By the time she reached the Dancing Academy, Fanny had ceased to care if Madame Elise took her daughter as a pupil or not. She had woken with what she called ‘One of me turns,’ which meant that her inside felt as if it had dropped a little further than usual. She spent the morning in a fumbling attempt to get everything done, a result which was hindered by her mind which seemed unable to think, and by the shop bell which pinged, every time she got started on anything. She loathed the shop, it had become a vampire sucking, from the daily round, the little life-blood she had to give to it. She was making a wretched job of it too; apart from the fact that there were fewer varieties of fruit and vegetables to be had, Mr. Smith was not buying with the skill George had done. Then too, when George was in the shop, if a customer came in for something they could not have, he saw to it they bought something else. Fanny was no good at that. “Any tomatoes, Mrs. Elk?” She would look round vacantly as though hoping a few might miraculously have appeared while she had been making the beds, and seeing none, would shake her head, move an inch or two nearer to the door to her kitchen, and say: “No. No tomatoes.” ‘Elk’s’ in the Fordham Road lost its reputation. “No good goin’ up to Elk’s. I know it isn’t easy to get things with the war on, but Elk’s don’t even seem to try.”
Dressed and washed, the dinner cleared away, and a neighbour put in to look after the shop, Fanny thankfully led Flossie to the tram terminus. A tram was the slowest means of getting to Madame Elise’s Academy, but it entailed no changing, and Fanny thought it safer; she had always known the other side of the river. ‘That West End’ was no place for a woman to be alone. Flossie insisted on going on the top of the tram, and the journey took an hour, during the whole of which time Fanny felt sick. She closed her eyes and told herself ‘it would pass off.’ It did not, ‘it passed out’ and that just as she had left the tram. She leant against a wall shaken, cold, and acutely embarrassed, for with the tram gone about its business, she had no excuse for what had happened. She had felt, years before, the same shame at Southend, when a similar misfortune had overtaken her in the middle of the sea-front, half a mile away from the Channel Queen which had been her undoing.
“Oh, I am unlucky, Floss,” she said.
Flossie looked at her with dislike.
“Such a show to make of yourself. In the road too.”
They walked to the studio, it was not far from the tram terminus, but Fanny did not feel like walking at all, and her eyes filled with tears when she saw that to reach the Madame Elise Academy you had to climb an immense flight of stone stairs.
At the top of the stairs was a dusty hall, papered with posters of the shows in which the offspring of the Academy had appeared. ‘Madame Elise’s Little Wonders,’ ‘Madame Elise’s Baby Pierrots,’ ‘Madame Elise’s Dancing Dots,’ ‘Madame Elise’s Wonder Mites,’ and as well, programmes of innumerable plays and pantomimes which had a note on them to the effect that ‘The children appearing in this production are pupils of The Madame Elise School of Dancing.’
Fanny gazed round with the glazed eyes of the recently sick, and took in nothing, but Flossie pulled her arm; she spoke in a whisper.
“Look, Mum.” She pointed to the word ‘Office’ written over a door. “Do you think we goes in there?”
Fanny never went in through doors with ‘Office’ written over them, never in fact went through strange doors at all, but they had a letter telling them to come; perhaps it would be all right.
“Maybe you might give a knock, but gently, mind.”
Flossie knocked.
“Com’in. Com’in. Com’in.”
The door opened into a little room, yellow-tinted by light which forced its way through an unwashed window. The drabness of the lighting was enhanced by the walls, which showed a little paper of a grubby green, but mainly a mass of photographs in fly-walked frames. Groups of children surrounding some star, or the finales of pantomimes, or single pictures of show performers signed in round childish handwriting, ‘To dear Madame, from Babsy,’ ‘Little Eva’ or ‘Baby Bubbles.’
Madame was sitting at a kneehole desk. Tall, scraggy, in a velvet dress that had once been black, a strange garment, in which presumably she lived, for it had no visible fastenings, and yet fitted so closely the likelihood was that it never came off. It bore out this theory by being so overlaid with dust that it never appeared black, but in some lights grey, and in others brown. She was a surprising-looking woman, an unusually white skin was enhanced by eyebrows painted crookedly a gay reddish-brown, eyelashes alternately black-cosmeticked spikes or, since they were dashed on anyhow, their original grey, which gave a piebald look, and a mouth slashed in the colour of a letter-box without the aid of a glass, so it had little bearing on its original shape. Crowning her was a red wig, a wig which, when new, some twenty years before, might have been glossy, with some semblance to real hair, but since it had belonged to Madame, had seen neither comb nor brush. Her legs, sprawled comfortably apart, resting on their heels, wore white cotton stockings and pink canvas ballet shoes. Heaven had given her one beauty which neither age nor comicalities of appearance could alter. Shrewd, kindly, very blue eyes. She turned these on the door.
She saw Fanny, and in a flash took in her lack of colour, both of body and soul. Then she studied Flossie. Madame was no procuress, as far as her school was concerned. The head of a woman’s college could not have been stricter, and as most of her children’s earning ability depended on their looking mere toddlers even when they had reached their late teens, she was seldom made anxious. Later, when choruses and musical halls, and more rarely stardom, had taken them from her, her first thought was a good marriage, what she called ‘something comfortable and safe.’ Nevertheless, should the marriage not mature, she approved what she called ‘The Little Nest,’ always provided the little nest was well endowed, and for choice embellished with a coronet. Her dancing establishment was built on a foundation of just such a nest. It had not been a nest at all as far as cosiness was concerned, but rather an iron-barred cage, gilded and even embellished with strawberry leaves, but nevertheless a cage which had imprisoned her, away from the ballet that she loved. Yet looking at her dancing school, the direct result of her faithful years with her Duke, she could not but feel that her pupils might do worse. Flossie, even at the age of nine, looked like somebody who might be trained to attain to almost anything. Madame’s shrewd eyes missed none of her perfections, she even appreciated that such perfect sculpturing would last. She rested her hands on her desk, and slowly withdrew her legs from under it, and stood up.
“Com’long. Com’long. Com’long.”
Flossie put up her hand to her mouth and sniggered. Madame gave her a look which made the snigger gurgle into silence. Majestically she led the way. She knew she made new children laugh, she was unconscious that she repeated everything three times, but that there was something humorous about her to the child mind she could not fail to realise. A laugh was a thing she understood, but a snigger, never.
They went into the studio. It was an airy room, lit by skylights, of which there were so many that even the layers of grime on them could not make the place dark; at one end of the room there was a piano, and round the walls were practice bars. A class of girls of fourteen and over, in cotton rompers and ballet shoes, were gripping the bars while doing an intricate exercise on their points. Instructing them was a stout, black-haired woman, dressed in dingy white; a short, pleated skirt, and a blouse. She occasionally, without the support of the bar, joined in the exercises herself, and when she did so her breasts, which were enormous, bounced up and down in the blouse. At the piano a fair pretty girl, her eyes on the rows of busy feet, thumped out a tune; occasionally she paused and each time she did so, the black-haired instructress roared: “And again, Connie dear, and again.”
Connie caught Madame’s eye, and raised her eyebrows enquiringly. Madame held up her hand, the piano stopped, and the children, as though they were marionettes whose wires had been cut, dropped limply off the bars.
“Muriel. Muriel. Muriel. Come here. Come here. Come here.” The instructress roared the quite superfluous instruction “Rest” and came to Madame. “Try this child. Try this child. Try this child.”
Muriel looked at Flossie.
“Got any music, dear?”
Flossie had skipped about to nursery rhymes when she had been in ‘The Infants’,’ but since she had been in ‘The Girls’’ had done nothing more graceful than physical exercises. She raised puzzled eyes to Muriel. Muriel had been looking into children’s eyes for the past ten years, ever since the evening when Madame had called her into her room, and had told her that she, the star child, who had fallen from that to front row of the chorus, to the back row, and from there to no job at all, had not the appearance for the stage. The horror of hearing, put into words, what she had been suspecting, had caused Madame’s statement that she was getting too old to teach and proposed that Muriel should take her place, to fall on years closed by misery. That was ten years ago, she was happy in her work: after all, time dulls even the most bitter of frustrations. In all her ten years she had never looked into such eyes as were looking at her now. She spoke gently.
“Take off your things, dear.”
The removal of Flossie’s hat made Connie sit upright on the piano stool, Madame murmur: “Goodness. Goodness. Goodness,” and Muriel stretch out her hand to stroke, only the stony eyes of her watching class made her resist the temptation.
“Come along, darling.” She held out her hand. “Connie, play that little polka you play for the babies.”
Not all her looks could blind the experienced eyes round her to the fact that Flossie knew nothing of dancing, but she had an ear to keep time, and she was loosely made. Muriel lifting first one of the child’s legs over her head, and then the other, nodded at Madame, who poked Fanny with her elbow.
“Com’long. Com’long. Com’long.”
Back in the office Madame eyed Fanny; she thought her a poor thing, but saw that she was exhausted; she returned to the door, opened it a crack and yelled, “Tea. Tea. Tea.”
A cup of coal-black tea, part of which, awash in the saucer, was licking away the contour of two lumps of sugar, partially restored Fanny. Madame, in spite of her queries coming in triplicate, succeeded in learning the story of the ‘Britain’s most beautiful child’ competition, and of how George in the Army didn’t hold with any such things, and must never know about the dancing. Also of the meeting with Kiddy Kathy. It was from this last that Madame got an inkling of what Fanny was aiming at for her child. She had not run a dancing school without learning what incredible sacrifices mothers will make for their children, but she was moved none the less when Fanny said haltingly:
“Havin’ the looks it seems she should do better’n what her dad an’ me have done.”
Madame lit a cigarette. Fanny was shocked, she had heard of women doing such things, but had never seen one at it. Madame, her smoke curling over her head, neither knew nor cared what Fanny thought, her mind was on Flossie’s future. How simple it would be to draw up a contract that would grasp the child’s earnings for years; this good-hearted, weak fool would sign anything. Instead she opened a drawer, took out one of her contracts, always fair documents, and with a few strokes of her pen made it more generous than it already was, and shoved it across to Fanny.
“Sign there. Sign there. Sign there.”
Fanny, clutching the contract, which was totally unintelligible to her, and a list of those shoes and garments needed before the first class the following Monday, sank down in their home-bound tram. She looked at her daughter and a faint sigh of satisfaction escaped her.
“I was glad I made you put on those clean drawers, lifting up your legs the way that Muriel did.”