Free Colouring In by Angela Huth

It’s something I must pass on to Sylvie in a few years’ time.
    The telephone was ringing when I got back to my hotel room: the office to say I was wanted in Nairobi on Monday. Did I want to come home first, or fly straight from Rome? Isabel, as I knew she would, said of course…it would be mad to return home for half a day. Oh hell: we’d been looking forward to the weekend. I was going to suggest Bert came round again on Saturday evening, on his own. So we were disappointed, but resigned. Di doman … No certainty of to-morrow, indeed.
    Now I sit gloomily in my air-conditioned room, dejected by the narrowness of the hotel desk. The shutters are half-shut. Sky, the colour of wild salmon, pushes in through the shut windows. I fling onto the floor the plastic hotel blotter and all the bumf about hotel services. They make a clatter. It jars my head, previously calm, now muddied by change of plans. I set up my word processor.
    My last play, finished two months ago – a more lively piece, than usual, I’d thought – is whirling round that silent outer space in which theatre managements reside and never respond. So it’s time to stop fretting about that one, and all the others, and to start something new. This time I feel more than usually enthusiastic – or do I always feel that? I’ve a suspicion I do. Anyhow, it’s to be about rejection. Something I’m familiar with. Something we’re all familiar with. Something we should all be taught to deal with as children in order to soften the inevitable blows as grown-ups. I’ve many thoughts on the subject. And I’ve a cracking good opening, I think. So here goes.
    Act One. Scene One.
    Now, late into the Roman night, I begin.
ISABEL
    When Dan rang late last night to say he was going straight from Rome to Nairobi – sensible, of course – I expressed the normal sort of disappointment, and cheerfully agreed it wasn’t that long till he’d be back on Wednesday evening. In truth I felt a profound sense of gloom which I could not understand. Dan is often away for anything up to ten days. I miss him no end but can cope perfectly well, enjoy spending more time than usual concentrating wholly on Sylvie. So why the shadowed feeling after his call? Perhaps it was simply because it was late and I was tired, and the envisaged weekend was shattered. I put out the light, very awake. Then the telephone rang again: Carlotta.
    ‘Hope I’m not calling too late,’ she said – she would have been scathing if I had said she was. ‘But I just thought you’d like to know my plan about Bert. Would you?’ I didn’t know what she was talking about but said I’d listen. ‘Although I’ve agreed to do up his house,’ she said, ‘I don’t want him to think of me just as a decorator.’
    ‘I understand,’ I said, after a long pause.
    ‘I’d like him to be a proper friend,’ she went on. ‘Now I’ve ditched Mike, there’s – well, a bit of a gap. It’d be nice to think I could – you know – ask Bert round sometimes, take him to things, generally ease him into my life in the most innocent way. What do you think?’
    I said I didn’t know what to think. I seemed to remember she’d said a few weeks ago that Mike had walked out on her. Perhaps I got it wrong. Or perhaps she’d changed her story. I felt no inclination to sidetrack her onto that subject. I didn’t really understand what she was on about, this plan about Bert. Where was it leading? Why did she have to ask my advice if all she was plotting was an innocent friendship? My long silence, tacked on to my lack of opinion, plainly disappointed her.
    ‘So what I’m going to do,’ she said, ‘ despite having rushed about getting samples of goodness knows what, is to keep him dangling for a bit. I mean, I don’t want to sound too keen. I don’t want him to get the wrong idea. So I’m not going to ring him at least till the middle of next week. By then, he might have become impatient. He might want to get the