‘So,’ Stackpoole said, ‘I like Lily. She’s got a lot of talent, but she’s very young and green. I think, with my help, she could be a star. And with me on her side, you wouldn’t have anything to worry about. My plan is to run my agency from this office to start with, then set up in my own premises. You’d sign a contract on behalf of Lily, because she’s not of age. My charge would be ten per cent of her earnings.’
Charlie, in a world so far from his own, was dumbfounded. His cigar ash fell on the floor. ‘We need time to think.’
‘I know. This is all very sudden. But your daughter can go far with the proper management. And if you agree with me, I have a condition.’
‘Yes?’ said Charlie, cautiously.
‘I’ll be quite frank with you. I’m Jewish. I hope you haven’t any particular prejudice against us.’
Charlie shook his head.
‘For a start,’ Stackpoole told him, ‘my name’s not Stackpoole. When I was a boy, it came to me that the world did better by the Stackpooles than the Cohens, which was my original name. One day, I happened to be standing by a glove shop in Hoxton, the proprietor being a certain Stackpoole, who I hadn’t met then and never will. At that moment I became Stackpoole. My parents are from Germany, and as you can see, I’m a large, fair man, as many German Jews are, so I can pass. But – and now I come to my point – my wife’s not like I am. She comes from a very traditional family, Polish. They all had a bad time in Poland, the Jews. My wife’s very shy, doesn’t go out much, doesn’t talk to strangers, as the Polish women don’t. So, to reassure you that I’m a respectable man not afraid to take you home to meet his wife, I’d like to invite you and your family to have tea with us one Sunday out at Green Lanes, where we have our little villa. I hope you’ll indulge me.’
‘Of course. Very generous and hospitable,’ said Charlie, who now had much to think about. ‘But as I say, we need to consider the whole matter….’
‘Ask anybody,’ Stackpoole said. ‘They’ll all tell you Sam Stackpoole’s straight as a die.’
‘I’m sure,’ said Charlie, and even as the tea came into the office, he hastened Lily out. He was too confused to stay any longer. He still clutched the cigar, which had gone out. Outside the theatre he stopped, and a woman with a string bag and three children, one on her hip, bumped into him. He didn’t even notice. ‘You could knock me down with a feather,’ he said.
Lily saw no reason to be knocked down by feathers, or brewers’ drays, for that matter. The information that there was a whole class of men acting as intermediaries between the music-hall artistes and the theatres in which they worked made sense to her. That Stackpoole wanted to represent her was, as she saw it, no more than her due.
‘He seems to be an honest enough chap,’ Charlie mused. ‘But I don’t know anything about all this.’
‘Come on, Dad,’ urged Lily. ‘Let’s go somewhere, not home, and think about it. I’ll buy you a pint of beer.’
‘At half past ten in the morning?’ Charlie questioned.
‘Just this once.’
In a nearby pub, where there were few drinkers, Charlie sat at a table with his pint. Lily had a lemonade. Charlie’s square face was puzzled. Lily gazed at him in some fear. It was obvious that she could not have Stackpoole as her agent if Charlie did not agree. Only he could sign for her. But she liked Sam Stackpoole and had rapidly understood that she must have him, or someone like him. She was like a sponge now, taking in all kinds of information about the stage, how it worked, what the lives of the artistes were like, how she, Lily, fitted into all this. She could see, too, that her father was going to be slower to understand.
Charlie now shook his head. ‘A contract. I’d have to sign it. What would happen if something went wrong?’ Charlie dreaded the idea of signing anything or joining anything. Officialdom filled him with horror.
‘Nothing can go wrong,’ Lily asserted. ‘It’s… it’s…’ She groped for the right words. ‘It’s a business arrangement,’ she concluded triumphandy.
‘It makes me responsible for you, Lily.’
She drew a deep breath. ‘If you don’t do it, you’ll be responsible for ruining my life,’ she declared.
‘Don’t give me any of your melodramatics,’ he said, almost relieved to be able to tell her off, as usual. ‘This is a serious matter and I have to think it over. It’s a worry, and no mistake. I wish this hadn’t happened. I’d better talk it over with your mother.’
On the one hand, Lily had seen the lights, had felt the stage beneath her feet, had heard the applause of the audience. On the other, she was sitting in a dusty pub, looking at the sunlight falling in a wide beam from the open door across the stained floorboards, while her father hummed and hawed about signing her up with Stackpoole and was now going to consult her mother. She knew, from experience, that Queenie might lose her head and start shouting all kinds of terrible things.
‘You don’t understand, Dad,’ she said.
‘You’re thirteen years old, Lily Strugnell, and don’t forget it. You’re getting swollen-headed. You’re still not too big to go across my knee.’
Lily made a sulky face. Charlie stood up. ‘Come on. We’ll go and talk to your mother.’
Queenie was in a bad mood. In a torrent of words she said that a woman in the baker’s had told her it was a crime to put a daughter on the stage because actresses, especially music-hall artistes, were little better than prostitutes. She’d looked at the money Queenie was handing to the baker for a loaf, and said that to share in the profits was the same as pimping. ‘The other women there agreed with her, I could tell,’ Queenie cried. ‘Lily, you’re doing the wrong thing. I’ve had this awful feeling come over me – this is all wrong, all wrong.’
Charlie sat down with a thump. ‘I could do with a cup of tea.’
‘No, Charlie. Listen to me. Lily – you’re not going back to that place. God knows what will become of you if you do.’
‘Why listen to a lot of women in a shop?’ asked Lily. ‘Haven’t you got a mind of your own?’
‘You have,’ said her mother, as if making a discovery. ‘You have a mind of your own all right. You’re all will, selfish to the core. You lost your job, then you got yourself in with that Jack Cunningham, without a word to me or your dad – I didn’t like it but your dad indulged you – and now this. It’s always your own way, it’s always just what you want to do. You take no notice of anybody. You’ll end up on the streets. I’ve always known it.’
‘You’re mad!’ cried Lily. ‘Mad! Look around you. Look at this kitchen. It’s filthy. You could never get it clean. There’s six of us in two rooms.’
‘Don’t you dare call me dirty. We may be poor but we’re respectable, Lily, and that’s the point. We don’t need you showing your legs on the stage, going to the bad with a crowd of drunks and show-offs. Men dressed as women, women dressed as men – it’s disgusting. You’re to stop all this nonsense now. Get a job. Go out now – find work. Charlie, tell her. Put a stop to all this now.’
‘It’s about a contract, Queenie,’ Charlie said.
‘There’ll be no contract,’ Queenie declared, ‘no contract at all, not while there’s breath in my body. Look at the little brat, answering me back, accusing me of being dirty – me, who slaves away here all the hours God gave. Contract, I’ll give you contract, my lady.’ And she advanced towards Lily, who ran out.
Outside the front door she stopped dead. The sunny, grimy, narrow street suddenly depressed her. The Watkins children were sitting on the pavement, their feet in the gutter, staring ahead of them. A cart with an old bath on it, drawn by a tired donkey, passed. Lily looked up. Mrs Blane, who was nineteen, was shaking a duster from a small upstairs window. Then she turned to pick up a crying baby. She stared blankly across the street, duster in one hand, holding the child, looking at nothing. There were two men on the corner by the lamppost, talking, hands in pockets, every line of their bodies speaking of no work, no money, nowhere to go. And inside the hou
se Charlie was uncertain, and Queenie was screaming. Lily had to get away from this. She had to. They had to let her go. She wasn’t going to run away from Queenie this time. She burst back into the house. Queenie was still raving on at Charlie. Charlie was still sitting at the table.
‘I’m like a prisoner in this place,’ screamed Lily. ‘I’m a prisoner. We’re all prisoners. You want me to get a job at ten bob a week, ten hours a day, then, like as not, they lay me off because there’s no work. And I’m supposed to go on living in a place where I have to sleep in the kitchen and there isn’t anywhere for my clothes. And when I get a chance to get out of it, what do you say? No. So why don’t you kill me –why don’t you kill me now and have done with it? Don’t bother, don’t bother. I’ll just kill myself. What’s the point?’ she cried out. ‘What’s the point? Do you remember when Eddie died and you didn’t have no money for his food, or a doctor, and if you had, he might be alive today? My little brother—’ And she burst into tears and ran into her mother and father’s bedroom, and fell down on the shabby rug on the floor and cried and cried.
In the kitchen Queenie and Charlie looked at each other. They never talked to each other about Eddie. Nor did any of the Strugnells. Perhaps Queenie’s occasional, involuntary loss of almost all control, her outbursts, her wild, semi-hysterical slappings and bashings of the children and frantic accusations were a protest against this silence, or just a reaction to what she saw as the arbitrary cruelty of life. If nothing, not even the lives of your children, was in your control, why not fill the void with noise?
After Lily had run from the room, Queenie tried, weakly, to re-establish her own normality. She started to accuse Lily, though in a much quieter tone than before: ‘We’ll have to do something about that girl.’ But both parents were shocked. Charlie just looked at his wife and said, in a voice that was near to a groan, ‘Shut up, Queenie.’ There was a silence, then, without discussing anything Lily had said, Queenie muttered, ‘She’d better have her chance, or she’ll make our lives a misery for the rest of her days.’
Charlie sent Lily off with a note to Sam Stackpoole that very day. He signed the contract the following morning, and that night Lily gave her second performance at the Cambridge. And now she had an agent.
Chapter Fifteen
‘Welcome to Mountview,’ the headmistress had said.
Elizabeth, standing in the chill air, which seemed lighter, somehow, than the smoky air of London, felt the darkening sky to be very high and very wide. She had spent her life in streets, among buildings, where the skyline was always formed of chimneypots.
‘You three,’ Miss Tully told the girls, ‘can have special supper tonight, for you’ve missed tea, and then you, Emily, can show Elizabeth where she’s to sleep – in the Green Dormitory. Tell her the school rules – if, that is, you can remember them.’
‘Yes, Miss Tully,’ said Emily. Suddenly, the two women were gone, and Emily was dragging Elizabeth through a tiled hall, like the hall of a normal house. ‘Sshh,’ she whispered, pointing at a door on the left. ‘Miss Tully’s room.’ They went on down a corridor into a long hall with a big fire burning at one end. Trestle tables with benches beneath had been pushed back to the walls, but one still stood in the middle of the flagstoned floor, with three places set. Diana and Emily made straight for it. Emily beckoned to Elizabeth, standing in the doorway. ‘Come and sit down,’ she called. ‘They’ll give us no supper till we’re seated, and I’m starving.’
Two tall girls came in, one fair, one dark. ‘You’re here, Diana,’ one said to Diana Wynn-Roberts. ‘Good holidays?’
‘Fairly decent. And you?’
‘Damned awful,’ said the fair girl. ‘I had to stay with my damned cousins in damned Norfolk nearly all the time.’ Elizabeth had been brought up to think swearing shocking, doubly shocking in a lady.
‘Mind your language,’ Diana said. ‘This one’s a new girl, Elizabeth Armitage, just come from home. You’ll give her fits with your profanity.’ Elizabeth smiled.
‘Well, I shall spare her susceptibilities and say sacré bleu and things of that kind,’ the fair girl said. She asked Elizabeth, ‘Do you like hockey?’
‘I’ve never played it.’
‘Sacré bleu,’ said the fair girl. ‘Still, you look quite fast. Perhaps you’ll come on. I’m Alice Graham, the captain of games. We’ve got a whole programme of matches fixed until Christmas, and the position’s grave. Last year was a tragedy, no less. Speaking of tragedies, by the way, Mountview prides itself on its dra-a-hma.’ She dragged the word out mockingly. ‘We do a play every year, the Mountview Play, and invite all the nobs and snobs. If you’re any good at games, don’t join in. That’s an order. Well – toodle-pip. Come on, Myra.’
Myra instead sat down. ‘Where do you live?’ she asked.
‘London,’ responded Elizabeth.
‘Which part?’
Elizabeth told her.
‘What does your father do?’
‘He’s dead.’
‘Bad luck. Do you just live with your mother then?’
‘My mother and my uncle and aunt.’
‘What does your uncle do?’
Elizabeth was getting annoyed at this inquisition. ‘What does your uncle do?’ she responded.
‘I’m the head girl. I have to know these things.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Alice, impatient to be off. To Elizabeth she said, ‘She’s just a nosy parker. Come on, Myra, give the girl a chance to eat her supper before you put her through the Spanish Inquisition,’ and she pulled Myra from the room.
In the meantime, a maid in cap and apron came in and put a plate of bread and butter on the table. Emily took a slice. ‘What are we getting?’ she enquired.
‘Boiled eggs,’ responded the girl.
‘I should have guessed,’ Emily muttered.
‘Nowt wrong with a nice fresh egg,’ the maid told her.
‘I was expecting roast chicken,’ Emily said. The maid laughed and went away. Emily waved at the bread and butter. ‘Take a slice,’ she invited Elizabeth. ‘There’s no one looking. What’s your religion?’
‘Church of England.’
‘Good for you. Some of the girls here are Methodists. They have to go to a kind of brick shed halfway up the mountain every Sunday. The rest of us just stroll down to the village church. Is your father really dead?’
‘It’s not the sort of thing you lie about,’ Elizabeth retorted.
‘Sorry,’ said Emily unrepentantly.
‘So you ought to be,’ said Diana Wynn-Roberts. ‘Very sad for you,’ she told Elizabeth.
A group of girls of about eleven clattered in. ‘Be quiet,’ ordered Diana. ‘Juniors,’ she explained to Elizabeth. ‘Luckily for you you’re a senior. The juniors make a noise all day and cry all night.’
‘Not all of them,’ protested Emily.
‘Most of them. They’re homesick,’ Diana explained to Elizabeth. ‘Miss Mummy and Daddy and Nanny and Rover the dog. You’re older, you won’t mind so much. Oh, sorry,’ she added, as Elizabeth’s eyes filled with tears. They were not, though, tears of homesickness, but tears for her mother, lonely and sad in London. This she could not explain.
‘It’ll pass,’ Emily said sympathetically.
The eggs came in on a tray, with mugs of cocoa. As soon as they were finished, Emily, spotting a friend passing through the hall, jumped up. ‘Susan, Susan,’ she cried.
‘Emily!’ cried the other, a girl with short blonde curls all over her head, and rosy cheeks, something like Emily herself. In minutes they had both run from the hall.
‘Don’t run’ called Diana in an emphatic voice, but they took no notice.
Elizabeth sat there, feeling abandoned. She had taken to cheerful, sympathetic Emily. ‘What shall I do now?’ she asked, at precisely the same moment that Diana said impatiently, ‘Oh, really’ continuing, ‘It’s a bit thick – Emily Preston’s such a silly, impulsive girl. I distinctly heard Miss Tully say she was to show you your
dorm. Now I suppose I’ll have to do it.’
Elizabeth said nothing.
‘Come on, then,’ Diana said unceremoniously and, standing up, she led the way through the hall into a second lobby, with several doors running off it, and up a broad sweep of stairs. On the landing she said, pointing right and left, ‘Junior dorms. The doors ahead are junior bathrooms. You’re not allowed to use them.’ Another flight up and she said, ‘Senior dorms right and left.’ She flung open a door to reveal a long room with ten beds on either side, and a cubicle at the end shrouded by a curtain. Trunks lay beside beds. Some were open, spilling the contents. Beside each bed was a small locker. Diana, blocking Elizabeth’s entry into the dormitory, said, ‘This one’s called Green, the other senior dorm’s Rose. I think you’re in here.’
‘That’s my trunk,’ said Elizabeth, pointing to her luggage lying beside a bed under a long window on the left-hand side of the room.
‘That’ll be your bed then,’ Diana remarked unemotionally. ‘I’m in Rose dorm myself. Well, I suppose you’d better go down to the seniors’ sitting room – the young ones have a playroom. Seniors are expected to sit like ladies and chat and do needlework. There is a ping-pong table, though.’ She led the way, clattering downstairs. As she ran, she asked, ‘Are you any good at games, by the way?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Elizabeth replied.
‘You’d better go in the Mountview Play then,’ Diana advised. She added, ‘One more year and I’m leaving here. Came when I was ten. Five long years and one to go.’
‘What’s wrong with it?’ asked Elizabeth, rushing beside her. But they had reached the hall below and Diana came to an abrupt halt. A tall, slim woman in her thirties, her chestnut hair done in a chignon, stood there.
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