The Clogger s Child

by Marie Joseph

  ‘He was nobody,’ Clara said, unhooking her long white dress from its rail behind the corner curtain. ‘Just nobody. That’s who he was. NOBODY!’

  ‘Well, for someone so anonymous he’s been pretty generous.’ Bending down to pick up the cup and saucer from the floor, Daisy held out a cheque. ‘Slipped this underneath, the crafty so-and-so.’ Her eyes nearly popped from their sockets as she read the amount aloud. ‘Five hundred smackers!’ Her tinny voice petered out in a squeak. ‘Five hundred of ’em, darling! He must have been a generous nobody, sweetie.’

  ‘Give that to me!’ Clara snatched the slip of paper from Daisy’s hand. ‘How dare he! How flamin’ dare he!’

  Leaving Daisy with lipsticked mouth agape, she blazed out of the door, almost knocking over an astonished Bart on his way to console or even to share Clara’s joy, whichever was appropriate.

  ‘Clara, love!’ His words were wasted as she tore along the narrow passageway, down the three steps, past the stage-door keeper’s little cubicle and out into the back entrance of the theatre.

  ‘She’s gone berserk, Mr Boland,’ Daisy told him. ‘Running out into the street like that. Running away from a handout like that.’ Her red hair seemed to stand on end with the force of her amazement. ‘Five hundred pounds! And if my guess is right she’s after him to tell him what to do with it. Oh God, and he looked such a nice fella. Who is he, for Pete’s sake?’

  Outside in the busy street, heedless of the stares of passers-by, Clara stood at the edge of the pavement in her flimsy dressing gown, caring nothing that it had fallen open at the front to show lace-trimmed camiknickers. Which way had he gone? Had he managed already to hail a cruising taxi, or was he walking in the direction of the nearest tube station, congratulating himself on a difficult job well done? Dismissing her from his mind, as he’d dismissed her mother from his thinking years ago?

  Suddenly she saw him across the street, a square thickset man, striding along, the leather briefcase swinging from his hand. The traffic was heavy, taxis, cars, a motorbike and sidecar, all streaming away from the lights in the direction of the West End, but holding no dangers for Clara. In that moment she would have braved a wall of fire to get to him.

  A car pulled up with a squeal of brakes as like a demented woman she ran to the other side of the road. Dodging round a nanny in full uniform pushing a high Silver Cross pram, she ran on, the dressing gown billowing behind her like a sail in the wind.

  ‘I think you dropped this?’

  When she caught up with him, positioning herself firmly in front of him rather than touch his arm, he stared at her as if he couldn’t believe the evidence of his own eyes. In her headlong dash, Clara’s hair had loosened itself from the neat bun she wore it in during the day to tumble down her back. From the deep lace of her satin camiknickers, her high firm breasts threatened to be revealed completely. If she didn’t cover herself, he thought illogically, she would surely be arrested. Or he would, which would be far worse.

  ‘This!’ she repeated, thrusting the cheque at him. ‘Is this what you reckon is enough to ease your rotten conscience and buy my silence?’

  ‘My child!’ He looked for a moment as if he would explode. Eyes bulging, flushing a deep beetroot red, the captain stepped back a pace. ‘This is hardly …’ Words failed him. ‘People are staring!’

  But Clara was past caring. All her natural reserve, all her normal serenity had vanished. She was the child of the streets again, flamed with uncontrollable temper. ‘You paid my mother off with forty pounds!’ she shouted. ‘You’ve upped your price a bit now, haven’t you?’ With a dramatic gesture she tore the cheque into tiny pieces, scattering them on the pavement. ‘You didn’t come to see me! You came because you were too scared to do anything else. Just as you ran away from my mother when you knew she was having me.’ She gave him a push with the flat of her hand. ‘You killed my mother because you feared she might interfere with your rotten life. She died all alone, even more scared than you are now. I hate you! Do you know that? I hate you!’

  ‘Clara!’ When Bart came beside her, putting his arm round her and folding the dressing gown closely about her, she tried to push him away, but he held her fast. She was too distraught to hear what he said to the captain as he spoke in a quiet voice filled with disgust. ‘Have no fear, Captain Foley. You won’t be troubled again.’

  ‘Come with me, sweetheart.’ Bart’s voice breathed gentleness. ‘It’s five minutes to curtain-up. Come on, darling. It’s all over now.’

  With obvious, almost laughable relief the captain stumbled away, walking at first with head bowed, then, as the distance lengthened between them, striding along with head erect as in the days of his soldiering. A man going home after a difficult job completed and done with.

  ‘He gave me money,’ Clara whispered. ‘Oh, Bart, he wanted to make sure I never bothered him again.’ A great swelling of tears rose in her throat, as the dam of her emotions threatened to break down completely. ‘I should never have asked you to find him, Bart, and yet … and yet …’ She allowed herself to be led back across the street and down the alleyway leading to the stage door of the theatre. ‘I know about my mother now.’ Her voice was rough. ‘An’ what I know is terrible. She must have been so unhappy. So terrified.’

  ‘I know … I know …’ Leading her back along the narrow corridor, Bart opened the door of her dressing room and almost carried her inside. ‘Three minutes’ he told her, taking her long white dress and dropping it over her head, with an astonished Daisy watching in spellbound fascination. ‘Make up now. The minimum.’ He handed Clara a stick of greasepaint. ‘Come on, love. You’re going on. You have to, you know that, don’t you?’

  For a second his eyes closed in relief as he saw Clara begin to apply her make-up with professional speed, all sign of tears dabbed away by the rose-rachael powder, the trembling of her mouth stilled by the swiftly applied crimson lipstick.

  The orchestra was well into the overture before Clara joined the boys and girls of the chorus in the wings. Daisy, bursting with pride at being ‘in the know’, winked at her friend, a raven-haired dancer dressed in a swathe of grey chiffon.

  ‘A bloke,’ she mouthed. ‘Came in the dressing room and upset her.’

  The friend raised eyebrows plucked to a thin line. ‘A bloke?’ she whispered. ‘Clara with a bloke who wasn’t her husband? Good for her! Serve that horrible husband right if his wife gave him a bit of the old tit-for-tat.’

  Almost without volition she moved in to stand close to Clara just as, sensing a drama, the other dancers did the same. It was a spontaneous demonstration of affection, of unstinted loyalty for the girl who was one of them, and yet was not. Clara felt it and, raising her head, smiled.

  ‘I’m all right,’ she whispered, and without knowing why she shouldn’t be all right, they touched her, tweaked at her dress and smiled. With a rusty groan, the curtain rose and Daisy danced onto the stage.

  Standing by the quick-change box in the shadowed wings, Bart watched the chorus go through their opening routine, then held his breath as Clara walked to centre stage.

  Her first appearance was brief, a deliberate whetting of the appetite for what was to come, but he heard a sigh ripple through the audience as the glorious voice soared clear and true, without a tremor.

  His strong face softened with love as Bart listened. It was impossible to believe that hardly five minutes before she had been running down the street like a wild thing, hair streaming, to confront a man who had thought he could buy her off. Bart shook his head. How little the gallant captain knew of the girl who just happened to be his daughter.

  Clara was pure gold, he told himself, verging uncharacteristically on the sentimental. But then, hadn’t he known it from the moment he first set eyes on her? Hadn’t he loved her from that moment? He hadn’t needed to be told that she was trapped in a loveless marriage, and it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right that she went on wasting her life married to a man who didn’t know how to cherish h
er. Clara had been born to be happy, born to be loved. And somehow, when he told her of his love, he would make her see that in life people sometimes made mistakes, married the wrong one – as he had done. But that didn’t mean that for the rest of her life she had to abide by that mistake.

  He was watching her, not hearing her voice now, just watching her face with its changing expressions as she sang. They could be happy. Oh, dear God, how happy they could be together. ‘I’m not really ambitious,’ she’d confessed. Bart’s lips curved upwards as he remembered.

  And yet she had it in her to be greater than them all.

  The matinée was over and Bart was actually standing with hand raised to knock on Clara’s dressing-room door when he heard the stage-door keeper calling his name.

  ‘Mr Boland! Mr Boland!’ The shrewd eyes behind steel-rimmed spectacles were clouded with a terrible anxiety. Nodding at the closed door, he spoke in an urgent whisper. ‘Mr Maynard. The flying chap. They’re calling from the ’orspital. There’s been an accident. They’re ’olding on, sir.’

  Putting a finger to his lips, Bart ran quickly down the narrow passageway to the small glassed-in cubicle by the back entrance of the theatre.

  Already a couple of well-dressed dandies hovered by the wide-open door, smoking cigarettes, hoping for a brief chat with their girlfriends before the evening performance. Daisy, clad in a grey satin wrap, leaned against the grimy wall, in flirtatious conversation with a paunchy man who looked like a stockbroker. It was so ordinary a scene, so normal, and yet when Bart stepped out of the cubicle two minutes later he had changed from a man filled with optimism and love into a man who knew that dreams could fade from one minute to the next.

  Life wasn’t like that. Solutions didn’t present themselves, not all neat and tidy on cue. Not unless scripted for a play, and a bad play at that. As he walked back down the ill-lit corridor a door swung open behind him, letting out a burst of laughter. Taking a deep breath, he stopped for a second time outside Clara’s door, knocked and went in.

  At midnight he was sitting beside Clara on a hard bench down the corridor from the casualty department in a hospital on the near outskirts of Croydon. They had been sitting there for almost five hours, stony-faced and silent. As if they were growing from the hard wooden seat. Directly opposite to them, on another long bench, a middle-aged couple sat close together, staring down at their knees. When a young doctor came striding towards them, white coat flying, they got up as if welded together, eyes wide and pleading in frightened faces.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Smith?’ The doctor’s voice was very low, very deferential. ‘Come with me, please. Mr Graham would like to see you both.’

  Shivering, Clara spoke to Bart without looking at him. ‘She’s dead, isn’t she? That’s where they’re going. To be told that she’s dead.’

  ‘We don’t know, love. The doctor said she was very young.’

  ‘Seventeen,’ Clara prompted.

  There was nothing else to say, so they sat there, listening to the subdued bustle coming from behind the big double doors of casualty, hardly noticing when a man was led in holding a bloodied towel to his head.

  When the middle-aged couple came back, walking slowly, leaning on each other for support, Bart saw Clara’s eyes dilate with fear. He could only guess at the courage it took for her to get up and walk towards them, hands outstretched.

  ‘Your daughter … ?’ Her voice failed her and she could only stand there, totally unaware of the incongruous figure she presented with her pale gold hair streaming down her back, in the long white dress and velvet cloak she’d been wearing when Bart had rushed her from the theatre.

  ‘Aye, she’s dead all right.’ It was the man who spoke, in a northern accent which Clara recognized and warmed to at once.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Clara’s green eyes filled with tears. ‘I can’t tell you just how sorry I am.’ She laid a hand on the man’s arm, only to have it shrugged off with a fierce swiping motion that brought the warm colour to her face.

  ‘He mesmerized her,’ the man said. ‘Yon husband of yours. She’d never met anyone like him afore. Taking her up in a plane no bigger’n a flea, and hedge-hopping.’ He drew himself up to his full height of five feet two. ‘What was he doing, gallivanting about with a young lass like a single man while his wife …’ the moustache that seemed to be too big for his face quivered with emotion ‘… while his wife disported herself on the stage painted like a tart?’

  For the first time since Bart had walked into her dressing room to break the news of the accident, Clara realized she was still wearing her stage make-up. Realized how she must appear to the man staring at her with hate – filled eyes.

  ‘You’re not our sort,’ he told her. ‘Theatricals.’ He almost spat out the word. ‘And fliers. Living apart.’ He shrugged off his wife’s restraining hand. ‘Let her hear it, mother. Let her hear what a good girl our Brenda was afore she met him with his smarmy ways and his flash car.’ His voice broke on the edge of tears. ‘If we’d stopped in Lancashire where we belong, none of this would have happened. But I had to come where the work was, hadn’t I, and he ’appened along and made out he was Charles Lindbergh. Taking her up in a two-seater, showing off flying low over fields till he hit some telephone wires. And now our Brenda’s lying there dead, while he gets away with it.’

  To Clara’s horror, the little man, frantic with grief, staggered over to the far wall, beating both fists against it, while his wife stood as if carved from marble, watching him impassively, dry-eyed and comfortless with shock.

  ‘They say as ’ow his back’s broken and he’ll be lucky if he walks again, but he’s alive, isn’t he? He’s alive, and she’s dead. Oh, God … She was the light of my life, an’ she’s dead …’

  ‘Let me take you both home.’ Bart came to him, leading him away from the wall, but not before Clara saw the clenched knuckles were covered in blood. ‘The trams have stopped running now. Tell me where you live and I’ll take you home.’

  He glanced quickly at Clara. ‘You’ll be all right, dear, till I come back?’

  ‘Yes … yes, of course.’ Clara sat down again on the long hard bench, a feeling of helplessness swamping her so that she felt physically drained and very, very sick.

  The little man had reminded her of her father, the clogger. Already the memory of her real father was fading. She shivered, wrapped her arms round herself and swayed backwards and forwards, feeling the habitual guilt take her, whirling her away into an empty, vacant despair.

  What was she doing here, in the middle of the night, sitting dressed in a white silk gown, with rouged cheeks and a mouth bright with lipstick? Where were the values she’d been taught from childhood? The simple truths which dictated that a woman stayed with her man, cleaving only to him for as long as they both shall live?

  Slumped in her seat, she asked herself over and over again would it have happened if she’d done the right thing? The yardstick she’d tried to live by said that a woman’s place was with her man. But then the men she’d known had worked in the mills or the pits, no more than a stone’s throw from their houses. The husbands she’d known came home in the middle of the day for their dinner, to a wife whose job it was to look after them to the exclusion of all else. You couldn’t compare. Surely you couldn’t compare?

  She started at the sound of a nurse’s voice. ‘You can come with me now, dear. Your husband is back from the theatre, but he won’t be fully round for a long time. When you’ve seen him, I suggest you go home and get some sleep.’

  She was a tiny girl with a mop of red hair on which her starched cap sat uneasily. She had been trained not to wonder, certainly not to pry, but where was the man who had brought the patient’s wife into the hospital, the man who had sat the hours away, his face all crumpled with compassion? And what relationship was the young girl who had died to the handsome husband lying in the ward with his back broken and all his ribs smashed in? There was a story somewhere, she was sure of that.

  Clu
msy with fatigue, Clara stumbled after her, down the long echoing corridor, up a flight of stairs and down yet another identical corridor to a ward as long as a tunnel lined with beds in which sleeping men lay, wrapped like parcels inside mitred sheets and tightly tucked-in white cotton bedspreads.

  ‘In here, Mrs Maynard.’ Opening a screen just wide enough to let her through, the nurse smiled her professional smile. ‘Just a few minutes, dear. The surgeon will have a word with you afterwards. All right?’

  The long ward was so quiet that Clara could hear the scratch of the night sister’s pen as she wrote up her records at the table drawn up to the coke-burning stove in the middle of the ward. Not a sigh, not a snore from the men in their high beds, stunned into sleep by the hospital’s regulation hot milk, and by the acceptance that they must lie comatose until five o’clock, when they would be handed a bowl of tepid water in which to wash.

  John was not there. His body was there, sealed in its cocoon of coverings, but his face was the face of a stranger. Waxen pale, with only a fingernail cut beneath one eye to mar the perfect symmetry of his features. Slowly Clara moved to stand looking down at him, shocked by his unnatural stillness.

  John had never looked like this. Always a light sleeper, she had seen him twitch and mumble by her side, as if he begrudged the hours spent lying still. Once, bending over him, she had seen his eyelids twitch as beneath them his eyes moved urgently from side to side, searching even in his dreams. And his hair … that fair flop of thick corn-coloured hair, which he would dash back so impatiently with the back of his hand or with a toss of his head. Someone had combed it straight back from his forehead, giving him an air of respectability he would have scorned.

  ‘Oh, John …’ His torn, mangled body was hidden by the bedclothes. Clara could only guess at the horror of it, but the doctor had said – so long ago it could have been in another life – the doctor had said …