Chapter Four
Three hundred and fifty miles away, Toni rushed up the steps of the Dublin theatre foyer to catch up with Flossie Ryan, her oldest friend from the world of acting.
‘I’m late because the traffic was a nightmare,’ said Toni, embracing Flossie, who was wearing her lucky preview coat, an indigo velvet piece.
‘I whizzed in because I got a taxi,’ said Flossie, beaming at her and wriggling out of the coat, which was too hot in the warmth of the foyer. ‘Drinkies afterwards!’
Flossie draped her coat around her shoulders and Toni helped her adjust it.
‘It’s getting so worn,’ said Flossie, adjusting a threadbare sleeve where the nap of the velvet had worn away to reveal just bare blue fabric.
‘But you have to wear it,’ finished Toni, grinning. Flossie had worn the coat many years ago for the preview of the wildly successful Oscar Wilde season both their husbands had been in and now, in the superstitious world of actors, the coat was a necessity. Flossie had to wear it, her husband, Bernard, insisted or the play would be a disaster.
Toni was just glad that she hadn’t been around all those years ago and thus confined to wearing something she’d long outgrown fashion wise. She was wearing an elegant camel coat over a sleek cream woollen dress which showed off her slender legs in knee-high tan leather boots. Simple and chic: that was Toni’s style. Once she put clothes on, she forgot about them.
Tonight was the first preview ofKing Learand the show proper wasn’t starting its run until the following Thursday. Therefore, tonight, dinner and many bottles of wine were inevitable and the cast would post-mortem the whole production.
Flossie, like Toni, was married to an actor, although in the hierarchy, Flossie’s husband Bernard was several fathoms below Oliver Elliott. Bernard was a character actor, with a face described as ‘interesting’ and not a hint of the leading man about him. Whereas Toni’s husband Oliver, with his flowing dark hair with the hint of grey at the temples, clever grey eyes and Roman orator’s profile, was very much leading man material. He was, naturally, playing Lear.
‘Haven’t they done a completely gorgeous job of the repainting,’ said Flossie, leading the way into the theatre, a delicious cachepot of a theatre that resembled a French cake: pastel curlicues and baby blue pillars all lovingly recently redecorated with painted-on ivy and improbably large flowers.
‘Yes,’ agreed Toni, not appreciating it all.
She always felt a huge wave of trepidation at play previews. Actors were such sensitive souls and a preview was a time when their hard work was laid bare for everyone to see. They were laying themselves wide open for everyone else to skewer them. Having been married to one for years and having spent many hours among actors, Toni would not be one for any amount of money. Oliver was such a strong character: determined, brilliant and wise. Yet even he could be felled by a harsh review, though it had been years since he’d had one. The worst he received nowadays were the critics saying he was wasted in the role.
‘Oliver Elliot shone in an otherwise lacklustre production,’ was a common theme.
‘Bernard says it’s a fabulous production. Majestic, he said,’ Flossie went on, holding onto Toni’s arm. Flossie was one of life’s affectionate people. She liked to pet her friends and acquaintances, stroking their hair and their arms.
‘He says Oliver’s magnificent,’ Flossie continued.
Toni smiled with quiet pride. Oliver was always magnificent. He had been ever since Toni had met him when she was twenty-six. He’d been forty-four. She’d seen him at a Yeats’ poetry recital and at the after-event party he’d made his way over to her with laser-like intensity.
She was fresh from work but had changed briefly into a draped shift, swimming-toned arms and long hair, making her look like an Amazon just back from a bit of archery.
‘When I spotted you, I felt that I had to meet you. I deserved a treat,’ Oliver had said, looking her up and down with hunger in his gaze.
Toni was tall but he was taller. Six foot four with charisma oozing out of every pore.
‘I’m positively ancient compared to you,’ he added in that famous gravelly voice, his eyes implying that he thought no such thing.
‘I like older men,’ Toni said boldly. ‘In fact, I don’t know if you’re old enough for me.’
Wrong-footing people was something she was working on at the time – her mother was an expert at it – but Oliver had simply raised one eyebrow, smouldering. He’d recently starred in a French film with a César-winning actress and they’d scorched the screen. Despite an abundance of self-confidence and a determination to have a successful career before she even thought about any man in a serious way, Toni had fallen for him.
Seventeen years later, she still adored her husband, but she wasn’t blind to his faults. When he was rehearsing, Oliver became the character he was playing and, in preparation for this Lear, he’d been rampaging around the house declaiming. It was easier when he was playing the television detective for the BBC Northern Ireland show because the detective was a thoughtful man who did not feel the need to rampage at dinner. In his detective persona, Oliver wore his hair long and bought her flowers and perfume, but as Lear, he shaved in such a way as to leave manly stubble as per the artistic director’s instructions and scowled at dinner. He’d been less scowly lately, though and more ... distant, yes, that was the word, Toni thought. He spent a lot of time in their shared work office, staring at his old laptop.
‘Research,’ he’d mutter whenever Toni asked what he was up to.
She’d left him to it, but she’d felt she was being excluded in some way, which was irrational, she thought, given the way they’d always lived their lives. Their marriage worked because they had different professional lives and each respected the other’s work ethic. They were separate beings but had a shared life. Toni had no time for couples who did everything together.
‘Oliver and I complement each other but we’re not tied together,’ she liked to say.
Yet recently she’d felt that perhaps the healthy distance between them was stretching.
She’d only felt that once before when Oliver had been on a two-month film shoot in Brazil. She’d worried – irrationally, it turned out – about the hours spent with his younger co-star, Alba, a Spanish actress with the broodingly sensual dark eyes of a Goya model.
‘I would never look at another woman, you should know that,’ Oliver had said when he was home again, when too much wine made Toni admit what she had barely admitted to herself. ‘Why would you worry about Alba?’
