A Dark Dividing (44 page)
Authors: Sarah Rayne
There were a number of theatre museums in London—the best-known was housed in Covent Garden’s old flower market—and there were also a great many people listed in the various phone books who described themselves as theatrical historians. It was impossible to know how much reliance to place on these descriptions, but they would all have to be checked. On top of all this there was a plethora of bookshops in and around the St Martin’s Lane area who dealt in theatrical memorabilia.
Harry made careful lists, and began working systematically through them. Finding an East End music hall ought, in theory, to be a breeze, in fact compared with chasing the Holy Grail or the White Unicorn or discovering the drowned city of Lyonesse, it ought to be child’s play. The trouble was that Dancy might never have actually existed, and even if he had existed and had owned or run a music hall in London’s East End, the place would have been demolished years since. Between looters and developers, to say nothing of the German Luftwaffe, the rubble of Dancy’s Hall would lie beneath the concrete foundations of some ugly office-block. Lancelot and Gawain and the rest of their gang had had it easy when you remembered they only had to get on a horse and ride vaguely around Logres until a descending cloud or a vision pointed them in the right direction. Then all they had to do was embrace celibacy for a while, possibly along with poverty and extreme deprivation, and the Grail materialized in their hands.
On this last thought, Harry broke off his quest to deal with several phone messages left on his voice-mail. There were really only two that needed an immediate response: one was one from Rosamund Raffan, who was wondering how his research was getting on and whether she had been of any help, and perhaps they might meet again to discuss it. Any night this week would suit her. It was impossible to miss the implication that any night between now and the Third Millennium would suit her, and Harry decided to delay calling back.
The other message was from Angelica Thorne, who apparently thought it would be great fun if they went to the theatre that evening with a few friends, and then on to a club. Since the celibacy requisite in most quests seemed unachievable at the moment, but since poverty and deprivation were clearly beckoning from the near horizon, Harry rang Angelica back to accept.
Charlotte Quinton’s diaries:
22nd October 1914
So after all is said and done, I have resumed my harlot status. I am a sinner and a fornicator and an adulteress, and a war is raging half across Europe with people dying wholesale, and I have never been happier in my life.
When I said all this to Floy, lying in the upstairs room of his house in Bloomsbury—so dear and so familiar and welcoming, that house!—he laughed and said, Did I honestly mean to tell him I had been abidingly faithful to Edward for the last fourteen years?
Well, I have not been faithful to Edward, of course, but there is a difference between unfaithfulness with the body (which do not think necessarily counts so very much), and unfaithfulness with the mind (which, as I see it, counts very deeply indeed).
So I said to Floy that I had been unfaithful to Edward once or twice (actually it was six times, unless you count the sweet young boy at Clara Wyvern-Smith’s that time, and that was only one afternoon when everyone else was out shooting, and in any case he was a virgin, poor child, and embarrassingly grateful afterwards, so do not really feel it qualifies).
‘But I don’t suppose,’ I said to Floy, ‘that you have precisely lived the life of a monk these past years?’
‘I have not.’
‘I thought not,’ I said, a bit waspishly. ‘It’s practically a religion with you, isn’t it, seducing unwary females?’
Floy said, ‘Some to Mecca turn to pray, and I towards thy bed, Yasmin.’
‘Oh rot,’ I said. ‘You pray to books if you pray to anything. Your own and other people’s.’ I turned my head on the pillow to look at him. We were lying in the big wide bed in the room that looked down on the jostling London streets, and his hair was an untidy tumble of black silk against the white sheets. There was a faint sheen of perspiration on his skin from the frantic love-making earlier on, and I loved him so much that I was not sure if I could bear it. So I said, in a much gentler voice, ‘Tell me about the war.’
His expression changed at once, so swiftly that it was as if a light behind his eyes had been abruptly snuffed out.
‘Charlotte, it’s going to be appalling. It’s dreadful now, but it’s going to become much, much worse. I don’t think there’s ever going to be another war like this one.’ He paused, and I waited. ‘Officially I’m attached to Reuters, although I’ve sent stuff to the
London Gazette
and
Blackwood’s
on my own account, but it all means I’ve been allowed very near to the front lines of battle. Sometimes I’ve been near enough to help with the casualties—there’re some conscientious objectors doing a lot of that work, did you know?’
‘No.’
‘I helped a bit where I could,’ he said. ‘Especially after they moved the main British force to Flanders—you knew about that?’
‘Yes.’ I had been able to follow quite a lot of the war’s progress, reading articles in
The Times
, talking to some of the men brought to the centre, even listening to some of the things Edward brought home from his work in the War Office. The thought of Floy going into the thick of it all, helping to carry the wounded or the dead into the Red Cross huts, sent a panic-stricken pain through my body.
‘I’ve seen so much in these last months,’ he said. ‘And all of it bad. The Ypres battles—They’re so impossibly young, those soldiers. That’s one of the most heartbreaking things, their youth and their—the only word I can think of is
innocence
. None of them have any idea of what they’re going into, you know. They walk out of their homes—they walk away from all the familiar things of their lives. Meadows and country lanes and perhaps sweethearts. And they’re going from that into a—a darkness. Battles and fear and pain. Half of them end up drowning in mud that’s like thick, evil-smelling ooze, with machine guns relentlessly spitting in their faces.’ He moved restlessly in the bed, as if pushing the nightmare images away. ‘I keep seeing those boys, Charlotte. I keep seeing them walking down country lanes with primroses in the fields and bluebells in the woods, perhaps singing one of these cursed jingoistic songs as they go. And all the time having not the least idea that they’re probably marching straight into their own squalid deaths.’
When Floy talks like this, it’s dreadfully easy to visualize it all: the spoiled fields, and the fierce rainstorms that turn the battlefields into swamps. It’s dreadfully easy to see those boys dying in pain and terror, with people and horses screaming all round them, and mud trying to suck them down, and blood puddling everywhere from the dead and dying…
But I listened without interrupting, and I thought: one day he will write this all down and it will be a kind of purging for him, in the way that nearly all his writing is a purging. I did not say this because there are areas of Floy’s mind where it is never possible to venture—just as I suppose there are areas in anyone’s mind where it is never possible to venture. I let him talk, and held him against me, and we made love again, this time more quietly but with such intensity that I wept for sheer joy and love, and afterwards we went downstairs and ate a meal from the food he had bought in one of the street markets near the hospital centre that morning. Beautiful fresh mushrooms and cheese, and there were a dozen eggs and a slab of butter on the marble slab in the deep larder downstairs. We beat everything up into an omelette which we cooked over the stove, and ate it at the kitchen table with wedges of crusty bread, thickly spread with butter. Should like to see Edward cooking omelette or anything else and should like to see him eating at a kitchen table as well!
While we ate he said he would probably sell this house: the government were asking for properties in London so that numerous war departments could be set up.
‘You’ll hate losing it,’ I said. ‘You love this house. So do I.’
‘Yes. I will hate it.’ He smiled at me. ‘But I shan’t give it away, Charlotte, I’m not that altruistic. And there will be other houses when this is all over.’
Other houses. Did he mean he and I would share one? And when the war ended, would that be the time that I could finally leave Edward?
Deeply thankful that Edward presently in the north, organizing his interminable lists of wartime supplies. Could not have faced Edward tonight—could not have faced anyone tonight.
I left Floy and walked home slowly through the gathering twilight, my mind in turmoil.
H
ARRY SAT AT the dining table of his flat, and stared at the foxed, ragged-edged playbill spread out in front of him.
He had spent the last week searching for evidence of Dancy’s Music Hall, and in that time he had met Dickensian-visaged gentlemen who kept obscure bookstores in curious little pockets of London and who wore fingerless gloves like Uriah Heep; earnest librarians who offered specialist search services; bright-voiced girls who clearly had no idea of the stock they were selling and wanted him to go on our mailing list, it’s really good; and several sharp-eyed salesmen who attempted to talk him into attending pseudo-sounding auctions for dubious-looking
belles lettres
and questionable first editions.
He had hunted through what felt like hundreds of boxes of old theatre programmes, drawers-full of sepia postcard prints of actors and actresses from the Naughty Nineties and the Roaring Twenties and all the years between, and had sifted innumerable stacks of old and extremely dusty playbills.
And then, just when he had been on the verge of giving the whole thing up—you could only take quests so far, for pity’s sake!—in a little narrow street near to St Martin’s Lane he had found the rather grimy bookshop with its ‘All books £1’ table hopefully positioned outside its squeezed-up façade. Inside, amidst turgid autobiographies of Victorian actor-managers and colourful memoirs of ladies who had acted with Irving and played with Tree, had been a cardboard box which had once contained baked beans and was now full of old music hall programmes.
Hardly daring to hope for anything any longer—you did not expect to discover the very fragment of the past you wanted inside an old baked-bean carton—Harry had knelt down to sort rather perfunctorily through the contents. And there, halfway through, had been the single tattered sheet announcing Matt Dancy’s Music Hall, London’s Finest Supper Club, Every Sunday night a Dazzling Array of Speciality Acts. The paper was brittle with age and frighteningly fragile and shreds of it flaked off it as he lifted it out.
There was no address for the hall; Harry supposed that would be too much to hope for, and the playbill had probably been given out to people who were already inside Matt Dancy’s Music Hall. But if there was no address there was a list of acts.
The Lilliputs—a family of midgets from Germany—were billed as dancing, singing acrobats, and after them had come the ‘Living Skeleton’, weighing just over four stone, and his wife, the Fattest Woman in Europe, who weighed an incredible forty-five stone. They were called Peter Robinson and Bunny Smith, and they sang nursery rhymes. Nursery rhymes. Such as, Jack Sprat Could Eat No Fat…?
There was a Half Man as well: billed simply as ‘Mr Johnnie’, but described as having a body that ended just below the waist. Harry, reading this last, was aware of strong repulsion at the faint whiff of prurience that came up from the words.
Last of all, in what had probably been regarded as the equivalent of star-billing, were listed two sisters—‘The Gemini Songbirds’. This was printed in an elaborate type-face, larger than the other names, and was adorned with many printer’s flourishes and curls. Beneath it were the names of the Gemini Songbirds.
They had been called Viola and Sorrel.
