Irene lay awake for more than an hour after Fin had finally stopped yelling at her about Jane’s debts. She was bitterly angry with him, not only for his lack of generosity to the daughter who had always adored him and taken his part in everything, but also because he had forced Irene to tell him how much she dreaded her meeting with Richard Orleton. Her one comfort was that Fin could have had no idea why she was concerned.
She had not spoken to Richard for nearly thirty years and she did not know whether he remembered her at all. They had met during her first year at drama school, when he was a star – the star, really – of the third year. Everyone had admired him, in spite of his sarcastic tongue and dangerous reputation. Looking back, she tried to work out why he had seemed quite so desirable when he was known to be untrustworthy and often foul to people.
It was partly, of course, because he was thought to be brilliant and destined for the top. He was also attractive, and in a rather unlikely way for an actor, with a long thin body and a surprising face with delicate features under soft, gleaming blond hair. In fact he looked more like a scholar than an actor, but there was an aura of power around him that few scholars could boast.
Irene had never been able to work out just where Richard’s power had come from, and she still could not decide. His reputation for rejecting people who adored him too obviously did him no harm; nor did his angry restlessness and his cutting tongue. And when he chose to bestow himself on someone he could make them feel almost godlike for a while.
For a time, a short time, he had chosen Irene. She had been at the Theatre School for only a few weeks when he first came near her. By then she had had to face the fact that her triumphs in school plays had nothing at all to do with whatever it was her new tutors were trying to teach her. Every day, she had to struggle to understand what they wanted her to do, let alone actually do any of it. She was alone in London for the first time in her life, aware that her family disapproved of the whole idea of the stage, lonely and frighteningly incompetent about the practicalities of living with three other girls in a rented flat.
Then one morning Richard had strolled in to one of her classes and everything had changed. Leaning against the wall he had watched the efforts of the ten nervous beginners, who had all recognized him instantly and become even more fumblingly inefficient than usual. Afterwards he had spoken to Irene and told her that she really had something, and that none of the other girls in her year had it.
The other students who had overheard him teased Irene for days afterwards, telling her that Richard just wanted to get into her knickers. That was a phrase she had not heard until then, but it was easily understood. Furiously angry, she had done her best to ignore them, and Richard too.
For the next few weeks he would often appear during her classes, but he showed no sign of wanting to seduce her. After a while, he casually suggested taking her to have a cup of coffee after class. She declined. He tried again a few days later. Eventually she accepted and found that she enjoyed herself. Thereafter it became a fixture of the day. Richard would pick her up at the end of the morning’s classes and take her across the road to the little café opposite the school. They would sit at either side of one of the red formica-topped tables and talk about acting. Irene had sometimes thought that the little she learned of the craft had come from Richard and not from the terrifying tutors with their incomprehensible Stanislavskian instructions.
Slowly she had begun to feel more at ease with him and had even, privately at first, begun to fantasize about how they might one day act together. The dreams had grown wilder and less and less confined to work, especially after he had taken her out to dinner in a tiny restaurant with a dance floor on which they had swayed, plastered against each other, for a delirious two hours one night. So happy had she become, and so nearly confident, that she had idiotically confided some of her hopes to one of her flatmates that night.
Irene had never discovered whether the flatmate had passed on the luscious bit of gossip so that it had reached Richard’s ears and made him drop her or whether the timing of his dismissal had been coincidental. Apart from one or two encounters at the local swimming pool, he had hardly ever spoken to her again and there had been no more shared dinners or even cups of coffee.
The combination of that humiliation, and the much greater loneliness that threatened to submerge her after Richard had stopped talking to her, had made Irene loathe everything about the Theatre School. But she had never been a quitter and had been determined to stick with it and let no-one guess how awful she felt. Thinking of ways to show how little she cared about the malicious amusement her predicament had caused, she planned to appear at the beginning of the second term in devastatingly glamorous new clothes. Her allowance would not stretch to the sort of things she wanted to buy and so she looked for a temporary and well-paid job to do during the Christmas vacation.
The first position she was offered was as nanny to three-year-old Helena Webton. Accepting it without a second’s thought, Irene had written to her parents to say that she would not be home for the holidays. They had remonstrated with her, but she had stuck to her decision.
Almost before she had unpacked and learned her way about Fin’s gloomy house, she had discovered the balm of Helena’s uncritical and apparently unalterable devotion. It was not long before Fin himself had come to seem almost as needy as his daughter and very nearly as appealing.
Handsome, tormented by the loss of his wife, working ferociously hard and obviously being brilliantly successful at what he did, he had seemed even more glamorous than Richard. Fin had also been much older and infinitely more sophisticated. The result was probably inevitable. Irene had never gone back to the Theatre School.
Life with Fin could probably never have remained on the plateau of bliss she had found at first, but after Ivo’s birth it had for a time become so bleak that she had begun to recast her memories of her brief time at drama school, concentrating on the few happy ones and persuading herself that the confusion and humiliation had not been so bad after all. Slowly she had rediscovered her old fantasies of acting with Richard and finding transcendental happiness in his arms before they took theatrical London by storm together.
With the familiar sound of imaginary applause in her ears she drifted off to sleep at last. It seemed only an instant before the alarm clock woke her at half past seven and she dragged herself out of bed in a fury of resentment to make Fin’s breakfast.
As she automatically boiled the kettle and the eggs and put bread in the toaster, Irene tried to forget her own rage and think sensibly of how best to persuade Fin to send Jane some money. It crossed Irene’s mind that one way might be to urge him not to send Jane anything at all and force her to face up to her debts herself. But, as Irene had told him, she was not deceitful and she hated the thought of resorting to that kind of manipulation. Besides, she did not see why she should stoop so low just to make him feel more comfortable about what he ought to be doing.
She heard him coming into the kitchen and turned to open fire. He smiled at her, which was so unusual first thing in the morning that it made her pause before saying anything.
‘I’m sure that it will go well today, Irene,’ he said as he sat down at the table. He did not even pick up the newspaper. In amazed silence she poured his coffee.
‘Orleton’s judgement is known to be sound and he has chosen The House on the Canal. You really do not need to be so nervous about it. It is undoubtedly a good piece of work. You should remember that.’
‘Perhaps,’ she said, pouring her own coffee. ‘Although it’s hard not to worry.’ Recognizing his gesture for what it was, she added as pleasantly as she could: ‘Thank you, Fin.’
‘That’s all right,’ he said as he picked up his newspaper and folded it open at the Law Reports as usual.
Irene felt cowardly as she fetched his boiled egg and toast and sat down opposite him in silence, but there was nothing she could do about it. After his almost unprecedented kindness, she could not bring herself to restart the battle over Jane’s debts. She hated the thought of her daughter’s being left in a noose of anxiety any longer than was absolutely necessary and hoped that the tension would not drive her into doing something stupid.
As she acknowledged that fear, Irene corrected herself at once. She knew that whatever Jane might do it would never be stupid. Irene promised herself and her absent daughter that she would tackle Fin properly and force him to do the right thing when they both got back to the house that evening. One more day would not make all that much difference to Jane and it might make quite a large difference to her parents.
Fin left for court at his usual time without saying anything else at all, and Irene went upstairs to get ready for her meeting. Wishing that her brain were sharper and her face less ragged-looking, she dressed with care, wanting to make it plain to Richard (if by any chance he should have remembered her) that she was no longer the ingenuous, manipulable girl he had known, but a confident, well-off, talented and sophisticated woman.
A suit seemed much too formal and middle-aged, but most of her good clothes were suits, chosen for occasions on which she had to play up to her role as a judge’s wife.
In the end, after an hour of dressing and undressing and a brief foray into the garden to check the temperature, she settled on a baggy peacock-blue jacket over a shocking pink shirt tucked into a pair of very dark purple coarse linen trousers. She was tempted to wrap a bright yellow silk belt around her non-existent waist, but she thought that might be going too far.
Looking at herself in the mirror, glad that she had managed to recreate most of the effect the hairdresser had produced the previous day, she thought of Fin’s likely comments about her choice of clothes. Parrots would, she was sure, have figured somewhere in his insults.
‘Well, Fin can go stuff himself,’ she said aloud and with great satisfaction.
By the time she got to the building where Richard had his permanent office, much of her confidence had dissolved. She felt her heart banging in her chest. Her hands were sweating disgustingly, too, and she had to find a cloakroom so that she could wash and dry them before she had to risk shaking his. It was absurd at her age to be nervous, but, absurd or not, that was what she was.
She was deeply relieved she had washed her hands when she was shown into his office five minutes later. He was sitting at a big polished wooden desk, reading a file when his secretary opened the door and announced Irene. She thought he looked like any middle-aged man at work. The blond hair had gone completely grey and he was wearing tortoiseshell spectacles.
Then he looked up, and she almost took a step backwards. His long face with the finely marked, arched eyebrows, thin skin and beautiful mouth was instantly recognizable. There were many more lines on his face, marking the creases made by both smiles and frowns, and he looked much older than his forty-eight years. As he smiled, she saw that his firing enthusiasm was unchanged.
He took off his glasses as though to see her better, flung them down on the desk on top of the file he had been reading, shoved back his chair with a huge crash, and stood up with both arms outstretched.
‘Irene! My God! I’d have known you anywhere.’
She had not heard that voice for nearly thirty years and would not have been able to describe it to anyone, but it was instantly familiar: light but edged with all the old exciting, dangerous ambivalence. As he came round the desk to where she was standing she remembered the frequent and always useless efforts her fellow-students had made to copy it.
He seized both her hands and kissed them.
‘But you’re far more gorgeous than I ever thought you’d become. Isn’t this fun? Come and sit down. I couldn’t believe it at first. I read your stunning play and thought, “Lumme! I’ve stumbled on something here.” And then I found that you were you and it was yours. Amazing! Not many playwrights come up with something so good at first go, you know.’
‘It wasn’t exactly my first,’ said Irene, finding her voice at last and taking her hands out of his. ‘More like seventh in fact.’
‘Was it? Well, that just shows you’ve got all the grit I always thought you must have. Coffee?’
‘What?’ she said as that single word whisked her back to his first ever invitation and her own astonishment that he might want to have anything to do with her. ‘Oh, coffee? Yes, please. Thank you.’
He yelled instructions to his secretary and then shut the door so that they were alone.
‘Come and sit down,’ he said, taking Irene’s hands again and pulling her towards a large sofa covered in oatmeal tweed that stood between two potted rubber plants. She was rather surprised that the Richard she had known, who had always been aware of what was in fashion, should have chosen such passé decorations.
‘Isn’t this place too ghastly?’ he said, laughing at her expression. ‘Journalists always comment and designer friends try to make me have something better, but what’s the point? The building’s so fearfully convenient that I’d put up with much worse, and it’s never seemed worth spending any money on it since I’m hardly ever here once the play’s on the go, whichever one it is.’
‘What do you really … ?’ Irene began, but she got no further.
‘We’ll talk about yours soon, but I don’t want to start until we can be sure of being uninterrupted. But there’s lots else to be said, isn’t there? Thirty years to catch up on, nearly. You’d better start.’
‘When did you realize it was me?’ Irene regretted asking that almost as soon as she had said the words, but it was too late to take them back.
Richard pushed his feet forwards and leaned expansively against the sofa with his hands behind his head. She saw that he was wearing the scruffiest of ancient carpet slippers beneath his expensive-looking corduroy trousers and eccentrically cut black suede jacket.
‘Pretty soon,’ he said, grinning at her with a teasing affection that showed it had not mattered in the least that she had given him the power to fire the first shot. ‘I know,’ he went on, although he could not possibly have known what she was thinking. ‘Here we are again, and I never thought we would be. It’s … oh, I can’t tell you what a treat it is.’
Irene smiled and did not bother to speak. Richard was saying everything that needed to be expressed. There was no war to be fought with him; she could just be herself and not worry about anything she might say or leave unsaid. It was the most liberating feeling she had had in years.
‘Why Webton, by the way?’ he asked out of the blue. ‘It’s not a name that suits you and it sounds deadly. Spindlebury was much more you.’
‘Only because you knew me then. Webton’s been my name for the past quarter century and it’s how I think of myself,’ she said, amused to realize through the singing pleasure in her mind that Richard had shown no sign of concern that she might not have remembered him. That was typical. And yet what did it matter if he was pleased with himself, even arrogant? What did anything matter any more?
‘Have you been happy in those years?’ he asked quietly. The amusement had gone from his voice, and he sounded as though he cared.
Irene looked at him, determined to make sure that there was no sign of malice in his face. He had always been an entertaining raconteur and if he were planning to describe their encounter to his current friends and admirers, she did not want him talking wittily about her private feelings.
‘Why do you ask?’
He took his hands from behind his head. Looking down at his hands and picking at one of his nails, he said: ‘Not for any prurient reason, believe me. I suppose it’s partly because the play doesn’t read as though it was written by someone happy.’
Irene flinched. Richard stopped concentrating on his nails and looked up. After a moment he seemed to realize that she needed some reassurance for which she would never ask and added seriously: ‘Not least because very few good plays are written by entirely happy people and, believe me, yours is definitely good.’
Even though she knew that Richard had not always told the truth when he had set out to charm someone, she believed him then.
‘And partly because there was an air about it that I recognized,’ he added, looking almost self-conscious. ‘At first, after I’d realized that it was yours, I thought that must have been why. I mean that there must have been a lot of you in it and that was what I’d seen. But I’ve come to think that just as we shared so much in the old days we must have been sharing this, too.’
‘What’s this “this” we’re talking about here?’ Irene did not trust herself to say any more. The idea that he remembered them as having shared ‘so much’was very different from all her dawn fears of the contempt with which he might have been thinking about her.
‘Oh.’ He pursed his lips and then laughed derisively. She was not sure which of them he found absurd. ‘A loss. A disappointment. A sadness that life hasn’t turned out as one had a right to expect. You were always so tough that I was surprised when I realized you’d been hit by much the same as me.’ He broke off as they both heard the door opening. ‘Ah, good: coffee. Thanks, Patsy.’
Irene was glad of the distraction. In those five or six minutes Richard had given her a great deal to think about and she had no idea how to respond to any of it. Almost the oddest was that he should have thought her tough. It was what she wanted to be, more than almost anything else, but she had always thought she had a long way to go.
‘Here you are,’ he said, handing her a cup from which rose the powerful scent of strong Italian coffee. Irene drank and almost gasped.
‘Too strong?’ asked Richard, clearly amused.
‘No,’ said Irene with unnecessary passion. ‘Absolutely wonderful. I haven’t had coffee like this for years.’
‘Well, take it carefully then. We don’t want you having palpitations – at least not over the coffee.’
They both laughed at that and Irene felt as though her skin and eyes were growing more luminous as her brain started to work effectively again. Her fears about Richard’s not remembering her, or taking the opportunity to humiliate her for her presumptuous designs on him all those years earlier, had gone completely. She realized that if they had been meeting for the first time she would have liked him at once.
‘And do you really like the play?’ she asked. ‘I mean really?’
‘You sound as though you don’t think I should.’ He looked into her face and then, as though seeing something vulnerable there behind the mask of gaiety and confidence, added with absolutely direct seriousness: ‘You ought to know that it’s good.’
She shrugged, not in the least minding that she was revealing a severe weakness.
‘I’ve lost all confidence in my judgement. I didn’t think the first play I ever wrote was up to much but it won a prize and got some amazing reviews when it was done on the radio. Then among the five in between were some I did think had something, but no-one else liked any of them – except for dear Michael Vestry, who was trying to so hard to keep me going. And now this one, which quite frankly I’ve had my doubts about from the beginning, is thought by people who matter to be quite good. You can see why I don’t know any more.’
‘Well, try to believe one of the people who matter. It’s great. Much as I’ve wanted to see you again for years, I’d never have done it like this if I hadn’t thought the play worthwhile.’ He looked at her with all the old arrogant confidence and then his face broke into a wickedly mocking smile. She would have felt outraged if the mockery had been directed at her, but it was so clearly at himself that she could only laugh. ‘After all, I do have my reputation to consider.’
‘Yes, you always were aware of how important that was. But I’m glad.’ She finished her coffee. ‘So, where do we go from here, Richard? I’ve never had a play put on live. I don’t know anything about what’s expected of me.’
‘Don’t worry. I’ll teach you. It’ll be fun – and it’ll let us pick up where we left off.’ Richard got bored with holding his coffee cup and dumped it clumsily down on the floor beside his sofa.
Irene saw that the cup had tipped up in the saucer, and was delighted to think that it was not her responsibility if any of the dregs spilled over onto the beige carpet. She was free of all such deadening, time-wasting, boring preoccupations for the time being at least.
‘First thing we must discuss is the casting. I’m sure you’ve got some ideas about that.’
‘Well yes, actually I have,’ Irene said, feeling shyer than she had for some time, ‘but the names I’ve been thinking about may be a bit above my station.’
‘Always aim high,’ said Richard, smiling. ‘Didn’t we agree that in the coffee bar that day?’
Irene nodded and felt one of the hairpins spring out of her hair. That was the problem – one of the problems – with such thick hair. Very few pins were strong enough to hold it up. She bent down to pick up the pin and thrust it furiously back into place, grazing her scalp.
‘Oh, that wonderful, Medusa-like head of yours!’ said Richard, watching her in amusement. ‘Even if there’d been nothing else, we’d all have been mesmerized by your hair. Do you still wear it loose?’
‘Only in bed.’ Absurdly she felt herself blushing. ‘I’m a bit embarrassed,’ she said hastily, trying to cover her silliness, ‘because the actor I’ve always had in mind for Major Blackson is Peter Callfield.’
‘Brilliant! He’s exactly the man I want, too, and the wonderfully satisfactory thing is that he thinks it might suit him to do it. He’s read the piece, likes it, and we’re negotiating with his agent at the moment.’
Irene had a sudden doubt. She wondered if the whole of this miraculous business were an enormous tease. No-one could be given so much luck, particularly not her. She was not – and never had been – a lucky person. Perhaps this was Richard’s revenge for her fantasies after all.
‘It’s true,’ he said, seeing the doubt distorting her magnificent face. ‘His face and voice, in fact the whole character, leaped off the page the first time I read the play and I got on to his agent at once. In fact, if we hadn’t managed to get him interested, I’d have had much less chance of raising the cash to do the play at all. Don’t think I’m putting you down or criticizing your work, Irene, but it’s tricky to get a no-name play staged at all these days.’
‘Good God, I know that,’ said Irene. ‘That’s why I’m finding all this so hard to believe. Who else have you been talking to? I mean for the other parts.’
As Richard told her his proposed cast for her play she was plunged into a mess of feelings that surprised her. The names he recited were much starrier than she could ever have expected, but even as she was wallowing in gratitude and amazement at them she had the feeling that Richard had taken control of something that belonged to her. He had said that he wanted to discuss the casting with her, and yet it was perfectly clear that he had already decided whom he wanted and was going to have.
When she thought about it, Irene realized that he would have had to have negotiated the actors’ contracts by then if the play were about to go into rehearsal. She assumed that better-known playwrights were involved at a much earlier stage and thought quite humbly about the time when she might be treated like them.
‘And the girl?’ she said, trying not to sound too aggressive. ‘Whom have you got for her?’
‘That’s the tricky one.’ Richard got up and went to stand looking out of one of the huge windows. He turned back and smiled reassuringly. ‘Don’t look so worried. It may be tricky, but it’s not impossible. In fact I have got my eye on someone, but I’m not absolutely sure about her yet. Whoever we use has got to be intelligent and yet vulnerable, mesmerizingly good but wholly unknown. She mustn’t appear carrying baggage from other parts in other plays.’
‘That makes sense.’
‘You’d have been perfect in the old days,’ he said, making Irene smile again and hang on to her common sense with difficulty. ‘And once I’d realized that, I started to have a word with some of my mates in the schools to see whether any of them had a girl we might use.’
‘And had they?’ asked Irene, who had no use for dramatic pauses in life, however useful they might be in the theatre.
Richard nodded. ‘She’s called Bella Hawkins, and I want to take you round to the Theatre School to have a look at her this afternoon,’ he said. ‘I’ve been a couple of times to sit in on her classes, and I think she’s perfect. She auditioned for me last week and was terrific, but I want to make sure you agree. It’s such an important part, and we’ll be taking a risk with someone quite so young. I thought we’d nip out for some lunch first and then take a cab to the school in time for her afternoon session.’
‘What year is she?’
‘Second.’
‘Oh, dear.’
‘Why? I assure you she’s perfectly competent.’ The arrogance was back in Richard’s voice and stance, for once undiluted by humour. ‘I would not even have considered her otherwise.’
‘It isn’t that, and I’m not questioning your judgement of her ability,’ said Irene in a hurry. ‘I just don’t like the idea of taking her out of school before she’s finished her course.’
‘I’m sure they’ll have her back if necessary. But I shouldn’t think she’ll need it. She’s a stunning actress already and she’ll do better working on plays like yours than enduring any more of old Ben’s Method madness. Come on. Lunch.’
They ate in a very small, very good restaurant, talking with so little constraint or self-consciousness that Irene felt as though she were outside time. She could not afterwards remember what they had eaten or what either of them had actually said, but she had felt known and liked for what she really was by someone who had shed all his own disguises. None of Richard’s capriciousness was in evidence, or his vanity, and when he talked briefly about his own just-contained marital disaster he seemed remarkably ungrudging in his acceptance of at least half the blame. Irene found herself wanting to ask his advice about her own dealings with Fin, but she controlled the impulse, trying instead to learn all she could from what Richard told her about his wife.
Eventually he called for the bill and Irene watched him drop his gold credit card on it, thinking of the day when she might be successful enough to have her own. Her teeth clamped together as she silently vowed to do anything, absolutely anything, to ensure the success of the play. It was her last chance to earn her own money and a place in the world and she was going to make the most of it.
The determination was still with her as they took a taxi to the Theatre School, but then it left her. In its place was a quite different feeling that made her stop on the steps of the building, unable to move.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Richard impatiently with one hand on the front door, turning back to look at her. She thought that if he had had car keys in his other hand he would have been rattling them at her.
‘Nothing,’ she said, shaking her head, unwilling to tell him quite how uncertain and pathetic her humiliating memories were making her feel. ‘It’s just so odd coming back like this.’
‘D’you mean you’ve never seen the old place since you ran away that term?’
‘That’s right. I occasionally used to fantasize …’ Irene broke off for a moment to command herself not to look self-conscious. ‘I used to fantasize about turning into a brilliant actress and coming back like a conqueror to lecture the students and having Ben falling on his face in amazed admiration.’ She laughed. ‘But even in the middle of the daydreams, I never believed them. Not one of them.’
‘Well, you are coming back as a conqueror,’ said Richard more pleasantly. ‘Come on and stop looking so scared. It doesn’t suit you and there’s no need. There are a great many more successful actors than there are good playwrights. And the actors are no use without the writers.’
Irene took that compliment with a bigger pinch of salt than usual. In spite of Richard’s admiration, she found it surprisingly difficult to feel anything but a creeping failure as the smell of the school hit her. It was exactly the same as it had always been: musty, slightly rotten, greasy, sweaty and full of intimations of inadequate plumbing.
Thinking of it as the very smell of anxiety, she followed Richard along the narrow passages to the main rehearsal stage, recognizing the expressions on the faces of some of the students they passed. Seeing their exhaustion and despairing fear, Irene could not suppress a shudder.
‘My dear, how delightful to see you,’ said a middle-European voice she would have known anywhere. ‘This is such a good outcome to an unpleasant moment of disillusion.’
‘Hello, Ben,’ said Irene, trying not to sound like the eighteen-year-old student she had been the last time they met.
He, too, looked almost exactly the same: whiter and more craggy, but just as predatory as ever. She was determined to show that he no longer had any power to tear chunks of emotional flesh out of her.
‘I don’t think I was disillusioned exactly; more frustrated,’ she said lightly, smiling at him with an assumption of exactly the kind of pitying superiority she disliked in other judges’wives.
‘I’m not talking about you,’ he said with a ferocity that did not seem to be as artificial as she thought it ought to have been. ‘I was disillusioned when you let me down. I’d fought so hard to have you offered a place here that when you ran away to marry your lawyer you made a fool of me. That is something I find hard to forgive.’
‘Oh, dear.’ About to apologize, Irene reminded herself of the hell of Ben’s first few classes, told herself that she owed him nothing and that a little disillusion for him was the tiniest possible revenge for what he had done to her. She produced what she hoped was a convincing smile. ‘Still, there’s nothing so educational as feeling a fool. Perhaps my defection will have taught you something.’
‘Not to back my hunches over rich girls who are not hungry enough to put up with a little emotional discomfort,’ he said drily, ‘or intelligent enough to understand what is happening to them and why, or what the consequences may be.’
‘Most people,’ said Irene, hearing an echo of what she had already said to Fin, ‘give of their best when they feel secure, not when they are mocked into believing themselves stupid and useless.’
‘But then you have no experience of training students for the stage, have you, my dear? Anyone who finds my classes too hard has no hope of surviving long enough to become a professional.’
‘Now, now, you two,’ said Richard, who had been watching them both with amusement that was undoubtedly malicious. ‘You’re fighting ancient battles here, and I don’t believe for one moment, Ben, that you remember Irene at all.’
‘But of course I do. The most stubborn student I ever had here. Even worse than you. I had to take a chisel to her – metaphorically speaking – to get her to do anything and I’d just made my first crack in her surface when she escaped.’
At last Irene began to feel more comfortable. Stubbornness seemed an admirable trait to have in one’s character, much better than the simple failure to understand that she had believed to be her worst fault.
‘Now, you want to see my other stubborn girl, do you?’
‘That’s right, you old tyrant,’ said Richard cheerfully. ‘Bring her on.’
He and Irene took seats behind Ben and the other tutors and waited in silence for the afternoon’s class to begin.
As soon as the young actor they had come to see appeared, Irene knew that Richard’s instinct had not let her down. Bella Hawkins was vulnerable and yet wickedly funny, attractive without being at all pretty, and enviably confident on stage. Even when Ben stopped her and savaged her with quite unnecessarily cruel criticism, she merely listened, returned to her place, smiled at her fellow actors and replayed the passage he had disliked.
Afterwards, Richard summoned her to be introduced to Irene. For a moment or two, the three of them talked politely about the class and then Richard slouched off to talk to Ben at the far side of the big room.
‘Are you quite happy about this?’ asked Irene as soon as she was alone with Bella.
‘Ecstatic,’ she said, clasping both hands under her square chin. ‘Mrs Webton, you cannot possibly imagine how wonderful I feel at the prospect of getting out of here.’
Irene laughed.
‘And,’ added Bella demurely, ‘from what Richard Orleton has told me about your play, it sounds extremely interesting. He said he wouldn’t let me read the whole of it until you had decided whether or not you wanted me for the part, but that if you agreed I could have a copy today, so that I have time to get to grips with it before the first read-through.’
‘I certainly do want you.’ Irene was still laughing, but she stopped as she added seriously: ‘But, Bella, are you sure you want to leap out of your course like this? I know how easy it is to get out of here and … I’d hate you to lose something important. I mean, I think you’re a terrific actress already and I’m sure you’ll make a success of the part, but it may be a dead end for you and you might do better staying on here to do your last year.’
‘Ben has said he’ll have me back,’ she said, sounding perfectly sensible and rather more aware of the consequences of her actions than Irene had been at her age. ‘So if it all collapses or there’s no sign of an agent or another part, I’ll do my last year, I promise. It’s all right, Mrs Webton. Really it is. Don’t stop him giving me the part, please.’
Irene wished she could believe that it really would turn out all right and that her presentiment of disaster was nothing more than a reflection of what had happened to her after she left the school.
‘I am over the age of consent, you know,’ said Bella, looking both intelligent and sophisticated.
Oh, toughen up, Irene, she said to herself. You’ll be getting as bad as Helena if you go on like this. You are not responsible for other people, even people as young, attractive, and exploitable as this one. Bella will survive whatever happens; and if she doesn’t it won’t be your fault.