The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk

by Sean Wallace

  She was never lonelier than during these minutes, when Peter was lost in the play, and Roger was just lost.

  “Roger, then you step back – Roger?”

  Roger’s arm slid through her fingers; he vanished out of the spot, and he was behind the shield of the rotting curtain, and Emily was standing alone, looking after him.

  “Lovely,” Peter said, “just the thing. Now, older son, I forgot your name, cross to your mother and take her by the shoulder; you want to see what the matter is.”

  During Emily’s first week at university, Peter and Phil had put on a vaudeville act.

  The writing was so awful that no one noticed the act amid the booing, but she was captivated despite the rough; they were like rubber men, painted eyes gleaming above infectious grins.

  She could tell that Phil had more sense and Peter had more spark. (It would amaze her later how easy it was to see how people really were, and how you tried so hard not to see, but back then she had been clever.)

  The next day she caught up with Phil on the green outside St Catharine’s.

  “You’re one of those lads looking for a writer.”

  He’d frowned. “We’re not.”

  “You should be.”

  Phil glared at her from his impossible height (she wasn’t short, but Lord, he loomed). She met his eye until he laughed. “We might, yeah. Come meet Peter.”

  Peter shook her hand with the same false welcome he gave everyone, and had nodded along with her ideas, smiling and winking and telling her they were going to have a hell of a time.

  “And with your lovely face we’ll do a bit better for ourselves,” he said, half to Phil, grinning.

  “It’s not a face you need,” she’d said, “it’s a script that doesn’t put the audience to sleep.”

  Phil laughed and shook hands, and after a moment Peter gave her a sixpence grin and shook, too.

  A week later they were banging out something for the New Year.

  In October she found out that Peter hadn’t wanted to share credit, and it had taken Phil two weeks to force him to agree.

  She confronted Peter. He’d frowned like he wasn’t sure how to frame a real answer, and said finally, “No one likes someone to say they’re better at his craft than he is. Takes the wind out of you.”

  “What, you’d have kept that awful act for years? You’re so afraid of hearing no?”

  He’d looked at her and said, “No, you’re right,” as if it was the first time in his life he’d realized it was possible for a girl to be right.

  The flirting stopped. He started taking her advice.

  And he ended up having plenty of practice sharing credit; Phil was always taking in strays.

  Rose had been refused a part in Twelfth Night amid rumors her Olivia would have been a bit too fond of Viola. Just as well; they were getting desperate for a romantic lead. (Even Phil could play a more alluring ingénue than Emily could.)

  “It’s a pleasure,” Peter said, shook Rose’s hand with a wink, and as soon as Rose was gone Peter grinned and said, “I’m in there.”

  Emily had cut off Phil’s protest, and she and Phil and Rose enjoyed three months of Peter tripping over himself running after her, until Rose brought her bosom friend Agnes to rehearsal.

  “You’re all a bunch of bastards,” Peter said when he saw them holding hands, and they’d laughed until they cried, even, eventually, Peter.

  That first year, the Understudies staged plays with as few characters as possible, Emily and Phil rending costumes backstage to play housemaid and dowager, best friend and priest, while Peter and Rose pitched passionate woo.

  The second year, Carol and Fitzpatrick joined.

  Peter’s choice, those two; he would pick two charming lookers without asking for so much as a line reading.

  As it turned out, Carol and Fitz had no talent, but they had chemistry. Their Romeo and Juliet could draw tears before intermission. They couldn’t handle much else, but they pushed through play after play on nothing but frenzied stage kisses and longing looks, and the Understudies began to draw a crowd.

  Mid-season, Carol and Fitz slept together.

  They announced their engagement, and Rose and Phil and Emily had wished them joy, but Peter was quiet.

  “It’s over,” he said afterwards, in Emily’s room. He sat back on the bed and frowned at his knees. “Now they’ve slept together, it’s gone.”

  “We’ve slept together,” Emily pointed out.

  “We didn’t have any chemistry to start with,” he said. “We’ve always been the old woman and the man wooing her daughter.”

  After a moment, Emily said, “Well, they have nothing but chemistry. They’ll hang on to it. They have to.”

  Peter shook his head.

  Their first performance after the holidays was Twelfth Night; a scout came from London to see it.

  Fitz and Carol’s chemistry was gone. It was a massacre.

  Rose, wide-eyed, gripped Emily’s wrists and hissed, “Do something!”

  The scout left without speaking to one of them.

  Carol and Fitz left at the end of the season. Noises were made, but roles for youthful mannequins with no chemistry were thin on the ground, and no one regretted their going.

  (They were all, Emily found out later, thinking of going themselves.)

  That spring, Phil found Roger.

  Roger wasn’t even trained; he was just in Phil’s student house, and Phil only found out he could act when Roger ran lines with him as a favor.

  “You won’t believe it,” Phil had told Emily.

  Roger’s pants were threadbare at the knees, his collar askew, his face too angular, but as soon as the first words were out, it was all over.

  His monologue was from The Condemned Woman. When Peter said, “Well, you’ll do,” she knew Peter hated him. (That had been Peter’s pet role; Peter couldn’t touch it now.)

  “Good to meet you,” said Emily, “we need someone dour,” and Roger had made a noncommittal face, then smiled at her when no one else could see.

  When the curtain first went up on The Condemned Woman, Emily was wearing a deep blue cloak spangled with little tin stars, and from the wings Roger crossed to her and held her hard enough that the points cut her.

  The audience went stone silent until they broke apart.

  The next night, an audience of twice as many went twice as quiet.

  Every night of the run, playing to a fuller and a fuller house, Emily and Roger stood tangled in the cloak of tin stars, listening to an audience enthralled.

  The last night, as Roger embraced her, there was such desperation in it that someone in the audience gasped.

  The scout came back; spoke to them all.

  They packed their bags for London.

  At first, Peter courted whatever press bureau was willing to send a man to photograph a bunch of upstarts. Soon, clusters of them waited outside their hotels. They all took to dressing sharp, just in case.

  They started getting offers from the Continent.

  Rose developed a voracious appetite for jewelry. Peter developed a voracious appetite for anything. Roger took every spare hour to sneak out and watch other plays.

  “Sizing up the competition,” Phil said. “Very clever.”

  “No,” said Roger, quietly, and Phil said, “Don’t be embarrassed, it’s good business,” and ordered another round.

  Roger looked at Emily and said, “I just . . . love it all,” and she felt for a moment like the others and the pub and the cameramen outside had fallen away, and he had seen right through her.

  “I know,” she said, quietly.

  Roger was searching her face, and his eyes were gray, and his lips thinned out when he really smiled.

  Then Peter was bringing her a beer, and the world came rushing back, and a flashbulb went off in the window.

  * * *

  Phil and Peter got them better and better contracts, but Emily put her foot down in Prague.

  “The non-
compete clause is so shoddy they’ll never be able to hold us,” Phil said.

  “One great gig in every city isn’t much unless they want us back,” she’d said. “Bad form. Better to take less money and have a place to come home to.”

  Peter had said, “She’s right.”

  (It was the first time he’d stood up for anyone but himself.)

  “You owe me an auto for the money I’m giving up,” said Phil, tearing up the papers with a sigh.

  In Prague, Peter found real English tea, and brewed it all night for Emily when she was memorizing lines.

  In Prague she began to love him.

  For months they clacked around in trains, threading through vineyards and snowy forests. They stalked around stages four times as large as their hotel suites, avoiding scrim-riggers and carpenters as they tried to work out the kink in this scene or that one.

  By then, some things were understood.

  When Emily and Roger were in a scene together, carpenters tended to stop what they were doing. Peter sometimes made them practice The Condemned Woman just to get some quiet if they couldn’t hear themselves over the hammering.

  (It was nice, Emily thought; Roger was so quiet otherwise, it was nice to share something.)

  If they went on too long, Phil would clear his throat.

  “Just making sure he’s paying attention,” she’d say at once, and Roger would look around and say, “Wait, isn’t this Vienna?” and the carpenters always laughed.

  At night they all cinched themselves into gowns and tuxedos and went to supper clubs, a crowd of glittering talent blinking into the flashbulbs, signing cartes de visites for awestruck girls.

  Emily hated the gowns. She started wearing trousers on the trains and in rehearsal.

  It was a small scandal, but by the time they made it back to Paris, the wife of the theatre owner was wearing a pair of tweed trousers when she came to greet them.

  “Now see what you’ve done,” Roger told her, when they were out of hearing, and she made a caught-out face at him and grinned.

  “If you keep on this way you’ll be more photographed than Rose,” he called over that night, as they unpacked in their connecting suites.

  It didn’t seem likely – the cameras liked glitter – but she sighed.

  “Then I’ll wear shoes on my hands. That should help; that doesn’t look very sharp.”

  “I happen to look very distinguished when I do it,” said Roger.

  Peter came in.

  “You have to come downstairs,” he said. His eyes glittered, and he was coiled with nerves, and as soon as she took his hand she knew what was coming.

  He proposed on the bank of the Seine, on one knee, and she laughed for a full minute before his expression registered.

  “Emily, I mean it.”

  His eyes were bright; without trying to be charming he still was, the bastard.

  “The first time you look at another woman, it’s over,” she said.

  He grinned and kissed her, and then they went upstairs to tell the others.

  “You’re mad,” said Rose, and Phil said, “He’s a prat.”

  Roger said, “I wish you well.”

  It wasn’t the answer she’d expected, and she didn’t know why.

  But they forgave her, and after photographers snapped pictures of Emily’s plain gold band for a week they got bored and went back to Rose’s fabulous jewelry.

  It would be all right, Emily knew – they were all young and flush and happy, and she and Peter could make a go of it if they wanted, and night after night she could walk onto a stage.

  Peter stayed late after rehearsal at the Metropolitan.

  “To whip these secondaries into shape,” he said, and kissed Emily on the cheek.

  “Wonderful,” she said. She almost said, Roger and I will go to bed, then, but it didn’t do to sound jealous, and she wouldn’t dare pull Roger into this.

  “See you,” she said instead, and Peter gave her a genuine smile and didn’t say, “I’ll be home later.” The omission was as close as he could be to honesty.

  “You take it well,” Roger said when they were outside.

  She shrugged and slid her hands into her pockets. “I’ve had practice.”

  He shook his head and fell silent; beyond this point they never went. Instead, they got fish and chips from a kiosk and went home to read lines.

  At midnight, halfway through the double-entendre scene in Mira, Roger sat back and clicked his libris shut.

  “God, I’m too old for this. It’s about first love. We’ll be laughed off the stage.”

  “Who’s asking if you’ve been in love before or not?” She pulled a cigarette from the packet on the table, lit it from Roger’s lighter. “You think the robots are out there convincing people they fall in love? Give the audience something different.”

  He frowned at the libris like it was feeding him the wrong lines. “If I were a better actor, maybe.”

  “I don’t know why you play at this,” she said. “You’re really something.”

  “Something aged,” he muttered, went in the kitchen.

  For such a quick study, Roger was dense as a brick. She didn’t understand how he couldn’t see that whenever he took the stage he filled it, his voice moving over the audience like a living thing.

  For three weeks it went that way.

  Roger almost kissed her as the Pale Ghost. She boxed Roger’s ears for leaving his regiment behind in The Last March of Colonel Preson. They stood side by side and mocked the world in Mira, which felt like the rest of their lives, except that in Mira he kissed her at regular intervals.

  Peter came home later and later.

  One morning she saw he hadn’t come to bed at all, which gave her a pang. It was one thing for him to find a woman younger, less likely to have a go at him; it was another when he found a woman more worthy of his time.

  (He should be faithful some way. It was the least he could do.)

  Peter was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking tea and staring at the kitchen cupboards.

  “Just get home?”

  He gave a guilty start, nodded.

  “You need to come home at night,” she said, sitting opposite him. “It looks—” She stopped.

  He flinched into his tea. “Do you think I’m hurting you, Em?”

  “Just come home,” she said, which wasn’t a real answer, but he took it. The real answer wasn’t something to examine. No point, after all this time.

  He rubbed his forehead with his thumb. “I’ve always cared for you, Em, you know that.”

  “I do.” You couldn’t go thirty years on nothing.

  He leaned in. “And you?”

  She never remembered Peter onstage; he was charismatic, but it was all for the audience and not for the actors, and she forgot.

  What she remembered was Peter taking the piss with Phil or Rose, brainstorming their next break. And it worked, right up until the War.

  Even after, with the Dramatons, they’d put up a better fight than most. Peter was married to the troupe, even if he forgot he was married to Emily.

  “Let me get tea,” she said, standing up.

  In the early light he looked his age at last, the wrinkles that had gouged the rest of them finally showing up under his eyes, bracketing his mouth.

  He didn’t look at her, like her answer had upset him, but when she handed him the cup he drank, and when she sat down across from him he rested his hand on her hand, and that was how Roger found them.

  “Peter’s staying late,” she said when she met Roger outside the Metropolitan. “We should go out.”

  “But we’ve seen that one already.”

  She grinned. “Get your coat.”

  It wasn’t the same play. (“That’s what I get for whinging,” Roger said, “wind out of my sails.”) It was a preview, The Rendezvous. They had to queue to get in.

  At the door, one reporter stuck out a microphone. “Mrs Elliott – sorry, Miss Howard? The Understudies?�
�

  “Yes.”

  “Last of a dynasty! Sporting of you to be here!”

  Emily managed not to make a face, but when she shot a look at Roger the reporter followed the gaze and piped up, “And who are you with?”

  “I’m the carpenter,” Roger said.

  “Oh, the stage is gorgeous, congratulations!”

  “Thank you,” he said. “We worked very hard.”

  After that it wasn’t worth trying to sit through the play, since Emily couldn’t even keep a straight face in the lobby, so they cut out and went home.

  Her bedroom door was closed.

  “Pretend we’re alone,” she said.

  “If only,” he said, but closer than that they never got, and he banged around the kitchen making tea as she tuned the radio.

  They listened to the news, and the local society-page gossipeuse blew a lot of smoke about the beauty of the Dramatons in the new production, and how they were without doubt the best artistic invention since the violin.

  “Even human actors can’t deny the appeal of Dramatons,” said the broadcaster, “as Emily Howard of the Understudies made an appearance in the company of one of the set designers.”

  Emily laughed herself into a coughing fit.

  “. . . at her best, even as her smile masked heartache. Ex-husband Peter Elliott was announced as the new Artistic Director before the curtain rose, and received with thunderous applause. The premiere Saturday should be a smashing success, and well deserved. Best of luck to Elliott and company!”

  The broadcast continued in the silent room. There were five minutes of compliment-clips from the audience. Two minutes of pre-recorded audio from the play.

  Roger got up and switched off the set.

  “First you’ve heard,” he guessed, looking at her.

  She cleared her throat.

  That’s what Peter had been talking about in the kitchen. You couldn’t make new coats from old cloth. The moment he’d met the secondary cast he must have known.

  He’d been a clever boy. Selfish, clever boy.

  The Understudies were down to two.

  She washed her face, and ate a bit off a chocolate bar, and at last she sat down beside Roger with a bottle of Scotch and got to work a glass at a time.

  The couch seemed smaller.

  “A prince among men,” he said, like he’d been waiting to get it off his chest, and after he’d finished that little speech he took the glass from her hand and drank.