by Rayne, Sarah
‘With your piano and the ghosts,’ said Madeleine softly. And then, ‘But don’t you understand that you were the main reason I didn’t open it.’ She leaned forward and took his hand. ‘I knew its history: I grew up knowing it. How people in that part of London had speculated about why it suddenly closed down in 1914; how Toby Chance—the owner at the time—vanished around then. No one ever knew what happened to Toby,’ she said. ‘I suspect my father knew, although he never said. But Toby’s disappearance set up a little legend of its own. In his day he was the darling of the gallery, the hero of the shop girls and maidservants. My father once said no one else ever got a look in with the women when Toby was around. But you see, it all meant people liked to wonder about the Tarleton and make up tales about it—it almost became a sort of local haunted house for some of them. If I had reopened it when my father died—well, it was still only the 1950s and there were people alive who could remember those old stories. There would have been a flurry of local interest and publicity. And that was what I was so afraid of.’
This time she looked at Hilary, as if saying, help me with this part, and Hilary said, ‘You couldn’t risk the truth becoming known. About—about what had happened to you—that you had an illegitimate child.’
‘I didn’t much mind for myself, but I minded for you,’ said Madeleine to Caley. ‘I visualized you growing up in some nice conventional home. Being happy and secure and settled. I never knew the name of your family, but Elise said they lived quite near to the Tarleton, so I was afraid it would all come out and would harm you.’
Robert, who had been listening with absorption said, ‘And that’s why you honoured your father’s request.’
‘To begin with, yes. And then, as the years went by, it somehow seemed a good thing to keep the place closed. I met my husband, and we were happy and moderately well off. I told you last night that I came to see the theatre as an investment, didn’t I? That was true. Then, later—when it would certainly have been safe to open it up—my husband became ill. It was a long illness—multiple sclerosis—and my whole life was taken up with it. He had quite long periods of remission, and during those periods we travelled a good bit. He wanted to make sure of seeing all the places in the world he had never seen. I wanted to make sure of seeing them with him. I didn’t give the Tarleton much thought all those years.’
‘I’m glad you never opened it,’ said Caley. ‘But to do so now…’
Madeleine said, ‘We’ll talk about that some more. I promise I won’t do anything you’d dislike. But I hope you’ll come to stay with me here if you can.’
‘Could I?’ It was almost painful to see the eagerness in his expression.
‘Only if you want to,’ she said. ‘But I hope you will want to.’ She hesitated, and then said, ‘You mentioned playing a piano in the old green room.’
‘Yes?’
Madeleine said, ‘I have a piano here. Quite an old one. It’s in the dining room on the other side of the hall. I never use that room nowadays. I used to play the piano a little as a child—my father hoped I might have inherited some of his talent so I had music lessons. But I wasn’t very good, I’m afraid.’
Caley said, ‘An old piano… How old?’
‘It belonged to my father,’ she said very gently. ‘I had it brought here after his death—it was a link to him. I had so many memories of him playing it—writing music on it. It’ll be shockingly out of tune, but it could be properly tuned, if—’
‘Yes?’ This time it was not just eagerness in his face, it was as if a light had come on behind his eyes.
‘If there was someone who wanted to play it again.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
IN THE MIDDLE OF the afternoon, the attic at Levels House was no longer the eerie place it had been the previous night. Hilary switched on the light and contemplated with deep pleasure the task ahead of her.
‘Ferreting into the past?’ Robert had said earlier.
‘Yes, but I’ve got the owner’s permission to ferret,’ said Hilary promptly, and he smiled in the way that narrowed his eyes.
Caley had returned to London—Robert had driven him to the station for his train after delivering Madeleine to the hospital. Caley had been grateful and a bit awkward. Hilary rather liked him and when she thought how he had wandered in and out of the Tarleton by himself for all those years, and how he must have schemed to get the few hours working for the Harlequin Society, she felt deeply sorry for him. She was not sure if he might need a bit of skilled help to deal with his fixation on the place, and then she remembered that she was nearly as fixated on it as he was. She also remembered that Robert had been so fixated he had smashed open the cellar wall, which she did not think he would normally have dreamed of doing. Perhaps, as Rinaldi had said to Madeleine, the Tarleton had its own particular magic.
A police inspector dealing with Shona Seymour had telephoned just after lunch. The phone was still not repaired, but the call had been transferred to Robert’s mobile, as arranged. The inspector sounded rather fatherly; he said he thought Miss Bryant and Mr Fallon would like to know that Miss Seymour was not in a very good mental state; in the early hours of this morning they had called in a doctor as a matter of emergency, and she had been taken to the psychiatric unit nearby. As things stood, there was no question of her answering any charges, in fact for the moment there was no question of actually charging her. Yes, of course they would let Miss Bryant know of all developments, said the inspector. Well, yes, if she could arrange for a small suitcase to be brought in with a few clothes and night things, it would be very helpful. Very kind.
‘I’ll do that as soon as I can,’ said Hilary, remembering that Shona’s overnight things were still at Levels House.
‘We’ll need to contact a next of kin,’ said the inspector. ‘Would you know who that might be?’
Hilary had a wild desire to say, well, there’s a cousin walled up somewhere in Yorkshire, but just said she did not know. ‘But the Harlequin Society might stand as some kind of proxy or take on power of attorney. Sorry I don’t know the right term, but you’ll get the meaning. She’s worked for them for twenty years. There’s a governing board—they’re a bit inaccessible, and I think it’s just half a dozen people scattered all over the country. I could find out about that for you.’
‘Would you do that?’
‘Yes, certainly. Um—would I be allowed to visit her?’ Hilary had not wanted to ask this, but she had not been able to bear the thought of Shona alone and perhaps bewildered. A friendly face—even the face of someone Shona had tried to kill twenty-four hours earlier—might be helpful.
‘Best not,’ said the inspector. ‘But it’s nice of you to offer. We’ll keep in touch.’
The hospital had also telephoned, to report that Mrs Ferrelyn had checked out as absolutely fine, but they would keep her with them overnight, and repeat the tests in the morning just to make sure. All being well she would be discharged tomorrow.
Robert was going back to London that evening, but Hilary would remain at Levels House for another day or so. And this afternoon, she was going to take up Madeleine’s suggestion that she explore the attic.
As she switched on the light and surveyed the attic, she was dimly aware of sounds from downstairs. Robert was staying to have supper with her before setting off—he said the roads might be less congested late at night—and they were going to have the remains of the chicken casserole. It was nice to know he was in the house and even nicer to think of sitting over a meal with him later on. Hilary smiled at this prospect.
But for the moment, the past was folding itself round her—a very particular fragment of the past: 1914, with the world on the brink of the war that was to end all wars—that ‘frozen instant before the cataclysm’. Had the Tarleton’s ghost legend started then? It seemed to be grounded in 1914, and 1914 was when the theatre had closed. Might the ghost be something to do with the Great War? Because whoever you were, Mister Ghost, said Hilary to herself, you do see
m to originally hail from then. ‘And what did you do in the war, Daddy?’ ‘Oh, I was mutilated by mustard bombs in the trenches, so I wrapped up my face and took to prowling up and down an old alleyway by a deserted music hall, frightening the locals and setting up a really good ghost story by way of cover…’ Was the solution to the ghost as simple—as tragic—as that?
She discovered the box with the old records which Shona must have found last night. There were six of them in all; the dates were mostly the early 1900s and the names on the labels were names that had become woven into the fabric of music-hall history. Marie Lloyd, Dan Leno, Charles Coburn… All curios in their way, and from the look of it all original recordings. They might sell for a good deal of money; Hilary would make sure to tell Madeleine about that.
And there it was, the record Shona had played last night. It looked as if she had removed it from the old gramophone and returned it to its box. Destroying the evidence? Hilary suddenly wondered how mad Shona had really been last night.
The label on the record was badly faded, but it was readable. ‘The Ghost Walks. Chance & Douglas © 1914. Lyrics by Toby Chance, music by Frank Douglas.’
Under that, in smaller lettering, were the words, ‘Sung by Toby Chance. Recorded 1914, London.’
Hilary sat back on her heels, staring at the record. This was something Toby had written over ninety years ago—something Madeleine’s father had set to music and that had been captured inside this thin circle of black vinyl. The song Caley Merrick knew about, perhaps because the music had been in the box of memories handed down to him, or perhaps because he had sought it out for himself. Whichever it was, it was the song he had sung to himself when he walked through the theatre.
Hilary had never heard of ‘The Ghost Walks’, but that did not matter; Toby and Frank Douglas had probably written a great many songs that had not survived. She turned the disc over and saw that ‘All Because of Too Much Tipsy Cake’ was on the other side. Hilary smiled, because this was like meeting an old friend.
The gramophone itself was nearby. It was an old wind-up machine, as she already knew, with a tone chamber and the characteristic trumpet-shaped horn. On one side was the handle for winding. It looked as if Shona had wiped it clean with a length of old curtain or screwed-up newspaper from one of the boxes. With infinite care Hilary pulled the machine into the centre of the floor, then laid the record on the turntable.
And then she stopped. She knew how Toby’s lyrics read on a sheet of music, because she had found the sheet music of ‘Tipsy Cake’ in the St Martin’s Lane bookshop. They were light and witty and mischievous. But reading them was a whole world away from hearing Toby’s own voice.
Last night she had only heard a few scratchy lines of this record, and she had been so frightened of Shona that she had not been in any condition to judge either the song itself or the singer. She did not mind that the sound quality would not be good; what she did mind was that hearing it properly might be a massive disappointment. Toby might have a terrible voice, hitting wrong notes all over the place, or the record might have been made when he was no longer very young—Hilary had no idea when he had been born—and it might be the cracked voice of old age. And even if he hit the right notes with the precision of a newly tuned violin, he might sound stilted and formal—in fact he probably would, because most music-hall performers were so used to an audience, they could not strike the spark without one.
This was crazy. Toby was interesting because of the Tarleton and all the mystery, and it did not matter if he sounded like an elderly tin can or a stuffed dummy. She turned the handle and the turntable moved, jerkily at first, and then with more assurance. In the quiet attic with its scents of age and memories, a forgotten old song—a song written almost a hundred years ago by two men who had been part of the lost world of music hall—began slowly and scratchily to live again.
And Toby Chance’s voice was as true as any Hilary had ever heard. There were no false notes, and it was not the cracked voice of a failing or ageing performer. It was a voice that was alive and alight with life, and the singer sounded as if he was on the verge of laughing, because he was loving every minute of performing and because he loved his theatre.
It was only then it occurred to her to look in the rest of the boxes in case there were other records to be found. She spent an absorbed hour, finding photographs and old programmes from Frank Douglas’s ENSA days. It looked as if there had been some connection with concert parties for first world war troops as well; there were a couple of envelopes with sepia photos marked 1916. Several had a slightly plump lady with beautiful eyes, clearly wearing a stage costume, standing in front of heart-breakingly young soldiers.
There was sheet music in the same box—some of it Chance and Douglas songs. ‘Tipsy Cake’ was there again, and also ‘The Ghost Walks’. Riches, thought Hilary gloatingly, seeing with delight that both were hand-written on musical score paper. Both bore a squiggle of initials in the bottom right-hand corner—T.C.
At the bottom of the box was a single sheet of paper, and as Hilary lifted it out she saw it was not music, but a brief letter, written in slightly untidy handwriting, as if the writer had been impatient to get the information down on the paper, or perhaps had been in a hurry when writing it. The paper was brittle with age and the ink had faded, but not badly, probably because the paper had been protected by being beneath the rest. It was undated and there was no address. With her heart beating faster, she read it.
Dear Frank,
Here’s the new song lyrics. If you can put one of your incomparable melodies to it, that would be wonderful. I visualized it as something like ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’, but you’ll be sure to compose something better, I know.
Put it somewhere safe for the moment, will you, because we obviously can’t do anything with it yet. But perhaps one day it will be performed, and people hearing it might understand the clues and know the truth about my part in that wretched ill-starred business in Sarajevo, and about Tranz and all the rest of it. I hope so—I’d hate future generations to believe I was one of the plotters who assassinated Franz-Ferdinand.
The letter ended with no signature, but there were the same squiggled initials as on the sheet music. T.C.
August 1914
‘At first I liked being in the Tarleton because it was where I felt nearest to Toby,’ said Flora to Hal, ‘but it’s becoming unbearable now. We’ve got the new concert on, though: Rinaldi and Frank and I did it between us. Could you come with me to that, Hal? It’s meant to lift people’s spirits in the midst of all the war gloom in the newspapers. Ever since the formal declaration last week, people are frightened. Suspicious of each other. They don’t quite know how to behave yet.’
‘I know.’ Hal, who had been staring out of the window, said, ‘And the show must go on?’
‘Yes. Without Toby if necessary.’ A spasm of pain twisted her face, then she said, ‘Theatres are important at times like this.’
‘I understand that. Of course I’ll come with you.’
The Tarleton’s boxes were not often used, but Flora asked Rinaldi to open one of them for the concert. The stage-right box, she said. It had a good view of the stage, which meant she and Hal would be able to see everything—also the audience would see them, and that might help quell the speculation about Toby’s continuing absence.
‘That’s assuming there is an audience at all,’ she said to Hal as they went inside.
‘You said it was a full house.’
‘Rinaldi said it was. Every seat sold and standing at the back for twopence. He wanted to open up the old stage box as well, but I told him not to bother,’ said Flora. ‘I always think of it as Toby’s place. It’s where he went to watch a performance.’
As the house lights went down and the footlights came up, Flora was aware of the warm affection of the audience. They love this place, she thought gratefully. It’s part of their lives—it’s part of my life, as well. She was managing to keep a tig
ht hold on her emotions, although she felt as if the smallest wrong word would cause her to collapse in a sobbing heap on the floor for Toby whom she might never see again and who might, in any case, be dead.
Here came the acts, one following another with seamless professionalism. The Rose Romain dancers opened the evening, which the audience enjoyed, all the way down to Elise Le Brun’s astonishing costume. ‘Far more daring than anything I ever wore,’ murmured Flora to Hal.
Then came a sketch which Bunstable had written about a confused traveller at a railway station getting his tickets and his destinations mixed up. It set the house rocking with laughter, because everyone loved Bunstable.
Prospero Garrick closed the evening with a Shakespearean speech.
‘He wanted to do something rousing,’ said Flora to Hal. ‘Something appropriate for a war. So he’s giving them his Richard II; he says it will rally them.’
‘Will he be sober?’
‘Rinaldi and Bob Shilling were going to lock him in the wardrobe and hide the gin. But I suspect he’ll dry and end in making half of it up as he goes along.’
‘Iambic knitting,’ said Hal.
‘Yes, but he does it so well that no one will know. In any case, most of the Victorian actor-managers rewrote Shakespeare to suit their own purposes. Prospero’s only harking back to an old tradition.’
But when Prospero came onto the stage they both saw he was perfectly sober; Flora thought that for all the portliness of his build, he cut an imposing figure on a stage. He was not wearing costume but had flung a cloak round his shoulders, and put on high leather boots into which he had tucked the tops of his trousers.
He came right up to the footlights, and said, ‘My dear friends, you all know we are now engaged in a massive conflict which may rage across an entire continent. Let us remember that we go into that conflict as Englishmen and heroes.’ He looked round the theatre, as if listening, then lowering his voice, said, ‘And let us also remember that we shall be victorious !’