Sweet Sorrow(66)

‘Helen,’ I said, ‘you’re brilliant. I’d no idea.’

‘Piss off, Charlie,’ she said and blushed, another thing I didn’t know that she was capable of.

‘Big round of applause for the design team, please!’ said Ivor.

Then, in case we were getting too comfortable, ‘Mask workshop, everyone!’ Alina called.

The orchard had been transformed into a sort of harem, with rugs and pillows arranged beneath the trees, sheets of plain brown paper and pots of some sort of porridgey paste set beside each pillow. The masks were needed for the Capulet party scene.

‘This is also a relaxation exercise,’ said Alina, ‘so we are going to take our time. We are going to listen to the birds, to the insects, to the sounds the trees make. But more than that, it is about close forensic scrutiny of the face, and what we express even when we think we express nothing. Now – get into pairs.’

‘Get into pairs!’ shouted Ivor, three words that always caused a wave of panic, heightened by the necessity of showing no panic. Etiquette demanded that we refrain from simply hurling ourselves at people we fancied. Besides, a whole afternoon sticking little bits of damp paper to Fran’s face; it would have been too much. She had already joined arms with Alex, talent clinging to talent, leaving the rest of us looking around needily, each moment of glancing eye contact heavy with meaning. Like the lunge for a seat in musical chairs, the scuffle lasted for seconds. Polly the Nurse adopted Colin Smart, Helen latched on to Alina and seemed very pleased with this. Lucy clung to Miles’ arm and John and Lesley, our Burton and Taylor, stuck to what they knew. Keith, our Friar Laurence, always keen to associate with the younger members of the cast, was obliged to make do with Bernard, the ex-Guardsman now facing the prospect of his first mask workshop with grim forbearance.

Only George and I remained.

‘I think this is called drawing the short straw.’

‘Don’t be stupid, it’s fine. Do you want to go first?’’

He removed his spectacles, the glass as thick as his finger. Without them, he seemed dazed and vulnerable and he blinked and placed them in his top pocket as if preparing to be blindfolded and shot.

He sighed. ‘I suppose so.’

Perhaps I’d imagined it, but I felt a certain affinity with George. He was reserved and watchful and though he rarely spoke, everyone listened when he did. In a rare moment of praise for someone else, Miles had revealed that George was ‘practically a genius’, a great writer, an invincible debater, a violinist that it was possible to listen to. Perhaps this was why we hadn’t spoken much, because what would I say to someone like that? Yet he rarely put these talents on display or used his intelligence as a stick to swipe at people. Instead he’d sit quietly and watch, one hand clamped to his chin or mouth, his forehead, the side of his nose, whichever part of his raw face caused him the most pain on that particular day. Watching his scenes in rehearsal, it seemed the role of Paris was to be a kind of anti-Romeo; the last person in the world that Juliet would want to be with – she would rather ‘see a toad, a very toad, than him’, says the Nurse, and marriage would be a fate literally worse than death. ‘O bid me leap, rather than marry Paris, from off the battlements of any tower!’ says Juliet, and I thought how harsh casting could be, to look at a teenage boy and think yes, we have our toad.

Elsewhere, an air of meditative concentration had fallen on the orchard, an atmosphere that Ivor was keen to enforce by playing his CD of chill-out music. With his head on the pillow, his fingers linked, his eyes, his every muscle clenched, it required clear effort for George not to place his hands over his face. ‘Christ’s sake.’ George exhaled through his nose. ‘Mask-making aside, I don’t think there’s anything in the world that makes me more tense than chill-out music.’

‘My dad calls it music for people who don’t like music.’

‘He’s a very smart man. What does your father do?’

‘He used to have a record shop. Now he’s unemployed, so – yours?’

‘Civil servant. Works in the Foreign Office.’

‘Okay. Shall we start?’

‘Please. Be my guest.’

I began to conceal his face in glue-soaked paper, the technique familiar from primary school, covering balloons in papier maché then popping them with a pin. Now George’s forehead was the balloon. ‘No need to apply grease,’ he said.

‘Let’s hope it comes off. I don’t want you going home like this!’ I’d taken on a strained, jaunty tone, like a plucky nurse at a dressing station.

‘Of course the best thing for all concerned would be to get a bag. Just a brown paper bag, put my whole head in that.’

I carried on silently.

‘Or bandages. Wrap the whole thing up like a mummy.’

I applied the paper to the bridge of his nose.

‘Maybe when you take it off my skin’ll be miraculously clear. Maybe wallpaper paste is the cure I’ve been looking for—’

‘George, you’re meant to be silent.’

‘Am I? All right. Not a word.’

‘You’re meant to listen to the trees.’

‘Fine. I’ll listen to the trees.’

I built up the layers of paper. We’d had boys like this at Merton Grange, their faces raw and scalded from scrubs and bleaches, hot flannels and astringents, boys who wore their school shirts at the weekend and too many clothes in summer, boys who were clumsy and fearful, huddled together at lunchtime like Christians in the Colosseum. Were the torments at private school any more genteel? It seemed unlikely that he’d made it through unscathed.