My sister Liz is responsible for my being here. She joined the Brambleton Players twelve years ago and has since been a duchess, a charwoman, the back half of a pantomime cow and, for one difficult season, treasurer. This year she is prompting. She says this means sitting in a wooden box at the side of the stage and saving people who have ignored her advice for months.
At the first rehearsal, the man playing the footman was called Derek. At the second, he was still called Derek but was now Derek with a cough. By the third, he had pneumonia. I asked Liz whether the pneumonia was serious. She said it was serious enough for Derek and extremely inconvenient for everyone else.
I should not have attended that rehearsal. I had gone to collect her because it was raining. I was sitting in the empty auditorium, coat buttoned, keys ready, when Judith came down from the stage and looked at me for longer than politeness required.
She asked whether I owned black shoes.
I said I did.
That was where I went wrong.
A sensible person would have claimed to own only sandals. I could have mentioned an old ankle injury, a religious objection or a lifelong fear of velvet curtains. Instead, I confirmed I had suitable footwear and, within ten minutes, was given a script containing one yellow mark.
Liz called it fate. I called it a lift home.
The Players did not pressure me. That would have been easier to resist. They behaved as if the matter were already settled, then thanked me with such warmth that refusal began to resemble an act of vandalism. Nora, who plays Lady Wetherby, found me a jacket. Colin, Lord Wetherby, shook my hand and said I had rescued the production. A woman whose name I still do not know measured the distance between my shoulders while holding three pins in her mouth.
I agreed to one rehearsal.
Then another.
Then it seemed petty not to attend the technical rehearsal, after which there was the dress rehearsal, by which time my name had been printed in the programme between Villager and Constable.
Graham Bell, Footman.
I bought four programmes.
Extract from the forthcoming collection The Book Had to Go Back and Other Stories.