He had a choice. He could say yes and set off in any direction, and God knew where he’d end up. Or he could…“Ms. Godine,” he said, “I live near you. I believe.”
“You believe you live near me?” She squinted at him and lifted her chin to release a plume of smoke. But then she smiled. “I am not even going to investigate that allegation. I suppose the thing is for me to ask you to escort me home. Yes?”
She ground her cigarette into the pavement and, without waiting for an answer, extended a hand. He held out an elbow, as his grandfather had shown him.
“Tell me your story, Nicholas. Let me hear that you have a proper voice.”
Her hand warming the crook of his elbow even through the sleeve of his jacket, she cajoled him into talking about his family, his wish for a dog, his favorite shows on the telly. She did not ask how he knew where she lived. Once he recognized the neighborhood, he led her to the foot of the mews, where he insisted she leave him off.
“And you’ll go straight home from here?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Are you free Saturday evening?”
When he told her that he was, she asked if his mother worked then. “Surely Saturday she has off.”
“Yes, Saturdays she’s at home with us, at least the evenings,” Nick said. Already he felt accustomed to Ms. Godine’s forward inquiries.
“Brilliant,” she said. “Then come to the theater on Saturday, by half seven, and there will be two tickets at the window in your name, Nicholas. Decent seats, too. Will you bring your mum, and then will you find me after? I’ll expect you. I’ll leave a note with the tickets.”
He hesitated.
“I will be cross if you don’t come,” she said, and then she backed away with a soldier’s salute, pivoted gracefully round on a narrow heel, and turned the corner.
When Nick entered the flat, he found his mother possessed by a grieving rage the likes of which he had never witnessed before. She seized him by the shoulders, sobbing, and asked, her voice a shriek, wherever on earth he had got to. She had sent his siblings out to search the parks and nearby streets.
“Theater,” he said. “The theater.”
She laughed manically. “Oh dear God, Nick, are you now on drugs? This too? You cannot do this to me, you have to be truthful, you have to be straight as a bloody arrow, you have to not make my life harder than it already is, you have to—”
“Mum, it’s true. I went out, and I…got lost, and I went into this theater to ask where I was, and I…watched a play. A rehearsal for a play.”
“You watched a rehearsal for a play.” She took a tea towel from beside the kitchen sink and wiped it harshly across her mottled face.
“Yes. We have tickets. We can go to the play, the real play, on Saturday.”
His mother stared at him, her breath still catching from her tears.
“You mustn’t fool with me. You mustn’t.”
“It’s true,” he said. “On Saturday I’ll prove it. It’s called Hedda Gabler.”
The strange thing was, he had no doubts that what he believed had happened had really happened, nor that Ms. Godine would keep her word.
—
Emmelina Godine gave Nick a paying job for the remainder of her six-month run as Hedda Gabler. After school, he would rush home and do his schoolwork as quickly and efficiently as he could. After an equally rushed dinner, he would walk to the theater and bring Ms. Godine a newspaper, a sleeve of chocolate biscuits, a bottle of lemon crush, and he would make her tea with the electric kettle in her dressing room. It wasn’t large or luxurious, but he liked sitting with her in that stuffy, windowless room while she made phone calls or read the news, sometimes aloud. (“Nicholas, what do you know about China? We all need to know about China.”) Sometimes she asked him to step into the hall while she took or made a call. She told him from the start that she would mostly ignore him, that he was free to go (or stay) once he had poured her first cup of tea.
The other actors were amused by his presence; now and then he would run an errand for one of them as well. Donal McSwain, who played Ms. Godine’s husband in the play, sometimes knocked on her door and asked, “May I borrow your young apprentice?” McSwain was constantly running out of fags. The smoke in the hallways grew thick after an hour or two; Nick’s mother didn’t smoke, so he wasn’t used to it, and at times he felt light-headed. He went home every night with clothes that smelled like a pub. (The smell of cigarettes, even now, makes Nick nostalgic for the bunkerlike comfort of a backstage warren.)
In the spring, Ms. Godine explained to Nick that the production would travel to America; she and her costar would go as well. “I wish I could take you along,” she said, “but I have a feeling your mum wouldn’t be keen on that idea.” As a farewell present, she gave him the big colorful cigar box where she had stashed her hairpins, stray coins, and the pack of fags she was always hiding from Donal McSwain.
She wrote Nick a handful of postcards, and he wrote twice to an address she had given him—short, awkward notes, because what did he really have to tell her? Once she was gone, she seemed as unattainable as she had when she was a figure of mystery behind a window across a street, unaware of his prying eyes. But she had made her mark on Nick.
That year, his life changed in other ways. One night Mum had a beastly row with Grandfather. It was over the phone, and Nick was in his room, studying for exams. Even through the closed door, he heard every word his mother said to her father. It was obvious that Grandfather had suggested Nick should go away to school; he would pay for it, and why in the world should Mum refuse? He hadn’t offered this option to Nigel or Annabelle, but for unknown reasons, he had decided that Nick should attend an independent school. Nick knew that whenever money was involved, Grandfather always won the argument, because money had power—the power to buy not just things and services and privileges but, Nick had only recently grasped, time. And sometimes people. Listening to Mum’s raised voice, he could tell that Grandfather was calling her selfish, accusing her of holding Nick back.
The row on the phone ended with Mum shouting that the decision would be Nick’s. The flat was silent after that. Nick continued to study, but he kept waiting for Mum to knock on the door. She didn’t.