Read Online Second Honeymoon by Joanna Trollope - Free Book Online

purposes, including ballet classes, and along one wall ran a barre screwed into a series of huge dim mirrors, which gave an eerie effect of plunging the place under water. At one end, sharing a littered card table, the director and producer of the play – both, Edie thought, about half her age – were sitting on grey plastic chairs with tin pub ashtrays on the floor at their feet. There was also a thin girl in black sitting by an upright piano and another man, in a grey ski jacket, reading a newspaper.
    Edie had decided that, as she was doing this reading to placate her agent, who had complained that Edie was not, repeat not, in a position to be choosy, she was not going to prepare meticulously. She had read the playonce, quite fast, and had determinedly not decided to dress in any particular way, not to think herself, with any depth, into the mind of Mrs Alving.
    She had also seen Russell look at her that morning, wondering.
    ‘I’m not in the mood,’ she’d said, pouring coffee. ‘Oh?’
    ‘I can’t apply myself. I feel too – too
scattered’.
    ‘Pity,’ Russell said. He was putting on his mackintosh.
    ‘It’s a wonderful part’. ‘This is a wonderful part,’ the director said now. He had a narrow dark face and a goatee beard.
    ‘Oh, yes’.
    ‘Have you played Ibsen before?’
    Edie shook her head. She’d been a non-speaking visitor once, at the spa in
When We Dead Awaken
, but that didn’t seem worth mentioning.
    The producer looked at her.
    He said, in a voice she regarded as unhelpful, ‘What do you know about Ibsen?’ Edie looked back.
    ‘He was Norwegian. And short. Very short’.
    ‘I see’.
    The director turned to the man reading the newspaper.
    ‘Ivor will read Pastor Manders for you. Act One. The scene revealing her husband’s conduct’.
    ‘OK,’ Edie said. She walked to a chair by one of the huge mirrors and dumped her bag on it, before rummaging in it for her book.
    ‘From this copy,’ the director said. ‘If you would’.
    Edie turned. He was holding out a sheaf of papers.
    ‘We have slightly annotated the Peter Watts translation’. He glanced at the man with the newspaper. ‘Ivor speaks Norwegian’.
    Edie came slowly forward.
    ‘We’ll hear you read,’ the producer said. ‘But, personally, I think Mrs Alving should be taller’.
    The man with the newspaper looked up for the first time.
    He said, in accented English, ‘Good face’.
    ‘But height,’ the producer said. ‘So important for dignity. This is a woman who has
suffered’.
    ‘How do you know I haven’t?’ Edie said.
    Nobody answered her. She took the sheaf of papers from the director’s hand.
    ‘Are you sure you want me to do this?’
    He gave her a fleeting smile.
    ‘Now you’re here’.
    ‘Is that enough reason?’
    ‘Miss Allen, you
applied
for this casting—’
    Edie swallowed.
    ‘Sorry’.
    The girl by the piano said, ‘Clare was a good height’. They all turned to look at her.
    ‘Yes’.
    ‘And she’d prepared meticulously. She understood that this was a progression from the heroine of
A Doll’s House
. What might have happened if Nora had stayed’.
    Edie waited. She had begun to feel faintly sick, sick in the way you feel when you have told yourself that, asyou don’t want something, you will make no effort to secure it, and then discover that your indifference is not as deep as you had supposed.
    The producer turned back and looked at Edie.
    ‘Did you make that connection, Miss Allen?’
    ‘I do now—’
    The man with the newspaper put it down and stood up. He was burly, even allowing for the ski jacket, and had light, blank blue eyes.
    He said to Edie, ‘This will be the seventh time I have played Pastor Manders’.
    ‘Heavens’.
    ‘Three times in Oslo, once in Edinburgh, once in Scarborough and once in London already’. She gave him a nervous smile. ‘Are you Norwegian?’
    ‘Half’.
    ‘Your father—’ ‘My mother’. Edie nodded.
    ‘You have,’ Ivor said, ‘a