Bess found the second theatre ticket underneath the first, like a bill someone had hoped she wouldn’t notice.
“Who is coming?” she asked.
The little speaker beside her toaster lit up. “You prefer not to attend the Belvedere alone.”
“I preferred to attend with Colin.”
“Yes.”
“Colin is dead.”
“Yes.”
The speaker maintained its pleasant light. Bess turned it face down on the tea towel. It carried on explaining the purchase to the worktop.
Two seats in row F. Final matinee, two o’clock. The ticket office would close at one thirty. Since she had used her entertainment allowance, there was no money left in that account for the taxi home.
She could stay in and ask for both tickets back. It would be sensible. Her daughter had used that word on Sunday, while moving the good plates to a shelf Bess could reach. Bess had waited until she left and put them back. The new shelf was near the hob; the plate she had taken down on Monday was greasy before she put anything on it.
She turned the speaker over.
“One ticket. I want to attend with one ticket.”
“Would you like me to find a companion?”
“I want you to find my brown coat.”
Its camera rotated toward the hall. That was something it could do well. It found her coat, reminded her that she’d left her purse in the other coat, and arranged the outward taxi. Bess put the speaker in her handbag with its travel battery. She disliked it less when it was useful.
The Belvedere’s letters had been removed from the canopy. Pale rectangles remained above the doors. A man on a ladder was winding a string of bulbs onto his arm, though the theatre would not officially close until after the evening show.
“Could you leave us the B?” Bess called.
“Nothing to do with me, love.”
“Neither was the question, apparently.”
He looked down. She had already gone inside.
The foyer smelled of floor polish and damp velvet. She had worked there for nineteen years, first taking coats, later sitting in the prompt corner with a shaded lamp and a glass of water nobody was allowed to borrow. The floor had been red then. Now it was grey, except under the brass rail where feet had never reached. That strip was still red.
At the ticket window, a boy wearing a headset looked at the two printouts.
“We don’t do returns on the day.”
“Your machine bought one too many.”
“Our machine?”
“Mine. I thought we might share the blame.”
He smiled, then checked the clock. One seventeen.
“I can ask about a resale. But you’ll need the manager.”
“Does the manager have a name?”
“Inez.”
Bess slid the tickets back into her purse.
For a moment she considered the bus. It stopped three streets from her flat. She could walk the three streets. The hill was unpleasant, but she could take it in pieces. She might buy bread on the way and use the baker’s chair.
“Is there another manager?”
The boy shook his head.
From behind the foyer curtain came a woman in a black rehearsal skirt, carrying a bucket with two paintbrushes stuck in it. Inez had the same long face Bess remembered, but the silver streak at her temple was new. She set the bucket on a folded newspaper.
“Bess.”
“Inez.”
“I heard you’d moved.”
“Only across town. People tell it as though I’ve crossed a sea.”
Inez looked at the printouts. Bess explained about the speaker, omitting Colin. She disliked using him to settle arguments.
“We can sell it if somebody asks,” Inez said. “Leave it at the window.”
“And if nobody does?”
“Then nobody does.”
That was fair. Bess had come hoping for fairness and now found it rather meagre.
The headset crackled. The boy pressed a finger to it.
“Leah’s still stuck outside town. She says the coach isn’t moving.”
Inez shut her eyes. Behind her, someone onstage dropped what sounded like an entire kitchen drawer.
“Has she sent the book?”
“A scan.”
“I need her cues, not just the words.”
Bess knew who Leah must be. She had once sent her prompt book to a young stage manager with notes in green ink. Later she had been told the theatre was using a new edition. She had said of course it was, and never asked for her book back.
“I know the play,” she said.
“You knew a version of it.”
“I could read the new one.”
Inez lifted the bucket.
“Thank you. Enjoy the performance.”
The curtain settled behind her. Bess stood at the window with her hand on the second ticket until the boy gently pulled it free.
She had expected anger. Inez’s ordinary dismissal was worse.
Twenty-seven years earlier, Inez had played the daughter in The House on Ferry Street. It was her first lead. On opening night she had stopped after the line about selling the piano, and Bess, hearing a blank, had fed her the next sentence.
Too loudly. The front rows heard. There was a laugh, a small one that spread, because the sentence was “I shall manage without your help.”
Bess had joined in. She had been embarrassed. That was the explanation she had offered afterward, when Inez stood in the prompt corner still wearing her stage shoes.
“I wasn’t lost,” Inez had said. “I was waiting for him to put down the glass.”
Bess had said nobody could tell the difference from where she sat. Inez had stared at her. Then she had left the theatre, and Bess had remained in the chair beneath the lamp.
The speaker stirred in her bag.
“Your return journey is not yet booked.”
“I’m aware.”
“I can contact Ruth.”
“Don’t.”
“Ruth is your preferred contact for unexpected travel changes.”
Bess took it out. “This one is expected. You told me about it in the kitchen.”
The light dimmed. She found the travel settings and removed the permission to call her daughter without asking. Colin had set that up after a taxi failed to arrive one winter. The taxi had eventually come. Colin had stayed on the phone for the whole forty minutes, telling her about a broken cupboard hinge.
She could remember the hinge better than most of what he’d said.
A bell sounded. In the auditorium, a steward held the door while she walked to row F. There was a painted house onstage, with three doors and a window too high for anyone to see out of. The wallpaper had changed. The piano hadn’t. Its missing upper panel still exposed the little felt hammers.
Her old seat at the side of the stage was empty. A tablet glowed under the prompt lamp.
Bess opened her programme. Inez was playing the mother now. The daughter was a young woman whose photograph showed the determined smile of somebody who had been asked to smile six times.
At one forty-two, Inez came through the side door and crouched in the aisle beside Bess.
“The tablet keeps going dark,” she said. “The boy from the box office can’t follow the scene and find the page at the same time.”
Bess closed the programme carefully.
“I’m asking you to read,” Inez said. “Leah’s book. No additions.”
“Of course.”
“And no prompt unless we look at you.”
Bess wanted to say that a professional knew when a prompt was required. She could almost hear the sentence. She gripped the folded programme until its staples pressed her palm.
“If you look at me,” she said.
The prompt corner was narrower than she remembered. Someone had put a fan where her feet belonged. Inez moved it. There was no water.
“May I have a glass?” Bess asked.
Inez brought one herself.
Bess set her handbag under the chair and propped the tablet against a sandbag. The screen filled with handwritten arrows, crossed-out sentences, and a large note in the margin: DO NOT GIVE THE PIANO LINE EARLY.
She looked toward Inez, but Inez was fastening a cuff.
The boy showed her how to keep the screen awake. His fingers flew across the menus. Bess asked him to do it again, slowly. He did. She repeated it herself before letting him leave.
“You can photograph the pages,” the speaker offered from her bag. “I can anticipate the next line.”
“You can tell me when it is four o’clock.”
“Would you prefer three forty-five for your journey?”
“Four.”
She turned its volume down and put it beside the water. It looked like a small guest who had been given a place at a table.
The lights went out. Bess had forgotten how completely a theatre could go dark.
Then the house appeared, and Inez entered carrying an envelope. Her first line was about a bill. Bess remembered it as a line about the weather. For several pages she felt the old words running underneath the new ones, faster, trying to reach the actors first.
She followed Leah’s green marks. Door. Bell. Turn. A long silence in which the daughter watched the mother fold the bill into a paper boat. The audience shifted. Bess waited.
When the daughter’s eyes finally came to her, Bess gave three words, softly. The girl took them and went on.
In the interval the ticket boy brought her an envelope.
“Sold your seat,” he whispered. “A woman came just before we shut.”
Bess looked across the auditorium. The woman in F12 had a red scarf folded in her lap. Ruth owned a red scarf. For a second Bess felt furious at the speaker. Then the woman turned to speak to the man behind her, showing a face entirely unlike her daughter’s.
She counted the notes in the envelope. Enough for the taxi, with something left. She put the money away before anyone could ask whether she needed help with it.
In the second act, the daughter announced she would sell the piano. Bess knew the scene by the pressure it made in her ribs. The father was supposed to put down his glass before the daughter’s answer. The actor raised it instead.
Inez stood very still beside the piano. The daughter waited. Somebody coughed in the front row. The actor drank, held the empty glass, and looked toward the prompt corner.
Bess glanced at the book. A green arrow connected his speech to a pencilled action: GLASS ON PIANO. He had asked her. She could give him the words immediately, make the gap disappear.
She pointed at the glass.
He looked down as if surprised to find it. He set it on the piano.
“I shall manage without your help,” the daughter said.
Nobody laughed. She was talking to her father. There was no room in the sentence for Bess.
The scene moved on. Inez shut the piano lid. A little later she needed a word herself. She looked toward the corner, and Bess gave it. They completed the play that way, with stretches when Bess was unnecessary and two moments when she wasn’t.
At the curtain call she stayed in her chair. Inez beckoned, but Bess shook her head. The space between the sandbag and the fan was difficult enough without an audience. She clapped from the corner, the tablet warm against her wrist.
Afterward, Inez came back in her own cardigan.
“I should have let you wait,” Bess said.
“Today?”
“Then.”
Inez sat on the edge of the stage. The painted wallpaper shivered as somebody began taking it down from behind.
“I spent a long time deciding I hadn’t been any good,” she said.
“I know.”
“You don’t, really.”
Bess looked at Leah’s notes. “No.”
Inez took the tablet from her and put it on the stage.
“We’re moving the small shows to the room over the baths. Leah can’t do Thursdays. If you’re interested, come to a rehearsal.”
“I can’t promise I’ll be fast.”
“You weren’t fast today.”
Bess looked up.
“It worked,” Inez said.
The speaker chimed four times. Inez regarded it.
“Is that yours?”
“Yes. It bought a ticket for my husband.”
“Oh, Bess.”
“It sold eventually.”
She reached down for her bag. Inez held it open while Bess put the speaker inside. Leah had called from a taxi during the curtain call; she would be there for the evening. Bess heard the box-office shutter rattle up in the foyer.
In the taxi, Bess unfolded her programme. On the back she wrote Thursday, six. Baths. Rehearsal. Her handwriting jogged when they crossed the tram tracks.
“Would you like transport arranged?” the speaker asked.
“Not yet. Put it in the calendar.”
“One attendee?”
“One.”
At home, she found the pencil had rubbed onto the lining of her purse. She copied the appointment onto the kitchen calendar, where she could see it from the table. Then she put the programme beside Colin’s old one, which had the wrong cast and a coffee ring across the piano scene.
She took it out again. The programme had a photograph of Inez standing beside the daughter, her hand almost touching the girl’s shoulder. Bess put it on the table, open to that page. Colin’s old programme went back in the drawer.
Loading comments…