by CL Skelton
She turned and looked lovingly towards him, a look that in its natural simplicity spoke touchingly of utter, almost childish devotion and disgusted her mother whenever she saw it. Albert Chandler had changed very little since the day, in the early twenties, when he and Maud had first met. That fact summed up both his personality and his career, and was at once both a compliment to his enduring qualities and a criticism of his inability to adapt.
He dressed and groomed his hair in precisely the fashion he had done when first working in the West End. The dinner-suit he wore was twenty years old, at least. He had a newer one, but it hung in his wardrobe. He preferred this, with its wide lapels and flapping trouser-legs tumbling in dusty black profusion over his polished black shoes.
‘Too tight,’ he always proclaimed of newer garments. ‘Damned uncomfortable. Can’t get a tailor who can cut a decent pair of trousers any more.’
Maud would smile; undoubtedly comfort was part of his reason, but nostalgia was more of it. To Albert Chandler, those bright and glorious days between the wars, when women were all ladies, men all gentlemen, and music a sweet soothing honey of horn and strings, comprised an unsurpassable halcyon era. Nothing after would ever match it. He still damped his hair and brushed it slickly back from his forehead, though it was too thin and too grey to create that smooth shining black cap, reflecting the lights of the stage like patent leather, that once it had been. He still wore the brisk little pencil moustache that no one ever noticed, but without which his face would have been utterly different, and infinitely more modern. When he dressed for day, no matter how informal a day, he wore a three-piece suit, a cashmere scarf and a belted woollen greatcoat which he had to be persuaded to discard even in the Californian heat. A kindly columnist in Hollywood had once said of him, ‘Wherever he goes, we really know that Albert Chandler is still gathering lilacs down an English lane.’ The columnist had, of course, known Albert well. Anyone who knew Albert, from his bandsmen to the favoured members of his audience, to all manner of the theatrical press, could be nothing but kind. He was probably the best-liked man in his profession, a profession not renowned for brotherly affection. But not everyone knew Albert, and not every columnist was kind.
Unkindest of all were audiences, those crowds of restless, unforgiving people, with no memories. Who was there in the West Coast sunshine who knew the Café de Paris, the Piccadilly Hotel, the Dorchester, the Grosvenor House? Who recalled Jack Johnson, Lew Stone and Bert Ambrose? Who had huddled over a wireless in a darkened British provincial living-room to catch the tinny translation of the heartsongs of the West End? Albert did not blame them. How could they miss what they’d never known? How could they not be seduced away by the bewitchment of black jazz, the American subtleties of swing?
But Albert Chandler remembered, and his memories, sweet and unrelenting, isolated him further, day by day, from his audiences until one day, recently, he had discovered they had nothing left in common. Like partners in a marriage gone slowly, slowly sour, they were left with nothing but a tired, baffled dismay. Albert was honest. He did not blame them but himself. He knew his music was ending even before he left London at the end of the war. It was ending, in a way, before the war ever began. The music of the dance bands had grown up with Albert Chandler, shared with him its heady prime and, by the end of the 1930s, was feeling already the chill of middle-age. He had been with it as a young trumpeter with the Savoy Orpheans. He had gone on to lead his own band, and broadened his fame by broadcasting from hotel ballrooms on the radio waves of the youthful British Broadcasting Corporation. He branched out into recording, coaxing from his ten skilled musicians. The precision and accuracy required to produce three uninterrupted flawless minutes for the wax disc and posterity. Later there were more musicians, bigger bands. Later there was Variety, as well as the hotel ballrooms and the clubs. The money was good and the Chandlers lived well. But even then, when the nightly symphony of clubland, the endless stream of dreamy ladies in silk frocks and gentlemen in monochrome perfection, seemed as eternal as London itself, change was whispered for those who would listen.
Albert found it hard to listen. He went with others of his profession to The Nest in Kingly Street, for after-hours jam sessions with black musicians, but Albert was not one who fell under their spell. He listened politely, and politely went away. Perhaps, he thought, he was simply too polite. Music, dance music, to Albert Chandler was always sweet, perfumed and rustling like silk. He had no heart for the sweaty gusto of jazz, no soul for the disturbing rhythms of swing. He was, he admitted once, just too utterly English for it all, and he went on quietly playing his own kind of music as long as anyone would listen. But the big bands were doomed. They’d thrown their lot in with Variety, topping the bills from the Palladium to Prague, but Variety had grabbed them for the same reason it clutched at the strippers and the dirty-mouthed comics: it was on the way down. The big bands were hitching a free ride to oblivion. Albert saw it coming but could not avoid it. He saw, too, the coming of the war and, with it, the snatching away of his best musicians one by one into the Forces. That he weathered, bringing old friends out of retirement and back on the boards, drying out those virtuosi of the whisky glass for a last swan song. What Albert could not predict was the fickle discovery of their former employers, club managers, hotel owners, proprietors of the big dance halls that, as in wartime, any band would now do. The big names meant nothing any more, and the big money was not to be had. For the very best, and Albert Chandler’s Band was one of the very best, it did not at first matter. He had a season, post-war, in the West End. The dancers were thinner on the floor, the lavish tips that had once been thrust into his hand with requests for favourite numbers were no more, the adulation of the audience only a memory. But he was in work. He adapted as much as he could. He added a vocalist, a pretty girl with a rich throaty voice and, when an invitation to tour the States appeared, he took it up, hoping to find in a new country the success now fleeing him in the old. It was a forlorn hope. He ended up in California with a string of half-empty houses behind him, a drunken tour manager, and a group of musicians in virtual revolt. But there, in a casual meeting at a party, he made the contact that had carried him through the last five years. An undistinguished gentleman approached him, glass in hand, and commented about a particular song in the repertoire of the Band. Albert thanked him for his appreciation. The man wandered off. He returned later and mentioned the song again. Albert thanked him again, and once more he ambled away. It was only on their third encounter in the same crowded room that the man had ventured to ask the composer. Albert explained that the song was his own. It was a piece of information he would never have thought to volunteer. For a trumpeter, Albert was exceedingly reluctant to blow his own horn. Too English to survive.
This time, however, he did survive. The gentleman was a film director. He was looking for theme music. He thought perhaps that song, some variations, if Albert had the time. Albert had more time than he cared to think about, and less money. He sat up all night and wrote the score. The little tune the director had fancied became in the end his world famous ‘Theme for a Lonely Woman’. They lived off it still.
Albert had often wondered what would have happened had that chance meeting, and the new world of film scoring that it opened, not occurred. He had wondered, but not worried. Doubtless something would have come up; doubtless they would have scraped by. With a woman like Maud beside him, he knew he could do anything. He would have found a job playing for some other band or orchestra, or opened a guest house, or stood busking in the street. Maud, he knew, with her gentle, unruffled smile, would be there contentedly at his side. One bleak night, when their vocalist, a beautiful girl with a lonely penchant for drink, had simply vanished on the evening of a performance, Maud, with her gentle shrug, had donned the girl’s costume and overcome her massive shyness to get up on their little stage before the band and sing. She had a pretty voice, prettier than Emily’s, and absolutely no desire to perform. But she would do it
, and still did it, from time to time, when gin got the better of their ageing chanteuse. Thus Emily’s dream was Maud’s patient penance, an irony that neither of them would ever fully understand.
‘Ah, don’t be an asshole, Bert.’
Everyone at once looked at the door. Only one person referred to Albert as Bert, and only one member of the family used words like that in mixed company, cheerfully and with no remorse. Mike Brannigan was standing in the open doorway between the palatial bedroom and the sitting-room of the suite. He had been dressing and was still struggling with his black bow tie. Helen rose at once, went immediately to his side and tied the tie for him, while he stood contentedly with his arms at his sides like a small boy. When she went to straighten his collar and adjust the lie of his dinner-jacket, flicking dust from the lapels, he squirmed and fussed, also like a restless child and said, ‘Aw, cut it out, Helen.’ Emily, watching, wondered if her mother ever realized how much their relationship visually resembled that of mother and son.
Helen tucked her arm possessively into Mike’s and steered him towards a chair beside the one in which she had been sitting. Well, not precisely handcuffs, Emily thought meanly, but we’re getting there. Undoubtedly Helen had cause for possessive caution, if not concern. Mike Brannigan was indisputably attractive. He had, with advancing years, lost the stunning handsomeness of his youth. The sharply defined perfect features were blurred now, by drink, time, and the batterings of a few less than successful fights. Mike was not a big man, but he had a straight-backed cocky stance, as if he were bristling for a scrap, that led him, rather gamely, into physical combats he could not always win. He had grown jowly in the year or two since Emily had seen him last, and his black hair was now heavily greyed. But his eyes, the dark blue, black-lashed Irish kind, were unchanged, deliciously troublesome-looking and, even now, roved ever so gently over the youthful innocent breasts of Ruth Barton, dressed up in her first adult evening gown. Ruth blushed and looked at her feet, and Mike, remembering who he was and where, smiled a soft smile of mature condescension and patted her head as he passed. He was practising that attitude of fatherly appreciation very hard just now, hoping in time he’d convince himself.
‘C’mon Bert,’ he said, taking the drink that Helen had offered him, knowing she would have watered it, but not prepared to argue, ‘you’re not really telling us you’re planning on staying in this dump?’
Albert sipped at his own drink and very quietly nodded. He looked more amused by Brannigan than offended.
‘Well look, pal, if it’s money’s the problem …’ Mike waved an expansive, generous arm. He was always generous. Whether he’d have been equally so if the money involved were his own, and not his wife’s, no one would ever know.
‘I can earn my living, Mike,’ Albert said.
‘Well all right. If it’s a job, I mean, I can fix that. I got friends on the Coast. One or two who owe me a favour. There’s no problem.’
He seemed so genuine in his concern that Albert was actually touched and said, ‘No, really, Mike. It’s terribly kind. But it’s not what I want.’
‘We want to come home, Mike,’ Maud said sweetly. ‘We miss home.’
‘This?’ said Helen, a little unfairly, waving a dismissive hand about the lavish fittings of the room. Still, if it were the Savoy Hotel they were coming back to on a permanent basis there’d maybe be less cause for concern. Actually, Helen thought, the place, with its now dating thirties décor, suited Albert and Maud perfectly. Maud, like her husband, had not progressed in her manner or dress beyond that era either. She was wearing now a backless evening gown, with a broad ruffle over the shoulders and down the back, where it met a large, girlish bow. On her feet were the black, peep-toed, ankle-strap shoes that everyone had stopped wearing three years ago. Her hair, still a warm honey brown, was softly, modestly waved and ended in a row of curls at the base of her neck. She wore, as always, the one strand of pearls that Albert had given her for her first wedding anniversary and which remained ever after her favourite jewellery, worn always, regardless of costume. Helen took it all in, in its familiarity, and dismissed it with a shrug. She had given up attempting to make Maud fashionable twenty years ago. As far as she was concerned Maud, the Savoy Hotel, and all of Britain could age peacefully together, if they so chose. But Helen knew, too, that it wasn’t to the sacred ballroom of the Savoy, where once he had reigned in triumph, that Albert Chandler was returning.
‘You’ll regret it, Albert,’ she said at last, and swallowed her gin and lime in a long, less than ladylike swig.
‘Perhaps,’ he said, unperturbed, convinced that he would not. Maud only smiled. She was watching her mother, wishing she would not drink quite so much, wishing she would not dye her hair quite so severely dark, nor paint her lips and eyebrows on quite so fiercely. Maud occasionally, at times like this, thought of her grandmother, Mary Hardacre, in the little cottage on the Hardacre estate where she had ended her days. She wished her mother were like that, or that Mary Hardacre had been her mother, and then at once felt a flood of guilt. She tried to see Helen then, loyally, as no doubt Helen saw herself, and admired honestly her trim figure, slimmer than Maud’s gentle curves, and the elegant fit of her black sheath dress with its slit skirt and fashionable flying panels. It was a beautiful dress. It really was. Helen looked quite remarkably like a young girl, if only from the back. Maud left her assessment right there, baying taken kindness as far as honesty would allow.
‘Hey, c’mon,’ Mike Brannigan said, looking at his watch and beginning to pace restlessly, like too large an animal in too small an enclosed space. It was always his way in immobile situations, like cocktail parties. ‘Let’s get this show on the road, folks.’ He looked at his watch again.
‘There’s plenty of time,’ Helen said calmly. ‘Anyhow we have to wait for Harry and Harry is no doubt being very British and late,’ she added drily.
‘Yeah, well, he better cut the crap and get here,’ Mike said again. ‘Janet’s not gonna be exactly thrilled if we turn up late for her première.’
Maud said nothing, looking a little sadly at her peep-toed shoes. Janet, she was very much afraid, would probably not even notice. She had felt in the last two years an ever-widening gap developing between her astoundingly successful daughter and the rest of the family, herself included. She did not resent it. Indeed, she understood. Janet Chandler’s world was not their world, but it was a world Maud, through her years in Hollywood, understood well. Frenetic and frantic, selfish and solitary; it was not the world she would have chosen for her daughter. But Hollywood had chosen Janet Chandler, and Janet was not like Maud. Janet was like Emily. Or like Helen. It was a thought that Maud, in a rare lapse of candour, tried not to face. But it came upon her more and more. Even so, it was not for her own sake but for Janet’s that she wished her different. Helen Hardacre Brannigan was many things, many of them much admired, but by no stretch of the imagination would anyone call her happy.
Harry Hardacre did arrive then, looking, in his faintly moth-eaten dinner suit and stiff wing collar, even more outdated than Albert, and a lot more uncomfortable. Harry, whose childhood had been spent on the fish quays, adolescence in a tatty public-school and university years at Oxford, and who, through marriage, had moved into the staid ranks of Yorkshire county gentry, had long ago lost any semblance of belonging anywhere other than the oak-panelled library of Hardacres itself. Only family duty, and his role as unassuming patriarch, could ever persuade him into a circle and setting such as that in which he now found himself. Hetty crept in beside him. She was wearing a pre-war gown of rose silk and the sort of fur wrap with its profusion of tails, paws and snouts that brought one in mind of a bad day with the local hunt. Emily put her lips together in exasperation and raised her chin in that gesture of hers that proclaimed she might be with them, but wasn’t of them. She was glad Philip had stayed in Kilham with the two younger children and the pub. By now he’d probably have been demanding a brown ale. Mary Gray, Harry’s little
granddaughter, emerged eagerly from behind Hetty and ran shrieking across the room to greet Ruth Barton with waves of giggles. She settled on a settee beside her cousin, with the skirt of her fluffy organza many-petticoated dress floating up in clouds about her. She sat with her feet together, pigeon-toed, and leaned and whispered in Ruth’s ear, giggling the while. She was a pretty child with the black hair and blue eyes of her great-grandmother Mary Hardacre, whom everyone said she resembled, if Mary’s one portrait was anything to go by. The portrait, commissioned by old Sam the year his family moved into the big house, showed a slim young woman, surprisingly young-looking if the painter was to be believed, who visibly shrank, even in oils, from the attention that portraiture demanded. Her features were indeed similar to those of this little girl, though Harry could not envision even that portrait as having anything to do with the gentle work-worn woman he had known. And this young lady, pampered and pretty, and totally unlike her own gawky mother, was a creature of another world. ‘When do we see her?’ she blurted out, and everyone knew she meant Janet Chandler.
Ruth Barton, every bit as eager, but determined to be mature said, ‘It’s really the film I’m eager to see. They say it will be a landmark of the cinema.’ She had read the phrase yesterday in Variety, and rolled it lovingly off her tongue.
Mike Brannigan snorted and said, ‘That means we get to see her in her slip for half a second before the lights go out. Big deal, first time I saw her she sat bare-assed on my knee.’
‘For Christ sake, you big ape,’ said Helen, ‘she was three.’ Mike shrugged, grinning at the two girls who sat wide-eyed and open-mouthed in fascination.
Mary Gray could be forgiven, no doubt, that Mike Brannigan was for her the most memorable person and event of both the première of A Lady in Love and the Festival of Britain. Older, wiser, more experienced women than she had been so affected. Mike’s charms, by his own rueful admission, were fading. But they were powerful enough to enchant little Mary and fill her dreams for years to come. Perhaps because she would not meet him again for years, the spell was all the more powerful. He would be her first love, and she, albeit without his knowledge, his last conquest.