A Night In With Audrey Hepburn

‘Did it!’ Mum practically yells, with the sort of triumphant fist-clutch Tim Henman is always doing on Wimbledon’s Centre Court, just a mile down the road from here, shortly before he’s knocked out of the tournament for another year.

‘Mum! Can’t you be a bit quieter?’

I mean, it’s embarrassing enough that she forced me and Cass to come to the auditions in matching, egg-yolk yellow dirndls (though actually Cass, a cute eight-year-old, looks rather fetching in hers, whereas I, an awkward thirteen-year-old, look like a badly stuffed rag doll, in a much smaller rag doll’s dress, after eating an entire deep-pan pizza); but now she’s drawing even more attention to the three of us.

‘They’ve agreed to move your audition half an hour earlier, Cass,’ Mum is going on, ignoring me, ‘because of the family emergency we have to get to.’

‘What family emergency?’ asks Cass.

‘You know. The important one,’ Mum fibs. ‘Anyway,’ she adds, lowering her voice so that only Cass and I can hear her, ‘the point is that it’ll get you in to audition ahead of the youngest Walker girl, so I’d be perfectly happy to say your grandparents were on fire if it did the trick.’

‘The youngest Walker girl’is Mum and Cass’s nemesis: a triple-threat nine-year-old (acting, singing and dancing) from an apparently unending line of showbiz Walkers. She has pipped Cass to the post for three big roles lately: Annie in the Aylesbury Waterside production of Annie, Cosette in a production of Les Mis at the Secombe Theatre in Sutton, and, most gallingly of all, Tevye’s youngest daughter Bielke in a nationwide-touring revival of Fiddler on the Roof. In fact, she’s over in the far corner of the lobby right now, practising some stunning-sounding arpeggios, and occasionally, for no terribly good reason at all, sinking into an impressive splits. (I don’t know if the splits are required in The Sound of Music, I don’t actually remember any in the Julie Andrews movie version, but it’s certainly doing a good job of psyching out all the other prospective Brigittas.) The last display of the splits caused three of them to burst into simultaneous tears and flee the auditions before their names were even called. Though it did earn the youngest Walker girl a pretty fierce telling-off from her older sister, another of the showbiz Walkers, who’s evidently here for the part of Louisa, and looking almost as unenthusiastic about it as I am.

‘They just need a chance to see you before they see her, darling,’ Mum is telling Cass, ‘and that part is yours. Now, do you need me to run through the words to the goatherd song again, or do you think you’ve got it now?’

‘I’ve got it, Mum!’ Cass may be a full five years younger than me, but she’s got roughly five times my chutzpah. ‘For God’s sake. Anyway, if I forget any of the main words, I’ll just skip as fast as possible to the Star Wars bit.’

Mum and I both stare at her, in confusion.

‘You know, the bits where I sing Yoda Yoda Yoda Yoda … I don’t understand, though,’ Cass adds, plaintively, ‘what Yoda has to do with The Sound of Music at all.’

I think I need a breath of fresh air.

‘Where are you going?’ Mum shrieks, as I reach across to one of the orange plastic chairs for my rucksack. ‘What about your audition?’

‘It’s not until ten past three, Mum. That’s three and a half hours away. Anyway, I thought I might go and find a quiet place to rehearse.’

‘Finding a quiet place to rehearse’often means I get left in peace for a while, without Mum coming and nagging me to help Cass learn lines for whatever audition or show is currently on the schedule, or without Cass coming and nagging me to give her a makeover so she looks like Sabrina the Teenage Witch.

Honestly, if I was rehearsing as much as I claim I am, I’d probably be acing it at this audition, exactly like one of the showbiz Walkers.

‘That’s probably a good idea,’ Mum agrees, because even if she must know there’s no chance of me getting this part, at least if I’m well rehearsed I won’t actually embarrass her. ‘Oh, and Libby …’ She’s reaching into her handbag for her mobile phone, and handing it over to me. ‘Please will you ring your father and remind him he’s picking you up from here at four o’clock, not home. I’ve already left him two voicemails, and I’m not calling him again. Why he thinks I’ve nothing better to do with my time than chase around after him trying to convince him to keep his rare appointments with his only daughter, I don’t know.’

‘He’s been busy,’ I tell her, ‘with the book.’

‘And the Pope,’ Mum replies, ‘is Catholic.’

Which means it’s time for me to get out of here, before Mum can start on about Dad’s book again. And the one thing this hideous waiting room really needs is Mum working herself up about Dad in a manner that would make you think they’d been divorced for only ten minutes instead of almost ten years.

I mean, she only divorced Cass’s father Michael six months ago, but she manages to remain calm – pleasant, even – throughout all her dealings with him.

‘OK, OK,’ I say, already backing towards the doors that lead to the main auditorium. ‘I’ll see you a bit later. Break a leg in there, Cass.’

But Cass has started to spritz her face with an Evian water spray and isn’t paying any attention.

I already know the auditorium at the New Wimbledon Theatre pretty well, from way too many days spent waiting around here last November while Cass was rehearsing Babes in the Wood, the festive season pantomime.

It’s so massive that it’s perfectly easy to squirrel yourself away far up in the upper circle, right at the back, and nobody will know where you are to bother you, even if they felt like it. So that’s exactly where I’m heading now, for a bit of peace and quiet. And it’s actually really, really nice up here, once you’ve recovered from the climb up the half-billion stairs, that is. Row F, that’s where I always used to hang out: I ended up feeling quite at home there on all those endless cold November days, with a good book, and my Discman, and a posh, weekly-allowance-busting chicken Caesar sandwich from the Pret a Manger opposite the station.

I settle down into seat number 23, perfectly situated halfway along the aisle, and reach back into my rucksack for my book.

Actually, my books. Three of them, placed on special order from our local library in Kensal Rise, and just come in yesterday.

Humphrey Bogart: A Biography.

The Man, the Dancer: The Life of Fred Astaire.

Enchantment: The Life of Audrey Hepburn.

Hmmm.

Now that I’ve actually got them, here in my hands, I’m not looking forward to ploughing into them quite as much as I’d thought.

They look a bit …

Well, I don’t want to actually think the word boring. Because these are all books that Dad recommended I read – books he recommends to his film studies students – and I doubt he’d have suggested them if they were really as dull as they look.

And I’m sure they won’t be dull at all, once I actually get into them.

It’s just that it’s the movies themselves I love, and not (what Mum, rather dismissively, calls) all the pontificating about them.

Which Dad doesn’t do. Pontificate, I mean. Even though it’s his job to pontificate, so it wouldn’t be wrong if he did.

I do sometimes think it’s just a littlebit of a shame, though, that he doesn’t seem to be able to really enjoy the movies themselves any more. Especially when it was him who introduced them all to me, on the nights when I used to go and stay at his place. And he picked them carefully as well, starting out with the lighter stuff – Some Like It Hot, It’s a Wonderful Life, Roman Holiday – when I was seven or eight, and moving on to more grown-up fare – Casablanca, Sunset Boulevard – by the time I was ten or eleven. I might not have always understood everything I was watching (in fact, in the case of Citizen Kane, for example, I understood precisely nothing of what I was watching), but that never stopped me being dazzled. I mean, just the Hollywood glow of it all. And Dad would make popcorn – well, he made popcorn a couple of times – and turn off all the lights so that, with his huge TV, it was almost like we were in a proper cinema … and these screen legends just seemed to come to life. Marilyn Monroe. Ingrid Bergman. Grace Kelly. Lauren Bacall. Audrey Hepburn – most of all, Audrey Hepburn.

No: I’m quite sure a book about Audrey Hepburn isn’t going to be dull. How could it possibly be? My favourite of favourites, the movie star I’ve worshipped from the moment I first saw her.

I’ll make a start on this one first – and leave Bogey and Fred Astaire for another day – so that I can talk about it with Dad when I see him tonight. He’s bound to have read them all already: he’s writing a book, my Dad is, not just about Audrey Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart, but a … hang on, what did he call it the last time he mentioned it? A definitive, fully updated, no-holds-barred history of Hollywood’s most exciting era. So it’ll be really nice, over dinner tonight, to discuss everything I’ve been reading, and hopefully—

‘Anything good?’

It’s a boy.

Sitting two rows behind me, on Row H.

Well, I say ‘boy’; he sounds – and looks, now I’ve spun round to stare at him – fourteen or fifteen, so ‘young man’ might be a more accurate description. He’s tall, maybe over six foot, if his legs dangling over into Row G are anything to go by, and he’s wearing a light brown Stüssy sweatshirt that matches his hair and, because it’s too big across his shoulders, makes him look a little bit lanky.

‘The book, I mean,’ he goes on. ‘Anything good?’ Then, probably because I’m just staring at him with a startled-goldfish look on my face, he adds, hastily, ‘I didn’t follow you up here, or anything, by the way. I was just sitting and having a bit of a break when you came in.’

‘A break from the auditions?’ I ask, in the sort of flat, bored-sounding voice you’re meant to use with boys (and that I’m not very good at; I always end up sounding like a depressed robot).

‘Christ, no! I’m not actually doing an audition. I’m just here with my sisters. My mum had to take one of my other sisters to an audition for the Royal Ballet School today, and she didn’t want them travelling all the way to Wimbledon on the buses by themselves.’

Sisters – plural – auditioning for this show, and another one trying out for the Royal Ballet School …

‘You’re not one of the Showbiz Walkers, are you?’ I ask.

He looks startled for a moment, and then laughs.