by Anna Hope
“Hey, Hettie!”
“Did you get in, then? Did you see it? Dalton’s? Saturday night?”
She turns to see that a ring of girls has gathered behind her, their faces expectant; hungry animals, waiting for the scraps. “Yes, we did.”
“So it’s real, then?”
“It’s real, all right. It’s so hidden, though, you’d never know it was there.”
The girls seem to exhale as one, and she can almost feel their breath alight on her, gilding her with their envy. She thinks of telling them about the dancers, about the way those people moved, as though they didn’t care, but it’s just too tricky to explain.
“And what about the band? Were they as good as the Dixies?”
“The band was killing.”
“And Di’s man? What’s he like?”
“Smitten. And rich.”
The girls sigh and draw away, back to the mirrors, their powder and cigarettes, giving last-minute adjustments to their faces, their hair. Hettie pulls her dance shoes out of her bag and sits down to buckle them on, warmed by a rare glow of satisfaction. She is envied for once. It may not be nice but it still feels good.
Di rushes in, just in time, pulling a face, whips off her coat, and changes at lightning speed, as the door opens and Grayson’s head appears around it.
“Time, ladies.” He claps his hands. “Out onto that floor.” He puts his head into the room and sniffs theatrically. “And if I catch any of you smoking that’ll be pay docked for a week.”
The girls move out into the chilly corridor, Hettie and Di at the back, the boys coming out of the dressing room opposite. Twelve of them, all dressed in their suits, ready for the afternoon shift.
The usual mix of feelings compete in Hettie as the dancers pass through the big double doors onto the floor. There is no doubt that the Palais is spectacular: Everything out here is Chinese: the whole dance floor covered by a re-creation of a pagoda roof; painted glass and lacquer panels showing Chinese scenes are hung around; and the ceiling supported by tall black columns, all of which are decorated in dazzling golden letters. In the middle of the vast dance floor is a miniature mountain, with a fountain running down its sides, and beneath one of the two smaller replica temples, the band is warming up.
The first time she saw the Palais was when she came down for her audition on a cold day in January. Parts of it were still roped off, then, and the sound of hammering and sawing formed a background to the thumping piano accompaniment as Grayson drilled the hopeful dancers in front of a severe-looking woman who barked out orders and culled the men and women from four hundred to eighty during the course of the day.
Even then, in the club’s unfinished state, smelling of shavings and planed wood, you could feel it was going to be something special.
There were the adverts placed in all the local newspapers:
Palais de Danse
the talk of london!
Largest and most luxurious dancing palace in Europe!
Two jazz bands.
Lady and Gentleman Instructors.
Evening Dress Optional
Hettie used to rip them out of the paper and leave them on the kitchen table for her mother to read.
Six thousand people turned up that first weekend, and when Hettie stepped out onto the dance floor that first time, seeing the Palais in all its glory, it truly did seem like a palace.
But what Hettie soon came to realize was that none of its splendor was meant for the staff. It was all for the punters, for the ones who had paid their two and six. For Hettie and Di and the other dancers, the Pen waited. As it still waits.
They file in now, boys on one side, girls on the other, heads bowed as Grayson inspects the line for any cardigans or visible hankies, anyone slouching, any contraband cigarettes or knitting needles that might while away the dances that you spend unpicked. His gaze rakes them. General Grayson: that’s what they boys call him; especially the ones who were out in France.
Twelve boys and twelve girls a shift.
Twenty dances in the afternoon (3–6) and twenty-five in the evening (8–12).
Sixpence a dance.
“Bloody freezing in here tonight,” hisses Di, as Grayson stalks past.
Grayson stops. He turns, slowly, and Di looks down at her hands. But there’s no time for reprimands since the heavy door is opening and the punters are streaming through; hundreds of them, even on a Monday night, heavy footed on the sprung wooden floor.
The band makes a bit of a ragged start and the first few couples brave it out. It’s always a waltz first at the beginning of the night. Hettie surveys the scrappy scene, hands in her armpits against the cold. If people ever bother to wear evening dress to the Palais they definitely don’t on a Monday, and the dance floor is a sludge of brown and black and gray, the men in lounge suits, the women mostly in blouses and skirts.
An upright matron trussed into a woolen two-piece is crossing the floor with a determined stride, heading toward the male Pen. Di nudges Hettie and giggles. “Here she is.” Across the aisle, Simon Randall sits up straighter, spits surreptitiously on to his hand, and smooths down his hair. The woman stops before him, holding a ticket coyly in her hand. Simon, smirking, takes it and lets himself out. Hired. Simon is one of the most popular men, rented out two afternoons a week by this same woman at eleven shillings a time. Not including tips.
The crowd is scattered now, some of them sitting at tables, a few buying drinks from the little cabins around the sides of the floor. The cavernous room is filling up, the dance floor thickening, the band sounding stronger, the afternoon starting to find its shape. Hettie’s eye catches a tall man, moving slowly among the crowd on the other side of the floor, and she sits up, heart hammering. It looks like him, the man from Dalton’s: Ed.
The Palais? I went there once.
She grips the rail. Would he come here looking for her?
The man steps out on to the dance floor, and she leans forward, the better to see. She’s almost standing in her seat, but as he comes closer she sees it isn’t him. This man, other than being tall, is nothing like him; this man has the hesitant, shuffling gait of the false-legged. You can tell them a mile off. You have to be careful with them; they can trample all over you and not even know.
“What was that about, then?” whispers Di.
“Nothing.” Hettie, feeling cross, shakes her head.
But the man has had his attention caught and is making his way across the floor. She knows the look: a little vague, half-whistling through his teeth, as though he is pretending not to know how this business works. “Afternoon,” he says, hands in his pockets.
“Good afternoon.”
“How much is all this malarkey, then?”
“Sixpence,” says Hettie.
“Sixpence?” The man looks aggrieved, his voice rising a notch. “But I’ve just paid two and six to get in.”
“Come with a partner,” Di chimes in, “if you don’t want to pay.”
The man flushes crimson.
Hettie feels immediately terrible. Her heart wilts, for him, for her, for the whole damn business. “You buy your ticket over there,” she says gently, indicating the cabin to her left. “It’s a foxtrot next.”
The man swallows. “I’ll come back,” he says, “shall I?” His Shall I? is aggressive, daring her to say no.
“Yes.” She smiles at him. “Please do.”
The man walks stiffly away, as though if he bumped into anything he might break, and he and his dignity smash all over the floor.
Di snorts. “That’ll be fun.”
“It’s all right for you.” Hettie turns on her. “I need the money. I haven’t got a man who’ll buy me things, have I?”
Di’s mouth rounds into a surprised little o. “What’s got into you, then? Get out on the wrong side of bed, did you?”
>
Hettie shrugs. She doesn’t know why, but she’s irritated with Di today. With the Palais. With all of it. The man is back, ticket in hand. She takes it from him, puts it in her pouch, and lets herself out of the small metal gate. And when she smiles at him, it’s not just for show, because, really, heaven knows what it must take them, any of them, to come here alone.
She lifts her arms, opens her palms.
This is how it works: You are hired, and you dance. If you’re nice to them, and they like the way you move, then they ask you for another, which means another sixpence, and so it goes. The management takes half your pay, so it pays to be nice.
The man’s hands are clammy as he pulls her close. He smells of sweat and basements and clothes that need a wash. He’s about as far from the man in Dalton’s as it’s possible to be.
That makes two of them then.
The band strikes up, and they move out across the floor.
. . . . . . . . . . .
By three the queue in front of the office is almost finished, and only five or six men are left. Evelyn sits back in her chair, stifling a yawn. The man at the front of the line is eyeing her, hesitant, moving very slightly from side to side, as though the ground were shifting beneath his feet.
Shell shock.
Private.
“Come in,” she says. “Take a seat.”
He perches on the chair in front of her.
“Name?”
“Rowan.”
She unscrews her pen.
“Surname?”
“Hind.”
It’s such a lovely name that it stops her in her tracks. Hind: gilded and natural all at once. She glances up, finding herself looking more closely than she ordinarily would, searching for a corresponding beauty in his face. He is no beauty, though; too small for his demob suit, left arm in a filthy sling, he has the wizened, old-man look of those who have lived their lives skirting close to the edge. One of the ones who signed up for the grub.
“Rank?”
“Private, Miss. As was.”
Her pen scratches over the paper. The afternoon sun warms her cheek. Hopefully, by the time she finishes, there will still be enough light to walk home through the park. “And what can I do for you, Mr . … Hind?”
“I was just passing,” he says. “And then I—I—”
She sits back. She is used to them: the stammerers, the stutterers. She can be patient when she wants to be; she can be kind. Rowan Hind’s gaze drops, and he is silent for a moment. Then, “Your finger,” he says, catching sight of it.
“Yes?”
“How did it go?” His pale eyes meet hers.
There is something strangely compelling about him, disarming; she decides to tell him the truth. “It was in a factory,” she says.
“The war?”
She nods.
“Munitions?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“Thought so.” He looks pleased. “Canary, weren’t you? You still got a bit of the yellow on your face.”
“Have I?”
“Did it hurt, then? Must’ve hurt.”
She looks down at the gap where the finger used to be, as the rest of her hand curls around it, a reflex, protective action. “It did,” she says. “Though not at first.”
At first she laughed. The astonishing sight of it: a finger. Her finger. Until a second before, attached to her hand. The strange, spacious moment before the blood burst out over her apron, her face. She remembers turning to the woman who was working on her left, and seeing that her face, too, was spattered in blood. Then back to the machine, still stamping away, the finger inside it, the white tendon, stretched like glue. She remembers someone screaming. Then everything went black. By the time she came around she was bandaged and in an ambulance on the way to the hospital.
In front of her Mr. Hind is nodding away. “I saw that, too. Men lose their arm or leg, first few seconds they don’t know their arse from their elbow. If you were a soldier,” he leans forward, conspiratorially, “you’d get a pension for life.”
“Yes,” she smiles ruefully. “Well.”
She can see the man behind Rowan shuffling his feet.
“Was there a complaint?” she says. “Is that why you’re here?”
He seems to think about this, then, “No,” he says. ‘It’s not that.”
She waits for him to elaborate, but he simply sits there, staring at his hands.
“Are you working at the moment?”
“I’m working.” He lifts his eyes. “Salesman. Yes.”
“And how is that?”
He raises his thumb to his mouth, chewing a bit of skin at the side of his nail. “It’s terrible,” he says.
Of course it is. Do people like him, then, when he knocks at their doors? Traveling salesman? Little Mr. Hind?
“It’s not that, though,” he says. “It’s something else.”
“Yes?”
“I want to find my regiment. I want to find my captain. I didn’t know where to look . … And then I was passing, and I saw the sign. I was in the Seventeenth Middlesex, you see, fighting with Camden men, during the war.”
“I see.” She takes a scrap of paper from her desk and reaches for her pen. It’s not her job, but she can always go to the records office with her worker’s pass. Can always bend the rules from time to time. “It shouldn’t be too difficult. Providing, of course, that the man in question’s still alive. Shall I take your address first?” She unscrews the lid from her pen.
“It’s Eleven Grafton Street … Poplar.” He leans toward her, watching her write.
“And your regiment?”
“Seventeenth Middlesex.”
She writes this down. “And which years did you serve?”
“1916 until 1917.”
“And 1917 is when you were invalided out?”
“Yes.”
“And what was your injury?”
He hesitates. “My arm.”
“I can see that.” She waits for him to elaborate. “You can’t use it?”
“No.”
Again, he doesn’t say any more. She feels a small flicker of irritation. “And your captain?”
“Yes.”
“What was your captain’s name?”
His face twitches. “It was Montfort,” he says.
At first she thinks she has misheard.
“Captain Montfort.” He says, leaning forward, waiting for her to write.
She looks down, to where her pen is held in her hand, pressing into the paper. The ink is running unevenly into the little gray marbled troughs and valleys. She lifts away the nib. “Captain Montfort?”
He nods.
“Well, I’m sorry.” She sits back. “I’m afraid I can’t help you with that.”
“What? Why?”
“We only deal with pensions here. Pensions and benefits. We are not a missing persons bureau.” She takes a slip from the pile beside her, turns it on to the blank side, takes out a small, leather-bound book, opens it, and copies out an address. She does everything slowly and carefully, keeping her pen as steady as she can. “I imagine the best thing to do would be to contact the army directly. All of the information is here.”
He looks at the piece of paper in her hand as if the letters are from a foreign alphabet. “But,” he looks up at her, confused, “you said you could do it. You just said you could help.”
“I’m sorry. I was wrong.”
He is studying her fixedly. He knows she is lying, she thinks. She holds his gaze. His head starts to jerk.
“Mr. Hind?”
The jerks are rising in intensity, passing through his body, until he is moving like a jack-in-the-box and his face is contorted, horrible. But she has seen these fits before. However awful, you can do nothing but wait. She
digs her nails into her palms and looks away at the stained brown-carpeted floor at her feet.
“All right, old thing?”
She looks up to see that Robin is standing directly in front of her, his hand on Rowan’s shoulder. For a second she thinks he is speaking to her. Then, “There, there.” He speaks quietly, as though calming an animal, his hand moving slowly up and down the smaller man’s back. “There.” He looks enormous beside Rowan, rooted as an oak. “There we are. That’s it. There.”
Slowly Rowan’s fitting stops, and he regains his self-control, breathing hard. Robin moves a little way away from him, allowing him space, creating a triangle between Rowan, Evelyn, and himself. He thrusts his hands into his pockets. “All right there, old chap?”
Rowan nods, his eyes on the ground. “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
“There’s nothing to apologize for,” says Robin quietly. He looks at Evelyn. “Everything all right?”
“We’re fine,” she says, curtly. “Thank you.”
“That’s good, then.” He gives her a quick look, then walks back to his desk. She watches him go, blood raging; they all try it, at one time or another. Telling her what to do. She hates nothing more. She has been here for two years; she is the longest-serving member of staff. She turns back to see that Rowan is staring right at her.
“You,” he says. He speaks slowly, as though pushing the words before him through something thicker than air. “You looked just like him, just then.”
“And who is that?”
“The man,” he says. “The man I want to see. “
“Well,” she says, passing the piece of paper over the desk toward him. “These are the people who will be able to tell you if—the man you’re looking for is still alive.”
. . . . . . . . . . .
The coffin is loaded into military ambulance number 63638. Alongside it are six barrels of earth, from six different battlefields, one hundred sacks in all. The ambulance sets off on the long straight road that leads north to the coast. A military escort accompanies it: two cars in front and one behind. Four soldiers sit silently in each car, their hats held on their laps.