Ballet Shoes

by Noel Streatfeild

Sylvia looked at them all in a worried way.

  ‘Do get it into your heads that nobody wants to stop you having two shillings to spend. I have always thought it a shame that Pauline had so little for herself when she worked so hard, and now the same applies to you, Petrova. But it must not come out of the half you save. You give me plenty for the house, I can manage.’

  ‘I shall put nothing more into the post office — at least, not until Gum comes home,’ Pauline said firmly. ‘And what’s more, if we need it, I’ll take out what I’ve saved.’

  Petrova and Posy looked at her with a mixture of admiration and shocked amazement. If there was anything that was sacred in the family, it was the savings books. The walk to the post office on Saturday mornings was more sure to happen than church on Sunday. Sometimes Nana, after an anxious evening patching and darning, would sigh as she saw the notes swallowed over the post-office counter; but when Petrova one day described the post office as ‘that nasty office eating my money’ she had been furious.

  ‘Right’s right, dear, and it’s no good questioning it, and don’t let me hear you at it again.’

  Now here was Pauline saying she would put nothing more into her book. That she was fourteen and could do as she liked.

  Sylvia got up.

  ‘I shall talk to Nana; she’s certain to make you see sense, Pauline. The London County Council don’t mean that because they give up watching you that they expect me to as well. I’ve got to take more trouble, if possible.’

  Sylvia sent for Nana to come down and talk to her, and as well the two doctors, as they had educated Pauline, and Theo because she taught her dancing. She would have liked to have asked Mrs Simpson’s advice too, but she could not think of any excuse. As soon as they all arrived she told them about the money argument and asked what they thought. To her great surprise they agreed with Pauline; but all for different reasons. Theo, who was just dashing off to the Academy, gave her views first. She said that she thought it was important that Petrova should save all she could, as she saw no future for her in the theatre; but that in Pauline’s case she showed signs that her gifts as an actress were not those of a precocious child, her work was improving, as incidentally were her looks; she thought with any-luck she should be so successful as not to need her savings.

  Doctor Jakes and Doctor Smith did not believe in too much saving. They both believed that with more money in the house there would be a chance for the girls to develop their tastes; it would certainly be good for Pauline to be able to go to the theatre now and then. Nana said that she had been feeling in her bones lately there was a change coming. Pauline was getting very independent, and that if it took the form of wanting to help more, she thought she should be given a chance.

  Sylvia thanked them, and when they had gone she called Pauline, and told her that she was to have her way.

  ‘Though you know, darling, I’m going to feel dreadful living on you like that.’

  Pauline took far more pleasure in her salary now that most of it did not vanish into the post office. It was with dismay that two or three weeks later she heard that the notice was to go up the following Friday. Sure enough when they arrived for the performance on the next Friday there was the notice on the green baize board in the passage. Petrova made a face at it, for although the extra matinées had stopped after three weeks, and they now only had them on Tuesdays and Thursdays, Pauline was still giving them a shilling, but if the play came off shillings were bound to end. Pauline did not seem much depressed about the notice when it was actually up, but rather excited instead. When they went down for their first entrance, Petrova wanted to know if anything nice had happened. She whispered because they were on the side of the stage.

  ‘Not yet,’ Pauline whispered back. ‘I’ll tell you on the way home.’

  The matron frowned at them.

  ‘Don’t talk in the wings, Pauline and Petrova.’

  In the tube that night Pauline dragged at Petrova by the hand and pulled her into one of the seats for two. The one opposite was full, so Nana had to sit some way off, and could not hear what they said. Pauline spoke quickly as she was excited.

  ‘That man that plays Oberon.’

  Petrova nodded.

  ‘Donald Houghton?’

  ‘Yes, him. Well, he’s putting on “Richard the Third” as soon as this comes off.’ She looked at Petrova as if expecting signs of intelligence, but Petrova gave none. ‘Don’t you know your “Richard the Third”?’

  Pauline sighed at Petrova’s short memory.

  ‘You know I don’t; you only did it because it was in the test examination you did for your school certificate. What about him doing it?’

  ‘The Princes in the Tower are in it.’

  ‘Us?’

  Pauline nodded.

  ‘I don’t see why not. I thought we’d ask him.’

  ‘How could we?’ Petrova protested. ‘We only see him on the stage, and we aren’t allowed to go into the grown-ups’ dressing-rooms.’

  ‘I thought we’d write.’

  Petrova looked in admiration at Pauline.

  ‘That’s an idea. When shall we write it?’

  Pauline considered their crowded days.

  ‘Well, we might get Theo to let us off dancing practice if we said it was for something very important; but then Posy would want to know what we were doing; and we mustn’t tell anybody or we shan’t be allowed to send the letter. We shan’t have time at lessons, of course, and then there’s our walk, then it’s half past one. Sometimes there’s a quarter of an hour after lunch before our other walk; if there is, we could do it then. If there isn’t we’ll have to ask the doctors to give us ten minutes out of after-walk lessons, for there’s never a minute between them and tea-supper before we go to the theatre.’

  ‘How about us both writing one in our baths and comparing them? That would save time,’ Petrova suggested.

  The letter which they finally took to the theatre next day was the result of snatched minutes. Theo would not let them off practice, but she gave them five minutes at the end before they began lessons. They got another five minutes after lunch before their walk. Pauline copied the letter out beautifully at evening lessons when she was supposed to be writing an essay. She showed it to Petrova on the tube, and they agreed it could not well be improved upon.

  ‘DEAR MR HOUGHTON,

  ‘We hear you are going to act King Richard the Third. Would you have us as the Princes? You will not know our names, but we are Pease-blossom and Mustard-seed. We are not supposed to write letters to people in the theatre so would you be sure to send the answer before the last act as we go then. Nana who comes to the theatre with us won’t mind but the real Matrons would.

  ‘Yours sincerely,

  ‘PAULINE FOSSIL.’

  ‘PETROVA FOSSIL.’

  The letter was addressed clearly to Donald Houghton, Esq. At the theatre Pauline went ahead with Nana, and Petrova lagged behind. The moment they were out of sight, Petrova rushed the letter across to the doorkeeper, asking him to be sure and deliver it, but not to say anything about who had given it to him. He bowed very grandly and said, ‘Leave it to me, Miss Fossil.’ At that moment Nana called Petrova, and she had to race up the stairs.

  Pauline and Petrova found the evening almost unbearably long. Each time they came back to the dressing-room they looked round for a letter, and there was not one. They came off after their last entrance and almost cried to find there was still nothing. Gloomily they peeled off their tights, and put on their dressing-gowns, and began to remove their make-up. Then suddenly there was a knock on the door. Nana opened it. Both Pauline and Petrova stopped cleaning their faces and listened.

  ‘Yes,’ they heard Nana say. ‘What is it?‘

  ‘Do Pauline and Petrova Fossil dress here?’ a man’s voice asked.

  ‘They do.’ Nana sounded very uncompromising; they knew she thought they had done something wrong, and was going to deny it if she could.

  ‘Well,’ the man we
nt on, ‘Mr Houghton says, would you bring the young ladies to his room for a minute?’

  Cobweb and Moth stopped cleaning their faces. They stared at Pauline and Petrova.

  ‘Well I never,’ said Cobweb.

  ‘What’s Oberon want with you?’ Moth asked.

  ‘Button up your dressing-gowns, dears,’ Nana interrupted, ‘and come along. We’ll be able to tell these two what he wants when we’ve found out.’

  Oberon was sitting at his dressing-table. He turned round as the dresser showed them in. He held out their letter.

  ‘You sent this?’

  Pauline nodded.

  He smiled at her.

  ‘What makes you think you could play the Prince of Wales?’

  Pauline felt very shy.

  ‘We’ve been taught to speak Shakespeare.’

  ‘Who by?’

  ‘A Doctor Jakes. You wouldn’t know her.’

  ‘She teaches us English,’ Petrova added.

  ‘All right, then. If she teaches you to speak blank verse, let’s hear you.’ He nodded at Pauline. ‘You begin.’

  In a dressing-room with your make-up not properly off is not a good moment to recite a speech of ‘Puck’s’, but, as usual, Pauline only had to begin and she was ‘Puck’. Petrova found the dressing-gown and rather smeared face a great help for the boy in ‘Henry the Fifth’. When they had finished, Oberon shook them both, and Nana, by the hand.

  ‘The casting doesn’t rest entirely with me,’ he said, ‘but I’ll do what I can; I can’t promise more. Good night.’

  Back in the dressing-room Moth and Cobweb were waiting.

  ‘Well,’ they asked as the door opened, ‘what did he want?’

  Pauline and Petrova said nothing, as they were afraid to say they had been for parts, as they knew if they did every child in the theatre would be after them tomorrow. Nana came to the rescue.

  ‘They’ve been talking in the wings as usual,’ she said severely. ‘And it wasn’t a lie either,’ she added as the door closed on Moth and Cobweb, ‘for I’m yet to hear of the night when you don’t talk in the wings. Come on, Petrova, must get you out of the theatre, or I’ll have the stage manager after me, and you don’t want to have to tell him you’re fourteen, Pauline, or you’ll be kept till the end of the show, and that’ll mean a nice job for someone fetching you home. And when we get on the tube I’d like to hear what all this Prince of Wales business is about.’

  CHAPTER XVI

  ‘Richard the Third’

  PETROVA could not get to sleep. It was all very well to write a letter asking Oberon to see Pauline and herself about the parts; that had been fun, but now she was faced with the possibility that they might be engaged for them. She had asked Pauline how much the ‘Duke of York’ had to say, but Pauline only said ‘not much’, which might mean anything. She sat up in bed and looked at Pauline. She seemed very much asleep, but perhaps she would wake up easily. She gave her eiderdown a twitch, but Pauline never moved. Then she gave all the bedclothes a pull, but she lay like a log.

  Petrova lay down again. It was sickening; Pauline was asleep. If only she knew just how long the part was she would feel better — it might only be a line, and then she was worrying for nothing. She heard the door of what they called their ‘sitting-room’, and Nana still would call the ‘day nursery’, shut; that meant Nana was going to bed. She sat up again. Nana did not take long going to bed, and once she was there, only a very little while before going to sleep. There was the Shakespeare on the shelf; she would find out about that part for herself.

  Half an hour later she put on her dressing-gown and slippers, and crept to Nana’s door. There were very noisy sounds coming through it; there could be no doubt she was asleep. In the sitting-room there were some red-hot ashes where the fire had been, and in the fireplace the coals that had been on the fire, which Nana had taken off to save money. Petrova looked longingly at the coals because it was very cold, but she knew picking them up in tongs was difficult, and she was sure she would drop one and wake everybody. Instead she got the Shakespeare, and lay down on the rug as close to the guard as she could squeeze.

  Lessons with Doctor Jakes had made her quick at finding her way amongst Shakespeare’s plays. She studied the cast list of ‘King Richard the Third’. There were the Princes. ‘Edward Prince of Wales;afterwards King Edward the Fifth’, ‘Richard, Duke of York’, they were bracketed together. She skimmed through the pages to see who entered, and came to the ‘Duke of York’ in Act II, Scene iv. She read the scene through, then sat up.

  ‘Petrova Fossil,’ she said to herself sternly, ‘what have you done? You’ve asked for a part you couldn’t possibly act.’

  She took up the book again and re-read the speech that begins ‘Grandam, one night, as we did sit at supper’. She could imagine the producer’s voice, ‘Make it amusing, my dear, you’re a small boy. Imitate your Uncle Gloucester’s voice.’ She shuddered to think just how badly she would do it. She turned over the page, and found ‘York’s’ entrance in Act IV, Scene i. It was the scene with his brother, the young King Edward. She could see in reading it how good Pauline would be as the elder boy; she would be dignified and say her lines well; but at the same time she thought that young ‘King Edward’ would be a lot easier to act. He had not got that awful habit of playing with words, and scoring off everybody that seemed to come over young ‘York’ every time he opened his mouth. She read on, and came at last to Act IV, Scene iii, where Tyrrell describes the death of the Princes; then she shut the book.

  ‘Well, at least, if the worst comes to the worst and I play the part, they both die soon.’

  She put the book back into the shelf, and turned out the light; as she did so the clock in the hall struck twelve. As she crept across the landing back to bed, she was struck by the fact that there was a light on downstairs. She leant over the banisters; it was not the hall light, but came from the drawing-room, which had the door open. ‘Somebody’s left the light on,’ she thought, and knowing that electric light accounts were some of Sylvia’s worst worries, she slipped down the stairs to turn it off. But when she got to the drawing-room, she found the light was meant to be on, for Sylvia was at her desk working. Petrova, sure that she was alone, had not been particularly careful about noise once she was past the bedroom doors, so Sylvia heard her.

  ‘Who’s that?’ she called out in a quick, frightened voice, for she was expecting no one to be about at that time of night.

  Petrova came in.

  ‘Goodness, darling!’ said Sylvia. ‘How you scared me! What are you doing out of bed?’

  Petrova sat down in the armchair. There was a tiny fire still alight, and she was very cold; she held out her hands while she tried to think of an excuse, for they had decided not to tell Sylvia about the parts until they had got them, so that she would not be disappointed if they did not. And she certainly could not tell her she did not want to be engaged for it; that would be too mean, with the money so badly needed. She got out of the difficulty by muttering she had been somewhere, and on the way back had seen the light.

  ‘And that’s true,’ she comforted her conscience: ‘the sitting-room is somewhere.’

  Sylvia came over to her and felt her hands and feet; she told her she was perished and poked the fire.

  ‘I tell you what we’ll do,’ she suggested — ‘we’ll have a picnic. We’ll have cocoa and biscuits. Mrs Simpson has given me a tin of cocoa and milk mixed, and one of biscuits; I’ll go and get them.’

  She went out, and while she was gone, Petrova began to feel less scared. She now saw it was ridiculous to worry. She need not play the ‘Duke of York’; she could perhaps send Oberon a letter tomorrow to explain she had made a mistake, and did not want him, and try to get into a dancing troupe instead.

  Sylvia came back with the kettle and things on a tray. She knelt by the fire and put the hottest coals together, and the kettle on them.

  ‘I’ve become quite clever at this,’ she said, ‘I’ve learn
t the art of boiling a kettle on the tail end of a fire; it’s the last thing I do before I go to bed each night.’

  ‘Why do you sit up so late?’ Petrova asked, while she watched the cocoa and milk doled into the cups.

  Sylvia made a face.

  ‘Accounts. Horrible things.’

  ‘But you can’t have to do them every night,’ Petrova persisted.

  ‘No.’

  Sylvia opened the biscuit tin and passed it; they were a lovely mixture, Petrova saw, with all the ones she liked, including gingers and petit beurres. She took two, and looked up inquiringly, for it was obvious Sylvia’s ‘No’ was not the end of what she was going to say.

  Sylvia found a finger biscuit for herself and broke it while she thought.

  ‘I’ll trust you with a secret, Petrova, that I haven’t told anyone except Nana. I’m trying to sell the house.’

  ‘Sell it!’ Petrova gasped. She had always lived in the Cromwell Road and could not imagine living anywhere else. ‘Sell it, Garnie? Then where’d we go?’

  ‘I don’t know, I haven’t sold it yet. A flat perhaps.’

  ‘What, all of us — Mr and Mrs Simpson and everybody?’

  ‘Scarcely. It would have to be an enormous flat for that. No, just ourselves and Nana.’

  Petrova looked at her indignantly.

  ‘Where are the doctors going, then? Or Theo, or the Simpsons? And what about Cook and Clara?’

  The kettle began to boil and Sylvia mixed the cocoa.

  ‘I don’t want to sell it, Petrova, so don’t be angry with me; but I went to see Gum’s lawyers a month ago; all the money he left me is gone. They are trying to trace him, as they think they know where he and his party are, but they are difficult to get in touch with. Meanwhile I have nothing at all except what you children pay me and what I make out of the boarders. But Mr Legge — that’s the lawyer — told me a thing I’d never known before; that this house was bought in my name. Gum bought it soon after I was born, and I suppose he planned to settle it on me.’

  ‘And you want to sell it?’