The Fun Factory (25 page)

“Join us, mon ami,” Maurice said, looking for another glass. “We must cheer you on your way, eh?”

“Thanks,” I said, “but I was looking for Tilly. Mathilde, I mean.”

Maurice turned to Mistinguett, and they began an animated exchange in French which I couldn’t follow. He was protesting about something and she was forbidding him to do something, if I understood the pantomime correctly.

“She… … um … Mathilde is doing something for Mistinguett, and Mistinguett is doing something for Mathilde. An admirer, you see, and they have left together already. I am sorry.”

“Where have they gone?”

“I cannot tell you, I am sorry. She will not allow it. She has high hopes for Mathilde and this nobleman, he is a Count from Prussia, it could be a very advantageous match.” He shrugged his apologies. “Have some champagne with us, my friend, and let us talk of other things.”

I reeled out into the corridor again and stumbled towards the stairs. Before I could make it out into the evening air, however, there was a little whistle from behind me, and suddenly Maurice was by my side.

“L’escargot d’Or,” he whispered. “Rue de Rivoli. Bonne chance, mon ami, et vive l’amour!” Then he embraced me, kissed me on both cheeks, and trotted back to his room. I mentioned he was French, didn’t I?

Shortly afterwards I managed to locate the restaurant where Tilly was apparently having a late supper with some continental nob. L’escargot d’Or had a large front window and the brightly
lit tables could clearly be seen from the street. I spotted a good vantage point from which to look in, behind a sort of cylindrical wrought-iron installation, so I loafed there and tried not to look too suspicious. I spotted Tilly quickly enough, at a table with two military gents in fancy blue uniforms – not quite as fancy as King Alfonso’s, but still – and another girl. I realised I had nothing, no plan of any kind. I fantasised briefly about making a scene and starting a fight, but even though it was my own fantasy the two foreign soldiers gave me a good sound beating.

Through the window I saw the Prussian count take Tilly’s hand and bring it to his lips, paying her a compliment of some kind, and she laughed. I remembered that laugh. I hadn’t heard it for a year. A steady reeking trickle of steaming liquid suddenly began to run under and over and into my shoes. Suddenly the gulf that had grown between Tilly and me was brutally apparent. She was being wined and dined by the aristocracy in a fancy restaurant, while I was outside in the cold, hiding behind a
pissoir
.

A Frenchman emerged, adjusting his clothing, and gave me a quizzical look, and I found myself walking away with my regrets, one of which was definitely choosing that hiding place. As I walked and walked it came to me that spending this last evening watching her from afar was maybe all I had left of my dream of us ever being together again, so I turned myself round and headed back up the boulevard.

And not a moment too soon, either, because as I made it back within sight of L’escargot d’Or, there was Tilly and the Prussian on the pavement outside. A moment later a carriage hoved into the picture (closed, with a fancy crest on the side, a bit like the one the Guv’nor had off the Duke of Chatsworth). It stopped alongside, and the driver jumped smartly down,
saluted his highness and held the door open as Tilly stepped inside.

I froze, horror-struck, thinking that this might actually turn out to be the last glimpse I ever got of her. Then, to my surprise, the nobleman closed the door to the carriage while still standing there on the pavement, took Tilly’s hand (through the open window) and kissed it, saluted, nodded curtly to the driver, turned smartly on his heel and went back into the restaurant.

I watched the carriage go, carrying Tilly out of my life. Then, with a mind of their own almost, my feet began to stride after it, faster and faster, until I was fairly pelting along. I dodged in and out, weaving through the late-night promenaders, until up ahead the carriage slowed to take a corner across me into a narrow street. If I’d carried on running I’d have flattened myself against the side of it. Quickly I grabbed the handle, wrenched the door open and flung myself inside.

“Arthur!” Tilly squealed. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Bit of excitement for a Saturday night,” I said, sitting down heavily on a plush leather banquette opposite her, gasping for breath.

“Get out, for goodness’ sake!” Tilly hissed. “This is Count Adalbert’s personal carriage! If he finds out you were in here molesting me I don’t know what he’ll do. Challenge you to pistols at dawn, most likely.”

“Who’s going to tell him?” I said. Tilly agitatedly indicated the driver, and I shook my head. “He didn’t see me.”

“He will, though, when we stop, and he escorts me to the front door! Whatever were you thinking of?”

“I wanted to talk to you,” I said, trying to keep a bleating tone out of my voice. “We’re leaving in the morning.”

“Well, you had all week to talk to me, didn’t you, or were you too busy knocking poor Charlie’s teeth out?”

“
Poor
Charlie, is it?”

“What’s that supposed to…?” she started crossly, but then our conveyance slowed and turned into a drive. “Oh God, we’re nearly there, this is it. Come here, come here…!”

Tilly slid sideways along the seat, urging me to do the same, and as the carriage came to a halt she waited with her hand poised on the door handle. As soon as she heard the driver clamber down from his perch on the one side she wrenched the door open and shoved me out the other. The carriage was thus between me and the flunkey, and he was none the wiser. Neatly done. I peeked around the back wheel and watched him gallantly guide Tilly up the steps to a pleasantly appointed town house with lights still burning inside. As she disappeared inside, the driver bowed from the waist, and then as he snapped back upright he clicked his heels with a crack, not unlike the noise Little Tich’s wooden clackers used to make, before hopping back up to his seat and clip-clopping away.

Ten minutes later the front door opened just for a heartbeat, and a small figure slipped out. She skipped quickly down the steps, peering around from side to side into the ornamental bushes, until I stepped out.

“There you are,” Tilly said. “Let’s walk, come on.” She slipped her arm in mine and we headed off along the wide, tree-lined boulevard. Even though the hour was late, there were still several couples strolling along in the lamplight. It seemed to be quite the done thing.

There was so much to say that I couldn’t quite summon up what should be first. The silence stretched on for an achingly
long time, until I heard myself uttering the following timelessly charming and witty opening gambit: “I like your hair.”

“What?” Tilly said, turning to look at me, and as she did so I saw for the first time that the hair tumbling down beneath her hat was actually the gold colour I remembered. “Oh yes, that wig. I just had to take it off. Such a relief! Mistinguett likes all her girls to be dark, you see. We are not really people, we are scenery.”

“How did you come to be with her?”

“Do you know it was straight after, you know, the end of that Karno thing – well, the end for
me
, anyhow…” She shot me a sharp look and I felt a surge of something acid in the pit of my stomach. “What was that, a year ago? I came to London, without an idea what I was to do, and my dancer friend Angeline – you remember her? Pale thing, puked up on the
Wontdetainia
? She was coming to France and said why didn’t I come too, so I did, and we started dancing at the Folies. I say dancing, it was posing, really, assuming alluring postures.”

She let go of my arm and demonstrated some of these, which made me smile, mostly with relief that we were starting to relax together.

“Then Mistinguett asked me to join her troupe, and that’s been me ever since. She’s lovely, although she does treat me rather like you would a pet. And you? Charlie seems to think you’re still Karno’s blue-eyed boy.”

“Does he?”

“Oh yes, I’ve been listening to him going on and on about how he could be the next number one to lead a company, just as long as it isn’t you, and how he has such and such a thing in his favour, and you have so and so. I like him, but he will talk about himself, that boy.”

“Did he not tell you I’ve been looking for you?”

“Have you? No, he didn’t mention that.”

“Why didn’t you say something when you realised I was at the Folies?”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I didn’t recognise you, did I?”

We turned a corner and found that we had walked to the Champs Élysées. Neither of us wanted to turn back, so we kept on walking towards the Arc de Triomphe.

“I wrote, you know? Over and over. Then I went to your address and your landlady gave me my own letters back to give to you if I saw you. I even went to Southend.”

“You never did!” she gasped.

“I did. I met your mother and father. I saw your father’s theatre. On the beach…?”

Tilly nodded slowly, acknowledging the demise of that little fabrication of hers.

“I met your sister, too.”

She stopped, and turned to face me. “Well then, you know what Fate had in store for me if I’d stayed there. A screaming brat on each arm and another on the way.”

“Not to mention a thriving ironmongery.”

She laughed. “They really didn’t keep any of my secrets, did they? Well, things are different now. Dear Mistinguett plans to marry me off to a Prussian Count who wants to whisk me off to the Hohenzollern, whatever that is.”

“Is that what you want?”

“Well, a girl could do worse, it seems to me. Than becoming a countess, I mean.”

“I see.”

“I feigned exhaustion tonight to get away early. Keeping him keen, you see.”

We strolled along in companionable silence, but inside I was churning away madly, trying to think, think,
think
how to bring up the matter that was eating me up.

Eventually the pavements began to seem emptier, and we were no longer walking past all-night cafés and bars, but shops and business premises closed up for the night.

“We should turn back,” Tilly said. She stopped, obliging me to circle her so we could retrace our steps. Now or never, I thought.

“Listen,” I said, my heart in my mouth. “That time, when we were married, remember?”

“Of course I remember. I don’t pretend to be married to all the fellows, you know.”

“Not a day goes by that I don’t wish I’d said something, or done something, different.”

She disengaged her arm from mine and walked ahead.

“You made your choice. It was me or Karno, simple as that. And you chose Karno.”

“It wasn’t as simple as that. We hardly even talked about it…”

“I was ready, you know, to throw in my lot with you,” she said softly.

“Do it then! Do it now! I’ll chuck Karno and we’ll make an act together, you and me!”

“What
act
, what do you mean?”

“I don’t know, we’ll think of something! It doesn’t matter what it is, we’ll make it work, and we’ll be together. That’s the important thing.”

She turned to face me, there in the street. Tears were glistening in her eyes but she wasn’t crying.

“And then what? Every time you saw a Karno company on the bill, or heard someone say how well Charlie was doing now, it would be my fault, wouldn’t it? My fault for making you choose me.”

“I want to choose you, I should have chosen you, I would
always
choose you,” I said fervently. “Always and only!”

I held my breath, as if I realised suddenly that the whole future course of my life, and hers, could be decided by what she said next.

“Well, that was then, wasn’t it?” she said finally. “I’ve got a life here now. A different life. With Mistinguett and Count Adalbert of Prussia.”

She put her arm in mine again, and we walked along together. I tried to think of something else I could say, but nothing came, and in any event I was choking. In no time, seemingly, we reached the house where she was staying and it was time to say goodnight.

I found a stub of pencil in my pocket, scribbled the Streatham address on a scrap of paper and gave it to her.

“Send me a postcard from the Hohenzollern,” I managed to croak out.

She reached up and put her hands on my shoulders, then gave me a quick peck on each cheek. Very French, I thought. Very sisterly.

“Take care of yourself, Arthur Dandoe,” she said, and then skipped lightly up the steps to the front door.

I turned and walked until I recognised where I was and eventually found myself back at the hotel where I was staying for what little was left of one more night only. It took hours and hours, but I didn’t really care. I didn’t really see the point of anything any more.

25

THE TOSS OF A COIN

“HARRY
Weldon has up and quit.”

Charlie and I looked at one another, then across at Fred Karno. Our jaws hit his desk in amazement.

“Yes, would you believe he’s got it into his fat head that he wants people to come and see him for a change, not the Karno Comics, and d’you know what? I say the best of British luck to him. He’s going to sing comical songs, if you please, and if he can get a booking outside of Lancashire by the end of next year then I’ll eat my hat. Not just my everyday hat, either, I’ll eat t’ big hat.”

He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the cupboard where all Karno comics knew the big hat resided, waiting to take you down a peg or two if you got too big for your outsized Karno comedy boots.

“What does this mean, boys, I see thee struggling to calculate? Well, I’m going to need to find myself a new number-one comic, as
The Football Match
still has bookings to fulfil. There’s Will Poluski, maybe, and there’s the two of you. So who reckons they could fill Weldon’s shoes, eh?”

“I could do it,” Chaplin blurted out, quick as a flash. “I’m ready. I know all the moves, and I’ve got some ideas too…”

“I’m sure you have,” Karno interrupted. “What about you, Mr Dandoe? Do you think you have what it takes?”

I tore my eyes away from glowering resentfully at Chaplin, and answered: “Yes, Guv’nor. I’m ready to step up, if you want me to.”

Now Chaplin was glaring at me, although what else he expected me to say I can’t imagine. Karno leaned back in his chair and interlocked his fingers behind his head.

“I’m inclined to think that young Poluski let Weldon push him around too easily, and he can wait his turn until he gets himself some gumption. So here’s my problem. Two promising candidates, but only the one opening. What to do, what to do…?”

He knew perfectly well what he was going to do, of course. He was just toying with us. We held our breath.

“All right,” he said, sitting forward again. “Here’s how it is.” He took a gold sovereign from his waistcoat pocket, showed it to us and poised it on the end of his thumb. He looked at Chaplin, and said: “Call it.”

Chaplin was aghast. “Guv’nor?” he wheedled. “You’re surely not going to decide something as important as this on the toss of a coin?”

“If I want to do so then I shall,” Karno said. “Call it, Mr Chaplin.”

Chaplin looked plaintively at me for support, but I just shrugged my shoulders.

“Very well,” he said, conceding defeat. “Heads.”

The sovereign spun and twinkled in the air, and then tinkled onto the desk between us. We all peered in to look, and ‘heads’ it was. Chaplin smirked triumphantly.

“Interesting…” Karno said, building suspense like the master showman he was. He was a master showman, I mentioned that, didn’t I?

He coughed.

“All right,” he said then. “Listen carefully.
The Football Match
opens at the Oxford on Saturday next. There is a matinée and an evening performance. In one of these performances Mr Dandoe will play Stiffy the Goalkeeper, and in the other, Mr Chaplin, you will play the part. After this I will make my determination and my decision will be final. Follow?”

We both nodded, brain cogs spinning, competitive juices already beginning to flow.

“Mr Chaplin, you won t’ coin toss. Will you take first or second turn?”

Now this was clearly a matter worthy of serious deliberation. The evening bill at the Oxford would certainly be rowdier than the matinée, and if the act went well the audience would
potentially
be more demonstrative. A calmer atmosphere, though, often meant that an audience was more attentive to details, and easier to control.

“Well?” said Karno, tapping his fingers on the desktop. You didn’t want to make him lose his patience.

“First,” said Chaplin hurriedly. “I shall go first. And he should not be allowed to watch.”

“Happy not to,” I said.

“Well, there it is,” said Karno, getting to his feet and fixing us with a stony eye. “I expect all this to take place in t’ proper spirit,” he said.

Truth to tell, the two of us had not spoken since the night of the fight in Paris. I think the last words that had passed between
us were Chaplin sneering: “Call that a punch?” just before I relieved him of a molar. We’d studiously avoided each other’s company on the train from Paris to Calais, on the ferry from Calais to Dover, and then on the train back up to London. I wasn’t going to extend an olive branch. Now, though, it seemed we were going to have to put a diplomatic face on things, for the Guv’nor’s sake.

Charlie forced himself to offer his hand and look me in the eye.

“May the best man win,” he said through gritted teeth.

“May the
better
man win,” I corrected him. I hadn’t spent all those years eavesdropping on old dons’ dinnertime conversations at the High Table of a Cambridge college without picking up some pedantism of my own. Sorry, I mean pedantry, don’t I…?

“I’m sure I shall,” Charlie smirked.

“Good, good,” Karno said. “All right, now run along, children.”

He made a show of going back to his paperwork: his habitual way of making his performers feel like there was always something to do that was more important than talking to us. As Chaplin and I reached the door he gave one of his little coughs.

“Oh, ahem … Arthur?”

I turned to look at him. Actually we both did.

“Could I just have a quick word? In private?”

“Of course, Guv’nor,” I said, enjoying the look that flitted across Chaplin’s face.

“Shut the door.”

I did so, on Chaplin.

“Have a seat.”

As I sat down, Karno perched on the corner of his desk.

“I like you, Arthur.”

“Thank you, Guv’nor.”

“And you like me, don’t you?”

“Of course I do, Guv’nor.”

He gave a little cough, and for one awful moment I thought he was about to proposition me. You just thought that, too, be honest. It might have been easier to deal with all round if he had done, because what he actually had in mind was this: “You want to beat young Chaplin, don’t you, at this little contest of mine?”

“Whatever it takes,” I said.

“Well, then, perhaps if … you could help me out with a little something, then maybe I should be able to help you in return, d’you get my drift?” He smiled in a friendly sort of a way. It was terrifying.

“What … could I help you out with, Mr Karno?”

The Guv’nor stood, patted me on the shoulder, then began to pace the room.

“Have you seen my wife of late?”

“Well, no, I have been in Paris for the last month,” I pointed out.

“So you have, so you have. But you are … friendly? With her?”

“I think so,” I said.

“She’s still a handsome woman.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Attractive. You think her attractive, I take it?”

“I … suppose … so…” I ventured.

“Good, that’s good,” Karno said. “That is as it should be. No need to beat about the bush. We are grown men. Men of the world. Eh?”

Karno paced up and down the small office, coughed again, then fixed me with his beady eye.

“When our marriage ended, as it sadly did – no fault on either side, just one of those unfortunate things – she was persuaded by unscrupulous men that her best interests lay not in the divorce which would have made things right and proper between us but in our remaining manacled together in a union that is little more than a sham. A sham, I tell thee, devised by lawyers with the sole purpose of milking me for every penny they can squeeze out!” Here he paused, and took out a handkerchief with which to mop his brow. “Because of this I am unable to make an honest woman of Maria, and am unable to move on with my life, leaving that unhappy chapter behind me.”

“I see,” I said, more to fill the pause than anything, because I didn’t see yet, not really.

“Good, Arthur, good, I knew ye would,” Karno said, and returned to his chair behind his desk, leaning forward again to rest on his elbows. “Now the fact is, I can see no way out of this legal impasse without the help of someone such as your good self.”

“Me? What can I do?” I asked, not sure I was going to like the answer much.

“Well. You say you are friendly with my wife, correct?”

I nodded.

“
Very
friendly, right?”

I shrugged.

“Just so. Now if you were to – how shall I put this…? If you were to become even
more
friendly with Edith – an attractive woman, as you yourself said just now – to the point where you could persuade her to indulge in a liaison of a … um … carnal character. That would give me grounds, do you see, for a challenge in t’ courts, she wouldn’t have a leg to stand on, as it
were, and the whole damned thing would be done and dusted in a trice.”

“I don’t know…” I began.

“Of course, of course, you take some time to think about it, eh? That’s only reasonable. You have a bit of think. In actual fact, if you have any qualms at all about what I am asking, it would not be essential – preferable, I think, but not altogether essential – for you to
actually
engage in a liaison with Mrs Karno, just so long as you were prepared to swear an affidavit to the effect that you had done so. There would naturally be questioning, in court and so forth, concerned with verification, and a knowledge of certain…” – here he coughed one of his little coughs – “…certain …
intimate
details would no doubt be, um, helpful, but I’m sure someone of your skills could carry that off without breaking sweat. Eh?”

So there it was. The road to success, for me, was paved with cruel seduction, or perjury, or a combination of the two. It was set before me as plainly as that. Ruin my wife, and I’ll make you a number-one comic.

Karno watched me anxiously. “Just our little secret, all right?” he said, with a wink.

Well, as you can no doubt imagine, I gave this matter a fair bit of thought over the next few days. In fact I doubt whether I spent a waking moment thinking about anything else.

Half the time I thought feverishly about the glittering prize that had been dangled in front of my greedy young eyes. To be the number one of a company of Fred Karno Comics was all I had dreamed about since I had come to London. And as if that
wasn’t enough, the brass ring came with the additional bonus of depriving Chaplin of the same.

The other half of the time I was thinking about what I would have to do to get it.

Was it possible to do what Karno asked, and still escape with my own reputation intact? Only if I could make it appear that I was a hapless victim of circumstances myself, which would mean pretending to actually fall in love with Edith Karno, becoming besotted with her, and sustaining that pretence for how long? Weeks? Months?
Years
…? Otherwise it was a straightforward proposition – seduce the woman, and then turn on her in court.

How could I do that to Edith? How could I do that to Freddie junior and Leslie, her sons? To Clara and Charley Bell, her dearest friends?

And yet … and
yet
… I could find myself the number one of a company of Fred Karno’s Comics, which was as near as damn-it-all saying ‘made for life’. Karno looked set to rule the roost for years and years to come, always provided he didn’t sink all his money into some God-forsaken scheme to set up his own entertainment resort on an island in the Thames and take himself to the very brink of bankruptcy, anything like
that
.
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