The Clogger s Child

by Marie Joseph

  ‘I’m coming!’ she called out again, pulling her dressing gown round her, lifting the heavy weight of her hair away from the nape of her neck and slipping her feet into a pair of feathered mules. ‘We’ve both slept late, we must have …’

  The words froze on her lips as she walked into the bedroom. There was a vice holding her from making a sound, and yet deep in the core of her a whirlwind of feeling was taking possession, swamping her with horror.

  He was lying on his back, both hands extended and crooked into claws. His eyes were wide open, rolled back in their sockets, but the worst horror of all was his mouth. Rigor mortis had drawn back his lips, setting them into a terrible smile.

  Always a joker, it seemed as if his own death was the last most macabre joke of all.

  Stumbling away from the bed, a hand to her mouth, Clara’s foot caught the empty bottle of disinfectant, sending it rolling across the carpet. Whimpering now, she watched it go, eyes wide as the full implication of what he had done hit her like a body blow.

  Retching and moaning, she ran into the bathroom to kneel down by the toilet bowl. Holding on to its ice-cold rim, she vomited until her throat was raw. Was it her making that terrible noise? She didn’t know. Her long hair fell forward, ends trailing in the pan, until, shaking and whimpering, she forced herself to go into the sitting room and unhook the telephone.

  When the police came she was able to answer their questions in a tight controlled voice. Yes, her husband had been asleep when she last saw him. No, she hadn’t seen the bottle of Lysol on the bedside table, and no, he couldn’t possibly have fetched it himself from the shelf in the kitchen.

  When the doctor came she repeated what she’d just said. When they came with a stretcher to take John away she went back into her own room to sit on her bed, clasping her hands between her knees, trying to shut her ears to the sounds coming from the other room.

  ‘My dear …’ The doctor came to sit beside her. ‘You mustn’t be here alone.’ His kindly face was creased with anxiety. ‘This is no time for you to be alone. Let me telephone one of your friends – and then get into bed and I’ll give you something to help you.’ He held her wrist and checked her pulse. ‘The next few days aren’t going to be easy for you, my dear.’

  She gave him Daisy’s number, then did as she was told, getting back into bed and pulling the blankets closely round her chin. Her teeth were chattering so much that the sunlight, lying sweetly now across her bed, was a mockery. When the doctor pushed her sleeve back and she felt the prick of an injection she stared at him, her green eyes wide and pleading.

  ‘He was asleep when I came in,’ she whimpered. ‘He was … he was …’ And all the time a little voice inside her was telling her it wasn’t so.

  ‘She will sleep for another hour,’ the doctor told Daisy when he let her in. ‘She is blaming herself, but you must talk to her. I’ll call in again this evening.’ He walked towards the door. ‘A bad business, a bad business all round, but I’m not surprised. He had never accepted. In a case like his acceptance is all.’

  After he had gone away shaking his head, Daisy couldn’t restrain herself from tiptoeing through into the big bedroom at the back of the house. Where it had all happened. She was quite surprised to see that the bed had been smoothed over and the pillows plumped up. Just as if anyone would ever think of sleeping in it again. She had asked the doctor straight out what ‘method’ Mr Maynard had used to do away with himself and when he’d told her in his reluctantly professional voice that it seemed as if the deceased had drunk poison, a small frisson of excitement had tightened her own bowels.

  She looked round the room, so obviously a sickroom, with books piled on a table in a corner and a bowl of grapes rotting gently in a dish, and shivered with deliciously morbid fear. She half expected to see a dark brown bottle labelled ‘Poison’ standing empty. She picked up the glass of water and sniffed at it suspiciously. Had he drunk it from a glass, or had he downed it straight from the bottle?

  She had never pretended to like Clara’s husband, so she wasn’t going to indulge in the hypocrisy of grief, but all the same … A remembrance of a play she had once been in at drama school before she decided to stick to dancing flashed into her mind. A Roman-orgy kind of play, with men in togas and women with their hair bound in silver ribbons expressing undiluted horror as a centurion raised a goblet to his lips and drank. It had taken him an uncommonly long time to die, she recalled, staggering about and groaning, to lie twitching, clutching his stomach before what must have been a merciful death overtook him.

  When the telephone rang, she jumped, as startled as if she’d been suddenly shot in the back, then hurried with her dancer’s light step into the sitting room.

  ‘It was Mr Boland,’ she told Clara, now hovering in the doorway, ashen pale, holding on to the back of the sofa for support. ‘You should be asleep. The doctor said you would sleep for at least an hour.’ She took Clara by the arm to lead her back to bed. ‘Mr Boland is coming round straightaway. He sounded shattered when I told him what had happened,’ she confided.

  ‘No!’ Clara prised at the fingers holding her arm. ‘I won’t see him! Don’t let him in! He mustn’t come! I don’t want … I can’t …’

  Shock, Daisy told herself, helping Clara back into bed and tucking her in. The drug was taking effect again. Clara’s eyes were closing, forcing themselves open, then closing once again.

  ‘He’ll put Maureen in your spot this afternoon and evening. He’ll be coming to tell you it’s all right. You know what Mr Boland’s like.’ Daisy pushed Clara’s left arm underneath the blankets. ‘Just you sleep, darling. That’s right. Just you sleep.’

  She would never sleep again, Clara told herself as Daisy closed the door behind her. There would never be a sleeping draught strong enough to shut out the memory of that terrible face with agony mirrored in the staring eyes.

  ‘The wages of sin is death …’

  Her sin. Her sin … Muzzily she forced herself up onto her elbows. She had sinned, and so now she must pay. She had been taught that, and taught it well. Whilst her husband was lying paralysed, she had committed adultery. She had come from Bart, and she had stood by John’s bed, and she had recoiled from touching him.

  And John had known.

  ‘The wages of sin is death!’

  A lay preacher in the pulpit of the chapel at the top of the street. A working man in a striped union shirt without a collar. An unlessoned man, speaking with the wide vowels of his Lancashire heritage. A man of sincerity, raising arms high above his head. Bellowing his beliefs so that the congregation shrank back in their hard pews, afraid of the wrath that would surely come.

  The Lake of Fire … Oh God, if this was it, then she was drowning in it, sinking screaming into its fiery depths …

  In spite of her anguish the drug was having its way, and when Bart came to her she was asleep. Smoothing the hair back from her pale face, he sent Daisy away, to continue his vigil alone.

  When at last she opened her eyes, he pulled her straight up into his arms, holding her tightly, whispering, soothing, feeling for the right words, knowing they could be the most important words he would ever speak. Hating the man who had played this last terrible trick on her.

  ‘If you let him, he will destroy you from the grave,’ he told her, holding her even closer. ‘He was determined to destroy you for the rest of the leftover life he had to live.’ His grip was like steel. ‘That is a fact we have to accept and tolerate together. Even though at the moment it seems intolerable.’ In his quiet voice he continued, ‘You are only human, I am only human, and because of that we make mistakes. We are weak. We sin …’ Tenderly he smoothed her hair away from her face. ‘How can you begin to forgive others when you cannot forgive yourself?’

  Clara moved to look into his face. One minute she was seeing him, the next her eyelids closed as the drug took effect again. But one thing her half-awake mind was telling her, and that was that this man was security, he was stability
, he was wisdom and, oh, how she needed all those things.

  ‘I love you,’ she whispered. ‘And I know that loving you is happiness.’

  ‘And not wicked?’ There was a hint of a smile on his lips. ‘Not a certain leap into the fires of hell?’

  For a long time he held her, feeling his shirt front wet with her tears, then she pushed him away, ready, he knew, to get on with the sad and terrible things that had still to be done before John Maynard could be laid to rest.

  She would do them, he knew, but not alone. For he, Bart Boland, would see that she was never alone again.

  Epilogue

  ON 30 MAY 1932, Their Majesties King George and Queen Mary attended a variety performance at the London Palladium.

  Up in the royal box, Queen Mary, a regal figure in her bead-encrusted gown, a diamond tiara sparkling in her white hair, sat ramrod straight. By her side King George fingered his nautical beard as if impatient for the show to begin.

  Behind the stage in the darkened wings, the huge cast moved into their allotted positions, a miracle of organized chaos. Star dressing rooms were shared, with good humour prevailing on the whole, although tension crackled like electricity and nerves taut as bow strings threatened to snap. But with swift professionalism they were brought under control.

  The entire proceeds were in aid of the Variety Artists’ Benevolent Fund, so the fashionable audience had paid with unstinting generosity for their tickets.

  In the third row of the orchestra stalls Bart Boland sat proudly between the son and the daughter he was only recently getting to know. The girl’s vivid blue eyes shone with excitement, but the boy stared down at his programme in an agony of adolescent embarrassment. But as the curtain rose at last and the sixteen Palladium Girls danced onstage, he perked up visibly, sitting forward in his seat. Legs and bosoms. Bart hid a tolerant smile behind his hand. A wickedly fascinating combination to a boy of fifteen playing truant from his public school for this one special day.

  There was a star-studded cast that warm May evening. Billy Danvers, cheeky one minute and philosophical the next. Cicely Courtneidge, singing and dancing with boisterous energy, followed by Flanagan and Allen crooning songs that set feet tapping.

  Bart watched them all with his critical eye, recognizing the brilliant timing of each brief act to fit the tight schedule. When Jack Buchanan glided on, suave and elegant in his white tie and tails, his voice a sophisticated whisper carrying over the footlights and up to the back of the gods, Bart saw his daughter lean forward, her young face rapt. There was a lump in his throat as he thought of the years of her childhood when he had hardly known her, and when her hand tightened on the red plush armrest he covered it with his own.

  Will Fyffe, Jasper Maskeleyne, the magician … one artiste after another up to the intermission, with the Palladium orchestra playing selections from Noel Coward’s Bitter Sweet.

  ‘I’ll see you again …’ The haunting music flooded the ramshackle Victorian finery of the auditorium, until, with the royal party back in their box, the curtain rose again.

  G S Melvin, Naughton and Gold, Jack Hylton’s Band. Violins, trumpets, clarinets, saxophones, blending with three pianos into tunes that had set feet dancing all over London.

  Bart found he was clenching his hands together to stop them trembling, so that when the curtain rose for the last item before the grand finale he felt he had lived a whole life since coming to the theatre. Like his father before him, he had put on shows; he had lost and made fortunes, but on not one of his first nights had he felt like this.

  Waiting in the wings, Clara was sure her bones had turned to jelly. At the rehearsal her voice had soared, but she knew the acoustics of an empty theatre could lie. As she walked into the shattering brilliance of the single spotlight, the audience was a sea of dim shapes, with white faces all upturned towards her. The stage was so big, so vast, the boards scarred and shabby beneath her feet. And she could sense the regal presence of her King and Queen. It was the loneliest moment of her life.

  Until the music began.

  ‘Look for the silver lining …’ Like a bird in flight her voice rose, each note true, every word clear as the ring of crystal. ‘When e’er a cloud appears in the blue …’

  The first song she had ever sung for Bart, the very first one, standing on the stage of the Palace Theatre in her home town. The song Joe had chosen for her.

  ‘Remember somewhere the sun is shining …’ She could feel the audience responding to her. She could absorb their adulation and give it back to them in her smoky-toned voice, filling them with optimism and hope.

  She knew she must not look up at the royal box, but she could sense the Queen leaning forward slightly, a faint smile of approval on her face.

  ‘So always look for the silver lining …’ Clara walked slowly up to the footlights, holding out her arms. ‘And try to find the sunny side of life …’

  The applause was a roar of pent-up emotion. Holding it to her, Clara walked quickly into the wings, leaving the stage for the stars of yesterday in their grand finale: Vesta Victoria, Harry Champion, Fred Russell and Marie Kendall. Old-timers every one of them, leading the reassembled company in a rousing chorus of ‘God Save the King’.

  A wave of patriotism swept the theatre. The King bowed his head, and his Queen raised, a white-gloved hand in gracious acceptance.

  The tenth Royal Variety Performance was over. Soon the great theatre with its red plush and its gold-painted pillars would be empty and silent. The audience would stream out into the night to waiting cars and taxi cabs.

  And Clara Boland would go home with the man she loved.

  In the past four years Bart had taught her that sorrow and joy, the good and the bad, could be the same, sometimes even indivisible. His quiet strength had given her peace and freed her from the torment of guilt.

  Now, secure in her husband’s love, Clara had found a deep and lasting serenity. The clogger’s child was happy at last.

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  First published by Hutchinson 1985

  Arrow edition 1986

  Reprinted 1988, 1989 and 1990

  © Marie Joseph 1985

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN 0 09 942070 8