After that she didn’t want to go back to where the mobile canteen was set up because they’d see she wasn’t eating anything and press a lot of stuff she didn’t want on her. She walked about the empty set, which she had never had to herself before. She wandered from room to room, thinking it was a pity that soon it would all be dismantled when the homeless who slept in doorways could do with it, even if only for a night.
‘Hullo,’ a voice said just before Bea heard Mr Hance’s footstep, and she knew he had come looking for her.
*
That evening Dickie came to the party. ‘You ask your father,’ Iris had said. ‘Only fair.’ Dickie had said yes at once.
‘Under time, under budget!’ Roland announced in his speech of gratitude to the cast, and everyone clapped.
They were all there on the set — the bag-lady, Ann-Marie, the police inspector, the old woman, the man in the maroon car, the workmen who’d been repairing a pavement, the policemen who’d searched the tip, Mr Hance.
They made a fuss of Mr Hance. It was his piece, they said, his show. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you,’ Dickie said to him, and Bea thought he hadn’t really, but Dickie was good at being polite. The tear by his jacket pocket hadn’t been repaired. Bea had seen Iris noticing it when Dickie came over to say hullo.
‘So what’s next on the agenda?’ the police inspector asked Bea. ‘Another part lined up, have we?’
‘Spoilt for choice,’ Iris said, but Bea wondered about that, and Dickie said what’s this then? A certain little lady on her way was what, the police inspector said.
All the technicians and production people were at the party — the sound man, the cameraman and the assistant cameraman, the set designer, the make-up girls, the costume girls, the continuity girl. They drank wine, red or white, and there was Coca Cola or orange juice to go with the plates of cold food. Dickie asked who the big woman with the glasses on a chain was and Iris said the producer. ‘Remember that producer on Emergency Ward 10?’ Dickie said.
‘Oh, my God, don’t!’
Music began. Bea showed Dickie about the set: Mr Hance’s room with the cat litter still there, the stairs, the hall with the antlers, the living-room of the other house, where the old woman rapped the window with her walking-stick. ‘Marvellous,’ Dickie kept saying. One part of the set had been dismantled already and Iris came along to explain all that.
Andi and the boy with fuzzy hair brought round the wine and the food. Roland knocked on the floor with the old woman’s walking-stick: early as it was, he said, he had to be going. They’d been great, he complimented everyone. Pure electricity this production was, the Good Housekeeping Seal.
There was laughter, and more applause. Roland waved good-bye with the walking-stick, then handed it to Andi. After he’d gone someone turned the music up.
When no one was looking, Bea opened the sandwich she had taken. There seemed to be scrambled egg in it so she dropped it into an empty cardboard box beside where she was standing. She was alone there, obscured by the pot plants that had been gathered together on a table, ready to go back to Flowers Etc, which was what was scrawled on a piece of paper tied around one of them. She could see Dickie and Iris and Mr Hance, the sound man seeming to be telling them a story. When he came to the end of it they laughed, Iris particularly, throwing back her head in a way she had. Still pouring wine, the boy with the fuzzy hair looked to where the laughter had come from and laughed himself, then moved over to fill their glasses up.
Peeping through the fleshy green leaves, Bea watched Mr Hance earnestly talking now, Dickie’s head bent to listen. A moment ago Iris had held on to Dickie’s arm, just for a second when one of her high heels let her down. She had reached out and clutched at him and he had smiled at her and she had smiled herself. Where they were standing was quite near where Bea had been when Mr Hance had said hullo that afternoon.
Across the set the old woman was sitting on her own, a cigarette alight, her wine glass half full. With her painted features and bright dyed hair she didn’t at all look like the old woman by the window, but in spite of that she still was, and suddenly Bea wanted to go over to her and say she’d been right. She wanted her to know. She wanted just one person to know.
‘Hi, Bea,’ Andi said. ‘That your dad, then?’
‘Yes.’
‘He looks nice. Nice way he has.’
‘Yes.’
‘Not in the profession, though? Not like your mum?’ Andi reached out to feel one of the leaves, softly caressing it between forefinger and thumb. ‘He could get a walk-on, your dad. You never know.’
Andi seemed forlorn without her clipboard and mobile telephone, wearing the same blue jumper she’d worn for all six weeks of the production. She wasn’t drinking wine; she wasn’t eating anything, but that would be because of her slimming.
‘You going for it, Bea? You reckon?’ She’d gone for it herself only it hadn’t worked out. She wasn’t right for the acting side of the business, although it was what she’d wanted at first. ‘Different for you,’ Andi said.
‘Yes.’
It would be better to tell Andi. It would be easier to say it had to be a secret, that all she wanted was one person to know. It seemed mean not to tell Andi when she’d come over specially to be friendly.
‘Maybe our paths’ll cross again,’ Andi said. ‘Anyway I hope they do.’
‘Yes.’
‘You did fine.’
Bea shook her head. Through the foliage she saw Mr Hance’s hand held out, to her mother and then to Dickie. They smiled at him, and then he made his way through the other people at the party, stepping over the electrical cables that stretched from one room of the set to another. Occasionally he stopped to shake hands or to be embraced. The old woman laughed up at him, sharing some joke.
‘I must make my farewells.’ Andi kissed Bea and said again she hoped their paths would cross some time.
‘So do I.’ Bea tried to tell Andi then. But if Andi knew it might show in her face even if she didn’t want it to. It mightn’t be easy for her not to let it, and when someone asked her what the matter was it could slip out when she wasn’t thinking. ‘Cheers,’ Andi said.
The bag-lady was going also. In the corner where the cameras still were, outside the set itself, Ann-Marie was dancing with one of the policemen. Dickie was holding up Iris’s see-through plastic mackintosh, waiting for Iris to step into it. ‘See you on the ice,’ the fuzzy-haired boy called after Mr Hance, and Mr Hance waved back at him before he walked out of the brightness that was the party.
*
On the train Iris told Dickie who everyone was, which part each had played, who was who among the technicians. Dickie asked questions to keep her going.
It was the first time Bea had made the journey in from the studios by train. There had always been the coach before, to the studios and back, to whatever the location was. The train was nicer, the houses that backed on to the railway line lit up, here and there people still in their gardens even though it was dark. Sometimes the train stopped at a suburban station, the passengers who alighted seeming weary as they made their way along the platform. ‘I must say, I enjoyed that,’ Dickie said.
They got the last bus to Chalmers Street and walked, all three of them, to the flat. ‘Come in, Dickie?’ Iris invited.
She’d got in the cereal he liked and it was there on the kitchen table, ready for breakfast. Bea saw him noticing it.
‘Good night, old girl,’ he said, and Bea kissed him, and kissed Iris too, for Iris had said she was too tired to come in to say good-night.