The Understudy: A Novel

by David Nicholls

  Certain environments—parks in autumn, deserted beaches at sunset, skating rinks, anywhere with snow—all of them inevitably tend to inspire kooky, free-spirited movie behavior. Galleries in particular are prone to this kind of stuff, and that afternoon with Sophie, Stephen allowed himself to succumb. There was a great deal of arm-swinging while holding hands, a lot of jokey comments about the paintings, speculation about who was saying what to whom, a lot of giggling. It wasn’t so much an activity as a sequence, but Stephen felt funny and happy and pleasant to be with, and realized that, for the first time in a very long while, he and Sophie were actually having fun.

  Once it had got dark, they walked across the Thames to Waterloo Station arm in arm, and joined the day-trippers and pre-Christmas Sunday shoppers on the train home to Barnes, Sophie falling instantly asleep in the crook of his arm. As the train crawled past the shell of Battersea Power Station, his mobile rang, and with his left hand he carefully extricated it from his coat without waking her. He saw Nora’s name on the phone’s display and smiled.

  “Hello, stranger!” said Nora.

  “Hi, there.”

  “I was starting to wonder if you’ve been avoiding me.”

  “Of course not,” Stephen whispered.

  “Hey—have I called at a bad time?” said Nora.

  “No, this is fine…”

  “It’s just every time I call, you seem to be getting in or out of a pair of pantyhose.”

  “Never on the Sabbath. I’m on the train, with Sophie.”

  “You’re on a date?”

  “Sophie, my daughter.”

  “Sophie, of course.”

  “She’s asleep.”

  “Okay, well, I’ll be quick. It’s just I’ve been looking through my diary and I find that I have absolutely nothing in my life to look forward to, so I wondered if you felt like going to the movies sometime? Or coming round here, after a show? Josh has just bought this new wide-screen TV for the bedroom. It’s so he can watch all his own movies, naked and lying down. Why don’t you come round and see it—the TV that is, not Josh naked—we don’t have to watch a Josh Harper movie, of course, and it would give my life some purpose.” She lowered her voice a little. “I haven’t seen you for a while, and I’ve sort of missed you.”

  Had she?

  “Yeah, you too,” whispered Stephen.

  “So—what are we going to do about it?”

  He could pretend to be busy, of course. After all, where was the pleasure in sitting around, acting as platonic confidant, listening to her talk on and on about him, when all he really wanted to do was lean across and kiss her? Hadn’t he been trying to give that up? Clearly, there was only misery and frustration to be had there. He pictured her face.

  “I’d love to see you,” whispered Stephen.

  “Okay, well”—she hesitated for a moment, as if she had something more to say—“…well, let’s talk tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Okay, tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow, then.”

  “Okay, bye.” He hung up the phone, and looked out of the window at the Wandsworth terraces, and caught his reflection in the mirror, smiling.

  “Who was that?” asked Sophie, without opening her eyes.

  “I thought you were asleep.”

  “I was pretending. Who was that?”

  “None of your beeswax.”

  “Don’t say beeswax, it’s stupid.”

  “None of your business, then. And don’t say ‘stupid,’ say ‘silly.’ ”

  “Silly, then.” Sophie shifted to look up at him, her eyes half-open. “Was it a girl?”

  “It might have been.”

  “I think it was your girlfriend,” she said, with a playground snigger.

  “Why would it be my girlfriend?”

  “Because you were talking like this…” And she bunched her mouth up into a tight little moue, rolled her eyes up in her head, and in a high, lilting voice cooed, “ ‘Hellooooo there, lovely to talk to you, I’d loooove to seeeee you, mmmmoi!’ ”

  Stephen laughed. “I did not talk like that, and it’s none of your business, and, anyway, Nelly, it was a private conversation.” Sophie settled once again into the crook of his arm, closing her eyes. “Just out of interest, what if she was my girlfriend?” he asked, brushing her fringe across her forehead. “You wouldn’t mind, would you?”

  “I suppose not. As long as she’s really nice,” murmured Sophie, and yawned a stage yawn, signaling the conversation was at an end.

  She is, he thought. That’s the whole problem.

  Lauren Bacall

  “Is it safe?” whispered Stephen.

  “Yes, it’s safe,” replied Alison. “Come in.”

  Colin was out at a rugby-team reunion when they arrived back, and wasn’t expected home till late. Stephen said good-night to Sophie, gratified by the hug he received, and pleased that Alison had seen it, then waited in one of the three reception rooms while Alison put her to bed.

  He poured wine into a heavy crystal goblet that felt like a prop, perched on the edge of a low-slung sofa and immediately slid down into its depths. It stank of expensive leather. He looked around the immaculate room, and wondered at how far Alison had come from the basement flat in Camberwell where the three of them had lived less than three years ago, hemmed in by mismatched cheap furniture, empty wine bottles, posters in cheap clip-frames, ashtrays and burned-out night-lights. Now, squeaking and sliding on the meaty brown sofa, he felt shifty and illicit, as if he’d accidentally been locked overnight in Heal’s furniture department. Retro-jazz burbled inoffensively from overdesigned hi-fidelity speakers, the kind of innocuous easy-listening antimusic Alison would have snarled at when they first met, and he knew immediately, with absolute certainty, that somewhere in the house there would be at least one, possibly two, copies of Buena Vista Social Club. Clearly she’d discovered a talent for interior design too: every object in the room—the heavy wineglasses, the modernist candlesticks, the dark-wood photo frames, the up-lighters and down-lighters, the paperweights untroubled by paper—everything felt as if it had come from a particularly ambitious and cohesive wedding list.

  On a low lacquered black and Chinese-red coffee table at Stephen’s side, in among the scented candles and the chronological back copies of Vogue and The Economist and World of Interiors, stood a wedding photo in a silver photo frame—one of those artfully informal wedding snaps that attempt to convey what a very, very special day it had really, really been—a whole gang of well-groomed prematurely wealthy young people crammed, whooping, into the frame. He peered closely at Colin, noting the wedding-morning razor burn, the way the meaty head bulged over his ridiculous winged collar, as if being slowly garroted by his own pink silk bow tie. An equally ruddy banker, wearing little sunglasses and a humorous kilt, presumably the nominal Best Man, grimaced over his shoulder, while Alison, in a low-cut silver-gray dress, was smiling with what Stephen imagined, hoped, was a satirical glint in her eye. In the foreground, Sophie peered through her fringe at the camera, the bouquet clutched in front of her face, as if hiding from these people. Clearly a very, very special day. It had been a notable day for Stephen too, the first time in his life he’d managed to get through a whole bottle of vodka by himself, along with eighty cigarettes and an emotionally disorientating quadruple bill of A Room with a View, Moonraker, Deliverance and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on the DVD projector. No photographs were taken of that particular day. In fact, it suddenly occurred to Stephen that he hadn’t taken a single photograph of anything for the last three years. When he’d been with Alison, they’d seemed to take pictures of the most innocuous things—of Sophie asleep on the sofa, or Alison reading; he still had the photographs. These days, he wasn’t even sure where he kept the camera.

  He tried not to read too much into this. Absently, he necked his glass of wine in one go, then peered closely at the photo of his ex-wife, looking beautiful and only slightly hard. She really was an amazing woman
. How the hell had he managed to foul that up?

  “Put the light out, Sophie. I mean it,” shouted Alison from the hallway. Stephen hurriedly put the photo back, and grabbed a magazine as an alibi as Alison entered the room, smiling, about to speak…

  “World of Interiors! I can’t believe you subscribe to this aspirational, bourgeois rubbish.” Stephen could hear his own voice in his head; how unappealing and hectoring it sounded, that absurd, pompous use of the word “bourgeois.” But the stupid wedding photo, and the awful fact of Alison’s presence in it, and how lovely she looked, had all combined to make him sulky and petulant and, yes, envious. “What is this appeal in drooling over pictures of other people’s houses?”

  “God, you know, you’re so right, Steve, and I wouldn’t look at it usually, it’s just there’s a big article in there about bedsits this month, so…”

  They both glanced at each other, then looked away. Alison pushed her hair back off her face, sighed and frowned, and on the Scandinavian hi-fi speakers, someone way too young started to croon their way through “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”

  “Actually, technically it’s not a bedsit, it’s a studio.”

  “Sorry—studio.” She sighed, looked up at the ceiling, scratched her head. “It’s nice, isn’t it? Just being able to meet up and chat away like this?”

  “Start again then?”

  “Yeah. Okay. Let’s start again.” She poured herself a glass of wine, returned the wedding photo to its usual place, and patted Stephen affectionately on the knee, managing, once again, to give the impression that she knew absolutely everything. Then she sank into the sofa next to him. “I was about to say Sophie said she had a nice time today.”

  “You sound surprised.”

  “I’m not surprised. She always has a nice time with you, she loves seeing you, you know that. Just sometimes she has more fun than others, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, it was fun.”

  “She said you might have a girlfriend too,” she said, nudging him, that familiar little jeer in her voice.

  “Don’t start.”

  “What?!”

  “Talking to me like I’m a twelve-year-old. It sounds like you’re going to tell me how babies are made.”

  “Well, I’m curious—go on, spill the beans…”

  “Maybe,” said Stephen, aware of the almost criminal inaccuracy of the impression he was giving. “There’s sort of someone, but there are…complications.”

  “Not another hermaphrodite?”

  “As good as. She’s married.”

  “Really? You dark horse! Who’s she married to?”

  The Twelfth Sexiest Man in the World, he thought, but things were still a little too raw for his ex-wife to play the role of best friend and confidante, so instead he said, “Oh—no one you know.”

  “Well, you don’t want to let a little thing like a marriage get in your way.”

  It was too obvious an opportunity to miss. “After all, you didn’t, did you?”

  They looked at each other for some time.

  “Walked right into that one, didn’t I?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She nudged his foot with her own, bumped her shoulder matily against his.

  “Change the subject?”

  “All right. Let’s change the subject.”

  Alison put her hand on his knee, and used it as leverage to slide off the leather sofa. “Stay there, I’ll go and get some more wine.”

  Within half an hour, they were fairly drunk. For the first time since the divorce, something of the old ease and affection had returned, and they both recognized this, and sought to sustain it by drinking more.

  “Any news about Johnny Johnson?”

  “Who’s Johnny Johnson?”

  “You know, your title role, your transatlantic romantic comedy?”

  “Oh, the movie? No, no news.”

  “But you’re still heavy-penciled?”

  “I’m still heavy-penciled.”

  “And the theater?”

  “D’you have to say it like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “ ‘The theater.’ ”

  “Sorry. How is it, though, you old gypsy, you?” She reached across to ruffle his hair, and he caught her hand and held it.

  “ ’S all right. Hey, if I were ever to get a chance to go on, you’d come and see me, wouldn’t you?”

  “ ’Course I would.”

  “Even if it was at short notice, even if you had to drop everything at the last minute?”

  “ ’Course I’d come. But it’s not very likely, is it?”

  Yes, it is, it’s definite, he wanted to say—December the eighteenth. “Still, got to hold on to your dreams, haven’t you?”

  “Dreams.” She nudged him with her foot. “ ’Ark at you, Judy Garland.”

  “Ambitions, then.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s fine having dreams, as long as they’re not unrealistic.”

  “Yeah, but then what’s the point of realistic dreams?”

  “Wise words, Steve,” she murmured. “Not sure what they mean, but still, wise words. Hey, you haven’t got a fag, have you?”

  “I thought you’d stopped.”

  “I have.”

  “Well, is it really a good idea…?”

  “Come on, give us one, before Gruppenführer Colin comes back.”

  Stephen reached into his pocket, and laughed as she snatched the packet out of his hand. There was a certain guilty, furtive, vaguely sexual pleasure in the ritual of lighting his ex-wife’s cigarette for her, watching as she drew the smoke into her mouth with her eyes closed tight, then gave a low, dirty laugh of delight as she fell back onto the sofa, let the smoke curl slowly out of her mouth and up into the air. Smoking was a filthy, disgusting habit, of course, in no way cool or glamorous or sexy, as all those movies seemed to suggest. If, and when, he caught his daughter smoking, he had a long, harsh pre-prepared speech ready about bad breath and addiction and cancer, but, still, there was no denying that it was appealing in a way that, say, eating a stick of celery never would be. There’s a beautiful piece of acting in In the Mood for Love where Maggie Cheung’s character conjures up the memory of her lost lover by lighting one of his cigarettes, and while Stephen found it hard to feel that strongly about a pack of twenty Marlboro, he was undoubtedly susceptible to the imagery. In movies there are no overflowing ashtrays, no yellow-tipped fingers or woolen tongues. And Alison was definitely one of life’s great smokers, like Lauren Bacall, say, or Rita Hayworth or Anne Bancroft. The only other woman who had this talent for making every cigarette seem postcoital was Nora Harper.

  The two of them started to get a little muddled in his mind. He realized that he liked, or loved, the same things in both of them: the wryness and irreverence, the occasional ferocity, the casual elegance, the fact that they were both smarter and harder and sharper than he was. He loved spending time with them, despite the inevitable frustration involved, and he loved hearing them laugh, loved the sense that their laughter was hard-earned. He found both of them almost unbearably desirable. He also realized that, quite coincidentally, they were both entirely unavailable.

  Alison reached for her wineglass, lay back on the sofa, her feet nestling disconcertingly near Stephen’s groin, and he noticed that she was wearing something very un-Alison, something that he thought might be defined as pop-socks. Was she flirting? She was definitely flirting. Stephen began to feel almost a little Byronic.

  “D’you remember that last job I had?” she said. “In that stupid bloody film.”

  “Sexy Air Hostess.”

  “Not even Sexy Air Hostess One; Sexy Air Hostess Number Four. One line of dialogue—‘Complimentary nuts, sir?’—and three days spent freezing my arse off in that stupid costume, blouse undone to there, and my tits hanging out, in a warehouse in Borehamwood, saying it over and over again—‘Complimentary nuts, sir, complimentary nuts, sir’—while some drooling cameraman stuck his lens up my little skirt
. And we’d just found out I was pregnant with Sophie, and I thought, Right, that’s it, bollocks to this, I’ve had enough. I mean I used to love it, when I was younger, when you and me first got together. But I thought it would be…different, you know? I thought it would be worthwhile in some way, and would make people’s lives better, and I’d meet all these brilliant, creative people, be part of a community, and play fantastic parts, and do great, hard-hitting, political TV plays that millions of people would watch and talk about, and be entertained, and inspired, and moved by. And changed by. And then all of a sudden, you’re doing it, actually getting paid for it, that thing you’ve always dreamed of, and it’s nothing like that, nothing at all. No fun, no satisfaction, no control. It’s like this completely different job—saying ‘Complimentary nuts, sir?’ all day, with my boobs hanging out. I felt like I’d been conned—years of hassle and waste and envy and anxiety, for this? Just to play bimbo air hostesses and murdered prostitutes and strippers. And that’s why giving up was so easy. ’Cause most of the time, the job was about being made to look like a fucking idiot,” and she took a long swig of her wine, before adding accusingly, “by men, mainly.”

  “You were a very sexy air hostess, though,” said Stephen, now feeling fuzzy-headed and flirty.

  “Aw, gee…” she murmured, and exhaled a long plume of smoke. “A dream fulfilled.”

  “No, it’s true.”

  “Yeah, well, Colin obviously appreciates it,” she sniggered through her nose, hiding her face in her glass.

  “What d’you mean?”

  She gave him a sideways look, and a grin. “Well…we’ve got a copy on video, yeah? And when I’m out, he has a sneaky watch.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “It’s true. I can tell, ’cause he keeps putting it back in a different place, the silly sod. Unless he’s got a thing about Sexy Air Hostess One, of course.”