The Understudy

A horse crossed the ceiling shortly before three. I was the only person in the room who seemed pleased.

“That's new,” said the woman beside me.

We watched its small, inverted legs move through a plaster rose. The cart followed, loaded with something pale. Then the entire apparition slid onto the wall and disappeared behind a wardrobe labelled SEA.

“Do you hire this room out?” I asked.

“Not for horses.”

Her name was Nell. She managed the little theatre downstairs, and I had followed her up carrying one end of a rolled carpet. I had gone in to buy a ticket. The carpet was an additional service I had apparently volunteered for by standing near it.

The room had once been used for rehearsals. Now it held scenery, costumes and a palace in six pieces. Nell wanted it dark enough to check the luminous paint on a prop moon. She had shut the door and drawn a heavy blind over the single window. Outside, the street lay in fierce afternoon sunlight. Inside, after my eyes had adjusted, there was a horse overhead.

I put the carpet down.

“A camera obscura.”

“Is it yours?”

“The room. You've made one by accident.”

Light was entering through a small round hole in the blind. Opposite it, the bright street assembled itself faintly on the pale wall, with the sky underneath. The horse had crossed the upper part of that image, where the wall curved into the ceiling. It had looked wonderfully unconcerned about the architecture.

Nell found the hole with a finger. The street vanished.

“Useful,” she said.

“Wait.”

She lifted her finger. A man pushing a barrow walked through the wardrobe.

I laughed. I couldn't help it. I knew perfectly well what light did through a little aperture, and there it was doing it in a room that smelled of dust and stage glue, and this was somehow much better than knowing.

Nell let me watch. I ought to record that. She had a moon to mend and a carpet blocking her door, and for a little while she simply stood beside me.

“Why upside down?” she asked.

I held a length of pale thread from the sewing table between the bottom of the window and the upper wall, passing it through the position of the hole. Then another from above to below. They crossed.

“Light from the top of the view comes through here and keeps going down. Light from below goes up. Nothing needs to turn it over afterwards.”

She followed the threads with her eyes.

“So we could have the street as scenery.”

“In daylight. With a suitably dark stage.”

“Our play is set at midnight.”

“An artistic difficulty.”

“And in a forest.”

“A larger one.”

She went to fetch the moon. I examined the blind. Its hole was ragged, perhaps an old fixing pulled loose. A piece of thin card with a neater, smaller opening might improve the image. I asked when she returned, and she handed me a damaged programme from a stack destined for scrap.

“Nothing permanent. I need that blind.”

I fitted the card over the opening. The shapes sharpened a little and grew dimmer. A hanging shop sign resolved into a rectangle, although I couldn't read its lettering. When I tried a larger opening, the scene brightened and the edges softened again.

More light was coming through, but each point outside now spread over more of the wall. The pictures overlapped. I explained this to Nell's left elbow; the rest of her was occupied with the moon.

“Mm,” said the elbow.

I began considering a lens. A proper screen. Whether we might move the wardrobe. Nell had a sheet, surely. She had several kingdoms in storage; she must have a sheet.

Then she said, “Could you hold this?”

I turned with three proposed improvements still waiting in my mouth.

The moon was a shallow wooden disc, large enough to be awkward, with a split beside its handle. Nell needed both hands to bind the damaged joint. I held it against the bench while she worked. My sleeve caught a streak of old silver paint.

“What happened?”

“The moon was dropped during the interval.”

“Gravitationally sound.”

“The king did it. He's also the carpenter.”

She tightened the binding and tested it. Beyond her shoulder, somebody outside opened an umbrella against the sun. Its dim outline flowered upside down across a painted castle. I nearly pointed it out, but the joint shifted under my hand and required all my attention.

Nell had been doing this since breakfast. She mentioned it without complaint when I asked whether she had eaten. Her sandwich was wrapped on the windowsill. Mine was still a theoretical sandwich, somewhere in a future I had neglected to arrange.

We took five minutes on the bench. She gave me half. I bought the next day's programme in advance, which she said was an unusually elaborate way of paying for cheese.

By then the street image had faded as cloud crossed the sun. I could still make out the shopfront, but not the people. We sat with our backs against an unfinished mountain.

I asked about the play.

Nell told me the plot. It involved a mistaken identity, two inheritances and a letter which nobody opened until the third act. I suggested opening it earlier.

“Then we'd all be home by nine.”

She considered that with unmistakable longing.

After lunch I moved the carpet where she wanted it, wound the thread back onto its reel and removed my experimental card. With her permission, I clipped an opaque patch over the hole. The last faint fragment of the street went out.

We tested the moon. It glowed unevenly, with a respectable dark patch near one edge. Nell liked the patch. She said it looked less like a plate.

Downstairs, she found me a seat for the evening. I paid for it and went out to walk until the doors opened.

The actual street seemed indecently bright. The man with the barrow was still there, having stopped to argue over a delivery. I recognised him by his hat and felt an absurd flicker of familiarity. He had no idea that he had just been scenery.

That evening the king forgot the letter.

Nell came on as a servant, put it firmly into his hand and waited.

I was sitting close enough to see the silver paint on her thumb.