Edith Holler, page 3
Here in the theatre, if we are low on pins or spirit gum, we have often been known to fix our wigs or beards with a little Beetle Spread. One of the disadvantages of the Spread is that people can roll a small ball of it and pop it in their mouths and then chew it for hours (making their teeth red—oh, the red teeth of Norwich!) and then, inevitably, after a time, after the taste has gone or jaw ache has set in, they often spit it out, on the street or even upon our front-of-house carpets (which are red in color because of the Spread, in the hopes of disguising it). Cleaning up after Beetle Spread gum is a time-consuming business. The smell of the Spread is hard to explain to the uninitiated. It is like a concentrate of meats. It is like a new animal not yet named. It is like a strange and uninvited intimacy.
Something else about Beetle Spread: I think the missing children are inside it.
I know this was alluded to before, but then it was said in jest and to frit the Norwich slums. But I think it is true. I came to this one morning as I sat propped up by pillows in my sickbed, studying the Norwich lost. A piece of toast beside me with butter and Spread. I read about the lost children, I took a bite of toast. Ernest Ridings I read, and I took a bite of toast. Bess Tollymash I read, and I took a bite of toast. Susie Headley I read, and I took a bite of toast. And then I stopped. I dropped the toast, it fell Spread-side down upon my sheets, a great red mark there.
Oh!
I no longer eat the Beetle Spread. I will not have it near me.
2.
Birth of a playwright.
Perhaps I should describe myself. How to turn my eyes upon my very own self? To give you the correct idea of me?
I am more bony than bonny, I admit, and just a little taller than average. I am flat of breast and likewise of feet. My hands and feet, though narrow, are rather large, so I may grow long in time, and one day I may fill out and thus become a woman.
I look a bit washed out, a bit rag doll you might say. My skin is very pale, almost all white. My own hair is a sort of greyish red, somewhat fair but a dull color, and sometimes seems as ashy as my flesh, and so it may be said I am only one color altogether. Except my eyes, which, like Father’s, are a very pale blue. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost” is a common enough observation. “You look like a ghost” is not unheard-of either.
Well, then, if I am monochrome, I do embrace it. I clothe myself in greys and whites. I am perhaps a little moldy, a touch mildewed, slightly foxed, I am an old book, a little yellowed, mothlike. I do need, probably, a little airing out. Also I have become crooked, perhaps, being so shut up for so long. My body grows awkwardly on account of my illnesses and does not mature. My voice is generally rather raspy.
What else must I say, or else my life be misunderstood?
I have told one story from Norwich; it is necessary that I balance it with one from within the theatre. How I have relied on stories in my sickbed. They have saved me certainly. For we are made of stories, surely, and some are true and some are not, and some are part truth and part lie—well, and perhaps that can be said of all stories. But there is a particular story of this theatre that I am told a great deal, everyone here knows a version of it, but it is Father who is the most regular teller and indeed he does narrate it very dramatically. It is dear to him, because the story is about me. It is the story of my curse.
It happened at my christening—which was upon the stage, this was a family custom, we always had the Bishop of Norwich come in for it, the stage set up for the cathedral in which Thomas à Becket was murdered—and chiefly concerns one of my old aunts. Everyone here to me is uncle or aunt, you see, or, if they are younger, cousins—though we are related not necessarily by blood but by profession. This particular aunt was no longer allowed to perform on account of her failure to remember her lines, though she insisted she could. She was not my real aunt, but a woman named Lorena Bignell, and came originally from Lowestoft in Suffolk. There are always several retired actors about; they are looked after here and find small jobs about the theatre—Father keeps them useful for as long as is possible, and they do on the whole prefer to be around the theatre than in some kennel for old people or in the workhouse or in the Bethel Hospital.
Since her banishment, Lorena Bignell had kept herself miserable in the wardrobe until she delivered her last, and most magnificent, performance. She appeared in one of the theatre’s grand boxes attired in a yellowed and ripped wedding dress, and in front of my family and all the actors, all the stagehands and crew, the orchestra, the puppeteers and the laundresses and wigpeople and carpenters and candlemen (this was shortly before the gas was put in), and even the prompter, Lorena Bignell spat and cried and placed a curse upon me. She was very fine and exact in everything she delivered, not a word was garbled; all was crystal clear and unforgettable. If I ever should set foot upon Norwich streets, she proclaimed, I would die. Then, as if this itself were insufficient, she added—after a grating moan—not only that I would die, but that the entire theatre would come tumbling down.
* * *
• • •
Ah, I see now that I must clarify.
Do not please think that this whole business was prompted by my father not inviting my aunt to the christening—that I’m simply reviving the story of Sleeping Beauty, performed often upon our stage. No, Lorena Bignell had been invited. In her day, she had been a most moving tragedian. The trouble was that she had been abused and murdered, haunted and despised, so many times onstage that the plays had leaked into her mind, and unlike the greasepaint it could no longer be washed off. She had become a woman much given to howling, very angry and uncertain, twitchy and confused. Yes, the poor woman had been ill-used—and it was my father, playing, as he so often did, the villain, who had done it all to her. And so, to get at him, Bignell cursed me. But it was more than that. Oh, she was a good one, and thorough. It was a performance so distinguished that it is still spoken of today. Some argue that she cheated, that her methods were not to be found in the script, that strictly speaking her performance was not theatre at all but something more rightly called a “demonstration.” (Norwich, may I say, is a famous city for rioting; much town property was destroyed in one of our worst riots, in 1766, and for their part in the uprising two men, John Hall and David Long, were hanged at Norwich Castle.) Others say that Lorena Bignell did in fact work from the script but rewrote it to serve her own ends. And that last I would agree with, because this extraordinary gesture of hers, within a playhouse, in front of a sizable audience, rewrote my entire life.
So then. Here it is, as it has been told to me: Aunt Lorena Bignell died in an explosion of blood.
My aunt spurted from the balcony onto the stage and everywhere in between. She was afterward to be found, in fact, everywhere—all over the stalls, for example, and the balcony was most spoiled. A good portion of her had reached the stage itself, which no doubt would have made her very happy. For days thereafter there was much mopping and scrubbing—the remaining Bignell was worse than even Beetle Spread—and it took a time, I am told, for the smell to surrender.
To this day, no one is quite sure how my aunt Lorena exploded. It was the most marvelous effect. Several members of my family, myself included—using dummies, you understand—have tried to re-create her extraordinary exit, but the result has always been a disappointment. She had burst into a hundred thousand bits, she had spread herself all over the auditorium. I was baptized twice, once in blessed holy water and once also—there were drops dotted about my gown—in blood, in ruddy flecks provided by my very recently expired so-called relative. This same christening gown is now framed and hung front of house, so that all may see the old blood upon it and remember my curse. Thus was I marked on my first day of life. The many people who had come to witness my christening were given also an Aunt Lorena bath; thereafter, thus besmirched, they walked Aunt Lorena severally all about our city, to the portions called Tombland (it is called this not because of tombs but from an old Scandinavian word meaning “empty space”) and Heigham, Millgate and Hellesdon, Lakenham and Pockthorpe, Old Catton and Sprowston, and even into their homes, because she was there upon their clothes and skin.
In consequence of this event, unlike my aunt Lorena in so many bits, I am not allowed out. My aunt’s explosion had sealed the severity of her curse. Without it, an exception might perhaps have been made, some way found to circumvent her fury. But Aunt had gone out in a large red puff, a crimson explosion, and that had sealed me, forevermore, inside. There is even a small bronze plaque affixed to the railing of the box:
UPON THIS SPOT EXPLODED LORENA AUGUSTA BIGNELL
And thus began my father’s worrying. Not only had Mother died, but I was ill and cursed right from the start. The actors shook their heads. The doctors shook their heads. There was death all about me. I had not much time, Oh, the poor child. And so I was born to stay inside.
I should include a very small addendum here. It is possible that this story is an exaggeration; it is quite possible that my poor aunt did not explode as such, indeed she had been coughing a good deal I have been told, and it is very possible that in fact my aunt, as a result of a severe lung infection, hemorrhaged, and that a little blood did indeed come from her mouth, perhaps even a quantity. It is difficult, at this distance, to know exactly. Certainly she died, and probably she bled. We who live in the theatre here have some belief in magical things. Rules that apply to other buildings do not apply here. In the theatre we strive to make the impossible possible, to believe in and convince our public of fantastical personages and happenings. Very frequently, for example, we bring back old dead kings (not Gurgunt under Norwich Castle, but the ones often called Henry or Richard) and have them alive here upon our stage. All this makes it seem possible, then, that Lorena did explode, but also that she merely leaked. I cannot say which is the truth. But in either case she did deliver her curse. In either case she did die very shortly afterward, perhaps even instantly. And so, as we are a very suspicious people—we believe in curses and in dying curses particularly—and so here I am and ever likely to remain.
It is well known that ravens must be kept at the Tower of London, or else the Crown will fall and Britain too. That is a London belief. We in the east of England have our own thinking: it is lucky to have a bent sixpence in your pocket; if you shiver, someone is walking over your future grave; if you break two things, you will surely break a third; if you put a broom in the corner, you are sure to receive strangers; if you stumble upstairs, you will marry before the year ends; if you eat pork marrow, you will go mad; you must never look at a new moon through glass; a horse has the power to see ghosts; you must always burn a tooth after it has been drawn, otherwise, if said tooth should be eaten by a dog, you will grow a dog’s tooth; a child cursed indoors will die outdoors.
Well, then, I am one of those.
* * *
• • •
My prison. My palace. My home. Every day and only.
It is a very old building, our theatre, and it has been rebuilt and added to over centuries. Its foundations, so they say, are in part Roman stones moved over from the city of Colchester after Boudicca had destroyed it, but I cannot say if this is true or only another story. When the Saxons conquered Norwich, the spot was made into a great beer hall; thus it stood a long time, and was the place where revelers would come and perform. In the sixteenth century our site was the White Swann Inn, and it was here that the Norwich Company of Comedians did gather and play. At first our theatre was religious, but then it shoved God off and became more and more secular. Increasingly it was about us mortal people and how we rise and fall and how sad we are and how happy and how brief.
In 1754 our neighbor, the Assembly House, was built. Here the well shod of Norwich came to dance and fall in love and have concerts and proper entertainment. At length that uprightness did spread out from the Assembly House until it infected the White Swann, and so at last, three years later, we became an actual theatre. The New Theatre we were called then, and our first show was The Way of the World by Mr. Congreve. A small place we were and we had no real license to perform, because only London had permission to have plays put on, and elsewhere went legally playless—until at last, on 17 March 1768, we who were out of the capital were given a royal assent to put on plays. Then we were called the Theatre Royal Norwich, though no royal of Britain has yet warmed our royal box.
Our theatre, greatly loved, was soon too small to fit Norwich in it. In 1801, keeping its old foundations and some of its timbers, it was built all over again in its present wonder. And so here we are—not so fresh as 1801, now that we’ve grown to 1901, and our decorations are fading and we do crumble in places. Our Norwich ground, after all, is chalk from the bones of thousands of deceased sea creatures that died many millions of years ago, and sometimes that bone does crack. Yes, Georgian are our walls, though our soul is Saxon and dead sea beast, and lately we were Victorian. We had our latest great overhaul near the beginning of her reign, but she did reign for so long that by the time she died, our decorations had lost a little of their shine. And so here we are today, 20 March 1901, the queen is dead, and the seventh Edward has taken his seat.
I can’t feel any difference, personally, between the old woman and her son the old man. We have lots of mourning crape front of house, and everywhere public wears the gloom, and my aunts appear in bombazine and my uncles wear black armbands made in our own wardrobe.
Norwich is famous for its mourning cloth, Norwich Black Crape it is called, it is a great business with us. All the nation does wear it when in grief, as it is now. No one knows how to mourn like the people of Norwich.
Otherwise, all is business as usual.
So then I must come to it. For no matter what I say, there is always that other thing behind it, like a creeping shadow. Even when I talk of the theatre, there it is, beside the theatre and within it: my discovery, the lost children of Norwich. I talk of the Spread and there, in the thick red, it does form itself: the lost children. I am riddled with my secret, and in order for me to go on I must let a little out at a time, like the doctors used to with their bleeding—drip my burden onto the page. But how does a twelve-year-old go about telling such a thing, how to make those that are twice twelve and more comprehend my learning?
I have never conquered my suspicion that many of the lost children are to be found inside the Beetle Spread. But I cannot prove it. I have wondered this to my aunts and uncles, yet they give it no creed. How did they get in there? they ask. Why, by murder, I say. Ha, they say, what nonsense. Of course they believe in kings under a hill, and fairy folk in the woods and at the bottom of a garden; they believe in Black Shuck; they believe all Norfolk tales to be purely true. But lost children and murder they will not trust. Whenever I do mention my secret to some adult, they do shove me off and tell me about imagination and its dangers and that I should go back onto the roof, and thus let the tale-telling weaken in the fresh air. “What you are saying is not truth.” I cannot tell it to the Norwich people, for whenever I go front of house when the public is within, Father insists for my own safety that I remain mute, that I keep a proper distance between myself and my city. “Leave the poor people of Norwich alone, my ailing Edith.”
But it doesn’t go away, my secret.
And yet, despite all this, I found a way.
* * *
• • •
I am twelve, as previously advertised, and when we come thirteen in this theatre then do we come of age. There is a sort of ceremony; if we are actors, it is during this time that we are first given a significant part and made much fuss of. And thirteen does come soon for me, as it does for so many of us—though not all, as I have hinted. I could never hope for a great acting role, for I am silent, at Father’s insistence, whenever I do tread upon the stage. How then may I make myself heard? There is a way. Oh, it came to me very quick one afternoon as I sat with my discovery beside me, almost tangible, amid all my maps and papers of Norwich, the long lists of children’s names, pages and pages of them. Many times have I gone up to the roof, folded these pages of names into paper birds, and launched them into Norwich—though in the main they do tumble unhappily onto Theatre Street. Among my borrowed literature was an etching of a skull upon a gravestone, and this skull turned the thoughts in my head to my own skull, and I whispered aloud: “So many skulls do I learn of, and so many immature.” The skull—I slapped my own at the realization. How many times had I seen my father dressed in black, holding up a skull in his hand upon the stage? Very well then, I cried.
