The Clogger s Child

by Marie Joseph

  When John made love to her that afternoon, with the curtains drawn against the sunshine, she moved against him and told herself that this was what love was like.

  And in giving of herself she experienced a kind of pleasure that dissolved all fear and hurt. If that wasn’t love, then she knew no other name for it.

  Fourteen

  ARLENE SILVER, FASHION editor of one of London’s glossiest magazines, was enjoying her month’s working assignment in New York. Nature had intended her to be plain but, knowing every trick in the book, she had turned herself into a striking beauty.

  She was used to being stared at and accepted men’s attentions as her right. A party where she wasn’t the centre of attraction would have been a wasted evening for Arlene. It took her the best part of an hour to apply her make-up and burnish her chin-length auburn hair, but the result, she would have been the first to admit, was worth every minute.

  She was dining late that evening, after the heat of the long summer’s day, in a new bootleg club down on West 45th Street, and after the meal was finished and a cup of fragrant coffee put before her, she rested her elbows on the table, cupping her face in her hands. She sighed with such deliberation that the marabou trimming round the neck of her jade green gown fluttered as if it had suddenly come to life.

  What was the point, she wondered, in a man possessing eyes as blue as the sea if those eyes were not adoring her over the width of the pale pink linen tablecloth? Not bothering to smother a yawn, she stared around the room, taking in the famous and glittering personalities there for the club’s opening.

  She could see Grace Moore, Marilyn Miller and the William K Vanderbilts, all enjoying themselves with the same abandon as if they’d been in a private house party. At another table a pretty blond girl leaned on Harpo Marx’s shoulder, laughing uproariously at something he’d just said. Already Arlene’s trained mind had filed away the details of the women’s dresses, noting the cut, recognizing in most cases the designer. Her enjoyment of the cabaret, with Jack Buchanan, Gertrude Lawrence and Bea Lillie making their debut as night-club entertainers, had made her wish she had a Union Jack to wave. It should have been a night to rememeber, but for Arlene there was one vital ingredient missing. And that was the besotted admiration of the man sitting opposite her.

  Closing her eyes, she shut herself off from the noise and laughter and began to compose in her mind the week’s fashion article for her magazine in London. As she formulated words and sentences in her head, she could almost hear the clack-clack of her portable typewriter. ‘Hold everything, dear reader. This you will find almost impossible to believe, but our own Gertie Lawrence has been seen around New York bare-legged! Yes, that’s right Bare-legged! Without stockings!’

  Here, Arlene decided, she would maybe put in a quote from Carmel Snow, fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar: ‘The idea is disgusting. It will never be done by nice people.

  ‘Bare legs at Ascot! That’ll be the day,’ Arlene said aloud, gratified to see at long last a spark of interest in the amazingly blue eyes of her escort.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He smiled, giving her his full attention. ‘You were saying?’

  Arlene put her glossy head on one side to study him from beneath eyelashes stiff with three coats of spit mascara.

  ‘Bart Boland,’ she whispered softly in her husky voice, ‘what’s eating you up, darling? I’ve known you for a long time, man and boy, and, well, let’s be honest about it, you could have been eating a chip butty on the end of Morecambe Pier for the attention you’ve paid to your food tonight.’ Stretching out a hand tipped with scarlet fingernails, she trailed a finger down the craggy lines at the side of his mouth. ‘Come on. Tell Arlene your little problem. I promise I won’t use it as copy, even though my editor does fancy the odd spot of human drama mixed in with the fashion. You’re all burned up, aren’t you, sweetheart?’

  Bart gave her a long level look. Arlene Silver was a crazy woman. Her age was anyone’s guess. Twenty-five? Thirty-five? Forty? She’d given up the stage long ago, realizing she wasn’t star quality.

  ‘Can you see me, darlings, hoofing it in the back line of the chorus with drooping bosoms separated by a wrinkled cleavage?’

  So, with a small legacy from her parents she’d gone round the world. Just for the hell of it. Arlene was smart; as smart as the paint on her vivacious face, and yet, Bart knew, underlying it all there was a softness, a sweetness she would have denied with her dying breath. ‘But then I’m a sod,’ was her favourite remark.

  ‘I got a letter this morning.’ Bart coughed as if in apology. ‘Telling me that someone I’ve known for a very long time has died.’

  ‘A woman?’ Arlene leaned forward, prepared to drag it from him, word by perishin’ word if necessary.

  ‘An actress.’ Bart bit his lip. ‘Well, more of an entertainer really. A jewel of a woman with a voice calculated to drown a ship’s siren. And that was when she was whispering.’

  Arlene waved away the offer of more coffee. ‘How old was she, love?’

  ‘Eighty-five? Ninety?’ Bart fiddled with the bowl of coloured sugar, stirring its contents with the small engraved spoon. ‘She stopped counting when she got to sixty. She died in a nursing home, bewildered and unhappy. I put her there,’ he said in a low voice. ‘As I saw it, there was no choice.’

  A sudden burst of laughter from a table in the corner brought his eyebrows together in a frown. ‘The letter I got today was from a girl who liked, well, loved this friend of mine. She’d never known her own mother, you see, and I suppose she needed a substitute, and Dora had never had children, so …’

  ‘I hated my mother,’ Arlene said gently. ‘But go on, darling. I’m a sod, as well you know.’

  ‘The letter said that the end was pretty terrible. No details, but I can see it all.’ His voice broke. ‘Dying, you know, not being sure who she was, or where she was, come to that.’

  Arlene’s razor-sharp brain was working hard enough to earn double time. To die at eighty-five, ninety, well, surely that was doing what came naturally? Around her late fifties was the age Arlene had decided she was prepared to go. When she needed spectacles to cross the street or when her pubic hair turned grey would be about right. She narrowed her eyes. No, it wasn’t the old woman Bart was grieving for, and, goddammit, he was grieving for someone, so … ?

  ‘This girl? The one who wrote the letter?’

  ‘Clara,’ Bart said at once, as a shadow passed across his face. ‘A singer in the London-based revue of Remember Me.’

  ‘A good voice?’

  The expression on his face made her want to cry. Arlene didn’t go much on souls, but Bart Boland’s soul was mirrored in his eyes. Even a sod could see that.

  ‘There’s an indescribable quality in her voice,’ he was saying quietly. ‘I found her, in a two-up, two-down little house in a back street in Lancashire. She was wearing her outdoor coat because she couldn’t afford to build the fire up.’ He looked away. ‘She’d cheeked me at an audition, and I suppose that made me curious about her.’ He looked up again and Arlene almost flinched at the depth of blue in his eyes. ‘She sang for me, there and then, standing in that awful long coat in a room almost bare of furniture. The rest you can guess.’

  ‘You became her lover?’

  ‘No!’ Bart’s voice rose. ‘She was a child!’ He seemed to falter. ‘At least, I thought she was a child. But her voice … It’s the purest thing this side of heaven. It has a quality in it I’ve never heard before.’

  ‘Why don’t you marry her?’ Arlene always said what she thought. ‘Your divorce is through, isn’t it?’

  Into her mind flashed the recollection of a cocktail party in London. Was it eight or nine years ago? Bart there with a woman he introduced as his wife. A hard-faced woman standing by his side, chin raised as if she was trying to avoid a bad smell. A bitch on two legs, putting her husband down every time he opened his mouth. Emasculating him, but in a well-bred way.

  ‘So why don’t y
ou marry your little singer?’ she asked again. ‘You’re not meant to live your life on your own, Bart.’ She glanced round the crowded room. ‘You’re in this business, I know, but there’s something sets you apart. You’re a different breed, darling. Given the chance, I’d’ve seduced you myself long before this.’

  ‘She’s married.’ Bart swirled the brandy round in his glass before drinking it down. ‘To a parson’s son from her home town.’ He grinned. ‘Better looking than me. And younger than me.’

  ‘But not right for her?’

  Bart’s laugh startled her, but after a moment she joined in, realizing that at last this lovely man’s attention had switched to her. And he was lovely, even if his ears did stick out a bit and his hair receded more than a little from that wide lined forehead. Placing a cigarette in a long ebony holder, she accepted a light, then blew a perfect smoke ring up to the high ceiling.

  ‘Now I know why you write the way you do.’ Bart looked up from busying himself with an enormous cigar.

  ‘And how does Arlene write? Go on. Do tell.’

  ‘You remind me a little of Dorothy Parker,’ he said at once. ‘You say things other people only think, and though your words are wrapped in velvet they can sting.’

  ‘I know.’ Arlene’s eyes sparkled now that they were talking shop. ‘I only wish I could write like Dorothy Parker. She has such a gorgeously acerbic wit. You laugh, then you think, Oh Lordy, she’s done it again.’

  ‘She’d have made mincemeat of Remember Me if she’d reviewed it.’

  ‘I think not.’ Arlene’s eyes twinkled. ‘I gave it a good mention, even though I knew they’d panned it in Boston. And now, look where you are. The Broadway vultures call you the English Gent. Goddammit, Bart, give them credit, the sods. What they said about your show made it into an overnight cult with the New Yorkers. The girls shimmying down white staircases balancing harvest festivals on their heads have had their day. And you, smarty pants, you knew it, didn’t you?’

  For a long moment their glances held, locked in affection, liking and trust. It was a good feeling, and suddenly Bart held out his hand.

  ‘Let’s get out of here, shall we?’ he said softly.

  Walking down 42nd Street in the heat of the afternoon, with the third shirt of the day sticking to his back, Bart Boland looked like a man at peace with the world.

  The feeling had come on him as he’d left Arlene Silver at five o’clock that morning when, clad only in a peignoir, she’d kissed him lightly, whispering her goodbyes. She was sailing for home in a few days, but they wouldn’t meet again. Loving friends, that’s what they were. Bart’s smile widened as he remembered. Making love to Arlene had been a joyous thing, a wonderful, purely physical thing, with no promises to be kept afterwards, no protestations of undying faithfulness.

  ‘You needed that, didn’t you, darling?’ she’d said as they lay side by side afterwards in her rumpled bed. ‘Forget her, Bart. The world isn’t well lost for love, believe you me.’

  With his loping stride, Bart walked on. Arlene could be right. He wasn’t the kind of man to spend the rest of his life pining for the unattainable. That was for the romantics, not for a man with a divorce behind him and two children growing up hardly knowing him. And last night Arlene had showed him that he wasn’t cut out to be a monk! Laughing at the very thought, Bart stood waiting to cross the street.

  And there, three thousand miles from home, waiting to join the milling crowds on the other side of the street, with the skyscrapers holding in the overpowering heat of the day, Bart said her name.

  ‘Clara … oh, little Clara …’

  As swiftly as it had come the moment passed and he was moving with the crowd, walking a little less quickly now, not holding his head quite so high.

  ‘But you slept with her, John!’

  Clara faced her husband in the bedroom of the flat in Conduit Street, hands clenched at her sides, green eyes blazing in the pallor of her face. The late summer day in London had been unbearably hot, and as she spoke there came the first low rumble of thunder.

  ‘How can you dismiss it as just a flirtation when she’s boasting to the other girls that you slept with her?’

  ‘Slept with her. Slept with her.’ John repeated the words in a singsong voice, wagging his head from side to side so that the fair flop of hair fell forward over his unwrinkled forehead. ‘Why do you say that when it isn’t true?’ The champagne he’d drunk that night wobbled his features into a lopsided grin. ‘A couple of hours on a couple of afternoons, that’s all it was. You’re the one I sleep with. You should know that.’ A giggle bubbled inside him. ‘I don’t keep you short, do I?’ Not wanting to look at her, he busied himself with the difficult task of tying his pyjama cord in a knot. ‘Used to be a bloody Scout,’ he muttered. ‘Passed tying knots in the Cubs, but they were with string, not with this slippery … this slippery shilk shtuff.’

  How on earth had she found out? Sitting down heavily on the side of the bed, he pressed his fingers against the throbbing pain in his temples. Trust that stupid dancer not to keep her gob shut. Gob? He hadn’t used that word in years. ‘Shut yer gob. Shut yer gob.’ Nice word ‘gob’ … He turned round and shot Clara a venomous look. By all that was holy, she was a dark horse. Known all day, she had, since the morning’s rehearsal. Kept it to herself through two performances, singing with never a falter in her voice, standing like she was standing now, as still as a flamin’ statue. He groaned aloud. Why wasn’t she like other women? Why didn’t she throw something at him, or curse, or even land him one? From where did she get that … that stillness? She should have been a flamin’ nun.

  He heard himself begin to bluster. ‘So we’re quits now, aren’t we? You with your precious Joe, and me with a girl whose name I’ll have forgotten by next week.’ He wondered if he was going to be sick. ‘It’s tit for tat now, so for heaven’s sake take that wounded look off your face and get into bed.’

  ‘You can’t compare!’ There were no tears, but Clara’s voice was hoarse with humiliation. Coming round the bed, she stood before him, green eyes blazing. ‘I thought Joe was going to marry me! We were both free, can’t you see? He was a part of my life, not some casual pick-up to while away an afternoon!’

  ‘Hah!’ John raised his head too quickly and winced as a pain shot through his eyes. The drink was making him canny, and now she’d given him the key to put her in the wrong. Now he could be the one hard done to. His smile wobbled his features out of recognition. ‘What am I supposed to do when there’s a matinée? Sit twiddling my thumbs in your dressing room? Take up bloody knitting? Have you once stopped to think what it’s like for me?’

  Clara lifted a hand as if to strike him, then drew it back. ‘You could find another job. Flying was your life till you married me. It isn’t right for a man to hang around doing nothing. You’re bored, now the fascination of being backstage has worn off. It isn’t like you expected it would be. Is it?’

  He flushed a dark red with selfrighteous anger. If there was one thing he couldn’t tolerate it was adverse criticism. Admiration he accepted as his due, but Clara was putting him in the wrong, and by God he wasn’t going to stand for that. Feeling at a disadvantage sitting down, he stood up and, though the room swayed around him, he felt better.

  Since packing in his job with Lord Broughton immediately after the wedding he had discovered he was losing the admiration of young girls who had looked upon fliers as equal to God. Now he milked that same adoration from the girls in the chorus, fooling around in the wings, tickling and nipping as they waited to go on. He clenched his fists. If only Clara would weep. That he could do something about. He walked to the dressing table and sat down on the stool, averting his gaze from his tripled reflection in the swinging mirrors.

  God! He looked as bad as he felt. Disgruntled and sorry for himself, he began to bite his nails, chewing morosely round each finger end. Marriage to Clara hadn’t worked out the way he’d thought it would. A clap of thunder was echoed by the
pounding in his head. Moaning with pity for himself, he buried his face in his hands, and when he looked up again Clara had gone into the bathroom, closing the door firmly behind her.

  God, but she was a cold fish!

  He got up and walked over to the wardrobe to pat the pockets of his jacket in search of his cigarettes. Why did drink sharpen his intelligence so that he saw himself straight on? If it wasn’t so damned late, and if it wasn’t raining like the clappers outside, he’d go out. If he’d anywhere to go, that was.

  Lighting a cigarette, he drew smoke deep into his lungs, exhaling it through his nostrils. He had to face up to the fact that he wasn’t as popular as he used to be. Some of the crazy antics he got up to seemed plain daft even to himself, if he admitted it. He was losing his audience, while his wife, blast her, was daily adding to hers.

  The cigarette was making him feel dizzy, but he persevered.

  Only the week before, on his way with three of the girls to a teashop, he’d climbed the scaffolding trimming the front of a bank, hanging from it with one arm, making monkey noises. Just for a laugh. The girls had laughed all right, but they’d walked on, leaving him dangling there like a silly fool, till at last he’d had to climb down and follow them along the street.

  Never once, before they married, had he suspected that Clara worked so hard. That had been because he was away most of the time, of course. Rehearsals, matinées, evening shows, cabaret. With him sitting at a table on his own like a lemon, hearing the same songs over and over again, and drinking till his head spun … as it was spinning now.

  Clara had undressed in the bathroom and when she came back she was ready for bed. He could hardly bear to look at her small set face. So this was the glamour of show business, was it? With his wife rocking on her feet from exhaustion, and them rowing like a married couple from the street where she used to live. His voice loud and protesting, and hers rough-edged with humiliation. Sitting down again on his side of the double bed, he drooped his head into his hands and trickled a sentimental tear through his fingers, hoping she would notice. So the honeymoon was over? So what, he wondered, as selfpity engulfed him, came next?