by Rosie Thomas
‘To start with, I didn’t take Oliver from anyone. He came, tongue hanging out. And if you think Stephen belongs to you, you are a fool. He’s poor old Beatrice’s, if he’s anyone’s right now. And no, if you want to know, Oliver isn’t enough. I don’t need a doped-up boy. Stephen is different.’
Chloe turned sharply on her heel and gained the sanctuary of her room. With the door safely shut behind her, she sank on to the stool in front of her dressing table and stared into her reflection. Her mascara had smudged into dark patches beneath her eyes, red-rimmed with the threat of tears, and her skin was flat and chalky. With an exhausted gesture, Chloe swept the surface clear of bottles and jars, laid her head down on her arms, and cried for Stephen.
Never, she thought. He had never let the suave mask drop, never in all their times together, and she had never seen him look as he had looked at Pansy tonight. Yet she had wanted and needed him more than anyone else before, and she had tried so hard to give him what he wanted.
Chloe screwed her eyes tight shut but the tears still streamed out, and there was no shutting out the sight of Stephen kissing Pansy’s cheek as if he wanted to devour her. And there was no muffling of Pansy’s voice, saying over and over, ‘Stephen is different.’ Pansy would get what she wanted, there was no doubt about that.
The hopeless tears burned Chloe’s cheeks and the sobs clogged her throat. At last she lifted her smeared face and pushed the heavy, damp hair back from her cheeks. In front of her she saw the pretty, inviting lettering on the sachet of a face pack. Savagely Chloe screwed up the pack and flung it at the waste-bin. It bounced off the edge and lay on the carpet, unfurling with a tiny crackle. She stared at it, then stirred uncomfortably.
With a deep breath, Chloe met her own eyes again. The swollen, streaming face was pathetic, and the habits of years were too deeply ingrained. Forcing herself to breathe evenly, Chloe reached out for her jar of cream. Gently, methodically, she began to remove her ravaged make-up. Her eyes were blank with misery.
Pansy had followed Helen upstairs. She came into the room behind her and lay wearily down on the bed. With her hands clasped behind her head, she stared up at the ceiling.
‘Won’t you make me a cup of coffee?’ she asked pleadingly.
‘Only instant,’ Helen said discouragingly. She didn’t want Pansy here.
‘Anything will do. God, how I loathe scenes.’
Helen stirred the uninviting liquid in a mug. ‘Plastic milk?’ she asked coldly and then handed the mug over. Neither of them spoke. Pansy sat up to drink her coffee, one arm wrapped around her knees.
‘Pansy,’ Helen said at last, knowing that she must say something. ‘You said that you liked Chloe. And that you’d never had women friends before. Don’t …’
‘Don’t what?’ Pansy asked challengingly.
Helen changed her tack, groping for words. ‘You said that Oliver isn’t important. Perhaps he isn’t, to you. But Stephen is important to Chloe. What is it that you want?’
‘Not Oliver,’ she answered softly. ‘Oliver’s turning into a wreck. But why is it me who has to back off? Don’t you think I might be looking for someone, needing someone too?’ For a second her face crumpled. ‘It’s lonely. All this.’ Helen knew at once that she meant her lovely face, Masefield’s money, the endless, effortless command of centre stage. She felt a bewildering stab of sympathy for her.
‘And Stephen’s different,’ Pansy repeated, almost to herself. ‘I don’t know why, but I want to find out.’
He’s no different, Helen thought. He’s a pretence. Don’t you fall for it too. And then poor Chloe. But she was silent, watching Pansy drain her coffee.
‘If you’ve finished,’ she murmured. ‘It’s late …’
At once Pansy was on her way. But she paused in the doorway. ‘You probably won’t believe me. But I wish it wasn’t like this. Oliver. Chloe. You. A mess, isn’t it?’ Then a little sardonic halfsmile came back. ‘But you know what they say. All’s fair … ’night.’ With that, she was gone.
Helen sat staring into space, left with the thought of Oliver. Not the dream-Oliver she had fallen in love with, but the real Oliver. A wreck, Pansy had said dismissively. Helen saw the clear features, smooth as marble, which still lived with her even though the man behind them had become someone else. And the dazed expression as he woke up this evening came back to her.
If only she could help him; she would do anything to save him from himself. But there was nothing she could do. Pansy was right. It was a mess, horrible and tangled. And it was going to get worse. ‘Stephen. Stephen is different,’ she heard again. Pansy could save Oliver, but she wouldn’t. Helen could see no solution and she felt cold with apprehension.
Then, with a little sound of helplessness and frustration she stood up and began to make herself ready for bed.
*
‘If you want to know, that stank. You’re a bunch of fucking amateurs and it stands out a mile. Now get back in your places and we’ll do it again. And we’ll go on doing it again until it’s how I want it.’
Tom’s anger was impressive and more than a little frightening. Even Pansy looked faintly cowed and Oliver straightened up and ran his fingers through his hair with an air of desperation.
‘Jesus Christ, we’ll be here all night. Can’t we knock off?’
Tom rounded on him, his face dark with fury.
‘You will be here twenty-four hours a day until we open, if necessary. I’m the director of this shitty play, and I want it done to the best of your admittedly limited capabilities. Try to listen to what I’m saying now, and I’ll have notes for every single one of you afterwards. Now move.’
Tom threw his script down and slumped back in his place. He looked exhausted and there were dark, damp patches under the arms and across the back of his tracksuit.
There were only seven days to go before the opening of As You Like It. Half-finished bits and pieces of the Forest of Arden set gave the stage a cluttered, makeshift air. The cast sat dispiritedly in the stalls or lounged in the wings, waiting to work through a scene for the umpteenth time. Tom Hart had proved a hard taskmaster, but he was driving his uneven bunch of students into a performance that was beginning to look impressive.
Chloe watched dispassionately as the actors regrouped themselves for the opening scene.
Oliver shook himself, the disenchanted air vanished, and he was Orlando again.
‘As I remember, Adam, it was upon this fashion bequeathed me by will but poor a thousand crowns …’
Tom leaned back, intent, not missing a single syllable or gesture. Once or twice he scribbled a brief note, but his concentration never wavered.
Intimidatingly professional, Chloe thought. He’ll make a good job of this, whatever’s going on backstage to wreck it.
There was no doubt, with his mixture of asperity and cajolement, that Tom was getting the best possible performance out of Oliver. Onstage his bored cynicism dropped away and Oliver almost magically became the fresh, idealistic lover. He was best of all in the scenes with Pansy as Rosalind. The tension between them was tangible and it gave the lovers a vivid dimension that Chloe had never seen in the play before.
And Pansy herself was remarkable. The wistfulness in her ‘O, how full of briers is this working-day world’ brought the tears to Chloe’s eyes, even in the prosaic clutter of the half-built set and the anxious, fractious atmosphere of the late rehearsal.
An unspoken truce had reigned at Follies House since the day of Pansy’s party. Pansy and Chloe skirted carefully around each other, and Stephen was never mentioned. Pansy absorbed herself in rehearsals and her spare time was spent with Oliver, just as it had been since the autumn. She was as evasively quick to joke as ever, and as difficult to pin down, but she treated him affectionately and he seemed happy enough with that. Chloe knew that Pansy had seen nothing of Stephen. And Chloe and Stephen went on just as before, meeting each other whenever they could. Cautiously Chloe made no mention of Pansy, and worked hard at
being as witty and beguiling for Stephen as she knew how.
Away from the feverish pitch of rehearsals, they were quiet, calm days. In a break between scenes Tom came back and sat beside Chloe. She felt at once as he stretched his legs next to her that he was physically tense with concentration. She knew that this production was a very small deal for him, and she admired his absolute dedication to whatever he had in hand, however unimportant it might seem.
They worked well together now. Early on Tom had recognised Chloe’s efficiency and had promoted her from dogsbody to informal production manager. Now he came to her to discuss whether a prop needed changing, or to beg her to produce coffee and sandwiches, or to think aloud about how to make a curtain line more effective.
Chloe was used to the discipline of her own world and found it interesting as well as easy to do what he needed.
‘You’re a godsend,’ he had told her once. ‘I think I’ll take you back with me. How d’you fancy fame and fortune on Broadway?’
‘It’s you who’ll be getting the fame and fortune,’ she told him coolly. ‘I don’t see myself as a jewel in the back room. Anyway, you couldn’t match my salary. Don’t top copywriters earn more than directors’ gofers?’
‘I expect so,’ Tom had said imperturbably. They had laughed, but their relationship had never settled on an easy personal footing.
Chloe would have liked Tom to respond to her as most men did. She was used to being found attractive, and being treated with the little, flattering extra attentions that went with it. But there was nothing of the kind from Tom. He was impeccably polite and unvaryingly businesslike. Too obviously, the play was their only interest together.
Could he, she wondered, be gay? Would that explain his exasperated but still fascinated loyalty to Oliver? No, she thought. Tom Hart was straight. She decided at last that he was simply frigidly professional, and wondered idly what he would be like when the professional mask dropped.
‘Now,’ he was murmuring, ‘I think we’ll just do the last scene once more before letting them go. Looks like they’re getting to rebellion point.’ Tom worked his cast hard, but he was sensitive to the moment when they would do no more.
Under his direction the play’s four pairs of lovers formed up and struck a pose as if for a wedding photograph. The men stood stiffly with their wives-to-be on their arms, smiling against an imaginary sun into an imaginary camera. It was a pretty final tableau. Chloe nodded her approval once again with a slight sigh.
‘How neat. Four happy couples, ready to live happily ever after.’ The tangles of the plot were all unravelled, neatly plaited and tied off. ‘Pity it’s not real life.’
Tom grinned. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Real life has a way of working itself out, perhaps not quite as pat but just as satisfactorily. Anyway, who says anything about happy ever after? Not Shakespeare. Remember “Men are April when they woo, December when they wed”?’ He was shrugging into his canary yellow jacket, smiling. ‘You’re too romantic, Chloe dear. Very dangerous.’
Easy to say that, she thought bitterly.
Tom was strolling away, whistling. As an afterthought he turned and asked casually, ‘Where’s Helen?’
Helen’s occasional visits to rehearsals had completely stopped.
‘I don’t think she can stand the offstage drama.’
‘How sensible.’ Tom was wry.
‘And she’s seeing quite a lot of Darcy.’
There was a perceptible pause before he spoke again. Then he said, ‘How nice.’ Tom was on his way again, still smiling faintly, to distribute acerbic notes to each of his actors.
The time before the opening of Tom’s As You like It was a happy one for Helen.
Spring came early that year. The crocuses along the river bank were rapidly followed by sheets of daffodils, and then by faint dustings of green on the trailing willow branches. Along the river the air often smelt of fresh paint as the long, flat punts were brought out and cleaned up for the start of the summer season.
Oxford was very beautiful in this early spring light. The pale sunshine penetrated into Follies House, putting a tinge of warmth into the red brick and throwing fantastic shadows from the carved banisters on to the dusty oak boards of the gallery. Helen felt the sense of truce in the house and it comforted her. She walked to and from the libraries or her tutorials with a calm she had imagined that she had lost for ever. Her work was going well, and the days had something of the old, orderly quality of life before the savage upheavals of the last year.
Anxious to preserve her tranquillity, she stayed away from play rehearsals. If she didn’t see Oliver she could hope that he was happier, and she could believe that the pain of losing him was fading at last. She had no desire either to witness any more of the feud between Chloe and Pansy.
Helen’s self-imposed solitude meant one other thing too. She was denying herself the chance of seeing Tom, and she was unnerved to realise how much she wanted to. She felt that her liking for him had deepened and was still changing, in a way that she didn’t quite want to account for. She told herself that her reluctance to confront her feelings sprang from shame at her own silliness on New Year’s Eve, and it would all be all right again when she had told him she was sorry. But she held back from going boldly to find him. When they met again, she wanted it to be by accident. Perhaps then she could apologise light-heartedly and their differences would be forgotten.
So Helen went on trying to spot his decisive stride in the ambling crowds of students, and telling herself that she simply missed the stimulating crackle of his company.
Then, one evening, she heard him. The timbre of his voice was unmistakable. It was one night not long after Pansy’s party, and he was in Pansy’s room again. Helen lifted her head instinctively and cocked it to the sound. In the breathless moment that followed she heard him sounding impatient and exasperated. Then Pansy answered him, her voice raised too, and tinged with petulance.
Don’t listen. Helen sprang out of her chair, galvanised by her desire not to hear any more. Whatever Tom wanted from Pansy tonight, whatever – even – he still felt for her, Helen didn’t want to know about it. None of my business, she tried to tell herself. I don’t care about Pansy or her pretty face or her long tentacles.
Damn it.
Helen clicked off her reading light and went downstairs to Rose and Gerry, rather than stay in her own room and be forced to eavesdrop. Down in the kitchen she half listened to Rose’s talk and remembered the books on her desk with a longing to immerse herself in them again. At least work kept the more uncomfortable realities at bay. I’ll stay in Oxford for ever, Helen thought. I’ll turn into an old maid and my biggest excitement will be the discovery of a forgotten footnote somewhere. I’ll have a smooth, unlined face and literature will be my life. What could be safer than that? Yet the prospect was less inviting than it had been a year ago. Made irritable with herself, Helen went back upstairs.
She had barely reached her room before she heard Pansy’s door slam and then the front door. Relief mingled with disappointment gripped her. Whatever Tom had wanted, it wasn’t going to keep him with Pansy all night. The house was comfortably silent again, but it was also very empty.
Helen told herself that she was sorry to have missed another chance of telling him how much she wished that New Year’s Eve had happened differently.
*
True to his promise, Darcy came again. He came so often that their outings together started to fall into a pattern. Usually they would walk somewhere, quite often in the quiet corners of the town itself. Darcy had not been at Oxford. ‘Agricultural College. Much more my line’ he had told her, but he displayed a surprising knowledge of odd, out-of-the-way treasures of the city. Together they visited the mournfully erotic statue of the drowned Shelley hidden in a corner of his one-time college, and the Epstein Lazarus at New College. Once Darcy took her hand as they stared up at the Burne-Jones stained glass in Christ Church Cathedral. When they turned away again, he gently released it.<
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On other days he drove them out into the country and they walked quiet lanes and footpaths almost obliterated by brambles. Afterwards Darcy took her to unfrequented pubs and bought her halves of malty, hoppy real ale with such enthusiasm that she began almost to enjoy them. When they ate together, it was ploughman’s lunches, or curries in odd little restaurants on the city’s outskirts.
Wherever they went, no-one seemed to know Darcy. Once or twice a barman nodded at him, or an old man in wellingtons sitting in a corner beside the dartboard might murmur, ‘Evening to you.’ But that was all. It couldn’t have been more different from going to places with Oliver. Everywhere Oliver went, heads turned after him, and nudges and whispers made ripples in his wake.
Oliver would never have bothered with the quiet pleasures which Darcy enjoyed. Helen tried and failed, amused, to imagine him in a public bar somewhere, watching a darts match with a pint mug of beer in his hand. No. Oliver belonged in his Jaguar, driving too fast to a chic restaurant where the waiters leapt to attend to him and where the other diners tried discreetly not to stare.
Helen remembered her own brief times in the Jaguar beside him, or in the casually expensive disarray of his rooms, as if from another life. She hoarded the memories, but the knowledge that it was over came more easily.
And unlike Oliver, Darcy was the most easy-going companion she had ever had. He liked to hear Helen talk, and she told him happily about her work, her family, the small events of every day. All the things that she had thought too dull or too humble for Oliver. Darcy would listen and nod, walking alongside her with his hands in the pockets of his corduroys. When he put forward his own opinions, he did it mildly, almost with an air of surprise that he should find himself expressing an opinion at all.
Almost by accident, Helen found that she was fond of Darcy and beginning to rely on the steady calm of his company. He wasn’t exciting, but he was utterly dependable. She discovered that his range of interests was limited – he cared about farming, the countryside, animals and his few friends – but his feelings for those were deep and genuine. Helen thought that he worried about Montcalm and his intimidating role there, but he was reticent about it and she tactfully avoided the topic.
