Pyramus and Thisbe

Inés had mended the lights.

Nobody knew how. She had been up the ladder against the wall at the back of the tithe barn every afternoon since December with a screwdriver and a roll of black tape and a book from the library in Cirencester on stage electrics from 1983, and she would not say what she was doing, and if you asked she said wiring, and if you asked what wiring she said the wiring, and on the Tuesday before the first night, at the dress rehearsal, at seven o’clock, with the barn dark and the cast in the wings in their costumes, she said, from the top of the ladder, in her flat voice, “Ready,” and Ms Roberts, on the hard chair in the middle of the floor, said, “Go.”

And the lights came up.

Not all at once. Slowly. A deep cold blue first, on the back wall of the stage, like a sky an hour after sunset. Then, along the front, very low, a pale green, like moonlight coming through leaves. Then, from somewhere high up in the dark of the roof, where nobody had known there was a light at all, a single soft gold beam, straight down, onto the mattress covered in ivy at the side of the stage where Titania would sleep.

The whole cast in the wings stopped talking.

Ms Roberts, on the hard chair, did not move.

“Where,” said Ms Roberts, after a while, “did you find a light in the roof?”

“It was there,” said Inés, from the top of the ladder. “Since 1970. Somebody put it up and never wired it. It was behind a beam. I found it in January.” She came down the ladder. “I had to climb along the beam.”

“You climbed along a fourteenth-century beam?”

“With a rope,” said Inés. “Kimura held the rope.” She put the screwdriver in her pocket. “She said it was the most interesting thing she’d done all year. She gave me an eight.”

---

The barn held two hundred.

On the first night there were two hundred and forty, because Mr Gage at the lodge had stopped counting at two hundred and simply stood at the door saying in you come, and they sat on the school’s dining chairs in rows on the stone floor and on benches along the walls and on the edge of the stage itself at the sides, and at the back, standing, in coats, and the cold came up off the stone floor through all of them, and nobody minded, because at the back by the door Sue Fennell and Bridget had set up a table with an urn, and the urn was full of something hot that Sue said was cocoa and was not entirely cocoa.

His parents were in the front row.

His father in the middle of it, on a dining chair with a cushion that Niamh had brought from the Palace, with the hazel stick across his knees and his tweed cap on his lap. His mother on one side of him. And on the other side, with her large handbag on her knee and her green folder on top of the handbag, in her best coat, Señora Ruiz.

She had sat down at a quarter to seven and opened the folder and taken out a pen.

“What’s she writing?” said Lucía, in the wings, in her Puck costume, which was green and brown and made of leaves, peering out through the gap in the curtain.

“Notes,” said Frederick.

“On what?”

“Us,” said Frederick, in the donkey’s head, which he had on already because Ms Roberts said he would need ten minutes to get used to the smell every night, and through the two small bright circles in the neck he could see Señora Ruiz in the front row writing in the green folder with great concentration, and his father beside her, not writing, with his hands on the hazel stick, looking at the curtain.

In the second row, behind his father, were Mrs Haverfield, with Ernest, who was not allowed and had come anyway, under her chair, and Jack.

Jack had a programme. He was holding it in both hands. He had been holding it in both hands since he sat down and he had not opened it, and he was looking at the curtain with an expression Frederick had never seen on him, which was the expression of somebody who is about to watch a person they love do something frightening and cannot do anything about it.

“He’s terrified,” said Lucía, beside him, through the gap.

“Who?”

“The boy from the pub. In the second row. Jack.” She peered. “Look at him. He’s going to rip that programme in half. Why’s he so scared? He’s not in it.”

“I don’t know,” said Frederick.

“He’s looking at the curtain like his dog’s behind it.” Lucía shook her head in her leaves. “Boys are weird,” she said, with the serene authority of the only person in the cast who did not know, and the lights went down.

---

He would remember it in pieces. He thought afterwards that that was probably how you remembered a play you were in: not as a story, but as a handful of moments seen through two small holes in the neck of a papier-mâché donkey.

The lovers, in the first act, under Inés’s cold blue light, quarrelling in the wood, Devon as Lysander so genuinely furious with the girl from Evenlode playing Hermia that the audience laughed in places that were not funny and then stopped laughing because they were. Lucía’s first entrance as Puck, which was not an entrance at all, because she did not come on from the wings; she came down a rope, from the dark of the roof, where nobody had known she was, in her leaves, very fast, and landed on the front of the stage on one foot with her arms out, and the whole barn gasped, and his father, in the front row, sat forward.

Hattie waking.

Inés’s gold beam coming down out of the roof onto the mattress covered in ivy, and Hattie sitting up into it, and looking at him, and the barn going so quiet that he could hear, through the donkey’s head, through three feet of stone, the river.

What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?

He did not answer. He sang about birds.

She came across the stage toward him in the gold light and put out her hand and touched the side of the donkey’s head, just behind the pink ear.

The ears went up.

Two hundred and forty people laughed so loudly that the sound went up into the roof and came back down off the beams, and in the middle of it, through the two small holes in the neck, he saw his father, in the front row, with his head back, laughing, silently, with his shoulders, with his whole body, so hard that his mother had to put a hand on his arm to keep the hazel stick from going off his knees onto the floor.

And Hattie did not laugh. Not on the night. She held it. She held her face perfectly still in the gold light with her hand on the donkey’s head while the barn roared round her, utterly in love, utterly serious, and waited, and when the laugh had gone all the way up into the roof and come back down and stopped, she said her next line into the silence it left, very quietly, and the barn went still again as if she had turned it off.

He thought, inside the donkey’s head, that he was watching somebody do the thing they were for.

---

In the interval he took the head off in the wings and stood in the cold with his face wet and his hair flat and drank a cup of whatever Sue and Bridget had put in the urn, which Kit had brought round from the back.

His mother came through the curtain.

She was not supposed to. Nobody from the audience was supposed to come backstage in the interval; Ms Roberts had said so, in red pen, on the notice on the door. But his mother came through the curtain at the side of the stage in her long dark green coat with her face alight, and found him in the wings in his Bottom costume with the donkey’s head under his arm, and put both her hands on his face, and said, in Swedish, fast, without thinking, the way she said things to him in the north wing kitchen when they were alone:

“Älskling, the ears. The ears. Your father nearly fell off the chair. I have never seen him laugh like that. Not since before. Not since the sea. I thought he was going to stop breathing.”

“Is he all right?”

“He is better than all right. He is crying. Niamh is giving him a handkerchief. He told Niamh to go away.” She kissed him on both cheeks. “You are wonderful. You are a wonderful donkey. I have never been so proud of anything in my life, and I watched you become King of fourteen countries.”

“Mamma, you’re not allowed back here.”

“I am the Queen of Sweden,” said his mother. “I am allowed wherever I like.”

Behind her, at the curtain, there was a small sharp sound, like a green folder being dropped.

They both turned.

Señora Ruiz was standing in the gap in the curtain. She had come through after the Queen, presumably to say something about the first half, with the green folder under her arm and her pen in her hand, and she had stopped in the gap, and the folder had slid out from under her arm onto the stone floor of the wings, and she was looking at Frederick.

She did not pick it up.

“Swedish,” said Señora Ruiz.

He looked at her.

“That was Swedish,” said Señora Ruiz, in Spanish, slowly, in a voice of a woman who has walked into a room in her own house and found the furniture rearranged. “You were speaking Swedish. Just now. With your mother. Fast. Like a boy from Stockholm.” She took a step forward. “You speak Swedish.”

“Yes, Señora.”

“Fluently.”

“Yes, Señora.”

“Since when?”

“Since I was born, Señora. It’s my mother’s language.”

Señora Ruiz looked at the Queen of Sweden. The Queen of Sweden looked back at her with an expression of perfect innocence.

Then Señora Ruiz looked back at him.

“Four years,” she said. “Four years I have taught you Spanish. Ninth grade, tenth grade, eleventh grade, twelfth. Four years. I have stood at the front of a classroom four mornings a week and taught you the subjunctive and the preterite and the difference between ser and estar*, and you have been the best student I have had in twenty-six years, and I have told the principal so, in writing, three times, and I have said to my husband, at dinner, that I have never had a student with an ear like yours, never, that he must be some kind of genius.*” She drew a breath. “And you had another language in your pocket the whole time. A third one. And you never said.”

“Nobody asked, Señora.”

“Nobody asked,” said Señora Ruiz, to the roof of the tithe barn, in a voice of the most profound and comprehensive outrage. “Nobody asked.” She looked at the Queen again. “Did you know about this, ma’am?”

“I taught him,” said the Queen of Sweden.

Señora Ruiz closed her eyes.

Then she bent down, and picked up the green folder from the stone floor of the wings, and opened it, and took out her pen, and wrote something in it, at the bottom of a page, very hard, underlining it, and closed it again.

“I am furious,” she said, to Frederick. “I want you to know that. I am more furious with you than I have been with any student in twenty-six years, including the boy in 2014 who set fire to the language laboratory.” She put the folder under her arm. “Also you are a wonderful donkey and your Spanish accent on the line about the hay was perfect, which it should not have been, because Bottom does not speak Spanish.” She turned to the curtain. “We will discuss the Swedish at Ellicott. In September.”

“I’ll have graduated by September, Señora.”

Señora Ruiz stopped in the gap in the curtain.

“Then we will discuss it,” she said, without turning round, “at your graduation,” and went back out to the front row.

---

The Mechanicals’ play was the last act.

It was the play inside the play, the one the workmen put on for the Duke’s wedding, Pyramus and Thisbe, the most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of two lovers who talk through a crack in a wall and arrange to meet at a tomb at night, where a lion frightens Thisbe away and Pyramus finds her bloody cloak and thinks she is dead and kills himself, and then she comes back and finds him dead and kills herself, and it is the worst play in the world, performed by the worst actors in Athens, and it is the funniest thing Shakespeare ever wrote.

Kit as Quince came out first, with the prologue, and got every pause in it wrong on purpose, so that every sentence meant the opposite of what it was supposed to, in a flat Leeds accent, with his glasses on the end of his nose, and the barn began to laugh in the first line and did not stop.

Then Wall.

Theo came on from the wings in a costume the art department had made, which was a long grey tabard painted with bricks, and a hat that was also painted with bricks, and he walked to the middle of the stage, very slowly, all six foot two of him, and stopped, and faced the audience, and stood there.

He did not do anything. Ms Roberts had told him not to. You just stand there, she had said, all through March, and be enormous, and be a wall. He stood in the middle of the stage under Inés’s pale green light in his tabard of painted bricks with his arms at his sides and his face perfectly, solemnly, profoundly serious, the face he had worn holding a train down the nave of Westminster Abbey, and said his speech, which explains that he is a wall, and that he has a hole in him, and that the lovers will whisper through the hole, in the voice of a Page of Honour reading a royal warrant aloud to a committee.

And then he held up his hand, and made the hole.

The chink. Two fingers, held apart, a V, at the height of his chest.

The barn could not breathe.

Frederick came on as Pyramus. He came on in the costume of a weaver playing a Greek lover, which was a sheet with a belt, and a sword made of cardboard, and he did not have the donkey’s head on any more, because Bottom has been changed back by now, and is himself again, and has forgotten everything, and is playing Pyramus with the total conviction of a man who has never once been embarrassed in his life, and he went down on one knee in front of Wall, and put his eye to the chink, Theo’s two fingers, and looked through it, and said, in the voice of the man who sold pasties in Cirencester market, with every r in it and all the hs gone:

“O wall, O sweet, O lovely wall, show me thy chink, to blink through with mine eyne!”

And Theo, without moving any other part of himself at all, held the two fingers higher.

The barn was gone.

Somewhere in the second row, Jack Fennell was making the noise he had made at three o’clock on Christmas Day, but the other way round, like a goose that had been told a very good joke.

Will came on as Thisbe in the blonde wig, in a dress, with a voice so high and so earnest and so determined that Thisbe was a lady that Mr Ellis, in the fourth row, put his face in his hands. Hugo Lomax came on as the Lion and roared, very gently, and then stepped forward to the front of the stage and took off his lion’s head, as the Lion does in the play, and explained to the ladies in the audience that he was not really a lion but only Snug the joiner and did not want to frighten anybody, with such complete and touching sincerity, in his deep mild voice, with the gauze from November still faintly visible as a scar over his eyebrow, that an old woman in the front row on the left side, who was Mrs Dunning from the shop, said, out loud, oh, bless him.

And then Pyramus found the cloak, and drew his cardboard sword, and died.

He died for a long time. Bottom dies for a long time. He stabbed himself with the cardboard sword and said thus die I, thus, thus, thus, and fell down, and got up again to say now am I dead, and fell down, and got up again to say now am I fled, and fell down again, and got up to say my soul is in the sky, and fell down, and every time he got up two hundred and forty people in the tithe barn howled, and on the last time, now die, die, die, die, die, falling down and getting up and falling down five times on the stone stage in Inés’s pale light, through the tears in his own eyes from laughing, which he was not supposed to be doing, because Bottom does not know he is funny, he saw his father in the front row with his head down on his knees and his shoulders going, and his mother with both hands over her face, and Señora Ruiz with the green folder held up in front of her face like a shield, and Mrs Haverfield in the second row, very small, with her chin up and her eyes shut and tears running down her face, laughing, without a sound.

He died.

He lay still.

---

At the very end, after the lovers and the Duke and the Mechanicals had gone, after the fairies had come back and danced through the house in the dark with Inés’s lights turned down to almost nothing, Puck came out on her own to the front of the stage.

Lucía.

In her leaves, in a single small light that Inés had put there for this and for nothing else, in the middle of the dark.

She had been told in December not to prepare it. Do not prepare Puck’s last speech; everybody prepares Puck’s last speech, and I will stop you after one line. And she had not prepared it for the audition. She had done the merry wanderer of the night on one leg instead. She had not done this one, once, in a rehearsal, in front of anybody, since January. Ms Roberts had rehearsed it with her alone, at night, in the barn, with the door shut.

If we shadows have offended, said Lucía, think but this, and all is mended.

She said it very quietly. Not to the back of the barn. To the front row. To the Duke of Cumberland, and the Queen of Sweden, and Señora Ruiz with her folder, and behind them a woman of ninety-nine with a dog under her chair and a loud boy holding a programme he had not opened.

That you have but slumbered here, while these visions did appear.

It is an apology. That is all Puck’s last speech is. It says: if you did not like it, imagine it was a dream. It says: we are sorry. It says: give us your hands, if we be friends.

Give me your hands, if we be friends, and Robin shall restore amends.

And she held out both her hands, in her leaves, in the single light, to the front row.

His father leaned forward on the hazel stick, slowly, and put out his hand.

Not to clap. Toward her. Across the gap between the front row and the edge of the stage, palm up, the way he put it out over the kitchen table when he did not have the word.

Lucía looked at it.

Then, still in the light, still Puck, she went down on one knee at the very edge of the stage and took the Duke of Cumberland’s hand in both of hers, and held it, for a moment, and let go, and stood up, and the light went out.

---

Afterwards there was nothing. Afterwards there was the noise, which went on for a long time, and the cast coming out in a line, and bowing, badly, because nobody had told them how, and Theo bowing so low in his tabard of painted bricks that his hat fell off, and the barn standing up, all of it, from the front row to the back, his father last, with the stick, slowly, standing.

And afterwards, in the cold outside the barn, in the dark, on the slope above the river, with the audience going away up the path in coats with torches, Jack.

He still had the programme in both hands. He still had not opened it. He stood in front of Frederick on the slope in the dark and looked at him, and his face was doing the thing it had done behind the bonfire, which was nothing at all, and Frederick waited for it to finish.

“Die, die, die, die, die,” said Jack.

“Yes.”

“Five times. You got up five times.”

“It’s in the text.”

“I don’t care if it’s in the text.” Jack’s voice did something. “Nan cried. Nan. I’ve never seen Nan cry. Not at Grandad’s funeral. Not when the dog before Ernest died. She sat there in the second row with her eyes shut and cried and laughed at the same time and didn’t make a single noise, and at the end she said to me, that’s the best thing I’ve seen in this valley since 1951.” He held up the programme. “And your dad. With his hand. And Lucía.” He looked at the programme. “I’ve not opened it. I couldn’t. I was too scared. I’ve been holding it for three hours.”

“You can open it now.”

Jack opened it.

He looked at the cast list, on the first page, in the light from the barn door. At the top, where the parts were listed in order of appearance, the Mechanicals, and beside each of them a name.

NICK BOTTOM, a weaver, F. HANOVER.

He looked at it for a long time.

“Hanover,” said Jack.

“That’s my name.”

“I know it’s your name,” said Jack, and folded the programme carefully in half, and put it in the inside pocket of his coat, and buttoned the coat, the way his father had buttoned a ticket into the top pocket of his shirt on the first Saturday in September, behind the badge. “I’m keeping it,” he said. “Two more nights. I’m coming to both.”

“You’ve seen it.”

“I’ve seen the ears,” said Jack. “I want to see them again.”

---

He did two more nights. On the Thursday the ears went up and the barn roared and Hattie held it. On the Friday, the last night, they went up and the barn roared and Hattie did not hold it, for the first time, because Theo, in the wings, waiting to go on as Wall, had very quietly started laughing, and she had heard him, and gone, completely, on the stage, in the gold light, with her hand on the donkey’s head, and Ms Roberts, on the hard chair at the back of the barn, where she had sat for all three nights, put her face in her hands, and then, slowly, took them away again, and was laughing too.

His father came to all three. Señora Ruiz came to all three, and wrote in the folder through all three, and on the Friday, at the end, when the cast came out to bow, stood up in the front row before anybody else, in her best coat, with the green folder held against her chest, and shouted ¡Bravo! so loudly that the bats left the roof.

In the blue notebook, on the Friday, at two in the morning, in the room at the end of the corridor, with the donkey’s head on the end of his bed because the art department had said he could keep it and it still smelled, he wrote:

Three nights. Inés found a light in the roof. Theo was a wall. The ears. Dad laughed till he cried. Señora Ruiz knows about the Swedish. Puck held Dad’s hand. Mrs Haverfield cried. Die, die, die, die, die.

And then, under it:

I have had a most rare vision.