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Why am I afraid?
I have the part. No audition. No read-through.
But still. I'm afraid.
"I will never forget Hotel of the Quiet Mother," Leith says. "How you took the audience with you. The whole theatre. Sobbed."
I cross my legs and graze my knee on the edge of the table, but she doesn't notice.
She had jumped right into the thick of it, after we had talked about her flight from Sydney, the cattle race through immigration, her fellow passengers like zombies pulling wheeled cases.
"I couldn't imagine anyone else playing Siddal. Of course, it has nothing to do with the fact that you're an English beauty, who happens to have gorgeous red hair." She leans forward then: "But, seriously, what was it that made you so convincing in ...Quiet Mother?"
I hold my coffee cup in both hands. "Playing a woman in the throes of madness frees you, somehow."
"It must have taken quite a lot of courage to go there."
"To be honest, I didn't think about it." I almost tell her that I have an odd sense of immunity. Sometimes. I grew up with a mother who had episodes, shall we say. But I don't even want go there. Instead, I set my cup down on the table and change the subject. "May I ask you a question, Leith?"
"Of course."
"What drew you to Siddal?"
She crosses her wrists on her knees and leans in closer yet. "She's haunted me since I was thirteen. When my parents took me to a visiting exhibition in Victoria. I got to see Millais's Ophelia first hand.
"The story goes that Siddal got pneumonia and nearly died, after posing for hours in frigid water. Of course, I didn't know that, then. All I saw was a young woman lying in a flooded stream. Her long red hair floating on the current.
"I was struck by the expression in her eyes. I couldn't name it then, but later, I knew it was surrender. Astounding that Lizzie, at twenty, could affect such an expression: I went back to her again and again that morning, trying to puzzle it out. The other Pre-Raph paintings with their fantastical dragons and sea monsters seemed cartoonish by comparison.
"So, two years ago, when I heard that a cache of Rossetti papers had been found, and with them, a bundle of Siddal journals, I remembered Ophelia. And I decided then and there that I had to fly to London.
"I practically camped out at the British Museum. Where I read through the hundred or so pages. And I was gobsmacked. Eighteen months later, in a cramped caravan in Tamborine Mountain, I finished Self Portrait." She sits back and ruffles her short hair until it stands like tufts of glossy feathers.
"Siddal's story is like a Bronte novel," she says, "excruciatingly dark, and passionate. The fact that Rossetti had her exhumed for the poems he'd slipped into her casket only intensifies it. I'm sure you've read about the tales that surfaced after Rossetti's friends rooted ‘round in her damp remains?"
"Yes... it's a recurring theme in Pre-Raph lore, isn't it? Lizzie still beautiful, even after seven years in the grave. A bit vampiric, don't you think?"
"Absolutely. It's been said that Bram Stoker got the idea for Dracula from the macabre rumours that circulated after the exhumation. Anyway, Rossetti got what he wanted, and, in the bargain, he made a good sum of money for his found Poems, which he published about a year later. And that reminds me, I have something for you."
Leith stands, maneuvers around the hotel suite of boxy furniture and disappears into the bedroom for a moment. She returns with a plastic folder and hands it to me. "A copy of the journal entries I wrote up. I thought you'd find them interesting."
I hold the folder to my chest. "I can't wait."
She offers me more coffee before finishing the carafe and then switches gears. "Aedan Byrne is ten years your senior," she says. "Your leading men have been much closer to your age." She studies me for a moment. "How do you feel about working with him?"
I shift sideways in my chair. "Quite frankly, I'm terrified. I have seen him. On stage and in film."
"And I have seen you," she says. "That's why I know there'll be chemistry. And, I've got a strategy." She steeples her fingers at her lips, as if she is about to tell me a secret. "I don't want you and Aedan to meet, other than on-set and in costume."
I turn my bracelet slightly, centering the quartz stone.
"No worries, Fiona," she says. "No worries. It'll be extraordinary."
Bloody hell, I can't think of anything more daunting. No downtime on-set. All character. All the time.
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