The Understudy: A Novel (32 page)

The First Good Luck

Except that isn’t quite what happened.

What actually happened was this.

They talked for a little longer, then Stephen put some clothes in a bag. They brushed their teeth, then lay on the bed back to back to try to sleep, and within moments Nora was snoring her trawler skipper snore. Stephen turned and lay on his back, dozing intermittently, then waking and looking at the ceiling or the back of Nora’s head, the short hair on the nape of her neck. As was his inclination when happiness looked like a possibility, he started to worry. He worried that they might not be able to get a train, that the snow would stop them running, or the seats would be sold out, or they wouldn’t be able to find a hotel in Paris this close to Christmas, and the great escape would lose its energy and joy and spontaneity and turn into just another disastrous day-trip. He rolled over to face her back and, as an experiment, placed one arm gently on her hip, and without quite waking, she took his hand, and pulled his arm around her waist. Shortly after that, he went to sleep.

He woke again at 6:00
A
.
M
. He got up, took the phone into the kitchen, and tried to find a minicab office that was open. Finally finding one, he booked a car for 6:30, only waking Nora at 6:25, giving her the smallest possible window of opportunity to change her mind. This was his other great fear: that she might change her mind.

As required by law, the minicab was late, and they spent a tense fifteen minutes waiting, with their bags at their feet. Finally, at 6:45, the doorbell rang and they tiptoed downstairs and drove north, very slowly, across an eerily silent, deserted London in the back of a decrepit Volvo estate wagon with a backseat topsoil of broken cassette cases and old newspapers. The city felt as if it had suffered some calamity in the night, and the only sound to be heard was the dawn chorus of car alarms, Heart FM playing a selection of love songs from the movies, and Nora intermittently humming along to “Take My Breath Away” and “Up Where We Belong.”

Finally, they reached Primrose Hill. The cab pulled up outside Josh’s house, and Nora and Stephen looked at each other anxiously.

“Want me to come in with you?”

“I don’t think that’s necessarily a good idea, Stephen.”

“But you’re just going to go in, get your passport and leave, yeah? I mean you’re not going to wake him up or anything?”

“Just wait here. If I’m not out in fifteen minutes…” She started the joke, but seemed unable to finish it.

“What?”

“Nothing. Just…wait for me,” and she climbed out of the car, and tiptoed warily across the snow-covered forecourt, and disappeared inside.

The cabdriver—Nigerian, he thought—glanced at Stephen in the rearview mirror.

“She’s a very nice lady,” he said.

“Yes, she is.”

“Your girlfriend?”

“I don’t know yet” seemed to be the only honest reply.

The taxi driver nodded sagely, then after a while: “So—what do you do for a living?”

“I don’t know that either,” replied Stephen.

“You do not know very much, do you?” said the driver.

“No. No, I don’t.”

This seemed to end the conversation. Heart FM was playing Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” now. The driver, clearly a fan, turned the volume up, and they both sat and listened to the song all the way through, neither of them speaking, the cabdriver nodding along solemnly to the music, joining in with the chorus, drumming along on his steering wheel.

She’s not coming,
he thought.

They listened to “The Power of Love,” “I Will Always Love You” and “Unchained Melody.” Then commercials. Then they listened to “Love Is All Around,” “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You” and “The Greatest Love of All,” Stephen’s fingernails digging progressively deeper into his palms with each chorus.

Halfway through “Wind Beneath My Wings,” the cabdriver turned in his seat and said, “You know you must pay me for waiting time, yes?”

“Yes, of course,” said Stephen, peering anxiously out of the misty window.
So she’s not coming after all,
he thought.
He’s talked her out of it. She’s changed her mind. I’ll give her two more songs—no, three more songs—then I’ll give up and go. I’ll leave her bag at the door and go home. Three, four more songs, five more, then the commercials, and then I’m definitely going home.

Music continued to fill the car like exhaust fumes. They sat and listened to “Every Breath You Take” and “Endless Love,” and by the time “It Must Have Been Love” started, the tension in the car was becoming unbearable. The sun was coming up now, and the driver had stopped drumming along, and was looking at his watch, and sighing impatiently, and Stephen felt that if he heard one more crash of drums, or one more screaming guitar solo, then he would almost certainly start to scream too. Then finally, just as “Against All Odds” threatened to make the situation completely intolerable, Josh’s front door opened, and Nora could be seen, head down, running as best she could toward the car. She bundled herself into the backseat and Stephen could see immediately that she had been crying.

“Are you okay?”

“Fine, fine,” she murmured, shielding her face with one hand.

“Did you get your passport?”

She brandished it with one hand.

“And did you see—”

“Stephen, I don’t want to…let’s just go, shall we?”

“To Waterloo?”

“Yes, yes…” she snapped, impatiently. “…To Waterloo.”

They drove the rest of the way in silence, Nora pressing herself up against the car door, head resting against the window, biting her nails, Stephen too anxious to talk, and the plan that last night had seemed so perfect and apt and romantic, in daylight now seemed ridiculous, and impractical and fragile.

Finally, they crossed the Thames again, and pulled up outside the Eurostar terminal, and Nora turned in her seat and managed a bleary, red-eyed smile. “Can we agree not to talk about it?” she said. “No more talking about the past. Only the future.”

“Of course.”

They paid, overpaid, the driver, wished him a Happy Christmas, and Stephen went to buy the tickets for the next available train, anxiously glancing over at Nora every now and then, to make sure that she was still there, that she hadn’t run off. Then, not speaking, they went through check-in, boarded the train and sat next to each other, once again, in complete silence. It was only when the doors hissed shut and the train started to move, that they could actually look at each other, and smile.

They rattled slowly out of the station, and Stephen had to admit that, for the first time in a long time, the city where he lived seemed incredibly beautiful.

The train curled away from the Thames and south toward Kent.

“I’m going to try and sleep now,” Nora said, then sank down a little in her seat, and closed her eyes. He watched as she tried to rest her head against the window, her coat wedged uncomfortably between her cheek and the glass, her mouth pressed open. When the makeshift pillow slid down the window, she adjusted it, her eyes still closed, and rested her head once again. When that didn’t work, she shifted sides, and leaned her head against his shoulder instead.

“What are you thinking?” she asked, very quietly.

“Just that I’m glad you’re here.”

“Me too,” she murmured. “I’m glad I’m here too.”

She lifted her head, looked at him from under heavy eyelids, then leaned up and kissed him.

Perhaps this is it,
he thought,
my first good luck.

“Let’s just…wait and see what happens, shall we?” she murmured, with her eyes closed again.

“Okay,” said Stephen. “Let’s wait and see,” and he closed his eyes too, and did his best to try to sleep.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to the following people for their support, their comments and the kind loan of certain jokes: Camilla Campbell, Sophie Carter, Eve Claxton, Christine Langan, Michael McCoy, Tamsin Pike, Justin Salinger and Olivia Trench. Thanks to Valerie Edmond, for that story.

An ongoing debt of gratitude is owed to Roanna Benn, Mari Evans, Hannah MacDonald and Hannah Weaver. Special thanks are also due to Nick Sayers, Jonny Geller, Robert Bookman, Deborah Schneider, Bruce Tracy and all at Random House.

D
AVID
N
ICHOLLS
is the author of
Starter for Ten,
which has been adapted for the screen by Tom Hanks’s Playtone Productions. He also wrote the screenplay for the film. He is a successful television screenwriter whose British credits include
I Saw You
and
Rescue Me,
both of which he created, as well as the third season of
Cold Feet
(seen on Bravo in the United States). He co-wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of Sam Shepard’s
Simpatico,
which starred Jeff Bridges, Sharon Stone, Nick Nolte, and Albert Finney. He lives in London.

ALSO BY DAVID NICHOLLS

Starter for Ten

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

2007 Villard Books Trade Paperback Edition

Copyright © 2005 by David Nicholls

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Villard Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

V
ILLARD
and “V” C
IRCLED
Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Villard Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2005.

This work was originally published in Great Britain in 2005 by Hodder and Stoughton, a division of Hodder Headline.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Faber & Faber for permission to reprint nine lines from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” from
Collected Poems
by T. S. Eliot.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Nicholls, David.

The understudy : a novel / David Nicholls.

p. cm.

1. Motion picture actors and actresses—Fiction. 2. Triangles (Interpersonal relations)—Fiction. 3. Motion picture industry—Fiction. 4. Married women—Fiction. 5. Actors—Fiction. I. Title.

PR6114.I27U53 2005

823'.92—dc22 2005048653

www.villard.com

eISBN: 978-1-58836-505-7

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