The Understudy: A Novel by David Nicholls

“Amazingly, this is the only comfortable chair in this place.” The accent was American; New York, perhaps. Her eyes were very dark, her mouth wide and red, and Stephen recognized her, from a brief conversation at the first-night party, as Josh’s wife, Nora. “You’re one of the waiters, right?”
    “Sort of.”
    “Well, surely you know if you’re a guest or a waiter…?” she said, drawing hard on the cigarette.
    “Yeah, you’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Nora looked confused. He decided to change the subject. “Should I leave you…?” he asked, sensing that he’d somehow stumbled upon her hiding place.
    “No, ’s okay,” she said brightly, standing, and with one finger deftly wiping something from the corner of one eye. “It’s all yours! Go crazy!” Then she lifted the toilet lid, tossed the cigarette in, listened to it sizzle, then turned to Stephen.
    “Can I ask you something?”
    “Go on.”
    “What do you think of this dress?” She stood up straight with her shoulders back, held the dress at her hips and tugged so that it pulled tight against her body. “Josh says it makes me look fat.”
    “He did? Fat?”
    “Well, he didn’t say ‘fat,’ of course. The actual precise word he chose was ‘lush,’ but he meant fat. You think I should go and change?”
    “Not at all. I think you look great,” said Stephen, because she did.
    “ ‘Great’ as in ‘great-big,’ right?”
    “Great as in fantastic.”
    “Great as in fantastic,” she repeated, mimicking his accent. “Well, thank you kindly, you’re a real gent.”
    Stephen had a powerful weakness for Americans doing English accents, and surprised himself by smiling. Nora smiled back, a little anxiously, perhaps, and with her eyes, which appeared slightly red, averted to the ground. “By the way, you do realize you were making a weird little noise, don’t you?”
    “When?”
    “Just now.”
    “I was?”
    “Uh-huh—a kind of hum. Like this.” And she closed her eyes tight and made the noise.
    “Yeah, I do that sometimes, apparently. It’s a nerves thing.”
    “And does it help?”
    “Oh, not really.”
    “Shame, I was going to give it a try. But why should you be nervous? You’re a professional, aren’t you?”
    “Yes, yes. I suppose I am.”
    “Well, there you go. At least you’re being paid to be here.” And her eyes flicked past him to the door that he leaned against. He stepped to one side to open it for her, but found that it had somehow jammed shut. He pulled hard on the door handle three or four times.
    “You might want to unlock it first maybe?”
    He unlocked it.
    “Okay, here I go…” she said, and took a deep breath, the kind you might take before dropping through a hole in the ice, swallowed hard, and stepped out into the main room, leaving Stephen alone.
    He waited a moment, then quickly locked the door again, and took Mrs. Harper’s place on the bidet, sitting down heavily on it. He lit a cigarette, attempting to inhale its whole length in one breath, then closed his eyes and pressed his eyelids hard with the tips of his fingers, until white bursts of light started to form, and tried to imagine what Cary Grant would do in these exact circumstances.
    He was finding it hard to imagine Cary Grant in these exact circumstances.
    It wasn’t so much the waitering. He’d been a waiter many times before, and fully expected to be a waiter again, and really didn’t mind—it was part of the job, after all. What particularly irked him about the situation was spending twenty-five quid on a bottle of champagne as a gift for a supposed friend, then being expected to serve that very same champagne to strangers, then wash up their glasses. He thought back to that night, standing in the wings, trying to work out how the terrible mistake had come about. What were Josh’s words exactly? “Are you available…”? “Suit-and-tie job”? “I’d really appreciate it”? Obviously, the simple truth was that Josh