The discomfort and shock Hettie had originally felt immediately turned to sincere pity and compassion as she heard the agony in Eddie’s voice.
‘I should not be speaking to you like this,’ he admitted. ‘Tomorrow you must forget what I have said and blame the absinthe if you do remember, for that is what I shall do,’ he told her morosely.
‘Oh, Eddie…’ Not knowing what to say, Hettie reached out and placed her hand on his.
‘You are a kind child, Hettie, and you have not yet learned to scorn and deride me and those like me. You cannot know the despair a perversion such as mine brings to a man. I carried the burden of that shame alone until I went to Paris. To be there and to know, to mix with others like me, to find what I thought was the most elevated form of human love, to have raised that cup to my lips and then to have had it dashed away…’ Eddie gave a deep shudder. ‘That one sip has poisoned my soul for ever, and I shall never recover. Absinthe is its antidote, the only thing that keeps me alive now. But why should I want to live? I wish I had never been born. I wish I had the courage to end it all. That would show him.’
Hettie didn’t know what to say or do. Eddie’s reckless confidences had shocked her, and she knew enough about life now to understand how dangerous it was for him to talk openly about a relationship that the law forbade.
‘Eddie, you must not say such things, or…or speak to me like this,’ she told him in a low voice.
He picked up his glass and downed its contents in one go. ‘Poor little Hettie. You just don’t understand, do you?’ he declared wildly before summoning the waiter and ordering another drink. As soon as the waiter had gone he continued bitterly, ‘How could you understand? We live in different worlds, you and I.’
‘I know what it means to love someone, Eddie,’ Hettie found the courage to tell him. It was true after all. She had loved Ellie and Gideon – and she had loved John as well.
Eddie’s mouth twisted. ‘So sweet…But the kind of love that torments me is not sweet, Hettie. It is bitter, and it is cruel, and most of all it is forbidden. And yet I would sell my very soul to the devil for just one taste of his lips, for just one touch of his hand.’ He had started to cry again. ‘I am a cursed and damned man, Hettie, and there is no help for me,’ he sobbed.
Hettie didn’t know how to console poor Eddie. She only knew how much it hurt when someone didn’t reciprocate your feelings for them.
‘And wot the hell’s up with Sukey? One minute she’s acting like we was ’er worst enemies and then half an hour later she’s laughing and joking as though she hadn’t got a care in the world.’
‘And talking ten to the dozen as well. You can’t shut her up,’ Jenny complained as she patted night cream into her face and demanded, ‘Move up, ’Ettie, will yer? I can’t see meself in the mirror.’
They were all getting ready for bed in Hettie and Babs’s room, a nightly ritual they had started on their arrival in London, and Jenny was busily complaining about Sukey, who still hadn’t come in.
‘I don’t think she’s very well,’ Hettie defended Sukey.
‘We all know that,’ Aggie replied with a grimace.
‘No, I mean really poorly,’ Hettie insisted. ‘She came into the dressing room this afternoon and she was shaking and trembling so badly she couldn’t even get the pills the doctor had given her out of her coat pocket.
‘Pills? Doctor?’ Aggie demanded suspiciously. ‘She ’asn’t said anything about needing to see any doctor to anyone else, so how come she’s told you, Hettie?’
‘I don’t think she wanted to make a fuss. She made me promise not to say anything to anyone else,’ Hettie admitted uncomfortably. ‘But anyone can see she’s not well. She’s gone that thin an’ all.’
‘’Ere, hang on a minute,’ Mary interrupted Hettie. ‘Do you know what I think? I think it’s a pound to a penny that Sukey has gone and got some of them diet pills from that quack doctor.’
‘Wot, you mean she’s taking them pills that Marge told us about?’ Babs demanded worriedly. ‘Them wot she said ’ad tape worms in ’em?’
‘Tapeworms? Don’t be daft, Babs,’ Aggie snorted. ‘It’s not tapeworms as is in ’em, it’s that cocaine. And if that’s what she’s tekkin, no wonder she’s bin acting a bit odd, like. Mad as a hatter they’ll make her, that’s what I’ve heard. She’s gonna kill herself if she doesn’t watch out.’
‘They’ve certainly made her as thin as a rake,’ Jenny joined in, adding with a small sigh, ‘I could do with a few of them myself. I’ve heard as how all them posh society debutantes take them so as they can get into their Chanel frocks, and the chaps tek it, too. Sniff it up like it were snuff, they do. Mad, the lot of them, if you ask me.
‘You’re lucky, ’Ettie, you don’t need to worry about your weight,’ Jess told her enviously.
It was true that she was naturally slender, Hettie acknowledged, and with the opening night only a few days away her nervousness was making her even more so.
‘Wot happened to you this afternoon, ’Ettie? When we got back to the dressing room you was gone,’ Aggie asked curiously.
‘Eddie asked me to go and have a drink with him,’ she explained.
‘I hope you ain’t getting moony over that Eddie, Hettie,’ Aggie cautioned her.
‘Of course she ain’t,’ Mary cut in scornfully. ‘Hettie knows a nance when she sees one, don’t you, ’Ettie?’
Pink-cheeked, Hettie nodded her head. ‘I just feel sorry for him,’ Hettie admitted.
Sorry for him and somehow sorry for herself as well, Hettie thought tiredly. She had not expected to find London’s streets paved with gold, of course, but with the excitement of their arrival behind her and the anxiety of their opening night now so close, Hettie had become victim to an inner sadness she couldn’t really explain. She knew it had something to do with the gulf that now existed between her and her parents, and she knew too that learning John had spent Christmas with his friend and his friend’s sister had added to it. There was an emptiness in her life that had once been filled with the small day-to-day diversions that came from being part of a family, and the girls, good friends though they were, were not family.
London was just as cold and damp as Liverpool, its street-children every bit as ragged and wretched, the faces of its poor just as pinched and hungry. And here there was no kind-hearted Sarah Baker, with her big basket of bread and potatoes to hand out to those in need. She had no need to count every penny now, Hettie acknowledged, because her wages had been increased as she was playing the second female lead. So she saved her pennies and half-pennies to drop into the grubby eager hands of the children who begged in small groups in Piccadilly Circus, darting off the moment a policeman spotted them.
‘Well, leaving yer supper isn’t going to help him, is it?’ Babs chided her prosaically. ‘Eat it up, ’Ettie, you’re going to need yer strength. It isn’t that long now ‘til New Year’s Day and our opening night, you know.’
Hettie couldn’t help but laugh. Babs sounded so like Ellie. Her laugher died, a sharp hurting pain digging into her heart. Did any of them think of her? Ellie? John? She had written to Gideon begging him to let her know how Ellie was, and telling him all her own news, but as yet she had not heard back from him. How long did it take for letters to get to the Lakes? she wondered bleakly.
NINETEEN
New Year’s Eve, and here he was spending it so very far away from his family and those who meant most to him, John thought as he battled with the bow tie he was attempting to knot, having refused the assistance of Alfred’s valet.
No, it still wasn’t right. Impatiently he pulled the crumpled fabric from his neck and breathed out heavily. He wasn’t looking forward to this evening, and to judge from her behaviour earlier in the day neither was Polly, although Alfred had complained that she had been the one who had insisted he must hold a New Year’s Eve dance.
This Christmas had been so different from the others he had known; the Christmases of his childhood in
the cosy parlour above his father’s butcher’s shop. Life had seemed so safe and happy then. But then there had been those frightening years after his mother’s death, when he and his siblings had been parted from one another, followed by his reunion with Ellie, then a young widow who had voluntarily taken on the responsibility for Hettie.
John smiled to himself, remembering the sharp pang of emotion he had felt the very first time Hettie had imperiously held out her baby arms to him. She had been a child of three, and he had been a boy scarcely a decade older.
And she had continued to tug on his heart in the years that had followed. First as the little girl who followed him around adoringly, but more recently as a young woman who aroused within him the feelings of a man rather than those of a friend.
He could still remember how confused and shocked he had felt last Christmas when Hettie, newly grown up, had appeared at the Christmas morning church service dressed as a young woman and not a child.
How she had pouted and looked cross when he had refused to kiss her beneath the mistletoe, and his heart had ached with longing to sweep her into his arms somewhere private so that he could kiss those sweet cherry-red pouting lips. He had gone home that night to daydream about the future and his ring on Hettie’s slender finger. But Hettie had had her own dreams and they had not included him.
The noise of the dinner bell broke into his thoughts. He looked at his reflection in the mirror. The tie still looked slightly lopsided, but he could not delay any longer. Putting on his jacket, he opened his bedroom door and stepped out on to the landing.
‘Oh John, goodness, what has Bates done to your tie?’ he heard Polly exclaiming as she hurried towards him. ‘Alfie really ought to retire him. His eyesight is terrible…’
‘I fastened it myself,’ John told her stiffly, but instead of looking embarrassed Polly laughed.
‘Oh, did you? No wonder then. Daddy always used to say that no gentleman should ever be able to make a decent bow tie because that was why one had a valet.’
‘Well, the reason I can’t tie one is because where I come from no one wears them,’ John told her sharply.
He had already overheard Alfred’s great-aunt commenting to her daughter that she could not understand why Alfred had befriended ‘a person so obviously from the lower classes’, and he was grimly conscious of his own flat working class northern accent – and equally grimly determined that nothing and no one was going to make him feel ashamed of either his background or his upbringing.
‘Oh John, I’m sorry. Please don’t be cross with me. You’re the only person who makes being here bearable.’ Polly had stepped up to him as she was speaking and before John could stop her she reached out and quickly unfastened his bow tie.
Automatically John pulled back from her, but she shook her head and told him firmly, ‘Keep still, silly, otherwise I’ll never be able to fasten it properly for you. Ollie taught me how,’ she added softly.
‘Alfie, why have you turned off the gramophone?’ Polly protested breathlessly. ‘I still want to dance.’
‘It’s almost midnight, Polly, and Bates will be waiting to First Foot us. Besides, I rather think that some of our guests have been shocked enough for one evening. Let’s put on the wireless so that we can hear Big Ben chime in the new year.’
‘Why are they shocked?’ Polly demanded as she pouted at her brother. ‘Because of the way I was dancing? Oh pooh! Old fuddy duddies. Who cares about them? John, I want you to promise me that you will be my first dancing partner of the new year,’ she insisted, turning towards John and reaching for his hand.
Her face was over flushed and her eyes were over bright, and John could well understand why Alfred had felt compelled to warn her that she was shocking his elderly guests. But at the same time John could not help but feel sympathetic towards her. She was so plainly unhappy and so obviously still grieving for the man she had loved.
‘And so as Big Ben begins to signal the arrival of the new year…’
The wireless crackled and then, as clearly as though they had actually been there, the room was filled by the sound of Big Ben striking the hour of midnight.
Everyone began to cheer, the ladies, led by Polly, taking the initiative and kissing the men.
‘I’ve saved you until last, John,’ Polly whispered to him as she stretched up on her toes and boldly kissed his mouth.
To his shame, John felt his body respond to her closeness, and even more shamefully he knew from the look she gave him that Polly was equally aware of the effect she had had on him.
The guests, led by Alfred, streamed out into the hallway to welcome in Bates and the new year.
‘A toast,’ someone cried out as glasses were filled with foaming champagne and passed from hand to hand.
‘A toast of the new year and to the future…’
‘I want to make a toast.’
Everyone turned to look at Polly, who was standing on the larger hall table, swaying slightly, a glass of champagne in her hand, her short beaded frock revealing her slenderness.
‘I say, Polly, come down off there, there’s a good girl,’ Alfie began worriedly, but Polly shook her head.
‘No. Not yet. Come on, everyone. Lift your glasses with me so that we can toast those who are no longer with us to toast themselves. All those gallant, doomed, dead young men who will never taste champagne again, never dance again, never kiss again. They were the best of us all and now they’re gone. We’re a doomed generation, all of us. They were doomed to die and we are doomed to live on without them until…’
John could hear the shocked uneasy whispers of the other guests. A female guest sobbed and a man close to him muttered, ‘Bad form, what?’
‘Raise your glasses everyone!’
There was a swift indrawing of shocked breath as Polly lifted hers and then, instead of drinking from it, flung it at the fireplace before collapsing on to the table, sobbing wildly.
‘Every seat in the house has been sold!’
‘Don’t tell me that, Babs, you’re making me even more nervous than I was,’ Hettie protested feverishly as she dabbed powder on her flushed cheeks.
‘I’ll lay odds that Jay Dalhousie has given away half of them seats just to get bums on ’em,’ Mary pronounced wisely. Especially wi’ every bloody critic in London already saying as how no American can possibly know how to put on a decent show in London.’
‘’Oo cares whose bums are in them seats,’ Jenny broke in, ‘just so long as they keep ’em there? Do you remember that panto we was in, our kid, when half the audience walked out before the end of the first act and then the rest followed them during the second?’
‘Yes. All apart from that bloody kid who stood up and started pitching rotten tomatoes at us,’ her sister recalled.
Antagonistic critics, audiences who walked out, people throwing rotten food at them…Hettie shuddered with dread. She couldn’t remember a single word of any of her songs, never mind a full line, and she had had nightmares last night in which Madame had suddenly reappeared and insisted that she was going to have to dance a ballet.
‘Five minutes,’ a young runner announced, banging on the dressing room door.
‘At least we’ve got decent costumes.’
‘You may call ’em decent, Mary, but I calls them positively indecent,’ Babs contradicted firmly. ‘And I don’t care if Mr Cochran does dress his bloody “young ladies” in the same sort of style!’
‘The reviewers should like them, then.’ Jenny winked.
‘Break a leg, ’Ettie,’ Babs whispered as the chorus girls headed for the door in a flurry of sequins, high heels and feathers. ‘You’ll do all right, don’t you worry about that.’
The chorus had reached the end of their first number, the male lead and the male comic were singing their opening songs, and soon it would be her turn.
Hettie took a deep breath. She wasn’t Hettie any more, she was a young Japanese Princess…
‘Go on, ’Ettie! It’s you wot they�
��re yelling for.’
Eager hands pushed her back on to the stage.
The audience was on its collective feet, calling out for Princess Mimi. The noise was like no other Hettie had ever heard. It rolled round the theatre and bounced off its walls, making the whole stage shake. Or was she the one who was shaking as she listened to the whistles, the stamping of feet, the shouts of approval and excitement?
The cast had already taken more than a dozen curtain calls, and now the audience was calling for her. Somehow she managed to make a small formal Japanese bow, and then get back to the wings.
‘Hettie, Hettie, you little wonder, you’ve stolen their hearts and the show. The critics are in raptures.’ Jay was standing there waiting for her, grinning from ear to ear with delight.
Hettie gasped as he took hold of her and lifted her off her feet, whirling her around. Jay was holding her so tightly that she could smell the hot male scent of his triumphant excitement. He kissed her – on the cheek and then on her mouth. Dizzily, Hettie looked up at him. She heard him groan her name and then he was kissing her again, a shockingly fierce passionate kiss, she acknowledged giddily as her heart started to beat even faster and all she could do was gaze up into his eyes, as though she were spellbound to him.
‘I’ve got to go,’ he whispered to her. ‘The press are waiting for me at the Ritz. But I haven’t forgotten about our dinner…’
‘Where’s Mary?’
After Jay had left, the director announced that Jay had told him to take the whole cast to a famous local chop house for a late celebratory supper, at Jay’s expense. So as soon as they had changed out of their costumes and cleaned off their stage make-up, they headed there, ravenously hungry now the ordeal of the First Night was over. They were high on success, adrenalin and youthful excitement.
Hettie of Hope Street Page 20