Rosie Thomas 3-Book Collection

by Rosie Thomas

  ‘Afterwards.’ Almost bodily, Helen propelled him from the room and down into the wings. There was the faintest stir of relief among the knot of people standing there.

  Out on the stage, old Adam was waiting. Oliver half went to join him, then turned back to Helen.

  ‘Where’s Darcy?’

  Startled, she said, ‘I don’t know. At home, I suppose.’

  ‘Pity. I’d have liked to see old Darcy.’

  Then Oliver took up his position. He pressed the palms of his hands to his temples, as if he was trying to suppress the noise in his head. From beyond the curtain the dull murmur of the audience was quieter but infinitely more threatening than the night before.

  Helen fled, unable to watch any more.

  She found her way to the green room. By an odd chance it was completely deserted. Helen crossed to the controls of the tannoy speaker, turned up the volume, and waited.

  Then Oliver’s voice came crackling out with the opening lines. Helen forced herself to listen, critically sharp-eared. But he was all right. His voice was still flat, but it was firm. By degrees she let herself relax. There was none of the surrender to enchantment of the night before, but at least the play was on. Oliver was walking blindly through the part, but he was on stage and that would have to be good enough.

  Then it was time for Pansy to make her entrance. Even up in the green room, listening to the distorted, tinny sound of the relayed voice, Helen sat up. If Oliver’s performance was wooden, Pansy’s was incandescent. She was playing as she had never done before.

  In the auditorium, the spaces in the wings, even in the lighting box, nobody moved. Tom sat in his director’s seat, a half-smile lifting the taut lines of his face. And in Pansy’s dressing room, Stephen Spurring stared down at his hands, where Pansy had printed kisses before running down to the stage, unbelieving.

  Somebody came into the green room. Helen looked up to see Chloe. Her face was dead white under the careful make-up and her eyes were swollen. She gave Helen a small defiant smile and then, as if intent on giving herself something to do, began to tidy the room. She swept empty paper cups into a wastepaper basket and then began to stack up discarded newspapers. The bundle slipped and pages drifted to the floor. Chloe stared down at them for a second before tears spilled down her face.

  Helen put her arm around her shoulders and they sat in silence as Chloe fought to stifle the sobs.

  ‘Listen,’ she said at last. ‘Just listen to her.’

  Pansy’s voice rippled all round them, soft with a new velvety warmth.

  ‘I can’t even be angry,’ Chloe said bitterly. ‘They have just fallen in love. Luminously, simply. Just like I wanted it to be for me.’ Her shoulders shook with the weight of racking sobs and she buried her face in her hands.

  Desperately, Helen searched for a consoling word and could think of none.

  ‘Chloe, Chloe,’ she murmured, rocking her as if she was a little child. ‘Don’t cry like this. He isn’t worth it.’

  ‘To me he is,’ Chloe said. ‘At least he came to tell me. At least he was honest. You should have seen his face when he talked about her, as if she was the most precious thing in the world, as if nothing else would ever be important to him again. I said what about Beatrice? and he looked quite blank, hardly remembering her name. I’ve never seen anyone fall in love like that.’

  ‘And Pansy?’

  ‘Something has happened to Pansy, too. You know that butterfly quality, the way she’s always flitting on to something new and more exciting? Well, now she’s calm, and still, and smiling. I saw her looking at him tonight with pure, triumphant happiness. Helen, I want to hate her for it, but I can’t.’

  Chloe sat up and pressed her fingers to her cheeks. ‘I can’t stay here. Tom’ll be needing me. And I don’t want anyone to see me looking like this.’ Deliberately, Chloe was pulling herself together again. ‘The show must go on, eh?’ There was even the glimmer of a real smile, and Helen smiled her own admiration and encouragement back.

  Chloe would survive, she saw, because deep down she wanted to. But Oliver was a different question. Helen couldn’t guess at the answer, and she knew that she didn’t really even understand what the question was. Thoughtfully she went down to the public call box outside the theatre and dialled Darcy’s number at Mere.

  By the end of the third act, he was at her side.

  Quickly Helen told him the story. ‘Oliver wanted to see me?’ he asked. ‘Where is he?’

  They found him alone in his dressing room, sitting out the interval.

  ‘Darcy?’ Oliver said. ‘You are here. How odd. You know, the strangest thing. I suddenly thought how good it would be if we played chess again. Like we used to, at home? Do you remember, it was the only thing you ever beat me at?’

  Helen realised gratefully that Darcy knew what was needed of him.

  ‘I’ll still beat you,’ he said calmly. ‘Where are the pieces?’

  She left them sitting hunched opposite one another over the board. Outside she bumped into Tom who had run up the stairs two at a time.

  ‘Couldn’t get away sooner,’ he said. ‘What’s he doing now?’

  ‘Perfectly okay. He’s playing chess with Darcy.’

  Tom took hold of both her hands and kissed her cheek.

  Helen looked quickly away down the long spiral of stairs.

  ‘You and Darcy,’ he said gently, ‘are true friends in need.’

  ‘So are you,’ Helen countered lightly. ‘Oliver told me about you nursemaiding him.’

  ‘Ah, but my involvement is entirely due to self-interest.’ Tom was suddenly at his most sardonic. ‘I’ve just been down to the box-office. Do you know, we’re sold out for the run?’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Helen called out after him, not meaning anything to do with his play. But his only answer was a little, cynical laugh.

  It was very late when Helen let herself into Follies House that night. She had waited to see whether Oliver would take refuge in drinking after the release of the final curtain. There had been a bottle of whisky, and Oliver had reached for it with the make-up still caked on his face and with Orlando’s white shirt clinging damply to his back after the effort of the last scenes. Helen understood what a toll the long evening had taken.

  But Darcy had stepped smoothly in before Oliver could drain his first glass. He had insisted, deaf to Oliver’s mocking complaints, that his brother should come back with him to Mere. And suddenly Oliver had capitulated, too weary to resist the decisions that were being made for him.

  Helen and Tom had said a brief goodnight. ‘Until tomorrow,’ he had said. ‘Will you come again?’

  She nodded her promise. ‘Yes.’ And had gone home alone to Follies, for once feeling the uncomfortable weight of her solitude. But as soon as the thick oak door swung to behind her, Helen felt a cold shiver running down her spine. Before she could see anything at all in the dimness of the Jacobean hallway she sensed the tension in the air. Then there was a movement in front of her. Pansy was standing like a wraith under the gallery rail. She was wrapped in a dark coat, and with a beret pulled down over her silvery hair, she looked even more like a boy. In one hand she was holding one of her chic leather suitcases and the other was clenched into a small white fist. Her face was turned upwards.

  Helen followed her gaze.

  Chloe was leaning over the carved baluster.

  For a long, long moment the two women stared at each other. Then Chloe said, very softly, ‘Won’t you at least tell me? You’re going to Stephen, aren’t you?’

  Pansy’s fist clenched even tighter. ‘I have to be with him, Chloe. Surely it’s better to go to him than bring him here?’

  Chloe’s head bent and the dark red hair swung across her face like a curtain.

  ‘Chloe,’ Pansy said urgently, ‘I can’t help it. Any of it. Don’t hate me. Even if you can’t forgive me.’

  There was no response. Pansy turned away and brushed past Helen as if she didn’t exist.
Then there was a sudden harsh gust of cold air and Pansy vanished into the dark.

  When Helen looked again, Chloe was walking away. There was no sound except for the soft padding of her slippers on the bare oak boards.

  Nine

  Between them, as Tom had predicted, they built up a system for seeing Oliver through the days and nights of the play.

  Each night Darcy took him home to Mere. Oliver scoffed at Darcy’s unremarkable car and insisted on driving the black Jaguar recklessly through the country dark. Darcy reported to Helen that once home, they sat up for hours playing game after game of chess. Oliver drank steadily until he had anaesthetised himself enough to fall asleep. Then he would sleep heavily, clinging to oblivion, until late in the morning. Darcy, as always, was up again at first light and made the rounds of his farmwork, half suffocated by yawns. Then Oliver would drive back into Oxford and Helen would try to persuade him to eat something, and then keep him company through the short, sunny afternoons.

  Oliver was irritable and resigned by turns, but he had accepted that he had to go on playing Orlando. He was still drinking a good deal but Helen thought that it was a way of keeping himself going. And she guessed that he was taking other things too, when his moods swung from dull apathy to violent impatience with Oxford, As You Like It and Helen herself. Yet Helen found herself growing to like him more, and even to understand him. When they talked and Oliver was not being bitterly flippant, she glimpsed a man who was somehow beleaguered and threatened by all the things that made him enviable to the rest of the world. She remembered how she had seen Oliver’s gilded exterior as protecting an inner, sensitive man, and had fallen in love with that twin image. This new Oliver was closer to the one that she had dreamed up for herself, but he was more complex and infinitely more vulnerable.

  Her new feeling for him was nothing to do with the old, hurtful romantic love. But in its way it was just as strong. It was loyal, and protective, and increasingly sharp with anxiety.

  There were signs that Oliver felt something different too. Once, when they were sitting in his rooms watching the light outside fade from gold to grey, he looked across at her and said, ‘I suppose we won’t do this any more, when the play’s over? When you’ve delivered me safe and sober to Hart for the last performance?’

  ‘Why not?’ she had asked calmly, staring back into his eyes.

  ‘I don’t know anybody else, like I know you now,’ he had said. ‘Funny, isn’t it, how alone we all are?’

  Another time he had murmured, almost to himself, ‘Darcy’s luckier than he knows. Or perhaps he does know, after all.’

  She hadn’t answered that.

  In the evenings Tom took over. He saw Oliver through the long demands of the performance with a careful mixture of asperity and subtle cajolement. Helen sat at her desk and tried to make up the lost hours of work.

  And so, at length, they reached the last night.

  It was traditional for the director of the OUDS major to throw a party after the last performance for everyone connected with the production, and Tom had taken up the idea with enthusiasm. He had been insistent that Darcy and Helen should be there.

  ‘If it hadn’t been for you, there wouldn’t have been a show after the first performance. Or at least, there’d have been me stumbling through Oliver’s part with the book in one hand. Disaster.’ He had flashed them one of his rare, brilliant smiles. ‘I’m a wonderful director and a lousy actor. So be there, both of you. Please.’

  A little to Helen’s surprise, Darcy had agreed. And at his suggestion, they were to see the play again too.

  When he appeared at Follies House to collect her, his hair was sleeked down, and he was wearing a velvet jacket which wouldn’t have looked out of place on Oliver, with a raffish bow tie, which suited him.

  ‘Darcy,’ she laughed at him, ‘don’t confuse me. This is a theatrical party, remember.’

  He looked so pleased that she kissed him, and stood for a moment contentedly with his arms around her.

  ‘Oh, one has to go to these affairs from time to time to make sure one isn’t missing anything,’ he told her cheerfully. ‘And I want to be there, for Oliver. You never know. Besides, you’ll be there too. You look very pretty tonight, Helen. You do make me wish we weren’t going anywhere at all.’

  Helen had been awarded a tiny travel bursary. She was supposed to use the money to broaden her studies with travel abroad, but she had half guiltily spent some of it on new clothes. Tonight’s amethyst silky jacket over a camisole top was part of her extravagance.

  ‘D’you like it?’ She spun round for him to admire her. ‘I love buying things.’

  ‘Frivolous girl,’ Darcy said humorously.

  They walked to the theatre hand in hand.

  Tonight’s audience was very different from the first. In place of the tense expectancy there was an air of celebration. Almost everyone there was a friend, connected with the company, ready to enjoy the play and then to toast its success at the party.

  Before the house lights went down, Helen caught sight of Stephen. He was sitting to one side of the auditorium, alone, and looking straight ahead at the stage. It was as if he was willing the curtains to open, Helen thought, so that he could see Pansy again.

  The play itself was subtly different too. Oliver was adequate, familiarity having given a kind of polish to his playing that compensated for his interest being so far from it. But Pansy was so good that she carried everything with her. The new warmth which Helen had detected from her hiding place in the green room was still there, even intensified. More, she seemed to inspire the rest of the cast to try to match her.

  When at last the curtain fell on her epilogue, Helen turned to Darcy and saw that he too was blinking back the tears.

  ‘She’s going to be famous,’ Helen said, rising to her feet with the entire audience. ‘She must be. She’ll be a great actress.’

  The applause was deafening. Pansy and Oliver took their curtain calls, smiling at the audience hand in hand, but never once looking at each other. Then Pansy came forward alone. She kissed her hand to the sea of faces again and again, laughing, pleasingly bewildered by the acclaim. Then a single white rose landed at her feet. She stooped to pick it up and stuck it into the bodice of her dress. Almost at once there were flowers all around her and she scooped them up until they spilled out of her arms.

  In response to a new crescendo of shouts, Pansy held out a hand towards the wings. Tom ducked into the blaze of lights and bowed, quickly, almost formally. Then he took Pansy’s hand and kissed it, turned her to face her audience one more time, and then led her away.

  The house lights came up to a long, last cheer of delight. The play was over.

  Helen and Darcy joined the throng of people making their way to Tom’s party. Helen had never seen Tom’s home and she looked interestedly up at it. It was an elegant, flat-fronted house in a North Oxford garden square. The front door stood invitingly open.

  ‘Here goes,’ said Darcy, pulling at the ends of his bow tie and grinning at her. Helen squeezed his hand, and was still holding it in hers when they stepped into the warmly lit hall. Tom was greeting his guests at the door. He saw their linked hands and there was a flicker of something that turned into cool amusement in his face. Helen felt a prickle of irritation and wondered why it was that Tom still had the knack of annoying her, however much she liked him.

  Their relationship should have been simple, but it wasn’t.

  He welcomed them warmly, dropping his arms around their shoulders for a brief instant as he murmured, ‘I’m glad you both came. I haven’t thought of a way to thank you both properly yet, but I will.’

  Helen felt the brief pressure of his hands on her shoulder. He glanced down at her outfit and murmured, ‘You look as pretty as you did on New Year’s Eve.’

  She stared up at him, suddenly wondering, but then he said, ‘Doesn’t she, Darcy?’ The blush that had started to rise in her cheeks drained away again.

  ‘S
he always looks lovely,’ Darcy said loyally.

  ‘Of course. Champagne’s through there,’ Tom told them. He moved away to kiss a well-known woman television don on both cheeks.

  Darcy and Helen wandered through the house, glasses of champagne in their hands. It was obviously rented, but aimed at the visiting-professor level rather than student digs. There were small Victorian button-backed sofas upholstered in velvet, thick pale-coloured carpets and glass-topped tables. It amused Helen to see the few items that emphatically belonged to Tom in this setting of carefully neutral good taste. There was a set of African ivory chessmen, and overflowing shelves of books, most of them to do with the theatre. On one low set of shelves there was a rounded, primitive soapstone carving of a polar bear.

  But it was Tom’s pictures that interested Helen most of all. Every wall, from the hallway right through the house, was lined with them. There were prints and lithographs by modern artists, some of them famous names and some of them that meant nothing to her. Between these were delicate watercolour scenes and landscapes and sombre portraits in oils, all together in an intriguing, concerted demand for attention. They made the expensively soulless little house immediately Tom’s own. Helen smiled at the idea of the organisation needed to get them all crated up and shipped to Oxford. Tom was nothing if not efficient. Even his party reflected that, with the discreetly watchful waiters who kept every glass filled and attended to the exotic food laid out in the dining room.

  In pride of place over the fireplace there was a little oil painting. It was of an open window, framed with blue wooden shutters, with a vase of bright flowers on the sill. Beyond the window was the sea, bright turquoise and dancing with reflected light. It was a simple, economical picture, with every brushstroke visible. Helen stood in front of it for a long moment, thinking how beautiful it was.

  The rooms were filling up rapidly. There were familiar faces from the cast, and backstage at the theatre. There were others that she recognised by sight from grander Oxford circles than those that touched her own – a couple of College masters and their wives, a sprinkling of novelists and poets, and a celebrated painter in the black fedora he always wore. Tom seemed to know and be on terms of easy familiarity with everyone. Helen was impressed, and she felt a little awe creeping into her feelings for him. But even in this sophisticated gathering there was a little stir of people covertly turning to stare as Pansy came in. She was wearing a simple black dress with her hair combed out in a pale halo around her head. Unusually for her she had painted her eyes with extravagant, theatrical rings of blue which made her face look small and fragile, her colouring more delicate. Half a step behind her was Stephen, with the same rapt expression that Helen had seen in the theatre tempered with a kind of defiance.