Debutantes

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘And even if she did,’ Alice added, ‘not only is she determined, she’s also very proud. So there’s no saying that she would come home. She might marry some theatrical reprobate out of panic or necessity. There’s no saying what might happen to her.’

  ‘Jane?’ Herbert turned to his wife. ‘You’ve kept silent during all this, love. What do you think they should do?’

  ‘She’s not our child, Herbert dear,’ Jane replied. ‘Although if she were, I think I would feel as Mrs Danby does. That it might be the most awful waste.’

  ‘So what will you do, Captain Danby?’ Herbert asked. ‘If you do refuse her request, what exactly do you have in mind?’

  ‘We plan to spend August in Westmorland, Mr Forrester, since you have so kindly granted me such a generous holiday,’ Charles replied. ‘By the end of that month we trust that any disappointment which May might suffer will have been mitigated by the time we shall all have spent together in her favourite place. After that, I suppose we shall then wait and see what life brings.’

  Because she would rather do anything than hurt her adoptive parents whom she now loved as if they were her own, May put up little or no real argument when Alice and Charles patiently explained what their decision was and why they had arrived at it. She listened carefully and then told them that naturally much as she was disappointed she understood their point of view entirely, particularly after all the hard work they had put into her social debut and more importantly into making such a wonderful and loving home for her. Then along with everyone else she said goodbye to her friends and prepared to leave London to enjoy a month in the Danbys’ lakeside house in Westmorland.

  At first everything could not have gone better. The weather was beautiful with the consequence that everyone spent most of the day out of doors, swimming and fishing in the lake or walking in the wonderful hills and dales all around them. There were no apparent recriminations on May’s part and she never once brought up the subject of what might have been, for at first all she felt was happy and settled. After all she had, as she reasoned with herself, enjoyed one of the most notable debuts into Society within living memory, far beyond the dreams of most well-born girls let alone an orphan such as she, and moreover she had by her play-acting helped a family who had been wronged take what was surely one of the most successful revenges in the history of polite society. So for those first few sun-drenched weeks May was utterly content, happy to be where she was and who she was, a loving daughter in the centre of a loving family in one of the most beautiful places on God’s earth.

  But when it began to rain which it then continued to do unremittingly she found she had time on her hands, and however much she tried to keep herself occupied by reading and learning to paint watercolours with her mother May got to thinking, and the more she thought the more she realized how much she was missing London. Which made her wonder why she should be missing London because none of her friends would be there since everyone she knew had also left the capital for the country, so it was not as if there would be much if any good company for someone of her age were she to return there. So what was it she was missing so badly? she asked herself day after day as she sat at the large window which overlooked the rainswept lake. What was it that was calling her back, that was tempting her to run upstairs, pack her bag and vanish without any given reason into the night back down to London?

  Of course she knew the reason well enough without having to keep repeating the question, yet she kept on doing so in a way to try to avoid giving herself the answer. She knew the answer stood at the eastern end of the Strand near the fine and lovely church of St Mary-le-Strand and in Cranbourne Street off Leicester Square, in two buildings known as the Gaiety and Daly’s. That was why May was now missing London so badly. She had found that try as she might she could not really live without the theatre.

  So she began counting the days until they might return to the capital and the time when she would be able to persuade her mother to take her out to see George Edwardes’ latest show or even to pay yet another visit to one of his long-running hits, hoping against hope that once this was again their established routine and the famous Season was far behind them and half forgotten her parents might review her position and perhaps even find a way to let themselves approve of the notion of May’s becoming an actress. It was not such a far-fetched notion, as she had said on the one occasion when they had all sat down to discuss the possibility before Mr Forrester had paid his visit to their London house. After all, many of the girls now finding employment in the Gaiety choruses came from much higher social strata than before, proving that there was no longer such a terrible stigma attached to wishing to go into the theatre. Girls from middle-class families had now found their way into the Guv’nor’s famous company, young ladies who were the daughters of doctors and lawyers, clergymen and stockbrokers, the types of families which twenty years before would never have heard of such a thing. So why not her? May thought. After all she had not been born in the purple and although her father had once been a captain in the cavalry and her mother had a courtesy title her father was now a businessman and her mother, now that the Season was over, was no richer or more highly placed in Society than the wife of a doctor or a lawyer. In fact, all things being carefully considered, the more May thought about it the more she fancied her chances.

  And then one day, the last Sunday in the month when the family sat down to lunch and began to discuss their return to what her father called the daily round, May realized that she had been living in a fool’s paradise because of course they were not going to return to London at all. With all the excitement of the holiday in Westmorland reality had been put to one side and the family’s future had not been discussed, at least not in front of May. But now as they sat down around the dining table it was, and May understood at last that her father was not due to go back to London to work but was to go to the city of Worcester to open and manage the new offices of Forrester and Co. Naturally her mother and she were to go with him and make their new home in a fine Queen Anne house in the cathedral close.

  For the rest of that week May hardly slept at all. Instead she lay tossing and turning in her bed at night wondering what she ought to do, whether she should discuss the problem with her mother, whether she should forget about the idea of becoming an actress altogether or whether she might simply just take the matter into her own hands. Finally she chose the first option, but after a long and reasonable discussion had degenerated into their first real argument, with her mother not only resolutely refusing May’s request but even to discuss the matter any more with her father, May retired early to her bed close to heartbreak. On his return from Kendal where he had been seeing a colleague of Herbert Forrester’s on business her father wondered why May was not to join them for supper, only to be told by her mother that because May was feeling a little delicate she had asked to be excused from dinner. Her father being a sensitive man knew better than to enquire any further.

  But when Alice went in answer to the housemaid’s call to come to her daughter’s bedroom the next morning she found May gone, as were her belongings.

  She had left a note on her pillow, telling her mother and father how much she loved them both and beseeching them not to hate her for what she was doing, but that the siren call had been too strong. I must at the very least give it a try, she wrote. Even if I fail, even if I make the most dreadful fool of myself, I will never ever be truly happy unless I give it a try. Please don’t try to stop me, or come and find me to bring me home, because I will only run away again and I do not want to do that, because I do not want to hurt you. I love you both far too much to wish to cause you further pain, but this is not something that I cannot do. It is something which I must do. Your ever-loving daughter, May.

  ‘When do you think she left?’ a distraught Alice wondered. ‘And how? Surely she cannot be walking, Charles?’

  ‘If she is she won’t have got very far,’ Charles said, getting quickly dressed. ‘I’ll go after h
er on horse this minute. At the very worst she’ll have got a lift on some farm wagon or other, that is if she was headed for the railway station which I imagine was the idea—’

  ‘No,’ Alice said suddenly, putting a hand on her husband’s arm. ‘No, Charles, you mustn’t. Even though I want you to. We have to let her do what she says because we owe it to her. Most of all we don’t want her to have a life in which there are any recriminations whatsoever, which there will be if we force her to come back now. She’ll either hold it against us for ever more or else sooner or later she’ll make another bolt for it, that’s May all over. Once she’s made her mind up, it stays made up, believe me. So let her go, Charles. I know where she’ll go, so we can always get people to keep a quiet eye on her.’

  ‘What do you mean, Alice? You know where she’ll be?’ Charles asked. ‘If she’s decided to run away she could be anywhere, surely?’

  ‘She’s not really running away, Charles,’ Alice replied. ‘She’s running off, rather the way girls run off when they elope. Because in her way May has fallen desperately in love. Which is why I know where she’ll be. She’ll go straight where her love is. She’ll go straight to the theatre, and more especially to Mr George Edwardes at the Gaiety.’

  George ‘the Guv’nor’ Edwardes could not of course believe his luck when the girl who he knew had been the toast of Society that year walked into his office to seek employment as an actress. The greatest entrepreneur of the times knew perfectly well as he welcomed her with the offer of one of his favourite green apples which sat in a basket on his desk that all he had to do was to promise to walk the famously beautiful Miss Danby across his stage once during every performance of his current show The Shop Girl to ensure that there was never an empty seat in the house. Not only that, but since this was the time of the ‘Kaffir’ boom on the stock market when those who invested wisely in the right gold-mining shares made their fortunes quite literally in a day, he knew such an attraction would bring in even more of these newly affluent stockbrokers, merchant bankers and other city slickers as well as the Society johnnies themselves who already crowded the stalls and dress circle of the Gaiety Theatre, and with their ever-increasing interest in his shows came the promise of ever more money to back them. So in spite of Miss Danby’s polite refusal of the offered apple which George Edwardes assured her was the very staff of life, and in spite of her somewhat reedy singing voice and self-conscious manner the moment she set foot on a proper stage, he signed her up straight away, promising that within a fortnight he would have her singing so beautifully and moving so gracefully that within the month she would be appearing in one of his shows as a member of the famous ‘Big Eight’, a small chorus of tall, stunning girls who sang the occasional chorus or supported one of the lead players in a number but whose main function was simply to look ravishing.

  True to his word by September May was touring the country in a lavish production of The Shop Girl. By the following year she would be opening in the West End in the Guv’nor’s new show, The Circus Girl.

  And in the royal box would be sitting the Prince of Wales himself.

  * * *

  Times were nowhere near as easy nor as glamorous as winter arrived in Galway. As the October winds began to lament around the once great house of Glendarven the family were reduced to living in two rooms downstairs and with only a skeleton staff. Even old Mikey was under notice but being old Mikey he refused to quit, regardless of the fact that he had not been paid for two months and was living on his savings, nor had he any horses besides Jack now under his care. Lady Oughterard spent most of her time in her bed reading poetry out loud while Lord Oughterard, with both his sight and his stable of hunters gone, prepared to spend the winter months in front of a peat fire in the drawing room which could hardly be kept alight for any length of time due to the amount of rainwater now leaking its way down the great chimney. Finally father and daughters decanted themselves out of the intolerably cold drawing room into the relative warmth of the library whose draughts at windows and doors were stopped up with bolsters and blankets and where they could at least manage to keep a fire burning for several hours at a time during the incessant rains which fell that year.

  All this time Emily never once asked after Rory O’Connor, not of her family at least in case she might learn something to her disadvantage. It was not that she pinned any hopes on him. Far from it, for she knew that had he intended to be her saviour she would long ago have received some sort of word from him. Having heard nothing she therefore concluded that he had either left the country, got married, or perhaps even the both.

  Then one day when she had brought Jack back from his exercise and old Mikey was putting away the tack she lingered in the little snug behind the tack room where the old groom always still had a good wood fire lit in his little stove. As always there was also the ever ready pot of tea on top from which Mikey helped them both, pouring the hot strong drink into two enamel mugs and stirring the sugar and milk well in with a nickel dining fork which he kept in the breast pocket of his old coat for that very purpose.

  ‘Ye got yourself cold today now, Lady Emmie, din’t ye?’ he asked as he prepared to hand over her tea. ‘Isn’t that always the very worst sort of wind? The one that gets up in the east den turns round north when ye’re least expectin’ him? And don’t I have the very thing to take the chill out of ye? And isn’t it good I’ve not drunk it all these past days, ‘tickerly seein’ de way tings are now?’

  Opening an old yellow painted cupboard above him in which he kept all his various linaments, ointments, drenches and powders for the horses Mikey fetched out from the back an old castor oil bottle with a cork in it.

  ‘You’re not intending to dose me surely, Mikey, are you?’ Emily grimaced. ‘If you’re talking about the way things are that’s the very last thing I need, I tell you. Sure I’d hardly have the strength in me legs to run up the stairs.’

  ‘Would I ever give yes a dose of the oil, Lady Emmie? Do ye think I’m in total lack of me senses?’ Old Mikey unplugged the old bottle with as great a care as a priest would a bottle of communion wine. ‘Now have a drop of the creature and won’t ye be as right as all that rain outside?’

  ‘The creature?’

  ‘Sure isn’t that what it’s called?’

  ‘What is it really, Mikey?’

  ‘Now if you ax me dat won’t dat make you an accomplice? So wouldn’t it be better that you didn’t so, Lady Emmie? For isn’t this sometin’ old Mikey made himself, for hard times such as this now?’

  ‘This is poteen, Mikey!’ Emily declared. ‘I dare say this is some of your famous poteen! But won’t we go blind if we drink it? Everyone says if you drink this stuff you go completely stone blind. And mad.’

  ‘Ach.’ Mikey flapped one old gnarled hand at her as if to indicate the nonsense she was talking, then he carefully added a good measure to both their mugs of tea before handing Emily hers. ‘Ye don’t want to listen to what dem smartees have to tell yes. For if dis made you blind would I still be able to read the signs for the fair from fifty paces?’

  ‘But you can’t read, Mikey,’ Emily said with a grin. ‘You could be as blind as a bat for all I know.’

  ‘I may not be able to read the words on the signs, Lady Emmie, but I can make dem out as clear as a hawk. Now drink your tay.’

  What was in the strong tea was barely detectable to the tastebuds but its effect was almost immediate, for as well as thawing the half-frozen rider out it made her more loquacious than ever so that by the time she was halfway through her drink she was talking nineteen to the dozen to her old groom, who having found a twist of tobacco had lit up his old pipe and was leaning back in his hardback chair with his feet on the stove contentedly listening to her yarns. She told him all about England, whom she had met there, what the people in Society were like and quite how dreadful her infamous patron was. Then there were the fine horses she had ridden on Rotten Row, the friend she had made there and how much she regretted her time
being truncated because it appeared to spell an end to that particular friendship.

  Which all of a sudden seemed to bring her round to the subject of Rory O’Connor.

  ‘Is it askin’ me ye are where he be?’ old Mikey wondered, blowing out a cloud of tobacco smoke through which Emily swore she could still see a glint in his eye. ‘And why should I know anything of that man now? For has sight nor sound of him been seen these last six months? It has not.’

  ‘What about his house?’ Emily asked, trying to unscramble her thoughts. ‘I mean you mean he’s moved, is that what you’re saying? Or simply that you have not seen him but he’s still here?’

  ‘How could he be here, Lady Emmie? For sure if he was here I’d have seen him, would I not? And so since I have not wouldn’t ye be right to imagine he isn’t? At least no longer?’

  ‘And you have had no word of him?’

  ‘I have not.’

  There was a silence during which Emily drank the rest of her brew and as a consequence became even more bemused.

  ‘Mind ye—’ old Mikey suddenly said, staring into the bowl of his pipe. ‘Mind ye am’t I saying that no-one has heard word of him? Because I am not. For didn’t I hear from Mrs McGann who as ye knows hears everything including the occasional word from even the Lord Almighty himself dat Mr O’Connor was long gone by this time to Amerikey like many before him, and may God help us like many yet to come?’

  ‘What?’ Emily said, trying her best to focus on her old groom who was now relighting his pipe with a twist of paper. ‘You’re not saying he’s emigrated, Mikey? Is that what you’re telling me?’

  ‘I am not,’ old Mikey replied emphatically, his tobacco rekindled. ‘For why would the likes of I know whether he had migrated or whether he had not? All I am saying to ye, Lady Emmie, is dat the man about whom ye speak now is said to have gone abroad to Amerikey.’

  ‘I see,’ Emily said thoughtfully. ‘How very peculiar that is, Mikey. I have to say I find that very peculiar indeed.’