Lily raised her head. She was very pale. ‘This is terrible, Dan,’ she said. ‘How the hell am I going to get free? I don’t want to stay tied to Jack Finlay. But I can’t let him drag Sam in. It’d kill his wife, and him too. It would be too cruel. Jack knows that,’ she said bitterly. They’re conspiring against me, all three of them. So this is Ma’s idea of bringing the family together. What am I going to do?’ She looked directly at Dan. He did not need to speak. ‘Yes,’ she said slowly, ‘that’s it. I have to pay Jack off. I suppose that’s another part of the plot. They can’t lose, can they?’
‘I think they counted on it from the first,’ Dan told her pityingly.
Lily sighed. ‘They’ll kill me, the whole lot of them. Between the managers of the theatres and the income tax people and my family on top of all that – they’ll kill me.’
‘It’d take more than that to kill you, Lily,’ said Dan.
‘Don’t you be so sure,’ Lily said wearily. ‘Oh Dan, I can’t believe my own mother turning against me like this.’
‘She didn’t like you kicking her out of Streatham,’ Dan said.
‘She’s conspired against me all along,’ Lily said in despair. ‘I was too happy, that was my sin. I was meant to suffer, like she did.’ She raised her head, brushed away tears and added, ‘It’ll cost me half a year’s work – if I stay on top.’
Dan said, ‘You know what the foreman earns where I work? Six pounds a week. He’s got three kids, and that’s considered good money. I’ll be lucky to get that when my apprenticeship’s over.’
Lily brushed away more tears from her eyes. ‘I know, Dan.’
As the pair went out, one of the men in the opposite booth said uneasily, ‘Crying? What’s all that about?’
‘To do with that rotten husband of hers, I expect – Jack Finlay, the boxer,’ said the other. ‘But that’s not him with her. I know Finlay. I had money on his last fight. He got knocked out in round three – out of training, lost his wind, I’d say. Everybody was booing. They say he knocks her about, and it’s made him very unpopular.’
‘Quite right too,’ said the first man. ‘Poor little Lily Strugnell.’
Lily accordingly got her divorce on grounds of cruelty, but she dropped the charge of adultery from the petition, and in return for Jack’s not counter-suing, paid him off. To do this she had to borrow from Sam Stackpoole.
Jack and Rose set themselves up in a smart house near Windsor, where, it was felt, Jack would be better able to train, far from the distractions of London life. The marriage would be postponed until Jack was on his feet again. Queenie tried to join this new ménage, with an eye to putting pressure on Jack to marry Rose, but Charlie forbade it. ‘You’ve caused enough trouble, Queenie,’ was what he said. ‘Now stay out of it, or I’ll divorce you.’
Lily stayed on at the Russell Square hotel. ‘So much,’ Dan said, ‘for uniting the family.’
Lily met Gordon Stillwell in Reading in the summer of 1912, when she was on tour. The Reading Palace of Varieties was her last stop before returning to London. After a gruelling eighteen months without a break, including two pantomime seasons, she planned to go to Brighton for a week’s holiday with Sam and Becky Stackpoole, then reopen in London at the Hippodrome.
On the second Saturday night in Reading she discovered a tall young man sitting in her dressing room when she came off stage after the second house. ‘Here!’ she said. ‘How did you get in?’
‘Influence,’ he responded. At that moment a second young man came in with a huge bouquet of thirty roses, a bottle of champagne under one arm, and under the other a fox terrier puppy in a little basket. The animal was soon on the floor, scampering about. Lily, tired and tense though she might have been, started laughing. ‘Oh Gawd,’ she said, and called her dresser: ‘Mary! Mary! Come and clear up the puddle. She’ll kill me for this, I warn you,’ she told the young men. ‘She can’t stand animals, especially when they aren’t house-trained. Oh, look at him, the little love, look at that black patch over his eye, like a little pirate.’ The tiny puppy sat on its haunches, wagged its tail and fell over. ‘Well, you are a little darling,’ said Lily, picking up the dog and hugging it, while her dresser went for a pail of water. ‘But,’ she added, ‘that doesn’t mean you’re not intruders here. I can’t think what the stage doorman was thinking of.’
‘He’s an old serf from Gordon’s family estate,’ said the taller of the young men. ‘Let me introduce Gordon Stillwell,’ and he pointed at the other man, who was dark and thick-set, with a black moustache and, Lily thought, one of the friendliest smiles she had ever seen. ‘And I’m Henry Cole, at your service. I am a pen-pusher in His Majesty’s Foreign Office, while Stillwell here is a gentleman of independent means.’ He bowed.
Gordon Stillwell said, ‘You can keep the dog, but only if you dine with us later.’
‘Blackmail,’ said Lily. ‘All right. But leave now. I have to change.’
They dined at Lily’s hotel. Over the meal Gordon said, ‘I’ll collect you after breakfast in the carriage. We’ll go to my father’s house. Then a walk and lunch – fresh air, that’s what you need. You are greatly talented and much loved, but there must be tensions in the life you lead. Rest and relaxation are my prescription.’
‘Am I included?’ asked the young woman who was Henry Cole’s dinner companion. She wore a cheap dress and laughed a lot.
‘You don’t seem to be included,’ Henry told her ruthlessly. She looked disappointed. It was plain enough to Lily that Henry had picked her up somewhere but had no intention of producing her in respectable surroundings.
Lily, tired and bored at a dull hotel meal, agreed with Gordon that a visit to the country would be nice; then she astonished her hosts by picking up her bag and leaving to go upstairs. ‘See you here tomorrow,’ she told Gordon, and abandoned the party, two men in evening dress and the young woman in her cheap frock, at the table.
Of the two, she thought tiredly as she got into bed, she much preferred Gordon. He had big, lively brown eyes. He was enthusiastic about her, about the fox terrier bitch who had given birth to the puppy she suddenly found was hers – it was asleep in a basket in the corner of her room, she noticed – about a recent trip to Paris. Henry Cole, though, was another story – rangy, with hard eyes, an opportunist, Lily thought. Although his manner was cooler and his behaviour better bred than most of the many others of that ilk she had met, she recognised the type. What was the harm, anyway, in visiting Gordon’s home, going for a country walk, listening to the birds? she thought, as she went to sleep.
She was woken early on a rather wet pillow by the puppy jumping on her bed. She threw the pillow on the floor, clutched the dog, mumbled, ‘Don’t fidget,’ and went back to sleep. The puppy, no longer lonely, settled down near her shoulder.
Lily, Gordon Stillwell and Henry Cole, accompanied by the dog, which Gordon suggested be named Fidget, set out next morning in a car driven by Gordon. They drove through Oxfordshire countryside, green and sunny, for an hour, arriving at Gordon’s father’s house, Crewe End Hall, in mid-morning. Crewe End was a very large, elegant three-storey brick house, constructed in the seventeenth century and surrounded by a vast estate. It took them five minutes to drive to the house from the huge wrought-iron gates at the end of the tree-lined drive. ‘Not actually the old family home,’ Gordon explained rapidly as they bumped towards the house, ‘That’s in Kent, a much less imposing place. This house was bought by my grandfather when they found coal under his land in Kent and he decided to set up in style. Father refuses to tarmacadam this drive. Says it’ll kill the trees. Truth is, he hates motor cars.’
Lord East did hate motor cars. He was outside the house, glowering, when they arrived. Without preamble he addressed Gordon angrily. ‘I thought I’d asked you to leave that thing at the bottom of the drive, if you have to use it at all.’
‘Father,’ said Gordon, ‘The only possible spot at the bottom of the drive is under trees. The ground’s permanently wet.
If I put the motor there I’d never get her out again without assistance.’
‘Then why not use some more sensible mode of transport?’ Lord East was not unlike his son. He was short and strong-looking, but his thick head of hair was grey. Like Gordon he also had a moustache.
Gordon dropped the argument about the car and said, ‘Father, this is Lily Strugnell.’
‘Good Lord,’ said Lord East, standing back and looking at her. ‘We all saw you in Robin Hood at the Lyric last year. My wife got up a party for some orphans, then disappeared, so I took her seat and came myself, I’m not sure I didn’t enjoy it more than the orphans did, although,’ he added quickly, ‘they were delighted too. Do come in.’ He led them inside, saying to Gordon as he strode through the large hall, ‘Lionel’s staying, and Annabel, of course. Your mother’s in the South of France.’
Lily was to discover that when Lord East was at Crewe End, Gordon’s mother was always in the South of France, or London, or staying with her family in Ireland. Similarly, if Lord East was in London, or elsewhere, Lady East might be at Crewe End. They had three sons but, as Gordon told Lily later, ‘They don’t get along. They’ve barely spoken for ten years. They only meet at weddings and funerals. I don’t know what began it. I asked Father once, and he said it began with a disagreement about pulling down a gazebo. I’m not sure that that’s the whole story.’
Lily, mindful of her own parents’ relationship, remarked that marriage was not always easy. At which Gordon, standing with her on the little bridge over the stream at Crewe End, where a full moon showed over the trees, had put his arm round her and said, ‘Ours will be.’
It was only a month after the Sunday lunch at Crewe End – heavily taken up with Lord East’s inveighing against Asquith’s government which, he was sure, planned to give away Ireland, and therefore his wife’s estates there – that Gordon, at a ball in London, proposed to Lily Strugnell, who accepted.
Gordon’s family did not at all like the idea of his marrying a music-hall artiste. It was not expected that they would. However, they made fewer objections than might have been expected. For a real fight against the marriage, a strong alliance between Gordon’s parents would have been necessary, and the imperfect relations between Lord and Lady East made this impossible. In any case, Gordon, as third son, was not going to inherit the title, or very much money, so little was at stake. Except that Gordon’s two older brothers, who had both been married for five years to very suitable young women, had no children. This was a point in Lily’s favour, Lord East considered. He told his protesting sister Caroline, ‘Frankly, I’d like to see one of my sons produce a child – anything with two legs and two arms will do. Just to encourage the others. Perhaps this family needs some peasant blood to get it started. If this girl has a son, the others might develop some competitive spirit and produce children of their own.’
‘I don’t think it’s anything Lionel or Thomas can decide for themselves,’ his sister had responded. ‘That’s more for God to determine.’
‘Birth control,’ Lord East had said in warning tones, ‘that’s what will bring the upper classes of this country to ruin. Women who won’t bear children, to keep their figures or so as not to interrupt their social calendar. Mark my words, if this young woman produces a child, the others will soon follow suit. Seen it happen with animals.’
Lily and Gordon were married quietly in November, at the church at Crewe End. While the Stillwell family had not fought to prevent Gordon’s marriage to a young woman of a dubious profession and a class so much lower than his own, they were not prepared to have a big London wedding or invite many friends or more distant relatives. All the more so as the wedding should not have been conducted in any church at all, Lily having been divorced. Lord East, arranging the ceremony, spoke to the vicar in aristocratic tones which brooked no argument. He did not mention divorce. The vicar was either unaware that Lily had been married before or asked no questions. Lily signed the register as a spinster.
The Strugnell contingent came down by the morning train and left, after a small reception at Crewe End Hall, by the one in the afternoon. The happy couple went straight to Chivering, the house in Kent that Lord East had given to his son on his marriage. He had waved the Strugnells off amiably enough from Crewe End station, but even as he did so, had it well in mind that if the moment ever came to break up this undesirable marriage, the fact that Lily had misrepresented her status to the vicar and that the Church would not, had they known she was divorced, have married her at all, might be very convenient.
Lily found herself, at first, very happy with Gordon. He was good-natured, he loved her, he was an ardent lover, highly sexed but far less cruel than Jack Finlay. However, once the mental and physical hardship of the previous two years had worn off – and it did not take long, because Lily’s constitution was strong – she began to feel a little bored. The discovery that she had conceived only a few weeks after the wedding upset her. She did not look forward to months of increasing discomfort and heaviness, ending in the painful ordeal of childbirth. She had seen and heard too much of that in her youth, and only hoped that bearing a baby in comparative luxury made the experience easier. She hoped this, but did not quite believe it. Then there would be a child, and she was not sure she wanted one.
In her sunny bedroom, Lily stretched, sighed and wondered what to do with herself. She was unused to leisure; she had led her life at a canter if not a gallop. For the last ten years she’d always been on a stage, facing first the nervous tension of making her appearance, then the battle to make the audience hers and the heady sound of applause. She had bathed in the warm glow of success and, occasionally, been plunged into the icy chill of a cold or indifferent crowd. Her relationship with Jack Finlay had been part of that life.
She had a new, even life now, where she had no living to earn, a loving husband and a child on the way. A sunny future lay ahead and she could not imagine what she would do with it. She did not welcome it, was not equipped for it, had never really looked beyond the next performance. Gordon thought he had rescued her from the treadmill, and she did not like to argue with him, but she was beginning to wonder if pretending to be a living statue at Chivering was better than the old life. She’d been grateful at first, and he thought she still was – but she wasn’t, not now. She supposed she would have to go plodding on, day after flower-arranging day, until she was indistinguishable from all the others – her sisters-in-law, her husband’s Aunt Caroline, Emily Hislop. These women seemed contented with limited good works, embroidery, complicated and often unnecessary household duties and local gossip.
There were other ways, Lily knew. Some women had discreet love affairs, gambled or drank in secret to pass the time. One woman neighbour tippled, one read novels, all and any, all day long, and Lord East’s cousin Thomasina entertained her local MP in the afternoons, and they did not meet to discuss women’s suffrage. The Longbridge sisters played cards for high stakes with a group of like-minded ladies who buried their card debts in the housekeeping accounts. Too late, she was realising that she had married Gordon Stillwell from exhaustion and to demonstrate, after a humiliating, very public divorce, that she could recover, change the terms on which she led her life, make a good marriage and become the respectable mother of a family.
As to the pregnancy, Lily knew what to think about it; she had been reared among women who mostly considered all pregnancies but the first, and often even that one, to be a burden and a danger. In the East End child-bearing and child-rearing brought lost looks, broken health and poverty, if not death. Presumably that was not so much the case in environments like her present one, but she felt trapped. She couldn’t leave, with a baby on the way; couldn’t leave anyway, for fear of more scandal. The divorce had been bad enough. To desert a good husband would be an outrage. She didn’t even have any money now, only the allowance made to her by Gordon.
Lily hoped that Harry Hislop and his friend would enliven the evening. She thought of the lives of th
e village women, colliers’ and farm labourers’ wives; the lives of the East End women of her childhood. She decided she ought to feel grateful that she wasn’t one of them. She tried to, and made some progress, but not very much.
When Lily entered the drawing room before dinner, she was surprised to find that although Emily and John Hislop were there, and Martha and Damian Lumley had arrived, there was still no sign of Harry or his friend. ‘Harry’s normally so punctual,’ Emily said from her chair. ‘He always has been. I hope nothing serious has detained them.’
‘Actors,’ Damian Lumley said in his deep voice. ‘They don’t keep the same rules as us ordinary folk.’ Lily, pouring him another glass of whisky, said, ‘Let’s give them a little longer,’ and rang for the butler.
‘The lady who’s coming with Harry is a playwright,’ Gordon told her. ‘Isn’t that unusual, Lily?’
Lily felt quite excited now. Not just Harry, but Harry’s woman friend, a playwright. She seemed to breathe more freely as she felt the world she knew, the world of theatres, dressing rooms, limelights, curtain calls, playbills. And here was a woman living that life coming along the dark country roads towards the house! That world, that life was still there, thought Lily. It had not gone away when she did. She disguised her excitement and spoke calmly to the butler, asking him to tell the cook to hold up dinner for fifteen minutes.
When Harry Hislop and Elizabeth Armitage were shown in, ten minutes later, apologising, she hardly had time to absorb Harry’s long, pale face, or even Elizabeth’s beauty, though she did conclude, ruefully, that the delay had been caused by the couple having a row and making it up in bed afterwards. Since she had announced her pregnancy, Gordon had considerately not visited her bedroom. Her own life lacked the stimulus of either rows or sex. It had been conveyed to her by her sister-in-law Annabel that a need for either was common.
Elizabeth and Lily Page 33