by Marie Joseph
Dora’s sense of humour had completely deserted her. The tearing anxiety was pricking away in her stomach with the force of a whole paper of pins. She was responsible for this small girl, dammit. Mr Boland had put Clara in her care, and, besides, she was fond of her. Well, all right then, she loved her, and if her suspicions were right then she’d find the man who’d done it and make him squeal for mercy.
Head jutting forward, bottom sticking out well behind, Dora walked beside Clara through one little grey street after another, her thoughts as grim as the expression on her face.
In the middle of the week the Manchester Evening News ran a full column on the girl singer billed as ‘The Clogger’s Child’.
Who said that music hall has waned in popularity since the war? Remember Me purports to be a revue, but it hasn’t strayed far in concept from variety. If you want to hear an angel sing, go and see ‘The Clogger’s Child’ hold her audience in her hands. Hear her wring a tear from even the hardest heart with the glory of her unique voice. We predict that one day she’ll be a household word.
‘Like Cherry Blossom Boot Polish,’ said Clara. ‘Fancy that!’
She stayed in bed later than usual one morning. There was no fireplace in the tiny room she shared with Dora and she was shivering with cold. She wanted to sleep, but when she closed her eyes the bed dropped away beneath her.
‘I feel a bit sick,’ she admitted. ‘My back hurts, but I’ll be all right.’ A winter fly buzzed round her head and she swiped at it with a languid hand. ‘If it lands on my face, I’ll scream,’ she said in a coldly despairing voice.
The pain in her lower back was so bad that evening that she allowed Dora to dress her as if she were a child. Dora’s fingers, fumbling with the row of tiny buttons at the high neck of the long white dress, smelt of strong cheese, and Clara turned her head away, swallowing the bile in her throat. Dora’s face was so close that Clara could see the way her lips looked, as if they’d been gathered with needle and thread. Her lipstick ran into the vertical wrinkles, and orange-tinted powder was pressed heavily into the purse-shaped bags beneath her eyes.
‘Let’s have a bit more rouge tonight, chuck,’ she was saying. ‘You’re that pale they’ll think it’s a corpse coming on.’
‘I’m all right, Dora.’ Clara bit her lips hard as a vicious cramplike pain moved round her back to stab her abdomen. She had to force herself to stand upright, and when she saw herself in the mirror she recoiled from the sight of the rouge standing out against the deathly pallor of her skin.
There was a question begging to be asked in Dora’s eyes, but Clara turned on her before she’d even opened her mouth.
‘I’ve told you. I’m all right.’
But waiting in the wings for the familiar music and the bronchial wheeze of sound as the dusty green and gold curtain rose, a fresh wave of pain brought beads of sweat out on her forehead.
‘You’re on, chuck.’ Suddenly Dora wanted to cry. With her long golden hair hanging loose Clara looked like a child on her way to bed. But she wasn’t a child, was she? Dora wiped her eyes with the end of her pussy-cat chiffon bow. Young Clara was having a miscarriage. Dora had lived too long and seen too much not to recognize the signs.
‘Just let her get through her song,’ she prayed, clasping her hands together. ‘She believes in You, so help her now. Just let her sing her song …’
On centre stage, in the dazzling spotlight, Clara sang as if she’d been wound up then ordered to sing. There was a mist in front of her eyes, and though she knew the pain was still there she found she could sing through it.
In the short time since joining the company she had changed from amateur status to professional, and so she sang the way her audience had paid to hear her sing. Not an untrue note, each word with the ecstasy of a bird in flight, the lower notes so deep and rich they sent a shiver down the spine.
When it was over and she stood in the small telling silence before the applause, it seemed the dusty boards came up to hit her hard between the eyes. When she fell the audience rose to their feet as one man.
‘Are you her mother?’
The young doctor at the big teaching hospital down the road from the theatre was finding it hard to look away from Dora’s brightly hennaed hair. He had worked thirty-six hours without a break and it showed in his eyes.
‘I’m her friend,’ Dora told him. ‘You can tell me what’s wrong.’
The doctor was sticking to the rules. He was too tired to do otherwise. ‘So you’re not her next of kin?’
‘She hasn’t got no bleedin’ next of kin!’ Dora had sat up all night on a hard bench. Her feet had swelled and her corsets were killing her. ‘I’m all she’s got! I’m responsible for her. I love her! If anything happens to that child, it’ll break my heart.’ The pancake make-up had not survived the long night well and Dora’s anguished face was not a pretty sight.
Sitting down by her side on the bench, the doctor threw protocol out of the window.
‘I’ll try to explain it as simply as I can,’ he said.
‘I know, Dora. The doctor told me.’
Two days later Clara was sitting up in bed, her fingers pleating and repleating the turned-down sheet.
‘I’ve been a wicked girl. I did a wicked thing and this is my punishment. If I can never have a baby, then that is God’s will.’
‘Rubbish!’ Dora lowered her voice to what she considered a whisper. ‘If that God of yours punished girls for doing what comes naturally, then the human race would die out. If that’s religion, then I’m glad I’m a heathen.’ She leaned forward. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? That’s what I can’t forgive. All that worry stiff inside you.’ She sniffed. ‘Quinine the girls try first, then a whip-round for the forty quid or so it costs for some foreign woman to help them. Help them? My God, I’ve seen girls …’
‘Please, Dora.’ Clara looked pained. ‘I’m not like that. You know I’m not.’
‘Like what?’ Dora’s voice rose again. ‘You don’t have to be wicked to get caught. Most of them were like you, let down by a man who promised them the earth, then cleared off.’ She took a handkerchief from her large straw bag and touched it to her nose. ‘Clara. It’s got to be said now and never mentioned again. The baby you were having was growing in the wrong place – in a tube – and they had to operate to remove it. So having another baby when you get married some day won’t be all that easy.’
‘I don’t care.’ Clara wouldn’t meet her eyes. ‘Dora. Please? I have to pay for what I did. Don’t you see?’
‘No! I do not see!’ As Dora’s corncrake voice rang out in the stillness of the long ward faces raised themselves from pillows. ‘I don’t like your God, Clara Haydock!’ So great was her anger she almost spat. ‘You’re a human being, child. Not a bleedin’ saint!’
Suddenly aware of the staring eyes from the rows of beds, she turned round, the flowers on her hat bobbing as if in a high wind. ‘Want a bit of a singsong to cheer you ladies up?’ she asked, standing up just in time to see a tall pale sister coming through the swing doors.
‘Well, never mind.’ She kissed Clara goodbye. ‘I’ve forgotten the best bit of news.’ The button eyes shone. ‘The company’s got a London booking – well – on the outskirts anyroad. And Mr Boland’s sent word you’re to get your strength up before you follow on.’
‘Does Mr Boland know what’s been the matter with me?’ Remembering those vivid blue eyes, Clara’s heart sank. ‘Will he find out, do you think?’
‘Mr Boland?’ Dora whirled round in indignation. ‘And what if he does? He won’t be looking for ways to punish you. Not like that God of yours.’
Nodding to the sister, she walked away down the ward in her floating dress with a none too clean pair of white pumps showing beneath. Wisps of red hair escaped from the bun at the back of her head onto the black velvet collar of her cloak, and before she disappeared through the swing doors she turned round.
‘London, think on!’ she bellowed. ‘Piccadilly Circ
us, Leicester Square, London, chuck! Think on …’
When she’d gone the ward seemed very quiet. The sister’s eyebrows raised themselves almost to her scraped-back hairline, but before she could say a word Clara spoke quickly.
‘That was my mother,’ she lied with pride.
Ten
AT FIRST CLARA wrote regularly to Lily West. She always included a forwarding address, but now, after more than two years without a reply, she gave up.
‘Maybe she’s kicked the bucket, chuck?’
Dora Vane stopped sewing lace into the neck of a pale green crepe-de-Chine nightdress to peer at Clara over the top of the spectacles she swore were only worn for show.
‘Or maybe she can’t write? A lot of people will never admit to that, you know.’
‘But Alec could write. Or someone could write. Even if Walter’s married or living somewhere else – he could write.’
Clara was stretched out on her bed, taking her rest before the evening’s performance – a rest Dora insisted she took, especially on the days Clara played cabaret after the show.
The Boland revue, with new acts added over the years, was playing a winter’s season at the Holborn Empire, and after the last performance Clara was whisked by taxi cab to a Soho nightclub to sing as lead-in to the star. By her side on the bed was a copy of the Daily Express, with her first mention in Hannen Swaffer’s widely read column:
‘The Clogger’s Child,’ he proclaimed, in the way every utterance of his turned into a proclamation, ‘has real star quality. She moves little during her act, but when she does, watch out for your blood pressure. Her voice, had it been trained for opera, could rise easily above the strings of a full orchestra. Her low notes are dark and rich, and her high notes fill the theatre with no sign of the irritating tremor which seems to afflict most of the West End’s leading ladies warbling up the nostrils of their leading men. The haunting quality of her voice goes on in your head, long after the curtain has come down and you’ve wended your way home. She sings with her heart, this beautiful young girl from some northern slum.’
Impatiently, Clara pushed the folded newspaper away from her so violently it slid from the shiny eiderdown onto the floor.
‘You know, Dora, I never thought, not once, that I came from a slum. I suppose it’s only folks who have never lived that way who consider themselves qualified to label those narrow little streets as slums.’ She linked both arms behind her head, smiling. ‘Our street was so quiet and respectable, you wouldn’t credit it, Dora. Flags mopped first thing, window bottoms stoned, washing hanging out in the backs full of smuts from the mill chimneys. And the coal carts and the rag-and-bone men trundling down the backs.’ She smiled. ‘I’ve come a long way since then. I have’n all.’ She waved a hand round the bedroom, a part of the flat at the top of a Georgian house in Conduit Street. ‘Remember the awful lodgings we stayed in on tour, Dora?’
‘I’d still be staying in them but for you, chuck.’ Dora’s pudgy face gentled into open affection. ‘You’ve taken me up with you, and I can’t forget that.’
‘But you work for your living!’ Swinging her legs over the side of the bed, Clara stood up, the front of her lace-trimmed housecoat opening to reveal a pair of jade green satin camiknickers. ‘Housekeeper, seamstress, chaperone. I couldn’t manage without you, and you know it.’
‘Chaperone? Huh!’ Dora’s rough voice was laced with disgust. ‘What do you need a chaperone for, may I ask?’ She stabbed her needle into the delicate material. ‘Ever since you had that trouble all that time ago you’ve never let a man come near you. And you don’t need to look at me like that. It’s not natural coming straight back here every night, sleeping all morning then walking the streets in the afternoons when you haven’t got a matinée. Where do you go, for heaven’s sake?’
Clara sat down again on the bed, her green eyes dreamy. ‘Piccadilly Circus sometimes.’ She turned to smile at Dora. ‘It’s so beautiful at midday with all the flower girls sitting round their osier baskets, busily wiring buttonholes to sell in the evening. All those taxis, cars and red buses going round and round. And then Shaftesbury Avenue, Dora. Do you know, all the theatres along there have long queues even at that time, with people wanting gallery seats? And Lyon’s Corner House. Oh, I wish you could walk well enough to come with me. I sit there eating poached egg on toast and drinking a cup of tea, hugging myself, Dora, because I’m here … And then Wardour Street. Dora, it’s so short, but there’s so much crammed into it. Old bookshops, a window full of wigs. And a framed letter from Sarah Bernhardt.’ Her gaze shifted as she lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘And prostitutes, Dora. Fallen women, standing as still as waxworks. It’s fascinating, can’t you see? If we were to live here for ever I’d only see a part of it. It’s London, Dora! The most marvellous city in the world.’
‘Spoken like a true Lancastrian.’ Dora pushed herself heavily out of her chair and came over to help Clara into her street dress. Her powdered face was clownlike in its thick coating of make-up. ‘Is that all you ask from life? The company of an old woman like me, and walking the streets on your afternoons off, with a poached egg in Lyon’s eaten on your own? What’s happened to your insides? Have they dried and shrivelled like mine?’ The lines down her cheeks deepened. ‘It’ll show in your voice. A woman has to love to sing the sort of songs you’re singing now. And I don’t mean loved by that God of yours either! Because that’s not enough.’
‘That’s a terrible thing to say!’
‘So I’ll burn in hellfire?’ Dora took up a tortoiseshell brush from the dressing table and motioned Clara to sit down on the padded stool. ‘You know what’s wrong with you?’ She tugged hard at a knot in the silky fall of white-blonde hair. ‘You’re frightened of men. Your head’s so full of puritanical religious claptrap, if a man laid a finger on you you’d faint dead away. You’ve got God and Satan, and that man who let you down, all fighting a losing battle in your head. And one day you’re going to fall in love. Then what will you do?’
She looked so genuinely worried that Clara turned round. Taking the brush, she held the liver-spotted hand to her cheek.
‘No more sewing tonight, Dora. To bed with your malted milk. All right?’ Snatching up her wrap from the bed, she smiled. ‘I’ll fall in love just to please you one of these fine days and when I do you’ll be the first to know.’
Outside the house the taxi was waiting. It was always there, at exactly the same time, standing by the kerb, the driver hunched over the wheel. Clara would have preferred to go to the theatre by bus, sitting on the open top deck with the small cover of waterproof sheeting over her knees, feeling the rain on her face, but she knew that would never do, not now she was almost famous.
Almost, she reminded herself, sitting back on the leather seat, pulling the fur collar of her white coat up round her face, hugging herself once again with the delight of seeing the theatres they were driving past coming alive for the night’s performance.
‘Here we are, Blondie.’ That was the taxi driver’s name for her. ‘And there they are,’ he grinned, giving her the thumb’s-up sign. ‘Not as many tonight with this rain.’
As usual the pavement outside the theatre was lined with a small crowd, young women in the main at that early time. Typists and shopgirls, mouths agape as they stared at Clara in her white woollen coat with its huge silver-fox collar, slim legs in white silk stockings, white kid shoes with pointed toes on her slender feet.
‘Coo! Isn’t she lovely?’
‘It was in the paper yesterday that the Prince of Wales came to hear her sing.’
‘They say she gets fifty pounds a week.’
‘No wonder she can wear white on a mucky night like this.’
The last speaker, a girl with bold dark eyes and hair cut in a piquant fringe, a style which she hoped made her look like Jessie Matthews, turned round as a man in a brown trilby hat tried to push his way to the front.
‘’Ere! Who d’you think you’re shoving, mate? Didn’t
your mum teach you no manners?’
Joe West stared into the vivacious face with the blank gaze of a blind man. Shrugging his shoulders, he elbowed his way back through the crowd to mingle with the people thronging the pavement on their way to the theatres and restaurants lining each side of the busy street.
Clara was achingly tired when her taxi dropped her outside the tall house in Conduit Street at two o’clock the next morning.
The cabaret and show had gone well. It was making a lot of money now, and even the chorus girls and the lead dancer, a girl who had grown too tall for the ballet, swallowed their jealousy to admit that it was Clara’s two solo spots which filled the theatre. Coming in out of the cold that bitter January, her voice seemed to warm them.
‘Listen!’ it seemed to be saying. ‘There is so much beauty in this world of ours. I am here to remind you of it. Just listen to me. Singing to you is what I was born for. Singing to you is all I want or need to do.’
‘Carolina moon, keep shining …’ Each note silver clear, each cadence heart-stopping in its purity.
Sometimes the more sensitive souls would sense a loneliness in her as she stood with pale golden head bowed to acknowledge the applause. Women in the stalls would unpin the flowers from their dresses and throw them at her feet.
Tonight she had brought an armful of flowers home for Dora, and as she held them awkwardly in one arm, scrabbling in her purse for her key, a man stepped out from the shadows.
‘Hello, Clara.’
There was no mistaking that voice, nor the sinuous smile beneath the wide brim of the rain-soaked trilby hat. Clara stared at him for a long moment without speaking, then opened the door and motioned for Joe to follow her in, surprised at her calmness, reminding herself that it was because she had always known he would turn up one day. Up the narrow oak stairs they went to the top landing, the flowers spilling from her arms as she unlocked the door.
And only then, with the door closed behind them, did she turn and look properly at him, and what she saw narrowed her eyes and made her heartbeats quicken.