Ada

by Kaz Cooke

  It went some way to salve the unshakeable memory I have of a Private Performance Jim and I did in London before we piled onto the Oroya for Australia. The job came through dear old Harry. We had to go in the kitchen door at the back of this very grand house, and were ushered up the secret servants’ stairs and into a room the likes of which I’ve never seen before or since if you don’t count the Viennese court at the Centennial Exhibition.

  We was to sing and do jokes but they didn’t want a skipping dance as I suppose they thought I’d sweep the tureens off the sideboard. The money was good but by the end of the night I wished I’d never set out. One of those sideboard tureens all painted in flowers and edged in gold would have paid for our passage to Australia. You could see more paintings than wall, and it wasn’t papered but an eau-de-nil green damask silk pulled tight and smooth, I can’t imagine how. They had all manner of fanglements everywhere your eye tried to rest. Roiling floral-painted porcelain figures on the mantelpiece, and silver frames and sprays of cultivated roses on top of the piano. There was an empty fireplace big enough to seat a brass section. The guests were holding the tiniest glasses of jewel-coloured liquid, like crystal thimbles on sticks they was, I did think it was the only stingy-looking touch in the place.

  We could see we’d have to adjust our voices, there was that much plush, deep material and upholstered chairs and sofas in the room. The ladies and the windows were all covered in bustles and ruffles and frills and skirts and swags and braids and tassels the size of oven bellows. The ottomans was dressed nicer than we was. I mean were. Each lady had the sort of big, high, plump curls you need help to arrange. The French word is frizettes, but we always called them rats, or hairstuffers. You know them, don’t you? No, Horace, I suppose you don’t, dearie-oh, you’re a lad after all, and allowed to be going on with whatever God decided to put on top of your head. And because you were behind the door when they handed out the information, duck. Let me enlighten you: those girls you think have cascades of voluminous curls? They’ve put a rat on their head – a pad stuffed with hair or sawdust, and then their curls are arranged over the top so it seems you’ve lots of lovely height and heft to it. And then on top of that these ladies in the posh house had ribbons and standy-up-combs and even jewels strewn about here and thereabouts.

  And in the quiet before we were to perform a gentleman made what he thought were amusing remarks about presenting his friends with entertainment from the streets. I felt Jim, in his best stage suit, straighten himself next to me. The streets, did he say? And then a lady – a lady! – in the front row said quite loudly, ‘This is slumming it, Cavendish! I don’t know if I could manage a little tart for dessert.’ She giggled and looked straight at me with a top lip that might have been lifted with a fish hook at one end.

  Have you ever had that small, mean feeling? You leave your lodgings with a bounce-like stride, feeling that all’s right with the world and convinced that you’ve scrubbed up splendidly, and then, in a moment, you see yourself through somebody else’s eyes. Mean eyes. And all at once you’re wearing the wrong thing, or you’ve said something that’s gone amiss, or your very existence seems unsuitable.

  The man tapped a little fork on his crystal glass and it sang out. ‘Well here they are, some amusing music-hall items,’ he said. ‘Try not to be too corrupted, Lady Beatrice.’ And he conceded the floor to Jim who began with a banjo and bones bit, and we did a song each and the bells mélange duet.

  I stumbled when I moved to take my place for my solo turn, because I felt a rush of nerves and the dread ghoul in a tiara was sneering away at me, and then men looked at me like I was a dangling fancy for their watch chain and I thought I might come a thunker on the carpets. I was saved by a waiter, a footman I suppose, I don’t know what you call them. A big, handsome one in a servant’s uniform at the back, standing with a tray of those silly little glasses. He tossed his forelock back and caught my eye and gave me a wink and I was away. It’s always a wink that saves you.

  For a moment as I drew breath to sing, I felt my eyes sting with tears. But I swallowed them down and made a fist of the warbling. They clapped with their gloves on in that exhausted, posh way, making little powdery sounds, already getting up and walking away. They talked amongst themselves going through the door and off to who knows where else in that vast house. ‘Rather crude,’ said the ghoul. We didn’t exist any more to a soul who’d been in that room, and yet I’ve never forgotten them.

  We tramped down the hidden service stairs and were shown out the back, where we found a dilapidated hackney cab that seemed to be made of newspaper, spit and draughts and drawn by a dismal, U-shaped horse. As soon as I was in, I cried good and proper. Jim couldn’t understand it, he fanned out three pound notes and held up a gleaming sovereign, squinched up one eye, and used it as a monocle, saying ‘What what what Lady Beatrice, you gawby cow.’ I laughed and cried then, which made hiccups.

  I think it’s one of the reasons I can’t abide Madam Marzella; she gives me the look I remember from that night. Like I’m clart under her fingernails.

  Do you know, Horrie, a little feeling is creeping upon me that no matter what your committee says, I won’t be taking on a dear little cottage. I’ve read the rules in the pamphlet you brought, and it seems you can go if you’re a lady alone, or a man with a wife. But you can’t go as a lady with a husband. And I couldn’t leave Jim – he’s stuck by me, and I shall do the same by him. I’ll grant you he’s not at home a great deal, because of his work at the theatre, and I’m not as much fun as a jack-in-the-box in my present condition. Who can blame him for staying on at the Prince of Wales saloon bar if somebody else is buying? Worse things happen at sea. That’s why they have maritime insurance, duck.

  He and Lizzie have abided though the last few years have been very hard. I used to tell the reporters, ‘All the world’s a stage and our stage is all the world,’ did I say? I did. Now this room is all my world. It has come down to this: everything I own I can see from this bed. Yet I don’t suppose I’ll need anything else any more. It would have been nice to leave Lizzie something more than a sprig of flocked forget-me-nots and the scrapbook of our career. But she knows I always did my best for her. I expect that’s why she’s still here. Well, she isn’t staying for the deluxe furnishings.

  It seems unfortunate that Treacle Poles and morphia and a monologue in my nightie have all combined to make me feel like a kip. What a shame, Horrie. Wake me if we get a letter from the Old Colonists’ Homes. If they grant me a cottage, Horrie, you can put me on a dray to get me dragged over there to the other side of town. I can see the sky and a couple of carthorse behinds and pretend I’m in a parade. I can still wave a bit of bunting if I put my mind to it, I’m sure. And I’ll shout the last, missing secrets to you along the way.

  I’m still alive. Don’t look so furrowed. I’m sorry you had the note from Lizzie – it was touch and go for a day or two they tell me. I think they’re telling me. Sometimes I can’t be certain whether anybody is really here at all, Horrie. A few difficult afternoons, is all. I have some new medicine with extra oomph in it, and some ladies from the church dropped off a bag of handkerchiefs for coughing on and ruining. Who knew that God’s bounty would extend to second-hand napery, dearie-oh.

  So here I am, just sitting against a cushion like a whey-faced wax dolly but awfully pleased to see you. How many days has it been? Dear me, how have you kept yourself amused without coming to see me? I hope you had a box of kittens and a Webster’s to read. If only I had some rouge to paint my cheeks. Such cheeks as I have left to me. Have you noticed I always seem to be sucking hard on a humbug even when I’m not? That wasn’t a hint. Well, it might have been. Toffees! How I’ve longed for a fat toffee. I’ve enough strength to have a rummage in the paper bag, what a pal you are. Lizzie says they ruin your teeth. The good thing about being on your last legs is you don’t mind so much getting through your last teeth.

  Well, Horrie, you’re looking at me in that searching fashio
n, I don’t think I’ll peg out before supper tonight. I’m as fettled as I can expect. It was very decent of you to send your father around to listen to my lungs – I don’t think they had a great deal to say to him. The Committee for the Housing of Dreadful Actors must wonder where you go of an afternoon. I’ve become fond of you, so it’s nice to know you don’t want to hurl me out a window, and that you enjoy our chats too. What’s today’s order of business? You want to know if I nicked the Serpentine dance? Well, I’ll tell you, and then I might tell you the other business.

  No afternoon tea for me, thank you. I hope you don’t mind. I don’t seem to fancy anything today. But help yourself to tea. There’s no milk but you can have lemon. Next door has a cartload on their trees, bless them, lovely thick peel like a yellow coat with lambskin lining. If your mother’s a marmalade fancier, you can get armfuls after dark.

  Hello again. I think I’ve been asleep, or possibly elsewhere. At least I still have you for company, Horace, though you’re looking rather diaphanous today I must say. I can almost see through you. Shall we have a cuppa? I rather think we shall.

  Jimmy’s fit as a flea, thank you. He’s been rather more repressible since his bankruptcy appearance last November. Nobody likes seeing their name in the insolvency columns. And part of it reported in the papers was ‘medical expense’, that made me feel as big as a bed bug, I’ll tell you. Two years gone since either of us have performed – that’s no trifling matter.

  Who have you found in the album this time? That’s Loïe Fuller, not me. Or somebody else pretending to be Loïe. I’m pretty certain that’s Loïe herself. And that’s the Serpentine dance, all right. She invented it, and I pinched it. And performed it nightly for almost twenty years.

  I dreamed I was doing it this morning, the curtains flapping and the morphia combined often does that to me. They called it Serpentine or Cobra di Capello, the cape of the snake, you see, because of the snaky lines made by the costume. But nobody thinks of snakes when you’re doing it, if you do it right.

  I’ve performed it for the King of Siam (did I mention?) and for about eleventy hundred-thousand whiskery miners from Launceston to Leeds. I could turn myself into a blazing fire, or a whirling calla lily, or a cloud, or a picture of Queen Victoria using magic lantern slides projected onto my costume, which was forty yards of silk (or 125 yards or 161 yards, depending on which reporter you told).

  I stole four versions of the Serpentine dance from Loïe Fuller. All right, six. It hardly matters. I wasn’t the only one. Stealing an act, especially if you take it to another hemisphere, isn’t like tiptoeing into somebody’s front hall and making off with the clock. It just isn’t. I tried to keep at least one continent and a couple of oceans between me and Loïe. When she was in Paris, I was in Wanganui, and when she was in London, I was in the middle of Tasmania, you see. She went off to be a world-beating headliner in Paris at the Folies Bergère, and have herself carved into Lalique vases and daubed on posters by celebrated artists, while I helped to pass out scraps of paper for the White Mahatma in the Boulder hall.

  So the scene of my crime, if that’s how you want to squint at it, was New York City in 1892. Baldwin and us Butterflies were performing and staying in Brooklyn, when the talk of the town became nothing but Loïe Fuller and her sublimely ethereal, original dance at the Madison Square Theatre on Fifth Avenue. I’d met Louise, as she was known then, during my Skirt-dancing season at the Gaiety in London in 1887. She was in the corps then too, fresh off being an extra in the Buffalo Bill travelling Wild West show.

  The next I heard of her was in New York. I saw her name on a poster, and she was even in all the newspapers. She was doing two of her newly minted Serpentine dances a night, one as a butterfly and one as a cloud, in a play called A Trip to Chinatown. Jim, Professor Baldwin, Kitty and I took a night off our own show in Brooklyn and took the train to see the sensation. The girls were furious they had to stay home with Alice. We were beside ourselves: it’s rare for theatricals to see each other’s shows, much less take a night off to do it. Although this was work too, of course. We already had an eye to pirate Loïe’s act, if it looked at all piratable.

  Let me set the scene, dearie-oh. The theatre itself made us faint with envy. It had two different stages, one winched above the other in seconds, for astonishingly swift scene changes. You got a thrilling whoosh up your frock from the basement furnace; air came out of tubes under the plush, bouncy seats. And when you stood up the seat folded up behind you.

  The stage curtain was designed by the man from Tiffany: embroidered satin with birds and insects flitting over a pond edged with bulrushes. A huge gaslight chandelier blazed high overhead, and the private boxes was like purdah kiosks, with lattice fronts. The swells inside could have been doing a jig and waving their wooden legs for all we could see of them. Everyone was dressed in their best. It brought tears to my eyes to see what the theatre could be.

  Just before Loïe’s first dance, every one of the four hundred people in the audience gasped aloud when they turned off the House and the stage lights. It made the hair on the back of my neck go prickly. Some people tittered with the shock of it. That was another invention of Loïe’s: the full blackout.

  The House lights stayed off, and then six spotlights were aimed at Loïe and illuminated. She was revealed, luminous, swathed in curtains of white silk. As she moved, she created a mesmerising spectacle of moving shapes and rhythms with the costume: waves and waves of flowing silk that became shapes and ideas glowing in the dark, a cloud, a flower, a butterfly. The effect of several coloured circles revolving before the light beams bathed Loïe in ever-changing illuminated colour, from a sunrise gold to robin’segg blue, and pink and then gradually violet.

  Stupefied, the House was silent, and then as the dance came to a sudden end and black cloths were thrown over the lights and the theatre was momentarily in complete darkness again. The House lights came up dim, and the audience drowned out the music with endless stomping and roaring. Each of her two dances stopped the show as the audience cheered themselves hoarse, and demanded an encore. Some nights Loïe did each dance three times.

  I can’t tell you how useful that was to some of us.

  Meanwhile, Jim and the Professor were noting her crew of electricians with ‘follow spotlights’ in the audience, in the wings and the balcony boxes and the dress circle. And one under the stage shining a light through a glass panel straight underneath her, who was said to be her brother Fred, for propriety, but I doubt it.

  We went round backstage after the performance, but couldn’t get close to Louise – she was squashed against her dressing table by a mob. I know she saw me through the throng, because our eyes met, and she looked like she was trying to remember where she’d seen me before, but I was shy and scarpered. I didn’t really want to look her in the eye all that much because I already knew I was going to pinch her act and call it mine. On the train back to the Brooklyn boarding house, we all twittered at each other all the way about how to get the costume, and do the lights, and what to call it on the posters.

  Professor Baldwin and Jim clubbed together and sent me to another night and two matinees, and I pinched every gesture off her. A few times I was close enough to hear the thump of the ballet shoes on the stage floor over the waltz the band played, see how her arms moved under the silk, watched her count through twitching lips.

  Before then Skirt dancers taking things artistic tended to wear a big dress with a butterfly painted on it, and flap their arms about for a bit, and bill themselves as a Butterfly Dancer (in case you thought it was a bison). It was music hall. Loïe was Art. (That’s why she needed two dots on her i.)

  The performance transformed her. A short, stocky woman stomping about in a flapping nightie became a sculptural rhapsody, a roiling cloud glowing from within like a religious vision. Lou from Chicago with clumsy feet had become La Loïe, inventor of dreamscape oceans and shells and floral extravaganzas.

  The second time I saw the dance I wat
ched only the silk, not Loïe underneath, and immediately understood what was so enrapturing. If you forgot there was a person inside, you saw shapes of light in constant motion. With the music, and lights, it was something that could make you feel sad, or astonished, or just transport you into a dream. I saw that ‘mesmerise’ wasn’t just a conjurer’s trick or a pretense. You truly believed there was a strange, whirling creature – or a miasma cloud, or a towering calla lily – on stage. You could even forget there was a woman at the heart of the business.

  Under her robe, Loïe appeared to be wearing a one-piece fleshing theatrical body stocking. It was rumoured that some dancers in very low places years later did the Serpentine with nothing on underneath, but that was not for me. Death of cold, I should think.

  Loïe’s costume seemed to be made of hundreds of yards of silk without a seam, though on my third visit I sat close enough to see some joins. I could see she had almost doubled the reach of her arms by holding sticks that when manipulated made the patterns with the costume.

  Her feet looked stompy and ungainly while her meringue dream-clouds whirled above them. Jim sat next to me at that first performance we saw, leaning forward, his jacket smelling of tobacco and rain. I could feel when he began to see that Loïe was signalling the light’s colour changes with her feet. We had worked together so long, Jim and I didn’t always need words to explain to each other what we were thinking. We knew each other’s rhythms, and what the other one found amusing – and as co-conspirators we both knew an act worth nicking when we saw it.

  Within two days we’d found a seamstress to make me the costume – a circle with a hole in it for my head, really, at least sixty square feet of the finest, whitest, lightest silk we could afford. I thought I could do better than Loïe with the presentation, I wouldn’t put on a gorgon face with lips-of-string.