The Girl from the Savoy (23 page)

“Music is nothing without an audience. We must have people to hear it; otherwise it is just markings on a page.”

T
here is a wonderful silence to the hotel in the predawn dark. While the guests lounge in their apartments and sleep off the effects of too many highballs, I lie awake, a hand on my chest, feeling the rise and the fall of a hundred beating hearts. I think about the governor's words; the connection with the hotel that he spoke of. I'm beginning to understand what he meant. I imagine the locked doors are closed eyes; the shutters and curtains tired eyelids, too weary to pull apart. And then I hear hushed whispers, soft footsteps in corridors as the hotel yawns, stretches, flexes its fingers, and gently wakes up.

Everything seems so simple in these silent hours. I think about my first meeting with Perry in his apartment. He called me Miss Lane. I called him Mr. Clements. He was clumsy and untidy. I was (he said) entertaining and intriguing. We drank pots and pots of tea, ate cake, and talked beyond the intended hour. He made me smile with his fancy notions of life. I made him laugh with what he calls “my northern outlook.” I sensed a pleasant understanding developing between us. I think about him often while everyone else sleeps.

But more than anything, in these quiet moments, I think about Teddy and little Edward, both of them out there somewhere, distant and fading. I try not to dwell on the past, to keep looking forward, but it isn't easy. Like a shadow, my past lingers beside me always. Strange things remind me of them, small insignificancies that send my memories tumbling forward like water on a mill wheel: the smell of a rose in the Embankment Gardens, the song of a blackbird, a butterfly, the distant stars, the shape of my mother's handwriting.

Her latest letter arrives with a Christmas package. She wishes me well and writes about the safe, predictable events that communities like ours have always relied on: marriages, babies born, the little runt who had thrived with the other piglets that spring. She doesn't write of the difficult realities we sweep aside when we choose to.

With the letter is a separate note scribbled on a scrap of paper.

Dear Dorothy,

I found these when I was clearing out your room. I thought you might like to have them. Or maybe not. I wasn't sure.

I will be thinking of you this Christmastime. I hope you are happy.

Your loving Mother

X

The package contains a lavender bag that I had made as a young girl, a yard of fabric, a bundle of letters, and a khaki-colored button from Teddy's tunic. I remember him giving it to me before he returned to the front from leave. I treasured that but
ton as if it were a diamond, as if every part of him was contained within it.

With unsteady hands, I untie the string around the letters. His handwriting is so familiar, so haunting. He took to reading and writing poetry when he went to war. His writing became almost musical.

As I take the letters from their envelopes, I think of all the times I had longed to see his neat script, to read his gentle words. Now they only torment me.

Somewhere in France. February '17

My dear Little Thing,

Do you sleep well? Sleep is broken and fleeting here. There is little to distinguish between night and day during these long winter months, so that I can't be sure if the sky is tricking me. We sleep in the dugouts, our bodies too wearied from marching and shivering to care about the discomfort. And to think that I used to complain of a broken spring in the mattress back home. What any of us would give for a mattress full of broken springs.

We long for the dawn, the first gray light to signal the end of another night of shelling and invisible enemies lurking over the top. The darkness plays tricks on the mind. The scratching of a rat becomes a German sniper, his gun barrel pressed against your temple. But that first sliver of light—the relief at knowing I have lived another day and that I am one day closer to seeing you again, my dear little girl. And the dawn is so beautiful, such color above all that is dreary and murk in the fields below. I think of you when I watch the dawn sweep across the sky. I imagine you sleeping as the light blooms
through the window of your little bedroom. I imagine myself creeping in to sit beside you and I watch you sleep, until you sense me near and open a sleepy eye.

What do you hear, Dolly? Tell me what you hear when you wake in the morning, for I hear only dreadful things. Even in the silence I hear death and fear.

Please write to me, my dear Little Thing, and remind me of the whispers of the reeds on the riverbank. Tell me about the birdsong and the cries of the swallow chicks in the eaves. Tell me about the rumble of thunder and the hiss of a summer rainstorm on the tin roof of the hay barn. Tell me about the clang of the milk churns, the crackle of the knife through the crust of the morning's bread, the spit and sizzle of bacon frying. Do you hear the ringing of the school bell, the rumble of the coal cart, the cry of a newborn baby?

What do you hear, Dolly? Please tell me. Fill my ears with life again.

Yours always, Teddy

X

Somewhere in France. November 1917

My dear Little Thing,

We are on the march in these short dark winter days. Just as the earth tilts away from the sun in the wintertime, so I feel a shadow fall over me as I move farther away from you.

How awful it was to leave you again. Worse than the first time we parted. I didn't know what awaited me then. Now I know what terrors await and I'm not ashamed to admit that my legs tremble at the thought.

They shoot the deserters and cowards. They are court-martialed and shot at dawn by firing squad. An example to us all. A reminder of how cowardice ends. But I cannot blame those poor boys. War can turn a man's mind inside out, so that the thought of being shot by your officer is better than being taken prisoner or torn apart by enemy shells. Who would ever have thought such decisions would have to be made? Who would ever have believed this was possible, Dolly?

Before I came home on leave, I scratched the days until I would see you into a wooden post in the dugout. I couldn't wait for the others to return so I could move up the list and get closer to seeing you. We all prayed for our brothers to come back so we could take our turn. And then I got my papers and I was walking away from that place and walking toward you, Dolly. There you were, hands on your hips, the sun in your hair, and I could not have been happier if I had seen an angel from heaven.

And now I have to tell you that I am afraid. I have a dreadful feeling that I won't see England again, that I won't see the great chimneys of the cotton mills or the blackened faces of the miners coming home from the pits. I think this is it, dear girl. And if it is, I want you to be brave and strong and I want you to go on and marry a man who is worthy of you and who will care for you and tell you he loves you when he wakes each morning.

You mustn't be frightened by these words. I have thought about keeping this letter somewhere safe so that they will find it when I go, but then I worry that it won't be found and you will never know what it was I wanted to say to you. So I am sending it now, and if my fears are wrong, and I live on, then I will write again, and again and again, and I will keep on
writing until the stump of my pencil runs out and the candle dies, and we will carry on, my darling girl, as best we can.

Think of me often.

Yours always,

Teddy

X

Somewhere in France. April 1918

I don't know how much longer I can stand it here, Dolly. I feel like I am a small boy again and I cry out in the night for my mother. I want to be tucked up warm in my little bed. I want to feel your hand in mine. I want to lie down and sleep.

Pray for me, my dear little girl. Pray for us all.

Teddy

X

Despite my efforts to forget and move on, I can't. The memories and the pain come flooding back with every word until the tears fall fast down my cheeks. He called me Little Thing. How my heart ached to hear him speak those words to me once more.

I was twenty years old when Teddy was demobilized and returned to England, but it was not the return I had imagined. I was not the naïve girl who had waved him good-bye. I was not the same girl who had spent years waiting for him to return. Waiting for Teddy, thinking about Teddy, writing to Teddy—it was all I ever did. “When Teddy is back,” “after the war,” was all I ever said.

Teddy returned a broken man. His body wasn't damaged; he carried his wounds on the inside. Shell shock, they told us. The
empty stare. The tremble in his arms. The damp stain at his groin. It was so painful to see. I tried my best to help him heal, but I too was damaged. I carried my own invisible scars and it is hard to mend someone else when you, yourself, are damaged beyond repair.

That was why I had to leave.

Teddy always knew I would. He said my feet were too restless to walk forever along the narrow laneways of Mawdesley. “When the war is over, you'll go,” he'd written. “Mawdesley isn't where you belong. You'll find a bigger stage to dance on than the village hall. And when you do, I'll be watching in the audience, and I'll clap and cheer, and blow kisses and throw roses at your feet.”

But life doesn't always work out the way we hope.

There is no stage.

There are no roses.

I rest my cheek against the bedroom window, blowing a warm breath onto the cold glass. It fades too quickly. Everything is slipping away from me.

What do you hear, Dolly? Please tell me. F
ill my ears with life again.

“I hear hope, Teddy,” I whisper. “I hear hope and love and adventure.”

T
he pages of Perry's discarded music remain unplayed beneath my pillow. I still haven't told him that I took them from the litter bin and I still haven't heard Mr. Somers's band rehearse.

Today is the day.

Taking my courage in my hands and a bundle of table linen in my arms, I make my way along the staff passageways that lead to a curtain at the back of the ballroom stage. I make a small gap at the edge of the curtain and peer around.

Half a dozen musicians are in full swing. Trumpet, banjo, violin, drums, trombone, and piano all mingle into a perfect melody
as they play a favorite number of mine, “Tiger Rag.” My feet tap in time as I gawk at the Oriental carpet and the huge ferns and palms that tower toward the ceiling at each side of a curved staircase. It reminds me of an illustration of an exotic Egyptian palace in
The Adventure Book for Girls.
Adventure lives in places like this; in the marble columns and crystal chandeliers, even in the scuff marks left by dancing feet on the wooden dance floor.

I wait until the band finish their last number and begin to pack away their instruments and then I whisper from my hiding place.

“Mr. Somers? Psst. Mr. Somers.” He glances up from the piano but doesn't see me. I step out from behind the curtain and walk toward him. “Excuse me, Mr. Somers. I'm very sorry to bother you, but you did say for me to come and listen to a rehearsal.” He looks at me, bemused. “I heard you playing the trumpet outside the deliveries entrance.”

A look of recognition flashes across his face. “Ah, yes. The maid who got herself a free concert al fresco. I wondered when you might appear. So, how did it sound?”

I step a little closer, the bundle of linen still in my arms. “It was lovely. That last one's my favorite.”

“Mine too. Well, I'm jolly glad you heard us.” He closes the lid on the piano and steps down from the stage. “Nothing like a little music to see one through the day in good spirits.”

“Actually, I wondered if I might ask you a favor, sir.” My heart thumps beneath my apron. I'll be in terrible trouble if anyone sees me here.

Mr. Somers narrows his eyes. He wears little round spectacles that look comical against his rosy cheeks. He reminds me of a pet hamster my cousin used to keep. “Well? Spit it out.”

“It's just . . . well . . . I wondered if you might play something for me.”

“For you?”

“Yes.” I feel silly for even asking.

“Of course. Which one would you like?” He opens the piano and sits on the stool, his hands poised over the keys. “Well?”

“Oh, no! Not one of
your
pieces.”

He looks a little offended. “Mine not quite to your taste?”

I blush. “No. I mean, yes.” I balance the linen in one arm and fish the folded sheets of music from my pocket. “It's just that I found some music a while back and I've never heard it played.”

“Found?”

“Yes.”

“I see.” He looks at me, and shakes his head. “Well, we can't have unplayed music. That won't do at all. Music is nothing without an audience. We must have people to hear it; otherwise it is just markings on a page. It is the audience that brings it to life.”

I hand him the folded sheets. He looks at the shabby state of them and frowns.

“They got a little damp,” I explain. “I rescued them from a litter bin.”

“A litter bin?” I nod. He smooths the pages before placing them on the music stand above the keys. “Well then. Let's see if their rescue was worthwhile.”

I take a deep breath. Standing in this beautiful room where I am not permitted to be, I feel heavy with anticipation. It is desperately important that the music is special; memorable. My instinct to rescue it has to have been worthwhile. I close my eyes and listen to the rise and fall of the notes, the gentle trill of the top keys, the melancholy of the sharps and flats. The melody is beautiful; haunting. I stand perfectly still and listen to every note until Mr. Somers's fingers come to a rest and the final chord echoes around the room.