Chapter 1: THE STRANGE DOOR

Lena Moreau arrives at the Aldridge Theatre two hours before anyone has asked her to, and the man in the stage door booth does not believe she belongs there. "Name?" He has a mug the size of a flowerpot, a crossword folded into quarters, and the settled expression of someone who has watched forty years of hopefuls turn up early. "Lena Moreau. I'm in Hedda Gabler. Understudy." She hears how small it sounds and adds, "And I'm playing Berte. The maid." His finger travels down a list. "Moreau. Third from the bottom. I'm Dunne. Everybody calls me Dunne, including my wife. Your pass is in the drawer. Don't lose it, and don't let anyone tell you the building's haunted, because it upsets the cleaners." "Is it haunted?" "Course it is." The laminated pass slides under the glass. "Rehearsal room's on the fourth floor. Lift's been broken since the Jubilee. Which Jubilee, I couldn't tell you." She takes the stairs, two at a time at first and then one at a time, because her hair is still damp from the shower and she doesn't want to arrive looking as if she has run there. The corridors are painted the green of old hospitals. Framed photographs climb the walls in decades: men in cravats, women in cloche hats, a chorus line from 1952 with every face in a different state of exhaustion. On the second landing hangs a poster from last season's Cherry Orchard. Isabella Vance in profile, hair pinned up, mouth almost smiling. Lena has seen that face on the sides of buses. She has stood at bus stops and been looked at by it. She is twenty-four. Three years out of RADA, which sounds like a long time if you aren't counting, and she counts every month. Her CV fits on one page only because of the font size. A BBC drama that nobody watched, in which she played a girl who finds a bag. A toothpaste advert that still pays her residuals of eleven pounds forty twice a year. Nine months on a touring Importance of Being Earnest, carrying the tea tray and understudying Gwendolen; in nine months she went on twice, once for a coach party from Rotherham and once for a school group who talked through all of it. She is not complaining. She is only noting that she knows exactly what it is to stand in the dark at the side of somebody else's evening. At home in Halifax, her father teaches French at a comprehensive and her mother nurses at the Royal, and neither of them had been inside a theatre until Lena was fourteen and cast as Snug the joiner in the school's Dream. She had one job: to play a lion. She roared so gently, so apologetically, that three hundred parents laughed until the headteacher had to wipe his eyes, and standing there in a costume made from a mustard-coloured bath mat, she understood that a roomful of strangers could be made to breathe together. She has not wanted anything else since. Her mother cried in the car park afterwards and said, "Well, that's us stuck with it, then," and drove them home through the rain. The rehearsal room on the fourth floor is long and pale and full of morning. Coloured tape on the floor marks out a drawing room that doesn't exist yet: here the French windows, there the stove, a rectangle of blue for the piano. Folding chairs are stacked against the wall. On a trestle table sit a kettle, a plastic tub of teabags, and a laptop with a woman behind it who is sharpening pencils into a neat row. "You're early," says the woman, without looking up. "Nobody's early." "Sorry." "Don't be. It's lovely. I'm Priya, I'm the DSM, which means I run the book and everyone else runs on me." Now she does look up, and her face is wry and kind and tired in advance. "You're Lena. Leave your bag under the table. Tea's the only thing in the building that's free. Marcus is..." "Here." He is on the floor in the far corner, cross-legged, pressing a strip of green tape along the boards with his thumbnail. Lena had imagined a director as someone older. Someone with a clipboard, a temper and a scarf. Marcus Whitmore is thirty-six and wearing a grey cardigan with a hole in the elbow, and dark hair falls across his forehead until he pushes it back with the back of his wrist. He gets to his feet in one movement, the way people do who spent their youth on stages and never forgot how to be economical. "Lena. Welcome. I hope you've had breakfast, because for the next six weeks it'll be your only meal." "I had a banana." "That counts." He holds out a hand and she shakes it, and he holds on a second longer than a handshake needs, looking at the book in her other arm. It is a paperback with the spine broken white, Post-it flags poking out of it in three colours. "You've done your homework." "I didn't know what I'd be asked." "Nobody will ask you anything for about a month. That's the job. Do you like her?" "Hedda?" "Hedda." Lena considers lying. She has been trained, at great expense, to say what a room wants to hear. "I don't know if you're meant to like her," she says. "I think I'm scared of her." Something changes in his face. It opens, like a shutter going up. "Good," he says. "Don't decide too early what she is. The ones who decide on the first day always end up playing a type." It is the first time she realises that being looked at attentively can feel like being warmed. She files it away, the way she files everything, for later. By ten the room is filling. Tobias Fenn, who is playing Judge Brack, arrives in a tweed jacket and a cloud of peppermint, announcing to nobody that he is too old for stairs. Two younger actors, Callum, who will play Tesman, and Anneliese, cast as Thea, hug each other like old friends and then introduce themselves to Lena as if she might be somebody's agent. The costume supervisor measures Lena's shoulders for the maid's apron with a tape that smells of cigarettes. Everyone is delightful. It is the kind of delight, Lena has learned, that holds until the first note. At ten past ten there is still no Isabella. At twenty past, Priya types something and does not look at the door. At twenty-five past, the door opens, and the room rearranges itself around a woman. Isabella Vance is smaller than the bus stops. That is the first surprise. She is slim and narrow-shouldered, in a camel coat and enormous sunglasses she doesn't remove until she is halfway across the floor, and she carries a paper cup in each hand as if she has been warned the room might be thirsty. Her hair is pinned up exactly as in the poster. She is forty-one, and Lena once read in a magazine that she is "luminous at any age," which is the sort of sentence you write about someone you can't describe. "Marcus, darling, forgive me, the Embankment was a car park." She kisses him on the cheek and puts the second coffee into his hand before he can speak, so that whatever he was going to say becomes thank you. Then she is moving around the room, kissing the air beside faces: Tobias, Callum, Anneliese, Priya ("You're a saint, you're a saint"), until she arrives at the edge of the circle where Lena stands. "And you," says Isabella, "are my shadow." Her voice is low and amused. Her eyes are very pale, grey going to green around the pupils. She lays two fingers on Lena's cheek, lightly, the way a person tests a loaf. "Don't be better than me in the second week," she says. "It ruins the mood." Everyone laughs. Lena laughs, half a second late, and understands that laughing is what she is being asked to do. It is a joke, and it is also a fence, and Isabella has put it up so gracefully that anyone who noticed would look petty. Marcus is smiling at both of them, delighted, missing it entirely. They read the play at a long table. Understudies, the stage manager has explained in a whisper, sit along the wall, so Lena takes her folding chair against the cold radiator, opens her paperback and listens. Tobias reads Brack with a purr. Callum is anxious and likeable as Tesman. And Isabella, when she begins, doesn't perform at all. She reads Hedda's first lines so quietly that the whole room leans in, and Lena sees, with a small cold click of recognition, that it isn't only talent. It is attention. Isabella listens to the other actors the way a cat listens to a wall, and every line she gives back has been shaped by what she has heard. This is going to be very hard, Lena thinks, being second to that. She doesn't yet know how right she is, or in what way. At six that evening she rides the Northern line home with the paperback in her lap and texts her mother: Day one done. Everyone's lovely. She looks at it for a moment. It is true. It is exactly true, and still she feels as if she has left something out, a stair she hasn't counted in the dark. Wonderful, love, her mother replies. Eat something proper. The window opposite holds her reflection against the black of the tunnel: a young woman with damp hair and a broken-spined book, clutching it like a shield. She puts it back in her bag. Tonight she will read the second act in bed, out loud, to the stuffed rabbit she refused to leave behind in Halifax.