‘Wake up.’ Celeste felt the flick across her face. ‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere you lazy, useless girl.’
She wiped the dream from her eyes and climbed sleepily out of the costume basket with its comforting smell of old tinsel and greasepaint. Before her stood a ferocious-looking lady who Celeste knew must be a wardrobe mistress for she wore a grey dust-coat over her clothes, had a tape measure hanging round her neck and pins in her lapels. But it didn’t explain why she had seen fit to attack Celeste with a glove.
‘What did you do that for?’ said Celeste. ‘You have no right to hit me.’
‘No right?’ said the wardrobe mistress. She was twisted with rage and sourer than a lemon that had never seen the sun. ‘And who are you, a little rat, to talk to me in such a manner? Don’t you dare start giving yourself airs and graces.’
‘I’m not,’ said Celeste. ‘Mother would be furious if she knew you had struck me with a glove and talked to me so rudely.’
‘Mother? Mother – oh my word, what dream have you been in? You’re an orphan as well you know. Your mother – whoever she was – left you in a basket and forgot all about you.’
‘Miss Olsen,’ called a stagehand, ‘Madame Sabina wants you.’
Celeste was about to tell Miss Olsen that she was wrong, very wrong, when she looked down at the dress she was wearing. It was a thin, worn thing.
‘I wasn’t wearing this,’ she said. ‘I didn’t put this on this morning. No – these clothes are so old-fashioned. I was wearing a brand-new sailor dress and playing with my toy theatre.’
‘When you have quite finished making up fairy tales,’ said Miss Olsen, ‘Madame Sabina wants her glove and wants it now – in her dressing-room.’
‘Madame Sabina,’ repeated Celeste. In her dream the man in the emerald green suit had spoken of her. But that was a dream, it wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. ‘Why do I have to take it to her? Madame Sabina is Mother’s understudy.’
Even as she said this she was aware that her memories were beginning to fall into forgetfulness and there was only this strange, disjointed now. The more she thought of the past, the more it disappeared. Down she falls and down she falls…
‘Did you hear me?’ said Miss Olsen. ‘How dare you talk of the great Madame Sabina Petrova like that.’
Celeste closed her eyes in hope that she might wake up, that everything would be as it should be. When she opened them she knew that something very strange had happened, was happening. The words of the man in the emerald green suit echoed in her head. ‘To pay for your lessons you work – when you are not required to rehearse – for the great singer.’
The only thing Celeste could remember for certain was her toy theatre.
‘Which city is this?’ she asked.
‘The city of C—, as you perfectly well know.’
‘There is no city of C—,’ said Celeste. ‘Where is Anna?’
‘Ridiculous girl, I know your game,’ said the wardrobe mistress.
‘Do you?’ said Celeste.
‘Yes, oh yes – you think I don’t know that you both live up there, in the dome.’
‘Do we?’ said Celeste.
‘I know everything,’ said Miss Olsen, ignoring her question. ‘I know what goes on behind the scenes and if you act the fool it won’t work with me. You are nothing more than a little rat.’
Celeste wanted to be gone from there. She needed time to think. It was easier to run the errand than argue with Miss Olsen. She took the glove and set off in what Miss Olsen considered the wrong direction and the wardrobe mistress stamped her foot.
‘Where are you going? You’re not to use that door. If I find that you’ve used that door I will tell Madame, so I will, and you…’ Her words were lost in the busyness of the theatre.
Celeste knew this theatre. Or perhaps she knew one similar for it felt familiar, yet it wasn’t. Somehow it was different and she thought it had to do with the light; it shone too brightly, illuminating her growing sense of panic. Where was she? She knew one thing to be a truth: that she had spent most of her life backstage in theatres, she had as good as grown up in the rabbit warrens of draughty passages with myriad doors to workshops, to the wardrobe department, the prop shop, the green room. Winding wooden staircases led up to the domes and the fly towers. She knew backstage and front of house better than the lines on the palm of her hand. The theatre was home to her. And, as if to prove to herself that she was right, she had relied on her instinct and taken what she hoped was the fastest route, even if it was strictly forbidden. The other way went down veiny corridors, took too long and was always full of people. Near the wig department, she stopped by a narrow door that you wouldn’t notice unless you knew it was there. It was only to be used by the directors and important people and it divided the back of the theatre from the front. As far as Celeste was concerned, they were two different worlds. She looked around to make sure she wouldn’t be seen. A blind man was coming towards her, his stick tapping each side of the corridor.
‘Out of the way,’ he shouted. ‘Out of the way.’
With a turn of the handle, she slipped through the forbidden door into the realm of thick, red carpets where the walls were decorated with murals of fairy tales. This was the part of the theatre that belonged to the audience. To Celeste’s relief it looked familiar. It was a place she was sure she knew. It would be inhabited by grand ladies in luxurious dresses with bustles, and trains that swished when they moved, and dainty shoes that a princess might wear, their hair sparkling with gems. They would be accompanied by gentlemen in evening dress with starched white waistcoats and collapsible top hats. In the intervals they would hover in this corridor in hope of glimpsing the king.
All Celeste had to do was let herself into the anteroom behind the Royal Box and run down the spiral staircase that led to the prompt side of the stage, then it was only a matter of a twist and a turn to the diva’s dressing-room. She smiled to herself, knowing she would arrive well before Miss Olsen who she imagined would have wheezed and plodded down two floors to the stage level, passing the wardrobe department where she would have been unable to resist checking on her seamstresses.
Knowing where she was quietened Celeste’s worried mind. More important still, all was as it should be. Perhaps it was Miss Olsen who was losing her memory. She had heard it said that happened to grown-ups. A bit like losing your gloves, she supposed, or your hat. You keep on losing parts of your life until you forget who you are. Celeste told herself that would never happen to her. She remembered, yes, she did remember. It was just the dream that had confused her. She stood in front of the grand, gold-embossed doors that opened onto the Royal Box. Silently, she entered the anteroom and congratulated herself. She knew this theatre. She could see into the Royal Box and beyond to the auditorium with its white and gold walls and red plush seats. High above in the ornate ceiling, surrounded by painted fairies, was a large, circular space through which the glass chandelier would descend, as it always had done, twenty minutes before the audience was admitted.
She stopped for a moment to take in the magic of the auditorium. It had been silly to let a dream upset her.
Celeste had her hand on the banister of the spiral staircase when she became aware that someone was watching her. She spun round. In the shadows she could see only a pair of buttoned boots and two elegant hands resting on a gold-topped cane.
‘Do you often come this way?’ said a gentle voice.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Celeste, ‘but it’s the quickest way to Madame Sabina’s dressing-room.’
The owner of the boots and gold-topped cane laughed.
‘You shouldn’t be here either,’ said Celeste.
The gentleman stood and stepped into the light.
‘I won’t tell if you don’t.’
He didn’t look anything like the head on the coins, she thought, or the marble bust at the top of the stairs in the auditorium. All urgency left and curiosity took its place.
‘Why are you here alone?’ she asked. ‘Shouldn’t there be soldiers to protect you?’
‘Protect me from what? Dragon divas? I came to watch the dress rehearsal. I was told that Madame’s voice is transformed but I could hear no difference.’
Her large eyes took in the gentleman before her. She was standing upright, hands behind her back.
‘You were the little dancer in the first act. You were the best thing about the dress rehearsal.’
‘No, sir,’ she said. ‘I can’t dance.’
He laughed. ‘Now you are being modest. Were those real wings on your back?’ he asked.
Celeste said again, ‘I can’t dance, sir. Perhaps you have mistaken me for someone else.’
‘There is no mistake. It was you and you flew – it was enchanting. And now you are dressed in the costume of a street urchin.’
Shyness overcame her.
‘No, sir. May I go, sir?’
‘Yes,’ he said. He put his long finger to his lips. ‘Not a word.’
‘Not a word,’ said Celeste. ‘And anyway, no one would believe me if I told them I’d met the king.’