The Portlight smelled of paint, damp wool and somebody’s burnt breakfast. I had been in beautiful theaters with marble foyers and seats that cost more than my first car. None of them had ever made me feel quite as glad to arrive.
Mina sat at the long wardrobe table examining a row of brass buttons through her glasses.
“Morning.”
“Morning.”
“Helen wants the blue coat to be less blue.”
I put down my bag. “It’s green.”
“I told her you’d be able to help.”
She pushed a mug toward me. My name was written on it in black marker, because actors could learn forty pages of dialogue but apparently could not remember which cups belonged to other people.
I took off my coat and hung it on the peg. Nothing happened. Nobody appeared to ask how I was managing. Mina went on choosing buttons. Down the corridor, someone laughed too loudly at a joke I couldn’t hear.
I drank the coffee while I looked at the coat.
It was green. A deep, slightly dirty green that would change under the lights. The Glass Orchard took place in 1954, in a household trying to look richer than it was. Everyone in it was pretending something, but the clothes were supposed to betray them in small ways: a hem let down too often, a collar turned, a good coat kept past the point at which it still fit the life beneath it.
I ran my hand over the wool. I had spent weeks finding it.
“She wants expensive,” Mina said.
“It is expensive.”
“She wants the audience to know.”
I sighed. “Of course she does.”
At half past nine, Rhys put his head around the door.
“Claire. Good to have you back. We’ve moved the eleven o’clock rehearsal to the hall because the stage floor’s still wet. Nobody tell Helen I said it would dry faster with the doors open.”
“Did you say it would dry faster with the doors open?”
“Repeatedly. She may have misunderstood my tone.”
He handed me the revised call sheet. His eyes paused on mine, just briefly.
“Anything you need changed, tell me.”
“Thank you.”
He nodded and left. That was the whole conversation. I found I could breathe more easily after it.
I laid out the jacket, waistcoat and trousers for Julian, Nick’s character. Julian had left the family years earlier and returned with money nobody quite believed in. His suit needed to promise success while carrying evidence of a less orderly journey. Helen had described him as a man who could persuade a room to forgive him before it knew what he’d done.
I had liked the description more last week.
Nick arrived at five to ten carrying his script and wearing a thin gray T-shirt.
“I followed instructions.”
“A promising start.”
“Don’t let it raise your expectations.”
Mina looked up. “Too late. I’ve put it in the diary.”
He smiled at her, then at me. I noticed the difference. His smile for Mina was quick and easy; the one he gave me stopped short of assuming it would be welcome.
I wished I hadn’t noticed.
“Trousers first,” I said, handing them over. “Screen’s there.”
“Still in the same place as last year?”
“We’ve had a difficult financial season. We couldn’t afford to move it.”
He disappeared behind the screen. Mina caught my eye and looked away before I could decide whether she’d meant anything by it.
I threaded a needle I didn’t need.
Nick came out in the trousers and stood on the low fitting platform. They were a fraction long, as intended. I knelt to pin the hem while he looked at himself in the mirror.
“My grandfather had a pair like these.”
“Your grandfather had excellent taste.”
“He wore them with a cardigan that smelled of pipe smoke.”
“I’ve left the pipe-smoke budget with Rhys.”
Nick laughed. I felt it rather than heard it, a small movement through his leg beneath my hand.
I shifted the pin.
There was nothing unusual about kneeling at a man’s feet in this room. I had measured people in their underwear, rescued zips from impossible positions, and once spent twenty minutes teaching a nervous nineteen-year-old how to sit down in a skirt without revealing half the cast to the front row. Bodies were part of the work. I was good at regarding them as a set of practical requirements.
Nick’s ankle, apparently, had become an exception.
“Turn a little.”
He turned too far.
“Not a full revolution. We’re not displaying a car.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. Just stay there.”
He stayed. I marked the second hem, stood and handed him the waistcoat.
“Should I breathe in?”
“Only if you intend to hold it for the entire run.”
He looked at the row of buttons. “The intervals will be difficult.”
Mina made a small choking noise into her coffee. I kept my face composed and helped Nick into the jacket.
The cloth changed him. It broadened his shoulders, lengthened the line of his body, gave him the careless certainty of somebody who expected a waiter to find another table. His chin lifted a little. Not enough to be a pose, but enough that I could see Julian arriving.
“Oh,” I said before I could stop myself.
Nick looked at me in the mirror. “Bad?”
“No.”
I smoothed the jacket over his shoulders. One sleeve pulled at the back. I had allowed for his reach but not the way he held one shoulder slightly higher when he was watching himself.
“Forget the mirror.”
“An instruction actors rarely receive.”
“Try thinking about something else.”
His gaze came to mine.
I could see the small scar in his left eyebrow, a pale break in the dark hair. I had never noticed it before. At parties, Nick was usually across the room, making Daniel laugh or telling a story to three people at once. He had always seemed to arrive with an audience already attached.
Here, he was quiet.
I took a pin from the cushion on my wrist and held it against the seam. His arm was warm through the fabric. The room was not silent—Mina was opening a drawer, someone pushed a rack along the corridor—but my attention had narrowed in a way that made all of it feel distant.
“Does that hurt?” I asked.
“You haven’t put it in yet.”
I looked down. He was right.
“I was considering the angle.”
“For a full minute.”
“Do you want a well-fitting jacket or an entertaining afternoon?”
His mouth moved. “I hadn’t realized I had to choose.”
I pushed the pin into the cloth with more determination than the task required.
“Hold still.”
“I am holding still.”
That was true too, and somehow not helpful.
Helen arrived before I could find another instruction. She wore a scarf the color of a traffic cone and had a pencil tucked into her hair. Her attention went straight to the jacket.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s him.”
Nick turned toward her, and Julian returned so quickly that I stepped back without thinking. He let one hand settle in his pocket and looked around the wardrobe room as if he had just inherited it.
“I was told there would be better coffee,” he said.
It wasn’t a line from the script. Helen laughed anyway.
I felt a foolish little disappointment. Of course he could do that. It was what he did for a living. I had asked a man to stand still and somehow taken the quiet personally.
“The coat,” Helen said, already moving on.
I took the green coat from the rail. “You think it’s blue.”
“Under the rehearsal lights it looks a little military.”
“The rehearsal lights are borrowed from a school gym.”
“And the audience won’t know how much you paid for the fabric.”
Mina became very interested in the buttons.
I held the coat open. “Margaret’s wearing the family money. Julian’s wearing his own invention of it. If they both look newly rich, we lose that.”
Helen pressed her lips together. “I don’t want her to look shabby.”
“She won’t. Let me change the collar and put the pearl buttons on. The green will look deliberate once there’s something clean beside it.”
“The cream buttons?”
“Pearl. They’re not quite the same.”
She looked at the coat again. I waited. I could feel Nick watching, but for once I didn’t mind.
“Show me tomorrow,” Helen said.
“I will.”
She checked her watch and pointed at Nick. “I need you downstairs in ten.”
“I’m full of pins.”
“Then move carefully.”
After she left, Mina gathered the coat and took it to the cutting table.
“Pearl,” she said under her breath. “A whole new world.”
I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing.
Nick was looking at the drawings pinned above the table. “I didn’t know you did all of these.”
“You thought the clothes grew on the rail?”
“I thought you drew them. I didn’t know you argued for them like that.”
“Usually I use my fists. Helen’s difficult about blood on the fabric.”
“I meant it as a compliment.”
I looked up at him. There was a small crease between his eyebrows.
“I know,” I said. “Thank you.”
He nodded, and I began taking the pins out of the sleeve one at a time so he could remove the jacket without losing the marks.
His phone vibrated on the table. The name on the screen was Priya. He glanced at it, then turned it over.
“You can answer.”
“It can wait.”
“You looked like it couldn’t.”
He exhaled. “My agent.”
“Good news?”
“Potentially. Which is an actor’s word for a thing that can ruin your week without ever actually happening.”
Mina laughed from the cutting table.
“There’s a winter tour,” he said. “Elsa Quinn’s directing. She wants a tape before she decides who to see.”
I knew Elsa’s work. I had watched one of her productions from a standing place at the back of a London theater and forgotten that my feet hurt.
“That would be good.”
“It would.”
There was no joke attached to it. I looked at him again and saw something I’d missed under the easy manners: how much he wanted it.
“What part?”
“The older brother.”
“You sound offended.”
“I’m adjusting to the word older.”
“You’re forty.”
“Exactly. I was hoping to be discovered before I had to play men who own sensible coats.”
“This is a sensible coat.”
He glanced down at the jacket. “I’ve made a terrible mistake.”
I helped him out of it. For a moment his hand rested on my shoulder to steady himself while one cuff caught, a practical touch so brief it ought not to have mattered. I felt the warmth of it after he let go.
He took the rest of the clothes behind the screen. Mina looked at me over her glasses.
“Don’t,” I said.
“I haven’t said anything.”
“Your eyebrows have.”
She lifted them a fraction higher, then returned to the coat.
When Nick came out, he was himself again: gray T-shirt, dark trousers, script under his arm. I was relieved and disappointed in roughly equal amounts.
“There’s something I could use a hand with,” he said.
I waited.
“The tape. Priya keeps saying the last one looked like a hostage message. Apparently the light was wrong.”
“Was it a hostage message?”
“Only emotionally.”
“Ask Rhys. He’s good with a camera.”
“He’s running the technical meeting after rehearsal. Mina says you filmed the costume tests last year.”
I looked toward Mina. She bent over the green coat with exaggerated concentration.
“It’s only ten minutes,” he said, then winced. “That sounded like a lie. Probably half an hour. I can buy you dinner afterward.”
The offer hung between us. He heard it too; I could tell by the way he stopped adjusting the edge of his script.
“As payment,” he added.
“I charge more than chips.”
“I could include a drink.”
I should have said I was busy. I was busy. There were seventeen things on my work list and a wedding dismantling itself in my phone. I did not need another small service to perform for a man who could smile his way into getting it.
But I had seen his face when he said the director’s name. I knew that look. It had been mine when Helen gave me the contract, before I started treating my own good news as something to fit around everybody else’s.
“Thursday,” I said. “After six. And you bring the tripod.”
He smiled then, suddenly and without the carefulness he’d been using with me all morning.
“Done.”
He left at a run because Helen called his name from the stairs. I stood with the jacket in my arms, listening to his footsteps disappear into the rehearsal noise.
Mina came over and took the jacket from me.
“Pearl buttons,” she said. “Before you forget why we’re here.”
I went to the drawer, opened it and found myself smiling at a box of buttons.
It wasn’t much. It was more than I had expected from the day.