Fallout (36 page)

‘We’ve been off book for over a week, Nina,’ he said, with a sing-song intonation, casting his eyes to the ceiling.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Nina, ‘I’m sorry.’

And she fainted.

Seeing her crumple to the floor, dead white, the others immediately sprang into life, forgetting their ungenerous thoughts for the drama.

Nina came to consciousness with a clammy sweat over her face. She had her head in Joan’s lap. Malcolm was kneeling at her side and the other actors were standing over her like mourners at a grave.

‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ said Nina.

They all took a step back. Nina sat up and somebody handed her a glass of water. The stage manager was hovering behind Malcolm’s shoulder, a mousy young man, called Joe.

‘All right, love?’ he said.

Behind his shoulder she could see Tony. His face was a mask of boredom. Nina closed her eyes. She felt better. She took some more sips of water.

‘Did you eat lunch, dear?’ asked Joan, patting her with dry, fat hands.

‘Yes,’ said Nina, who hadn’t.

Then she heard the actor playing Tom – Tom who loved Mary and lost her to the chaos of his father’s hand – whisper to his stage father, ‘Pregnant . . . ?’

‘But whose?’ said John to him, and they laughed.

Nina turned over onto her hands and knees, determined to get up. Her head felt detached from her body. She thought she might have imagined they said it. She felt them all looking at her.

‘You’d better go home,’ said Malcolm. ‘Go
home
, love, have a good night’s sleep and forget all about it. We don’t need you until Friday, do we, Joe?’

‘Not till Friday,’ echoed Joe.

Nina nodded. She got to her knees.

‘I’m fine,’ she said.

She saw Tony’s hand come into her line of vision, his long white fingers. She took it. He helped her to her feet.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said to them all. ‘I’m so sorry.’

She sat quietly, staring out of the window of the taxi on the way home.

‘I can’t do this part,’ she said.

‘Don’t be silly,’ said Tony absently.

‘Tony – I can’t.’

He didn’t speak to her again until they were at the house. Bright afternoon sun shone down and blackbirds sang as he opened the door to the dark hall.

‘Luke wrote a different girl,’ said Nina, ‘and I can’t play her.’

He turned to her. ‘That’s your problem, love, not mine,’ he said.

‘Is it what you wanted?’

‘Me?’ He was surprised.

‘Did you know this would happen?’

‘You give me far too much credit,’ he said. ‘How on earth could I know you’d humiliate yourself? And in
his
play?’

‘You’re pleased,’ she said, wonderingly.

‘No,’ he said. He paused, and went to her, taking her hand. ‘You don’t understand, it is you who hurt me. I only want you to be happy. You’re my wife.’

He let go of her hand and went to his study and Nina went up and to the back of the house, to the chaise in the tiny room, and sat.

She could still hear the blackbirds singing, and Tony’s feet above her as he went about his room. She felt insubstantial, like balsa wood, a stick figure. She picked up the telephone and dialled Luke’s number. As she dialled she heard Tony pick up the extension and the moment’s sound of his breath before he covered the mouthpiece with his hand.

‘Hello?’

‘Luke?’

‘Hello . . .’

In that one word she could hear the weariness, the fear for her – or of her – that she had weighed upon him. She thought of Tony waiting, listening, upstairs.

‘Luke,’ she said, ‘I’m leaving him.’

‘You’re—’ He stopped. Then, ‘Really?’ as if she would lie about a thing like that, as if he didn’t think that she loved him.

‘I’m leaving him now. Will you be there?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes.’

When she had put down the phone she went to the hall. There was no sound from above. She climbed the stairs. Tony’s study door was closed. She went to her room and filled a suitcase – underwear, a few changes of clothes, make-up – the long habit of years of rep and packing quickly on tour made it easy.

When she left her room with the suitcase she knocked on the door of the study. There was no answer.

‘I’m going now,’ she said to the blank door, and she left.

She felt nothing as she walked the sunlit street towards the King’s Road and caught a taxi, nothing as she watched the streets that separated her from Luke go by. The taxi took her up through Knightsbridge and across the Park to Bayswater and the ease of it amazed her. It was just a drive away.

They turned into Moscow Road. He was standing on the pavement outside.

‘Just there,’ she said to the cab driver. ‘Where that man is standing.’

The taxi stopped. She got out and Luke paid the driver, fumbling for coins and dropping them in the gutter while she stood in the warm, bright sunshine by her case. Then he turned to her. He didn’t say anything, he just put his arms round her.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’ He picked her up, like a bride. ‘You need to eat more,’ he said.

‘Absolutely fabulous gossip! Unbelievable,’ cried the actress, throwing her arms out to the crowd at the table.

‘Nina Jacobs has run off with Luke Last!’

With happy consternation, exclamations, guesses and rumours, the group fell upon the news like lions tearing the hide of a gentle zebra on the African plains.

‘She’s been having an affair with him for
months
,’ said the actor to the other actor, and the director next to him said, ‘And Last’s play? What will happen with the play?’

‘God knows – he left Maggie O’Hanlan and Paul Driscoll high and dry.’

‘Or maybe they left him – it might not be up to much, who knows?’

The food was abandoned for this new feast; the papers they had been poring over for friends’ reviews, the first night they had been at earlier, everything was forgotten but this.

‘I always thought she was a bitch.’

‘Mind you, Tony’s been up every rent-boy in town for years.’

‘He must be hell.’

‘She’s hell, too.’

‘Oh, I think she’s sweet.’

‘And Luke Last is a genius – and so attractive.’

‘Genius, really? There’s a word to conjure with.’

‘Didn’t you laugh in
Paper Pieces
? So
clever
.’

‘Laugh? I cried.’

‘Well, he must be deeply neurotic, of course.’

‘Apparently. Nina Jacobs? My God.’

‘I know!’

And so it went on. The only people in London not talking about it were any who happened to be in Tony’s company; then the conversation was assiduously respectful. And the scandal was not just in the air, it was on the page – clotted lines of news print in the
Standard
, the
Mail
– photographs of Nina and Tony leaving theatres, their wedding, Luke circled in white in the middle of a crowd. It was good enough to eat. It was a full meal.

Before Nina awoke the first morning after she left Tony, Luke was up and out, hurrying, buying food and flowers for her, blinkered by delight and anxiety.

When he got back she was sitting up in bed and on the telephone.

‘Goodbye,’ she was saying, shakily, to someone, ‘and thank you, darling, I’m so sorry . . . But I am. Bye.’

She put down the phone and smiled at him, pale with dried tears.

‘That was Jo. I’ve asked her to see if she can get me out of this play,’ she said.

This play. His play.
Diversion
.

Luke put down the shopping bags and took her the flowers. He sat on the bed.

‘I can’t believe I’ve done it,’ she said.

‘They’ve got nearly two weeks. They’ll recast. He can say you aren’t well.’

Nina nodded bleakly.

‘My name will be mud in this town,’ she said, with a rather poor American accent. He smiled anyway.

‘No,’ he shrugged, ‘you’ll be all right. Girl like you?’

‘Better than wrecking your play.’ She stopped and looked down. ‘I wish we could get away.’

‘Then we will,’ he said and kissed her.

Later, they walked in the park, slowly, and then went for lunch. It was a blank. The quiet before or after battle. In the afternoon he left her alone and did not say where he was going. She tried to read and then watched television – children’s programmes because that was all there was; quite comforting, with nanny-like presenters in stripy jumpers and talking animals, until she was distracted by the honking of a car outside in the street. It did not stop. She got up and went to the window.

Luke was standing by a maroon and white Triumph convertible. It had the roof down. He gave a small bow and Nina stood at the window, like Juliet, and laughed.

Chrissie Southey was in bed when Nina called her.

‘Darling – where could you be?’ Chrissie rolled over and cradled the phone, the hot weight of her pregnancy dragging at the ruined muscles of her waist.

‘I’m at Luke’s. Could you do me the most enormous favour? Are you using Trapps?’

‘Not for months – we’ve been so busy, darling, and I’m afraid it’s a tip.’

‘Luke will come by for the key, is that all right?’

‘Any time, I’m holed up like a fat hedgehog and Alexander is filming, the bastard.’

They left London that afternoon, cold-boxes and cases in the back, and bottles of wine, steaks in bags with ice, bread and cheese, and Nina in a hat to keep her hair from the wind.

‘I’m sorry I ruined your play,’ she said, while they were sitting at lights, the three-year-old engine of the Triumph steadily growling. Luke was trying to get used to the gearbox, and putting the lever through the gears one by one, with his foot on the clutch. He glanced up at her when she said it.

‘You haven’t ruined it,’ he said. ‘It’s just a play. They’ll sort it out.’

The way he said it –
just a play
– she didn’t see a glimmer, hear a note of anything more. He dismissed his play and she believed him. Her fear receded, he did not hate her; he had chosen her above all things.

A woman in a short, bright-yellow dress with white flowers printed on it, a pram festooned with string bags and two children hanging onto her heaved herself across the road in front of them.

But still –

‘I shouldn’t have . . . forced that part,’ she pressed. ‘She wasn’t me.’

‘You’re an actress.’

‘But, Luke, who was she? Mary.’

The lights changed.

‘Who was she? She wasn’t anybody. I made her up. And Tom isn’t me,’ he said, reading her mind. ‘I bloody well hope not, poor bastard.’

They crawled in steady progress south, towards the suburbs.

‘It’s all right, the car, isn’t it?’ he said.

‘It’s lovely. I’ve never seen you drive.’

‘Got my licence up north with Paul. We shared the Transit. Never driven in London, though. Leigh always liked to drive Janis the Beetle.’

‘Janis for Janis Joplin?’

Luke smiled. Laughed – thinking of some part of his life that she didn’t know about.

‘What?’ she said.

‘Yeah, Janis Joplin – she was like that.’

‘Who, Leigh?’

‘Yes,’ said Luke, smiling again, remembering. ‘Silly names for things.’

Nina tried to stop it but she hated that smile; it was so easy, he seemed so light when he thought of other girls, not her.

‘The first time I saw you I thought she was your girlfriend,’ she said.

‘Leigh?’ He was surprised.

‘And then I thought she must be your sister. You look so alike.’

He frowned at this. ‘Never thought of it,’ he said.

‘You do.’

Then the traffic moved and he changed gears up, and up again, as they left the city for a wider view.

Trapps was Chrissie’s bolt-hole in the Sussex downs. It had been the scene of many drunken silly weekends with Tony and she and then, once or twice, with Alexander too; a tumble-down cottage at the end of a muddy track with four bedrooms, no central heating, wood stoves and fields and woods all around the small post-and-railed garden. The track was not muddy now, but overgrown with nettles that brushed the bottom of the low car as they approached and budding cow-parsley trailing and bumping at their sides. Nina held her hands out of the car and touched it, the smell of grass on the cool air, fresh and lively as she breathed it in.

‘This house is always so
dark
,’ she said, as she unlocked the cottage door. ‘It’s a good thing we brought sheets, Chrissie doesn’t keep them here because of the damp.’

The stone-floored hall was a jumble of mismatched wellingtons, spiders scuttled.

‘I love it,’ said Luke. ‘I’ll get some logs.’

There was a wood-pile, covered, in the garden and Nina unpacked the car while Luke carried logs in and lit fires in both the downstairs rooms and the stove in the kitchen. Only in the height of blazing summer was the cottage warm enough to do without.

‘I’ve just realised the most wonderful thing!’ called Nina from the car, pulling bags from the open boot. ‘No telephone! We’ll have to go into the village! Oh dear, how
ghastly
, we won’t be able to speak to our very cross agents.’

And in London, in the mess they had left behind: the Depot, Paul, Maggie, the cast, director and producers of
Diversion
all waded in the debris, finding ways to fix the chaos. After forty-eight hours of wrangling, Nina’s agent, Jo, implacable in her loyal assertion Nina was unwell, and the rest of the cast quite openly relieved to be rid of her, Hannah Gold was cast as Mary. Tony ceased attending rehearsals, too, and nobody could say that he was missed.

Hannah Gold found Mary quite naturally, in the lines and within herself; she had a stoical, steady heart. Coming from three years in series television with her bosom crushed into a corset and dreadful scripts, she was happy to be returning to theatre, and had enough of a name to satisfy Lou and Tony. She didn’t mention she’d worked with Luke before – and had slept with him, too, more than once over two happy months, some years before. They had found one another easy companions. She didn’t think her nostalgic reminiscences would go down well with the company at the Trafalgar, so she kept her memories of him to herself; their laughs – the delight he had in the curves and shape and kindness of her. Hannah learned her lines fast, kept her fears to herself, and a week later they were in the theatre proper, for the dress-run.