Читать книгу Six Against the Yard - Margery Allingham - Страница 6

THIS IS A CONFESSION. I WANT TO TELL THE whole truth and to explain how it happened.

In the first place my name is not Margery Allingham. I was born Margaret Hawkins, and later on, when I went on the stage, I changed it to Polly Oliver. I don’t suppose you remember the name now, but your fathers might, although I don’t know … it’s no good me pretending.

I was clever and I had looks when I was younger, but I was never what you might call a top-liner, not like Louie. It’s really because of her that I’m confessing at all. The fair boy, who looked too young to be a policeman when he took his hat off, didn’t suspect me. I don’t think anybody did, not even the coroner, and there was a shrewd old man if ever I saw one.

I suppose you would say that I’ve got clean away with it, but I want to tell about it because of Louie. After all, she was the main cause of it. If it hadn’t been for her, poor old girl, I certainly shouldn’t have ever brought myself to stretch out my hand and–––

But I’m coming to that.

Louie and I were pals, not like girls on the stage are nowadays. I’m not saying anything against them, but they’re not the women we used to be. Little bits of rubbish they look to me, as they come in and out of my house. They don’t look like actresses. That was one thing about me and Louie. In the old days—I’m talking about thirty or forty years ago—if you saw us a mile off you’d know we were in the profession, with our white boots and our bits of fluff, and the boys running along behind.

We met in burlesque. I was in the chorus, and she had a little part: nothing much, you know, but she used to come on in front of us girls and say, ‘Here we are, boys!’ I can see her now, her figure pinched in and her tights glistening, and her bright yellow curls, which were always real—more than mine were, I don’t mind telling you—bobbing up and down as she moved.

Even then she had that spirit—’verve’ we called it then, and ‘pep’ they call it now—which made her name for her afterwards. Louie Lester: you’ve all known it since your cradles, you’ve all heard your fathers talk about her and most of you have seen her. She went on the halls in nineteen hundred, and she still headed the bill in nineteen-eighteen, at least, up North.

I remember her best in the early days when she was making her name. Grandpapa Has Done It Again, Jonah Likes a Little Bit of Pink, Forget It and Kiss Me Again—Lorn wrote all those songs for her and she ought to have married him. You must remember the act? First there’d be the little twiddly bit from the orchestra, then the red curtains’d go up, and there’d be the ‘Town Hall’ set with the piano and the potted palms, and Lorn himself in the early days sitting there playing. The house’d be clapping by this time, and then the silver curtains that she travelled with her would part over the archway centre-back and out she’d come, all twelve stone of her, silk stockings, petticoats, white skin, and eyes so blue they made the sapphires Jorkins gave her look like bits of glass, all twinkling and shaking, and giving off great waves of life like a dynamo going all out.

They used to say she never had a voice, but she had. It was tuneful, and it filled the hall. She hadn’t any fancy notes, but she put the stuff over. And she never tired. They could shout for her again and again and she’d still give them a chorus and lead ’em over the difficult bits like kids at a singing class.

They loved her and she loved them. Her turn was like a reunion.

I haven’t described her now—I don’t suppose there’s any need to—but since you probably remember her when she was stouter and noisier, although she never lost her spirit, I may as well tell you how I saw her, and how I always think of her.

She was tall and fair, with blue eyes and a wide mouth, and a figure that was fine and strong and very human, and she radiated affection. I think myself that was her great gift. You felt she loved you, everybody did; taxi-drivers, people in shops, the orchestra, the house itself, they all sat up and preened themselves when she smiled because it was a personal smile, if you understand me, meant for you and genuine because she liked you. It made her what she was and it kept her there for a long time.

I’m telling you all this because I want you to understand why I did what I did do and where I made my mistake, my terrible mistake.

She met him when she was at the top of her career. There were thousands of men she could have married, men with money, men who could have given her something. Or there was Lorn, if she wanted somebody to take care of. Lorn would have died for her—did die for her, when you come to think of it. She didn’t know he had consumption and that theatre up at—but it was pulled down a long time ago and there’s no need to rub it in—was a death-trap, notoriously.

Still, that’s not the point. As I say, she might have married anybody and she chose Frank. I don’t know what he was. Something in the orchestra, in a little one-eyed town whose very name I’ve forgotten. I remember when she brought him round to my dressing-room—I was still in burlesque and only just out of the chorus. I looked at him and she said: ‘This is Frank Springer. We’re going to be married,’ and I waited for her to wink at me, but she didn’t.

I didn’t like him even then, and her money hadn’t gone to his head at that time. He was an undersized, flashy little object with so much side you wondered he didn’t fall over. He could talk: I gave him that. There was nobody who could talk so well to people they didn’t know. The first half-hour you were with him made you think you’d discovered something, but all the other half-hours were a disillusionment.

And she never saw through him. At least I don’t suppose that’s quite true. But she never saw right through him. It made me wild then, and it still makes me wild when I think of it. To everybody else in this blessed world that man was a four-flushing gasbag, a fellow with such an inferiority complex, as they say now, that his whole life was spent trying to boost himself up to himself, and the more weak and hopeless and inefficient he saw himself the wilder and more irritating his lies became.

I had enough of him on the first evening, and when I got her alone I began to laugh at him, and that was the first time I ever saw her ‘funny.’

She wasn’t angry, but a sort of obstinate look came into her face. I can’t describe it and I won’t try, but it was the one thing I never understood about her. He was the one subject on which we never were frank, and one is frank with pals one’s known and worked with.

‘You’re not really going to marry him, duck?’ I said at last. I was quite startled by this time.

‘Oh, don’t you like him?’

It was all she said, but there was an appeal in it. She had a way of doing that, of saying ordinary things and making you feel they were important.

‘Yes, I do in a way,’ I said cautiously, because I didn’t want to hurt her. ‘But you’re not really going to marry him? Is he rich?’

‘He hasn’t got a brown,’ she said, and she sounded pleased and somehow complacent.

I was younger then and I hadn’t learnt what I have now, so I’m afraid I said what I thought.

She walked out on me and in the morning when I tried to get hold of her she told the old girl to say she was out. That was the first row we ever had, and when I met her again it was after her big hit at the Oxford with When Father Brings the Flowers Home With the Milk. We had a drink together and she said she was married.

I said. I was sorry for what I’d said about her husband—after all, when a man’s a girl’s husband it makes him somebody—and she warmed up to me again and I felt things weren’t really so bad. I was out of a shop at the time and I saw her at the second house, and afterwards I met him again in the dressing-room.

He was horrible.

Even afterwards, when he was old and I knew him for what he was, I never really loathed him as much as I did at that first meeting after they were married. He took all the credit for her success, talked about her as though he’d made her, and he wore a diamond and chucked his weight about until it made everybody sick. There were a whole crowd of us there, her old friends and several new ones and a lot of smart people. They were nice to him because of her. But he took it all to himself and, although it was a jolly enough gathering, for the first time I saw her in that atmosphere which never deserted her all her life.

It’s hard to describe it but it was a sort of pitying-polite atmosphere, almost as though she’d got a hump or a wooden leg, and everyone was too fond of her to let her know that they’d noticed it.

Lorn was sitting in a corner. His illness had got hold of him by then, but we didn’t know it. Frank was rude to him and had the impudence to criticise the way he played one of his own songs, but he didn’t say anything. He just sat there shivering and sipping his glass of the champagne somebody’d brought in.

He looked so miserable that I went over and joined him, and afterwards, when Louie had fixed up to go out to supper at some titled chap’s house and Frank had invited himself and promised that she’d give a show there, announcing he’d accompany her himself, Lorn and I went off and had a meal together.

We went to a Sam Isaacs’—I don’t know if it’s still there—and had some fish and stout. I had a job to make Lorn eat; he just sat shivering. Neither of us mentioned Louie at first. I knew he was supposed to be in love with her, but then most people were. It became half habit, half affectation with every man who knew her, and I suppose Lorn knew her as well as anybody in the world.

He sat playing with his food, turning it over and over on his plate and looking at it as though he were not at all sure what it was.

‘How d’you like him?’ I said at last when every other topic had failed.

He put down his knife and fork and looked at me across the little table. Now that I’ve seen death in a man’s eyes I know what it was that shocked me so in his expression.

‘Oh, God, Polly!’ he said. ‘Oh, God!’

‘You eat your grub,’ I said, because I was flustered and embarrassed by him. ‘You mark my words, my lad, the time’s coming when it’s going to be easy for a respectable woman to get in and out of marriage. She’ll get tired of him and pack up.’

He looked at me earnestly. ‘Do you really believe that? Because if you do you’re more of a perishing little fool than I thought you were.’

‘Isn’t that what you think?’ I said.

Neither of us was in the mood to get touchy with the other.

‘No,’ he said, so quietly that I stared at him. I can see that pale face of his with the great high-bridged mournful nose and the wildish light eyes to this day. ‘No,’ he repeated. ‘She loves him, Polly. She loves that little squirt and she’ll go on loving him until she breaks her heart or someone takes him by the back of his scrawny little neck and twists it round and round until his head falls off.’

His voice had risen on the words and one or two of the other people in the room—it was a quiet little place—looked round at us. I felt uncomfortable.

‘You be quiet,’ I said. ‘Don’t say such dreadful things. Frank’s not the type to get done in and if he is it’s not going to be by you or me.’

I remember I choked over the last word, and he laughed and gave me a bit of bread and we cheered up after that. But I think of it now sometimes. It’s twenty-five years ago. I didn’t believe in the subconscious or fate then, and I don’t now, really, but I did choke and I did kill him.

Lorn took me home that night. I was digging at old Ma Villiers’ just off the Streatham High. You certainly wouldn’t remember her, but she was a fine old trouper and had been quite a queen of melodrama in her day. We sat round the fire in her kitchen and I can see her now standing on a swaying chair, ferreting about in the cupboard for some cinnamon for Lorn’s cold.

After he had gone—and he went slowly, I remember, with heavy steps like an old man—she stood talking to me while I filled my hot-water bottle from the kettle on the stove. She was a great gaunt old woman—they don’t all run to fat—with a shock of grey hair and a Shakespearean manner.

‘There’s death there,’ she said. ‘You won’t see him again.’

I was sharp with her.

‘He’s all right. He’s only got a cold and he’s fed up because his girl’s married somebody else.’

She looked at me sharply with her little black eyes.

‘‘A scratch, a scratch, hut marry ‘tis enough,’’ she said. ‘You won’t see him again.’

She was right. I didn’t. I never saw Lorn again. I heard about his death long afterwards from some people who were in the same bill as Louie up North when Lorn collapsed. They were nice people, a dancing act, who came into a burlesque show in which I was playing. We were calling them ‘revues’ by that time. I remember the woman, a pretty little dark-haired thing, she was called Lola Darling, telling me with tears in her eyes of the awful row there had been back stage, Louie insisting that Lorn was not fit to go on and Frank bullying her and swearing first at her and then at Lorn, and finally Lorn staggering out to the piano and doing his little bit in the icy draught that would have killed an elephant, let alone a man half dead already. And then Lorn collapsing—dreadfully vivid she was, I dreamt of Lorn in pools of blood for nights afterwards—and being rushed off to hospital and dying there.

‘Who’s accompanying her now?’ I said, and when she told me Frank was doing it himself I felt anxious.

He didn’t smash her career at once. Nobody could have done that except Louie herself. But he chipped away at the foundations of it, if you understand what I mean. The rumour went round that the act was temperamental, but that didn’t matter while she drew the houses.

I didn’t see much of her then. She used to write to me sometimes, but her letters grew guarded. At first they were all about Frank. Frank did this, Frank did that, Frank was so clever, Frank won three thousand pounds at Doncaster on one race. But afterwards I didn’t hear so much about Frank. She wrote generalities.

All the time, though, she was at the top of the bill, and when she did come to London her old songs went down just like they used to do, even if some of the new ones weren’t so successful.

The rumour went around that Frank was jealous of Lorn’s memory, and threw a tantrum every time she revived one of his songs.

He wrote one or two for her himself, but they were terrible, and even her personality couldn’t put them over. I believe he gave her hell when that happened, but, of course, nobody knew about it then.

That was the beginning of the secret life she led, the life that turned her into two different people.

Meanwhile I was having my own adventures. My husband—did I say I had a husband?—died and left me the little bit of money he had, bless him. We never got on together but we never worried each other. I banked my money and went on working.

It was war time now and there was a lot of stuff going. I was so hurried I didn’t have time to think. We were all so busy making merry in case we died to-morrow that I didn’t realise I was getting older, but I was always a sound worker, reliable and steady, and the managers found me little bits so that I could live and save my spot of money.

It was nearing the end of the war that I first saw the new Louie. We hadn’t set eyes upon one another for two years, and although there had been rumours about her, her extravagance, her wildness and the sort of crowd she was mixed up with, I was not prepared for the atmosphere I found when I went round to her dressing-room at the Palladium after my own little show at the Winter Garden was done.

I tapped on the door and the dresser opened it half an inch. It was a new woman. Old Gertie had got the sack, I heard afterwards. This new one was a beery old party with a face like a frightened hare. When she saw I wasn’t going to hit her she opened the door a fraction or so wider.

‘You can’t come in,’ she said. ‘Miss Lester’s resting.’

‘Resting?’ I said. ‘What’s she been doing? Swimming the channel?’

‘Polly!’ I heard Louie’s voice from inside and I pushed the woman aside and went in.

She was lying on a couch, her make-up still on but standing out from her face as though the skin beneath it had shrunk. I hardly recognised her. She was heavier, older, and although still lovely there was an exhaustion, a weakness which was incredible when associated with Louie.

‘Oh, Polly,’ she said, ‘oh, Polly …’ and burst into tears.

This was so unlike her that I forgot myself entirely.

‘Why, Duck,’ I said, ‘why, Duck, what’s the matter?’

She wiped her tears away and looked nervously at the woman.

‘You clear out, Auntie,’ I said. ‘Go and have a drink. I’ll look after Miss Lester.’

The old rabbit stood her ground.

‘Mr. Springer said she wasn’t to be left,’ she said.

‘Mr. Springer said …!’ I gaped at her. ‘You get out!’ I said. ‘Gawd luv a policeman, what d’you think Miss Lester’s going to do? Blow up? You get out. And if you meet Mr. Springer, you tell him I told you to.’

‘Oh, no, Polly, no.’ Louie put her hand to me and clutched my arm and I looked down at her hand and saw that her rings were paste. I can’t tell you why, but that shocked me more than anything I’ve ever seen in all my life … yes, more than his face when–––

But I’m coming to that later.

Finally the old woman went. I’m not so big, and the last part I ever played was a burlesque charwoman, but I usually get what I want when I set my mind to it.

When the door was closed behind her I locked it and turned to Louie.

‘Are you ill?’ I said.

‘No. Only tired.’

‘How many shows have you done to-day?’

‘One.’

‘’Strewth!’ I said. ‘What’s the matter?’

She began to cry again.

‘I don’t know, Polly, I don’t know. I’m all right when I’m on the stage, but afterwards I’m laid out. I used not to be like this always, did I, Polly? Did I?’

‘Of course you didn’t,’ I said. ‘You ought to go along to see a doctor.’

‘A doctor?’ She laughed. ‘Frank wouldn’t like me to do that.’

I tried to point out to her that it wasn’t much to do with Frank, but that made her laugh. She wasn’t bitter about him. She was very nice.

I was really frightened for her by this time and I remember sitting down at the foot of the couch and trying to get the trouble out of her.

But you’re helpless, you know, you’re so helpless when you’re only fond of people and haven’t any authority.

‘How are things going?’ I asked her.

She shot me a little sidelong frightened glance.

‘All right,’ she said dully.

‘What do you mean?—all right? How are bookings?’

‘Oh, good. Good. Frank says they’ve never been so good. He’s my manager now, you know.’

‘What! Old Tuppy gone?’ I was shocked. Tuppy had put Louie on the map years before.

Her mouth twisted. ‘Tuppy was killed. He would join up—over age, you know. Killed the first day he landed. He’s gone. Everybody’s gone.’

‘Except Frank,’ I said rather pointedly.

She was up in arms at once.

‘Frank’s over age and his chest’s weak. There isn’t a doctor on earth who’d pass him.’

I tried to be more cheerful.

‘Well, if money’s all right what are you worrying about? You’re not losing your popularity.’

She hesitated. ‘Money isn’t too good. We—we have to live extravagantly, you know.’

I looked down at her hands and she hid them behind her like a child.

‘What do you mean, have to live extravagantly?’

‘Oh, publicity,’ she said vaguely. ‘Frank—I—I mean, we’ve had a lot of betting losses too. I’ve never been in debt before, Polly, and now I’m getting tired. I get too tired to rehearse, and I’ve got to go on or I don’t know where we’ll be.’

‘D’you mean to say you haven’t saved anything?’ I said.

She shook her head. ‘Nothing. And now we’re getting old. I can feel it coming on. I’m still successful, but it’s not going to last. I don’t get the big hits I used to. The songs aren’t so good and one can’t go on for ever.’

‘Look here,’ I said, ‘you’ve worked all your life and your husband’s gone through your money and you’re tired, my girl. You want a holiday. Give it up for a couple of months. Go down to the country.’

She closed her eyes. ‘I can’t. I can’t afford it. I haven’t got anything I could sell, even. Besides, Frank wouldn’t let me.’

I told her what I thought of Frank. It took me a long time and when I’d done she smiled at me.

‘You’re wrong,’ she said. ‘You’ve never understood Frank, Polly, and you never will. He just doesn’t realise, that’s all. He’s so strong, so full of life himself.’

I remember putting my hands on her shoulders and looking down into her face.

‘Louie,’ I said, ‘you’re sacrificing yourself for that man and he’s not worth it. Now I’m going to say something that’s going to hurt you, but I’m an old friend and you’ve got to take it. I’ve heard all sorts of tales about Frank. What about this little ‘bit’ on at the Empire?’

I could see the colour fade out of her face under the make-up.

‘Oh, they’re talking about it, are they?’ she said. ‘Haven’t you heard about the others too? You’re a bit behindhand, you know, Polly.’

‘Gawd!’ I said, and I didn’t get any further because there was an almighty row outside the door and Louie was on her feet immediately.

‘Quick, let him in,’ she said. ‘We’ve had two barnies with the management already.’

He came in and I shall never forget him. You’d think that a mint of money spent on a man would at least make him fatter if it made him nothing else. A wizened little brick-red mannikin he looked, not even too clean.

He glanced round the room, ignoring me.

‘Where’s Eva? I told her not to leave you.’

‘I sent her out,’ I said. ‘I wanted to talk to Louie.’

He swung round and peered at me and she tugged my sleeve warningly.

‘Miss Oliver, I did not want my wife disturbed.’

Even his accent was wearing thin and, having decided that he had finished with me, I suppose, he returned to her.

‘We’re going on to a night-club,’ he said, ‘and if you’re asked to sing, damn well sing, because it’ll probably be your last chance with the shows you’re putting up here.’

‘My God!’ I said, and I began to tell him exactly where he got off.

He stopped me.

I’ve been on the stage all my life and I’ve never heard language like it. I could hear footsteps in the corridor outside and I can see Louie’s face as she turned to him imploringly to this day.

‘You’re drunk,’ I said at last when I could get a word in.

But he wasn’t. If he had been I could have forgiven him. He wasn’t drunk. He didn’t need drink. He was like it naturally.

‘Louie, for God’s sake leave him,’ I said.

That did it. The balloon went up. I’ve never had a row like it and I’ve been in a few. I remember turning to Louie in the middle of it.

‘He’s ruining you, old girl. And you’ve ruined him. He ought never to have had more than three pounds a week in his life. You’ve given him so much corn he’s blown his head off.’

Of course it didn’t do any good. I might have known. She stuck to him and stood by him even then while a crowd of his little girl-friends were waiting for him at the stage door in his own car, anxious to get every little bit they could out of him. Even then she stood for him, poor old girl.

He threw me out—physically. Took me out by the shoulders and pitched me into the corridor. I was wild. I was beside myself.

‘I’ll kill you for this,’ I said.

But when it came to it and I did kill him I wasn’t in that mood at all.

They came to live in my house at the end of the ’twenties. We all get old and I admit that the discovery came to me as a bit of a shock, but it didn’t throw me off my balance. It was the same sort of feeling I had when I realised that I couldn’t wear a ballet skirt any longer. Something had to be done about it. It was a pity, but it couldn’t be helped.

I left the stage and bought my house with most of my little bit of money. It’s not a grand house, but it’s just the place for me and a couple of little girls to run when the boarders do most of their own work.

I won’t tell you the exact address, but it’s up Maida Vale way, nearly to Kilburn, and it stands in a row with a lot of other houses which used to be very fashionable and are still respectable, in spite of the efforts of some people whom I have to call neighbours.

There are three floors, a basement and an attic. I live in the basement. There’s a little room for me and a kitchen and a tiny spare room that used to be a pantry where I can put up an old pal who can’t afford to pay me what they’d like to.

Louie and Frank started on the first floor. That was at the beginning of the time. Then they moved upstairs, but at the time I’m talking of they were in the attic. There were two rooms, with a little gas-stove in one of them and a sink out in the passage. The windows of the rooms looked out over the parapet, which is one of the features of all the houses in our street. It’s a big yellow stucco parapet that finishes the roof off and makes the houses look like great slabs of margarine on a Sainsbury counter.

I don’t think I ever really got to know Frank until I had him in the house. Louie I seemed to know less. Every now and again I’d recognise the dear old girl she really was and I’d see a spark of the old spirit, the old friendliness that had made me love her all my life. But for the most part she was on guard against me. She wouldn’t let me get near her. She was always defensive, always frightened.

Frank was mad. I came to that conclusion when he gave the Peeler Ventriloquist Act’s parrot a great lump of bacon and killed it, and Louie and I were at our wits’ end covering the business up.

It’s difficult to explain why I should have found that so enlightening, but it wasn’t done through, ignorance and it wasn’t done as a joke, and it wasn’t even done out of maliciousness, because he had nothing against the Peeler pair except that they were living; in the rooms he used to have. But it was done out of a desire to be powerful, if you see what I mean, and after that I knew he was dangerous.

I find myself skipping the story of Louie and Frank in between that time we had a row at the Palladium and the time they finally gravitated to my attic. It’s because it’s an old story and a tragic story, the same old miserable story that any one-time star who hasn’t saved can tell you.

There were more rows, less good performances, changes in the public taste, hard times and worst of all, a dreadful moment when her old spirit came back and she gave ’em the affection that she used to give ’em, gasping and exhausted and fighting as she was and they didn’t want it any more. And there were empty seats and perhaps even a catcall or so from the gods.

There were other things too: unpleasant interviews with managers who didn’t even know the names of predecessors who’d been more than half in love with her.

And all the time there was Frank, making it worse. He’d always done silly things, but being wild with a lot of money is funny and being wild with no money is criminal.

He was never in jail. She kept him out of that somehow. Now and again she got a little engagement. At those times I had my hands full with him. If he could get down to the theatre he’d make a scene. He couldn’t help it; he just wanted to be in the picture, like a silly hysterical woman.

He was never drunk, or at least only very rarely and then only when it suited his purpose and he fancied himself doing the Garrick act. Then he’d knock her about. It looks incredible now I’ve written it down. You remember Louie Lester: can you see any man knocking her about? But he did. I’ve had the doctor in to clean up a black eye before now.

As the years went on it got worse—worse for me, I mean. She’d always had hell’s delight with him, I imagine. But he became an old man of the sea. They couldn’t pay me very much at first and they paid me less and less until they paid me nothing at all. Time and again I’d lose my temper and threaten to throw him out, and then he’d laugh at me.

‘If I go Louie goes,’ he’d say. ‘Can you see her, Polly, sitting under the Adelphi Arches?’

I couldn’t, but I could see him sitting there and her singing in the street until she could bring him something, like a poor old mother wagtail with an obscene, bald red cuckoo tucked up in her nest.

So they stayed. Times had been difficult in the theatrical profession. They still are. People have still got to live but they don’t live so well, and there are too many real business people in the boarding-house line to make it all jam for old women like me, who don’t know how to count every halfpenny and haven’t learnt how to be mean.

He began to affect my business. I haven’t brought myself to tell you his worse fault; I don’t know how to describe it without making him sound a lunatic, which he wasn’t. If he’d been certifiable I’d have had him done long ago, whatever Louie said.

He used to swank. But it wasn’t only that; lots of people swank, especially old pros. But he did it with a sort of frenzy. A man couldn’t open his mouth and mention anything clever or remarkable that he or anyone else had done without my lord piping up with a tale of how he’d done the same thing much better.

There wasn’t an actress you could mention he hadn’t either slept with or taught her her job. There wasn’t a manager who hadn’t borrowed money from him. All of it lies, silly lies, lies everybody saw through. He used to get on people’s nerves and I found I was getting my house full of foreigners who couldn’t understand him.

When he couldn’t get satisfaction that way he’d do tricks, make out he could walk tight ropes and jump on to the ledges of tables. I used to think he’d kill himself and hope he would.

Louie never deserted him. She used to get cross and I’d hear her pleading with him and sometimes snapping at him. But she’d never do anything definite. She’d never frighten him. She’d never turn him out of the house, even for half an hour.

He lost her all her old pals, some of them useful There were folks who’d retired and gone down to live in the country who’d have been glad to put her up for a week or so, but they couldn’t stomach Frank and you couldn’t blame them.

She kept her health wonderfully. You only get a vital personality like that when there’s an iron constitution behind it, and it’s a miracle to me what a real constitution will stand. He’d exhaust her, beat her, jag her nerves to ribbons, and she’d come up again, a ghost of herself but still ready for punishment.

I gave up trying to plead with her after the first year. She was never angry, only obstinate. She’d never leave him.

They’d been in the attic over a year and things were terrible. It was two years since Louie had had a shop and then it was in some dirty little unheard-of hall on the south coast. Frank had gone down there and after the management had had a dose of him, if she’d filled every seat in the house it wouldn’t have got her a return booking. And she hadn’t filled every seat by a long chalk.

Things were bad with me too. I’d mortgaged the place for more than it was worth and got rid of one of my little girls. Money wasn’t coming in. I didn’t see what I was going to do.

Then one day, just when it looked as though we’d all be in the street, young Harry Ferris came round to see me. Just walked into the kitchen without ringing the bell, and although I hadn’t seen him since he was at school I recognised him; he was so like his Dad. It was all I could do to prevent myself from crying all over him, and that’s not the way to treat any manager even if you’re sixteen, much less sixty.

He was a nice boy, much quieter and more the gentleman than his father, and he called me Miss Oliver. But he was none the worse for that and he sat down at the kitchen table and talked to me. I soon saw what he was after.

They were trying to revive the old music hall at the New Imperial and he wanted Louie.

‘There’s a chance for her, Miss Oliver,’ he said. ‘A real chance. She could sing all those old songs of—Lord’s, was it?’

‘Lorn,’ I said, and I thought of him, the first time he’d come into my mind for years. Poor Lorn! He was just one of the good things Louie threw away.

‘Lorn, was it?’ said my visitor. ‘Oh, well … anyway you know the songs. I’m not promising anything, but if she did go over big—and she might; there’s a great revival in this old hearty stuff just now—well, there’d be a good long run. There’s only one thing I’m afraid of, though.’

He hesitated and I knew why he’d come to me and not gone straight to Louie, and I saw Frank for what he was for the first time in my life. He wasn’t a man at all; he was a vice, a vice of Louie’s.

‘It’s her husband,’ the boy said, and if he’d said ‘it’s her drinking,’ he couldn’t have said it in any other way.

‘Now look here,’ he hurried on, ‘we’re going to start in Manchester, and I want her up in Manchester for a trial fortnight, and I want her there alone. Can you manage it?’

‘I’ll try,’ I said.

‘And when she comes to London I want that man kept away,’ he continued. ‘It’s a great chance, Miss Oliver. Do what you can, won’t you?’

‘Of course I will,’ I said, and because I was so happy and because he looked like a rescuing angel I forgot he wasn’t his father and I kissed him.

He looked very uncomfortable and went off upstairs.

Louie came down to me about an hour later. She was bubbling with excitement as she told me the whole story all over again.

‘I can do it, you know, Polly,’ she said. ‘I can do it! I know I can. These new kids to-day aren’t the war-tired lot who wanted to be sung to sleep. They can stand a bit of noise, a bit of the old stuff. I’m going to do it. Oh, Duck!’ she said, and threw her arms round me. ‘Oh, Duck, it’s going to be all right!’

We both had a bit of a cry, I remember.

We started talking about the arrangements, how to raise her fare and what to do about her clothes and so on, and then I said:

‘I’ll look after Frank.’

She looked at me and I saw her openness disappear. It was as though a shutter had been drawn down inside her eyes. She looked at me warily.

‘Frank’ll come with me,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t want to be left at home. You can understand it. I shan’t mention it to Mr. Ferris—you know how difficult these new managers are—but Frank can come up and stay at different digs. He’ll keep quiet, Polly, he’ll keep quiet.’

‘Now look here, my girl,’ I said. …

I talked to her for two hours by the clock and had lunch late for everybody and in the end she agreed with me. She had to see it.

‘He’ll be difficult,’ she said. ‘You know what he is, Polly.’

‘Yes, I do,’ I said, ‘and that’s why it’s suicide to take him. If I had my way I’d keep him under lock and key the whole engagement.’

She nodded gravely. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But we couldn’t do that. He’d get out. You don’t understand him.’

‘You put your foot down,’ I said.

There were tears on her cheeks when she gave me her promise.

Half an hour later he’d got round her again.

There were fourteen days before she had to go to Manchester and we had time to get busy. She had to rehearse and we had to get her clothes. I think we both realised how much depended on it. It was the last chance, you see; the last life-line.

I made up my mind I’d see to Frank. I tried arguing with him. I tried pleading. In the end I tried to bribe him. It wasn’t until I thought of frightening him that I got him to listen to me at all, and then I saw how it was going to be. He’d agree with me, they’d both agree with me, they’d both promise, and then I’d find him brushing up his best suit and taking some of the money we’d scraped together for her stage clothes to buy himself a couple of fancy shirts, old and horrible though he was.

I saw him beating me and I got the idea of him as a vice more clearly in my head. I had a father once who used to drink, and all that business came back to me as I struggled with him and I struggled with Louie. There was the same cunning, the same promising and going behind your back, and the same utter hopelessness of it all.

Once when she was out he came down and sat on my kitchen table and laughed at me.

‘You’ve tried to separate us all your life, haven’t you, Polly? You’re not going to do it, d’you hear. I made her. I put her where she was and she’ll never do anything without me. We shall be together at the end. She’s been a bitch to me, Polly, but I’ve stuck her … and I’m going to stick to her. And if we go down together, well––––’ he nodded his little round head, ‘—well, we go down together, see?’

‘Yes, you’re a millstone all right,’ I said.

He looked surprised.

‘A millstone? I’m her lifebelt.’

And I could see by the way he said it that he’d deceived himself and he believed it.

It was then, as I lifted the suacepan off the fire and put it on to the draining board, that I began to make up my mind how I was going to kill him. It was a question of who was going under, you see; him, or all of us together.

It’s not easy to kill someone in your own house if you don’t want anybody to know. I didn’t see how I was going to do it, and the need was so great it became a nightmare to me, growing more and more desperate as the days approached and I saw him and her, too, making little sly preparations to get him to Manchester.

If he’d only let her have her chance without him! Just a start. But he wouldn’t, and I had to hurry.

I’d let my second floor, which is very nearly self-contained, as all my places are, to Ma Pollini and her family, who had booked up a seven-week engagement on the Stuart Circuit. She was a monstrous old girl who looked like a bull. She used to be in the act herself and still kept them all together, Pa and the three boys and their wives and the two kids. I never knew a woman who was so clean. I wonder she didn’t have the paper off the wall. She spoke English all right but not too well and you had to explain things to her very carefully, but there wasn’t much her little black eyes missed and I knew I’d got to be careful with her.

Young Ferris used to let Louie go and rehearse up at some practice rooms he had over the theatre. There were pianos there and a clever accompanist, so she was out a great deal and it was good to see her coming back bright and hopeful and to feel her pat my shoulder and say: ‘It’s going to be all right, Duck. Oh, it’s going to be all right.’

I thought ‘Yes, by God it is, if I can get rid of this horror for you.’

I’d begun to see him like that, like a cancer or a monstrous deformity that was dragging her to death before my eyes and taking me with her—because I knew I’d never let her down however much I argued with myself.

While she was out I used to go up and clean her rooms in the attic and although I got used to him talking I did wonder why she hadn’t gone out of her mind. Idiotic lies—dozens of them! Continuous tales of his importance and his cleverness which didn’t even sound true. Nothing was too big for him to have done, nothing too small. I happened to mention an act I’d seen that was new to London, a fellow flinging himself down from the flies without a wire or a net or anything, and immediately he caught me up.

‘That! …’ he said. ‘God, that was an old trick when I was a boy. I could do it … have done it a hundred times. Though I’m an old man I could do it now.’

I didn’t say anything at the time but it gave me the first real helpful idea I’d had.

I went about it very slowly. It began when I started shaking the tablecloth out of the front attic window, that is to say out of their living-room window. I had to fling it wide because it had to miss the parapet, and the crumbs—I saw there were plenty of them—used to float down on to the little balcony outside Ma Pollini’s sitting-room. I knew it would annoy her, and it did. We had quite a set-to about it on the stairs and the whole house knew about it. I was apologetic because I didn’t want to lose her just then, but the next morning I did it again. There was another row and the third morning I shook the crumbs into a dust-pan as any sensible woman would.

But the fourth morning—however, I’m coming to that.

I am not usually a chatty woman. In my experience the less you say the less people can repeat. And if I’d been the most talkative person in the world I wouldn’t have talked to him. But I spent a lot of time with him during those four days and I did my share of talking. I talked about the Pollinis.

‘He’s a clever man,’ I said. ‘That act’s come on.’

Frank rose to it as I thought he would. I knew he wasn’t too fond of Pollini. He’d tried to tap him without much success. No one, not even Frank, could tap a man who looked at you like a surprised bison and shambled off muttering ‘Don’ understand. Git th’hell outa here.’

‘Pollini?’ said Frank. He was sitting in his shirt sleeves, without a collar, on the back of the dilapidated old chesterfield that Louie slept on when they had a row. ‘I taught Pollini all he knows and he’s too much of a stiff to say how d’you do to me these days.’ That was the sort of statement he used to make. It had no relation to the truth at all and no purpose as far as I could see, because not even Frank could expect me to believe it.

I rambled on. I told him I’d seen young Latte Pollini teaching the kids.

‘Hand-springs!’ I said. ‘You’ve never seen such neat ones.’

I won’t tell you what he called me. There’s no point in writing things like that down.

‘Look at this,’ he said, and he stood there poised at the top of the sofa looking like an organ-grinder’s monkey, the white stubble sticking out on his red face.

‘You be careful. You’ll hurt yourself,’ I said over my shoulder.

‘Look! ‘he commanded. ‘Look!’

I straightened my back and stood there, the dustpan in my hand.

‘I’m looking,’ I said.

Well, he didn’t do it. I didn’t think he would. That’s what I was afraid of. He always took wonderful care of himself. But I went on.

Louie came in when he was telling me how he once walked a tight-rope and threatening to show me if I’d get him one. I had to leave it for that day.

The next day I started again, still on the Pollinis. At first I thought I’d frightened him. He sat there, morose and angry, while I did the room.

It was then I found out about the shirts. I told him what I thought of him and I realised more and more how necessary it was for me to hurry if she was going to have her chance at all.

He began boasting to me. ‘This time next week we shall be at Manchester. I shall tell them what she used to be like. She’s not much to look at now but I’ll put her over.’

My heart was in my mouth and I very nearly picked up the poker and did him in there and then, and it might have been just as well in a way.

However, I didn’t. I went on about the Pollinis and I got him interested. He even did a simple somersault for me and when he pretended that he’d hurt himself I got him a drink, and another.

It was an extraordinary thing, but I only discovered then after all these years that he couldn’t drink. A couple made him silly. I left him sleeping.

That was the day I had my second row with Ma Pollini about the crumbs.

The next day I only gave him one drink and I brought it with up me. I’d told my little girl that I was doing it for his health and she didn’t think anything of it. People were always having little drops for their health in my house.

Everything played into my hands. He’d had words with Latte on the staircase the evening before and didn’t want to hear about the Pollinis’ prowess. But I kept on. I let him have it.

‘Do a handspring if you’re so clever,’ I said. ‘A simple handspring.’

He saw I was laughing at him and came and thrust his face into mine.

‘I can’t do it here,’ he said. ‘There’s not room.’

‘There’s no room big enough for you in the whole world, you old liar,’ I said.

That rattled him. He opened the door so that he could get on to the passage and took a run, stumbled, actually succeeded in turning some sort of cartwheel, and pitched downstairs, finishing up on the half-landing between me and Ma Pollini.

She came out and I explained to her what had happened. And she laughed. You should have seen her laugh! She’d have made a fortune on the halls just doing it. Tears poured out of her eyes and ran down the sides of her great coarse nose and she shook all over. What with the noise she made and the sound of him swearing the whole house was roused and everybody knew that old Springer had been swanking again and had nearly broken his neck doing it.

Louie heard about it when she came in, and it made her cry.

The fourth morning I watched Louie out of the house. I’ve never felt like it before or since. Everything seemed to be in bright colours and Louie’s old black satin coat shone like a black beetle as she went out under the porch and down the little stone yard that we call a garden and out into the road.

I was trembling and I don’t know if I looked funny, but anyway there was no one to see me except my little girl, and she’s so busy, poor kid, she doesn’t have time to keep her mind on two things together, even if it were capable of it.

I went slowly up the stairs and started making the bed. There was Louie’s suitcase half packed, and in a cupboard, where they thought I wouldn’t see it, there was his. It’s still there, for all I know. All packed up neatly, labelled and ready.

He came out when I was in the bedroom and I knew by the way he fidgeted and talked about his health that he was wondering if I’d brought him up his drink. I sent him down for it.

I’d forgotten it; that’s what frightened me. I had meant to bring it and it had gone clean out of my mind. I wondered what else I’d forgotten.

He went off, padding down the stairs in his stockinged feet, and came back very pleased with himself. I wondered if he hadn’t taken an extra dram. He said something uncomplimentary about my little girl and I guessed she’d given him something to go on with.

I started talking about the Pollinis and, as I hoped, the memory of old Ma Pollini laughing at him made him furious. He told me the Pollinis were a lot of stiffs. Wops and stiffs, he called them. He said they hadn’t got a trick between them that any man couldn’t do if he had his wits about him, and told me what he could do as a child.

I was getting him where I wanted him. I went into the other room where the gas stove was and opened the window when I’d taken the cloth off the table. Then I went back to the bedroom and shook it out of there, so that the crumbs would miss Ma Pollini’s balcony.

My heart was beating noisily and I was so long about it that I thought he’d notice something. Finally I did what I meant to do and the cloth slipped out of my hand and landed on the edge of the parapet.

It was very neatly thought out, because, as I forgot to tell you, the window in the bedroom was stuck. It wouldn’t open more than six inches at the top. I had to stand up on the sill, push the cloth through and shake it with one hand.

I went back to the other room, where he was sitting up on the end of the sofa again.

‘What are you looking at me like that for, Polly?’ he said.

I pulled myself together. I couldn’t tell him that I saw him in bright colours, just like I’d seen Louie go out of the gate. I saw him in crude colours, like the printing in a twopenny comic. His shirt was bright blue and his head was smudged red.

‘I want a broom,’ I said. ‘I’ve dropped the tablecloth out of the window and it’s stuck on the parapet. Now if you were a Pollini …’

He didn’t hear me, or didn’t seem to, and I was afraid I’d been too quick. But he was interested, as he always was in silly little incidental things that happened. He went to the other window and looked out. He could see the cloth about fifteen feet along.

‘How are you going to get it?’ he said.

‘I’m going to get a broom and fish it up through the window in the other room,’ I said. ‘Or get a Pollini kid to come and walk along the parapet and bring it in for me.’

‘Let me try with a broom,’ he said.

I looked about for a broom, though it was the last thing I wanted.

‘You’ll break my window,’ I said.

He grinned at me. ‘I’ll buy you fifty windows when I come back from Manchester.’

I leant out of the window. The parapet sticks up about a foot over the glass and the windows are built out of the roof, dormer fashion.

‘I’ll get a broom,’ I said. My courage was going. I thought I’d have to try some other way. It wasn’t working out as I thought it was going to.

I suppose I must have been silent for nearly three minutes, for then he said quite suddenly:

‘I suppose one of your Pollini pals would just trot along there and pick it up?’

‘I believe even old Ma Pollini could,’ I said.

That did it. He swept me out of the way.

‘I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘I’ll get your damned tablecloth. I can do anything a Pollini can.’

He scrambled up on the sill and I saw that he was waiting for me to pull him back. I did. That was the extraordinary thing: I did.

‘Don’t you dare,’ I said. ‘You’ll break your neck. You haven’t got the courage.’

He thrust his little red face into mine. ‘I’ll show you,’ he said.

I watched him out upon the sill and saw him climb shakily on to the parapet, which was nearly a foot wide, holding his arms out like a tight-rope walker.

‘Don’t you dare,’ I said. ‘Don’t you dare.’ Now I’d got him there I panicked. I lost my head I screamed. I ran to the top of the stairs.

‘Bring a broom! ‘I shouted to nobody in particular and rushed back again.

There was no sign of him, only the big bare room with the stove and the window open at the bottom, and far away the tops of the trees.

I ran over to the window and looked out. He was coming towards me, holding the cloth in his arms. I screamed. I screamed and screamed.

‘Be careful!’ I said. ‘Be careful!’

He came to the window and stood there swaying, holding the cloth, his little bulk blotting out most of the light. I saw his short trousers and his shoeless feet in their grey army socks standing on the slippery stucco. He put down his hand to catch the top of the window and at that moment I leant out and caught him round the ankles.

I can hear my own voice now shouting hoarsely:

‘Be careful! Be careful!’

I heard him shout and I realised that I could make up my mind there and then.

I pushed.

He threw his weight against the top of the window and a shower of glass fell in over me. I was still pushing, pushing with my head, my arms round his ankles.

I felt him go. I heard his scream. Just for a moment I saw his body swing past me and then there was silence until far below in the little stone yard that we call a garden there was another sound, a sound I can’t get out of my mind.

I stepped back from the window and from that moment my mind was clear. There was a noise on the stairs and I ran towards it, screaming, but intentionally this time, knowing what I was doing.

It was Ma Pollini. I tried to tell her but she’d only talk in Italian and finally I pushed her out of the way and hurried on down the stairs.

Everybody in the house was running out into the street and I remember coming out under the porch and standing there in the bright sunlight.

I didn’t see him. There was a crowd round him and one of the Denver boys, who had the ground floor rooms, came and put his arm round me.

‘Don’t look, Ma,’ he said, ‘don’t look.’

I told the young policeman exactly what happened right up to the moment when I caught Frank by the feet. Then I said I was so frightened that I just hung there until he overbalanced and went out, jerking his ankles out of my arms.

He was very kind to me, I remember.

Then the other men came and I told them the same thing and they said there’d have to be an inquest. And all the time he was lying out there in the yard, with a sheet off the Denver boys’ bed over him.

They’d just finished with me when Louie came back. The other Denver boy had told her over the ’phone what had happened.

I shall never forget her as she sat in my kitchen with the police there and listened while I told my story yet another time. She didn’t break down and when I saw the calm in her face, the extraordinary repose and dignity, I felt it was worth it.

She never reproached me. Instead she came over and kissed me and said:

‘Don’t worry, Polly. I know you did what you could.’

Then the first floor people took her in and wouldn’t let her go upstairs.

The police were very careful but they were never unkind, they never bullied. I thought how young they were, even the oldest of them. I remember the Inspector particularly. Such a boy he looked when he took his cap off.

They couldn’t understand how he got out on the parapet, but when I told my story there were lots of people to back me up: Ma Pollini and the Denver boys who had been in bed when he fell downstairs the day before. They all knew him for what he was, and told stories about how he’d show off and how he’d lie and the idiotic things he’d do, and gradually the police got him straight in their minds.

They chose two or three of the boarders for witnesses at the inquest and I had to go too. There was only one awkward moment and that came from the Inspector.

‘You know, you killed him, Ma,’ he said just as he was going.

I suppose I gaped at him because he dropped a hand on my shoulder.

‘Let that be a warning to you not to try to drag a man in through a top-floor window by his feet,’ he said.

I expect you read a report of the inquest. It took up quite a bit in the paper. The Coroner put me through it, but I stuck to my story: I was frightened and I held him round the feet. It was a silly thing to do, but they were all I could get hold of.

Finally they were satisfied. The jury brought in Death by Misadventure and I went home.

A lot of my boarders had come to the inquest with me. Louie was there too, of course, and she gave her evidence very quietly and calmly and I thought she looked years younger, poor old girl.

She went to bed early that night. She didn’t want to talk to me and I didn’t want to talk to her. I knew it had been a shock and I wanted her to get over it and wake up and find out what it was like to be cured, what it was like to have her chance all over again without the dead weight that had been dragging her down half her life.

I got so used to telling my story that I believed it. It was such a simple story, so easy to remember, so like what really happened.

It became so real to me in the next two or three days that now I have to strain my memory, as it were, to get at the truth.

People were very kind. We had to borrow for the funeral, but it was worth it and as I stood beside his grave I hoped he’d lie quiet and have more rest himself than ever he gave Louie or me.

That would have been the end of the story. I should never have tried to remember the truth and I should never have set it down if it had not been for the one thing that beat me, the one thing that had always beaten me, the one vital fact that I never recognised until now.

This is the day that Louie ought to have gone to Manchester. There are a lot of bills up there now advertising her triumphant return. But she’ll never come through the silver curtains and blow a kiss to the orchestra and sing Fonah Likes a Little Bit of Pink in Manchester or anywhere else.

This morning my little girl tapped on my door when she came at six o’clock to tell me there was a smell of gas in the house. I didn’t go up. Somehow I knew what had happened.

Latte Pollini found Louie lying with her head in the gas oven for all the world as if she’d gone to sleep.

She loved him, you see. I never knew that, or perhaps I never knew what it meant. Poor dear loving old girl.