Cherry came in as she was applying the thick foundation needed to show up under the footlights.
‘Guess what?’ she demanded excitedly. ‘The most fantastic news! Helen has had a little girl—this morning. They decided to do a Caesar last night, apparently. Simon’s here—he came straight to the theatre from the hospital. He’s over the moon, as you can imagine. They’ve decided to call the baby Hero, apparently—God help the poor little mite,’ she added with a pious grin.
‘Simon must be relieved that it’s over,’ Kirsty commented, applying eyeshadow. ‘It must have been a dreadfully worrying time for him.’
‘Yes, he looked exhausted when he walked in. He’s going to stay for the performance. I left him talking with Drew. By the way,’ Cherry asked Kirsty, ‘how’s Rafe? Is his throat any better?’
Rafe had developed a sore throat the previous day, and Kirsty had been concerned about him. Twice during one speech he had been on the verge of losing his voice completely, and Drew had advised him to rest it during the rehearsal.
‘I haven’t seen him yet. He’s sharing a dressing room with David, isn’t he? I’ll go and find out how he is. Are you all ready for the party afterwards?’
Kirsty managed a weak smile. In truth she could not think beyond the performance to the party being held afterwards.
‘I would be in your shoes,’ Cherry told her. ‘You’ve barely seen anything of Drew recently, apart from during rehearsal. Have you made any plans yet—for the wedding, I mean?’
‘We haven’t talked about anything other than the play,’ Kirsty told her truthfully, grateful for the warning bell ringing stridently to remind them how close they were to curtain-up.
‘Well, there’s one good thing,’ Cherry told her as she opened the door to leave. ‘The seats are filling up very nicely—you know we’ve sold all the tickets? We normally do very well on first nights, but this time we’ve surpassed ourselves—will your family be there?’
Kirsty managed a noncommittal shrug. To tell the truth she was both disappointed and hurt that she hadn’t heard from either her parents or Chelsea and Slade, despite the fact that she had written to them both sending her complimentary tickets and asking them to the first night.
They had all come to watch her in both her previous roles. Perhaps seeing her in two disasters was enough loyalty to expect from any family, she thought dismally, trying not to let the prospect of the ordeal in front of her intimidate her too much. And all at once it was an ordeal. Faint beads of perspiration broke out on her skin as she contemplated the enormity of the task ahead. How could she have ever thought she was good enough to play Hero? No wonder Rachel had been making such snide remarks to her! She would never get through the play without making some serious blunder; she knew it.
She was just beginning to panic in earnest, when the door opened and Simon popped his head round, smiling at her.
‘Okay?’
Meg, who had finished her make-up, grinned back.
‘Everything’s just fine. And we’re having a double celebration afterwards, I hear?’
‘Yes. Helen is over the moon now that she’s got her daughter. She sends you her love, Kirsty, and says you’re not to worry—you can do it!’
Kirsty was appalled to find weakly emotional tears blurring her vision for a few seconds, but she was unbearably touched by Helen’s kindness—to think of her, in the midst of everything that had happened to her, spoke of a depth of kindness rarely experienced.
‘Oh, by the way, you know…’
‘Time we were on stage,’ Meg announced firmly, taking Kirsty by the arm. She was feeling dreadfully nervous, a whole flock of butterflies clamouring for release in her stomach, and she barely registered Simon’s unfinished sentence as Meg ushered her out of the room and back stage.
Rachel was already there, her normal expression hidden beneath her Beatrice.
‘Right,’ Simon instructed softly behind them, and in the concerted move towards the stage, protected by the closed curtains, Kirsty barely had time to wonder where Drew was.
During the initial part of the first scene Kirsty had little more to do than speak briefly and then remain in the background, which gave her ample opportunity to study the other actors as they entered part-way through the scene. They all looked unfamiliar in their costumes—Kirsty still hadn’t got used to the difference they could make. She stiffened as she studied Claudio, her eyes widening as they lifted to his face. Only it wasn’t Rafe’s face, it was Drew’s. Her heart started to thump erratically. What was Drew doing playing Claudio?
She found out during the first interval. Rafe’s sore throat had proved more serious than had been expected and he had been told by his doctor that if he went on stage he risked losing his voice altogether.
‘Wasn’t it lucky that Simon was able to come back to direct?’ Cherry chattered enthusiastically as she helped Kirsty to change ready for the wedding scene, ‘otherwise Drew wouldn’t have been free to play Claudio. There you are,’ she announced, fastening the dress. ‘Very nice—almost like a dress rehearsal for the real thing,’ she added a grin, ‘although Drew’s hardly likely to do a Claudio on you!’
‘No,’ Kirsty agreed hollowly. It was true he wasn’t, for the very simple reason that he had no intention of marrying her in the first place.
Knowing that she was playing opposite Drew increased her nervous tension, and Kirsty was actually trembling when she went back on stage. A vague sense of unreality seemed to possess her, so that she wasn’t entirely sure what was real and what was merely play-acting. Drew’s cool, cynical eyes were real enough, and so was the expression in them. Just for a moment Kirsty actually felt she was Hero, unable to comprehend why her husband-to-be was looking at her so coldly. And then came his rejection of her.
Listening to the cold hauteur of those words, Kirsty had no need to act. Her shame and pain were real; her agony of mind at being so misjudged evident in her expression as she spoke her own lines in a voice that trembled with fierce conviction. The audience was forgotten; the other actors were forgotten; she was simply a woman in love trying to convince her lover that he was wrong. Gradually her trembling anxiety changed to scorching sarcasm; it was evident in her movements, and the curl of her mouth, underlined as she spoke her lines, fading away to nothing as she listened to Claudio’s final denunciation before swooning away at his feet.
Somehow she managed to stumble off stage when the curtains closed. Cherry was waiting for her.
‘Oh, Kirsty, you were marvellous! I actually cried!’ she told her. ‘I couldn’t believe I could be so affected—you were a thousand times better than I’ve ever seen you before. You’ve stolen the show from Rachel,’ she added with relish. ‘She’s furious! I’ve just heard her arguing with Drew. She says you deliberately upstaged her.’ Cherry gave a gurgle of laughter. ‘Drew wasn’t impressed. Actually he didn’t seem to be in a very good mood. Perhaps he’s finding being on stage a strain.’
Kirsty was inclined to dismiss Cherry’s comment as fanciful until her final scene with him. He did look strained, she acknowledged. Beneath the stage make-up his face was drawn in bitter lines. Was it because Beverley wasn’t here and he still had to tell her that they were back together?
Kirsty forced herself to concentrate not on her own private pain but on the play.
The final scene was a very emotive one. Drew’s voice was raw with a feeling that brought the ache of tears to her throat, until the moment when he had to accept her in place of Hero.
He stepped forward, touching her arm, and Kirsty started to tremble. In the seconds before he kissed her she experienced an aching sense of loss to know that they were simply acting two roles and that the sensual brush of his lips against hers was no more than a part of that acting. But even that knowledge was not sufficient to prevent her lips from parting beneath his, her body swaying against him, her eyes closing as she drowned in the fierce pressure of a kiss that made her eyes sting with tears. And then it was over. The rest of the play passed in a fog of unreality. She took her bows with the rest of the cast, still wrapped in the strangely numbing blanket which had engulfed her the moment Drew released her.
As she made her way to her dressing room, the applause of the audience still ringing in her ears, all she wanted to do was to go back to her room and sit re-living the precious memory of Drew’s kiss. She started to cleanse off her make-up automatically, when the door opened and in the mirror she saw Drew’s reflection. He was still wearing his costume, but like her had removed his stage make-up.
‘It’s all right, Meg,’ Kirsty heard him saying calmly as the older woman got up to leave, obviously thinking tactfully to give them some time alone. ‘I just came to tell Kirsty that I’ll pick her up outside in fifteen minutes.’
‘Wasn’t she wonderful?’ Meg enthused. ‘I don’t think anyone watching the pair of you could have doubted that you were very much in love,’ she added forthrightly. ‘It showed. I can’t remember ever seeing such a charismatic performance before. Poor Rafe,’ she said with a chuckle, ‘he’s got a lot to live up to!’