Edith Holler, page 18
A question: If the theatre’s so rickety, why then do we live in it?
The answer: because it is our home.
To be frightened by the only place you can be—there must be many people, I supposed, like that.
* * *
• • •
In the days that followed, everywhere I went, I found sawdust on the floor. Always grains of it, never shavings. In the corners of rooms, in drifts on the stairs, on shelves and under chairs.
“Devil stuff,” Bleachy said. “Used to use sawdust to soak up all the blood that spilled during a show. I was friends with sawdust then, but I was also in command of it. And now, Edith, my own dear brush, did you know that the blood barrels have both grown quite solid? No more blood now. Hard as a rock, it is.”
Now the sawdust, unchecked by blood, grew wild all around.
One morning, when I was supposed to be cleaning an empty dressing room, I found a message scrawled into the plaster, presumably by some bored actor: CATHY LONGLEGS. An insult of a colleague, perhaps. Going about my day, I happened to look out the window at the streets of Norwich. People hurrying by, busy with their lives. Come from the market, come from St. Stephen’s, girls running to the Norwich School. Who are you all? How real you do seem! I stared deep into them: Notice me, notice me. Soon I became aware of people coming out of the theatre, people upon the very steps where I had had my accident. A huge, hunched figure going out and behind him a couple of tiny men, like a giant and two dwarves. Who were they? I’d never known them before. The giant turned around: it was a giant, the giant from “Jack and the Beanstalk,” wearing an old mac and a flat cap. He turned around briefly and looked up at me, tipped his hat, and off he went, followed by the dwarves, disappearing into the gloom.
“Wait!” I called. “Come back!”
Others on the steps, then, too: a thin young man, a dark look about him, in patched working clothes, his face pinched and ill. I’d seen him before. Hamlet! Hamlet is leaving. Then three old men, huddled together, shivering and gabbing; one was blind, I saw, and another wore an old flower in his hair; it was the Fool and Gloucester and Kent, but done up as pensioners of the city of Norwich. And there were Falstaff and Justice Shallow sharing a hip flask between them; they looked like they might sell root vegetables in Norwich Market. A man with a red nose, burst with drink—that was Bardolph, surely. Then, finally, came Lady Macbeth herself, wearing a Norwich shawl. Oh, where are they all going?
Out of the theatre, all of them, and into Norwich.
I ran from the window then, to try and stop them, and soon I found people walking along the backstage corridors on their way out. I bumped into a fellow, looked up at the strange face. Oh, it was a troll!
“Mornin’,” said the troll and shuffled on.
“Don’t go!” I said.
And the figures kept coming. There were thin, awfully thin, young women, more like dolls really, but with hunches beneath their shawls; surely there were wings there, fairies being evicted. A great stream of them. Oh, all the parts are leaving, keep them in, keep them!
I ran back through the theatre, to the stage door. There I stood appalled as role after role went out into the drizzle: Oedipus in a sou’wester; Argan the hypochondriac, sneezing convincingly into his dirty handkerchief; the Pied Piper in patches, with a rat in his hands, feeding it a piece of cheese; Medea, smacking her lips as if she’d forgotten to put her teeth in. Last was Britannia. Her stockings had holes in them, and her dress was very greasy, I could see it beneath her long woolen cape. She was smoking a roll-up.
“Don’t go!” I begged.
“Not wanted, Miss Edith,” she gurgled. And then I knew it was Aunt Agatha Wilson I was seeing, after all. They were all our old actors, shuffling out onto the streets.
“You mustn’t go,” I called.
“Can’t stay.”
“No! Please!”
“We’ll be back, when the theatre’s open.”
“Don’t leave me.”
And they did.
It cannot be a theatre with all the actors cleared out.
“Is Mrs. Margaret, hinttut?” murmured Mr. Peat. “She’s having a clean-out, the pootrud mawther. When will there be an end on it?”
Out they went, all the actors, evicted from their dressing rooms. It was Margaret that had done it. No need to keep them on, she reasoned, not when we have no stage. Besides, she had said, it was not safe to keep so many in the theatre, it was adding danger to the building. Let them go, then, until all is repaired. In this way the actors were removed, until just the technical workers remained—a few carpenters, some lighting people, a handful from wardrobe. Mr. Mealing was kept, only because he had made himself agreeable. Beyond that were left only my true blood relatives.
Mr. Peat was nervous about it all.
“Who else?” he moaned. “She’ll have the building empty, she’s that stingy. Botty mawther.”
Most of my fellow cleaners were let go. Margaret’s bidding, Bleachy told me. “Something is surely wrong,” Margaret had announced, “if a building’s sole purpose is to be cleaned. Clean for what, for whom?”
Bleachy and I were left to our mops, left to our floors.
“We’ll keep cleaning, shan’t we, Edith?”
“Yes, Aunty,” I said, for she looked so unhappy.
“Do you still have your clacker, Edith?”
I showed it to her on its red ribbon.
“Good, my bucket. Keep it to yourself, mind. They’ve been forbidden. You won’t find one all over Norwich.”
“But why, Aunty?”
“On account of them being insulting, it seems. A cruelty to the Utting legacy. A mocking toy. Utting’s been to the courts over it for years, and they have ruled at last: No more Meg Pegs. They’re dangerous, it’s said, and boys are hurting one another with them. News to me, that was. So they’re gone: in the toy shops one day, nowhere the next.”
Empty corridors and rooms then, Edith lonely amid the desolation.
14.
Discoveries upon the grid.
The best plays have a change of scenery. They might go from a castle to a wood, for instance, or from a place on the low ground to a place high in the mountains, or a kingdom on the clouds, or else might go lower down, in a dark cave deep beneath the earth. Let us climb up and down, the theatre tells us, so that we may be taller and we may be deeper, that we may view the world from different angles. I needed a new perspective in those stale days, to get me out of myself, to feel a little different, to dust off Edith. I hid my mop and bucket at the bottom of a stairwell and set out.
The highest part of the theatre—excepting the roof, which I could no longer visit—is the grid. The grid is far above our heads, in what we call the fly tower—the home of all the windlasses and the drum and shafts and counterweights that are used to haul our worlds up and down. It is a dangerous, lofty place, the lid of the stage. If I could climb that mountain, what would Ben Nevis be to me?
It was an early summer’s day when I left. As I stepped out, I felt it was far from certain that I would return, and yet, a little tight of breath, off I went.
I climbed up and up the first ladder, and came to a little galleyway where I could rest awhile. There were wooden passageways like balconies up there—bridges, they are called—where the stage people move their canvases like sailors. Indeed some of our stagehands were sailors in their time, from Lynn and Yarmouth and Lowestoft, and knew how to work the ropes. This land is called the loft, or the stagehouse, and it was stacked with scenes that lay still and neglected now, like my own card theatre in the second furnace. But even above this there is a higher where to climb. And so I ascended the mast of the theatre, higher and higher and ever higher, beyond the last bridge—the blackness a river of death beneath—until I was at the loading rail, which is the highest a scene may ascend within the theatre’s throat. Here was the scenery stacked up.
And here I found among the backdrops something I had never even hoped for:
Scenes from my own play.
Here all along, proof of it.
“Edith Holler,” I said, though my voice was dry.
Here upon canvas, pieces of me. I took off my cleaning bonnet and let it fall down and down into the darkness. Bleachy would scald me for it later, no doubt, but in that moment I didn’t care. Here was Norwich, ancient Norwich, completed now. Behind it the interior of Maw Meg’s hovel, and behind that a portion of King Gurgunt’s deep chamber. All was here, wrapped in darkness. As if my own play had been calling me. And in that moment I loved it again. Look, Edith, at what you’ve done! Oh, what beauty.
If the play is still hanging here, I thought, perhaps there is still a chance for it.
ABOVE: A stack of backdrops for a card theatre.
BELOW: A pair of wing supports for a theatre, right and left, to be glued to the proscenium arch at one end and the back wall at the other.
I asked myself: You remember the play, don’t you? Much of it, at least? Well then, why not write it down a second time? If I’d done it once, I could do it again. What a fool I was—of course I could. The play had been there all along, in grey Edith’s grey brain. All I needed was to tip it out from the bony basin.
I reached out to stroke a little Norwich scene, and then it was time to finish my ascent. A little climb and at last I had reached heaven. I was up there with the stars, the grid itself, that most high of all places—the very limit of travel.
I crawled out across the thick slatted wood. It did bend in places where the wood was weak, and in parts it appeared rather worn, yet still I ventured out onto this great crow’s nest, to look at all the wooden machinery that made the worlds seem different down below—the great drums and wheels that pull the rope and allow the world onstage to change. This was the very brains of the theatre. Here come and go all the different lands that give our plays their settings: the heavy backdrops, the side tabs, the castle, the mountains; all the cities of man. Here may you play puppet master with landscapes.
It is very busy at this level. I must step over the shafts and around the drums; I must be so very careful not to trip upon the ropes that stretch across the great space, as if a god had been playing cat’s cradle here. There are holes everywhere in the grid, square holes between the ropes, where you may brave yourself to contemplate what gravity is. From that dizzy height I could look down and down to the stage—but no! To where the stage used to be, but was no longer, and now even deeper, all the way down into the secrets of the underground. The hole in the Holler Theatre seemed to lead to the very core of the earth, Hollow Theatre should be its name. And, just for a moment, I felt it calling for me to tumble, spinning and screaming, into its depth of death. But Edith did not.
I was not alone in that highness. Hidden by one of the windlasses, I came upon a little mound: a pile of scraps and cuts of material—worsted, it was. How I leaped to find it there! Another proof of a different sort. There was no ghost boy inside it, though I wondered if this was one of his sleeping places. Perhaps for years he had lain himself upon a worsted bed and looked down onto the stage, seeing from that seagull position all our entrances and exits. To think: if only I had looked up, I might have seen his tiny eyes looking down.
Yet this worsted was nailed into place here. Was this to punish it? To keep it safe? Or was it left here as scarecrow to keep trespassers away? To ward off ghosts? To keep Edith out? I did not like the nails, was the ghost pinioned underneath them? No, this was his private home, I felt sure. The nails were just to keep all in place. But why so many of them? That question I could not answer.
I took a piece for myself—certain confirmation of him.
As I lay there on the high wood, watching eternity, I sensed something down in the darkness. Something moving. I peered through the grid and there it was, deep in the black: creeping legs, hairy body, and all around it, thin films of thread. A monster! A huge, many-legged thing with a girl’s head. Close your eyes and look again, poor disturbed Edith.
Ah, but no! It was no great monster in the broken hole of the stage depth, but only a spider, spidering away close at hand, just beneath the grid, no more than an inch in length. I laughed to recognize it, a spider, such little life. It threaded its way out of sight—but with its absence there came a knock.
The knock again.
You grow so bold.
Then, on the other side of the grid, quite at my eyeline, a beetle came trip-trapping, then two, then four and five of them. Again the sound: knock, knock. Not waiting for the dark, but in the daytime now. Oh, the theatre, I whispered, I think the theatre will fall. The grid itself seemed to me to shake a little. I scrambled for the edge; I tripped on some ropes and fell—not far, just a bit—and split my lip; but I knew I must go on, I must get off the grid before it falls.
Rung and rung, descending. Wrung and wrung, with a galloping horror. As if something were trying to pull me from the ladders. I looked up: a beetle crawling on the ropes just above. Come on now, Edith, move! On, on, slipping now and then, down I went, the scream for now kept inside. Then, at last, I was again on the rim of the stage, on the very edge of the fall.
And then: a bang!
And I nearly fell in.
A bang again!
I followed it straight, off the stage area and into the first of the dressing room corridors.
BANG!
There! There was the noise and there, in the same place, was Uncle Wilfred, with his hammer, sending a nail home. He had his back to me.
“Uncle Wilfred! Uncle Wilfred!”
Bang! went another nail. He was hammering a sign up. It said:
keep out
construction site
no entry to the stage
“Oh it’s you, Edith,” said Wilfred. “Shouldn’t you be cleaning?” He banged in another nail. “The building starts any day now. And they shan’t use our carpenters. Utting’s people only. Get it done proper.”
“Uncle Wilfred, the beetles are eating the theatre. It’ll all be dust!”
“Edith, we know. The builders will put it right.”
“Then I am not to blame.”
“It seems not.”
“And yet I’ve had no apologies, Uncle. Not a word.”
“Who’s left to apologize?”
“Father must know then that I didn’t do it.”
“Edith, these are hard times for everyone. But it shall be made right again.”
“The builders must come quickly, Uncle. At once! Or it shall be too late.”
“Any day now, it’s certain. And so you must tread no more front of house, Edith.”
“Just once more, Uncle, whilst I still may.”
“One last time then, my dear niece, until the stage is done.”
15.
I am come to play; Mealing writes a play.
The beetles’ knocks that I heard upon the grid, so loud in the daytime, had little echoes that lived on after the initial sounding. Those echoes, the children of that dreadful noise, danced all about the backstage, bounced along the corridors, whispered in the empty dressing rooms and the empty greenroom, in the wardrobe, in the puppet mistress’s room. In they went, those trespassing echoes, darting before they died—mayfly noise that they were—inside the heads of all the remaining people of the theatre. To most of us, the knock and its echo offspring caused little more than a sudden intake of breath, or a pang in the heart, or a twitch in the bowels, or a flare of acid in the gut, before all was forgot and dullness came back upon them. And yet, in some heads and bodies, the echoes nudged and bothered and caused them to stand up and to speak out.
Knock it went upon Margaret.
Knock it went upon Agnesia.
Knock it went upon Mealy.
* * *
• • •
When all imagination was shut up, and all fanciful things were covered by sheets and tarpaulins, when all players had been dismissed and there was no story to be found inside the entire building, then truly were we in the thick, treacly days of Beetle Spread. Then truly did the deathwatch beetles command the theatre.
And in that dark age Mr. Mealing, who spread dullness everywhere, felt quite at home with the world. In the instant of those specters of beetle knocks, something seized that undramatic man, something dark and misshapen, a strange little ugly thought, and he began to knock a little himself. That knocking was the knocking of Mr. Mealing’s unimaginative heart, as it set up shop in his left ventricle, and there it grew. It echoed within him until at last he found himself at the door of Father’s apartment. He saw the daughter Agnesia step out, and he stepped in, knocking as he did upon the open door. Margaret, seated and studying the designs for the rebuilt theatre, gave him permission to enter. “Ah, Mr. Mealing, ah, Oliver, how good to see you.”
“Dear Mrs.,” and here I break off a moment to say that Mealing pronounces Mrs. as Meeesiss—a little direction for anyone who happens to find themselves playing the role of Mealing—“Dear Mrs. Holler, dear, dear Mrs. Holler. Fine lady.” The Mealing pump was pumping harder, something new stirring inside the oily little man. “I found myself, of a sudden, compelled to approach your person.”
“And you are most welcome.”
“Is there anything I can do for you, anything at all? To ease your entrance into this theatre life?”
“Well now, that is kind, I must say. And actually I have been thinking, Oliver. You are: Oliver, a playwright. Is it not so?”
