A Desirable Residence - By Madeleine Wickham Page 0,49

them big. If he liked them.

‘We know you can act,’ had been almost his first words. Piers stared down at the pale blue carpet of the office and allowed a secret, painful thrill to run through him. Alan Tinker knew he could act. Alan Tinker had told him he knew he could act.

‘But all of this isn’t just about whether you can act or not,’ Alan had added impressively. Piers nodded intelligently.

‘Of course not,’ he murmured, then wondered if it was a mistake to say anything.

‘What we really want is commitment,’ said Alan. Piers looked straight back at him, trying to adopt his most committed expression. ‘We don’t want someone who’s going to disappear after six months to do, I don’t know . . .’ Alan waved his arms airily ‘. . . a juicy part in the West End.’

‘Of course not,’ said Piers again. Some fucking chance, he thought bitterly.

‘You’ve been doing a lot of stage work recently, haven’t you, Piers?’ Alan gave him a penetrating look.

‘Yes,’ said Piers. He thought desperately. ‘But I’m very committed to working in television as a long-term aim.’

‘Is that so?’ Alan raised his eyebrows at Piers, who remembered, too late, the announcement in the latest edition of The Stage that Alan Tinker was setting up his own theatre company. Fuck it. He just couldn’t win. But Alan relented. ‘Good, good,’ he said encouragingly, and leant forward. ‘Now, Piers, we on Summer Street like to think of everyone, cast and crew alike, as part of a team. A family. If you’re working as hard as we do, there’s no time for not getting along with this person, or thinking yourself better than that person. You’re just a part of the machine. A cog. Do you see what I mean?’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Piers, trying to sound as convincing as he could. ‘Everyone working towards the same goal.’ What was he saying? The guy would think he was taking the piss.

‘Many actors,’ Alan continued, ‘consider themselves too important to blend in with a lot of others. After all, you have to be pretty self-centred to be an actor in the first place.’ Piers wondered whether to dispute that. Was this some elaborate test to see whether he had any character; whether he could stand up for himself? He eyed Alan’s face. But Alan looked in deadly earnest. And he’d always heard that the guy had some weird ideas.

‘So what we like to do,’ said Alan, ‘as well as, obviously, a screen test, is to let each contender for a part come into the studio for a couple of hours, and rehearse a few scenes with the rest of the cast. That way, if anyone is obviously not going to get on with the others, isn’t going to blend in easily, then we realize it straight away.’

‘Good idea,’ Piers had said heartily. ‘That really makes sense.’

Now, left alone, he rose to his feet, too keyed up to sit still. He paced over to the window, allowing his eyes to skim the papers on Alan’s desk for anything interesting, then adopted a relaxed but elegant pose by the side of the window. Rupert, the character he would be playing in Summer Street, was, if not exactly camp, then certainly not hearty—and it would do no harm to try to show Alan that he could look the part.

The door opened, and Piers turned his head unhurriedly. There in the doorway was a woman dressed in a pair of crushed-velvet leggings and suede boots up to her thighs.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but Alan asked me to tell you that he’s been held up. He’ll be in touch later this week.’ Piers stared at her, blankly, stupidly, for a moment, and then realized what she was saying.

‘Oh, I see,’ he said. ‘So I’ll go now, shall I?’

‘If you wouldn’t mind,’ said the woman, in tones that weren’t quite sarcastic. ‘Alan did ask me to apologize. But he’s terribly busy at the moment.’

‘Oh, no!’ said Piers, hurriedly. ‘That’s fine. We’d finished our meeting, anyway.’ The woman didn’t look convinced.

‘I’ll show you out,’ she said.

Piers followed as she marched along the carpeted corridors, nodding to people as she passed but neither looking at Piers nor speaking to him. By the time they reached the entrance, he felt rather deflated.

‘Well, goodbye,’ he said, trying to summon up some cheer. ‘Thanks for showing me the way.’

The woman didn’t smile, but said, ‘Could you give back your visitor’s pass please,’ and Piers handed over the white