“And how fares our Ugly Sister?” asked Sara, as they were all being given their menus.
Harry scanned the hors d'oeuvres.
She tried again. “Are you enjoying your biggest challenge since RADA or is it proving too much, even for you?”
Eventually Harry put down the menu.
“On the contrary, I hope I have enough humility to admit when I was wrong.”
Sara could hardly contain her relief and excitement.
“What are you going to do? Where are you going to get another Lizzy Bennet at this late hour? How will you break it to the poor girl?”
“No, I don't mean that at all,” said Harry stiffly. “I mean exactly the opposite. She was the perfect choice. I couldn't have cast a more ideal Lizzy Bennet.”
“Nor a more gorgeous Jane Bennet,” beamed Jack, putting his menu down and rubbing his hands together. “I'm going to have the steak, I think.”
“Ah yes, but Jane Bennet was never in doubt,” said Harry to Jack.
Sara tried to pull the conversation back on track.
“In what way is the Ugly Sister your perfect choice? Do tell, I'm fascinated,” she said, a careful lightness to her tone.
Harry thought about it for a while.
“Everything about her,” he said simply. “Her temperament, her acting, her figure, her face, her eyes. She's perfect.”
Sara found herself staring at the menu without taking any of it in. She discovered she'd lost her appetite. Damnation. She loved their foie gras.
After the waiter took their orders, Jack started waxing lyrical about George. A thought crossed Harry's mind.
“I do hope you're not going to do your old trick of falling in love with your leading lady and then breaking it all off the day before opening night.”
Jack laughed, but said nothing.
“I won't stand for any of that, you know. Not in my production,” said Harry, sipping red wine. “I'll never forget when your Beatrice tried to punch your lights out in the final scene of Much Ado. We could have renamed that production Much Ado About Quite A Lot, Actually.”
Jack smiled at the memory. He couldn't even remember the name of the actress now.
“There's nothing worse than getting involved with an actress while you're in the same play as her,” lectured Harry. “Ruins your focus.”
Jack looked uncomfortable. “Life's about more than focus, old chap.”
“Not if you want to be great,” clipped Harry. “Relationships with actresses are doomed. Biggest mistake an actor can make. Drains him of energy. He'll either be unhappy or unsuccessful.” He gulped down his wine. “Unless of course, she's merely an advert actress. Though why anyone would want one of them is beyond me. Better not to let women in your life at all. Unfocuses you,” he repeated himself grumpily. “Present company excluded, of course,” he said as an afterthought.
Sara wondered desperately if that included marriage. Jack picked at his bread and looked around the restaurant.
“Wine's splendid,” said Charles, belching loudly.
The honeymoon period was well and truly over and Jazz now knew who in the cast she hated, who she found amusing, who she thought ridiculous, and who she liked. Purple Glasses fitted into all the first three categories. Even Jazz was surprised at how much Purple Glasses managed to irritate her. In the beginning, Jazz had maintained a cool but polite distance. But there was always some pretext Purple Glasses found for bossing Jazz around, and pretty soon Jazz could hardly look her in the eye without either laughing in her face or being downright rude. The ruder she became, the more Purple Glasses seemed to seek her out.
“You left your fan on the wrong chair again,” said Purple Glasses after a particularly long and difficult rehearsal, a note of triumph in her voice.
“How will I ever live with myself?” answered Jazz, in as bitter a tone as she could muster.
Purple Glasses ignored her and studied her notes. “You're meant to leave it on the chair Upstage Right, not Downstage Left. How many times do I have to tell you?”
“Since you ask, you've told me quite enough times, thanks.”
“Well, it doesn't seem to make any difference, does it?” said Purple Glasses as if she was telling a small child to stop picking its nose in public.
“Not in the great scheme of things, Fiona, no. It doesn't make any difference at all where I leave a poxy fan.”
Purple Glasses stared at her and then stalked off.
Jazz also didn't like Sara Hayes, but she couldn't quite put her finger on exactly what annoyed her so much about the woman. There was of course, her obvious insincerity; that was entertaining, but it was more than that. From the first moment of seeing her in the audition room, it had been obvious to Jazz that Sara's one aim in life was to catch Harry Noble. Everyone else was happy merely to catch a glimpse of the man, Sara was determined to catch the man himself. Jazz didn't know women like her still existed. Jazz was used to women going out and getting their man, but Sara wanted to turn Harry into a man who would want to go out and get her. It was like watching living socio-history at work. What made it more entertaining to watch was that Harry was oblivious to Sara's charms. It made wonderful viewing. Jazz supposed that was why Sara hated her so much; because she was playing Lizzy Bennet she was taking up most of Harry's time. If only Sara knew, thought Jazz with a smile, how little she thought of the great man. The friction between Sara and herself was beginning to add a certain piquancy to the rehearsals that Jazz was almost enjoying.
“I do like your method of acting,” Sara whispered to her, while they were watching Bingley and Darcy rehearse one afternoon. “It's so refreshing.”
Jazz smiled graciously, and did a very good impression of a genuine thank you, pretending not to understand. It was worth the effort, as she saw Sara's eyes shrink in annoyance. She then watched Sara in awe as Harry slowly paced across the room to Sara's right, and Sara, sensing his presence there, moved her head away from Jazz towards him with such concentrated grace that it fell so as to accentuate her beautiful jawline just as he turned to face them. Amazing, thought Jazz. Her timing was so precise it looked as if the two of them were in a choreographed dance. But then, to her great amusement, Jazz saw Harry look straight through Sara to focus, in familiar frustration, on her.
That was it! thought Jazz. The thing that had been annoying her since she'd first met Sara - it had suddenly clicked! It was that every movement - however minuscule - was completely controlled. Did this woman ever do anything spontaneous? Not a flutter of her eyelashes, not a fractional glint in her eye or a twitch of her perfect mouth was natural. No wonder her acting always seemed so stilted — how could she act natural when she didn't know what natural was? Jazz started wondering if Sara only ever farted in her sleep.
To hide her smirk at that thought, she looked away from Harry to Brian. And there her smirk froze on her lips. The more she watched Brian the more obvious it became to her that casting him as Darcy had been a complete mental aberration on Harry's part. It didn't matter how many first-night jitters this would save Harry in the future, the man acted like a stick. Harry was having terrible trouble getting Brian to even frown properly, let alone deliver his lines with conviction. What Harry didn't realise was that Brian, the critic feared by all, was absolutely terrified of him and the more Harry shouted, the more constipated Brian looked. It would have been amusing if it wasn't so worrying.
Jazz had never before even considered that every tiny movement on stage had to be choreographed by the director. And now that she had seen Brian on stage, she marvelled that in most plays, the actors didn't regularly collide with each other.