by Maggie Ford
The band struck up with a smooth foxtrot – ‘Oh, sweet and lovely, lady be good…’
She could see Eddie coming back towards the seat she had vacated. He was looking round, his expression concerned.
‘Do you foxtrot?’
The smooth cultured voice shocked her eyes back to the man still holding her imprisoned.
‘Yes.’ Her reply was automatic. From the corner of her eye she could see Eddie moving along the rows of chairs, looking for her, his hands occupied by two glasses, one of pale ale and one of lemonade shandy.
‘Then right-ho!’
The next instant she was whisked onto the dance floor, striving to match the long accomplished steps of her partner as she was whirled this way and that, her supple body bending to the power of this man’s will.
She could no longer see Eddie for the twists and turns this dance called for. The lights had dimmed. A spotlight trained on the central faceted crystal globe twisting slowly above the couples sent stars swirling around walls, floor, across the shadowy figures of dancers, glinting off glass jewellery. Langley Makepeace smiled down at her.
‘Did you ever tell me your name, little Cinderella?’
‘I did. It’s Cissy. Cissy Farmer.’
‘I shall call you Cinders.’
‘No!’ She pulled away a little, interrupting the flow of their steps. ‘My name is Cissy. I won’t answer to anything else.’
In the dim light she heard him chuckle.
‘Fine. I promise never to call you anything other than Cissy. That is, if you allow me to know you long enough for an opportunity to call you Cissy.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ she hedged, thinking of Eddie, guilty already that she was abandoning him, and heard Langley chuckle again.
The music ended with a flourish of cymbals and he whirled her round in a finale of twists, flinging her out into a graceful finish.
The lights came up in a blaze, dimming the still revolving globe. Tucking her arm through his, he began to guide her back to his corner. She pulled away.
‘I…I’d better go back to my seat,’ she said hastily. ‘Thanks for the dance.’
‘My pleasure. I shall escort you there then. Where were you?’
The floor was clearing. Eddie was sitting where he had left her. She could see him easily now and felt terribly exposed.
‘I’m with a friend,’ she began then hastily altered it. ‘Friends.’
Langley gave her a wry grin. ‘Later on, then.’
‘Yes,’ she gasped, and fled.
She told Eddie that she had been paying a visit to the ladies cloakroom. He nodded without comment, handing her her drink. Excuses to Eddie were always easy to make. He was so trusting, always unruffled, seeing nothing untoward in anyone. But Cissy’s heart raced, hoping, yet not hoping, Langley would come asking her for another dance, though surely he wouldn’t be so indiscreet, seeing her with someone.
Yet there was no escaping that twinge of disappointment when indeed he did not approach her. It was hard not to follow him with her eyes as she glimpsed him among the crowd on the floor, dancing expertly with someone else. Once or twice, dancing with Eddie, they passed close by and she caught the glimmer of his smile in her direction, but she could say farewell to any further meeting with him, that was certain.
Then, as Eddie went for more refreshments to quench their thirsts after a session of hectic jiggling, she saw Langley making towards her as a tango struck up. She held her breath. Oh, heavens! He wasn’t about to ask her to dance? She would have to refuse. Oh, cruel, cruel fate!
She noticed then that he wasn’t even looking her way. Obviously he had no intention of asking her to dance. Dull anger moved inside her as she watched him draw nearer, apparently to walk right past her. But as he came abreast of her, he paused, looking off into the body of the hall like a spy about to impart some national secret.
‘I shall most likely be here next Friday.’
His voice was so quiet she only just heard the words.
With that, he moved off, leaving her gazing after him, her mind in a complete turmoil but her heart already winging its way heavenward. How could he guess that she seldom saw Eddie on Fridays? But then, many a girl stayed at home on a Friday evening to wash her hair and preen herself ready for the weekend ahead. Not all, but many. How very perceptive of him to see that.
Chapter Seven
The half-finished pile of garments on Daisy’s bench pushed aside to make it easier to eat lunch, Cissy took a deep breath, and between mouthfuls of bread and cheese, casually mentioned the Friday date.
Daisy stopped chewing to look at her as puzzled as if her friend had announced intentions to enter a lunatic asylum.
‘You mean with Eddie? That’s not a date. That’s going out steady. You don’t call that a date.’
‘This isn’t with Eddie.’ She needed very much to tell Daisy about last Saturday. Firstly, because she had to have an ally; secondly, to prove to Daisy, who had not long ago accused her of backing out when it came to action, that she did have the courage to kick over the traces. She had the satisfaction of seeing Daisy’s easy expression change to one of consternation.
‘You mean someone else? But you’re engaged.’
‘We’ve not yet bought the ring.’
‘But you can’t go out with someone else behind Eddie’s back.’
Cissy almost choked on her sandwich. ‘Do you think I should tell him then?’
‘No! But you won’t half be playing with fire. Say if he finds out?’
‘He won’t find out. It’s only for one evening.’
‘Yes, but it don’t end there, does it?’
Cissy didn’t answer and they fell quiet, Daisy munching her lunch as though diplomacy depended on it. Removing the top of her battered vacuum flask she gulped down the tea it held, finding her voice again.
‘You ought to think before you go off like that.’ She restoppered the flask with a fierce twist of determination while Cissy gazed on her, partly with irritation and partly with satisfaction.
‘You’re one to talk. Who wanted to leave home last Christmas and go on the stage, then?’
‘I’m not engaged,’ Daisy said acidly.
‘Neither am I. Not until we buy the engagement ring, that is.’
She felt suddenly, terribly guilty. Poor Eddie, poor trusting Eddie didn’t deserve to be cheated. That was what she was doing – cheating. But how could she pass up such an opportunity?
Cissy swallowed hard on the last of her sandwich. In a way she did love Eddie. She should know by now which side her bread was buttered, yet there was something more than love that kept pulling her away. But what was more than love? Selfishness? Was the need to make something of herself more a pull than the love of someone? She couldn’t answer that.
‘Anyway,’ she said petulantly, crumpling up the empty sandwich bag and dropping it in the bin at her feet among the offcuts of material, ‘it’s only for one evening.’ It made her feel a little better.
‘You’ve not said who the date is,’ Daisy reminded, her sandwich bag following Cissy’s into the waste bin.
‘Just someone I met last week.’
‘Who?’
‘His name’s Langley Makepeace.’
‘Ooh, la-di-da! What’s he doing with a name like that?’
‘Well, I think he lives in west London somewhere.’
‘He is la-di-da. Good God, Cissy, mind you’re not getting out of your depth. You could come a cropper mixing with that sort.’
‘I know what I’m doing,’ she said peevishly. ‘I know his is a different world to mine. I don’t expect him to take me off into his world but…if only for just one evening it would be nice to have a taste of the one he does come from.’
‘Whatever made him pick on you?’
‘Don’t be nasty!’ Cissy shot at her. ‘I can conduct myself as good as any of them. That’s what I have been taking elocution for. And I know all about deportment and manners and that sor
t of thing.’
‘I’m not being nasty,’ Daisy defended, but Cissy wasn’t listening, her mind in the clouds now.
‘I don’t for one minute expect him to ask me to share his life with him,’ she repeated. ‘But if I don’t go on Friday, I’ll always be left wondering for the rest of my life whether he might have. It’s only for one evening, Eddie need never know. What harm can it do?’
Daisy’s shrug spoke volumes, but Cissy ignored it. ‘It’s wonderful that someone like him has even asked me to meet him.’
Before Daisy could reply, a sharp double clap of the forelady’s hands brought the lunch half-hour to an end, and as the power began to wind up, Cissy got up from Daisy’s bench and made her way back to her own.
Cissy was losing her nerve. ‘Come with me?’ she begged, with Friday drawing nearer. Daisy laughed cruelly.
‘I’m not playing gooseberry. It’s your date.’
‘Please, Daisy.’
‘You don’t have to go.’
‘If you won’t come with me, then can you do me a favour?’
‘That depends.’
‘It isn’t much. I’ll tell my parents I’m going to the pictures with someone from work and as it’s across London I might stay the night with her. All you have to do is bear me out if they say anything.’
Daisy’s expression was a study. ‘You’re not thinking of sleeping with this Langley person?’
‘Of course not! It’s just that if I get home later than usual, I can say I changed my mind about staying and her father or her brother brought me home in a taxi – or something.’
Doubt clouded Daisy’s face. ‘It’s a bit underhanded.’
‘Please, Daisy. It’s not a lot to ask.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Oh, Daisy…’
‘Oh, all right then. But I’m not taking the can back if you do it again.’
‘It’s just this once.’
There was no risk of Dad finding out. Few ordinary people had a telephone in their homes. The only way he could contact her would be to go there in person and she couldn’t see him traipsing halfway across London. If she gave a fictitious address how would he know it wasn’t genuine?
Daisy was still concerned. ‘You’re being deceitful, Cissy, you know that?’ But desperation had caught hold of Cissy.
‘It’ll be fine,’ she assured, her fingers crossed behind her back.
Dad, as she had expected, wasn’t happy even with the promise of a father seeing her home should she decide not to stay the night. But Mum was more forthcoming.
‘So long as her friend’s dad sees her ’ome all right.’ Nodding her reassurance to Dad that all would be well, he bowed to her judgement.
With her blessing and his dubious agreement, Cissy made for the seclusion of her bedroom to push her dance dress and shoes, make-up and perfume into a bag, and with her best coat and hat over an ordinary dress hurried off.
‘I don’t perticlerly like ’er being out all night,’ were Dad’s parting words, but Cissy’s heart was soaring as she made her way towards Hammersmith along with the other West End bound.
The place when she arrived was already lively. In the ladies, she changed in one of the toilet cubicles, restuffing the bag with her discarded dress and shoes. Leaning close to an ornate mirror, she put on lipstick and a dash of powder; a touch of rouge, outlined her eyes with a kohl brush, tweeked her already finely shaped eyebrows, patted her shingle into place and applied a splash of Evening in Paris for good measure, wishing it was some Jean Patou creation. But what she could afford had to do.
Satisfied she had done her best with herself, she handed her hat, coat and bag to the cloakroom lady who hung them on a hook. Then, stowing her cloakroom ticket in her handbag, she moved on into the hall, where she was met by the distorted blare of the dance band and an unceasing buzz of talk and laughter. The dance floor was already packed with couples slowly gyrating to the tempo of a painfully dragged out waltz dictated by a half-hidden percussionist. Cissy drew in a deep breath of perfume and cigarette smoke that always sent the blood soaring, and gazed around. It wasn’t going to be easy to spot her date in this crush.
Hovering by the door for what seemed an age, she alternately eyed the entrance and the crush of dancers, scanning them as they left the floor with the waltz ending, observing each couple moving back again for a lively one-step. All the time she was growing uncomfortably aware of eyes turned briefly and enquiringly in her direction. She could just imagine their thoughts, those girls who passed by in twos and threes, the couples pausing in their absorption of each other to glance her way, the boys looking for partners, wondering about her. Who was she with? Why was she standing there so long on her own?
The one-step finishing in a crash of cymbals, the floor was again vacated and again filled, this time for a crazy bunny-hop.
Still no sign of him. She was a silly fool. What had she expected? A man like that, with money and parents wallowing in wealth, used to high living – what did he want with her? Most likely he had forgotten about her the moment she was out of sight.
Everything cried out, go home! Be sensible and go home! Yet she couldn’t. Not yet. Clinging to her last few shreds of hope, she hung on, looking, waiting, turning her head away should anyone look as if they were approaching to ask her to dance.
She didn’t want to dance. Certainly she didn’t want to go and sit down – reveal herself the wallflower that she was. There was a lump coming in her throat. The bright lights had begun to grow dangerously misty. None so alone as the lonely in a crowd, came the words in her head. Might as well go home. Yes, go home.
Decision made, she bent her head to fish for her cloakroom ticket, thinking now on what yarn she would spin Mum and Dad at being back so early.
‘Cissy?’
She swung round to the light-toned enquiry. And there he was, his grey eyes dramatised by thick dark lashes and eyebrows, his dark hair slicked back and shining with expensive brilliantine. His face radiating affluence, he was looking whimsically down at her.
Cissy felt her own face grow hot, knew it had become bright red as only a fair skin could, and hated this display of embarrassment.
‘Oh, it is you!’ was all she could find to say, adding a further touch of idiosyncrasy: ‘You remembered my name.’
‘How could I forget it?’ The light return made her feel instantly that he was quietly laughing at her. She stood her ground.
‘I just assumed you would, that’s all.’
The startling grey eyes seemed to hold hers. ‘As a matter of fact I’ve been urging every day along till I could meet you again.’
‘That’s nice.’ God, how stupid that sounded. He was smiling, showing just the edge of white, even teeth.
‘I do hope you’ve not been waiting long. I know it’s the woman’s prerogative to arrive late. I do apologise.’
How well he spoke, so easily, where she must still watch each unrehearsed word lest it betray her.
‘Did you have to come far?’ she asked, and again felt angry at her lack of aplomb.
‘Belgravia. And you?’
It had been a stupid question – left her wide open. She was flustered, her mind working on where she could pretend to be from. Openly lying didn’t come easily and no handy locality came to mind.
Langley Makepeace solved the problem for her, this time with no hint of banter in his tone. ‘At a guess, I would say, east London.’
She was defeated, crestfallen. ‘What makes you think that?’
‘The delightful way you said “my”. You speak very well, Cissy, but you have a way of saying “Mie” that says it all, and I loved it. In fact it’s what attracted me to you in the first place. That, and your ravishingly pretty face. I needed to know more about you.’
‘Is that all you wanted?’
‘No. You’ve been in my head this whole week. And now I’m here, and you’re here – what about us using our evening for what it was meant for? They’re playing a waltz. Fa
ncy a twirl, then?’
His grammar was so casually full of the errors that would have had Madam Noreah passing out, yet seemed so right on his tongue. She who’d spent hours perfecting her vowels only to have him pick up on the one she’d slipped up on at the first go, she was lacking the one thing he had that she never would have – breeding in the bone, that allowed for sloppy speech and still put him above the life she knew. But at the moment, none of this mattered.
Whisked away in his arms, happiness flooded over her. He didn’t care that she was East End. Later she broached the subject again and he laughed, a loud rippling laugh.
‘You’re not worried about it, are you?’
‘I’d rather have been brought up in west London,’ she answered as best she could, breathless from the one-step he did so expertly.
‘Now that’s silly. You mustn’t put yourself down, you know. I’ve great regard for those from the East End. Salt of the earth. You know, I feel I’m beginning to know you very well, Cissy. Hope I get to know you even better and that you feel the same about me. As for origins, if you like, it’ll be a secret just between us. I could say you’re a foreign princess who I found one day.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ she gasped.
‘Pygmalion, you know, by George Bernard Shaw.’
‘I don’t want to be a foreign princess.’ She pouted. ‘And I don’t want you putting it about that I am.’
‘Very well, you’re plain Cissy Farmer. As a matter of fact it’s perfect – its simplicity quite bon-ton, don’t you think?’
She did, immediately thrilling to the idea.
They danced every one of the next four dances, waltzing, tangoing, one-stepping and shimmying energetically. He had plenty to say, telling her about himself: his father in farming, the family home, as Langley called an obvious mansion in Berkshire, having been in the family for three generations; before that in the dim and distant past there had been a titled ancestor somewhere.
The house in Belgravia was often used for the winter. Not much to do in Berkshire in the winter, he said, the management of which was left to the farm steward and the house was closed, needing just a minimum of staff. The family were back there now, with only he occupying the Belgravia place.
