by Rosie Thomas
He struggled for the words and then bowed his head. In a man who had been so fluent the inarticulacy was even more shocking than his altered looks.
Eliza placed her hand on his sleeve.
‘Perhaps Nancy might bring you a glass of lemonade?’
Nancy stared at the buttons of his coat so as not to see his face, and still his proximity made her shiver.
I don’t want to be a seer.
Mr Feather collected himself and sadly nodded.
‘Lemonade? That is kind, but no, thank you. I should offer my condolences in return, for the loss you also suffered on that day.’
‘Phyllis was our children’s companion. Very sad, of course, but she was not a relative.’
Eliza’s tone indicated that the topic was closed. Nancy shot her a glance, wondering how her mother could sometimes seem so devoid of feelings.
A young man hurried towards them. He called out, ‘Lawrence? So sorry, I had to speak to a chap I was … ah? Hullo!’
With an effort Lawrence Feather produced a smile. ‘Not at all, Lycett. I too have bumped into some friends. Mrs Wix, Miss Wix, may I introduce Mr Lycett Stone?’
He was a tall, plump and dishevelled Etonian in top hat and elaborate waistcoat. He grinned and removed the hat with a flourish, clearly elated by the match. Unconfined by the topper his curly hair gave him the look of an overgrown Cupid. Nancy didn’t want to stare, but she was struck by the young man’s exuberance. She thought it would have been fun to hear his account of the game. More fun than listening to Arthur, at any rate.
The young man beamed. ‘Well, I have to say, it’s been a great day.’
‘You must be delighted,’ Eliza agreed.
‘Eh? Oh dear. Your boy’s a Harrovian, I assume?’
‘Yes, he will be.’
Lycett Stone pursed his full lips and did his best to look sympathetic, but unruly satisfaction spilled out of him.
‘Next year,’ he consoled. ‘There’s always next year.’
Lawrence Feather looked even more sombre beside this vision of merriment. He murmured, ‘I shouldn’t detain you any longer, Mrs Wix. But may I call on you at some convenient time?’
Eliza agreed, mainly out of pity for the state he was in. The strange pair said goodbye and moved off into the crowd as Faith and Lizzie rejoined them.
‘Who was that?’ Lizzie Shaw demanded.
Eliza explained the circumstances in which they had last seen Lawrence Feather.
‘Oh, I see. Actually I meant the other one, the Eton boy.’
‘I don’t know, Lizzie,’ Eliza said. ‘His name is Lycett Stone. Why do you ask?’
‘He looked rather jolly.’
It was almost seven o’clock and the crowds were thinning out at last. The two families had planned to eat supper together but Rowland and Edwin Shaw excused themselves, saying they were going on to meet some fellows for a drink. The brothers shared a set of bachelor rooms in Holloway. Only Lizzie still lived with her mother and father, and she had privately confided to Nancy that she didn’t intend to remain there much longer. As they threaded their way to St John’s Wood underground station Lizzie was still volubly talking.
‘We are liberated women in this family. We don’t need overseeing and chaperoning every time we step out of the front door, do we? Look at your mama. Even in her day she was able to live in a ladies’ rooming house and work as an artists’ model.’
This wasn’t news to Nancy or anyone else. Eliza loved to reminisce about her artistic and theatrical days.
The Wixes lived beside the Regent’s Canal at Islington. It was a pretty house, rising three storeys above a basement area enclosed by railings. There were curled wrought-iron balconies at the tall windows, and the play of light over the water was caught in the rippled old glass. Only ten years before the canal had been busy with laden barges drawn by huge slow horses, but lately the furniture-makers of the area had begun to receive their timbers by motor wagon and the channel now bloomed with carpets of green weed.
Devil had bought the house for Eliza shortly after Cornelius was born, borrowing the money at a high rate of interest from a private bank. The heavy repayments on the loan had begun the serious undermining of the Wixes’ finances. The theatre business and their home lives had rocked on more or less unstable foundations ever since.
When they reached the house Eliza had to stop and lean against the railings to catch her breath. She seemed too tired even to search for her key.
‘Mama?’ Nancy said in concern.
Arthur ran up the steps to ring the bell and the door was grudgingly cracked open by Cook.
‘Evening, mum, Mrs Shaw, Mr Shaw.’
The cook was not pleased to see visitors for supper, especially since it was Peggy’s evening off.
The Wixes kept two servants in the house, Mrs Frost the cook (‘An aptly named person,’ Cornelius had remarked), and a housemaid. Nancy loyally insisted that she wouldn’t accept any replacement for Phyllis. A daily woman came in to do the heavy cleaning and laundry, her morose little husband did odd jobs, and a smeary-faced boy appeared in the mornings to clean the shoes and run any necessary errands.
‘There’s only cold cuts, mum,’ Cook called after Eliza as the sisters went upstairs to take off their hats. ‘I reckon I could boil up a few spuds, if you really need me to.’
In her bedroom Eliza drew the hatpins from her plumed toque and set it on the dressing table. Faith steered her to the chair at the window.
‘There. Sit for a moment.’
‘Matthew …’ Eliza began.
‘… will be glad to read the newspaper in peace for half an hour,’ Faith finished for her. ‘Shall I ask Cook to bring us a pot of tea?’
‘By all means. She will certainly give notice if you do. It will save me the trouble of dismissing her.’
Faith only laughed. She was well used to the state of semi-warfare between Eliza and the cook.
‘No tea, then. Something stronger?’
A silver tray with a bottle and glasses stood on Devil’s dressing stand. Faith placed a weak gin and water in her sister’s hand and watched her take two swallows.
‘I don’t know where I’d be without you, Faith.’
Eliza and her sister were close, and had become even more so in recent years. As a young woman Eliza had dismissed Faith’s choice of marriage and motherhood as unadventurous, but she was generous enough now to ac-knowledge that for all her youthful insistence on freedom they had ended up in more or less the same place. How age enamels us, she would say. It builds up in layers and locks us inside our own skin, stopping us from breaking out, preventing the outside from burrowing in.
Faith said, ‘You’d do perfectly well, but you don’t have to because I am here. Is it bad today?’
Eliza closed her eyes. Her fingers splayed over her lower belly as if to support the failures and collapses within.
‘My back aches, a little.’
‘What else, then? Is it Devil?’
There was a long pause.
‘No more than usual.’
Faith didn’t ask, ‘Who is it this time?’ but she might well have done.
There was always someone: an actress or a dancer from the theatre, a waitress from one of the supper clubs, or a young girl met across a shop counter when he was choosing a pair of gloves or a bottle of scent for Eliza.
That was the strange thing.
Apart from the few years at the beginning of their married life, before Cornelius was born, Devil had been incapable of fidelity. Yet even when his pursuit of women was at its most fervent, Devil had always been – so it seemed to Faith and Matthew – utterly obsessed with his wife.
Faith said, ‘He adores you.’
Eliza gave a thin sigh. It was not the first time the two of them had discussed the matter.
‘That’s partly the trouble. I can’t satisfy his craving, and the more I fail in that the more he longs for what he imagines I am withholding.’
It wasn’
t just sex, although sex lay at the root of it. Once they had been well suited. But then Cornelius had come, or rather a brutal doctor with a pair of forceps had dragged him into the world, and after that there had been a change. Pain and distress made Eliza hesitant, even though she had tried to pretend otherwise, and although Devil had done his best he had in the end read her hesitancy as reluctance. He was cast as the importuner and Eliza as the withholder, and although the front line of their battle constantly shifted, sometimes dressed up as comedy and at others bitterly rancorous, there was always a battle.
Almost five years after Cornelius Nancy had arrived easily, but Arthur’s birth hardly more than a year after that had been almost as difficult as his brother’s.
Nowadays Devil propitiated his wife with expensive comforts and sea air. Accepting her reliance on new doctors and patent cures, he squandered too much time and energy on the Palmyra, arguing that otherwise the theatre could not generate the money he needed to care for his family. Devil regarded the diversions of motor cars and women as just that, and would have claimed – in the circumstances – they were nothing less than he deserved. Eliza didn’t see it the same way, and she was angry with him. All the images of herself that she had created as a young woman had been to do with strength and freedom, and now she possessed neither. She was little better than an invalid, and she had become dependent on her unreliable husband for everything.
Eliza sat upright. She squeezed her glass so tightly that it might have shattered.
‘How has this happened to me? Here I sit like a wilting girl. I’m ashamed of myself, Faith.’
‘There is no shame in what you have suffered.’
‘I am weak.’
Faith shot back at her, ‘We’re women. We’re all weak. You don’t have a monopoly on the condition.’
Faith was not usually so blunt. Eliza stuck out her glass, still miraculously intact. They were both smiling, almost girls again.
‘We’ll have to endure it, I suppose. Give me some more gin before we go down and feast on the boiled spuds.’
On the floor above Lizzie stuck her head out of Nancy’s bedroom window and – to Nancy’s astonished awe – smoked a cigarette.
‘Do you want one?’
‘No. I mean … I don’t mind, but I don’t smoke.’
‘Terrible, isn’t it? I caught the habit from some of the girls at work and now I’m completely hooked.’
Cornelius rapped on the door and Lizzie quickly ground out the cigarette on the windowsill before tossing the end into the grey air.
Cornelius called, ‘Cook says to come now if you don’t want it cold.’
‘It was cold to start with, wasn’t it?’ Lizzie laughed.
The stage door was in a narrow alley that ran from the Strand towards the Embankment. Devil stepped inside. The doorman in his wooden cubicle passed over a sheaf of post and wished him a good evening.
‘Who won the match, sir?’
‘Eton, I’m sorry to say.’
‘Mr Arthur’ll be disappointed.’
‘That’s hardly the word.’
Devil made his way down a dark passageway lit by a single overhead bulb and up a short flight of bare wooden stairs. There was a strong smell of worn clothing, congealed grease, and mice.
The theatre owner and manager’s office had brown-painted walls and was hardly wide enough for a cluttered desk. The lighting was no better or brighter than in the corridor outside. He propped himself on a corner of the desk and quickly shuffled through the mail. It was all bills, mostly final demands, and at the bottom of the heap he found a flyer for the new show at a rival theatre. The type was blocky, modern and rather eye-catching. Devil screwed the sheet up and threw it at the wastebasket.
The backstage manager Anthony Ellis stuck his head round the door.
‘All right, Mr Wix?’
‘Hullo, Anthony. What was the house like this afternoon?’
‘Eighty-three.’
‘Christ. Tonight?’
‘Better. Might be two hundred.’
Devil nodded. The capacity of the Palmyra was two hundred and fifty. Its intimate scale made it perfect for performances of magic, although even when it was full it was an exacting task to make it pay well. There was no profit to be taken out of a thin house.
‘Thirty until the up,’ Anthony reminded him.
The stage manager withdrew. Devil heard him tread along the corridor to the door of the main dressing area. He knew every creak of the old floorboards, every scrape of a hinge and click of a switch. The other performers all made ready in one chaotic room, ducking behind screens and crowding at a single mirror. The Palmyra was not noted for its backstage luxury. All resources were lavished on the front of house.
Devil whistled as he stripped off his blazer and soft-collared shirt. He stood in his vest at a broken piece of mirror and rapidly applied a layer of make-up, then worked over the arches of his eyebrows with a dark pencil before finally reddening his lips with a crimson crayon. When he was finished he removed his starched shirt from the hanger and slipped it on, careful to keep the folds away from his painted face. He fixed his collar with an old stud and deftly tied his white butterfly.
Once he was fully costumed he stood in front of the glass again. He rubbed brilliantine through his greying hair, the gloss turning it darker. Then he briskly applied a pair of old wooden-backed hairbrushes to the sides and top.
Devil was fifty-four years old and still a notably handsome man.
By this time Anthony Ellis was coming back to call the ten. Devil walked through the skein of cramped passageways to the wings. Stagehands in shirtsleeves greeted him as he passed. From the pit he could hear the small orchestra tuning up. As he took his place behind the house curtain a stooping elderly woman hurried from a niche to brush the shoulders of his coat. Sylvia Aynscoe was the wardrobe mistress and dresser, and she had been employed at the Palmyra almost since the beginning.
‘Evening, Sylvia.’
She gave him a compressed smile before twitching the points of his collar into place. Sylvia was an old ally of Eliza’s. It was through the unobtrusive conduit of the dresser that news of everything that happened at the Palmyra found its way back to Islington.
At two minutes to the up Devil was poised on the balls of his feet like an athlete ready to sprint. He flexed his white-gloved fingers and patted the props in the concealed pockets in his coat. The rustle and chatter of the audience through the heavy green velvet drapes sounded like the sea.
The first act of the current show was a dance illusion routine. Four girls in laced satin pumps and scanty dresses of sequinned tulle softly padded to their positions behind him. The best-looking of the four, an elfin girl with a dancer’s taut body, knew better than to try to attract his attention at this tense moment. She turned her head instead to catch her reflection in one of the mirrors. A tall plume of white feathers nodded from a tiny tiara, darts of radiance flashing from the paste gems.
The orchestra struck up the national anthem and the audience rose to its feet. As soon as they had resumed their seats Devil stepped out between the tabs. The bright circle of the following spot tightened on him as he smiled into the heart of the expectant house. He was glad to see that it was better than two hundred. All the stalls were occupied and only a score of seats in the gallery were empty. Pale faces gazed down at him from two tiers of gilt-fronted boxes at the sides of the stage. He let his eyes sweep over the rows of seats.
‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the home of magic and illusion. We have a magnificent and intriguing show for you tonight.’
Devil pivoted. When he turned again a ringmaster’s whip had appeared in his hand. He cracked the whip and a mirrored ball spun on the boards at his feet; he cracked it a second time and the ball rose like a giant soap bubble and floated away.
Laughter and applause spread through his veins, lovely as warmth in winter. Even though he was pinioned in the lights he could see out to the slender pillar
s that were carved to resemble palm stems, and the fronds of painted plaster leaves. Gilt-framed lozenges of bright paint glimmered at him. His voice rose into the graceful cupola surmounting the auditorium. Devil thought of his theatre as a jewel box that his audience could open, only a few feet removed from the din of the Strand. He offered them opulence in exchange for the mundane world.
He loved every brick and plank of the place.
The giant bubble sank again. Another flick of the whip broke it into real soap bubbles that drifted out over the double fauteuils at the front of the stalls and gently vanished.
Devil swept his bow and backed into the wings.
The curtain rose at once on the dancers. Four girls arched their taut bodies against four triangular columns. Two faces of the columns were mirrored and the third was black.
The orchestra began to play ‘Let Me Call You Sweetheart’.
The columns were mounted on spindles, and in the recess beneath their feet a stagehand turned a drum and the columns silently revolved. The girls moved into their dance. Four were multiplied to eight, and the mirrors reflected their reflections until sixty-four splintered images danced into the light, were swallowed up by the turning darkness, and then pirouetted into view again. Dozens of white plumes swayed and the jewels shot points of fire.
The audience drew a collective breath and the applause for this vision almost drowned out the music.
Devil watched from the wings. The elfin dancer spun en pointe and her blank gaze passed over his face. But on the next turn their eyes locked for a fraction of a second. No one else saw it, but the ghost of her smile for him was multiplied into infinity.
Devil lifted his gloved hand in a small salute. He turned away through the wings, and returned to his office where the bills were still piled on his desk.
CHAPTER THREE
The housemaid brought in the tray and placed it on the table.
‘Anything else, Mrs Wix?’
Eliza ran her eye over the tea service with the pattern of forget-me-nots, the silver pot and sugar tongs, and the two varieties of cake on a tiered plate.
‘Thank you, Peggy, that will be all.’ When the girl had left the room Eliza said to her guest, ‘Now, Mr Feather, how do you take your tea?’