Jack appeared by her side. ‘Is everything all right?’
‘No!’ Bridie exclaimed.
‘Yes,’ her grandad said. ‘Everything is just perfect.’
Bridie shot him a look. How could he say that, when he’d brought Julian to her show? ‘No, it’s not.’
‘Who are you?’ Jack asked Julian.
‘I’m Bridie’s secret benefactor.’
Bridie suddenly felt the room begin to spin.
‘What’s happened?’ said Rufus and Reggie, rushing over to the little crowd of family and friends that had gathered around Bridie, flapping their hands, waving theatre programmes, trying to give her some air.
‘She’s fainted,’ Oliver said, anxiously. They sat her in a theatre chair, Oliver beside her, his arm around her shoulders, supporting her lolling head.
‘Bridie just had a little shock,’ said her grandad matter-of-factly. He turned to Julian as Bridie started to come round. ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t have just come out with it.’
‘Sorry.’
Bridie looked up at her grandad.
‘Are you all right?’ Oliver asked.
She sat upright. ‘Yes, I think so.’ She stared at Julian before shifting her gaze to her grandad. ‘You knew all along about the theatre, and that Julian is my secret benefactor?’ She still couldn’t believe it.
He shook his head. ‘No, not until the day, about a week ago, when Julian turned up at my flat. He had a confession to make.’ He turned to face him. ‘Julian – it’s time you told her what you told me.’
Bridie sat up in her seat as her friends from Cobblers Yard and her family gathered round, taking seats either side, and in front, and behind.
Bridie said, ‘You never told me you owned that theatre.’
Julian frowned. ‘I know.’
‘But … but you grew up with your parents in Cornwall. How did you end up with a theatre on the Suffolk Coast? You didn’t like visiting Suffolk, said you didn’t like the easterly wind, or my parents.’
‘It wasn’t either of those things. They were just excuses – it was this theatre and going on a guilt trip over it because of my parents.’
‘Your parents?’
‘Yes. You see, my grandfather left them the theatre but didn’t have the money to do the place up. I think my grandparents briefly reopened it for one school year to stage a play – something about seeing if an investor might consider throwing some money at the theatre for a good cause, you know, helping out the local community. But it was not to be.’
‘Hey, that was the school year I joined the drama club and acted on that stage.’
‘Yes, I remember coming along to see the show at this theatre as a talent scout. How could I forget? It was the first time I saw you,’ said Julian. ‘So, anyway, they decided, in their wisdom, to give it to me, as I was a hot-shot theatre producer, earning potsof money – so they said. The expectation being that I’d do the place up to honour my grandparents’ legacy and run the place.’
He sighed heavily. ‘For one thing, I don’t earn pots of money, so I didn’t have the means to do it up, or the inclination. But even if I’d had the money, I didn’t have time to get involved with a local theatre when I have a full-time job working in theatres in London.’
‘But why not just sell it rather than leaving it to go to rack and ruin?’ Jack asked.
Bridie glanced at Jack knowingly. If Julian had sold it years earlier, Jack would probably have got his hands on it, and the little theatre wouldn’t exist now. She shuddered at the thought of an ugly, boxy new build in its place.
‘It had a blasted covenant specifying it had to remain in the family and be passed down.’
‘So, you couldn’t sell,’ Oliver said.
‘No, but I didn’t want the responsibility of keeping hold of it, with my parents breathing down my neck, forever on at me about it. Then I happened to have this conversation with a lawyer friend who said there was a way to get it off my hands without selling it. It was a loophole.’
