SYLVIA
After a reluctant Saturday afternoon in the office, Sylvia squeezed herself onto a packed tube carriage. Over the shoulder of a fellow passenger, so close she could see dandruff speckling his dark coat, her eye caught a story on the front page of The Times:
STARS LINE UP FOR LAST NIGHT AT OLD VIC
After nearly 13 years, the National Theatre Company takes its final bow at the Old Vic tonight in view of its move to…
The doors opened at Embankment and Sylvia was propelled out of the tube and up into the cold, early evening air. She took the steps up to Hungerford Bridge and there it was on the other side: the Denys Lasdun building, which was to be Maggie’s new workplace, its Brutalist towers an unapologetic presence on the South Bank. She walked across the bridge, down Waterloo Road and into The Cut, breathing in the buzz of a city supercharged by Saturday night fever.
London always filled her with such excitement. It was a living, breathing, capricious thing, with all the unpredictability of an errant teen, and she adored the sense of possibility it offered. It flooded her body like a drug, one she’d badly needed after growing up in the Home Counties, where the only possibilities were a Saturday job as a waitress in a cafe followed by a warm white wine in the George & Dragon, thanks to a landlord who turned a blind eye to minors.
But tonight her excitement about her new commission and her best friend’s final show as an usher at the Old Vic was dampened by her still-lurching stomach and a nagging voice in her head telling her: this isn’t food poisoning, and you know it.
The foyer of the Old Vic was packed. Smoke curled up to the ceiling, enveloping the chandelier in a haze, and the room hummed with an energy born of the collective anticipation of hundreds of people. As she weaved her way through the crowd, she was impressed to spot the great actress Sybil Thorndike, still turning heads at ninety-three, while the Chancellor, Denis Healey, stood at the bar talking to another besuited man Sylvia didn’t recognise. She caught Jim’s eye and waved, and the news was out of her almost as soon as she’d reached him.
‘Switzerland?’ Jim leant forward as though he hadn’t heard her properly.
‘Isn’t it exciting?’
‘It’s bloody brilliant, Syl. Roger finally caved to your genius. But what are you writing about, the origins of fondue?’
She slapped him lightly on the arm and smiled. ‘As if.’ She took a drag on her cigarette and blew it out slowly, savouring the moment of revelation. ‘Women’s rights, five years on from national suffrage.’
It wasn’t often she rendered Jim speechless. She put her head back and blew out smoke to the ceiling. ‘Your face is a picture.’
He laughed. ‘I never thought Roger would go for that. Well done, Syl, I’m impressed.’ He held out his glass. ‘To my fabulous fiancée.’
She clinked her gin and tonic against his. ‘Thanks, Jim.’ She knew he meant it.
Thank God Jim wasn’t one of those men who thought his wife’s place was firmly in the kitchen. Sylvia didn’t know how her friend Gilly put up with that. Nor Polly, Oxford-educated but treated like a fashion accessory by Alan, who only seemed proud of her if she wore designer clothes and kept herself in full make-up at all times. Each to their own, Sylvia supposed. She was pretty certain her friends were happy with their husbands, but she never would have chosen such a man herself.
Jim – wonderful Jim – had supported her career ambitions right from those early days working together on the student paper. Of course, back then it was partly because he wanted to get into her knickers. Most of the men she met at Oxford had seemed to want that; not, she knew, because she was any more attractive than anyone else, but simply because men far outnumbered women and they would take whatever they could get. That was surely why, in her first week at St Hilda’s, they’d been subjected to a lecture by the college chaplain about showing restraint.
She’d wondered at the time if the male freshers had received the same advice.
But unlike the other boys, Jim hadn’t felt the need to bring her down a peg or two simply because she was a woman with the cheek to show ambition. He’d liked her. He’d liked her writing. And it was both of those facts that eventually enabled him to get into her knickers.
She recalled lying in his college bed on a Sunday morning, breath visible in the frigid air, plotting their futures in parallel: they’d both move to London, apply for internships, trainee schemes and junior reporter positions, work hard, get promoted. Everything they wanted was in sync until the issue of children came up. So many heated conversations hashed out under the covers, or picnicking in Christ Church Meadow, or drinking in the Eagle and Child, as she gradually brought broody Jim round to her way of thinking. They’d have children, but only when she was ready: when her career was at a suitable point, when they could afford childcare so she could go back to work. Because she knew, with utter certainty, that if she had a baby too early, her much dreamed about career would diverge from that twin track and go down a different path entirely.
A flash of colour and a familiar hairstyle brought Sylvia out of her thoughts. She stuck out her hand and grabbed Maggie’s arm, pulling her towards them. ‘There you are!’
‘You made it!’ Maggie kissed them both and clapped her hands.
‘Wouldn’t have missed it for the world. You okay? Not too emotional?’ Sylvia could practically see her flatmate’s nervous energy emanating off her. She seemed heightened somehow, as did everything in the room – the laughter shriller than normal, the colours more vivid, the clothes extra glamorous for this special gala performance.
‘A bit. But just wait ’til curtain down and I’ll be bawling.’
‘I’m sure everyone will. It’s the end of an era.’
‘And the start of something,’ Jim said.
Maggie’s eyes shone, and pride rushed through Sylvia. Years of ushering and studying part time at St Martin’s and it was all about to pay off. One last show here, and then later in the year, Maggie would be starting the job she’d wanted for so long. Her future was finally on track; a messy, creative, fulfilling future surrounded by paint pots and fabric and set designs at that new concrete behemoth on the South Bank.
The bell rang loud and shrill. ‘I have to go. I’m meant to be in there.’ Maggie jerked her head towards the doors of the auditorium. ‘Enjoy. And don’t wait up – I’m going to the after-show.’
Sylvia watched her sidle through the throng and then the crowds in the foyer began pushing past her and Jim – terribly sorry, do excuse me – shimmying shoulder to shoulder up the stairs, past the ushers tearing tickets and towards the auditorium.
Sylvia knocked back her drink, took a last drag on her cigarette and followed the hordes into the darkened theatre. When the house lights went down and Peggy Ashcroft stepped onto the stage, a trickle of sweat rolled down the back of Sylvia’s neck. What had she done? What had she done to her own future?