all the cast of the current play had melted away home, but a small hard core of Friends of the Theatre Workshop remained talking to Stella Pinero who was sitting in one corner. A few people were hanging on because they had heard that Nell Casey, star of a transatlantic famous soap, and booked to play in the Festival, might appear.
Here too was Gus Hamilton, current star at the Old Vic, who would be joining the Festival in French Without Tears and The Cherry Orchard. He was also teaching a group of local students in a Drama Workshop. Getting to Know the Bard, he called it. He was doing it for peanuts, just one peanut, as he said himself. Gus was never greedy about money but he was shrewd about how to advance his career. He was standing on his own, drinking a glass of white wine, a posse of his admirers having just left.
There’s something I ought to tell him, thought Stella. Then it happened before she had a chance. Oh dear, she thought, Gus is going to be furious.
Casey came in through the swing door and met his gaze across the room. She stood still. ‘My heart stopped,’ she told herself afterwards. ‘Just for one second, I stopped breathing.’
They moved towards each other, reluctantly, but irresistibly impelled.
Casey began to breathe again, but her breath was hard inside her like a knife.
‘I thought you were dead.’
‘Not funny. You knew I wasn’t dead. I’m still on the Equity list. You could have looked.’
‘I’ve been in the States.’
‘I was on Broadway.’ Off Broadway, but that was smarter.
‘Not that kind of dead,’ she said. ‘Not dead dead.’
‘Is there another kind?’
‘Dead to me.’ Her voice dropped.
‘You always had a duff hand with dialogue, Casey. I’ve told you that before. It’s why you haven’t been more successful. You can’t give a line the right weight.’
‘I am successful. And you played off Broadway.’
‘Aha,’ he said triumphantly. ‘So I’ve come back to life, have I? Not dead at all.’
‘And you got lousy reviews.’
‘Better than you did, dear, for your extremely lousy Amanda.’
‘Dead spiritually and emotionally,’ said Casey.
It looked as though they were about to embark on one of the stand-up fights that had broken their relationship in the first place. They had a fascinated audience all round them, drinking it in. Casey and Gus at it again.
Then Gus held out a hand. ‘Come on, Nelly. Kiss and make up.’
Casey swung on her heel. ‘You ought to have stayed dead.’
John Coffin, walking into the room, thought: Who are these people who are behaving badly? Years and years of knowing Stella Pinero and having a stage-struck sister had not accustomed him to the idea that a scene was words but not deeds and a quarrel was not for ever. Probably not even for the next ten minutes.
Still, this one had looked real.
The girl, tall, beautiful, reddish hair (he liked red hair on a woman but not on a man), a thin and delicately boned face—did he know her face?—was talking to a group of three, then moving on, being hailed, kissed and exclaimed at. Someone asked her if she had ‘brought it with her’. He made his way across to where Stella sat. ‘What was all that about?’
‘Oh, you’ve turned up?’
‘I said I’d be late. So what was it?’
‘They knew each other well once, and were going to be married. May still be,’ she added thoughtfully. Only indefinitely postponed. Owing to injury.
‘What got in the way?’ From the manner in which they assaulted each other he would have said they were a perfect match.
‘Something rather nasty. A death.’
‘Oh?’
‘Don’t prick up your detectival ears.’
‘Bad word.’
Nell Casey finished her tour of the room and ended up by Stella. ‘That was painful.’
‘I should have warned you he was here.’
‘Are we both going to be working in the Festival?’
Stella prudently held back the information that they were cast in the same play, the Rattigan. Wonderful publicity to be got from their pairing, she had to put the show first. ‘Apart from work, you need never meet.’
‘We have met,’ said Casey.
‘Isn’t it about time to call it a draw?’
‘No,’ said Nell. ‘Niet, non, nein. Is that clear? No, no, no. I’ll never forgive that shit. And you heard him just now.’
To Stella’s relief, she turned to John Coffin, and held out her hand. ‘I’m Nell Casey. I know who you are, I’ve seen your photograph in the papers.’
‘Surely not.’
‘Yes, and I saw you on TV. You were over in Los Angeles on some policemen’s conference. You said …’ She stopped there, perhaps she couldn’t remember what he had said. ‘Well, it was about women as victims.’
‘I ought to have had my mouth shot off.’
A tall figure, bespectacled, with greying hair and a small white beard, who had just come into the room, tapped Casey on the shoulder. ‘So you got here.’
She spun round. ‘Ellice! I didn’t expect you.’
Neither did I, thought Stella, a little disconcerted. Ellice Eden was a famous and caustic theatre critic, who had not so far been too kind to her productions although professing undying admiration for Stella herself. ‘Lovely actress,’ he always said. ‘Lovely.’ Unmarried himself, he was famous for a special sensitivity towards actresses, while asking the question if women could ever reach the height of the greatest of men. Garrick, Kean, Olivier, did they stand on their own?
Duse, Bernhardt, goddesses, he said. Among moderns he praised Ashcroft, Redgrave, and Bloom. Nor did he despise the screen. Hepburn, marvellous. Monroe, now there was a talent of a very special kind. Streep? He was still watching and assessing. But the reservation about the supreme greatness of women remained, so actresses were careful with him.
He had shown a special liking for Nell Casey, and true admiration for her professional skills. She was so young, she had a long way to go.
‘Came to see you. It’s been quite a gap.’ He held her at arm’s length. ‘You look more Pre-Raphaelite than ever.’
‘“By the margins willow-veiled, slide the heavy barges trailed.” You always did like the river,’ she laughed.
He
