Family Chorus

by Claire Rayner

  ‘The thing is, they should be back in London very soon,’ Bessie said abruptly, covering her embarrassment as best she could. ‘I got a letter from Barbara the other day. She says she’s coming down this week — there’s business things she’s got to settle and —’

  Lexie sat bolt upright. ‘They’re coming to London? When? That’s wonderful!’

  Bessie shook her head. ‘I said Barbara’s coming to London. Molly can’t leave the show. She’s the star, you know. Not seventeen yet and she’s the star! So when it’s business Barbara has to come on her own.’

  ‘What sort of business?’ Lexie demanded, and again with increasing uneasiness Bessie shook her head.

  ‘I can’t say, really,’ she said. ‘I mean, Barbara didn’t say much —’

  ‘Where’s her letter?’

  ‘It’s around somewhere,’ Bessie said vaguely, but she made no effort to go and look for it and after a moment Lexie nodded. ‘I see. It’s like last time, isn’t it? Secrets. Things I mustn’t know.’

  ‘It’s not for me to say, Lexie,’ Bessie said wretchedly. ‘It’s awful, it really is, the way I keep getting in between. I never mean to, but it just sort of happens to me. I feel like a walnut sometimes between the crackers. All I want to do is love you all and keep you happy, and all that happens is I get in the way.’ She peered agitatedly at Lexie. ‘When you went away it was like that, and now here you are, only one day back and here we go, starting it all over again.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Lexie said after a moment, and again leaned forward and hugged Bessie. ‘I suppose you’re right. I’m sorry, lovey, I didn’t mean to upset you. Just tell me, when will Barbara be here?’

  ‘She wasn’t sure — next few days was all she said. She’ll phone me as soon as she gets to London. It’s so hard these days to plan anything properly — the trains are so bad and —’

  ‘I know,’ Lexie said. ‘I know. I suppose I’ll just have to wait. Maybe, once she gets here, I can arrange to go back to Scotland with her. See Molly there —’ And Bessie, relieved, smiled radiantly at her and began to fuss again over her lack of appetite for breakfast.

  The waiting days were dreadfully difficult. It wasn’t that she had nothing to do; she had a great deal to do, for the flat downstairs needed opening up, needed to be filled with fresh air, to have its windows cleaned and its floors swept and curtains shaken out, and she enjoyed the domesticity. It made her physically tired, which helped her to sleep and pleased Bessie, who nodded happily at the way the lines of fatigue slowly dissolved from her face and her thin frame filled out a little as the meals Bessie insisted on providing each evening had the desired effect.

  There were other things she could do, too, like getting back in touch with her own career. She’d been oddly nervous about calling the Cochran office at first, and then had chided herself. She, who had been working so hard and so continuously for so long to be afraid that she wouldn’t be wanted any more? Ridiculous! She had sorted out the clothes she had left behind in her wardrobes and chosen the most becoming of her pre-war suits, a smart tailored affair, and perched the most outrageously cheeky of her hats on her head and gone up to the West End to see what was news in the world of entertainment.

  It was dispiriting. The theatres were all open again, and had been ever since the first blitz had spluttered to its end. In the last few months the lightening of the blackout to a dimout had given many of them a new lease of life, as audiences came back to the West End aching for a little entertainment to relieve the eternal grinding effort of making war. But in the last few weeks fear had returned again, and though performances went on — with a sign on-stage throughout each show warning audiences there was an ‘Alert’ (it was rare that anyone had time to post a warning once a doodlebug came) — the audiences were scanty and abstracted, always keeping one ear cocked for the ominous silence that meant a rocket had chosen them for a target.

  So, although she was welcomed with open arms wherever she went, and Cockie’s office talked optimistically of how they hoped to do all sorts of things once the war actually was over, and though other managements she visited made it very clear that they’d take her like a shot if they put on another show worthy of her talents, the hard fact was that there was no real offer of immediate work. Lexie felt a sudden twinge of fear as she sat in the Savoy having a meagre afternoon tea late one afternoon when she’d been home just over a week. Was this the moment that every performer feared, the moment when the pedestal on which they’d stood and lived and pirouetted for so long began to crumble, when other pedestals threatened to be raised by other stars? Was she to find herself on her way out so soon after working so hard for the war?

  She tried to push the idea away, but it clung stubbornly to the edge of her consciousness. She had seen it happen to other dancers, seen the years catch up with them. Couldn’t it happen to her? She was, after all, well past forty. Had her time come so soon? For a moment she thought of Max and ached for him, thought of the small house of her Cypriot fantasy, the small white house near Hyde Park, and shivered apprehensively.

  But she pulled the shreds of her courage and her dignity about her and went home to Bessie, telling herself not to be such a fool. Once she saw Barbara, really sorted out what was to happen about Molly, she’d get her confidence back. That was all it was, she told herself as her bus went swaying eastwards towards the familiar security of Victoria Park Road. I’m unsettled, can’t put my mind to things till I’ve told Barbara what’s to happen. Once I have I’ll be fine again.

  Because she had made her plan. Barbara was to be told first — that was the only fair way to do it. She owed Barbara a great deal, she knew that, and she was determined Barbara should know how grateful she was. But she was equally determined that the time had come for her to reclaim the daughter she hadn’t meant to lose, and even if that hurt Barbara badly, it had to be done.

  She had planned the conversation in her head over and over again; how she’d sit down with Barbara and explain to her that she had never meant to use her as she had, that it had just seemed right at the time, but the time has changed.

  ‘I’m blessed in my family,’ she would tell Barbara. ‘Bessie has been more than a mother to me, and you have been more than a mother to my child. But now it’s different, and we have to put it right. Because Molly needs a father, and until she has her mother, that can’t be given to her. You do understand, Barbara, don’t you?’ In her imagination Barbara would smile and nod and say with sweet reasonableness, ‘Of course I understand, Lexie, dear, of course I do. I’ll stand back and forget all the years when I looked after Molly for you — I’ll just be her cousin now, and you can be her mother and —’

  But then her imagination would let her down badly, for the image would shiver and disintegrate and she would hear only Barbara’s impassioned voice shrieking at her, ‘No! No — you mustn’t — you can’t — she’s mine —’

  The uncertainty came to an end at last. One evening, just as they were separating to go to bed, Bessie’s phone rang. It was Barbara, and Bessie stood there with her eyes bright as she held the phone pressed to her ear so ferociously that her fingers went white, nodding and crying loudly, ‘Yes — yes,’ as Lexie stood in a fever of impatience to take the phone from her. But as she seized it from Bessie’s hand the line went dead and she literally stamped her foot in her frustration.

  ‘It’s all right, Lexie,’ Bessie said eagerly. ‘Really it is. I got it all from her — I never talk much when she rings because it always happens like that, the line getting cut. It’s awful — but she’s getting the overnight train from Inverness tomorrow. She should be in London by ten in the morning if they’re lucky, and she’s going to the Regent Palace Hotel. But she’s going first to some business meeting — there’s a contract to be signed, she said — and then she’ll be at the Regent Palace at about half past twelve. She has to go back to Scotland the same night, so she said I was to meet her there. Only we’ll both go, Lexie, shall we? It’ll be a great surp
rise for her, just as it was for me. We’ll see her at the hotel the day after tomorrow and then you’ll hear about everything. Only another day, Lexie. That’s all.’

  37

  A grey day, threatening rain but thick and hot, dewing the hands and face with sweat, so that the air was heavy and oppressive and that matched her mood. As she sat beside Bessie on the bus coming into the West End from Hackney, staring out at the passing streets, she had a sudden memory of herself sitting on another bus and looking out at rain and feeling dreadfully, agonizingly unhappy. Puzzled, she teased at the shred of the image, trying to remember when it had been and why she’d felt so bad; and suddenly it all came back to her. Alf. No, Ambrose. She’d loved him so much, she remembered, gazing out through her own reflection at the crowded pavements of Holborn as the bus trundled on its way. I loved him so much and I haven’t thought of him for years. She marvelled at how desperately important he had been to her, and how easily she had forgotten him, and felt a sharp stab of sadness at the passage of time.

  She’d never worried much about time before, had always been rather scornful of those who frantically denied their real age, and hid from themselves the fact that time was passing with silly stratagems like make-up and clothes. She had always dressed in the way she felt best, not in the way that made her look youngest, and yet here she was now, thinking sadly of her lost youth, grieving over the child who had once sat in a bus in tattered finery and broken her heart over a boy who cared nothing for her.

  Remembering Ambrose and the years when they had danced together triggered other memories and she said abruptly, not looking at Bessie but still staring out of the window, ‘I wonder what happened to Poppy Ganz? I should have seen her before I went to America, but somehow —’

  ‘Oh, she’s doing well enough,’ Bessie said. Lexie jerked her head round to stare at her, dumbfounded.

  ‘You know?’

  Bessie looked at her in surprise. ‘Well, of course I do. I mean, you don’t just lose people, do you? Not people you know as well as I know Poppy. I mean, it’s been over thirty years, hasn’t it? We go back a long way together —’

  Lexie shook her head and managed a tight little grin. ‘You make me feel really bad sometimes, Bessie, you really do. I lose people all the time, don’t I — I sort of lost Poppy —’

  ‘Oh, well, it’s different for you,’ Bessie said. ‘You had your career to think of and all —’

  ‘You had yours too,’ Lexie said. ‘With Alex.’ And suddenly Bessie went rosy pink.

  ‘I never thought of that as a career,’ she said, dismissing it, but she sounded pleased all the same. ‘It was just a job, to make sure we — just a job.’

  ‘It was a career,’ Lexie said. ‘Still is. And you kept up with — where is she, then? Poppy? How is she? Well?’

  Bessie grinned suddenly. ‘I think she’s well enough. Tough Poppy Ganz is, always was, but since she had that illness she carries on like she’s a real nebbish. Always watching her liver, you know? Clever, I grant you. Meant she got special rations — she’s been at Hemel Hempstead, little place out the other side of Watford — for years. Went in 1938, before Munich — said there was goin’ to be a war and she wasn’t hanging around London to get bombed. There were people who laughed at her, but she wasn’t all that wrong, was she? Runs a dancing school there. Does all right, I think. I saw her a year or so ago when she came up to see her sister-in-law, after Lenny died —’

  ‘Lenny Ganz died?’ Lexie tried to see back through the years to the sharp-faced little man who had sat there beside her on a rug in Cephas Street, and she frowned. People shouldn’t die that easily, she thought with a sudden surge of fear. They shouldn’t —

  ‘He left London soon’s he could when the war started, went to live in Coventry to be safe, and poor chap got caught in the raids there. Terrible they were. He was injured — broke his back — and he never got over it. Lingered a long time after, but —’ Bessie shrugged. ‘It was a blessed release when it came.’

  Lexie turned her head to look out of the window again. Not far now; another three or four stops and they’d be at Piccadilly Circus and then they’d walk into the Regent Palace Hotel and there would be Barbara and they’d sit down and —

  Once more her mind sailed into one of her imagined conversations, and she shook her head at her own reflection and frowned again. There’s no sense in this, she told herself. No sense at all. Think of other things. People — all the people who were so important to me, and now where are they? What happened to them all? Are they dead too, like Lenny Ganz?

  ‘Have you heard from anyone else lately?’ she asked Bessie abruptly. ‘Joe or —’

  Bessie made a little face. ‘It’s all right, Lexie,’ she said. ‘I mean, you don’t have to feel bad because you aren’t like me. Not everyone has to be the same — I got the time to write letters and keep up with news. You haven’t. It’s no sin —’

  ‘It’s bloody selfish,’ Lexie said with a sort of violence and then managed to smile. ‘I am selfish, aren’t I, Bessie?’

  The bus was at Oxford Circus, now, turning left into Regent Street, and Bessie began to pull on her gloves. Whatever the weather, Bessie always wore gloves in the street. ‘Selfish?’ she said, and there was a considering note in her voice, as detached as though she were discussing the price of a yard of blackout cloth. ‘I wouldn’t say that. It’s more that you’re sort of single-minded, you know? You can’t think of too many things at the same time, because when you think about things you think about them very deeply. You were always like that when you were small. If you wanted something there was nothing else in the world. Just what you wanted, and you had to have it. You used to — oh, it’s hard to explain.’ She looked at Lexie almost shyly. ‘You used to make things happen the way you wanted them to happen. Just by being the way you were. It was like — oh, like you had a searchlight in you. It used to pick out what you wanted the way searchlights pick out planes in the sky, and when the light’s on the plane you can’t see nothing else. Everything else just disappears. You were always like that. Me, I sort of have an ordinary light on all the time so I can see everything, and remember everything. But it don’t mean you’re bad and I’m good. It just means that you’re you and I’m me. That’s all —’

  The bus stopped at the corner of Glasshouse Street and the conductor called loudly, ‘Piccadilly Circus, Piccadilly Circus. Alight ’ere for Rainbow Corner and America — you’ll find plenty of ’em if you want ’em, the ’ole lot, overpaid, oversexed and over ’ere, that’s all that’s the matter with ’em — Piccadilly Circus and Rainbow Corner —’ Two American servicemen sitting behind Bessie and Lexie laughed and bantered with the conductor as slowly the bus emptied and Lexie and Bessie found themselves out on the pavement. Lexie wanted to say more to Bessie, wanted to tell her she was sorry for being the way she was, wanted to explain to her that she didn’t mean to be so selfish, would prefer to be like Bessie, remembering people, keeping in touch with them, but the moment had passed and all she could do was tuck one hand into Bessie’s elbow and guide her along Glasshouse Street towards the hotel.

  I’ll tell her tonight, she promised herself as they walked, her Hand firm against Bessie’s thin arm. After I’ve talked to Barbara and sorted it all out. And I’ll try to say it to Barbara too, help her to see I didn’t mean to be so selfish with her, didn’t mean to use her so. Because I did use her, I know that now. She was always there, always so willing, and I used her and I’ve never told her how grateful I am, and how much I care for her. Suddenly she felt a little wash of emotion for Barbara and knew it was love, a real undemanding love, and it made her feel good. We’ll be all right, she told herself with a lift of certainty. We’ll be all right, and so will Molly and so will Max. All all right, every one of us —

  The street was clotted with people, the American servicemen who used the social club called Rainbow Corner, round in Shaftsbury Avenue, and the girls who hung around to snare them. Even at this time of the day,
just before one o’clock and lunchtime, they were there in strength, their faces garish with rouge and their lashes beaded with heavy mascara. Bessie stared straight ahead as they made their way between the groups, clearly embarrassed by them, and equally clearly quite terrified that one of the lounging soldiers would misconstrue her presence among them and speak to her. It was one of the best-known pieces of mythology that no respectable woman could walk anywhere near Piccadilly Circus, and Lexie smiled involuntarily. To think of her dear straitlaced Bessie with her grey hair in its wispy bun and her crooked shoulder being molested by a lascivious soldier — it was a ludicrous image and she enjoyed it so much that when one of the big sergeants leaning against the window of a tobacconist’s winked at her and called, ‘Hi, sweetie, fancy a li’l gum?’ she hardly noticed him.

  They reached the corner of Glasshouse Street and were about to cross the road towards Denman Street and the hotel when it started. The sound had been there in the background for a few seconds, Lexie realized suddenly as people stopped all round them and looked upwards. A heavy thrumming was filling the air, making itself heard even over the rumbles of vans and buses and the clatter of wheels from the cabs that were arriving at the hotel. Then it seemed even louder as people stopped talking. Heads craned and eyes stared upwards, and then Bessie cried shrilly, ‘I can see it — look, I can see it —’

  At that moment others saw it too. Voices were raised and hands pointed and some people began to push urgently towards the end of Glasshouse Street where the steps led down to Piccadilly tube station. Someone began to shout — ‘Take cover, take cover! The bleedin’ thing’s goin’ to cut out — take cover, take cover —’

  It was an extraordinary moment. The sound stopped with a sharp little cough and then there was silence. People seemed frozen where they stood. Even the buses in Piccadilly Circus behind them seemed to be aware of the need for quietness. There was a breathlessness in the very air that made Lexie’s chest feel tight. Even in North Africa, when gunfire had spluttered all round her, there hadn’t been fear like this. There she had always felt she could dodge, that she’d be all right because the guns were fired by men, and they weren’t aiming for her. It had been an irrational feeling, but it had protected her from terror none the less. Now she was filled with it, for the thing overhead, silent and gliding downwards, was not under the control of any man: it had no real target. She tried to take a deep breath, tried to reach out to pull Bessie away, back towards the tube station and safety, but she couldn’t move.