’s not the story. Jennifer’s the keeper of that.
He let everyone else go to the pub, saying he was waiting for Jennifer. Perhaps he should ask her to go to a different pub? No. After the beach, that would be sending out the wrong message.
When she emerged from backstage, what message he might be sending out was immaterial: she looked completely distracted. He guessed he was on a hiding to nothing, attempting to talk to her.
‘I almost lost the will to live in a few places back there,’ he said.
‘You lose most things,’ she replied, nearly at the door, buttoning up her coat.
He tried again. ‘I know I didn’t exactly cover myself in glory this evening, but—’
‘No, you didn’t.’ She looked irritated. ‘Jocelyn and you are still like a couple of plaster dummies. Your feet are wrong too, all nervous, like you’re scared if you position them correctly, your bodies will touch.’
It was only when he said, genuinely hurt, ‘Gosh, I thought I was the brutally honest one,’ that she seemed to realise what she’d said. She rubbed her fingers back and forth across her forehead. ‘Sorry, Matt, I didn’t mean to be so harsh … look, I’m a bit tired tonight, I’m going to head home.’
There was no point in asking for a lift, she was already walking quickly along the path to the car park. Whatever Cressida had told her, she needed time to mull it over alone, that much was obvious.
Doug took him home in the end, chatting about Pat and wondering if she’d come to the play. Mack did enough to pretend he was listening. This was all getting serious now; this was what he had come here for. He had to remember that: harden his heart for the last push.
CHAPTER 27
The man in the baggy suit who had turned up from the council to give them a ‘little chat’ about cost-cutting initiatives was getting only a tiny part of Jennifer’s attention – the part that wasn’t being expended on Cressida’s weird phone call and the man sitting up in the gallery wearing what looked like a new fleece.
However Jennifer twisted and turned over what Cress had said, everything seemed to point towards Rory Sinclair being her new love. How could she have fallen so deeply for him after the way she’d talked about him before? And what was all that about the repercussions for him being worse than for Cress? Rory had affairs all over the place; they were like water off a duck’s back. Unless … unless he’d actually fallen for Cress as much as she’d fallen for him?
Could a man who seemed so in love with himself, fall that deeply, that quickly? Stranger things had happened in love. She glanced up at Matt, but he seemed lost in his thoughts. Or maybe he was still smarting from all those tactless things she’d said yesterday evening.
Lionel gave her a nudge. Poor Lionel, he looked unsettled, but she did not know if it was in anticipation of what was about to be said or Sheila’s probable reaction to it.
Jennifer felt her body yearn to turn and stare up at Matt again, and so she did. This time he grinned down at her, and she not only felt relief, but lust. Would today be the day he’d kiss her? Right now she was going to have to settle for that grin, but who knew, it was nearly lunchtime and he might ask her out. She smiled up at him and felt light-headed with possibilities. Could he really see beyond this scarring?
Stop with the questions, Jen, you’ll wear yourself out.
‘We’re looking at all kinds of initiatives to give the public ownership of our services,’ the man from the council was
saying. ‘We’ll be taking self-service checking out and return of books a step further—’
‘To self-service putting the books back on the shelves?’ Sheila asked tartly.
‘Or we might even have to look at staffing levels.’
‘With a view to making staff cuts?’ Lionel asked, his frown indicating that this was news to him.
‘Cuts … and possibly closures of smaller libraries.’
Lionel looked as if someone had just stripped his guts out, but Sheila said sweetly, ‘Do you know, I think you have a point about giving the public more ownership of our services.’ They all looked at her as if she were a leopard who had just turned up in a striped bodysuit. ‘No really, we should listen to our users more.’
Jennifer’s confusion evaporated when she spotted Mr Armstrong tottering his way towards the desk, carrier bag in front of him like a shield of righteousness.
‘This is one of our oldest users,’ Sheila said, niftily getting round the counter to stand by him. ‘He’d love to have more involvement. Has loads of great ideas.’ Sheila raised her voice. ‘This man is from the county council, Mr Armstrong, come specially to talk to you.’
‘County, eh?’ Mr Armstrong said. ‘About time. Been trying to get through to you lot for years. Nobody listens.’
‘You see,’ the man from the council said, practically falling on Mr Armstrong in his eagerness to shake his hand, ‘this is exactly what I was talking about.’
‘Off you go then.’ Sheila gave both men a little push in the direction of some seats in the large-print section.
They watched the full Mr Armstrong treatment unfold, particularly enjoying the selection of books he extracted from his carrier bag. Ten minutes ticked into twenty, twenty minutes to half an hour.
‘I think the man from the council is signalling for one of us to come over,’ Jennifer said.
Lionel squinted. ‘I don’t see anything.’