‘It’s haddock, rice and boiled eggs, William,’ Mrs Mussey says, putting a helping onto his plate.
‘Thanks – my mum doesn’t like fish,’ he says, hoping to imply they would otherwise have eaten it regularly, along with cornflakes and sliced white toast with Robertson’s marmalade.
‘Richard,’ says Mrs Mussey as she gets up from the table, skimming her hand over his hair, ‘can you try and get on stage by eight at the latest tonight? We’ve got about ten people coming, including Mrs Wickers who slept through it all last year. And your grandfather will be driving home afterwards, so it’s not fair to keep him too late.’
William thought how wonderful it would be if his mother, Uncle Robert and Howard could be in the audience to see how he was part of this cultured family.
Richard is intent on scraping the serving bowl of the last of the kedgeree. Mrs Mussey steps back towards the table.
‘Did you hear me, Richard? Answer when I speak to you.’
‘Yep, that’s fine,’ Richard answers. William hopes they are on stage by eight, because if not, he knows he’ll feel anxious.
After breakfast, the young people migrate to the sitting room around the polished oval table, swept clean of the National Geographic, Punch and New Statesman. Richard summarises for William’s benefit that they write the play before elevenses, for which Flo is, as they speak, baking biscuits. After elevenses and before lunch they allocate roles and do a run-through. After lunch they divide into two teams – one for costume and one for set. After tea break it’s dress rehearsal. William calculates they will have said their lines only twice before the performance.
‘Do we keep our scripts in case we forget our lines, or will there be a prompt?’
Everyone laughs.
‘No. No prompts. No script, really,’ Martin says, ‘you remember or you make it up. It’s all part of the fun!’
‘And at least one of the boys usually shows off their arse or todger at some point,’ Isobel says.
He looks at Martin – he’s never mentioned this, William is sure of it. ‘OK.’ He tries to look relaxed.
‘Let’s crack on, shall we?’ Richard lights a cigarette then balances an A4 pad on his knee. He looks round at everyone with a smile. ‘Scenario?’ he says, pencil poised.
‘Operating theatre,’ shouts Edward.
Richard nods and writes it down. ‘Setting?’
‘Rome, 1945,’ says Imogen.
‘Why not?’ says Richard, writing it down. ‘We can have fun with the accent.’
‘1945?’ says Edward.
‘The year we were born,’ offers Isobel.
‘Theme?’ Richard doesn’t look up from his pad.
‘Unrequited love!’ shouts Martin, eyes wide, colour high in his freckled cheeks.
‘We had that last year,’ says Imogen, on the verge of boredom again.
‘Not last year,’ says Edward, ‘it was definitely revenge last year – Imogen got cross at Richard even though he was only acting.’
‘You were alarmingly hateful, Richard,’ Imogen says.
‘Unrequited love it is then.’ Richard glances at his watch. ‘Title?’
‘Open Heart Surgery,’ shouts Martin in another explosion of enthusiasm.
‘Or Love under the Knife?’ suggests Edward.
‘What about Wounded Heart?’ dares William.
‘Marvellous, William,’ says Richard, ‘Wounded Heart it is.’
As everyone claps, William gets the feeling that they’ve all been waiting for him to say something, simply so they can all agree with it.
By 11 a.m., when Flo enters the sitting room preceded by the smell of baking, the play is written and William has radically revised his understanding of what it means to write a play. He’s a female nurse in love with the handsome doctor (Richard) who in turn is in love with another nurse (Imogen), who is in love with the patient being operated upon (Edward). Martin is a patient in love with William’s character. The only consolation of being cast as a woman is that William won’t be called upon to show his arse or his todger.
The day passes in a frenzy of improvisation, dressing up, good-humoured arguments, and the filching of furniture and household items. The operating table is an old door from the barn balanced on dining room chairs. A selection of flannels from a selection of bathrooms are surgical masks. Operating instruments are gathered from the cutlery drawer, and the patient’s heart is a piece of liver out of the fridge, donated by a reluctant but forbearing Flo.
In spite of being able to remain fully clothed, on balance William still regrets being the only one to switch gender. As a male character, he most certainly would have had some opportunity to be amorous towards one of the twins, and perhaps even better, have one of them be amorous towards him. Instead he is left having to feed Edward spaghetti and have his bottom pinched by Martin. At the eleventh hour, during the dress rehearsal, Richard decides that for the close of the play, everyone delivers a kiss on the lips to the person they love. William would have preferred to have left it at the bottom-pinching, but now he has to take Richard’s face in both hands and smack a hearty kiss on the lips. And he has to endure the same treatment from Martin. At least the idea makes Isobel laugh, and at least they only have to do it once. In rehearsal they are allowed to air-kiss, with the proviso that when it comes to it, there’ll be no holding back.
By late afternoon, William’s overcome with a longing to go to his room for a while and be on his own. They’re all wonderful, but so noisy and lively and demanding. His face hurts from all the expressions he’s had to make in the many conversations he’s had, and he still hasn’t got used to just how many of them there are. How Martin must have missed them when he first came to Cambridge. How quiet and lonely the dorms must have seemed compared to this mayhem.
Over supper, they aren’t allowed to talk about the play so as not to spoil it for the audience, who are outnumbered by the cast. But something must have leaked, because Flo serves lasagne, which William discovers is an Italian dish. He isn’t sure about the slippery sheets of pasta and he’s starting to get very nervous.
27