Miss Treadway & the Field of Stars. Miranda Emmerson

darkness,’ Iolanthe had told her. ‘Look out into the darkness and you’ll see them.’

      ‘Do you look?’ Anna asked.

      ‘Sometimes. Sometimes I forget not to. Always at the curtain, at the end. The old ones with their bags of liquorice. The dates who look at me, the dates who look at him. The students; herringbone jackets, no tie. The ones who look lustful. The ones who look bored. Some of them, you can see they’re thinking about something else entirely. You, up there on the stage, you’re nothing more than the reflection of a bulb.’

      ‘What are they thinking about?’ Anna asked.

      ‘All the stuff that’s going wrong. The stuff they can’t fix. What they’re always thinking about.’

      Anna paused in the action of pinning Iolanthe’s hair and caught her eye in the mirror. The older woman was sitting in her underwear, quite still and unselfconscious as if Anna were a lover or a sister.

      Anna moved Lanny’s hand to hold a roll of curls while she picked through a bowl of oddments for more hairpins. ‘It must be very strange,’ she said. ‘Everyone looking and seeing something different. As if you were a funhouse mirror.’

      This made Iolanthe laugh. ‘That’s just what I am. Different for everybody. The Lanny who sits here will die as soon as she walks through that door. And a new Lanny will be born. Stage-door Lanny. Interview Lanny. Getting-the-drinks-in Lanny. I walk through the door and I start afresh. No hang-ups. No neuroses.’

      Anna cast a questioning glance towards the surface of the mirror and Iolanthe seemed almost to blush. ‘That’s the idea, anyway. Live in the moment. Don’t get caught in the net.’

      ***

      Out in the darkness of the upper stalls, tiny pinpricks of light caught Anna’s eye. Opera glasses, trained no doubt on Iolanthe, bouncing back light. Towards the stage she could see long rows of pale faces tilted upwards. From where she stood the stage looked tiny and the sound was flattened and distorted, muffled by the footsteps of the actors and the crew. Look at us all, she thought. Look at all us monkeys sitting in a great black box. Less than ten of us facing one way; nine hundred facing the other. One person speaks; the many hundred stay silent. And at the end all but the speakers will bang their little paws together. How did we all learn what to do? What made us so obedient?

      Anna watched Lanny stride upstage and gesture to the crude oil painting of a woman in 1920s garb which hung above her on the living-room wall. In the semi-darkness the scene-shifters were quietly rolling the fairground set into place behind it.

      ‘… I had the inspiration … the ability … to be anything.’

      Lanny paused and gauged the level of attention, the silence in the space. In the upper circle there was a fit of coughing. Anna saw Lanny’s face twitch just slightly with displeasure. She drove her next speech across the heads of the stalls and right into the upper circle high above. Her annoyance rang through in her delivery, her anger directed not at her fellow actor but at the audience members themselves.

      ‘This whoreish existence that you despise me for … I chose it. I had everything before me and I chose the life that would fit me best.’

      Archie flicked three switches down and the stage went dark. Anna blinked in the blackness waiting for her eyes to refocus, and when they did she saw the shape of Lanny hopping towards her, pulling her heels off as she came.

      ‘Awful audience,’ she pronounced darkly, shoving her feet into black Oxfords. ‘Fuck ’em.’

      Anna stripped Lanny of the negligee and opened her orange flower dress wide so she could step into it. Lanny popped the poppers shut and Anna cinched the belt as the lights rose on half a carousel and strings of fairy lights and bunting. Anna ran her hand quickly over the line of the dress, feeling for mistakes, then squeezed Lanny’s arm, telling her she was okay to step on out. And out she bounded, literally kicking her heels up, high on all kinds of wild energy.

      In the corridor on the way back to the dressing room Anna met Dick, whose job it was to man the counter at the stage door.

      ‘There’s a journalist downstairs. Wingate. Says he’s got a meeting with Lanny. Interview? I told him he’d need to hang around till five.’

      ‘Okay,’ Anna told him. ‘I’ll warn her.’

      ‘And Cassidy called again.’

      ‘Cassidy?’

      ‘American guy. Third time this week. Is she seeing someone?’

      ‘No one she’s mentioned. Is there a message?’

      ‘Just to say he’d called.’

      As act three drew to a close, Anna made lemon tea in the little kitchenette at the top of the stairs and buttered some bread. She watered Lanny’s plants and Agatha’s for good measure. She cleared the rubbish from the dressing table. The wrapping from a malt loaf, sweet papers, ticket stubs from a lunchtime showing of The Great Race.

      Lanny wasn’t big on culture but she liked the pictures. Every few afternoons she’d take herself off to a matinee at The Empire on Leicester Square. What’s New Pussycat? How to Murder Your Wife. Nothing too serious, nothing tragic. Anna had tried to persuade her to go and see The Hill, but Lanny had laughed in her face.

      ‘A film about a bunch of sweaty men trekking over a mound of earth! Seriously? Is that what passes for entertainment with you art school types?’

      ‘Art school! I went to secretarial college in Birmingham.’

      ‘Yeah, but you have the whole black stockings, polo neck, pony tail thing going on. You’re just missing a beret and a pack of French cigarettes.’

      ‘You’re calling me a pseud!’

      ‘I’m not. It’s a look. I’m fine with it.’

      ‘Lanny. I am not a pseud!’

      ‘No, I get that. Just because it walks like a pseud and talks like a pseud …’

      Anna smiled at the memory of this derision – for in truth she was rather pleased with the art school reference – then she set to sweeping magazines, knickers and old socks off the chaise longue.

      Lanny was back in her dressing room by ten to five. So anxious was she to get out of costume that she tried to pull her jacket off without unbuttoning it first. Anna took her by the shoulders and sat her down, then she unbuttoned and unzipped the woman as if she were a child. She hung the costume on the rail and found Lanny a pair of jeans and a shirt which she’d thrown into the corner of the dressing room a week earlier.

      ‘The jeans don’t fit,’ Lanny told her.

      ‘Would you like a skirt?’

      ‘I’d like not to be so fucking cold all the time. This country just makes me want to eat. All I could hear through my final speech was hack hack sniff sniff cough cough.’

      ‘British audiences sniff when it’s cold.’ Anna’s eyes searched the dressing room for whatever Lanny had worn into work that day. She found it under the make-up table, a green silk dress lying in a creased heap. Anna shook out the expensive rag and handed it over.

      ‘You know you have an appointment at five?’

      ‘Do I? Who with?’

      ‘Some journalist. He’s been downstairs for hours.’

      Lanny pulled on a pair of heels and sat at the dressing table to drink her tea. ‘Would you hang around for a bit?’

      ‘For the interview?’

      ‘Yeah; sometimes journalists can be a bit … sleazy. I haven’t got the energy for all that crap.’

      ‘Of course. Also someone called Cassidy called.’

      Lanny nodded. ‘Did he leave a message?’

      ‘Just