Wild Lavender

by Belinda Alexandra

  ‘We can get jobs at the Alcazar,’ said the hungry chorus girl, whose name was Claire. ‘Their girls are always getting offers from Paris.’ She shook her skinny fist and turned to the other chorus members, trying to muster their support. A couple of the girls nodded bravely, but I noticed Claudine and Marie purse their lips. They both had children to support and had more realistic views. The Alcazar was Marseilles’ top music hall. No one from Le Chat Espiègle was good enough to perform there.

  ‘What we need,’ said the lighting director, ‘is a whimsical, humorous act. Like the ventriloquist was in the last show. That made the audience laugh. It opened them up.’

  ‘I can’t get the ventriloquist,’ Monsieur Dargent said, his eyes pleading with us. ‘He was snapped up by a resort in Vichy.’

  ‘Nothing’s going to save the first act,’ snarled Claire. ‘It’s a dud!’

  A murmur of agreement buzzed around the room.

  ‘Humour will do it!’ the lighting director shouted above the voices.

  Monsieur Dargent lifted his eyes as if he were praying. Then he dropped his gaze and studied each of the performers. I wondered if he felt like Julius Caesar, about to be betrayed by his friends. Hadn’t he given each of these people their break in show business? Madame Tarasova always said that Monsieur Dargent had a gift for spotting talent, he just wasn’t any good at running a business. He fiddled with his jacket pocket and pulled out a cigarette. He tried to light it, but his hand shook and it fell to the floor. He bent to pick the cigarette up and as he did he saw me. A strange look passed over his face.

  My breath caught in my throat. Oh God, I thought. He’s remembered my parody of the opening number. He’s in a bad enough mood to fire me now. I tried to squeeze behind Albert, but the room was too crowded and, to my horror, I ended up being pushed even closer to Monsieur Dargent.

  ‘Humour?’ Monsieur Dargent muttered, tapping his foot. ‘Humour!’ He clicked his fingers and the whole room jumped. He rushed at me, grabbed my shoulders and pressed his face into mine.

  I was terrified. What on earth did he intend to do? ‘Aloha! Aloha! Aloha!’ he sang, peering into my eyes.

  Madame Tarasova caught on faster than any of us. ‘We have half an hour,’ she cried.

  ‘Quick, get her clothes off!’ shouted Monsieur Dargent, pushing me towards a stool and make-up mirror. No one thought to question him. His voice had taken on a Napoleonic tone of command and everyone sprang into action.

  Madame Tarasova grabbed Bonbon from me and put her on a chair. Albert shooed the other performers away before running back to his post at the door. ‘Get her a costume from downstairs,’ Madame Tarasova called after him. ‘Anne’s one will do—she won’t be needing it any more.’

  Madame Tarasova tugged off my dress while Vera pulled at my shoes. Marie dabbed at my face with a greasepaint stick. ‘She doesn’t need any on her body,’ Claudine advised, brushing back my hair. ‘She’s as brown as a nut.’

  It finally dawned on me what they were intending to do. I wanted to laugh and scream at the same time. If it wasn’t for the giddy feeling that overwhelmed me as people pulled pieces of clothing off me and covered me in oily lotions, I might have been embarrassed. The only man left in the room was Monsieur Dargent, and he was so engrossed in making notes on his song script that he didn’t seem to notice that the wardrobe assistant was being stripped naked. Someone pulled off my chemise and pushed my breasts into a coconut bra with the same sensitivity a greengrocer might use to pack his goods for the market.

  ‘Aloha! Aloha! Aloha!’ Monsieur Dargent sang to himself.

  ‘Shouldn’t you get her to do this tomorrow?’ asked Madame Tarasova. ‘When she’s had time to rehearse!’

  ‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘We’ve lost our lead chorus girl. We have to save the show tonight or not at all.’

  My arms and legs were trembling so much that I could barely stand up when Madame Tarasova needed to take in my skirt. I still didn’t believe what Monsieur Dargent wanted me to do.

  The stage bell rang. ‘Ten minutes until show time,’ Vera called out.

  Madame Tarasova fitted my wig and Vera pinned it in place. I stared at myself in the mirror. My face was alive with colour: my eyes had green arches over them and my lips were painted ruby red. My eyelashes were so stiff with mascara they looked like twin centipedes.

  ‘Now,’ said Monsieur Dargent, leaning towards me, ‘when I give you the signal, I want you to appear out of the left wing and dance and sing on the mountain plateau exactly as you did in the wardrobe area the other night. I want you to mimic the chorus girls. You are going to be our comedian.’

  I swallowed but the lump in my throat didn’t disappear.

  The chorus girls lined up on the stairs, waiting for their cue to go on stage. The pre-show music was a tinny carnival tune with accordions and guitars that put my nerves on tenterhooks. Madame Tarasova and Vera led me to the left wing. The place where I had viewed the show for the first time had been cleared out and there were some wooden steps leading up to the stage and out onto the plateau where I was supposed to dance.

  ‘Wait at the top of the stairs,’ said Madame Tarasova, giving my wig a last brush. ‘Good luck!’ The tone of her voice and the way she patted my shoulder made me feel as if I were about to be fed to lions. Of course I was doing what every performer dreads, although I had no idea what to call it then. I was going on cold.

  I climbed the stairs and waited on the top step for the next signal. I cast my eye over the backdrop of smoking volcanoes and low-slung clouds. Below me, where the chorus girls were to dance, rubber palm trees and a water tank suggested a blue lagoon. Monsieur Dargent appeared in the wing opposite. The way he was chewing his bottom lip and fingering the hair at the back of his head did not inspire my confidence.

  The curtains opened. The spotlights flicked on. A drum roll thundered through the hall and the orchestra burst into the first act’s theme song. The girls rushed onto the stage.

  ‘Aloha! Aloha! Aloha!’

  My throat tightened. Beads of sweat sprang up on my lip, but I was too scared to wipe them away in case I smeared my make-up. Any desire I’d had to work in the theatre drained away from me. The girls danced around the lagoon, swinging their hips. Claudine and Marie strummed ukuleles. The situation was surreal. Monsieur Dargent didn’t even know my name, but the success of the evening now depended on me. Only a short while ago I had been worrying about my rent, now I was about to appear on stage for the first time in my life, with coconuts for breasts and a wig that was in danger of slipping from my head. Many of the seats in the audience were empty, but enough were occupied to make me shiver. The faces loomed at me out of the dark. I realised that the girls were on the last line before the chorus and Monsieur Dargent was signalling to me. ‘Now!’ he mouthed.

  I lifted my trembling leg to step onto the platform and ended up stumbling onto the stage. The brightness of the lights was a shock. I stood there, dazed, unsure of what I should do.

  A man with a coarse voice roared with laughter. A woman cackled. My skin smouldered. I was sure my face was glowing. Another man joined in the laughter, but his voice held something besides mockery. Anticipation? Somehow that laugh loosened me and woke me from my stupor. ‘Aloha! Aloha! Aloha!’ I sang in a warbling voice that mimicked the chorus girls. At first I wasn’t sure the voice was mine; it carried itself past the orchestra pit and echoed back to me, much fuller than the thin voices of the other girls. More people laughed and some started to clap. ‘Aloha, Mademoiselle!’ someone shouted. ‘What next?’

  I dared to look out at the audience. Two men in the front row were watching me with interest. I smiled at them and shimmied. The audience went wild. I didn’t dance with any finesse, but the more the audience cheered and clapped, the more my body relaxed and the more wildly I jiggled. My self-consciousness vanished and I moved easily and gaily, bowing my legs and batting my eyelids, letting my arms and legs do whatever the music told them to. A thrill ra
n over my skin. Every face in the audience was looking at me.

  We had been in such chaos before the number that no one had told me how to end the dance. I gyrated in a circle and when I faced the front again the chorus girls had left the stage. I threw my arms up in the air and posed like a statue, incongruous with the performance but a gesture of Camille’s from her Egyptian number that had impressed me. The curtain came down and a tidal wave of applause burst from the audience. I ran off the stage, barely able to breathe.

  Monsieur Dargent, Madame Tarasova, Albert and the others were waiting for me in the wing. Albert lifted me up, sat me on his shoulder and paraded me around. Monsieur Dargent was grinning from ear to ear. Madame Tarasova rushed forward and grabbed my cheeks. ‘You know what you did is what every performer wishes for. You got them, Belle-Joie! You got them!’

  FIVE

  At my first dance rehearsal with Le Chat Espiègle I felt like an imposter. As part of my contract, I was to practise with the chorus girls each afternoon at two o’clock in the basement beneath the stage, except for Thursdays and Sundays when there was a matinée to perform. The room was kept locked and I sat on the dust-flecked stairs along with the other girls until Madame Baroux, the ballet mistress, arrived with Madame Dauphin, the accompanist. When she did, the girls scrambled from their slouched positions and I followed them. Only Claire and Ginette dragged themselves up with the listlessness of participants in a funeral procession, but if Madame Baroux noticed she didn’t show it.

  ‘Bonjour, ladies,’ she sang out, leaning on her walking stick. She tugged a key on a piece of string from around her neck and pushed it into the locked door.

  ‘Bonjour, Madame Baroux,’ the girls answered, their voices ringing out like students in a convent.

  Madame Baroux’s eyes turned to me and she nodded. I assumed that Monsieur Dargent had explained who I was. The chorus girls were required to train every day to keep themselves supple, but that wasn’t Monsieur Dargent’s intention for me. He wanted me to understand what the girls were doing so I could mimic them on stage. Also, he wanted me to gain elementary dance training in case I was required for the next show or to fill in for someone who was sick. I had to earn my pay.

  After several shoves, courtesy of Madame Dauphin’s shoulder, the door creaked open and we trailed into the room after Madame Baroux. Madame Dauphin sat down at the piano and lifted the battered lid. She warmed her fingers on the keys with a tune that made me think of butterflies skimming over long grass. Her unkempt curls and floral dress were the antithesis of Madame Baroux, who wore her hair swept up with combs and kept any individuality tucked away beneath the crisp white blouse and crocheted shawl of an elderly Frenchwoman.

  ‘Stretch!’ Madame Baroux commanded, banging her stick on the parquet floor.

  The girls threw themselves to the floor, transforming into a sea of sprawling limbs, their twisted figures doubled in mass on account of the mirrors that lined the basement walls. I dropped down too. The grit on the boards stuck to my palms and I brushed my hands down the sides of my tunic before studying what the girl in front of me, Jeanne, was doing.

  ‘Like this,’ Jeanne whispered, stretching out her leg and bending her chest towards her knee. Her mouth twisted and her cheeks turned red. I followed her example and, to my surprise, accomplished the pose without too much difficulty. I was congratulating myself when I felt Madame Baroux’s stick tapping into the small of my back. ‘Keep your spine straight. You are a dancer not a contortionist. All your movements must flow gracefully from your vertical axis.’

  Although they were chorus girls and not ballerinas, most of the girls were experienced in classical dance. I was lost among them. What was I doing here? What was my vertical axis?

  ‘Yes, Madame,’ I said, correcting myself as best as I could. But when I glanced up, Madame Baroux had already moved on.

  ‘Not much grace required in her act,’ I heard someone in the front row mutter. I peered through the mass of headbands, tights and slips to see who it was. Claire? Paulette? Ginette? I may have saved the show, but that didn’t mean that there wasn’t resentment at someone from wardrobe being given a featured role.

  ‘To the barre, ladies!’ cried Madame Baroux. I looked up and saw that the rest of the class were waiting in position by a wooden railing along one of the walls. I trotted after them and took a place in the row. Madame Baroux sent me a grimace, barely passing it off as a smile.

  ‘Arabesque,’ she said.

  I glanced at the girl next to me and extended my leg backwards in imitation. Madame Baroux moved along the line, pushing back shoulders and lifting hips. I gripped the splintery bar and imagined the vertebrae from my neck to my tailbone lined up like marbles. I held my leg steady, ignoring the burn in the back of my thighs. But Madame Baroux walked past without a glance in my direction. It wasn’t that I was perfect; it was that I wasn’t worth correcting.

  ‘She looks like a baby in that get up,’ Ginette whispered to Madeleine loud enough for me to hear. I compared their sleek jersey leotards to my calico tunic, pieced together from some cloth I’d brought with me from the farm. ‘Well, she has been put in the show to make people laugh,’ Madeleine giggled.

  I bit my lip and fought back tears. Wasn’t this what I had wanted—to be in the theatre? Yet I’d never felt more awkward, ugly or alone.

  The tension between me and the chorus girls came to a head some time later. We were crammed in the dressing room, getting ready for a performance. I had been allocated a spot in the back corner, squeezed between a painted-over window and a withered palm. It had been hot during the day, and although all the unbroken windows had been flung open there was still no breeze. Our costumes were due for laundering but Madame Tarasova was overrun and someone, possibly Marion, hadn’t washed her feet since rehearsal. The air was loaded with a stomach-turning concoction of cologne, clammy skin and dank shoes. Only three of the ten bulbs on my mirror worked. It is just as well, I thought, shaking my head at the smears of colour above my eyes. I hadn’t got the hang of make-up, although Madame Tarasova had done her best to teach me. I was trying to blend in the greasepaint at my jawline when Claudine pulled up a stool beside me.

  ‘The show is going well because of you, Simone. I heard Monsieur Dargent say that he has just broken even,’ she said.

  I picked up my eyebrow pencil and nodded. I liked Claudine but I was wary of Claire, who sat behind me. She had taken Anne’s place in the line and made no secret of the fact that she thought I was one person too many in the dressing room. No matter how careful I was, each time I pulled out my stool I seemed to knock the back of hers. ‘Watch it!’ she’d snap. ‘If you tear my tights, you can pay the fine.’

  Sure enough, she spun around now and growled at Claudine. ‘The first act is terrible. It needs to be scrapped immediately!’

  ‘Why?’ asked Claudine, shifting her stool to face Claire. ‘A new act would mean weeks of unpaid rehearsals.’

  Marie glanced up from her mirror. ‘It’s unnecessary now anyway,’ she said. ‘Simone has saved the show. The audience numbers are up and last night we were filled to capacity.’

  I bent down to fasten my anklets and avoid anyone’s gaze. Everyone had been friendly to me when I was a dresser, but getting a role in the show had changed things. The girls were divided in their opinions of me. Claudine, Marie, Jeanne and Marion, who treated their role in the chorus line as a job, were happy to have me join their act because it meant they didn’t have to be away from their children to rehearse a new one. But some of the other girls, like Claire, Paulette, Ginette and Madeleine, had ambition. They wanted to be stars, and I was a threat.

  Claire wrinkled her nose. ‘Bah!’ she huffed, dismissing Marie with a wave of her hand. ‘The numbers are up because the Bastille Day celebrations are over and people are looking for something to do.’ Some of the other girls murmured their agreement.

  ‘I think we should speak to Monsieur Dargent after the show,’ said Paulette, wrapping her greasepain
t-stained gown around her shoulders. ‘The audience comes because they want to see beautiful girls dancing. Simone makes us look like fools.’

  ‘You spoke to Monsieur Dargent last week,’ tittered Claudine. ‘And he fixed the problem by hiring Simone.’ She patted my shoulder and beamed at me. I knew that she meant well but wished she would stop. ‘And what’s more,’ she said, ‘he is so pleased with Simone, he’s thinking of putting her name on the billing for the show.’

  The hum of voices in the room ceased. All eyes turned to Claudine. No one looked at me.

  ‘It’s true,’ Marie said, rouging her cheeks. ‘I heard him talking about it with the cashier yesterday. People have been asking if this is the show “with the funny girl in it”.’

  Paulette turned back to her mirror and tore her brush through her hair. Madeleine and Ginette exchanged a look.

  ‘If she gets her own billing, I’m out of here,’ said Claire, hunching her skinny shoulders. ‘She’s nothing more than a dresser. She won’t last long on the stage. It’s not enough to behave like an idiot. You have to be able to dance.’

  ‘She’s no beauty either,’ said Madeleine, her nose in the air.

  I stood up and rushed to the door, stepping over slippers and bags. Once in the safety of the hall, I dabbed my forehead with the back of my wrist and leaned against the balustrade. The nastiness of the chorus girls had bruised my confidence. Perhaps they were right and I wasn’t cut out for the theatre.

  But my mood changed the moment the stage bell rang. I rushed down the stairs to take my place in the wing. I could sense the audience before I saw them: the air was charged. The voices of the men and women entering the hall buzzed and crackled like sparks of static electricity before a storm. I pressed my hand against the rear wall to ground myself. The building itself seemed to be pulsating. Tonight was going to be a full house.