Family Chorus

by Claire Rayner

  ‘Lexie, please go away.’ He was still standing with his back to her as he straightened his clothes.

  She shook her head at him, even though she knew he couldn’t see her, and said, ‘No.’ But now he turned round, tidy at last, and stared at her. His face was blotchy and his eyes seemed to glitter a little as he looked at her. ‘I don’t know why you came, but I’m very sorry you did. This isn’t going to get either of us anywhere. Please go away. Now.’

  ‘But, Max,’ she began. ‘I didn’t — I mean, I only wanted to talk to you. I didn’t mean to —’

  ‘It doesn’t really matter. Just go away, please. I can’t cope with this, not here. I’ll meet you tonight before the show and we’ll have dinner, and we can talk properly. But I can’t arrange my life this way. Whatever theatre people may do, I’m still me, and I can’t handle this sort of — well, I just can’t.’

  ‘Arrange your life what way? I don’t understand.’ She shook her head again, and after a moment reached for her bag and took out her powder puff and compact. It didn’t really matter what she looked like, but she had to do something distracting, something to keep her hands and eyes busy, to stop her looking at that blotched, tense face and angry eyes.

  ‘I’m not one of the — I’m not like the people you new women are used to. When I — when I care about a person it has to be on my terms and they’re the old-fashioned kind. I have to treat people with — with respect and patience and — I can’t cope with this sort of casualness. It’s not my style. Making love in offices — it’s sordid.’

  She put away the compact and closed her bag with a little snap. ‘I came to you for help, Max. I hadn’t planned to make love to you. Believe it or not, I’m not made that way either. I’d have thought after knowing me for so long you’d know that I wasn’t some sort of — oh, whatever it is you think I am. I was upset and lost control and kissed you. Is that so awful? If it is, I’m sorry.’

  She got to her feet, picked up her hat and started to walk towards the door. ‘I didn’t make any dark plans, you know. I didn’t set out to seduce you. Is that what you thought? That I was trying to trap you into something you don’t want? Well, I wasn’t. There’s nothing you’ve got to offer me that I want. I’m sorry I bothered you — I’ll know better in future.’

  ‘I’ll come to the Café tonight, when we’re both cooler,’ he said, taking a step forwards. But she turned on him so sharply that he drew back.

  ‘Don’t you dare,’ she said and her voice was thin and high. ‘Don’t you dare come anywhere near the Café. I’ve got better things to do than spend my time with someone who thinks I’m some sort of a — some kind of a tart. And you obviously do. So go to hell and leave me alone —’ She went slamming out of the office and ran down the stairs, passing the typist, on her way up, in such a rush that she whirled to stare after Lexie with wide, startled eyes.

  She ran out into Bedford Row and along towards Theobalds Road, the tears starting to sting her eyes again, and feeling sick with confusion and anger and disappointment to add to all the other hateful feelings that had come crowding in on her ever since last night’s visit from Mr Welch. Twenty-four hours ago everything had been wonderful and now it was all awful. She needed someone to go to, someone to look after her. And who else was there but Bessie.

  But she couldn’t go to her. Not ever.

  21

  When the letter came about Fanny, she treated it in the same way as all the others that Bessie had sent — she didn’t read it for several days. Why it should make any difference to put it in a drawer and then, when she happened, not really accidentally, to open that drawer again a week later to pick it up and slit the envelope, she didn’t quite know. All she did know was that it made her feel more in control of the situation deliberately to delay reading Bessie’s appeals and apologies. So she didn’t know until well after the funeral that her older sister had died.

  When she did read the letter, sitting there with a cup of watery coffee on the edge of her small desk in her practice dress and sweating a little, because she’d worked hard on the new routine that morning, she didn’t feel anything at first, apart from mild surprise that Fanny had after all really been as ill as that. She’d looked ill, certainly, at the Seder night service, but then Fanny had always been good at making the people around her think what she wanted them to, and she had for some time wanted to play the invalid; or so Lexie had thought until she sat there in her Mulberry Walk flat on a warm morning in June and read in Bessie’s spidery writing the news of Fanny’s death, at home, three weeks before. She had been just fifty years old.

  She refolded the pages carefully, put it back in its envelope and dropped it back in the drawer with the rest of Bessie’s letters. She had written almost every day at first after that dreadful morning behind Alex’s tea shop in Tottenham Court Road, then at least twice a week after that, and the drawer was adrift with envelopes. Even though Lexie had maintained a stubborn silence, had refused to answer a single one of the appeals with which Bessie had bombarded her, she still kept the letters, and refused to ask herself why. They were just there, and that was all there was to say about it.

  Now she closed the drawer and went to rewind the gramophone and start the record again. There was work to be done. Lots of work, and not a great deal of time in which to do it. Grimly she set to again. The tap routines she had devised for herself were getting easier now, and she watched herself in the big mirror she had bought in one of the back street shops in World’s End, at the foot of the King’s Road, appraising each twist of her head, each movement of her feet and ankles with a cool subjective approval. She was getting better, no question of it. Another couple of weeks and she’d be ready to go back to C.B., show him what she could do, force him to keep the half-hearted promise made to her all those weeks ago when everything had come crashing round her ears.

  America, America, she said inside her head in rhythm with the music and the rattle of her shoes. A-me-ri-ca, A-me-ri-ca, I’m on my way, I’m on my way. She whirled and tapped and whirled again, concentrating on her work, on her sweating body and screaming muscles, on the music syncopating tinnily from the old gramophone, on everything except the news that the fortnight-old letter had dropped into her mind.

  It’s going to work, it’s definitely going to work, she told herself as the room dipped and leaped around her in rhythm with her flashing feet. I’ll never be dependent on another person again. There’ll be just me on my own, and I’ll be the best they ever saw or heard. I’ll show them I don’t need any Ambroses or Poppies — but that thought still hurt and she didn’t want to think it. She redoubled her efforts, putting in an extra step in every three, speeding up the rhythm breathlessly.

  But the thought wouldn’t go away and she had to let it unribbon in her mind as it wanted to, had to remember the way Mr Welch had looked at her with elephantine melancholy, and told her that C.B. was dreadfully sorry, really cut up about it, but what could he do? The thing that had attracted him to the act had been the Toytown number with its half dozen changes of costumes in as many minutes. If she couldn’t deliver that, then the deal was off. No One Dam’ Thing After Another for Alexandra Asher unless she could change costumes one after another — and he’d laughed at his joke with great delight and then looked at her lugubriously over his cigar.

  ‘Mind you, my dear, you’ve got style. I’m not saying Cockie mightn’t take to something else you do for some other show. He’s putting together a nice little revue to take to Broadway later this year and if you can come up with a nice snappy little number for that, a classy little act like the one you had at the Café, why, I dare say he’d make a real effort to fit you in.’ And he’d nodded at her, lumbered to his feet and shown her the door.

  The management at the Café de Paris had shaken their heads over the act, telling her that without that Toytown number it really wouldn’t pull ’em in any more and it was a breach of her original contract not to include it, so maybe she ought to give it a bit of a rest,
just till she got herself together, got a replacement for her dresser — and to crown it all, Ambrose hadn’t waited. He’d seen the problems piling up and gone scuttling back to André Chariot to ask for a job, and got one. He hadn’t told Lexie what he’d done until he’d already been in one performance at the Vaudeville and there was no possibility he could be persuaded to back down.

  Not that she would have asked him to, she told herself now, as she went into the fast end section of the new act she was devising, seeing herself as a blur in the mirror propped against her living room wall. I don’t want people who don’t want me, people who can’t be relied on, people who scuttle and run the moment you’ve got problems. I don’t want people at all. From now on it’s just me, me, me. I’ll show them, I’ll show them I don’t need them, rattle, tap, whirl, rattle — and the record at last ground to its hissing end. She stopped breathlessly and at once laughed herself into her scales, singing as hard and loud as she could. It was getting better, her breath control was stronger, she could sing up and down the scale now immediately after dancing without sounding like a puffing hippopotamus or looking like a fish out of water. Soon, now, very soon, A-me-ri-ca, A-me-ri-ca, I’m on my way. I’m on my way —

  But all the time it stayed there in her mind. Fanny dead. Fanny no longer able to nag and needle and make Bessie look so mulish and Dave so hunted. It didn’t seem possible, and for a moment she thought — it’s not really true, it’s just a trick Bessie’s cooked up to get me to go and see them. But she knew that wasn’t so, even as the idea came into her head. Bessie couldn’t say a thing like that if it wasn’t true; she’d think it was wicked. It had to be true. Fanny was dead.

  She stopped work at last, knowing that, much as she wanted to go on, she’d reached the danger point. Push herself any harder and longer and she’d not only stop getting anything useful done; she’d actually start to harm herself. She’d had a bad fright a few days ago when she’d overdone it and her calf muscles had gone into an agonizing cramp. She’d lain there on the sheet of thin plywood she’d bought to use as a practice floor, clutching her leg, with tears running dawn her face, terrified at the severity of the pain and at being alone and in such agony, convinced she’d done herself some sort of permanent injury. No, overwork was a risk she couldn’t take.

  So she bathed and wrapped herself in her yellow satin peignoir, and went and sat in front of her open living room window, as the sounds of a July-baked London street drifted in with the fitful breeze, her bankbook and the sheaf of bills in front of her. That was something that needed thinking about, and thinking about it would keep her mind off Fanny and Bessie and everyone else too—

  She ate her lunch of a thin egg sandwich, starving hungry as usual after the morning’s work, trying not to worry about how little she had in the meat safe in the kitchen. Half a loaf, a bottle of skimmed milk, three eggs and a couple of apples. Not much food to fuel such effortful working days, but it should see her through to the end of the week, just — and she bent her head to read her bank book, poring over the figures as though she could by a sheer effort of will make them more.

  But the facts were there; the rent was paid till the next half-quarter day only, and that was just a week away; the telephone she’d already had cut off, but the electricity and gas bills were still outstanding. Another month without a job and she’d be out on the streets. She looked round at her little flat, so brave with its satin cushions, its chrome and glass tables and bent chrome chairs, and wanted to cry. She’d furnished it so expensively when she’d started out, gaily buying the best that she could find at Heal’s and Maple’s, choosing the jazziest of Cubist-style curtains and carpets, certain that she could afford them, and now —

  But Dave was paying the rent then, she reminded herself. She’d seen no reason why he shouldn’t at the time. It had seemed the most reasonable and natural thing in the world. He’d enjoyed being her supporter, she’d known that. It had made him feel he was part of the wicked raffish world of dancers and singers and performers, and he had liked coming to the Vaudeville and then to the Café as often as he could to watch her, taking a secret delight in knowing he was part of her life, albeit at arm’s length. She’d known that, and hadn’t minded — until the time had come when she could afford to be totally self-supporting and had dropped him completely. She’d enjoyed doing that, not least because he’d been so put out by it, and she remembered now how she had shrugged her shoulders at him when he’d tried to persuade her to go on letting him help her, and how cast down he’d been when she’d refused. Maybe now he’d like to help again and—

  But she pushed that idea away. Independence, showing them she didn’t need anyone else, proving that Alexandra Asher could manage her life completely on her own, that was the plan and it had to be followed. No one was going to help her, ever again. Not friends, not family and certainly not Dave Fox, with his hopeful eager eyes and his knowing stares — no, certainly not Dave Fox.

  She slept for most of the afternoon. It was the best way she knew of conserving energy, and in this hot weather she needed to rest, even if her sleep was restless and dream-laden. All she had to do was put in another few days on the act; then she could go to C.B.’s office again, tell Welch she was ready for the job in America, and make them give her a sub on her first week’s salary.

  She woke suddenly in the late evening, as the hot air dwindled to a tar-scented dustiness in the streets outside and the traffic settled to the dull roar that ended the day’s busyness. Something extraordinary had startled her. She heard it again and sat bolt upright. No one had rung her front door bell for weeks, not since those first few days when Bessie had come and waited patiently for an answer that Lexie had no intention of giving. Had she come back again? Was she trying yet again to make Lexie talk to her?

  She thought for a moment of just lying down again and putting her head under the covers, but her curiosity was too strong and she slid out of bed. Pulling a peignoir over her nakedness — for she had been too hot to wear anything in bed but the thin sheet that covered her — she padded barefoot to the front door. There was a little window at the side of it, shrouded with a net curtain, through which she could see without being spotted from outside. Just to know who it was she was ignoring, that was why she was going, she told herself as she slipped silently into the tiny entrance hall of her flat.

  The lights were burning in the outer hallway and she could see him clearly and she felt a lurch of shock. Keeping him out of her mind all these weeks had taken the strongest effort she had in her, and it had worked until now. She had managed not to think of him at all, but now seeing him standing there was so shocking that without thinking she actually opened the door. Not until she was standing barely a foot or two away from him did she realize what she had done, and at once she tried to close the door again. But he put out a hand and stopped her.

  ‘Hello, Lexie. I’m sorry to have to bother you so late, but it’s important I talk to you. It’s a legal problem. I’d have phoned but the operator couldn’t get through —’

  ‘The phone’s been cut off,’ she said, and then shook her head angrily. ‘I don’t want to talk to you. Please go away.’ Again she tried to close the door.

  ‘I’m here on a legal matter, Lexie. I have to talk to you. For your own protection. Please —’ He pushed the door open wider and stepped inside, and after a moment she shrugged and turned to go back into her living room. She was suddenly very aware of the fact that she had on only a thin satin wrapper. She pulled it round her tightly, and went and curled up in the armchair under the window as he followed her in.

  ‘Well, you’d better sit down,’ she said ungraciously. ‘No, don’t put on the light. I prefer the dusk.’ After a moment he nodded and went and sat in the chair furthest away from her.

  There was a short silence and then he said awkwardly. ‘Are you well, Lexie? I was so sorry to hear about the act —’

  ‘I’m very well.’ Her voice was hard and clear. ‘There’s no need to worry a
bout me. What do you want? What is this legal business?’

  ‘I’ll come to that — but I just wanted you to know how — I’ve been feeling dreadful about you. I hadn’t realized when you came to see me that morning that you were — upset. Bessie explained it all to me — what had happened with Poppy —’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she said. ‘You said there was some business to discuss. So discuss it.’

  ‘Yes — I —’ He stopped and in the dim light she saw him rub his face and realized that he was embarrassed. Just for a moment she was amused, in spite of the anger that was simmering in her. He’d hurt her a great deal that morning in his office, hurt her pride and her self-confidence. She, who had never felt the need for any sort of physical contact with any man, who had always rather despised people who did, to have been swept away by the sort of feelings she had had that morning only to have them thrown back in her face. Even thinking of it now made her throat tighten, but seeing him embarrassed in her company was pleasing and made the tightness less severe.

  ‘Well?’ she said. ‘What is it? Has someone decided to adopt me and make me into an heiress?’

  ‘I wish it were that —’ He took a sharp breath. ‘Your sister Bessie —’

  ‘Has she sent you?’ Lexie sat bolt upright in her armchair, pulling her wrap round her more tightly as she did so. ‘Is she using you as a go-between? Or —’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Please listen. After your sister Fanny died there had to be investigations into the books at your brother-in-law’s office. She’d been a full partner, you see, and it was part of organizing probate for her will. Your sister had left her property to her son Monty, absolutely, and since he doesn’t want to play any part in his father’s business your sister’s share had to be sorted out so that he could have his inheritance. And —’