The Rehearsal

girl’s life this year, and if we are very lucky we will see some of these tragic and beautiful things reflected in her performance tonight. Through her misery, every note she plays for you will become a lyric, and she will conjure up much more than a sense of longing and of loss. If we are very lucky, and this is my hope, then we will be able to see the vast extent of the hardship she has endured this year: we will see the unspeakable incest of two women together, played out before us like a rare recording stolen from a vault. You will have to listen carefully.”
    Julia’s palms are cold and sweaty, and she wipes them roughly on the knees of her trousers.
    “And just before I welcome Julia to the stage,” the saxophone teacher says, “can I just thank all the mothers here tonight for allowing me the strange satisfaction that is got by saying something that nobody hears.”
    October
    “You didn’t say he had the main part, Issie,” Isolde’s father says. He points to the program. “Look, his name’s right at the top.”
    “He hasn’t told me anything,” Isolde says. “He even said don’t bother coming. I guess he was nervous.” She is looking up at the stage, tense with vicarious pre-show nerves. The lights are on in the orchestra pit and she can see the musicians emerging from the hidden half-door in the wall to take their places in front of their instruments. As they sit down they disappear from Isolde’s view.
    “Queen of Spades,” Isolde’s father reads out loud, and then takes his reading glasses off and says “What about this, eh?” and elbows Isolde in a jovial sort of way.
    “Maybe we shouldn’t have come on opening night,” Isolde’s mother says, tucking her knees sideways to let a young couple pass. “If he’s nervous.”
    “I told you, he doesn’t know I’m coming tonight anyway,” Isolde says. She is craning around to look at the crowd. She watches a throng of senior students from the Institute flood into a wedge of seating in the rear of the stalls and suddenly feels foolish that she has brought her parents with her. The acting students are all clasping each other and hugging and gesticulating madly as they talk amongst themselves. Isolde imagines pushing her way backstage to surprise Stanley at the end of the night, knocking on his dressing-room door and waving shyly as she stands on the threshold with the actors shrieking and shouting up and down the corridor behind her, and all at once she suffers a horrible feeling of dread.
    “We don’t have to go backstage,” she says out loud, to reassure herself. “I can just call him tomorrow.”
    She hasn’t spoken to Stanley since the fight on the side of the road.
    “Isn’t it posh,” Isolde’s father says. “Look at that plasterwork on the arch. That’s a beautiful job.”
    The band starts up and the house lights begin to fade.
    “I wish I’d got some mints now,” Isolde’s mum says. “I hope there’s a half-time.”
    October
    “It’s always—and only—vicarious,” the Head of Movement is saying, drumming his fingers impatiently on the glossy cover of the program that is lying on his knee. The cover shows a caricatured girl in pigtails and a school uniform, and the title of the play: The Bedpost Queen. The Head of Acting is craning around to look out over the crowd, and isn’t really listening, but the Head of Movement is speaking with a strange tight urgency that cannot wait for an audience, and anyway the words are mostly for himself. He says, “You never get around that aspect. Even at your most effective, your most vivacious and inspirational, you’re always just… looking on.”
    September
    “Do you know something?” Stanley’s father says, leaning down the couch toward Isolde. She turns her head, so they are profiled there against the cream: her delicate upturned pout, his sunken cheek and lantern jaw.
    “When I do a group therapy session,” Stanley’s father says, “for my work—say if I have six or seven or more clients in a room, maybe a whole family if that’s what I’m working on—my policy at first is to say absolutely nothing. I ask questions, invite people to speak, bring up issues, but I say nothing about what I think. I don’t even hint. I do this for the first session, and the second.
    “By the end of the second everyone’s itching. They want to know who this guy is, this psychologist who only listens, sits and listens and sometimes asks a question, always a mild