by Simon Brett
Twinks did not argue as Madame Clothilde’s hand dipped into the unappealing sludge and started to apply it to her cheeks and hands. She made sure there was a line of black under each of her client’s delicate fingernails. ‘Ne t’inquiète pas! This will wash off with a little bit of savon . . . how you say? Soap!’
The couturier stood back and took in her creation. She looked very pleased with what she had achieved. ‘Voilà! C’est magnifique! And now you may look in the mirror.’
Twinks surveyed herself in one of the basement’s many cheval glasses. Yes, Madame Clothilde had done an excellent job. ‘Larksissimo!’ cried Twinks.
‘Even your own mother would not recognise you.’
Having grown up in the same house as the Dowager Duchess, who frequently didn’t recognise her own children, Twinks felt she might have to qualify this, but then realised it didn’t matter. So she said, ‘You’ve potted the black there, Madame Clothilde! I wish my bro Blotters was around. I bet he wouldn’t spot his old sis. Ooh, I’ve had a thoughtette!’ she interrupted herself suddenly. ‘Our chauffeur’s waiting in the Lag outside. Let’s call him in and find out if he can recognise the young mistress.’
‘Bonne idée!’ Madame Clothilde summoned one of her elegant acolytes to bring the chauffeur downstairs.
But when Corky Froggett walked into the basement room, he did not notice Twinks. All he saw was Madame Clothilde. He cried out, ‘Yvette!’ and they fell into each other’s arms.
Twinks drove the Lagonda back alone to the Savoy.
So good was her disguise, she had considerable difficulty in persuading the staff in the hotel foyer that she was actually staying there. It was only after she had produced her passport from her sequinned reticule, and done a dauntingly realistic impression of her mother, that she was allowed to go up to her suite.
In which, she spent the afternoon rehearsing for her evening performance.
The people queuing for returns outside the Pocket Theatre half an hour before that evening’s performance of Light and Frothy were used to buskers trying to separate them from their small change. There might be an ex-soldier, wearing his medals and playing a wheezy accordion, a couple of tap-dancing kids who shouldn’t have been out so late on their own, or a soprano whose high notes had subsided at the same pace as her bosom.
But never had they been so well entertained as they were that night. Some of them even risked losing their places in the theatre queue to get closer to the phenomenon they were witnessing.
Despite the scruffiness of her appearance and the grubbiness of her face, the girl’s talent shone through magnificently. Her voice was fine and pure, her dance steps delicate and unfaltering. More than one of the makeshift audience expressed the opinion that, ‘if the cast of Light and Frothy are half as good as this young woman, we’re in for a corking evening!’ The small battered basket the girl had left out for donations already gleamed with gold sovereigns.
It was just as the entertainer was about to sing her song, ‘Kensington Cavalcade’, that a short man wearing a black overcoat and black beret joined the fascinated throng.
Twinks transformed to full tear-jerking mode, as she went into her number:
‘I sing on the street corner,
Come the sunshine or the rain,
And I watch the varied fauna
Who come strolling down the lane.
I see each lord and lady,
See the top hats on each head,
And, because my life’s so shady,
I wish I was them instead.
‘With my nose against their winders,
When my only source of heat
Is the chestnut-seller’s cinders,
I feel sad and incomplete.
But the rich, so fine and free,
Will never notice me . . .
In their Kensington Cavalcade.
I try not to be dismayed
By all the wealth that is displayed . . .
In their Kensington Cavalcade.
‘I sing my songs for pennies,
Just enough to buy some bread.
And all I hope for then is
A bit of pavement for my bed.
Oh, my clothes are rags and tatters,
Which I’ve had to darn and mend.
And, as the cold rain splatters,
Only poverty’s my friend.
‘With my nose against their winders,
When my only source of heat
Is the chestnut-seller’s cinders,
I feel sad—’
‘Stop!’ cried the short man in black, interrupting her second chorus. ‘Tell me, ma petite, where did you learn to sing like this?’
‘Oh, lawks, guv’nor,’ came a reply in Cockney, born rather closer to Bow Bells than the Ball’s Pond Road. ‘Ah started aht singin’ in the church kwah, then Ah done singin’ rahnd the pubs wiv the Sally Army.’
‘But you did not ’ave any professional training?’
‘Lord bless you, sir! When’s a poor girl like me goin’ to be trained to anything uvver than scrubbin’ a doorstep?’
‘What about your dancing? Is that self-taught, as well?’
‘Well, ah never ’ad no dancin’ teacher, if that’s what you mean, no. Dancin’ teachers ain’t for the likes of me. Toffs ’ave dancin’ teachers. People like me don’t take dancin’ classes. We take anything that ain’t nailed dahn!’ This last was accompanied by a throaty Cockney chuckle.
‘But your dancing, it is merveilleux!’
‘I dunno what that means, guv’nor, but if it’s a compliment, fank you kindly, good sir.’ And she dropped a neat curtsey.
‘So, ’ow do you learn to dance like that?’
‘Ain’t got a clue, mate. I just listen to the music, and that, like, tells me what to do with my arms and legs.’ The Dowager Duchess, who had spent a small fortune on dancing teachers to develop her daughter’s natural talent, would not have been pleased if she had heard this answer.
‘And your chanson . . . your song? Oo write this wonderful song?’
‘Ah did, mister.’
‘It is not possible. No girl can write a song like that.’
‘Well, this girl did!’ She was about to add, ‘Wrote the bloomin’ thing this afternoon.’ Which would have been the truth. But caution prevailed. To admit how recent the song’s composition had been might have raised suspicions about her serendipitous appearance outside the Pocket Theatre. So, instead, she said, ‘I bin singin’ it for years.’
‘But the tune? Did you write the tune as well?’
‘’Course I did, matey.’
‘C’est incroyable. That tune is as good as anything by Everard Stoop.’
‘Don’t know oo yer talkin’ abaht, guv’nor, but that song – words, music, the whole rombooley – was all done wiv me own fair ’and. So, stuff that in yer pipe and smoke it!’
The man in black was amazed, dumbfounded for a moment. Then he said, ‘Ma chérie, you ’ave wonderful raw talent.’
‘Oy, watch it, mate! Ah ain’t raw. Not ’alf-baked neither, come to that. Done to a turn, Ah am. Ah don’t know, there’s you complimentin’ me one moment, next you’re bloody insultin’ me.’
‘No offence was meant, my dear young lady. And I cannot go on calling you “my dear young lady”. Please, what is your name?’
Fortunately, Twinks had given some thought to the likelihood of this question arising. ‘Florrie Coster,’ she replied demurely.
‘Florrie Coster . . .’ Pierre Labouze tried the name on his tongue. ‘It is perhaps more a name for the Music Hall than Intimate Revue, but n’importe. It can be changed. Everything can be changed. Bien, très bien.’
The impresario extracted a card from his coat pocket and scribbled an address on it. ‘Come to this place tomorrow morning, at nine o’clock sharp! And I will transform you into the biggest star the world has ever seen!’
As she walked back to the Savoy, to face more disbelief from the staff at Reception, Twinks thought to hersel
f that her plan had gone rather well.
10
Threats of Matrimony
It wasn’t at that moment much fun being Giles ‘Whiffler’ Tortington. For a start, he had no idea where he was. Straight after his abduction from outside the Pocket Theatre, the two men who’d manhandled him into the black saloon had blindfolded him. He had then been driven a relatively short distance – which suggested he was still in London – to what he took to be a private house. Only once inside had his blindfold been removed.
He had found himself in a small apartment, all of whose windows had closed shutters on the outside. The room in which he was incarcerated had functional furniture and no pictures on the walls. A large radiator mitigated the springtime chill.
The main door was double-locked, and if he had contemplated escape, the continual presence of his two abductors would have foiled such plans. His guards proved to be singularly uncommunicative, hardly exchanging more than a few words with each other, and certainly none with him. His enquiries as to where he was, and what was going to happen to him, might as well have remained unvoiced. They elicited no information. Nor did questions about who was imprisoning him, and why.
Whiffler was not physically mistreated, though the muscular bodies of his minders, and the open way they wore their revolvers, suggested that, if he did resort to fisticuffs, he wouldn’t stand a chance. And the unchanging diet of ham sandwiches (without mustard, for God’s sake!) made him long for the nursery food at the Gren. He also missed his regular hauntings of London’s stage doors. Above all, he missed Frou-Frou Gavotte.
Like many prisoners before him, he began to lose track of time. The shutters on the windows prevented him from seeing the outside light change, and, perhaps with a view to disorienting him further, the two men in black had confiscated his pocket watch. There was a reasonably comfortable bed, but whether he found the welcome oblivion of sleep in the daytime or night-time, he had no means of knowing.
Perhaps fortunately, he did not know about the hundred-thousand-pound ransom demanded for his safe return to his former life. Nor the fact that that deadline had long since passed, without any of the threatened consequences.
Then, suddenly – who could say how many days into his incarceration – someone new was admitted into the apartment.
The man wore the face of a pugilist, who had gone a few hundred rounds too many. He had cauliflower ears, and his nose shared qualities with a cauliflower too. But he was smartly dressed in a suit of sober black. And at his throat was the white band of a dog collar.
‘Good morning, Mr Tortington,’ he said in a voice of sonorous profundity. ‘I have come to discuss the arrangements for your wedding.’
The Earl of Hartlepool had three reasons for telling his chauffeur to get the ageing Rolls-Royce out of the Little Tickling garages and drive him to London.
First, he was anxious about running out of matchsticks for his model, and his trusted supplier was a pipe-maker in an arcade off Jermyn Street.
Second, he wanted to attend a meeting of EGGS (The Eradication of Ghastly Guns Society).
And third, in the continuing absence of his son, he was more than ever determined to marry Twinks.
The same evening that his sister was entertaining the queues outside the Pocket Theatre, Blotto had spent at the Gren, meeting a few of his old muffin-toasters and generally putting the world to rights. He had staggered back to the Savoy and was trying to work out why the walls of his suite’s bedroom were rotating around him . . . when the telephone rang.
The cowed voice of the flunkey from Reception forewarned him that the call with which he was about to be connected came from his mother. The Dowager Duchess did not like using the telephone. She was of the view that, if she spoke loudly enough, people should be able to hear her without any mechanical intervention. The result of this was that, on the rare occasions when she did use the instrument, she spoke even louder.
‘Blotto,’ she thundered. ‘I bet, by this time of the evening, you’re drunk.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that, Mater. Maybe slightly wobbulated, but not—’
‘Don’t try that line with me, boy. I’ve known when you’re lying since you were in your sailor suit.’
‘Toad-in-the-hole, Mater!’
‘Blotto, I’m telephoning to tell you you’re giving me luncheon tomorrow.’
‘Luncheon? At Tawcester Towers?’
‘No, you idiot boy.’
‘In London?’
‘Of course in London! You’re staying at the Savoy.’
‘How d’you know that, Mater?’ Blotto was totally snickered by her omniscience. ‘Have you taken up mind-reading in your old age?’
‘Don’t need to do that, you voidbrain. I’m telephoning you at the Savoy, aren’t I?’
‘Yes.’
‘So, the fact that you’re answering from the Savoy suggests that’s where you are.’
Surprised, Blotto could not but admit, ‘Yes, I suppose it spoffing well does.’
‘There’s no need to use the language of the barracks, Blotto.’
‘Sorry, Mater.’
He was seriously worried. The Dowager Duchess clung to her ancestral home like a limpet to the rock which her facial features so thoroughly resembled. Only something on the scale of a Coronation would detach her from the fastness of Tawcester Towers. And the fact that she was coming up to London specifically to see her son boded ill for him.
Blotto didn’t have to wait long to find out the nature of the latest threat to his sunny equilibrium. ‘The luncheon table tomorrow will be for four,’ his mother boomed.
‘You, me, Twinks and who?’ he asked. Then, trying to remember what his English beak at Eton had taught him, he tried, ‘Whom?’
‘Your sister will not be involved,’ said the Dowager Duchess ominously. ‘One of your guests will be the Countess of Lytham St Annes.’
‘Tickey-Tockey,’ came the vague response from Blotto, to whom the name meant nothing.
‘And the other will be her daughter, Araminta fffrench-Wyndeau.’
Broken biscuits, Blotto murmured inwardly. Though, having been told off so forcibly for a ‘spoffing’, he wasn’t about to use such language out loud to his mother.
‘I thought,’ he said in a wavering voice, ‘that I wasn’t going to meet the filly till the Hunt Ball.’
‘The previous schedule has been moved forward,’ the Dowager Duchess responded. ‘The Countess and I have discussed the matter. We both feel it would be convenient to get the ceremony out of the way before the next hunting season starts. Can’t be faffing around with weddings when one should be focusing on foxes. You and Araminta will therefore be getting married in September.’
Blotto felt as though the last sustaining guy-rope of his personality had just snapped in a tornado.
Immediately after this upsetting telephone conversation, he had gone straight across the landing to Twinks’s suite. His sister was bound to have some fruity scheme to extricate him from the current gluepot.
But, when he knocked on the door, there was no reply. And when he went downstairs for a St Louis Steam-hammer in the American Bar (which he needed after the traumatic exchange with his mother), the flunkeys on Reception told him that, though they had seen his sister leave earlier, she had not yet returned.
They didn’t mention that, when she left the hotel, she’d been dressed up as a Cockney street entertainer.
The address Twinks had been given the night before was of an old Church Institute off Fulham Broadway, a squalid part of London to which her dainty aristocratic footsteps had never before been drawn. Had she been dressed in her normal street clothes, she would have attracted much attention, and quite possibly become a target for street thieves. In the guise of Florrie Coster, her presence elicited nothing more than a few whistles and catcalls from labourers on building sites.
It was clear when she entered the Church Institute, at eight forty-five precisely, that its current usage had nothing to do with religi
on. Even at that hour, from behind closed doors came the sounds of musicians and singers practising. The building had been converted to use as rehearsal rooms.
Pierre Labouze, still in his trademark black, still wearing his beret, was waiting impatiently in the hallway.
‘Ah, Florrie, you ’ave arrived. I knew you would arrive.’
‘How could you be so sure, matey?’ The question was, of course, posed in perfect Cockney.
‘Because I am Pierre Labouze. I am the greatest impresario in the world. I make careers in the theatre. Nobody ever refuses a summons from Pierre Labouze.’
‘Cocky little blighter, aintcher?’ said Florrie Coster.
‘What you call “cockiness”, ma petite, is simply being aware of my valeur . . . my value to the world.’
‘If you fink that makes you sahnd any less cocky, you’re barkin’ up the wrong fundament, matey.’
‘Right,’ said the impresario, turning on his heel and ushering her into one of the rooms. ‘Now we find out ’ow much talent you really ’ave.’
The floor was bare boards, blinds had been pulled down over the windows, and the wattage from the overhead bulbs was dingily low. In the corner, at a shabby upright piano, sat a man who looked as dilapidated as his surroundings.
‘Émile,’ barked Pierre Labouze. ‘She will start with scales. Give me a C!’
The lugubrious pianist struck a lugubrious note, from which Twinks sang the scale perfectly. This was stale bread for her. The Dowager Duchess’s insistence that her daughter should have all the accomplishments to qualify her on the marriage market would have turned a gerbil into a viable matrimonial prospect. Applying such specialised tutoring to someone with Twinks’s natural gifts could not fail to produce a prodigy.
Pierre Labouze could not fault her on the scales, but he was a man whose greatest pleasure in life came from faulting people, so he moved on to a stiffer test. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘you cannot read music.’ It wasn’t even a question; it was an assumption.
‘Well, strike a light, guv’nor,’ said Florrie Coster. ‘As it ’appens, Ah can.’