Rehearsal

They had been rehearsing since January in pieces.

Ms Roberts did not believe in reading a play through from the beginning until everybody in it knew what they were doing in their own corner of it, so for ten weeks they had rehearsed in corners. The lovers on Tuesdays in the music room, four of them, with Devon as Lysander and a boy from Coln as Demetrius and two girls from Evenlode as Hermia and Helena, quarrelling in the wood, over and over, until Ms Roberts said they sounded like a real quarrel and Devon said it is a real quarrel and the girl playing Hermia hit him with the script. The fairies on Wednesdays in the gym, Lucía as Puck and Hattie as Titania and a tall silent boy from Leach as Oberon, and eight girls from the Lower Sixth as Titania’s train, who spent most of the first month learning how to run across a stage without making a sound, which Ms Roberts said was the whole of fairy acting and the hardest thing in the theatre.

The Mechanicals on Thursdays, in the tithe barn.

The Mechanicals were six: Quince the carpenter, who directs the play inside the play, played by Kit Barraclough, who had been told he would be Quince in January and had said I’m not acting and been told by Ms Roberts you’re not acting, you’re directing, you’re a man trying to get five idiots to do a play, you’ve been doing it with Hartigan since September, and had thought about this, and agreed. Snug the joiner, who plays the Lion, played by Hugo Lomax, enormous, gentle, terrified. Flute the bellows-mender, who plays Thisbe, the girl, in a wig, played by Will Ellis, who had been told it was traditional and believed it. Starveling the tailor, who plays Moonshine, with a lantern and a dog and a bush, played by Ollie from Evenlode, who had said in the common room in October that the Throne looked lonely.

Snout the tinker, who plays Wall.

And Bottom.

---

The first full read-through was on the Monday of the third week of March, at four o’clock, in the tithe barn, with every member of the cast sitting on the stone floor in a great ring in their coats with their scripts on their knees, and Ms Roberts in the middle on her hard chair with the clipboard, and Inés up a ladder against the wall at the back doing something to the lighting bar with a screwdriver that she had been doing every afternoon for a month, and refusing to say what.

They read it from the beginning.

It took two hours. It was not good. Ms Roberts had said it would not be good. The first time you read it all together, she had said, it will be terrible, because you will all hear for the first time that you are in a play with other people in it, and you will all be frightened of each other. And they were. The lovers were frightened of the fairies, and the fairies were frightened of the lovers, and everybody was frightened of Hattie, who read Titania’s speeches in a voice so quiet that the whole ring had to lean in to hear, and so terrible that nobody wanted to, and the Mechanicals were frightened of everybody.

And then they got to Act Three, Scene One, where Bottom is in the wood with the others rehearsing their play, and Puck finds them, and turns Bottom’s head into an ass’s head, and the others run away screaming, and Bottom is left alone, not knowing what has happened to him, and sings.

Frederick read it.

He read it the way he had been reading it on Thursdays since January, which was the way Ms Roberts had taught him in the audition, not like a King, like a man who has never known what to say and has never once let that stop him. It was all right. He knew it was all right. The ring laughed in the places it was supposed to.

Ms Roberts said stop.

He stopped.

She was looking at him from the hard chair in the middle of the ring with her pencil behind her ear and her large dark eyes, and the ring went quiet, and turned, very slightly, to look at her looking at him.

“It’s fine,” said Ms Roberts.

“Thank you.”

“It’s fine. It’s perfectly fine. It’s the best Bottom I’ve had in a school.” She folded her arms. “And it’s you. It’s your voice. It’s a nice clever American boy doing Bottom in a nice clever American voice, very well.” She tapped the clipboard with the pencil. “Bottom’s not American. Bottom’s not clever. Bottom’s a weaver from Athens who’s actually from Warwickshire because the man who wrote him was. He sounds like somebody. He sounds like a man down the pub.” She leaned back on the hard chair. “Do it in any voice but your own.”

“Any voice?”

“Any voice. Any accent you like. I don’t care. Just not that one. Not the radio.” She waved the pencil. “You can’t do accents, I know. Americans can’t. You’ll do a terrible Cockney like a film and everyone will laugh and that’ll be fine, at least it’ll be somebody. Go on.”

He looked at the script on his knee.

He looked round the ring. At Theo, at the other side of it, sitting cross-legged with his script, in his coat, with his knees up round his ears. At Kit, beside Theo, with his glasses. At Will, in a blonde wig that Ms Roberts had made him start wearing in February so you get used to it. At Lucía and Hattie and Devon and the tall silent Oberon from Leach. At Inés, up the ladder at the back, who had stopped doing whatever she was doing to the lighting bar and was looking down.

He thought about a riverbank and a line round a tree. Nobody’s ever asked.

He did it in Morag’s voice.

---

There was a silence in the tithe barn.

It was not a long one. It was about as long as it took for forty people on a stone floor in their coats to understand that the voice coming out of the King of fourteen countries, reading Bottom the weaver from Act Three, Scene One of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, was the voice of a ghillie of twenty-five from the hills north-west of Stirling, exactly, every vowel, the rolling r and the lift at the end of the line, and that it was not a joke, and that he was not doing it for a laugh, and that it was not a terrible Cockney like a film.

He got four lines in.

Ms Roberts said stop.

She was sitting forward on the hard chair. She had uncrossed her arms.

“Again,” she said. “Something else.”

He did it again. He did it in the voice of a woman from Cork who had looked after him when he was three and four and five in the north wing nursery at Columbia Palace and had sung to him in it every night, and had gone home to Cork when he was six and written to him every Christmas since, and whose voice he had not heard out loud in eleven years and had not forgotten.

“Again,” said Ms Roberts.

He did it in English. Not the radio. A voice from the market in Cirencester, from behind the pasty stall under the green awning, the man who sold them, broad, slow, from somewhere west of here, with every r in it and all the hs gone.

The ring had stopped breathing.

Across it, Theo was looking at him with his mouth open.

Not with the face he made at the top of a caber. Not with the face on the steps of the Abbey. With a face Frederick had never seen on him in six years, since seventh grade, since the second week, since Freddie. It was the face of somebody who has known a house his whole life, every room of it, and has just opened a door he thought was a cupboard and found a staircase.

“Again,” said Ms Roberts, very quietly.

He did it in Welsh.

He did not do it in Mr Pryce’s mother’s voice, from the valley in the south. He had been listening to Ms Roberts since December. In the barn and in the corridors and at the top of the stairs taking the paint off doors. He knew where she was from before she had told anybody. He had known since the audition. It was not the same valley as Mr Pryce’s. It was the next one over, west, a little further up, where the vowels went somewhere else and the tune of the sentence went up at the end and stayed up, like a question nobody was going to answer.

He did Bottom in Ms Roberts’s own voice.

He got two lines in.

Ms Roberts put both hands over her face.

---

“Where,” said Theo.

It was afterwards. It was outside the tithe barn in the dusk, on the slope above the river, with the cast going away up the path toward the school in twos and threes in their coats, all of them looking back, and Theo standing in front of him with his script in one hand and an expression of complete, bewildered, wounded astonishment.

“Where,” said Theo again. “When. How. Six years, Freddie. Six years. I knew about the Swedish. I’ve always known about the Swedish. You speak Swedish to your mum in the kitchen and you think nobody’s listening and I’ve been listening since I was twelve.” He held up the script. “I didn’t know you could do that.”

“Nobody asked.”

“I’m asking.”

“I just listen,” said Frederick. “That’s all. I’ve always just listened. You grow up in a house with a mother from Stockholm and a father from London and a nanny from Cork and Bridget from wherever Bridget’s from, and a Household full of people from everywhere, and you don’t talk much, because you’re not supposed to, and you listen.” He looked down the slope at the river. “And then you can do it. I don’t know how. I just can. I’ve never done it out loud before Morag.”

“Morag,” said Theo. “Morag knew?”

“And Mr Pryce. And Rennie’s sister.”

“Rennie’s sister knew before me?”

“It was Burns Night,” said Frederick. “I had to do the grace.”

Theo stood on the slope in the dusk and looked at him for a long time.

Then he started to laugh. Not the caber laugh. A slow, helpless, rueful laugh, with his head going back, at the sky, which had a star in it now over the hill.

“Six years,” said Theo, to the star. “Six years I’ve been sitting next to you in every class, every car, every aeroplane, every church. I carried your train. And you could do Scotland.” He wiped his eyes. “What else can you do? Can you juggle? Can you fly a helicopter?”

“I can’t skate.”

“I know you can’t skate. I saw the photograph from Stockholm.” Theo shook his head. “You fell over eleven times.”

“Mum counted.”

“Of course she counted,” said Theo, and put his arm round Frederick’s neck, in the dusk, on the slope above the river, the way he had done in seventh grade, when they were twelve, and walked him up the path to the school like that, laughing, and did not let go until Windrush.

---

The donkey’s head came on the Thursday.

It had been made by the art department over three weeks out of chicken wire and newspaper and flour-and-water paste and a great deal of grey paint, and two enormous ears lined with pink felt, and a mane of black wool that had come off an old rug in the staff room, and a pair of large brown glass eyes that the head of art had found in a box in a cupboard and declined to explain. It was carried into the tithe barn by two Lower Sixth girls from the art department on a board, like a dish, and set down on the edge of the stage, and everybody stood round it in a ring and looked at it.

It looked at them.

“It smells,” said Will.

“It’s flour paste,” said one of the art girls. “It’ll stop. In about a week.” She considered. “Probably.”

Frederick put it on.

It went down over his head like a bucket, and the inside of it was dark and close and smelled of wet newspaper and old flour and, faintly, of the staff-room rug, and he could see out through two holes in the neck, not through the glass eyes, which were for show, so that the whole world was two small bright circles of tithe barn somewhere about the level of his chin. It was very heavy. Not as heavy as the Crown of State. But heavier than it looked, and it sat on the top of his head and down through his neck in the same place, exactly the same place, and he stood on the stone floor of the barn in the dark inside the donkey’s head and felt it settle, and for a moment, just for a moment, he was in the Robing Room at Westminster with an old man in a black tailcoat saying chin up, sir.

He lifted his chin.

The donkey’s head came with it. The two pink ears went up.

The whole cast fell about.

From somewhere in front of him, in one of the two small bright circles, Ms Roberts’s voice said, “Yes. That. Do that. Do that every time she touches you.”

---

She did not touch him until Saturday morning.

Titania wakes in Act Three, in the wood, from a sleep that Oberon has put her in with a flower, so that she will fall in love with the first creature she sees when she wakes, and the first creature she sees when she wakes is Bottom in an ass’s head, singing, badly, about birds. And she falls in love with him. Completely. The Queen of the Fairies, who has quarrelled with the King of the Fairies so badly that the seasons have gone wrong, wakes in a wood and falls in love with a weaver with a donkey’s head, and he does not notice. He does not notice at all. She says the most beautiful things anybody has ever said to anybody, and he asks for hay.

Hattie had not done the scene with him before. Ms Roberts would not let her. Not till Saturday, Ms Roberts had said, all through February and March, not till he’s got the head.

On Saturday morning, in the tithe barn, he had the head.

He stood on the stage in it and sang the song about the birds, badly, as instructed, in the Cirencester pasty man’s voice, which Ms Roberts had chosen for Bottom out of the four, because he’s the only one who sounds like he’s never once in his life been embarrassed. And Hattie, lying on the bank at the side of the stage that the art department had made out of a mattress and a green blanket and some ivy, opened her eyes.

She sat up.

She looked at him.

He could see her through the two holes in the neck. She was not acting. That was what he thought, afterwards. He had seen Hattie Ellis act for three months and she had been very good, frighteningly good, and this was not that. This was a tall fair girl of seventeen sitting up on a mattress covered in ivy looking at a boy in a donkey’s head with an expression of such absolute, helpless, transfiguring adoration that he forgot, for a moment, that it was not real.

“What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?” said Hattie.

He did not answer. Bottom does not answer. Bottom goes on singing.

She got up off the mattress and came across the stage toward him, slowly, as though walking toward something she could not quite believe was there, and put out her hand, and touched the side of the donkey’s head, very lightly, just behind the pink ear.

The ears went up.

He had not done it on purpose. He had lifted his chin. He had not been able to help it.

The barn was silent.

Then Hattie Ellis, with her hand still on the donkey’s head, burst out laughing. Helplessly. All at once. Bent over, on the stage, in her jeans and her rehearsal jumper, with one hand still on the ass’s head, laughing until she could not stand up, and Frederick inside the head started laughing too, and the ears went up and down, up and down, with every laugh, and the whole cast on the stone floor of the tithe barn was gone, Theo on his back on the floor with his legs in the air, Will in his blonde wig crying, Kit Barraclough with his glasses off and his face in his hands.

Ms Roberts did not laugh.

She sat on the hard chair in the middle of the floor and watched it with an expression of the most perfect satisfaction.

“Right,” she said, when it had stopped, which took four minutes. “Good. Now do it again, and don’t laugh, and leave the ears in.” She wrote on the clipboard. “Every night. Every time. Leave the ears in.”

---

On the Saturday afternoon Ms Roberts took the cast to Cardiff.

It was the trip she had promised in December, and it had been on the noticeboard since January: THE CAST WILL VISIT CARDIFF ON SATURDAY 22 MARCH TO SEE THE NEW THEATRE AND THE SENEDD. COATS. SANDWICHES. DO NOT BE LATE. S.R. They went in a minibus, two hours, over the long bridge across the Severn into Wales with the water brown and wide and shining underneath them and the hills going up on the other side, and Ms Roberts in the front seat beside the driver went very quiet as they crossed it, and did not say anything until the far side.

They went to the theatre first. It was where she had worked, until the summer. It was closed. It had a sign on the door that said CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE in English and the same thing underneath in Welsh, and the windows were dusty, and she stood in front of it with her hands in her coat pockets and the cast behind her on the pavement and looked at it for a long time.

“I’m going back,” she said.

Nobody said anything.

“Not here. It’s not reopening. Somewhere else. A company in Swansea. I start in September. I had the letter on Thursday.” She did not turn round. “I’m telling you because I’m going to tell Dr Ord on Monday and I wanted you lot to know first. Because you’re the best cast I’ve ever had and you’ll be the last one in a school.” She looked at the dusty windows. “I’m an actress. I’ve always been an actress. I came to teach because the theatre closed and I needed the money and I thought I’d hate it.” She took a breath. “And I didn’t. And that’s why I’ve got to go. Because if I stay another year I’ll never leave.”

Hattie Ellis, at the front of the cast, said, in a small voice, “Miss.”

Ms Roberts turned round.

“Don’t you dare,” she said to Hattie, fiercely, with her large dark eyes very bright, “don’t you dare say anything, Harriet Ellis, because you’re going to drama school, I’ve written to three of them about you, and if you cry on this pavement I’ll never forgive you.” She turned to the rest of them. “Senedd. Now. Coats.”

---

The Senedd was by the water, in the old docks, a long low building of glass and slate and wood with a great curving roof that came out over the steps like the brim of a hat, and inside it the debating chamber was round, a bowl, with the members’ desks in a circle and the public gallery above.

It was not sitting. It was a Saturday. A woman from the Senedd’s own staff showed them round, in Welsh first and then in English, every sentence, without exception, so that the tour took twice as long as it needed to and nobody minded, because the Welsh first was the point. She showed them the chamber and the gallery and the long slate wall in the hall with the words carved in it, and the glass floor you could look down through into the debating chamber from above, and at the end, in the hall, she stopped, and looked at the cast of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in their coats, and at Ms Roberts, and then, for the first time, directly, at Frederick.

“Every law we make here,” she said, in English, “is made twice. Once in Welsh. Once in English. And both are the law. Neither one is a translation of the other.” She looked at him. “So when a man stands up in the House of Lords in London and opens a Parliament with a sentence in Welsh, he is not doing us a courtesy. He is speaking one of the two languages the law of this country is made in.” She paused. “We noticed.”

“I hoped somebody would,” said Frederick.

The woman looked at him a moment longer.

“Where did you get the accent?” she said. “From the radio?”

“From a rugby master. Mr Pryce. From the valley.” He named it.

The woman’s face changed.

“That’s my mother’s valley,” she said.

Behind him, very quietly, Ms Roberts said, “Of course it is,” to nobody, and then: “Everybody’s is somebody’s mother’s valley. It’s a very small country.” And then, to the woman from the Senedd, in Welsh, something long and fast and fierce that Frederick only half followed, and the woman answered, in Welsh, and the two of them looked at each other across the slate floor of the hall of the Senedd for a moment with the expressions of two women who have just discovered they went to the same school, and then the woman from the Senedd laughed, and Ms Roberts laughed, and the cast of A Midsummer Night’s Dream stood in its coats in the hall and did not understand a word of it.

---

On the minibus home, over the long bridge in the dark, with the lights of Wales going away behind them across the water, Ms Roberts turned round in the front seat.

“Hanover,” she said.

“Miss.”

“You did my voice.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. It was very good. It was uncannily good. It was my mother.” She looked at him in the dark of the minibus. “You’ve had that all your life. That ear. And you’ve never used it. Not once. Not out loud. For seventeen years.”

“No, miss.”

“Why not?”

He thought about it. The bridge went past in the dark, the cables, the lights on the water.

“Because a King’s supposed to sound like the radio,” he said. “Everywhere. To everybody. The same. So nobody thinks he belongs to anyone more than anyone else.” He looked out of the window. “That’s what I was taught.”

Ms Roberts was quiet for some time.

“Well,” she said at last, “you can sound like the radio for the rest of your life. You’ll have to. I know that.” She turned back round to face the road. “But for three nights in April, in a barn in Gloucestershire, in a donkey’s head,” said Ms Roberts, to the windscreen, “you’re going to sound like the man who sells pasties in Cirencester market. And belong to somebody.” She settled into her seat. “Leave the ears in.”