The Actor

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

London, 2001

It was two years before I saw the Actor again.

Of course I’d enjoyed plenty of bragging material from our first encounter. Even if most girls didn’t believe that we’d really French kissed, they could just about believe he might have pecked me on the cheek or similar. Certainly that I had met him and spoken to him at least, because they knew about my uncle.

“You are lucky,” my best friend Milly had said, sighing with envy because she did believe me about the tongues thing. She knew I wouldn’t lie to her, anyway. And if I had wanted to lie to the others she would have been totally on board, because we never liked Claire Bennett to get the better of us. “Tell me what he was like again. Exactly every moment!” Milly insisted.

And so my approximately two minutes in the drunken company of a famous actor had to be spun out into an involved romantic drama. We all read romances back then, so it wasn’t hard to embellish with a few phrases about “magnetic attraction” and “unquenchable thirst” and “rising surge of passion”. I don’t know if Milly truly believed it had been exactly like that, and I was pretty sure I didn’t. But it was a fifteen-second kiss that became a fifteen-minute wonder and it permanently elevated my status at school as a girl who mingled with famous people in the holidays.

Once, and only one famous person, but it was enough.

Now, two years on, we were all in the Upper Sixth and in the midst of university applications, offers and rejections, mock A-levels and revising for actual A-levels. I was doing English, History and French which naturally meant I was going on the school sixth form trip to see Hamlet in London. Starring the Actor.

Amanda Trent and Claire Bennet, two girls we didn’t much like but always seemed to end up getting thrown together with, started digging at me.

“I expect you’ll be getting free tickets, won’t you, Eloise?” Amanda said, giving a nasty smirk to Claire. The two of them were members of the in crowd at school, and Claire had never forgiven me for outdoing her cricketer. Claire had blonde hair in a short bob and always attracted loads of boys. Amanda was chubbier and didn’t get so many, but she did alright with Claire’s rejects.

“I shouldn’t think so,” I said.

“But naturally you’ll be popping around to the stage door with a sprig of mistletoe?” They caught one another’s eyes again and started laughing at me, but it gave Milly an idea.

“You should try going round to the stage door. Why not? He’s bound to remember you.”

I doubted this. I also doubted that one could pop around to the stage door anyway, even if I knew where it was which I didn’t. There was probably loads of security.

Unfortunately Claire and Amanda leapt on the plan. “Of course you’ve got to visit him! I bet he’d be quite insulted if you didn’t, given how close you claim to be with him. Or don’t you dare? Perhaps you haven’t got the nerve?”

I hadn’t claimed any such thing, but a challenge was a challenge. Refusing to try was almost to admit that I’d made the whole thing up, or at least to deflate one of our school’s greatest ever myths. I had benefitted from the kudos of being “the girl who once kissed a famous actor” which was an even greater wonder to girls in younger years. Now I had to put my money where my mouth was, so to speak.

“I might well do so,” I said, and hoped my further silence on the subject would appear enigmatic, rather than evasive.

After the play was over and we filed out of the auditorium into the crowded lobby, where people were spilling out from the warm fug of the theatre into the chilly night air, they were on my back about it again. I was hoping that Mrs Padstow would hurry us all onto the coach so there wouldn’t be time. Unfortunately she was giving us ten minutes to go to the bathroom and so on. "We won’t be stopping at any motorway service station, so take your opportunity now."

There were some moans and groans, because hardly anyone wanted to head straight back home.

"The queues are ages, we’ll need more than ten minutes."

"There’s a McDonald’s over the road. Can’t we get some food first?"

It was the last week of term, the play had been outstanding, and we had all been very well behaved. And we were the Upper Sixth, after all. Mrs Padstow relented. "All right. Half an hour. Anyone not back on the coach by then will be explaining themselves to the Head tomorrow."

Everyone else was full of glee but my heart sank. Half an hour was easily long enough for the others to push me out and round the side of the theatre, to a stage door. It was frustratingly easy to find.

It was manned by an old fellow who wore a doorman’s black hat. I was expecting a queue of fans and autograph hunters, but unfortunately it was just us. Amanda gave me a sharp poke in the back.

"Is it possible to get a message to Mr Astwell?" I asked.

"Mr Astwell, eh?"

"Yes. Could you just tell him it’s Rosa and Gerard’s niece? Rosa and Gerard Gordon."

If I’d tried this anywhere else, I may as well have said Joe Bloggs or John Smith. But this old man worked in the theatre world, and in that sphere. my uncle’s name was recognised.

"Gerard Gordon, eh? Madness in the Moonlight and Cliffs of Dover?"

They were two of my uncle’s biggest commercial successes. "Yes. And Remember September."

"Alright then, I’ll see what I can do. Oi, Jimmy." A skinny, lugubrious looking lad, carrying a stack of boxes, appeared at the door. "Take a message to Mr Astwell’s dressing room. Gerard Gordon’s - niece, was it? - here to see him."

I waited, suddenly conscious of what I was wearing. Jeans and a purple top and my black corduroy jacket and a scarf, because it was March and still freezing. I had my hair, which was blonde, in a ponytail and I briefly considered whether I should loosen it. Then I thought of Claire’s and Amanda’s scorn, and left it as it was.

Two minutes later I was being ushered through a dingy corridor to a dressing room door. For a place frequented by top actors and actresses, it seemed quite shabby. I don’t know what I expected backstage to be like, but less dark and cave-like than this. Jimmy knocked twice at the door, then nodded for me to go in.

The Actor had been sitting at his dressing table, though he rose to greet me. He was taller than I remembered. But then I had had heels on at the party.

He still had his stage make-up on, and it looked odd this close up. Not like normal make up, in fact. More like a few crude lines of face paint. The smell of greasepaint reminded me of a school play I had been in.

He was faintly surprised by my appearance. "Jimmy said Gerard Gordon had asked to see me."

"It’s not Gerard or Rosa, I’m afraid. I think the message got confused. I’m their niece. Sorry."

"There’s no need to apologise. To be visited by Rose and Gerry’s niece is a far more unusual and interesting proposition." He was spectacularly handsome. Debonair summed him up exactly, I think. All the angles of his face were sculpted perfectly, and his jaw had a firmer and more chiselled look than I remembered. I was studying his features more closely because of the makeup, trying to see under it. The light, mainly from the bulbs around his mirror, was also much brighter than it had been in the conservatory.

"You probably don’t remember me," I began, feeling about as awkward as I ever had, "but we met at my aunt and uncle’s New Year’s Eve party a couple of years ago."

"I remember you very well." His gaze was direct and I felt I could read his thoughts. He was remembering exactly what had happened.

"I thought you might have forgotten, as everyone had had a lot to drink."

He laughed, and the corners of his eyes crinkled. He gestured for me to sit, which I did, and he sat down as well. "My darling, I might have been merry but I wasn’t blackout drunk."

He was only saying "darling" in an avuncular way or theatrical way, but it still gave me a thrill. I could just imagine telling my friends that he’d called me darling. "Oh. Anyway, I just wanted to say that it was really brilliant tonight. We all thought it was great." We had all thought he in particular was great as Hamlet, but I was too embarrassed to say this. I already regretted coming. I was making such an i***t of myself. As if my opinion mattered compared to actual theatre critics, all of whom managed far more eloquent phrases than "really brilliant". I was supposed to be doing A-level English, for God’s sake, and that was the best I could manage?

He didn’t seem to mind, though. Possibly he was used to it. "There are more of you here?"

"It was a class trip." As soon as I said this I regretted it, because I didn’t want him to know I was still at school.

"Give your friends my thanks. I’m glad you all enjoyed it."

There was an awkward pause. Awkward for me, anyway, but he seemed to be quite amused. Then he told me something that took me totally by surprise.

"I rang up for you a couple of days after the party. Your aunt put me wise."

I was absolutely mortified. Aunt Rosa had never said anything to me. I couldn’t blame her, I supposed. "Did she?"

"It seemed I had already behaved outrageously enough." His lips twisted in a smile that was both knowing and rueful.

It made me feel quite ashamed. He must have been very cross and embarrassed when he found out, I feared. "Did you mind very much? When you found out how old I was?" I hoped he hadn’t been too horrified.

He looked at me, the amused gleam still in his eyes. He lowered his voice as he spoke.

"Would it be even more outrageous of me if I didn’t particularly mind at all?"

Once again, he had shocked me. "Oh," I said again, feeling very out of my depth. Perhaps Aunt Rosa hadn’t told him my exact age.

Then it seemed as if he were reading my thoughts when he asked: "Are you of age now?"

This was tricky to answer, because what did he mean by "of age"? Sixteen was the age of consent. Eighteen was the legal age of majority. People with a more old-fashioned turn of mind, which was pretty much everyone in my parents’ generation, regarded twenty-one as the traditional coming of age.

I was eighteen in two weeks. "I am," I told him.

"Then how about coming for a drink with me some time?"

He had asked me out. A famous person had actually asked me out! It was impossible of course, but it was something to tell my grandchildren. Or Milly and the others, at least. "I don’t live in London."

"But you can come up to town, surely? You’re here this evening?"

Thinking about it, I supposed I could. The thing was that if you lived more than an hour or so outside London, it was rather a momentous thing to go there. You didn’t just pop up for a visit unless you were making a special trip for something. And then it would be a full day trip, and you’d probably have a list of things to do. "I’m not sure."

"I’m sure you can, unless you’re confined to some convent in the Hebrides. In which case I suppose I’ll have to find a grappling hook and scale the walls."

My stomach lurched at this, and seeing the expression in his eyes, it was the first time I had a sense of inevitability. I don’t mean that I couldn’t have avoided him. Just that we both knew we wanted to meet again, and we would.

"It’s not a convent." I wish I could have told him I was at college. The sixth form college in our town was a cool place that was more like university than school. You could show up whenever you liked, in dreadlocks and reeking of weed, and no one cared if you never handed in any coursework. Whereas Hadleigh House was a regular all girls private school, where we still wore school uniform and had assembly every morning and got fined house points if our hair wasn’t tied neatly back.

But at least it wasn’t a convent, at which he expressed relief. "That’s encouraging. How about one night next week?"

It was all happening very fast. Getting up to London was one thing, and I could claim I was staying the night at Milly’s. Plus the school term finished this Friday which made that aspect easier. But how would I get back? Was there a late train, or could I manage to stay with Aunt Rosa and Uncle Gerard? Except that wouldn’t work, because Aunt Rosa would be bound to tell my mother. It wasn’t fair to make her complicit in it all.

He could read the conflict on my face. "Will school be a problem?"

"No, it’s the holidays. Or it will be."

"That’s settled then. How about Wednesday? If you can bear to sit through it again, I’ll leave you tickets on the door. Then come round here afterwards, and Harry will let you through."

Midweek seemed a weird time to be running up to London for the night, and I still had no idea what I would do with myself afterwards. If the worst came to the worst perhaps I could simply sit on a bench at Paddington Station and try not to freeze until dawn. Perhaps there was an all-night waiting room. Either way, it was my problem to figure out. If I were going to travel up to London to have a drink with a famous man, then I could surely manage the rest of it.