C1 Advanced (CAE) - Reading Multiple Choice 4

The Price of Things

Memory plays curious tricks, folding time like badly creased paper. At sixty-three, standing on stage for my final performance as King Lear, I found myself not in the storm scene before me, but back in a small corner shop in Birmingham, watching a seven-year-old boy count copper coins with trembling fingers. That boy, of course, was me, though it took several heartbeats to reconcile these overlapping versions of myself: the acclaimed actor taking his last bow, and the child learning his first lesson about worth.

Father had always measured life in precise increments. Each morning was portioned into carefully calculated segments, his ledger books spread across our kitchen table like an accountant's breakfast. When he announced we were going to Mr. Bennett's shop that Sunday afternoon, I'd assumed it was simply another errand. I couldn't have known then how that day would ripple through the decades, surfacing at the strangest moments – during contract negotiations, first-night celebrations, even as I watched my own daughter sort through her pocket money thirty years later.

The challenge he set was deceptively simple: he handed me a fifty-pence piece, bright and warm from his pocket. "This needs to buy three things," he said, "something for you, something for Jane, and something for the house." The complexity lay not in the arithmetic but in the weighing of desires against necessities, a balancing act I would later perfect in countless auditions, choosing between paid work and artistic satisfaction.

I stood before the shop's shelves, each item suddenly transformed into a moral decision. The Mars bar I craved cost almost half my budget, while Jane's favourite liquorice would leave little for the household item. Mr. Bennett watched from behind his counter, his silence as weighty as my father's presence by the door. Years later, directors would create similar pressure with their quiet observation, but none would match the intensity of that moment.

Time stretched and contracted. Other customers came and went, their transactions flowing around my stillness like water around a stone. In my memory, this scene plays out simultaneously in multiple theatres: the dusty shop of 1982, the West End stages of my career, and the shadowy backstage of my present, where I still sometimes rehearse those sums in dreams.

I finally selected a small chocolate bar for myself (cheaper than Mars), wine gums for Jane (her second favourite), and a tin of polish for Mother's hallway cabinet. The total came to forty-eight pence, the remaining two pence burning in my palm like stolen gold. Father examined my choices without comment, though I later understood that my selection of furniture polish – practical, necessary, unremarkable – had pleased him more than any sweet could have.

That evening, as Jane and I shared our meagre treats, Father explained how the price of things rarely reflected their true value. It was a lesson I would revisit throughout my career, most notably during a disastrous production of The Merchant of Venice, where my Shylock grappled nightly with the cost of revenge versus the price of mercy. The parallel struck me only decades later, while watching old recordings: there I was, still counting out life's costs in front of an audience, still trying to balance the ledger between what we want and what we need.

Now, as I pack away my final costume and prepare to leave the stage forever, I find myself returning to that Sunday afternoon. The shop is long gone, replaced by a chain café where no one counts copper coins anymore. Father's ledgers are yellowing in some forgotten box. Yet the lesson remains, clear as stage lights: value and cost are rarely the same thing, and the richest moments in life often come without a price tag attached.