The Collected Short Stories - Jeffrey Archer [265]
By the time the man in front of me had bought the ticket on the end of row H, I had my lines well rehearsed and just hoped I wouldn’t need a prompt.
“Thank goodness. I thought I wasn’t going to make it,” I began, trying to sound out of breath. The man in the ticket booth looked up at me, but didn’t seem all that impressed by my opening line. “It was the traffic. And then I couldn’t find a parking space. My girlfriend may have given up on me. Did she by any chance hand in my ticket for resale?”
He looked unconvinced. My dialogue obviously wasn’t gripping him. “Can you describe her?” he asked suspiciously.
“Short-cropped dark hair, hazel eyes, wearing a red silk dress that …”
“Ah, yes. I remember her,” he said, almost sighing. He picked up the ticket by his side and handed it to me.
“Thank you,” I said, trying not to show my relief that he had come in so neatly on cue with the closing line from my first scene. As I hurried off in the direction of the orchestra, I grabbed an envelope from a pile on the ledge beside the booth.
I checked the price of the ticket: twenty pounds. I extracted two ten-pound notes from my wallet, put them in the envelope, licked the flap and stuck it down.
The girl at the entrance to the orchestra checked my ticket. “F-11. Six rows from the front, on the right-hand side.”
I walked slowly down the aisle until I spotted her. She was sitting next to an empty place in the middle of the row. As I made my way over the feet of those who were already seated, she turned and smiled, obviously pleased to see that someone had purchased her spare ticket.
I returned the smile, handed over the envelope containing my twenty pounds, and sat down beside her. “The man in the box office asked me to give you this.”
“Thank you.” She slipped the envelope into her evening bag. I was about to try the first line of my second scene on her, when the house lights faded and the curtain rose for Act 1 of the real performance. I suddenly realized that I had no idea what play I was about to see. I glanced across at the playbill on her lap and read the words “An Inspector Calls, by J. B. Priestley.”
I remembered that the critics had been full of praise for the production when it had originally opened at the National Theater, and had particularly singled out the performance of Kenneth Cranham. I tried to concentrate on what was taking place on stage.
The eponymous inspector was staring into a house in which an Edwardian family were preparing for a dinner to celebrate their daughter’s engagement. “I was thinking of getting a new car,” the father was saying to his prospective son-in-law as he puffed away on his cigar.
At the mention of the word “car,” I suddenly remembered that I had abandoned mine outside the theater. Was it on a double yellow line? Or worse? To hell with it. They could have it in part-exchange for the model sitting next to me. The audience laughed, so I joined in, if only to give the impression that I was following the plot. But what about my original plans for the evening? By now everyone would be wondering why I hadn’t turned up. I realized that I wouldn’t be able to leave the theater during the intermission to check on my car or to make a phone call to explain my absence, as that would be my one chance of developing my own plot.
The play had the rest of the audience enthralled, but I had already begun rehearsing the lines from my own script, which would have to be performed during the intermission between Acts 1 and 2. I was painfully aware that I would be restricted to fifteen minutes, and that there would be no second night.
By the time the curtain came down at the end of the first act, I was confident of my draft text. I waited for the applause to die down before I turned toward her.
“What an original production,” I began. “Quite modernistic.” I vaguely remembered that one of the critics had followed that line. “I was lucky to get a seat at the last moment.”
“I was just as lucky,” she replied. I felt encouraged. “I mean, to find someone who was looking for a single