Paddington Green, page 6
Sitting beside Jonah on the floor, with a tallow dip candle carefully shaded with a paper lanthorn, Oliver was sitting hunched up over a book, his fingers thrust in his ears and his face totally absorbed and happy. The weight of his back resting against his leg made Jonah feel a little less anxious, and he glanced fondly down at the boy’s bent head and reached down with one hand to brush his dark hair out of his eyes. Oliver looked swiftly up at him and smiled vaguely, shook his hair back into his eyes, and went back to his reading.
The musicians stopped with a final flourish and an attempt at a crashing chord to bow in a perfunctory manner and some of the customers near enough to notice jeered and shouted and applauded ironically, and called,’ ‘Song, song!’ And Jonah sighed softly, then jerked his head at the girl standing opposite him in the other wings.
She came bouncing on tc the stage, stamped her foot roguishly at the audience which at once set up a roar (for she was an attractive buxom little girl with snapping black eyes and a lively manner which was quite popular with the regulars) and launched herself into a very loud and earthy song about the way London girls got their education. ‘I’ve been tumbled in ev’ry alleyway from ’ere to Temple Bar,’ she bawled lustily at the end of each verse, and the men roared their own accompaniment, egging her on, and Jonah sat and watched her and wished, very much indeed, that he liked this sort of entertainment better.
For this was becoming ever more of a thorn in his side. He knew that the show they provided here at the Celia Rooms was good of its kind— indeed, very good. That was why the place was so full and why the profits were rising. As well as Norah Norton, the girl now singing, there were other popular and cheerful cockney performers, all well appreciated by the Rooms’ regular customers. Even the quieter weekday ones enjoyed in their more genteel way the choruses and comic jingles with their very direct and vulgarly honest accounts of gutter life in the great city that was London. The regular performers included men who recited; older women who danced; a pair of twin sisters much given to singing shrill soprano songs about Loving Mothers Up In Heaven and Dreams of Happy Days Gone By; Danny Donger, a droll man with a long white face and a shocking cough who would stand up drooping miserably in the centre of the stage and tell one lugubrious—and very lubricious—joke after another, never cracking a smile himself while he reduced the audience to helpless guffaws; and Pretty Polly, Pride of Peckham, as she called herself, a vast young woman of barely thirty who must have turned the butchers’ scales at over twenty stone, and whose extraordinary speciality was juggling and acrobatics, in which she would throw her huge and trembling bulk about in cartwheels, somersaults and twists that made the tiny stage shake, and displayed great unappetizing expanses of the flesh which she kept barely contained in spangled tights and a feathered bodice. There were those who played the Jews’ harp with enormous verve, others who performed clowns’ tricks in classic white face, even a troupe of performing dogs who pranced about on their hind legs, jaws slavering, on wheels and planks their sweating, swearing, wizened little Italian owner spread about the stage. And Jonah hired them all, paid them all, could recognize at a glance any ability to please the customers—and yet despised every single one of the performances he had to watch.
He had tried once, long ago, to explain haltingly to Celia how he felt about the sort of show that was growing up as part of the Rooms’ offering. He found it so raucous, so lacking in any of the refinements of music or poetry or artistry which so much mattered to him, that it had a positively physical effect on him. He would listen to Norah shouting the crudities of one of her songs and the flesh at the back of his neck would crawl. He would listen to Danny Donger producing his earthy jokes and his belly would knot itself with sick distaste. And the sight of Pretty Polly, Pride of Peckham, and her quivering pinkness amid the glitter of her tinselly costume was more than he could bear, and he would turn his head fastidiously aside.
Celia had listened to his attempt to explain how he felt about it, his suggestion that they offer something a little less gutter-inspired, and her jaw had hardened.
‘It is of little use thinking we can make a living here with the sort of missish entertainment you would offer, Jonah, and so I tell you!’ she had said sharply. ‘The people in these parts want red meat that is to their taste, and they’ll tell us in no uncertain way what they think of bread-and-milk singers just as they would if we tried to sell ’em bread-and-milk slops for their bellies! If we would eat at all we must give the customers what it is they have a taste for, not what you think is more elegant. Much good elegance ever did, come to that! For my part, I am a woman of this world, and a London-born one at that, and I like the shows we are getting here! They stink of honest sweat, perhaps, but I like that better than swooning drawing room whines of the sort you would favour—’
And, typically, Jonah had said no more. He was all too keenly aware of his own failure as an entertainer; his plays over which he had been used to work so diligently and with such delight had been poetic in the extreme, full of elegance and artistry, and he shrank inside himself when he remembered how so many audiences had at the very best ignored them, at worst—and more frequently—had jeered and catcalled and shouted obscene advice to the actors. No, he was not a person who had any right to make a judgement on the quality of the entertainment offered in King Street. His job was just to select the best performers of the much hated material, see to it that the show ran smoothly and suffer his distaste in silence. And extraordinary though it was that it should be so, he knew he performed his task very well indeed.
But of one thing he was sure. His children were not to be tainted by these shows. He had long ago given up as a bad job the attempt to get them to their beds and asleep before the entertainment started, for the noise was so great and the music went vibrating through the old house so strongly that it was sheer absurdity to expect any sleep while the programme was going forward, and certainly not a child like Phoebe, who adored the lights and smells and the sound of her parents’ eating rooms.
Oliver had been no problem. Given a book, he would sit happily in a corner of the wings totally oblivious of what was going on about him. At eleven o’clock when the entertainment ended he would blink vaguely up at his father when he touched his shoulder, grin sleepily and go obediently off to bed. But Phoebe was a problem.
There was no doubt in Jonah’s mind that she must not, on any account, spend the time of the show in the supper rooms and this most particularly because she wanted to so much. He saw her as so vulnerable, so likely to be smirched, to have her taste for true artistry permanently ruined by these cheap performers, that she needed extra protection. Before it began, he would permit her to flit about among the customers, giggling and sparkling and being petted, but after that, Jonah had told her firmly, she must stay above stairs with Mary, the youngest of the maids and one that was used more to look after the family’s rooms above stairs than to serve the customers, although when business was brisk she was sometimes pressed into service in the kitchens.
Phoebe had stamped and pouted and pleaded and wept, but for once Jonah had been adamant, not a little to small Phoebe’s surprise, for she was accustomed to having her own way always with her father. She had, usually, but to pout at him and let her lower lip tremble a little and he would melt with love and sweep her up and hug her close and tell her the story she was begging for or take her for the walk she craved, or buy her whatever little gewgaw it was her eye had lighted upon. But her pleas to stay and see the singing ladies and the funny men—they never got her anywhere, and each night she would go sulkily upstairs, her small hand firmly held in Mary’s big red fist, to sulk and mutter her way through her supper and generally to torment Mary until she could be persuaded into her bed.
Thinking now about her, as Norah Norton launched herself into her encore, a mock melancholy song about a lost child—’I only wish I’d got him safe in these arms, oh, wouldn’t I ‘ug and a-kiss him, I never thought ‘ow per-recious ’e was, but a child don’t feel like a child till you miss ’im—’ he let his eyes wander round the room, picking out faces as they gleamed in the red glow reflected from the walls by the candle ends that smoked and guttered in the row of footlights at the front of the stage. And then realized just why he felt so uneasy.
At the back of the room he could see Mary, her big ungainly body lumping itself between the tables as she carried pints of porter and plates of cheese and pickled onions to latecomers who had to settle for these furthermost corners, and at once his throat tightened with anxiety. She must have been working there for some time, he realized; it was only now that he had actually registered her presence. And if Mary were down here working, where was Phoebe?
He began to rake the room systematically with his eyes, trying to penetrate the smokier corners to see beyond the upraised arms of the drunken men waving accompaniment to Norah Norton’s song (and she had reached the chorus, a plaintive wail of ‘Will no one tell me where ’e’s gorn—’ which sharply underlined the anxiety that was now thickening in Jonah), almost moving on to the very stage itself in his efforts to make his gaze reach as far as possible.
And then Norah was bowing and cheekily flicking her soiled befrilled skirts up as the audience shouted its approval, and the next act, a girl in short spangled skirts who affected to do classical dancing but who in actuality offered a most outrageous performance that was exceedingly knowing in its inviting gestures, was waiting to come on from the opposite side, and still he couldn’t see Phoebe, and wanted quite urgently to climb down from this wretched little stage to go and find her. But he had his job to do, and he did it, nodding to the streaming-faced musicians below, who struck into the dancer’s music as Norah came flopping offstage beside him, swearing when she almost tripped over.
‘Have you seen Phoebe?’ he hissed at her urgently, as the dancer went into a series of pirouettes and leaps that were meant to show as much of her legs as possible to the leering gaze beneath her. Norah stared at him, then shrugged and said, ‘Oo? Your kid? I got better things to do than go ‘unting a bleedin’ kid, mate—’ and went thumping off to get the pint of porter she demanded between every stage appearance, and to glower at the audience as they cheered the dancer on stage. She was now getting more and more lascivious in her movements, stroking her own body with her hands, rolling her pelvis and jerking her knees at the front row of men while staring with bright-eyed knowingness at them, her tongue held between her teeth and her lips moistly apart.
This was one act that Jonah disliked above almost all others, for he found it disturbed him in a most disagreeable way; it was not the dancer herself that he found so disagreeable but the looks on the faces of the men who watched her. There had been times when he had found his own face redden with shame at the sight of their half open mouths and glazed eyes as they stared at the girl’s gyrations and moved their own bodies in clumsy time with her.
He decided swiftly, and with one downwards glance at Oliver, still oblivious in his book, he stepped back and down the three little steps at the side and pushed through the looped side curtain into the crowded room. He could see less now than he could from the raised vantage point of the stage, and he paused for a moment, wondering whether to go back and look again, then stood on his toes and craned his neck; but still he couldn’t see and stood uncertainly trying to decide what to do.
And then he heard it, above the wailing of the music—the flutes and violin making a curiously sensuous sound for the dancer, who was now writhing backwards across the stage, her legs completely exposed— and he pushed forwards through the mob more urgently, towards the direction the sound had come from; for he had heard Phoebe’s shrill voice cry out something unintelligible and then abruptly stop.
There was a shout from the audience as the girl on the stage produced another of her erotic movements, one more obviously inviting than any she had hitherto shown, and then there was a sort of hush as the men stared, and Jonah heard it again: Phoebe’s voice raised in protest. This time a few other heads turned and the movement was enough to help Jonah push through more swiftly until he reached the furthest darkest corner.
It took another moment for his eyes to become accustomed to the dimness, and then he saw her. Phoebe, her white frilled dress tumbled over her stockinged knees, a black shoe dangling from one foot and the other unshod, and her face flushed. She was sitting uncomfortably on the lap of a vast man who was holding her close in a bear hug, and as Jonah reached her she cried out again, and wriggled on the man’s lap, trying to pull away, for he was nuzzling her neck and tightening his arms about her.
For so peaceable a man, Jonah acted with a speed that amazed him, even as he moved. He thrust his hands forward and seized the wrists of the seated man with a grip so hard that it drew a sudden whimper of surprised pain, and then, exerting all the muscle power he had, prised the man’s hands apart—and he was a huge creature, with arms as knotted and thick as great wooden clubs, obviously a market porter— at the same time shoving him backwards. And the man’s arms parted, and immediately Phoebe scrambled down and ran to clutch Jonah’s knees, as the man with ludicrous slowness and a startled expression on his face tumbled backwards off his stool.
Jonah realized that the dancer behind him on the stage had finished her performance, that the bulk of the audience were cheering her and clapping madly, but that some of the people nearby were talking to him above the hubbub.
‘Don’ you worry none, mister!’ One of the men was saying, thrusting his face close to Jonah and leering at Phoebe, who clung closer to her father who had scooped her up into his arms, putting her arms about his neck but smiling bright-eyed and cheerful at the stranger. ‘Don’ you worry—that’s only old Davie! ’E won’ do no ‘arm to the little miss, no more’n I would, eh, little pretty? Got a kiss for me, then? Eh? Pretty little dilly like you, give you a penny for a kiss, I would—’
Jonah jerked his shoulder at the man, making him fall back, and with one hand pushed Phoebe’s face down into his neck, feeling obscurely that that would prevent her hearing or seeing anything else. And then went shoving his way through the crowd, caring not one whit for the customers he sent reeling or the porter mugs he caused them to spill.
Behind him the dancer started another of her gyrations, delighted that Jonah was not in his usual place in the wings to make sure she made way for the next performer, and the audience returned its attention to her, away from the little flurry that marked Jonah’s passage through the crowd. At last he reached the door and went pushing through, to find himself in the comparative calm of the passageway, at the foot of the stairs.
He stood for a moment, holding Phoebe close, and feeling the trembling of his barely controlled anger rising in him, and then along the stone-flagged passage the door to the kitchens swung and banged, and Celia came through, her head inquiringly on one side, and her face set as she dried her hands on the white towel she was holding and which made a bright splash against the dull purple of her gown.
‘Jonah?’ she said sharply. ‘What are you doing here? That girl’s gone into another encore and the Perry Twins are waiting to go and furious at being held back! Why aren’t you in the wings?’
‘Why was Mary not above stairs watching Phoebe?’ Jonah’s voice sounded hard in his own ears, and Celia was clearly startled by the quality that was in its tone, for she sounded much less sharp herself when she answered him.
‘I needed her for the back tables. Letty, the wretched creature, has been drinking like the slut she is, and is casting up her accounts into the yard—I shall have to turn her off. She’s a useless object—I had to set someone to the work, and there was none but Mary. What has happened?’
‘He was kissing me, Mamma!’ Phoebe raised her head from Jonah’s neck. ‘He was a nasty man and he made my neck all wet. Faugh!’ And she scrubbed suddenly at the collar of her gown. ‘And he smelled horrid and kept whispering in my ear and I only wanted to watch the dancing!’
‘I have told you time and again you are not to come down here during the performance,’ Jonah said harshly, holding her away from him a little so that he could look into her face. ‘What were you doing down here at all? The man could not have kissed you at all if you had stayed above stairs where you belong!’
‘Mary went down and I heard the music and I wanted to watch!’ Phoebe pouted, and wriggled in his firm hold. ‘Oh, Papa, do not prose on so! I like the music and the people, and I wanted only to watch and the man said to sit on his lap so that I could see the stage, but he wriggled so, and kept on whispering and kissing but I did no harm, Papa! Do not be vexed, please, Papa?’ and she smiled up at him and set her head beguilingly to one side.
But Jonah was not to be mollified, and he moved towards the stairs, holding her firmly.
‘I shall take her up and you are to send Mary up to set her to bed,’ he said shortly to Celia. ‘And then I must talk with you about this matter. No, do not look at me so! I am most disturbed about it, and talk about it we shall. It must not happen again! Now call Mary at once!’
And Celia, after one narrow frowning stare at him nodded her head and went sweeping into the kitchens to seek Mary, leaving Jonah to carry the still protesting Phoebe upstairs to her bedroom.
It was not often he set his face against Celia, he was thinking, but the time had now come. Whatever she said, he told himself, some plan must be made to remove his precious burden from this place. Even if it meant removing her also from his side; a thought which made him move more slowly and heavily as he reached the top of the stairs.
6
‘Really, father, you are making a great pother over a small matter,’ Gideon said again, but he could not look the old man in the face, and leaned forwards to tuck the fur rug more firmly about the lax and bony knees. But the old man twitched irritably at his touch, and pulled the rug up to his waist, and said, ‘So? A great pother, is it? Then why should you make so much of a pother yourself when I tell you I am not happy in the situation? If it was as unimportant as you say it is, then you would not argue with me.’
