The Clogger s Child

by Marie Joseph

  His face cleared a little when Clara came to sit beside him. He guessed she was going to forgive him, because her religion was based on forgiveness. But blast her, he wasn’t going to allow himself to be forgiven!

  ‘And when ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have aught against any; that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses.’ Mark, Chapter 11. Verse 25.

  John felt his whole body tense. He knew the way it went, and if she quoted it he felt he really would be sick, right then and there.

  How often he’d been forced to sit in a high-backed pew, listening to his father preaching a sermon based on his favourite passage from the New Testament. So that the son he was now rejected such sentiments, preferring to interpret them as patronage.

  When he raised his head Clara saw the tears on his cheeks and a small tic beating away in his lower eyelid. Locked in the bathroom, she too had been facing up to the truth. Perching uncomfortably on the edge of the high bath, the thought had come into her head that already her love for her husband had died. The music that had gladdened her heart from the day he had walked into her dressing room, as if in answer to her prayer, had somehow drifted away.

  She had no idea that her very stillness was scaring John silly. No idea that he would have known how to deal with her screaming at him. Used to women who threw tantrums, he didn’t know what to do, so he got into bed, burying his head in his pillow.

  When she got in beside him he sank almost at once into sleep, with the comforting thought that she’d have got over it by the next day; but, lying awake by his side, Clara stared up into the darkness, hearing the thunder dying away over the rooftops.

  It was surprising her now that what was hurting most was the knowledge that everyone in the show must have known what was going on. There was still deep within her the legacy of her strict working-class upbringing; the importance of keeping up appearances, the belief that a marriage was truly made in heaven. In her well-remembered childhood, she had known women with husbands who cheated on them, drank their wages away, even beat their wives into cowed submission. But the cry was always the same: ‘He’s my husband. How could I even think of leaving him?’ Then, with typical Lancashire commonsense: ‘And anyroad, where would I go?’

  She wasn’t surprised the next morning to face a husband who now saw himself as the deeply injured party.

  ‘I thought that giving up my flying for a while would please you. We hardly saw each other when I was working for old Broughton, so I thought that having me around was what you wanted. Now I know different.’

  As usual he had wakened before Clara, as bright as a brass button the moment he opened his eyes.

  ‘I’ll apply to Imperial Airways this time. They’re passenger flying from Croydon.’ He sprang out of bed, as refreshed as if he’d gone to bed at ten the night before, with a glass of Horlick’s malted milk to help him sleep. ‘I know they’re looking for experienced pilots for their Silver Wing Service on the London to Paris route. I could be just what they’re after.’

  As he shaved in the bathroom Clara heard him whistling a tune from the show.

  ‘After all, we are desperate for money,’ he said sarcastically when he was back, his face as smooth as his mood. ‘I won’t be a drag on you any longer.’ Standing with his back to her, he knotted his Flying Corps tie neatly at the neck of his white shirt. ‘I’ll have to get a room somewhere near Croydon, but that can’t be helped. I’ll come back here on my days off. That’s if you can bear the sight of me.’

  Still whistling, he emerged from the kitchen ten minutes later with the daily help’s apron tied round his middle and a teatowel looped over his arm. On a tray he was carrying two cups of tea and a plate of slightly charred toast.

  ‘Grub up!’ he announced, looking for all the world like the naughty little boy he would always be. ‘Rise and shine, me beauty!’

  In October, with the days growing shorter and the London streets made magical by gaslight, Clara was offered a month’s engagement singing at the Savoy Hotel. When the letter of congratulation came from Bart, John was there, at the Conduit Street flat, on one of his days off.

  By now he was, as he had predicted he would be, flying with Silver Wing, staying in Croydon while on duty call and enjoying every minute of his double life. He was the proud owner of a car, an Austin coupe, and the night before had beaten his own record for burning up the miles between London and Croydon.

  To make the daily help laugh he was sitting at the table wearing his linen napkin tied beneath his chin like a mill girl’s shawl. When she brought in the toast rack he jumped up from his chair and took it from her with a bow.

  ‘By gum, but tha’s a sight for sore eyes this morning, Mrs Williams.’ He pretended to peer closely into her wrinkled face. ‘Wasn’t it you I saw at Romano’s last night? Dancing the Black Bottom with the Prince of Wales?’ When she gave a shriek of laughter, the sound was like manna to his soul. He knew she repeated all his sayings to her friends because he’d caught her on the telephone one day, bellowing into the mouthpiece with tears of mirth running down her cheeks. ‘Back to the saltmine, Mrs W,’ he shouted, reaching out to slap her behind with his still-folded morning paper, before sitting down again and staring hard at his wife.

  Engrossed in her letter, Clara was ignoring him, and he couldn’t bear that. It frightened him more and more. The blokes he worked with at Croydon had laughed at his antics at first, then made it plain that enough was enough. Because they were mostly southerners, he told himself, lacking a proper northern sense of humour.

  ‘Trouble at t’ mill?’ He clasped his hands together as if in supplication. ‘Don’t give me me cards, Mr Boss Boland. Don’t send me back to a life of jam butties and three looms in t’mill.’ Lifting his head, he began to sing in his tuneless voice, ‘She was poor, but she was honest …’

  ‘You can read it if you like.’ Clara passed the letter over to him. ‘Bart’s really pleased about the Savoy booking. Says it’s the top spot for cabaret, but he doesn’t want me to change my act … Anyway, read it for yourself.’

  Taking the letter, John mimed placing an eyeglass in his left eye, screwing his face up and even groping around on the floor by his chair to find it when it dropped from his grasp. Using an accent so clipped it would have made the young Noel Coward sound as if he was drawling, be began to read, skipping the first few paragraphs.

  ‘Leave the risqué songs to others, my dear.’ Remembering he was still wearing the linen napkin on his head, John tore it off and adjusted the imaginary monocle. ‘Let them wear their revealing gowns and flashy jewellery. Remember, my dear, always remember, you are unique.’ Wagging a finger, John continued. ‘There’s no one quite like you on the West End stage at the moment, and in that very difference lies your well-deserved success.’

  ‘Fancy that!’ said John in a mincing tone, turning a page.

  ‘But at the Savoy you will be singing to a sophisticated audience, many of them celebrities in their own right. At first they may not understand your act, but don’t be afraid. Stand quite still and sing. Simply sing, my dear. I’ll be back in England for Christmas, I hope, and by then even your sternest critics will be praising you.’ For the last few lines John put his hand on his heart, adopting a Shakespearian ringing tone in his voice. ‘They’ll listen, little Clara. Reach out to them as only you can do. Sing them into that stillness. Don’t try to emulate Gertrude Lawrence, Gracie Fields, Evelyn Laye or any of the current revue stars, however much you’re tempted to. Promise me?’

  ‘What a load of old codswallop!’ John threw the letter back across the table. ‘I thought you said Mister Boland had one of the shrewdest minds in show business? I reckon he’s off his chump. If you do your normal act at the Savoy, they’ll puke into their smoked salmon. It’s oomph they go there for, a bit of the old ooh-la-la.’ He held out his hands as if he were weighing a couple of melons. ‘You’ve got a nice little figure, so why not give the boys an eyeful? Otherwise they’ll crucify you.’<
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  Clara watched as John knocked the top off his boiled egg, then cut a slice of toast into ‘soldiers’, a childish habit he still kept to.

  ‘Dora once tried to change me into what I could never be,’ she said quietly, folding the letter back into its envelope. ‘And it didn’t work.’ She hesitated, trying to make him see the reason of it. ‘I didn’t come up the way most of the other girls did.’ She bit her lip. ‘I was never seen dancing round a barrel organ, or singing to a queue outside the theatre. The way I was brought up, the stage was a rude word and girls who went on it finished up gone to the bad. When they were singing in clubs and entering competitions I was singing in the chapel choir, or twice a year at Sunday School concerts. Or in front of the class at school.’ Her eyes willed John to remember and to smile with her, but he was busy dipping a ‘soldier’ into his egg and sprinkling salt on it. Because she wasn’t saying what he wanted her to say, he’d stopped listening, she realized. ‘Bart once told me my voice is really an operatic voice, an untrained operatic voice, and so …’

  John leaped to his feet, opening his arms wide. ‘On with the motley, the paint and the powder …’ His flat voice slid up and down the notes, then with his hand on his heart he proclaimed in a ringing voice, ‘We are bringing you this broadcast straight from La Scala, with Miss Claramino Haydocktorino singing the role of Nedda. In Italian! As she is spoke!’

  Clara had to laugh. He looked so funny in his brown woollen dressing gown, waving a finger of toast like a baton. But when he sat down again his expression changed swiftly to one of contempt.

  ‘Don’t listen to me, of course. Listen to anyone but me. Listen to your bloody hero over there in New York.’ Throwing down his napkin, he pushed his chair back and stood up. ‘What’s his second name? Svengali? I don’t know why you didn’t go with him in the first place since you think he’s so bloody marvellous!’

  When Clara pushed her own chair back and stood up, gripping the edge of the table, he flinched. Now she was going to give him a piece of her mind, and rows made his head ache. Why didn’t she behave like a normal woman and cry, for God’s sake?

  ‘You know well why I didn’t go to America.’ Her voice was low with restrained anger. ‘I couldn’t go when Dora needed me.’ Her chin lifted. ‘Oh, all right, then, I was trying to be Florence Nightingale, instead of being practical. But I’m not practically minded, am I? I put people first, other people, because that’s the way I was brought up. Then you came along, and I wanted to stay with you, and marry you, because that’s another thing I was brought up to believe. That a good marriage was worth more than anything else.’ Her eyes filled at last with tears. ‘But you’re either playing the fool or being sarcastic, nothing in between. I’ve tried and tried to see you as I first saw you, a boy I used to know, a boy who once had his nose bursted for fighting for me. An’ I can’t.’ Angrily she dashed the tears from her cheeks with the back of her hands. ‘Our life together is a mess, John, and you know something? I’ve stopped blaming myself. I’m not the kind of girl you should have married. You should have married someone like yourself, who doesn’t give a … a monkey’s arse for anybody!’

  The crudity, coming from Clara’s lips, startled him more than all her impassioned speech had done. In that moment he could have gone to her, pulled her into his arms, promised her he’d be different, pleaded with her to start again. But it was too late, and he knew it. She’d taken the ball out of his court and he wasn’t going to stand for that.

  ‘All right then,’ he sneered. ‘Go and make a fool of yourself, if that’s what you’re determined to do. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. I know the kind of audience you’ll have to face at the Savoy, and they’ll laugh their socks off at you. Just wait and see!’

  He marched into the bedroom banging the door violently behind him, leaving Clara to sit staring at the toast ‘soldiers’ lined up by his plate. As if on parade.

  Fifteen

  ON THE AFTERNOON of her debut at the Savoy, with no matinée to take her mind off the evening ahead, Clara closed the flat door behind her and went for one of her walks through the London streets.

  There was a cold wind blowing up from the river, and as she turned in the direction of Covent Garden she could smell the sickly sweet odour of rotting cabbages mixed with the sharp tang of apples. Making her way down Shaftesbury Avenue, she saw that there were already long queues snaking along the sides of the theatres, with people waiting patiently for a chance of the cheaper seats. On her way back to the flat she walked through Golden Square and into Regent Street, where she stopped outside a window dressed out in furs. Pastel mink jackets, ermine stoles and squirrel coats.

  ‘When I’m famous I’ll buy you a fur coat,’ Clara had promised Lily West a long time ago, and Lily had clutched her sides, laughing fit to bust.

  ‘Nay, love,’ Clara remembered her saying. ‘An’ what would Mrs Nosey Parker up at the top end of the street have to say about that? Her eyes would stand out like chapel ’at pegs if she saw me traipsing down the street in a fur coat. Oh, Mother of God! That’d be the day!’

  Now that Clara could afford to walk into the big store and buy any coat she set her mind on, it was too late. Because Lily West was dead.

  Shivering suddenly as if a goose had walked over her grave, Clara walked on, an eye-catching figure in her beige coat trimmed with beaver, her hair pushed up inside a small round beaver hat.

  Four of her friends were going with her to the Savoy after the theatre. Matty, two of the girls and Tony, the male lead dancer. Clara was glad of that. John had rung to say he was sorry he couldn’t get back to town because of an early flight, and she’d told him it didn’t matter. It should have mattered, but it didn’t.

  ‘It’s a pity John can’t be here tonight, love.’ In the back of a taxi pulling away from the theatre Matty twined Clara’s ice-cold fingers in his own. ‘But then, I expect it’s hard for him to get away. Planes don’t fly on their own.’

  Matty didn’t like John Maynard. The old man reckoned the handsome flyer had come into young Clara’s life at the wrong time. On the wrong cue. With all that business of Dora going a bit potty, the young lass had been at her most vulnerable. Matty’s nostrils jerked sideways with the force of his sniff. And craftily the handsome flier had taken advantage. Matty squeezed Clara’s hand. Old Dora had been like a mother to her, and if Matty was any judge, a mother was what she needed right now. Not hard as nails, this bonny lass, like most of them. Stand on their grandmother’s belly most of them would to reach what they called stardom. Aye, and lift their skirts for any man who would help them on their way.

  Matty’s small mouth chewed on nothing as he angered himself with his thoughts. He’d known what was going on between John Maynard and that girl from the chorus line. The one with a face like a yard of tripe. Aye, an’ as well as that, Matty knew what was going on in Croydon. A married woman by all accounts. The blighter even had the nerve to bring her to town now and again, picking her up on the way back. An’ him a vicar’s son at that. He glanced at Clara’s face, his soft heart aching for her. Singing to a lot of toffs was a sight different from what she’d been used to, but she’d show them. Matty patted her hand, his rubbery features gentled by affection.

  As the taxi turned out of the Strand, wheeling sharply into Savoy Court, he saw that Clara’s eyes were closed as if in prayer.

  John Maynard had been in one of his self-sacrificial moods all day. The unwritten law was that before an early flight the pilot must have his full quota of sleep, but rules had never bothered John overmuch.

  The most marvellous idea had occurred to him that very afternoon. If he drove fast and hard the minute he came off duty he could be at the Savoy in time to surprise Clara. If he drove even faster than that, there would be time to stop off at the flat and change into his penguin trappings. Then, after the cabaret finished in the early hours, he could drive back to Croydon and, with his usual luck, none would be the wiser.

  It was a cold night, a nig
ht without stars, and when he got to the flat, frozen to the marrow, the first thing he did was to pour himself a treble whisky.

  There was actually time for him to pick Clara up from the theatre. He debated this point, pinching his lower lip between finger and thumb, shaking his head as he thought of a better idea. Mightily pleased with himself, he swirled what was left of the whisky round in his glass and drank it down.

  The way he saw his little drama was this: Clara was to be stunned and grateful, absolutely bowled over by his unexpected appearance. Preferably spotting him sitting there as she was in mid-song. The management was bound to give him a table; bound to once they knew who he was. He closed his eyes, raising the empty glass. He would raise his glass to her, like this, and people would stare, and wonder …

  So, in the meantime, before he changed, there was time for another drink.

  The glass was halfway to his lips when the doorbell rang, but before he went to see who was there, he got up from his chair to study his reflection in the mirror. Standing well back, he admired the expensive cut of his new grey flannels and the way he’d tied his yellow cravat into a Prince of Wales knot. A pity he’d have to change – he always felt that sporty clothes were more him.

  When the bell rang for the second time he walked over and opened the door.

  ‘Forgive me for calling so late, sir, but does a Miss Haydock live here? A Miss Clara Haydock?’

  The man on the landing was dressed in a uniform known the world over. John gave him a gracious smile. He had a lot of time for the Sally Army. Always had. Decent chaps doing a worthwhile job. Taking his wallet from the inside pocket of his jacket, he extracted a ten-shilling note.