by Marie Joseph
But ‘The Singing Angel’! Never! The vivid blue eyes flickered up and down for a moment, taking in the swell of Clara’s full breasts beneath the hideous coat. He could swear her legs were all right too, in spite of the fact that she had refused to reveal them. With decent clothes and that appalling accent changed, this girl could reach the top. It was there in the way she stood, in the tilt of that proud head, in the purity of her diction. And that hair! It was almost impossible to believe she’d been brought up in this little back street, in this house which reeked of mice droppings.
He leaned forward. ‘Can you spare the time to tell me something about yourself, my dear? I caught you on the point of going out, didn’t I?’
‘Oh, no.’ Clara glanced down at the coat buttoned up to her neck. ‘I always wear me coat till the fire gets going properly.’ Lifting the lid of a beaten copper scuttle in the hearth, she recklessly threw on a precious cob of coal. ‘Would you like a cup of tea, sir? It’ll only take the kettle a minute to boil once the fire gets agate.’
Bart shook his head. ‘Not for me, thank you. Now tell me. Are your parents out working? I’ve come to talk to them, actually.’
Clara hesitated. Joe had said this man was important, and he certainly looked it in his tweed overcoat, with his neat collar and tie fastened with a small round gold pin. He wasn’t as old as she’d first thought either, and handsome, especially when he smiled. There was a kindness about him, and hadn’t her father always said that if a person was kind then all else fell into place? Suddenly she knew she could trust this Mr Boland.
‘Me father’s dead,’ she told him with a catch in her voice, ‘and me mother gave me away when I was new-born. Me father was a clogger. That was his shop through there, but he wasn’t me real father.’ She sighed. ‘I’m a bit of a mix-up sir, but it didn’t matter when he was alive. Now,’ her head drooped, ‘I’m on me own, sir. There’s just me.’
Accustomed to hearing sentimental sob stories from actresses who swore they’d risen from the gutter itself, Bart fixed Clara with his penetrating gaze.
‘What if I said I believed you’d just made all that up?’ he asked.
‘I’d say you was a flamin’ liar, sir!’
Bart Boland hadn’t had what he called a good old belly laugh for as long as he could remember. Throwing back his head he laughed as if he were coming apart at the seams.
‘That wasn’t meant to be funny, sir.’ Clara was all indignation now. ‘I don’t tell lies. Me father would’ve had me over his knee for lying.’ She sighed. ‘I was a bit of a job for him at times.’
‘Your father, the clogger.’ Bart nodded, in full control of himself again. ‘The Clogger’s Child! That’s it! Look here, my dear. I can offer you a ten-week engagement with one of my smaller companies touring the northwest, with an option of, let’s say, five years at £5 a week to begin with. But you’d have to pay your lodgings out of that, so it’s not exactly a fortune.’ He began to button up his coat. ‘It will be hard work, and some of the digs won’t be up to much, but there’s a good friend of mine in the company who will look after you if I ask her. Miss Dora Vane. She used to be one of a trio, singing and dancing. My father thought the world of her.’ He stood up, setting the chair rocking of its own volition. ‘Dora Vane was on the bill at the Palace Theatre here when it reopened. On the same bill as Charlie Tempest, I’m almost sure.’ The blue eyes twinkled. ‘But that was a bit before your time.’ Holding out his hand, he took Clara’s cold fingers in his warm grasp. ‘I’m going now to tell the producer exactly what I have in mind for you.’ He jiggled her hand up and down. ‘And don’t worry. I promise you’ll be covered up decent.’
Still smiling, he walked through the shop and out to the front door, a tall man who still walked as if he were on parade. ‘Go down to the theatre at ten in the morning for rehearsal. They’ll be expecting you.’
Clara watched in awe as the uniformed chauffeur came round the car to hold the door wide.
‘I’ll be keeping an eye on you.’ Bart turned his head to talk over his shoulder. ‘No need to worry.’
He was still smiling as the large black car drew away from the kerb. Clara waited until it had turned the corner, then she went inside the house and burst into tears.
She cried for joy; she cried for the miracle which a tall man with the brightest blue eyes she had ever seen had made happen for her. Then she cried for Joe, who should have been with her to share that joy.
He would come back; Joe always turned up sooner or later, but this time it would be too late. Clara’s face hardened as she reminded herself that Joe had gone away, after making love to her, after spoiling her for any other man. Because that was true. One man, one woman, like the Bible said. Clara stared into the flames leaping round the coal she’d hurled on to warm Mr Boland. She had given Joe West her absolute, unquestioning love; nothing held back, not even her purity. She was quite serious, rocking herself to and fro before the fire. Joe had spoiled her, then, to add to her shame, he’d gone away.
There would be no more tears for Joe, Clara told herself firmly. She had cried for him as a child, without reason, with the pain a child feels. But no more. She might send him a complimentary ticket some day for one of her shows, then maybe allow him in her dressing room, just for old time’s sake. And she’d extend her hand graciously to allow him to kiss her fingertips … If she was in a good mood, that is.
‘Do you know where Joe is?’
Clara faced Lily West in the untidy shambles of the back room in the house across the street. Alec slouched in a chair by the fire, his leg in its clumsy iron caliper stretched across the hearth, while beneath the big square table two small black-haired boys played with a paper of margarine, blissfully tasting and smearing it greasily over each other, their dirty faces rapt.
‘Do I ever know where Joe is?’ Lily’s laugh wheezed through her protruding teeth. ‘I’ve never known where to find our Joe, not since he was big enough to climb over the front step.’
She was rocking a third child on her knee, a baby curled round her cushiony breasts. Fred’s latest, Clara guessed, and yet another boy by the look of the bullet-shaped West head. For a little while Clara watched her with affection. It was an obsession Lily had for babies, it had to be, how else could she have lived out her life in a house teeming with children for all the years Clara had known her.
‘What do you want our Joe for?’ Alec stared at her suspiciously. ‘He’s gone back to his fancy woman in London if he’s any sense. There’s nowt for him up here.’
‘What fancy woman in London?’ Indignation flared Clara’s nostrils. ‘Who said Joe’s got … what you just said?’
The loss of his job and the ugly contraption to help him walk had turned Alec into an embittered young man. ‘London, Manchester, Sheffield, Newcastle.’ His mouth curved into a sneer. ‘Our Joe’s got women everywhere. There’s no woman goes short while our Joe’s anywhere about.’
‘That’s enough, our Alec!’ Lily’s brown eyes shot daggers at her son. So that was the way the land lay. Poor little Clara. Lily rocked the baby fiercely, holding him so tightly he let out a squeal of protest. She’d always known that Joe and young Clara were as thick as thieves, but she’d thought it was a childish thing, even – God forgive her ignorance – a brother and sister feeling they had for each other. She smiled at Clara.
‘He’ll be back, love. We never know how long he’s going to stop away, but he always comes back. And sends the money,’ she added, unable to keep the pride she felt for her favourite son out of her voice.
Clara wasn’t listening. She couldn’t take her eyes off Alec, because what he had just said was true. It was a vindictive truth showing in his eyes. Since losing the use of his leg and his job at the pit, Alec told hurtful truths to everyone. She swallowed the lump in her throat. Blindly she reached out for a chair and sat down. Hadn’t she always known Joe wasn’t to be trusted? Could she really have been such a fool believing he had chosen her out of all the others to l
ove? If Joe hadn’t been sure Mr Boland had dismissed her as a nobody, then he might have stayed. And she’d let him … oh, dear God, she’d even believed he would marry her!
From somewhere deep inside her she dragged up the tattered remnants of her pride. ‘I’ve got a job. A good job that means I have to go away.’ The colour was coming back into her cheeks. ‘I’m giving the house up, Mrs West, but there’s a few things you can have if you want them. A bed, the big table and a couple of chairs. The rest went to the salerooms a while ago.’
‘A bed? Did you say a bed, lovey?’ The chance of getting something for nothing made Lily sit up. Clara could almost see her mind working overtime. ‘There’s never no money to replace things.’ In her imagination Lily was seeing the bed upstairs, the one eaten away with woodworm. The one which only last week had collapsed beneath the weight of three warring small boys.
‘And the bedding to go with it.’ Clara stood up. ‘You can come across and have a look, Mrs West. There may be other bits and pieces as well.’
In spite of her distress she couldn’t hide a smile at the look of gloating eagerness on Lily’s plain face, a look compounded of greed and necessity.
‘How much do you want for them, love?’ Lily fingered the blankets on Clara’s bed. ‘Our Joe left me some money before he went, and I could …’
‘Nothing,’ Clara said quickly. ‘I’ll leave you the key and the rent book paid up, and you can hand it in for me when the rent man comes on Friday. The things you can take just when you like.’
Tenderly Lily stroked the big jug standing in its basin on the wash-hand stand. Not a chip in it and, dear Mary Mother of God, that pillow on the bed was feather, she’d stake her life on it. The strip of rug would go a treat in front of the slopstone, and as far as she could remember there was a zinc bath hanging on a nail outside on the backyard wall.
In her elation she failed to notice that what was left were the bare essentials. That to keep alive Clara must have sold even the pictures from the walls. A lifetime of doing without, grabbing what was rarely given, had turned Lily into the sort of woman God never intended her to be.
‘I’ll get our Fred to give Alec a hand with moving them across the street. When it’s gone dark,’ she added. ‘We don’t want that Mrs Davis from the top end asking if you’re doing a moonlight flit.’
Something in Clara’s face softened her plain features into sudden compassion.
‘You’ve always been such an independent little lass,’ she said, sitting down on the edge of the bed, touching the pillow where her son’s head had lain not all that long ago. ‘Our Joe … he’s not … he’s never tried anything wrong with you, has he?’ Yes, the pillow was feather. She’d been right in that. ‘But no. He wouldn’t. Not with you. You’re more like brother and sister.’
Clara nodded, keeping her face averted. ‘All your boys have been like brothers to me, Mrs West.’
‘An’ this job? You’re such a little whipper-snapper to be going away on your own.’ Tearing her glance reluctantly away from the bed, Lily stood up. ‘I hope there’s going to be somebody looking out for you, love. Your father would turn in his grave if you got into any kind of trouble. Haunt you, he would, from the other side.’
With a last lingering glance, Lily padded towards the door. ‘At least leave me your address, then when our Joe comes home next I can give it to him. He won’t like you going away and him not knowing where.’
‘No!’ Clara’s voice rose almost to a shout. ‘For one thing I don’t know no address, Mrs West. I’ll be moving about. An’ for another, this is something I’ve got to do on me own.’ At the foot of the stairs she turned and laid a hand on Lily’s arm. ‘I’m not a child now. Me father’s dead, and that leaves me to fend for meself.’
‘You’ve allus got me.’ Lily’s long nose quivered. ‘I know I’m not much cop, but I’ve allus been there, Clara. Across the street, an’ whatever trouble you’re in, well, God knows, I’m used to trouble. You could say me and trouble has been bedfellows all me life.’
There was such genuine anxiety on the familiar troubled face that Clara relented. ‘It’s the stage, Mrs West. I’ve been offered a good job singing on the stage. An’ I’m burning me bridges because bridges are supposed to support and my support went when my father died. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do, and when I’m famous I’ll come back and bring you …’ The green eyes twinkled. ‘I’ll bring you a fur coat, and that’s a promise.’
Lily’s laugh was a rusty wheeze, as if it hadn’t been used for a long time. ‘Me in a fur coat! Oh, my sainted aunt! That’d make her up at the top sit up, wouldn’t it? Lily West in a fur coat! She’d have kittens, old Ma Davis would. Her eyes’d stand out like chapel ’at pegs if she saw me coming down the street in a fur coat. Oh, Mother of God, that’d be the day!’
When she’d gone, padding her way across the street in her down-at-heel slippers, Clara sat hunched in an uneasy and unnatural calm round the tiny fire. Suppose Joe came back in the few days left to her before she left the street for ever? Suppose they’d made a baby that night they made love? Joe had said it would be all right, but how did he know? Her ignorance and innocence would have surprised most girls of her age, but Clara only knew what she read in books from the library, and not one of them had told her exactly how a baby was made. And besides, Joe had said …
Oh, to hell with Joe! Clara said the words aloud, then opened her eyes wide at her own daring. If she’d been a Catholic she’d have crossed herself. If her father had been there to hear he would have made her wash her mouth out with soap and water. Bringing her father to mind brought a rush of tears to her eyes. If he’d still been alive, Bart Boland and his offer would have been turned down flat.
‘No child of mine will ever set foot on the stage.’
Clara could hear him saying just that to Mr Boland, politely but firmly. She could actually see him walking over to the door with his slight limp and holding it wide for Mr Boland to pass through. Clara got up from her chair and wiped her tears away with the back of a hand. As Joe had said, the clogger was dead.
And with her father gone there was nothing to keep her here. The sloping narrow streets, the tall mill chimneys, the morning sound of the knocker-up tapping on the windows with his long pole, followed by the clatter of clogs on the cobblestones; all these were a part of her life, and yet already they seemed like shadows in a dream.
She was never coming back to live in the street. Never. Never. Never! Going over to the slopstone, Clara ran water into a cup and stood there drinking, looking out down the sloping backyard where once she’d given a concert with the entry fee an empty jamjar. That was the day when her father had come out to tell them that the first of Lily West’s sons had been killed in the war.
Clara shrugged. Looking back and memories were for old people, not for her. Tomorrow she would be starting a new life, and all this – turning she surveyed the bare, almost empty, room – this part had been the dream. The reality was about to begin.
Nine
‘YOU MEAN YOU’VE cut yourself adrift? Left yourself without a roof over your head? With nowhere to go if this show folds?’ Dora Vane shifted the stub of a cigarette from one side of her mouth to the other. ‘You’ve a lot to learn, chuck. I’ve seen more shows fold than you’ve had hot dinners. And by the look of you, you’ve not had many of them lately.’
Clara had never seen anyone who looked like Miss Dora Vane, not in the flesh at least. Billed as the ‘Northern Star’ at the turn of the century, Dora’s hair was a bright fierce red shade, a colour at shouting variance with the purplish rouge dotted high on her sunken cheekbones. She wore a blouse with an old-fashioned high-boned collar over which her treble chin flowed when her head was in any other position than tilted back.
‘Look, chuck.’ She took Clara’s arm as they made their way over the tramlines to the wide sweep of Blackpool’s promenade. ‘I’ve stood in the wings at every blinkin’ rehearsal. I know you’ve got a voice, but I have to b
e honest with you, I can’t for the life of me imagine what Mr Boland’s thinking about.’
The wind took her round hat and whipped it from her head. Anchored to her hair by two long hatpins, it flapped like a sailor’s collar in the breeze. Undeterred, she stopped and, opening a faded carpet bag, took out a third pin and rammed it home so fiercely that Clara shuddered for the safety of her brains.
‘Breathe in, love,’ she ordered. ‘Get this good ozone right down in your lungs; you’re going to need all your strength when we open tonight.’
‘You mean you don’t think I’m really good enough?’
As they stood by the railing, staring down at the wide expanse of golden sand and the sea glinting in the far distance, Clara felt the beat of her heart change for a terrifying moment to an uneven rhythm. Remember Me was a bits-and-pieces kind of show. Jack Tremain, the man who had written it, was the producer and the pianist. He’d made it quite clear that as far as Clara went he was doing what young Mr Boland had said he must do. Left to himself Clara had guessed he would throw her out of the show.
In Remember Me there were short sketches, one of them a clever satire on the ‘Land fit for heroes’ supposed to have been inherited by the men returning from France. It was Dora’s job to drill the chorus girls, and drill them she did, her smoke-ruined voice yelling at them from the stalls. The star of the show was a coming-up-to-middle-age soubrette, who could be Marie Lloyd or Nellie Wallace in less time than it took for Clara to catch her breath in admiration. And there was Matty Shaw, a comedian in a straw hat and baggy suit, who sang ‘Twenty-One Today’ with a verve that belied the fact that he’d been singing it for the last twenty years in halls up and down the country.