Annabel - Kathleen Winter [144]
The Théâtre Capitole had been renovated. Everything was fire red, blue, and gold. Wayne and Thomasina sat in cabaret chairs that had been covered in velvet. There was a scent of blackened steak, which patrons ate with two-pronged forks, and the smell of Gitanes and expensive soap mingled with this. The evening was a program of Schubert presented by the Berklee College of Music in Boston and the Juilliard School in New York.
“Wallis,” Wayne read in the program. “Wallis Michelin.”
Wally Michelin wore a headpiece that winked and flung stars across the theatre. She wore a gown that billowed at the sleeve and a breastplate that made her look, Wayne felt, ready for a battle under the waves, with Poseidon and an array of glorious fishes. When her voice began, Wayne knew it did not come from the girl he had heard under the Croydon Harbour apple tree. It came from a different person, a person who had learned how to build a voice from the ruins up, a person who had lost everything and had begun from having worse than nothing. A person who had not given up believing she sang, that music would come to her because she wanted it to come, and it had to come, and she would use everything in her power to encourage it to do so.
“You go down to the green room,” Thomasina said at the end of the program. “I’ll wait for you here.”
Wayne stood against the tide of audience members as they left the theatre, then descended the stairs, passed the pillars, and took a corridor to Wally’s dressing room. He knocked on her door, holding flowers.
There were lights around a mirror and pots of makeup. Wally had taken her costume off and stood in her camisole and slip, taking makeup off her face with a sponge. She had peeled her stockings and hung them over the back of an unpainted chair. People had given her other flowers: yellow and red roses, and cream coloured roses, and lemon roses with blushing edges. There was a bird of paradise surrounded by freesias. But the flowers Wayne gave Wally Michelin were Labrador plants that Thomasina had kept alive in a piece of soaked caribou moss: Labrador tea with its orange furze under the leaf and its misty white bloom; wild rhododendron’s asymmetrical purple on a woody stem; sundew and pitcher plants, carnivorous and threatening and beautiful in a way only someone from Labrador would know. The first thing Wally did with the flowers was break a leaf of the Labrador tea so that its scent, which is the scent of the whole of Labrador, broke over the two of them.
The pitcher plant’s leaves, exactly like little jugs, still held ants and a few tiny flies caught in the sticky substance the plant produced as a trap. With pitcher plants, some creatures got away and others did not. The pitchers caught other things too. They caught the changing light of Labrador mornings and springtimes and snow light, and they caught the sounds of the harlequin and eider ducks and hermit thrushes, and some of the sounds were considered beautiful and others were not, but the pitchers caught them.
Labrador tea with the same scent grew undisturbed around the shore of that central lake in Labrador, the unnamed lake from which the rivers run both north and south. The same insects visited lethal pitcher plants and a sky looked down; some might call it a merciless sky. And now and then in the pitchers’ water a cloud journeyed, and so did patterns of ducks on their spring flight.
Treadway Blake came