Jazz signed quickly. At the end of the corridor was a trestle table peppered with piles of scripts, each one entitled Pride and Prejudice, An Adaptation. Jazz picked one up. She tried reading it but couldn't concentrate. She sat on one of the chairs by the wall and waited for more people to arrive. Some knew each other and there were various luwie air kisses and much affected affection. She watched intrigued, trying to guess who was an actor and who was a fish out of water. It wasn't too difficult to make the distinction.
An actress entered. She wore a beautiful big brown fur-lined leather jacket and had a commanding presence. Her jet-black hair fell to angular shoulders, her long legs seemed to go on for ever and her eyes were like bullets. Jazz recognised her from a recent three-part thriller, in which she'd played a malicious killer. She was surprised to see that she actually looked even harder off-screen than on. The actress's name was Sara something - Jazz couldn't quite recall. Jazz watched her pick up a script and read it intensely, while pacing the floor. She seemed to desperately want a part.
A group of impossibly attractive people entered the hall and one of the men among them stood out from the rest. Jazz knew him instantly — he was a household name. He was the actor William Whitby, famous for his role in the popular series The Trials of Father Simon. In it he played the eponymous Father Simon, a warm, loving priest who brought peace to a rough inner-city housing estate. He had sandy-coloured hair and a handsome, easy, round face, but the most attractive thing about him, Jazz decided, was that he chatted to nearly everyone in the room. He was obviously well-liked, and Jazz could see why. Although he made a lot of rather unnecessary body contact with people, he seemed sincere and likeable. He stood with his head inclined towards them, a hand gently touching their elbow while they spoke to him, or he nudged them before saying something that he followed with a big, loud, warm laugh. He seemed delightfully unaware of the effect he had on everyone he talked to. No wonder he made such a perfect priest, thought Jazz.
She found it almost impossible to tear her eyes away from the actors. How did they manage, so instinctively, to make themselves so interesting to watch? It was compelling viewing. She wanted to know everything about them, and yet oddly enjoyed this temporary stage of not knowing anyone well enough to be able to fix any significance to their actions. It was like watching a foreign film in glorious technicolour Without the subtitles. She didn't want to miss a moment of it. Her eyes were everywhere. She kept trying to turn her attention to the wallflowers like herself, but couldn't do it. The butterflies were too entrancing.
A tall, blond man wandered in, looking keenly at everyone, reminding Jazz of a big golden Labrador looking for a stick. He had twinkly blue eyes and rosy cheeks. She couldn't remember what play or programme she'd seen him in, but she knew his face well. He sat down on a chair by the wall opposite her and quietly studied a script. To her surprise, the woman in the brown jacket went over and joined him. She noticed that they were intimate enough not to need to talk to each other. The woman in the jacket was then joined by a shorter, less stunning friend, who was in turn accompanied by a man whose face had had a fight with gravity and lost.
What made the whole exercise so enjoyable for Jazz, was that for the first time ever, she was able to watch people without them minding. Usually, when she people-watched, she had to do it subtly - with quick sideways glances -otherwise people started to stare back. But these actors seemed to expect her stares; in fact, some of them were happily giving Jazz her own private performance. She wondered whether, if she got up and left the room, they would, en masse, collapse in a silent, audience-less heap on the floor, waiting for the next observer to come in so that they could start again. Naturally, not one of them was wasting any time looking at her unknown face.
Eventually, she tore her eyes away from them and looked towards the door. There she saw a face that made her innards shrink. It certainly wasn't an unpleasant face; in fact, Jazz could still see its charms, although now they left her cold. It was a smiling, unctuous face that she could now barely tolerate. Yet at the same time, by some obstinacy she didn't understand, she couldn't take her eyes off it. It was incongruously feminine, with pale skin and full red lips and cheeks, topped with a crop of dark hair, slicked forward into the newest French style with thick Brylcreem. Of course the mouth was upturned into a forced smile, but those eyes she knew so well were darting here and there; it was only a matter of time before they alighted on her. Still she couldn't look away. All too soon, the bright eyes met hers and Jazz only detected a nano-second of consideration before they were filled with careful warmth.
“Jasmin Field, I might have guessed you'd be here,” said Gilbert Valentine, ex-colleague and now self-important theatre journalist for a small, exclusive, self-important theatre magazine. Gilbert, she knew, always liked to think of himself as a superior sort of journalist - and, indeed, as a superior sort of person - but it was common knowledge that he used his privileged position, one that enabled him to get into previews and cast parties, to supplement a spin-off career as the tabloids' primary source of luvvie gossip. He didn't do it for the money, although the money was good; he did it because it gave him the kind of fame he craved. To be famous within the most desperate circle of fame-hunters was quite an achievement.
Gilbert Valentine was dangerous. When he had first entered the theatrical world, he had, chameleon-like, adopted a camp manner to endear him to his victims. He had never been able to shake it since. Gilbert was the only 100% straight man who minced like a true thespian. And like his manner, nothing about him could be trusted. He was the sort of journalist who gave journalists a bad name, and he put all actors in a no-win situation. If they didn't invite him to their parties, he got the gossip on them anyway, through fellow-actors anxious to get on his right side. So actors were forced to treat him as a friend, which for many of them was the most successful performance of their lifetime. However, it wasn't really difficult to butter Gilbert up. All one needed to do was natter his writing. Gilbert's Achilles' heel was his genuine insecurity about the quality of his work. He was the sort of man who couldn't wait until his obituary was published and all the quality newspapers would beat their chests for never utilising his genius themselves. It didn't occur to him that his obituary was already written and filed under T for Tosser.
“I didn't know you were an actor manqué!” he oozed patronisingly, as if Jazz's presence at the auditions was somehow more revealing than his. He came over and sat down next to her.
Jazz always found herself in the unhappy position of wanting to say to Gilbert, “Likewise”, but knowing that it would only belittle her. It was incredibly frustrating.
Instead she smiled and said simply, “Well, now you know everything.”
“Oh, hardly everything,” he simpered. “How are things at your lovely little women's mag?”
Jazz decided not to mention the trivial fact that Hoorah! her "little women's mag" had roughly three-quarters of a million more readers than his. Instead, she took a big breath and answered composedly, “Lovely thanks.”
“Oh good, good,” he smarmed.
“And how are things in the artistic world of theatre journalism?”
Gilbert sighed heavily, rubbed his eyes with his podgy, pale hands and just remembered in time not to brush them through his Brylcreemed hair. Jazz began to worry that he might be auditioning for the part of Darcy.