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The Dragon in the Dress Circle

By Ophelia Ravenwood

The dragon arrived while Fenricka was trying to remove a boiled sweet from the carpet with a spoon.

She saw his feet first. Four of them, in the revolving door, going nowhere.

“Stop pushing,” she said.

“I have stopped. The door hasn’t.”

The brass leaves juddered against a folded wing. Fenricka put down the spoon, took the side door off its latch and went outside. Rain had collected in the hollows above the dragon’s eyes. He was about the size of a small pony, though there was considerably more of him behind. His tail disappeared around the corner of the building.

“Backwards,” she said. “Slowly. Mind your left—yes. That.”

A scale the colour of old copper dropped onto the step.

“I’m sorry,” he said, looking at it.

“I’ve seen worse come off people in this doorway.”

Once she had him free, he shook himself. Fenricka closed her eyes. Water ticked against the glass behind her.

“Oh,” he said.

“Come in.”

His tail was shorter than she’d feared. He had wound it around a drainpipe while struggling with the door, and had to go back to unwind it. By the time he was properly inside, she had fetched a bath towel from the dressing rooms.

He accepted it between two claws.

“I have a ticket.”

“Most people do.”

“Not everybody believes mine.”

He took a flat tin from beneath his wing and opened it with great care. Inside, wrapped in a handkerchief, lay a cream rectangle. He offered it to her.

Fenricka read the date, then read it again.

“That’s sixty years ago.”

“Sixty years and four months.”

“Did you know?”

“Of course I knew. I was there.”

Through the wall came the noise of Lucan practising his death. He had done it three times since six o’clock. The first two had sounded remarkably like someone moving a wardrobe. This one ended with an accusation addressed to heaven.

The dragon looked towards the sound.

“He’s still here, then.”

“You know Lucan?”

“Does he still fall down?”

“Eventually.”

On the ticket, in faded purple ink, someone had stamped AUTHOR’S SEAT. Below that, Dress Circle, A1.

The box-office woman appeared behind the glass. She looked at the dragon, looked at Fenricka and held up both palms. There were forty-three people booked for the last night. There was room. That wasn’t the difficulty.

“What is it you’ve come to see?” Fenricka asked.

The dragon brought the towel carefully down between his horns.

“My play.”

At fifty-seven, Fenricka had spent thirty-one years explaining that the toilets weren’t through the doors marked EXIT, that an interval was not the end, and that actors could see people using illuminated spectacles to read the programme. On Monday she was going to start answering a telephone in a furniture warehouse. She had bought a blouse with small blue birds on it because the woman who interviewed her had said the office was cheerful.

She had not told anyone about the blouse.

Tonight, however, she was wearing the burgundy jacket with the polished elbows. Its right pocket contained a torch, six safety pins and a peppermint she couldn’t remember acquiring. She led the dragon past the dark refreshment counter to the little sitting area under the stairs.

“Othzair,” he said, when she asked his name.

She gave him hers.

“You’re wet through, Othzair.”

“Yes. The tram driver wouldn’t take me.”

“Wouldn’t he?”

“He said my tail counted as an unaccompanied parcel.”

She almost smiled. He noticed and added, with some satisfaction, “I offered to accompany it.”

His tin also contained three letters and a newspaper cutting. The cutting announced the theatre’s closure. The oldest letter regretted postponing a proposed curtain-raiser because of alterations to the evening’s programme. A second promised to keep the work in mind. The third, sent eleven years later, asked him to collect his manuscript.

“Why didn’t you?”

“I did. That doesn’t mean I agreed.”

“You’ve waited quite a while to argue.”

“I argued for the first four years. Then I had other things to do.” He flexed a claw over a stiff joint. “I read that they were selling the building. I thought, if I wrote again, there would be another letter. I don’t want another letter.”

Fenricka glanced at the clock. Twenty-eight minutes before the advertised start.

“What’s your play called?”

“An Excellent Dinner.”

She waited.

“That’s the title.”

“Right. And how long is it?”

“Ten minutes. Twelve if they understand the pauses.”

Behind the wall, Lucan began to die again.

Othzair winced.

“I could do without those.”

Lucan had taken off his crown and was rubbing the bridge of his nose. The crown was pasteboard, beautifully painted. From the back row it looked like beaten gold. From the dressing-room doorway Fenricka could see the staple holding it together.

“If you’ve come about the sound,” he said, “tell her the thunder’s too early.”

“There’s a dragon in the foyer.”

He looked at her in the mirror.

“A real one?”

“No, I’m making conversation.”

“Is he breathing fire?”

“He’s using a towel.”

Lucan turned. He was seventy-nine, though the portrait beside the dressing table suggested that he had spent most of those years being thirty-eight. On stage he could still make an entire room wait while he raised one hand. Off stage, getting that hand through the sleeve of his coat sometimes required assistance.

Fenricka showed him the ticket.

He didn’t take it.

“Oh, no.”

“Do you remember him?”

“Oh, God.”

“Apparently you do.”

He sat down on the stool. The velvet of his king’s robe spread over his slippers.

“I was nineteen.”

“You’re going to have to give me a little more.”

“It was my first engagement. The manager had read something about dragons patronising the arts. He thought there might be money. There wasn’t. The dragon repaired survey instruments for a living.”

“And wrote plays.”

“One play.”

Lucan picked up a powder puff, found he had no use for it and put it down again.

“The manager wanted a battle. Or a volcano. Our author had written about a man making dinner for his wife. The wife was late. The man had borrowed a saucepan from next door. It was all very—”

“Domestic?”

“Difficult to sell on a poster.”

“So you cancelled it.”

“I didn’t cancel anything. I was earning less than the woman who washed the curtains.”

“What happened?”

“We rehearsed it. Then the manager found a singer who brought her own pianist. Four songs, no scenery. I was told to send a letter.”

“The letter says the programme was being altered.”

“It was.”

She looked at him.

He looked away first.

“Have you still got it?” she asked.

“The letter?”

“The play.”

For a moment she thought he was going to deny it. Instead he drew open the bottom drawer beneath his mirror. There were old programmes inside, a broken watch chain, a tin of throat pastilles and a flattened paper parcel.

“I keep my first parts,” he said. “I brought them in to sort out. For tonight.”

“Have you ever performed this one?”

“No.”

“Then it’s still your first part.”

“Fenricka.”

She let him open the parcel.

The script was held together with red thread. A small brown ring stained its front page. Under the title Lucan had written his name in handwriting so ambitious that it nearly touched both margins.

“Ten minutes,” she said.

“I’m giving my last performance in this building tonight.”

“I know.”

“I’ve spent a month preparing it. I don’t intend to go out carrying a saucepan.”

“You can put it down before the king comes on.”

He gave her the look that usually preceded a speech about standards. She had used the time it took to develop that look to retrieve lost gloves, move chairs and once to stop a small child dismantling a radiator.

Tonight she waited.

“Does he know I’m here?” he asked.

“He heard you.”

Lucan closed his eyes.

Othzair recognised him at once. This was plainly both a pleasure and an inconvenience to Lucan.

“You’ve grown into your nose,” the dragon said.

“Thank you.”

“I wasn’t sure you would.”

Lucan held out the script. Othzair stopped drying the narrow place beneath his jaw.

“You kept it.”

“Yes.”

“May I?”

He turned the first page with the blunt side of a claw. The handwriting in the margin was Lucan’s. Fenricka could make out WAIT FOR LAUGH, underlined twice.

Othzair made a small noise.

“I didn’t know you thought there would be one.”

“There was one at rehearsal.”

The dragon looked up.

“Was there?”

“The carpenter. I heard him behind the flat.”

Othzair looked down again. After a while, he turned the page.

Fenricka could hear the first audience members at the outer door. Her colleague went to admit them. One woman said, “Oh, is that part of it?” and was quietly encouraged to collect her tickets.

Lucan pointed to a passage.

“I can’t do this.”

“Which bit?”

“Climb onto the table. Drop into the chair. Fall out of it.”

“You weren’t very good at that when you were nineteen.”

“You weren’t at the rehearsal.”

“I was at the audition.”

Fenricka took the script when Lucan offered it. The action concerned a man who had put on his wife’s best apron to cook a celebratory dinner. He was attempting to hide a ruined pudding from her, and a borrowed saucepan from the neighbour who wanted it back. There were two doors and three increasingly bad hiding places.

“Why does he climb onto the table?” she asked.

“The saucepan’s on the high shelf,” Othzair said.

“Put it on a low one.”

They both looked at her.

“He can’t bend very well either,” she added.

“I can bend.”

“Getting up’s the part we’re worried about.”

A laugh came from behind the box-office glass.

Lucan took back the script. He read the passage again, moving one slipper on the carpet.

“If the saucepan’s underneath the chair,” he said, “he could sit on the apron. Then when he stands—”

“It pulls him back,” Othzair said.

“No fall.”

“A very small fall.”

“No fall.”

The dragon considered this revision. His tail tip moved an inch.

“The spoon must still drop.”

“Oh, the spoon can drop.”

Fenricka went to ask the stage manager for a chair.

The stage manager listened, said, “Tonight?” in a voice of astonishing weariness, and came out to look at Othzair.

The dragon did not offer money. He offered to read the neighbour from behind the door.

“That saves an actor,” the stage manager said.

“I’m free as well,” Fenricka said.

“You’re working.”

“I can cover the front until the interval,” called the box-office woman. “We’re hardly expecting a rush.”

“Have you acted?” the stage manager asked Fenricka.

“School. Once. I was a tree.”

“The wife has six lines,” Lucan said. “She arrives at the end.”

“Is she a convincing tree?”

They had seventeen minutes.

The stage manager agreed to put the little play in front of the main one, using the bare apron of the stage with the great curtain still closed. She made them promise there would be no fire, no water, no flour thrown, and nothing dropped that could roll into the orchestra pit. Then she went to find the spare door flat and a wooden spoon.

Othzair followed her halfway down the passage before his folded wings caught between two hat racks.

Fenricka backed him out.

“The other way,” she said. “Through the loading door. It’s wider.”

“I’ve become rather wide.”

“We can see.”

She helped him out into the covered yard and through the broad backstage entrance. A young technician moved a cable and showed him where to wait. The place smelled of hot dust and old paint. Othzair stood very still beneath the work light, looking at the back of the curtain.

Fenricka had to fetch the saucepan herself. The only one in the building was on the dressing-room stove, full of the stage manager’s soup.

“Absolutely not,” its owner said.

There was a metal basin in the cleaning cupboard. Lucan struck its rim with his knuckle.

“Too thin.”

Fenricka took it from him and put it on the chair.

“Then don’t eat it.”

They rehearsed the first two minutes while the audience settled on the other side of the curtain. Othzair was meant to knock once, wait, then knock twice. His claws produced three distinct holes in the painted door.

“Knuckles,” Fenricka said.

“I don’t have those.”

“Use this.”

She gave him the cork end of a spare curtain pole.

At the first knock Lucan lifted the basin, looked into it and said, “I hadn’t expected the sauce to set quite so firmly.”

Nobody laughed. The technician was holding the door upright.

Lucan tried it again, more slowly.

Othzair shook his head.

“You’re doing something with your eyebrows.”

“I’m acting.”

“I know. Could you do less of it?”

Fenricka looked away before Lucan caught her expression.

He tried it a third time. He looked into the basin as though he genuinely hoped its contents might have changed.

The technician laughed through his nose. The door wobbled.

“That’s it,” Othzair said.

Lucan didn’t answer, but he put a pencil mark beside the line.

Then came Fenricka’s entrance. She had to say, “What a lovely smell,” look into the basin and add, “Is it meant to be supper?”

She said both lines without looking.

“The basin,” Lucan said.

“I know.”

“You have to look in it.”

“I know. There are people out there.”

“Yes.”

She could hear them: a cough, a programme opening, someone calling along a row to ask whether this seat was taken. She had spent thirty-one years standing among those sounds. Behind the curtain they seemed to belong to an animal breathing.

Lucan brought the basin closer.

“Just look at this. I’ll wait.”

She looked.

“Is it meant to be supper?”

“Yes,” he said, quite gently, though that wasn’t his line.

The stage manager checked her watch.

“Places.”

Othzair’s grip tightened on the cork-ended pole.

“There’s one thing,” he said.

All three of them turned.

“The wife likes him.”

Fenricka waited for more. Othzair searched the script, although the thing he wanted wasn’t written there.

“Even with the pudding,” he said.

“I’ll bear it in mind.”

The stage manager went in front of the curtain and announced a late addition to the programme. She said the title and the author’s name. Then she announced Lucan, who was already on stage beside the chair, and Fenricka, who was hidden behind the wing wearing the burgundy jacket under a borrowed coat.

Someone in the audience said, “Our Fenricka?”

She nearly went back to the foyer.

Lucan lifted the basin.

The first laugh surprised her. It was small and close to the front. He waited for it without looking pleased with himself.

Othzair knocked.

Lucan hid the basin beneath the chair, sat down and called, “Nobody’s in!”

“I can hear you,” said the dragon.

“It’s an old house. Sound lingers.”

A much larger laugh followed that. Fenricka felt it through the soles of her shoes.

Othzair nearly missed the next knock.

The trouble with the apron worked. Lucan rose with enormous dignity, was brought up short by the cloth beneath him and slowly looked back at the chair as though it had behaved badly. He didn’t repeat the movement. He let the audience finish discovering what had happened.

Fenricka had seen him play kings, judges, a jealous husband and a sea captain who took twenty-three minutes to drown. She had never seen him stand quite like this, one hand holding the basin behind his back, the other trying to free the apron without anyone noticing.

The wooden spoon slipped from his fingers. It hit the chair rung and bounced neatly into the basin.

That hadn’t happened in rehearsal.

Lucan looked down. From behind the door Othzair said, “Was that my spoon?”

Lucan held the silence until somebody in the dress circle broke.

“No.”

It was Fenricka’s cue.

She crossed the stage too quickly and arrived beside him with her breath caught high in her chest. He turned the basin towards her, just as he had backstage.

“What a lovely smell,” she said.

Then she looked into it.

The basin contained the wooden spoon, a dead moth and the old label from a bottle of floor cleaner. She had scrubbed it, but not quite enough.

“Is it meant to be supper?”

The audience laughed. Lucan’s eyes creased at the corners.

He began to explain. Every explanation required another explanation. The neighbour knocked again. Fenricka had only four lines left, but she found she didn’t need to stand still while he spoke. She took the basin, inspected the apron and gently pulled the tied bow round from his hip to his back.

Othzair watched from the gap beside the door. His mouth was open slightly. The cork-ended pole rested against his chest.

Fenricka gave her last line.

“Take off my apron. We’re going out.”

Lucan began to untie it. The knot had tightened.

He tried again.

The audience waited.

This wasn’t in the script either. Fenricka could see a little colour rising above his collar. She stepped behind him, worked one finger under the knot and loosened it. It was an ordinary movement, performed with her head bent and her tongue pressed against her teeth.

The apron came free.

Lucan held out his arm.

They walked off together while the neighbour knocked on the empty house.

Othzair would not take a bow until the stage manager found somewhere to put the pole. Then he came out sideways, avoiding the basin, and stood between them.

Forty-three people made a surprising amount of noise.

The dragon bowed too low. His chin brushed the boards. Lucan put a hand on his shoulder, or on the place that seemed most nearly a shoulder, and helped him straighten.

Backstage, Othzair said, “They laughed at the spoon.”

“They did.”

“I didn’t put that in.”

“No.”

“Keep it.”

Lucan folded the apron. His hands were shaking a little.

“We haven’t anywhere to keep it for,” he said.

Othzair looked at the closed curtain. A technician was already carrying away the door.

“I know.”

The stage manager gave Lucan four minutes to become a king. He went towards his dressing room, then turned back.

“Your wife,” he said to Othzair. “Was she based on anybody?”

“Not particularly.”

“Oh.”

“I was very hungry when I wrote it.”

Lucan laughed. It came out so abruptly that he had to lean against the wall.

Fenricka took Othzair round through the yard and back into the foyer. Her colleague was waiting with the tin and his old ticket.

“The circle stairs are broad,” Fenricka told him. “But there’s a turn at the top. If it’s too much, we can seat you downstairs.”

“I’d like to try.”

They took it slowly. At the turn he stopped to rest, pretending to admire a plaster rose. Fenricka admired it with him. When he was ready, they went on.

A1 stood at the end of the front row. With the adjacent unsold seat folded up, there was room for him to settle, his tail curled beneath his own body and clear of the aisle. Fenricka put the folded towel under his chin so the edge of the balustrade wouldn’t rub.

“Can you see?”

“Yes.”

“Comfortable?”

“Not enormously.”

“Neither is anybody else. They were narrower sixty years ago.”

He made a dry, delighted sound.

Downstairs, the house lights began to dim. Her colleague had agreed to stay at the front until the interval. Fenricka should have gone to the landing, where she could watch the doors. Instead she sat in the next empty seat beyond the folded one, close enough to hear the little catch in his breathing after the stairs. The landing was visible from there.

On Monday, she would put on the blouse with the blue birds. Tomorrow there would be chairs to stack and a jacket to return.

The great curtain rose.

Lucan stood beneath the painted winter sky, crowned and solitary. He lifted his hand. The room waited.

Beside Fenricka, Othzair leaned forward.

“Is this the one where he falls down?” he whispered.

“Yes.”

“Oh, good.”

She put a finger to her lips, and he settled back to watch.