Fallout (38 page)

Leigh, who had heard more of the Depot than she had seen, saw them all through Paul’s eyes and felt the sentiment and joy of it on his behalf. Smilingly she watched him, as he stood with his arm around people, as much to keep himself up as with affection.

She worked all night, making sure the waiters were doing their jobs and not just smoking in the kitchen, filling herself with reflected glory and glasses with wine. She wallowed. She thought she probably loved it even more than Maggie did, or Paul, who were more closely connected, because she had safe distance and a measure of their success. After midnight she sat, and put her feet onto a chair. Two women were earnestly talking nearby about a collective they were forming, an all-women’s theatre to tour the country, new plays, experimental. She had met one of them before, who was going out with someone at the Duke of York’s, and liked her.

Across the room a group of actors were shouting to be heard, topping one another with ever sillier accents, worse disasters they had faced in New York . . . Sheffield . . . television . . . but the women near Leigh drew her in with dangerous whispered plans of risk – they had a grant, they had a play, they were hoping to be ready.

‘You still SM at the Duke of York’s?’ said one to Leigh, who had almost forgotten she was physically present, so absorbed was she in her role of onlooker.

‘For a while,’ she said.

‘Chuck it in,’ said the woman, huge serious eyes over her glass. ‘We need someone like you.’

‘I might,’ said Leigh, thinking of Graft and how happy they had been.

She realised how it scared her, the idea of leaving the security of her limiting job.

She remembered she had used to be braver.

She smiled and got up. She took some plates as she passed a table, tucking her glass between her forearm and the edges, precarious. On her way to the kitchen a waiter bumped into her, and the red wine tipped and spilled onto her front, the wet fabric smell of it rising up immediately as it spread.

The waiter began to apologise but could not speak English. He was very skinny, long-haired, and looked as if he ought to be on a Vespa in Italy somewhere, not like a waiter at all.

‘It’s fine,’ she said, knowing the stain would never lift. ‘Don’t worry.’

They both mopped at her dress and she saw, as she looked up, past him, Paul and Maggie at a table in the corner. They were about three feet apart. They were not touching, but sat almost unnecessarily distant from one another. They were talking intently, and there was something in it – something in the way they faced one another, the atmosphere around them – that made Leigh halt.

She gave the plates and glasses to the waiter, hardly looking at him, and went over as they both looked up as if she were interrupting them.

‘Hello,’ said Paul. ‘What’s that?’

She had forgotten about the wine stain down her front.

‘You look as if you’ve been stabbed,’ said Paul.

‘Here, sit,’ said Maggie, and pulled out the chair between them.

Leigh turned away from the suspicion in her mind, dismissing the moment’s perception.

‘Good idea,’ she said.

She saw Paul look at her – check her expression – as she sat, but again she put it from her mind.

She turned to him and he put both his hands on either side of her face and kissed her mouth.

‘Missed you,’ he said.

She leaned against him, closed her eyes and drew the safekeeping fabric of her life around her like a cloak. Paul was her own, and steady. It was nothing he had done, only her own fugitive heart, always alert to danger. She must remember she had conquered it. She opened her eyes.

‘You two have been to hell and back,’ she said, with slightly drunken sincerity. ‘No wonder you are so close.’

At home she went about the process of undressing and washing like a mechanical toy winding down. All she wanted was bed. It took her several minutes to realise that Paul was not doing the same. Usually they moved around one another at bedtime like a well-rehearsed stage crew between scenes; silent, not bumping into one another in the dim light as they undressed, washed, climbed into bed. But Paul was not there. She took a blanket, wrapped herself in it, and went into the sitting room. He was on the sofa in the dark.

‘Too tired to sleep?’

‘I have to tell you now or else I never will,’ he said.

Leigh stopped in the doorway. Knowing but not accepting. Waiting.

‘I’m sorry, Leigh. I’ve been – Maggie and me are seeing each other.’

Leigh stood wrapped in her clumsy blanket and all she felt was the humiliating comedy of not having realised. He had looked at her each night after being with Maggie all day and she hadn’t known. She had been foolish. The words kept coming at her. Foolish. Stupid. Pitiable. Idiotically happy while her boyfriend was seeing someone else.

‘How long?’ she said.

‘Long enough.’

‘How long?’

‘A month. Bit more.’

She stood in silence, taking it in. Then the pain started. She didn’t have anger, only this embarrassing, ugly pain that she, ridiculously, had felt safe. It felt as though she had been kicked.

‘Leigh—’

She shook her head and went into the bedroom, her breath and body out of kilter with her mind, sick. She sat on her side of the bed and then got up again. Sitting was too vulnerable.

Paul came into the room. She was not going to show him anything. She would not.

‘I want you to go; I can’t talk to you about it,’ she said.

‘All right,’ said Paul, recognising her right to tell him how this should be, because he had wronged her. She must be given her way.

‘Are you in love with her?’ she said, despising the cliché and the victim tone of her voice but knowing it would matter later when she had to piece herself together.

‘I don’t know,’ said Paul. ‘She’s really very—’

‘No,’ said Leigh, warningly, who could not hear what Maggie was.

She turned round.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said and she saw that he was wrecked by it. He’d had time to feel it, after all. He looked so sad. He looked as if he might cry, and she felt sorry for him because she loved him very much and she did not want him to suffer.

‘Please can you go?’ she said. She knew she was going to lose herself to grief or protest, and could not bear for him to see it.

He nodded, and he went.
He’ll probably go to her
, Leigh thought, and she remembered her mother throwing her father out and into the arms of other women and herself, a child, watching from the top of the stairs.

Paul did not move out immediately and neither did she. There was all the mess of it to get through first. A week of helpless arguing, circular conversations, apologies and blame. Sometimes they decided they would stay together, as if nothing had gone wrong at all, and take refuge in familiarity, knowing there was nothing really left of the two of them. The habit of one another broke like bones. And her rage. Her rage. She indulged in elaborate revenge fantasies; confronting Maggie in rooms full of people, spilling food on her, sending her hate-filled letters that she wrote in her mind, and rewrote, and sometimes put down on paper, but never surrendered to sending. And she would say to him –

What’s it like with her?

How did it feel to lie to me, was it fun?

Where were you the first time?

In the office?

At her house?

Did you bring her here?

She’s so old, Paul – for God’s sake, a divorcee!

Does she like her younger man? Good for her vanity?

And at her worst –

You’re just like my father, you fucking bastard, you shit
. . .

She hit him. He fended her off, gently. She cried. He wiped her tears. And he would say –

I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

I didn’t think of you.

It was selfish.

She’s not a bitch – leave her alone.

She’s nice. She wants me.

I didn’t want to hurt you, Leigh.

Don’t make me tell you.

And once, when he was cornered, ‘I went to her because you don’t really love me,’ so that Leigh laughed in the face of her pain and his.

‘Now you want me to tell you I love you?’

‘No. You always say it.’

‘I mean it.’

‘I know I’m not enough for you, Leigh. I’ve never felt safe,’ he said.

‘I did,’ said Leigh. ‘I did.’

She had prized safety above all things, had backed herself into a corner and found nothing but danger there.

She handed in her notice at the theatre; Paul put the flat up for sale, and they said goodbye.

‘What are you going to do?’ he asked.

She had offers from friends to sleep on their floors, rent their rooms, but London – her London, the theatre – had Paul in it, and she couldn’t be there.

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

He didn’t ask her any more. She was not his to uncover. Such a very long short-time together, from that long-ago February of ’72 to this July of ’73, but her secrets were now not his to keep.

Diversion
was a stone-cold hit, smashing cracks in every other production of that season from the RSC’s redefining
Antony and Cleopatra
to Alan Ayckbourn’s
Norman Conquests
;
Diversion
made that year not just a good year for theatre but
the
year. The season. The play.

It was three weeks before Luke went to see it. When he did, it was to stand at the back of the stalls, dazed by the surreal experience of the words being his but the design, cast, the production all new to him. It was like seeing a dream made flesh, but generations from the origin. The text had been altered slightly in places, and he could not be offended; Malcolm Dewberry couldn’t have discussed the process with him if he had wanted to. Luke doubted he would have wanted to.

Diversion
. The most loved, the most painful and – he did not mind the reductive judgement – the
best
piece of work of his life. Seeing it on stage, from a distance, he registered that having betrayed it, it was not now his, and could not now be loved.

Hannah Gold, playing Mary, was just right, he noted. She was warm and – as Bridge had said of the part – she was womanly. He remembered how sweet she had been when they were together. He left in the interval.

The week before, he had written Paul and Maggie a letter of apology, stilted and heartfelt, but had not heard back. His agent, Ben, was busy sticking plasters over the cuts and grazes Luke had inflicted on his professional relationships, but he was sanguine about it.

Success causes amnesia, Luke, and Nigel Dempster’s poisoned pen never harms the box office.

Earlier that day Luke left his cramped, dirty hotel room in Bloomsbury and went to the matinée of
Hierarchy of Angels
at the Depot. Sitting in the top tier of the brand-new theatre he was overwhelmed with pride at what Paul had done. The foyer still smelled of paint. The play was very good. The agonisingly tight timing of its opening had lent urgency to the Depot’s originality. Cubitt, in
The Times
, had sneered that the factory-like setting was
inconducive to the appreciation of art of any kind, even Denton’s grating polemic
, but Kurtz in the
Observer
had fallen in love with the space and said that . . .
all thinking people welcome the Depot with an open mind and open heart; it is the future, and Denton its perfectly pitched voice.

Luke hoped that Leigh was cutting out the notices for her scrapbook as he was for her, in his mind.

When he came out of the theatre, before he could lose his nerve, he went straight to the Depot’s offices.

Paul looked up at him as he came in, and covered his surprise with blankness. Luke stood in the doorway, twitching with nerves and shifting from foot to foot, as the phone rang and Paul ignored it.

When it stopped Luke said, ‘Come to say hello.’ He noted Maggie’s absence with relief.

‘Hello,’ said Paul.

‘Did you get my letter?’ said Luke.

‘Yep,’ said Paul.

‘I just saw
Hierarchy
, it’s a bloody – well, it’s really good, Paul.’

‘Nice of you to say so.’

Luke winced, knowing nothing good would come of this and yet unable to leave. He deserved the slings and arrows and couldn’t back out a coward, too.

‘What’s next, then?’ he asked.

‘What?’

‘For the Depot.’

‘The
Hamlet
, you might remember?’

‘Oh. Yes. Right. Good.’

‘Listen, Luke, I’m busy.’

‘Yes, I know, I just wanted to – how’s Leigh?’

Paul did not answer and Luke felt frustration. This wasn’t natural to him, this cool enmity, he would have talked if Paul would let him, tried to find some truth to close the distance. But then Paul asked, ‘How’s Nina?’ and Luke didn’t want to talk any longer, just get out of there.

‘I don’t know,’ he answered, and found he couldn’t say any more because it hurt too much.

‘Don’t you have to go and get interviewed by someone?’ said Paul, and the funny part was, he did.

The
Observer Magazine
journalist was waiting on the pavement in Cartwright Gardens, outside his hotel; a bespectacled man of Luke’s age, like an overgrown student. He had a photographer with him who took pictures of Luke as they talked, standing by the window in the tiny hotel room, because there wasn’t a bar and nowhere to sit but the bed. They turned towards one another unnaturally with the
click-whirr
staccato of the camera punctuating the questions like a pulse.

Does it surprise you to be compared with Arthur Miller? Peter Nicholls? Pinter? Beckett?

Is there any truth to the rumour Peter Hall has commissioned you to write a play for the new National?

Do you consider
Diversion
a tragedy? A comedy? A morality tale?