A man lingering at a table nearly said, ‘Congratulations, Lily. You got the old woman weeping tonight. Didn’t you, girl?’ And the worn woman he was with did not deny it.
‘Come tomorrow. I’ll cheer you up again,’ retorted Lily with a grin, yanking Charlie from his seat.
‘My beer,’ he protested.
Carolling the temperance song ‘Father Dear Father’, she started to drag him from the pub. Onlookers laughed. ‘She’s a caution,’ said the man who had congratulated her. And his wife replied, ‘I hope it keeps fine for her. I really do.’
‘Hold on, Charlie,’ Cunningham called out. ‘Finish your beer, and have another on the house. Lily, I’m talking to your dad.’
Lily and Charlie went back to the table. Cunningham gravely ordered two beers, then, turning to Lily, said ‘I don’t want to hear a single word from you. Not one.’ To Charlie he said, ‘Look, Charlie, like I say, I think I’m doing you a good turn and myself a bad one – not that I don’t do that every day of the week. Lily’s a good girl. She’s young and that means she’s stupid; but she’s a good girl at heart, and that’s what counts. What I’m going to say is, I know this business, it’s booming, and Lily’s raw and crude – as a performer, of course,’ he added hastily, ‘but she’s got what’s required to be a first-rate artiste, when the corners are knocked off.’
Lily squealed and wriggled, her face alight with glee. ‘Shut up,’ said Cunningham. ‘You look like a baby being given a lollipop. That’s what I’m saying, Charlie. She’s got a lot to learn, but the thing is, she isn’t going to learn it here. What you’ve got to do is make up your mind, you and your missus, if you want her to go further. Because she can. Then get her down to a big theatre, the Pavilion, the Cambridge in Commercial Road, the Britannia in Hoxton. With luck, she’ll get a try-out first house on Monday, or some time when the place is quiet. If they throw pennies at her, that’s that, no more fame and fortune, get her a job in a factory or a shop. If she does well, she can have a career. If’ he added, ‘that’s what you and the missus want for her. She’s a good girl, Lily, a bit high-spirited, but no harm in her – yet. But it’s a life full of temptation. If you’d seen what I’ve seen you’d worry about putting your girl on the halls. But if it’s what you want, then she can’t stand still. It’s up or down. Think it over. I’m a fool to myself, mind you. Beer sales have gone up two kegs a week since she started singing here. Like I say, think it over, and if you like I’ll give you a note to my wife’s cousin’s husband – he’s an undermanager at the Cambridge. They’ll give her an audition, maybe.’
As Cunningham had spoken Lily had obeyed orders and sat in silence, listening to him with an expression of deep concentration on her face. When she heard of the introduction he could provide at the Cambridge, that huge landmark music-hall theatre, seating hundreds, with its stalls, circle, gallery, promenade and bar, she found it hard to stay silent.
‘Dad – Dad, can I? Can I go to the Cambridge? Oh, Mr Cunningham—’
‘We’ll have to think it over, Lily,’ Charlie said.
‘You can have all my wages – well, nearly all. Go on, Dad. Let me.’
‘Oh, let’s go home,’ said Charlie wearily. It was almost midnight and he had been at work at seven that morning. ‘Thanks, Jack. You’ve given us a lot to think about.’
On the way home, Lily, hanging on to her father’s hand, skipped along beside the weary man. From darkened windows came the cry of a baby, or a row in progress. Dark figures carried bundles through the night. Women stood, plying for trade, on street corners. There was music coming from the doors of brightly lit pubs. Figures slept, huddled in doorways.
‘Please, Dad. I must try. Let me at least try. I don’t want to go back to a factory.’
‘We’ll see,’ said Charlie, but he was looking with different eyes at the streets they were walking. A barefoot girl came past with a shawl over her head and a jug of beer in her hand. Two prostitutes stood on a corner under a streetlamp. A group of sailors reeled from a pub door. This place is no good, he thought. Then he imagined Lily on the stage, covered in make-up, showing herself off to any man with sixpence for a ticket, associating with stage folk, men and women with no regard for common decency, drinkers, adulterers and the like. How long would his Lily survive all that untouched, with a nature like hers? How long could anybody of her age, sleeping all day, up all night and earning big money, stay respectable? What a choice, Charlie thought despondently.
Before they entered the house he warned her, ‘Don’t say anything to your mother about all this. Let me go at it in my own way.’ For that was the other problem Charlie faced – Queenie’s fierce and unpredictable reaction. In the end he did not face the problem. He said nothing.
Instead, one Saturday he pretended to go to the butcher’s with Lily, and went straight to Jack Cunningham. He asked him for a note to introduce Lily to his wife’s relative at the Cambridge.
Cunningham surprised them. He said, ‘Well, I’m at a loose end. I’ll do better. Let’s go there together and I’ll introduce her in person.’ And so they got on a tram to Commercial Road.
Lily was mortified. She was wearing her everyday heavy black boots, black stockings and a plaid dress she was growing out of. But though furious and embarrassed, she dared not change her mind about going, in case the chance never came again. She fluffed out her long blonde hair.
‘So what does Mrs Strugnell say about all this?’ asked Jack, as the tram rattled along.
‘Mrs Strugnell doesn’t know,’ Charlie told him. ‘She thinks we’ve gone out for some meat for our supper.’
Cunningham smiled, but made no comment. Charlie confided, ‘My idea was that if Lily got turned down, she need never know. If she gets her chance, then we have something to talk about. In any case,’ he added, ‘I suppose I’m master in my own home.’
‘I daresay,’ was all Cunningham replied.
Lily was fuming but dared not show it, in case Charlie lost his temper with her and called off the visit to the Cambridge. She had no music, thick boots, and now Charlie was saying she might not get a job. And the worst of it was, he might be right. Oh, calm down, Lily, she told herself silently. Calm down. You can do it. You know you can. But could she?
They were lucky that Jack Cunningham’s relative, Arthur Duggan, was at the stage door of the theatre when they arrived. The young red-headed man was working in his shirtsleeves with an oil can on the bar of the door. He looked embarrassed at being caught like this. ‘Hallo, Jack,’ he said. ‘You can’t get anyone to do anything these days. This thing’s sticking and jamming all over the place. If I don’t do it it won’t get done.’
‘With all due respect, I think your door’s warped,’ said Charlie.
‘Warped? It’s been done to death with people kicking and banging at it. We need a new one, but try telling them that. They’ll wait till it falls off its hinges. Well, Jack, don’t tell me what brings you here. It’s this pretty little lady, isn’t it?’ He looked at Lily with an appraising eye.
Lily burst out nervously, ‘I didn’t know I was coming or I’d have changed my dress.’
‘It’s not the dress, it’s what’s underneath it, eh,’ responded Duggan, and then, catching Charlie’s hard glance, said hastily, ‘What I meant was, the underlying talent.’
‘I expect you did,’ said Charlie.
‘An audition, then,’ he said. ‘All right. Let me get this muck off my hands and we’ll see what you can do.’
He went through the stage door and began to rummage under the doorman’s desk. The others followed him into the dark corridor. ‘Slam that door behind you,’ said Duggan. ‘Though God knows what’ll happen if you do.’ He found a piece of rag and began to wipe his oily fingers on it, saying, ‘Name?’
‘Lily Strugnell.’
‘Hm,’ he said doubtfully. ‘Well – never mind. Got your music?’
‘No, sir,’ she said, abashed.
‘Oh well, the pianist’ll manage, I expect, if h
e’s here, and if he’s sober. Harold!’ he called loudly. ‘Harold!’ He groaned. ‘He’s meant to be here, but where is he? Let’s try the stage. Follow me. Try not to fall over in the dark.’
There were doors all along the corridor, mostly closed, though Lily saw through one which was open an old sofa with an elaborate red dress flung across it. There was a smell of sweat and greasepaint and dust. At the bottom of the corridor was a spiral staircase. Duggan went up it like a monkey, calling, ‘Harold! The pianist, has anybody seen the pianist?’
As if by a miracle, they were in the wings, then Lily was on the dark stage, five feet above the body of the theatre. It was huge, like a ballroom. In front of them, in dimness, were the rows and rows of empty stall seats. Beyond and aloft were the gilded frames of the circle and, higher still, the gallery. Behind Lily was a set showing a seaside scene, a very blue sky, yellow sand, deckchairs, a Punch and Judy. Lily’s mouth dried. She felt very small. She had never been on a proper stage before. Yet she moved, as if drawn by a magnet, away from the three men at the side of the stage, to the middle. It seemed vast and high. Now she could see, through the gloom, a woman in a large hat, sitting in the fourth row of the empty stalls. Suddenly, down the aisle came a large man in an even larger coat, with a huge fur collar. He took the cigar from his mouth and bellowed, ‘Get off that stage.’ Lily scuttled back towards her father and the others.
‘Mr Green,’ Arthur Duggan called down nervously. To Cunningham and Charlie he added, in an undertone, ‘He’s got an interest in the place.’
‘Duggan,’ shouted the man below, ‘where’s the pianist? Where have you been? Miss La Verne has been waiting ten minutes in this mausoleum.’
‘Yes, Mr Green,’ said Arthur, advancing to the edge of the stage. ‘If I’d known you were coming – and the lady…’
‘Who are all these people? They’re nothing to do with us. Where’s the manager, Stackpoole?’
‘I really don’t know, Mr Green. I was not informed about any of this. I’ll go to Mr Stackpoole’s office—’
‘I’ve already been. He’s not there,’ cried Green angrily, then broke off as the door at the back of the theatre opened with a crash and a tall, blond man in his early thirties rushed down the central aisle. ‘Stackpoole!’ Green cried angrily.
‘Mr Green,’ he said, ‘a thousand apologies. The pianist didn’t arrive and I’ve been obliged to find a substitute.’
‘Is that him?’ Green said, pointing to a tall, thin young man advancing hesitantly towards them.
‘Yes, this is Oliver James. I’m sure you’ll find him adequate – quite adequate.’
‘I’m glad to hear it. Shall we proceed? And clear the stage.’
Arthur Duggan, now very nervous, had already gestured to the party on the stage to follow him. He led them down the stairs beside the orchestra pit. They passed the thin young man, who was going to the piano. As he was about to sit down, Green cried out to Stackpoole, ‘Perhaps young what’s-his-name would like to come over here and take Miss La Verne’s music, unless he thinks he can do it all by instinct.’
Mumbling, ‘I beg your pardon,’ the pianist left the piano and made for the woman seated in the stalls.
Meanwhile, Stackpoole had edged furtively through the stalls to where Lily’s group stood. He muttered to Arthur, ‘What the hell’s going on here, Duggan? Who are these people?’
Lily, standing in the aisle, detected that her big day might very well end prematurely. Her eyes had filled with tears, though she dared make no sound.
‘It’s a young lady I said I’d try out – very popular locally,’ Duggan began to explain.
Stackpoole interrupted, his face beaded with sweat. ‘We’re on the verge of getting the sack here! Get rid of—’ But Lily was willing him to look at her, and he did. ‘Soprano?’ he muttered, taking in the shabby dress, the pretty face, the big eyes full of tears.
Cunningham said quickly, ‘Mezzo – it’s a bigger voice than you’d think.’
‘Wait. Stand back against the wall and try to be invisible,’ he said urgently, and shuffled back through the seats to where Miss La Verne’s music was being discussed in raised voices. ‘It doesn’t say that in the music,’ the pianist was pleading.
‘Mr Green, he must do what I say, mustn’t he?’ came Miss La Verne’s small, breathy voice. She was now standing elegantly in the central aisle, pointing at her music and saying to the pianist, ‘You slow down here, I say. My top notes are my speciality.’
‘Yes, Miss La Verne,’ answered the pianist.
At last she stepped on to the stage, revealing herself as a tall, elegant woman of about twenty-five, with huge dark eyes and much black hair piled up under a large cream silk hat. She had a tightly corseted, rounded figure, and was wearing a well-petticoated rose-coloured silk dress and long matching gloves, on which bracelets gleamed.
Lily’s eyes were out on stalks. She saw before her the fruits of fame on the stage. Cunningham and Charlie, though, perceived something different. The piano struck up, very slowly, the opening chords of a popular drawing-room ballad, ‘Come Into the Garden Maud’. Cunningham pulled a face. It took none of them, even the bedazzled Lily, very long to hear that Miss La Verne, though she performed elegantly, with much gentle bending of the body, charming raisings of the eyes, and gestures involving the rose-coloured gloves, was not a good singer. It was true that her top notes were not bad, but she had selected a song difficult to sing in tune, and she was consistently slightly flat. With that, and a pianist instructed to drag out the phrases, the experience shortly became a painful one. Lily, uncertain at first, saw her father grimacing in the shadows, while Jack Cunningham furtively mimed sticking his fingers in his ears. Lily grinned. The song went on, verse after verse. Well, thought Lily as it proceeded, if you only need to do better than that, there’s nothing to it. On the other hand, she reflected reasonably, this was much worse than anything she had seen before on her few visits to music halls. She didn’t know what to think.
Nevertheless, after the performance, Green, Stackpoole and Duggan all clapped enthusiastically, and Mr Stackpoole cried out, ‘Excellent! Bravo!’ Miss La Verne came from the stage, smiling, with her arms extended, and put her hands in Mr Green’s. After a short conference in the aisle, Stackpoole showed Green and Miss La Verne to the door of the theatre, with every mark of respect. Once they had left he came rapidly back down the aisle, wiping his brow with his handkerchief. He went straight to the pianist, said something, and put his hand in his pocket. Cunningham, followed by Charlie and Lily, emerged from the shadows. Jack called out, ‘Sir! Would you mind hearing this young lady, like you said?’
‘Well, all right,’ Stackpoole said reluctantly. He handed a coin to the pianist and said, ‘Do you mind throwing in another tune for the money, my boy?’ The pianist muttered something, and Stackpoole laughed.
Lily, terrified, whispered to her father, ‘I can’t sing like that.’
‘Like what?’ asked Charlie.
‘Hurry up,’ called Stackpoole. ‘I haven’t got all day.’
Lily began to go on stage. It was a mercy that Charlie suddenly understood what she was planning. He ran after her and called up, ‘Lily, don’t try to sing like Miss La Verne.’ Lily was bewildered. They had liked Miss La Verne’s singing; they had clapped her and praised her. She had concluded that if she copied Miss La Verne she, too, would get an engagement at the Cambridge.
The pianist, Oliver, played a chord, attracting her attention. Looking up, he said, ‘Young lady, take my advice, too. Please don’t try to sing like Miss La Verne.’
‘Why not?’ demanded Lily from the stage.
‘Just tell me what you’ll sing.’
‘“A Bird in a Gilded Cage”. Do you know it?’
‘Who doesn’t?’ he said, and began to play the introduction.
At first Lily could not prevent herself from copying Miss La Verne’s swooping notes, shows delivery and slightly flat tone. At this, Cunningham put his hands ov
er his face. But Oliver would not play as slowly as he had under Miss La Verne’s instructions, and Lily’s innate feeling for music would not allow her to challenge him as Miss La Verne had. By the end of the first verse she was forced to yield and sing naturally. In the second verse her voice soared, her head went up, and steadily, in her clumsy boots, her hair untidy, she took command. When she finished there was applause. Even Stackpoole clapped, though reluctantly, and the pianist stood up and shouted, ‘Very good! Well done!’
Lily’s confidence rose. She bowed to him. Then, lifting her head, she called out cheekily to Stackpoole, ‘Do you want something a bit more cheerful now?’
‘You might as well,’ came the reply.
Lily launched into ‘Down At the Old Bull and Bush’ with gestures, skirt-lifting and the perky little dancestep she had developed at Cunningham’s. When she’d finished, Stackpoole turned to Duggan and said, ‘There’s no doubt about her. None at all.’
‘You’ll give her a try?’
‘I’d be mad if I didn’t. Well,’ he called, ‘which of you gentlemen is in charge of this young lady?’
‘I’m her father,’ said Charlie, advancing.
In a rapid mutter they settled the details of Lily’s first proper theatrical engagement. She would play the first house on Monday, Wednesday and Friday of the coming week, at fifteen shillings per performance. Meanwhile, Lily stood on the stage, wondering what was going on. She knew she had done well, but dreaded that Stackpoole was telling her father to take her home and get her singing lessons – perhaps so that next time she would sound more like Miss La Verne.
The pianist put on his coat and ran up on stage. Seeing her face, he said, ‘They’re sorting out your terms. Here – Miss – Miss Lily, will you come out with me one night?’
They’re sorting out my terms, thought Lily. Does that mean we got the job? It must. To Oliver, she said automatically, ‘I can’t go out with you. My dad wouldn’t let me.’ Then she took in his crestfallen face and added, kindly, ‘I’ll tell you what, though. You’ve done me a good turn today. When I’m rich and famous, if you have any trouble at all, you just come to me and I’ll look after you. I’ll see you’re all right.’ And she meant it.
Elizabeth and Lily Page 13
