by Rosie Thomas
‘I can’t tell you how bucked I am we’ve met at last. Arthur is so secretive about his family, I’d more or less given up on ever seeing any of you in the flesh. Unless I bought a ticket to the music hall or turned up to a seance, perhaps.’
There was a silence. Laughing uncertainly Bella put her head on one side and Nancy became aware that she had probably had quite a lot to drink.
‘I mean, I wondered if there was something wrong. A terrible family secret or something of that sort, you know?’
‘Bella.’ Arthur looked imploringly at her.
Harry put in, ‘My sister always leaps in with both feet. You’ll have to forgive her, Miss Wix. She means well.’
‘Please call me Nancy,’ she said vaguely. There were two refrains running in her head, the talk and laughter at the table, and the sound of Gil Maitland’s low voice.
Zenobia Wix?
Bella protested, ‘Well, what? I mean, Arthur and I have been in love for what feels like centuries, ever since he was away in France and writing me heavenly letters, and I thought when he came home we would announce our engagement like everyone else. But it turns out that there are about a million obstacles. Money, and my parents, and expectations, and all that sort of stupidness. I don’t care about any of it. I love Arthur, you know. And that’s the only thing that matters, isn’t it?’
Arthur put his hand over hers.
‘I have to do the caring for both of us, darling. And I will, I promise.’
He said to Nancy and Lion, ‘Bella and I met at her debutante dance. Harry said it would be the usual insipid affair of fruit cup and girls who talked about their dearest ponies, and he begged me to keep him company.’
‘I was right, wasn’t I?’ Harry sighed.
‘No, old chap, you were quite wrong. As soon as I saw Bella I knew there would never be another girl for me. It was perfectly simple. I was going to marry her.’
Arthur’s certainty was touching. Naturally Isabella Bolton would return his feelings. His spectacular physical beauty didn’t narrowly define him, as it did many handsome people. He managed to be both kind and good, and he was of Bella’s world because he had been to Harrow and Sandhurst and held a commission in a good regiment.
Nancy’s thoughts scattered as she found herself staring across the table at Harry. The litter of dishes and glasses between them shimmered with strange prisms of light. Instead of smiling at his sister, Harry’s face contorted in a spasm of agony. Nancy heard a hubbub of shouting, and saw his body huddled on a gritty road. She clenched her fists and stared hard at the tablecloth, willing the image to disappear. After a second the Uncanny faded and the ordinary bustle of the restaurant swelled around her. Harry looked the same as before and Nancy was left wondering if she had glimpsed the past or the future. She made herself concentrate on the here and now.
Bella’s eyes were glittering with tears. The girl blinked them away.
‘Darling, light up a cig for me?’
Arthur took out the gold case that had been his twenty-first birthday present from Devil and Eliza, lit a cigarette and placed it between her lips.
He said, ‘We have to wait, you see. Bella’s father is a soldier and I intend to be as distinguished as he is some day.’
‘General Sir Reginald Bolton,’ Lion murmured, because he knew such things.
Arthur said, ‘Is it all right to talk about this, Harry?’
His friend nodded through a curl of cigarette smoke.
‘Bella will inherit a substantial fortune through her mother, who is an American manufacturing heiress. There are conditions attached to the inheritance involving a suitable marriage and parental consent and so on.’
Lion’s mouth humorously curled. ‘How quaint.’
‘I don’t care about the money,’ Bella protested.
But you would, Nancy thought, if you didn’t have any.
Bella knew nothing about being poor, and Arthur was wise to put off asking her formally until he had established himself. He would throw all his energy into soldiering and he would certainly succeed at it, and the process would remove him even further from his background. By giving him the best of everything Devil and Eliza had cut themselves off from their beloved boy.
‘You and Nancy know each other’s families, I’m sure?’ Bella asked Lion.
He looked surprised. ‘I have met Mr and Mrs Wix, yes. Just the one time. The circumstances were a little unusual because it was after the first of Nancy’s public sittings and there was a huge clamour to do with a murderous butcher. Apart from that, not at all. This is 1921, my dear. Nancy and I are individuals, a man and a woman in the greatest city in the world, living the way we want to live. We don’t care a damn for what has been, or who was second cousin to whom, or about the shackles of inheritance and entails and wills. That’s pre-war. Last century. History. I believe in who I am, and what I can achieve in my own right. That’s right, Nancy, isn’t it?’
She gave a non-committal answer, wondering as she often did how Lion combined these radical ideas with his casual attitude to actual work.
Harry Bolton looked sceptical but Bella wanted to be convinced. She said doubtfully, ‘You will have Stadling, won’t you?’
She knew these things, just as Lion did.
He shrugged. ‘Some day. I’ll probably have to knock the place down. I can’t afford to keep it going on what I earn as a copywriter, can I?’
Nancy and Arthur glanced at each other. It was only possible to dismiss the prospect of coming into a fortune if you were an heiress, and to talk wildly about demolishing a crumbling old house if you were the last descendant of a landed family. Their own position offered a different per-spective.
‘There you are,’ Bella cried triumphantly to Arthur.
Forlornly, Nancy recalled her own speculations about marrying a man with a chauffeur and a Daimler and all the assurance that wealth bestowed.
How pointless, when she had just seen him and he hadn’t tried even to speak to her.
Arthur took Bella’s left hand and kissed the ringless third finger.
‘Trust me,’ he said.
Lion was restless.
‘Shall we go on somewhere else?’
‘Definitely not,’ Arthur groaned. ‘That party was quite enough for one night. Who was the fellow with Lizzie, by the way?’
‘Raymond Kane. He is a racing driver,’ Nancy said.
Bella raised her eyebrows. ‘Is he? I thought he must be a bookie.’
Arthur signalled for the bill and when it came he paid it, dismissing Harry’s ready offer. Lion tried half-heartedly to hand over a pound note but he waved that away too.
On their way out Arthur said privately to Nancy, ‘How is Ma?’
‘She isn’t so good. Will you come and see her?’
‘Of course I will. Just as soon as I can.’
‘I am so proud of you, Arthur.’
He paused. ‘Are you? Really?’
Out in the late-night street clamour Bella kissed Nancy on both cheeks. ‘We’ll be friends, won’t we? Can you arrange for me to be introduced to your mother and father? Arthur came to tea with my aged P’s. It was quite sweet – Daddy and he talked about the army for two whole hours.’
Nancy was pleased.
She said, ‘I’d like you to come. I’ll see what I can arrange. You will have to take us as you find us, you know.’
The girl’s eyes innocently widened. ‘Of course.’
‘Good night, Nancy,’ Harry Bolton said, warmly shaking her hand.
Having escorted Nancy home to Covent Garden, Lion followed her inside without waiting for an invitation. There was a huge damp patch on the landing wall and a clump of fungus sprouting from behind the skirting. Lion prodded it with his shoe while Nancy searched for her door key.
‘Could we harvest this and sell it in the market, do you think?’
‘I might just pick it and have it fried for my breakfast.’
She pushed the door open and Lion fell inside.
‘Your breakfast? Don’t I get any?’
‘Have I asked you to stay the night?’
Lion kicked off one shoe and hopped towards the bed as he tried to pull off the other. He collapsed on the mattress and the springs squealed.
‘Oh, please. I am too drunk to go home.’
Nancy was a little drunk too. Lion held out his arms.
She lay down with her chin in the hollow of his shoulder and ran her hand from his hip up over his belly and waist, feeling the slabs of solid flesh under the smoothness of his skin. With the tips of her fingers she traced his wide lips and touched the springy curls. She was safe here. Not excited or enthralled, but safe.
It had been a long, strange and very uncomfortable evening.
Firmly she closed her mind to Gil Maitland. She wouldn’t think about him any more, because it hurt her to do so.
‘I think Bella is very pretty, don’t you?’
Lion answered drowsily, ‘Not really. Her big sister is more interesting, if you happen to like those saucer-eyed English-rose types. This one is a little too marsupial for my taste. In any case I care for no one but you, my bad-eyed Madame Blavatsky.’
‘Shh. Do you think she and Arthur will make each other happy?’
‘What kind of a question is that? I haven’t the foggiest idea.’
‘I am going to make sure she meets Ma and Pa. She should know them, at least.
A long sigh told her that Lion was asleep.
After months of preparation, Devil opened his new show at the Palmyra.
Nancy went to the first night alone and she was surprised to encounter Jake Jones, also alone. They had met a handful of times since the Whistlehalt party and she had been to see him in every stage role he had taken. Once or twice she had even ventured backstage, where she was affectionately welcomed by Freddie and by Jake himself. They drank what she learned was Jake’s invariable after-show reviver, champagne with the bubbles swizzled out.
‘What do you think?’ she asked the actor after Devil’s show.
For all the popular music and dance routines that showcased it, Devil’s magic employed electrical circuits, mirrors and wires and black velvet drapes, handcuffs and locked boxes. It was Victorian music hall in the age of airships and cinema, Nancy feared.
‘Telling the truth? I’m sorry to say it all creaks louder than a fishmonger’s cart. As a birthday matinee treat for children and grannies, maybe. But as a fashionable night out in the West End, for men and women who have lived through the past seven years and must face up to the next? Perhaps not.’
‘I know,’ she sighed. It was painful to realise that her father might be losing his touch.
Jake looked keenly at her. ‘The stuff you are doing. The spirit voices. That’s fashionable. Why aren’t you onstage here at the Palmyra?’
‘It’s rather complicated. I have an arrangement with Mr Feather, an informal one, and Pa doesn’t think much of the Spiritualists.’
‘He likes money at the box office.’
Nancy smiled and Jake took her arm.
He said, ‘Come on, let’s go backstage and talk to him.’
The stage doorman let them in and they shouldered their way between downcast artistes hurrying in the opposite direction, along the mouse-scented passageways and stairways that Jake evidently knew far better than Nancy did. Devil was in his shirtsleeves, drinking brandy. He glared at Jake.
‘So, Mr Jake Jones. As an actor, tell me what went wrong this evening?’
Jake put his hand on her father’s shoulder.
‘Does it matter what I think?’
Devil regarded him.
‘Yes.’
‘All right. Are you living in 1921 or 1891?’
Devil stared, and then he grinned.
‘1921, I’m sorry to say. My God, Jakey, what wouldn’t I give to be the man I was back then.’
‘Quite frankly, tonight’s show belongs there too.’
‘Rubbish. I’ve got Tanner Bracewell on the piano and music by Sonny Gooder.’
‘You could put every negro hoofer in the world on that stage, dress them up in the latest from Paris and have them dance the Bonbon all night in front of every flapper in London, and what you’d have would still be old-fashioned music hall. People want different things these days, Devil.’
Devil drank brandy and frowned into the glass.
‘What should I be putting on my stage?’
Silently, Jake pointed to Nancy.
Devil mused, ‘A fat man called Jacko Grady used to do a spirit voices show, do you remember? It was at Haggerston Hall, and Miss Someone-or-Other sat on a chaise longue with an electric circuit under her backside, tapping out the letters engraved on the case of my old watch here, as spied out by her accomplice in the audience.’
He took the watch from his waistcoat pocket and swung it through a lazy arc.
Nancy thought of the initials on Helena Clare’s locket.
‘You were at the first public sitting I ever did, Pa. I wasn’t putting on an act, you know that.’
Devil frowned.
‘I don’t want to think about ghosts. This theatre is haunted, did you know that? I used to see a boy, a poor creature I knew when I was only a boy myself. He died, but he was here, I tell you.’
‘When I was young I used to be afraid of seeing. I could never talk to you or Ma about it, or even to Neelie. Lawrence Feather knew without my having said a word. I’m not scared any longer, because I have learned what to do when it comes, and how to use it. Some of that he taught me, and I’m grateful to him.’
‘Feather is a charlatan, no better than Jacko Grady.’
‘Mr Feather believes in what he does. And I believe in what I do.’
There were infinite shades beyond the solid hues of normality, so diaphanous that she could not define them even for her father.
Grudgingly, Devil admitted, ‘There may be some sense in what you say, Zenobia. Do you really want to do this? Can you do it?’
Nancy was thinking that the Palmyra was in her bones as much as Devil’s. She had always shrunk from it, for its sinister backstage smells and darkness and the gaudy blister of the auditorium that lay on the other side of the footlights, but it seemed now that everything that had happened in her life had been leading her to the empty stage. She shaded her eyes with her hand, as if dazzled by the spotlight.
Jake nodded his approval.
There was a long silence. At last Devil snapped upright.
‘Very well. Let’s give it a try.’
He could always be decisive when the situation called for it.
Nancy went to speak to Lawrence Feather.
He was enraged. Nancy had never seen him like this before, all the man’s unctuousness burned up like oil consumed by a flame. His shoulders uncontrollably twitched in the black coat.
‘You have used me,’ he spat.
She forced herself to meet his eyes, her old fear of him reawakened and sharpened by guilt.
‘I’m so sorry. It’s natural that in the end I’d want to work with my father at the family theatre, isn’t it?’
‘Natural? To betray my faith in you? It is the most unnatural and vindictive act. In my most precious link to Helena it is no less than wickedness.’
Feather continually begged her for a word or a sign from his sister. These days there was a lasciviousness in his grief, and he clung to it as passionately as if it were Helena herself. Nancy had come to hate the mention of her name.
He fixed her with his eyes. ‘I have made a fine medium of you. My followers have become yours.’
This was true. Zenobia Wix was now a bigger public draw than Lawrence Feather.
‘I am not wicked. My father needs me.’
‘Your father.’ Feather’s voice splintered with contempt. ‘A penny-in-the-hat magician, a card sharper, a drunk.’
Nancy stood taller. ‘My father.’
Gower Street murmured beyond the thick curtains.
Feather tried
a different tack. ‘Nancy, I beg you. Don’t withdraw from our partnership. We have worked so successfully together.’
‘I’m truly sorry to make you angry. I did everything I said I would do about the money and learning from you. I will always be grateful for your guidance. Circumstances change, and I must look after my father and the theatre. From now on I will be appearing at the Palmyra.’
‘What about Helena?’
‘If there is anything, the smallest sign, I will come straight to you. I swear on my mother’s life.’
His glance shifted. His dismay was not even about Helena, or not principally. Lawrence Feather was just another showman and he was more interested in his protégée’s earning potential.
Knowing as much made it easier for Nancy to break from him.
‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated.
‘And my godson?’
‘I’ll tell him, of course. I haven’t spoken about it yet because I wanted to see you first.’
Feather went to the window. He drew aside the curtain to peer out, as if he expected there to be watchers in the street. When he turned back the anger had indelibly set in his face.
‘You make a mistake in crossing me,’ he said. ‘Because I shall retaliate.’
She determined not to flinch.
‘I hope we’ll meet again when you feel less upset.’
Nancy gathered her gloves and bag and left the muffled room for the last time.
CHAPTER TWELVE
By the summer of 1922, after more than a year of regular seances at the Palmyra, Nancy had developed a ritual that preceded every performance. When she arrived at the theatre her dresser, Sylvia Aynscoe, made a pot of tea. They drank a cup together and talked about trivial things while Nancy flattened her hair and powdered her face. The dresser helped her into one of the sombre wool or plain crêpe de Chine outfits she had adopted for the stage.
‘No shawls, feathers, turbans, painted screens or mumbo-jumbo of any kind,’ Devil decreed, and he was right.
The nightly repetition was soothing. At the ten-minute call Sylvia walked with her from the dressing room to the wings. Nancy spoke quietly to the backstage workers, glanced up into the flies to reassure herself that there was nothing untoward up there, checked the positioning of her mirrors and then squeezed Sylvia’s hand for luck. The dresser left her and Nancy slipped to the chink in the curtain that gave her a view of the house. The audience would be shuffling and coughing, or sending up puffs of laughter, but a moment always came when silence gathered and spread. No matter how impervious they believed themselves to be, however cynical they might have been up to that second, every single person from the cheap seats to the front-row fauteuils was experiencing a tremor and wondering, ‘What if there turns out to be something in it?’