3
LILY HAD BEEN STAGE-STRUCK FROM BABYHOOD when she would drape herself in her mother’s old feather boa and traipse around the little flat above the shop, singing in her true little voice. Against all the odds Helen Pears had forced the corner shop into profit and saved the money to send Lily to ballet school and to a singing teacher. Scrimping on the household bills and hiding money from her husband, she had managed to get Lily a training which had been good enough to win her a place in the chorus of the Palais, owned by the Edwardes Music Halls of Southsea, Bournemouth and Plymouth. It was not what Helen Pears had wanted for her daughter, but it was the best she could provide. And it was the first step in moving the girl away from the narrow streets and narrow lives of Portsmouth.
Lily might have been a dancer in the chorus line for ever, if she had not caught the eye of the musical director, Charlie Smith, in the first week of rehearsals.
“Here, Lily, can you sing?” he asked during a break in one of the sessions. The dancers were scattered around the front seats of the darkened theatre, their feet up on the brass rail that surrounded the orchestra pit, drinking tea out of thermos flasks, eating sandwiches and gossiping. Charlie was picking out a tune on the piano.
“Yes,” Lily said, surprised.
“Can you read music?”
Lily nodded.
“Sing me this,” he said, tossing a sheet of music at her.
Charlie started the rippling chords of the introduction. Lily, her eyes still on the song sheet, walked to the orchestra pit, stepped casually over the brass rail and leaned against the piano to sing.
There was a little silence when she had finished.
“Very nice,” he said casually. “Good voice production.”
“Back to work everybody, please,” the stage manager called from the wings. “Mr. Brett wants to see the greyhound number. Just mark it out. Miss Sylvia de Charmante will be here this afternoon. Until then please remember to leave room for her.”
Charlie winked at Lily. “Buy you lunch,” he said.
The girls climbed the catwalk up to the stage and got into line, leaving a space in the middle for the soloist.
“She’s got a dog,” the stage manager said dismally. “A greyhound thing. Remember to leave space for it. Madge, you’ll have to move stage left a bit. Lily, give her a bit more room.”
“What does the greyhound do?” Charlie demanded.
“Bites chorus girls, I hope,” Mike, the SM, said without a flicker of a smile. “From the top, please.”
They ate lunch in a working-men’s café in one of the little roads near the Guildhall Square. Charlie drank tea and smoked cigarettes. Lily ate a bread and dripping sandwich and drank milk.
“Disgusting,” Charlie said.
Lily beamed and shamelessly wiped her mouth on her sleeve.
“Would you like to be a singer?” Charlie asked. “Want to be a star?”
“Course,” Lily said. “Who doesn’t?”
“Not very old, are you?” Charlie asked. “Seventeen? Eighteen?”
“I’m seventeen and a half.”
Charlie grinned. “I could get you a spot. We’re an act short. We need a girl singer. But something a bit different. Want to do it?”
Lily gaped for a moment, but then shot him a quick suspicious look. “Why me?”
Charlie shrugged. “Why not? Someone’s got to do it. Who else is there?”
“Madge Sweet, Tricia de Vogue, Helena West.” Lily ticked the names of three of the other five dancers off her fingers. “They can all sing.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Charlie said. “I’ve heard them all. They all sound like someone else. They’re all ‘in the style of’ . . . I’ve got something else in mind. An idea I’ve had for a while. D’you want it or not?”
Lily grinned at him. “I told you already,” she said. “I want to be a star. Course I want it.”
“Bring your ma here to see me this evening,” Charlie said. “I have my tea here too.”
Back at the theatre, Charlie found the director talking on the stage door telephone, dictating a telegram to Miss Sylvia de Charmante at the Variety Theatre, London, due on the eleven o’clock train from Waterloo and still not arrived. Charlie took him gently by the elbow. “Lily Pears, in the chorus, I want her to try the song I told you about,” Charlie said persuasively. “You said we could give it a go. There’s no-one else available and a big gap in the second half.”
William Brett flapped an irritated hand and said, thank God there were still some people who wanted work—and what more could he do to get that overpaid spoiled damned prima donna out of her hotel bed and down to Southsea for rehearsals?
Charlie nodded and drifted across the stage and down the steps to the orchestra pit to play a few soft chords.
“Places please, dancers,” the stage manager said with infinite patience from the prompt corner. “I shall walk Miss Sylvia’s steps and you can dance around me.”
“Will you sing soprano as well?” Charlie asked.
The SM scowled at him. “Like a bleeding canary if that’s what it takes to get this show on the road,” he said dourly.
Lily waited till the afternoon tea break to tell the girls that she was to have a song in the show and then smiled smugly as they fluttered around her and kissed their congratulations. Her smile was as false as the kisses and the cries of delight. They were a company bonded by work and riven with jealousy. Lily’s luck was declared to be phenomenal.
“I’m just so envious I am sick!” Madge Sweet said, hugging Lily painfully hard.
“How will you do your hair? And what will you wear?” Helena asked. “You don’t have anything to wear, do you? This is your first show?”
“I expect my ma will get me something,” Lily said. “She was in the business. There’s all her old costumes in a box at home.”
The girls burst into high malicious laughter. “A hundred-year-old tea gown is just what Mr. Brett wants, I don’t think!” Tricia said.
“Moth-eaten fan!”
“Bustle and crinoline!”
Lily set her teeth and held her smile. “I’ll think of something.”
“You could wear your hair long,” Madge suggested. She pulled the pins at the back of Lily’s head and Lily’s thick golden hair tumbled from the roll at the nape of her neck and fell down. It reached to her waist. “You could wear it with a hair band and sing a girl’s song. Alice in Wonderland type.”
“Little Lily Pears, the child star!” Tricia suggested sarcastically.
“I shan’t be Pears,” Lily said with sudden decision. “I’ll use my ma’s stage name. She was Helen Valance. I’ll be Lily Valance.”
“Lily Valance! God ’elp us!” Tricia said.
“Dancers, please,” the SM called. “The flower scene. Please remember that in front of you is a conjuror who will be taking flowers out of your baskets and coloured flags and ribbons and God knows what else. The conjuror isn’t here yet either. But leave a space for him centre stage. We don’t have the baskets yet, but remember you’ve got to hold them up towards him so he can do the trick. Have we got the music?”
“Music’s here,” Charlie said from the pit.
“One out of three isn’t bad, I suppose,” the SM said miserably. “When you’re ready, Mr. Smith.”
• • •
Helen Pears shut the shop early to meet Lily at the stage door and walk her home. She knew her daughter was old enough to walk home alone, and there would be no men at the stage door until the show was open. But Lily was her only child and, more than that, the only person in the world she had ever loved. Helen Pears’s life had been one of staunchly endured disappointments: a failed stage career, an impoverished corner shop, a husband who volunteered in a moment of drunken enthusiasm for a ship which blew up at sea before it had even fired a shot in anger. Only in the birth of her fair-headed daughter had she experienced a joy unalloyed by disappointment. Only in Lily’s future could she see a life that might, after all, be
full of hope.
Lily said nothing to her mother until they were crossing the road before the music hall. Then she breathlessly announced that she was to sing a solo. Helen stopped in the middle of the tram tracks and squeezed Lily’s hand so hard that she cried out.
“This is your first step,” Helen said. “Your first season and you’re further ahead than I ever got. This is your big chance, Lily. We’ll make it work for you.”
Lily smiled up at her mother. “As soon as I can earn enough we’ll sell the shop,” she promised. “As soon as I earn enough I’ll buy you a house in Southsea, on the seafront, somewhere really nice.”
“I’ll talk to this Charlie Smith,” Helen said with decision. “And to Mr. Brett too, if needs be.”
“Charlie said to meet him for tea,” Lily said, leading the way. “He wants to talk to you.”
Charlie was sitting at the window. He half-rose to greet them and shook hands with Helen. The woman behind the counter brought them thick white mugs of tea.
“We can go back to the theatre and try something out,” Charlie said. “I’m working late tonight anyway. Sylvia de Charmante’s music has arrived and I have to adapt it for our orchestra. We can try out Lily’s song. I’ve got an idea for it.”
“Nothing tasteless,” Helen stipulated.
Charlie met her determined gaze across the scrubbed wood table. “Your daughter has class, Mrs. Pears,” he said. “We don’t want to lose that.”
The theatre was very cool and quiet and empty, smelling hauntingly of stale beer and cigarettes. The rows of seats stretched back from the stage until they vanished into the darkness. The pale balcony floated in the dusty air. There was a hush in the theatre like that in an empty church, a waiting hush. Charlie’s little green light in the orchestra pit was the only illumination. Lily and Helen, crossing the darkened stage, were like ghosts of old dancers moving silently towards an audience that had vanished, called up and gone.
On the left of the stage was the rickety catwalk and steps. Helen walked gingerly down and sat in the front row near Charlie’s piano.
“Can we have some lights?” Charlie called to a technician working somewhere backstage.
A couple of houselights came on, and one working stage light.
“Sit down,” Charlie said to Helen. “I have an idea for her.”
Lily stood at her ease in the centre of the stage. She smiled at her mother.
“D’you know this?” Charlie handed a sheet of music up to her.
Lily gave a little gasp of surprise and then giggled. “I know it!” she said. “I’ve never sung it!”
“Try it,” Charlie suggested. He played a few rippling chords and nodded to Helen. “Just listen,” he said.
The beat of the music was regular, like a hymn. Helen knew the clear simple notes but could not think of the song. Then Lily on the stage, half-lit, threw back her head and sang Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” Helen felt tears prickle behind her eyes as the sounds arched upwards into the bell-shaped ceiling, and the piano accompaniment formed a perfectly paced symmetry with the rhythm and cadence of the song. It was a holy moment, like the sound of a blackbird singing in no-man’s-land. When Lily was silent and the last chord had died away, Helen found her cheeks were wet.
“That was lovely,” she said. She fumbled in her handbag for her handkerchief. “Just lovely,” she said.
“It’s hardly music hall!” Lily complained. She dropped to one knee to speak to Charlie in the pit. “I can’t do that in front of an audience.”
Charlie grinned at her, turned and spoke to Helen. “Just wait a moment,” he said. “Think of Lily in a chorister’s outfit. Red gown and a white surplice, white ruff.”
“Blue,” Helen said instantly. “Brings out the colour of her eyes.”
“Blue gown,” Charlie agreed. “She comes out. No-one knows what to expect. She sings like that. Just simply. Like an angel. Everyone cries. All the old ladies, all the tarts, all the drunks. They’ll weep into their beer and they’ll love her.”
“They’ll laugh themselves sick,” Lily said.
Charlie shook his head. “I know them,” he said. “I’ve been doing this a long time, Lily, and I know what tickles their fancy. They like their ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ays and they like a class act. They like something that makes them feel pious. They love a good weep.”
Helen nodded. “You’re right,” she said. “But if they heckle . . .”
Charlie shook his head. “Not here,” he said. “London maybe. Birmingham maybe. Glasgow, certainly. But not here. And not anywhere on tour. They want a good time, a good laugh and a good weep. They’ll adore her.”
“I’m a chorus girl!” Lily protested. “Not a choir girl!”
“Not a choir girl,” Charlie agreed. He nodded to Helen. “Keep thinking the ruff and the white surplice. Keep thinking Christmas cards and carols and weddings.” He climbed out of the pit and strode up the catwalk.
“Let your hair down,” he said to Lily. He stood behind her and folded her sheet of music into a little fan. “Hold this under your chin,” he said. He nodded to Helen. “Think of a spotlight, very white, and no make-up at all. Perhaps a little pale powder. No lipstick.”
He scooped up Lily’s mass of blonde hair and folded it so that it was as short as a bob.
“Choir boy,” he said. “Ain’t I a genius?”
There was a full minute of silence from the auditorium. “You’d never cut her hair,” Helen said finally, outraged.
“Bob it,” Charlie said. “So it’s the same length all around. She has a side parting and it comes down to the middle of her ears both sides. We oil it back a little bit, off her face. Nothing shiny, nothing slick. Just a newly washed boy. A well-scrubbed choir boy. A little angel from heaven.”
Lily giggled irrepressibly, but stood still as Charlie had ordered her, holding her folded sheet music under her chin while Charlie held her hair in handfuls off her neck.
“A young Vesta Tilley,” Helen said incredulously.
“Delicious,” Charlie said.
“Tasteful,” Helen conceded.
“And hidden oomph,” Charlie said, looking over Lily’s shoulder. “She’s just gorgeous. There isn’t a public school boy in England that wouldn’t fall down and die for her. Ain’t I right?”
Helen nodded. As he sensed her agreement Charlie dropped Lily’s hair and took the mock-ruff from under her chin. “What d’you think, Lily?” he asked.
She shrugged and grinned. “I’ve wanted my hair bobbed for ages,” she said.
He laughed. “As easy as that?”
“Ma said I had to keep it long,” Lily said. “If I can have my hair bobbed I’ll sing whatever you like!”
• • •
They never rehearsed Lily’s song again. She tried it through once more with Charlie that night and he gave her the score and told her to learn the words and practise with her singing teacher. Mr. Brett the director was resigned to the experiment. Charlie had been batting on for years about a choir boy number and with the conjuror drunk in Swansea and Miss Sylvia de Charmante still in London, he had neither time nor energy for an audition and an argument. Besides, Charlie Smith was rarely wrong.
“So what are you singing?” the girls asked in the crowded dressing room. The costumes, hung on hangers on hooks on the wall, bulged out into the room, shrouded in cotton sheets to keep them clean. Lily, as the youngest and newest dancer, had her hairbrush and comb perched on the inconvenient corner of the table, nearest to the door and overwhelmed by hanging gowns.
“It’s a classical song,” Lily said. “Charlie Smith’s idea.”
“He’s off his rocker,” Madge said. “You should speak to Mr. Brett and tell him you won’t do it.”
“I couldn’t do that.”
“You ought to,” Helena said. “It’s not fair making you sing something no-one wants to hear. You should try ‘Blue-eyes.’ ” She sang the chorus in a hard nasal tone, nodding at Lily.
; “Or ‘Walking my Girl,’ ” one of the other dancers suggested. She sang the first verse.
“No!” someone else exclaimed. “That wouldn’t suit Lily, she ought to have something saucy!”
There was a gale of sarcastic laughter.
“I can see your ma letting you do something saucy and tying your garter during the chorus!” Susie said. “What are you wearing anyway?”
“A long blue gown,” Lily said mendaciously. “Charlie told Ma what I should have and she’s making it for me.”
“You’re not going to set the town alight,” Madge said, without troubling to conceal her pleasure. “A classical song and a home-made dress! Not so lucky as you thought then, Lily.”
“Probably be dropped after the Southsea opening anyway,” Susie said. “We’re running hours too long.”
Lily kept her head down and her mouth shut.
• • •
The night before the dress rehearsal Lily and her mother took a tram up to Commercial Road, Southsea, the best part of town, for Lily to have her hair cut.
“Not a woman. No woman in the history of the world has ever known how to cut hair,” Charlie decreed. “You’re to go to David’s, on Commercial Road. I’ve told him you’ll be there at seven. He’s keeping open just for you so there won’t be any men around. You can be quite private.”
Helen had frowned.
“Come on, Ma!” Lily had urged. “It can’t hurt.”
David’s shop was closed for the night as Charlie had predicted. The blinds were discreetly down.
“Charlie Smith told me you wanted a straight bob,” David said. Lily sat in the comfortable barber’s chair, her feet tucked up on the foot rail, looking at herself in the mirror.
“No fringe, just the same length all around,” she said. “Like a boy’s.”