They lay there for a while, listening as the ice-cream truck pulled into the street and sounded its theme tune for the children to hear. The truck whined away down the road, and it was quiet again.
“That was it,” Stanley said, looking up for the first time, into the lights.
“That was what, Stanley?” the girl said, rolling over and touching him lightly on the lower curve of his back with her fingertips. “That was what?”
“That was the most intimate scene of my life,” Stanley said. “Right then. That was it.”
August
“Cue Mr. Saladin!” one of the students shouted. “King of Spades! Where the hell are you, Connor?”
There was a commotion in the wings, unseen, and then the King of Spades appeared, red faced and trotting, ejected so swiftly from the parted cloth it was as if he had been physically launched.
“Sorry,” he called out wildly in the direction of the pit. He cast about to find his mark on the floor, two pieces of tape crossed in a pale X like a cartoon Band-Aid.
“Get your bloody game on,” someone shouted.
They watched with contempt and satisfaction as the King of Spades found his mark, drew himself up and took a breath. The stiff waxy breastplate of his costume had come untied on one shoulder and so hung at an odd angle across his chest. He had forgotten his gloves and his sword, but it was too late now.
The onstage students sighed and retraced their steps to give the boy his cue again. They said, “But look at it from another point of view. She lost her virginity, and in good time, before it began to cling unfashionably like a visible night-rag. She snared an older man. She achieved celebrity. And now she has a secret which everyone craves to know: a sexual secret, the best kind of secret, a vortex of a secret that tugs and tugs away at her edges so she’s never quite there. Oh, don’t pity Victoria. Pity poor lonely Mr. Saladin, who has tasted the bright ripe fruit of youth and purity, and now nothing else will do.”
There was a kettle-drum clash from the orchestra pit, on the beat. Its effect on the King of Spades was dramatic. He crumpled, as if he had been clubbed between the shoulder blades, and all in an instant he became crippled and fragile and old. As he began to speak and the lesser characters reformed like children around his knees, one of the boys in the stalls leaned over to whisper, “He’s still playing it for laughs. It won’t work if he plays it for laughs.”
The King of Spades said, “There was something so very endearing about it, right back in the beginning. The way she played it, out of a textbook, big moon eyes and an open collar, and her skirt hitched up to show her knee. It was so touchingly amateur. It was like a child’s painting, imperfect and discordant and poorly executed and crying out to be celebrated, to be pinned to the wall or the fridge, to be complimented and fawned over and adored.”
He trailed his foot and looked down at the floor and smiled secretly to himself, as if he was remembering something infinitely private. The band in the orchestra pit had struck up a jazzy pulse, drums and double-bass and the throaty murmur of a tenor saxophone.
He said, “In ten years’ time she will be able to look at a man in cold blood and think, We are compatible. She will think, given your generosity of spirit, given your ability to provide me with the emotional shelter I need, given your particular wry and self-deprecating sense of humor, your interest in silent film, given the things you like to cook, and your tendency toward pedantry, and the things you do to pass the time—given all of this, I can conclude that we’re compatible. Over the course of her life she will gradually compile this dreary list of requisites. Year by year she will reduce the yawning gulf of her desire to the smallness of a job vacancy: a janitor, or a sentry, or a drone. The ad will say, Wanted. That’s all.”
The King of Spades shrugged.
“But with me she didn’t have a formula,” he said. “She didn’t know her appetites, didn’t recognize the jumping pulse that leaped and leaped in the scarlet recess of her throat. Every time we touched she was finding out something new—not about me, but about herself, her tides and tolls, her responses, the upturned vase of emptiness she carried around inside her always, like something unfinished or unmade.”
Behind him there were shadow-figures arched and clawing behind mullioned screens. They were silhouettes, crisply lit and dark against the white cloth, and they were all the shapeliest of the first-year students, chosen for their linear form, their profile. They were hand-picked by the others, who squinted until they saw only the positive outline and could judge the massy contour on its own.
The jazz band eased into the main theme now, the recurring motif of the production, and the seething crowd on stage reformed into another shape, another scene. The lights changed and the music changed, and the King of Spades was swallowed by the crowd.
“You missed out a bit,” one of the stage managers said, when the King of Spades at last heard his cue to exit and bowed out, stage right. He was holding a sheaf of papers fixed together with a bulldog clip, and he shook the papers in the King of Spades’ shadowed face. He said, “You missed out that whole section where he says, How can I protect these girls and excite them at the same time?”
September
“Has anything ever gone wrong?” Stanley said. “In the devised production? Like, the pistol was loaded and nobody even knew it was real. Or the flying harness was unclipped, or somebody fell from the fly-floors and slammed into the action in the middle of the stage. Some tragic story that happened almost too long ago to remember.”
“You’re nervous,” Oliver said, as he slid into the seat opposite. He pulled an apple out of his backpack and began tossing it back and forth between his hands.
“There’s just something scary about being let loose,” Stanley said. “Without the tutors watching or anything, just us on our own for months and months. And I just wondered if anything’s ever gone terribly wrong. Like in a Lord of the Flies kind of a way.”
“You’re worried you’re going to be impaled on the spikes of your wimple,” Oliver said, taking a cheerful bite and grinning across at Stanley as he chewed. “Suffocated by that big black dress. Death by habit.”
“So nothing’s ever gone wrong?”
“Well, if not, maybe this year’s the year.” Oliver enjoyed Stanley’s frowning distress for a moment longer, then reached across and slapped him on the arm. “Hey man, you’re awesome in that role. Everyone always says so as soon as you leave the room.”
“I didn’t mean that,” Stanley said. He drummed his hands on the tabletop and sighed.
August
Stanley left the Institute buildings at a brisk trot, hugging a long woollen trench coat around his body. He was wearing a suit and tie, and his shoes were shined brightly black. He took the stairs two by two, broke apart from the rest of the group and set off across the quadrangle with his head inclined and his shoulders slightly bowed, his hands clenched in fists inside the pockets of his coat. He walked swiftly, and soon he had left the rest of the group and was walking down the boulevard alone.
Behind him, a motley clutch of characters from Tennessee Williams, Steven Berkoff, Ionesco and David Hare milled about briefly before settling upon an objective and dispersing likewise. One of the girls had costumed herself in a taffeta dress that was cut above the knee, and she looked uncomfortable and underdressed in the chill of the afternoon. Her bare legs were blood mottled and the fine fur on her arms was standing on end.
Stanley had resolved to circumnavigate the park, detouring to avoid the children’s playground, then looping carefully around the lake and returning to the Institute buildings from the opposite side. He withdrew further into the collar of his shirt and lengthened his stride. He supposed he was probably being followed: the Heads of Acting, Movement, Improvisation and Voice had all left the premises earlier that morning to station themselves around the city quarter.
“You mustn’t leave the bounded area,” the Head of Acting had said again and again, tapping the illuminated area with
his forefinger and looking down past the steel arm of the projector at the shifting mass of students straining in their seats. He was dressed in canvas trousers and an open-necked shirt, looking only slightly jauntier than usual but nevertheless infected by the same giddy thrill of disguise as the students, some of whom were almost unrecognizable in their pinned costumes and period hair.
Stanley turned off the boulevard and passed through the blunt-tipped iron gates into the botanical gardens. A suited man passed him on the gravel path and gave him a long look. Stanley almost looked away, but quickly remembered he was Joe Pitt, and looked hard at the man for the longest possible instant, not breaking his gaze until he had passed. He felt an unpleasant flicker of guilt at the deception that did not dissolve when the man rounded the corner of the hothouse and disappeared. Stanley thought he saw out of the corner of his eye the Head of Improvisation sitting on a park bench in a pool of sunlight and holding a newspaper on her lap. He drew his coat tighter around himself and walked on.
Pretending to be somebody else gave Stanley a curious feeling of privacy in himself. The inner thoughts and processings of his character, visible only as he chose to make them visible, across his face and in the lie of his hands and through the curve of his posture, enclosed his own thoughts like an atmosphere, parceling the real Stanley up beneath a double-layered film, the inner and the outer Joe Pitt. He felt snug, as if tightly curled within a nut, safe in the knowledge that nobody could truly see him beneath the double fog of his disguise.
“Hello,” said a small voice, and suddenly there was the girl from the wings, the music-lesson girl, coming toward him with her saxophone case slung over her shoulder like a quiver. She grinned, the first properly uncensored grin he had seen on her face, and said, “Are you following me?”
“If I was following you, wouldn’t I be walking behind you?” Stanley said.
“I meant stalking.” The girl was still grinning, now flicking her gaze up and down Stanley’s overcoat, which was a little too large for him, the sleeves hanging over his fingertips as if he was a child dressing up in the clothes of his father.
“Oh. I’m doing an acting exercise for drama school,” Stanley said without thinking. As soon as he’d said it, he awaited a sinking feeling in his stomach: he’d failed the exercise; someone would surely have seen and noted it. “If you tell anyone that you are doing an exercise, or describe the Institute or your profession in any way,” the Head of Acting had said, “it goes without saying that you will automatically fail.”
“I have to stay in character all morning,” Stanley said, rushing on. “Those are the rules.” The sinking feeling didn’t come. He felt curiously lighter, standing here in the park with this pretty upturned girl, and he flapped his oversized coat around him and laughed.
“Do you want to get a coffee later?” he asked. “When I’m done being Joe Pitt.”
“Okay,” Isolde said shyly. “Who’s Joe Pitt?”
“Well, he dresses like this,” Stanley said. “And beyond that, I couldn’t really say.”
“You’re not doing a very good job of being him then,” Isolde said.
“I guess not.”
Stanley located the feeling of lightness: he felt real, more real than he had felt in months.
“How do I know you’re not acting now?” Isolde said, which was almost a cliché but he forgave her because of his feeling of lightness and because of how pretty she looked, with her pink ears and her woollen coat and her mittens clapped together against the cold.
“How do I know that you’re not?” Stanley said.
Isolde smiled and made a funny gesture, turning out her hands and lifting herself up onto her tiptoes to show that her whole body didn’t know. Stanley felt a rush of happiness surge over him like a tide.
“I guess that’s a risk we’re going to have to take, then,” he said.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw the Head of Improvisation approaching.
“I have to go and finish my walk now,” he said. “But I’ll wait for you under the ginkgo tree.”
“I finish at five,” Isolde said.
“I know,” Stanley said. “I’ve been watching.”
July
“You have to follow through with the action to the very end,” the Head of Movement called out crossly. His tired hand was smoothing the hair on his crown, over and over. “Right now it’s obvious that you both know the scene is about to end, and you relax before the lights go down. It’s only a split-second thing, but it matters. You have to give the illusion that the scene is going to keep going on, behind the curtain. You have to follow through with the action to the very end. Again.”
Stanley and the girl again assumed their position, Stanley standing with his palm cupped against the girl’s cheek and his index finger slipped inside the tight little bud of her ear. They said their lines again, and tried not to loosen or slacken their bodies as the scene came to its invisible end.
“It is what I want. This is what I want,” was Stanley’s last line, and he gave her jaw a tight little shake with the clutch of his hand, for emphasis. The girl looked up at him. The scene ended.
Stanley’s face was close to hers and her cheek was in his hand. He followed the action through: he leaned down and kissed her like he meant it.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” the Head of Movement exploded, and the two of them jumped hastily apart. “When did I say kiss her? I said, Follow through with the action to the very end.”
“I thought that was what you meant,” Stanley said, with hot embarrassment, looking out past the lights. The girl wiped her mouth and looked at the floor.
“We are not going to have the curtain come down on the two of you pashing like a couple of kids!” the Head of Movement shouted. “Think about the scene, man!”
The Head of Movement did not usually yell. He was generally less vicious than the Head of Acting, less inclined to shame or fracture his students, less given to little bursts of irritation or cold contempt. But today he was scratchy, surly and tight chested as if short of breath, and as he glared up at the pair of them from his seat in the stalls he was smothered by a vast glove of anger and blame.
“What is it?” he said. “Just leaped at the opportunity, I suppose? What?”
The boy had a wounded look. He had been expecting congratulations, probably, praise for his physical commitment to the scene, his willingness to put personal considerations aside in the name of his art; he had been shamed, moreover, and shamed in front of a girl. The Head of Movement might well have destroyed all possibility of a relationship between the pair by this public shaming that caused them to flush and leap apart. The tutor knew it, and didn’t care. He was suddenly immensely irritated at them both, the boy with his fair lashes and vulnerable pout, the girl with her practiced look of nervous naïveté, worn thin.
“I just thought that’s what you meant,” Stanley said again. “Sorry.”
The Head of Movement did not speak for a moment. They were looking at him with faint pity now, he thought, as any teenager looks at an adult they believe to be utterly incapable of lust. They were looking at him as if they believed their awkward dry fumble against the fold of the curtain had somehow made him jealous; as if their collision had made him yearn for some lost youthful spontaneity of touch, and his outburst had only marked his dissatisfaction, his recognition of his own immeasurable loss. The Head of Movement felt disgusted. He wanted to turn his head and spit on the floor. He wanted to mount the seven steps to the stage and tear them from their cocoon of self-absorption and conceit. He wanted to shout and make them see that he was not jealous, that he could not be jealous of any pathetic hot-light kiss between two ill-made brats, and if anything what he felt was a profound nausea at what he had been forced to watch.
“Again,” said the Head of Movement sourly, and threw himself back into his chair.
September
Stanley was waiting for Isolde under the ginkgo tree when she emerged from her lesson, trotting down
the sunken stone steps and across the courtyard to embrace him and kiss him briefly on the mouth.
“Look at you, you little gypsy,” Stanley said as he stepped back. “All your bags and everything.”
“Fridays are horrible,” Isolde said. “Sax and PE and art all in the same afternoon.”
“Gypsy girl.”
Isolde exhaled and flapped her arms and then grinned at Stanley, a broad, honest grin that lit her up completely. It was the same unashamed openness that had lured Mr. Saladin to Victoria, only it was transplanted here on to her sister, the same smile on a different face. Stanley leaned forward and kissed her on the nose.
“So when am I going to hear you play?” he said.
“I thought you could hear from down here in the quad.”
“But I’m never sure which sax is you and which is your teacher,” Stanley said with a grin. “I might be thinking you’re much better than you actually are.”
“Our saxes actually have really different voices,” Isolde said. “If you know to listen for that sort of thing. My mouthpiece is vulcanized rubber and hers is metal. The metal piece makes a really different sound.”
“Like how speaking voices are different from each other.”
“Yeah,” Isolde said. “Right. Like the difference between a woman and a girl.”
The stone building behind them was now unlit, all the curtains pulled and the lights doused. Inside, the offices were locked for the night and cooling now in the gathering dusk. On the attic level the saxophone teacher’s window was dark, as if she had locked the studio after Isolde’s departure and departed herself for the night, but if you looked up through the ginkgo branches you would see an inky figure standing by the curtain and looking down into the courtyard at the pair standing together under the ginkgo tree. Stanley and Isolde did not look up. Stanley crushed Isolde in a one-arm hug and together they walked away, talking quietly with their heads together, until they were swallowed by the cloisters and the branches, and they disappeared.