There but for The_ A Novel - Ali Smith [31]
It happens: the wronged queen comes back from the dead. She moves, she steps forward, she takes the hand of her husband, she turns towards her lost-and-found daughter Perdita, about to speak for the first time ever to her child, and someone’s mobile phone goes off at the front of the stalls. Beebedee beebedee bedee beep. Beebedee beebedee bedee beep. Beebedee beebedee bedee beep.
The actress playing the queen takes her daughter’s hands as if nothing had happened and continues her speech through it.
Minutes later the play ends.
Perfect timing, Mark says to the stranger on his left, the man he happens to be sitting next to, as the curtain comes down.
It was, the man says.
God, Mark says shaking his head.
But I mean it, the man says. It really was. I’ve often heard phones going off in the theatre or the cinema, but that was the best time I’ve ever heard it happen. Right at the moment when, there on stage, someone really needs to speak to someone, there it is, the same need in the audience watching it happen on stage.
Well, Mark says thinking to himself that the man he’s chosen to speak to is an idiot to need such things explained. I take your point. But.
Ah, the man says. But?
There’s a world of difference, Mark says, between Hermione and Perdita and what they’ve got to say to each other and whatever that person in the audience was going to hear in his or her ear, Hi I’m on the train, or Can you pick me up at half past five, or Can you pick up some cat-litter or Nurofen or whatever.
Reason not the need, the man says. Need not the reason. We don’t know. We simply don’t know. All we know is—someone wanted to speak to someone else. That’s more than enough. Doesn’t matter how quotidian it is, it’s still all we have at the end of the day.
He says all this mildly.
He says the word quotidian with no self-consciousness.
The way he says the phrase at the end of the day somehow makes it not a cliché, makes it mean that days end and that it might matter that they do.
You don’t think it ruined it? Mark says.
I think it made it better, the man says.
Astonishing, Mark says.
Yes, the man says. The play can still astonish, even though we think we know it, no matter whether we’re seventeenth century or twenty-first. And I always feel a bit sorry for the daughter, who never gets to speak back. What’s that last thing she says, when she believes the statue’s still a piece of art and not her mother at all? She’s happy to be a bystander, a looker-on, and she’ll gladly be exactly that, for twenty long years, she says, if she can just stand there for each of those years and appreciate this semblance, this combination of stone and paint that resembles the mother she never knew. Then, suddenly, from nowhere, it’s not a statue at all, it’s real, it’s her real mother, miraculous, alive, right there in front of her. And then the play’s over, and we never get to hear what she thinks.
So that phone going off, Mark says. Perdita phoning Hermione.
Another way to see it, the man says.
Mark laughs. The man is delightful. By now they’ve moved with the crush of the crowd out of the dark into the light and the foyer. They go out through the same exit. They stand for a moment in the surprising warm of the evening. It is lovely. It is summer. The man, Mark notices, is wearing a very nice dark linen suit and an expensive-looking shirt. He smells nice; Mark realizes that this man’s aftershave has kept him company through all the madness and all the seasons all the way