‘Well, they can all behave like stupid babies if they want to! Too boring!’ she said, and her voice was high and clear. ‘But I’m not going to. Give me that box, Mr Whoever-You-Are, and go and mind your own affairs somewhere else. I’m going to have some right now!’
‘Are you?’ he said. He took the box out of his pocket and held it out towards her, balancing it on his open palm. ‘Are you sure? I can’t stop you, of course, since you’re a grown lady with every right to go to hell any way you choose. But I rather think the papers would be greatly intrigued to hear of it. Café de Paris cabaret star is Drug Fiend! Can’t you just see the headlines? And hear what the Café management would say?’
‘You wouldn’t,’ she said, staring at him. ‘You wouldn’t dare!’
‘Of course I would,’ he said. ‘Immediately. Help yourself, Miss Asher. It’s all yours.’
18
The ringing of the phone dragged her out of a dream so confused and alarming that when she snapped her eyes open and stared at her bedside table she couldn’t think where she was, what day it was, or what the noise was that had woken her. It went on and on, shrill if a little muffled by the crinoline lady doll that she kept over the instrument. She shook her head against her pillow and dragged herself upright.
‘Mm?’ she said into the mouthpiece, lying back so that she could rest it on her chest and jamming the earpiece between her tousled head and her pillow. ‘What is it?’
‘Have I woken you?’ the tinny little voice clacked. ‘Sorry, I tend to forget the sort of hours you theatre people keep.’
She opened her eyes wide, for they had closed as sleep threatened to overtake her again. ‘Who’s that?’ She shook her head again to clear its muzziness. ‘Ambrose?’
‘Hardly,’ the little voice said, and even though it was distorted she could hear the sardonic note in it. ‘Max Cramer. Calling to apologize.’
She wriggled up to sit more comfortably against her pillows, staring at the opposite wall with the earpiece still pressed to her head, and tried to think. Last night she had been so overpoweringly angry that, had he telephoned then, she would have hurled the instrument through the window rather than talk to him. Now, with the thin light of the October morning creeping through her curtains and the sour taste of a disturbed night’s sleep in her mouth, she wasn’t sure how she felt.
‘Are you still there?’ the little voice said. ‘I said this is —’
‘I heard you. I’m thinking,’ she said. ‘What’s the time?’
‘Ten o’clock,’ the voice said, and she turned and looked at her little bedside clock, squinting at it in disbelief.
‘Ten — are you out of your mind? Who gets up at ten o’clock?’
‘I do. That is, I get up at seven. I’m at my desk well before ten. I’m due in court in a nioment so I had to call now and risk disturbing you. By the time I get out of court you could be anywhere. And my apology unoffered.’
‘Court?’ she said, still muzzy with sleep.
‘Indeed, court. Middlesex Sessions. I’m dealing with a case of embezzlement. It’s something of a speciality with me. But it’ll be a long one, and I did want to reach you as soon as I could. Do you accept my apology?’
‘I’m not sure. Why are you apologizing? After all, some people might think you saved me from some terrible —’
‘If you thought that I’d be delighted. Do you?’
‘You haven’t answered my question. Why are you apologizing?’
‘I was ill-mannered. I meddled. I bullied. A reasonable list of sins, I’d have thought.’
She sat and stared at the curtains moving sluggishly against her window as the chill morning air sighed through the cracks of the frame, and tried to think. Yes, he’d been officious, but all the same — even to have contemplated using that damned stuff had been lunacy. She’d seen enough of what it could do to some of the musicians she’d worked with. There was old Bixie, with his collapsed nose, his constantly wet eyes and his even more constant fights with managements when he drifted in late for rehearsals and even, sometimes, for performances. There was Sammy the drummer who had once been so amusing and lively and now wept as often as he smiled. She’d never been in the least interested in getting involved with people like that, and yet last night she’d let Ambrose and that stupid posing ass of a friend of his take her to the edge of —
‘Are you still there? Or have you gone back to sleep?’
‘I’m here,’ she said, repositioning the earpiece against her head, for she had let it slip down as she lay there thinking.
‘So, do I have an answer? Is my apology accepted?’
‘Why does it matter? You’ve said it. Now you can go into your court and deal with your embezzler and feel pleased with yourself because you’ve cleared your conscience. What does it matter whether I accept or not? After all, you behaved very well, didn’t you? Upright citizen concerned about the law and all that —’
‘I’m a lawyer. That’s what I do for a living.’
‘And last night you did it for nothing. Can’t you settle for that? Or do you want me to pay you a fee for it? Is that why you called? To get your reward?’
There was a little silence and then he said, ‘I should have expected that, I suppose. I did interfere where it was none of my business. But all the same, I did it for the best of reasons.’
‘Really? And what could they be?’ She was beginning to enjoy herself now. The sleepiness had gone, though her eyes were still gritty, and her mind was working properly. Talking to this man was fun. He had none of the extravagant tricks of language used by the people with whom she worked, and yet wasn’t dull as Dave and Bessie were. ‘Do tell me.’
There was another little silence, then he said bluntly, ‘To protect my client was one of them. The other was to stop you making a fool of yourself.’
Her pleasure in the conversation evaporated as fast as it had come. ‘Indeed?’ she said icily. ‘Kind of you. And who might your client be?’
‘David Damont. He owns that place —’
‘How nice for him.’
‘And he’s trying to sell it. It’s no secret, so I can tell you about it. I want him to sell it because it’s not good for someone like him to be involved with the sort of people who frequent that sort of nightclub —’
‘People like me’ she said with great sweetness.
‘I don’t think you’re an habituée of the place. Certainly your name isn’t on the list as a member. I suppose you could be a regular guest of some other member —’
‘It’s none of your damned business if I am!’
‘Of course it isn’t. But it’s my business to keep David Damont out of trouble, and that means trying to get him out of the place. Last night’s little episode convinces me even more that he’s got to sell. I didn’t know about the cocaine parties — apparently they happen often. Did you know that?’
‘Oh, you’re collecting evidence now, are you? This is turning out to be the oddest apology I ever —’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Miss Asher! You’re deliberately misunderstanding me! I know perfectly well you haven’t used the stuff before —’
‘Indeed? How do you know that?’
‘Because of the way you behaved when it was offered to you. I’d been watching you, and it was obvious you weren’t keen. And because you didn’t look as though you’re any sort of dope fiend —’
‘You talk like the Daily Mail!’.
‘Ouch. You can’t say worse than that, I suppose. Anyway, you don’t. People who use that stuff stand out like — like —’
‘Try a sore thumb. That’s what the Daily Mail says. They like the same sort of ideas and phrases you do.’
He took a sharp breath. She heard the soft little sound across the miles of wire, knew she’d hurt him and was glad. The moment of pleasure she’d found in his conversation was quite gone now. He was as pompous and boring as a man could be, sounding just like Bessie with her worrying and nagging, and she wanted nothing
to do with him. He was to be put firmly in the box labelled ‘Boring’.
‘Look,’ he said after a moment. ‘Let’s start again. Let’s behave as though we didn’t talk last night, and as though I had no reason to apologize. I just happen to have seen you at this club I was at, for reasons of my own, and remembered having seen you in a show —’
‘A dreary one, you said, as I recall.’
‘In a show,’ he said as though she hadn’t spoken, ‘— and now I’m calling to ask you to dine with me.’
She took the earpiece away from her head and stared at it. This was the last thing she’d expected. She was used to men asking her out, used to men leering at her, wanting to entertain her, because that was the way men were — opportunists who thought that dancers were automatically easy meat. She had learned over the years how to freeze them away, how to stop the invitations being made at all, with one sharp look of distaste. But this had never happened before, this sort of direct yet polite approach from a man like this. Max Cramer wasn’t the sort who hung about theatres, wasn’t the kind of man who usually came her way, and to have him behave like this — she felt a sense of dreariness settle over her and put the phone back to her ear.
‘Are you there?’ the little voice was clacking. ‘Are you there?’
‘I’m here,’ she said. ‘And the answer is no thank you. Goodbye.’ She put the earpiece back on its hook, set the phone neatly back on the bedside table, and dropped the crinoline lady doll over it. Its little china face simpered at her and she said loudly, ‘Damn!’ got out of bed and went padding away to run her bath. There was no point in trying to sleep any longer. She was much too irritable now for that.
In time to come she was to remember, often, that morning in October 1926. She would only have to smell the acrid smokiness of autumn to be there again in her small flat in Mulberry Walk, feeling irritated and yet elated by that telephone conversation, had only to lie back in hot silky water to soak away fatigue to remember lying in her bathroom that morning thinking about Max Cramer and wondering why it was he had been able to make her feel so confused.
For that conversation was by no means the end of it. Two days later she had a letter from him, in which he repeated in spare and direct language his apology for meddling in matters that did not concern him, i.e. her actions, and asking her to dine with him. She ignored the letter. Three days after that she saw him sitting at a stageside table at the Café de Paris, his arms folded, his eyes fixed on her unwinkingly.
He almost made her lose balance, for she first caught sight of him as Ambrose lifted her into the twirls for the ‘Princess in the Park’ number, and she knew he knew, because he grinned at her so that the clefts in his cheeks became crevasses. She thought — he must have had dimples when he was a child, and was furious with herself for being interested enough to consider the possibility.
He came every night for a week to the Café de Paris, until everyone else in the place noticed and began gossiping about him and she had to give in. On the last Saturday night of the first run of her contract at the Café she accepted the invitation he sent as usual by the hand of Joe, the waiter who always acted as go-between for artistes and customers, and went to have a drink at his table.
After that it seemed inevitable that she would agree to dine with him, and after that first dinner, at a very small and very comfortable Italian restaurant tucked away in a side street behind St James’s, refusing further invitations would have been ungracious. Anyway, she had begun to enjoy his company.
He was not boring at all, she found, but amusing in a dry sort of way, talking easily and comfortably of matters she had never thought much about before. He talked of politics, of the effect on the country of the aftermath of the General Strike that had caused so much upheaval earlier in the year; and of the new developments in Soviet Russia, where Trotsky had been expelled from the Politburo (‘Who’s Trotsky?’ she’d asked. ‘He sounds like one of the clowns in Barnum and Bailey’s circus.’ He’d laughed and said a little grimly, ‘Something of a clown in some people’s eyes, perhaps — but an interesting and important one.’) He’d talked of sport, launching himself so passionately into a panegyric of praise for Jack Hobbs and his sixteenth century in first-class cricket that she’d stared at him open-mouthed, and he’d actually blushed and apologized for his interest in what had been a lifelong hobby. He talked of books, telling her why D.H. Lawrence was so important a writer and lending her his brand-new copy of his latest offering, The Plumed Serpent (which she didn’t particularly enjoy, somewhat to Max’s disappointment). They went to exhibitions and cinemas and concerts; and slowly she relaxed with him and even more slowly came to realize that he was not as other men were. He didn’t produce a special sort of talk for her, designed to cajole her into bed with him, the way most men did. He had none of the silly flippant small chatter that other men seemed to think was the only kind of conversation women cared about. He spoke to her, she was certain, as he spoke to the men he worked with, and she took that as the best compliment he could have paid her.
Not that he was lacking in the graces that were obvious compliments. He sent her flowers, sometimes, so that she would come into her small dressing room at the Café de Paris, where her contract had been renewed after her short stay at the Mirabeau, to find it adrift with the scent of tuberoses or lilies, horribly expensive flowers in these dark dank winter months, or she would find a small cotton wool-filled basket in which lay one perfect hothouse peach, and that warmed the whole evening for her. He chose good restaurants to which to take her, so that gradually she learned to take an intelligent interest in wine and good cooking, and yet never once was he anything but punctiliously polite, never once did he do anything that could be construed as an unwanted advance, never once did he seem to want more from her than her company.
She was deeply suspicious at first, sure that he must have some sort of ulterior motive in behaving as he did, but as the months went by and December slid into January and brought the New Year roaring in with fog and ice that filled the streets of London with fallen horses and traffic jams, she came to the conclusion that he was just as he seemed, a pleasant friendly man who asked nothing more than her enjoyment in return for the hours they spent together, before she had to go to the Café de Paris to give her supper show.
Nor, she decided, was he like Ambrose. The fact that she was herself unconcerned with love affairs, wanted no part of the silly games that other girls of her age played, didn’t mean she wasn’t perfectly well aware of what such affairs were all about. She knew when a man was interested in her as a woman, and she knew that Max was. He would look at her sometimes with the pupils of his eyes so dilated that they looked twice as dark as they were, and would hold himself so rigidly apart from her when they were sitting side by side with their arms close that he trembled, yet never once would he touch her. If they were at restaurants where there was dancing, he ignored the music and made no attempt to dance. When they parted at her door in Mulberry Walk or the Café de Paris at the end of an evening he would bend his head in a sketch of a bow to say goodnight, never so much as shaking hands with her. It was all very comfortable and easy, for her if not for him.
She was also grateful to him because he made no attempt to pry into her life. He asked no questions about her history, her family or her past experiences, and she liked that. It was not, she would tell herself defensively, that she was ashamed of being what she was. To have been born in the East End was no shame, after all. But it was nothing to boast about either, and she saw no reason why she should. She also saw no reason why she should suffer again the indignity of that time at the Vaudeville in the Chariot shows when she had been taunted with the ‘sheeny’ label. She said as little as possible about herself nowadays, taking a leaf from Ambrose’s book. He had a new voice now, with no hint of the old nasal twang of the East End streets. He spoke like any other Englishman, if in a manner a little more flowery than some, ate the same sort of food as any other Englishman, and never
displayed in any way at all his Jewish origins. And Lexie, when she was at the Café, did the same. She made excuses when Bessie wanted to come to the show, telling her all the tables were booked, that anyway she’d seen the act, so why bother to sec it again? Bessie, for all her quiet understated clothes and her neat appearance, was unmistakably the product of her background. She spoke in the same sort of accent that Alex Lazar did, had the same air of slightly uneasy otherness about her, and Lexie, the new Lexie, wanted no part of that. So Max Cramer’s apparent lack of interest in matters to do with her origins was a comfort to her. In his company she felt properly assimilated, a true Englishwoman, and she liked that feeling.
But even there he surprised her. It was in April, when the streets were washed clean of the winter’s mud by dusty little showers of warm rain, and the windowboxes began to sprout hyacinths and daffodils along the Mayfair streets, that she discovered that he had been born not seven streets away from her.
They had been dining at one of their favourite fish restaurants, Overton’s in Piccadilly, before she went early to the Café. She had changed the act again, putting in new songs, because after six months, even though it had been hugely successful, people were beginning to tire of the familiar material. As he had filled her glass with Chablis he had said easily, ‘It’s Passover next week. Where will you be? Is there any chance of coming to my brother’s for the Seder?’
She had put down her fork with a clatter and stared at him. ‘What did you say?’
‘Next week, it’s —’
She shook her head. ‘It’s all right, I did hear. It was just that — I mean, I didn’t think — I didn’t know —’
‘That I was a Jew?’ He’d smiled, and continued eating his lobster salad with equanimity. ‘Why be so surprised? My name’s not exactly Vere de Vere, is it? A good Jewish name, Cramer. My family lived in Myrdle Street. My brother and his wife still do.’
Family Chorus Page 21
