‘I should have left a note,’ Lexie said. ‘Bye.’ The line clicked and went dead and slowly Bessie recradled the phone. Lexie, to worry like that about her? To take time out from a business meeting to call me? Again her nose filled with tears. She sniffed noisily and went back to the fire, to coax the smouldering briquettes to burn more cheerfully.
A suburban tour, she thought, and now the tears couldn’t be held back. Her Lexie in a second-rate suburban tour? Once she’d have laughed at the mere suggestion, and indeed no one would have made it. Alexandra Asher was a West End star, not a stopgap for a tired tour round the edges of London. It must have hurt her dreadfully to be offered that. Dreadfully. Bessie got to her feet and went to the larder to see what sort of meal she could scrabble together, trying all the time not to let the tears overwhelm her.
It wasn’t till she was eating her meagre supper of toast spread with margarine and enlivened with the dried-out end of the week’s cheese ration that she found comfort in the thought that, though Lexie must have been hurt by the poverty of the offer she’d been given, she’d still accepted it. She hadn’t flown into a rage, or made a fuss; she’d accepted the unpalatable fact that after the years she’d spent out of the public eye, touring the army and naval bases, she was no longer the star she’d been. She was ready to climb back the hard way from the bottom.
If only, she thought, as she washed up her dishes, if only it had all been different, and she slipped into her favourite daydream, the one in which Lexie hadn’t run away to America, but had married Max and settled down in England and had Molly and been secure and safe and properly looked after and —
She stopped rubbing at the plate she was holding and stared down at her hands in the washing-up bowl. They looked gnarled and twisted under the distortion of the water and she thought suddenly, ‘I’m getting old — sixty-five — ridiculous,’ and then bit her lip, trying to decide whether the idea that had slipped into her mind had any right to be there. It was so unlike any idea she’d ever had before, that was the trouble. I never was the sort to push at things, to make them happen the way I wanted. I’m not like Lexie. I’m me. I just let things happen, don’t I?
But after a while she took her hands out of the water and dried them meticulously and then went downstairs to fetch the letter that lay on the hall table.
41
‘I’ve heard of black Mondays,’ the stage doorkeeper said, and spat into the dust outside the stage door. ‘But this is bleedin’ ridic’lous. Blackest Tuesday I ever saw in all my natural.’ He went back into his cubbyhole, slamming the glass door behind him as on the stairs beyond the black corridor there was a rush of feet and the shouting of jubilant voices. Lexie made a face at the man beside her and turned to go to her dressing room.
‘You’d think he’d manage to cheer up today, at least,’ she said. The man laughed as he followed her towards the stairs and his own dressing room. ‘I only asked him if there were any letters for me, and I get a lecture about how miserable he is.’
‘That’s Arthur, love. Never been known to crack a smile, that one. Everyone hoped the doodlebugs’d get him, but there it is — still grousing and still in amongst us. Doesn’t deserve it! Black Tuesday? He ought to be strung up.’ He nodded cheerfully at her and went hurrying away to his own dressing room to change out of his costume and go to join the hubbub outside.
She could hear it even from here: the shouting of voices, the raucous noise of hooting buses and vans and people singing and, from somewhere fairly near, the wail of an ill-played saxophone. London was shrieking its corporate head off in relief and didn’t care who knew it. It may have been bad for business — and Arthur had been right about that: she couldn’t remember ever playing to a smaller house, all through the run — but it was an incredible night for all that, and she sat in her chair and stretched and yawned before beginning to wipe off her make-up.
The end of the war: it didn’t seem possible and after a moment she got to her feet, went to the window and pulled at the dusty black fabric that had been nailed over it in 1939 as a permanent blackout. It resisted her for a moment and then gave way in a shower of dust that left her coughing but it opened at last on to the warm May evening and she could smell the excitement coming in from the streets beyond. Victory night. It was over, all over. No more bombs, no more sirens, no more deaths on remote battlefields. It was over, in Europe at any rate, and she rubbed her face and tried to let the excitement fill her too.
She went back to her dressing table and set to work again on her face, trying to concentrate on what she was doing, but it wasn’t easy. There beside her on the table, her sticks of make-up on top of it, lay yesterday’s paper. Just a bit of rubbish, fit to wrap up fish and chips, she told herself savagely, or for lighting a fire. It’s rubbish, yesterday’s dead news. Not important. Why let it fret you so? Not important.
But of course it was, and once her face was clean, and she’d reapplied street make-up and dressed, she picked it up again. To deny it was there wouldn’t help. She had to accept it, had to come to terms with it, and she unfolded the pages carefully so that the photograph was on top.
It was a boring pose they’d put her in. Just the same as those they’d all used in the old days, before the war, perched on a rail with a grinning sailor alongside her. She sat with her legs crossed to show her pretty knees and the long expanse of shin, her head up, smiling directly into the camera. Is it just to me that she looks so alive, so ardent, so marvellous? Lexie thought. Is it because I’ve got this special feeling for her? Or does she really look like that? She had to admit it was because Molly truly did have that vitality and eagerness that could make people breathless, because the photograph was absurdly large on the page. It dwarfed all the other items there, even the jolly little stories of children reunited with parents in London, as reverse evacuation brought the hordes pouring back home again, and the snippets of news about gloomy prisoners of war going on hunger strikes in distant camps, and who-cared-anyway-about-prisoners? jokes. Clearly the editor had been as enchanted with Molly as was the journalist who’d written the glowing, gushing words that captioned the picture:
Delectable seventeen-year-old Molly Rowan. Delightful, Delicious, altogether the most Disarming young lovely of the Peace poses for our lucky photographer at Southampton as she prepares for her adventures in the New World. Off to Hollywood to leave us weeping at our loss, saucy Molly promises she’ll be back one day soon to see us all.
‘You mustn’t forget I’m American by birth,’ she carolled to me when I told her how sad we were to see her go. ‘I came to do my bit for good old England, and now we’ve beaten the Hun, I’m off to Hollywood to make my first picture. But I’ll be back, if you’ll have me —’
If we’ll have you, Miss Rowan? I don’t know how we could bear to let you go — but go with our love and gratitude. You have indeed done your bit for old Blighty, and we’re grateful. Come back soon!
Lexie had known it was going to happen. She’d seen the contract with her own eyes, so it had only been a matter of time. Yet it had hurt dreadfully; she had opened her newspaper so casually, had leafed through it the way people always did in these new peaceful days. The time when you seized on every edition with as great a hunger as if the words were printed on cake had gone; now people weren’t concerned any more. It was over. The war was over and no newspaper now could shock and distress as they had all through the bad years. But there it had been, and she had felt it as sharply as though she’d been kicked in the belly, had actually caught her breath with surprise so that Joe Damian, the acrobat, who was sitting beside her in the canteen noisily drinking tea and arguing with the dance director over horses as they always did during the show breaks, had swivelled his eyes at her anxiously and asked her if she was well.
‘I’m fine,’ she’d said as calmly as she could, and had folded the paper away in her bag, but ever since then it had hung over her head like a cloud. Molly’s picture filled her mind’s eye, Molly’s wide challenging smile haunted her, Mo
lly’s hair blown in the wind over Southampton Water mocked her, Molly going to Hollywood.
Now, moving swiftly, Lexie packed her handbag, took one last look round the dressing room, closed the door and made her way through the corridors to the stage door. Home, through the shrieking crowd celebrating the arrival of peace, home to Bessie and a different kind of peace. Tomorrow I’ll try to sort it out in my head. Tomorrow I’ll decide. Somewhere deep inside her Lexie knew she’d already made up her mind, but she didn’t want to face up to the implications of her decision. Not yet.
She could hear Arthur’s grumbling voice long before she turned the corner that led to the last corridor and the street. He was haranguing someone who spoke only occasionally in a softer voice, and there was something about the sound of it that made her set her head on one side and slow her steps.
‘Much as me bleedin’ job’s worth,’ Arthur was complaining. ‘I can’t go lettin’ every Tom, Dick an’ ’Arry as asks go wanderin’ around ’ere just like that. Could be bleedin’ Fifth Column for all I knows, couldn’t yer? Yers, I know the wars over — to listen to the way everyone’s goin’ on you’d think it was going to make a lot o’ difference, but it ain’t. All it’s going to mean is blokes out’a work like I was for three years after the last bleedin’ lot —’
She had to turn the corner then, for she had heard the soft voice speak once more and now she knew, and there was no point in hiding. There had been a clink of coins too, and that meant that Arthur was going to decide miraculously to be obliging after all, so any moment now he’d come and find her skulking there. She took a deep breath, and walked out to meet him.
‘Hello, Max,’ she said. He twisted his head sharply, looked at her, and then, very slowly, grinned.
‘To think I could have saved myself ten bob,’ he said and grinned even more widely as Arthur snorted and slammed himself into his cubbyhole. ‘You look marvellous, Lexie. Really marvellous. Are you well?’
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘And you?’
‘Never better. Home again, you see. They promised they’d get us back before the last day, and God bless their Lordships of the Admiralty, they did. Docked at Pompey last week, managed to get shore leave this morning. Came straight here.’
She looked at him in the dim light of the single dirty bulb that swung above their heads in the draught created by the bustle as some of the cast came pushing past with mutters of ‘G’night’, dropping their keys on the sulking Arthur’s shelfed door. Max was in uniform, looking remarkably handsome for a rather plain man, and somehow exactly right in his well-tailored and gold-emblazoned jacket and peaked cap, and Lexie was very aware of the interested stares the chorus girls gave him as they went past.
‘You look well,’ was all she said, and then with a sudden sharp little frown, ‘How did you know where I was?’
‘The Stage,’ he said. ‘They’re still publishing it, you know! I got a copy in Portsmouth and saw the notice of the tour. I’d have called you at home, if I’d managed to get to London in time, but the train was late, of course, so it was easier to come straight here.’
‘Yes,’ she said, feeling as shy as a child suddenly. He seemed to understand, for he said, ‘Let’s go and see the fun, shall we? It was hell getting out here from Watenoo. The underground was going mad — people dancing in the aisles! Come on —’ He tucked a hand into the crook of her elbow and led her out into the street. She followed, very conscious of the warmth of him through the fabric of her sleeve.
Outside the street was a heaving, roaring mass of bodies. The noise hit her ears and made her pull back a little and he laughed and shouted above the hubbub, ‘I reckon they’re happy,’ and she nodded, unable to shout back. He grinned reassuringly, and then, leading the way, began to push through the crowds that milled round the theatre.
She realized he was making in the general direction of the tube station and followed with her head down, grateful for his guiding hand firmly holding hers.
They were baulked after a while by a particularly noisy knot of people who were dancing a conga in a closed circle, and he pulled her closer to him and put an arm about her shoulder. She shivered even in the warmth of her coat on this May evening; he held her close and said in her ear, ‘Won’t take long now. Let ’em work it off and then we’ll go —’
It doesn’t matter that he’s back, she told herself fiercely, staring at the glazed eyes of the dancers as they went weaving and ducking in front of her. It makes no difference, I’ve decided —
‘I wish we could go up to the Heath,’ he shouted in her ear. ‘It must look wonderful up there, looking down on London with the lights on again.’
‘We’d never get home,’ she roared back. He made a face and nodded.
‘I suppose not — pity, though —’ Then the crowd in front of them broke and the dancers went shrieking and reeling away, leaving a clear pathway. At once he used the advantage he’d been offered and went plunging forward, pulling her with him.
They were breathless when they reached the comparative calm of the station, and as he bought tickets for them she ran her hands over her rumpled hair and took a deep breath. The panic and excitement of the interlude in the crowd was over, she told herself firmly. Keep your head, Lexie. For God’s sake keep your head. Whatever he says now he’s here, you’ve decided.
They sat on a bench at the end of the platform for a long time, waiting for the train. They were still running, the woman guard told them very definitely. Probably held up by the passengers acting daft, but still running. There’d be one in soon, ready to turn round and do the run back to town. Just wait, she said, just wait.
So they waited, sitting side by side, and Lexie stared over the lines to the platform on the opposite side, at the shaded blue lights, the empty chocolate machines, and the torn posters warning that Careless Talk Costs Lives and demanding whether their Journey was Really Necessary, and tried to behave as though this was any other night; that she was just going home after a show to a bad house, and tomorrow there’d be another performance and then another till the end of the week, and then back on the road again. Till the tour was over and she —
‘Are you as well as you look, Lexie?’ he said abruptly. She turned to look at him, surprised.
‘I didn’t know I looked that well,’ she said. ‘I’m fit enough.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of health so much as — oh, it’s more than that. You look — eager, I suppose is the word I’m looking for.’
She laughed then. ‘Eager? What for? A tatty show that can’t even pull in the crowds on a Victory night?’
He shook his head. ‘No show could pull ’em in tonight. There’s more fun to be had on the streets for nothing than you’ll ever get in a theatre. It isn’t every night we win a war, after all. Not that it’ll do us much good. There are times coming that’ll be so grim they’ll wonder they celebrated.’
She frowned at that. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Wars have to be paid for,’ he said shortly. ‘We’ve been living and fighting on credit. Now we’ve got to pay the debts and that’s going to be hell. But —’ He shook his head. ‘No need to talk of that now. Not tonight.’
‘You sounded like your old self then,’ she said. ‘Not a bit like a sailor.’
He laughed. ‘A sailor! A hell of a sailor I was! Running a ship’s like handling a complex law case. You have to think of half a hundred things at the same time. I may be in uniform, but I’m still a lawyer. Don’t be beguiled by all the scrambled egg.’ He touched the gold braid on his sleeve briefly and looked at her comically, and she smiled. It was fun to be with him again, after all.
Somewhere down the track they heard a rattle of wheels and they both peered to see if the train was coming, but it was a false alarm. They leaned back on the seat again and relaxed, staring ahead of them at the faintly gleaming lines snaking away in the darkness. After a moment he stirred and turned to speak to her, just as she in turn opened her mouth to speak to him.
‘Lexie
,’ he said, just as she said his name. He stopped and shook his head, but she refused to go on and he started again, and it was clear now that he was strained and uncomfortable. She had felt the tension in herself, and knew it had to be in him too, but now for the first time since she had seen him standing talking to Arthur at the stage door she could feel it.
‘All right,’ he said after a moment. ‘All right. Me first. I don’t know what you were going to say, but I hope — I’d like to think it’s as important as the words I’ve been practising ever since I left Pompey.’ He threw a small glance sideways at her, then looked back at his cap, which he was turning rhythmically between his hands, snapping the brim with his thumbnail. ‘I’ve practised them for years, I think. Lexie, will you marry me?’
She sat for a long time watching him play with his cap, and tried to think. It would be so easy to stop trying. To say — I’m tired. I’ve done what I wanted to do, I showed them, didn’t I, that I was a star? I was the biggest and best Broadway had. I showed them. So can’t I be quiet and easy now, and say, ‘Yes, of course I’ll marry you and be comfortable and —’
‘No.’ She was almost surprised to hear the words come out of her mouth. It was as though it were someone else who had spoken. ‘No, I can’t.’
He was very quiet and then he said, almost conversationally, ‘Oh. Can’t or won’t?’
‘There’s a difference?’
‘Decidedly. Can’t implies some sort of impediment. Won’t displays lack of will. Can’t isn’t as cruel to me as won’t. So, which is it?’
She was silent for a long time. Down the line the signal flapped and a gust of wind brought a sudden burst of singing from the streets outside the station.
‘Can’t,’ she said at length. ‘Can’t.’
He took a deep breath. ‘Thank God for that. All right. What’s the impediment? Have you married someone else?’
‘No.’
‘Have you stopped loving me?’
Family Chorus Page 43
