no traffic at all this morning. Well, afternoon now, let’s be pedantic. What a lovely day. Words come into his mind in Ken Dodd’s voice. ‘What a lovely day for looking up an old lover.’ Careful. He doesn’t want to sound like Nappy Ever After.
He becomes very bold and pulls up right outside the house. His heart is racing. Supposing she’s there. She might be visiting. There’s no sign of a car, but maybe she hasn’t got a car. Actresses are probably funny that way. Maybe she can’t afford a car.
He is safe. Nobody goes in or out. He should leave. It would be better to leave. But he doesn’t.
He thinks about the last time he spoke to her, nine years ago, in Iquitos. He thinks about the last time he saw her in the flesh. A year ago, at the Coningsfield Grand, as Cleopatra. He’d had to go with Maggie. It had been a dreadful evening, because suddenly, seeing her on the stage, he had realised that he no longer adored Maggie, he had only been pretending to do so for a long time now, she had become obsessive about cleaning, she bravely tolerated occasional sex, it was her duty, and she lived for her thirty-four children, the two that were her own and the thirty-two that were her duty.
He had thought, as they had sat waiting for the curtain to go up – well, not the curtain exactly, he could remember every detail, they hadn’t used a curtain – as they had waited for the lights to go down, he had realised that it would be very difficult for him to break away from Maggie, present himself at the stage door, and say, ‘I’d like to see Miss Walls, please. I’m an old friend and I want to tell her how marvellous she was.’
But that had been the worst thing of all about that awful evening. She hadn’t been marvellous. She hadn’t been bad, of course she hadn’t, in fact she’d been quite good, but it was no good being quite good, not as Cleopatra; she had never for one moment been the Queen of Egypt, she had been Naomi Walls bravely portraying the Queen of Egypt. The stillness, the power that she had shown as Juliet, it hadn’t been there. Of course she was as good an actress as ever, you couldn’t lose abilities like that; there must have been some other explanation, anything, a dislike of the actor playing Antony, an unsympathetic director whose vision had clashed with hers, an illness perhaps from which she had only just been recovering, or perhaps, even for the best of them, in long runs, there were performances where you’d got it, and performances where you hadn’t. It had let his emotions off the hook about going round to see her, because he couldn’t have gone if he couldn’t have told her that she had been marvellous, but it had been terrible to witness. At the end, the applause had risen when Antony had come on for his solo bow. It hadn’t dipped for her, but it hadn’t risen further, and it should have done, and she had known it, and he had known that she had known it.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
