Now she had to concentrate on getting the party into the dining room in good order and making sure everyone sat where they should. Custom dictated that married couples should not be seated together, and that the more important male guest should be placed to the right of the hostess. Instead Lily put Elizabeth Armitage beside her and assumed that this would be dismissed under the general heading of her ignorance of the right way to behave, which worried her very little. She was getting what she wanted – a chance to talk to the interesting woman playwright. So even as the soup was being poured into Elizabeth’s plate, she turned to her and said eagerly, ‘You’re a playwright, my husband says. How did you come to get into that line of business?’
There was no doubt in Elizabeth’s mind that this really was Lady Stillwell, daughter-in-law of Lord East. She had been introduced as such. She was sitting at table in the place where you would expect to find the hostess. She wore a long, straight, beaded dress in green, her blonde hair piled up in the correct style. But her pretty face did not wear the appropriate expression. She looked too excited. And her accent verged on the Cockney. Elizabeth felt like retorting, ‘I might ask you, how did you come to get into this line of business?’ but replied instead, in a restrained way, ‘I began as an actress but parted company with the lady who managed the theatrical company, who then kindly offered me the opportunity of writing a play, which I did.’
‘That would be the same company Mr Hislop is in – Constance Albury, at the Imperial?’ her strange hostess asked keenly.
‘That’s right,’ Elizabeth replied.
‘Was the play successful?’ questioned Lily.
‘It was quite successful. So I wrote another – which wasn’t. It came off in May and the company won’t be taking it on tour.’
‘Disappointing for you,’ sympathised Lily. ‘You’ll have to try again. What was wrong with it?’
‘I don’t know,’ Elizabeth pondered. ‘I thought it was better than the first one. Too much theory, perhaps, too many long speeches.’
Lily thought hard, and was about to speak again when Damian Lumley, sitting to her right, asked Elizabeth, ‘What particular theory were you promulgating?’
‘The right to vote,’ said Elizabeth.
‘For women?’
Who else? thought Elizabeth. She nodded. Damian Lumley, who knew that his duty was to prevent the raising of controversial subjects at his hosts’ dinner table, moved on smoothly, ‘And have you a subject for your next play, Miss Armitage?’
Lily was undeflected. ‘I suppose an audience is usually more interested in a human problem, not politics,’ she burst in. ‘You tried – that’s the point. Did you act in the play yourself?’
‘Miss Albury thinks I’m too unreliable.’
‘You don’t look unreliable to me,’ said Lily.
Gordon was staring at his wife. Harry, on Elizabeth’s left, was trying to overhear while pretending not to do so. Opposite him his mother had given up any pretence of conversation and was listening avidly.
Elizabeth knew she should drop the subject, but did not. ‘I’m not,’ she said, ‘in the ordinary run of business, unreliable. But I told her I couldn’t promise I’d stay out of prison, and she responded by telling me she couldn’t promise me parts in the theatre.’
‘Did you go to prison?’ asked Lily.
Damian Lumley saw that the conversation was now a runaway horse no one could stop.
‘Twice,’ Elizabeth said.
‘My God. Poor thing,’ said Lily, with heartfelt sympathy. ‘How awful. Did you get forcibly fed?’
‘I didn’t dare hunger-strike,’ Elizabeth said. ‘There are cases where the pipe burns your larynx. The damage is permanent.’
‘And you’re an actress,’ Lily said.
‘Quite,’ said Elizabeth.
The table had become silent. Emily Hislop was appalled. She knew that women defied the law and went to prison to get the vote. She was in favour of women’s suffrage herself, though she disapproved of the actions of the suffragettes. Petitions and lobbying, she felt, would be more effective, and were certainly more suitable methods for ladies to employ. But whatever her opinions, no one had told her that Elizabeth had been in prison.
Harry, turning to Elizabeth, said, ‘Now, Elizabeth, you’ll frighten people if you keep boasting about being a gaolbird.’
‘I’ve been cross-questioning her like a lawyer in court,’ claimed Lily. She turned to Elizabeth. ‘You must let me read some of your plays,’ she said earnestly. ‘I wrote a song once, myself.’
‘What was it about?’ asked Elizabeth.
Lily looked furtive and whispered in Elizabeth’s ear, ‘“I’d rather have a cup of tea”.’
Elizabeth looked quite astonished; then, remembering the famous song, a piece of heavy double entendre in which the singer impersonated a seemingly innocent young girl always involved in compromising situations, with the refrain, ‘I’d rather have a cup of tea’, she burst out laughing. A thought struck her: ‘Lily Strugnell. Of course – that’s who you are!’ she exclaimed, though she tried to keep her voice low in case this previous identity was something everybody present preferred to forget.
Lily nodded, haughtily. Elizabeth put her head closer to Lily’s. ‘I’ve been meaning to find you for years and ask you one – just one – important question,’ she said. ‘Can we speak later?’
Lily nodded again.
The party ate grilled fish with early peas, followed by a saddle of mutton with redcurrant sauce and new potatoes, then a meringue pudding and a savoury. At this point the ladies left the gentlemen behind in the dining room and went to the drawing room for coffee. Emily Hislop and Mrs Lumley sat down and took needlework from their bags, but Lily had already drawn Elizabeth off to a room at the bottom of a passage, where there was a billiard table and some bookcases. She took a cardboard box of Turkish cigarettes from behind the clock on the mantelpiece and offered one to Elizabeth, who took it. Lily sat down, putting her feet on a leather stool in front of her. ‘I’m expecting,’ she said glumly. ‘The doctor says I have to put my feet up after meals.’ There was a pause. ‘Well, what did you want to ask me?’
Elizabeth smiled. ‘I didn’t quite like to bring it up in front of the others,’ she began. ‘You see, for years I’ve been seeing your name and picture on playbills. And once I came to see you at the Hippodrome, and all the time there was one question in my mind – were you the girl who I once saw dancing on a workbench in an East End clothing factory? They sacked you and you told them—’
‘You know where you can put your job – I’m going to be an artiste,’ Lily laughed, mimicking the little Cockney girl she’d been. ‘That was me all right – but where were you? Who were you?’ As she spoke, she’d been thinking. ‘I know!’ she exclaimed. ‘You were one of those girls standing there looking horrified – was that you?’
‘It certainly was,’ replied Elizabeth.
Lily laughed. ‘Well – I’ll be buggered. I should have known by the red hair.’
‘There was a very bad row about your sacking between me and my uncle, Robert Warren, who owned the factory. I thought it was a shocking place and you’d been unfairly treated.’
‘Right on both counts.’
‘So they sent me away to school.’
‘Phew!’ Lily said. She pondered. ‘Now – what was I singing? And, by the way, how was the school?’
‘Not too bad,’ said Elizabeth. ‘That was where Constance Albury found me, so if I hadn’t been sent away…’
‘If I hadn’t been sacked…’
‘You were singing “Land of Hope and Glory”,’ Elizabeth told her. ‘I’ll remember it all my life.’
‘So the upshot was, old Warren put us both on the stage,’ Lily concluded. She began to laugh. ‘We should thank the bastard and his sweatshop. He got us on our feet, one way or another.’
When Emily Hislop, curious about where Lily and Elizabeth had gone together, and what they were doing, arrived to tell t
hem that the coffee was cooling in the drawing room, she found the pair, arms linked, doing high kicks on the rug in the billiard room and singing, ‘Blow Out the Candle, We’re Home for the Night’. Ask as she might, she never found out why.
Chapter Thirty–Three
Lily’s child was born in late September 1913 at Chivering. The birth was presided over by Sir Virgil John, the London doctor who normally treated the Stillwells. Lily had wanted the young and kindly local doctor to attend, with the experienced midwife who normally helped him. However, as soon as the first signs of labour appeared one dark autumn morning, Gordon put through a phone call to Sir Virgil. He arrived at six that evening, with a nurse, examined Lily and said, ‘A long way to go yet, I would say,’ then went downstairs for a drink. Ten years on the music halls had enabled Lily to gauge exact stages of drunkenness, however well controlled, and she detected that Sir Virgil was already half cut. He dined, looked at Lily at bedtime, and made much the same remark to the nurse as he had on arrival, adding, ‘Call me if anything happens. I don’t suppose it will.’ Then he went off to a comfortable bed.
Lily shocked her nurse, who had anticipated a young woman of good birth. Expecting her first child she would be nervous, the nurse thought, and either hiding it bravely or shaking like a leaf. But Lily was by this stage so bored with her pregnancy that all she wanted was to get it over. She and the nurse drank tea until midnight. Lily groaned intermittently, from pain, boredom and impatience. Then she got up, which she should not have done, and won five shillings playing pontoon with the nurse. By six in the morning, she had to start making sure the nurse did not know how far her labour was advanced, her main aim being to keep Sir Virgil away from her for as long as possible.
The nurse, who had been awake all night, was now dozing by the fire. Waking at eight and seeing Lily in spasms of pain, she panicked. She was going to run for Sir Virgil when Lily said, ‘Let him finish his breakfast. This is not so bad.’
Half an hour later the baby was plainly nearly there. Sir Virgil arrived in state and spoke sharply to the nurse, who said to Lily in an undertone, ‘You’ve deceived me, wicked woman.’ Lily, in agony, managed to gasp, ‘I can smell brandy on his breath.’ By that stage, there was little for a doctor to do, though Sir Virgil did it with dignity. Half an hour later Lily gave birth to a ten-pound boy, destined to be called Digby. The Stillwells, and particularly Lord East, were delighted. Lionel, who would inherit the title, still had no children. Nor had his brother Thomas. The family name was safe.
There were tears in Gordon’s eyes as he bent over the bassinet – in which he himself had lain as a child. In the afternoon his Aunt Caroline arrived with a nanny, who had travelled second-class in another compartment on the train. Caroline Stillwell examined little Digby with satisfaction and settled in for a long stay, on the unspoken grounds that, though childless, she was needed to instruct Lily from the outset on the rearing of a child in families such as theirs. Thus, before Lily had recovered from the birth, Caroline and Nanny Dalrymple were firmly established in the driving seat, so that, even if she had been a woman with strongly maternal instincts, she would have had a struggle to reclaim the child. As it was, though, Gordon was delighted, and adored his son, while Lily’s attitude to her baby was kindly but disinterested. On some level she had never forgotten her little brother’s death. She feared loving the child too much in case he, too, died. Though she could tell no one, for the first three months after Digby’s birth the child brought her little joy, only the return of dreams of her brother’s death so long ago.
The baby’s birth, however, enhanced her status with the Stillwells, and their friends and neighbours. It did not, though, relieve Lily’s boredom. By November she was fit and well, as was Digby, who of course spent most of his time in the nursery, looked after by Nanny Dalrymple and a nursemaid recruited from the village.
One morning Lily was gazing out over a flat and frosty landscape from their drawing room, her mind perfectly empty except for nagging depression, like toothache. With breakfast over, there was nothing to do or say until lunch. Then, neighbours might call. The Hislops, the chairman of the local Conservative Party, and the Lumleys were coming to dinner.
If she’d not married she might have been topping the bill, earning at least a hundred pounds a week, enjoying the company of friends and fellow artistes, going to parties every night and being recognised everywhere she went. She recalled the fun, the rigours of stage life, the six-nights-a-week routine, the summer touring, the eternal, never-conquered stage fright. But, I wouldn’t have married Gordon if Jack Finlay hadn’t broken my nerve, Lily thought.
Outside, the gardener was digging the frosty ground of the flowerbed beside the lawn. The big trees were bare. A pall of mist lay still over the land, the tones grey, brown, green-grey, and all was utterly silent. She looked round the drawing room. A bright fire crackled in the comfortable room. Jack broke my nerve, she thought again.
A letter from Queenie was burning a hole in the pocket of her dress. First and foremost it was an appeal for money. Lily’s father, Queenie said, must not know she had asked. There was more trouble in Hoxton.
Lily’s brothers were not the source of this, for they had taken the lease on a piano factory in Highgate. Then Dan had written to say he was engaged to their landlady’s daughter, while Lennie was walking out with a young servant from one of the big houses in the neighbourhood.
Lily had smiled when she got this letter. She said nothing, though, to Gordon.
The reason for Lily’s brothers leaving Hoxton was, though, not so pleasant to contemplate. After the divorce, Jack Finlay’s career had continued its downward slide. He’d managed to get a fight with the American champion at the Albert Hall, was badly outclassed and took a grievous and humiliating beating. There were those who said that, about the time of his parting with Lily, all the fight had gone out of him. None knew why, only that such things happened. And Jack’s decline had continued. Lily guessed that life at the cottage in Windsor must have become progressively less pleasant. Unless Jack had changed greatly, he would have tried to boost his morale with other women and taken his anger about his own failures out on Rose.
Whatever had happened at the cottage, after Jack’s big defeat lack of funds forced Rose and jack to move in with the Strugnells. There could be no question of their staying under Queenie and Charlie’s roof unwed, so they had, in fact, married, at a register office. Queenie had told Lily none of this, but Lennie, who was a good correspondent, had written to Lily:
You can imagine Ma’s excitement and all the preparations. As you’d guess a lot of people, including Dad, thought it was horrible, your divorced husband getting married to your sister, in a register office as it’s against the law in church for divorced people. How did you manage it, Lil? We’ll never know, ‘nuff said, eh? Well – where was I? Yes – a lot of people thought all this would have been better kept quiet, but no, Ma would have Rose tricked out in a big white dress, with a wreath of flowers in her hair, and Jackie done up to the nines in a new suit, which I expect she paid for. And there was a big wedding breakfast, chicken and wine, and a barrel of beer for the men, and half the neighbourhood coming in – Auntie Mavis refused to come because she said it was immoral. By the way, Mr and Mrs Barrington sent their kindest regards when they heard I was in the habit of writing to you. They came to the wedding but their faces were long as fiddles. For Dan and me it was all a farce which would have been better on stage at the Lyceum! But there you are, that’s Ma for you. Well, Lil, I hope this doesn’t upset you, I hope not, but if I don’t tell you I’m guessing nobody will, and you’ve got your own set-up now, and very nice it is. So I don’t suppose you’ll mind. Anyway, the upshot of all this was that after the wedding, there was Dan and me squeezed together in the small back bedroom, while Rose and Jack were king-and-queening it in the bigger room which I used to have. It was all nothing but the best for Rose and Jack. Does Jack like salmon, and how many spoonfuls of sugar does he want in
his tea today? Meanwhile, they were hanging round the house all day while Dan and me were out finishing our apprenticeships with old Marks, which had begun to pall by the end, as you’d imagine. And that wasn’t all that was getting us down.
As you can imagine, once we’d finished we both thought we’d be better off out of it. We’d just enough saved to take a year’s lease on a factory in Highgate, a thriving little business the owner wants to leave in safe hands, so we hope hard work, sober habits and plenty of yellow soap about the neck will soon bring us fame and fortune. When we said we’d better move out and take lodgings closer to the factory, Ma carried on shocking. You could have heard the screams at the Mansion House but Dad, dear old Dad, said him and me should go to the pub for a drink and there he said he could quite see why we were doing what we were doing, and good luck to us. He pushed two guineas into my hand from his savings he keeps in the tobacco jar saying we could probably do with a month’s rent to get us started. He looked so sad, Lily. We told him as soon as we were set up there’d always be a meal and a bed for him with us, and I’m afraid, Lil, he replied, ‘I may need it.’ He is a dear man and has always been a good father to us. I have to confess I don’t think this is at all fair on him. Still, keep smiling, and, my dear, since I’ve now written you a book, I hope none of this has upset you, and all my love,
Your loving brother, Len.
And now there was an appeal to Lily for money, from Queenie, who had not actually revealed to her previously that Jack and Rose were living at Hoxton – that would certainly have been a difficult letter for a mother to write, Lily thought. She could see that now Charlie’s wage would not stretch to covering Rose and Jack’s expenses. Yet she had little money of her own, now that she was married and knew that if she sent off part of her dress allowance there would only be an appeal later for more from Queenie. And why, she asked herself, should she pay for Rose’s gloves and Jack’s drinks and cigarettes? She took the letter from her pocket and threw it on the fire.
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