The Joyce Girl

by Annabel Abbs

  “Ah, Miss Joyce. I’m glad I’ve caught you. I thought you might have left.” Monsieur Borlin stood in the doorway smoothing the front of his waistcoat with his gloved hands and peering at me through his monocle.

  I straightened up and brought my arms to my sides. There was something about his expression that piqued me. Besides which, he rarely made small talk.

  “Sit down.” He pulled a scalloped fan from his breast pocket and gestured at the gold wicker chair beside the piano.

  “But that’s your chair, Monsieur.” I moved uncertainly towards it. No one ever sat in the gold wicker chair except him.

  “I shall be sitting all night at the Théâtre des ChampsÉlysées.”

  I sat on the edge of his chair wondering what he was about to tell me. What could be so terrible I needed to be sitting down? It crossed my mind he was about to dismiss me from his classes. He was notorious for throwing out pupils who displayed no talent or discipline. I felt my muscles stiffen.

  “I have taken the liberty of entering you for the International Festival of Dance in April. It’s short notice but I have no doubt you are up to the challenge.”

  “What?” I frowned. Me? Had I misheard him?

  “Let me be frank. You are my most talented student. Modern dance is the alphabet of the inexpressible, and you understand this, Miss Joyce.” He opened his fan and fluttered it in front of his face while I considered his words.

  “What do I have to do?”

  “You will dance two solos, for which you will also do the choreography, costumes and staging. You have the talent to win, Miss Joyce.” He snapped his fan shut and began painting at the air with it. “Dancers are the pioneers of a new dawn of art. I see it embodied in you. The way you move so freely, so eloquently, and yet with utter control. How did you master that?”

  “My background’s in gymnastics,” I said lamely, wishing I had a more distinguished history to refer to.

  “I can see that. On occasion you are more acrobatic than balletic. But that’s not what I refer to. Dancing is the writing of the body and you instinctively understand this. I sense in you, Miss Joyce, a raw emotion ordered into something potentially quite extraordinary. It’s a gift, Miss Joyce, a gift.” He stuck his fan back into his pocket and screwed up his monocled eye.

  “Thank you, Monsieur.” I wanted to sing out in triumph but my voice was a dazed stutter. I wanted to circle the room in vast leaps, to dance out of the studio and up to the Sacré-Coeur where all of Paris would see me turning and spinning. I wanted to cry out to the moon and the stars, “I have talent! Monsieur Borlin says I have talent!”

  “Three months and then you will compete with the very best dancers from across the globe. The judges are yet to be confirmed, but rest assured they will be the world’s most eminent dancers.” He gave a succession of small sniffs and turned to leave. “Lock up when you go, Miss Joyce, and put the key in its usual place.”

  As soon as Monsieur Borlin left, I did the highest toe-touch jump I could muster. Again and again I jumped. I had to start planning my competition dances but my head was too muddled and my heart was too full – and I only wanted to dance. I cart-wheeled across the studio, three, four, five times. And then back again. Suddenly my tunic felt too heavy, too hot. My canvas dance shoes felt constrictive and tight. I kicked off my shoes and threw off my tunic so that I was bare foot and wearing only my dance knickers and a vest. The cooling air of the studio licked at my arms and legs. The stove had gone out but I felt scalded and for one crazy moment I thought about stripping off all my clothes and dancing naked.

  Instead I back-flipped across the room. And as my feet flew over my head I heard a cough. Taken aback I landed clumsily, stumbling against the barre. I felt a flush racing up my neck and wished I’d kept my tunic on. No doubt Monsieur Borlin had dropped his fan. Or perhaps his monocle had fallen out. But it wasn’t Monsieur Borlin. It was Mr Beckett.

  “I’ll wait outside.” His voice was rough-edged as if he had a throat full of embers. “Your father said you’d be here. And I was passing.”

  My insides cringed as I looked down at my large dance knickers but Mr Beckett had discreetly withdrawn and I could hear the floorboards shifting in the corridor.

  “Please don’t worry,” I called out as I slipped my tunic over my head and grabbed my dress from the barre. “I don’t normally dance in my undergarments, but I was very hot and I’ve had some wonderful news.”

  “Oh?” Beckett cleared his throat again.

  “My dance teacher has entered me for the biggest modern dance competition in Europe. I’m nervous and excited and happy and scared all at once.”

  “Congratulations,” he called through the doorframe.

  “He thinks I have real talent.” Even as I repeated Monsieur Borlin’s words, I heard my voice quaver. Had he really said that?

  “Mr Joyce has been telling me so. I–I wanted to see for myself.”

  “I’m fully dressed now. You can come in.” I shook out the hem of my dress and pushed back the hair from my face. “Would you like to see a bit of my Rainbow Dance? It’s not finished but I’m creating it with Babbo in mind.”

  “Could I?” Mr Beckett appeared slowly from behind the door.

  I nodded, wondering if I should take my dress off and dance in my tunic. But I heard Mama’s tongue in my ear and decided against it.

  “Imagine the music and imagine I’m one of six dancers. And imagine I’m in some sort of rainbow costume.” I stood in first position, slid back my right leg and then began the opening sequence. Sheering across the studio. Pivoting and gliding. Swooping and soaring. An ephemeral arch of colour, swaying and dissolving. Flashes of imprisoned light. Trembling loops of movement. A wind-washed rainbow, my bands of colour shivering and melting. I crouched and twisted. Needles of rain, spiked and hard. I stretched and spread my fingers, soft rays of warm sunlight. I was a swathe of luminous colour. I was the gold-skinned weaver of the wind. Sun-spangled sovereign of the cosmos.

  “That’s as far as I’ve got.” I waited for Mr Beckett’s verdict, suddenly feeling nervous and unsure. What had come over me? Monsieur Borlin’s praise had gone to my head!

  “Incredible,” he said, stupefied. “I had no idea … Mr Joyce said you were good but …” He shook his head as if lost for words.

  I paused, unsure what to say next. But then my mouth opened of its own accord and I blurted out something so bold, so flirtatious, it was as if a Parisian flapper had taken possession of my vocal chords. “I’d love to teach you to dance, Sam.”

  There was a wordless moment while I stared at the floorboards and waited for him to blush and politely decline. But he didn’t. To my surprise he said, “I’d like that too. Very much.” He gave me one of his long hard stares – as if he was looking straight through me, to my palpitating heart, the air trapped in my lungs, the hot blood springing in my veins.

  I tried to modulate my voice so he wouldn’t see how elated I was. “We should start with the Charleston. Everyone in Paris does the Charleston.”

  “Very well. The Charleston it will be.” He gave a half-smile and gestured at the windows. Darts of rain were hitting the glass with a spitting sound. “I ought to go. I’m on my way to Montmartre.”

  “I can’t teach you until after my dance competition. Can you wait until then?”

  “I think so.” And there was a timorous tone to his voice that I couldn’t decipher.

  We parted ways outside the studio. When I got to the end of the street, I looked back for a last glimpse of him. He was climbing the steps towards the Sacré-Coeur, his hair spreading out in the wind like a small ruffled halo. My thoughts immediately turned back to dancing, to Monsieur Borlin’s words, to the Festival, to Charlestoning with Mr Beckett. How was I to do it all?

  7

  January 1929

  Paris

  When Mr Beckett returned from his Christmas break, Giorgio and I had already moved out of Robiac Square to stay with Mrs Helen Fleischman. Her husban
d was away; Mama was in hospital and Mrs Fleischman had offered to look after us, saying she would be ‘like a mother’ to us. Babbo had accepted with an alacrity that took me by such surprise all my words about Giorgio being twenty-three and me being twenty-one died on my tongue. I hoped Giorgio might put up more of a fight and convince Babbo we were quite capable of living alone at Robiac Square for a few weeks. But he didn’t. Instead he nodded and mumbled something about Mrs Fleischman’s generosity.

  “Why didn’t you insist on staying at Robiac Square?” I asked Giorgio later. “I thought you were tired of Babbo treating us like children. And you know I can’t stand Mrs Fleischman.”

  “Why would I want to stay here without Mother? At least Mrs Fleischman has a houseful of servants.” And with that Giorgio had slapped the tip of his cane against the doorframe and marched out.

  So our apartment at Robiac Square was shut up and Giorgio and I packed our suitcases and headed to Mrs Fleischman’s apartment on rue Huysmans. Spacious and sumptuous, it was quite unlike our homely flat. Canary-yellow silk curtains framed the tall windows. Oriental rugs in muted ochres and emeralds lay neatly on the parquet floors. The walls were lined, on one side, with oil paintings in gilded frames and, on the other, with thick shelves of leather-bound books. The thin winter light streamed in and fell in pleats on the polished antique furniture, the collections of fine porcelain bowls and the carefully placed bronze sculptures. Every room smelled of freshly polished shoes and Mrs Fleischman’s eau de cologne. House maids flitted silently from one room to another, removing a dead flower, closing a window, placing a log on a fire. Even the maids were perfect, their hair pulled tightly back from their scrubbed faces, their black and white uniforms starched, their tiny feet in glossy black slippers.

  Babbo refused to be away from Mama while she had her operation. He moved into the hospital, taking all his books and papers with him. Mr Beckett spent most of his time running between the hospital and Robiac Square and Miss Beach’s lending library, finding misplaced books and papers or returning encyclopaedias and dictionaries that Babbo no longer needed. I yearned to see him, but Mrs Fleischman kept our evenings full, with theatre outings and dinners and ‘socials’ that I found unutterably dull but which Giorgio found riveting.

  During the days I danced and danced, preparing for the International Festival of Dance. Monsieur Borlin made me perform my solos to him every day and I was determined to be a finalist. Babbo had already invited Mr Beckett to join him. And knowing I was to dance in front of Mr Beckett had given a new impetus to my practice. As I stretched and sprang, I imagined Mr Beckett’s admiring eyes upon me, and his long thin hands clapping with such vigour he’d be unable to write for days. Babbo warned me that Mama might not be well enough to attend after her operation, and although that saddened me I couldn’t help remembering all the performances she’d watched, always squinting into the audience to see who was there, her eyes small and hard like coins, her hands resolutely clasped in her lap. No – this performance would be different. Mr Beckett would be there!

  As I practised early one Sunday morning, I became aware of something that unsettled me, that tossed a shadow over my new bloom. I was standing with my hand on the back of a chair practising my pliés, pushing down through my thighs until I felt every muscle taut and contained. I let go of the chair and raised both arms above my head, counting my breath as I did so. I paused, head back, arms outstretched. I could hear nothing but my breathing, even and controlled. Every sinew was still and at perfect pitch. As I held the pose I imagined Monsieur Borlin and Mr Beckett watching me.

  It was then that I heard laughter, muffled and smothered, from the room next door. Giorgio’s room. I held my breath and waited. The laughter stopped. I exhaled, my nose wrinkled in confusion. Was I imagining things? Perhaps Giorgio had gone out and the maids were sharing a joke as they tidied his room and made his bed. I looked at the clock. Half-past seven. Not like Giorgio to be up so early. Not like Giorgio at all. He and Mrs Fleischman and some of her friends had had a late night at the jazz clubs in Montmartre.

  I took hold of the back of the chair again and thrust one leg out, before raising it in front of me as high as I could. I then swung my upturned leg out and back, releasing my arms as I did so – my own variation of a turn en attitude. I began counting my breath in and out again. It was coming faster now, in little gulps and I could feel a faint fluttering in my muscles. And then I heard it again. The distinctive sound of laughter, Giorgio’s laughter, intermingled with furtive giggling. Someone was in Giorgio’s room. Did he have a maid in there? A woman he’d picked up in Montmartre? Surely he wouldn’t bring a whore back to Mrs Fleischman’s apartment?

  I padded down the hall to Giorgio’s room and knocked softly on the door. Giorgio opened it slightly, his body wrapped round the door so I couldn’t see beyond him. Was he – was he – naked? He raised his eyebrows enquiringly.

  “Giorgio? Are you all right?”

  “I’m busy. I’m getting dressed.” He tried to close the door but I felt a surge of unexpected and inarticulate hatred, as if hundreds of furious firecrackers were exploding in my head. I knew he was lying to me and in that moment I loathed him.

  “I don’t believe you,” I shouted, putting my foot between the door and the frame so he couldn’t close the door without trapping my foot.

  “Oh Lucia, grow up! I’ll be out in a minute.” He nudged the door purposefully against my dancing shoe.

  “What are you doing in there?” Out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed the black and white of a maid, head bowed, scurrying silently down the hall behind me. But even that didn’t bring me to my senses and snap me from the ungovernable emotions sweeping through me.

  “I’m getting dressed!” Giorgio’s face was black with rage. “Now bugger off!”

  I withdrew my foot from the door and Giorgio slammed it in my face. Dazed and unable to move, I stood there with my eyes fixed on the door handle. And then it opened again and there was Mrs Helen Fleischman in her violet cashmere dressing gown, smiling her serpent smile and beckoning me in.

  “Sit down, Lucia.” She gestured to a chair.

  Speechless and stiff with anger, I moved towards the chair, noting the clothes strewn across the floor, the bed with its covers flung back, the salty odour that hung in the air. Giorgio had pulled on a dressing gown and was sitting on the bed glaring at me.

  “I’m sorry we didn’t tell you.” Mrs Fleischman coughed delicately and fiddled with the sash of her dressing gown. “But with your mother in hospital and …”

  Another spark of rage exploded inside me. Blinding light flashed behind my eyes. My lungs rattled with the effort of each breath. How long had this been going on? All this deceit and treachery – behind my back, behind Babbo’s back, behind Mama’s back. Mrs Fancy Pants Fleischman pretending to look after us while she seduced Giorgio.

  “You’re married. You’re old enough to be our mother!” I jabbed my finger at her with undisguised ferocity. “You’ve got a husband! You’ve got a child! You’ve got money! You’ve got everything! Why do you have to take Giorgio?”

  “My marriage is over, Lucia. It’s all just a formality now, the divorce I mean. And I’m not old enough to be your mother. Not quite.” She gave an embarrassed gulp of laughter.

  “Mama and Babbo won’t like this. They won’t approve and you know it, Giorgio.” I paused and turned to Giorgio who had lit a cigarette and was now pulling hard on it. My eyes cut back to Mrs Fleischman. “Babbo doesn’t need you. There are hundreds of women out there who want to type his manuscripts and read to him. He doesn’t need you.”

  “You may be right, Lucia, but we haven’t done anything wrong have we, Giorgio?” Helen turned to Giorgio who exhaled a thin jet of cigarette smoke and grunted.

  “You’re married and you’ve got a child! And you’re too old! And now you’re trying to take Giorgio because you couldn’t get Babbo. Just because you’ve got lots of money you think you can do what you like.”


  “Lucia!” Giorgio stabbed me with his eyes. “Don’t be so bloody rude! What’s got into you?”

  I ignored him. “I know why you started working for my father. I saw you batting your eyes and trying to touch his hand when you took his papers off him. I saw it all. I could see what you were trying to do. Worming your way into our lives. Wanting a little bit of ‘genius Joyce’ all for yourself. You didn’t fool me!” I could hear my voice rising, becoming louder and shriller, as if someone else was speaking, someone full of bitterness and savagery. “And now you’re buying Giorgio with your filthy American money. Just because you couldn’t bribe my father away!”

  “Actually,” said Mrs Fleischman tersely, “it was the other way round. But I don’t think we should talk about that. Giorgio and I just want to calm things down so we can all carry on living sensibly together until your parents get back from the hospital. So why don’t we be grown up about this?” She was standing proprietorially over Giorgio as he sat stooped on the edge of the bed, dragging furiously on his gold-filtered cigarette.

  “You can start by apologising to Helen.” Giorgio was talking more calmly now, but his face was still a cold mask of rage.

  “I’m sorry if you feel betrayed.” Mrs Fleischman’s manicured hands moved distractedly from the cord of her dressing gown to the pearls at her neck. “As soon as your parents are home you can go back to Robiac Square. But we need to let your mother’s operation go ahead first. Until then we’re just going to have to muddle along.”

  I glowered at Giorgio. “And who’s going to tell them about you two?”

  “I will, when I’m ready. It’s really nothing to do with you.”