‘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 O 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 recognised 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 to wonder whether he himself had broken through the persona of the teacher and begun to ‘act’ in the real world. Their faces were more individual, sad or happy, private, extrovert, determined, yet vulnerable. It seemed to him that he had failed to see what Shakespeare was really about, he had taken the wrong road to find him.
‘A babble of green fields,’ he thought with a smile. So that was what it meant, that Wooden O, that resonator of the transient, of the real, beyond all the marble of their books, the white In Memoriams which they could not read.
How extraordinarily curious it all was.
The final part of the play was to take place on the following day.
‘Please sir,’ said Lorna to him, as he was about to leave.
‘What is
