Fallout (9 page)

Then he stepped back from her, and shook his head, and laughed.

‘Don’t chat up the stage management,’ he said, and left.

Leigh lay next to Paul in her clothes, slept hardly at all and waking first, watched him for a while. The early-morning light showed his paleness and the silver gleam of his hair, which was brown in the shadows. He needed to shave. The stubble was sandy; not so much a shadow as a burnishing, a softening of his jaw.

The night before was at her back like a dream or fever. She felt Luke wrenched from her; his painful absence. He had not liked her enough to stay. She refused to countenance humiliation but it had its way with her anyway.
Don’t chat up the stage management
. His mouth and hands on her face and neck. She had been assaulted by her reaction to him – had plainly imagined something quite different to his experience. Foolish. Trusting. She settled against the pillow, against the wall. Set her jaw. Shut her eyes, was grateful Paul was sleeping and could not see her. It would take time and careful sense to push Luke from her mind.
He is one of those men,
she thought, to fix him in her controllable universe,
just one of those men – that cause pain and don’t think.
Her father had been one. Charisma and blind hunger; she had never known what her mother meant by it but now she saw. Now she had felt it. Just because her mother had fallen in love with a man like that, it didn’t mean she must. She would be well-guarded. She would. Slowly, she came back to herself.

Paul was a quiet sleeper, kindly and untroubled. The morning light touched them.

At seven she got up and went to make tea.

‘Where did Luke get to?’ asked Paul as soon as he sat up, disorientated and disarranged. He scratched and shuffled his clothes about when he knew she had her back turned.

‘He left,’ said Leigh. ‘At about three.’

‘He’s on his rounds, Thursdays,’ said Paul. He shook his head to wake up, like a cartoon character recovering from a punch.

They went into the Lord Grafton together for nine o’clock sharp, through the cold stale smoke of the pub in the morning light and up to the theatre. They were casting the men from ten. Mike and Jack hadn’t arrived yet, it was just the two of them.

‘They’ll be here soon,’ said Paul.

They should have been talking about the day, making sure they had the pages ready, but they sat in silence, each on a separate step, a few feet apart. Leigh’s mind felt thin with sleeplessness and drained of feeling.

Paul was examining his hands, front and back, turning them. They were big hands, broad, with short square nails and no visible veins. He looked at them as if he were assessing his soul, the maleness of himself, and then, joining them together in resolution, he looked straight up and at her and said, ‘Will you come out with me one night?’

Leigh knew that it was a serious question. She wanted him to hold her in his arms. She imagined telling him about Luke.
Don’t chat up the stage management.

‘You don’t have to,’ said Paul, ‘it’s not part of the job or anything.’ And he smiled grimly, anticipating rejection.

‘Yes, please,’ she answered.

They heard Mike Wall’s coal-dust smoker’s cough as he came up the stairs.

‘Beautiful morning,’ he said.

Luke had no sleep at all. He walked the five miles from Camden to the depot in Hammersmith and had to make do with his ordinary clothes, and getting the stink of rotting bins on himself. He borrowed boots and gloves, which stank themselves.

He could only think, in febrile sleepless repetition, that Paul wanted Leigh and that she was just the girl for him. She was as nice as he was, and strong like him. He thought of Jack Payne, leching about her being a principal boy. But she wasn’t Peter Pan, she was Saint Joan. She ought to have armour and a sword. Leigh had nothing wrong with her the way Paul had nothing wrong. They were of good stock, with no shadows cast over them from behind. They were not like him, they were not contaminated.

It was hard physical work catching up to the cart as it crawled; lifting the dented metal bins from a standstill; shouting to each other, keeping it going. Normally, Luke gained energy from rising above the shit as all of them did; businesslike absurdity, dirty jokes. But that morning he did not speak. He just thought about Leigh and that he must not want her.

Then home, coated in the stench, broken glass in the soles of his boots, hair stinking of the air that breathed from the back of the dustcart. He cleaned up, scrubbed – nails, arms, back of neck – covered himself in Pears soap like washing socks out in a basin. He did not feel the lack of sleep. He hoped Paul had got up the nerve to ask Leigh out. Paul didn’t mess about with women any more, not for a couple of years, and even when he had he was half-hearted about it. He was serious, looking for a girl he could really like.

Good luck to them; it was not for him. He needed the drug of sex, not that, not the tiny sharp thing he felt last night with Leigh, the prospect of raw, sweet kindness. He didn’t recognise it and it couldn’t draw him.

When he got to the theatre he ran up the stairs and stopped, getting his breath, before opening the door. An older actor was reading, obviously uncomfortable, and there was a feeling of awful endurance in the room. Luke slipped inside, against the wall, and looked at the tableau of the others on the steps.

They all, in their way, greeted him – a nod, a raised hand – except Leigh. She kept her eyes down on the page, her thick, dark hair hiding her face. Paul, just past her, smiled at him and went back to watching the actor, but he moved his hand – not onto Leigh’s shoulder or arm, but to rest on her jacket, thrown onto the step behind. It was enough.

Luke saw them together and despite himself, despite all his certainty, he felt nothing but loss; the breaking of something precious in the heart of him that he had not known how to keep safe. Frightened, he shuddered the feeling from his skin. He pushed his coat sleeve up his arm, rubbed his neck – restored himself. He was pleased for Paul. He was. He smiled as a familiar restlessness overtook; he felt the habitual painful joy of searching and the lack, the lack, the distance from love that was his moulded shape, the fallout that had warped his heart.

On the morning of Nina’s twenty-third birthday she was washing out her tights in the basin of a boarding house in Cambridge, squeezing the gritty water from the toes and soaping them again, with a bar of Lux. Lynsey de Paul was singing ‘Sugar Me’ on the radio by the bed where her mother was lying, wearing a towelling dressing gown over her old silk one.

At breakfast that morning Marianne had reached over the doily and teapot to hand her a red lipstick, unwrapped.

‘Happy Birthday, my darling,’ she said. ‘By the time I was your age I had had you, and your father had disappeared off to Australia . . . but then I also had something of a film career. You’re not as young as you think you are.’

Nina had imagined when she left drama school she would have to fend for herself, but in all the towns they went to, all the theatres, rehearsal rooms, bedsits and boarding houses, Marianne had been her constant shadow. She altered Nina’s costumes and fixed her face, took her part in rows with directors, fought for her with her agent.

They had been in Cambridge for ten days. Before that it had been Worthing. Before that, London. In London the job had been a subversive pantomime that Marianne condemned as pornography. Nina had been the front end of an angry camel stitched from sack-cloth, released from her normal inhibition by the anarchy of the production and giggling with the rest of the camel, a down-to-earth girl named Suzy. Suzy had stocky legs for a camel and didn’t care if she ever worked again because she was in love with the lighting designer. The writer and director said the piece was about the absurdity of Christianity. The Church had been publicly and gratifyingly offended, but the dwindling audiences remained largely mystified.

Suddenly, though, in the past weeks, there had been a change. When Nina was galloping about the London stage as a camel, Marianne met a theatrical producer named Tony Moore. The Worthing run was fraught with telephone messages and stage-door notes. Immediately they moved into their Cambridge digs Marianne had slipped away; train tickets and a small suitcase, taxis throbbing by the rehearsal-room door. For the first time in her professional career Nina had been alone. She presented herself at rehearsals without her mother; went to the pub afterwards unchaperoned. It irked her that her new freedom was stalked by fear, as if she depended upon her mother’s tight harness for safety. She had dreamed of kicking over the traces, but she had missed her company.

The birthday lipstick, unfashionably scarlet, sat on the glass shelf over the basin on the opposite wall from the bed. Nina ran the cold tap over the tights again, her reddened hands kneading the flesh-coloured nylon.

‘
Oh dear, I feel so sad
,’ said Marianne behind her, reading the script she was holding.

‘
Bored, dear, bored. Not sad
,’ recited Nina back, wringing out the tights and hanging them on the radiator. ‘
Call things by their right names
.’

She dried her hands on the balding towel that hung beneath the basin.

‘. . . blah blah . . .’ said Marianne. ‘
I can see the snow falling
. Is this what passes for drama these days?’

‘That’s not helpful.
It has snowed. It will snow
. . .’

‘. . .
Yawn
.
Zithern
.’

Nina yawned, obediently, and mimed playing a zithern. Marianne laughed.

‘I can’t imagine that’s accurate. Have they
found
you this rumoured zithern yet?’

‘Not yet. We have a lute.’

‘Darling, they’re not going to black you up for this?’

‘Japanese people aren’t black.’

‘You know what I mean. Slitty eyes. Wigs.’ Marianne riffled through the pages. ‘It’s like a ghastly intellectual
Mikado
.’

‘It’s a very exciting piece,’ said Nina, who was trying to convince herself. ‘Iris Murdoch, Mummy?’

‘She isn’t even a dramatist, she’s just dabbling. Aren’t you glad I wouldn’t let you cut your hair? I should think that’s the reason they cast you.’

Nina went to the end of the bed and sat, pulling a corner of the blanket over her feet.

‘
Such
a drag.’ Marianne put the script down. She leaned forward and cupped Nina’s face in her hands. ‘You’re so pale. You should make more of an effort. I’m going to have a bath.’

She got up, shedding the two dressing gowns like a skin despite the cold, and collecting her sponge bag and towel from the chest of drawers.

Nina picked up the script again, but Marianne paused at the door, her body beneath her nightdress taut and ready.

‘Darling, I want you to meet Tony,’ she said.

Nina looked up. ‘Why?’

‘He’s a very nice man.’

Nina felt her heart jump uncomfortably. Inexplicably she abhorred the mention of her mother’s lover’s name, dreaded the closeness of the association.

She paused before she said, ‘Mummy, he’s
your
very nice man.’

‘Don’t be silly. He’s a producer. He’s casting.’

‘Oh.’

‘
Now
you’re interested.’ Marianne’s tone was lascivious.

‘I’m actually not – I’ve got rehearsals.’

‘Not until Monday. Come tonight. It’s your birthday.’

It wasn’t an invitation; it was an order.

And so Nina and Marianne dressed for Saturday-night dinner-after-the-theatre in London at five o’clock in the afternoon in Cambridge. Marianne, in a wide-legged silk trouser-suit with a knotted plaited belt, lounged on the bed back-combing her hair and smoking, as Nina tried first her maxi-skirt and printed blouse, then her mini-dress over the same blouse, then her hot-pants, then her denim skirt, her waistcoat, her deep-necked pale blue party dress – until the floor was awash with wrinkled rejection. Finally she unearthed a tiny, rather old, navy-blue mini-dress with a white round collar.

‘This. Yes. And lots of eye make-up,’ Marianne instructed. ‘There’s a difference between pure and dowdy. Thank God for your legs.’

‘Why?’ Nina was hot and frantic, and close to tears after an hour of her mother’s constant assessment of her anatomy. ‘What does it
matter
?
God
.’

‘Believe me, it matters.’ Marianne put out her cigarette. ‘It’s too late for my legs now.’

‘They help you walk about, don’t they?’

‘Very droll. My knees have dropped. No more miniskirts for me.’

Nina finished putting on her shoes, damping down her impatience, and then turned to look down at her mother on the bed. She looked mournful; not her usual unassailable self, but small. Nina, standing above her, felt the power of youth against her parent’s slow diminishing.

‘You’re so beautiful, Mummy. You always have been.’

‘No, darling,’ said Marianne, and met her eye. ‘My time is over.’

They took the train, make-up glaring in the unforgiving light. Nina read, while Marianne sat, barely moving. Her expression – and Nina hesitated to look – was set and her lips closed tight, calculating something beyond her sight.

They took a taxi to the Strand and arrived at 10.30 exactly.

Nina had never been to the Savoy before. The taxi turned in and approached the hotel, deeply recessed off the street, like a backdrop on a stage, and stopped at the entrance. Stepping out, Nina waited while her mother paid the driver. The hotel was the most glamorous thing she had ever seen. She stared up at the 1930s lettering. Marianne turned to her daughter with her handbag over her arm. The liveried doormen did not look at them as, with her cigarette in her mouth, narrowing her eyes against the smoke, she adjusted Nina’s shiny hair over her shoulders.

‘I have a good instinct for luck, my darling,’ she said when she had finished, ‘and tonight feels lucky. Don’t you think so?’

Nina did not know why Marianne’s eyes were bright. She did not think it was for her, but seeing her excitement, she could not help her heart reaching out.