The Understudy: A Novel Read online

I brought a bottle.

  But Josh was speaking now, Josh his employer, saying something about people arriving in half an hour or so, which was plenty of time, and did he want to bartend or take food round or carve the Serrano ham off the bone or just collect coats or maybe they could take it in turns and was he any good at shucking oysters, but Stephen couldn’t take any of this in because of the sound of the blood ringing in his ears, so instead he asked…“Is there a toilet I can use quickly?”

  “Sure. Use it slowly if you want!” quipped Josh, and one of the waiters obliged him with a £15-an-hour snort of mirth. “Other side of the room, on your left.”

  “Thank you very much,” Stephen managed, very formally, and turned and walked stiffly across the room, as if he’d just learned how, stopping only when he was about twelve inches away from the wall. There was no sign of a door. He looked both ways along the length of the wall. Nope, definitely no door. He desperately needed to be on the other side of a door right now, any door at all, but there was definitely no door here. He contemplated kicking himself a door, but the walls looked too solid, so he worked out a form of smile, practiced it facing the wall, nailed it in place, then headed back to the kitchen, where Josh was showing one of the caterers, Adam perhaps, the correct way to open an oyster.

  “…and hold the shell flat in your hand…”

  “Hi there, Josh…?”

  “…so you don’t lose the precious juices…”

  “Josh, sorry, I can’t…”

  “That’s the best bit about an oyster, the juices…”

  “Hi there, Josh—JOSH!”

  “Mr. McQueen?”

  “I can’t seem to find the toilet.”

  “It’s a concealed door—if you look carefully, you’ll see the…” Josh sighed, gave up on the oyster, hocked it impatiently into Adam’s hand, precious juices and all, and led Stephen out of the kitchen. As he left, Stephen glanced back, just in time to see Adam clutching the oyster shucker by the handle as if contemplating embedding it in the top of Josh’s head.

  Josh, meanwhile, had his arm around Stephen’s shoulder, pointing at the wall opposite. “There—you see that rectangle?” and sure enough, Stephen could make out the faint outline of a door. “That’s the bog. Hidden doors, you see? Like in an old castle or something. Cool, isn’t it?”

  “Amazing,” said Stephen, taking care not to move his face too much, in case it collapsed.

  “Should be amazing—it cost me a fucking fortune…” Josh said, then headed back to the kitchen. “Just push it gently, and it should swing open…”

  Stephen pushed the edge of the door and, sure enough, it swung open with a futuristic pneumatic hiss. Once safely inside, he turned, locked the door, stood with his head resting against it and let out a long, high, demented hum, the kind of noise you hear in hospital dramas, when a life-support machine is turned off. The bathroom was L-shaped, large and chic, gun-metal and black, lit only by a host of tea lights and a jasmine-scented candle, and it wasn’t until she gave a little artificial cough that Stephen realized there was someone else there.

  An attractive woman with cropped black hair, in a knee-length, tight-fitting black dress, sat on the bidet with her legs crossed, smoking a cigarette.

  “Everything okay there?” she asked with an American accent.

  Stephen stopped humming. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize…” he stammered, pointedly looking up at the ceiling.

  “ ’S okay, I’m not doing anything…intimate,” said the woman nonchalantly, and Stephen glanced discreetly down at her crossed legs, just to check. No, she didn’t appear to be doing anything intimate, just sitting quietly on the bidet, by herself, smoking. “Amazingly, this is the only comfortable chair in this place.” The accent was American; New York, perhaps. Her eyes were very dark, her mouth wide and red, and Stephen recognized her, from a brief conversation at the first-night party, as Josh’s wife, Nora. “You’re one of the waiters, right?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Well, surely you know if you’re a guest or a waiter…?” she said, drawing hard on the cigarette.

  “Yeah, you’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Nora looked confused. He decided to change the subject. “Should I leave you…?” he asked, sensing that he’d somehow stumbled upon her hiding place.

  “No, ’s okay,” she said brightly, standing, and with one finger deftly wiping something from the corner of one eye. “It’s all yours! Go crazy!” Then she lifted the toilet lid, tossed the cigarette in, listened to it sizzle, then turned to Stephen.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Go on.”

  “What do you think of this dress?” She stood up straight with her shoulders back, held the dress at her hips and tugged so that it pulled tight against her body. “Josh says it makes me look fat.”

  “He did? Fat?”

  “Well, he didn’t say ‘fat,’ of course. The actual precise word he chose was ‘lush,’ but he meant fat. You think I should go and change?”

  “Not at all. I think you look great,” said Stephen, because she did.

  “ ‘Great’ as in ‘great-big,’ right?”

  “Great as in fantastic.”

  “Great as in fantastic,” she repeated, mimicking his accent. “Well, thank you kindly, you’re a real gent.”

  Stephen had a powerful weakness for Americans doing English accents, and surprised himself by smiling. Nora smiled back, a little anxiously, perhaps, and with her eyes, which appeared slightly red, averted to the ground. “By the way, you do realize you were making a weird little noise, don’t you?”

  “When?”

  “Just now.”

  “I was?”

  “Uh-huh—a kind of hum. Like this.” And she closed her eyes tight and made the noise.

  “Yeah, I do that sometimes, apparently. It’s a nerves thing.”

  “And does it help?”

  “Oh, not really.”

  “Shame, I was going to give it a try. But why should you be nervous? You’re a professional, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, yes. I suppose I am.”

  “Well, there you go. At least you’re being paid to be here.” And her eyes flicked past him to the door that he leaned against. He stepped to one side to open it for her, but found that it had somehow jammed shut. He pulled hard on the door handle three or four times.

  “You might want to unlock it first maybe?”

  He unlocked it.

  “Okay, here I go…” she said, and took a deep breath, the kind you might take before dropping through a hole in the ice, swallowed hard, and stepped out into the main room, leaving Stephen alone.

  He waited a moment, then quickly locked the door again, and took Mrs. Harper’s place on the bidet, sitting down heavily on it. He lit a cigarette, attempting to inhale its whole length in one breath, then closed his eyes and pressed his eyelids hard with the tips of his fingers, until white bursts of light started to form, and tried to imagine what Cary Grant would do in these exact circumstances.

  He was finding it hard to imagine Cary Grant in these exact circumstances.

  It wasn’t so much the waitering. He’d been a waiter many times before, and fully expected to be a waiter again, and really didn’t mind—it was part of the job, after all. What particularly irked him about the situation was spending twenty-five quid on a bottle of champagne as a gift for a supposed friend, then being expected to serve that very same champagne to strangers, then wash up their glasses. He thought back to that night, standing in the wings, trying to work out how the terrible mistake had come about. What were Josh’s words exactly? “Are you available…”? “Suit-and-tie job”? “I’d really appreciate it”? Obviously, the simple truth was that Josh had just been too embarrassed to use the word “waiter.” What Stephen had taken to be the hand of friendship was actually just passing him a full ashtray.

  Far away in the distance, he heard the pop of a fork piercing the film seal on the top of a ready-meal.

  He thou
ght seriously about climbing out of the window, but it was too high and too small, and simply admitting the mistake would just push the humiliation one stage further—he imagined Josh’s embarrassed, pitying look. No, clearly the only mature, sensible thing to do was feign acute illness. Do some acting—that was his trade, after all. He started flicking through the mental medical dictionary he kept at hand for such emergencies: angina…no, beriberi…no, cholera…no. A stroke was too extreme, tonsillitis too mild, irritable bowel syndrome too intimate. Was there a quick and easy way to make your own lung collapse? He settled on that all-rounder food poisoning—perfectly plausible, as he did in fact feel like throwing up. He put his hand on his stomach, clutching it as if he’d just been shot in the guts, bent over slightly, practiced his queasy face in the mirror, swallowed another rogue antibiotic, flushed the toilet unnecessarily and stepped out into the room.

  The music was louder now, generic cocktail-bar dance music, and Josh was hunched over the DJ decks, bobbing slightly, eyes screwed shut and the tip of his tongue protruding, one cup of the headphones pressed to his ear, as he concentrated on mixing seamlessly between two apparently identical records.

  “Josh, I—”

  “Heeeeeeey! Stephanie, Stevearoony, the Stevester.” Josh jabbered away like some beautifully coutured village idiot. “I just wanted to say massive cheers for doing this,” he shouted, coming out from behind the decks, and putting his arm around Stephen’s shoulder. “It’s just I hate having a party and having to worry about filling people’s glasses and tidying up and all that crap.”

  “ ’S all right, really, I just—”

  “And strictly between me and you, these guys”—he nodded toward the trio of caterers in the kitchen—“well, they’ve all got a bit of an attitude, if you know what I mean, like they’re too fuckin’ good for it or something. Plus the fact that they’re bloody expensive, so it’d be nice for the money to go to someone I know, if you see what I mean. And I expect you’ve done this kind of thing before, haven’t you? Catering?”

  “Yeah, yeah, Josh,” he said, taking the dusty bubble pack of mystery antibiotics out of his pocket, for use as a prop. “It’s just I’m feeling a bit—”

  “And you know your cocktails? A bit of basic mixology, yeah? I mean, not the fancy stuff, but vodka martinis, margaritas, all that shit.”

  “Oh, yeah, sure, but—”

  “Well, why don’t you bartend then, to start off with, anyway, and we’ll call it, what, ten, no, fifteen squid an hour, yeah?” He was holding Stephen by the shoulders now, his face just inches away, looking at him intently with his expensive blue eyes, as if about to kiss him, and Stephen realized that if he brought his head down hard and fast enough, he could quite easily break Josh’s nose.

  He thought about the money he’d spent on the bottle of champagne, his impending unemployment, the mortgage on that hellhole, his lack of a fridge, his daughter’s Christmas present. He made some calculations in his head, fifteen times six hours, fifteen times seven maybe…

  “Fifteen quid’s way too much,” he said finally.

  “Rubbish. You’re easily worth that!” said Josh, lightly punching the top of Stephen’s arm, and despite himself, Stephen actually felt flattered—yes, he was definitely worth at least fifteen squid an hour. “Besides, you’ve got to give something back, haven’t you?” said Josh.

  “Okay, then,” said Stephen, finally.

  “Goodly good! Give us a hand with these fairy lights, would you?” he barked, padding off.

  At the far end of the room, across great expanses of poured black rubber flooring and funky furniture, Stephen could see Nora Harper, lying on a distressed leather sofa, leafing through a magazine, a bottle of beer in her hand, which she raised and tipped toward him, giving him a little wave with her fingers, and a smile. At least he thought she was smiling; at these kinds of distances it was hard to tell.

  “Fasten Your Seat Belts. It’s Going to Be a Bumpy Night”

  And half an hour later, the cool people started to arrive.

  They were actors, mainly, mostly in their mid-twenties to early thirties, faces Stephen recognized off the telly, from high-end, top-of-the-range period dramas or edgy New Wave sitcoms and sketch shows, or the smarter commercials; the Cute, Feisty Girl who is Britain’s Biggest Hollywood Hope, a couple of sharply dressed violent-but-lovable Brit-Flick Gangsters, the Unconventional Campaigning Lawyer with the Complicated Love Life and enough Charismatic-But-Troubled Surgeons, Hunky Doctors and Perky Nurses to staff a small rural hospital, ideally in the 1950s. The Twenty-eighth and Sixty-fourth Sexiest Women in the World were there, along with the Fifteenth Most Talented Man Under Thirty and the Eighth and Fourteenth Most Powerful People in Comedy, while over on the low Italian sofa, the latest Heathcliff was flirting with the most recent Jane Eyre as Nicholas Nickleby looked on.

  There were the TV and theater producers too, the directors and casting agents, people that Stephen had been regularly sending the same letter to for eleven years now: “Dear X, I understand that you will soon be casting a production of Y, and I believe I would be ideal for the role of Z, please find enclosed my CV, an eight-by-ten photograph and a self-addressed envelope. I look forward to meeting you, etc, etc.” And here Stephen was, actually meeting them at last, or if not meeting them as such, at least offering them nibbles and a napkin to catch the crumbs. Initially he had worried that he might be recognized—“Weren’t you the young man who wrote to me in 1996, asking to be considered for the role of Peer Gynt?”—but realized soon enough that nothing rendered a person invisible quite so effectively as a large white china plate of chicken satay.

  Elsewhere, keeping themselves to themselves, were a sprinkling of young aristocrats, heirs and heiresses, entrepreneurs, the militantly trendy: trim, shiny, young men and women with familiar surnames and honey-colored October tans whom he recognized from the diary pages, those flash-lit party-roundup photos that Stephen sometimes found himself scrutinizing with a kind of masochistic curiosity—people who seemed to have a champagne flute fused permanently to the tips of their fingers. They wore vintage silk dresses, beautifully cut suit jackets and artfully faded low-slung jeans that threatened to fall down around their ankles, and were only pegged up by finely sculpted hip bones, prominent from a diet of canapés. Unfailingly polite, they smiled and thanked Stephen for their champagne refills in strange, slurred, absent voices, cultivated somewhere between Shropshire and a Shoreditch market stall. There were a handful of models too, recognizable from controversially explicit billboard campaigns and men’s style mag photo shoots, outlandishly attractive women whose names escaped him but whose breasts and buttocks he was disconcertingly familiar with; women in thrift-shop dresses and Top Shop jewelry, hair greased and slicked down in all different directions, as if they’d felt an obligation to look as downbeat as possible, because otherwise it just wouldn’t be fair.

  And there were children too: actor/model/child children, funkily dressed little moppets in tailored dungarees, cheekily asking for sips of champagne, and sprawling on all fours over the buffet table, their elbows in the organic smoked salmon. Stephen found himself serving champagne to a decorously pregnant woman, an elegant and serene dark beauty in a bosomy low-cut black dress with a bump so high, so round and perfect that you might almost imagine it had been surgically augmented. Other guests had gathered round to stroke it, and it was such an appealing bump that, if he hadn’t been holding a tray of honey-mustard sausages, Stephen would have liked to stroke it too. He suspected that this might have thrown her.

  Stephen thought back to Alison’s pregnancy: nine long bad-tempered months of unemployment in a shared basement flat in Camberwell. He had tried to convince himself that this period had been “challenging but magical,” but his abiding memory was of damp clothes failing to dry on a lukewarm storage heater, and of Alison, bloated, angry and silently resentful, padding around in gray tracksuit bottoms, eating bran flakes straight out of the box as part of an ongoing battle
with constipation. But apart from the neat, petite bump, the dark woman at the party was as thin and graceful as a musical annotation. Stephen stood for a moment, staring at her, lost in these thoughts, until the pregnant woman and her group of friends stopped talking and turned to look at him.

  Quickly, he hurried off to get the Sea Breeze, “with some actual booze in it this time,” that had been ordered by a very drunk and belligerent Wacky TV Comedian. “Will Swap Sex for Drugs” read the retro-style slogan on the T-shirt under his suit jacket, a slogan that had the advantage of being both humorous and literally true.

  Josh, meanwhile, looked around at the party he’d created, and saw that it was goodly good. He lolloped around with his long white shirt undone, calling Michaels Micksters and Johns Johnaroony, distributing beatific smiles and self-deprecating anecdotes, performing magic tricks, hoisting the funky little moppets onto his shoulders, dimpling his cheeks at their delighted mothers. At one point Stephen actually spotted him in the act of sniffing a baby’s head. He seemed to be everywhere at once, and everywhere he went people had their photographs taken with him with the cameras on their mobile phones, to prove that they were actually there, that they actually knew him.

  “How you doing, mate, all right?” he asked, winking, cocking and firing his imaginary gun at Stephen as he headed out to the kitchen area. Stephen was carrying a tray of goat’s cheese tartlets, so was unable to fire back.

  In the kitchen he shook up the Sea Breeze, filled a glass to the brim, then drank the remains straight from the cocktail shaker, and tried to trick himself into believing he was having a good time. Maybe he actually preferred to be the wry, ironic below-stairs observer, and maybe the glasses he was loading into the dishwasher were half full rather than half empty. Certainly the booze was helping—since the party started he’d been drinking fairly indiscriminately from beer bottles and champagne glasses, and was now experiencing a pleasant, woozy Sunday-night glow. He peeled the Parma ham from a stick of out-of-season asparagus and ate it slowly, leaning against the zinc worktops as Adam, clearly the ringleader, ferociously lobbed oranges into some kind of industrial juicer, as if they were grenades.