Unable to concentrate, he finally gave up and closed his book.
In his gut, he wanted to go. He didn’t want to leave Mum, not if it would make her unhappy, but the flat felt emptier than ever when she was at work. Nigel had just pushed off to university up north, and Annabelle was spending all her spare time working in a dress shop (where, as far as Nick could tell, she must be spending half her wages). Nick had a room to himself now, but if boredom was a tunnel, all it did was lead him only deeper into the earth; these days, boredom was more like a mine shaft. He had no knack for sports, and for spare-time reading, he’d begun to borrow plays from the school library—but to simply read a play felt a bit tunnelish as well. He imagined that a public school, surely richer than the one nearby that Nigel had attended, would give him a chance to try out the stage for himself. Ms. Godine had told him that the best foundation an actor could have was solid schooling, that he mustn’t think of shortchanging himself on that.
Mum cried when he told her he would like to accept Grandfather’s offer.
“You are all leaving me, all of you,” she wailed. “And you are all I have.”
Nick had no argument to offer because he feared that what she said might be true. He said, “I won’t go far. I’ll come home during holidays—every one, I promise. And now you won’t have to worry about me. Where I am, things like that.”
When she continued to weep, he said, “And when I’m done, I’ll stay near. Not like I’m going to desert you.”
Through his early twenties, he did his best to honor that promise: he went to university in the city, studying theater at Goldsmiths. For two years, he lived with fellow students, but when Mum moved to a modern flat with a lift and a lower rent, he joined her. It was smaller than the old flat, but there was a room off the kitchen just big enough for a bed and chest of drawers, and Mum wouldn’t let him pay her more than a token rent. This spared him wasting half his life on the crap jobs that other scrabbling actors were thankful to land; time was as crucial as talent. Bit parts on the stage and in radio adverts kept him hoping for more while keeping him close to home.
But then he was cast as Valentine in a West End production of Two Gentlemen of Verona; after that, he was virtually handed a plum role as an all-suffering frontiersman in a BBC drama to be shot in the wilds of Canada. His mother’s cancer was diagnosed two weeks after he crossed the Atlantic. Annabelle took Mum to her appointments and stayed with her on bad nights. Nick felt helpless and callow, especially when the time difference and the shooting schedule conspired to keep him from talking to Mum more than once or twice a week.
By the time the shoot had wrapped, Nick miserably awake and anxious on the three flights he took to reach home, Mum was weak from radiation and waiting for her place in the chemotherapy queue. Nick was desperate to help her, but it was, effectively, too late, in part because she had lost the will to fight the bureaucracy as well as the disease. Annabelle had been similarly depleted.
And then came the offer of a role in a new series about King Arthur and the legends surrounding his knights. The role was Gawain. Arthur was to be played by Sir Gwyn Pugh, who almost never left the realm of theater, where he reliably filled every seat in the house.
“Go back to your work,” Annabelle told him. “I’m not saying that out of bitterness. At this point, it’s what she wants for you. She’d murder us both, weak as she is, if she learned that you’d turned this down on her account.”
His work, this time around, took him to a punishingly cold, rain-drenched forest in Romania. (Why couldn’t he snag a role in a drawing-room comedy? Was it something to do with his bony, hungry-looking physique? Perhaps it didn’t help that he had been properly schooled in swordsmanship and riding.) So he cleared off, obedient, sheepishly relieved, and found himself so consumed by the daily marathon of racing against a straitlaced budget that his mother’s illness began to seem as if it must have been a mirage—until, just a few weeks later, Annabelle called again.
As it turned out, he was the one sitting beside their mother when she died in hospital. Annabelle was running errands on her way there, Nigel pulled out of the room by an urgent call from his wife. Nick sometimes wonders if his half sister can’t quite forgive him, though Mum was hardly present much herself at the end of her life.
—
Nick sees his career thus far as a steady progress, marked by only a few truly galvanic moments, bone-jarring cracks of thunder, strokes of fate. Following Emmelina Godine to that theater was one; his arrival at boarding school was another; the most recent had to be the moment, two summers ago, when he came down from his room to the lobby at the San Domenico Palace, in Taormina—addled by travel delays (a missed flight connection in Milan), unsettled by bad airport food (whatever possessed him to buy prawns?), and missing Kendra—to collide, almost literally, with his costar, Deirdre Drake.
“Well met, cowboy,” she said in her prairie-wide American contralto.
“I’m so happy, so honored, so gobsmacked,” he heard himself gushing. They had met once, for a screen test in L.A. to see how Nick partnered, visually, emotionally, with the woman around whom the film would revolve. They had made no small talk, and a literally gut-wrenching brew of superstition and terror had left him both tongue-tied and nauseated beyond the boundaries of the audition itself.
In the hotel lobby, she took him by the arm and, leaning so close to him that he could feel her breath on his ear, said, “If I’m going to be your mother, boyo, we’ve got our work cut out, don’t we?”