Tom looked to Alistair. “What do you think?”
Alistair thought it strange that they deferred to him. His uniform was hardly native to these gilded columns and these pink velvet seats. Civilians must surely outrank him in this theater. He laughed, then realized by their expressions how inappropriate it was. He held tight to the table. Now that he was standing, he understood that he was drunker than strictly necessary.
He looked around at the chaos of the theater, the stalls in packed disarray and the great circle jammed with people trying to circulate in opposite directions. He hadn’t a clue what to suggest.
“Miss North?” said a voice from behind them.
The Interlocutor had come down to their table. Alistair watched Mary compose herself and smile.
“You need to work on Zachary’s writing,” she said, offering her hand.
“Yes?” said the Interlocutor as he shook it.
“He uses punctuation as if it were rationed and vowels as if he had hit the mother lode.”
From above came anxious voices as the upper circle pushed downstairs.
“Might the rest wait until parents’ evening?” said the Interlocutor. “Only I came to invite you people to share our basement shelter.”
“If you’re sure it’s no trouble,” said Mary.
“Why, what are you going to do? Heckle us?”
The Interlocutor led them backstage and down into the theater’s basement. It was arched and vaulted, twenty feet from floor to ceiling at the apex of each vault and never lower than fifteen feet at the pillars. The basement was as long and broad belowground as the theater was above. It was lit by a hundred bulbs swinging on cloth-braided wire.
The Interlocutor ushered them along a narrow passage that had been cleared between the rolled backdrops and wooden facades and pantomime horses, to an area against one wall where the players and crew members were grumbling as they took their seats on wooden benches. Their voices echoed and boomed through the sound box of the basement. The mood was of annoyance—the performance had been hotting up nicely, and here was another false alarm.
“Make yourselves easy,” said the Interlocutor, and they all sat.
“Isn’t it a bore?” said Hilda. “There should be a law that they can’t do these drills at the weekend.”
The Interlocutor put two fingers in his mouth to give a whistle, and Zachary appeared from behind a rack of drapes.
“Fetch me the basin?” said the Interlocutor.
Zachary disappeared and came back with a cloth and a bowl of water, which he set before his father. The Interlocutor patted the bench beside him and Zachary sat down and grinned. “Good afternoon, Miss North.”
“Mary, please. You needn’t ‘Miss North’ me out of school.”
“Fine, then you needn’t call me Zachary.”
“Oh? What am I to call you?”
“ ‘Mr. Lee’ will do just fine.”
Mary smiled. “Very well then, Mr. Lee. I should like you to meet my friends Mr. Tom Shaw, Miss Hilda Appleby and Mr. Alistair Heath.”
“Good afternoon,” said Zachary, more shyly.
“Don’t say you live down here?” said Hilda, rather loud from the wine.
The Interlocutor looked up from scrubbing off his stage paint. “We rent a room above a cobbler’s. Which is fine except for the hammering. You might say the sole inconvenience is the sole inconvenience.”
Tom gave Zachary an avuncular smile. “And you come along to watch?”
Zachary looked down at his hands. “I help out.”
“Excuse the boy,” said his father. “He’s quiet around people.”
Tom ruffled Zachary’s hair. “No need to be shy, is there? We won’t bite.”
Alistair watched Tom in the lurching light of the bulbs, and wondered if his old friend had always seemed such an ass. Perhaps it was only the wine wearing off, making Tom clumsy and Alistair unkind. He wished he had thought to bring the bottle down with them.
“And how do you help out with the show?” Hilda was saying.
Zachary shrugged. “This and that.”
“He’s here to remind himself what not to do,’ said his father. “Boy’s going to be a lawyer or a physician.”
Mary smiled at Zachary. “That’s what you want, is it?”
“Sure.”
His father said, “That’s why it lifts me when he tells me how well he’s doing in class.”
Zachary looked to Mary, widening his eyes in appeal. She hesitated, then smiled. “He tries splendidly hard. And anyway, I don’t see what’s so wrong with what you do. You’re marvelously good.”
Zachary’s father wrung out the facecloth and the milky water ran into the bowl. “It’s a living, I suppose. And we don’t bother anyone.”
“I have to ask,” said Mary. “How do you find it? The show, I mean?”
He gave her a steady look. “How do I find it, Miss North? I walk up the Strand and make a left onto Wellington Street.”