‘Let’s examine this little transaction. Are you religious?’
‘My auntie took me to the synagogue once. There was chanting and candles and men downstairs with beards and funny hats.’
‘So much for your soul. And your talent as an artiste?’
‘What about it?’
‘Ten years’ hard labour I’ve invested in you. And at the end of it you can just about carry a tune and show your legs and bust to advantage. At least you’re not bottom of the bill any more.’
‘I know I’ll never be a real headliner. But what good did it do her? Fifty thousand people at her funeral this morning, there was. Twelve cars full of flowers, there was a model of a stage and her old cock linnet’s cage, with the door open, all done in roses and carnations. And on top of her hearse there was the ebony cane with the diamante top she used for “The Directoire Dress”. Dillon was all on his lonesome in one of the cars, and the crowd booed and groaned at him, the pot-house blackguard. And all the pubs in Golders Green was draped in black –’
‘Well, she was a pretty good customer.’
‘Don’t laugh! I went to see her at the Bedford a few months back. Did I tell you? She looked ancient, although she was only fifty-two. Long yellow teeth, came waddling on to the stage like an old man in drag. “One of the Ruins that Cromwell knocked about a bit” … Her voice was so weak the other artists had to sing along with her. I cried. And the whole bloody audience roared with laughter. They all knew Dillon knocked her about.’
‘Well, I may have my faults, but I don’t beat you. Anyway, why should you worry? You’re young and beautiful and successful.’
‘Now – with you to push and bully me and fight for my contracts. I’m not half as good as her anyway. Dunno why you bother.’
‘You amuse me. Not much does. But you’re not amusing when you’re miserable like this. How can I cheer you up?’
‘Don’t let me get old.’
‘You’re only twenty-five, you silly girl.’
‘And after a few more years like this, working the provincial halls and boozing, I’ll look forty. Don’t let that happen.’
‘How can I stop it?’
‘You can, you know you can. You can do anything.’
‘Pure fantasy. You’re not entirely without talent. Men like you.’
‘Is that a talent?’
‘Most certainly. Would you give up your ha’penny-worth of stardom to stay twenty-five for ever?’
‘’Course I would. But what would you get out of it?’
‘Company. A warm heart in a chilly world.’
‘And what would I have to do?’
‘Very little. Play the eternal ingénue. And, of course, you would have to love me.’
‘I don’t love you, you bastard.’
‘Then your duties should be quite light. Are you sure you really want to go ahead with this?’
‘’Course I do. If it’s a joke it’s a bloody good one. How could I turn it down?’
‘Exactly. Now this won’t hurt.’
‘What the hell are you doing to me now?’
‘Just a prick. Blood’s a very special kind of ink. As they say.’
‘Blood? No! Leo, this isn’t funny any more …’
He leans over me, and there’s blood – or is it red wine? – on the white table-cloth. Red where my pale arm meets the shiny jet beads of my dress. Leo stoops over me with creamy parchment in his hand and makes me sign something. Then he swells until his shadow fills the ceiling, the candles are extinguished and Leo and I disappear in a kind of giant flambé, an explosion of light. As we float away I see George staring up at us, looking very small and puzzled.
Eugenie
A few months later the first accident happens. Leo doesn’t like the stage manager at the Holborn Empire, Gerry, a fat little ginger beer, very good at his job but not much charm about him. He likes to know everything that’s happening backstage, and he keeps asking Leo how his act works. Leo can’t abide questions – after ten years he still hasn’t told me where he was born or where his family is or whether he’s ever been married. Thing about Leo is, you have to handle him carefully, and I do. I reckon he’s been good to me and we still have a great time in bed, so I don’t ask too many questions.
But Gerry keeps asking questions, like how can he do all those tricks without any wires or special lighting effects. One evening before the show I’m in Leo’s dressing-room when Gerry comes in and starts up again. ‘I’ve been thinking about what you said this afternoon, and I’m not happy about it.’ Leo’s just putting on his greasepaint, he’s glued on half his moustachios and one side of his face is all white and red and black. He fixes his eyes on Gerry in the mirror, and I want to warn the poor little sod. ‘It’s simply impossible, what you do.’
‘Are you complaining about Pantoffsky’s act?’ I’m in my Little Dutch Girl costume. My clogs are killing me, but I give him a smile that’s meant to disarm him. ‘Seems to me he gets more applause than any of us.’
‘I’m not denying the audiences like it, but I want an explanation. I’m responsible for what happens in this theatre, and I like to feel I’m in control.’
Leo laughs. I don’t like the sound of that laugh at all, only I have to go on so I leave them to it.
I finish my act and the audience liked me, so I’m high on that hot tingly feeling, like I’ve just made love to five hundred people. I hang around in the wings giggling and gossiping with the other girls. Gerry’s like a bloody sergeant major backstage; he fines us for talking or smoking or drinking. You can tell he’s not here tonight because we’re all having a good time. Then one of the boys needs help shifting the scenery from windmills to Lambeth for the ‘Coster’s Serenade’, and Miss May Mason the Miraculous Living Marionette can’t find her strings, so we start to look for Gerry.
They find him strung up from the flies at the top of the theatre with a wire around his neck and a note stuck to his forehead saying, ‘How did he do it?’ We finish the show, of course. We’re pros after all, but there’s police all over the building and we’re not allowed to leave the theatre.
I’m sitting in my dressing-room, half naked, with my face smothered in cold cream, when there’s a knock and I think it’s Leo being politer than usual. It’s a policeman, plain clothes, so I know he means business. I show him all I’ve got and hope he’ll take advantage of me, give me time to think up a few boomers, but he starts firing questions at me right away. Who is this Great Pantoffsky? What’s his real name? How long have I known him? Was there any bad feeling between him and the deceased? I just have to answer quick as I can, and it’s just as well I don’t know much, but I am shocked. I’m no angel and I’ve seen violence all my life, but murder’s out of my league and I want it to stay there.
I’m shaking when I leave the theatre, and I’m glad George isn’t waiting at the stage door. I wouldn’t want him mixed up in this. I always thought the police were stupid, but when I get to Leo’s rooms in Fitzroy Street at one in the morning they’ve been and gone. Those rooms that once impressed me so much are a pigsty. There’s papers everywhere, and that Turkish rug and the leather armchairs I learnt so much on are all slashed to pieces. The landlady tries to get me to pay for the damage. She chases me downstairs demanding money, and by the time I get home to my room in Gower Street I’m terrified.
The newspapers love it, of course. They’re at the theatre every day, then they find out where I live and wait for me outside my front door, too. Mysterious Murdering Magician’s Floozy. I thought it would be a lark to be famous, but I hate this. Can’t sleep or eat or concentrate, and I fluff and stumble in my act and the management are looking for an excuse to sack me when the show folds anyway. I won’t talk to anybody, and when I do all I say is it was an accident and Leo and I had a purely professional relationship. George turns up at the stage door on my last night, but I can’t face anybody so I pretend I haven’t seen him, go back upstairs, sneak out down the fire escape stairs, go home and lock
myself in my room.
Thing about being with Leo was I never had to be afraid of anything. He always knew what to do and say, how to get money and food and clothes. It takes me a few weeks to realize he really has disappeared, and I don’t know what I feel. Love? I miss him, but I don’t know who it is I’m missing. I’m angry with him for leaving me in the lurch. It’s like Ma all over again, only this time I really am alone. Can’t go back to Auntie Flo, and all I know about Lizzie is she’s gone off to South Africa.
London audiences want musical comedies now, with plots and characters, however absurd. I’ve auditioned for a couple, but I didn’t get the parts. Magicians and charming soprano vocalists are going on tour in the provinces, doing theatres at the ends of piers in summer, and I don’t fancy that. Leo was my agent as well as everything else, so if I’m going to work in the theatre I’ll have to find myself a new agent as well as a new name.
Luckily Binkie’s investments have gone up, so if I can find somewhere cheap to live I won’t need to work, which is, I imagine, the height of glamour; to have my own house abroad, expensive clothes and time and space and servants – the fantasy of the chorus girl who marries a duke only without the nuisance of the duke himself. If Vesta Tilley can become Lady de Frece, why shouldn’t I live it up on the Riviera, too? The only French I know is ‘twiggy voo’ and I’ve never even been to the ‘Naughty Continong’.
I get a passport in the name of Mrs Eugenie Bishop. A widow’s more stylish than an out-of-work chanteuse; all the prettiest women in the twenties are war widows. I find our marriage certificate under my bed. Leo produced it one weekend when we wanted to stay in a stuffy hotel in Cheltenham – but I don’t allow myself to think of him.
I don’t tell anybody I’m leaving the country because I know the police are still pursuing their inquiries and I don’t want them pursuing me. I pack my Louis Vuitton trunk, get a taxi to Victoria and take the boat train late one night. Northern France looks too much like England, so I just keep going south until I get to the Riviera.
Although I’m not exactly the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo I’ve enough to buy new clothes, stay in good hotels and eat wonderfully in restaurants. I soon make friends and learn to flirt in French and Italian. I never knew there was a place like this, where it’s perpetual summer and nobody works. That’s not quite true of course; the fishermen and hoteliers and waiters work hard to pamper the rest of us, guests at a never-ending party. The Riviera is still a string of fishing villages, mellow slabs of colour baking in that golden Mediterranean light. There’s no grey in the sea or the sky or the faces around me; sun and colour go to my head, I gulp beauty down, inhale it, dive into it as I learn to swim in the generous sea that links the jewels of this coast.
For a year I explore, moving from village to village, hardly able to believe my freedom and happiness. One afternoon I take the train to Rapallo, and when I see those ochre, rose, yellow and burnt-sienna houses reflected in the bay I know I want to stay here. I rent a villa in the hills behind the town.
The Villa Ginestra is a crumbling rose-pink building set in the green, rocky hillside studded with its namesake broom. There’s a terrace overlooking the bay, and whenever I look out over my view I see Auntie Flo’s house like a shadow behind the glory of sapphire, turquoise, emerald, yellow and pink. Can’t remember hiring Assunta. I’ve never had a servant before, and she isn’t one really, more of a friend.
If you’re going to eat lotuses, Italy’s the place to do it. I enjoy being Eugenie. That extra syllable raises my head and makes me feel dignified. Italians take people at face value, so when I tell everybody I’ve been a famous music-hall star I become one. My husband was a handsome young officer killed at Ypres. Not so long ago I’d have said ‘Wipers’, but my French and Italian have become fluent and my English is improving, too. Vowels and aitches flow naturally now, and words that would once have defeated me come sailing out of my mouth.
At first I think our paradise is classless, but I soon learn the invisible ropes. At the top there are the kosher aristocrats and the genuine artists whose work they buy. They sit in the same bars and restaurants as me, but I don’t dare talk to them. My friends are flappers and flibbertigibbets and gamblers and drunks, younger sons and divorcees, poets and painters who never quite get around to writing or painting. We have wonderful parties in my villa that start with booze and end up in bed or on the beach.
I avoid the casinos along that coast because my memories of poverty are too vivid to allow me to play with money. But one day Assunta says, ‘You should buy your house, signora.’
‘Can’t afford to.’ My investments have survived the 1929 crash, when so many of my drinking companions disappeared, but my income is barely enough for rent, booze and food.
‘I will show you where money is piled like ripe fruit at the foot of a tree.’ Assunta has a very poetic way of expressing herself. Sometimes I wonder why she doesn’t get a better job. I think she’s joking, but the next afternoon she lays out my green Schiaparelli dress and tells me she’s ordered a car to take us into Monte. On the ravishing drive she sits beside me in her black dress, her black hair drawn back into a bun, her brown, oval face fierce with concentration as if she is drawing all the brilliant colour and energy out of the landscape and into herself.
At the casino I’m nervous and cling to Assunta. I don’t understand the games that whizz and rattle and whisper in the smoky darkness. If I were alone I would run away from this ritual, from the chanting croupier priests and the silent initiates, the radiant and the ruined. Assunta takes my arm and guides me to a long green-baize-covered table where faces are illuminated moons floating amid the shadows. The other women, like me, wear vivid evening dresses, heavy makeup and jewellery. Assunta in her plain dark clothes is almost invisible, like a Bunraku puppet master.
Assunta asks me for ten thousand lire, changes them into chips, piles them in front of me, whispers a number, tells me to back it and push the chips forward. We join in the collective gasp as the roulette wheel spins capriciously. When it stops hers is the only stifled laugh of triumph as the chips are raked towards me.
My passive silence is rewarded with more money than I could have earned in forty years in the feather factory. After a couple of hours she leans over to me and whispers, ‘You have the price of your house. We can go now.’
In the car on the way home she looks exhausted. ‘Congratulations, signora.’
‘But I didn’t do anything.’
‘You won.’
‘No, you did. This money should belong to you. Are you a gambler, Assunta?’
‘Not this time.’
Later that month I buy the Villa Ginestra and also, for Assunta, the cottage on the beach where she lives with Stefano, her fisherman lover.
All this time I miss you, Leo. I don’t know who you are or where you are or even if you’re still alive, but my other lovers – and there are many – can’t replace you. When I think of London it’s you I remember, our love-making and fights and passionate reconciliations. You were never violent with me, and I no longer believe you could have killed poor Gerry. You are the one I talk to in my head, the face I search for in the crowd. You know me better than anybody.
But I don’t miss Lizzie, and when she writes to say that she has returned from South Africa and wants to see me I don’t bother to reply. Her semi-literate note and whining tone remind me of a self I want to obliterate.
You always said it was dangerous to be blind to politics. The Fascist youth parades in Rapallo throughout the twenties and thirties seem as remote as the Changing of the Guard, games played by people in silly costumes. I stay out of the arguments that rage around me over Franco and Hitler and Musso and Stalin and never read newspapers.
I go on ignoring Fascism until the summer of 1939, when it comes to my doorstep in the form of an Italian officer who asks me to use my ‘famous voice’ to broadcast propaganda. Although the officer is handsome I don’t like his script, full of platitudes abou
t love of nation and family. I don’t give a damn about either and object to his bombastic style, so I refuse to cooperate. Nobody here knows I’m Jewish, but I hate their anti-Semitic rants. It’s as if I’ve just woken up after years of sleep-walking. The light musical comedy I thought I was starring in has turned to heavy tragedy, and there are no parts for me. I’m not a bit heroic but I am bloody-minded enough to risk my property, which, I know, will be requisitioned as soon as I leave Italy. I suddenly long to return to London, to find you and my friends, if any of you are still alive. I know George is because I’ve had a couple of letters from him.
If I’m going to return to London I have to decide who will be returning. One night after my bath I stare at myself in the long mirror in my dressing-room. My biological age, forty-two, is about twenty years older than my reflection. I could wear a wig, ageing makeup, dress dowdily, but all these options seem perverse, like a millionaire who refuses to spend any money. For the first time I believe in that bargain I struck with you that night at Giulini’s. I want to enjoy every moment of my eternal youth. So I invent my daughter, Virginia, a shy young thing whose mother has sent her to safety in London. I’ve had enough of glorious isolation. I’ve proved that I can live without you and now I want you again.
Italy is a country of bureaucracy and forged documents, and I have no trouble at all buying a passport for my alter ego.
‘Come with me,’ I say to Assunta as I lean out of the window of the train to hug her goodbye.
‘No, he wouldn’t like that.’
‘Who?’
But she’s shrinking, receding, a waving insect and then a speck of dust in the sunset bathing the town I never expect to see again.
Virginia
The prospect of having to fend for myself in London, of being open to surprises again, is so exciting that I can’t sleep a wink on the train.
Loving Mephistopeles Page 3