New Year’s Eve, and here he was spending it so very far away from his family and those who meant most to him, John thought as he battled with the bow tie he was attempting to knot, having refused the assistance of Alfred’s valet.
No, it still wasn’t right. Impatiently he pulled the crumpled fabric from his neck and breathed out heavily. He wasn’t looking forward to this evening, and to judge from her behaviour earlier in the day neither was Polly, although Alfred had complained that she had been the one who had insisted he must hold a New Year’s Eve dance.
This Christmas had been so different from the others he had known; the Christmases of his childhood in the cosy parlour above his father’s butcher’s shop. Life had seemed so safe and happy then. But then there had been those frightening years after his mother’s death, when he and his siblings had been parted from one another, followed by his reunion with Ellie, then a young widow who had voluntarily taken on the responsibility for Hettie.
John smiled to himself, remembering the sharp pang of emotion he had felt the very first time Hettie had imperiously held out her baby arms to him. She had been a child of three, and he had been a boy scarcely a decade older.
And she had continued to tug on his heart in the years that had followed. First as the little girl who followed him around adoringly, but more recently as a young woman who aroused within him the feelings of a man rather than those of a friend.
He could still remember how confused and shocked he had felt last Christmas when Hettie, newly grown up, had appeared at the Christmas morning church service dressed as a young woman and not a child.
How she had pouted and looked cross when he had refused to kiss her beneath the mistletoe, and his heart had ached with longing to sweep her into his arms somewhere private so that he could kiss those sweet cherry-red pouting lips. He had gone home that night to daydream about the future and his ring on Hettie’s slender finger. But Hettie had had her own dreams and they had not included him.
The noise of the dinner bell broke into his thoughts. He looked at his reflection in the mirror. The tie still looked slightly lopsided, but he could not delay any longer. Putting on his jacket, he opened his bedroom door and stepped out on to the landing.
‘Oh John, goodness, what has Bates done to your tie?’ he heard Polly exclaiming as she hurried towards him. ‘Alfie really ought to retire him. His eyesight is terrible…’
‘I fastened it myself,’ John told her stiffly, but instead of looking embarrassed Polly laughed.
‘Oh, did you? No wonder then. Daddy always used to say that no gentleman should ever be able to make a decent bow tie because that was why one had a valet.’
‘Well, the reason I can’t tie one is because where I come from no one wears them,’ John told her sharply.
He had already overheard Alfred’s great-aunt commenting to her daughter that she could not understand why Alfred had befriended ‘a person so obviously from the lower classes’, and he was grimly conscious of his own flat working class northern accent – and equally grimly determined that nothing and no one was going to make him feel ashamed of either his background or his upbringing.
‘Oh John, I’m sorry. Please don’t be cross with me. You’re the only person who makes being here bearable.’ Polly had stepped up to him as she was speaking and before John could stop her she reached out and quickly unfastened his bow tie.
Automatically John pulled back from her, but she shook her head and told him firmly, ‘Keep still, silly, otherwise I’ll never be able to fasten it properly for you. Ollie taught me how,’ she added softly.
‘Alfie, why have you turned off the gramophone?’ Polly protested breathlessly. ‘I still want to dance.’
‘It’s almost midnight, Polly, and Bates will be waiting to First Foot us. Besides, I rather think that some of our guests have been shocked enough for one evening. Let’s put on the wireless so that we can hear Big Ben chime in the new year.’
‘Why are they shocked?’ Polly demanded as she pouted at her brother. ‘Because of the way I was dancing? Oh pooh! Old fuddy duddies. Who cares about them? John, I want you to promise me that you will be my first dancing partner of the new year,’ she insisted, turning towards John and reaching for his hand.
Her face was over flushed and her eyes were over bright, and John could well understand why Alfred had felt compelled to warn her that she was shocking his elderly guests. But at the same time John could not help but feel sympathetic towards her. She was so plainly unhappy and so obviously still grieving for the man she had loved.
‘And so as Big Ben begins to signal the arrival of the new year…’
The wireless crackled and then, as clearly as though they had actually been there, the room was filled by the sound of Big Ben striking the hour of midnight.
Everyone began to cheer, the ladies, led by Polly, taking the initiative and kissing the men.
‘I’ve saved you until last, John,’ Polly whispered to him as she stretched up on her toes and boldly kissed his mouth.
To his shame, John felt his body respond to her closeness, and even more shamefully he knew from the look she gave him that Polly was equally aware of the effect she had had on him.
The guests, led by Alfred, streamed out into the hallway to welcome in Bates and the new year.
‘A toast,’ someone cried out as glasses were filled with foaming champagne and passed from hand to hand.
‘A toast of the new year and to the future…’
‘I want to make a toast.’
Everyone turned to look at Polly, who was standing on the larger hall table, swaying slightly, a glass of champagne in her hand, her short beaded frock revealing her slenderness.
‘I say, Polly, come down off there, there’s a good girl,’ Alfie began worriedly, but Polly shook her head.
‘No. Not yet. Come on, everyone. Lift your glasses with me so that we can toast those who are no longer with us to toast themselves. All those gallant, doomed, dead young men who will never taste champagne again, never dance again, never kiss again. They were the best of us all and now they’re gone. We’re a doomed generation, all of us. They were doomed to die and we are doomed to live on without them until…’
John could hear the shocked uneasy whispers of the other guests. A female guest sobbed and a man close to him muttered, ‘Bad form, what?’
‘Raise your glasses everyone!’
There was a swift indrawing of shocked breath as Polly lifted hers and then, instead of drinking from it, flung it at the fireplace before collapsing on to the table, sobbing wildly.
‘Every seat in the house has been sold!’
‘Don’t tell me that, Babs, you’re making me even more nervous than I was,’ Hettie protested feverishly as she dabbed powder on her flushed cheeks.
‘I’ll lay odds that Jay Dalhousie has given away half of them seats just to get bums on ’em,’ Mary pronounced wisely. Especially wi’ every bloody critic in London already saying as how no American can possibly know how to put on a decent show in London.’
‘’Oo cares whose bums are in them seats,’ Jenny broke in, ‘just so long as they keep ’em there? Do you remember that panto we was in, our kid, when half the audience walked out before the end of the first act and then the rest followed them during the second?’
‘Yes. All apart from that bloody kid who stood up and started pitching rotten tomatoes at us,’ her sister recalled.
Antagonistic critics, audiences who walked out, people throwing rotten food at them…Hettie shuddered with dread. She couldn’t remember a single word of any of her songs, never mind a full line, and she had had nightmares last night in which Madame had suddenly reappeared and insisted that she was going to have to dance a ballet.
‘Five minutes,’ a young runner announced, banging on the dressing room door.
‘At least we’ve got decent costumes.’
‘You may call ’em decent, Mary, but I calls them positively indecent,’ Babs contradicted firmly. ‘And I don’t care if Mr Cochran does dress his bloody “young ladies” in the same sort of style!’
‘The reviewers should like them, then.’ Jenny winked.
‘Break a leg, ’Ettie,’ Babs whispered as the chorus girls headed for the door in a flurry of sequins, high heels and feathers. ‘You’ll do all right, don’t you worry about that.’
The chorus had reached the end of their first number, the male lead and the male comic were singing their opening songs, and soon it would be her turn.
Hettie took a deep breath. She wasn’t Hettie any more, she was a young Japanese Princess…
‘Go on, ’Ettie! It’s you wot they’re yelling for.’
Eager hands pushed her back on to the stage.
The audience was on its collective feet, calling out for Princess Mimi. The noise was like no other Hettie had ever heard. It rolled round the theatre and bounced off its walls, making the whole stage shake. Or was she the one who was shaking as she listened to the whistles, the stamping of feet, the shouts of approval and excitement?
The cast had already taken more than a dozen curtain calls, and now the audience was calling for her. Somehow she managed to make a small formal Japanese bow, and then get back to the wings.
‘Hettie, Hettie, you little wonder, you’ve stolen their hearts and the show. The critics are in raptures.’ Jay was standing there waiting for her, grinning from ear to ear with delight.
Hettie gasped as he took hold of her and lifted her off her feet, whirling her around. Jay was holding her so tightly that she could smell the hot male scent of his triumphant excitement. He kissed her – on the cheek and then on her mouth. Dizzily, Hettie looked up at him. She heard him groan her name and then he was kissing her again, a shockingly fierce passionate kiss, she acknowledged giddily as her heart started to beat even faster and all she could do was gaze up into his eyes, as though she were spellbound to him.
‘I’ve got to go,’ he whispered to her. ‘The press are waiting for me at the Ritz. But I haven’t forgotten about our dinner…’
‘Where’s Mary?’
After Jay had left, the director announced that Jay had told him to take the whole cast to a famous local chop house for a late celebratory supper, at Jay’s expense. So as soon as they had changed out of their costumes and cleaned off their stage make-up, they headed there, ravenously hungry now the ordeal of the First Night was over. They were high on success, adrenalin and youthful excitement.
Talking and laughing, her friends swept Hettie along with them, insisting that, from now on, she was going to be their good luck mascot; and insisting, too, on telling the chop house owner and everyone else who would listen that Hettie was going to be London’s new female star.
Then a group of diners who had seen the show got up and started to clap and cheer as word got round as to who they were. Drinks were sent to their table, and glasses raised to them, and it was only now as the initial euphoria started to wear off that Hettie realised that Mary wasn’t with them.
‘Mary? She’s probably having dinner with that chap who sent a message from the stage door saying as how he wanted to tek her out,’ Jenny announced.
‘A right posh toff he is too, by the sound of it. Sent up his card, he did, and he’s only a lord, if you please.’
‘How come she gets to have dinner with a lord?’ Sukey asked sulkily, suddenly pushing away her meal.
‘Gawd, Sukey, what’s up with you now?’ Babs demanded.
Jenny nudged Babs and muttered, ‘You know what’s up wi’ her, Babs. It’s them pills she’s tekkin.’
Hettie let the excited chatter flow around her. She still could not believe that it had actually happened and that Princess Mimi had won the hearts of the audience, and, even more importantly, at least according to Babs, the much harder hearts of the critics as well.
Someone had ordered champagne and Hettie’s face burned bright red when the director stood up and toasted her.
Not that everyone was as pleased about her success.
‘She won’t last, of course,’ Hettie heard the female lead saying pointedly as she gave Hettie a cold look. ‘Her kind never does. They get too typecast. Of course, one only has to look at her to see why she got the part…’
‘Tek no notice, ’Ettie,’ Babs told her. ‘she’s just a spiteful old cat wot’s jealous of you.’
‘’Ere, waiter, we needs another bottle of champagne,’ Jenny declared grabbing hold of a passing waiter. ‘Gawd, but this stuff gets up yer nose a bit. Can’t say as ow I can see what posh folks see in it, meself.’
‘I’ve heard as how it doesn’t give yer a bad head in the morning,’ Aggie informed her knowledgeably.
They were all in such high spirits that Hettie wasn’t totally surprised when several of the chorus girls, egged on by the others, got up and did an impromptu can-can, much to the delight of the goggling waiters and the other male diners.
‘Common. That’s what they are,’ Hettie heard the leading actress sniff disparagingly.
‘Like she didn’t come up from the chorus herself and on her back by all accounts,’ Aggie said wickedly with a knowing wink.
Further up the table Hettie could see the director and the other actors, but although she looked for him Hettie couldn’t see Eddie anywhere.
Everyone else at the table was enjoying themselves, and of course she was thrilled and excited that the play and she herself had been so well accepted. How could she not be? But there was still a place inside her that felt empty and cold, a place that yearned for the warmth of Ellie’s voice and Ellie’s love; a place that longed for her family to be here with her to share in her success. Sharp tears pricked at her eyeballs.
It had been a dank, damp day, too wet even to go out shooting, as Alfred had complained irritably over breakfast; a day that John was only too glad to see coming to an end. He had hinted to Alfred that maybe he should take his leave of the household and get back to work, but his patron had insisted that he wanted him to stay.
Polly had not come down for breakfast, which, to judge from the tight-mouthed expressions of her female relatives, John suspected had been a wise move on her part. Nothing had been said about the events of the previous evening, but a strong odour of disapproval emanated from the other ladies, whilst Alfred was still plainly embarrassed and put out of sorts by his sister’s behaviour.
There had been plenty of people the previous evening willing to suggest that Polly had had too much to drink, and it had been with a sinking heart that John had been obliged to listen to Alfred confiding to him how concerned he was about his sister, knowing that he could not offer him any comfort.
He had not seen Polly at all during the day, but she had come down for dinner, albeit looking wan and vulnerable. During the meal she had been uncharacteristically quiet, contributing nothing to the dinner table conversation and barely touching her food. John had witnessed, though, how her hands had been shaking so much that she had needed both of them in order to hold the glass of water that was all that she had had to drink.
‘I suppose you’re all waiting for me to apologise for last night,’ she had remarked at the end of the meal. ‘Well, I shall not do so. I shall never apologise for believing that the best of all of us are gone, taken from us for ever. But I do apologise to you, dearest Alfie, if I embarrassed you, for you are the best of all brothers, and you do not deserve to have such a wretched burden of a sister.’ She had smiled tearfully at him and then got up and left the room.
‘Well!’ her great-aunt had fumed. ‘I had heard that modern young people were lacking in manners, but I had not expected to see evidence of it with my very own eyes and from a member of my own family. Alfred, your father would never have countenanced such behaviour. If you want my opinion, it is your mother who is to blame for your sister’s shocking behaviour.’
‘I say, Aunt,’ Alfred had objected. ‘Mother died when Polly was still in the nursery.’
‘Exactly! Had she lived she would have seen to it that Polly was brought up under a far stricter regime. It is a mother’s duty to prepare her daughters for their role in society, not a father’s, and I shall not have a word said against my nephew, your dear father, on that head.’
The ladies had all retired to their beds over an hour ago and now, as he made his way upstairs to his, John acknowledged that he was looking forward to returning to his normal life.
He opened his bedroom door and stepped inside the room, closing the door behind him, and then froze in disbelief. There, in the middle of his bed, lying on her side with her head propped up by her arm – her naked arm, John couldn’t help but notice – was Polly.
‘John, at last! I’ve been waiting for you for ever,’ she reproached him. ‘And I’ve drunk all the gin,’ she added sorrowfully.
‘Polly, Lady Polly,’ John corrected himself firmly. ‘This is not…’
‘John, please don’t send me away. Please let me stay. I can’t bear to be alone tonight.’ Tears filled her eyes. ‘It was New Year’s night when Ollie proposed to me…’
John felt his heart contract in pain for her. ‘I do understand, but you must know that you can’t stay here,’ he said to her gently. But as he approached the bed he could smell the gin. The bottle beside the bed was empty and he wondered how much she had actually drunk.
‘All I want is to be with someone…To be held and kept safe from my own dark places. You have no idea how much they torment me, John.’ She shivered and the bedclothes slid away from her body. John was relieved to see that she was actually wearing a pair of silk pyjamas.
‘Is that really too much to ask?’ she asked tearfully. ‘You have no idea how much I hurt here inside, John. Please, please let me stay. Just for tonight, that’s all.’
It was unthinkable that he should agree, but how could he make her leave?
As though she sensed his dilemma, Polly looked up at him pleadingly. ‘Please don’t deny me this, John. Please don’t. I promise you that all I want from you is the comfort of a brother and a friend…You do believe me, don’t you?’ she demanded emotionally. ‘Tell me that you do?’
‘Yes. Of course I do.’ John tried to calm her.
She was sitting up in his bed now, her knees drawn up under her chin and her arms wrapped around them. She looked as young and innocent as a child, but if she were to be discovered in his room no one would believe either of them to be innocent.
‘I want so much to sleep’ she told him pathetically. ‘I wish I could go to sleep and never wake up again.’ She laughed mirthlessly. ‘But God will not be so kind to me. He has not punished me enough yet.’
Suddenly she started to cry, her whole body shaking with the force of her emotion. Automatically John went towards her.
‘Lie down beside me, John,’ she begged him. ‘Please, just lie next to me and hold me. Please make the pain go away for me.’ Her voice was thick with gin and sleep,
‘I will sit here beside you,’ he told her firmly.
‘But you will hold my hand?’
‘Very well then,’ he agreed. ‘But only if you lie down quietly.’
Obediently, she did as he had told her, her fingers clinging tightly to his hand. ‘Have you ever been in love?’ he heard her asking him, as she had once before.
Immediately he tensed.
‘You have, haven’t you?’ she guessed. ‘What happened to her?’
‘She wanted to go on the stage and sing.’
‘And you are angry with her because of that? No, don’t deny it. I can hear it in your voice. You were angry with her and so you made her choose between you and her singing. That is how men are.’
She was almost asleep. John held his breath and then released it when her fingers slackened their hold on his hand and her breathing slowed.
He waited another few minutes until he was sure she was fully asleep and then he moved slowly and carefully to the other side of the room, and the chair where he would have to spend what was left of the night.