by Marie Joseph
‘Keep the change,’ he smiled, wondering where the fellow was hiding his collection box. ‘A good cause. You chaps do a magnificent job.’
The man with the strong face, grizzled hair showing at the sides of his peaked cap, shook his head. ‘I’m not collecting, sir.’ His manner was quietly respectful. ‘You are, sir?’
‘Maynard. John Maynard.’ John was being very patient, very helpful. God’s Army, his father had called these chaps. Smiling, he waited for the officer to explain.
‘Joe West. Does the name mean anything to you, sir?’
So that was it. John hesitated, forcing the officer to explain further.
‘Joe West,’ he said again. ‘A man we picked up earlier today, suffering from pneumonia and malnutrition, I’m sorry to say. A man who doesn’t appear to have eaten a decent meal in months. With only hours to live, I’m afraid.’
‘Sodden with drink, I expect,’ John said quickly. ‘You chaps deserve a medal.’
‘Yes. Pickled in the stuff, sir.’ The officer’s eyes were the kindest John had ever seen in a man’s face. ‘He’d been sleeping rough for a long time, but you know, sir, a craving for drink is as clearly a disease as diphtheria.’ He tried not to look at the glass in John’s hand, and instead consulted a piece of paper torn from a notebook. ‘So Miss Haydock doesn’t live here now? The man mumbled this address, but in his state he could be remembering someone he knew from his childhood, or have it all wrong.’
‘Probably.’ John held out the ten-shilling note. ‘Have this anyway, officer. Every little counts, I expect.’
‘God bless you, sir. Sorry to have troubled you.’
The officer turned and made his way down the stairs. Propped against the kerb, his rusty bicycle was parked a yard away from John’s car. Mounting the lopsided saddle, he pedalled away down the street. If ever a man was in need of God’s salvation, it was that man with the cold light brown eyes. Muttering to himself, he rode on. He was bitterly cold and very hungry, but there were two more calls to make that night. Bending his head against the freezing wind, he reminded himself that it was not his mission to play God, no matter what his own private thoughts might be.
‘Judge not,’ he told himself, rounding the corner, working his legs like pistons to get up a bit more speed.
Back in the warmth of the sitting room John glanced at the clock, checking the time on his wristwatch. If he hurried he could be at the theatre in time to catch Clara before she left for the Savoy Hotel.
‘Joe West is dying. He is asking for you,’ he’d tell her. He hadn’t asked the officer exactly where Joe was, but a quick telephone call to the tall headquarters building in Queen Victoria Street would soon sort that out.
Pouring himself another drink, wasting valuable time, John sat down in a chair, imagining Clara’s face when he told her. Her green eyes would open wide, the fresh colour would drain from her cheeks and she’d go to see Joe West. She would bloody well go!
Clara wasn’t the main attraction in the cabaret. They were trying her out, he knew that. But a lot of important people would be there, come especially to hear her sing. The papers would be represented, and Clara had told him herself that James Agate was almost sure to be there. A word from the famous critic in the right direction could set Clara onto even bigger things. Now that revues were slowly dying the death, it was cabaret where she would make her name. Radio, records, they were all beckoning. And dance bands were already broadcasting. Ambrose at the Mayfair Ballroom, Geraldo, Harry Roy at the Cavour Restaurant, Leicester Square, and of course the Savoy Hotel Orpheans with Caroll Gibbons. Clara’s voice would be wonderful with a big band to back it.
Tonight could set her on a great wide golden road stretching ahead. He was sure of it. Even though he’d told her that her act wasn’t sophisticated enough for the glittering clientele of the Savoy Hotel, he had to admit that he had seen her with his own eyes reaching out with her voice to confound even the most hard-bitten critic.
The Savoy. In his mind’s eye John saw the doorman in his green frock coat with its polished brass buttons. He saw the marbled entrance and the spacious reception area with the crystal chandeliers shining down on hothouse flowers arranged on low tables. He could almost smell the fragrance of expensive luxury pervading the place. Closing his eyes, he could imagine the subdued clink of cutlery and glass in the restaurant on the other side of the high white archway. It was a world John craved for, where money brought slavish attendance from a staff who pandered to one’s slightest wish. Oh, yes. He’d done his homework on the place a long time ago.
‘For excellence we strive.’ That was the famous hotel’s motto, and if Clara went down well that night she held the key to all that luxury. Dear God, she held it all even now in the persuasive beauty of her singing voice, in the sincerity and honesty which shone from her wide green eyes.
There was another motto, too: ‘The show must go on.’
John turned his glass between his fingers. But he knew his wife all right. He could read her like her precious Bible. Because a finger from her past beckoned, because a rotten no-good son of an Irish navvy reverted to his upbringing and wanted to be given absolution before he died, Clara would run like some po-faced nun to hold his hand.
Clara wasn’t the only one to have been forced as a child to learn the chapter of St John off by heart. He frowned, trying to remember. ‘But whoso hath the world’s goods and beholdeth his brother in need, and shutteth his compassion from him, how doth the love of God abide in him?’
John got up and began to pace the room. Passages to be memorized, usually as a punishment for some boyish prank. And yet it was strange how the appropriate words surfaced at times. Once a vicar’s son, always a vicar’s son, he supposed. But that didn’t mean he had to listen to the words. That didn’t mean they always signified. That was where Clara made her mistake. It was being said in some quarters that the New Testament was partly fiction, anyway.
John was seeing himself now in his own best light. Clara needed saving from herself, and who better than her husband to do it? No, to tell her about Joe West would be madness.
Much later he was whistling as he ran down the stairs, anticipating the look on her face when she saw him in her audience. He would raise his glass to her, and she would maybe walk towards him as she sang.
Joe West drew his last tortured breath in the very same moment that Clara bowed her head to an applause that had the waiters scurrying from the kitchens. Clapping with hands held high above their heads, the normally laconic diners at the Savoy Hotel were going wild.
Clara was smiling, holding out her hands to them, excited by the tumult of approval, accepting the flowers, smiling across the room at John.
Exactly as he’d planned.
Sixteen
‘I DON’T BELIEVE you!’
Standing with her hands on her hips, yelling at the top of her voice, Clara reminded her husband of the young girl he’d known as the clogger’s child, running wild in the street with the West boys.
‘You’re not working every single day over Christmas week and on into the New Year! You’re lying, John Maynard!’
His smile was neat and sarcastic. ‘Revert to your origins then, and throw me out. Open the window and hurl my clothes after me into the street below! That’s what the women in your street used to do, isn’t it?’
The fury fermenting inside Clara’s chest had paled the fresh colour from her cheeks. Her apple green satin peignoir fell apart at the front showing her shapely legs in silk stockings, held up by beribboned suspenders. In that moment John wanted her so much he could feel his heartbeats quicken. If he hadn’t been half afraid of her when she had her temper up he would have lifted her into his arms and carried her through into the bedroom.
‘Yes! That’s just what the women from my street used to do.’ Her voice dripped scorn. ‘But they were martyrs! Doormats! Putting up with anything because they knew there was no escape.’ She held up a hand as if to fend him off. ‘It must be a def
ect in my character, but I can’t live with it, John. Either you stay faithful to me, or you stay out of my bed!’ She tilted her head to one side. ‘An’ if I did throw you out and your clothes after you, I’d pray a car would come along and splash them all with mud. That would give me a good feeling.’ She stabbed a finger into her chest. ‘Right here!’
‘She means nothing to me.’ John heard himself being truculent. ‘What do you expect me to do all on my own in that poky flat in Croydon between flights? Play bloody patience?’ He began to feel sorry for himself. ‘I just like women’s company. There’s no sin in that, is there?’
‘She’s been living with you!’ Clara’s voice was ragged with shame. ‘She’s answered the telephone twice when I’ve tried to ring you. Who is she, John? Why is it necessary for you to have more than one woman?’ Her temper flared so that her green eyes blazed like emeralds. ‘Marriage is all important to me, just as it is to the women in the street where I lived.’ The shame and humiliation was sapping the last of her control. ‘But you wouldn’t want me with you, would you? There’d be no way you could go on leading your double life with me there all the time.’
When he slapped her hard across her face, her head jerked back with such violence she felt her neck would surely snap in two.
Turning and running away from the full horror of what he’d just done, John jerked the door open, almost knocking over the tall man on the landing. A man in a dark grey suit with a Christmas-wrapped parcel in his hands.
‘John!’ Clara heard the slam of the big front door downstairs, then found herself staring up into well-remembered blue eyes.
Bart had come round to the flat almost straight from the boat train at Victoria. Hearing angry voices, he’d been on the point of going away, and now he looked with dismay at the hollows in Clara’s cheeks and the distinct mark of the slap spreading across her face, sparkling her eyes with unshed tears.
‘I’ve come at the wrong moment,’ he said inadequately. ‘Shall I go away, my dear?’
Clara’s distressed eyes met his. ‘Bart,’ she whispered, shame enveloping her. ‘I didn’t know you were coming back so soon.’ Pulling her robe closer round her, she stepped back. ‘Please come in.’
Dropping hat, coat, gloves and the present on the nearest chair, Bart came to her, taking both her hands in his own. He spoke to her carefully, measuring every word, touched to the heart by the way she was looking at him, her green eyes so very big, one cheek deathly pale and the other … Gently he lifted a finger to touch a tear glistening on the tips of her long eyelashes.
‘You’re not the first couple to have a lovers’ quarrel, my dear. If you want to cry it out alone, then I’ll go away.’ His voice was so gentle and yet so strong Clara felt the tears spill over. ‘But we are friends, and friends have shoulders for crying on, you know.’ He wiped the tears away with his fingers. ‘The Clara I know never used to cry.’ He smiled at her. ‘Now, aren’t you going to cheer up and open your present? I searched the whole of New York to find just the right shade. Then make me a real English cup of tea. I think we’d both like that.’
Putting her from him reluctantly, he picked up the parcel and handed it to her. ‘Peeled grape green. That was the colour I had in mind and, yes, I was right,’ he added as Clara held the exquisite crepe-de-Chine blouse up to her eyes.
Oh, Bart,’ she said shakily. ‘It’s so good to see you again. Do you really want a cup of tea, or are you just being kind?’
Sitting down in the chair that had once been Dora’s, Bart stretched out his long grasshopper legs to the fire. ‘Tea and toast,’ he affirmed. ‘With the rain against the window.’ He smiled at her, his blue eyes crinkling round the corners. ‘Then I’ll know I’m home.’
When the tea was drunk and the toast all gone, they sat opposite to each other in the warm room and talked the next two hours away.
He told her about Broadway, with its cops, its fight promoters, bookies and song pluggers. He told how people he thought were strangers would come up to him in the street, punch him in the shoulder and say ‘Hiya, Mr Boland!’ or ‘Hi, Bart!’ or sometimes even ‘How ya doing, pal?’ He described the huge neon signs, the honky-tonk gift shops, and the shooting galleries, and he said that on Broadway a show was either swell or it stank. No in between.
‘And yours was swell.’ She was calmer now. ‘Thank you for your letter, Bart.’ She pushed a wayward strand of hair behind an ear. ‘You were right about Dora. I couldn’t have managed her the way she was towards the end. Not and worked as well. That’s why I wrote to you in the way I did. It was my way of saying I was sorry.’
‘You should have come with me to America.’ His eyes were very steady. ‘If you’d done that, things might have turned out very differently.’
‘I know.’ She leaned forward, trying to make him understand. ‘I’m going to tell you something, Bart, that will make you despair of me.’
He lifted a hand to shade his face from the fire. ‘Try me.’
It was long past the time when the tall standard lamp should have been switched on, but as she began to speak Bart knew that the darkness was her ally. Quietly he waited to hear what she had to tell him.
‘I’m not terribly ambitious, Bart.’
‘You’re not?’ Bart prayed the smile he couldn’t control was unseen. ‘Go on, love.’
‘Well, of course, the success I’ve had means a lot. The money it’s brought with it has given me a room like this, and beautiful clothes.’ She sighed and curled her feet beneath her on the big armchair. ‘I wouldn’t like to go back to being poor. I’m not that daft. It’s just that I’ve found out that the acquisition of money and possessions doesn’t necessarily make a person happy. Ambition is all right in its place, but I’ve seen girls lie and cheat, and even break their own hearts, just to get to the top. To be a star.’
He could see that her eyes were very tired, and knew it was time for him to go, but she needed to talk, and so he stayed.
‘I suppose what I really want is to be a happily married woman, with children, if that were possible; with a husband who is a breadwinner, and with me singing now and again at local concerts.’ She looked very young and earnest as she tried to explain. ‘The stage has given me everything, and yet in a strange way it’s given me nothing. I told you you’d despair of me.’
Bart was shaking his head. ‘You’re wrong, my dear. There are women the world over who would give up all they had to feel and think like you. You’re the wise one, my dear, and your John is a lucky man. Is that what you were quarrelling about? Because he couldn’t see things your way?’
She refused to answer that, and for a while they sat in silence. No one, she thought, had ever treated her so gently. In the firelight she could see the lines round his blue eyes that had deepened since he went to America. He wasn’t half as handsome as John, and somehow Clara suspected that John’s face would always look the same, even as he grew older. There was nothing written there. It was an unfinished face.
But her thoughts and the conversation were getting out of hand. She got up and walked over to a small mahogany writing desk.
‘This came the other day,’ she told him, holding out a letter. ‘Enclosing this.’ From her finger dangled a gold medallion on a thin gold chain. ‘It was sent to the theatre, addressed to the Clogger’s Child. The stage-door keeper handed it over to me.’
‘From a fan?’ Bart was smiling as he reached up to switch on the lamp by his chair. ‘You’ll have to expect this kind of thing, you know.’
‘Not from a fan.’ She came to perch beside him on the chair’s padded arm. ‘Read it, please.’
Sensing the urgency in her voice, he unfolded the sheet of lined paper.
‘Dear Miss …’ The writing was printed in capitals, the words badly spelt and running over the lines.
‘You don’t know me, but I saw about you in the paper. It was telling of your life before you went on the stage, and when it said you wos born in 1907 at Easter, I knowed it wos you. It
said as ow you wos given to the clogger by person unknown, wrapt in a grey shawl which you still have. Well. I was there when you wos born. Yor mother was with my dancing troop in the fair. She wos not wering a wedding ring, but she had the enclosed round her neck when she dyed. I have kep it all this time, and now I have seen the wicked of my ways, and want you to have it afore I go to join my Maker. I have been living a respectful life ever since leaving the fair the year after you wos born, so hope you will not persecute me. I am glad you have got on so well.
Yours truly,
Jessie Bead
When Bart looked up, Clara dropped the medallion into his hand. ‘There’s a name and also the name of a regiment if you look closely.’
Holding it up to the light Bart peered at the tiny engraved lettering. ‘Captain Charles Foley. The Boer War,’ he said at once. ‘This is a privately made thing. The sort of thing men had designed for their wives, or their sweethearts.’ He examined it again. ‘What does John say about all this?’
‘He would dismiss it.’ Clara blushed. ‘He knows I was probably illegitimate, but he doesn’t like to dwell on my background. You see, coming from a straightforward family, he thinks my beginnings are a bit, well, News of the World or Peg’s Paperish. This new thing … about the fairground … no, he wouldn’t like that.’
Bart took a long, slow, deep breath, holding back his own feelings. ‘So now you know your mother didn’t give you away. That must help a little?’
‘Dora told you I thought that?’ Clara nodded. ‘Dora would have advised me to throw the letter away. She didn’t believe in raking up the past.’
‘But you’re not Dora.’
‘I’m not Dora.’ Her face was so sad, so lost. ‘And you’re not John.’ She frowned, realizing she had at least to try to explain. ‘John is sometimes rather selfish. He isn’t always able to understand a person’s feelings. He doesn’t want to know anything about the way it was for me. If he doesn’t want to listen he switches off in his mind. Dora saw him as cold and unfeeling, but he’s just unthinking. He certainly wouldn’t want to hear about this.’