Page 61 of A Snowfall of Silver

Dan makes a triumphant if slightly rude gesture at Russ, who glowers at me. “Of course you’d take his side.”

“It’s not a side, it’s a shirt,” I snap, flushing at this disjointed sentence.

“It always happens at the end of the tour,” Nora says to me later. “Real life starts to impinge once more.”

“That’s just it.” I frown down at the dress I’m mending. “I don’t know what my real life is at all. What am I going back to?”

We’re interrupted then by Miss Meriden, who comes flying into the room, as if the hounds of hell are on her heels, or – at least – at a most un-Miss Meriden like trot.

“Freya!” she exclaims. “There you are! Thank goodness. Viola is ill. She can’t perform tonight.”

I stare at her. “Viola is … ill?” I say slowly. My first thought is of her fight with Kit. Perhaps she can’t face him. I get to my feet. “Has someone checked on her?”

Miss Meriden shakes her head. “She’s refusing to open her bedroom door – says she is too ill to perform. So,” she finishes, “we must get you ready.”

“Get me ready?” I have the feeling that my brain is swimming very hard against an angry current. My knees start to shake.

“For god’s sake, Freya,” Nora says firmly. “Snap out of it! You’re the understudy. You’ll have to perform tonight.”

“Yes,” I say, getting to my feet on such unsteady legs that I stagger slightly. “I need to get ready. To perform.”

“Are you sure you can?” Miss Meriden looks at me uncertainly, no doubt worried about my ability to form complete sentences. “We could cancel the show, I suppose, although it would be an awful shame – it’s going so well. And we had to cancel those performances because of the snow…”

Suddenly, I am calm. Uncannily calm. Ice-cold calm. I shake my head. “We don’t need to cancel. I can do it,” I say. I smile. “Everything is going to be fine.”

“Well … good.” If anything, Miss Meriden is looking at me with even greater concern than before.

“Let me do a quick costume fitting while she’s here,” Nora says. “I’ll ask Lindsey if she or one of the girls can help out as a dresser tonight.”

“All right, and then Mr Cantwell wants her in the theatre manager’s office,” Miss Meriden says, still eyeing me uneasily.

Nora makes a sound of agreement, and I continue to smile serenely. I feel nothing. Absolutely nothing. I am a hollowed-out egg.

I am utterly composed as Nora dresses me and undresses me. She chatters away, a rattle of excitement. We’ll have to alter Viola’s dresses at speed, I am after all a lot rounder than her, and yet I don’t feel worried. In fact, I feel nothing. I had thought I would have a lot of feelings about realizing my lifelong dream of acting on a real stage in front of a real audience, but apparently realizing your lifelong dream only makes you feel numb.

Kit appears at the door, his hair sticking out all over the place, catastrophically wild, worry in his eyes.

“Freya,” he says. “Are you all right about going on? You will be wonderful, I’m sure.”

Curious that this absence of feeling has stretched out to include Kit, I observe. I had been worried about seeing him, there was a lot I wanted to say to him, but, blissfully, none of that matters now.

“I’m fine,” I say a little distantly. “I’m absolutely fine to go on, please don’t worry.”

Kit and Nora exchange a look. Normally that would make me cross, but my reflection in the mirror does not flinch. It remains pale, stoic, unmoved.

The feeling of calm continues while people drop in and out of the dressing room, firing questions, whirring about in a desperate hive of activity.

“Bloody Viola,” Russ grumbles when he comes in to wish me luck. “Typical of her to flake out on us at the last moment. She gets away with murder, that girl.”

“She’s unwell,” Nora says.

“Sure she is,” Russ snorts. “Sick of not getting her own way, and sick on her own drama. Still,” he says, turning his winning smile on me, “it will be fun to be onstage together, won’t it, Freya, my darling?”

I smile and nod. Russ and his behaviour mean nothing to me. I am the eye of the storm.

I suppose this is what it is to be a professional, I think. How nice that I have so instantly become one. This must be what happens when you train for something your whole life.

The feeling of complete serenity continues as I walk down the corridor, and it continues as I knock on the door of the manager’s office. It continues right up until the point when Rhys Cantwell lifts his head and looks me in the eye.