Olivia's First Term (6 page)

Chapter Thirteen

Olivia stood in the middle of the corridor, desperately studying her timetable and feeling as if she was caught in an endlessly revolving door from which there was no escape. Her brain had turned to mush and she couldn't work out if she was supposed to be heading to singing in the Callas Rehearsal Room, musical theatre in the Sondheim Space or ballet in the Pavlova Studio. The Swan was like a rabbit warren spread out over three floors. Trying to find your way around was difficult, and nobody in her class except Georgia and Aeysha had made any attempt to help her. Even Tom McCavity, who had seemed so funny and nice, was now keeping his distance as if she had somehow offended him.

She got out her map. Olivia knew that the theatre, cafeteria and school hall took up the whole of the ground floor of the huge building, but she had been surprised to discover that there were also music practice rooms there. The upper floors were even more warren-like – a mixture of classrooms and rehearsal rooms. Once, walking past an unmarked room, she had heard terrible screams and had rushed in thinking somebody was being murdered, only to discover that the seniors were rehearsing
Macbeth
. She had backed out of the room, red-faced and embarrassed.

She kept turning up in the wrong rooms in the right clothes or the right rooms in the wrong clothes. She didn't really care; she hated every class equally. She didn't mind the morning academic classes so much, but the vocational lessons in the afternoon were hell. Fortunately they were a hell that stopped at 5 p.m. each day when the final bell sounded and the children tumbled wearily but excitedly out of their classes, rubbing their aching muscles and dreaming of their future careers in the theatre.

Olivia wondered whether she might just sneak to the girls' changing room, stay there for the rest of the day and hope nobody missed her,
or whether Abbie Cardew or one of the prefects would discover her and send her to class. Abbie, at least, was always kind to her.

Around her swirled children dressed in practice clothes, all heading purposefully towards their next classes, ballet shoes slung over their shoulders and copies of scripts or musical scores tucked under their arms. At the end of the corridor she spotted Eel skipping her way towards a jazz class, talking so animatedly with her new friends she didn't even glance at her forlorn elder sister. Olivia wished that Eel would notice her and run up and take her hand, but she didn't. Olivia was overwhelmed by a sense of grief: she had lost her old life, and her dad, and now she was losing Eel to the Swan and dancing. She had always been the one who had tried to keep her crazy little sister safe, but now it was Olivia who needed someone to hold her hand.

More pupils passed by, including a group of older boys talking loudly about forming a boy band, and another boy, carrying a cello, who stopped for a moment to scan the upcoming auditions board and accidently rested it on Olivia's toe. A gaggle of excited girls pushed
past her to join a group of children being taken for a screen test for a remake of
The Railway Children
. Most of the children took no notice of her, but a few nudged each other as they passed. Olivia had already made an impression, and it wasn't an entirely good one.

Things had gone wrong over breakfast on the first day when Alicia was explaining the timetable to her granddaughters.

“You'll be taking all the dance options, Eel,” said Alicia, “and I'll also be arranging a number of private classes for you. We'll reassess the situation in a few weeks to see how you're progressing.” Eel wriggled about in her chair and beamed happily.

“Now, Olivia,” said Alicia, turning to her elder granddaughter. “It's probably best if you follow a more general vocational curriculum until we discover where your talents lie.”

“They lie in the circus,” said Olivia sulkily. She hadn't slept a wink and felt as edgy as a crocodile in a handbag factory.

“So Jack tells me. But I'm afraid there isn't any circus training at the Swan. It's really not an area in which we have any interest. We're a performing arts school and our students are
heading for the legitimate theatre or TV and the movies, not the sawdust ring.” Alicia was irritated by Olivia's sulky face and spoke more harshly than she had intended.

She'd spent so many lonely hours fantasising about being reunited with her grandchildren, and had spent so much time and effort trying to track them down. But now they were here, sitting at her breakfast table, Olivia's resentful face just brought back all Alicia's memories of her arguments with her own daughter. For Alicia, whose own career had been brutally cut short by illness rather than choice, her daughter's decision to willingly give up the stage was incomprehensible, and she had never recovered from the shock of waking up one morning to find that Toni had run away to join Jack and the circus, abandoning both her mother and her career. She looked now at Olivia's wan face and memories of Toni came flooding back. She turned away as tears filled her eyes. Even looking at Olivia felt tender and painful.

Olivia watched her grandmother turn her back on her and felt totally bereft. Nobody cared about her or what she wanted; not Eel, who was thrilled to be at the Swan, not Jack, who, after all
the talk of partnership, had clearly decided he didn't need her, and definitely not Alicia, who hated the circus and seemed to hold some kind of personal grudge against her, too.

A week later she still felt exactly the same. Jack had been impatient with her on the phone when she had complained about how horrible everything was at the Swan, such as having to do ballet with the seven-year-olds, which was downright humiliating.

“I feel like an elephant in a room full of baby gazelles,” she said, but Jack had just laughed and said that elephants were much more interesting creatures than gazelles. Even Eel was unsympathetic when Olivia moaned about the Swan and about how she couldn't practise the high-wire.

“Why don't you just ask Gran if there's somewhere you can practise?”

“She'll only say no,” said Olivia, pushing out her bottom lip.

“You don't know until you ask,” said Eel patiently.

“I do,” said Olivia. “She's made it quite clear that she hates everything to do with the
circus and thinks that circus artists are no better than performing sea lions. She even seems to think that the ring is still sawdust. It's not worth the bother.”

Eel shook her head. There was no point in arguing with her sister in this mood; she knew from past experience that you just had to wait for the sun to come out again from behind the cloud in Olivia's head.

Standing in the corridor, Olivia turned her timetable round again and realised that she was due in acting. She turned miserably on her heel and headed up the stairs, dragging her feet.

Chapter Fourteen

Olivia slipped into the Wilde Room, hoping that nobody would notice her, and tried to make herself invisible in a corner. The class had begun long ago. Aeysha, Tom and William Todd were acting out a scene from
The Secret Garden
. Olivia had seen the three of them sitting together at lunchtime in the school cafeteria, running over their lines together while they bolted down vegetable risotto. They were taking this performance in front of their twenty-four classmates and Mr Shaw as seriously as if they were acting before an audience of a thousand people in a West End theatre.

Everyone watched them closely. At the end there was a tiny silence and then everyone applauded enthusiastically.

“I really enjoyed that. Thank you,” said Sebastian Shaw, before giving the children some notes about their performances. “Don't hurry too much, William; you're inclined to gabble. Good work, Tom. I like the way you use stillness and silence on stage. Aeysha, you need to think a bit harder about how Mary Lennox really feels. She's much more than just a monster; she behaves badly because she's lost everything she loves: family, country, an entire way of life. You've got to find a way of making us understand that all she says and does is informed by that.”

He invited the other children to constructively criticise the actors' performances. Sebastian Shaw was always talking about how important it was for actors to learn to be
self-critical
and said that process began by learning to discuss – but not judge – other people's performances.

Olivia glanced around and caught Georgia looking at her. Most people in the class kept their distance from Olivia, but she often found Georgia looking at her as if she was on the verge of confessing something momentous to her. Olivia turned away without acknowledging her. She liked Georgia and she needed a friend,
but she was wary because Georgia was always hanging around on the fringes of a group that had Katie Wilkes-Cox at its glittering centre. Olivia was determined not to have anything to do with a stage-school brat like her.

It was Katie who stood up now and went to the front of the class. She flicked back her hair and then launched into a speech from Shakespeare's
The Tempest
. She was playing Miranda, a young girl who has just witnessed a shipwreck in a terrible storm and is telling her father, Prospero, what she has seen and asking him to use his powers to stop the storm and save the ship's passengers.

Olivia watched, and thought about Jack and how the accident had turned their family life upside down and how he had been powerless to do anything about it. If Eel had never run into the road, they'd still be in Italy or maybe in Ireland or Brittany or Cornwall now, and she would be doing a double act with her dad. Instead she was at the stupid Swan Academy watching
Katie Wilkes-Cox pretending to be somebody else. Not very well, in Olivia's opinion. Katie, thought Olivia suddenly, wasn't being Miranda, she was
acting
being Miranda. Rather too loudly and slightly hysterically. It was false, like everything else at the Swan, thought Olivia, who hated the fact that everyone was so bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and eager to please. The way the jazz teacher, Mrs Merman, always said, “Smile, children, smile,” made Olivia want to snarl with rage and bite her.

Katie finished and everyone clapped politely. Sebastian Shaw made a few remarks, suggesting that sometimes in acting less could be more, and then looked around the class.

“Now, what do other people think?” Everyone hesitated. Nobody wanted to speak first. Mr Shaw's eye lit on Olivia sitting under her curtain of hair.

“Olivia, do you have an opinion?”

Olivia turned very pink and said nothing. She wished she could disappear. Everyone was looking at her.

“Olivia?” repeated Sebastian Shaw firmly.

Olivia looked up from under her hair at the expectant faces. She thought she heard
somebody giggle and whisper, “It watches, but does it talk?” The words rose angrily in her throat, very loudly and clearly: “It's silly. I think acting is silly. What's the point of pretending to be other people when you can just be yourself? It's just lying by another name. And there's no real risk; it's not like when you see someone doing something really dangerous such as flying through the air on a trapeze and having to grasp someone else's hand mid-air or hurtling head first down a pole. That's real, and the consequences of getting it wrong are real too. If you don't catch the hand or you don't stop in time at the bottom of the pole, you'll get injured very badly or die. But nobody in a play really dies. Acting is just faking it.”

A murmur of surprise passed around the class, and Katie flushed scarlet. Some people started to protest at what Olivia had said, but Mr Shaw raised a hand to silence them.

“I think what Olivia has said is very interesting. Olivia, have you ever seen a play?” asked Mr Shaw gently.

Olivia shook her head fiercely. “I don't want to either.” Her eyes flashed dangerously.

“Well, I hope that I will eventually
persuade you to change your mind, Olivia, because sometimes a play, a good play, tells more truths in two hours than most people discover in a lifetime. It allows us to experience things and feel emotions, sometimes terrible things and emotions, in a way so powerful that it becomes unnecessary for us to feel or perform those things ourselves in real life. Great acting isn't about lying, it's about daring to be totally honest. Great acting wears no clothes, it is completely naked.

“Olivia, I once saw your father on the high-wire crossing between two skyscrapers in New York; it was thrilling and felt as if I was watching something very dangerous. But I also saw your mother play Rosalind in
As You Like
It
here in London and that was thrilling, and I felt as if I was watching something very dangerous then too. In both cases the performer was utterly fearless. They gave themselves completely.”

He spoke with such passion that the entire class was silenced, and the quiet was broken only by the sound of the bell going for the next lesson. Mr Shaw had to rush off and everyone began to collect their belongings.

Olivia stood up and walked towards the
door, acutely aware that everyone was watching her.

“The cheek of it! Her, somebody so completely talentless, lecturing
us
on acting,” said Katie loudly and scornfully.

“I don't think she meant it like that,” said Georgia quietly.

“Oh yes, she did, dummy. And she said I was silly,” said Katie.

“No, she didn't,” said Aeysha soothingly. “She said that
acting
was silly. I don't think she's right but it's a point of view. I mean, I find football boring but loads of people think it's ace.”

“Either way,” said Katie ominously. “From now on, Olivia Marvell is dead.”