by Marie Joseph
‘And because I’m getting married,’ Clara said.
For a moment his head jerked back as though she had hit out at him. Bart had to swallow hard before he could bring himself to speak.
‘To the boy from home?’ he asked quietly.
Clara nodded. ‘Yes, to the boy from home. I’ve known him since I was a child.’
‘And you’re no longer a child?’
Bart stared at her for a long time without speaking. He had known, as indeed he suspected that everyone had known, about the baby Clara had lost, and about the boy who had deserted her when she needed him most. Dora had sworn him to secrecy, and being a man of his word Bart had not only kept silent but managed to push the whole sad story out of his mind.
‘So he finally came back?’ he said at last. ‘And you find you still love him?’
Clara moved her head slightly. ‘You’re talking about Joe,’ she whispered. ‘How long have you known about Joe?’
It was very quiet there on the big stage, with the empty seats in the auditorium stretching in tiered rows. Bart picked up her hat from the piano and handed it to her. ‘Does it matter?’
‘You mean it doesn’t matter?’ They were whispering as if they were in church, the shame that Clara still felt and would feel for the rest of her life flooding over her. It was a moment of such intensity that the air seemed to shimmer between them.
‘I knew you were more sinned against than sinning.’ Bart stretched out a hand as if he would draw her to him. ‘I know you, Clara, and I know that once having given yourself to any man you would be bound to feel committed to him.’ The intense blue of his eyes deepened. ‘Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you, my dear?’
‘But I’m not like that!’ The words seemed torn from her. ‘Joe did come back, but it’s not him I’m marrying. What kind of a person do you think I am?’ She spread her hands wide. ‘I stopped loving Joe the day I realized he had gone away not caring what happened to me. My father taught me respect and, respecting myself, how could I hold fast to a love that was a waste of time?’
‘Then who … ?’ The sadness in Bart’s face was livened now by bewilderment. ‘Is there another boy you left behind? The fair one I saw you with at Gennaro’s last night?’
‘Two of them,’ Clara told him. ‘Two boys in the same class at school. Joe, who had nothing, and John, the son of the Church of England minister.’
‘Ah …’ Enlightenment flickered across Bart’s expression. ‘And he’s followed his father into the Church?’
‘No. He’s a pilot. He flies planes in Europe. For a newspaper magnate.’
‘And you want to be there, waiting for him when he comes home?’
Clara bridled. ‘I intend to be a good wife to him, if that’s what you mean.’
Bart turned away, walking with his long stride out to the wings and back again, hearing his wife’s voice shouting after him the last time he left her to travel down to London, ‘Is that all you need me for? To be here, like a good little wife, waiting for you when you decide to come home for a while? Do you blame me that I’ve made a life for myself, and do you wonder that the children hardly know you?’ Her voice had risen to a scream. ‘Stay away this time, Bart! Don’t feel you have to put in an appearance now and again for the sake of your conscience!’
‘But it’s my job!’ He had turned at the door, wasting his time he knew but trying just once again. ‘Come down to London. We’ll take a house there. You can keep this one up here for the children’s summer holidays. Give it a try. You’ll make friends down there. You can even ride as much as you want to. London is greener than you think.’ He had picked up his case. ‘You knew what I was when you married me. You knew my work meant I’d be London-based.’
‘But I didn’t know you’d want to be there nine tenths of the year, did I? I even kidded myself you could work from home when the telephone was installed.’
‘My job? Worked from home?’ He was shouting at her now, giving back as good as he got. ‘What about your job? Isn’t marriage a partnership?’
‘With the man the bloody managing director!’ she’d yelled after him, slamming the door in his face.
That was two years ago. The gentleman farmer she’d been friendly with for years had almost moved in with her, according to rumour. Bart saw his children once a year, but had never seen his wife since that day.
‘Unless this John of yours understands show business,’ he said, coming back to Clara and speaking as if he had never left her side, ‘it won’t be easy.’ He hesitated. ‘Couldn’t you wait until you’re of age? Couldn’t you change your mind about America? The show needs you, Clara.’ He drew a long breath. ‘And I need you, too.’
‘To help the show to be a success?’
‘That, yes, and to give you time to be sure you’re doing the right thing.’
‘In marrying John?’
‘In marrying someone who turned up at a time when you are emotionally vulnerable. When Dora, whether you like to admit it or not, has come to a stage where she needs far more care than you’re able to give her. And because someone from home has turned up at just the right moment, giving you the security you crave, reminding you of that little street you’ve never really left behind.’
She had always talked to him as an equal, and she wasn’t going to change now. ‘You know what they’d’ve called you in our street, Bart?’ The green of her eyes had darkened to emerald. ‘Clever-clogs Boland. That’s what they’d’ve said. An’ you’re right. I am still part of that street, an’ I always will be. I can talk posh, an’ I can wear a coat that cost ten pounds, but I’m still me inside. An’ me is little Clara Haydock, playing hopscotch on the clags in me clogs, an’ running to school with a rag pinned to the front of me dress to wipe me nose on when the teacher says “blow”.’
‘An’ me is accepting that you were right and I was wrong about Dora. She needs more care than I can give her.’ Her chin lifted. ‘But you were wrong about thinking you could persuade me to sail to America. Where I come from a girl stays with her man when she marries. He is the breadwinner and his job is more important than hers. What kind of a start to a marriage would it be with me three thousand miles across the sea and John coming home from his flights to an empty flat? I’m going to be a good wife, Bart, an’ I couldn’t be that on your terms. No so-called success is going to make me swell-headed and throw me off balance. I’ve got my priorities right.’
An apologetic cough heralded the return of the pianist. Silently he slid onto the piano stool and placed his hands on the keys. He would stay like that, head bowed, for as long as was necessary. The £8 a week he was being paid had to be earned, and if part of that time entailed being merely an extension of the rehearsal piano, then he was more than willing to oblige.
Privately he considered Clara’s next song to be wrong for her. Gershwin had written it for a deeper contralto voice, an older voice with power. When Clara turned her flushed, angry face towards him and nodded, he began to play. His opinion had counted for less than nothing for a long time now.
‘Some day he’ll come along,
The mn I love.
And he’ll be big and strong,
The man I love.
The emotion and, yes, the power in Clara’s voice brought the old man’s head up sharply from his shoulders. She was belting the song out with such passion, if an audience had been there it would have brought them to their feet. Startled, he nearly played a wrong note.
‘And when he comes my way,
I’ll do my best to make him stay …’
Was there nothing this slightly built girl couldn’t do with her voice? The old man shifted his foot to the soft pedal. It wasn’t an accompanist she needed, merely a soft breathing as a muted background to her singing. She was letting the words speak for themselves, giving them such feeling that the old man felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise. The song might have been written for her, and she was singing it in a smoky tone, technically not quite permiss
ible, but with none of the metallic quality of a run-of-the-mill dramatic soprano. Her lower tones were so rich, they filled his heart with pain.
Suddenly Bart could take no more. Clara was taking the song, using it to convey her feelings to him. This was no young girl eaten by ambition, putting her career first and hoping her life fitted in around it. She was the kind of girl every man hoped to meet one day.
Knowing he could bear no more, Bart swung round, clattered his way down the aisle, letting the doors at the back of the auditorium swing back with a noise that reverberated right through the empty theatre.
And more quietly now, as though the emotion had been drained from her, Clara finished her song.
Thirteen
ON THE DAY of her wedding to John Maynard Clara woke early. Pulling a white satin dressing gown round her and tying the long sash at the side, she went through into the tiny kitchen of the flat in Conduit Street to make herself a cup of cocoa.
‘Cocoa?’ John had teased her about her liking for it. Surely your cocoa-drinking days should have been left behind by now? Coffee’s the thing you should be drinking.’ His amber eyes had teased with their slightly mocking expression. ‘Cocoa’s a sign of your working-class origins, love. It should be drunk wearing a mob cap on your head and a cross-over pinny tied round your middle.’
But Clara clung to the small comforting routine. Putting a spoonful of the cocoa powder into a cup from its yellow and orange rectangular tin, she added sugar and a little cold milk before mixing it into a smooth paste. The boiling water from the kettle gave the drink a good froth, which she drank first with pleasure, closing her eyes as she savoured the fragrant brew.
It was going to be a beautiful day. She could see powder-puff clouds sailing serenely across a bright blue sky. All at once her sleepiness vanished and she knew she was looking forward to all the day would bring.
At a party the night before John had convulsed the entire company with his out-of-tune rendition of a song he’d told them he only sang when he was tiddly:
‘I fly in the sky,
Ever so high.
Surely you’ve heard,
I soar like a bird.
When I fly, when I fly,
When I fly, when I fly.’
He’d landed at Croydon Airport only the day before, coming straight to the theatre and sweeping Clara into his arms. ‘I was in Copenhagen last week,’ he told her. ‘Passenger routes are being opened up all over Europe. Soon you’ll be able to sing in London one night and Rome or Venice the next.’
He’d walked up and down, talking with his hands, totally unable to keep still. ‘I saw rednecked farmers from Germany with catalogues of the big cattle sales sticking out of their pockets. You should have heard them praising the virtues of flying, as opposed to sitting for hours in a luxury express train. It won’t be long before practically every businessman in Europe will refuse to travel by any other means but along the air routes.’ He’d stuck both thumbs up in the air in a gesture of triumph. ‘And yours truly is in at the beginning!’
The sheer force of his enthusiasm had been so infectious that Clara, sipping her cocoa, could almost imagine he was there with her, tramping up and down the kitchen, talking with his hands, his eyes shining and his fair hair falling forward over his forehead.
‘It won’t just be passengers, either. Already we’re using planes for transporting breakable electric light bulbs, sensitive chemicals and furs. D’you know, love, the Prince of Wales flew from Paris to London recently on a special plane! But it’s his brother George who enjoys flying. I’ve been told he never asks stupid questions like, “Is the plane safe?” or “What happens if the engine fails?”’
How young he was. Clara finished her cocoa and went to run her bath. The seven years’ difference in their ages seemed to disappear entirely at times. He was the fun and laughter she’d denied herself, coming straight back to Dora after work each evening. He was a light in a dark room, and what did it matter that they’d been able to spend so little time together? He was part of her childhood, and he saw her not as she was now, successful and coming up to being rich, but as she used to be. John had known her when she really was the clogger’s child, sparking her clogs when her father wasn’t looking and spitting on her slate to rub her sums out when she’d added up wrong.
And besides all that, how proud her father would have been to see her marry the minister’s son. Even a Church of England minister’s son. Clara stepped into the warm water. Methodists worshipped the same God, even if they did sing His praises more loudly and in more tuneful rhythms.
Carefully she soaped herself all over. John had said that a true Methodist couldn’t really ever enjoy what life offered because they were always looking over their shoulder to see if the devil was clapping his hands, knowing they’d suffer for it later. Was that true of her?
‘You’re guilt-ridden, Clara Haydock,’ he’d told her, and she’d shouted back, amazed at her fury.
‘I was born into guilt! Can’t you understand? Not knowing either a mother or a father, how can I feel otherwise? It’s all right for you, coming from a normal straightforward family with parents who passed on to you their good points, and a few of the bad. But me? How do I know what lies hidden in my ancestry? My father might have been a drunk, or a murderer even, and my mother? What kind of woman was she to give her new-born baby away? She didn’t want me, that’s certain!’
Another thing was certain and that was that John didn’t cleave to his own parents. He never spoke about them, and when she had wondered if they could come to the wedding he’d mumbled something about them being too old, too ill to make the long journey from the North Yorkshire village to which they’d retired.
‘That’s another working-class thing, wanting to live in your parents’ pockets when you’re grown up,’ he’d said, but Clara knew that if her father had been alive he’d have been there at the wedding to give her away if he’d had to come all the way in an ambulance.
‘Oh, my lovely father, who was never my father,’ she whispered as she dried herself. ‘Would you ever have forgiven me for singing on the stage? And would my marrying the minister’s son have made up for it?’
There it was, just as John had said. The guilt, the worriting if she was doing the right thing. And the burning in hell that would surely follow if she wasn’t.
There was nothing unnatural in her thinking about her mother and real father on her wedding day, surely? A happy childhood with the clogger didn’t preclude her from wondering about them, did it?
When two hours later she stepped out of her taxi in front of St George’s, Hanover Square, her face was serene, her expression unclouded with any of the disturbing thoughts which had made her eyes fill with tears as she dressed. A small crowd waiting in the sunshine surged forward to catch a glimpse of the bride.
‘She’s not wearing white!’ A girl in a bright yellow dress turned in obvious disappointment to her friend. ‘I was sure she’d be wearing a wreath and veil.’
‘But she looks lovely, doesn’t she?’
‘Just like a mannequin out of Vogue magazine. You can’t tell she’s got stockings on, they’re that fine.’
Clara was wearing a pale pink dress with a flounced skirt, each flounce bound with satin cut on the bias. A long pearl necklace dangled over her fashionably flattened bosom, and her hat, pulled low over her brow, was trimmed with wild roses handmade from silk in a slightly deeper shade than her dress.
When John turned round from his position in front of the altar steps and saw her, his eyes filled with sentimental tears.
In that moment he vowed to himself that he would love and cherish her for ever.
In that emotion-filled moment, he meant it with all his heart and soul.
When Clara made her first appearance at the matinée that afternoon, the audience rose to their feet.
‘Congratulations!’ someone in the gods shouted out loud, and the entire audience took up his cry. ‘Congratulations! Congratulations!
’
From the wings where he waited John was pushed, with a mock show of reluctance, onto the stage. Hand in hand with her new husband, Clara bowed her head in acknowledgement of the thunderous applause. She could feel the excitement emanating from John, and she knew he was loving every minute of the adulation.
‘What’s he bowing for? He’s not done anything to be proud of,’ a chorus girl whispered in the wings.
‘Not yet.’ The girl standing next to her giggled. ‘Wonder if he’ll find the time before tonight’s performance?’
At last, to quieten the excited audience, the conductor tapped smartly on his stand with his baton. Reluctantly John walked off stage.
‘I might give them a bit of a dance if they do the same this evening,’ he told the giggling dancers, slapping one hard on a behind embellished with a curling feather. ‘Then that lad who dances with his sister at the new show at the Empire had better watch out.’
‘Who? Fred Astaire?’ The feathered bottom gave a cheeky twitch. ‘Oh, my God, have you seen him dance?’
‘Seen him?’ Surrounded by girls showing strips of bare flesh, John was experiencing the same sensation he got at the controls of his plane flying high above the clouds. ‘Seen Fred Astaire dance?’ he asked. ‘I taught him! He’d be nowt a penny without his sister, anyroad,’ he added, knowing that an exaggerated Lancashire accent was always good for a laugh.
It was a pity that John Maynard hadn’t inherited his mother’s musical talents, or even his father’s presence in the pulpit before a congregation. Given the ability to play any instrument, he would have turned his back on any tutor at university trying without much success to guide him into a love of the Classics. Given a voice, he would have been another Al Jolson, belting out his songs to an enraptured audience, absorbing the applause like a sponge. Given even a mediocre talent for dancing and rhythm, he would have worked his way out of the chorus by the sheer force of his exuberance.
