‘You touched her. You dared. And never came near me again. That’s why you’ll die, and I’ll still be here, watching over her for you. Waiting for her to die too, in her own way, at her own pace.’
First her laugh, then his.
And he said: ‘I think you’d better look more carefully at the table, and see where you went wrong.’
Then her scream. Not, thought Elaine Mancroft seven or eight yards away, a particularly convincing scream.
‘What have you done to me?’
‘It’s what you’ve done to yourself,’ said the man by the sofa. ‘The poison’s in you, Madeleine, not in me.’
Another scream: really, the poor dear would have to do better than that on opening night. Elaine stood in the wings and tried to subdue her own agitation by deriding the performance of the two on stage. In a few minutes’ time she would show them what power and passion really meant. All their inept fumblings would be overshadowed by her final entrance and the long, vibrant closing speech.
She shivered. She could not stop shivering.
The play had a compelling theme, and a leading part that would have been coveted by any actress. But it had not been fashioned for any actress: it was Elaine Mancroft’s, hers and hers alone.
She could not afford to bungle it. Not again; not now, at dress rehearsal.
As she stood in the wings, she murmured the closing lines over and over again to herself, a thing she had not had to do for years. The wrong words kept swimming up in her mind. Worse, they kept swimming up in her throat. She tried to swallow, and gagged on them.
Somewhere Adelaide was laughing at her.
She tried to blot out the sound with the sound of those crucial last lines.
‘You must make your last entrance very steady,’ Daniel had exhorted her. ‘It should be doom-laden, implacable. But when you speak, you’re very quiet. Make them wait for you—and don’t say one word until you’re at a standstill. Then make it final, despairing...beautiful. You can do it, Elaine. If only you’ll do it as I’ve written it.’
He must by now be as scared as she was that she would do it quite another way.
Down there in the stalls he was sitting and waiting for her to make a mistake. Her head echoed not only with his advice but with his barely concealed scorn.
What possessed her?
And what possessed Daniel? Did he, in his heart, want her to ruin everything so that he would have an excuse to be done with her? He wanted her to leave, she was sure of it. To go as Adelaide had gone. Or, if not as violently as Adelaide, still to go.
The air whispered with Adelaide’s thin, vengeful laugh.
Nonsense. Adelaide was dead. She would never hear Adelaide again.
She heard her cue. ‘The lies will have to stop.’
It was impossible to set one foot in front of the other. Out there on stage she would meet Adelaide again: face to face this time, perhaps.
Roderick Grenville glanced over his shoulder. Ten more seconds, and the pause would be too noticeable.
She forced herself forward. But she was moving too quickly. She slowed, and made her way deliberately to the sofa on which the wife of the drama was now crumpled in death.
Grenville turned with a melodramatic start. He had always been one for the grand manner and the violent gesture. Today in the Green Room he had been overpoweringly histrionic even before starting rehearsal: flexing his muscles for the grandiloquence, which his little claque of faithful followers would expect on opening night.
Elaine spoke; and saw the shock in his face.
What had she said wrong?
She tried to grasp the lines and hold them steady. But they were coming out of their own accord, and they were not the lines Daniel Clegg had written. Adelaide was taking over. Adelaide was forcing her to say things unrehearsed and unuttered before. She found herself leaning across the sofa, haranguing Grenville and the unresponsive corpse beside him. Her voice was soured by the whining accent she knew to be Adelaide’s.
‘It’s the wrong ending, it wasn’t like this, you know it wasn’t. The wrong ending....’
‘We will not say goodbye.’ Grenville struggled gamely, absurdly.
‘The wrong ending,’ she shouted. ‘Why are you afraid to write the true one?’
The sofa appeared to be tilting up to meet her. A face swam across her vision and became two faces; three. The back of the sofa caught her across the stomach, and she doubled up over it.
When she was pulled upright, it was by Daniel, his fingers biting into her arms.
‘What the devil are you playing at?’
‘It’s too close,’ she sobbed.
‘Too close? To what?’
‘To reality. But not quite. Not honest at the end, is it?’
‘What are you raving about?’ When she did not reply, because her throat was too choked with fear for any reply, he insisted: ‘What is it—what’s got into you?’
‘Adelaide. Adelaide’s got into me.’
He let go of her arms and stepped back.
The other two edged their way uncomfortably yet gloatingly around the sofa. They would have so much to gossip about later. It would all add splendidly to the Clegg-Mancroft legend.
‘Adelaide’s gone,’ said Daniel. ‘You know that as well as I do.’
‘I know she’s waiting for me. Waiting to get into me.’
‘Go home. For God’s sake—’
‘That’s where she’s waiting now. At home. And she comes at night when you’re not there. And on stage she slides her way in between me and my lines, she won’t leave me alone.’
‘You want everyone to hear you?’
‘Everyone will hear you—your version. On stage. In a string of falsifications.’
He tried to steer her across the stage, away from the attentive group in the wings.
‘Go home.’ he said again.
‘I won’t let her destroy me. And I won’t have you helping her, do you understand?’
‘It was a good rehearsal, it was wonderful right to the end. We all get frayed at this stage. When you’ve slept it off—’
‘Sleep is death, and I won’t die. I won’t, I won’t.’
‘No, you won’t die.’ He attempted a laugh. ‘You’re
