The Dreaming Suburb (45 page)

It was his guillotine act that made the audience sit up and gasp. From where she was sitting Elaine was able to make the maximum allowance for the part played in the performance of this trick by Eugene's swirling cloak, which interposed between audience and pinioned girl at inconvenient moments. Nevertheless, she cried out with the rest when the knife went
“clonk”,
and a head—
somebody's
head—bumped into the gilded basket, at the very moment the victim sat up and shouted
“Hoi!”,
without so much as disturbing her exact smile.

It was in the performance of this particular trick that Eugene's showmanship revealed itself. Although alone on the
stage, except for his strapped victim, he seemed to be in every corner at once, declaiming his patter in French, in English, and in a mixture of both languages. But although he impressed Elaine, she could not help comparing this splendidly confident figure with the slightly pathetic man who had handed her the complimentary ticket that morning. Up here, in front of his audience, Eugene was great indeed, twirling, pattering, skipping, and clapping his hands. He was the kind of man, she thought, whom any girl might be happy to accompany to a smart London restaurant, or even a Paris boulevard, and he was not far short of the man of her dream, the one who would eventually carry her off, and install her in a mansion, with a terrace for the swains to swoon upon. It was a pity that she had met him in mufti, when the tiny network of nasal veins were visible from the far side of the reception desk, and the steaks of grey showed in the magnificent eyebrows. Still, for all that, he might be worth encouraging—just a little, just enough to launch her one more step in the direction she had made up her mind to go when she became a receptionist two years ago.

It was just possible, she decided, that the Great Eugene, carefully handled, might compensate her for two almost wasted years behind the reception desk, years that had promised much but given, as yet, very little.

5

In the meantime Eugene had been making plans of his own, and Elaine might have been disturbed to learn how important a part she was playing in them.

The Great Eugene was not like other vaudeville artists, his vanity having little to do with his art as an entertainer. It never had, not since the earliest days, when he had been climbing to the top of the bill of the Number Two circuit. He was vain only in respect of his conquests, and as middle-age and insecurity overtook him it became more and more important to him that he should make new conquests, and make them among younger women. For Eugene saw himself not as Houdini, or a Maskelyne, but as a Juan or a Cellini, a man whose finesse in the lists of love no woman could resist, so
bold, yet so calculated, was his initial approach, so novel, yet so practised, his ultimate technique.

In the years leading up to the Great War, when he was in his early 'thirties, and at the peak of his earning powers, he had enjoyed a very considerable success with women, particularly among women of the theatre. They were amused by his macaw-like flamboyance, and often agreeably surprised by his virility. Over the years Eugene had kept a diary, and in that diary were the names of fifty-seven women with whom he had shared a bed for seven or more consecutive nights. He did not bother to enter up casual encounters, being of opinion that mere promiscuity deserved no laurels. He had no particular preferences for one type or another. He had, in his time, consorted with Poles, Hungarians, Creoles, Finns, and even Chinese. He had been married, for a time, to an Italian trapeze artist, and had exchanged her, in Macclesfield, for a French seal-trainer. He himself had never been to France, or anywhere abroad, not even to Dieppe or Boulogne, but he had masqueraded as a Frenchman for so long now that he almost believed himself to be a native of Nantes, whose father and grandfather had been magicians before him, and whose secrets were derived from Cagliostro.

He spoke with a slight French accent, even when asking the time, and he thought of himself as a French lover, a man to whom the current affaire was the most important thing in the cosmos. In his more successful days he had loved outside the profession, but now that this free range was denied him for economic reasons he practised a somewhat limiting combination of business and pleasure. In short, his mistress had to be his assistant as well, and be guillotined twice nightly in exchange for the privilege of sharing his bed, board, and patronage.

His arrival in Colwyn Bay coincided with his parting from Maggie, the girl with the glacial smile, for when the curtain descended on the second house at Llandudno the previous Saturday, Maggie had given him notice. She was marrying, she told him, her childhood sweetheart, now a master-baker in Doncaster, and had received from him a firm proposal earlier that week.

They parted without rancour. In some ways he sympathised
with Maggie's need for security, and could well understand why she sought it in a baker's shop in Doncaster. There had been times, particularly of late, when a few slices of bread, with or without the butter, would have been a welcome addition to his own menu whilst he was “resting” between engagements.

Maggie was a generous girl, and promised to see him through the opening night at Colwyn Bay. She had even persuaded a stagehand to stand-in for her until a new girl assistant could be engaged for the act. Like most of her predecessors of late she felt rather sorry for him. He tried so hard, and it was not his fault that he was half way through his fifties.

“You'll soon find somebody, Eugene,” she comforted him, in the tiny dressing-room they shared that night.

Eugene could not bear to be pitied.

“I already have, my dear,” he snapped, and wondered vaguely how much a week The Falconer paid its receptionist, and whether she was likely to be sufficiently stagestruck to be interested in a certain proposition he had in mind. He continued to ponder along these lines during his walk home, and was still abstracted when he passed in at the revolving doors of the hotel.

There was nobody to warn him that, notwithstanding the fifty-seven names in his diary, which included a Finn, he had yet to encounter anyone as cold-blooded as Elaine Frith, who was even now placing a large double whisky and a chicken sandwich in his room, with a note thanking him for “a wonderful wonderful evening at the theatre”.

It was all very much easier to manage than he had supposed. A few light-hearted conversations over the reception desk, and a pleasant tête-à-tête in a café on the Pier during her afternoon break, and she had consented to replace Maggie's stagehand at the Wednesday matinée. He told her that it was all perfectly simple, and indeed it was, for all she had to do was march up from the audience, and do everything he said the moment he said it. She was unable to satisfy her curiosity regarding the mechanics of some of his tricks on this occasion, for most of the time she was either shut up in his sentry-box, or lying, face downward, on his guillotine. But
the audience gave her a very sporting hand when Eugene gushed his thanks, and the experience as a whole proved enormously stimulating. She went again the following evening, and again to the Saturday matinée, Eugene readily providing the tickets, but not calling upon her to assist him for fear that it should get abroad that his appeals for volunteers from the audience were bogus.

In the meantime she saw a good deal of him offstage. They lunched together at another hotel, and shared a bottle of champagne in his dressing-room on Thursday night. He was due to move on to Chester on Sunday, and throughout Saturday evening, when she was on late shift, and he was at the theatre, she wondered what further approaches he would make in the short time left to them.

She looked back on the week with pleasure. It was some time since she had been able to purr at the hunger in a man's eyes. She did not count Esme, who had always made her feel like a marble statue in a museum, but there had been two or three promising flirtations with married men at the office, and three brief associations with hotel guests during the previous season. None of these flirtations had amounted to much. The men at the office had proved too timid when it came to the touch, and the manager of the hotel actively discouraged staff associations with visitors. She had not wanted to lose the job, and had been discreet, but since meeting Eugene, and since hearing the burst of applause when he took her hand as she wriggled from the guillotine, the reception desk at The Falconer had lost much of its original attraction. She suddenly realised how terribly bored she was with keys and bills and idiotic requests for hot-water bottles on summer nights. In fact, the job that had once promised so much looked like becoming a dead end, whereas the stage was surely the traditional springboard for beautiful young women, anxious to beguile men out of their senses. Suppose Eugene was to offer her a position as his assistant? Surely it would not be long before she was noticed by somebody bigger, wealthier, and more personable? She had discerned, in his conversations, a hint or two in the right direction, but the fact that he had not enlarged upon the possibility, yet was due to catch the train for Chester next
morning, began to depress her. It would have been nice, she reflected, to decline his offer, or temporise, even if commonsense did tell her the whole idea of going on the stage was preposterous.

She was aware that she interested him physically for she had never had any difficulty in recognising the patterns of speculative thought that began to be woven in the minds of most men she encountered. As far back as the Avenue days she had always been able to sort out the mildly intrigued from the frankly sensual. There was a scale in her mind for measuring this kind of speculation, and Eugene's thoughts regarding her could be read in clear print. His courtly approach was something left over from his act, and she was never in the least doubt as to what he was after, from the very first moment she looked up at him from her telephone switchboard. What did puzzle her was that he seemed to have snarled up on something, as though he had sensed in her response, or lack of it, a physical distaste for him that she did not feel, as though he imagined that the moment he ceased to flirt in the Edwardian sense of the word and said or did something slightly more definite, he would get his face slapped, and there would be an end to it. On the other hand, he was not the sort of man a girl could encourage with impunity, for he wore his considerable experience with women like his cloak. Again, as with this spectacular mantle, he used his experience to throw dust into the eyes of his audience, never quite relinquishing his hold upon courtesy, and striving hard to create an impression that he was really a man of honour as far as the ladies were concerned.

Altogether she found him a difficult nut to crack, and one so far quite outside her experience. She spent the last hour before midnight rehearsing her farewell speech to him, but she went upstairs to her room in a sulky mood when she had no opportunity to deliver it. For although she waited until 12.30, pretending to busy herself with bills, he did not come strutting through the revolving doors, so that she finally decided to wait no longer, and punish him with pertness in the morning.

For once Elaine was caught off guard. When she opened her door, and turned on the light, he was sitting in her little
armchair, in front of the dressing-table. It took her at least thirty seconds to recover her poise and shut the door.

He sprang up and bowed the moment he saw her. His cloak and opera hat were lying on the bed and he had beside him a bottle of champagne and two tumblers, thick and chipped, that he had obviously borrowed from the theatre. She saw at once that she had misread his diffidence, that he could read her as well, or better, than she could read him. This called for an entire reassessment of the situation at a moment when she was tired and he had a distinct advantage over her.

“Forgive me, my dear, there was no other alternative,” he said crisply. “You were on duty until midnight, and I must leave on the ten-five tomorrow. This week has been a very delightful one for me, and I did not want it to fade out, as it looked like doing. Is it presumptuous of me to imagine that you sympathise with that viewpoint?”

He was giving her an opening and she took it, gracefully.

“It's been a very happy time for me, Eugene,” she said. (It was the first time she had ever addressed him as “Eugene” and not “Mr. Eugene”.) “All the same, you shouldn't be here. You must know that.”

He laughed softly, and she decided that he looked much younger when he laughed. His teeth were good, and his eyebrows were eyebrows consistent with laughter.

“I feel sure, my dear, that both you and I will always be the sort of people who get the most fun out of being where we shouldn't be
when
we shouldn't. I brought champagne, but you must forgive the glasses. Perhaps you would prefer your tooth-glass?”

No, she told him, the tumbler would do, and he opened the bottle with the air of a man who has opened an infinite number of bottles, and with another bow from the waist handed her the least chipped tumbler.

The champagne relaxed her. For a moment or two they talked about the show that night. Then she kicked off her shoes, and curled her legs under her on the bed. It passed through her mind then to ask him outright about the possibilities of entering show business, but her instinct told her to
wait, that it must come from him. So all she said was: “How did you find my room?”

He looked at her steadily. “I found it the first night I was here. I watched you go in, and tonight I came here an hour ago, through the side entrance, and up the service stairs. Nobody saw me, you can be quite sure of that. After all, I'm a professional at disappearing acts.”

“You'll have to go now,” she said firmly, “and I hope you'll be just as clever at getting out.”

“I must know something first,” he said, and she was suddenly aware that he was flushing, and it needed an effort to keep his voice steady.

“Well?”

“Are you happy in this job? Do you think you're getting anywhere?”