As she exited onto the pavement she was vaguely aware of someone calling out a name behind her. It wasn’t until that someone tapped her on the shoulder that she became aware they were calling to her.
“Ms Roberts?”
It was a waiter. She looked at him blankly.
“Your card?” and he handed her a credit card.
“Oh, yes, of course, that’s me!” she said gaily, laughing in an attempt to hide the fact that she had been completely thrown by the use of that name – it was the first time she had been addressed by the assumed appellation, after all. She must have left the card on the table by mistake. Smiling, she took the card, and made her way to the tube, using Anna’s pass to go through the barriers. Well, someone else had now accepted her as Anna Roberts, so she now just had to do the same.
Chapter 9
-Kate-
Kate spent the next afternoon prepping herself for the start of the drama class. She had not intended this to take the whole afternoon. She had got up in reasonable time, efficiently taken herself off to the bookshop on Gower Street and had returned the triumphant possessor of what looked like a good book of women’s auditions speeches. She had flicked through it while eating a hastily-prepared sandwich (courtesy of the food and wine store – she really was getting back into the metropolitan method of just buying food when it was needed, glad to be free from the weekly suburban supermarket drudge) and had settled upon a speech by Viola from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. She planned to have a quick coffee, crack on with learning the speech, then spend the rest of the afternoon looking at the proofs that had arrived the previous day. So far, so many good intentions.
She had made pleasing progress initially, reading through the speech, familiarising herself with where it came in the play. She was reading it out loud for the second time whilst parading round the room when she realised there was a problem. She had thought about the characterisation of Viola, and how she would feel when she realised that the beautiful Countess Olivia (believing her to be the man that she was disguised as) had fallen in love with her, whilst Viola herself was in love with the Duke of Illyria. She felt she had pretty well mastered Viola’s emotional turmoil through a good use of varied tone and pace. However, what she had not done was think about how Anna would approach the piece.
Kate became involved in a difficult and somewhat frustrating debate with herself. If she had truly grasped the essence of the part of Viola, then surely it would not matter whether she was playing her as Anna or as Kate, because she would have captured the true Viola-ness of the character? But then on the other hand, she was only playing her as an actor of her own capabilities and understanding, drawing on her own internal resources to think about how Viola would feel in the circumstances, and adapting her intonation and modulation from her own experience of how she, Kate, herself would react to that situation. Perhaps what she ought to be doing was thinking about how Anna would react, or at the very least how Anna would interpret the character? Perhaps she had to be Kate playing Anna playing Viola (in a soliloquised reprieve from playing Cesario)? Anna did say she had certain standards to maintain, after all.
Kate ran her hand through her hair and flipped it over to the other side. The only difficulty with the ‘What would Anna do?’ approach was that she didn’t really know enough about Anna to know how she would tackle the role, never mind the situation in which Viola found herself. She thought hard, marshalling what little she did know about her opposite number. Anna had been pretty focused and business-like through the exchange process, particularly on the second visit, with a strong drive and energy propelling her to closure. Kate thought about the obvious awareness that Anna had of her good figure, the casually stylish dress sense, the cool way in which she had gone into a coffee shop as her first act in Kate’s life. This and the impeccable design of the flat and the collection of jazz that graced the shelves convinced Kate that Anna would be a very cool, sophisticated Viola, maybe quite sensual and sexual in her desire for the Duke, not given to over-indulgence in emotion or sweeping gestures. Kate would have to shelve her own usual depiction of Viola, frank and almost childlike in her honest and zealous puzzling over the situation in which she found herself. Thus resolved she tried again.
“I left no ring with her. What means this lady?
Fortune forbid my outside have not charmed her!”
No, too keen, too concerned. She tried again. And again. She finally got through the speech, but the net result seemed only to be that Viola was now being played as a paranoid schizophrenic, veering between total selfish disinterest in all but carnal lust for the Duke on the one hand, and sudden deep emotional attachment to him and concern for Olivia on the other when Kate’s own instinctive interpretation got the better of her. And that Kate was now completely hoarse.
Sighing with frustration after her voice gave way on “It is too hard a knot for me t’untie”, she gave up and threw herself onto the sofa, and the book onto the floor. She reached for the television remote. There was always tomorrow morning before the class, right? And she could get up a bit earlier and start looking at the proofs then. She simply did not have the spirit to try and work out how Anna would feel about the more controversial aspects of punctuation this evening. The virtue of trashy television was that it was surely scientifically impossible for anyone’s brain to remain capable of active thought after about twenty minutes of watching it, and if she was effectively brainless for the rest the evening it wouldn’t matter if she was Kate or Anna.
Unfortunately for Kate’s plans for an efficient morning, she had forgotten another important element of trashy television – its strangely addictive quality. Reality television show had merged into comedy quiz show had merged into statistic-driven investigative journalism exposé. Even more addictive was imagining Neil there beside her, how he would laugh at the contestants, how they would fantasy cast their friends into the shows, how he would reduce her to tears of laughter with innuendo about what was going on behind the TV scenes. It was a square-eyed Kate that had finally pulled herself off the sofa and into bed the wrong side of midnight, and consequently rather a bleary-eyed one who finally emerged from bed the next day after spending the best part of two hours hitting snooze on the alarm clock on the bedside table.
Grabbing a flustered breakfast and a strong black coffee, Kate tried to make the best of what remained of the morning to start on the proofs that had come through to her. The publishing house seemed to be going through a sci-fi phase, Kate’s least favourite genre, and she laid out the three implausibly titled books in front of her, trying to decide which one to start with. In the end she opted for the one with the title that she actually understood, and had got through three chapters largely putting squiggly underlining beneath words that she was sure could not possibly be in the English language, or if they were must be some sort of private sub-set of language that she was not privy to.
After she had been driven to writing rude comments in the margin she began to realise that she might be approaching the task in the wrong way – someone had clearly decided it was worthwhile publishing this book, which presumably meant that they could understand it, and so presumably her role wasn’t to go through the book generally rubbishing it. She also remembered that Anna had in fact left her a guide from the publishing house about what she was actually required to do, and leafing through it confirmed that her role was limited to commenting on typos, punctuation, non-controversial grammar and type-setting. It appeared she was not supposed to query the plot or re-order paragraphs, and particularly not delete the ones she didn’t like. That was someone else’s job, and apparently the sub-plot concerning floating brains engaged in projecting active thought despite being in cauldrons full of so-called ‘space plasma’ was to be allowed to stay. She felt very glad she had started off in pencil and rubbed out her angry extraneous comments and went through the next two chapters restricting herself to more conventional intervention.
Given this set-back, and the pressing deadline of the middle of the following week (why were these books so long – how much was there really left to say about aliens?), she decided there wasn’t time to look over the speech