I Wrote Him Savage Reviews, Now He Thinks They're Love Letters novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Treaty

In a prop cupboard Kit demands rules, Dorian turns each into a flirtation, Fenella starts a sweepstake, and the producer arrives demanding that one of them hate the other by Thursday.

The prop cupboard held nine teacups, a stuffed pheasant, and the two leads of Hollowmere.

Kit had dragged Dorian in by the sleeve of his coat.

He now stood with his back against a shelf of candlesticks and a speech prepared.

"I am not in love with you," he said.

"I want that on record before we do anything else."

"Noted," said Dorian, with great warmth.

He was holding the pheasant, because there was nowhere else to put it.

"It was a professional interest," said Kit.

"You were an actor with habits. I noticed the habits."

"For five years."

"Four years and eleven months," said Kit.

"The first post was in November."

"That's lovely," said Dorian, and Kit understood what he had done a moment too late.

He shut his eyes.

It was a small cupboard, and correcting things in it was not going to help.

"All right," he said.

"We need rules."

"Rules," said Dorian.

He set the pheasant on a shelf and took out a pen.

On the back of a call sheet, in careful capitals, he wrote THE TREATY.

"Clause one," said Kit.

"Notes happen in the rehearsal room. Nowhere else. Not in the car park, not at lunch, not in the toilets."

"So you will be giving me notes," said Dorian, writing, "regularly, in a room."

"It's a workplace."

"A room where you give me your opinion of my body of work on an ongoing basis," said Dorian.

"That is not what that means."

"Clause one," said Dorian happily, and underlined it twice.

"Clause two," said Kit.

"Nobody uses the word courtship."

"Of course not," said Dorian.

"Not in the room, not in the corridor, not to the press."

"What shall we call it, then?" said Dorian.

"Nothing," said Kit.

"It isn't happening."

"The Nothing," said Dorian, and wrote that down too.

The door opened.

A woman in a green boiler suit, worn over a long Edwardian dress, came in with a biscuit in her mouth.

She looked at the pheasant, at Dorian, and at Kit, and took the biscuit out.

"Hello, Kit," she said.

"I knew you'd be in a cupboard."

This was Fenella Perring.

She was twenty-nine, with short red hair and a gift for noticing what everyone in a room was pretending not to do.

She had been Kit's closest friend since a panto tour on which they had played the two halves of a cow.

In Hollowmere she was cast as the Earl's sister.

"Fenella," said Kit.

"Dorian is under the impression that I wrote him love letters."

"Aren't they?" said Fenella.

"They are reviews."

"Of his bottom?"

"Of his pauses," said Kit.

"Some of them were about his bottom, but only the television."

Dorian put a hand on his chest.

Fenella ate her biscuit slowly, looking from one man to the other.

Then she took a small notebook out of her boiler suit.

"Right," she said.

"One pound a head. You pick the date Kit admits it."

"Admits what?" said Kit.

"It," said Fenella.

"I'll put you down for never."

"I'd like Tuesday the third," said Dorian, producing a pound coin.

"Of November."

"That's a Wednesday," said Kit.

There was a pause.

Dorian took out his phone, looked at a calendar, and put the coin back in his pocket.

"Wednesday the third," he said.

"I'd still like it."

Fenella wrote that down.

She wrote it with pleasure.

For the first time since the read-through, Kit felt his friend had been assigned to the wrong side.

"Clause three," Kit said, over her head.

"You don't quote the binder before ten in the morning."

"That seems arbitrary," said Dorian.

"It's a firm cut-off," said Kit.

"I need my mornings."

Dorian considered the paper.

Then he wrote the clause, dated the bottom of the call sheet, and signed it with a flourish.

Kit leaned over to read it.

"That's the wrong date."

"Is it?" said Dorian.

"It's the fourteenth. You've put the thirteenth."

"Ah," said Dorian.

He looked down at the page, then up at Kit, and the smile that came to his face took its time.

"There it is again."

"There what is?" said Kit.

"You."

Fenella put her biscuit back in her mouth to keep from saying something.

Kit looked at the paper, then at the shelf, and could think of nothing that was both true and safe.

"Why me?" he said at last.

It was not a question he had meant to ask.

Dorian stopped smiling for a moment.

"Because I've been praised for ten years," he said, "and not once did anyone say what I actually did."

He folded the treaty and held it out.

Kit took it.

His hand was steadier than he expected.

The cupboard door opened a third time.

A man in a quarter-zip fleece stood there holding his phone at chest height.

"Kit, is it? Rupert Malkett, executive producer. Love this. Love the energy in here."

"We're discussing a pheasant," said Kit.

"Love that," said Rupert.

"Now. I need one of you to hate the other by Thursday."

"The magazine's coming, and a nice feud sells forty per cent more than a nice friendship."

"Neither," said Dorian.

"Him," said Kit.

Rupert looked at them both and wrote it down.

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