The Wife Of Castellane

The director had asked her to stop twice, and both times Nadia Rourke had kept going, because stopping was the one thing she had never learned to do gracefully. “Thank you,” the director said a third time, and this time it wasn't a request. Nadia let the last line of Viola’s speech settle into the rehearsal room and stood with her hands open at her sides, the way she’d practised in the bathroom mirror for a week. The room was on the third floor above a bank. The radiator under the window ticked against its pipe, slow and irregular, like a bored fingernail. Three people sat behind a folding table with cold coffee and a stack of headshots. Hers was somewhere near the bottom. The director, a long man in a longer scarf, tilted his head. “That was very good.” “Thank you.” “Whose was it?” She smiled, because she’d been trained to smile at questions she didn’t understand. “Sorry?” “That Viola. It’s someone’s. The little catch before Orsino. The hand that goes to the throat.” He drew a line in the air near his own collarbone. “I saw it at the National, maybe six years ago. It was better there, if I’m honest, but it was hers. It wasn’t yours.” The woman beside him studied the pen in her hand. The third person, a young woman with a lanyard, looked at Nadia with the terrible sympathy of someone who had once been on the other side of that table. “Do it again,” the director said. “Not hers. Yours.” Nadia opened her mouth. There was a moment she had known before, in other rooms, that felt like reaching for a stair that wasn’t there. She knew the speech. She knew where Viola stood in it, what the sea had already taken, and how a girl who had just lost her brother might hold her own ribs to keep from coming apart. She knew six different ways to play it. She could not find the seventh. The one that was only her. Somewhere under her breath she was humming, low and tuneless, a sound like a wet finger circling the rim of a glass. She didn’t know what the tune was. She only knew that all three of them could hear it. “Thank you, Nadia,” said the director, kindly, which was worse. She made it down three flights and out through the fire door before her face gave up. It wasn’t crying, exactly. It was the slow slackening of a face that had held a shape for too long. She leaned on the wet brick of the alley and let it happen. A bus went by at the end of the street, throwing up a wing of dirty water. Her phone buzzed. Mum. Bank letter came again-nothing to worry about, love. Don’t ring, I’m doing the lunches. Xx Nadia stared at it. In twenty-nine years, her mother had never said nothing to worry about unless there was something to worry about. She typed, deleted, and typed again. The audition went brilliantly. They loved it. Will hear by Friday. She sent it before she could read how it sounded. The lie came out warm and easy and perfectly pitched, and that, more than the audition, made her feel ill. The Halfpenny Yard Theatre held a hundred and ten people if nobody minded the pillar. Nadia had been coming through its stage door for three years, the last eight months as a cover. The creaking stair, the radiator that needed a kick, the green room kettle that took four minutes, the good mugs at the back of the second cupboard behind the paint tins-all of it was hers by heart. She was two steps inside when Jo Mercer stepped out of the wings with a headset around her neck and a clipboard held flat against her chest. “Don’t,” said Jo. “Don’t what?” “That face. You’ve got your audition face on.” Jo’s eyes went over her. “It didn’t go well.” “It went brilliantly. They loved it.” “Nadia.” “They loved it, Jo.” She said it again, a little flatter, a little drier. Jo was twenty-eight, small and unhurried, with a voice that could stop a fire drill. She had never once asked Nadia to be anyone. She put the clipboard on a prop table between a plastic sword and a stack of programmes and folded her arms. “You’re doing my voice,” she said quietly. Nadia blinked. She heard it then: the dry, level cadence, the small drop at the end of each line. She’d been doing Jo’s voice for several sentences. “Sorry.” “It’s fine. Just not tonight.” Jo took a breath and looked, for the first time, like a person who wished she were somewhere else. “I was going to tell you after the show. But you’re here, and you look terrible, and I’d rather you heard it from me.” Something cold moved in Nadia’s stomach. “Heard what?” “They’ve cut the covers,” Jo said it quickly, like pulling off a plaster. “All of them. Budget. The board met yesterday, and there’s a line in the grant we can’t touch. It’s arithmetic. Friday’s your last night. You’re still paid through Friday.” “I haven’t gone on once.” “I know.” “In eight months. I’ve learned every line, every blocking change. I know where the lead drops the cup and when she’s going to be late on the second cue.” Nadia heard herself getting louder and pulled it back down, out of habit. “I could go on tonight. I could go on tomorrow. Nobody’d notice.” “That’s the problem,” Jo said, very gently. “They wouldn’t.” Through the wall came the muffled thump of the sound check, someone saying one, two into a microphone, and the dull, ordinary sound of the building carrying on without her. “I’m sorry,” said Jo. “It’s fine.” Nadia smiled. It was a good smile, wide and warm and completely without weight. She felt it settle on her face like a costume. “Honestly. Don’t worry about me.” Jo looked at her a beat too long and said nothing. *** By the time she came out of the stage door that evening, the rain had thickened into something with intent. She stood under the narrow iron canopy with her bag against her chest and counted what she had. Rent, due in nine days. A bank letter nobody would explain. A phone with eleven percent left. A mother who wrote don’t ring. A cover who knew every line in a play she would never speak. Her hands were cold. She turned them over in the light from the doorway, as if the palms might have something to say. The hum was back in her throat. She let it. “Miss Rourke?” The voice came from her left. A man stood at the edge of the canopy, just beyond the drip line, in a grey coat cut too well for any rack she had ever walked past. He was somewhere in his forties, and perfectly still. Rain ran off the edge of his umbrella while he remained completely dry. She had the odd sense that he had been standing there for some time, and that he was practised at it. “Yes?” “I was asked to give you this.” He took one step in, out of the rain, and held out an envelope. It was thick cream paper, unmarked apart from her name in a slanted hand she didn’t know. No stamp. No return address. It weighed almost nothing and felt, in her cold fingers, like something that would leave a mark. “Who’s it from?” “I’m not the right person to answer that.” His tone was courteous, without apology. “It’s meant to be read tonight, if you would. Good evening, Miss Rourke.” He turned and walked to the end of the street, toward a dark shape she didn't register. She stood under the canopy with the traffic hissing past and the envelope in her hands. Inside, the sound check ended. Far away, her mother was wiping down a counter in the café that was quietly losing. The flap wasn’t sealed. She opened it and drew out a single card, thick and cream and blank on the front. She turned it over in the doorway light. There was one line, in the same slanted hand. We have seen your face.