Ghost Song (41 page)

‘The bar could serve the kind of food and drinks the audiences would have had in 1914,' said Hilary. ‘We've got a very good freelance food expert on our register—her name's Judy Randall, and she'd fall on this project with absolute glee. We wouldn't charge 1914 prices, of course.'

She grinned, and Madeleine said promptly, ‘I should hope not, indeed. Would you have the audience dressing up as well? Edwardian finery?'

‘I considered that, but I think it's better not. It smacks a bit of
Old Time Music Hall
, and I think it might turn out a bit twee. Also,' said Hilary, ‘I think the angle should be that this is a look at the Tarleton's past—a nod to the nineteenth century from the twenty-first. Taking a modern audience back ninety-odd years.'

‘Yes, I see all that. I think you're right.' Madeleine glanced at Shona. ‘Is this the right moment to bring up the sordid subject of coinage?'

‘It has to be discussed at some point,' said Shona.

‘Well, then, you'd better know right off that a small trust fund was left for maintenance of the place—it's administered by the bank, and it's what they use to pay your fee and the cleaning and insurance costs and so on. It really is quite small, though. I don't know the exact balance offhand, but I do know the bank were getting a bit worried as to whether it would last out until the restriction ended. There wouldn't be anything like the sum you'd need for all this, in fact I'm inclined to think the terms of the trust wouldn't allow the money to be used in this way at all.'

Shona registered that she and Hilary shared the same thought:
who
created the trust fund? But Hilary, hardly missing a beat, said, ‘Finance is really Shona's area, but my idea was that we'd try to get backers or sponsors.'

She glanced at Shona with an over-to-you look, and Shona said, ‘Yes, I think we could get backers.'

‘Could you make that kind of approach on my behalf?'

‘We wouldn't normally, but this is rather a special case,' said Shona. ‘We'd like the Harlequin to be involved in the project as much as possible. It really is a piece of music-hall history. So I think we could talk to finance people on your behalf, and also theatrical agents and designers. It would be good if a backer could take on the whole package, although we'd make sure that you—through the Harlequin—retained overall control.'

‘I'm inclined to say I'll trust you with the whole works,' said Madeleine. ‘My health isn't up to whizzing about talking to financiers and theatrical agents, even if I knew where to start, which I don't.'

‘Well, we'll take it one step at a time,' said Shona. ‘Hilary and I will draft out a more detailed plan on the lines we've talked about and I'll get costings. We can talk again in a week or so. Do you ever come to London, Madeleine?'

‘Not for years and not very often even when I was in better health. Doctor's not so keen on my travelling anywhere now.' She tapped her chest. ‘Heart's been unreliable for a few years—rather a bad attack last year which put the wind up the doctors, and then a stroke straight on top of it. That's why the date for the Tarleton over-ran. I knew the restriction had ended, but I wasn't in any condition to do anything about it.'

‘I'm sorry to hear you were so ill,' said Shona conventionally.

‘A wretched nuisance,' said Madeleine. ‘But they keep me going with pills and pink stuff to spray onto my tongue if I get an attack.' She smiled. ‘We won't discuss ailments. But you'll understand it makes it difficult for me to travel far.'

‘It's not a problem,' said Shona. ‘We can easily come down here again. And most things can be done over the phone or via email—' She broke off questioningly, and Madeleine said, ‘I don't have a computer, but I'd be prepared to buy a laptop if it would help—I've been thinking it was time I put a toe into modern technology anyway.'

Shona said, ‘On the money side, there are several grants we can certainly apply for and probably get—the government's keen on developing areas like Bankside. And once the place is up and running it should pay for itself—at least, that will be the aim. You could be as much or as little involved as you wanted to be. In any case, we'd report to you regularly.'

‘The Harlequin's done a fair enough job all these years,' said Madeleine. ‘And it's certainly respected the conditions in my father's will.'

My father…
We're both waiting for the right moment to ask who he was, thought Shona, glancing at Hilary.

Hilary had clearly registered the mention of Madeleine's father, but she only said, ‘I'm assuming there was at least one of Toby Chance's songs that night—if not, I think we'd have to cheat a bit and put one into our own programme. I found one quite recently for a TV thing—it's called “All Because of Too Much Tipsy Cake”—and I don't think it would be difficult to unearth one or two more. I keep calling them Toby's songs, but correctly they were Chance and Douglas's songs, weren't they? That was the team: Toby wrote the lyrics and Douglas wrote the music.'

‘We'd certainly have to use one of their songs for the reopening,' said Madeleine at once, ‘because he was my father.'

Into the silence that suddenly fell, Hilary said, ‘Toby Chance was your father?'

‘What? No, my dear, I meant the other one. Toby's music partner. Frank Douglas. He was my father. He was the one who imposed that long dark silence on the Tarleton.'

‘I
T'S NO USE ASKING
me why or how he ended up owning the Tarleton,' said Madeleine, ‘because I don't know and he never said. The curious thing, though, is that he wasn't the kind of man you'd associate with owning property of any kind, in fact he was a bit of a rolling stone—even a touch irresponsible, although not where my mother and I were concerned. And I think my mother had a little money of her own.'

Hilary said softly, ‘So all along, the mysterious owner was the man who wrote those songs with Toby Chance.'

‘We've speculated a bit about who the owner might be,' said Shona. ‘Of course we have. But I don't think Frank Douglas was ever a contender, was he, Hilary?'

‘No. I don't know that we knew much about him other than his name on some old song sheets. I thought it would turn out to be Toby who put that restriction on the theatre.'

‘Toby Chance certainly owned the theatre for a number of years,' said Madeleine. ‘And I always had the impression that my father acquired it from him after it was closed.'

‘In 1914,' said Hilary.

‘Yes. It was ceded to him by Deed of Gift in October of that year,' said Madeleine. ‘That's one thing I do know, although I don't know much more than that. A Deed of Gift means no money is actually paid over, of course.'

‘Yes, but it's a perfectly legal way of transferring a piece of property,' said Shona, ‘although restrictive covenants can sometimes be written in, I think, and I'd guess that's what happened with the Tarleton.'

‘It is. It's all wrapped up in legal jargon, but the burden of the gift is that it wasn't to be sold or used in any public way whatsoever until fifty years after my father's death.'

‘That's a very long time,' said Shona. ‘And it's extremely strange to leave such an inheritance to someone and then prevent it being beneficial.'

‘It's almost as if he was handing you a—a task,' said Hilary. ‘Trusting you to safeguard something.'

‘Without giving me any idea of what that something was,' said Madeleine rather drily. ‘I've done what the will requested, but I've never known why the request was made in the first place.'

‘Didn't your father ever talk about the Tarleton?' asked Hilary. ‘Didn't he say anything that might provide a clue?'

‘He hardly ever mentioned it,' said Madeleine. ‘I wasn't born until he was turned forty—1933 that was, in case you were wondering.' She smiled. ‘I think he'd always been a bit of a rover: he'd hear of something he'd like to do or be involved in—usually some theatrical venture—and off he'd go. While my mother was alive she usually went with him: they were a good pair. I was at school and they always came back for the holidays, and it all seemed perfectly normal to me. Sometimes he'd have friends from his music-hall days to the house—I liked that. They used to have evenings round the piano, singing and laughing. Impromptu stuff, but they enjoyed it. I was generally sent to bed, but when I was a bit older I was allowed to join in sometimes.' She suddenly looked very wistful, but then said, briskly, ‘They're good memories I have of those years. But you see, my dears, it all meant I was never especially close to my father—not to either of my parents, really. And then when the war broke out my father was away a good deal, mostly with ENSA—they organized concert parties and plays for the troops and the allied forces.' She said this with a slightly questioning air, as if unsure whether they would know what ENSA was.

Shona knew quite well what ENSA was because of her years with the Harlequin, but she was grateful to Hilary for saying with unmistakable sincerity, ‘I've always loved reading about ENSA.'

‘There are some photos from those years along with the other stuff in the attic,' said Madeleine. ‘My father toured a lot of the camps. But you do see,' she said, ‘that I didn't really spend very much time with him and I certainly didn't know a great deal about his early life. I knew he was on the halls and I knew he wrote quite a lot of music—songs in the main, mostly in collaboration with Toby Chance. And he stayed in touch with some of the people from his earlier life—there was a disreputable old comic called Bunstable, I remember. He'd turn up from time to time. And Rinaldi who was stage manager at the Tarleton—I liked Rinaldi. Everyone did. And there were one or two dancers from the old days—my mother said they were probably no better than they should be. But she laughed when she said it, and she always gave them a meal or a bed for the night if they needed it.'

Shona glanced at Hilary and saw she was listening with absorption.

‘My mother died at the end of the war,' said Madeleine. ‘I was twelve. But it wasn't until my father died, ten years afterwards, that I discovered he was the actual owner of the Tarleton. It was quite a shock, although I'd have to say the discovery of the restraint was an even bigger shock.'

‘It's a remarkable restriction,' said Shona.

‘The will is very strongly worded,' said Madeleine. ‘I remember asking the solicitor how legally binding the clause was and he said it couldn't actually be enforced, but that if I sold the theatre or opened it to the public he thought I might stand in danger of forfeiting the rest of the inheritance. The executors were the bank—the one you've dealt with—together with the solicitor's own firm. If I chose to ignore that clause, the bank were required to report to the probate authorities. The solicitor did admit he'd never come across anything quite like it—he had no idea which way a decision might go; he said it would be a test case.'

‘Extraordinary,' said Hilary. ‘So you decided to comply with it.'

‘I sort of got swept along by various events,' she said. ‘My father didn't leave me a lot of money, and I think what he did leave had originally been my mother's. I was rather badly off in those days—we all have difficult patches in our lives, don't we, and that was one of mine. So the money I did get was a bird in the hand as far as I was concerned. There wasn't anything like enough to start putting on performances, and I had no idea how to go about finding a backer or anything like that. I'd never lived in London and I wouldn't have known where to begin. And also—' She stopped and Shona waited.

‘Also,' said Madeleine, and Shona had the impression she was choosing her words with care, ‘the Tarleton was already regarded as a bit of a mystery—I knew that if I didn't know anything else. If I had contested the will, it could have caused quite a stir. And even ignoring the will and just opening the place up would have attracted some publicity. I didn't want that.' She broke off, one hand going to the left side of her chest, a white look appearing round her mouth.

Shona was aware of Hilary making an involuntary movement forward, and she thought: there's something Madeleine Ferrelyn isn't telling us. Whatever it is, it's distressed her to remember it. Her heart's clearly quite frail. Do we pretend nothing's happened, I wonder? Yes, I think we do. But why on earth didn't she fight that clause in her father's will all those years ago? Surely, given a choice, anyone would opt for the Tarleton? Its open-market value, even then, would have far outweighed whatever Frank Douglas left—and it doesn't sound as if he left all that much.

Madeleine seemed to have recovered from that momentary spasm of pain or distress. She was saying television had put a lot of theatres out of business in the 1950s and early 1960s. ‘And the Tarleton was already old-fashioned. Even I could see that a lot of money would have to be spent on it to make it even halfway viable.'

‘So you decided to honour the requirement in the will?' said Hilary.

‘Anything else seemed such a gamble, you see. So I thought I'd stay with the safe option for a few years at least—there was the small trust fund to keep the place maintained so it wouldn't become derelict. And then, as the years went by, I began to look on the place as a sort of investment. Almost as a pension fund.'