‘We’re here,’ announced Flossie now as they reached their row near the stage and sat down to discover that right behind them was an excited gaggle of beautifully made-up women in their twenties. Their clothes sparkled as if they were en route to a nightclub, and every one of them had eyelashes that fluttered like butterfly wings. Toni briefly wondered if she was getting old because she didn’t want false lashes and then decided that no, she wasn’t old. Just not twenty.
‘I bet they’re some of Marissa’s party,’ whispered Flossie, who always knew everything about everyone in a play.
‘Marissa?’ said Toni, wrong-footed. She had a fabulous memory, was known for it. There was no actor named Marissa in the production.
‘Sheila’s understudy,’ said Flossie. ‘Sheila’s Achilles tendon snapped at yoga. Very painful, apparently. Marissa’s just had two weeks to take over. It’s a huge break for her, playing Cordelia, the most important female character, when she’d only had small parts up to now. Bernard says she’s luminous. Oliver didn’t tell you?’
‘He probably did,’ lied Toni.
Why the hell hadn’t he told her?
‘I’ve been so busy,’ she added.
Someone had once said that Toni’s most fabulous skill was being able to handle tricky people. In fact, her most fabulous skill was the secret one of being able to lie on demand, which was almost but not quite the same thing.
‘You never stop working, do you?’ Flossie said, patting Toni’s hand in the over-familiar way that Toni would not have permitted from anyone else.
‘As usual,’ agreed Toni, her game face on.
Something was pinging in her brain, trying to come to the surface, but she ignored it, joining Flossie in speaking to the cast’s friends and families until, finally, the lights were dimmed.
Relieved that all the talking was over, Toni sat quietly and waited for the curtain to lift. What was in her brain? She tried but couldn’t reach it. No matter. She’d let it process quietly. The magic of the world of a play swept around the theatre, and the darkness enveloped everyone except the people onstage.
Toni caught her breath as she watched, but it wasn’t because Oliver was playing the best Lear of his life or because she was admiring the work of the cast, all of whom she’d seen before.
Her breath had stilled at the sight of Marissa playing Cordelia, King Lear’s only loving daughter. It was not for Marissa’s acting but for her ethereal beauty. The pinging in Toni’s brain became more insistent.
Far younger than the actress she was replacing, Marissa was also shorter. When she stood close to Oliver onstage, her slender blonde head bowed, she looked young and vulnerable. The set design was 1920s and the exquisite dresses that Lear’s three daughters wore flowed beautifully in bias-cut symmetry over flanks and breasts. Marissa, in pale lilac satin, was a poem.
Not that Oliver appeared to notice. His Lear was commanding and brooding, the ageing king still trying to control. And yet, was he noticing Marissa but pretending not to? Theatre was all pretence, after all.
‘Fabulous,’ whispered Flossie to her.
‘Yes, they all are,’ Toni whispered back.
It was the automatic pilot response. Everyone was fabulous, nobody was ever a dud. Loyal to a fault, the cast’s family and friends never said a bad word about any performance.
The language, taken from the ancient by the skill of the actors and made understandable, flowed over her but she barely heard the words. Instead, she watched as the vulnerable Cordelia stood beside her father, the king.
All directors interpreted things differently. This production involved much physicality. At that moment, Cordelia reached up to touch her father’s face. Toni felt rather than saw that this touch was not one actor in character touching another. Marissa’s young face burned with hero worship. Was that it? Was she overawed by her big break and her role opposite this titan of stage and cinema?
There was something magical about theatre, Toni had always thought. Magic that was so difficult to describe. There were no three words for it. It was always different. The suspension of disbelief and the sense that alchemy from one small stage could transport the audience into a whole other world. And yet, tonight, Toni was not transported. She felt a tingle of fear, as if every goosebump in her body suddenly raised in anticipation of a threat. She thought of Alba, the Spanish actress, and how she’d worried over Oliver’s closeness to her. She’d been wrong then, so she was probably wrong now, too – wasn’t she?
At the interval, shaken but pretending not to be, Toni led the way to the bar.
‘Can you make vodka martinis?’ Toni asked the barman when she and Flossie had made it past the throng.
‘Can I make vodka martinis?’ he asked back, obviously wildly outraged at such a suggestion. ‘I can make a martini that would make an angel sing or take the sight out of your eyes.’
‘We’ll have two of the angel versions,’ Toni said grimly. ‘I need my eyes in my line of work.’ She leaned closer to the barman. ‘Could you make mine very strong?’
The pretty young women beside them were discussing manicures when Flossie and Toni went back to their seats, Toni heavily fortified with vodka from two industrial-strength martinis.
One of the women was displaying a hand with each fingernail decorated with a flash of silver and then a swirl of neon pink.
‘Aren’t the young so funny with their twinkly manicures,’ said Flossie, and Toni realised, in a rush of horror, that Flossie had linked the two of them together. Together in their aged-ness, even though Flossie was well over fifty and Toni was ten years younger.
Alba. Alba and Marissa. The two younger women danced in her imagination.
