When the Footlights Listen

I hold the match while Mr. Venn opens the gas.

This is not among my duties. I mend hems, revive crushed flowers, and remove orange peel from the pockets of gentlemen playing dukes. Mr. Venn says any fool can hold a match, which explains why he chose me.

The footlights wake one by one along the lip of the stage. Each flame wears a little wire crown. Dust lifts from the boards, carrying the warm smell of paint, glue, and mice.

“Too high,” I say.

“Too yellow,” says Mr. Venn.

We are both correct, but in different professions.

He crouches at the brass cock and turns it with a key. The flames shrink. Behind us, the empty house keeps its red seats folded and its gilt cherubs staring down in mild embarrassment. Rain touches the roof in soft handfuls.

Then someone in the third row coughs.

I turn. Mr. Venn does not.

“Did you hear that?”

“I have heard coughing before.”

“There is nobody there.”

“That improves it considerably.”

He adjusts the valve again. The flames tremble, and a woman laughs near the centre aisle. It is a small, private laugh, the sort produced by a dropped hat or an actor whose moustache has begun to travel.

Mr. Venn looks over his shoulder.

The seats remain empty.

A man whispers, “Move your elbow.”

Another voice says, “I cannot see her face.”

I step away from the footlights. The voices stop.

Mr. Venn studies the row of flames. “Pipes carry sound,” he says. “Everyone knows that.”

“From where?”

He puts his ear near the nearest crown. “Boiler room, perhaps.”

“There is no boiler room.”

“Then it is doing very well for itself.”

I kneel beside him. The heat presses against my cheeks. In the blue root of the flame, something murmurs too softly to catch. Mr. Venn turns the key a hair.

The auditorium fills at once.

Not with people. With the sounds people make when they believe nothing has started yet. Coats settling. A sweet unwrapped. A program tapped against a knee. Someone complains of the rain. Someone else says the ceiling is lower than expected.

Mr. Venn’s smile fades.

The voices are wrong for a theatre. They speak of a table, a window, a rug that keeps curling at the corner. A child is told not to jump on the bed.

Above us, on the painted ceiling, the cherubs continue offering plaster roses to nobody.

“This building has never had bedrooms,” I say.

Mr. Venn reaches for the cock.

A child begins humming.

The tune is plain and wandering. I know it because I invented it last winter for my sister’s baby, on the night his fever broke. I have never sung it here. I have never sung it outside her kitchen.

Mr. Venn’s hand remains on the key.

The child stops humming.

“Mum,” she says, very clearly, “the lady under my floor is singing again.”

My mouth is open.

The footlights are giving the song back in my own voice.

For a moment I see it, though there is nothing to see: this stage gone, the red seats gone, rain falling into foundations. Then walls rising where the boxes were. A narrow bedroom suspended over the orchestra pit. A rug curled at one corner. A child lying awake above the buried line of gas pipe, listening downward through years that have not happened.

Mr. Venn closes the cock.

Darkness takes the stage, but not all at once. The final flame, nearest my knee, holds on with a blue bead of light.

From somewhere inside it comes the sound of a match being struck.

Mr. Venn and I watch the empty house.

High above the third row, where no window stands, a square of morning appears and slowly brightens.