Ada

by Kaz Cooke

  Lizzie could play excelophone on my ribs, these days – we could get up a comedy duet and do it in the foyer of the Homeopathic Hospital. Jim’s at the Tivoli now. He’s the stage manager, did I say? And have I ever told you I performed for the King of Siam? Have it your way.

  Lizzie and Jim sometimes can’t get home of a night because they miss the last tram, you see. Of course, Lizzie grew up sleeping backstage, so as long as she isn’t in the paint room being suffocated by vapours she can sleep through marches of Amazons, fortissimo piano, and escaped backstage lions. I think they’re going to make a special effort to be home this evening.

  It isn’t an easy day today, so I’m afraid I’m more drifty-wifty than usual. You don’t have highs and lows with morphia, you know. It shaves off the jolly along with the pain. Just memories and floating and seeing things – some real, some imagined. Words disappear, or jump out of the gloom from childhood. Time goes awobbly.

  Bless you, I’m very careful. They say with an overdose you bring your hands up, and move them like a bobbin-lace maker, as if forming the gestures for Incy Wincy Spider, so I know what to look out for. I used to sing that to the boys under the table, we wasn’t allowed to have a candle under, for fear of fire on the straw mattresses. Did your mother sing it to you? Of course she did.

  Let’s sing it together – oh go on, nobody’s looking. ‘Incy wincy spider, climbing up the spout. Down came the rain, and washed poor Incy out. Pause for pathos, dearie-oh. Aaaand, OUT came the sunshine, and dried up all the rain. And Incy wincy spider climbed out the spout again.’ Up you say? Up, then. Indomitable, that’s the point. But in the end, not very fascinating.

  Leave me with my little blue bottle, Horrie, there’s a dearie-oh. Pop in tomorrow and see if I’m still breathing. If I am I’ll help you examine a lady’s morals and recount the story of a gruesome incident. Up to you.

  I can see you’ve found the right photograph of me, at last. Having Ada spelled out on your front in paste diamonds is a bit of a tell, isn’t it? That brooch is long gone now, perhaps broken down and used for alphabet parts. Professor Baldwin had that Ada pin made for me in Liverpool, said he was relieved I wasn’t called Marguerita-Constancia-the-Third. Would’ve bankrupted him.

  Get a load of me, eh? Look at those eyes. I was putting on a dreamy face like the photographer’s assistant told me, but you can see I’m still wet behind the ears. This was taken in the mid-nineties, after our big successes. My little serene gaze doesn’t see any thunderclouds in the future. That’s a blessing, anyway.

  It’s funny, when you’re going along living in yourself you don’t think you’re pretty. Not when everyone calls you piquant. But if you have an aide-mémoire like this photograph, you can see the evidence – I was pretty. Or at least I didn’t frighten the horses. It turns out that everyone young is beautiful, Horrie. You’re rather handsome, with or without whiskers, you know. Get a photograph taken before the year is out, so when you’re fifty you can look back and see your blazing beauty.

  To tell you the truth it wears a bit after a while, the way they always review a lady’s looks whether you’re juggling barrels or singing a song. I was a very good dancer – nimble and graceful, and a quick study. I was mostly reviewed for my looks. My act was reviewed as if it had whirled itself into existence without any help. The dance was ‘luminous and breathtaking’. The dancing was rarely mentioned.

  Let me look at myself in this picture. Too much chin as usual but I think with the feathers and the bow and the hair all tong-tortured, I’m getting away with it. These days my hair’s as straight as the mane on a fairground pony, though taffled and knotty at the back by too much lying on the pillow. Looks like it’s been cut with a knife and fork.

  I remember the day the photograph was taken. It was at the Talma Studios in Melbourne, in Buxton’s Building, opposite the Town Hall. They could put you in front of a backdrop and make you look in the pink – or in Italy, if necessary. The picture was to be for my postcards, for the children to sell at intermission and after the show. Tom had come back with us to Australia, and had learned a cockney sales patter from Harry. ‘ ’Ow about a pitcher of Ada Delroy’s loverly boat-race? ’Ere, mate, a keepsake for your hinside pocket?’ Lizzie sold half as many as Cissie: she would thrust a photograph of me into a chap’s face and look accusing, whereas Cissie would pretend they wasn’t allowed to see it unless they gave her a sixpence. ‘Ooh, I can’t show it ye. It’s far too beautiful, sir. It’s worth every penny. Oh, all right, have a peek.’

  I walked down from the Vic Pal to the studio with Under-the- Table Charles. He was about sixteen by then, had come out to learn the lights and props. He would rather have designed the posters, but who could make a living from that on the road? It had been a fearful hot night and the pale stone blocks of the Town Hall was still radiating heat held from the day before. I slipped a glove over Charles’s forearm to make him feel manly: he was eager to be a grown-up chaperone for me.

  Cable trams were being hauled up Collins Street. A red one was stopped right in front of us, in the centre of the road, the open sides of both cars presenting little rows of ladies in their tight corset-shapes, sprouting giant sleeves and wide picture hats. ‘They’re like rows of little birds on perches, ain’t they?’ said Charley. ‘I should like to paint them.’

  A lone council water tanker followed the tram up, against a nasty hot wind, drawn by one horse and a cross-looking man spraying his hose to subdue the tangy, gritty miasma of macadam powder and dry horse dung. It was hard to decide what was worse on Melbourne streets – summer dust or the winter slurry of horse mess and rain.

  The drooping taxi horses at the Hansom rank looked like they’d rather lie down and die than take you to the seaside. It was so still you could catch a hum here and there from all the telegraph wires strung high on the espaliered poles up and down the boulevard. Charley and I usually would pretend to be the voices but today Charley was being all grown up on official Company business, while Jim was doing the accounts and training Under-the-Table James junior to be our new advance man.

  Poor love, young James arrived expecting to be finally Eldest Son in Charge of Something, and so he was, but as Lizzie was indispensable companion and excelophone soloist and understudy for Serpentining and Mahatma-ing in an emergency, he was soon sent off again on his own to travel ahead of us, booking theatres and lodgings, and buttering up newspaper editors. (He used his middle name, Rickards, to some effect in that job, did Jim junior.) Still, there’s something to be said for not having a boss looking over your shoulder. What I wouldn’t have given in those days to get into a pair of trousers and stride off for parts unknown. The grass is always greener, Horrie. Charley didn’t want to change the bulbs on a Magic Lantern, either.

  On the way to the photographer’s studio, we stopped before the window of Buxton’s art supplies shop in Swanston Street so Charley could have a longing look at the yellows with the beauteous names – gamboge, ochre, chrome, citrine, orpiment, antimony and cadmium – all fanned out with the big tube of lead white in the middle.

  In an instant, a walnut face was thrust between us – it was Mary Scully – do you remember the poor debauched old match-seller with a face like a crumpled newspaper page, who had the Town Hall corner? She tugged on Charley’s elbow. ‘Here, Mary,’ he pulled his arm away. He dropped thrippence into her curled hand.

  Sixty years of her hard life showed on her face, in all the nicks and long, grimy furrows that made her look 103. Mary had been in the papers on and off for years for petty theft, and drunkenness and living in a disorderly house. Did she ever recognise entering fashionable Buxton’s a girl from years ago in the characterless trade a few blocks north? A gussied-up former flash-girl who’d had a change in fortune, perhaps walking with an attentive husband and a trotting child? If she did, then Mary wouldn’t give her away, I thought. Mary would let her be. She’d think, good luck to you, duck.

  Thankfully she’d taken a shine to us, and thanked Charley fo
r the thrippence. ‘There now, Gawd bless. You lovelies enjoy yer outing. What a hat, miss.’

  We were lucky. A flash of colour caught Mary’s eye: a gaggle of women coming out of the Town Hall, in shades of nasturtium yellow and rich blue, enough feathers on their hats to clothe a herd of ostriches. Hat trimmings whipped about wildly in the dirty swirls and gusts, guipure and tulle flying out to four-yard lengths, a silk rose detaching itself and bowling off towards Hosie’s Baths. The ladies held onto their hats and shrieked through their leprous, lace-pattern veils. A liveried doorman in a top hat was trying to gather all their flyaways and load them into a carriage with a coat of arms on the doors drawn by two matching greys.

  ‘Lady Mayoress my fat arrrse!’ screeched Mary, clear across the street. ‘Yer a ghastly little piece, y’are! Like a collie dog with a fruit-boat on yer head! Your mother is a danger-woman and I’ve got her secrets in my pocket!’

  The ladies pulled down a blind inside the carriage. Mary Scully was not discouraged. ‘Youuuuu . . . cat-faced slangwhanger!’ she concluded, in triumph. The driver whipped off down towards Prince’s Bridge, the Mayor’s wife no doubt sitting rigid with affront on the bench seat.

  Mary winked at us, and we made our escape. ‘I say, cat-faced slangwhanger,’ Charley said admiringly, writing it down in a notebook as we walked.

  In the studio there was a little dressing area with a folding screen, camera tripods with black capes out the back for the photographers to hide under, big gaslights on swinging pipe-arms, rolled-up backdrops and rugs standing in one corner, ferns in urns, armchairs, plaster plinths, and a dressing table near the windows fronting the street.

  A small, wide woman in bombazine black turned from a window, showing a raw red face and scraped-back hair in a bun and an all-business smile.

  ‘Righto, let’s get cracking. I’m Mrs H. We’re supposed to be doing a Mr Sayles on the Rickards account before you,’ she said, examining us. ‘But that particular flash dude is nowhere to be found. Our afternoon programme is away in the wind and a thundering ’orde of dumbbell fancyin’ gentlemen in their unmentionables next door taking their time is not helping. You sit here, dear, and give yourself a pinch.’

  I plonked myself down at the dressing table on a low stool and took out my Horton’s Pills tin that I used to keep my burned cork and a couple of matchsticks in. I blacked up my eyelashes a little bit and pinched my cheeks until they pinked. From the inside pocket of his jacket Charles handed me a small, thick leather baton. I unrolled it and drew out the paste butterfly pins, and my name brooch, and the chain with the big fat diamond drop pendant that was given to me by the Nabob of Udaipur. Oh, have it your way. A lovely bit of tat Professor Baldwin bought on the Colombo docks. I’d borrowed the sliver-moon pin from Alice, and the ‘diamond’ neck circlet of little gems from Lillie May. They glinted away in their foil backing.

  To tell you the truth Horace, at that moment I was feeling very pleased and rather sure of myself. Professor Baldwin had polished up my words and taught me how to talk myself up. I was the star of my own company, and the Premier Serpentine dancer in the Southern Hemisphere as long as Loïe didn’t develop a love for sailing. All the girls at the Tivoli thought I was a celebrity: I’d been the star of a smash success panto in the large halls of North England two years running. Harry had offered me a solo career though I couldn’t see myself clear, and we had some of the Under-the-Table Boys back. And now here I was, lit up with sparkles like a Brighton pier for Christmas, and having myself photographed for the purposes of idol-worship. Not bad, eh?

  Just between you and me, I was looking forward to having mashers and goldfish mooning over my postcard picture, as long as I didn’t have to do much about it. I didn’t mind a flirty fangle every now and again, but I was a busy woman, with responsibilities, and a new antipodean tour to begin.

  ‘Ooh very nice, dearie,’ approved Mrs H, fiddling with the ostrich feathers on my hat. ‘I always say, consult the looking glass and if you can manage it, put something else on.’ She arranged me on a hard chair facing the window, in front of a plain backdrop. A taciturn photographer came over and held me by the chin. He turned my head so that my higher eye was closest to the camera (he said), then retreated to his equipment.

  ‘Not chin up, lovey,’ said Mrs H, firmly. ‘If you try to hide yer chin, you invary-ably end up with three of ’em! Hold it out and down. Put all your back against the chair. You don’t want to look as thick as a stone wall. Gaze into the distance like you’re remembering lost love.’

  Mrs H raised her voice for the photographer, who’d thrust his head under his bustle: ‘Right. Herbert! Head ’n’ shoulders, postcard size. With a hint of the far forevers.’ She nodded at me. ‘Off we go. Stay still and think of custard, on my count of three . . .’

  I forgot to put my chin down but stared soulfully up at a swaying cobweb in the corner. On ‘two’, there was a snatch of a tune outside the door. I knew that whistle and I think I had a skerrick of a smile because it meant Irving was about to arrive late as ever, sporting diamanté dicky buttons and emitting almost visible vapours of cologne water. He strolled in and bent down, using his boater to brush the white road dust from his shins, like it was a cloud of hawthorn blossoms.

  The photographer pulled out the plate with my face on it from the side of the camera, and handed it to a boy who scurried off to the back rooms.

  ‘Next!’ bawled another lad. Two boys shot in and began winding down another backdrop and replacing my chair with a fish fern on a pedestal.

  ‘Now, you look just like sunshine on a rainy day, Mrs H, but you got to make me look good, now, you hear?’ Irving said. ‘I need to be tall, fine and ready for my pay. Lend us a shilling, would you Ada?’ he asked.

  ‘Alright, Irv, stand up next to the greenery,’ Mrs H instructed him. ‘Herbert!’ she called. ‘This is Mr Irving Sayles, black as a coal scuttle, so adjust yerself. We shall want him majestic. Or dignified, I don’t mind which.’ Then to Irving: ‘Lean on your stick, lovely, and set your boater back so we can get some light on you.’ I’ve got that picture somewhere, cut from The Sportsman. It’s not a very good printing. But better than the cruel caricatures they used to do of him for the Illustrateds. They always drew him as a terrible blackface minstrel with clacking lips. His Edith burned the newspapers when she saw them so he wouldn’t see.

  When that photo of me was taken, Harry was sailing to England and America to book tens of thousands of pounds worth of talent for the first two years of his Melbourne and Sydney theatres. And only three years before Jim had wired twenty-five pounds from Scotland to Harry to tide over him and Kate, isn’t that funny? And now Harry’s got Tivolis in every capital city and circuit deals in New Zealand, and Heaven knows how much nicker in the bank – thousands, I suppose. And a house in England. And Canonbury, their mansion in Sydney with a front hall that’s thirty feet long and a parlour with ivory and gold wallpapering and there is a sixhorse stable, and a billiards room and a cigar cabinet and servants’ quarters, and Harry’s dressing-room stuffed with all his fineries: the eye-popping suits, silk ties and diamond pins.

  I don’t want to hammer on about it, Horrie, but just have a look at me in this picture in my own glad rags, would you? All the finery I owned in the world, I’ve got on in that picture. There I sit under a fountain of feathers, with no notion of what was coming. Now we’ve come to it.

  Here’s the part of the story Marzella never tells. There’s no correct answer to the question: ‘What ought a girl do, if she’s going to have a babby and she hasn’t got a husband?’

  That’s a terrible feeling for a girl to have. You could go to an opium room in the lanes between Bourke and Lonsdale streets and try to block it out of your mind. You could have the baby and knock on the door of an asylum for fallen women when you were too big to hide it any more and they’d make you feel like muck under their boots. They’d only take you if it was your first, and you had no choice in where it went afterwards.

  The
Salvie Army and the Catholics both made money out of taking babies from girls and replacing them with toffs’ laundry for the girls to wash: there was a lesson there about stains. And you wouldn’t come out of the convent yourself, people said, once you were in. Whereas the Salvies tended to throw you out as soon as you were two people again instead of one. Your baby went one road to an orphanage or an industrial school and you went the other to make a living, such as you could.

  And there was the other way out. Even after dead girls turn up hither and yonder in lanes and the river they couldn’t prove it was the operation that killed her, so the doctors didn’t get gaoled, customarily. Even if she bled to death a day later in a boarding house box-room. I know we’re not supposed to talk about it but it doesn’t matter for me anymore, I’m on the way out, in any case.

  You can’t truly call all that choices, can you? It’s a high price to be paid for a bit of firkytoodle. ‘A victim of her own lawless lust’, The Age called it the other day. Lawless lust, indeed. I know more than one girl who was cruelly forced or who believed the wrong promises.

  I’ll tell you who I’ve no time for, Horace. Rudyard bloody Kipling. Serves him right. Have you seen this poem that’s in all the papers this week – something about the Native Born in which he admires the colonists. Palaver, palaver, palaver about raising a glass to the men born in Australia, and – give me The Argus from yesterday . . . yes, here.