‘You’re the one that’s not being fair. You never stuck up for us. Why should we stick up for you? Your “business” is with the Butcher, not us. We don’t owe you a fig. If you want to harass someone, go and sue the pants off Mr Arthur Percival.’
Eddie slunk away then and I was glad to see the back of him. We thought we had washed our hands of him. Little did we know! Eddie marched straight down to the Police Courts and filed a case against the Butcher, setting in chain events that the newspapers would feed upon for months to come. I was to become famous, but not in the way I’d always imagined.
A week later, we fled Madras in a flurry of confusion. Mr Arthur had filed a case against both Mr Ruse and Mr Wilkes in the Police Court, accusing them of kidnapping. Within hours we were on a train heading west. We had to leave the Presidency of Madras before the morning was out.
By late afternoon, we were in Bangalore, where we were greeted by crowds of admirers and members of the press. I kept our story clear and simple, though I knew it was being reported as an international scandal.
I had far too many other things to worry about. The shows in Bangalore were dreadful. After the last awful production of Florodora in Kolar where everyone missed their cues, Ruby and I called a meeting. We weren’t going to attempt the musicals any more. We were only going to do revues. Ruby and I made everyone perform their best pieces in front of a panel of me, Ruby, Myrtle and the Kreutz twins. At the end of the auditions, I stood up and made an announcement.
‘I have two pieces of news, one rather lovely and one a bit awful. Firstly, we’ve received an invitation from the Maharajah of Mysore to perform at his palace.’
When the flurry of excited chatter had settled, I went on, ‘Secondly, Eddie Quedda has won his case and the Butcher has produced rather a lot of money to prevent himself being thrown into jail.’
Everyone cheered, which was quite stupid of them.
‘Stop it! There’s nothing to cheer about. Eddie winning is not particularly good news for us. As you know, the Butcher has been scribbling nasty letters to the press from his hidey hole in Pondicherry and has filed that ridiculous case against Mr Ruse and Mr Wilkes as kidnappers that led to us having to leave the Presidency. Of course he also said we are in breach of our contracts. Now, the magistrate in the Police Court has let Wilkesy off but Mr Ruse has lost his defence against the Butcher. The case is going to be heard in the High Court. The wretched magistrate thought Mr Ruse has a kidnapping case to answer. We all have to return to Madras to give evidence.’
‘But that’s stupid,’ said Ruby. ‘He didn’t kidnap us. We couldn’t run away fast enough.’
‘Of course it’s stupid,’ I said. ‘You might just as well say we kidnapped Mr Ruse! The thing is we are in breach of our contracts because we’re not meant to perform unless the Butcher agrees. So now the Butcher is going to try to sue Mr Ruse for more than sixty thousand rupees!’
A murmur went through the troupe. It was such a vast sum of money it made everyone shiver to think of what would happen to poor Mr Ruse if he lost the case. I put my hands up to quieten them all.
‘Now it’s our turn to help Mr Ruse. After everything he’s done for us, it’s only decent that we go back to Madras and get him off the hook.’
I wasn’t afraid of the court. I wanted to march straight up to the bench and give that judge a piece of my mind. I had truth on my side.
Poesy had grown white as a ghost. You could smell her fear. But what did she expect? Every folly comes back to you. Now Poesy Swift would have to swear under oath, to swear on the Bible, that Mr Arthur Percival had tried to kiss her.
53
THE CAGED BIRD’S SONG
Poesy Swift
As we passed under the arches of Bangalore Railway Station, I felt my heart sink into my boots. It seemed we were travelling backwards, into the dark.
There had been something sad and meagre about our performances in Bangalore and Kolar. We didn’t have Mr Milligan and Jimmy to arrange the sets, nor Miss Thrupp and Lo to help us with our costumes. We didn’t even have the music box to accompany our songs. We had only two sets that we didn’t know how to assemble, and an assortment of costumes from two shows. Mr Ruse didn’t understand that without the music box that had been sent on to Colombo or Eddie to play the piano, or Mr Arthur to cue us on and decide upon the blocking in each venue, the performances were going to be nothing less than shoddy.
Every evening, as the audience applauded Daisy’s last song, Mr Ruse stepped forward and told the same tired story about Mr Arthur cheating on the railway fare and then he would bow out and let Daisy tell the story herself. Daisy held the audience in thrall, as she had at every show we’d done since the strike. It was a good performance. You could see the women’s faces melt with sympathy when she lisped her way through the description of lying under the seats on the trains, among all the spiders and cobwebs, of how she had to stay for such a long time even when she pinched the other girls’ legs to beg if she might come out. Why did people like to hear of little girls being treated badly? Wouldn’t it have been better if we’d told a story about how grateful we would be if they could help us to go home? Why did everyone want to feed on the miserable account of little children betrayed?
At night we tramped back to wherever we were staying, having to smile until our faces hurt to show our gratitude to our hosts.
We should have felt breathless with excitement about performing in Mysore. The Maharajah was one of the great maharajahs of India, one of only three for whom the army performed a twenty-one-gun salute. But every face on the train to Mysore was tense with worry.
All the splendour of the Maharajah’s palace, with its murals and gold leaf and all the elaborate tiling and fretwork, couldn’t distract me from misery. He was building another palace too, a palace that everyone said would be one of the grandest in all India. We were taken to see the elephants at work as they carried great loads of timber and dragged pallets piled high with stones.
The worst of being in Mysore was that the boys were taken away from us to stay in a hotel while we girls were taken to the old Maharani’s palace. I didn’t like being separated from Charlie. He was feeling so low about Lionel that I was worried he might go back to his original plans of becoming a sorcerer’s apprentice and simply disappear into the night.
On the morning after our performance, I woke early to the sound of bird cry. No one else was awake and I slipped from our room without the other girls noticing. I stood, very quietly, in the courtyard of the palace, looking at the columns stretching upwards, their carved rosewood dark and glossy in the morning light. I heard a door shut somewhere further away in the palace. How could one princess have so much to herself?
I liked this palace much better than the gaudy, cluttered rajah’s palace we’d performed at the night before. The coloured mosaic of tiles was cool beneath my feet as I walked back to my room.
It was as I crossed from the cool dark into a patch of sunlight that Richmond came jumbling back into my mind. It was like a fever that grew in my brain until I was back in our little terrace in Willow Lane, then walking in Studley Park on a Sunday to catch yabbies and tadpoles, past the Chinese market gardens, the Yarra Bend Asylum – and all the time Chooky was running ahead of me. The Salvos played on the corner of Coppin Street and Bridge Road, and my hands were sticky with fairy floss or greasy from fish and chips wrapped in white paper and layers of newspaper. The rabbito was coming along the street with his handcart and wild rabbits hanging all around it. I picked one out and watched him skin and gut it and I took it in to Mumma on an enamel plate, then I rode the rabbito’s cart to the end of the street. But suddenly it wasn’t the rabbito’s cart at all but the back of a grey elephant and then I was trapped inside a red howdah as the elephant charged into the jungle. The rabbito turned and scowled and it was Mr Arthur and he lifted a spiked ankus and shook it at me as I shrank down into a corner of the howdah.
I woke on the cool tiles. For a moment, I thought it w
as Lizzie’s hand on my brow, just as when we’d slept side by side in the little bunk sailing across the Surabaya Straits. But when I looked up, it was a beautiful Indian woman in a green-and-gold sari. Her hands were soft and smooth and she murmured gentle-sounding words that I couldn’t understand. Then in English, she whispered, ‘May I suffer instead of you, child.’ It made me weep, to hear a stranger speak like that to me.
A servant came and picked me up from the floor, and the Maharani had me laid on a long couch beneath a high window. They brought me sherbet and bathed me with cool cloths and the Maharani came back to me later in the morning, when my fever had abated.
‘I have a small gift for you, little songbird,’ she said. ‘You sang so sweetly for us last night, I want you to have this to remember your time in Mysore.’
She took my hand and in it laid a small silver brooch. At first I thought it was the symbol of the royal family, the Wodeyar’s two-headed eagle. But then I realised it was something much smaller, a tiny bird with its throat stretching up, its beak open as if it was in song.
‘It is a nightingale, little one.’
I fell asleep again with the tiny brooch in my hand and dreamt of rivers and palaces, of dusky red plains and cool green gardens, and when I woke I was myself once more.
I didn’t see the Maharani again. I might have dreamt her visit but for the fact that when we climbed onto the train I still held the silver brooch in my hand.
The nightingale is such a small bird that you’d almost overlook it but for its lovely voice. I had heard them singing from a cage in the palace courtyard. And now I was about to go back to my cage and sing. I felt so hollowed out that I could ring like a bell. I clutched the brooch tightly in my hand. The tail feathers felt as sharp as pins.
54
HAPPY EVER AFTER
Poesy Swift
I walked up the steps of the Elphinstone Hotel, almost hoping that Lizzie wouldn’t be there. I’d watched the hotel from a distance, waiting until I saw Lionel and Mr Arthur leave. I hadn’t told anyone what I was planning, not even Charlie. But ever since that fleeting moment in Mysore when I had mistaken the Maharani for Lizzie, I hadn’t been able to get Lizzie out of my mind. I dreamt of her every night. It was as if she was haunting me.
You’d have thought that after all the publicity the clerk at reception would have been wary of handing out her room number, but he didn’t bat an eye when I asked him which room Miss Finton was staying in.
She opened the door dressed in nothing but her kimono. I could tell she was expecting Mr Arthur or Lionel. Anyone but me. Her mouth went slack and she pushed her hair away from her face.
‘What do you want?’ she said wearily.
‘Lizzie, I only wanted to see you. To see that you’re all right.’
Her mouth twisted downwards and she clutched the front of her kimono. I thought she was going to shout at me, to tell me to leave her alone, but she pushed the door open even wider and drifted over to her bed where she lay down and burst into tears.
I shut the door and sat down beside her. Her body heaved and shuddered as she sobbed. Very gently, I began to stroke her long, dark hair.
‘Hush, don’t cry, Lizzie. Everything will be all right.’
She sat up and looked at me, her face a portrait of misery. ‘No it won’t, Poesy. It will only get worse. Arthur is mad, determined that he’s going to win, but how can he?’
‘It’s not about winning or losing. He only has to let us go.’
‘Is that what you came for? To ask me to take your side?’
‘No, I came to see if you were all right. I’ve missed you. I’ve missed you ever since Bombay.’
She wiped her face dry with her hands. ‘It’s been awful. Simply awful. Pondicherry was a nightmare. Arthur made us travel in a bullock cart because he’d lost so much of his money. It was vile. Hours and hours of hot and dusty travel. And then when we got there, no one spoke English, only French or all those different mumbly-jumbly Indian languages. It was simply me and Lionel and Arthur. And Lionel was there constantly or I was all alone. We stayed in a horrible little guesthouse and everything was broken. I cut myself . . .’
Her face grew clouded. I took her hand and saw where a wound was healing across her palm.
‘How did you get that?’ I asked, touching the red line very tenderly.
Eliza looked confused. ‘We were having an argument. I can’t remember what we were arguing about. Everything and nothing. And then I smashed the lamp. I couldn’t stay in the room a minute longer. My hand throbbed and I ran to the beach.
‘I stood on the sand and there were black rocks and a black, black horizon and I stared out across the water. That’s all that’s between us and home, you know. That water. I tried to push down my sobs but the hot air seemed to feed them, I felt I was suffocating. I was choking on the heat, on the loneliness.
‘Everything has changed. Everything and everyone is awful. The people in Pondicherry didn’t know any better but they kept calling me Madame Percival, as if I was Arthur’s wife.’
‘But you will be, won’t you?’
Lizzie looked at me and her blue eyes grew hard. ‘How can I know? If “she” won’t divorce him, how can I ever be his wife?’
‘Perhaps you don’t want to be,’ I said. Because despite everything, despite all the proof of her actions, I couldn’t believe she loved him. I had to hear her say it myself.
‘It’s all I want,’ she said flatly. ‘It’s all I’ve ever wanted.’
55
SORCERER’S APPRENTICE
Poesy Swift
Reporters came and went from the Castle Hotel. We weren’t meant to talk to them, though they sat at the back of the court day in, day out, writing down every word that was said. I tried not to meet their eyes. I was frightened they might look into my heart and see my terrible confusion.
The worst thing about those long weeks in Madras was not being able to perform. I kept thinking if only we could sing, if only we could be in front of an audience that looked at us with pleasure, rather than the busybodies and reporters that flocked to the trial. Mr St John had tried to secure us a performance at the Madras Club in Mount Road where he was a member, but it was a stuffy old men’s club where children weren’t welcome. Finally, his wife arranged an invitation for us to perform a ‘benefit’ at the Adyar Club. It was a clever way of getting around the fact that we weren’t allowed to sell tickets to shows because of the court case.
We were lounging about on the verandah of the Castle Hotel when Ruby and Tilly decided we should keep on with a different version of the revue and try to make it more like vaudeville.
‘Here’s your chance, Charlie,’ said Tilly. ‘You can do your magic.’
Charlie sat in a cane chair, flicking through a magic catalogue. He looked up at Tilly briefly and then back at the catalogue.
‘Perhaps,’ he said.
Tilly rolled her eyes. Charlie had become so morose, no one could talk to him. As the court case dragged on, he grew more and more miserable. I knew he was thinking of Lionel.
‘C’mon,’ I said, pulling him out of his chair. ‘We’re going for a soda.’
It was the best thing about not having Mr Arthur around. No one was paying attention to our comings and goings, nobody watched over us.
I was glad to see Prem sitting at the Elphinstone Soda Fountain. He lit up when he spotted Charlie, though he was still rather shy of me. We sat in a booth together and ordered a soda each.
‘Charlie’s going to do a magic show. At the Adyar Club,’ I told him.
‘No I’m not,’ said Charlie. ‘I can’t do a show without Lionel. I don’t have an assistant.’
I bit my lip. ‘I could be your assistant.’
‘Oh yes, Miss Poesy,’ said Prem. ‘You would be a most fine assistant.’
‘See,’ I said. ‘Prem thinks it’s a good idea.’
Charlie looked up uncertainly.
‘I suppose if it’s at night, I could do some t
ricks with fire.’
‘That would be a very excellent way to begin,’ said Prem encouragingly. ‘I could obtain some white phosphorus and some carbon disulphide for you.’
Charlie started to smile. ‘If you could get me some phosphorated ether too, I could do fire on the waves.’
‘Certainly,’ said Prem eagerly. ‘You must do fire on the waves. Do you need me to procure some sugar cubes also?’
‘No, they have them in the dining room of the hotel.’
I was so relieved to see Charlie animated, I held my breath for fear the spell would break.
‘Maybe I should do second sight too,’ he said. ‘It makes it look as though I know things in advance. You’ll have to be in the audience, Poesy, while I’m on stage. You go down among the crowd and let someone pick a card.’
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a deck of cards, fanning out a selection before me. ‘You offer them out, like this.’
I pulled out a Queen of Hearts and held it close to my chest.
‘Now, as you hand it to Prem, take note of which card it is and I’ll know exactly what it is by the way you question me. See, if you say “What suit?” then I’ll know it’s Clubs. If you say “The suit?”, that means Spades. “Which suit?” is for Diamonds and if you simply say “Suit?” then I’ll know it’s Hearts.’
The catch was to only offer the audience face cards so there weren’t too many choices. In the next hour we practised the trick over and over, using the same system for the value of the card as well. Charlie could tell which card it was by how I framed the questions. Finally, I swapped sides in the booth and sat next to Prem so we could use him as our practice audience. I saw Mr Dorai, the owner of the soda fountain, glance in our direction. He was smiling as if he thought we were terribly funny.
When I fanned the cards out for Prem, I held them under the table and for a minute our hands touched as he picked out the Knave of Hearts. I couldn’t help smiling. We did make an odd threesome.
India Dark Page 23
