Witness account · 3 min read · Set in The Meridian Hall ·
The Understudy of the Fifth Night
The company's understudy ledger rules five lines to every week though no week Meridian Hall has ever played held a fifth night, and the lady standing by goes in and acts it.
- reliability: corroborated
- witness: "Doreen Vatcher, wardrobe mistress"
I mind the wardrobe records at Meridian Hall — mending lists, dress holds, the strict-clothes dockets — and I meant to go on minding them in silence, but the Archive's clerk asked me plainly, and I will not put my signature to a thing that is not true.
The company keeps an understudy ledger. Grey boards, brass corners, ruled five-and-thirty lines to the page. Each Monday the company manager sets down the week: one line to a performance, and against it the name of whoever stands by the lady of the company. Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday. Four calls, as the booking agreement has always had it, as the box-office rolls show, as the board minutes show back to the Hall's first winter. Meridian has never played a fifth night. No fifth night has been billed, printed, or let in sixty-two years.
The ledger carries five lines to the week.
Those are ruled no differently from the rest. They are filled in ahead of the four, in the manager's own blue pencil: the week's dates, the words FIFTH NIGHT, and opposite them whoever stands under — this season Ivy Salter, a quiet young woman with a steady autograph and no other entry anywhere in the house. The principal's space on the fifth line is left empty. Whatever the fifth night is, the lady of the company does not play it. Salter does.
I set the seasons side by side the way the clerk wanted them. Fourteen seasons reach back readable in my time at the Hall. Four calls to the week makes two thousand two hundred and ninety-six performances, and the cast book agrees with itself line by line, signatory by signatory. The ledger runs to two thousand eight hundred and seventy lines. That is five hundred and seventy-four over, and five hundred and seventy-four is forty-one weeks by fourteen seasons, every fifth line counted in and nothing else. The two books disagree by exactly the fifth lines. Not one short. Not one over.
The rest is habit, kept to a schedule nobody advertises. The doorman's pass-book signs Miss Salter in at nine past seven on Fridays the box office never opened, and out at six and twenty to eleven; I counted his Fridays and they came to the five hundred and seventy-four. On those Fridays I warm the lady's dresses at four for the evening that is printed, and Salter's spare set goes to the wardrobe room cold at six and comes back at half past nine with the collar pins moved and the lining holding a warmth I did not put there. The hall's electricity book shows the flies light and the make-up bench drawn together for three hours and twenty-five minutes on Fridays nobody billed. The printer bundles four hundred programmes to a house, and his returns have come up four hundred short of the order every week of my eleven years — and the shortfall lands on Friday, never on a night the house can account for.
When the clerk's letters reached the others, they signed: Percy Dunn with the pass-book, Mr Luckraft with the ledger itself, the electrician with the typed meter readings, the printer's son with the returns. It stands corroborated to the value of seven names. The board, in its minute of 1959, resolved that no fifth performance exists and none shall be found to.
I attended the board and asked whether the lady of the company ever takes the fifth wings herself. The chairman did not answer. But the flyleaf of the ledger, which used to carry something in Miss Salter's hand, has been cut out since, and I should like to know what she wrote there, and who the four hundred a week were that stood in the dark to hear it.