by Georgie Hall
Thankfully this conversation’s shut down because we need to set off to allow time to pick up Dad’s hearing loop headset which he stresses about if he’s not got at least half an hour before the performance. Jackets are fetched, children kissed and pep-talked, the Jack Russell removed from humping Paddy’s leg. Taking a quick swig of my water, I realise that it is refreshingly cooling so I drink it all and get head freeze, but at least my body returns to a normal core temperature. It doesn’t occur to me to pop to the loo before we leave.
*
Traffic crawls into Stratford agonisingly slowly, our eyes blinded by the evening sun. I’m pouring sweat because Mum insists I keep my window closed to safeguard her hair. Forced to crank my seat forwards so much to make room for Julia’s legs that the steering wheel is hard against my ribcage, my right tit keeps setting off the windscreen wipers. She’s having an animated call with a client whose husband has just turned up demanding the Sage espresso maker and the family labradoodle (did I mention she handles divorces? Potentially handy). Sandwiched between her and Dad, who is fretting we’ll miss curtain up, Miles catches my eye in the rear-view mirror and pulls the face he’s been mastering since he was six – all tongue lolling, foaming-mouthed, cross-eyed horror mask – and which in humourless middle age I now have to remind myself sharply is not a heart attack/asthma fit/anaphylactic shock. The brothers-in-law are in the back row, London-based Reece talking loudly over long-time local Paddy to recommend where I should try to park the car.
I drop everyone directly outside the theatre, taking my ticket and waving them away with a stoic smile: ‘I’ll see you in there.’
Yessss! Engage automatic door locks, open all windows, kick start the Annie Lennox CD and we’re cruising past the riverside day trippers and theatregoers spilling out of the Dirty Duck, me and the battered Picasso. All too briefly, we are alone and could go anywhere.
Annie is singing ‘No More I Love You’s’, which makes me want to run away even more. We could burst through the Bladerunner hoardings into wilderness, fly over the Thelma and Louise canyon, warp-speed Back to the Future. I could drive home and have the place to myself. I could drive to a whole new life, although realistically the car would probably break down before I got beyond the M42, and I’d miss the kids.
Besides which, Kismet has other ideas. A Range Rover pulls out of a parking space immediately ahead of me. You could fit a bus in there. Even my rusty parallel parking skills can nail this one.
My first attempt almost kills a Japanese tourist. I apologise profusely out of the window and he backs away with his hands up. ‘Solly! Me no good English.’ We both apologise to each other for a bit then give up because I’m causing a traffic jam.
I start to reverse again and he stands and watches, which is unnerving. At least he’s not filming me on his phone.
Five minutes later, after hotly revving in and out at increasingly unlikely angles, the Picasso and I are snugly alongside the wall. The drinkers outside the pub applaud, as does my Japanese audience of one. I get out to take a bow, then get back in again to flip down the sun visor mirror. Make-up still miraculously intact, I sit quietly listening to Annie while I regroup embarrassment and anger into something less sweaty. She’s speaking to me tonight.
A polite shadow bobs by the open window. My tourist friend hands me a parking ticket he’s bought from the machine. I glance up in surprise and he gives a shy smile and makes a drink gesture. At least, I think it’s a drink gesture.
Blimey. Still got it, Eliza. Must be the eighties hair.
‘Gosh. Thank you. That’s terribly kind. What a lovely gift. I’m afraid I’m about to go and see the play on the main stage.’
‘Me no good English,’ he reminds me. Did he just wink?
Apologising that I have family to join, I glance at the car clock. Fuck! It’s three minutes to curtain up. Me no pause.
4
Play Time
My family are all in their seats. My bag gets searched, the flashlight lingering on three dirty tissues and a Galaxy wrapper.
The lights are about to go down as I – ‘sorry… thank you… sorry’ along our row. Excellent seats. Dad always buys the best. I’m right next to him in C34, just two grey heads between me and the stage.
Paddy shoots me a black look from C29, trapped between Reece and my mother. Julia – on Dad’s other side – is scouring the programme for anybody she’s seen in a BBC crime drama.
There’s a swing dangling from the fly tower, a ravishing actor upon it, languidly sad.
‘It should be you up there, Elz,’ Dad says automatically as the musicians strike up. He says it every time, and I know he’s trying to be kind, but I wish he wouldn’t. Especially when it’s a male character. I always played the male parts at university because there weren’t enough real men and I was tall. At drama school there was a shortage of mad old ladies which became my niche. Now I’m slowly turning into one, nobody wants to cast me.
The lights lower, his hand folds over mine and I feel a warm, tingling sensation.
I need the loo. I really need the loo.
*
I always wanted to be an actor. The stage is in my soul. Mum and Dad are passionate theatregoers and took us along with them as often as possible growing up: Shaftesbury Avenue, the South Bank, the Barbican, Old Vic and Donmar, out here to Stratford, up to Edinburgh, down to Chichester. What an education! I’d look at these amazing figures strutting and fretting their hour and know I had to be amongst them. My parents never stopped banging on about qualifications, so I sat all my exams like a good Finch and studied drama at university where I blagged cheap tickets to anything I could see. Who else can boast they watched all seven consecutive performances of Daniel Day-Lewis playing Hamlet? It’s still my top trump at dinner parties. I sometimes pretend to have seen the ghost of his father too, just to see the jaws around me drop.
Fast forward thirty years and I’m no longer such a good audience member. I suffer from acute, inconvenient jealousy the moment the action starts. I’m a competitive Finch, remember. We find failure very hard to swallow.
And after almost thirty years, I’m finally learning to accept that I am never going to be a successful theatre actor. From the day I left drama school I was proclaimed too loud, too masculine, too tall. Directors always cast their gazes and their Rosalinds elsewhere. I used to cite Janet McTeer and Fiona Shaw as reasons to keep going, but let’s face it, they’re Janet McTeer and Fiona Shaw. Eliza Finch might be a decade younger, but it’s way too late to catch up professionally. At some point I might be brave enough to admit I was simply never good enough, but it’s the ‘what ifs’ that keep you going in this profession and I won’t give up hope of making this family sitting beside me proud.
*
Orlando is delivering his opening speech, complaining that his brother’s being a meanie after the death of their father.
My jealousy is having a brief stage raid. I want to be in this production, not sitting down here between a woman sucking a mint and my dad who’s hand in mine is warm and reassuring – and making me sweaty. I haven’t taken off my jacket and my handbag’s still on my lap. Shit! My phone is on.
I manage to fumble one-handed into my bag to put it on airplane mode, but not before half the contents fall out. Groping around underfoot for lost lipsticks, pens and purse, I feel up Mint Lady’s ankle by mistake. I’m getting hotter and hotter.
Orlando’s whinging at his meanie brother now, and there’s a bit of stage-fighting going on. I’ve never liked all the macho stuff at the beginning of As You Like It, and personally think Rosalind a bit shallow getting the hots for Orlando when he’s taking part in a wrestling match.
Mint Woman hands me back one of the crumpled tissues which has found its way onto her lap.
Please God let my bladder hold, I pray. There’s at least an hour and a half of this to sit through until I can have a wee.
*
I’ll admit to always being a tad weak-bladdered. Growing
up, I used to nip out and widdle behind the coal bunker in our garden if both the Finch family’s loos were occupied because I couldn’t wait, not even for five minutes.
Then pregnancy and childbirth screwed my bladder up some more. It’s perhaps true that I short-changed myself on the pelvic floor exercise front, and my high-risk coffee addiction means I live life on the edge, although it’s always amazed me how long I can hold a wee in if I really try.
Until the first time I really tried and didn’t quite hold it.
Now I’m not talking a full-on floodgates tsunami. No, it’s the little leaks: those occasions you don’t quite get the tights down in time, the jeans fly is stuck or some bugger’s closed the loo seat without you noticing before you sit down.
And it’s the dawning realisation that this small but embarrassing affliction is here for keeps, along with a host of other signs of ageing that conspire to make fools of older women: the sweats and mind fog that oestrogen leaves behind when it scarpers, along with the fattening tummy rolls and thinning hair, and the squinting scowl of laughter lines trying to see the funny side.
Which brings me to the little laughter wee. Lately, mine’s gone rogue and the joke’s on me.
I’m watching a comedy and I can’t laugh.
*
It’s the twenty-minute interval. I have spent seventeen minutes of it queuing for the Ladies and the three-minute bell is already ringing to get us back in our seats.
Right now, I have the best seat in the house, locked in my cubicle, celebrating that I made it without mishap. The RSC upholstery is safe. This woman can clench.
I’m still steamingly hot, yet I savour this moment a drip at a time. I have queued a long time for this.
Back outside, my fragrant air-bladed hands have a bottle of water pressed into them.
‘You’ll need this,’ Julia insists.
‘Wow, thanks.’ Sadist.
I look around for Paddy, but he’s already gone back in. As I follow the grey heads shuffling into the auditorium, the torch is flashed in my bag again. I spot a small jewelled ballet pump and realise, to my horror, that I’ve picked up somebody’s shoe.
*
I just have time to tuck the cool water bottle into my top, gripped between my sweating breasts, before Dad takes my hand again. He falls asleep three minutes in. Dad’s never one to let a bottle of interval Montepulciano go to waste, but it’s taken its toll.
Mint Woman now smells of coffee. Good call, as long as her bladder’s up to it. Did she hop to the foyer, I wonder? As soon as the action onstage is suitably distracting, I ease the ballet pump out of my bag and drop it as discreetly as possible underfoot.
The water bottle is fantastically cooling. Thank you, Jules.
On stage, Orlando and his new mate Ganymede (Rosalind butching it up) are engaging in some pretty intense gender-fluid flirtation. The actor playing Rosalind is very good. Intelligent, empathetic, adorable. I totally believe her feelings, the spontaneity of her thoughts, and in her love.
As You Like It is all about love, and Rosalind and Orlando are head over heels in the stuff. It’s intoxicating. How we all drank in that feeling the first time we felt it, that addiction, that madness. Not the mutually dependent banality it later becomes. The pure initial fix is something magical, so potent it knocks you off your feet, spins you round, turns you upside down. I once defied gravity with Paddy, who caught me almost before I knew I was falling.
It strikes me that I almost certainly won’t get to experience Cupid’s arrow through this heart another time. That G-force fall.
Watching Rosalind faint when she hears of Orlando’s fight with the lion, I feel a couple of tears slide down my face. That sort of love. Theatre often moves me to tears, and more so than ever recently. The same’s true of films, books, Long Lost Family and anything starring Olivia Coleman, even the old Kev and Bev ads. Maybe I’m just leakier all round these days.
Before I know it they’re all dancing and rejoicing in the Forest of Arden, and I don’t want the play to end. Beside me, Dad lets out a snorty snore that wakes him up, mutters ‘Howzat!’ then gapes wide-eyed at the stage, on which the god of marriage Hymen is represented by a giant baby-faced papier-mâché puppet. It really is giant. I’m not sure it quite works for me, to be honest, but it’s an impressive piece of engineering. I sneak a look along the row at Paddy who’s rapt. When Paddy’s full attention is on something, he looks just like our sons, that wide-eyed Hollander wonder carried through from small boys to men.
Unable to stop myself, I think back to our argument. At its height I said something awful about his parents. I remember how angry he was, we both were, and I can’t unsay it. A marriage is full of things you can’t unsay or undo. They dilute that first intoxicating love a drop at a time, taking us from cloud nine through thin ice to deep water.
When the actors take their curtain call, my crumpled tissue is soggy and threadbare, and I’m too red-eyed and snotty and full of shame to look at Paddy. I clap and clap and clap instead. The lights go up and we stand up. I wait to shuffle out behind Mint Lady, grateful to notice the Cinderella of Row C is now wearing two shoes.
My sister catches me up in the slow mass exodus to the foyer. ‘You’ve been blubbing. Don’t tell me, emotions all over the place? A low-dairy wheat-free diet can help.’
‘I’m sure Antonio can rustle something up on the soya and flax front,’ I mutter, knowing I’ll soon be pigging out on antipasti, arancini, wild boar ragu and tiramisu come what may.
‘Oh, old Antonio’s retired, I thought you knew,’ she says, with the satisfaction of insider to outsider.
I’m in shock. Antonio is Russo’s.
‘He’s moved back to the family home in Puglia and a nephew of his is running the restaurant now. Dad adores him.’
I feel a flash of possessive anger, of resistance to change. Nobody can replace Antonio. It’s the end of an era. This young usurper will surely fail.
‘I hear you might be getting another dog.’ Jules switches subject as we wait for the others.
My all-over-the-place emotions dial back to anger. ‘Paddy told you we’re getting a new dog?’
‘During the interval.’
‘Well, we’re bloody well not,’ I snap, no longer feeling so teary and shame-filled.
Jules looks startled. I think I might have just accidentally spat on her a little bit.
*
While we’re waiting by Door 3, I’ll quickly divulge the bit of the dog fight I’m most ashamed of. It’s colouring everything tonight.
It came right at the start, when Paddy was showing me adorable puppy pictures and telling me how much better cuddling one would make me feel. And all I could think about was how I’d watched Arty’s last breath, a breath I had wished upon her by telling the vet to inject her, one final breath that stole away her companionship and love forever. And I miss her, I miss her, I miss her.
Paddy just didn’t get it. I needed him to get it, this pain, to understand it was grief.
So I shrilly explained that I wasn’t ready to replace Arty any more than he could just rush out and replace his parents.
Paddy looked like I’d just hit him.
I know. It was a stupid, stupid thing to say.
He shouted that it’s not the same, not even close, and that I had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.
And he’s totally right. But I was upset and hurting and so, so angry I just couldn’t back down.
Paddy might not have heard my apology later that night, the rage and hurt still tight in my throat, but he is the one who is willing to draw a line, to say no more about any of this for now, to put it behind us.
But I don’t think he can quite bring himself to forgive me, and I can’t forget about it.
*
Out in the foyer Reece manfully takes charge of returning the hearing loop headset while Dad gets loud and flappy, rounding us all up to walk to Russo’s. He’s hungry and a bit groggy from sleeping off the interval wi
ne. Mum and Miles have already started on the scene-by-scene critique as we’re herded outside. Night’s arrived, soft and warm as a shot-silk wrap.
‘What did you think?’ Paddy falls into step beside me. The unforgotten argument walks silently between us.
‘That you’re justice, with eyes severe and beard of formal cut.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
I explain it’s from the Seven Ages of Man speech we heard Jacques say earlier tonight, although technically I didn’t hear a lot of it because the only thing going on in my head at that particular point was don’t wee yourself, don’t wee yourself. ‘You know, “All the world’s a stage”? By the fifth act of a man’s life, he’s “justice”: a judge.’ Please stop judging me, I want to add, but Reece is running backwards ahead of us all, holding up his phone camera and shouting ‘smile!’ so that he can crop, filter and label the moment to put on Facebook, and the real moment passes.
‘Peter’s the judge,’ Paddy mutters. Before he retired, Dad was a circuit judge, very Gilbert and Sullivan in the wig and gown.
‘Dad’s in his eighth act,’ I point out, putting my arm through Paddy’s and elbowing the argument out of the way again. ‘You’re the one with the wise saws and modern instances.’
‘Well, I am a carpenter.’ He smiles across at me and straightens his tie. His gaze has more watts than usual tonight. Seduction is definitely on the cards. Do all men see sex as marriage’s hard restart, something that needs to be done when the usual buttons stop working?
*
When Paddy wants sex, he puts on a suit, like it’s a job interview.
He thinks I get off on all that James Bond stuff because years ago, when we were quite new together and went to a lot of weddings, the novelty of him in a three-piece did absolutely do it for me. As did the sight of him out of it, in his overalls, in jeans, in anything.