Jasmine Nights (7 page)
Arleta dug Saba in the ribs and mimicked the man’s swishy walk for a few strides. When he opened the door into the auditorium, her heart started thumping. Oh Jesus, Mary and Joseph, this was it! The famous Theatre Royal stage; in a matter of minutes, triumph or humiliation to be decided. When her eyes had grown accustomed to the gloom, she saw that the stage, crudely boarded off for auditions, looked disappointingly small, far smaller than she’d imagined, and in a ghostly gloom without the front lights switched on. But never mind, she was here! Whatever comes, she told herself, I will remember this for the rest of my life. I’ll have danced and sung on this stage, and that will mean something.
Her heart was thumping uncomfortably as she watched the blond man fold his coat fastidiously and put it on the seat behind him. He lit a cigarette and talked intensely to three uniformed men who sat in the stalls surrounded by rows and rows of empty seats, some of them still covered by dust sheets and bits of rubble from the bomb damage.
A pale girl in ballet shoes sat four rows behind them clutching a black bag on her lap. Beside her, silent and pensive-looking, the old comedian.
‘Right now. Shall we crack on then?’ A disembodied voice from the stalls. ‘We’ve got a lot to cover today. The old man, Willie, you first. Come on!’
A stenographer with a clipboard sat down quietly beside the three men. The music struck up, whistles and trumpets and silly trombones. A few seconds later, old Willie ran out, fleet-footed in his patent-leather pumps, shouting, ‘Well here we are then!’
Arleta clutched Saba’s hand, digging her nails into the palm. ‘He needs this so badly,’ she whispered in the dark. ‘His wife died a few months ago. Married thirty-four years. Heartbroken.’
Willie went down arthritically on one knee and sang ‘Old Man River’ with silly wobbling lips. The silence from the auditorium was deafening – no laughter from the watching men, no applause. For his next trick he deadpanned what Arleta whispered was his speciality: a hopelessly garbled version of a nursery rhyme called ‘Little Red Hoodingride and the Forty Thieves’.
Saba joined in with Arleta’s rich laughter; Willie was really funny.
After his next joke, about utility knickers – ‘One Yank and they’re off’ – a shadowy figure stood up behind the orchestra pit and said:
‘Mr Wise, I take it you understand our blue-joke policy?’
‘Sorry?’ The old man walked towards the spotlight and stood there blinking nervously.
‘If you get chosen, all scripts must be submitted to us for a signature. We’re clear about the standards we want to live up to; we hope you are too.’
‘All present and correct, sir.’ Willie stood in a blue haze, smiling glassily. ‘Appreciate the warning.’ He clicked his heels and saluted, and it was hard to tell in that unstable light whether he was mocking or simply scared.
The pale girl rose. She had long limbs, very thin eyebrows and beautiful hands. She wafted towards the main spotlight and stood there smiling tensely.
‘Janine De Vere. I’m from Sadler’s Wells, you might remember.’ The posh voice bore faint traces of Manchester.
‘What have you got for us, Miss De Vere?’ from the dark.
‘My wide-ranging repertoire includes tap and Greek dancing. Ah’m very versatile.’
‘Oh get you,’ murmured Arleta.
‘Well perhaps a small sample. We don’t have long.’
Miss De Vere cleared her throat and faced the wings. She held a beseeching hand towards a woman in an army uniform and sensible shoes who put the needle down on the gramophone. Syrupy music rose and sobbed. Miss De Vere took a tweed coat off and in a sea-green tutu sprang into action with a series of leaps across the stage. With her long pale arms moving like seaweed as she twirled and jumped and with light patting sounds, she ran hither and yon with her hands shading her eyes as if she was desperately searching for someone. Her finale, a series of flawless cartwheels across the stage, covered her hands in dust. She sank into the splits and flung a triumphant look across the spotlights.
‘Lovely. Thank you. Next.’ The same neutral voice from the stalls.
‘Saba Tarcan. On stage, please. Hurry! Quick.’
Dom, hidden in the upper circle of the theatre, sat up straight when he heard this. He trained his eyes on her like a pistol. He’d got her message, and ignored it because he wanted to hear her sing again. It was a kind of dare – for himself, if nothing else – to prove he could have her if he wanted to.
He’d sneaked in after slipping half a crown to the friendly doorman, who’d shaken his hand and said, ‘We owe a lot to you boys in blue.’ He’d kept her original letter to him in his wallet:
I expect to be in London, at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on 17 March for an audition at ENSA
.
She walked down the aisle and on to the stage, childlike from the back in her red frock, he admired once again her fantastic posture, her refusal to scuttle. That kind of poise was a statement in itself.
Watch me
, it seemed to say,
I matter
.
He’d heard her laughing earlier – a full-throated laugh at the comedian. If she was feeling overawed by this, she certainly wasn’t showing it.
She didn’t see him at all. She stood in the weak spotlight, smiling at the dim figures in the stalls, thinking,
this is it, kid
. The accompanist took her music without smiling. She cleared her throat, and thought briefly about Caradoc Jones, her old music teacher from home. He’d given her lots of advice about opening her throat, and relaxing, and squeezing her bum on the high notes – ‘I’ll train you so well,’ he’d told her, ‘you won’t have to worry about your diaphragm or your breath or whether you’ll be able to hold a high note, it will all be there.’ But what he’d talked about most, apart from developing technique, was being brave.
She’d gone to him first aged thirteen, pretty and shy, but keen on herself too, having easily won two of the talent competitions organised by the Riverside Youth Club. She’d warbled her way through ‘O For the Wings of a Dove’, thinking he’d be charmed as most people were.
And Caradoc, a famous opera singer before the booze got him, had not been in the slightest charmed. This fat, untidy man, with ash on his waistcoat, had listened for a bit and then asked:
‘Do you know what all bad singers have in common?’
When she said no, he’d slammed down the piano lid and stood up.
‘They do this . . .’ He’d made a strangled sound like a drowning kitten. ‘I want you to do this . . .’ He’d bared his ancient yellow teeth, his tongue had reared in his huge mouth, and he’d let out a roar so magnificent it had sprayed her and his checked waistcoat with spittle.
He’d glared at her ferociously. ‘For Christ’s sake, girl, have the courage to make a great big bloody mistake,’ and she heard her mother gasp:
Swearing! Children!
‘Nothing good will ever happen,’ he said, ‘unless you do.’
Now the pianist rippled out the first soft chords to ‘God Bless the Child’. She went deep inside herself, blocking out the pale and exhausted faces of the ENSA officials and the bored-looking stenographer, and she sang. For a brief second she took in the vastness of the space around her, the ceiling painted in white and gold, where the bomb hadn’t got it, the rows and rows of empty seats, the magic and glory of this famous theatre, and then she got lost in the song.
When it was over, she looked out into the auditorium. She saw no movement at all, except for Arleta, who stuck her thumbs up and clapped.
Dom sat and listened too, confused and frightened. When he’d heard her first, or so he’d reasoned with himself many times, he’d been at the lowest ebb of his life, and she’d smelled so good, and seemed so young, and he was vulnerable.
But there she was again, with everything to lose – or so it felt to him – in the middle of the stage, making his heart race because she seemed so brave, so pure suddenly in the way she’d gathered herself up and flung herself metaphorically speaking into the void, where those bored-sounding fuckers in khaki sat with their clipboards and pencils.
And sitting on his own in the dark, he felt a tremendous emptiness. How foolishly schoolboyish of him to have written to her – she was everybody’s and nobody’s – but once again she’d called up a raw part of him, a part that normally he went to great lengths to try and hide. And although he’d always known he didn’t love Annabel, or not enough, he was shaken still by the loss of her, the blow to his pride as much as anything, the sense of everything being so changeable.
‘Anything else for us, Miss Tarcan?’ one of the men asked. She did ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, and hearing the stenographer give a little gasp, a sound she recognised, dared to hope that after all the many anxieties of the day, things were going well.
She sang her last song, ‘Mazi’, on her own and when she finished, faced them close to tears. Tan had taught her that song; she’d sung it with her father in the chicken shed.
One of the nameless men who were watching her stood up. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his head. He looked at her aslant, as if she was a piece of furniture he would shortly measure.
The pianist smiled for the first time that day.
‘Right-ho, a break for lunch now,’ was all he said. ‘We’ll see the Banana Brothers at three and Arleta after them. We’ll meet at four for our final decision.’
‘Flipping heck,’ Arleta joked to Saba. They had paused on the island between two rows of busy traffic; they were on their way to lunch. ‘Now I’m going to sound like something the cat’s sicked up after you, so thank you very much. But actually’ – she held out a protective arm as an army truck passed – ‘I’m more in the novelty-dance line myself. I really just sing to fill in the gaps.’
The truck driver wolf-whistled; Arleta gave him a coy wave. ‘Naughty,’ she called out happily.
They ate lunch at Sid’s, a workman’s café with steamy windows, full of people in khaki. The set menu, a two-and-six special, featured strong tea in thick white china cups, a corned-beef patty made with greyish potatoes, tinned peas, and a custard slice for pudding. While they were eating, the three Banana Brothers arrived. Lean, athletic men whose age Saba guessed to be around forty.
‘Well whoop de whoop,’ said Arleta, who seemed to know everyone. ‘Look who’s here.’ She kissed each one of them on both cheeks and did the introductions.
‘This is Lev, and that’s Alex.’ The two men folded into graceful bows. ‘This little titch,’ she pointed towards a younger man whose hair was dyed an improbable black, ‘is called Boguslaw.’ He closed his eyes dramatically and let his lips nuzzle their hands. ‘You won’t remember that,’ she added. ‘You may call him Bog or Boggers, or Bog Brush.’
She explained to Saba that they’d all worked together before, too, in panto in Bristol. ‘And they all behaved
appallingly
.’ She narrowed her green eyes at them, like a lioness about to slap her cubs. The acrobats, squirming and smirking, seemed to love it.
Close up, Bog was handsome, with a chiselled jaw and the kind of shine and muscle definition most usually seen on a thoroughbred horse. He sat down next to Saba, tucking his napkin in when the waitress came. He asked for a piece of fruit cake but refused the corned-beef patty, because, he said, they were auditioning after lunch and he didn’t like to do anything on a full tummy. He looked Saba straight in the eye as if he’d said something mightily suggestive.
Arleta was pouring tea for all of them from a stained enamel pot. ‘I hope we all make it, and I hope it’s Malta,’ she added. ‘I had a lovely time there last time.’
‘Do you never know where you’re going until they tell you?’ Saba put down her knife. She was trying not to seem as shy as she felt.
‘Never,’ Arleta said. ‘It’s a complete lucky dip, that’s what I like about it.’
When the boys had gone, Arleta, pouring more tea, gossiped in a thrilling whisper about the acrobats. They were from Poland originally, she said, and were a first-class act. Lev and Bog were real brothers. They had lost almost their entire family during the war, and sometimes they drank and got angry about it, so it was better not to talk too much about families unless they brought it up. Bog, the younger one, was a womaniser and had got two girls, to her certain knowledge, in the pudding club. He had been excused call-up because of his hammer toes, although how you could be an acrobat with hammer toes was a complete mystery to her, but they wouldn’t mention hammer toes either, unless it came up naturally, which it almost never did in conversation. Ha ha ha. Arleta, digging into her custard slice, was in high spirits. She told Saba she’d been very, very low indeed before the audition, but this was just what she needed. ‘It’s the greatest fun on earth, ENSA,’ she said. ‘A real challenge.’
‘Are you nervous?’ Saba said.
‘Not really.’ Arleta winked. She took out her handkerchief and wiped the lipstick from her cup. ‘I more or less know I’m in,’ she said cockily.
‘How?’
Arleta stuck her tongue into her cheek, closed her eyes and squinted at Saba.
‘Let’s just say I have friends in high places,’ was all she would say.
After all the auditions had ended, Dom hung around outside the stage door for nearly two hours, waiting for her. The doorman, sitting in a glass box, read his
Sporting Life
from cover to cover. Dom watched prop baskets and racks of clothes come and go, listening with a certain exasperation to snatches of conversation: ‘I worked with Mabel years ago. She’s a marvel, but puffed sleeves, imagine!’ from a loud middle-aged woman with dyed hair, and ‘I’d try the wig department, if I were you’ from a mincing little type in a checked overcoat.
And then, she emerged from behind him, so buoyantly that she could have been walking on air. There were bright spots of red on her cheeks; she was smiling to herself. It was starting to rain, and the street was full of dun- or dark-coated people putting up umbrellas.
She looked straight at him as she stepped on to the pavement.
‘It’s Dominic,’ he said. ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’
‘Waiting for me?’ She looked confused and embarrassed, and then the penny dropped.