Nancy Netherwood Extract from Night and Light and The Half-Light

Nancy Netherwood

Extract from Night and Light and The Half-Light

Wakeworth House, Lincolnshire, the country seat of the Caldwell Family, creeping with illicit magic and ghosts. No sense of modernity has ever survived in the house. Even when we’re not in the house, we’re still in the house in spirit. We’re also in the theatre.

prologue: lantern

Darkness. Then, seventeen-year-old lorna opens the shutter of a dark lantern, spilling a little window of light into the void. She waits. Then she closes the shutter. She looks out, waiting for a response. Somewhere else in the dark, a light shines back. Then darkness again. A clock chimes twelve.

part 1: halloween/samhain

1922. aoife, 18, emerges from the darkness. She’s an Irish farm girl, dressed simply, practically – no unnecessary embellishments or fuss. She’s a girl who has worked and lived her life outdoors and it shows.

Aoife is covered in soil, like she’s crawled out of the earth. She looks haunted. The darkness shifts around her. She is stripped down to her slip and dressed in something formal, fitted, a little dour. Her hair is pinned up. She looks older, a little girl in her mum’s clothes – or maybe more like a doll, squeezed, tugged at, lovingly puppeted. There is care in it, and there is violence too. Then she’s alone. She’s in a no space, a darkness. When she speaks, she conjures – maybe we start to hear the wind, the sea, the birds.

Aoife: There’s, Water. Water beneath me and all around. Beneath the shrunken boards of the boat and the, Eating up the shore. Pulling it under, swallowing it. The House. Our house. Up on the cliff, hanging on, limpet house going under the tide line and, You. On the jetty. Your hair like seaweed, rippling in the close breath of the storm as it comes, whipping up the waves. It’s pulling at you, and your hat, Gone. It drifts for a moment like a bird on the crosswind, circles, soars. Then into the water. A wicker casket for some fish or mermaid not yet dead. It’s bad luck to have a coffin when you’re still living. Ireland shrinks away ’til it would fit in my pocket, ’til it’s a smear of green on a grey horizon, a smudge on glass, wiped away with a, I’ve never seen it as something outside myself. Something separate. It has always been the only thing, the only place, singing in my blood and the air in my, In me. If that world is a shape small enough to vanish then what are you, my dear sister? How will I find you again?

How can I, I, The sea opens up around me and it takes the breath out of me. The guts out of me. The wind gauzes around me like it could pick me up and carry me carry me back carry me home carry me anywhere, I see Him watching me and I think maybe I’ll jump. Maybe I’ll climb up on the rail and hold out my arms and let myself, Just let myself, Go,

A shift.

The sea starts to shrink and then the shrug of the land, looming out of the water. England with its flat, grey arms open to catch me. The sick magnet draw of it, the reeling in, the whirling plug hole, England. England. Poisoned ground that runs with blood, Hard under my feet, clogged with rocks and hidden bone, torn up for roads and railway tracks. Dead leaves and brown water. Stale air. Dearth. There’s a house. It’s rooted on the edge of a town on the edge of a forest. It sits in the shadow of a red brick factory that manufactures steel. He owns it. My, My, The man I, James Caldwell owns the factory like his father did, like his grandfather who built it. It belongs to him because his family’s money bought it. His family’s money bought Wakeworth House.

Aoife is in Wakeworth House. Maybe she was always in The House. At the heart of the room/The House/the theatre space is The Cabinet, covered by a dust sheet. The Cabinet is a Victorian display cabinet that has become something else, half-dolls house, half-treehouse – each section is laid out like a room, but the dolls and tiny furniture are overrun with stones, dried flowers, taxidermy, pottery. It’s chaotic but strangely harmonious, eerie but charming, a little magical. You get the feeling that everything in it will come alive the second you turn your back. But we can’t see this yet. For now, it’s just a shape under cloth.

They bought the land from wild earth into brick, into windows and chimneys and sconces like wedding cake. Into a Morning Room, a Dining Room, a Gallery, a Library. They bought hard lines where there were only leaves and water and animal skin. They bought locked doors to keep the forest out. That was a mistake. But they don’t know that yet. The Caldwell family suffer from a terminal lack of imagination. They don’t know what it means to be haunted.