‘Who does he mean – Schneider?’ Titus asked a stagehand.
‘Wouldn’t you know it? Old bossy-boots. She’s not in position and we’re running late already.’
‘I’ll check. Which dressing room is she in?’
‘Nine, on the OP side. It’s being taken care of.’
‘I’ll still check. That’s where she’s got to be.’
He crossed behind the scenery. Out of consideration for her below-average mobility, Schneider had been given a ground-floor dressing room that by rights should have been occupied by a leading actor. The door was open. Two stagehands were trying to coax her back to the stage, but she was in her chair with arms folded showing no intention of budging.
One of them was saying, ‘You can’t stop the show. It isn’t fair to the rest of the cast.’
Schneider was implacable. ‘I won’t be treated as a half-wit. I know what I saw. Mr Shearman was downright rude to me. He seems to think I imagined it. Well, if that’s what he thinks, he can rot in hell and so can the rest of them.’
‘Wouldn’t it be better to make your point after the play is over?’ the other stagehand said. These two young women were almost certainly drama students getting experience, and they would learn from Schneider’s behaviour, but they weren’t competent to reverse it.
Titus took over. ‘I understand you had a sighting of the lady in grey. I’m Titus O’Driscoll, dramaturge.’
‘If you’re here to drag me kicking and screaming onto the stage, you’d better think again, because it won’t look pretty.’
‘Madam, I have no such intention,’ Titus said. ‘I have the utmost sympathy for you.’
‘Bad cop, nice cop, is it?’ she said with a glare. ‘That won’t wash with me.’
‘What was her appearance?’
The more vocal of the stagehands said, ‘Sir, we don’t have time. She’s needed for her first entrance.’
‘Grey. She was all in grey, with cold, glittering eyes I shall never forget so long as I live,’ Schneider said.
Titus asked, ‘Was she wearing the costume of a nineteenth-century lady?’
She became more animated. ‘Yes! It looked like a cloak, the sort of thing they used to wear over their ball gowns, with a cowl, all grey.’
Titus gasped and his voice faltered in excitement. ‘This is truly momentous.’ After a moment’s thought, he said, ‘We need to speak for longer. Why don’t you go on stage now and meet me afterwards to talk about this amazing occurrence?’
‘I’ve made my position clear,’ Schneider said. ‘I’ve been through a terrifying experience and was given no sympathy whatsoever. Until that horrible little manager man goes on his knees and apologises to me I’m not moving from here.’
‘Find Mr Shearman,’ Titus said to the stagehands with more drama than anything heard in the play. ‘Get him here fast. Tell him he’s needed by the dramaturge.’
‘There isn’t time.’
‘Young lady, if you want to stay working in this theatre, do as I say. I don’t care if you drag him feet first. Do it!’
Both of them hurried out.
‘You’re a gentleman,’ Schneider told Titus.
The DSM’s voice over the tannoy said, ‘We’ll have to manage without her.’
‘Fat chance,’ Schneider said with a smirk.
‘All she does is step on stage and announce people,’ the DSM went on.
Schneider drew in a huge, affronted gasp.
‘We’ll have to improvise. Isherwood must answer the doorbell himself. Are you okay with that, Preston?’
‘The hell he is!’ Schneider said, rising from her chair. ‘They’re going to axe me from the scene. They can’t do that.’
‘You’ll be redundant,’ Titus said, sharing her outrage.
‘It’s underhand. It’s blackmail,’ Schneider said.
‘You’d better deal with it fast,’ Titus said. ‘We can talk about the grey lady later.’
The protest came to an abrupt end. Schneider swept out of the room and beetled towards the wings, elbowing Hedley Shearman aside as he arrived to plead with her, flanked by the stagehands.
‘Is she going on?’ Shearman asked. The emergency had exacted an extraordinary toll from him. He was sweating and he’d changed physically, drained of colour, jowls quivering, voice thinner, as if he’d seen the ghost himself.
‘Under protest,’ Titus said. ‘I doubt if you’ve heard the last of it.’
‘Whatever you said it appears to have worked.’
‘The lady has my sympathy,’ Titus said. ‘The supernatural is extremely unnerving. I’ve no doubt in my own mind that the theatre ghost was among us tonight.’
‘Auto-suggestion, I expect,’ Shearman said.
