Sapphires at Her Throat

Every stone Corinna Pendry wore on a stage was glass, and in fifteen years nobody out front had ever minded.

The lane up to Hartsell Court went through a gate that had been opened for her and left open, between two stone piers with worn balls on top, and then climbed through parkland where the grass was already going gold at the tips in the first week of June. Corinna drove it slowly, one hand at the bottom of the wheel, the camel coat folded on the passenger seat beside her because the car was too small for a coat like that and a singer in claret silk both. She had sung in country houses before. She knew what they were: somebody's grandfather's pile with a barn or a ballroom made over, good intentions and a damp dressing room, and an audience that had driven forty miles in black tie to picnic on a lawn. She had not expected the riding school.

It stood a little way off from the house itself, long and red-roofed, and when the front-of-house manager walked her through it in the late afternoon the auditorium took her by the throat in the way the good small ones sometimes did. Four hundred seats, perhaps, rising steep under a new ceiling, the whole of it done in red plush and gilt that had been paid for properly, not apologetically. The stage was deep enough to breathe on. She stood at the front of it and looked out, and the house looked back at her the way houses did when they had been built by somebody who loved them.

"Row C on the aisle," the manager said, following her eye, "is the seat to hear from, if you can get it. The acoustic's kindest there."

Corinna noted it the way she noted the rake and the sightlines, and went to find her dressing room.

She carried the case up herself. A lad from the stage crew offered twice on the back stair — it was that kind of company, everyone young and over-willing in production week — and twice she thanked him and kept hold of the handle. It was heavy. It had been heavy in her grandfather's hands and it was heavy in hers, a battered leather-bound fitted case the size of a small suitcase, the corners gone soft and pale with fifty years of dressing rooms, and she had never once in fifteen years of touring let anybody else carry it up a stair.

The room was up the back stair and along a passage, and it was better than she had allowed herself to hope: a lit mirror, a proper rail, a counter running under the window, a chair that did not fold. She set the case on the counter and opened it, and the familiar smell came up at her — leather, metal, the ghost of the little pot of rouge Edwin had kept in the lid for touching up a foil — and there it all lay in its trays, his tools in their slots, the hammers and the burnisher and the fine-nosed pliers with their grips worn smooth, and below the tools, in their fitted beds of faded velvet, her grandfather's work.

She did not take anything out. She stood and looked at it for a moment, and then she went down to wardrobe.

The wardrobe was in the stable block, all low beams and the smell of sizing, and Ione Varley was waiting for her with a tape measure round her neck and a gown already on the stand: Angelina's Act 2 dress, a great sweep of something pale and glowing that caught the work light as the door opened. Ione was short and round, fifty-odd, with long grey locs pinned up off her neck and dark, quick eyes that went once over Corinna from her heels to her hair and came back with the inspection complete.

"You'll be Pendry," Ione said. "Stand on the block. Six weeks of this, so we may as well like each other."

The fitting took an hour. Ione worked the way good dressers work, by pin and palm, talking in a plain, unhurried rhythm that Corinna placed as Birmingham within three sentences and liked immediately. The gown wanted letting through the ribcage — "you lot are all the same, you breathe like furnaces and they cut for coat hangers" — and taking up an inch, and Ione chalked and pinned and stood back, and the thing hung off Corinna's shoulders and swept from her waist as though it had grown there.

It was while Ione was doing the hem that the designer came in with the box.

She was a neat, fierce woman with a sketchbook under her arm, and she was courteous about it, and the box was the company's stock: a tray of stage jewellery, good modern costume work, open-backed settings, bright as mirrors up close.

"For the ball," the designer said. "She gives the prince one bracelet and keeps its match — it's the plot, the whole recognition scene turns on it — and I need the jewels to read as a set with the crown. If she's in the stock pieces the whole look is mine. If she's in something I've never seen, I'm designing blind."

"I've brought my own," Corinna said.

"So they told me." The designer kept her temper, to her credit. "Miss Pendry, I've had singers bring their own before. It's always paste somebody bought them, and under my lights it either glares like a Christmas tree or it does nothing at all, and the bracelet scene is the second act."

"Mine won't glare," Corinna said. "And it won't do nothing at all."

She felt the heat climb to the tips of her ears, which was where her temper announced itself, never her face, and she kept her voice level because she had had this argument in four companies and she knew the shape of it. It was Ione who settled it. Ione had straightened from the hem with a mouthful of pins, taken the pins out one at a time, and said, in her plain Midlands rhythm, "Bring the case down, love. If it's what I think it is, this won't take long."

Corinna brought the case down and set it on the cutting table and opened it, and Ione lifted out one of the bracelets and carried it to the work lamp and turned it under the light.

She looked at it. She turned it over and looked at the back — the closed settings, smooth little cups of metal, no light let through — and then she held it up at arm's length the way you hold a thing you are pricing with your eyes.

"Pendry," she said. "Edwin Pendry, out of Nottingham. I dressed the ballet tours in the nineties and half the tiaras in the Midlands were his. You can tell them from across a room." She looked up at Corinna over the bracelet. "He was family of yours."

"My grandfather," Corinna said.

"I thought as much. You don't buy these. You get left them." Ione set the bracelet back in its bed with a care that was its own kind of respect, and turned to the designer. "Take the tray and this lot up on the stage and put the lights on them. Both. Then decide."

The designer looked as though she would have liked to refuse and could not find the ground for it, and so the four of them — Corinna in her claret silk with her hair loose down her back, Ione with the tape measure still round her neck, the designer with her sketchbook, and a bemused electrician fetched out of the flies — carried the case and the stock box through the pass door and out onto the stage.

The stage lights, when they came up, changed the world the way they always did. The red plush went to a glowing dark beyond them; the gilt caught; the empty house held its breath. Corinna stood at the centre in the heat of them with her grandfather's parure on — the necklace at her throat, the drop earrings, the matched bracelets, one on each wrist — and Ione walked backwards away from her down the auditorium with the slow, deliberate tread of a woman who has done this before, up the aisle, past row C, past row M, all the way to the back under the gallery.

"Turn," Ione called, from the back. Her voice came small and clear through the empty house.

Corinna turned, slowly, the way Angelina would turn at the ball, and lifted her wrist the way she would lift it in the recognition scene.

She could not see the jewels from the stage; that was never the point. She saw Ione's face, sixty feet away in the dim, and she saw the designer, who had gone up the aisle with her, come very still.

"Now the stock," the designer said, quietly, and it was not quite an order any more.

The stock pieces were bright under the light for the first ten feet. From the back of the house they were nothing: pretty metal, a glitter at the throat that could have been anything, glass doing what glass does when it has no help. Edwin's paste, from the same sixty feet, burned. That was the whole of his trade, and it was the whole of hers: foil behind glass, closed settings, every stone backed with its little mirror of bright metal so that the light went in and was thrown back doubled, fire made deliberately, engineered to carry. From the front row you might have known, if you were Ione. From the back of the gallery you believed. That was what they were made to do. You did not make paste for the front row.

"All right," the designer said at last, from the back of her own auditorium, and Corinna heard the surrender in it and the honesty. "All right. The bracelet scene is yours." A pause. "They're extraordinary. Whoever he was."

"He was my grandfather," Corinna said, into the lit dark, "and he knew what he was doing," and her ears were hot again but for the other reason.

Afterwards, in the wardrobe, Ione fastened the parure back into its beds herself and closed the case with her own hands.

"He'd have liked that," she said. "Being put up against the modern stuff and beating it at his own game." She gave Corinna one of her quick looks. "Six weeks, then, Miss Pendry. I'll look after your frocks, and I'll look after his stones, and we'll get on."

"Corinna," said Corinna.

"Ione," said Ione, and that was the season's first piece of luck, and Corinna knew it for what it was.

The company digs were in the village below Hartsell, a converted stable cottage the company rented by the season, and she reached them in the long June dusk with the sky still pale over the hill. Two rooms and a bath, sloping ceilings, a good bed, a kettle, a window that looked over other cottages' gardens to the fields. Her trunk had come down from London ahead of her and stood at the foot of the bed where the company had left it, and she put the fitted case on the chest of drawers and her coat on the back of the door, and unpacked the trunk the way she had unpacked it in a hundred sublets: silk dresses hung on the rail in order, claret and bottle green and sapphire; shoes in a row; scent on the windowsill; the one photograph, of a bench in Nottingham with an old man at it, propped against the mirror.

It took her twenty minutes. It always took her twenty minutes. Fifteen years, and everything she owned would go into a single trunk and the fitted case, and she had never yet wanted the thing that would not fit.

She made tea in a stranger's mug and sat on the bed in the warm dim with her hair down over her shoulders and thought about the designer's face at the back of the house. That was the creed, proved again, the way it was proved every time the lights came up. An audience only has to believe — Edwin's voice, dry and level, over the bench, while the foil went in behind the glass and the little cup closed over it. The stone didn't have to be what it looked like. It had to do what it looked like. Glass under lights was not a lie and it was not a compromise; it was a craft, and the belief was the thing being made, and the belief was real.

And nothing real ever needed to be kept. That was the other half of it, the half she had made her own. A stone you kept was a stone you insured and worried over and left in a safe; a trunk you could lift was a life you could take anywhere. She owed nobody anything — not the company, which had contracted her to sing Angelina and housed her while she did it, both of them holding up their ends of a plain piece of paper; not a bank; not a man; not a landlord for longer than a season. Her stage jewels were her grandfather's work and her own trade, worn and then put away, and her dresses were silk because she liked how things looked on her, and the rest of it was air and light and the next contract.

It was a good way to live. It had never once cost her anything.

She finished the tea and set the mug on the trunk and went to brush her hair at the mirror under the old man's photograph, thirty-eight years old and owed nothing by nobody, with a season in front of her in a red-and-gilt house in the Shropshire hills, and the work — her work, his work — waiting in its case on the chest of drawers for Saturday.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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