I bit my lip to stop myself from grinning. This was utter madness, but I was desperate to know what was going to happen next.
‘You used the magic invocation,’ he said. He crooked his finger at me, beckoning. ‘Come here.’
My sequinned gown swept through the dust.
When I was about a foot away from him, he put out a hand to stop me.
‘I want to look at you,’ he said.
This suited me, because I wanted to look at him.
Up close, he looked younger than he did on television and in the papers, but at the same time he had more wrinkles, at the corners of his eyes and mouth. This was a good sign – he must smile more than one ever noticed. Or perhaps it was just the legendary chain-smoking.
He wasn’t smoking now, though. He was thinner in real life, too. He was of the type you might call ‘elegantly wasted’; beautifully dressed with ruthlessly neat hair and bright, shrewd blue eyes.
Those same bright, shrewd blue eyes bore into me while I stood, chin up, looking as bold as I dared, waiting for the next thing.
His fingers brushed my shoulders. They were tinder-dry and I could see the yellow smoker’s tinge on the inside of his left index finger. They left a trail of delicious sparks behind them, moving slowly across my exposed collarbone, then up the centre of my neck, to the soft underside of my chin.
He prodded it higher, straining the back of my neck, making me look directly up at him.
‘Caroline Reddish,’ he intoned.
‘My friends call me Callie.’
‘I’m not your friend.’ He smiled, a thing of cruelty and sex. It made me smile back.
‘I know,’ I said, my voice as smoky as I could make it.
‘Why did you come here?’
‘Because you asked me to.’
‘No. Why did you come here?’
I swallowed, which wasn’t easy with my head tilted so far back.
‘I wanted to see what would happen.’
‘What were you hoping for?’
‘You, well, you offered a, uh, a critique, which I would be very grateful to hear, from the lips of our greatest living theatre critic.’
He laughed, or rather made a ‘ha’ sound at that, and removed his finger from my chin, and tapped my cheek instead.
‘You’re a little slyboots, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘I like that. I like to deal with those kinds of tendencies. But first, I have another question for you. Why did you choose to perform Kiss Me, Kate?’
‘Oh. Well, it’s a classic, isn’t it? And it plays to all my company’s strengths – musical numbers, comedy, drama …’ I trailed off. He had a look on his face that showed quite clearly that he wasn’t buying this line.
‘There are plenty of shows that do that,’ he said. ‘I think you had another, more specific, reason. And I’m going to worm it out of you, believe me, my girl. So you might as well tell me now.’
‘I just thought you might like it.’ I was speaking in a shamed whisper for some reason. I felt guilty, a kid caught scrumping apples in the meadow.
‘Yes. You thought I might like it. And why did you think that? Have I ever, in any of my columns, expressed the slightest enthusiasm for this kind of thing?’
Well, no, he hadn’t. His columns tended to favour the hard-hitting, depth-plumbing type of thing. Light musical comedy was rarely mentioned.
‘Well … We did win,’ I said. ‘So I must have got the right idea, from somewhere.’