The Girl from the Savoy

by Hazel Gaynor

  I’ve worked hard over the winter, practicing my dance steps and deportment, much to the amusement of Sissy, who laughs at my newly rounded vowels. She says I sound like Lizzie of York and that she wouldn’t be surprised if I was invited to tea at the Palace soon! I don’t mind her teasing. It’s a sign that I’m becoming the girl I long to be.

  As the months pass, my heart continually trips me up, confusing me with my feelings for Perry. With the infectious bloom of spring and a growing ease in each other’s company, our arrangement to spend an hour together has gradually lapsed into many more. We often leave his apartment and stroll along the Embankment or through St. James’s Park. On cooler days, we visit the British Museum and the Tate at Millbank. I enjoy spending time with him, learning from him. Without going any farther than a mile in either direction, my world is expanding around me. I’ve come a long way from the rain-spattered girl who arrived at The Savoy on a rainy October afternoon, but improved posture and the arrival of spring cannot fix everything.

  Like the winter soot that clings to the rooftops and windows, my past clings to me. There is no word from the Mothers’ Hospital. No letter. My child remains a face in a faded photograph, a distant memory of a fluttering heartbeat against my chest. Until I know that he is safe and loved, part of me will always remain tethered to that night in the butler’s pantry; my wings will remain broken and useless.

  But there is hope. Under Loretta May’s careful guidance, I can feel myself transform. I still pinch myself when I walk into her apartment, but there are moments when I concentrate so hard on her exercises and instruction that I forget how famous she is and where I am. She is a determined teacher and I am an eager student. She shows me how to stand to make myself appear three inches taller, how to walk onto a stage, how to turn my head for photographers, how to extend my arms to make a movement more fluid, how to smile to break the hearts of men and capture the hearts of women. She tells me people are beginning to talk; rumors threading through the gossip columnists about a girl she is developing; a protégée. The pressure of expectation worries me but she dismisses my concerns. “Let them speculate,” she says. “It will all help when you make your debut. There is no greater entrée than intrigue.”

  Each time we meet, she has something new planned for me. Today, I am to be measured for a new dress. She wants me to experience the boredom of standing still for hours at a time while measurements are taken and adjustments made. She insists that I must learn how to move in a couture dress to show it off properly, telling me “a couture dress moves differently than those dreadful shapeless things people buy from shops.”

  I arrive at the Berkeley Square apartment and wait in the drawing room, twiddling my thumbs until she sweeps into the room in an ochre caftan, great swathes of material flowing behind her as she flounces over to me and kisses me on the cheek. She wears an olive-green turban, embellished with onyx and amber. A long line of bangles along her arm click and clack as she moves.

  “Now, Miss Lane. Straight to work. Strip down to your underwear and stand in front of the window.” She senses my hesitation and tuts. “Use the screen if you must. You’ll have to get used to people peering at you and commenting on how thin you are or how plump you’ve become. Come along. Get on with it. We’ve no time for prudery.”

  I step behind the screen and wriggle out of my dress and stockings. I emerge reluctantly and stand awkwardly as Miss May lights a cigarette and walks around me, prodding and poking her elegant fingers into my skin.

  “Darling, you’re like a dumpling.” I pull my stomach in, but she already has a lump of doughy flesh between her fingers. I shriek as she pinches me. “Exactly. That is what laziness feels like. You’ll never get a shriek from a girl who fits into her skin perfectly. You need exercise, Miss Lane, and plenty of it. Wait there.”

  I perch on the window seat as she sweeps from the room and reappears with a beautiful ivory chiffon dress over her arm. She holds it up against me.

  “Lucien Lelong,” she says. “Last season, but never mind. Put it on and let’s see if you can carry it off.”

  I shimmy the dress over my hips. It feels like air against my skin, even though it is too tight here and there. As I twist my hips from side to side, the elaborate beading rustles. I twist faster, relishing the sound. Miss May fastens the hook and eye and places her hands on my shoulders, turning me back around to face her. Her face is inscrutable.

  I glance at my reflection in the looking glass, standing on my tiptoes to make myself taller. “It’s so beautiful,” I whisper.

  “A dress this beautiful will look good on anybody, but it will look incredible when you’ve lost a few pounds. Ivory is terribly unforgiving, but so wonderful under the spotlights.”

  As I wriggle out of the dress, a door closes downstairs and I hear voices. Miss May claps her hands together. “Ah, good. Here’s Hettie.”

  Hettie arrives, out of breath and flustered. “I’m so sorry I’m late, Miss May. My sister isn’t well, so I had to bring Thomas. He’s downstairs with Elsie. He won’t be any bother. I promise.”

  “Not to worry. These things happen. I’m quite sure Elsie can find something to entertain the little chap. Now, introductions. Hettie, Miss Lane. Miss Lane, Hettie.” We smile and say hello, both too polite to remind Loretta that we’ve met before. “She’s all yours, Hettie,” Miss May continues. “I’ve told her she needs to lose a few pounds, so bear that in mind when you take your measurements.”

  She drifts over to the gramophone player and sets the needle on a record. Lazy jazz fills the room as she flops down onto the chaise, placing a satin mask over her eyes.

  I feel self-conscious in my undergarments as Hettie walks over to the window and puts a sewing case on the table beside me. The sight of all the pins and needles and reels of different colored cotton reminds me of Mam. I feel a sudden longing to see her.

  Hettie takes a measuring tape and a box of pins from the case. “Stand as straight as you can. Shoulders back. Chest out.” She takes hold of my limbs and positions me as if I were a mannequin. “That’s perfect. Place your arms out to the side. I won’t be long.”

  She is quick and efficient with her measurements, scribbling notes onto a small pad of paper and making a few preliminary sketches. I talk about The Savoy and the famous guests I’ve met. She tells me about the actresses she’s dressed. From downstairs, I catch the occasional sound of a child’s laughter.

  “It sounds like they’re having fun down there!”

  Hettie smiles. “He’s a good boy. Elsie’s mad about him.” She lowers her voice. “Although I’m not so sure about Miss May.”

  Loretta leans over the chaise. “What Hettie is trying to tell you, Miss Lane, is that I don’t especially care for children. Although I will admit that little Thomas is rather adorable—and utterly ruined by his mother. He’ll never marry and leave home if she keeps being so nice to him.”

  Hettie blushes at being overheard. “She’s right. We do spoil him. Poor little mite. He’s had a tough time of it. His father died suddenly last year.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Thomas is named after him. He misses his daddy terribly. We all do. My sister especially. She clings to little Thomas like her life depended on him.”

  “He isn’t yours, then?”

  “No. He’s my sister’s boy. I mind him sometimes to help her out, although she can hardly bear to let him out of her sight.” She wraps a measuring tape around my hips and waist. I try to resist the urge to suck my stomach in. “Do you have children?”

  The question hangs over me like lead. “No. No, I don’t.”

  “Well, maybe one day. When you meet the right man—although that’s easier said than done these days.”

  She chuckles to herself and asks me to turn around. I gaze out of the window, looking at nothing in particular, my thoughts a million miles away.

  When Hettie finishes she leaves me with Miss May to practice my do-re-mi’s and my dance steps. I tell he
r about the latest shows I’ve seen, and how I’ve been watching the girls in lead chorus, noticing how they outshine the others.

  “Good. You’re beginning to understand,” she says, drifting across the room like a wisp of smoke. “There is far more to a performance than learning steps by rote and fixing a grin on your face. It comes from here,” she says, placing her hands over her chest. “From deep inside. You can move your feet and hit all the steps in all the right places, but if you don’t feel the music in your heart, you’ll never truly shine. There is dancing and there is moving in time to the music. They are as different as a couture dress from a shop-bought one.”

  “You really don’t care for shop-bought dresses, do you?”

  She pulls a face as if she’s sucking a lemon. “Vulgar things. I’d rather walk around naked.” She lights a cigarette and blows perfect circles of smoke as she wafts around the room. She seems distracted today, unable to settle on anything. “You like to read, don’t you, Miss Lane?”

  “Yes. I’ve always loved reading.”

  “Did you ever read a book that captivated you so much you didn’t notice the sun setting or the fire going out?”

  I think of The Adventure Book for Girls, how I would sit by the fire and forget all about my chores or the hours passing by. “Yes. It was like everything else melted away. As if the stories became part of me.”

  She grabs my hands and looks into my eyes. “Exactly! And that’s precisely what performing should feel like. You shouldn’t think about where your feet are or where your hands are or who might be in the audience. Dancing should be as natural to you as breathing in and out. It should be like reading a book; not spelling out each individual word, but becoming lost among the sentences and paragraphs and chapters until you are transported to another place entirely.”

  I look at this amazing woman whose velvet-soft hands I’m holding in mine. Her green eyes carry something of sadness in them as well as beauty. Like I did the first time I met her in the Embankment Gardens, I see her as a real woman, not the theater star whose face I’ve admired on so many posters, but a real person with hopes and fears and flaws. She seems suddenly fragile beside me.

  “You are a beautiful young woman,” she says, pushing a loose hair back from my forehead. “Look at you. So perfect. Like the first flower of spring.” She holds my face in her hands for a moment and I see the glisten of tears in her eyes.

  “Miss May? What’s wrong?”

  She drops my hands and turns away. “Nothing. Take no notice of me. I’m a silly old fool.”

  She pours us both a drink and perches on the edge of the window seat, the afternoon light falling around her. I sip my drink. Gin. I’ve never really cared for it, but I don’t like to say.

  “Have you ever been loved, Miss Lane?” She is in one of her thoughtful moods. It happens every now and then. Something in her changes, as if she is going over her entire life. “Truly loved?”

  I think about Teddy. “Yes. Yes, I have.”

  She walks to the writing bureau, picks up a scrapbook, and passes it to me before returning to the window seat. “I was loved once. Take a look.”

  I flick through the pages of cuttings, each one labeled and dated. So much love and admiration written in the press notices, but it is a single scrap of paper, lying loose among the pages, that she asks me to look at. It is a small press cutting, an image of a younger Loretta May. I have the very same cutting in my own scrapbook.

  “Turn it over,” she says.

  I turn the paper over in my hands. On the back are the words Now, you are mine! Always, Roger xx

  “I loved him with all my heart,” she says. “I loved him so much that I was physically sick from the pain of watching him leave.” I think about Teddy at the train station, about how I felt as I left him in the hospital and walked away. I understand that pain. “Roger wasn’t good enough for me,” she continues. “Not the titled gentleman I should have met during my Season. We wrote to each other for eighteen months and spent three blissful days together one summer. We were married in secret before he sailed back to France. It was the most reckless, most fabulous thing I’d ever done, and I told nobody.”

  “What happened?”

  “He was killed by a shell explosion. We’d been married exactly one week.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  She turns to look at me. “I have never loved anyone since. No one else will ever come close. Roger looked at me as though the world was made endlessly better, simply because I existed. Do you know that feeling, Miss Lane?”

  I see Teddy grinning. I hear him telling me he is happy, just because I am there, beside him. I do know that feeling. And I know what it is like to be without it.

  We sit in silence, watching the blossoms that dance on the trees outside the window, until Miss May sweeps across the room and places a record on the gramophone. The scratch of the needle blends into a waltz.

  “‘The Merry Widow Waltz,’” she says. “Our favorite. Roger was a wonderful dancer. We danced to this very song at The Savoy beneath a starlit sky.”

  I smile. “Teddy was a wonderful dancer too.”

  “Teddy? You haven’t mentioned him before.”

  I look at my feet. “I don’t talk about him.”

  “I don’t talk about Roger either.” She looks at me with a softness I haven’t seen before. “Did he die?”

  I listen to the music, the rise and fall of the piano and violin, trumpet and clarinet. “No. He survived. He suffered very badly from shell shock. I tried to help him, but he didn’t remember me.” I stare at my hands in my lap. “I left him and came to London. I abandoned him when he needed me the most.”

  The relief of saying the words I have carried in my heart for so many years prompts a sudden rush of tears. Miss May passes me a handkerchief and I weep into it, apologizing as I dab at my cheeks and wipe my nose. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t be troubling you with these things.”

  She sits beside me. “We all have a past, Miss Lane. We’ve all done things we regret. Sometimes it is easier to ignore the truth. Pour a drink. Take a shot of morphine. Run away. Dance.”

  We listen to the music until it scratches to a stop. She takes another record from its sleeve. A jazz number. More upbeat.

  I dry my tears and look at her. “Can I ask you something?”

  “You are in my apartment drinking my best gin. You can ask me anything you wish, dear girl.”

  “Why are you helping me? Why me?”

  She leans back against the chaise and thinks for a moment. “Why not you, Miss Lane? You and Perry stumbled into each other for some inexplicable reason. I am helping you because you are helping him, and you are both, in turn, helping me.” She takes a long swig of her drink. “It occurs to me that while we may come from very different beginnings, in the end we are all looking for the same thing. To love and to be loved. Isn’t that all that matters?” She stands up. “And after all, every leading lady needs a great understudy. What better than for someone I have taught myself to step into my shoes?” Her face lights up. “Talking of which, what size are you?”

  “A five.”

  “Perfect!” She rushes from the room and reappears a moment later with a pair of silver Rayne’s dance shoes in her hands. “Here. Try them on.”

  “But, I couldn’t. They’re . . .”

  She sighs and puts her hands on her hips. “I may be in a benevolent mood, Miss Lane, but I have no time for silly notions of unworthiness. Put them on.”

  I do as I am told. The shoes slip on like silk. I think about Larry Snyder’s hand against my ankle and brush the memory aside. I don’t need to look over my shoulder here. I don’t need to explain or apologize. These shoes come with an invitation.

  “They’re perfect,” I say.

  “Marvelous! Keep them. They can be your lucky shoes, just as they were always lucky for me. Now, Miss Lane. Show me what you’ve got.”

  I laugh as she begins to twirl around the room. I follow her steps, th
e shoes so light on my feet. It is like dancing on a cloud. I close my eyes, allowing myself to get lost in the music as I think of something Perry once said. “There is a moment when you’re writing a song when the lyrics and the melody begin to meld into one glorious thing and it settles across you like a gentle summer rain. That is when you know you have written something special. That is the music people will carry in their hearts. That is when their feet will truly dance.”

  For the first time, I really believe that I can do this. I feel it in my heels and my toes, in my fingertips and the fine hairs that prickle at the back of my neck. For the first time, I sense that the adventure isn’t waiting for me. It is here. Right now. I am in the middle of it.

  I shout above the music. “I’m ready, Miss May. I’m ready to audition.”

  She glides and twirls around me. “I know,” she laughs. “You’ve been ready for weeks, darling. The only person who didn’t know it was you.” She grabs my hands and spins me around. “You’re going to be glorious, Miss Lane. Glorious! Loretta’s Little Star. My very own shining star!”

  Neither of us notice Perry walk into the apartment. We don’t see him lean against the doorframe and watch us dance over the boards where we’ve rolled up the Turkey rug. Only when the gramophone record stops playing and we fall onto the chaise in an exhausted heap do I see him standing there, looking at me with those gray eyes, a gentle gaze that hints of something like love, and I wonder. I wonder if I can ever truly let Teddy go, and if I did, I wonder if a girl like me could ever find love with a man like Perry Clements.

  I wonder.

  36

  LORETTA

  “That’s the beauty of a life on the stage,

  one can be whomever one chooses to be.”

  The spring I longed for arrives with so much color and life that it is almost impossible to think about dying. I have confounded the doctors with my ability to fight this disease and my stubborn refusal to die. Whenever my thoughts do wander to such dark places as my eventual demise, I distract myself with the girl. It gives me such immense pleasure to watch her bloom. Miss Lane has become quite a marvel under my watchful eye. She is that rare kind of girl Charlot spoke of; the kind of girl one discovers perhaps once in a decade, a rough diamond waiting to be polished and brought out to dazzle for all the world to see. It was in her all along; that indescribable magical something that sets an ordinary girl above the rest. She may not be the best dancer or the greatest beauty, but she has lived—my goodness she has lived. Miss Lane has overcome heartache and disappointment, she has struggled and suffered, loved and lost, and all of that sorrow and anger blends with such determination and hope until it shines out from her in the way she moves and sings and the way she looks at you. It excites me. She excites me as I watch her transform from the dowdy young girl who first walked into my apartment to the determined young woman I see now.