They are booked for six weeks. They stay for nine months.
By June, Lucille is well enough to join them.
And Babe is complete.
The first weeks are cold. The Audience queues amid snowdrifts. There are fuel shortages. Coal is scarce. They register by candlelight at chimerical lodgings, and hand over ration books in return for the plainest of food. They open in Newcastle, where the theater is so poorly heated that their breath plumes like smoke from funnels, even under the lights, and later they gather for warmth around their shared fire at the Royal Station Hotel.
He does not care. He is home.
And he begins to understand that in this changed country, with its bombsites and its dead, it does not matter that they are older men.
That they have made poor choices in the name of poorer pictures.
That their personal lives have become fodder for gossip and newspaper columns.
What matters is that they came back.
In London, floodwaters rise in the thaw. At the Palladium, Babe is in costume hours before curtain. Babe cannot sit, Babe cannot rest. The stage is his home, not Babe’s. Babe is always nervous before a live performance, and the Audience made real. Thousands are waiting, with thousands more to come. Babe is sweating so much that Babe’s clothing is soaked, his shirt transparent. Babe has lost weight—austerity favors him—but Babe remains a big man.
You have to relax, he says. They already have one flood outside.
—I can’t remember my lines.
—You can remember your lines. You’ve just forgotten that you remember them.
Babe stops pacing to stare at him.
There are times, says Babe, when I don’t know where the real you ends and the other you begins.
—If you need clarification, you could call some of my ex-wives.
As if they could help, says Babe, and resumes his pacing.
When they take to the stage, the Audience rises. The noise is unlike any that he has heard before. The Audience cheers and claps in unison, becoming one voice of approbation, a perfect series of adulatory strikes pulsing from the dark. It begins as a joyful sound before growing deeper, more elemental. It transforms, and in transforming, it liberates.
It drowns out the orchestra.
It drowns out their voices.
It drowns out war and pain and fear and loss and hunger and grief.
It drowns out death itself.