Davy puffed himself up and coughed. “A play there is, my lord, some ten words long, which is . . . as brief as I have known a play; but by ten words, my lord, it is too long which makes it tedious; for in all . . . the play there is not one word apt, one player fitted . . . ”
“Which about sums up these auditions, never mind Shakespeare’s play within the play,” Brando whispered to Anna. “We haven’t had a half-decent performance the entire night.”
Anna failed to suppress another giggle. Connal sent her a quelling look and soldiered on until Davy’s piece had reached its end. “Thank you, Davy. That was . . . interesting. We’ll get back to you tomorrow night.”
“I was good, wasn’t I? Or I can do it again.” Davy gave a rueful nod. “Aye, I could probably do it better. Let me try again.”
“No, no,” Connal said hastily, sending Anna a sideways glance that hinted at amusement. “I think we’ve seen everything we need to see.”
With a beatific smile, Davy hitched up his pants and stumbled unsteadily out of the recessed stage area. He wound between the crowded tables and stopped halfway across the room near the fireplace to have a loud exchange with someone about a wager. Money changed hands.
“I hope he’s not betting on himself to get the part,” Anna said.
“That’s one bet he’d lose outright,” said Connal.
Anna marked a number four beside Davy’s name on her copy of the audition signup sheet and circled it. Four out of ten. Unfortunately, that was on a theoretic scale, not an indication that they’d seen any performances worthy of a ten. Or even six performances better than Davy’s. More unfortunately still, there were only four names left on the sign-in sheet, which made the odds of avoiding having to cast at least some of the people they’d already seen impossible.
Anna nodded. “You’re going to have your work cut out for you, that’s all I have to say.”
As if to underscore the point, Rhona Grewer hurried up to Connal carrying her audition piece, her steps small in her tight red skirt and mile-high heels. Brando gave a low, quiet groan. “Can’t we take a break? I need a break.”
“Brilliant idea.” Connal stood up. “Let’s take fifteen minutes, shall we, everyone? Rhona, hold tight, and we’ll call you the moment we’re ready to start up again.” He smiled at Rhona in a way that made her blink, and she made a U-turn back to where her daughters were sitting with Erica MacLaren at a table beside the wall.
“This is going to be pure disaster,” Connal said, slumping back down into his chair. “Whose brilliant idea was it to do a play in the first place?”
“Rhona’s. Whose do you think?” Brando said.
Anna rolled her shoulders, trying to ease some of the tension away. She debated sneaking into the pub to get another coffee. Without the liqueur. Or maybe with.
She turned to Connal. “All I can say is, I hope you’re planning to ask a lot of friends to help.”
“They won’t be my friends for long if I saddle them with this lot.” He rubbed the back of his neck and frowned down at the audition sheets.
“I don’t suppose they’d believe you’re being meta? Making the whole thing awful on purpose to spoof the way Shakespeare wrote the play-within-the-play for the Mechanicals to be so bad that they were funny?”
“Shakespeare couldn’t have envisioned the low bar these auditions have set,” Brando said.
“Hold on. That’s not a bad idea.” Connal’s head came up. He cocked it slightly and stared at the empty stage area, lost in thought. “With a bit of a rewrite here and there, some modernizing and gender flipping . . . it could work. We could make the bad performances funnier and easier to understand, and if a few of my friends will agree to do the larger roles, we could pull it off.”
“We’d still have the problem of too many women,” Anna said.
“Since when is that a problem?” Brando asked, laughing at her.
She cast him a dark look and shook her head at Connal. “Who would have an ego big enough to rewrite Shakespeare? That’s begging for trouble with anyone who comes to see the performance.”
“Maybe.” Connal smiled over at her, a smile like a little boy, full of mischief. “I know someone who might be willing to try.”
“Of course you know someone,” Brando said.
“Who?” Anna jabbed an elbow into Brando’s ribs.
Connal ignored Brando entirely. “Graham Connor,” he said to Anna. “He’s a screenwriter not a playwright, but he’s used to working under pressure. The rewrite shouldn’t take much time, and if we double up some of the bigger roles, which was what Shakespeare intended in the first place, it would make it easier for Julian Ashford and Victoria Holmes and the others I’ve asked to agree to help us. What do you think?”
What was there to think? Even Anna had heard of Graham Connor, who had won an Oscar for best screenplay two years back. And the actors whose names Connal had been throwing around so casually were household names, almost as big as Connal had been at the height of his career. Victoria Holmes had been Isobel Teague’s best friend offscreen and also her closest rival.
Shifting in her seat at the thought, Anna looked up to find Connal watching her, his expression expectant and intimate and oddly vulnerable.
“That would be fantastic,” she said. “As long as it’s all right with Elspeth and the rest of the village.”
“I can’t see that it wouldn’t be. Let me go make a few more calls.” Connal surged to his feet, creative energy sparking in the air around him. “If I’m not back in ten minutes, you two start Rhona, Erica, and the twins on their auditions. I’m not expecting a miracle from any of them, but it would be a relief to end up with halfway reasonable versions of Hermia and Helena. I don’t have a clue what we’ll do with Rhona.”
“She signed up to audition for Titania and Hippolyta.”
“Which she’ll play over my dead body.” Connal snatched his cell phone off the table along with the scratchpad onto which he’d been making notes and strode from the room.
Brando turned to watch him leave. “Typical, isn’t it? Himself forces us into sitting through this misery with him then finds the first excuse to get out of having to deal with Rhona. She won’t be half-pleased, I’ll tell you that much.”
“To be fair, Connal wouldn’t be directing if you hadn’t forced him into doing the play in the first place.” Anna rubbed the spot between her eyes where her head had begun to ache. “Really, I’m the only innocent bystander here. Anyway, Rhona can’t honestly be throwing herself at him, can she? Isn’t she a bit too old?”
“Try telling her that; I dare you. And why does everyone defend Connal all the time? You should see how much grief I’ve gotten since yesterday. Don’t tell me you’re already on his side. You’ll break my heart.”
“I didn’t think your heart was breakable.”
“You malign me.” Brando threw his hand onto his chest, tipped his chin in the air and assumed an overwrought expression. “‘Oh, why rebuke you him that loves you so?’”
Anna laughed, and it felt good to let the giggles out. “I suspect you’re far more likely to be the heartbreaker instead of the breakee.”
“If only that were true,” Brando said.
Anna thought he was joking at first, but the creases of laughter in the corners of his eyes had grown a little shallower, and his smile had dimmed. It was only a minuscule change of expression, almost invisible, as if the general air of amiability he wore had slipped just enough to reveal that it was, in fact, a disguise. Anna wondered, suddenly, how much of his inner self, his true self, Brando ever let others see.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to imply—well, anything really. Elspeth mentioned the village taking bets on the women you’ve dated since you’ve been back from London.”
“True, which is why I make a point of falling in love at least once a month for practice.” Brando smiled with effort, and again she had the impression that beneath the affable exterior there was a deep well of
sadness.
He had an actor’s face, Anna realized abruptly, that same deceptive mobility of expression as Henry. And like Henry, too, he used it to cover up what he was truly thinking and feeling. How had she never seen that until this moment? She also hadn’t realized how much she’d bought into the stereotype and the muscles and the kindness—she kept misjudging Brando. Maybe people in general. She’d gotten complacent about her ability to read people, and apparently she was failing at it. Maybe she’d always failed at it.
“I wonder how often we talk ourselves into believing that falling in like is the same as falling in love,” she said. “Liking someone is painless. Less risky. Falling in love, though, that requires trust and hope—or a deep streak of masochism. But I’m sorry. It must be frustrating to have the village meddling in your love life.”
“Much as I love most everyone here, they don’t know half of what they think they do. It’s hard when they’ve all watched me grow up from a child in dirty nappies, felt sorry for me when my parents died, and watched my sister drag me across the glen by the ear for smoking and drinking at the bothy across the loch. I went to London to make something of myself and came back, and no one ever noticed that I’d grown up in between.”
Anna thought of her own family, where the dynamics had been realigned when she was ten and hadn’t changed much since. Margaret and Katharine had gotten married, and Katharine had moved to Hollywood with Henry while Anna had gone off to D.C., as far on the other side of the country as she could get. Until last week, she’d had a successful career at one of the top law firms in the world, but that had never mattered when she went home.
Always when she saw her family, she still felt like a child. Even before her meltdown, the only person who had been impressed when she’d graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law was her father. To her mother and sisters, that achievement didn’t come close to Margaret snagging a job anchoring a local morning program in Cincinnati or the handful of speaking roles in B+ movies that Katharine had landed out in Hollywood while waiting for her “big break.”
“I’m sorry you got hurt,” Anna said to Brando softly, “and I’m sorry about the village. The people who know us best sometimes don’t look hard enough to see who we really are.”
He smiled in a way that no longer fooled her. “First love is a training wheel romance. It’s full of extremes, the best feelings in the world and the worst, but you have to live through that. You have to find your balance so you’re ready when the next love, the real love, comes along.”
Anna wondered if that was true. But what happened if the next love never came? Did you spend your whole life waiting?
Brando looked so wistful that she wanted to tell him she understood, that he wasn’t alone. Except he wasn’t the one alone, was he? He seemed to be ready and waiting for that real love to come along. Meanwhile, she’d been making bargains with herself since Henry had left her, making plans and three-step programs about when and how she would allow herself to live and fall in love. Had she been guarding her heart so carefully that she hadn’t given love a chance to set down roots?
With a sudden wrench in the pit of her stomach, she clamped her lips together. That’s what she’d been doing, wasn’t it? Making plans instead of living.
With Mike, deep down, she’d never wanted the time to be right to set a wedding date. That had been an excuse for not making the commitment. Her relationship with Mike had been safe, easy, but never right. Staying with him, she’d been protecting herself against falling all the way in love.
His expression concerned, Brando turned in his chair and studied her. “Are you all right? I didn’t mean to upset you.”
Anna shook her head. “The idea of one perfect love for every person is a romantic notion, isn’t it? That’s what makes the legend of the Sighting so compelling. But what if the love of your life passes you by? What if you never get a second chance?”
“The Sighting’s not about promising someone for everyone. Some people never see anything. Other people wait so long for the person they’re meant to be with that they give up hope. But my sister used to say the loch would find a way to make things happen even when the head wouldn’t listen. Maybe that has less to do with the loch than it does with fate or destiny or God having plans for us. I won’t pretend to know why the Sighting works or what’s behind it. I only know it’s as real as the fact that you’re sitting here beside me.”
“What if what you see isn’t what you want to see?” Anna asked, thinking about what Elspeth had told her.
“I’ve known people who’ve walked away from what they saw and ended up miserable all their lives, and plenty of others who’ve managed to sabotage the love they were meant to have. Maybe love’s like anything else. You have to be willing to accept it when you’re lucky enough to have it cross your path.”
Anna frowned down into her empty cup. Her head swam, and her chest felt tight. Maybe the alcohol had gotten to her more than she’d thought, or maybe the dizziness came from the fact that the word sabotage felt too right, the way sometimes the universe rang out with a clear, echoing note in answer to a question she hadn’t even known she’d asked.
Consciously or unconsciously, maybe she had sabotaged her relationship with Mike. She’d put off setting a wedding date so long that he’d finally stuffed a suitcase full of boxer briefs, socks, and t-shirts, and carried it away along with an armload of shirts in dry cleaner plastic when he stormed out of their apartment the last time she’d tried to push things back.
“Maybe some people aren’t good at being in love,” she said. “No matter how much they wish they were.”
Brando’s expression softened. “I may not know much about you at all, Anna, mo chroí, but anyone who’s not a sad, blind fool can see that there’s love and joy inside you.”
Anna didn’t know what to say to that. What to do with the sudden inexplicable hope and longing and brittleness she felt in her chest and the thickness developing in her throat.
A chair scraped on the right and Rhona, with impeccable timing, stood up from her seat at the nearby table and tapped her watch. “So where’s Connal got to, then? The twins have school in the morning, and it’s getting late.”
“He’s outside making a call, I think. Let me go and find him,” Anna said, feeling a sudden, desperate need for air.
Dangerous Air
He who kisses joy as it flies by
will live in eternity’s sunrise.
William Blake
The Last Stand Inn was a warren of rooms spanning what had once been a handful of separate buildings connected through the centuries with step-ups and step-downs, odd angles, crooked walls, and scattered courtyards in between. Anna left the small dining area where the auditions were being held and wove through several cozy side rooms, each occupied by one or two scattered groups of people. When she reached the pub, she found Flora and Duncan moving at double-quick speed behind the bar, a well-orchestrated dance of beer foaming into glasses, light refracting on bottles of amber whiskey, ice clinking. A small crowd clustered near the television watched a soccer game, their occasional cheers or groans punctuating the hum of conversation. A goal shortly after Anna entered brought three-quarters of the fans to their feet.
Connal wasn’t in the main pub, but she finally spotted him on the far side in a quiet alcove of the adjacent room. Seated alone by the fireplace, he had his phone wedged against his shoulder while he scribbled notes.
The sight of him caught Anna unexpectedly. Caught her in the pit of her stomach like an ache she’d been trying to ignore.
Still listening to whoever was on the other end of the phone, Connal took off his hat and ran a hand through his hair. He looked vulnerable in that moment, the way he had at the first village meeting, and the distance shrank between them, the air growing warm and lighter, as though parting to let her reach him faster. To push her toward him. Which was a ridiculous notion, brought on—clearly—by one or possibly two too many of Flora’s Highland coffees.
Cheeks hot, Anna stopped halfway down the bar to collect her thoughts. She couldn’t let her imagination overrule her common sense.
It wasn’t just that he was pretty. Brando was pretty. Brando was also smart, considerate, more complex than she’d imagined, and—as Elspeth had repeatedly pointed out—looked darn good in a kilt. Brando had a sense of humor. For all she knew, Connal MacGregor had none of those things, and while Brando had an actor’s ability to mask his feelings, Connal was an actor. That made him doubly dangerous. So what was she doing, standing here gaping at him with her stomach tied in knots and her heart beating too fast?
Being an idiot, that’s what.
She really needed air.
What was it that Brando had said? The loch would find a way to make things happen even when the head wouldn’t listen. But Anna had already been kicked into a thousand pieces once by the kind of romance that made her dizzy. Henry had made her palms sweat the first time he’d passed her a handout in AP Bio their sophomore year of high school, and she’d never stopped feeling that way about him. Not until the moment when, the summer after college while she was back home finalizing the arrangements for their wedding, he’d thrown away his job managing his father’s furniture factory and run off to Hollywood with her sister Katharine.
He’d given Anna no warning at all, none that she had seen anyway. Maybe none that she’d been willing to see. Apparently, he’d always been a better actor than she’d believed him to be.
She’d spent the rest of that summer sending back wedding gifts and trying to politely hold her head up while her mother told her to pretend it didn’t matter, that she couldn’t let people see she minded. Of course, Anna had minded. So much she’d ached with it.
Lake of Destiny Page 8
