Family Chorus

by Claire Rayner

  ‘But —’ she began and then swallowed and tried again. ‘Me in a West End tea shop! I can’t imagine it.’

  ‘In the office, you understand,’ he said reassuringly. ‘I told you, I got all the pretty girls I want servin’ in the place. Pretty girls you can get anywhere, but a good Yiddisher kopf is somethin’ else. So you’ll try?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, and tried not to care about the pretty girl she wasn’t. It shouldn’t hurt any more, not after so many years of being as she was, but it still did. A little. Especially somehow, with Alex Lazar —

  She stood up, and bobbed her head at him a little awkwardly. ‘There’s just one thing. My — Fanny and Dave. You won’t say nothing to them?’

  ‘Are you mad? I told you! I got it in for that fella, and if I can do him down by doin’ you good it makes me feel marvellous! I ain’t the vindictive type, you understand, Bessie. Me, I’m an easy-goin’ fella. Like to do business sharp, I grant you, but never nasty. That’s why I couldn’t do nothin’ to Dave Fox when he did me. But now — this is different! I make life easy for you, I make it tricky for Fanny and Dave Fox — I like it, I like it! So listen, I’ll go see your Madame Gansella, if you like, but let me advise you. Let me give you a sub against the job. I got an instinct about people, and you’re goin’ to be all right, I reckon. I won’t lose if I advance you a bob or two for the old B. And it don’t do to let that one think she’s doin’ you any favours. She’s a bit of a villain, in her own way. No, don’t look like that! She teaches the kids fine, but when it comes to money she looks after number one, first, second and third. With Lenny Ganz for a husband, believe me, she’s got to. Better she doesn’t know you’re a bit strapped for the ready. I’ll see to it she’s paid, all right? Good. Now, go already, doll. I got work to do. Come here tomorrow, about half past two, I’ll take you up to the Lane, get you the uniform and that, and after we’ll go see the tea shop. I reckon we’re in business together, eh? And Dave Fox’ll never know —’

  And he laughed and slapped his knees again as Bessie, more than a little bemused, went out. She could hear him laughing all the way down the stairs.

  7

  ‘MADAME POPPY GANSELLA’s JUVENILE JOLLITIES!’ screamed the poster, in huge scarlet letters. ‘THE SHOW OF THE SEASON! THE WONDER OF THE AGE! DO NOT MISS THIS!!!’ and then in a different type face, but still as urgently, ‘EVERY CHILD AN ARTISTE — EVERY ARTISTE A CHILD!’ And finally in neat squared letters the name of every one of them. Baby Myrtle Levy. Little Doris Finer. Wee Lily Lassman. Sweet Maisie Kupfer. Young Joel Josephs. Master Sidney Soutar. David and Daniel the Tannenbaum Twins. And right at the bottom, in a line of its own, Lovely Alexandra Ascher and Darling Ambrose Asquith, a Symphony in Dance.

  ‘Doesn’t it look lovely, Alf?’ she said, tucking her hand under his elbow and squeezing his arm, and he tightened his biceps against her grip so that her hand was caught warmly against his body. It felt lovely there and she held on tightly, aware of his touch all down her side and hoping he wouldn’t notice how unevenly she was breathing, as the faint clouds of water vapour appeared in the bitter November air from her slightly parted lips.

  ‘I’d like it better if they’d used a different size of lettering for us,’ he said judiciously. ‘I mean, we’re the stars of the show, aren’t we? We ought to get the best billing.’

  ‘We have,’ she said. ‘I mean, right at the bottom, on a line by ourselves. And your name looks deevy. Ambrose As-quith! I mean, it’s a bit of a change from Alfie Abrahams. Very posh —’

  ‘Yours is too!’ he said. ‘Mine’s no different —’

  ‘But mine’s real —’ and she giggled. ‘I think you were very clever to have thought of it. Much better to choose a new one than to get stuck with the one you’ve always had. Alfie, shall we —’

  ‘If I’m going to be called it on the bills I might as well use it,’ he said. ‘I don’t answer to Alfie any more. If you say it I shall pretend you don’t exist. Like this —’ He pulled away from her and moved towards the billboard and leaned against it, one leg crossed over the other so that the toe tip of his highly polished shoe rested on the pavement with the trouser leg slightly lifted to display his cream-coloured spats, while his rabbit fur-collared overcoat fell open negligently to display his blindingly white shirt and sleekly cut suit. He looked magnificent and a good deal older than his seventeen years, and was well aware of it as he stared into the middle distance over her head with an air of deeply casual un-awareness of anyone else around him. His hair, still showing that deep red tinge in spite of the heavy application of oil he had used to sleek it down, gleamed in the dull morning light. She sighed with pleasure as she looked at him, and then giggled again.

  ‘That pigeon’s going to dollop on you,’ she said conversationally, and at once he ducked awkwardly, looking fearfully above his head. She skipped a few steps towards him, pointing her finger at him and crowing until he too had to join in.

  ‘Bleedin’ posh you are, talking that way!’ he said, and made a mock punching movement at her. ‘Ladies — real ones — never talk about things like that.’

  ‘And thank God I’m no lady, this is no lady, officer, this is my partner — listen — Alf — Ambrose, all right, all right, Ambrose — let’s go and have some tea and toast somewhere. I’m flush this week. I’ll stand you.’

  He shook his head. ‘Can’t. Got to go and get some gear for the old B. She’s got some shoes on order at Gamba’s. Gave me a tanner for my bus fare for once, mean old cow. I’d better go.’

  ‘I’ll come with,’ she said and again tucked her arm into his elbow and sparkled up at him. She was wearing one of the newest of deep-brimmed hats, surmounted with a pair of glossy blackbirds’ wings sweeping high into the air, and the heavy fringe of her exceedingly fashionably bobbed hair shone blackly beneath them with an equal gleam. She had chosen the hat very carefully this morning, hoping she would be out with him, and had spent half an hour deliberating over which of her new outfits to wear. The Russian tunic in crimson felt to be worn over the black hobbled skirt? Or the coat with the even more closely hobbled skirt in dark brown to be worn under a matching frock trimmed with braid? She had settled at last for the deep blue suit with the cutaway fronts and the big rabbit fur muff with the almost-ermine tails.

  It dangled now from one gloved hand, the tails trailing elegantly against her black-stockinged legs, and she felt she looked almost as superb as Alfie. It had been a battle to persuade Bessie to let her have such fashionable clothes; if Bessie had had her way, Lexie would still be wearing short white frocks and have her hair down her back, as befitted people of her age — not quite thirteen. But Lexie had been determined to look as much like her idol, Irene Castle, as possible. Every picture of her published in the penny papers she cut out and thrust under Bessie’s nose; every piece of gossip about ‘those great American dancers, Irene and Vernon Castle’ that she could cull from the columns she brought home, and in the end Bessie had relented, as she always did these days, now that Lexie had learned the trick of getting her own way. And today she was exultant to have got it over her clothes. Only in an outfit as splendid as this could she possibly walk along the street beside someone as elegant and smart as Alfie. No, Ambrose, drat it; it would take a little time to get used to his change of name.

  ‘You’ll have to pay for yourself then,’ he said as he turned away from the billboard outside the Empire Theatre and began to walk along towards the bus stop at the end of Mare Street. ‘I’m skint —’

  ‘You always are,’ she said joyously, and fell into step beside him. He hadn’t said no, he hadn’t said no! It was never easy to judge his mood; all morning as she had dressed in her small room at the back of the flat in Victoria Park Road, overlooking the sooty laurels and shabby grass of the park, she had hoped and planned and hoped again, going through all the rituals she used to comfort herself, like setting all the things on her dressing table in perfect alignment, and counting backwards from a hundred without making a mist
ake as she brushed her hair. And it had worked. Here she was now walking along Mare Street with him, going up to the West End. Wonderful!

  It hadn’t been so wonderful dealing with Bessie, though. She’d been awful for weeks now, ever since Madame G. had said they were going on a real tour, outside London and not just around the local Empires and Hippodromes doing cod talent shows. They were going to be the real thing, at last, now that it was properly legal. All the years of pretending they were amateurs because children under twelve couldn’t work professionally for the hours the show needed, the way they’d had to when she started Juvenile Jollities five years ago, had been a bit boring, compared with what was to come, and Lexie had been bursting with the excitement of it when she had come home to tell Bessie all about it, early in September.

  ‘Leeds, Madame G. says! And Glasgow and Liverpool — and, oh I don’t know — Cardiff, and all over the place. Trains and sometimes we’ll have to have our own charabanc to go across country and she’s got great big new skips and everything. I’m going to be a topliner, she says, with Alfie, and he’s going to have a new name, to make it look good on the bills, and I’m going to have all my name and not Lexie any more and she says I’ve got to have new costumes and she’ll tell you where to go for them and everything —’

  ‘Oh yes?’ Bessie had said, as she slapped Lexie’s dinner on the table in front of her. ‘And who’s going to pay for these new costumes, tell me that?’

  Lexie had stared at her, startled. ‘What’s the matter, Bessie? Don’t you want me to go? It’s a marvellous opportunity! I’ll get seen all over the country! And I’m going to have three speciality numbers and I’m going to sing and everything! What are you looking so miserable about?’

  ‘On the road,’ Bessie said after a moment. ‘It sounds awful. Racketing about — we’d be better finding you a new teacher —’

  And then the fight had started; Bessie getting more and more mulish, as she always did when they had an argument, and Lexie getting more and more determined to do it her way. At first she hadn’t been all that excited about leaving London, not after listening to the Tannenbaum twins talking knowledgeably about it, for they had had experience, been on the road for years, they said loftily, long before they joined Madame G.’s soppy company. They’d made it all sound very dreary, with cold digs, if you were lucky enough to get digs at all and didn’t have to sleep in the chara or on the trains, and nowhere to go when you weren’t working and people getting on each other’s nerves all the time; but then Alfie had lifted his head and said shortly that they were talking rubbish — that he was going to have a marvellous time, so shut up. And at once she had known that she too would have a marvellous time. On the Road. It sounded wonderful and she visualized herself tramping along busy roads side by side with Alfie as people watched and admired them go by. It was lovely.

  And now here was Bessie making a fuss, going on about who would look after her and who would do her laundry and see to it she got enough to eat, and slept properly, and at once Lexie had flared back at her, ‘I can manage! I manage now when you’re at your damned tea shop late, don’t I? I’m not helpless, you know!’ And then Bessie had gone white and quiet the way she always did when Lexie said anything about the time she had to spend in the flat on her own while Bessie was working at Alex Lazar’s office, and then had started to cry so that her nose went red and her eyes got puffy, and Lexie hated that. It meant she had to go and hug her and make a fuss of her and wheedle her happy again and that was miserable. But it was her own fault; she knew the right way to get what she wanted; she’d learned, painfully, not to be too direct, not to say straight out what it was she was after, but this time she’d been so excited, she’d done it wrong. Her own fault, she told herself as she hugged the sniffing Bessie, her own fault.

  In the early days of living here in Victoria Park Road, in a really nice flat with a bedroom for each of them as well as a living room and a kitchen and only one other family sharing the bathroom, she had had a different way of controlling Bessie when she got difficult. She just had to cry and, if that didn’t work, say she wanted to go to live at Auntie Fanny’s, and at once Bessie would come round. But that had been before the night that Alex Lazar had been there, and taught her better.

  There had been a fight that night too, over Madame G. She had told Bessie that Lexie needed more rehearsal time and said she should let her stay away from school even more than she did — and heaven knew she missed enough one way and another — for after all her real future lay in the theatre, but Bessie had for once put down her foot firmly.

  ‘No,’ she’d said, when Lexie pleaded with her because she found school boring anyway. ‘No. You’ve got to be properly educated as well as a dancer. Not enough, just to dance. Look at me, if you want to see why. Here I am, running Mr Lazar’s office and all because I was good at arithmetic at school —’

  ‘I hate school, I hate arithmetic, I hate everything,’ Lexie had screamed at her. ‘I’ll stay away from school even if you send me. I’ll run away, I won’t do nothing even if I’m there — and I’ll tell Auntie Fanny you won’t let me do more rehearsals and she’ll let me —’

  She had paid no attention to Alex Lazar sitting at the table in the middle of the living room with a pile of ledgers and some cash in front of him. He did that frequently, when he had some special reason not to want the people around the tea shop to know what he was doing. Bessie he could trust, of course; working in her place was like working in his own, only better, because she was there to sort things out for him if he needed her. So he often came to Victoria Park Road to do. the figures with Bessie, and on this day when Lexie had come bursting in she had just nodded at him the way she usually did, just accepting him as part of the furniture and then forgetting he was there, launching into her fight with Bessie over rehearsal time with all the energy she had.

  But he had not done as he usually did, and got on with his own affairs. He had lifted his face from his ledgers and stared at her as she stood there in the middle of the room, her fists clenched with passion and her face white as she went on and on at Bessie, and after a moment he had got to his feet and gone over to stand beside her, looking down at her.

  After a moment she had faltered and stopped, staring up at him and then at Bessie sitting pale and tense at the table, and then back at him again.

  ‘Listen, dolly, I don’t go in for interfering in what ain’t my business. I got enough business of my own to keep me busy. But I don’t reckon to sit here and listen to you going on at your sister this way, not when she’s done so much for you. Here’s you, nine years old and —’

  ‘I’m ten!’ she had flared at him. ‘I’m ten! I’m old enough to know what I want and —’

  ‘You’re old enough to get your tochus tanned, young lady!’ he’d roared then and Bessie had jumped up, protesting, but he’d shaken his head at her. ‘No you don’t, Bessie. Listen, you’re a great office manageress. Getting you to do my books was the best thing I ever did, but bring up a child! — you shouldn’t know from herring, you’re so terrible! You ought to meet my sister-in-law Minnie, you want to know how to bring up a child! One word but of place and they go flying, her lot — and this one here could do with a bit of the same!’

  ‘No, Mr Lazar, please —’ Bessie said. ‘Don’t shout at her. I can’t stand it if you shout at her.’

  ‘So what are you going to do? Let her shout at you for fear I should shout at her? Pfui! You’re a crazy woman, you know that, to let the kid behave this way! It ain’t good for her — you ought to know better —’

  And then Lexie had blinked, because after a moment Bessie had said amazingly, ‘I know,’ and then sat down and stared miserably at Lexie. ‘I know. But what can I do, Mr Lazar? She knows how to upset me. What can I do?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what you do, Bessie,’ Alex Lazar had said, going back to the table and sitting down. ‘You call this little madam’s bluff, that’s what you do. So you want to back to your Auntie Fanny? Get h
er to spoil you? So, go already. Here — I’ll give you your bus fare —’ he had reached into his pocket and pulled out a sixpence and set it down on the red plush tablecloth in front of him.

  ‘Mr Lazar!’ Bessie had cried, but he had shaken his head at her. ‘Go already, dolly,’ he’d said genially to Lexie. ‘You’ve still got your coat on, still got your hat on, here’s the money — go to your Auntie Fanny. See if she’ll pay for your dancing lessons, work all the hours God gives to take care of you the way Bessie does. See if she’ll get her Dave to invest his money in your dancing school the way I do — I do it to please your sister Bessie, and you might as well know it. But I don’t do it no more if you go to Fanny, of course. She can take over the business with Madame G. and her debts. If she won’t, o’ course, no more Madame G. dancing school. Still, that won’t worry us, will it, Bessie? We’ll have no worries. You’ll be at Fanny and Dave’s —’

  Lexie had stood stock still in the middle of the room, staring at him, and then as what he was saying slid into her mind properly the tears started, choking hot tears, and a sick feeling of misery. Until now it had been so easy getting her own way; all she had to do was say she was going to leave and Bessie would crumble. But now Bessie sat there beside Alex Lazar looking at her with her face quite blank and no sign of any of the usual confusion that Lexie could read like a book and which always meant she had succeeded. She had just sat and looked at her, and after a long moment Lexie had turned round and gone to her bedroom to take off her coat and sit on her bed and cry. There was nothing else she could do.

  He had come to sit on her bed beside her before he left, and for a moment she’d wanted to shout at him and hit out at him and hurt him, but he was a very big man, so much bigger than Bessie, so all she could do was thrust out her lower lip and sit and stare at the floor and say and do nothing.