Celeste was grateful for an excuse to get away from Madame Sabina. She found Hildegard shivering in the corridor.
‘Do you think I can go back in?’ she asked with a sniff.
‘I don’t know,’ said Celeste.
‘Perhaps I’ll come with you,’ said Hildegard. ‘Where are you going?’
‘To find a glove that your mama left on stage.’
‘I’m good at finding things,’ said Hildegard. ‘That’s what Mama always says. You’re Maria, aren’t you?’
‘No, I’m Celeste.’
‘Then why do they call you Maria?’
Celeste was about to say there had been a mistake, that it wasn’t her name, when Madame Sabina called for Hildegard.
For a moment Hildegard hesitated and later she wondered what would have happened if she had ignored her mother and gone with Celeste. Perhaps everything would have been different. But instead she went back into the dressing-room while Celeste walked out onto the stage.
In the wings she’d noticed a group of stagehands and scene painters standing round Mr Gautier. They were in a deep discussion about the gauze.
The stage manager walked past Celeste and said, ‘Good luck for tonight,’ then she heard him tell the director that it would be best to announce to the audience that there would be a fifteen minute delay before the curtain went up.
Celeste easily found the missing glove. She put it in her pocket and instead of going back to the dressing-room as she should have, she walked to the front of the stage and looked up.
Mr Gautier came over to her. ‘Are you feeling better?’ he asked.
Celeste nodded. ‘I’ve found the glove,’ she said.
‘Good, good.’
He too glanced up at the dome. Any minute now the chandelier would slowly make its entrance into the auditorium.
‘I always marvel at the fact that this chandelier is lit with candles,’ he said. ‘Gaslight would surely be much easier. I read somewhere that it weighs over six thousand kilos and is nearly as tall as three men. Seven hundred and fifty candles illuminate its bronze and crystal. Here it comes.’
Celeste held her breath as a bright ball of light beamed through the hole in the dome. Very slowly the chandelier began to appear, for it was believed to be unlucky if a candle was blown out on its short journey. Celeste couldn’t take her eyes off it.
‘I’ve worked in many opera houses,’ said Mr Gautier, ‘and I can’t remember any chandelier that shone as brightly as this one. You know, it was commissioned by the king as a memorial to all those passengers who vanished from the Empress. His son was among them.’
‘Vanished?’ repeated Celeste. ‘What do you mean – vanished?’
But Mr Gautier seemed not to hear her. ‘One day,’ he continued, ‘I’ll go up to the dome and see who’s responsible for cleaning it, for lighting all those candles. Yes, one day.’
Celeste, spellbound by the sight of the chandelier, took a step closer to the edge of the stage.
‘Be careful you don’t fall into the orchestra pit – we don’t want any more injuries,’ said Mr Gautier.
As if in a trance she stared up at the chandelier, at its blazing candles. She now saw that it was a vast crystal galleon. This was the chandelier from her dream, the one that the man in the emerald green suit had pointed to with his quill.
Once nightly the majestic vessel, fully rigged, leaves the harbour of the dome and descends with its weighty cargo of candles that illuminates the glass and bronze rigging, the shimmer giving wind to the stiff crystal sails. Gracefully it comes to rest on the sea of stagnant air, suspended between a fairy tale sky and the rocks of the red plush seats below.
‘This isn’t right,’ Celeste cried. ‘This is all wrong.’
Some things are never meant to fall. One is the grand galleon chandelier that hangs in the Royal Opera House. As Celeste watched, the tide changed, the galleon broke free from its moorings and for a moment it hung lopsided. Mr Gautier pulled at her but she didn’t move. She heard screams and behind her the thudding of feet, but she couldn’t look away. Anchored to the spot, all she could see was the great glass galleon set sail. It took all time, no time, for it to be wrecked by gravity on the red rocks where it exploded in the empty auditorium. A storm of glass rained down on her.
Down she falls. And down she falls.
‘Here you are again,’ says the man in the emerald green suit. ‘And too soon, if I may say so.’
‘I don’t know how to play the game,’ says Celeste.
‘What game?’
‘The Reckoning.’
‘Why should you know? I never told you,’ says the man.
‘Does that mean I’ve lost?’ says Celeste.
‘Entirely to the contrary. I think it means that you are very much in the game. If you survive. Which, at the moment, I think is doubtful. You have a very high fever and hundreds of fragments of glass in your skin. It would be a pity if you were to die.’
He leans back in his chair and gazes up.
Celeste thinks she must study this picture, remember it well. What is different from the first time I saw the man in the emerald green suit? she asks herself. Yes, of course, there is no crystal galleon. Everything else is the same – the suit, the… where’s the emerald ring?
‘Are you drifting off?’ asks the man in the emerald green suit.
‘No, no. I don’t understand the rules of that game, that’s all.’
‘I wouldn’t call them rules. I hate rules. You heard me wrong. You have to bring me three things. You see, I said it was easy.’
‘What are they?’ asks Celeste.
‘Oh, you’ve asked me that before.’
Celeste hesitates. I haven’t, she thinks. But I’m not the first player.
‘What makes me unique,’ says the man in the emerald green suit, ‘is that I don’t answer questions. You believe in rules that don’t exist. Or perhaps I confused you. Tut, tut, tut.’
‘Three things?’ asks Celeste.
‘Easy, bright and breezy. Three is a good number.’
How best, thinks Celeste, to find out what the things are without asking a direct question?
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she says. ‘I seem to be doing all right without knowing. I’ll just carry on. The three things can’t be of any importance, or you would have said.’
Celeste turns her back on him.
‘One is the song of a bird who can’t sing,’ says the man in the emerald green suit. ‘Two is a play too small for actors. Three is a light that blinds the seeing.’
Celeste feels more lost knowing the three things than she did before. She sighs and says, ‘Then it is no harder than carving an elephant from a grain of rice.’
‘You said that to me before,’ says the man in the emerald green suit.
‘Is this a fairy tale?’ asks Celeste.
‘No, and that is a question. But I will be generous. I am generous to a fault. You are in the gutter of time. A world full of endless possibilities.’
‘That’s nonsense,’ says Celeste.
‘On the contrary, it is quite straight forward. I put your lack of understanding down to your fever. One possibility is that you die, which given your present state is probable. Another is that you live. Another is that the chandelier never fell. And another possibility is that I’m lying. You decide. Are you following? Yes? No?’
‘I think so.’
‘Good. These endless possibilities disappear into infinity, taking with them all the might-have-beens, the could-have-beens, the should-have-beens, the would-have-beens.’
Celeste sighs. ‘I’m still lost. There seem to be a lot of beens. It must be like the seven times table and I have never understood the seven times table.’
‘It’s nothing like it. Really, I thought you were cleverer than that. I must have been mistaken. Wake up – you’re drifting off again.’
‘Two sevens are fourteen.’
‘Are you listening?’
‘I think so.’
Celeste looks up and catches a glimpse of herself hanging from a boat hook. How, she thinks, am I here and not here?
She realises she must have said it aloud for the man in the emerald green suit says, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Of course you can be in two places at the same time.’
‘Can I?’ says Celeste.
‘This is why I hate passenger ships because there are always innocents on board and one innocent means I have to play the Reckoning. Go, and don’t come back unless you have won the game.’
Down she falls. Oh, how the world has tumbled.
