Fallen Skies

On the left of the stage was the rickety catwalk and steps. Helen walked gingerly down and sat in the front row near Charlie’s piano.

‘Can we have some lights?’ Charlie called to a technician working somewhere backstage.

A couple of houselights came on, and one working stage light.

‘Sit down,’ Charlie said to Helen. ‘I have an idea for her.’

Lily stood at her ease in the centre of the stage. She smiled at her mother.

‘D’you know this?’ Charlie handed a sheet of music up to her.

Lily gave a little gasp of surprise and then giggled. ‘I know it!’ she said. ‘I’ve never sung it!’

‘Try it,’ Charlie suggested. He played a few rippling chords and nodded to Helen. ‘Just listen,’ he said.

The beat of the music was regular, like a hymn. Helen knew the clear simple notes but could not think of the song. Then Lily on the stage, half-lit, threw back her head and sang Bach’s ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’. Helen felt tears prickle behind her eyes as the sounds arched upwards into the bell-shaped ceiling, and the piano accompaniment formed a perfectly paced symmetry with the rhythm and cadence of the song. It was a holy moment, like the sound of a blackbird singing in no-man’s-land. When Lily was silent and the last chord had died away, Helen found her cheeks were wet.

‘That was lovely,’ she said. She fumbled in her handbag for her handkerchief. ‘Just lovely,’ she said.

‘It’s hardly music hall!’ Lily complained. She dropped to one knee to speak to Charlie in the pit. ‘I can’t do that in front of an audience.’

Charlie grinned at her, turned and spoke to Helen. ‘Just wait a moment,’ he said. ‘Think of Lily in a chorister’s outfit. Red gown and a white surplice, white ruff.’

‘Blue,’ Helen said instantly. ‘Brings out the colour of her eyes.’

‘Blue gown,’ Charlie agreed. ‘She comes out. No-one knows what to expect. She sings like that. Just simply. Like an angel. Everyone cries. All the old ladies, all the tarts, all the drunks. They’ll weep into their beer and they’ll love her.’

‘They’ll laugh themselves sick,’ Lily said.

Charlie shook his head. ‘I know them,’ he said. ‘I’ve been doing this a long time, Lily, and I know what tickles their fancy. They like their ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ays and they like a class act. They like something that makes them feel pious. They love a good weep.’

Helen nodded. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘But if they heckle …’

Charlie shook his head. ‘Not here,’ he said. ‘London maybe. Birmingham maybe. Glasgow, certainly. But not here. And not anywhere on tour. They want a good time, a good laugh and a good weep. They’ll adore her.’

‘I’m a chorus girl!’ Lily protested. ‘Not a choir girl!’

‘Not a choir girl,’ Charlie agreed. He nodded to Helen. ‘Keep thinking the ruff and the white surplice. Keep thinking Christmas cards and carols and weddings.’ He climbed out of the pit and strode up the catwalk.

‘Let your hair down,’ he said to Lily. He stood behind her and folded her sheet of music into a little fan. ‘Hold this under your chin,’ he said. He nodded to Helen. ‘Think of a spotlight, very white, and no make-up at all. Perhaps a little pale powder. No lipstick.’

He scooped up Lily’s mass of blonde hair and folded it so that it was as short as a bob.

‘Choir boy,’ he said. ‘Ain’t I a genius?’

There was a full minute of silence from the auditorium. ‘You’d never cut her hair,’ Helen said finally, outraged.

‘Bob it,’ Charlie said. ‘So it’s the same length all around. She has a side parting and it comes down to the middle of her ears both sides. We oil it back a little bit, off her face. Nothing shiny, nothing slick. Just a newly washed boy. A well-scrubbed choir boy. A little angel from heaven.’

Lily giggled irrepressibly, but stood still as Charlie had ordered her, holding her folded sheet music under her chin while Charlie held her hair in handfuls off her neck.

‘A young Vesta Tilley,’ Helen said incredulously.

‘Delicious,’ Charlie said.

‘Tasteful,’ Helen conceded.

‘And hidden oomph,’ Charlie said, looking over Lily’s shoulder. ‘She’s just gorgeous. There isn’t a public school boy in England that wouldn’t fall down and die for her. Ain’t I right?’

Helen nodded. As he sensed her agreement Charlie dropped Lily’s hair and took the mock-ruff from under her chin. ‘What d’you think, Lily?’ he asked.

She shrugged and grinned. ‘I’ve wanted my hair bobbed for ages,’ she said.

He laughed. ‘As easy as that?’

‘Ma said I had to keep it long,’ Lily said. ‘If I can have my hair bobbed I’ll sing whatever you like!’

They never rehearsed Lily’s song again. She tried it through once more with Charlie that night and he gave her the score and told her to learn the words and practise with her singing teacher. Mr Brett the director was resigned to the experiment. Charlie had been batting on for years about a choir boy number and with the conjuror drunk in Swansea and Miss Sylvia de Charmante still in London, he had neither time nor energy for an audition and an argument. Besides, Charlie Smith was rarely wrong.

‘So what are you singing?’ the girls asked in the crowded dressing room. The costumes, hung on hangers on hooks on the wall, bulged out into the room, shrouded in cotton sheets to keep them clean. Lily, as the youngest and newest dancer, had her hairbrush and comb perched on the inconvenient corner of the table, nearest to the door and overwhelmed by hanging gowns.

‘It’s a classical song,’ Lily said. ‘Charlie Smith’s idea.’

‘He’s off his rocker,’ Madge said. ‘You should speak to Mr Brett and tell him you won’t do it.’

‘I couldn’t do that.’

‘You ought to,’ Helena said. ‘It’s not fair making you sing something no-one wants to hear. You should try “Blue-eyes”.’ She sang the chorus in a hard nasal tone, nodding at Lily.

‘Or “Walking my Girl”,’ one of the other dancers suggested. She sang the first verse.

‘No!’ someone else exclaimed. ‘That wouldn’t suit Lily, she ought to have something saucy!’

There was a gale of sarcastic laughter.

‘I can see your ma letting you do something saucy and tying your garter during the chorus!’ Susie said. ‘What are you wearing anyway?’

‘A long blue gown,’ Lily said mendaciously. ‘Charlie told Ma what I should have and she’s making it for me.’

‘You’re not going to set the town alight,’ Madge said, without troubling to conceal her pleasure. ‘A classical song and a home-made dress! Not so lucky as you thought then, Lily.’

‘Probably be dropped after the Southsea opening anyway,’ Susie said. ‘We’re running hours too long.’

Lily kept her head down and her mouth shut.

The night before the dress rehearsal Lily and her mother took a tram up to Commercial Road, Southsea, the best part of town, for Lily to have her hair cut.

‘Not a woman. No woman in the history of the world has ever known how to cut hair,’ Charlie decreed. ‘You’re to go to David’s, on Commercial Road. I’ve told him you’ll be there at seven. He’s keeping open just for you so there won’t be any men around. You can be quite private.’

Helen had frowned.

‘Come on, Ma!’ Lily had urged. ‘It can’t hurt.’

David’s shop was closed for the night as Charlie had predicted. The blinds were discreetly down.

‘Charlie Smith told me you wanted a straight bob,’ David said. Lily sat in the comfortable barber’s chair, her feet tucked up on the foot rail, looking at herself in the mirror.

‘No fringe, just the same length all around,’ she said. ‘Like a boy’s.’

David nodded and took the pins from her hair. The tumble of gold silky hair fell down. He glanced at Helen. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Don’t ask me, I could weep,’ Helen said grimly. ‘Just do it.’

Helen looked at the floor but she heard the snipping of the scissors and the soft fall of heavy hair. The floor was a patterned linoleum, smart and easy to keep clean. Out of the corner of her eye Helen could see a fallen lock of deep gold.

‘Take a look,’ David said after a while.

Helen glanced up.

Lily was stunning.

Firstly she noticed Lily’s long neck and the way she held her head. She could see the shape of her little head, her small ears. Helen walked slowly around to the front of the chair. Lily’s hair was combed smoothly to one side, just long enough to tuck behind her ears. Helen had never seen her daughter’s features so clearly, she stared at her as if she were a stranger. The clear lines of her face were exposed, the bones of her cheeks, her forehead, her nose. The curve of her mouth and her huge dark-lashed deep blue eyes. She was a beautiful androgynous object of desire. A tomboy, a romantic poet, a St Joan.

David was watching Helen’s face with a half-smile. ‘Charlie’s a clever man,’ he said quietly. ‘I think you have something a bit special here.’

Helen nodded, her eyes still on Lily’s rapt self-absorbed beauty. ‘What d’you think, Lily?’

‘What a lark!’ Lily breathed adoringly at her reflection. ‘What a giddy lark.’

Chapter Four

There were shrieks and screams in the dressing room the next day when Lily took her cloche hat off her newly bobbed head but the girls were too busy with their own worries to interrogate her. The technical rehearsal in the morning went as badly as everyone expected. The backdrops and props had been kept to the bare essentials of a touring set which would be loaded and unloaded all along the south coast; but even so there was a problem with a quick change of scene which had to be done over and over again until the crew could do it quickly and noiselessly while the comedian told jokes in front of the curtains and the dancers raced down the stone steps backstage to their cramped dressing room to change their costumes.

‘I’ll break me bloody neck on these stairs,’ Madge cursed as she scurried down the steps in her silver high heels.

They worked through the dinner break, snacking on sandwiches and tea while William Brett, with infinite and weary patience, went through the lighting cues again. One of the stage lads went out and bought hot meat pies for everyone at three in the afternoon. Lily went to eat hers in the dressing room.

‘Not in here! Not in here!’ Susie screamed. ‘Mike’ll kill you if he sees you taking hot food into a dressing room.’

Lily froze on the threshold, backed rapidly into the corridor and demolished the pie in three giant bites. They took their dinner break at four.

‘Total run through at six o’clock. I want everyone here at five thirty,’ William said. ‘And we’ll run through as if for real. I’m not stopping for anything. We open tomorrow and I want to see it as for real. No changes, no accidents.’

They went out for their tea in a dismal group to Charlie’s café. Sylvia de Charmante, who had arrived that very day from London in a gentleman’s car and a cloud of apologies, came with them, and the drunken conjuror as well. Miss de Charmante was graciousness itself, promising the woman behind the counter a complimentary ticket to the show if she could make her a cup of tea just as she liked it. Charlie sat in his usual seat like a sardonic pixie and kept quiet.

‘D’you like my hair?’ Lily finally prompted him.

He nodded briefly. ‘It’s how I thought it would be.’

Lily waited for him to say something more but Charlie only drank his tea and smiled at her. ‘Scared?’ he asked finally.

‘Petrified!’ Lily said with a quavery laugh.

Charlie grinned. ‘You’ll do,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a bet running on it, Lily. I’ve got a guinea on you.’

Lily’s face lit up. ‘Have you?’

‘It’s time we went,’ Charlie said to everyone generally.

The conjuror extracted a silver hip flask from his pocket and splashed a measure of dark treacly rum into his tea cup. ‘Bloody Southsea,’ he said in his rich plummy voice. ‘My God, I hate the seaside.’

Lily watched him, fascinated, as he downed a mixture of cold tea and rum. ‘Do you?’ she asked.

He glanced at her with brief interest and looked away. ‘I just said so,’ he replied with massive dignity.

The chorus girls opened the show with a charleston number, then they changed into long gowns while the comic was on, and strolled in a slow languid walk from one side of the tiny stage to the other while Sylvia de Charmante sang her first song, a mournful ballad.

Two of the girls assisted Arnold the conjuror’s first appearance and came back to the dressing room giggling about his fumbling and Mr Brett’s silent white-faced anger in the front row. Then there was a juggling act – a brother and sister team who had arrived only that morning from Dover – and then the interval.

Lily was on after the opening song from the chorus. She took her choir boy gown to the ladies’ toilet. She did not want to change in front of the other girls and endure their ribaldry when she was already sick with nerves. She sat on the toilet with her cotton camiknickers rolled up and her fists pushed into her churning stomach.

‘Oh God,’ she said miserably.

She stood up and unwrapped the precious gown from its white sheet, then the snowy surplice and ruff. She had tried them on at home and she knew she could do the fastenings. But now her fingers were trembling with nerves and she could not hook the back at all. In the end she twisted the whole gown around and did most of the hooks in front and then pushed it around to the back. The surplice was just thrown over the gown and her mother had put a single popper on the starched ruff which Lily could see in the broken triangle of mirror shoved behind a water pipe on the wall. Her face was pale, even her lips were white.

‘Oh God,’ Lily said.

She could hear the dancers clattering up the steps to the stage and then she heard the thump of the orchestra for their number. Lily’s stomach suddenly contracted with nausea and she had to pull up her gown and undo her knickers again.

Nothing came but a trickle of urine. Lily wiped herself and pulled the chain. The cistern was slow to fill. It would not flush. Lily bundled the robe to one side and put both hands down to try to button her knickers. By the time she managed it her face was flushed and the gown crumpled. ‘Oh God, I look awful.’

At least her hair was perfect. Lily smoothed it flat again, pushed it just a little more off her face. She felt as if she had been waiting in the cold evil-smelling toilet for days and days.

She heard the SM’s boy coming up the stairs and his knock on the door. ‘You in there, Lily?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you sick?’

‘No.’

‘Three minutes.’

Lily turned to the mirror again, straightened the ruff, smoothed the surplice. She turned to the door with absolute reluctance. Suddenly she needed to pee again.

‘Oh God,’ Lily said miserably. ‘I can’t. I mustn’t! There isn’t time!’

She opened the door and peered out. There was no-one in the corridor. She tiptoed down the stairs and through the door to the wings of the stage. The girls were near the end of their number, banging out the beat. Lily went and stood behind the stage manager’s desk, trying to blend into the shadows. He glanced behind at the movement and then gave a double-take.

‘My God, you scared me to death. I thought you were a ghost. What the hell are you supposed to be?’

‘Choir boy.’

‘Charlie Smith must have gone off his head,’ the SM said bluntly. ‘Has Mr Brett seen you?’

‘Not yet.’

The man buried his face in his hands as if he could not stand the prospect.

‘You’re dead,’ he said. ‘We’re all dead. But you especially are dead and buried.’

‘I feel it,’ Lily said, quite without sarcasm. ‘I wish I was.’

The girls clattered to a standstill.

‘Applause applause,’ came the weary voice from the dark auditorium. ‘No announcement at all now. Lily comes straight on.’

The girls, clearing the stage, pushed past Lily as she stepped forward. She just heard Madge say, ‘Wait a minute, what’re you wearing?’ and then she was under the dazzling hot lights and she could see nothing but Charlie’s face and his raised hand, and a quick bright nod to her and the regular sweet notes of the start of ‘Jesu, Joy …’

Lily, her mouth dry and her throat so tight that she knew she would be mute for the rest of her life, stood still with her hands clasped before her and longed for a pee.

She opened her mouth on cue, knowing no sound would come, and then she heard, as if it were someone else singing, the sweet steady notes in their ordered simplicity. ‘Jes-u, joy (wait) of man’s desir-ing (wait wait wait) holy wis-dom, lo-ve most bright …’

‘Golly,’ Lily thought. ‘It’s all right.’ It was as if her own stage-fright had moved her to a place where she could feel neither nerves nor her own body. She sang clearly and simply and her ears could hear the rightness of the sounds, and even enjoy them, as if they were being sung by another girl. As if it were not Lily Pears, sick with fear, under a burning hot spotlight, with all the Palais Dancers crowded in the wings behind her, waiting to laugh.

She sang as she had been taught, simply and clearly, and held the last note. The final chords died away like ringing bells.

‘You win a guinea, Charlie. Very nice indeed. Applause, applause, weep, weep. Next,’ William said from the darkness.

Charlie threw a grin at Lily and the drum rolled.

‘Come off,’ the SM hissed behind her. ‘Come on! Clear the stage. You’ve had your moment of glory, duckie. It’s someone else now.’

Mesmerio the hypnotist, splendid in a black tie and tails, pushed past Lily and stepped on to the stage. Lily, still dazzled by the lights, stepped into the wings and went slowly down the stairs to the dressing room. The girls, silenced by a glower from the SM, went with her like a patrol with a prisoner in their midst.

‘Well!’ Madge said, outraged, as soon as the dressing room door was shut. ‘I never saw such a performance in my life!’

‘Pie!’

‘I thought she was sweet! You were sweet, Lily!’

‘She looked more like a boy than a girl!’

‘Charlie must be off his head!’

‘Too scared to hang around the dockyard more like!’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘I always thought Charlie Smith liked boys – now look what he’s done to Lily!’

Lily undid her ruff and pulled her surplice off over her head, hardly hearing them.

Helena undid the hooks of the gown for her. ‘They’re all crooked. You should have got someone to help you.’

‘I will tomorrow,’ Lily said vaguely.

‘Where did you learn to sing like that – proper singing?’

‘With my teacher.’ Lily felt a deep sleepy weariness, as if all the excitement and nervousness had drained out of her body, leaving her empty and exhausted. ‘I’ve had singing lessons since I was little.’

‘You ought to be a proper singer, opera or something.’

Lily smiled, shook her head. ‘I’m not good enough,’ she said.

She hung her gown with the surplice and the ruff on the hanger and then wrapped the sheet around them. Helena thrust her next costume towards her. It was a scarlet froth of tulle with a black tightly-laced boned bodice for the finale – a can-can. Lily stepped into it and Helena spun her around and did up the hooks at the back.

‘You all right? You’re very quiet.’

Lily’s little face was pale against the harsh cherry-red of the gown. ‘I’m fine.’

The boy knocked on the door. ‘Finale. Five minutes.’

There was a rush towards the mirror. Madge screamed for someone to do her up quick! and then the six of them burst out of the dressing room and clattered up the narrow stone steps to the wings.

Sylvia de Charmante was singing her final song. It was ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’. Lily – last of the line in the wings – leaned back against the cold wall and gritted her teeth. She hated the song. She hated all the war songs. She hated their sentimental lushness, she hated the stupidity of men whistling them as they marched to the Front. She had taken her father’s death as an act of folly, not heroism. Alone of all the kids in the street, Lily hated the war, and disliked and blamed Kitchener when everyone else worshipped him. Lily never knitted socks and balaclavas, she never joined a gang to collect scrap paper. A solitary rebel, she pretended that the war, which overshadowed her childhood and drained it of joy, did not exist.

‘Applause, applause, weep, weep. Very nice, Miss de Charmante,’ William said from the front row. ‘Now, Sylvia, step forward. Gauze down. Lights down. Can-can backdrop down. Sylvia, you’re still bowing, taking flowers. Then you walk slowly slowly slowly across the stage and you’re gone. And we should be ready … now.’

Absolutely nothing happened.

‘Mike!’ William said very quietly through his teeth.

The SM waved frantically to the stage hands. ‘Clear the stage, we’re going up!’ he hissed. ‘Go!’

The drummer gave a long exciting roll on the drums and Charlie at the piano with the trumpeter and the two violins burst into a spirited thumping rendition of the ‘Thunder and Lightning Polka’ – the traditional can-can music.

Lily, with Helena’s hand firmly clutching her boned waist, and her hand behind Helena’s back gripping Madge’s wrist, started marking the steps as the first girl on the stage – Susie – danced out sideways. Lily’s head went up; she loved the can-can. She grinned at the morose SM as she danced out under the hot lights, matching her kick to the others, then keeping the rhythm of the music with the low half-kicks as the line folded in on itself and Lily and Susie were face to face and then pairing off, dancing around, in pairs through the middle and into the line of the can-can again.

It was a short number. Can-can was spectacular, but exhausting. Charlie played it at the edge of safety – as fast as he dared. The girls’ screams as they kicked, or cartwheeled, or jumped into the splits, were screams of protest, not excitement. But Lily loved it. The relief at her song being over, her simple delight at being on stage and the absolute fun of the music and the dancing, and Charlie’s darkened face in the orchestra pit, kept her feet pounding on the stage. The final dance step and dive into the splits came too soon for her. Lily stayed in the splits, her head up, her face radiant.

‘Applause, applause, rapturous applause,’ William said miserably. ‘Walk down.’

The chorus girls stepped smartly up, walked forward in time to Charlie’s brisk march, took a bow and then fell back either side of the stage. In order of increasing importance the stars entered from the rear of the stage, strode forwards, took a bow and stepped to one side. Arnold the drunken magician stood in front of Lily and she could see nothing more than his back and his outflung hand inviting applause.

The curtain fell, throwing the stage into twilight. The cast formed themselves into two straight lines facing the curtain, waiting for it to rise again. They bowed. The curtain fell. The music reached a closing phrase and stopped.

It was as if the strings of puppets had been snapped. All the smiles were switched off and everybody slumped, ostentatiously weary.

‘That fool on the light had me in blue,’ Sylvia de Charmante exclaimed.

‘Darling girl, if you don’t hold your basket steady I’ll be taking ribbons off your tits, not out of your basket,’ Arnold said to Madge. ‘I can’t run around the stage after you.’

‘We were too bunched up in the can-can,’ Helena complained. ‘I was squashed in the middle.’

‘I can’t spread out any more,’ Susie replied. ‘I was half in the wings as it was.’

The curtains rose slowly, as if to signal this was work, not performance.

‘Get changed and then out here for notes in five minutes,’ William said. ‘All of you. Five minutes only.’

Lily looked towards the orchestra pit to Charlie. He was checking his sheet music and did not look up.

‘Come on, Lily,’ said one of the girls. ‘We’ve only got five minutes.’

The ‘notes’ were William’s final chance to make corrections. He had a sheaf of papers in his hand. The stars he spoke to individually. Sylvia de Charmante was soothed and complimented until she consented to sit down and listen to the general comments. She even agreed to speed up ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’.