by Caro Peacock
‘Has Madame arrived yet?’ she asked the other girls, her tone suggesting that she didn’t much care for Columbine. They told her that, yes, she had, so she’d better hurry up changing.
I walked towards the pit, intending to warn Daniel that curtain-rise looked likely to be late. Running footsteps sounded behind me. I turned and there was Jenny in her thin costume and dancing pumps. She laid a hand on my arm, light as a falling leaf.
‘Excuse me, Miss Lane …’ She spoke in a whisper, with a Kentish accent. She was shaking with nerves or cold, but determined to say her piece. ‘I wanted to tell you how grateful I am. I didn’t… didn’t know anybody could be so kind.’
I looked into her wide grey eyes and understood what Daniel meant about her courage, but she was fragile too. You could no more be unkind to her than a bird fallen out of its nest. I held out my hand to her.
Instead of taking it, she suddenly threw her arms round my neck and kissed me on the cheek.
‘Thank you. Thank you so much.’
Then she turned and fled in a rustle of muslin, back towards the dancers’ dressing room.
CHAPTER FOUR
The curtain rose half an hour late, but the audience seemed cheerful enough about it. Rodney Hardcastle and his gentlemen friends took their places in the two on-stage boxes after the overture had started. Most of them were talking loudly to each other, although Hardcastle himself looked sulky. I was standing by Daniel at the piano, making myself useful sorting out music and giving myself a good view of stage boxes and stage. As the overture ended, the twin acrobats spun themselves into complicated somersaults on and off a see-saw placed in front of the curtain. They were a marvel of strong nerves and good timing, but chiefly there to give late-comers a chance to settle. When they bounded off, the orchestra went straight into the introduction to the first ballet. The curtain quivered and rose. The chorus skipped on, wafting garlands. Columbine, in green satin and gold gauze, entered en pointe as Titania, with a smile that looked as if it had been set in wax. Bursts of cheers broke out from the boxes and front row, along with a thumping of walking canes on the floor and snorts of laughter from Rodney Hardcastle’s friends. There was a joke going on among them that the rest of the audience didn’t share.
I watched Columbine carefully, trying to understand why Disraeli should consider her a possible threat to the good order of society. She looked younger and more beautiful under stage lighting than close-to, but as for her dancing … To describe it as second rate would have been charitable. She was the wrong shape for a dancer. Admittedly her feet were small and neat, and her ankles and calves shapely. But her breasts, only just contained by her bodice, were like a swell of downland. They were magnificent, but put her out of balance, like a schoolboy’s top that can only stay upright if it keeps twirling fast. She could not twirl fast. She was insecure en pointe, hardly airborne in her leaps, unreliable in her pirouettes. Luckily, the ballet had been arranged so that the eight dancers were always on hand to offer discreet support. They did their work efficiently, but only Jenny danced as if there were any joy in it. Her diffidence fell away and she moved with an instinctive response to the music, sure as a fish darting through water. She belonged in some other, less tawdry, ballet. Daniel’s eyes followed her every move until almost the end of the ballet.
Columbine finished triumphantly on tiptoe, the girls kneeling round her, leaning back like the petals of a flower. All that was needed was a repetition of the opening bars to get them off the stage. Daniel was already signalling with his eyes to the bassoon player to be ready for the comic fanfare that opened the burletta, so he didn’t see what came next. The girls stood up and formed a line. Columbine walked past them towards the wings, curtseying to the applause at every few steps. It happened that Jenny was the last in line, standing like the rest, head up and arms extended sideways. Straightening up from her final curtsey, Columbine stretched her arm back in an arc and, quite deliberately, struck Jenny hard across the ribs. The audience probably didn’t notice anything or thought Jenny was simply being clumsy when she staggered back, but from the pit I saw it quite clearly and even heard the gasp of pain that Jenny gave. She recovered almost at once, and walked off into the wings with the rest of the dancers. Then the curtain came down.
‘What did she do to deserve that?’
The lead violin whispered the question to me, under cover of the bassoon blasts. He was Toby Kennedy, a big and kindly Irishman from County Cork, friend of both my father and Daniel. If Daniel assembled a group of players for anything from Haydn string quartets to the present shambles, Toby Kennedy would be there. He might have been one of the greatest violinists of his day, if it hadn’t been for an easy-going temperament that made him love company and good fellowship better than his art. He must have been in his fifties but wore his age as lightly as everything else; a bear of a man with a shock of curly grey hair and a wind-tanned face from riding on the outside of coaches on his way to far-flung concert engagements.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Better not tell him. Not until afterwards, anyway.’
He nodded towards Daniel.
‘No. He’s … he is very fond of Jenny Jarvis, isn’t he?’
He gave me a sideways look.
‘Don’t worry, I’ve seen him like this a few times before. Usually it’s the soprano in whatever opera he’s directing. He’ll recover in time.’
‘I don’t think it’s like that,’ I said. ‘Not this time.’
The violins were cued so he couldn’t answer.
Hardcastle and his friends sat through the burletta, then left noisily as the arithmetical horse began its act. They returned an hour later, even more noisily and some of them unsteady on their feet, during the instrumental prologue to the second ballet.
As far as there was a plot, it concerned the goddess Diana, out hunting with her maidens. Anything less like the chaste moon goddess than Columbine in gold-spangled muslin and a coronet sprouting blue ostrich feathers in her hair it would be hard to imagine. The high point of the dance was Columbine turning a series of pirouettes. The girls kneeled down and stretched out imploring palms to their goddess, so that if she became unsteady she could take support from the one nearest. With luck, it would look like a graceful acceptance of homage rather than desperation. One pirouette safely executed, second pirouette, a hasty clutch at a nymph’s hand, similarly with three. She came down flat-footed at four and a half, turned and dropped her usual curtsey to acknowledge the applause. Jenny was at the end of the line and there was no need for Columbine to touch her at all. I couldn’t believe it when she straightened from the curtsey, put her hand on Jenny’s outstretched palm and forced it backwards with all her weight. Jenny made no sound that I could hear, but her face contorted.
Daniel positively yelled a protest that must have been audible on stage if not to the audience and, for once in his life, missed a note. Kennedy rallied the strings and the dance went on. Jenny was smiling again, the automatic smile of all the nymphs. Daniel looked at me. I signed to him to go on playing and he did, his eyes fixed on the stage.
The yellow-haired girl, Pauline, presented Diana with a wooden hunting spear. Some animal was notionally attacking them from a canvas-painted thicket. The nymphs formed a protective circle round their goddess. Columbine flourished her spear and drove the point of it straight into Jenny’s shin. Jenny yelped and jumped. This time the audience couldn’t have missed it. There was a hole in Jenny’s stocking and blood flowing. The dancers nearest her looked horrified, while the others held their attitudes and their smiles.
For a moment it looked as if Jenny was going to take it as passively as the previous attacks; but only for a moment. Still moving with delicate grace, she kicked Columbine hard and accurately on the kneecap. Columbine’s shriek was probably heard in the street outside. The gallery were ecstatic, whooping and cheering. They were too far from the stage to see the brutal reality of the thing and thought this was all part of the entertainment, muc
h more to their taste than ballet. Most of the musicians had stopped playing by now, though Kennedy – on the principle that in theatre you must keep going whatever happens – fiddled out an Irish jig that formed an oddly appropriate accompaniment.
Jenny, seeing the look on Columbine’s face, tried to move for shelter behind the other dancers, but Columbine went after her, limping heavily but with more energy than she’d put into the dance. She caught Jenny by the back of the bodice, spun her round, and raked her nails deeply down her cheek. By that point, Daniel was climbing on to the stage. I caught his coat tails.
‘No – you’ll only make it worse.’
Jenny, with fierce stripes of red on her cheek, clutched at Columbine’s hair and yanked hard. By then, the rest of the audience had taken their cue from the gallery and were laughing out loud, even Hardcastle’s party, who were surely in a position to see it was all too real. The laughter grew to hysteria as Jenny fell over backwards on the stage, with Columbine’s wig and its coronet of ostrich feathers spread across her body like the tendrils of an exotic octopus.
Columbine screeched again and clapped her hands to her head. She wasn’t bald, nothing as bad as that, but her own hair was thinner than the wig, pinned close to her scalp and wet from perspiration. The combination of her small, wet head, smudged rouge and spreading circles of eye make-up above her billowing gauze was oddly clownish.
Through it all I’d been aware of the voice of Barnaby Blake shouting from the wings. He’d probably been ordering the stagehands to bring the curtain down, because it descended so suddenly that some of the dancers who’d been watching open-mouthed had to leap backwards to save themselves from being knocked off their feet. Behind it, Columbine was still yelling.
Daniel ran up the steps to the stage and round the edge of the curtain. I followed. On the way he almost collided with Rodney Hardcastle, who was trying to scramble over the edge of the box, possibly with the belated idea of helping Columbine. Daniel simply pushed him aside. As I went past I glimpsed Hardcastle’s round face, mouth open, expression caught between hilarity and alarm.
On stage, the dancers and the maid Marie had clustered round Columbine and were trying to soothe her. Barnaby Blake was taking no notice of them, shouting to the stagehands to change the set.
‘Suter, what are you doing here? Get back into the pit, stop that infernal jig and play the music I’m paying you for.’
‘Where’s Jenny?’ Daniel said.
‘Gone to throw herself in the Thames, I hope.’ Blake turned to yell at a stagehand, ‘Just get the bed on quickly, never mind the battlements.’ Then, ‘Suter, where do you think you’re going?’
Daniel went at a run past Diana’s glade, into the wings and out to the dimly lit backstage corridor. He hesitated at the door to the dancers’ room and noticed for the first time that I was following him.
‘I’d better go in first,’ I said. ‘She may be changing.’
The room was empty, the dancers still on stage.
‘She couldn’t have just run out in the street in her dancing clothes, could she?’ Daniel said.
‘I don’t know. She might have been desperate to get away. She knows she’s the one who’ll get the blame.’
We went out of the room and along the corridor to the side door. The fat man, Billy, was in the doorkeeper’s room, feeding his cat by the light of a feeble gas-lamp.
‘Has a girl just gone out?’ Daniel said.
‘Someone just went rushing past. Didn’t see who it was.’
I followed Daniel out of the door. Late-evening crowds were pushing along Long Acre. An endless procession of carriages went by, their lamps illuminating a dense mass of pedestrians, hawkers, chestnut braziers, beggars and patrolling policemen. There was no sign of Jenny.
‘I’ll go to her lodgings,’ Daniel said.
‘I’m coming with you, then.’
Seven Dials, a short walk from the theatre, was an area where even policemen didn’t venture alone after dark.
‘No. You go back to the Augustus. She might still be inside. If she is, keep her away from Columbine and tell her to wait for me.’
From the tone of his voice, there was no point in arguing, so I made my way back through the crowds to the Augustus. It seemed as if I’d been away from the pit for a long time, but Othello still hadn’t finished strangling Desdemona. Kennedy raised an eyebrow to ask what was going on. The audience were restive now, talking amongst themselves or shouting rude advice at Othello; for them, this was all an anti-climax after the scandal.
When the curtain had come down at last and the few remaining musicians had thumped out ‘God Save the Queen’ at quick-march speed, I told Kennedy what had happened.
‘He shouldn’t have gone into Seven Dials at this time of night.’
‘I tried to stop him,’ I said. ‘Do you know if the girl’s still here?’
He didn’t, so I went back along the dressing-room corridor. Barnaby Blake’s door was closed, but a hum of voices came from inside with Columbine’s plaintive tones among them.
The door to the dancers’ room was open, half-dressed girls spilling into the corridor from lack of space inside. I asked the nearest girls if they knew where Jenny might have gone.
‘A good long way, if she’s got any sense.’
‘Barney wants her guts for garters.’
Pauline took no notice, staring at the rest of them with eyes like a cat on the hunt. When I repeated the question to her she turned the look on me, assessing whether I might be of any use to her, and deciding it was unlikely.
‘Haven’t a notion.’
Only a small dark-haired dancer who looked no more than fourteen broke ranks to the extent of trying to do a kindness to Jenny.
‘She’s left her basket here. If you’re looking for her, you could take it to her.’
She darted into a corner and came out with the wicker basket.
‘That’s her ointments and things,’ one of the others said. ‘We should keep that for the next time one of us gets hurt.’
I took the basket from the dark-haired girl and thanked her before any of them could try to grab it.
The outside door slammed and Daniel arrived breathless, as if he’d run back down the road from Seven Dials. He looked at me questioningly. I shook my head.
‘Where’s Columbine?’
Scared at the tone of his voice, I said nothing. But Columbine’s voice, proclaiming loudly that she’d never set foot on stage again for any amount of money, sounded from behind Barnaby Blake’s door. Daniel strode to the door, flung it open and went in. Columbine was standing like a tragedy queen, wrapped in her velvet and fur cloak. Barnaby had his hands spread out, appealing to her. Behind them, the maid hovered with something hot in a glass. They all turned. Daniel stopped within a few feet of Columbine.
‘Get out, Suter,’ Blake said.
Daniel took no notice, staring at Columbine as if he wanted to hypnotise her.
‘You’re a wicked, talentless, selfish whore,’ he said. ‘I hope to God that somebody will treat you the way you’ve been treating others all your life.’
Silence. Columbine stood, mouth open. Blake recovered first.
‘He’s gone mad. Suter, get out at once and don’t come back.’
‘Don’t concern yourself about that. I shan’t set foot in any theatre that woman’s polluting, and neither will Jenny Jarvis.’
With that, Daniel turned and strode along the corridor and out of the side door.
When somebody makes a dramatic exit, other people have to attend to the practicalities. I went back to the pit to collect Daniel’s outdoor clothes and music, and to tell Toby Kennedy what had happened. We caught up with Daniel in St Martin’s Lane, still looking for Jenny and attracting attention even from the midnight beggars for his hatless and coatless state.
We took him back to his lodgings – rousing poor Izzy from her bed in the basement because Daniel had lost his key – then Kennedy insisted on seeing me home to Abel
Yard. As we parted, he told me again that I shouldn’t worry, that Daniel would recover; only this time he didn’t sound so sure of it.
CHAPTER FIVE
The next day was Sunday. Mrs Martley went to church while I stayed at home and tried to distract myself with guitar practice. Later, she settled at our parlour table and allowed herself one of her indulgences: catching up with her Queen Victoria album. She had a stack of magazines that in their shining youth had been delivered to ladies in the houses fronting on to the park, and went from there via the hands of ladies’ maids to the kitchens, where Cook would fillet out recipes and household hints – possibly with the knife used to chop meat judging by the smears on some of the pages. They then made the sideways shift to our building because the carriage mender’s wife had friends in some of the kitchens. Mrs Martley would pore over them endlessly, looking for news of our young queen. Coming from a family of republicans, I didn’t share her loyal enthusiasm but tried not to laugh at it.
‘I got Mr Suter’s note,’ she said as she cut out an engraving of Little Vicky receiving an ambassador. ‘Your friend didn’t come home with you last night, then?’
‘No.’
‘Will she be coming today?’
‘I don’t know.’
Somewhere under the grey skies, in the slums around Covent Garden, I knew that Daniel would be searching for her.
‘She’ll have to share your bed, I suppose.’
‘I suppose so, yes.’
I’d worked hard at achieving my few square feet of privacy. Originally, Mrs Martley and I had to share the attic bedroom and the double bed, each to her own side of the feather mattress with a dip in the middle. Every night Mrs Martley, being heavier than I was, would roll down into the dip, leaving me clinging with my fingertips to the edge of the mattress to stop myself rolling on top of her. Also, she snored. Yet she claimed she couldn’t get a wink of sleep all night because of my fidgeting. So I spent five shillings on a smaller bed for myself from a second-hand shop in Tottenham Court Road, and another two shillings to have it carted home. Soon afterwards I acquired a long curtain which I nailed from a ceiling beam, giving us the luxury of a narrow bedroom each. I had a peg for my bonnet, a wooden chest for my clothes and an old apple box to support my candlestick.