Between the Regions of Kindness

by Alice Jolly

  She steps towards the door. The disembodied face of an old lady appears in the window of the next house, framed beside a heavy damask curtain. The lady wears a hairnet and is all white – white hair, white face, white blouse – so that Mollie wonders if she’s really there at all. It seems, in the dim light, that she has no eyes, only hollows dug into her face. Mollie finds herself drawn into those hollows, unable to look away. But then the door of the shop opens and Mr Brandt is there. Mollie steps back, in her too-big shoes, and is about to turn away.

  Come, come, he says. And ushers her into the velvet interior of the shop with a wave of his hand, as though he’s the doorman at an elegant hotel.

  You are interested in music?

  Mollie is embarrassed for him because he has a foreign accent. She hopes he isn’t German. Opening her mouth, she tries to ask about an audition but no words arrive. Her school satchel bulges with her school shoes and socks. It’s difficult to play the part of a theatre star with that on her shoulder so she puts it down, pushes it close up against a shelf of sheet music but that only makes it more obvious. Mr Brandt is looking her up and down. He might take her between his thumb and fingers, feel the quality of her warp and weft, decide to buy a yard or not.

  Yes, Mollie said, clearing her throat. Yes, I’m interested in music. She stares around at the instruments and racks of sheet music in an attempt to validate this statement. Her throat is dry and she coughs, worries that she might sneeze. Her school blazer feels soggy on her shoulders, rainwater drips from her hat. Around her the shop is strangely dark, illuminated only by a lamp on a distant desk.

  I’ve come – I want – an audition.

  An audition? Mr Brandt’s black eyebrows travel up into the ridges of his forehead. He raises his finger to his lips, still considering her. His eyes seem suddenly to have too much white to them and they roll more than they should. His thick black hair lies in neat furrows as though recently combed with hair oil. The sleeve of his suit moves up his arm revealing more of the mauve shirt, the glittering gold cufflink.

  Yes. I spoke to Stan, at the theatre, the doorman. And he said—

  Mr Brandt laughs, moves his hand in a circular motion, as though welcoming her again. Well, good old Stan. Would you like a cigarette? He reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket, takes out a silver case, snaps it open, holds it out towards her. Ludo, he says. He twirls a cigarette in his fingers. Do call me Ludo. Mollie has never been offered a cigarette before. She worries that she won’t know how to smoke it, so shakes her head. She’d felt so sure that Stan’s advice must be right because Ludo does look rather like Arthur, that stranger who came to the house, who she’d loved for that brief, singing afternoon. The same dark hair and pitted olive skin but – Mollie feels disloyal to even think it – fortunately no wooden leg.

  The door opens with a bang, a bell rings and three girls, followed by two much younger girls, come giggling into the shop, followed by umbrellas which they flap shut so that water sprays across the maroon carpet. The older girls have raincoats with belts pulled in at the waists and dainty, flat shoes. Their smooth hair is held in place by bands around their heads. Mollie recognises them as actresses from the theatre.

  My dears, how lovely to see you. Ludo’s voice has a rolling lilt to it, like a man with a limp. He grabs each of the girls and holds them against him while kissing them loudly on the lips, then he disappears to the back of the shop and returns with a glass jar of sweets. The two little girls push their hands into the jar eagerly. The prettiest of the older girls is called Donna and, as she talks to Ludo, she twists her fingers in between his. Under her mauve raincoat, her dress is low cut. The lids of her eyes glint with a line of blue shadow and her eyebrows are drawn in a high, brown arch. Behind that thick band, her dark hair is looped up into an elaborate chignon like a picture in a magazine.

  Mr Dabricci sent us, Donna says. Can you play the piano for a rehearsal tonight because Mrs McClintock can’t get in with the flooding at Kempsey?

  Yes, yes. Of course, I’ll play.

  And you owe me some money? Donna says, twisting his hand in hers.

  Oh do I?

  Yes, for the dinner. Tuesday night.

  Yes, you owe my sister money, one of the little girls says. For the dinner.

  Ludo takes a tobacco tin from a drawer, pulls out a thick wad of notes, counts out a few and hands them to Donna, who puts them in her pocket, smiling.

  Please, Ludo, Donna says. A drink? Please.

  No, my dears. Not now – another day. Can’t you see, I have a visitor. A young lady who has come for an audition. He gestures to Mollie who stands uncertainly by the harpsichord.

  An audition? Donna says. She laughs, rolls her eyes, and one of the other girls digs her finger jokingly into the silk of Ludo’s waistcoat, then they are gone, laughing out of the door, leaving behind a smell of rain, hairspray and boiled sweets.

  I sing in the school choir, Mollie says, into the silence left by the girls. And I sing songs by Kay Starr, Jo Stafford and Billie Holiday. These are names she’s read about in magazines.

  Ludo continues to measure her with his eyes, calculate, estimate. Outside the light has dimmed so that now the shop is even darker than when she first entered. The glow from the desk lamp spreads a circular fuzz of yellow across the back of the shop but everything else is shadowed. The cabinets around her might contain bottles of poison, skulls or shrunken heads rather than sheet music and instruments. The door to the street seems suddenly distant. She swallows and raises her chin.

  I sing in the school choir.

  Of course, Ludo says. Of course, I’m sure you sing beautifully. But what about your mother? Will she not be expecting you home?

  No, Mollie said. She’s busy – very busy.

  Oh really. I see. I s-e-e-e. Well, in that case I can audition you now.

  Now?

  Why not? I’m just about to shut up the shop.

  Ludo produces a ring of keys from the desk drawer. Mollie swallows several times as she hears the rattle and click of the key in the lock. Ludo opens a door at the back of the shop and she follows him into a dark hallway, up narrow stairs, hearing her too-big shoes clanking on the wooden boards. In the Folies Bergère romances the plucky, raven-haired heroine is often drugged by the evil pirates and shipped to Marrakech but a prince always comes to rescue her.

  Mollie had expected the upstairs of the house to contain several narrow and cramped rooms but the whole of the upstairs is just one room, with heavy curtains shutting off the back section. The walls are painted blood red and a sofa is upholstered in zebra stripes. Ludo pulls thick velvet curtains across the front window, shutting out the lights from the street. The walls are covered with theatre photographs and publicity shots of breathless young women and girls with pigtails and endless smiling teeth. Mollie keeps her eyes away from the photographs at the top that show women in their underwear, their breasts heaving above the top of laced corsets. A piano is piled high with sheet music and a camera perches on a tripod. African masks glower down from above the fireplace. A vase of white lilies stands on the mantelpiece, the water pale green, petals edged with brown, and drooping, ready to fall. In one corner a hatstand is hung with crowds of shirts – pale blue, white, lilac, striped and checked – and bunches of silk ties. Shoes and shoe trees are piled around it. Everything is thick with dust and crumbs. Mollie can’t see any cobwebs but the ceiling is surely festooned with them.

  Ludo motions to Mollie to sit down and so, sliding off her snakeskin shoes, she organises herself on the zebra sofa in a film-star-type pose. She should have accepted that cigarette. Tomorrow she’ll buy some blue eyeshadow like Donna had. Beside her is a tiny gramophone, hardly bigger than a thick book, in a green crackled case, with a carrying handle. Mollie has seen a gramophone like this before somewhere.

  What shall we play?

  Ludo waves at a pile of records on the table in front of her and she looks through them. She doesn’t know most of the song titles but t
hen she comes to one she does know, that same record that she played when the stranger came to visit. She passes the record to Ludo who takes it from its sleeve, balances it neatly in his hand, then places it on the turntable. He slides the arm across the record. It clicks and the record begins to turn. He drops the needle down onto it and, with a hiss, music washes through the room. Paradise here, paradise close, just around this corner. The place where happiness is for me.

  I don’t know your name, Ludo says.

  His voice jerks her out of that shadowy remembered world.

  Mollie – Mollie Mayeford.

  A beautiful name, Ludo says.

  Mollie had known before she spoke that Ludo would enjoy that name. She’d decided to use that as her stage name as soon as the stranger Arthur had said it. It was his gift to her. Mollie Mayeford. A name for a film star or a singer. Mollie can see the name glittering in neon lights outside a London theatre, as the big black cars roll along the glistening streets, crammed with the furs and cigars of the people who are coming to see the show.

  Would you like a drink? Ludo asks.

  Mollie knows her mother always asks for gin and tonic but her nerve fails her.

  Martini? Ludo says. Why don’t you have Martini?

  Oh yes please. Why not?

  As Ludo’s takes hold of the lid, twists, the neck of the tonic bottle appears perilously small in his engulfing hands. The bottle moves up from the glass with a flourish and then down again as he pours. His cigarette burns on an ashtray, filling the room with a blur of smoke. His black hair is combed back from his forehead, so that Mollie can see the furrows left by the comb. In the slanting light his face is long, the shadows under his cheekbones deep. She likes the way that he wears that scarf, tied up close to his neck, like a gangster or the Mafia.

  The sound of banging leaps from the wall. Mollie holds onto the edge of the sofa, feeling for a moment that the house might shiver, rock, collapse. The banging comes again, making the dust on the bookcases jump, the African masks quiver. A petal falls from a white lily. Ludo shrugs, smiles grimly, turns the gramophone down. Mollie remembers the hollow eyes of the old lady next door and feels sure that those eyes can see right through the wall.

  So difficult, Ludo says. To live among such Philistines – but it’s better not to upset them. No one can tell where that might lead. Although apparently it’s quite unfair to say Philistines – in reality they made exquisite pots, or so I’m told.

  He hands her the Martini in a tall red glass and it tastes so bitter that Mollie can hardly force it down. Of course, Ludo is right. It’s often been hard for her as well, living among Philistines, pots or not. She looks up again at the board of photographs. No doubt those are all the girls who Ludo has worked with in the theatre. She wants her photograph up on that board. Ludo asks her about her singing and she talks grandly, reeling off more of the names she’s seen in the record shop. Ludo goes to the piano and she stands up, trips on the snakeskin shoes. When she looks up, she has the sense he might be laughing at her.

  They discuss what she would like to sing and she longs to be able to offer some of those record-shop songs but she doesn’t know them. Ludo suggests various possibilities. The names mean nothing to her. How disappointing that he should make things so complicated. He was meant to know immediately the right song for her to sing.

  ‘Greensleeves’?

  Mollie knows that’s not the right song for a real audition but she has to agree.

  So very English, he says. Mollie has always thought that being English was something to be proud of but now she feels ashamed. Ludo plays a few bars and she wonders whether she should start. His fingers are tapered and pale, the nails long, immaculately manicured. She opens her mouth, but no sound comes out.

  Relax, my dear. R-e-lax. Ludo lays his hand on the bottom of her spine and a spark of lightning travels up through her body and into the nape of her neck. She tries to breathe deeply, but when she starts again her voice comes out thin and squeaky. She keeps on going and soon even she’s surprised by the graceful flourish of the sound. Closing her eyes, she imagines herself in a theatre, under the glaring lights, faces in the shadows turned up towards her. After that she sings ‘The Ash Grove’ and knows she’s impressed him.

  When she’s finished, he turns to her, claps his hands together, then reaches around her waist and pulls her to him. You sing beautifully, he says. Beautifully. He takes hold of her face in his impeccable fingers and examines it closely. And you’re very beautiful – altogether.

  So I could get a job in the theatre?

  He looks at her, laughs, tinkles a few notes on the piano. How old are you?

  Seventeen.

  Fourteen perhaps?

  Fifteen, Mollie says, although his guess is accurate.

  You have the most exquisite voice, he says. And you could certainly have a big career in a music hall or theatre. No doubt about it. But let me give you some advice – don’t bother with the local theatre here. Do some preparation and then go to London. I know all the people in the best theatres in London and I can get you an audition – when the moment comes. But first we have work to do. You must learn how to focus your voice, how to present yourself. I can show you all that. Will you be able to come here for lessons? Would your mother allow it?

  As I said, she’s very busy.

  And your father?

  Stepfather. Busy as well.

  Oh, I see.

  So I can come any evening.

  Oh, Ludo says. Oh. His fingers move in an arpeggio up the keys.

  His words – and the Martini – have made Mollie feel dizzy so she asks if she can go to the bathroom. He points her to the velvet curtains at the end of the room. Is that really the bathroom? With no proper door? Mollie blushes at the thought of it. Taking her glass, she pushes through the curtain into a room of glass wall tiles, oval mirrors, and dark green linoleum on the floor. A pot of face cream stands open on the windowsill and, next to it, a string of pearls in a white china dish. Mollie stares at her flushed face in the cracked mirror, then sits down on the loo, swaying a little because of the drink. She’s embarrassed to pee because she’s scared that Ludo might hear so she tries to be quiet but still the sound echoes all around her. Beside her a brassière – peppermint green and edged with black lace – hangs from the end of the towel rail. The intimacy of its small, neat cups makes Mollie shiver. The brassière must belong to Donna but Mollie knows herself to be a match for a cheap girl like that. Screwed up by the sink taps is a pair of wet, peppermint-coloured knickers.

  She picks up her glass and takes two large gulps of the Martini. Soon she’ll be ruined and she doesn’t care. She’ll go to his bedroom and together they’ll do what married people do. The thought makes her hot inside and she wonders if she might be sick. But he works in the theatre and is going to teach her to sing. Feeling too hot, she undoes the catch on the window. It opens narrowly onto fenced back yards and the dipping darkness of the canal. From somewhere a dog whines, desperately.

  Twisting her head up, Mollie can see a silver shower of lights above. One of those lights might be from 48 Langley Crescent. It’s only a half a mile away, across the canal, beyond the allotments and the railway line, up the hill. For an aching moment, she longs to hurry up the hill to 48 Langley Crescent. Tea with sugar, a hot-water bottle, a cool hand laid on her feverish brow. But it won’t be like that. The house will be empty and fragile, her stepfather away on business so there won’t even be his laughter to fill the gap between floor and ceiling. And Mollie will lie awake at night, waiting for the moment when it will come tumbling down. She slams the window shut, turns back to face the nauseous green linoleum, the velvet curtains, the swaying light above her head.

  Won’t your mother be worrying about you? he asks again.

  No, she never worries about me.

  But that uniform is the Alice Ottley school, he says. And you a young lady? Why doesn’t your mother worry? She should.

  Mollie wonders why he’
s asking so much about her mother. He should see her power, understand that she can do whatever she likes, go out when she likes, borrow her mother’s clothes, come in at eleven o’clock. The only reason why she doesn’t do those things all the time, every night, is because of her stepfather. For a moment, she thinks of his laughter and his presents and the arguments she hears behind the bedroom door as she comes home at eleven wearing her mother’s fur coat. Of course, she could make her mother worry if she wanted. She only has to say those words – why did that man know my name? And there are other words as well. She can’t make their shape on her lips but she can feel them inside her. Dark words, spells and curses, mysterious in their power. And so her mother will never ask. Instead she pours a gin and tonic, goes out. Leaving, leaving. Climbing into the long black car next to her yearning, laughing stepfather.

  Perhaps I’ll have another drink, Mollie says.

  He turns to pour it. Can you dance?

  Oh yes, of course.

  Mollie has only ever done the Dashing White Sergeant in the assembly hall at school but surely it can’t be difficult? He pushes back the rugs revealing a parquet floor. Mollie’s head is swimming from the Martini and when she shuts her eyes everything rolls backwards. The needle drops down onto the gramophone. That music again which comes from another time, another place. Ludo catches hold of her and spins her around and strangely she does know how to dance. It must have been there in her limbs all the time.

  Take off your stockings, he says. Or you’ll slip on this floor.

  He watches as she unclips her mother’s stockings. His eyes are on the flesh of her thighs. As they dance, her chest presses against the beat of his heart and she feels his legs against hers, and a lump of something that presses against her. He smells of lavender or is it roses? A heavy, sweet smell that thickens her throat. Surely she has heard this song before? That lump presses against her again and she feels tears brimming in her eyes.