I did not stop until I had reached my empty shell of a house.
Now dawn.
Heart racketing.
Brain-boil.
— XV —
In which Miss Terry reveals a secret and the theatre’s ghost is met
In the Leading Lady’s office that Miss Terry has insisted on having installed as part of her contract, she rises from the desk, crosses to the meeting table.
‘Where are we with the list, Bram? You were on page four? Can we hurry?’
She has asked him to let her observe his work as a manager, is planning to run her own theatre one day.
‘I have paid the wages,’ says Stoker, reading from his notebook of tasks. ‘Arranged the auditions, spoken to the bank, ordered the glazier for the new doors to the auditorium, settled the accounts for refurbishing this room.’
‘That can’t have cost much,’ she says, looking about, ‘the furniture’s off a scrap heap.’
‘And there is a reporter from The Times downstairs, gristly old sort. He would like to speak with you for an hour about the show.’
‘Have him fed to the Chief’s dog, will you? Fussy don’t mind a bit of gristle, do you, old fellow?’
The hound utters a grunt from its rug by the fire.
‘The publicity would be useful in selling tickets.’
‘My hat to their tickets, Auntie, let them come or not.’
‘Without tickets being sold, there is no theatre at all. As you will see when you run a playhouse yourself.’
‘If you insist.’
‘I do.’
‘I surrender.’
She returns to the desk, pulls a handkerchief from a drawer and uses it to polish her spectacles.
‘It’s always the same tedious questions from the reporters,’ she says dully. ‘They make one lose the will to live. Vot do you reckon to Shakespeare? Vot is it like being a vumman in ze theatre? Ow does you put togezzer a portrayal?’
This is one of her odder mannerisms, the adopting of what she describes as a Hungarian accent to imitate anyone she finds an irritation.
‘Well, how do you?’
‘I look at the people around me. How does anyone?’
‘You look?’
‘A limp? My housemaid. A squint? My aunt. A nice old girl? You. A pompous but likeable bore? The Chief.’
Stoker permits himself a laugh. She imitates it back to him with such exactitude that he startles.
‘Watching is meat and drink,’ she says. ‘People are food. You have surely noticed that the Chief has put your own particular way of reading a book into his Macbeth?’
‘I hardly think so.’
‘You lick your fingertip before turning a page. So does his M. His Iago touches his face when frightened. So do you. There is a gesture you make where you touch the tips of your palms, you do it when you’re asking for something – watch carefully, he’ll use it.’
‘A coincidence surely?’
‘Nothing is a coincidence.’
‘This is.’
‘Pop over and open that drawer in the cabinet for me, would you, Bram? You’ll find a bundle of little sketchbooks. Fetch one of them over like a good man. Any at random.’
The tome’s wrinkled pages are of greying old parchment, every inch of space alive with inked drawings of hands, mouths and eyes, free-flowing lines of footprints, bits of musical notation.
‘You drew these?’
‘It’s the way I go into a part, darling. I look. That is all. Their mannerisms, habits, things about their accent. How a character walks is as important as anything she says. The way she lifts a wineglass. The way she draws a curtain. Whatever words she puts the weight on when she’s saying a sentence. Most of all her stare. Get that, you get everything.’
Stoker riffles the pages. A nun’s head turns towards the viewer, smiles, bares its teeth.
‘Started doing them as a girl,’ she says. ‘Tip I got from my father, an old warhorse, took me on for his panto when I was only seven or eight. “Always attend to your sketches, they’ll stand to you in the end. Your scholar’s got his schoolbooks. But a player’s got those.” ’
‘They are beautiful. I didn’t know you could draw.’
‘No no, it’s not beauty, it’s just looking, dear Bram. It’s knowing everything contains the opposite of itself. It’s the key to playing Ophelia, Desdemona, Lady M. Put something into every lover that wants to be rejected. And something into every villain that wants to be loved. All the evil in the world, it comes from shattered love. Forget that and the audience won’t believe you.’
‘Aren’t we straying a little from theatrical management?’
‘These wonderful stories you write? That’s why they don’t sell as well as they might do, darling. Oh, you can scribble a fine sentence but more ginger in ’em, more zhoosh. Because you’ve not done your sketches. You’ve not enough to draw from. Now come down with me and watch the Ripper at rehearsals, will you.’
‘The Chief’s new nickname among the players is not something he knows about.’
‘Oh I should think he’d rather like it, wouldn’t you say?’
The Merchant of Venice. They sit together in the wings. People come and go, asking questions, seeking money, but he finds it hard to turn his gaze from the light of the stage, as though a scrim of gauze has been raised, some diaphanousness removed.
There is no costume, no wig, only an ungainly man in a dressing-robe and battered top hat, calling into the darkness as he sucks on a cigar
‘Shine the bloody lime, man! It’s me they’ll want to see.’
The light adjusts. But the Chief is still unhappy.
‘I said BLAZE the blasted things, can’t you. And give it some red, you twittering drip, before I come and stick my boot up the highest rafters of your hole!’
The beam reddens down. ‘Now we’re farming. Good lad.’ The Chief lowers his head heavily, as though its weight has increased. When he raises it again, the face is not Irving’s.
It is longer, scrawnier, forty years older. The voice has the quiver of an old man frightened and hurt. There is confusion in the eyes, stony shock in the grimace, disbelief in the curve of the abject mouth which drops occasional stunned question-marks into the text, like ice cubes into a vat of hot blood.
He hath DISGRACED me and HINDERED me half a million? … LAUGHED at my losses. MOCKED at my gains? … SCORNED my nation? … THWARTED my bargains … COOLED my friends?.. HEATED mine enemies. And what is his reason? I AM A JEW.
The scrubwomen working in the stalls pause and turn. He looks at them a long moment before seeming to notice them. He totters towards the footlights. Kneels. In silent tears. Points towards his face, fingers trembling.
Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew HANDS? Organs? Dimensions? Senses? Affections, Passions? FED with the same food? HURT with the same weapons? Subject to the same diseases? HEALED by the same means?
He waits. Oh so long. As though trying to force them to answer. His arched eyebrows asking, his features wrenched in pain.
If you prick us – he joins his fingertips as though begging a cruel judge – then the howl of betrayal – DO WE NOT BLEED?
Stoker feels her link his arm. ‘Terrible old ham,’ she whispers, ‘but you see, he’s done his pictures.’
The reporter from The Times is waiting. Off Miss Terry goes. There are tickets to be sold, truths to be concealed, suggestions to be hinted at, spotlights to be ducked.
Hot, breathless, Stoker rolls up the left sleeve of his jacket. As though seeing a man on a stage for the first time, or noticing a ghost that has always been there, he watches, scribbling pictures on his cuff.
It will not be too long before he climbs again to Mina’s Lair. There was never any choice of destination.
Since she has not slept in a hundred years, ‘awakening’ is not the word for what happens to Mina. It is akin to the turning of a tide, the fall of a shadow across stone, water becoming steam or ice. A crow stares at nothing. A small fl
ame falters. At such moments Mina notices she is here.
In her attic of dust and spiders, she listens.
Sky-shriek, rat-scuttle, gull-call, heron, the tittuping of squirrels across the ancient roof, then the snore of the oaken rafters. The creak of bony pillars and chimney-stacks and newels, the wheeze of dead pipes, the rumble of an old furnace’s long-defeated innards. Not having a body herself – earning nothing but trouble from it when she had – she finds bodies a fascination.
Time is different for Mina. Five years in one second. A month is a hundred years. Her senses come in contours the living don’t see. She thinks in the shape of a coffin.
A heavy
crate is not
as heavy if the
crate is well made
Every stagehand
knows it is so
but no one
knows why
It is one of
the things
I know
Sometimes she voyages out, wanders the riverbank, the backstreets. There are hours when she stands in the Stage Door.
She has been glimpsed in the Royal Box, once or twice on the Upper Balcony. Some say she walks Exeter Street on the night of a full moon. There are occasions when she can be seen despite not wishing to be, and others when she would like to be, but can’t be.
Out she wraiths across Tobacco Wharf, whirling up among the masts of clippers, swooping low towards the bollards and dreggy waterlines. Trailing comets of story, afterlives of sin. Past portholes and casements, down chimneys, through locks. London has no secrets from Mina.
Some nights, she is a wall of dust moving slowly across Piccadilly, causing passers-by to marvel and to rub at their clothes; others, she is a tolling from St Mary le Strand that exhumes a long-buried memory of broken love. She has been seen as far away as Deptford, on the waterfront at Gravesend, in the portico of the Royal Opera House, among the street-girls behind Charing Cross station. The sudden click behind you in the still and empty hall, the sense of a presence in the room. That time, late at night, when you felt certain you were watched, when you were terrified to raise your eyes from the pages of your ghost story because of what you might see in the mirror.
Awakening is not the word. Here she is in her flaxy roost, her purgatory beneath the slates, this girlchild made of dusk and betrayal. She spins herself slowly along the spine of the roof-beam, tendrils around the ribs of the rafters.
The intruder is here again. Sat hunched at his machine, in a globe of pale candlelight and exhaustion. Whatever can he be doing? For whom?
His own spinnerets cannot be seen, but they exist all the same. Around him, the web of spun words. Onward he weaves, not knowing quite why, through the smogs of self-doubt and the starbursts of rage.
A large man. Portly. In that way like her murderer. The candlelight takes on gold and purple. There is a reservoir of savagery in him, it seeps from his pores, but there is also something stranger, a woman-gentleness. He comes here every evening, this chubby, bearded fire-eyes who thinks himself alone in the attics. Rolls his shoulders, punches the dust, scratches hard at his scalp, unjackets his weird machine.
Mina listens to its clack as her motes come and go. The racketing ching and chunk, its whirr. Her nothingness rearranges herself in harmony with his tapping and the dirty bronze glow from the skylight. She whispers to her sisters, the moonbeams over London. She waves through the broken slating as she counts up the stars, one for every woman was ever murdered by a man, and a constellation of failed, dead books.
His first. His second. His third. His fourth. She has watched as the forlorn twinkle for each of them was added to the night, a pinprick of luminous irrelevance. When he looks at them himself, they have the ferociousness of the sun, but other people don’t even notice, and this he knows, too. Still, he comes climbing to her attic.
Tell my story, she says. Give me back my life. But he can’t or won’t hear. His tapping is too loud.
She has the feeling that is why he makes his words, so he won’t have to listen to what happens when the curtains of a silence part.
Her fingers strum the body of the broken harp. He thinks the weird music is made by the breeze.
When her teardrops smudge his words, he tells himself the stain has been caused by the leaky roof.
Weeping? Yes, she weeps. A body is not needed for that. Tears are the part of grief that is visible above the waterline, they are not where the wreckage is done. Nights she has stood in front of him and screamed with all her vanished heart, tugged at his hair, slashed at his face. For pity’s sake, storyteller. See me.
He stares up and sees only three droplets from a rafter, caused to drip by the force of her scream. One night, she tried so hard – agonising, the effort – but when he turned from his machine towards the place where she was kneeling before him in supplication, he saw only a one-eyed cat.
I am not a one-eyed cat. I am not a drop of rain. Why can’t you see me? I am here.
Back he swivelled to his machine, podgy fingers playing the keys, his thick brows caterpillars of sweat. Desperate not to lose his thread. Must have been wintertime because the attic’s great pipes were roaring, all around the veins of the world. The spider-web smelt queer with the metallic stench of the heat, there was a taste of iron filings where her tongue should be. He had taken off his shirt, was gulping from a flagon of water.
A glue of sweat trickling his back. His face red as monthsblood. The tip of his tongue protruding.
On the table, a ledger, his scribbles of runes. He stared at them, translated them, bashed out the sentences, pausing to shout a blasphemy or to light a cigarette on the glowing corpse of another or to howl in abject frustration at the effort of whatever it was he was attempting, as a man trying to pass a kidney stone.
Up she crept behind him. So close she could see the tiny hairs on his neck. Peered over his shoulder, saw the strange words the machine was making.
The blood. Is the life. I was conscious. Of the presence. As if lapped. In a storm. Of fury.
‘Papa, will you help with my Latin prep?’
A fervent, serious sixteen-year-old boy, eyes shining with intelligence, in his nightshirt, by the fire, playing with a model theatre.
‘Not at the moment, old thing.’
‘Mamma, can’t you make him?’
‘Bram?’
‘I am busy with these papers.’
‘For heaven’s sake, Bram, he’s hardly seen you in weeks.’
‘Mamma, Papa, please don’t fight again … You promised.’
An hour later, the guilty father pads his way up the stairs, tells the nanny to leave the room. The boy’s eyes are strained; his face pale as the bedlinen. Yesterday he was a baby. Tomorrow he’ll be a man. On the table by the washstand, a model soldier stands sentry, his glossy scarlet livery giving back the candlelight as a music box on the counterpane tinkles ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’.
‘Wotcher, there, Nolly.’
‘Papa.’
‘Been crying?’
‘No.’
‘Fluff up a chap’s pillows shall I?’
‘Missed you awfully when we were away in Ireland, Pops.’
‘Missed you also, old tyke.’
‘Mama says you’ve been writing another book.’
‘We’ll see.’
The father glances about the room, at the fleets of expensive toys the boy is getting too big for, the hoops and glittered puppets, the swords and suits of armour, the shields and ships-in-bottles. Something macabre in the helplessness of toys, like relics of a lost religion, the strange beauty of creatures becoming extinct.
‘Is there a monster in it, Papa?’
‘Wouldn’t be much of a story if there weren’t.’
‘Oh spiff, I like a monster story. Is he outstandingly horrid?’
A spear of longing pierces the father as he strokes his son’s hair.
‘He’s horrid in his way. But then other times, he’s sorrowful and just wants to go to sleep.�
��
The boy chuckles. ‘I never want that.’
‘But this feller’s been awake a thousand years. He’s bushed.’
‘I don’t see why that should make him sad.’
‘That is why we have stories, Nolly. So we can know what it’s like to be someone else.’
‘Why would we want that?’
‘Because sometimes it’s beastly tiring being us.’
‘Are you and Mamma going to fight again?’
‘No, pet. Sleep easy.’
In the living room, she is seated by the window, looking out at the rain. He opens his briefcase, retrieves papers, sits by the fire.
‘Another book, then?’ she asks, in a quiet, quavering voice.
‘Not certain just yet. Probably nothing.’
‘You don’t feel that we see little enough of you as it is? Out every night of the week and never home before dawn. Four books to your name and none of them what you had hoped—’
‘You put my failure tactfully I see, but you put it all the same.’
‘And now the writing of yet another is to take up whatever minuscule shred of time you do not already give to that – creature.’
‘I thought I’d have a last go. One final attempt.’
‘Your writing seems to lead to nothing but hurt feelings for you.’
‘I suppose a man’s feelings are still his own business.’
‘Then why would he marry?’
‘I daresay he wonders.’
‘I daresay so does his wife.’
The flames in the grate crackle as the fizzing coals adjust. A point has been arrived at. The spouses opt for silence. But the magnetism is too strong for peace.
‘I have asked Mary to make up the guest room,’ she says.
‘Of course. If you wish. What’s brought this on?’
‘It wakes me when you come in from the theatre at dawn. And then you seem so restless.’
‘I see.’
‘Let’s try it for a bit anyhow, see how it works.’
‘Agreed.’
‘Very well.’ She opens her book, an old edition of Dante he bought years ago from a stall on the Embankment.
Shadowplay Page 19
