A Place Called Winter (7 page)

Chapter Seven

‘Look!’ Winnie whispered, tapping his knee to distract him from his attempt to find anything of interest in the programme.

In the pit, the orchestra had struck up the tune of an especially irritating song that seemed to be everywhere that season, and from the gallery above arose an entirely male murmur and several drunken cheers. The Gaiety Girls were coming!

Harry glanced at Mrs Wells beside him. The little woman was sitting very upright and forward in her seat, at once straining to see through her mother-of-pearl opera glasses and trying to appear calm. She looked more than ever like a well-dressed partridge.

Musical comedies were Harry’s idea of hell. He disliked their forced sentiment and cheeriness, their wildly improbable plots – which so often seemed to involve shop girls elevated to the ermine, or sugar-coated Mittel-European princelings disguised as servants – and the tension induced in him by knowing that at any moment a character would burst into song. He liked plays, proper plays, in which you could lose yourself and believe that real things, important things, were happening. He liked bold plays by Shaw, Pinero or Ibsen. He liked his audiences silent and his theatres small. Musical comedies tended to play in theatres of cathedral proportions in which he suffered vertigo and felt oppressed by the noisy enthusiasm of people crowding in on every side. He had already lost track of the plot of tonight’s farrago. The scene was vaguely Tyrolean – wooden chalets, fringed with artificial red geraniums and with a cyclorama of snow-capped mountains and even a distant lake with a paddle steamer botheringly immobile in its middle. Into it skipped the famously beautiful chorus of girls, inexplicably all dressed as postmen, only in racily short navy-blue skirts instead of trousers. They sang the entirely unrelated popular song as they skipped and danced and posted love letters through letter boxes in the scenery.

Pattie was the last on, her voluptuous figure instantly recognisable. She sang with less abandon than the others and was often slightly behind in matching her steps to theirs. Perhaps she was nervous. But this was not the ballet; devotees attended the Gaiety not for impeccable footwork but for a flesh-and-blood catalogue of youth and beauty.

How Pattie had made such a swift transition from being polished by Belgian nuns to showing off her charms on a West End stage was a story whose barely coherent details were rapidly being recast into palatable legend. Obliged to return home by an increasing downturn in Mrs Wells’s income, Pattie found her financial embarrassment all the more acute when she discovered, too late, that she had left her pocket book behind in the station café in Liège and had boarded the train with neither ticket nor means to buy its replacement. Reduced to pleading in less than immaculate French with the ticket inspector, who was threatening to put her off the train before they even reached the coast, she was rescued by an extremely elegant young woman who insisted on paying her fare for her and buying her lunch.

This turned out to be none other than the young wife of a composer whose latest show was scheduled for the Gaiety. Picking up on Pattie’s enthusiasm, she encouraged her to come along for an audition, which Pattie managed to do in secret, only releasing the news when her excitement at being offered a trial could not be contained.

Her mother cried and her brothers forbade, of course, but Pattie displayed considerable mettle, withstanding them all and pointing out that Gaiety Girls were famously ladylike and stood a much better chance of marrying to advantage than young women immured in villas in Twickenham. She stormed every bit as fiercely as Robert – nobody had suspected before that she had such a temper – and ended by simply going her own way.

Rehearsals happened during the day, while Frank and Robert were off at work, and Winnie acted as chaperone, at least at first, accompanying her to the theatre, meeting and being thoroughly won over by her colleagues. Indeed, some expert emergency assistance she lent to the leading lady’s wardrobe led to her receiving a flurry of dressmaking commissions, including one from the chorus’s acknowledged star, Gladys Cooper.

Winnie and Harry had been obliged to move to Ma Touraine in the end. They had taken the little flat over the stable block, where they were really very cosy. Though nominally independent, they ate most of their meals with the others. Of all the economies he had made in the process of leaving Herne Bay, it was the loss of daily riding that Harry felt especially deeply. When entering a cab, or sometimes when simply crossing a busy street, he would catch the patient eye of a waiting groom or smell the familiar scents of sweat, leather and hay-sweet dung and be unsettled by a violent yearning.

He found that he liked, however, the novelty of life
en famille
. While Winnie busied herself with her dressmaking, he would spend time with Mrs Wells, simply chatting, playing cards with her friends or wheeling Phyllis around the garden in her pram. Winnie had never liked his spending too much time with the child. Often he would be firmly told that Nurse had taken Phyllis out, or that she was sleeping or on the point of being fed. Babies needed routines, he was told, in which his presence would constitute a damaging interference. But the move back to Strawberry Hill had in some way demoted Winnie from wife to daughter, and she seemed happy to relinquish the care of the child to others.

Mrs Wells seemed amused at the novelty of a father showing an interest in an infant, and sometimes encouraged him to walk ahead, pushing the pram around the adjoining riverside park, so that she could follow a few yards to the rear and enjoy the expressions of surprise or curiosity on the faces of the people strolling there.

Now that he was their brother-in-law, the youngest girls, Julie, Kitty and May, were no longer hidden from him in the nursery but would co-opt him into games and play-readings and even their lessons. Madame Vance had, perforce, been let go as part of the economies Mrs Wells was obliged to embrace. It amused Harry, and made him feel a little wise and useful, to quiz them on their geography and French. He even attempted to teach them some elementary Latin.

They certainly had no good example from Pattie, who had barely begun rehearsals at the Gaiety (where she soon persuaded Winnie that a chaperone was quite unnecessary, and even mortifying) when she started disappearing for mysterious weekends away. One of her friends, who was engaged to an American financier, had a cottage, or had been
set up in a cottage
, as Winnie said darkly, near Pangbourne, where the fiancé threw parties. Here, Pattie acquired an aristocratic admirer. He was a third son, rather cruelly nicknamed Notty, which was short for Not Quite, as in not quite an earl.

Beside herself with excitement, Mrs Wells had looked up his family in
Burke’s Peerage
. They were known to be immensely wealthy, owning coal mines and a steelworks as well as large tracts of central London. Third son or no, Notty was a
catch
. And yet the manner of his knowing Pattie was irregular, having been overseen by neither Pattie’s mother nor his. Having encountered her first as an actress rather than as somebody’s precious daughter, he had inevitably engendered a fear – barely voiced in Ma Touraine – that his intentions were less than honourable.

This had been exacerbated when Pattie swanned home wearing a dazzlingly pretty French gold pocket watch he had given her. She was told she must return it at once, since they were not engaged, but in the course of the furious row she revealed that she couldn’t possibly, as poor Notty would be too hurt since it had been his grandmother’s. Mistresses, or mistresses-by-intent, were not as a rule given family jewels, so this in turn had cranked up Mrs Wells’s anticipation, as had her receiving a letter from the generous gentleman, inviting her and her family to join him in his box for the opening performance of the new show, and afterwards for supper.

Even when teased, Pattie would reveal nothing about Notty other than that he was
sweet
, which had led Winnie to guess they should expect someone a little like the King. ‘Considerably older, rounder and with a beard,’ she suggested. The image, offered in bed, had taken root, so it had been a shock to arrive at the box to be welcomed by a diffident, sandy-haired young man who was indeed neatly bearded but not much older than Harry. Far from resembling some worldly seducer, he gave off an air of candid innocence and enthusiasm that had Harry thinking him not terribly bright and that perhaps it was he who needed protection from Miss Pattie and not the other way around.

As the ladies of the chorus finished their song and dance, Notty was far louder in his applause than Pattie’s kith and kin, and shouted out, ‘Splendid! Splendid!’ so enthusiastically that Harry felt Winnie shrink back in her chair.

Pattie made more appearances, each time in a new costume. Her contribution was neither notable nor risible. That unnerving magnetism she could display in a drawing room, however, was quite lost upon a cavernous stage and amidst practised competitors. The more verbally supportive her Notty became, the surer it seemed that there was no risk of her ever stepping out of the chorus to become a celebrated promoter of cold cream or toilet water.

Perhaps this was the reason the members of this particular chorus were noted for their advantageous marriages: for all their beauty, their theatrical skills were not alarmingly professional. As Mrs Wells received compliments and a further glass of champagne in the first interval, and flattered their host by pretending she needed his help to understand the wafer-thin plot, there was in her manner an unmistakable air of relief. Had Pattie stepped forward to the footlights to dance a spectacular solo or comedy turn, had she been called upon, as another girl was, to swing on a garlanded trapeze over the orchestra while the chorus pelted her with silk peonies, her chances of passing from this eccentric adventure to something more respectable would have been drastically diminished.

The Honourable Notty had booked a large private dining room above a nearby restaurant and had encouraged Pattie to bring along several of her new friends from the company. This was a relief, as their host’s enthusiasm sat awkwardly with Robert’s haughtiness (which, Harry had noted, grew far worse when he was made to feel middle class) and Frank’s inability to varnish the truth. Indeed, Frank had just announced that true talent was one thing, he supposed, but his sister was cheapening herself and the family to no discernible purpose, when the party of performers arrived and everyone else burst into nervous laughter and applause.

Harry embraced Pattie – who was wearing Notty’s watch, he noted – and she presented him to Gladys Cooper, who dropped him a laughing curtsey to show off the gown Winnie had made her, which was enjoying its first outing. Then there was a little flurry of awkwardness.

The usual questions of precedence were hardly going to arise in a restaurant, and at a round table. They were to sit where they liked, Notty announced unhelpfully – though he naturally would have Mrs Wells on his right and Pattie on his left – so long as no men sat drearily beside their wives. In her exuberance, and evidently at ease with her admirer’s largesse, Pattie had swept up with her more members of the company than could fit round the table. Harry ensured that Winnie had a seat between her brothers, then found himself at a secondary table the staff had hastily swathed in white linen.

He shook the hand of Cora Lane, an actress of a certain age who had sung a comedy song. She looked like minor royalty but turned out to speak a form of Cockney thinly larded with arch touches of elegance she had surely acquired from play scripts. She declared herself charmed, made him a funny little bow when he said, quite truthfully, how amusing he had found her song, and introduced him to the others at the table over which she had effortlessly assumed rule.

There was one other woman – a young, feathered wisp of a thing so shy and wordless it was hard to credit she had ever found the courage to pass through a stage door, much less attend an audition. She was introduced simply as Vera, as though the name told one all one need know, then not addressed again all evening.

‘And these are Messrs Pryde, Hawkey and Gosling, whose footwork I’m sure you admired every bit as much as my little ditty.’

‘Gentlemen.’

Harry was unsurprised to find the dancers’ handshakes repellently limp. They were of a type he recognised from walks along the Strand or from his visits to the Jermyn Street baths: slim-hipped, ostentatiously flexible creatures who inexplicably chose to ape girls rather than exploit as men the advantages fate had awarded them. One assumed they had parents and siblings somewhere, in some rarely visited country village possibly, but they gave every impression of having emerged, fully formed, from eggs, as brittle as the waxy shells they had discarded.

‘And this is Mr Browning.’

Mr Browning had not come clucking and pecking from an egg; his handshake made Harry wonder whether his own had been sufficiently firm. He was taller than Harry, black-haired and serious.

They sat, Harry finding himself between solemn Mr Browning and Mr Pryde. Mr Pryde insisted on clinking champagne flutes with Harry, simpering, ‘Cheers, m’dear,’ then immediately turned aside to pay court not to the resolutely silent Vera, who was on his other side, but to the empress of their little table, who had launched on some anecdote.

‘You’re stuck with me,’ Mr Browning said, and allowed himself a small, self-deprecating smile, which emphasised the interesting cleft in his chin.

‘On the contrary,’ Harry told him. He said it, as he often said things when shy, without thinking. Then he worried that the rejoinder sounded wrong, or misleading, so added, ‘You’re rather a relief.’ Something in the close way Mr Browning’s deep-set eyes, with their lingering traces of stage make-up, were watching him caused him to stammer on
relief
.

It was one of his rare bad stammers, which seemed impossibly long and loud. Mr Pryde turned to look at him with passing curiosity and he fancied Cora Lane momentarily paused in her performance to frown at the interruption.