by Rosie Thomas
Silence.
Beyond the edge of the stage there was not a cough, a rustle or a whisper. No-one moved, and no-one thought of anything but the play. Tom had heard that silence only once before, and that was at the opening of New York’s greatest hit in ten years.
Got you, you bastards.
When the house lights came up for the interval, there was a second’s quiet before the rush and jostle began for the bars. Helen and Darcy smiled at each other through it and squeezed hands again.
‘It’s good, isn’t it?’ Darcy asked anxiously. ‘Surely it is?’
‘Yes. It’s very, very good. Spectacular, in fact. If only they can carry the rest of it off.’
Squashed together in a far corner of the bar, they watched and listened. No-one was talking about anything else.
‘Greg Hart’s son. The impresario …’
‘Better than the one at Stratford …’
‘Rather clever, wouldn’t you say? …’
‘Of course, you know who she is? Masefield Warren’s daughter. The shady tycoon …’
‘I like the whisper of bleakness. The play should be a synthesis of light and shade …’
‘Oh, for God’s sake. But aren’t they pretty? …’
Helen need not have worried.
The production gathered momentum until the last, spellbinding moment.
Pansy spoke the epilogue from a small circle of light on the darkened stage. Helen had forgotten everything, forgotten that this magical Rosalind was the girl who lived downstairs at Follies House.
‘When I make curtsey,’ Pansy’s slow smile embraced all of them, ‘bid me farewell.’
The storm of applause broke instantly. Wave after wave of clapping rose to the stage as the cast took their bows. Pansy and Oliver, hand in hand, stepped forward and the applause redoubled.
‘Bravo,’ someone shouted and the cry was taken up across the whole theatre. They stood side by side, flushed and dazed with pleased surprise at the acclaim. Oliver put his arm round Pansy’s shoulders and kissed her cheek, and she leaned against him. They were both laughing now and suddenly the spell of the performance was behind them. They were themselves again.
At last the clapping died away. Helen saw that the only empty seats were the ones left by the London critics who had slipped away to phone in their reviews for the early editions. There had been no stampede for the exits tonight.
Now, with the curtains firmly closed at last, she watched the audience streaming up the aisles and saw that there was a smile on every single face.
Not bad, she thought. Not bad for a piddling student production of the classics, and she smiled at the memory of Tom’s cynicism.
The awkwardness between them all forgotten, Helen longed to find Tom and congratulate him.
‘We must go backstage. Darcy, we must.’
Darcy looked horrified. ‘No. It’ll be all people kissing each other and shrieking. You go – I’ll wait for you.’
Helen was still glowing with the joy of the play, and for the first time, his reticence struck a chord of irritation in her.
‘Don’t you think Oliver will be hurt if you don’t go?’
‘No. Yes.’ He looked so miserable that Helen was sorry at once.
‘Come on,’ she said gently. ‘There’ll be so many people no-one will notice us. We’ll just say “well done” and go away again.’
Reluctantly, Darcy followed her.
The spiral of narrow stairs that linked the dressing rooms was packed with laughing, cheering people. The crowd was thickest in Pansy’s room. When Helen and Darcy squeezed in, they found her perched in a sea of flowers. Pansy blew them a kiss. A glass of champagne was being passed to her, hand to hand over the heads of the crowd. Beside her Oliver twisted the cork off another bottle. He lifted the bottle with a flourish and drank from it, and silver foam ran down his chin and splashed over his shirt. He spluttered and laughed and Pansy reached across to ruffle his hair. Helen thought he looked happier than he had done for weeks.
They were, once again, the perfect couple.
Head down, Darcy wriggled through the throng to Oliver’s side. He touched his brother’s shoulder and, with his quick, shy smile, murmured, ‘well done’. Extravagantly Oliver flung his arm out to embrace Darcy and shouted, ‘Look everyone. Even my mystery brother came.’
Darcy went scarlet but everyone’s attention had shifted to the doorway. A bulky man in an emphatically tailored suit was forcing his way in.
‘Daddy!’ Pansy shouted over the uproar. ‘Weren’t we good?’
Masefield Warren kissed his daughter’s forehead as gently as if she were a piece of rare china.
‘You were great, princess,’ he said, his blunt, seamed features suffused with pride. ‘Just great.’
The dizzy blonde at his side was draped in furs and perched on the highest, thinnest stiletto heels.
‘Even I enjoyed it,’ Pansy’s stepmother giggled. ‘Darling, how did you remember all those words?’
When Helen looked again, Darcy had disappeared. He had narrowly avoided his parents. Even here, in this throng that had nothing to do with their world, a narrow path automatically cleared itself for the Earl and Countess of Montcalm. Even the foursquare bulk of Masefield Warren shifted slightly to one side.
But it was Tom whom Helen wanted to see. At last she saw him outside in an angle of the stairs. He was still listening, but the dark, sharp planes of his face were softened. He looked satisfied, under the habitual ironic amusement.
Stephen and Beatrice Spurring reached him and stopped. Under the greying wings of hair, Beatrice’s face wore its usual frown of concern, but it dissolved briefly into a smile of real pleasure as she congratulated Tom. Stephen was more circumspect.
‘Dazzling,’ he said. ‘Perhaps a touch too much loud pedal, but overstatement always pulls the crowds in. Well done.’
Tom smiled very slightly. ‘I’m delighted you enjoyed it.’
The long association through weeks of rehearsal had done nothing to improve their liking for each other. Hostility still bristled under the polite façade.
‘And where’s the star of the show?’
Tom pointed to Pansy’s dressing room. Stephen sprang up the steps with his wife in his wake. He looked young tonight, in his open-necked bright blue shirt and with his silky hair flopping over his forehead like a boy’s. Much younger than Beatrice.
Tom was on his own again, and Helen waited no longer.
She ran down to him, took hold of both his hands and reached up to kiss the corner of his thin, clever mouth. She felt his start of surprise and then his strength as he pulled her close to him. She thought that the ironical mask had dropped to show real pleasure.
‘Well?’
His voice was no more than a whisper. He was asking her something intensely private, here in this impervious crowd. The thought suddenly made her shy, so shy that she could think of nothing to say. And then it made her answer him as if all he wanted was a response to his play.
‘You know how good it was.’
‘Ah. Oh yes, I know how good it was.’ Tom kissed her in return, lightly, like an old friend. His arm dropped from her shoulders, and she felt cold. ‘But all this celebrating is a shade premature until we’ve seen the reviews. And filled the seats for the rest of the run.’
‘I’m sure you needn’t worry about that.’
Another surge of people coming up the stairs pressed them back against the wall. Tom put out his arm to shield her, perfectly polite. He was cool again, just as he almost always was. She realised that the moment for telling him that she was sorry for New Year’s Eve had gone. She would never do it now. But how stupid. Why ever not?
Helen opened her mouth again, groping for the words to say I’m sorry. I’m sorry I slapped you like some affronted Victorian maiden. If only it hadn’t been then, Tom. So soon after seeing Oliver …
But someone else was demanding her attention. It was Darcy. He looked hot and uncomfortable.
‘Darcy.’ Tom nodded his greeting. Then he leaned comfortably against the wall with his arms folded, watching them.
‘I’m sure Tom would,’ Darcy said helpfully.
‘Darcy.’ Helen broke in as quickly as she could. ‘I can manage a few hundred yards on my own.’ Affection for his old-fashioned concern, his quaintness, flooded through her. But it was increasingly mingled with mild irritation. There was something pedantic about Darcy too. ‘Anyway,’ she said hurriedly, ‘I’m ready too. Goodbye, Tom.’
She turned and almost ran. Behind her, Darcy looked faintly puzzled, but he followed with relief. Tom stood for a moment looking ahead into emptiness, but then he went away up the stairs to drink champagne with his elated actors.
Darcy and Helen stood together on Folly Bridge. The spring night air was cool and sweet-smelling and filled with the gurgle of water. Helen leaned over the parapet. Beneath her the foam showed creamy in the race around the piers of the bridge. Follies House was in total darkness. Everyone was still at the theatre. She concentrated on the sound of the water, letting her odd, prickly ill-humour slide away with it.
Her mind was almost empty when Darcy lifted her hand and laced his fingers into hers. He began to talk in a low, humble voice. He was apologising for dragging her away from the party, laying bare his own fear and shyness with painful, determined honesty.
‘Don’t think I like myself for it,’ he murmured. ‘Don’t think I wouldn’t be different, if only I knew how.’
‘Oh, Darcy, Darcy.’ Helen rubbed her face helplessly against the familiar rough tweed of his jacket. ‘Please don’t be so unhappy. Please. I like you so much …’ But, she was going to say, but I can’t do anything to help you, or make things between us any different from the way they are now.
Darcy denied her the chance. He pulled her to him with a violence that was startling in such a gentle man. His face burned against her cheeks and the bones bruised her flesh as he kissed her.
The soothing splash of the river was drowned. Threat boomed instead in Helen’s ears as she tensed, then tore herself out of Darcy’s arms.
‘Don’t ask me,’ she mumbled incoherently, ‘don’t need what I can’t give you …’ Almost before she knew what she was doing she had reached out to touch his cheek with the tips of her fingers, then fled away down the mossy, slippery steps to the safety of the island.
‘I’m sorry,’ she heard the desperation in Darcy’s voice. ‘Helen, I won’t …’
‘I know,’ she called back to him. ‘I know. Just let’s … not change things.’
He put his hands on the parapet and pulled himself so far over that she was afraid he would fall.
‘Never?’ he shouted.
‘Oh, please,’ she was almost sobbing now. ‘What do you want?’
Up on the bridge a heavy truck thundered past and Helen thought that she missed his answer. But then it came, in his normal voice, so that she barely heard him.
‘Just to be with you.’
‘You are with me,’ she blurted out. ‘Much more than anybody else. Please, please let that be enough.’
Her key found the lock and the dark vault of the hallway gaped behind her. Darcy seemed to be satisfied. He had half turned away and now a car, travelling very fast, was racing past behind him. He had said something else, Helen was certain. It might have been I love you. But now he was gone, and she hadn’t really heard him after all.
Helen was very tired. She closed the door and climbed wearily up through the close darkness of the house.
Helen went out early the next morning to buy the newspapers. It was a perfect spring morning, with sunlight flashing off the ripples and all the trees visibly misted with pale green. As she came out of the house, an empty pleasure steamer chugged past on its way to the little landing-stage downriver. The rows of seats inside it were freshly white-painted and there was a new striped awning fluttering over them ready for the first tourist river trip of the season.
There was so much light and brightness everywhere that anxiety was impossible. The evening with Darcy had given Helen a restless, dream-filled night but the significance of it all melted away in the brilliance of the morning. They would go on just as they had been doing, making each other undemandingly happy. Everything would be all right.
Helen bought a selection of papers and dawdled back to Follies with them folded under her arm, savouring the anticipation of rave reviews.
Chloe heard her coming back and ran down to peer at the bundle under her arm. ‘Oh good, you’ve got them. Come and have coffee and we’ll gloat together.’
Helen perched herself in a patch of light on the window seat. In front of her the pinnacles and towers of Oxford shone a pale, buttery gold. Helen sighed with pure contentment.
Chloe handed over a wide china bowl of coffee and a croissant wrapped in a napkin. She licked her fingers greedily, pushed back the tumble of red hair and said, ‘Now. Let’s see …’
They opened a paper apiece and riffled through to find the place. ‘Here,’ Chloe murmured. ‘Oxford. As You Like It.’
There was a second or two of silence as their eyes skimmed and then they were shouting simultaneously, not listening to each other.
‘Helen, just hear this! “A magical evening … outstanding performances … see it if you possibly can …”’
‘Mine’s even better!’ Helen shook out her paper and read, ‘“This is, quite simply, the best student production I have ever seen. I would go even further and say it is the best As You Like It I have ever seen, and there have been a good many. So far as I know this is Mr Hart’s debut as a director in this country. If he can be persuaded to stay here, our theatre will be the richer.”’ They made awed faces at each other. ‘Who’s that?’ Chloe craned to see which paper it was. ‘Not very often he goes over the top like that. What does the other one say?’
Helen found it. ‘Oh, listen. “A star was born in Oxford last night. Pansy Warren is a bewitching, enchanting Rosalind. She has the makings of a great Shakespearean actress … Umm … Miss Warren is well served by Lord Oliver Mortimore’s suitably aristocratic Orlando, and by the most sensitive direction that I have seen in Oxford for a very long time. Greg Hart, the great name of Broadway, will be proud of his son today.” Chloe, how fantastic. How pleased Tom will be … everyone will be …’
Chloe rocked back on her heels surrounded by the crumpled sheets of newsprint. ‘I knew it was good,’ she kept saying, ‘but I hadn’t a clue it was that good. Not a clue. Who said that about Pansy? A star is born?’ Still only half believing they went back to the notices and read them through again. Then they lifted their cups and toasted the production and each other in cold coffee.
Then, with a jug of iced orange juice and a bottle of champagne from Chloe’s store, they went along to Pansy’s room. But the door was shut, and there was no response to their knocking.
‘Oh dear,’ Chloe said. ‘I was so looking forward to drinking the health of a new-born star.’
‘Absent friends, then.’
They drank the Buck’s Fizz together, sprawled in the patches of sunlight that glowed on the faded Persian rugs. The champagne and the play’s acclaim made them giggly.
Chloe balanced her glass precariously on the cushion beside her head and laced her fingers across her chest with a contented sigh.
‘Mmm. I think drinking champagne in the sun is my favourite kind of morning. It only narrowly pips attending a lecture on devotional poetry of the Middle Ages, of course.’
‘A close-run thing,’ Helen agreed.
‘And are you happy, Helen Brown?’
Helen squinted at the dust particles spinning in a shaft of light.
‘Blissfully,’ she said lightly. ‘Oh yes, ecstatically. Why not?’
Chloe rolled sideways to look at her.
‘Oliver all forgotten, then?’
&nbs
p; ‘No, not forgotten. Just … gone.’
‘Vanished into orbit round the star. And now you’ve got Darcy.’
‘Yes,’ Helen said a little shortly. ‘I have got Darcy. Tell me about Stephen.’ For weeks she had avoided asking. Now, in this moment of cheerful intimacy, she wanted to know.
Chloe rolled back and groaned into her cushion. ‘I wish I knew. Heaven and hell. He doesn’t act married, but it’s there, like a plate-glass wall. I can come this close to him,’ and Chloe put her hands together, a perfect match but not quite touching, ‘but never any closer. It gives me no pleasure to think of wrecking anybody’s life, Helen, but I’d give anything for him to be mine. All of him. No more hole-and-corner afternoons, stolen weekends, furtive phone calls.’ With sudden violence she said, ‘I’m tired. I want it to be simple and clear, like the way I feel for him. I love him, and I’m scared. I know you think I’m morally wrong. D’you think I’m a fool as well?’
Helen turned her empty glass against the light. ‘I don’t think either of those things. I do think he won’t make you happy,’ she said very quietly.
‘Oh, but he does.’ Chloe’s voice was full of tenderness. ‘Just by existing he does. And so long as he is here, I shall be here for him.’
The room was silent. Helen was remembering Stephen running up the steps to Pansy’s dressing room last night, and Beatrice trailing wearily after him. There was nothing more that she could say.
Chloe jumped up and reached for the jug. With a flourish she dribbled the last few drops of Buck’s Fizz into their glasses.
‘Let’s think,’ she said cheerfully. ‘What shall we drink to? Not happiness, perhaps. I know …’ she stood upright, smiling, with the sun bleaching out the anxious lines around her eyes. She looked lean and tawny like a jungle cat. ‘To satisfaction.’
Helen raised her glass too. Yes, she could drink to that. ‘To satisfaction,’ she echoed hopefully.
That afternoon Helen was back at her usual desk in the brown somnolence of the Bodleian Library. In the carrels that stretched all around, other people were industriously bent over their weighty books, sheaves of notes, card indexes. Librarians trundled up and down with trolleys of books that had been ordered up from the vast stacks underground.