The Understudy

For eleven weeks I had learned the part of Leontes in every spare minute I possessed. I had rehearsed it in the bath and on the bus, and once, memorably, in the queue at a supermarket, where an elderly gentleman had moved his trolley away from me with the polite haste of one who has recognised the symptoms of a particular kind of madness. The role, which is long, difficult and entirely unsuited to casual conversation, had colonised my brain. You will understand, then, that I was not exactly impartial about the health of Mr Aldous Pembridge, our leading actor. By all accounts, he had never missed a performance in thirty-one years. He gave the impression of a man who had negotiated personally with the common cold and obtained a permanent exemption. Every evening, at about the time the audience was settling in, I would stand in the wings in costume, in case of catastrophe, in the manner of a lifeboat on a perfectly calm sea. "Don't take it personally," the stage manager, Marguerite, told me during the first week. "Understudies are insurance. And nobody feels grateful to insurance until the house has burnt down." I did not take it personally, I told her, with great dignity. Privately, I imagined elaborate scenarios, all of them bloodless and none of them seriously unkind: a minor travel delay, a slightly disagreeable oyster. I imagined the moment when Marguerite would hurry towards me, whispering, "You're on." I imagined the hush in the auditorium and the review in the paper. On the final night of our run, the one performance that I had resolved not to attend at all, I stood in the wings as usual, if only because it seemed rude not to. Mr Pembridge, in tremendous voice, stormed onto the stage. I listened to him deliver the great speech in the second act, and something unexpected occurred. I found I was no longer waiting for him to falter. I was listening to the way he paused before the word "betrayed", a pause I had never thought to try myself, because I had always been too busy counting the lines until my own entrance. At the curtain call, the audience rose, and a few of them, I noticed with some surprise, were crying. Mr Pembridge caught sight of me in the wings and, while the applause was still thundering, raised one eyebrow in what I can only describe as a gesture of professional sympathy. "Eleven weeks," he said afterwards, coat over his arm. "Most people give up at about six." I never did play Leontes. But it is a curious fact that I can still recite the whole of the part, from the first syllable to the last, whereas Mr Pembridge, I am told, now grows tomatoes in Cornwall and cannot recall a line of it. If that is not justice, it is at least a good approximation of irony.