Auditions

The notice went up on the Monday on the board outside the dining hall, a single sheet of paper pinned at the corners, typed, with a line drawn under the title in red pen so hard that the pen had gone through the paper.

THE SCHOOL PLAY, LENT TERM 2031

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

by William Shakespeare

Auditions in the Tithe Barn, Wednesday and Thursday, 4 to 6 p.m. Open to all sixth-formers, including our guests. Prepare a speech of no more than twenty lines. Do not prepare Puck’s last speech; everybody prepares Puck’s last speech, and I will stop you after one line.

Ms S. Roberts

And under it, in the same red pen, in a smaller and more furious hand:

Do not prepare it in a funny voice either.

---

Ms Roberts was new that year, like the Americans. She had come in September from a theatre company in Cardiff that had closed in the summer for lack of money, and she was twenty-six and Welsh and about five foot one, with very short dark hair and very large dark eyes and a voice, when she wanted it, that could take the paint off a door. She taught English to the Lower School and drama to everybody, and in the first week of term she had reduced the head of school to silence in a corridor over a fire door that he had propped open with a chair, and in the second week she had reduced a visiting inspector to silence over the lighting in the tithe barn, and by the third week there was nobody in Coln Abbey, staff or pupils, including Dr Ord, who did not step slightly to one side when they saw her coming.

“She’s terrifying,” said Will.

“She’s brilliant,” said Hattie.

Hattie Ellis was Will’s twin. She was in Coln, not Windrush, and Frederick had seen her at meals all term without knowing she was anybody’s sister, a tall fair girl with Will’s grey eyes and none of his patience, who talked very fast and moved very fast and had once, in the second week, stood up in the middle of supper and said oh, for God’s sake to a boy from Evenlode in a voice that had silenced the hall. She was going to be an actress. She had been going to be an actress since she was four. She had told her parents at four, and again at eight, and again at twelve, and at sixteen she had stopped telling them and started writing to drama schools.

“Dad wants her to do the farm,” said Will, at supper, with the gloom of a man watching a storm come over a hill. “With me. Partners. He’s had a sign made. ELLIS AND ELLIS.” He ate a potato. “She says she’d rather die.”

“I would rather die,” said Hattie, from the next table, without turning round.

---

The tithe barn was at the edge of the school grounds, below the abbey, on the slope above the river, and it was the largest building Frederick had ever been inside that was not a church or a palace or an aircraft hangar. It had been built in the fourteenth century for the abbey to keep its tithes in, a tenth of everything every farm in the valley grew, piled up to the roof, and the roof was a great dark forest of oak beams going up and up into the shadow like the inside of an upturned ship, and the floor was stone, and the walls were stone, three feet thick, and it was so cold in December that you could see your breath in it with the heaters on.

At one end there was a stage. It was a wooden platform two feet high that somebody had built in about 1970, with a curtain on a wire and a row of lights on a bar above it that Ms Roberts had been fighting with since September.

At four o’clock on Wednesday there were forty sixth-formers sitting on the stone floor in front of the stage in their coats, and Ms Roberts was sitting on a hard chair in the middle of the floor facing the stage with a clipboard on her knee and a pencil behind her ear and her coat on, and she did not look round when they came in.

“Name,” she said, to each one, in turn, when they got up on the stage. “Part. Go.”

She stopped every single one of them.

She did not stop them rudely. She stopped them the way a surgeon stops bleeding. A boy from Leach did Oberon’s speech about the bank where the wild thyme blows, and got four lines in, and she said thank you, and he stopped, and she said you’re thinking about where to put your hands, don’t, put them in your pockets, and he put them in his pockets and did it again and it was much better, and she wrote something on the clipboard and said thank you. Next.

Lucía did Puck.

She did not do Puck’s last speech. She did the speech where Puck tells the fairy who he is, the merry wanderer of the night, and she did it standing on one leg on the edge of the stage with her arms out, very fast, as if she were about to fall off and did not mind, and Ms Roberts let her do the whole of it, all fifteen lines, without stopping her, and at the end said nothing, and wrote something on the clipboard, and then underlined it.

Hattie did Titania.

She did the speech where Titania tells Oberon that their quarrel has ruined the weather, the fogs and the floods and the rotting corn, and she did it straight out to the back of the barn, to the dark under the roof, very quietly, so that everybody leaned forward, and on the human mortals want their winter here her voice went somewhere that Frederick did not know voices could go, and when she stopped the barn was so quiet you could hear the river through three feet of stone.

Ms Roberts looked at her for a while.

“Thank you, Hattie,” she said. “Sit down. Don’t do it again in front of anybody till March.”

---

Frederick did Oberon.

He had chosen it because it seemed the obvious one. Oberon was the King of the Fairies. Everybody would expect him to do Oberon. He thought that if he did not do Oberon, people would wonder why, and that if he did, and did it well, there would be nothing to wonder about, and he had learned the speech about the bank where the wild thyme blows, and practised it in the boot room among the rugby boots, and it was, he thought, quite good.

He got up on the stage.

“Name,” said Ms Roberts.

“Frederick Hanover.”

“Part.”

“Oberon.”

Ms Roberts looked up from the clipboard.

She looked at him for some time, from the hard chair in the middle of the stone floor, with her large dark eyes and the pencil behind her ear and her coat on. Forty sixth-formers sitting on the floor in their coats turned, very slightly, to look at her looking at him.

“No,” said Ms Roberts.

“I’m sorry?”

“No. Not Oberon.” She put the pencil down on the clipboard. “I know why you’ve picked it. You’ve picked it because it’s the King. And you’ve thought that if you don’t do the King people will say why didn’t he do the King, and if you do the King and you’re good at it people will say well, of course he’s good at it, he is one, and that’ll be safe.” She folded her arms. “Am I wrong?”

Frederick stood on the stage.

“No,” he said.

“I didn’t think so.” Ms Roberts picked the pencil up again. “Do something else.”

“I haven’t prepared anything else.”

“I know. Nobody ever has.” She looked at him with her head on one side. “Do you know the play?”

“I’ve read it.”

“Do you know the Mechanicals? The workmen? Quince and Snout and Snug and Flute and Bottom. The ones who put on the play in the wood for the Duke’s wedding and are hopeless at it.”

“Yes.”

“Do Bottom,” said Ms Roberts.

There was a small noise from the floor. It was Theo.

“Bottom,” said Frederick.

“Bottom the weaver. Who wants to play every part in the play. Who gets turned into a donkey by Puck in the middle of the night and wakes up with a donkey’s head on and doesn’t notice, and the Queen of the Fairies falls in love with him, and he doesn’t notice that either, and then it all goes back to normal and he wakes up and thinks it was a dream.” She looked at him. “Do his speech when he wakes up. I have had a most rare vision. You’ll know it. Everybody knows it.”

He knew it.

“I’ve never done it.”

“Good,” said Ms Roberts. “Then you won’t do it the way you’ve done it before.”

---

He did Bottom’s speech.

He did it badly. He knew he was doing it badly from the first line, because he did it the way he would have done Oberon, straight, carefully, the way he read a Speech from a Throne, and after four lines Ms Roberts said stop.

“You’re doing it like a King,” she said.

“I don’t know how else to do it.”

“Yes, you do.” She leaned forward on the hard chair. “You’re Bottom. You’re a weaver. You’ve got a loom in your front room and four children and a wife who’s fed up with you and you’ve just woken up in the middle of a wood with no idea how you got there, and you’ve had the most extraordinary night of your life. You were a donkey. A Queen loved you. Fairies scratched your head and brought you honey. And now it’s morning and it’s gone, and you can’t remember it properly, and you’re trying to tell yourself about it, and you can’t, because it’s too big, and you keep getting the words wrong.” She sat back. “That’s not a King. A King knows what to say. Bottom doesn’t. Bottom’s never known what to say in his life and it’s never once stopped him saying it.”

Frederick stood on the stage.

He thought about the Back Walk at Stirling. His father at the bottom of it, leaning on the stick, looking up at the castle, trying to find the word, and the word coming, one at a time, like stones. He thought about the space behind the bonfire, and Jack’s face doing nothing for the first time, and himself, saying sorry, and I didn’t, and I don’t know why I, and not being able to finish a single sentence.

He thought about how it had felt, afterwards, walking back round the fire. As if something enormous had happened in the dark and he had been there for it and could not, now, in the light, remember how.

He did it again.

He did not do it like a King. He did it like a man who has woken up in a wood and cannot find the word for what has happened to him and keeps trying. I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. He got the words wrong on purpose where Bottom gets them wrong, the eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, and he did not do it for a laugh, he did it because he could not get them right, and the barn did laugh, the forty sixth-formers on the stone floor in their coats, but not at him, and then it stopped laughing, and was quiet.

He got to the end.

Ms Roberts did not say anything.

She wrote something on the clipboard. Then she underlined it. Then she underlined it again.

“Thank you,” she said. “Sit down.” And then, as he got down off the stage: “You’ll do.”

---

Theo did not audition.

He had not meant to. He had come to watch. He had sat on the stone floor at the back with Kit for two afternoons in his coat with his knees up round his ears, and at a quarter to six on Thursday, when everybody else had been and Ms Roberts was writing on the clipboard and the light was going in the high windows, she looked up and saw him.

“You,” she said. “At the back. The tall one.”

Theo looked round to see who she meant.

“Yes, you. You’re the one who fell over under a tree.” She pointed at him with the pencil. “Stand up.”

Theo stood up. It took a while.

Ms Roberts looked at him from the hard chair, all the way up, and all the way down, with an expression of profound professional satisfaction.

“Have you ever acted?”

“No.”

“Do you want to?”

“No.”

“Good,” said Ms Roberts. “You’re Wall.”

“I’m what?”

“Wall. In the play inside the play. The Mechanicals need a wall for the lovers to talk through, and they can’t afford a real one, so they get Snout to be a wall, with some plaster and some stone on him, and he holds up his fingers for the chink.” She looked at Theo with deep approval. “You’ll be the best Wall this school has ever had. You won’t have to do anything. You’ll just have to stand there and be enormous.”

Theo opened his mouth.

“Kit,” said Ms Roberts, without looking round, “make sure he comes to rehearsals.”

“Yes, miss,” said Kit Barraclough, with the deepest satisfaction of his life.

---

The cast list went up on Friday morning.

It went up on the board outside the dining hall at a quarter to eight, and by eight o’clock there were sixty people in front of it, and by five past there were a hundred, and Frederick could not get anywhere near it, and did not need to, because Will came back through the crowd holding his head in both hands.

“Bottom,” said Will. “You’re Bottom. At the top. It’s at the top. BOTTOM, F. HANOVER.” He took his hands off his head. “Hattie’s Titania. Your Lucía’s Puck. Devon’s Lysander, God help us. And Theo’s.” He started to laugh. “Theo’s Wall. It says WALL, T. HARTIGAN. And then in brackets, in red pen. (Do not argue.)”

Behind Frederick, Theo said nothing at all.

Then he said, quietly, “She’s been talking to Dame M.”

“She’s never met Dame M.”

“She’s been talking to her in spirit,” said Theo.

At the bottom of the list, under the cast, under Stage Manager and Prompt and Wardrobe, there was one more line, and Inés, who had pushed through to the front of the crowd and back again without anybody seeing her do it, came and stood beside Frederick and said, in her flat voice, without looking at him:

“I’m on lights.”

“I didn’t know you’d asked.”

“I didn’t ask. She asked me. On Wednesday. She saw me looking at the bar.” Inés looked at the floor. “The lights in the barn are terrible. They’ve been terrible since 1970. She said if I could make them not terrible she’d put my name on the poster.” She paused. “In the same size as yours.”

“Can you?”

“I don’t know yet,” said Inés. And then, after a moment, with something in her voice that Frederick had not heard in it before, in four months of knowing her, something that sounded very like happiness and was trying hard not to be: “I’ve never been asked to do anything I didn’t know how to do.”

---

On Friday afternoon there were two letters on the table in the porters’ lodge, beside the telephone, where Mr Gage left his post.

One was a long thin white envelope with a New Westminster postmark and an Ellicott High School crest on the flap, addressed in a small upright hand that he knew at once. He opened it in the lodge.

There was one sheet of paper inside. On it, in the same small upright hand, there was a problem. Written out in full, in the exact form in which it would have been set on a Thursday at lunch in a room that smelled of the gas taps. An equilibrium. Two gases in a closed vessel, the pressure doubled, the temperature held, what happens and why.

There were no other words on the page. Not Dear Frederick. Not How is England. Not a name. Just the problem, and at the bottom, in the corner, the space where his answer would go.

He stood in the porters’ lodge and laughed out loud, and Mr Gage, in the next room, did not come out.

He did it there, on the counter, in pencil, left-handed, because the finger was still strapped. It took eleven minutes. He checked it. It was right. He folded it back into the envelope and wrote on the outside, Mrs Okonedo, Ellicott High School, New Westminster, and put it in the post box by the lodge door.

He did not write anything else either.

---

The other letter was pale blue.

Airmail. A careful old hand that leaned to the right, in pencil, and under his name, as an address, Coln Abbey School, Gloucestershire, ENGLAND, underlined twice, and then, at the bottom, as though the post office might need encouragement: PERSONAL. FROM 22ND ST.

He had known it would come. He had not known when.

He took it out onto the gravel in front of Windrush and sat on the bench by the door, in his coat, in the cold, with the light going over the valley, and opened it.

A photograph first. Of the kind that comes out of a chemist’s machine in ten minutes. A street of wooden houses, old ones, pale blue and yellow, with porches. And between the blue one and the yellow one, where in the spring there had been a frame of raw new timber against the sky like the drawing of a house, there was a house. Walls. Windows with glass in them. A roof, half on, the tiles in stacks in the yard. A porch with no paint on it yet. And in front of the porch, on the low wall, in a long row, the roses, finished now, cut back for the winter to brown stems.

In front of the roses, on a folding chair, with a stick across her knees and a coat on and the straw hat replaced by a woollen one, a very small very old woman, looking at the camera as though she would like it to hurry up.

Two pages, in Spanish, in the same pencil.

Federico,

It has walls. You said you would come when it had walls. It has walls now, and windows, and half a roof, and my son says the other half will be on by Christmas if it does not rain, which it will. So you may come.

I know you cannot come. Rosa has told me. Rosa reads me everything from the newspaper, including the one by the man who wants to know where you are. I could have told him where you are. You are at school. That is where boys of seventeen are. It is not a mystery.

Rosa also read me that you said a sentence in the Welsh and a sentence in the Scottish, in the London Parliament, and that the man in the newspaper wishes to know why not one in Spanish. I have thought about this. I agree with the man in the newspaper. I do not often agree with newspapers.

So I will tell you what you should say. I have chosen it. It is on the other side of this page. I have written it very clearly so that even a boy who speaks Spanish like a teacher cannot get it wrong. You may say it at Christmas. Rosa says you speak to the Realm at Christmas on the television. Say it then.

If you do not say it I will know.

The kitchen table is back. Exactly where it was. I measured. My son says it is an inch to the left. My son is wrong.

You are still too thin. I could tell from the photograph in the crown. The crown is too big for you. Eat.

Esperanza Ruelas

And under it, in a different hand, younger, in blue ink:

She wrote the sentence nine times before she was happy with it. Then she made me check the accents. Then she made me check them again. R.

He turned the page over.

There, on the back, in the careful old pencil hand that leaned to the right, printed, very large, one letter at a time, like a woman laying stones, was a sentence in Spanish.

He read it.

He sat on the bench in the cold in front of Windrush with the light going over the valley and read it again. Then he folded the letter round the photograph and put it inside his coat, against his chest, and sat there until Kimura, from the porch behind him, said, quietly, “Sir. Tea.”

He went in.

That night, in the blue notebook, under the Gaelic and the Welsh, he copied out the Spanish, very carefully, checking every accent twice.

Then he took a pen out of his drawer, a cheap blue ballpoint with the end chewed, ELLICOTT HIGH SCHOOL, and a sheet of paper, and wrote, in Spanish, slowly, with his left hand, because his right was still strapped, a letter back to Twenty-Second Street.

It was not long. It said that he would say it at Christmas. It said that he would come when he was home in June. It said that he was eating. It said that he had been cast in a play as a man who is turned into a donkey and does not notice.

And at the bottom, before he signed it, he wrote one more line, and looked at it for a long time, and did not cross it out.

Something has happened here that I do not know the word for yet. When I know it, I will tell you.