I woke to screaming, not sure where I was or what was happening. I was still trying to unscramble my wits when a tiny figure burst into my room and stood, sobbing, on the mat in her bare feet.
“Monsieur Art’ur! Monsieur Art’ur!”
It was Amélie, the thirteen-year-old première danseuse from the Folies, who was staying with her mother and sister in our hotel.
“It is Monsieur Charles! He is…” Here she broke off, choked with emotion. “Dead!”
There is an undeniable frisson of excitement when you think you might have killed someone with the power of your bare hands. A moment of raw masculinity, something like that. And France, as a nation, and as a legal system, recognised the crime of passion as a legitimate defence, so I might even have got away with it.
I had the grandmother and grandfather of all headaches, though whether this was from the drink or from being run into a wall like a bull I wasn’t sure. I lurched up into a half-sitting position, and grunted: “Dead?”
I just about managed to focus my eyes on little Amélie, who was looking at me, appalled, as though horror was piling upon horror. Her hands flew to her mouth, and then she filled her lungs and let out another almighty scream as she fled.
I got myself to the basin, which seemed to be full of pink water, like some sort of medicine. I splashed my face with the stuff and it got even pinker. Aha… That would be blood then. I then caught sight of myself in the shaving mirror and realised why Amélie had run for her life. I looked like an ogre, battered, swollen and bloody, with a fat lip, one eye half closed and a lump like a goose egg on my forehead.
I grunted, and shambled my aching carcass into the next room to check on Chaplin.
I could see – actually any fool could have seen – his chest rising and falling, but he’d taken such a battering that all the screaming and palaver hadn’t woken him up, and there was blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. I gave a little harrumph of satisfaction.
As I shuffled across the corridor I passed little Amélie cowering in the corridor.
“He’sh not dead, more’sh the piddy…” I snarled, then went back to bed.
Of course, we’d kicked off at the restaurant. Tilly stood up, and I met her halfway across the room.
“Tilly?” I said, still not wholly believing my eyes.
“Hullo, Arthur,” she said, keeping hers downcast. “I’d better … you know…” She hurried over to answer Mistinguett’s summons.
“Well?” I said, turning to confront Charlie. “What have you got to say for yourself?”
“I really haven’t done anything wrong, have I?” he bleated shiftily.
“Haven’t done anything wrong?” I shouted. “You know, you know, that I have been looking everywhere, trying everything I know for a year to try and find Tilly, and now here I find you blithely sitting here having a secret romantic dinner with her as though it was nothing!”
“Listen, I couldn’t tell you, could I? She asked me not to.”
Maurice was putting two and two together. “Mathilde? Mathilde is the girl? Oh là là…!” Apparently French people do actually say that when surprised.
“That’s right!” I bellowed, “and this little weasel has been sneaking around with her behind my back!”
I grabbed a fistful of his shirt front and pulled him up onto his feet to oblige him to face me like a man. I planted myself foursquare, feeling the need, I must admit, to keep my balance against the effects of the celebration, and gathered myself to deliver Retribution with a capital R.
The room gasped as I swung my fist at Chaplin, who ducked, lightning fast, and then scurried away on all fours between my feet and stood up behind me. The indignity of it! I lumbered round to confront him again, swung my fist at his head, and he did the same thing again, popping up behind me like a jack-in-the-box.
Now the whole restaurant seemed to be laughing and cheering, which only enraged me more. I was trying to kill him, and the little bastard was scoring laughs off me!
It was too much. I gave up on the haymakers and jabbed my fist forwards at his face, trying to slow him down. He swayed left, making me miss, and then swayed right, and I missed again. I drove another big punch at his chin and he disappeared between my feet once more. This time when he popped up behind me he kicked me up the backside.
Hoots of laughter were ringing round the restaurant now, and I changed tactics, my cheeks burning with embarrassment. I decided to give chase, and Charlie dodged away around one large round table and then another. We found ourselves suddenly facing each other across a smaller empty table. He feinted one way, and I matched him. He made to go the other way, and I blocked. He went one way and then the other, and I mirrored his moves, and then grasped the table and hurled it aside to grab him in a bear hug. He turned to flee, but wasn’t fast enough, and I managed to grab hold of him from behind, pinning his arms.
Before I could work out what to do next, though, Charlie ran up the white-shirted barrel chest of a fat gentleman sitting at the table opposite – yes, ran up him – and twisted out of my grasp, so that he was now horizontal, with his feet on the fellow’s shoulders either side of his pop-eyed gasping red head, and his hands on mine. On the way up his feet kicked over a large plate of mussels, which went flying down the cleavage of the fat gentleman’s wife, and everyone at their table screamed. Charlie and I were momentarily face to face. He planted a kiss on the end of my nose and sprang to freedom.
I roared incoherently with rage, but all of a sudden I couldn’t move. Strong hands had taken hold of my arms and legs, and I suddenly found myself being carried bodily out into the street by four burly waiters, with applause inexplicably ringing in my ears. As they shoved me roughly through the glass doors and dumped me onto the pavement, I saw to my satisfaction that Charlie was being similarly dumped some six feet away, and prepared myself to continue hostilities right away. However, Maurice had followed us out and barred my way, while Ernie had hold of Charlie, who otherwise, I think, might have just bolted into the night.
“Non, my friend!” Maurice urged. “You must not fight in the street, it will be a night in prison for both of you.”
I saw the sense in his argument, particularly as two gendarmes were at that very moment eyeing us suspiciously from across the boulevard.
“He’s right,” Ernie said, although Charlie needed little persuading to back down. He wasn’t expecting what Ernie said next, though. “We’ll settle this back at the hotel, come on. Queensberry Rules, like Englishmen.”
Ernie, of course, had been a prize fighter in his time. He was only a lightweight, but he was certainly imposing enough to bend Charlie to his will, and I was mustard keen. Maurice waved and blew a kiss through the picture window at Mistinguett, who was peering out into the night, and by her side I saw Tilly, also watching, her expression unreadable.
At the hotel we went straight up to Ernie’s room. He made us take off our shoes so as not to disturb people in other rooms, and Charlie and I stripped down to shirtsleeves and braces. Ernie stood between us, a hand on each of our chests, and said: “Right, let’s do this thing. No kicking, no gouging, and hands off the family jewels. You get me?”
We nodded, tensed, and Maurice began to snigger. We glared at him.
“I’m sorry,” he giggled. “It is all so … noble!”
Now that he couldn’t back out of it Charlie was as ready for battle as I was, and when Ernie stepped back he came at me, landing a couple of light blows to the sides of my head, which I swatted away derisively. I thumped him on the chest, which took some of the wind out of him, and then we went at it in earnest.
Charlie danced around on his toes to begin with, trying to stay out of my reach. There were none of the crowd-pleasing comedy antics he’d employed in the restaurant, apart from one occasion when I rushed him, trying to get to grips, and he sidestepped so that I ran headfirst into a wall. I gave him a ringing thump on the ear, which slowed him down a bit, then he tried to brain me with a chair, but Ernie pinned his arms by his sides and gave him a stern talking to, which I’m not sure he could hear, on account of the ringing.
Finally I caught Chaplin with a big flailing open-hand slap which rattled his jaw and echoed off the bare walls like a gunshot ricochet. He stepped back and put his hands up, then began to feel in his mouth for loosened teeth. There was blood on his fingers, and I think he had bitten his tongue. I waited, poised to finish him off.
“C’est fini!” Maurice cried, and led me to the far side of the room. I was too tired to protest. I looked up and saw that there was blood on the wall and on the ceiling.
And the next thing I remember is that silly girl screaming and waking me up.
In his autobiography, by the way, if you care to take a look at his account of the month we spent in Paris, you will find that Charlie says he had this fight with Ernie Stone. I suppose this is so he doesn’t have to mention me, or the fact that he was entirely in the wrong and deserved everything he got. It also makes him sound like a tough little scrapper, doesn’t it, to have fought an ex-professional boxer to a standstill. We can’t both be right, can we?
I didn’t speak with Tilly for several days, even though I now knew where she was and how to find her. Partly I wanted to wait until I was at least presentable, having received absolute proof that my face was capable of scaring children, and partly I was cross with her for not making herself known to me.
I saw her, though, now I knew to look for her. In fact I could hardly believe I’d managed to miss her. It was the dark hair that had thrown me, as all my daydreaming (and night-dreaming, for that matter) of her had recalled her lovely fair locks. But there she was, not only one of Mistinguett’s chorus, wearing very little, this fact concealed artfully behind a pair of giant feather fans, but also as a shocked hotel maid trying to keep vases and glasses from crashing to the floor as La Valse Renversante whirled on its merry way. I took every opportunity to watch her in action, but couldn’t quite bring myself to approach her backstage.
I didn’t speak to Chaplin either, and he didn’t speak to me. I wasn’t interested in his self-justifying wheedling, and in any case his mouth was so sore that he couldn’t have spoken even if he’d tried to. The Drunken Swell appeared even more drunken than usual, while much of the change to the Magician’s appearance was fortuitously masked by his moustache.
On the last night of our month in Paris, with the prospect of the boat train for Calais first thing in the morning, I finally decided that it was time. After our last performance of Mumming Birds I dodged my share of the packing up and slipped around front of house to watch the second half of the bill, which contained Tilly’s appearances, and then I went backstage.
I determinedly checked every crack and crevice of all the dressing rooms, much to the flirty glee of the Folies Bergère dancers, but Tilly was nowhere to be seen. At last Maurice beckoned me into his room. Mistinguett was there, and the two of them were drinking champagne.
“Join us, mon ami,” Maurice said, looking for another glass. “We must cheer you on your way, eh?”
“Thanks,” I said, “but I was looking for Tilly. Mathilde, I mean.”
Maurice turned to Mistinguett, and they began an animated exchange in French which I couldn’t follow. He was protesting about something and she was forbidding him to do something, if I understood the pantomime correctly.
“She… … um … Mathilde is doing something for Mistinguett, and Mistinguett is doing something for Mathilde. An admirer, you see, and they have left together already. I am sorry.”
“Where have they gone?”
“I cannot tell you, I am sorry. She will not allow it. She has high hopes for Mathilde and this nobleman, he is a Count from Prussia, it could be a very advantageous match.” He shrugged his apologies. “Have some champagne with us, my friend, and let us talk of other things.”
I reeled out into the corridor again and stumbled towards the stairs. Before I could make it out into the evening air, however, there was a little whistle from behind me, and suddenly Maurice was by my side.
“L’escargot d’Or,” he whispered. “Rue de Rivoli. Bonne chance, mon ami, et vive l’amour!” Then he embraced me, kissed me on both cheeks, and trotted back to his room. I mentioned he was French, didn’t I?
Shortly afterwards I managed to locate the restaurant where Tilly was apparently having a late supper with some continental nob. L’escargot d’Or had a large front window and the brightly lit tables could clearly be seen from the street. I spotted a good vantage point from which to look in, behind a sort of cylindrical wrought-iron installation, so I loafed there and tried not to look too suspicious. I spotted Tilly quickly enough, at a table with two military gents in fancy blue uniforms – not quite as fancy as King Alfonso’s, but still – and another girl. I realised I had nothing, no plan of any kind. I fantasised briefly about making a scene and starting a fight, but even though it was my own fantasy the two foreign soldiers gave me a good sound beating.
Through the window I saw the Prussian count take Tilly’s hand and bring it to his lips, paying her a compliment of some kind, and she laughed. I remembered that laugh. I hadn’t heard it for a year. A steady reeking trickle of steaming liquid suddenly began to run under and over and into my shoes. Suddenly the gulf that had grown between Tilly and me was brutally apparent. She was being wined and dined by the aristocracy in a fancy restaurant, while I was outside in the cold, hiding behind a pissoir.
A Frenchman emerged, adjusting his clothing, and gave me a quizzical look, and I found myself walking away with my regrets, one of which was definitely choosing that hiding place. As I walked and walked it came to me that spending this last evening watching her from afar was maybe all I had left of my dream of us ever being together again, so I turned myself round and headed back up the boulevard.
And not a moment too soon, either, because as I made it back within sight of L’escargot d’Or, there was Tilly and the Prussian on the pavement outside. A moment later a carriage hoved into the picture (closed, with a fancy crest on the side, a bit like the one the Guv’nor had off the Duke of Chatsworth). It stopped alongside, and the driver jumped smartly down, saluted his highness and held the door open as Tilly stepped inside.
I froze, horror-struck, thinking that this might actually turn out to be the last glimpse I ever got of her. Then, to my surprise, the nobleman closed the door to the carriage while still standing there on the pavement, took Tilly’s hand (through the open window) and kissed it, saluted, nodded curtly to the driver, turned smartly on his heel and went back into the restaurant.
I watched the carriage go, carrying Tilly out of my life. Then, with a mind of their own almost, my feet began to stride after it, faster and faster, until I was fairly pelting along. I dodged in and out, weaving through the late-night promenaders, until up ahead the carriage slowed to take a corner across me into a narrow street. If I’d carried on running I’d have flattened myself against the side of it. Quickly I grabbed the handle, wrenched the door open and flung myself inside.
“Arthur!” Tilly squealed. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Bit of excitement for a Saturday night,” I said, sitting down heavily on a plush leather banquette opposite her, gasping for breath.
“Get out, for goodness’ sake!” Tilly hissed. “This is Count Adalbert’s personal carriage! If he finds out you were in here molesting me I don’t know what he’ll do. Challenge you to pistols at dawn, most likely.”
“Who’s going to tell him?” I said. Tilly agitatedly indicated the driver, and I shook my head. “He didn’t see me.”
“He will, though, when we stop, and he escorts me to the front door! Whatever were you thinking of?”
“I wanted to talk to you,” I said, trying to keep a bleating tone out of my voice. “We’re leaving in the morning.”
“Well, you had all week to talk to me, didn’t you, or were you too busy knocking poor Charlie’s teeth out?”
“Poor Charlie, is it?”
“What’s that supposed to…?” she started crossly, but then our conveyance slowed and turned into a drive. “Oh God, we’re nearly there, this is it. Come here, come here…!”
Tilly slid sideways along the seat, urging me to do the same, and as the carriage came to a halt she waited with her hand poised on the door handle. As soon as she heard the driver clamber down from his perch on the one side she wrenched the door open and shoved me out the other. The carriage was thus between me and the flunkey, and he was none the wiser. Neatly done. I peeked around the back wheel and watched him gallantly guide Tilly up the steps to a pleasantly appointed town house with lights still burning inside. As she disappeared inside, the driver bowed from the waist, and then as he snapped back upright he clicked his heels with a crack, not unlike the noise Little Tich’s wooden clackers used to make, before hopping back up to his seat and clip-clopping away.
Ten minutes later the front door opened just for a heartbeat, and a small figure slipped out. She skipped quickly down the steps, peering around from side to side into the ornamental bushes, until I stepped out.
“There you are,” Tilly said. “Let’s walk, come on.” She slipped her arm in mine and we headed off along the wide, tree-lined boulevard. Even though the hour was late, there were still several couples strolling along in the lamplight. It seemed to be quite the done thing.
There was so much to say that I couldn’t quite summon up what should be first. The silence stretched on for an achingly long time, until I heard myself uttering the following timelessly charming and witty opening gambit: “I like your hair.”
“What?” Tilly said, turning to look at me, and as she did so I saw for the first time that the hair tumbling down beneath her hat was actually the gold colour I remembered. “Oh yes, that wig. I just had to take it off. Such a relief! Mistinguett likes all her girls to be dark, you see. We are not really people, we are scenery.”
“How did you come to be with her?”
“Do you know it was straight after, you know, the end of that Karno thing – well, the end for me, anyhow…” She shot me a sharp look and I felt a surge of something acid in the pit of my stomach. “What was that, a year ago? I came to London, without an idea what I was to do, and my dancer friend Angeline – you remember her? Pale thing, puked up on the Wontdetainia? She was coming to France and said why didn’t I come too, so I did, and we started dancing at the Folies. I say dancing, it was posing, really, assuming alluring postures.”
She let go of my arm and demonstrated some of these, which made me smile, mostly with relief that we were starting to relax together.
“Then Mistinguett asked me to join her troupe, and that’s been me ever since. She’s lovely, although she does treat me rather like you would a pet. And you? Charlie seems to think you’re still Karno’s blue-eyed boy.”
“Does he?”
“Oh yes, I’ve been listening to him going on and on about how he could be the next number one to lead a company, just as long as it isn’t you, and how he has such and such a thing in his favour, and you have so and so. I like him, but he will talk about himself, that boy.”
“Did he not tell you I’ve been looking for you?”
“Have you? No, he didn’t mention that.”
“Why didn’t you say something when you realised I was at the Folies?”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I didn’t recognise you, did I?”
We turned a corner and found that we had walked to the Champs Élysées. Neither of us wanted to turn back, so we kept on walking towards the Arc de Triomphe.
“I wrote, you know? Over and over. Then I went to your address and your landlady gave me my own letters back to give to you if I saw you. I even went to Southend.”
“You never did!” she gasped.
“I did. I met your mother and father. I saw your father’s theatre. On the beach…?”
Tilly nodded slowly, acknowledging the demise of that little fabrication of hers.
“I met your sister, too.”
She stopped, and turned to face me. “Well then, you know what Fate had in store for me if I’d stayed there. A screaming brat on each arm and another on the way.”
“Not to mention a thriving ironmongery.”
She laughed. “They really didn’t keep any of my secrets, did they? Well, things are different now. Dear Mistinguett plans to marry me off to a Prussian Count who wants to whisk me off to the Hohenzollern, whatever that is.”
“Is that what you want?”
“Well, a girl could do worse, it seems to me. Than becoming a countess, I mean.”
“I see.”
“I feigned exhaustion tonight to get away early. Keeping him keen, you see.”
We strolled along in companionable silence, but inside I was churning away madly, trying to think, think, think how to bring up the matter that was eating me up.
Eventually the pavements began to seem emptier, and we were no longer walking past all-night cafés and bars, but shops and business premises closed up for the night.
“We should turn back,” Tilly said. She stopped, obliging me to circle her so we could retrace our steps. Now or never, I thought.
“Listen,” I said, my heart in my mouth. “That time, when we were married, remember?”
“Of course I remember. I don’t pretend to be married to all the fellows, you know.”
“Not a day goes by that I don’t wish I’d said something, or done something, different.”
She disengaged her arm from mine and walked ahead.
“You made your choice. It was me or Karno, simple as that. And you chose Karno.”
“It wasn’t as simple as that. We hardly even talked about it…”
“I was ready, you know, to throw in my lot with you,” she said softly.
“Do it then! Do it now! I’ll chuck Karno and we’ll make an act together, you and me!”
“What act, what do you mean?”
“I don’t know, we’ll think of something! It doesn’t matter what it is, we’ll make it work, and we’ll be together. That’s the important thing.”
She turned to face me, there in the street. Tears were glistening in her eyes but she wasn’t crying.
“And then what? Every time you saw a Karno company on the bill, or heard someone say how well Charlie was doing now, it would be my fault, wouldn’t it? My fault for making you choose me.”
“I want to choose you, I should have chosen you, I would always choose you,” I said fervently. “Always and only!”
I held my breath, as if I realised suddenly that the whole future course of my life, and hers, could be decided by what she said next.
“Well, that was then, wasn’t it?” she said finally. “I’ve got a life here now. A different life. With Mistinguett and Count Adalbert of Prussia.”
She put her arm in mine again, and we walked along together. I tried to think of something else I could say, but nothing came, and in any event I was choking. In no time, seemingly, we reached the house where she was staying and it was time to say goodnight.
I found a stub of pencil in my pocket, scribbled the Streatham address on a scrap of paper and gave it to her.
“Send me a postcard from the Hohenzollern,” I managed to croak out.
She reached up and put her hands on my shoulders, then gave me a quick peck on each cheek. Very French, I thought. Very sisterly.
“Take care of yourself, Arthur Dandoe,” she said, and then skipped lightly up the steps to the front door.
I turned and walked until I recognised where I was and eventually found myself back at the hotel where I was staying for what little was left of one more night only. It took hours and hours, but I didn’t really care. I didn’t really see the point of anything any more.