William Boyd - Waiting for Sunrise

The cab rattled over some cobblestones and woke him up. Gilda swayed with the motion and grabbed his arm to keep herself upright.

“Oops, sorry,” she said. “But don’t you think so?”

“Think what?”

“You’re not listening to me, you beast.”

“Do you think I went too fast through, ‘Is this her fault or mine? The tempter or the tempted, who sins most?’ I thought I may have rushed it.”

“Not to my ear. No, I was saying — are we mad?”

“In what way?”

“To be doing Miss Julie as well. The first night’s in two weeks, I can’t believe it.”

“It’s only ninety minutes and there’s no interval.”

“I suppose so…But it’s very intense — I think we’ll be exhausted. What have we taken on?”

The back of the cab was full of her scent — a clinging, farinaceous odour of lilies and cinnamon —’Matins de Paris’ she had said it was called when he asked. He had agreed to wait for her after the show but she had taken forty minutes to put on her finery. She was looking in her compact-mirror now, checking her hair, her lip-rouge — the palest pink. It suited her.

“We’re going to be the last there,” Lysander said.

“Then we can make an entrance. It is our night.”

“Don’t let Rutherford hear you say that.”

She laughed — her real laugh, Lysander noted, rather deep and raucous, not like her fake laugh, a kind of girly trill. He could easily distinguish them, now they had spent so much time together rehearsing Measure for Measure and Miss Julie , just as he could distinguish the real Gilda Butterfield from ‘Miss Gilda Butterfield’, the latter overlaid with many veneers of faux-gentility, pretension, archness and other affectations, the laugh being the least of it. She was talking again.

“Rutherford asked me one of his questions about Miss Julie that I really didn’t know how to answer.”

“Oh, yes, one of his ‘Stanislavsky’ questions.” He was awake now — exhilaration had vanquished fatigue. “What was it?”

“He said: what do you think happens when Julie and Jean go outside — just before the ballet sequence?”

“And you said?”

“I said I assumed they kissed.”

“Come on, Gilda. You’re a woman of the world.”

“What do they do, then?”

Lysander decided to take the risk. Something about Gilda dared him to say it. She was an actress, for god’s sake. He lowered his voice.

“They fu — they fornicate, of course.”

“ Lysander! Talk about calling a spade a spade.” She laughed again, however.

“Excuse my Anglo-Saxon. But it’s very obvious. It’s very important also, for when they both come back on, that the audience realizes this. When we both come back on.”

“Now you put it that way I see what you mean, yes…” She busied herself with her mirror again, embarrassed, he supposed, wondering if he’d gone too far.

“When Jean and Julie come back on after the ballet. Everything’s changed,” he said. “They haven’t just been billing and cooing in the rose garden. They’ve been — you know, passionately, irresistibly…” He paused. “It affects the whole play. That’s why you commit suicide.”

“You sound like Rutherford,” she said. “Or have you been reading too much D.H. Lawrence?”

They were rolling down Regent Street towards the Café Royal. It was a warm clear night, not too muggy for late July. The cab pulled up and Lysander paid the driver and helped Gilda down carefully. She was wearing a very tight hobble-skirt that gave her a footstep of no more than eighteen inches and a sleeveless silk blouse freighted with flounces and ribbonry. She had a pearl choker at her throat and long white gloves almost to her armpits. Her curly blonde hair had been subdued under numerous hair-ornaments. He handed over her chiffon stole and she wound it loosely around her bare shoulders.

“You look very beautiful, Gilda,” he said. “And you were superb tonight as Isabella,” he added, sincerely.

“Stop. You’ll make me cry.”

He offered her his arm and they went into the Café through the revolving doors to be met by a manic babble of talk and laughter and a blurry wall of smoke.

“We’re with the Rutherford Davison party,” Lysander said to the maître d’.

“Upstairs, first floor,” the man said. “The smaller of the two private rooms.”

They walked up the stairs. On the landing they could hear the excited talk and laughter coming from the rest of the company through the open door of the private room, left ajar as if in welcome, expecting them. There was a pop of a champagne bottle opening and the sound of people clapping. Gilda tugged on his elbow and held him back, pausing them both in the gloom of the corridor. She looked around and took his hand and drew him to her. Their faces were close.

“What’s going on?” Lysander said.

She kissed him hard on his lips and pressed herself against him. He felt her tongue pushing, flickering, and he opened his mouth. Then she stepped back, checked the copious frilling of her blouse and readjusted her chiffon stole. Lysander took out his handkerchief and dabbed at his lips in case there were any traces of her lip-rouge. She looked at him squarely — a look that came from the real Gilda Butterfield.

“We’d better go in,” she said, “or they’ll wonder what’s become of us.”

She linked arms with him again and they walked into the room together. The company rose to their feet and applauded.

♦

Lysander allowed a waiter to pour him more champagne as he tried to listen to what Rutherford Davison was saying. He was very aware of Gilda across the room and the many glances she was throwing his way. He felt in something of a quandary. He decided to see simply where the evening would lead. A night for instincts, not rationality, he decided.

“No,” Rutherford was saying, “I think we’ll do two full weeks of Measure and then very quickly announce Miss Julie . I have a horrible feeling they’ll close us down as soon as the reviews start appearing so we want to have as many performances as possible.”

“But it was done in Birmingham this year, you said. So there’s a precedent.”

“A precedent for a very boring, prudish, safe-as-houses production. Wait till you see how we do it — what I’ve got planned.”

“It’s your company.”

Lysander had grown to like Rutherford — perhaps ‘like’ was the wrong word — he had grown to trust his intuition and his intelligence. He was not naturally a warm or open person but he seemed to know what he was doing and didn’t waver from his purpose. He had said that Measure for Measure and Miss Julie were a perfect double-bill as both plays were fundamentally about sex, even though they were written three centuries apart. Certainly the emphases and undercurrents that had been revealed this evening had set audible mutterings running through the audience a few times. He wondered what the reviews would be like — not that he’d be reading them. Rutherford said he only read reviews for adjectives and adverbs — he was hoping for ‘shocking’ and ‘daring’ — even ‘disgraceful’ would suit. We’re here to stir things up, he had said to the company. Let’s show them a Shakespeare as troubled and worldly as the sonnets. This Swan of Avon has paddled through a sewer.

Lysander moved off and wandered round the room. He ate a couple of canapés and chatted to some of the other actors and their friends, aware of Gilda circling the room in the other direction — anti- to his clockwise. It was after midnight. He went back to the bar and ordered a brandy and soda.

“Would you light my cigarette, please, kind sir?” Cockney accent. Lysander turned.