And then the wedding feast. After a great fanfare the court and servants threw plastic glasses into the audience, then ran around with flagons to fill them. Everyone toasted Theseus and Hippolyta. Balloons and streamers descended from the grid. Faery and human danced together, and the hall became a great swirling mass of color and light and melodious sounds. Nicholas climbed a flight of steps and stood watching, his throat closed and dry with excitement; then, as if on the stroke of midnight, all movement ceased, and Nicholas realized that Puck was standing next to him. So close their arms were touching. The actor spoke: “ ‘If we shadows have offended ..’ ”
Then Nicholas realized that it was coming to an end. That the whole glorious golden vision was going to fade away and die … “no more yielding but a dream.” And he thought his heart would break. Puck spoke on. Nicholas studied his profile. He could feel the dynamic tension in the man, see it in the pugnacious tightness of his jaw and the rippling muscles of his throat. He spoke with tremendous force, emitting a small silver spray of saliva as he declaimed the closing lines. And then, on “Give me your hand, if we be friends,” he stretched out his left arm to the audience in a gesture that was all benevolence and, with his right, reached out to Nicholas and seized his hand. For the space of one more line they stood, the actor and the boy whose life would never be the same again. Then it was over.
Nicholas sat down as the applause went on and on. When the company finally dispersed and the audience drifted away, he remained, clutching his glass, in a daze of passionate emotion. Then one of the stagehands took the steps away. Nicholas emptied his glass of the last spot of black currant, then spotted a red streamer and a pink paper rose on the floor. He picked them up and put them carefully in his pocket. The lighting grid was being lowered and he felt in the way, so he took himself off with the deepest reluctance.
Outside in the road were two large vans. Someone was loading the metal tree with golden apples. Several of the actors emerged. They set off down the road and Nicholas followed, knowing that tamely going home was out of the question. The group went into the pub. He hesitated for a while by the door, then slipped in and stood, a rapt observer, just behind the cigarette machine.
The actors stood in a circle a few feet away. They were not dressed stylishly at all. They wore jeans, shabby afghans, sweaters. They were drinking beer; not talking or laughing loudly or showing off, and yet there was something about them… . They were simply different from anyone else there. Marked in some subtle way that Nicholas could not define. He saw Puck, a middle-aged man in an old black leather jacket wearing a peaked denim cap, smoking, waving the smoke away, smiling.
Nicholas watched them with a degree of longing so violent it made his head ache. He wanted desperately to overhear their conversation, and was on the point of edging nearer when the door behind him opened and two teachers came in. Immediately he dodged behind their backs and into the street. Apart from feeling that he could not bear to be exposed so soon to the banalities of everyday conversation, Nicholas felt sure that the enthralling experience through which he had just passed must have marked him physically in some way. And he dreaded what he felt would be clumsy and insensitive questioning.
Fortunately, when he got home, everyone had gone to bed. He looked at himself in the kitchen mirror, surprised and a little disappointed at the modesty of his transformation. His face was pale and his eyes shone, but apart from that he looked pretty much the same.
But he was not the same. He sat down at the table and produced the glass, the flower, the streamer, and his free cast list. He smoothed the paper out and ran down the column of actors. Puck had been played by Roy Smith. Nicholas drew a careful ring around the name, washed and dried his glass carefully, put the rose and the paper and the streamer inside, then went to his room. He lay on his bed reliving every moment of the evening till daylight broke. The next day he went to the library, asked if there was a local drama group, and was given details of the Latimer. He went to the theater that same evening, told them he wanted to be an actor, and was immediately co-opted to help with the props for French Without Tears.
Nicholas quickly discovered that there was theater and theater, and adapted philosophically. He had a lot (everything) to learn and had to start somewhere. He was sorry that none of the CADS, with the exception of Deidre, had been to see The Dream, but sensed very quickly that to attempt to describe it, let alone mention its effect on him, would be a mistake. So he made and borrowed props and ran about and made himself so useful that he was co-opted permanently. For the next play, Once in a Lifetime, he went on the book. He made a mess of prompting at first, bringing down on himself Esslyn’s scorn and Harold’s weary disdain, but he took the play home and read it over and over, absorbing the quick-fire rhythms, getting to sense the pauses, making himself familiar with exits and entrances, and became much better. He helped build the set for Teahouse of the August Moon, and Tim taught him basic lighting, letting him share the box and patting his bottom absentmindedly from time to time. He did the sound effects and music for The Snow Queen, and in The Crucible, he got a speaking part.
Nicholas learned his few lines quickly, and was always the first actor at rehearsals and the last to leave. He bought a cheap tape recorder and worked on an American accent, ignoring the amused glances between certain members of the cast. He made up an entire history for his character and listened and reacted with intense concentration to everything that went on around him onstage. Long before the first night he could think of nothing else. When it arrived and he was incompetently putting on too much makeup in the packed dressing room, he realized he had forgotten his lines. Frantically he sought a script, wrote them down on a piece of paper, and tucked it into the waistband of his homespun trousers. Waiting in the wings, he was overcome with a wave of nausea and was sick in the firebucket.
As he stepped onto the stage, terror struck him with hurricane force. Rows of faces swam into his line of vision. He looked once and looked away. He spoke his first line. The lights burned down, but he felt cold with exhilaration and excitement as, one after the other, the rest of his lines sprang to the forefront of his mind when needed and he experienced for the first time that strange dual grip that an actor must always keep on reality. Part of him believed in the Proctors’ kitchen in Salem with its iron pots and pans and crude furnishings and frightened people, and part of him was aware that a stool was in the wrong place and that John Proctor was still masking his wife and Mary Warren had forgotten her cap. Afterward in the clubroom he experienced a warm, close camaraderie (“Give me your hands, if we be friends”) that seemed fleetingly to surmount any actual likes and dislikes within the group.
In the pantomime he played the back legs of a horse, and then was offered the part of Danny in Night Must Fall.
Rehearsals started six weeks before his “A” levels, and he knew he had failed the lot. The endless grumblings that had been going on at home for months about all the time he was spending at the Latimer erupted into a blazing row, and he walked out. Almost immediately Avery offered him the tiny room over the Blackbird bookshop. It was rent-free in exchange for dusting the shop every morning and cleaning Avery’s house once a week.
He had lived there now for nearly a year and subsisted, sometimes superbly (on Avery’s leftovers), but mainly on baked beans purloined from the supermarket where he worked. Nearly all his wages went on voice and movement classes—he had discovered an excellent teacher in Slough—and on theater tickets. Once a month he hitched up to London to see a show, determined to keep his batteries recharged by frequent injections of what he thought of as “the real thing.” (It was after an exhilarating performance of The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Barbican that he had chosen Ford’s Epicurean speech for his Central audition.)