Not long after this film was shown, Alan managed to acquire a property adjoining the cinema building. It was incorporated into the main structure, providing them with a large apartment on the upper floor, which meant they could leave Sylvia’s home and have a place of their own at last. At ground level they opened a cinema café that served afternoon teas and light suppers which soon proved to be an additional and highly profitable attraction. It was Lisa’s ideas that tea dances be introduced and the evening orchestra further engaged for this afternoon diversion. Once again it was a move of great success and the dancing space was filled every afternoon with those enjoying the tango, the fox-trot, the one-step and the two-step as well as a variety of other popular dances from the Bunny Hug to the Turkey Trot.
The Fernley had been opened eighteen months when an incident occurred that caused Lisa some upset. Billy had found two barefoot slum children hiding in the balcony while he was checking that no property had been left behind after an evening’s performance. They had waited outside and slipped in when patrons were leaving, their intention being to conceal themselves there to see the programme free of charge when the cinema opened next day. He had turned them out unceremoniously and was taken aback next day when Lisa, upon hearing his report, angrily demanded to know why he had not taken their names and addresses.
“I didn’t think you’d want to put the police on to them, ma’am,” he said with a frown.
She shook her head vigorously. “Of course not. I would have wanted you to make sure that they had a home to go to, and that they were not just being turned back into the streets. You should have telephoned me, Billy. I’d have come at once. Please remember that if anything similar should occur again.”
As the days went by she could not dismiss those unknown children from her mind. Then an idea came to her which she thought out in every detail before voicing the proposition to Alan.
“I’d like to put on a Saturday-morning movie show especially for children, pricing the stall at a half-penny and a penny while retaining normal prices for children accompanied by adults in the Grand Circle and Balcony. Well? Do you have any objection?”
“None at all,” he replied, smiling at her. Trust Lisa to think of children at all times. Her devotion to Harry never failed to move him. However busy her day, she always spent some hours with the child, teaching him the alphabet, reading to him, playing games in the house or garden and taking him for walks in the park. Although Alan never failed to wish that his wife would spare some of her devotion for him, he did not begrudge it to his son and he loved them both dearly, his passion for Lisa unabated. Recently they seemed to have quarrelled less, their shared enthusiasm for the picture-house a kind of buffer between them, but that did not reach beyond their bedroom door and there their problems remained. He believed that if she could have conceived his child all differences between them would eventually have faded away. It seemed a cruel trick of fate that she, with her strong maternal instincts, should be denied true motherhood.
“In Leeds there’s a renter of movies suitable for children,” she told him. “Instead of writing for lists, I’ll go there myself on the train. It will give me a chance to see the old orphanage and visit Mrs. Bradlaw if she’s still superintendent there.”
*
When Lisa alighted at Leeds station, she almost seemed to see the ghostly images of herself and the rest of the orphanage party that had once huddled there under the eagle eye of the evil Miss Drayton. Never would she have believed then that one day she would be on the same spot again looking every inch a lady in an elegant heliotrope coat with mother-of-pearl buttons and an enormously large hat trimmed with pale green plumes.
She completed her business first with the movie-renter, whose offices were decorated, as these places always were, with posters of the movies they had on offer, mostly in garish colourings. Upon leaving there, she walked to the orphanage, covering the ground she had traversed countless times when she had lived in the city. She found the large building to be virtually unchanged and rang the polished brass doorbell for admission. A young girl in the standard grey uniform opened the door to her, and she asked if Mrs. Bradlaw was there.
“Yes, madam. What name shall I say?”
“Mrs. Bradlaw knew me as Lisa Shaw.”
As the girl went to the study door to tap and enter, Lisa saw that the red-gold porcelain plate she had always admired was still in its place on the shelf. Its trick of catching the light had not been dimmed by time and she recalled how it had inspired her to think that the colour of love must be blazing sun-gold. The hue of passion. She had never thought to glimpse its full magnificence in a forest fire.
“Please come this way, madam.”
The orphanage girl was showing her into the study as if she would not have known the way. She entered and there was a slightly older-looking Mrs. Bradlaw with much greyer hair than before coming from behind the desk to greet her.
“What a delightful surprise, Lisa! How are you?”
“I’m well and married to an Englishman, which is why I’m back in England, and I have a stepson of whom I’m immensely proud. And you, Mrs. Bradlaw?”
“I’m still fighting for more enlightened attitudes towards my girls. Do sit down. Take the wing-chair with the cushion.”
Lisa raised her eyebrows smiling. “That was always reserved for guests of importance as I remember.”
“You fill that role today.”
As they seated themselves, Lisa asked the question that was uppermost in her mind. “Did you ever receive the letter I wrote you about the Herbert Drayton Memorial Society?”
“Indeed I did! I put the authorities on to the matter straightaway. Did you never hear the outcome?”
“I never received a reply from you. Later I realised that it might have been withheld from me by Miss Drayton’s assistant, Miss Lapthorne.”
“For your own safety, I refrained from acknowledging your letter until much later, when that wretched Emily Drayton was receiving her just deserts. By then there was no trace of you and my letter was returned.”
“Please tell me what happened,” Lisa implored.
The whole account was then forthcoming. Mrs. Bradlaw, her worst suspicions confirmed by Lisa’s letter, had contacted her Member of Parliament, who instigated an inquiry into the society and forbade the shipment by the woman of any more children. But by then Emily Drayton had taken fright and she retreated to the States where she lay low for a couple of years beyond the jurisdiction of the Canadian authorities, who had been alerted by their English counterparts as to what had been going on. Then Emily, imagining that everything had been forgotten, and unaware that she was a marked woman in Canada, returned to her home in Toronto. The police were keeping a look-out for her return and promptly arrested her to charge her with fraud and procuring. When the house was searched, the remains of her assistant were found in the basement. For a time it seemed that the charge of murder might be levelled against Emily Drayton, but a pathologist’s findings cleared her.
“Poor Miss Lapthorne,” Lisa said sadly, remembering the pathetic, dithering creature who had held Emily in such high esteem and must have been heart-broken at being left behind.
“You knew the woman well?”
“Yes, I did. What was the result of Emily’s trial?”
“She went to prison for five years. I believe the case was reported in the Canadian newspapers very fully. How strange you never read any report of it.”
“By that time I was on Quadra Island, which was far away from everything. A delivery of newspapers was few and far between there.”
“You must have had a difficult and adventurous time. I’ll ring for tea. I should like to hear whatever news you can give me about the other girls in the party that went with you from here, and how you yourself met your husband and came home to England again.”
Over tea, Lisa told her as much as she knew about those in the orphanage party who had been scattered from the centre in Sherbourne Street. Mrs. Brad
law shut her eyes for a moment in distress at hearing of the fate of poor little Amy and of what Minnie had been through before meeting Lisa again. She shook her head wearily, but not with surprise, upon hearing that Rosie had ended up in a Calgary brothel.
“She is still there as far as I know,” Lisa said. “I hear from Teresa from time to time. She is happily married, with two sons, and has moved with her husband to Victoria in British Columbia.”
Before leaving, Lisa asked to see the orphanage, and she spoke to many of the children. She would have liked to take them all home with her and spent so much time with the little ones that if she had stayed another minute she would have missed her train back to London. Her generous donation to the orphanage funds was to be spent on a special treat for all the children.
*
It was not long before the first of the special movies she had ordered were delivered to The Fernley and the Saturday-morning shows became a regular part of the cinema’s organisation. These shows soon became a nightmare to the usherettes posted in the stalls, for they hated the boisterous behaviour, the earsplitting whistling, the banging of seats and the fights that broke out between the boys. A delegation of usherettes finally came to see Lisa in the office, one of them limping through having tripped suddenly over an urchin’s boot which had been deliberately stuck out into the aisle.
“We are requesting unanimously that you cancel these Saturday-morning shows for all our sakes, Mrs. Fernley,” the girl chosen to be spokesman for the rest said to her in fervent appeal. “The din at times is enough to make our heads split. You have heard it when you’ve played the piano in place of the relief pianist and you know we’re not exaggerating.”
“I can’t cancel them.” Lisa’s tone was firm. “The shows are profitable for one thing. The better-paid seats are nearly always full, and that covers the reduction on the front rows and the stalls downstairs.”
“Then put up the price of the cheaper seats! That would keep out the worst of the ragamuffins.”
Lisa shook her head adamantly. “I don’t want to keep them out. Some of the poorest slum children in the district come to these performances. It’s the only chance they get to hear music and appreciate good acting and glimpse a world beyond their own terrible living conditions. I’ve seen those barefoot children collecting up bottles to take to the nearest shop that gives a farthing back on those returned. That’s the only way they can get into a picture house and often it’s a long search in rain and bad weather to raise the money for admission. That’s why when some of the little ones come mistakenly with the bottles themselves to Mrs. Morris in the pay-box, she always accepts them. She knows my instructions are that no child be turned away.”
“They piddle on the floor!” a young usherette burst out in fastidious outrage.
“I know that happens,” Lisa replied evenly. “When I’ve been at the piano I’ve seen it trickling past me from under the curtain around the orchestra pit. That’s why I had the curtain raised an inch. The little ones can’t control their bladders in the excitement of seeing the cowboy fights and the comedy chases. But the floor isn’t carpeted in the stalls and the cleaners use disinfectant when they scrub there with plenty of suds immediately after the Saturday-morning shows.”
“Then you’re expecting us to carry on as before?” The usherette sounded close to tears.
“No. I’ll arrange longer intervals to give the children more time to go to the toilet facilities, and I’ll give prizes of complimentary tickets to older children who keep themselves and the younger ones in order during the performances.”
The new arrangements took effect. The Saturday morning shows became more orderly, and Lisa had the satisfaction of knowing that many deserving children were able to attend more regularly through the complimentary tickets.
A few more months went by and a 1914 calendar appeared on Alan’s office wall. Recently, Mack Sennett comedies had begun to delight cinema audiences and played to packed houses at The Fernley. Risto, with his flair for comedy, had moved to the Sennett studios at Glendale in California, but his interest had swung more to being behind the camera than in front of it, and his original ideas for visual gags had drawn him into the production side. Minnie, putting Risto’s career before her own, had moved with him from their first studios, where she would have preferred to stay. Lisa could understand and sympathise when she saw Minnie being subjected to custard pies in the face, falling over in puddles when the Keystone cops raced past and being the centre-point of many mad rescues. Minnie made it clear in her letters that she had almost had enough of it and had written that D. W. Griffiths, the director whom everybody was talking about, was taking on a cast for a feature epic to be called The Birth of a Nation, and she was hoping for a part.
Minnie’s luck was in. She secured a good part as a Southern belle. Her news, over which Lisa would normally have rejoiced greatly, lost much of its impact since it was received on the June morning when the newspapers at the Fernleys’ breakfast table blazed headlines on the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife at Sarajevo by Serb terrorists. Lisa, who kept abreast of world politics through all she read and her discussions with Alan, did not need the sight of his grave expression as he studied the report to know that a Balkan crisis could have serious consequences if other nations chose to involve themselves.
This development occurred a few days before the first holiday she and Alan had ever had together. He had almost decided on the site of a second cinema, and they both felt it would be good to get away from London for a rest before a new wave of work and activity hit them. By the time they set off in their automobile for Brighton with Harry and Maudie, it had become known that Serbia and Austria were mobilising, and Russia, Germany, and France were following suit. Great Britain had taken on the role of peacemaker.
Their hotel at Brighton faced the sea. On the golden sands and under a July sky of brightest blue, the rattling of sabres seemed very far away. They swam and went on the Pier and built sand-castles with Harry, who was bouncing with energy and whose skin turned a honey-brown as the days went by. In the evenings after dinner when he slept and Maudie was left in charge, Alan and Lisa strolled arm in arm along the promenade under the stars and in the glow of fairy lights strung between the lamp-posts.
“We must come on holiday more often,” Alan said to her one night as they wandered back to the hotel after listening to a concert by a regimental brass band in the open air. “It suits you.”
She smiled back at him, looping both hands in his crooked arm. Her hair had a soft aura from the fairy lights and her pale dress of georgette crêpe was wafting against her form in the balmy breeze. “I never knew days away from routine could be such fun. Apart from the weekends we have with friends sometimes, it’s the first real holiday I’ve ever had.”
He gave a mock groan, adopting the pose of hand to head used by screen villains brought to remorse. “What a brute I am to have made you work so hard.”
She laughed, giving him a playful little punch. “You know I didn’t mean that. It must seem curious that Harry, who is six and a half, and I, who am twenty-six, should both be enjoying our first vacation.”
“There’ll be many more from now on,” he assured her. “We’ll make a point of having more time out of London.”
“Maybe when the second Fernley cinema is a success, we might think of getting a house in the country where we could spend some time.”
“You’d like that, would you?” he asked with a chuckle.
She raised her eyebrows in puzzled amusement. “What’s funny? Tell me the joke.”
“We already have a country house.”
“What!” Her exclamation was so shrill in her astonishment that other strollers along the promenade glanced in her direction. She clapped a hand over her errant mouth and continued in a giggling whisper. “You mean it, don’t you? What is it? An old barn? A ruin somewhere?”
“No. Surely you remember I told you long ago that my grandparents l
eft me their home when they died shortly before I went to the States?”
“Yes. But I suppose at the time I imagined you had sold it. I know it was the maturing of some bonds they left you that enabled us to invest in a cinema of the size and scale of The Fernley, which we couldn’t have done otherwise. Where is the house?”
“Near the village of Twyford in Berkshire. It’s not all that far from London but too much of a distance from the cinema to travel daily. In any case, we can’t afford to live there yet, not with a second cinema in the offing, which is going to stretch our bank balance until it’s launched. By keeping the house shut up and unoccupied I don’t have to pay rates on the place. There’s a village woman, once housekeeper to my grandparents, who has a key to clean it up sometimes and light fires to keep out the damp.”
“Could we go and see it?” she asked eagerly.
“Yes, of course. We’ll drive out there one Sunday soon.” “I’ll take a picnic. Harry would love that.”
That night when he made love to her it was better between them than it had been for a long time. He began to hope that things were on the mend at last.
In the morning the alarming news had broken of Austria’s declaration of war against Serbia. “As long as Germany and the other Great Powers keep out,” Alan said to Lisa as they crossed the street to reach the promenade and the beach, Maudie and Harry running ahead, “there is a chance of keeping the conflict confined.”
That was not to happen. On the first and second days of August, Germany in support of Austria declared war against Russia and France respectively. Forty-eight hours later, when the Fernleys were fishing from the Pier, Alan giving Harry his first lesson in handling a rod and line, there came cheering and shouting in the distance along the promenade.
What the Heart Keeps Page 31
