Mark could see that Tracy was thinking this over: it was a real objection. Where was her fare going to come from? She paused, her mind grappling with the problem.
‘I’ll sell my records,’ she said at last.
Her father burst out laughing. ‘You’re the first one who starts out as a pop star by selling all your records.’ And then in a sudden rage in which Mark could hear echoes of reality he shouted,
‘All right then. Bloody well go then.’
Helen glanced at Mark, but his expression remained benevolent and unchanged.
Tracy, turning at the door, said, ‘Well then, I’m going. And I’m taking the records with me.’ She suddenly seemed very thin and pale and scrawny.
‘Go on then,’ said her father.
‘That’s what I’m doing. I’m going.’ Her mother glanced from daughter to father and then back again but said nothing.
‘I’m going then,’ said Tracy, pretending to go to another room and then taking the phantom records in her arms. The father’s face was fixed and determined and then Tracy looked at the two of them for the last time and left the room. The father and mother were left alone.
‘She’ll come back soon enough,’ said the father but the mother still remained silent. Now and again the father would look at a phantom clock on a phantom mantelpiece but still Tracy did not return. The father pretended to go and lock a door and then said to his wife,
‘I think we’d better go to bed.’
And then Lorna and Helen went back to their seats while Mark thought, this was exactly how dramas began in their bareness and naivety, through which at the same time an innocent genuine feeling coursed or peered as between ragged curtains.
When the bell rang after the first scene was over he found himself thinking about Tracy wandering the streets of London, as if she were a real waif sheltering in transient doss-houses or under bridges dripping with rain. The girls became real to him in their rôles whereas they had not been real before, nor even individualistic behind their wall of apathy. That day in the staff-room he heard about Tracy’s saga and was proud and non-committal.
The next day the story continued. Tracy paced up and down the bare boards of the classroom, now and again stopping to look at ghostly billboards, advertisements. The girls had clearly been considering the next development during the interval they had been away from him, and had decided on the direction of the plot. The next scene was in fact an Attempted Seduction Scene.
Tracy was sitting disconsolately at a desk which he presumed was a table in what he presumed was a café.
‘Hello, Mark,’ she said to the man who came over to sit beside her. At this point Tracy glanced wickedly at the real Mark. The Mark in the play was the dark-haired girl who had asked for the records and whose name was Annie.
‘Hello,’ said Annie. And then, ‘I could get you a spot, you know.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘There’s a night club where they have a singer and she’s sick. I could get you to take her place.’ He put his hands on hers and she quickly withdrew her own.
‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘If you come to my place I can introduce you to the man who owns the night club.’
Tracy searched his face with forlorn longing.
Was this another lie like the many she had experienced before? Should she, shouldn’t she? She looked tired, her shoulders were slumped.
Finally she rose from the table and said, ‘All right then.’ Together they walked about the room in search of his luxurious flat.
They found it. Willing hands dragged another desk out and set the two desks at a slight distance from each other.
The Mark of the play went over to the window-sill on which there was a large bottle which had once contained ink but was now empty. He poured wine into two phantom glasses and brought them over.
‘Where is this man then,’ said Tracy.
‘He won’t be long,’ said Mark.
Tracy accepted the drink and Annie drank as well.
After a while Annie tried to put her hand around Tracy’s waist. Mark the teacher glanced at the class: he thought that at this turn of events they would be convulsed with raucous laughter. But in fact they were staring enraptured at the two, enthralled by their performance. It occurred to him that he would never be as unselfconscious as Annie and Tracy in a million years. Such a shorn abject thing, such dialogue borrowed from television, and yet it was early drama that what he was seeing reminded him of. He had a quick vision of a flag gracing the roof of the ‘theatre’, as if the school now belonged to the early age of Elizabethanism. His poor wooden Ο was in fact echoing with real emotions and real situations, borrowed from the pages of subterraneous pop magazines.
Tracy stood up. ‘I am not that kind of girl,’ she said.
‘What kind of girl?’
‘That kind of girl.’
But Annie was insistent. ‘You’ll not get anything if you don’t play along with me,’ she said, and Mark could have sworn that there was an American tone to her voice.
‘Well, I’m not playing along with you,’ said Tracy. She swayed a little on her feet, almost falling against the blackboard. ‘I’m bloody well not playing along with you,’ she said. ‘And that’s final.’ With a shock of recognition Mark heard her father’s voice behind her own as one might see behind a similar painting the first original strokes.
And then she collapsed on the floor and Annie was bending over her.
‘I didn’t mean it,’ she was saying. ‘I really didn’t mean it. I’m sorry.’
But Tracy lay there motionless and pale. She was like the Lady of Shalott in her boat. The girls in the class were staring at her. Look what they have done to me, Tracy was implying. Will they not be sorry now? There was a profound silence in the room and Mark was aware of the power of drama, even here in this bare classroom with the green peeling walls, the window-pole in the corner like a disused spear. There was nothing here but the hopeless emotion of the young.
Annie raised Tracy to her feet and sat her down in a chair.
‘It’s true,’ he said, ‘it’s true that I know this man.’ He went over to the wall and pretended to dial on a phantom ’phone. And at that moment Tracy turned to the class and winked at them. It was a bold outrageous thing to do, thought Mark, it was as if she was saying, That faint was of course a trick, a feint, that is the sort of thing people like us have to do in order to survive: he thought he was tricking me but all the time I was tricking him. I am alive, fighting, I know exactly what I am doing. All of us are in conspiracy against this Mark. So much, thought Mark, was conveyed by that wink, so much that was essentially dramatic. It was pure instinct of genius.
The stage Mark turned away from the ’phone and said, ‘He says he wants to see you. He’ll give you an audition. His usual girl’s sick. She’s got …’ Annie paused and tried to say ‘laryngitis’, but it came out as not quite right, and it was as if the word poked through the drama like a real error, and Mark thought of the Miracle plays in which ordinary people played Christ and Noah and Abraham with such unconscious style, as if there was no oddity in Abraham being a joiner or a miller.
‘Look, I’ll call you,’ said the stage Mark and the bell rang and the finale was postponed. In the noise and chatter in which desks and chairs were replaced Mark was again aware of the movement of life, and he was happy. Absurdly he began to see them as if for the first time, their faces real and interested, and recognized the paradox that only in the drama had he begun to know them, as if only behind such a protection, a screen, were they willing to reveal themselves. And he began