Palimpsest with Limelight

There were fourteen of us in the line that season, and I was seventh from the left. I knew this the way I knew everything at the Canterbury — by its number, its position, its distance from the nearest fixed point. Seven steps from the wings to my mark. Forty-two gas jets in the footlights, though by November three had gone to electric and the light they threw was a different colour, colder, less like breathing. The stage boards had been painted black that autumn for the new pantomime set and the paint was already wearing through in patches, so that older colours showed — green, then red, then bare pine — and the effect under the limes was of walking on a surface that could not decide what it was.

The house held eleven hundred. I had counted the seats once during a Tuesday rehearsal, row by row, starting from the pit and working back through the stalls and up into the gallery where the benches had no numbers and the counting became a matter of estimation, which I did not care for. I preferred the certainty of the stalls. Row A through row M, thirteen rows, and in the third row, on the left side, seven seats in from the aisle, there was a woman I had not seen before.

I noticed her the way you notice a draught — not by seeing it but by feeling your body adjust. She was perhaps forty. Dark hair, not dressed for the evening in any notable way, though her jacket was good cloth, the kind that doesn’t shine under gaslight the way cheap stuff does. She was not watching the act. The Dolorez Sisters were on — a contortion routine, very popular, the crowd was stamping — and this woman was looking at the chorus line as though it were a painting hung at the wrong height, something she was trying to read from an awkward angle.

I miscounted the steps in the second number. Eight instead of seven. My heel caught the edge of the painted mark and I felt the jar of it up through my ankle and into my knee. Annie Platt, who stood sixth from the left and therefore next to me, cut her eyes sideways, and I corrected. The footlights were very hot that night. My costume — satin bodice, paste diamonds, cotton skirts stiffened with sugar water — itched where the stays dug into the underside of my arms. The sweat ran down between my shoulder blades and pooled at the small of my back above the corset line, a sensation so specific to the Canterbury that I could have mapped the building by its discomforts: the particular ache of the raked stage in the left hip, the way the powder in the air caught in the throat after the second hour, the smell of the gas jets mixing with beer and orange peel and the slightly scorched scent of hair that had been curled too close to the tongs.

I did not look at the woman again. But I knew she was there the way I knew the draught was there, by the adjustment in my body, by a certain attention in the quality of the air on the left side of my face.

Her name was Judith Blackwell. I learned this from Mr. Carney, our stage manager, who knew her as a patron — one of those women who contributed to the Canterbury’s renovation fund and in return received a seat in the stalls and the right to send cards backstage. She had been coming for three weeks, he said, always the same seat, always alone. He said this without inflection, as a fact about the running of the house, and I received it the same way.

The card arrived on a Thursday, between the matinee and the evening show. It was cream-coloured, heavy, the kind of paper that has texture when you run your thumb across it — not smooth but slightly rough, like very fine sand. The handwriting was dark ink, a broad nib, the letters not perfectly formed but confident, the confidence of someone who writes frequently and does not wait for the pen to agree with her. It said only: If you would care to take tea — 14 Gower Street — any afternoon that suits. And her name.

I kept the card in my glove box for four days. On the fifth day, which was a Tuesday and therefore my afternoon off, I took the omnibus from Lambeth to Bloomsbury. It cost tuppence and took forty minutes and I sat on the upper deck in the cold because the inside was full and counted the streets as they passed — Waterloo Road, the Strand, Kingsway, and then the smaller streets that led north toward the university and the museum, streets where the houses were tall and pale and the railings were painted black and there were no eel-pie shops and no one was selling watercress from a barrow.

Number fourteen was narrow, four storeys, the door painted a dark green that was almost black. A woman who was not Judith opened it — a housekeeper, grey-haired, unsmiling, who led me up one flight to a drawing room that was unlike any room I had seen in London or, before London, in Margate, where I had grown up and where rooms were small and smelled of salt and fish oil and the sea that was always just outside.

This room smelled of paper. Old paper. The kind of smell that is not unpleasant but is so dense it becomes a texture — dry, faintly sweet, with something underneath like dust or very old wood. Books lined three walls, floor to ceiling, and on the fourth wall hung framed pages — not paintings but fragments of text, writing I could not read, scripts that curled and branched like the roots of plants growing in the wrong direction.

Judith was standing by the window. She wore a grey dress, wool, no ornament. Her hands were bare — no rings, I noticed, and then noticed that I had noticed. She had a way of holding herself that was still without being stiff, a quality of attention that suggested she was always listening to something just beneath the surface of whatever sound was present.

“I thought you might be interested in these,” she said, and what she showed me were palimpsests.

She explained the word. A page of vellum — animal skin, she said, prepared for writing — that had been used, then scraped clean, then written on again. The original text removed to make room for the new. But the scraping was never complete. Traces of the first writing remained, visible beneath the second if you held the page at the right angle to the light.

She placed one in my hands. It was heavier than I expected — not paper-heavy but skin-heavy, with a warmth to it that paper does not have, as though the animal it had been was not entirely gone from it. The upper text was Latin, she said, a fragment of a psalter, fourteenth century. Beneath it, fainter, written in a different hand and a different direction, was something older — a letter, or a record of accounts, something secular and daily that had been scraped away to make room for God.

“Hold it here,” she said, and moved the lamp closer, and I tilted the page toward the light, and I saw them both. Two texts. Two hands. Two centuries. One page. The older writing bleeding through the newer like a voice speaking beneath another voice, not louder but more persistent, and I understood — not with my mind but with my hands, which were holding both texts at once — that a thing could be written over and the original still be there, still legible, if you knew the angle.

The room tilted slightly. I held the vellum steady. Judith was very close — she had leaned in to adjust the lamp, and I could smell her, not perfume but soap and something warmer, like the paper. I counted the seconds between that moment and the next thing either of us said. I counted eleven.

I went back on Tuesdays. Then Tuesdays and Saturdays. Then whenever I was not at the Canterbury, which in those weeks felt like a place I left rather than a place I occupied, though I did not examine this, the leaving or the occupying, or the difference between a building you stand in because it pays you six shillings a week and a building you enter because a woman has opened the door.

The omnibus route became a kind of corridor between two countries. Lambeth to Bloomsbury: the eel-pie shops thinning out, the costermonger barrows giving way to booksellers’ carts, the smell of the river replaced by the smell of dust and polish and the particular cleanness of streets where someone is paid to sweep. I always sat on the upper deck. I always counted the stops. There were nine, and by the fourth week I could have walked the route blind, which is a figure of speech I use precisely, because the walk was something I did not need my eyes for — I needed them for other things, for the room at the far end, for the reading that happened there.

Judith’s house in Gower Street was a house of texts. Manuscripts covered the tables, the desk, the wide Ottoman near the fire. She collected damaged things — scrolls with lacunae, codices with missing pages, letters where the ink had faded to the point of ambiguity. She liked the spaces where meaning had been lost, she said. She found them more honest than the parts that survived. I did not ask her what she meant by honest. I understood it the way I understood the palimpsest — not through the word but through the object, the feel of a page that held two truths at once and did not pretend that one had cancelled the other.

On the evenings I came, she read to me. Not the manuscripts — those required Latin, or Greek, or skills I did not have — but other things. Poetry. Old letters. Fragments she had transcribed and kept in a leather folder tied with cord. She read slowly, her voice lower than her speaking voice, and she wet her left thumb before turning each page — always the left thumb — and the sound it made against the paper was very small, a whisper, the sound of a page admitting it was ready to be turned.

We sat on the settee by the fire. It was a small settee, built for two people who did not mind proximity, upholstered in green velvet that had worn to a shine on the arms. By the third visit I knew which side was mine — the left, closer to the fire, where I could see her hands as she read. She wore no rings. She had said her husband had died eight years ago and she said it the way you say that winter follows autumn, as a fact about the order of the world that required no further comment. I did not ask about him. I did not ask if the house had been his. What I noticed — and I catalogue this as a noticing, not an interpretation — was that there were no photographs of him anywhere in the room, and the books on the shelves were arranged by a system that was clearly her own, and the chair by the window had been positioned to catch the morning light at an angle that only a person who spent long hours reading in it would have calculated, and these observations told me something about the duration and nature of her solitude that the fact of his death had not.

Sometimes she showed me her work. She was preparing a catalogue of the palimpsests in the British Museum’s collection, a project she described without apology or self-deprecation, simply as the thing she did with her days. She had a magnifying glass with a brass handle that she used to read the undertext, and she held it the way a surgeon holds an instrument — precisely, with a learned steadiness, the wrist still and the fingers doing the fine adjustment. I watched her work. I did not say that watching her work made the room feel like a different room, a room with more air in it, or that the quality of her concentration changed the quality of my attention, or that I had begun to count different things in her presence: not the seats in the stalls or the steps from the wings but the times she tucked her hair behind her left ear, which she did when she was reading closely, and the number of breaths she took between one sentence and the next when she read aloud, which was two, always two, a rhythm as regular as a metronome and as specific to her as a fingerprint.

She asked me to sing.

Not a music-hall number, she said. She had heard those. She came to the Canterbury twice a week and she had heard every number in the current programme and she did not need to hear them again in her drawing room. She asked me to sing whatever I would sing if I were alone.

I was not, in that moment, thinking about what to sing. I was thinking about the word alone, how it sounded in her voice, how the room received it and did nothing with it, how the fire popped once, how the clock in the hallway was ticking at a different speed than the clock on the mantelpiece, which I had counted and which ticked sixty-three times a minute, slightly fast.

I sang a song my father used to sing. He had been a fishmonger in Margate and the song was about the sea, though not in the way that London songs were about the sea — not heroic, not sentimental, but practical, a song about currents and tides and the way the water moved when a storm was coming from the east, and it had no proper ending, it just stopped, because my father would stop singing when the work required both hands. I had not sung it since I was fifteen, since the year he died, and my voice in Judith’s drawing room was different from my voice on stage — smaller, rougher, closer to the ground. On stage my voice was part of fourteen voices and it carried because it was held up by the others. In this room there was nothing to hold it up. It was just a voice in a small room with a fire and the two clocks and the old paper and a woman whose eyes were closed.

When I finished, the silence had a shape. Not empty but bounded, the way a room is shaped, with walls and a ceiling and a measurable volume of air. The fire popped again. The street outside, which in Bloomsbury at nine o’clock was quiet in a way Lambeth never was, sent up the sound of a hansom cab and then nothing. I could hear Judith breathing. I could hear my own pulse, which was faster than either clock.

“You have a beautiful voice,” she said, and this was unremarkable as a sentence, people had said it before, Mr. Carney had said it when he hired me, but her voice when she said it was the voice she used for reading, the lower one, and it arrived in the room the way the older text arrived on the palimpsest, beneath the surface of the words, and I felt it somewhere below the collarbone and to the left, in a place that was not the heart but was near enough to be mistaken for it.

One evening she passed me a glass of wine and her fingers touched mine on the stem. It was not accidental. I knew this because I knew accidental touches — the jostle of fourteen girls in a dressing room the size of a pantry, Annie Platt’s elbow against my ribs during a quick change, the chairman’s hand on my shoulder steering me toward the stage when I was slow in the wings. Those touches were weather. This touch was a sentence. Her fingers stayed against mine for perhaps two seconds, and in those two seconds my skin went hot from the point of contact outward, a heat that spread up my wrist and into my forearm like a flame following a wick, and my hearing changed — the fire became very loud, and then very far away, and the traffic on Gower Street, which was always audible, reduced to a pressure against the window glass like the pressure of water against the hull of a boat. My vision narrowed to the place where her hand met mine. I could see the small hairs on her wrist, the crease where her sleeve had been pressed, a freckle below the knuckle of her first finger that I had not noticed before or had always noticed and was only now allowing myself to catalogue.

I took the glass. I drank the wine. It was claret, as always, slightly warm from standing near the fire, and I tasted nothing.

She told me, on another evening, about a doctor — an American, a Dr. Mitchell — who had studied soldiers from their civil war. Soldiers who had lost arms or legs but who still felt them. Pain in a hand that was no longer there. An itch in a foot that had been buried in a field hospital’s pit. The body, she said, creates sensation in empty space. It remembers the shape of what it has lost and fills that shape with feeling.

I found this interesting. I said so. I said, “How strange, that the body should remember what the mind knows is gone.” And she said, “Perhaps the body is more honest than the mind.” And we sat with that sentence the way we sat with the silence after songs, and I counted the books on the shelf opposite — forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine — and I did not say what I recognized in it.

On the first Saturday in December I went to Gower Street and there was another woman in the drawing room.

She was sitting in the chair by the window — not my chair, not the settee, but a chair I had not paid attention to before because no one had been in it. She was younger than Judith, with paint under her fingernails — not entirely scrubbed away, traces of cadmium yellow in the quick — and she wore her hair shorter than fashion allowed and she was drinking wine from one of Judith’s good glasses as though it were water, holding it in one hand while she talked, not setting it down between sips.

Judith introduced her. She was a painter, she lived in Chelsea. I did not retain her name for long.

What I retained was this: she knew which chair was hers. She poured her own wine without asking where the bottle was. She called Judith Ju, a name I had never heard, a small name, intimate as a thumbprint, and Judith answered to it without hesitation, the way you answer to the name your body knows rather than the name that was given to you for the benefit of others.

They talked about a lecture they had both attended. They referred to people I did not know, places I had not been, a vocabulary of shared experience that operated like a wall — not built to exclude but excluding nonetheless, the way a house excludes the street simply by having walls, not maliciously but structurally.

I sat on the settee. My side, the left side, close to the fire. The fire was lower than usual. The room was colder, or I was colder, or the word cold is not what I mean but it is the word that my body supplied and my mind did not correct. The wine Judith poured me was the same wine she always poured, but I held it without drinking, and I counted — the painter’s earrings (two, small garnets), the buttons on her cuff (four, bone), the seconds between when Judith looked at her and when Judith looked at me. I counted those seconds several times during the evening and the number varied but the average was high.

The painter left at ten. I left at quarter past. The walk from Bloomsbury to Lambeth took fifty-five minutes that night. I had walked it many times and it had never taken fifty-five minutes before. The streets were the same streets — Gower Street to Kingsway to the Strand to Waterloo Road to the Lower Marsh and then the turning into the lane where my lodging house stood, a lane that smelled of the river and of the brewery on the corner and, underneath both, of the particular damp of Lambeth, which is different from the damp of Bloomsbury the way one body is different from another, recognizable by its own composition of cold and wet and rot.

My room at the lodging house was narrow. The bed was narrow. I had not thought of it as narrow before. I had thought of it as a bed, sufficient, mine, and now I thought of it as narrow, as specifically and measurably narrow, and I lay in it and I did not think about the painter in the chair, because to think about her would have required a framework I did not possess, a vocabulary that included words for what I had seen in Judith’s drawing room and what those things meant and what they meant about me, and I did not have those words, not because I was afraid of them but because they did not exist in the language I had been given, the language of Margate and the Canterbury and fourteen girls in a line, the language in which a woman was a friend or a patroness or an eccentric but never the thing for which I had no word and which I therefore could not think, only feel, only lie in my narrow bed and feel, the way the body feels what is no longer there.

I did not go to Gower Street the following Tuesday. Or the Tuesday after. On both Tuesdays I stayed in my room at the lodging house and washed my stockings and mended the hem of my second-best skirt and ate bread and dripping from the paper it came in and listened to the woman in the room above mine, a seamstress called Flo Needham, pacing the boards of her floor in a pattern I had memorized without trying: twelve steps one way, a pause, twelve steps back. The ceiling was thin enough that I could hear her counting under her breath. Or perhaps I imagined the counting. Perhaps the counting was mine.

On the second Tuesday I took out the card — the cream-coloured card with the dark ink, which I had kept in my glove box for reasons I did not examine — and I held it the way I had held the palimpsest, tilted toward the lamp, as if a second message might show beneath the words that were already there. There was no second message. There were only the words she had written, in the hand of a woman who did not wait for the pen to agree with her, and the address, which I could have walked to in fifty-five minutes or forty or thirty if I had allowed my legs to carry me at the speed they knew and I did not.

I put the card back. I washed the other pair of stockings.

On the Saturday I went to the Canterbury and I performed.

The house was full for the Christmas programme. Mr. Carney had hired a new act — a male impersonator from the Tivoli, very good, very popular — and the crowds were the best they had been all season. I stood in the line, seventh from the left, and I performed the numbers I had been performing since September, and the numbers were the same and the steps were the same and the footlights were the same — forty-two, though now six had gone electric, and the cold white light was spreading across the stage like a tide, replacing the old amber gas-glow foot by foot — and nothing was the same.

The stage boards, when I looked down, were still painted black with the older colours showing through, and I saw this now not as a surface that could not decide what it was but as a record, a history of every production the Canterbury had mounted, preserved in layers, each colour a season, each season a company of performers who had stood where I stood and felt the boards under their feet and left without knowing that the paint would remember them long after the programmes were thrown away and the playbills were used to wrap fish.

The audience was not a mass. It was individual faces. A man in the pit with a pipe clenched between his teeth and his hat still on, the brim casting his eyes in shadow so that his face was half-lit, half-dark, a page with part of its text obscured. A woman in the gallery leaning forward with her elbows on her knees and her mouth open, not singing along but almost, her lips moving a half-second behind the melody, reading the song the way you read a text you almost remember. Two boys in the stalls, young, dressed alike, and one of them watching the stage and the other watching the first one watch, his face turned not toward the performance but toward the profile of his companion, and I saw this, I saw the angle of his attention, and I knew it.

Third row. Left side. Seven seats from the aisle.

She was there.

Judith was wearing the grey wool dress, the one with no ornament, and her hands were in her lap and she was watching me. Not the act. Not the line. Not the fourteen bodies moving in unison or the comic who was mugging in the wings or the orchestra that was slightly behind the tempo in the way it always was on Saturday nights when the first violin had been at the pub. She was watching me the way she had watched me the first night — reading a text written in two hands, trying to see both at once, holding the page at the right angle to the light.

I performed. I hit my marks. Seven steps from the wings, every one of them counted, every one of them placed on the black paint that was wearing through to green, then red, then pine. The footlights threw my shadow behind me, long and flat, and in the new electric glare the shadow was sharper than it had ever been in the gas-light, more defined, more like a second body, a body made of absence that moved when I moved and stopped when I stopped.

The number ended. The applause came up from the house like weather, a warm front, a pressure change. I walked offstage. Seven steps from my mark to the wings. Annie Platt walked beside me and said something about the tempo and I answered — I must have answered, because she laughed — but the words were not words I retained. They were the upper text, the psalter, the layer that was written over the thing beneath.

The stage door opened onto the alley behind the Canterbury. The air was cold — December cold, the kind that enters through the nostrils and settles in the chest like a coin dropped into deep water. It smelled of the river, which was three streets away and which you could always smell in Lambeth, the particular green-brown mineral smell of the Thames at low tide, and it smelled of smoke from the chimneys of the houses on the Lambeth Road, and beneath both of those it smelled of something I had never noticed before or had always noticed and never had a way to separate from the general texture of the night: the smell of the stage still on my skin, greasepaint and powder and sweat and the faintly scorched scent of hair that had been curled too close to the tongs, the smell of performance, of standing in a lit place while a dark place watched.

The cobblestones were wet. My boots made a sound on them — not the sound of stage shoes on painted boards but a harder sound, each step its own small report, and I listened to it, I counted the steps, and each one was distinct, and each one landed on a surface that was cold and real and did not care what had happened in the room behind me or what would happen next.

The alley turned onto Lambeth Road. I stopped counting. Not because the steps had ended but because the number did not matter, and I stood there for a moment at the corner with the cold in my chest and the smell of the river and the sound of the Canterbury behind me — applause, another act, the house still full — and I did not go back inside.