Stage Fright (6 page)

‘You mean?'

‘Clive and Belinda.'

‘Oh, no, surely not. Not Clive, I mean, uxorious isn't the word. He never stops talking about – what's her name? Roberta?'

‘Yeah, you're right – she's lovely, actually, and so are those daughters of his. And it's different now. In the old days before Aids, everyone used to be at it like rabbits, but that's all changed. In fact, I've never known a production with so little social life attached to it as this one. At the first opportunity everyone's off home like a shot. Even Jake and Geoff. Jake heads north to that girl in Leeds, Geoff is off in that Jeep to his wife in Wales.'

‘Oh, Geoff's married, is he?'

‘Very devoted, I gather. He and wife run a smallholding together. He showed me a photograph the other day. His wife looked really sweet. And it's an idyllic place. Tucked away in a valley in Snowdonia.'

She leaned over and with a few clicks the auditorium disappeared. For a moment or two the after-image of the lights blazed on my retina, then they too were extinguished. It was as if Stan had conjured up the whole glorious confection out of nothing and then dissolved it again into darkness. I could almost believe that it really wasn't there.

We made our way back down to the dock. When Jake was agitated he had a habit of rising up and down on the balls of his feet as if he was trying to compensate for his lack of height. He was doing that now.

‘Well,' he said eagerly, ‘Is there someone lurking there?'

Stan shook her head.

Jake's face fell. ‘Are you sure?'

‘Quite sure.'

‘They might be hiding?' he persisted.

‘More likely Belinda imagined it. Trick of the light or something.'

Jake was gazing at Stan intently. ‘Wouldn't it be worth going out front and having a proper look? After all, Belinda didn't imagine the lights going off. And shouldn't we have a look under the stage? They could be there – waiting until we've gone…'

Stan considered. ‘Perhaps it would be just as well,' she said at last. ‘I'll have to go back and put the house lights on. I'd better get a torch as well. We'll go under the stage and round the other side of the auditorium. If there is anyone there, we'll flush them out. If I ask Fred to come and wait in the dock, we'll have all the exits covered.'

There are dressing rooms and the green room on one side of the stage, but on the other there's only a corridor. To reach it during a performance there's a passage that runs along the back wall under the stage. We went in single file down a narrow flight of stairs. Stan went first, I followed, with Geoff behind me, still filming, and Jake at the rear. Where the light from the naked lightbulbs touched the wall beads of water stood out on the surface as if it were sweating. The space behind the orchestra pit was used to store props and the path behind them was narrow.

We were half-way through, when Jake said, ‘Jesus, what's that? I thought I heard something.'

Stan stopped and swung her torch round. The beam of light picked out a jumble of objects in surreal juxtapositions: a hip-bath with an old Singer sewing-machine balanced across it, a rocking-horse, a dressmaker's dummy draped in a dustsheet. Jake elbowed his way past Geoff, so that he was standing next to me.

‘There's someone there,' he said. ‘I know there is.'

‘Don't be silly,' Stan said, raking the floor with the torch beam. ‘Look at the dust.' There was an intricate pattern of paw prints. ‘No one's been in there for months except the theatre cat. Come on, let's get on with it.'

We emerged at stage level. This side was really only used for actors to make exits and entrances. The gloom was made more intense by the way that everything – walls, radiators, woodwork, pipes – was painted in a dark, reddish brown that was almost maroon. There was a typed notice stuck on the wall announcing that insecticide spraying had taken place.
DO NOT BRING FOOD INTO THIS AREA
, it warned. It was dated 2 September 1978: over twenty years ago.

Stan saw what I was looking at and grinned.

‘The land that time forgot. Hopefully they'll do something about all this when the next stage of the grant comes through.'

We followed her up some stairs and through a door into the dress-circle. It was like stepping into a different world. The brick walls with their peeling paint were replaced by red-and-gold striped wallpaper. Our footsteps had been loud on the concrete floor. Now they were muffled by a thick, brand-new, red carpet. We walked up the side aisle to the back. Even with all the house lights on it was darker here under the overhang of the gallery than it was at the front of the stalls.

‘No one here now,' I said.

‘If there ever was,' Stan said. She peered down the row. ‘Hey, what's that?'

‘What?'

‘There!' She pointed down the row.

I still couldn't see anything.

‘What is this? The ghost scene from
Hamlet?
' I only realized how much on edge I was when I heard myself snap that out.

Stan didn't say anything. She took my arm and pulled me closer so that I could share her line of vision. Jake and Geoff crowded up behind us. Stan leaned forward and gathered up the dustsheet. With a flourish, like a magician pulling the cloth off a fully laden table, she jerked it towards us.

The dustsheet came flowing down the row and I saw what it was she had been pointing at.

Chapter Five

I drove home in a very different mood from the day before. The weather was uncomfortably hot and muggy. Grace was feeling the heat, too. She cried as I negotiated my way out of Cambridge, and she didn't fall asleep until I turned off on to the A10. I'd gone only a couple of miles, when a lorry carrying a huge tower of hay bales pulled out in front of me. Specks and stalks of chaff and wheat dust eddied and darted about in front of me like sparks in the draught of a bonfire. I slowed right down and closed the car window. The heat was sweltering. On a day like this, the flatness of the fens and the huge empty sky were oppressive. I felt like a fly crawling across a table.

When I'd finally seen what Stan was pointing at in the theatre, I'd felt a shiver of unease. It hadn't been Belinda's imagination after all. There was a seat stuck down at the aisle end of the row. Someone had been sitting there. We had searched the theatre and hadn't found any more signs of an intruder. But we had found, right up at the back of the gallery, an unlocked door to a flight of steps that ran down to the foyer. The decorators were coming and going all the time. It wouldn't have been too difficult for someone to slip in and out unnoticed if they'd timed it right.

I didn't like the way things were going at the theatre. Up to now, it had seemed to me that we'd all been one happy family – a cliché, but that was how I'd felt. I'd been surprised at how smoothly everything had gone and how different it was from the academic world, where there is so often an edge of competition in even the friendliest of exchanges. But probably Stan was right, and we'd just hit the doldrums. If only I could talk things over with Stephen … if only we hadn't parted on such bad terms.

Ahead of me the tower of hay bales wobbled as the lorry went round a tight bend in the road. I slowed down even more and let the distance between us increase. It was impossible to overtake: there was a constant stream of traffic coming the other way. But I'd soon be home anyway. I turned off down the track to the Old Granary with a sense of relief. Look on the bright side, I told myself. There was nearly a week to go before we opened and as for Stephen, he wasn't the kind to bear a grudge. Generally speaking he was an easy-going sort of bloke. Probably he'd have rung from the airport and left a message on the machine. If not he'd certainly ring when he landed.

I slowed right down when I got to the gate. This time no black-and-white shape came hurtling out. I parked and got out of the car, plucking the shirt from my body. It was damp with sweat. Grace woke up and began to complain as I got her out of the car. I went up the path with her in my arms and sat down on a bench by the house to cool off. It was warm enough for Grace to be wearing just her nappy and T-shirt and her small body was hot against mine. Bill Bailey, my long-haired cat, came round the corner of the house. Grace stopped crying when she saw him. He stretched out on the grass at a discreet distance while Grace murmured nonsense and waved her hands at him. He blinked and yawned. He didn't object to her as long as she kept her distance; the little grasping hands were apt to fasten round his tail or to grab a handful of fur. I drank in the scent of the summer garden: honeysuckle on the wall nearby, a bed of sweet peas. The only sound was the gentle sigh of running water. I calculated the least I could get away with doing this evening. I could tuck Grace up in our bed and get in beside her with a sandwich and a peach, perhaps even a glass of wine, though not more than one. Then sleep, possibly even six or seven hours of it, if I was very, very lucky. Getting between those sheets would be like diving into a cool pool on a suffocating hot day. I could hardly wait. I gave a yawn, the kind that makes your eyes water.

I stood up and hoisted Grace on to my shoulder. Inside the house the phone began to ring. It was awkward holding Grace with one hand and fumbling in my bag for my key with the other. The thought that it might be Stephen made me even more butterfingered and when I did find my key I immediately dropped it and had to grope around in the laurel bush by the front door. I finally got the door open, and rushed into the kitchen.

I grabbed the receiver, afraid that I'd be a split second too late.

‘Yes, hello?'

There was silence on the other end of the line – then an exhalation of breath and with a quiet click the caller hung up.

Almost immediately the phone began to ring again. I snatched it up.

‘Who is this?' I snapped.

‘I beg your pardon?' The voice on the end of the line was a woman's, unfamiliar and rather husky. ‘Is this Dr James?'

‘Yes?'

‘You've been selected for a complete make-over of the façade of your house.'

‘I'm really not interested – look, did you ring me just now and hang up?'

‘Just now? No, but if I could just tell you about our offer: completely free, I assure you, no strings attached. We ask only that you allow us to take before and after photographs and—'

‘I'm sorry,' I said. ‘I live in a beautiful old weather-boarded house and there is nothing that you could do to it that wouldn't make it
less
attractive!'

‘You could save pounds on your fuel bills. May I ask, do you have double-glazing—'

‘Double-glazing! You must be joking! It's a Grade II listed building!' I slammed the phone down.

Grace had got bored and was beginning to cry again.

‘Oh, hell,' I muttered.

Perhaps if I put her in her cot, she'd settle down, and then I could have a nap myself. I toiled up the stairs. As I passed through my study, the little red light on the answering machine winked at me from my desk. I picked my way over the piles of books and papers on the floor, resolving for the hundredth time to clear up and deciding for the hundredth time that it would have to wait until the play had opened.

I pressed rewind. There was one call. It was from Cathy, my departmental secretary in college. She sounded worried.

‘Cass. I'm so sorry. There's this young girl in the office on work experience. She was only trying to be helpful, but she answered the phone to someone yesterday and I've only just found out that she gave them your mobile number. Apparently this chap said he was a visiting fellow at St John's and he sounded very disappointed when he heard that you weren't likely to be back in college until September. The name was Baldassarre. Professor Baldassarre. I hope you do know him. It's not the kind of name you'd be likely to forget, is it? See you soon. 'Bye.'

I sat down abruptly on the swivel chair by my desk.

No, indeed, I thought, it certainly wasn't a name I'd easily forget.

Not when it belonged to a man who had once been my husband.

*   *   *

Grace wasn't asleep by eight o'clock, nor by nine. Neither was I. I was pacing up and down my bedroom with Grace against my chest, her cheek on my shoulder. She had a clean nappy, she was full of milk, and as long as I was walking up and down or rocking her, she was a happy gurgling baby. But the instant she stopped moving she began a thin, high wail. There was something about it that reminded me of the cat on a car journey, something obdurate and measured about it. There didn't seem to be any reason why she should ever stop. Probably my own state of mind had something to do with it. My brain was seething and I couldn't settle to anything. It was so long since I'd seen Joe – since I'd thought of him, even. We'd completely lost touch after the divorce. And when had that been? Fourteen years ago? fifteen? We'd been so young when we got married. How had he tracked me down? It wouldn't have been difficult. I'd resumed my maiden name. I'd kept that through my second marriage. And with Stephen, well – I hadn't got round to tying the knot yet. It was a case of twice bitten …

And why hadn't Stephen rung yet?

I paused at the window and looked out towards Ely. The sky seemed too light for the darkening landscape, it was like one of those trick paintings by Magritte where a blue noon-day sky is matched with a dark, lamp-lit street. There was a prickling of little lights where Ely stood up from the plain. As I watched, automatically rocking Grace against my shoulder, the floodlights around the cathedral came on. The single tower at the west end and the elegant octagonal crossing tower sprang into relief. It was a sight I never tired of.

It was strange to think that where Stephen was the sun would be setting eight hours later. I pictured the plane high in the sky racing westward ahead of the night. It made him seem terribly far away. My own day seemed to have been going on for ever too. Having a small child is like having permanent jet lag. Time slows down and the boundaries between day and night become blurred. I tried to work out what time it was in Los Angeles. About 1.30 in the afternoon. And what time was his flight due in? I couldn't quite remember. I tried counting from the other end. The flight was leaving at ten o'clock and Stephen had said it was an eight-hour flight, so he must have landed hours ago.