Season of Storms (14 page)

xi

I
got lost on my way to rehearsal next morning.

To be fair, in a house like Il Piacere my only hope of finding my way round would have been to leave a trail of biscuit crumbs or unwind a ball of thread behind me, like Theseus in the maze of the Minotaur. Of course, I could have used Den’s map, but at the moment it was doing service as a bookmark in the little red volume of Galeazzo’s Celia poems sitting on my bedside table. I’d been falling asleep last night reading the poems, and the map, neatly folded, had been right there beside me, and I’d put it in to hold my place, not thinking. And this morning I’d forgotten where it was, and what I’d done with it. I’d only just remembered now.

The problem was, I thought as I came round another bend in the dim corridor, that now I was lost, and about to be late.

I quickened my pace, spurred by the same irrational impulse that made me drive faster whenever I took a wrong turn, as though my mind had already dismissed everything around me as unfamiliar and was eager to look round the next corner. I knew I’d gone wrong because I wasn’t in a corridor any longer, I was passing through a chain of formal rooms, eerily quiet and empty and smelling of polish and dusty old draperies. Confused, I stopped and nearly turned to double back . . . but then I heard a small and reassuring sound, as welcome as the beacon of a lighthouse to a sailor, certain evidence another human being was nearby: the industrious clacking of a computer’s keyboard.

I tracked it to a closed door on my right. The clacking stopped, but I heard movement, someone walking on a creaking floor and a snuffling sound that
wasn’t
human. Alex, I thought, and the dogs. I hesitated, not altogether sure that I wanted to let Alex know I was lost, but the pressures of time overrode my reluctance. I was raising my hand to knock when the door opened suddenly, making me jump.

He was startled as well, but he recovered more quickly than I did. “Good morning.”

“Good morning. I—”

“Shouldn’t you be at rehearsal?” He checked his watch. “I thought it was supposed to start at ten.”

“It was. It is. I mean, that’s the problem, I can’t find the room . . .”

“Ah.” His nod held comprehension. “You came down the main staircase, did you? You should have turned right at the bottom, not left, that’s all.” He raised a hand as though to direct me back again, then appeared to think better of it. Stepping fully through the door he pulled it closed behind him. “I think it might be simpler if I showed you.”

Following, I tried to keep track of the route we were taking, back into one of the rooms I’d just come through then out by a different door into a short passage that in turn brought us into a cloister-like corridor looking down over an idyllic courtyard . . . but these things only registered in part. I was much more aware of the time and the man at my side, of his breathing and the way he walked and how often the dogs at his knee sought his hands. Bryan always said a dog could tell you more about a man than people could. “You can fool another person,” he’d once told me, “but you’ll never fool a dog. They know the stuff you’re really made of.”

I found myself wondering whether, in Daniela Forlani’s case, it was a matter of her not liking the greyhounds, or of them not liking
her.

I said, “It’s kind of you to do this, really. I didn’t mean to interrupt your work.”

“I was finished. And anyway, I was only on the computer reading my mail.”

“Oh, you have e-mail?” I said that too quickly, and with rather too much interest.

Alex noticed. “Is there someone you would like to send a message to?”

“No, no, it’s not—”

“You are most welcome,” he invited me. “It wouldn’t be a problem.”

“Well . . .” I thought for a moment, then finally caved in. “If you’re sure . . . I mean, thank you, I’d love to send something to Bryan. I’m sure he’s dying to know how we’re getting on. We rang him from Venice, of course, and I know Roo was planning to phone at the weekend, but it’s so expensive talking on the telephone and he does have his computer at the flat . . .” My voice trailed off as it occurred to me that Alex might not know who Bryan was; that he might not, in fact, know anything of Rupert’s private life. Even in these more enlightened times in our society, not everyone approved.

But Alex’s expression hadn’t changed. “No problem,” he said. We’d arrived at the foot of the stairs I’d come down from the first floor. “So now you go this way,” he told me, “and turn, and the passage will bring you right into the Stanza degli Angeli.” He angled his wrist and looked down at his watch. “You still have two minutes. You’ll get there on time.”

“Thanks.”

“You do get a break before lunch?” he asked, as I was turning.

I paused. “Yes, I think so. A short one.”

“Come then if you like and I’ll help you to e-mail your friend. You’ll remember the way?”

“Heavens, no. I’ve a horrible sense of direction. But not to worry,” I said. “I’ll just come to this stairway and then try to find my way back to the rehearsal room.”

I think his smile surprised him, too. He looked at that instant unguarded, approachable. Only I knew that I couldn’t approach him in the way I would have liked to. The moment passed.

Still, watching him walk off, the two dogs trotting at his side, I felt the stirring of a feeling that I recognized—a faint but certain tightness in my chest that almost tingled. Damn, I thought. I didn’t
want
to be attracted to the man. No good could come of it. But the feeling persisted, ignoring my attempts to fight it.

“Damn,” I said aloud and, turning, ran for the rehearsal room.

xii

FIRST
rehearsals always made me nervous. It didn’t matter that I had already met the other actors, or that Rupert was directing, or that all we had to do this first time out was sit around a table reading through the play out loud. I still felt beastly nervous.

For one thing, there were strangers present. Everybody came to first rehearsal—the people who would be in charge of make-up and our costumes and the set design, they all turned up this first time out, although we mightn’t see many of them until the final days before performance. They were all friendly, all fairly young, all Italian, though none of them came from the town and the one who lived furthest away had had to come from Verona this morning, which must have been a fair drive for him. Rupert introduced us round, but though I shook their hands and smiled I didn’t retain any faces or names. My mind just wouldn’t concentrate.

The room didn’t help. In this echoing space with the mirrors all round me I couldn’t help feeling small and insignificant, a child in grown-up clothing, fooling no one. And it didn’t help, either, that Madeleine was sitting directly across from me, graceful, composed, every inch the professional.

For assistance I looked heavenward, my eyes seeking the angels in the ceiling paintings—more cherubs than angels, with soft wings and sweet childish faces that offered encouragement.

Rupert was talking. Having already shown us the overall design for the production, he’d moved on to the finer points. “. . . And that, I think, covers the rules and procedures. Is everyone clear on those? Good. If you do have a problem, just let Dennis know. Are there any objections to Nicholas smoking?” he asked without breaking stride, as Nicholas, rocking back in his chair at the opposite end of the table, touched the flame of his lighter to a cigarette.

The pause that followed held surprise. From the look on Nicholas’s face I could tell it had never occurred to him to ask permission; he was used to doing as he pleased.

“Right,” said Rupert, when no one objected. “Then I think we’ll get on with the read-through. I’m going to let you just feel your way through this first time, let you make the first contact with your character, and we’ll see how that goes, all right? Dennis, would you call the cues, please?”

Rupert settled back as Den picked up his stopwatch and started us off with a brilliant imitation of a chiming clock, the sound that first opened the play. Some stage managers, when calling cues, would simply read ‘A clock chimes four’ and be done with it, but Den’s way was better. It helped set the mood.

I set my script flat on the table to hide the fact my hands were shaking, took a deep breath and read out the first line. My voice came out flat, rather tense, not at all what I’d wanted; the harder I tried to correct it, the worse it became. And it went on like that, with me stumbling over the words and Madeleine coming back smoothly while everyone else simply followed along. I could feel them all watching me, wondering why in God’s name I’d been given the part—or at least, that’s what I would have wondered, in their place. I couldn’t even bear to raise my eyes to look at Rupert; didn’t want to face his pity or, worse still, his disappointment.

Head down and desperate I soldiered on, reading too quickly in my effort to get to the end of the first act, to the séance scene in which Nicholas’s character would at last come in, beginning as a disembodied offstage voice, then making a dramatic appearance in the flesh at the next-to-last line, relieving the long unbroken dialogue between myself and Madeleine.

Only when he finally spoke it didn’t come as a relief. If anything, it threw me more off balance.

Nicholas read without any expression—his voice was a monotone, lifeless and dull. I had friends who knew actors who did this, kept their first readings free of emotion so as not to commit themselves to any particular interpretation of their character; but I’d never had somebody do it with
me.
It was highly unnerving.

“Well,” said Rupert, as I miserably spoke the last line of Act One, “I think that’s as good a place as any for a break, don’t you?”

Den agreed. “I’ll go see if Teresa can make us some tea.”

Thank heavens I had an excuse to escape, I reminded myself, gratefully remembering Alex’s invitation to come e-mail Bryan when we had our break. I stood, self-conscious. “I think I’ll go and stretch my legs a bit.”

Rupert nodded his consent. Nicholas, in the act of lighting a cigarette, didn’t react at all. The others merely smiled. But Madeleine pushed back her chair. “I’ll come with you.”

I hadn’t planned on that. I must have looked a bit confused, because she said, “That is, if you don’t mind?”

And what, I wondered, could I say to that? Except, “Of course I don’t.” The problem was, I thought as we left the mirrored ballroom and went out into the corridor—the problem was that now I couldn’t do what I had meant to do. I couldn’t take Madeleine with me to Alex’s study, not after I’d said I just wanted to go stretch my legs. But if not to Alex’s study, then where . . . ?

“Let’s go out to the terrace,” said Madeleine. “I could do with a breath of fresh air.”

xiii

SHE
had clearly been learning her way round the house. Whereas I would have got all turned around trying to decide which way was which, Madeleine simply opened a door from the corridor and led me through an empty room whose long French windows opened out directly to the terrace.

The stones were still wet with the rain that had fallen at breakfast, and the heavy mist clung to the darkly treed hillside behind us and shrouded the opposite shore of the lake. The high golden walls of the house at my back showed the only real colour, and even that had flattened in the absence of the sun. But for the present, anyway, the rain had stopped, and the breeze blew clean and cool and had a brisk, reviving scent.

Madeleine breathed it in deeply and tipped her face up like a child. “That’s better. I can’t stay too long in a room without windows.” She stretched and moved forwards to stand by the parapet.

Even just standing at rest she commanded attention, I thought bleakly. I could never look like that. Oh, why had I taken this part? Madeleine and Nicholas were in another league, I’d never match them in performance. Kicking myself, I looked up and across at the mist-covered mountains, only half-aware that Madeleine was speaking.

“. . . And Rupert reminds me so much of the man who directed my first West End play—he was quiet, like Rupert, but brilliant, and here I was barely nineteen with my first leading role and they had me playing opposite Sebastian Boyd, of all people, and I was absolutely terrified. I wanted so badly to please everyone that I went all to pieces.” Her voice was quite light, and her gaze was still turned to the lake, and she might have been simply relating an anecdote. Only I knew better. Focussing my full attention on her, I stayed silent as she went on, “By the end of the first week I was certain they were going to recast my part, I was that awful. And then one day Sebastian came up to me after rehearsal—I’ll never forget, he’d grown a beard for the play and he had those fierce eyebrows, you know, and he looked just like Moses come down from the mountain to give me an earful. I felt sure he was going to tell me I’d chosen the wrong line of work. But he didn’t. He asked me,” she said, with a smile of remembrance, “if I’d ever heard the fable of the old man and the donkey. You know the one, about the old man and his grandson and the donkey, and they’re going along and someone they meet says that one of them ought to be riding the donkey, so the old man puts the boy on the donkey and the next person they pass says how horrible, look at that young able boy on the donkey and the old man struggling along. So the boy gets down and the old man rides the donkey, and of course that doesn’t do either, because the next person thinks that the little boy shouldn’t be made to walk; so they
both
get on the donkey, and then everyone says oh, how cruel, to make the donkey carry so much weight. And in the end I think they wind up carrying the donkey, and they have a fall, or something, and then none of them can ride. At any rate,” she said, “Sebastian asked me did I know the fable, and I told him yes, I did. And he said, ‘Well then’ ”—she did a fair imitation of the venerable Shakespearean actor, catching his booming voice and trademark glare—“ ‘Well then, stop worrying so much what the rest of us think; just get on the damned donkey and ride it.’ ” She turned her head then, and her smile was deliberately kind. “I always thought that good advice,” she said.

I thought it good advice as well, and took it.

Back in the rehearsal room I shut my mind to everyone else and, ignoring Nicholas’s deadpan delivery, gave myself over to reading the part. The second and third acts went off like a dream. When I’d finished I looked up and saw Rupert’s eyes and I knew I’d done well.

“Very good,” he said, pleased. “Very good, everyone. After lunch, we’ll go back then and take it by scenes, all right?”

A chair scraped beside me as Den rose and stretched with a grin. “That was one hell of a comeback,” he murmured. “What did Madeleine
do
to you at break?”

“Nothing,” I said. “We just talked.”

“I thought maybe she was out there feeding you triple martinis, or something, to make you relax.” His grin grew broader as he reached an arm across to hug my shoulders. “Good work, anyway. You’ll do just fine.”

The tempting smells of roasting meat came wafting through the passage as we left the rehearsal room, beckoning us to our lunch, but there was something I needed to do first. “I’ll catch you up—won’t be a minute,” I said to the others, and parting from them went the other way along the corridor.