Lily, who had been staring in the glass, dropped her head and began to cry hopelessly. ‘Nobody cares what happens to me. Nobody cares. Nobody bloody cares.’
Jack went to her and put his arms round her. ‘Oh, love,’ he said. ‘Of course we do. Of course I do. Nobody loves you more than me, I love you more than anything in the world. More than anything, anybody. You know how much I love you.’
‘Why do you hit me, then?’ she asked, still crying.
‘Oh – it’s the way I am. Just the way I am. I’m hasty. I’m too bloody hasty. Don’t mean I don’t love you.’ He put his thumb under her cheek and turned her face up to his. ‘’Course I love you. Love you to bits.’ He kissed her, and Lily kissed him back. They clung to each other.
Sam Stackpoole put his hand to his head, as if it hurt him. He sighed, went out, closed the door quietly and leaned wearily against it.
The theatre manager, also in evening dress, carrying a large bunch of keys, came hurrying down the narrow corridor. He stopped. ‘What’s up, Sam? You look dejected. Trouble in there?’ He nodded towards the dressing room.
‘Just a little matrimonial problem,’ said Sam, moving away from the door.
The manager looked sceptical. ‘Again?’
‘You know what these things are like.’
‘I do,’ agreed the manager. There was a silence. ‘Fancy a drink when I’ve locked up?’
‘No. I’m going home,’ said Sam.
The manager nodded towards the dressing room again. ‘Makes you appreciate the comforts of your own home, I suppose, seeing all that.’
Sam said only, ‘’Night, Charlie,’ and put an end to the conversation by beginning to walk down the corridor. The other man, though, was close behind him. He said in a low voice, ‘She’ll have to get rid of him, Sam. He may win his fights but he’s not a good fighter. He’s got no control. He’s a mad dog.’
Sam stopped. He said only, ‘Thank you for telling me that, Charlie,’ then moved on again.
The manager shrugged. Then he turned and called in the direction of the dressing room, ‘Miss Strugnell, theatre closes in fifteen minutes, if you please.’
He hoped very much that the pair would be out of the dressing room in fifteen minutes. If he had to go in there to remind them that the stage doorman wanted to go home, and so did he, he had no idea what he would find. Finlay could be giving his bride of six months a thrashing, or another kind of seeing-to, with Lily spread-eagled across her wicker hamper of stage clothes, Finlay on top with his trousers round his ankles. Or they could be laughing, playing cards, using Lily’s costume basket as a table, or have started a party, roping in anyone left in the theatre for a session that would go on all night. Lily Strugnell’s dressing room had become famous, or notorious, for the scenes which took place in it. Managements tolerated anything she chose to do – she was top of the bill, a household name, toast of the town, loved by audiences. She was Lily, London’s sweetheart. She got away with murder. And the way she and Finlay carried on, the manager thought gloomily, murder might be the right word.
He set about his business, locking the main doors of the theatre, carrying the cash from the night’s box-office takings to his office safe, locking the exits, checking the windows.
When he got to the stage door he asked the doorman, hopefully, ‘Miss Strugnell and Mr Finlay gone?’
The man nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘How did they seem?’
‘Left in a hurry,’ he related. ‘She ‘ad ‘er ‘and over ‘er face. She was trying to beat ‘im to ‘er carriage. I ‘oped she’d manage to leave ‘im behind, like, but ’e was too quick for ‘er. She jumps in, he jumps in behind ‘er. From what I saw, they left together.’
‘Well, let’s go home,’ said the manager.
‘Bet they’ll be at it all night at that big ‘ouse in south London,’ the doorman remarked. ‘Luxurious it may be, but I prefer peace and quiet myself.’
‘They’re young. They’ve got the energy,’ said the manager.
Chapter Twenty–Eight
Lily Strugnell was twenty-one now, and Jack Finlay twenty-three. Sometimes she would earn a hundred pounds a week. Jack, from those early fights in the improvised ring in the disused warehouse, had gone on and on, the purses he won becoming bigger and bigger, his fame increasing. Now he was lightweight champion of Great Britain. He had fought one hundred recorded fights and lost only two. His last fight had brought him one thousand guineas. Even before that, Jack and Lily had purchased the lease of the huge, turreted house in Streatham. It had two acres of garden, greenhouses, a tennis court, a conservatory, ten bedrooms, a study and a thirty-foot drawing room with three chandeliers.
‘A gentleman’s house,’ Jack had called it, standing, hands on hips, head thrown back, on the lawn and gazing at the expanse of red brick, now his.
Lily had laughed. ‘You sure you’re big enough to live in it?’ she asked. Finlay was only five foot five inches tall, and weighed seven stone, all muscle. And Lily was three inches shorter and weighed virtually nothing. Both came from the East End, both had been poor and half-starved as children. They had thrived, as weeds thrive in the cracks between bricks and paving stones in cities. They were both very fair. People said they could have been brother and sister. They made love and fought with equal ferocity. Tenderness had little part in their relationship.
Lily’s sister Rose, who had come to live at the Lodge, as the Streatham house was called, said in a shocked voice to her brother Dan, ‘They’re like a couple of rats – fight, fuck, eat, leave mess all over the place. It’s not human.’ Dan was unmoved by this remark. They had all come from the same embattled place where love, gentleness, order and grace were difficult to maintain; harsh words and blows, resentments and the seizing of mean advantages came easier. Jack and Lily, emerging after hard childhoods – very hard indeed, in Jack’s case – had been forced to struggle through as best they might. Now, they were a byword in the East End – the local boy and girl who had made good in spite of circumstances. When they went back to visit Lily’s parents or open a bazaar, crowds assembled to watch them arrive in their expensive carriage.
Now, after the row backstage, they sat grimly in that very carriage until they were the other side of the Thames. A second argument had broken out after Sam Stackpoole left the dressing room. Then Lily had run for it, to escape Jack, who had pursued her and jumped into the carriage while it was moving. When they had crossed the Thames, Jack put his hand quickly up Lily’s skirt and fondled her. She murmured, ‘Oh you are a rotten bastard, Jack,’ and soon the coachman heard the familiar swinging and swaying of the carriage, and the muffled sounds from inside. Jack and Lily were up to one of their favourite sports, making love in the vehicle as it clopped at night through streets of darkened houses.
Back at the Lodge, Lily walked in, silk skirts swinging, through a door held open by a maid. She shouted, ‘What ho! What’s afoot?’ Behind her came Jack, trim and cocky.
There was a crowd in the long drawing room – Alexander Frank, the impresario, was there with three girls from the chorus of one of his shows, an operetta; Jack’s manager was there with his big fat wife, a figure upholstered in blue taffeta. There were a couple of comedians, one still in greasepaint, the other accompanied by a girl in red, known as his niece. Rose Strugnell, now a pretty dark girl of nineteen, was also clad in red silk, very low-cut. She was already drunk, and wearing the famous blue bowler belonging to Georgie Smith, the made-up comedian. She was dancing round the room with him, to the sound of the William Tell overture, emanating from the gramophone lodged on the grand piano in the corner. The impresario, his chorus girls, and the elderly comedian’s ‘niece’ were doing another dance in a circle on Lily’s silk carpet, the bottle of champagne in one of the girl’s hands spilling on to it as she jogged up and down. The chandeliers blazed down on this scene as Lily and Jack came in from the darkness.
Rose swayed up to Lily. ‘How did the new song go tonight?’ she demanded. ‘Ja
ck – give us a kiss.’ She flung her arms round him.
‘Give over – he’s mine,’ said Lily, pushing her sister away from Jack. Rose staggered and burst into laughter.
‘Oh dear,’ said Georgie Smith, coming up to the group. ‘And I thought you were mine for the night, Rose. But no. It’s always your brother-in-law. No chance for me.’
‘Here – you,’ Lily cried sharply to the woman with the champagne. ‘Watch what you’re doing to my carpet.’
Rose was clinging to Finlay again, saying drunkenly, ‘It’s in the family, ain’t it, Jack?’
Lily had marched over to the gramophone and turned it off. She faced the guests. ‘Now look here—’ she began.
‘Oh, have a drink, Lily dear, and shut up,’ cried Maisie Laschmann. Laschmann himself had come up to Jack and was saying, ‘For the love of God, Jack, stop the party and get to bed. You’ve got a fight in two days’ time. You don’t need no booze or women from now on.’
‘I’m a boxer, not a monk,’ declared Jack.
‘You know the rules as well as I do,’ his manager said. ‘Jack – I’m serious.’
The gramophone went on again. Lily, glass in hand now, began to dance the cakewalk with Alexander Frank, until spotting Rose still clinging to her husband. She shouted, ‘Over here, Jack. Leave my sister alone. I want to dance with you.’ Frank, a big man, snatched her to him and hugged her, swaying to and fro with the music. ‘Leave me alone, Alex,’ mumbled Lily weakly into his waistcoat. ‘We must pull ourselves together. This has got to stop. We can’t have a party now. Jack’s got a fight in two days.’
‘A bit of fun’ll put lead in his pencil,’ said Frank. ‘If you’ve left any in it, that is.’ He roared with laughter. He caught one of his two girls, who were prancing about to the music, by her bare shoulder. ‘Hear what I just said to Lily?’ he cried. He repeated his joke, and the woman burst out laughing.
The door flung open and two men in evening dress appeared. Lily broke from Alexander Frank and ran over. ‘Harry! Walter!’ she cried. ‘Lovely to see you, darlings. I thought you were in Paris.’
‘Just got back,’ one said. ‘All right if we bring in these ladies?’ From behind them emerged two girls, very young, pale, dressed in identical low-cut evening dresses. One wore a string of large pearls at her throat, the other a ruby necklace. ‘Twins,’ announced one of the men. ‘Tarts,’ said the other. ‘Don’t mind what you say in front of them. They don’t speak any English – or French, for that matter. They’re Hungarian.’
‘Hungarian, Bulgarian, never mind the difference,’ Lily cried. ‘Come and join the merry throng.’ And seizing the two men by their hands, she pulled them into the room. ‘Come on, me dears,’ she called back. ‘Turn up the music,’ she cried. ‘Come on, girls, and see how the English enjoy themselves.’
She woke next morning, very cold, lying across her bed in her nightdress. Jack was not in the room. A glance at the lace-edged pillows on the vast carved wooden bed they slept in told her that no head, not hers, nor his, had touched them the night before.
She jumped off the bed, shouting for her maid, ‘Dolly! Dolly! Dolly! Where the hell are you?’ She ran down the curved staircase and began flinging open doors. There was no one in the billiard room, although a champagne bottle had toppled on its side on the table and left a wide stain on the green baize, indicating that someone had been there the night before. In the library, where a parrot shrieked in a cage, Alexander Frank lay on the leather sofa, with one of the chorus girls, in her petticoat, at the other end. Both were asleep. A brilliant green dress was spread out carefully across the desk.
Lily’s maid Dolly, a thin, tidy, sensible young woman, came to her side. ‘Mrs Finlay?’
‘Where’s Jack?’ Lily asked sharply.
‘Fast asleep at the dining-room table,’ replied Dolly in careful tones.
‘And my sister?’
‘Asleep in her own room. Mary went to rouse her at eight. She had orders. But there was no waking Miss Strugnell.’
‘What a bear garden,’ groaned Lily. She went swiftly to the drawing room. A maid was clearing the fireplace, while another collected fallen bottles and put them by the door. Empty glasses stood on a tray. The windows which looked on to the lawn had been flung wide. The room was very cold. ‘Bloody hell. Look at the top of that piano,’ Lily moaned. ‘Someone’s let a cigar burn out on it. You’ll have to send for the French-polisher, Dolly.’
‘Third time this month,’ warned Dolly.
‘Never mind. Easy come, easy go,’ said Lily. ‘Oh, my bloody head. Look – I’m going back to bed. Fetch me some tea. And wake up Mr Finlay and get a good breakfast down him. Eggs and bacon – he’s got a fight in two days.’
When she had gone, one of the maids said to the other, ‘The lace on that nightdress!’
‘No lady, though,’ said the other, a new maid. ‘It’s B this and B that – oh dear, oh dear.’
‘Get on with your work,’ ordered Dolly. ‘This is a good place, good wages, good rooms for the staff. If you can’t take a bit of bad language you’ll have to go elsewhere, with small, poky bedrooms, rotten food and rotten wages. Mrs Finlay is not a lady, and she don’t pretend to be one and nobody would believe it if she did.’ And she turned briskly and went to give orders in the kitchen.
‘What a household!’ exclaimed the cook. ‘Breakfast at eleven, lunch at four, supper all over the place.’ She said this nearly every day.
Slowly, the Lodge began its day. Alexander Frank and his chorus girls took the carriage back to the West End. Jack Finlay was pounding the still-frosty roads of Streatham. His sparring partner arrived on a bus and had a cup of tea in the kitchen while waiting for him to complete his four miles. Lily’s riding instructor arrived on horseback, with a second horse behind him on a rein, and soon, clad in well-cut riding clothes, Lily was cantering across the frosty lawn. Rose was still in bed, hugging herself and thinking about her brother-in-law, Jack Finlay.
Chapter Twenty–Nine
Two nights later, at half past ten, Jack and Lily were standing in an open carriage, going through the East End in November fog. Huge crowds turned out down Whitechapel Road into Bethnal Green, Mile End and Hackney. Children were dragged from sleep and held up to witness them; crowds of men and women came out of pubs to cheer; people leaned from windows, came running from side streets, in their slippers; gangs of dockers left the wharves and pounded up from the river to see.
Lily, in her stage costume, greasepaint still on her face, clutched Jack. The blood was still oozing from a cut beside his eye. He was grinning and waving. This was like a royal progress. It was impossible to know how the East End had discovered that only half an hour ago, four miles away, Jack Finlay had, after twelve tough rounds, knocked out Henry Jethro, the American contender for his title. It was as if the news had conveyed itself through the air as the event occurred. How they knew the pair were coming – on impulse Lily had dragged Finlay away from the crowd, got him into his clothes, into a barouche and down to the East End – was another mystery. Nevertheless, they knew, and they turned out into misty streets to cheer and shout: ‘Congratulations, Jack!’, ‘Hurray for Lily and Jack!’, ‘God bless, Lily and Jack. God bless!’ The two were idols, friendly idols, the pair of East End kids who had escaped hard lives but had not forgotten their beginnings.
Jack’s manager was also in the barouche, seeing the crowds, hearing the cheering, looking at a woman holding up her child to the carriage to give it a view, watching a crowd of men in working clothes outside a pub, all shouting, ‘God bless you, Jack and Lily!’ Laschmann wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
‘What’s the matter, Mr Laschmann? Purse not big enough for you?’ Lily had called, in a voice used to reaching the back of the gallery. Everyone laughed. That was Lily for you, smart Lily, the girl from their own streets, Lily who earned, it was said, one hundred pounds a week – and stayed the same East End girl she’d always been.
Jack Finlay had just won himse
lf eight hundred guineas in the ring. It would be America next, they were saying. His next fight ought to be for the championship with the American title holder.
Lily, clinging to Jack in the carriage, was intoxicated. She had raced from the Hackney Empire to see the last part of the fight. After an hour and a half in the ring, Jethro, reeling from the last uppercut, had walked into the final punch. The referee had counted him out. Lily felt violently sexual, and knew that, in spite of the fight and his injuries, Jack was the same. They were like a king and queen, she thought. They would live like this forever. They were happy, loved, on top, rich. Nothing could touch them.
Chapter Thirty
February 1911
Elizabeth Armitage lay on a hard bed in Holloway Women’s Prison in darkness and silence, breathing in the stuffy, disinfectant-laden air. Her head was spinning. She felt cold and sick with fear, for herself and for her friends, some of whom were in the notorious third division of the prison, perhaps being fed by force. She felt desolate about Harry Hislop, and yet angry with him. He had parted from her a week before, saying, ‘I can’t go on coming second to your desire to put a cross on a ballot paper.’
Constance had sacked Elizabeth from the company six weeks earlier, in January. She had arrived at Elizabeth’s lodgings in Ebury Street early one morning. Elizabeth had answered the door in her wrapper, straight from bed, and stood trembling with cold in front of an unswept grate. She had known that this moment was coming. She’d been with the company for nearly eight years, was gifted and famous. And now Constance was going to fire her – if she went on the next demonstration for the vote. Because if she went, this time she would probably end up in the dock, standing trial for obstruction. This time, unlike the last, she would go to gaol.
Constance, in her shapeless black hat and a huge sable coat, sat in Elizabeth’s pretty drawing room and said coldly to her, ‘On the last occasion you ran this risk you were due to play Portia in the evening. That morning you were in the dock at Bow Street. I had to endure the anxiety of thinking we might have to play The Merchant of Venice for a week, or two weeks, with Lilah Zakarova as Portia. That was not a happy thought. Now, you expect me to cast you as Marguerite in The Lady of the Camellias and risk having to resort to playing it myself because you’ve voluntarily put yourself in prison. And we know what a wonderful success my last Camille was – we had to close after three weeks. But anything would be better than Edith Strutton – that I have to say in confidence. She, of course, is furious that you have the part, but she would play Marguerite in the manner of the wife of a canon from the cathedral close at Salisbury… For God’s sake go and put on a coat or something, Elizabeth,’ she interrupted herself. ‘I can’t stand your shivering. Can’t the fire be lit? Ring the bell.’
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