Fallout (16 page)

Nina and Tony were married at the Chelsea registry office in late September that same year, immediately the run of
In Custody
had finished. They stood on the steps, photographed, fitting together; Nina in her cream silk trouser suit, Tony with his girlishly soft looks, androgynous, meeting halfway between their genders,
au point
. Their guests filled the broad King’s Road pavement, bringing a party to the weekday street. Men’s hair curling over their collars, women in gauze scarves, droopy-brimmed hats; high shoes and paisley. And Tony, with his cool, empty expression, delighting in it, as confetti and flash-bulb pops rained down. Shoppers and teenagers stopped to stare, policemen held out their arms to encircle the wedding party and wave the staring cars past, music floating from their open windows, T-Rex, Kiki Dee.

Aunt Mat, solid and suburban in her sensible heels and brand-new suit, stood apart with her handbag on her arm. She searched for Marianne in the crowd but her sister-in-law had deserted her as they left the Town Hall. Aunt Mat clutched her fistful of confetti and found she could not throw it, but let it fall, clumping, onto the pavement. She had invited Tony and Nina to tea when she heard the news of their wedding, but Nina had cancelled at the last moment. She had tried, but had seen her niece only rarely in the seven years since she had moved out and she felt the rejection very keenly. She had shared Nina’s erstwhile favourite, the Victoria sponge, with the ancient cat, now gaunt, and the neighbours from across the road.

The wedding party was held at Meridiana, with champagne and profiteroles, chicken Kiev and cocaine, actors, musicians and models, shouting laughter and the newly-weds clinging together in the centre of it all, Nina’s eyes shining, her bunch of autumn roses, overblown, scattered across the table at her side. In the evening they went to Tramp, with Tony having changed into black on black, and Nina in a white suede mini-dress, her insect-long legs in platform boots. She felt her bare thighs printed by Tony’s occasional pressing fingers, high on the attention and short-sighted, anxious dreams.

They went to Corsica for their wedding holiday. A short week on hot, windy beaches; Tony, languorous and unexpectedly boyish in cotton trousers and T-shirts, a sudden, briefly natural breath of honest relaxation.

The hotel was basic but Nina had never been abroad before and everything was new to her. She felt released, escaping the drudgery of her mother’s judgement. They drank Negronis in the morning and white wine at lunch. They ate clams and gambas with sharp vinegar-laden salads and dipped their dry bread crusts into the juice. They sunbathed in the last of the heat, fading into autumn with each day that passed. Strong wind whipped sand around their ankles. In the afternoons they slept in the sun on the rocks by the crashing sea and woke with dry mouths, and then, with Nina in long silk scarves wrapped around her small naked breasts, they walked back across the spiky volcanic rocks to the bar.

And the nights. When they were not making love they did not hold one another. He liked her to face away from him when he fucked her, and often put his hands over her eyes, or closed them gently about her throat. The lack of intimacy was dangerous-safe. She was content to feel that he was attracted enough to want her in the first place. He didn’t like to come inside her, and sometimes she didn’t think he came at all, or if he did, he kept that moment hidden, as if it were too personal to show her. She couldn’t see, or feel it, and didn’t know what he did. One night, overcome by the need to know him, she turned around to face him when he was too deeply into his pleasure to stop. She lifted her long leg up and over his head and swivelled to face him, wrapping herself around him, a loving prison, bravely putting her hands on his shoulders to look into his eyes.

‘Don’t,’ he said, ‘don’t.’ But then he came, and immediately, as if in pain, his face crumpled into tears, like a baby.

‘Bitch. Bitch. Don’t look at me, I’m horrible, I’m sorry,’ he said.

He climbed off her and rolled into a ball, sharp shoulder blades and the knobbled fossil curve of his spine protecting himself from her.

‘Don’t cry,’ she said, ‘don’t cry . . .’

‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured, with his face hidden. ‘I’m sorry.’

Nina pulled the sheet over herself and sat up in the dark.

Her hair fell down around her, she was undone. The two of them were alone with the hours of night-time. The bright, low moon shone into their room.

‘I don’t know anything about you,’ she said.

‘Yes, you do, you know everything.’ He sounded bored.

‘You’ve never told me anything about your parents,’ she said, adding in her mind,
nothing true
.

‘There’s nothing to tell.’

Tony turned onto his back and stretched, and reached for a cigarette. She took one too, and lit them both. He stayed flat on his back, smoking.

She waited for revelation, confession – a clue to him – but he did not speak.

She watched his profile and wondered what she had done in marrying him and what awaited her.

‘Tony,’ she said, ‘will we be all right?’

‘We’ll be marvellous,’ he said. ‘Look at us,’ he waved his cigarette in a generous arc, ‘
killing
.’

‘It’s just – I want to make you happy.’

‘How quaint. Darling,’ he looked across at her and smiled with warm, ironic charm, ‘I hope you’re not going to buy an apron and start messing about with coq au vin.’

He’d done it. He had made her fears sound funny. She loved him.

‘Fondue set,’ she said.

‘Chicken brick.’

And they laughed loudly in that moonlit night, hoping someone would hear them and be disturbed.

In the morning they swam in the chilly sea, thick with salt on their tanned bodies, and fought through the choppy waves to shore.

They got back to London as the leaves were turning and Nina went straight into a short week of rehearsals and tech runs for the transfer of
In Custody
from the Nag’s Head to the Duke of York’s.

Tony’s wife was starring in the West End in a play that he had produced; he moved the
Wot, Not Married?!
poster to the downstairs loo, where everyone would see it but no one could say he didn’t know its place. The revue was still coasting along, making him money while he slept, and he was free to raise his standards, to travel the regionals looking for another play, and read the stack of submissions he had neglected.

The upstairs room at the Lord Grafton was vacated and the flaps, cyc and lighting rig flogged off to other companies; nothing left but a little money in the bank.

Leigh and Paul looked for work, calling friends and circling ads in the back of
The Stage
, but for now, unemployed, they had their evenings free. It was luxurious. They lived on savings and Luke’s wages and ate out of tins, and Leigh went to Biba with girlfriends in the middle of the day to try on hats and drank coffee not just to keep awake. The grief for their lost company faded more easily than they had imagined, replaced by Paul’s enthusiasm for Luke’s work and the struggle to find him an agent, anyone who would read him and take notice of his talent.

The three of them went to all the plays they’d been missing, saving money by sitting up in the gods or seats where they had to crane their necks around columns to see the stage, then met up in the interval to talk. They went to parties; early ones, where everyone else was looking for work in theatre too, and late-night ones for those whose shows had just come out. They drank Rioja and smoked hash – except for Luke – and argued and laughed. They went to shared houses in unknown streets and sat on beanbags with burn-holes in them, spilling foam, or rickety kitchen chairs wobbling on terracotta kitchen floors. They listened to music for hours at a time and lay in bed until late in the morning because there were no rehearsals to go to.

Leigh was the first to find a job. It was the best she could have hoped for.

‘We can eat,’ she announced, flushed with pride and confidence, returning from the interview.

It was the first cold day of the year, wind whipping the tainted leaves from the trees before the stems were weak enough to drop them, gritty dust flying up from the pavements.

‘Bloody brilliant!’ said Paul, and hugged her.

‘Call me the last-minute-girl,’ said Leigh, taking a bow. ‘Up for ASM at the Strand, right? But then the stage manager who interviewed me, who was really nice, sent me over to the Duke of York’s, because the SM there has chicken pox and they used the excuse to fire her too because she couldn’t –’ she laughed ‘– manage! The whole place is a
mess
, I’m going to have to sort
everything
out.’

‘Stage manager? At the Duke of York’s? Fuck. Brilliant.’ Paul hugged her.

Luke grinned. He patted her shoulder, smiling. ‘Well done,’ he said.

Leigh blushed and went back into the safety of Paul’s arms. ‘They were really nice,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why me.’

‘Why not?’ said Luke. ‘You held Graft together with string and glue.’

‘I’m probably carrying all the fired-one’s chicken pox germs. She was there to hand-over and she was stumbling around like a plague victim.’

‘What’s the play?’ asked Paul.

‘
In Custody
. Same cast. Nina Jacobs and Henry Fidele. They’re opening a week on Wednesday.’

Luke stood up, quickly. ‘Cool,’ he said. ‘Monday, then?’

‘Monday.’

They went out to the Fulham Road to celebrate; pizza and red wine, and got home late, Paul and Leigh quite drunk and kissing their way to the sitting-room floor and laughing as they kissed.

‘Goodnight . . .’

‘Night.’ And Luke went to his room alone.

He lay in bed to the sounds of records being played and their voices through the wall. He saw Nina Jacobs kneeling before him. He felt her very close to him; the imprisoned girl and the closing-in of cell doors accompanying him through the night.

When Nina was playing the part of Elena in custody, she visited the heart of herself. It was the only time in her career that she had felt such honesty. It was entirely personal and yet released her. She existed only as the work dictated, within the moment. She had no nerves. In rehearsals, she could be businesslike, holding back, walking through the new blocking, taking her part in the machine of the production growing about her easily and with confidence. But on the stage, in performance, she lost herself in focused truth. Between shows, afterwards, getting ready to go on, even then, she savoured the knowledge of her talent, and her present success. She felt it with exquisite nostalgia because she knew how precious it was, that she might never find such joy in her work again. It was not in keeping with the rest of her existence. And it did not in any way represent the reality of her marriage with Tony. In that, she lived the perpetual insecurity of pretence.

Their house was not her home. Tony dictated the redecoration and the entertaining. Tony decided the food and the colours and who they would see. Once it was up and running he lost interest in
In Custody
as he had in
Not Married
. He hardly ever came to the theatre and had no sympathy for Nina’s growing exhaustion as the weeks of the run went by. He was proud of her triumph and of having found the play for her and expected her to be consumed by it but he didn’t want to hear about how it had gone that night, or if the director had been in. Marianne gratefully filled the gaps. She telephoned her daughter every morning at ten –
Darling, you’ll never guess
– while Nina was still in bed with the papers and Tony across the landing in his study writing his column – yapping at the world about Ayckbourn or Olivier – up and down the stairs to collect people at the door for meetings, shouting down to Mrs Wills for coffee, or playing the piano in the living room. The walls were jungle green, with shiny potted plants in the corners and the furniture on deep-piled rugs. When
In Custody
was nominated for an Evening Standard Award, and Nina as its leading actress, Tony had bought the gloss-white piano to celebrate. When he was bored, or angry, the sound of thundering, bouncing chords would fill the house, along with his high voice, singing along a little sharp, like a rattling Noël Coward.

His Sunday-night parties had grown with his success, not aspiring any longer, but buzzing, happening and desired. Nina often dreaded them, they stole her one night off, but when she looked around at their guests and saw the living face of their achievement she warmed herself with it, grateful not to be alone with her husband.

Tony took a lot of cocaine, chopping the lines with a razorblade on a mirror on his desk or the glass coffee table in the sitting room. She dreaded his taking it at night because it made him impersonal – more impersonal – in bed with her. Strung out, numb, he took delight in games that discomfited her; the subtle manipulation of her body and heart. His controlling her like that triggered adrenalin that occasionally excited her but more often sickened her. Just the way he held her arm, or pressed her neck, or trailed a thing she could not see across her body when her face was pressed into the pillow coloured the nature of their sex. When he was working, he took coke to focus and when he was hosting his parties or out with Nina and entertaining he took it for fun and to quell his appetite. He didn’t want to put on weight. Like her mother, he watched Nina’s figure.
Careful
– he would murmur, warningly, if hungry from her night’s work, she absent-mindedly broke off pieces of bread and ate them before her steak and salad arrived. Occasionally she had them both together –
careful
,
naughty-naughty
– one on one side, one on the other, winking at each other and poking her taut waist to check for a spare tyre.

Nina did not communicate much with the backstage crew. She was polite but very much the star. She had learned from her mother’s example that she didn’t have to be best friends with everybody to do the job. Tony had bought her a fur coat. She took pleasure in wearing it to the theatre over jeans, hair tied back roughly but sweeping through the dusty warren of corridors to her dressing room protected by its richness. She found she did form friendships of a kind with the men, but hardly at all with the women, taught by her mother as she had been that they were jealous, and would not like her.