The Rehearsal

the action to the very end.”
    “I thought that was what you meant,” Stanley said, with hot embarrassment, looking out past the lights. The girl wiped her mouth and looked at the floor.
    “We are not going to have the curtain come down on the two of you pashing like a couple of kids!” the Head of Movement shouted. “Think about the scene, man!”
    The Head of Movement did not usually yell. He was generally less vicious than the Head of Acting, less inclined to shame or fracture his students, less given to little bursts of irritation or cold contempt. But today he was scratchy, surly and tight chested as if short of breath, and as he glared up at the pair of them from his seat in the stalls he was smothered by a vast glove of anger and blame.
    “What is it?” he said. “Just leaped at the opportunity, I suppose? What?”
    The boy had a wounded look. He had been expecting congratulations, probably, praise for his physical commitment to the scene, his willingness to put personal considerations aside in the name of his art; he had been shamed, moreover, and shamed in front of a girl. The Head of Movement might well have destroyed all possibility of a relationship between the pair by this public shaming that caused them to flush and leap apart. The tutor knew it, and didn’t care. He was suddenly immensely irritated at them both, the boy with his fair lashes and vulnerable pout, the girl with her practiced look of nervous naïveté, worn thin.
    “I just thought that’s what you meant,” Stanley said again. “Sorry.”
    The Head of Movement did not speak for a moment. They were looking at him with faint pity now, he thought, as any teenager looks at an adult they believe to be utterly incapable of lust. They were looking at him as if they believed their awkward dry fumble against the fold of the curtain had somehow made him jealous; as if their collision had made him yearn for some lost youthful spontaneity of touch, and his outburst had only marked his dissatisfaction, his recognition of his own immeasurable loss. The Head of Movement felt disgusted. He wanted to turn his head and spit on the floor. He wanted to mount the seven steps to the stage and tear them from their cocoon of self-absorption and conceit. He wanted to shout and make them see that he was not jealous, that he could not be jealous of any pathetic hot-light kiss between two ill-made brats, and if anything what he felt was a profound nausea at what he had been forced to watch.
    “Again,” said the Head of Movement sourly, and threw himself back into his chair.
    September
    Stanley was waiting for Isolde under the ginkgo tree when she emerged from her lesson, trotting down the sunken stone steps and across the courtyard to embrace him and kiss him briefly on the mouth.
    “Look at you, you little gypsy,” Stanley said as he stepped back. “All your bags and everything.”
    “Fridays are horrible,” Isolde said. “Sax and PE and art all in the same afternoon.”
    “Gypsy girl.”
    Isolde exhaled and flapped her arms and then grinned at Stanley, a broad, honest grin that lit her up completely. It was the same unashamed openness that had lured Mr. Saladin to Victoria, only it was transplanted here on to her sister, the same smile on a different face. Stanley leaned forward and kissed her on the nose.
    “So when am I going to hear you play?” he said.
    “I thought you could hear from down here in the quad.”
    “But I’m never sure which sax is you and which is your teacher,” Stanley said with a grin. “I might be thinking you’re much better than you actually are.”
    “Our saxes actually have really different voices,” Isolde said. “If you know to listen for that sort of thing. My mouthpiece is vulcanized rubber and hers is metal. The metal piece makes a really different sound.”
    “Like how speaking voices are different from each other.”
    “Yeah,” Isolde said. “Right. Like the difference between a woman and a girl.”
    The stone building behind them was now unlit, all the curtains pulled and the lights doused. Inside, the offices were locked for the night and cooling now in the gathering dusk. On the attic level the saxophone teacher’s window was dark, as if she had locked the studio after Isolde’s departure and departed herself for the night, but if you looked up through the ginkgo branches you would see an inky figure standing by the curtain and looking down into the courtyard at the pair standing together