‘Two minutes, everyone, oh and, Fran, swap your last number for “Dover”, will you? We’ve been swamped for requests for it.’
‘I’m not Vera Lynn,’ Francine wryly reminded the stage manager, as she powdered her nose in the makeshift ‘dressing room’ that had been set up for the visiting ENSA entertainers. They were here to entertain the troops at the desert camp ‘somewhere close to Cairo in Egypt’, as the taciturn major, who was their military liaison officer, had answered Francine’s question as to their destination when they had left Cairo at daybreak in their military transport.
It had taken them four months to sail from England to Alexandria, with a stopoff in South Africa on the way, travelling the whole time as part of a convoy, for protection against the German Navy’s submarines.
When they had left Southampton Francine hadn’t really cared if she lived or died in her grief for the loss of her son, her despair in sharp contrast to the excitement of other members of the troupe, most of whom had never travelled abroad before.
However, as she tried to remind herself she had a duty to the serving men that ENSA was sent abroad to entertain, and listening to the grim stories of some of the sailors and the serving men themselves – some of which had been so heartbreaking that initially she had been unable to understand how those telling them were able to go on – had made Francine feel that she had at least to try to match their bravery.
In South Africa they had put on a couple of shows for some injured men travelling home in a hospital ship that had put into port whilst they were there.
After their first show some of the artists, including Francine, had volunteered to tour the ship’s makeshift wards at the request of the doctors in charge.
Francine had stopped by the bed of one young man, who had called out eagerly to her when he had heard her talking to someone else. Blinded in both eyes by shrapnel, and horribly wounded, he had told Francine how much hearing her singing had meant to him.
‘Took me right back to when our mam used to sing to us when we was kiddies, you did, and no mistake,’ he told her in a soft Northeast accent. ‘Bin feeling that I wasn’t going to make it home, I was, but then I heard you and it was like I was home already. By, but it means a lot to a lad, that, something from home close by him when he needs it. Fettled me up good and proper, it has.’
Francine had reached automatically for his hand as he spoke to her, and that night when she had been told that the young soldier was dying and had been put in a side ward, she asked if she could go and sit with him.
The major had demurred at first, but Francine had been resolute, and in the end permission had been given.
She had sat with the young soldier, holding his hand, as she sang the only Northeast song she knew, and whilst she was singing it the young lad’s ‘boat came in’, as the words of the song said, and bore him away with it on its tide from life to death.
After that Francine had tried to put her own grief to one side and focus on her determination to give every bit of support she could to those they were travelling to entertain.
Ordinarily Fran would have been the second singer in the troupe, but Lily, the lead, had gone down with a huge sulk and a ‘gippy tummy’, leaving Fran as the sole singer, and two shows a night to get through for the next week.
The huge sulk was the result of the failure of Lily’s four-month-long campaign to tease the major into a flirtation with her, whilst the gippy tummy was the result of the full bottle of gin the singer had drunk as a result of that failure. Lily wasn’t used to men turning her down, but then neither was Lily used to war-hardened, taciturn soldiers. None of them was, including herself, Fran admitted. She’d watched Lily’s overtures initially with resignation and some disdain, and had felt slightly sorry for the major, assuming that, given the relentless nature of Lily’s campaign, allied to her determination, the major would ultimately have to give in. After all, Lily was a woman – attractive, available and extremely willing. The major was a man – heterosexual, alone and being tempted. But to her astonishment and Lily’s obvious disbelief, the major had not given in. So now Lily had changed tactics and was loudly proclaiming that he was ‘an odd sort’ and a ‘kill joy’, and that if she had her way they’d have had a very different kind of officer escorting them.
Francine wasn’t totally convinced that Lily had given up, though; it wasn’t in her nature. Not that she cared one way or the other.
When she’d signed up for ENSA she hadn’t really cared about anything; when she was feeling particularly ‘low’, as she was now, she still didn’t. She knew she would never stop grieving for Jack. How could she? She still went to bed at night thinking of him, unfolding from her memory those precious days she had spent with him.
Not that there hadn’t been some compensations for the long weeks of travel.
The sight of Cape Town, with Table Mountain in the background, was a memory that would stay with her for ever. And now, as for Cairo, Fran felt almost as though the richness of its sights and smells, combined with its history and the intensity with which those men posted to the area threw themselves into enjoying their leave, had overloaded her own senses.
Cairo was a hot, exotic, erotic, fiercely intense mix of colour and excitement. Louche news reporters and photographers lined the bars of the city’s most famous hotels – and so did some of the most beautiful women Fran had ever seen – some of whom, she had discreetly been informed by one of the comedians travelling with them, were not women at all, but rather young men who, having been castrated, had opted to ‘become women’.
Fran was no stranger to ‘different’ forms of sexuality – she had lived in Hollywood, after all – but she admitted that she had been perhaps naïvely shocked at the way in which so many of the men on leave in the city seemed able to forget that they had wives and girlfriends at home.
It was as though in some way Cairo itself seemed to act as a hothouse for all those things that were such a visible part of its exotic nightlife. Life there seemed luxurious indeed compared with at home in England, and predictably Lily had thrown herself into that luxury with a vengeance.
Lily had made her hostility towards Fran clear the minute they were introduced on board the troop ship at Southampton, along with her determination to make sure that Fran knew that she, Lily, was the star of the show.
Fran had taken it all in her stride. She had been in the business long enough to know what its insecurities could do to people, and Lily was typical of many other lead singers Fran had met over the years, in her jealous determination to guard her own position.
So far as Lily was concerned, being the lead singer meant getting the best of everything that was going, whether that was a hotel room, a stage outfit, or a man, and she was an expert at manipulating the situation to make sure she got what she thought of as her due.
Sometimes Francine thought that, ridiculously, her own lack of any desire to compete with Lily seemed to exacerbate Lily’s antagonism towards her rather than pacify her.
Lily had made it plain that she wasn’t happy about the fact that she and Francine were billeted in the same hotel, and had equally luxurious rooms, both with en-suite bathrooms – true luxury indeed, and a very welcome one. Francine, knowing how cramped the rooms of some of the chorus girls were, had made a point of letting them know that she was more than happy to ‘lend out her bathroom’ when the occasion arose.
They’d been made very welcome in Cairo. Lily and Fran had arrived to rooms filled with flowers and invitations.
So far they had been taken to the famous Shepheard’s Hotel, photographed for the English papers at home, and entertained at the British Embassy. The dancers had soon been complaining that they were too tired to dance in the show because of all the partying and dancing they did ‘off duty’. Cairo, as Fran had been told by one of the newspaper reporters who propped up the bar in Shepheard’s Hotel, was a hotbed of political and sexual intrigue and scandal, where gossip was fanned by the heat of the desert wind.
Not that Cairo and its environs didn’t have other attractions. On their rest days between the shows, Fran and some of the ENSA members had been driven out to see the pyramids in transport organised for them by the major: tough desert-ready Jeeps driven by equally tough and desert-hardened men. She had also explored the bazaars, accompanied by a small barefoot dark-haired and dark-eyed ‘guide’ – one of several boys who had attached themselves to the group. Fran didn’t think she would ever get used to the sight of so many children begging, although the major had told her that for them it was a way of life and that many of them would have caused Dickens’ Fagin to marvel at their pocket-picking skills.
She had ridden a camel and managed to quell the nausea she had felt at its rolling gait – but then they had travelled halfway around the world on a troop transport ship – but now that they had actually been transported out into the western desert to entertain the men in their camps Fran felt that she was finally doing what she had joined ENSA to do: her bit for the war effort by helping to raise the spirits of the country’s fighting men.
They were performing several shows at the desert camp, with men coming in from more outflung, smaller camps to see it. Lily had complained nonstop about the sand, which got into everything, blown in on a hot wind that at night became a very cold wind.
The sand lay against the skin like a layer of sandpaper, coating both food and tongue when one ate, so that within a few hours of their arriving at the camp, it had become an intimate and unwanted part of their lives. But where Lily complained, Fran tried not to, reminding herself instead that the men they had come out here to entertain had to endure these desert conditions month in and month out, and fight as well.
In contrast to the army, they were being treated like royalty. Fran and Lily had their own private showers in a specially erected tent. They had a full military escort to drive them and protect them. Every single aspect of their tour – the accommodation; the stage when they performed; the way they travelled – was under the expert control of their liaison officer, and whilst he might be taciturn and withdrawn, there was no denying the expertise and skill with which the major did his job.
They had all been told when they signed on for ENSA in London that they could be appearing anywhere, from a tent in the desert to a palace in Cairo, and to be prepared to go on in the clothes they’d travelled in, if necessary, but to take some stage outfits in case they got the chance to change into them.
‘It’s good for the men’s morale when they see a pretty girl all dressed up for them,’ was a now familiar comment from commanding officers, and one that Fran had taken to heart.
Tonight, for instance, Fran was wearing a full-length emerald satin gown that was in reality more style than substance, but which, like her paste jewellery, looked good on stage.
The cool of the evening was a relief after the enervating heat of the day, and she had only had to endure it for a few hours and in relatively relaxed comfort, not the searing exposure the men had to endure out in the desert in combat conditions, Fran reminded herself. Initially she had felt drained and exhausted, but now with the first half of the show behind her Fran was buoyed up by that fierce surge of adrenalin that hit the veins like a drug the minute she felt a stage floor beneath her feet and saw an audience in front of her.
She’d already sung ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’, and had been called back for encore after encore, and in all honesty she was not really surprised that the men had requested that she sing ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’.
There would be tears in more than a few pairs of male eyes by the time she had reached the end of the song, Fran knew, and who could blame the men for longing to see the white cliffs of home and to exchange the desert for England’s green and pleasant land? They were here, after all, to fight to protect that land, and she was here to remind them what they were fighting for.
From somewhere behind her she could hear the major’s familiar voice, and a prickle of awareness sensitised her skin in much the same way as the sand. Fran didn’t like admitting it but it wasn’t hard to understand why Lily had made such a play for him. Major Marcus Linton was a very good-looking man, a very male man. Tall, broad-shouldered, grey-eyed, dark-haired and in his late thirties, he had an air of self-control and command about him that most women would find attractive.
Including her? Hardly. Even if Lily hadn’t openly warned her off within minutes of him being introduced to them, Fran would not have been tempted to attract his attention. Marcus Linton might be a very different sort of man from Con, the theatre producer she had fallen for as a girl, and who had fathered her illegitimate child, but her experience with Con had made her very wary of the male sex.
Fran was an extremely beautiful woman with a lushly curvy body and the kind of features that men found sexually attractive. She couldn’t change the way she looked but she could and did make sure that men understood that the sexuality of her face and body did not mean that she had the kind of nature that meant she was sexually available to them.
Fran knew that she could have had a very big career as a movie star if she had been willing to trade on the image created by her looks and if she had chosen to take the casting couch route to success and fame.
Singing was as much a part of her as breathing, and she would hate not to be able to use her voice in the way that nature had designed it to be used, but she was certainly not going to use her body or allow others to use it so that she could claim the false coin of ‘stardom’.
The comedians were on now; then it would be the turn of the ventriloquist, then the chorus girls. The sound of male laughter rolled in a wave from the audience to reach backstage, where Fran was struggling to change and redo her makeup for the second half.
Fran and Lily were supposed to share a dresser, but typically Lily had appropriated Martha’s services, claiming that her ‘poorly stomach’ meant that she needed someone on hand to minister to her. Since Lily had stayed behind in Cairo comfortably ensconced in the excellent Metropolitan Hotel, which they had been booked into, Fran failed to see exactly why she should need Martha, but Lily’s temper tantrums were so well known and feared that John Woods, the ENSA officer travelling with them, had simply given in to her, begging Fran to manage without Martha.
Fran knew perfectly well that Lily wasn’t above manipulating things to ensure that she not only remained the lead singer, but also to undermine anyone else’s act if she thought they might be in competition with her. Fran wasn’t going to put herself through all the emotional drama that went with that kind of situation just for the sake of being without a dresser for a couple of shows. In fact, Fran rather thought that Lily was hoping that Fran would challenge her and provoke an outright showdown between them.
Fran had far more important things on her mind, though. Today was the anniversary of the day she had met Connor Bryant – Jack’s father – and remembering that brought the loss of Jack unbearably sharply into her thoughts.
She had been thinking about him all day: the hard labour of his birth, with its pain and her own fear, and then the tremendous sense of exhausted pride she had felt when she had given birth to him, followed by such a surge of maternal joy and love that she could feel its echo within her now.
She had been so young – too young – and nothing had prepared her for the intensity of that love: to give birth to a child, to hold it in your arms, a new life, so filled with trust and so dependent on you that the stab of fierce protective love was forever balanced with an edge of fear.
She had sworn that she would do the best she could for him. She had made that promise – that vow – to him, but she had broken it. If only she could go back and right what she had done wrong.
If only … Fran tried to shake away her painful thoughts. She could feel the satin fabric of her frock clinging tackily to her skin. She had lost weight since she had begun this tour and the reflection she could see in the mirror was not one that pleased her. She looked thin and tired, her face slightly gaunt. She opened the flap of the tent that served as her dressing room and stepped out into the familiarity of the backstage bustle, and the velvet darkness of the desert night.
‘Ten, Fran,’ the floor manager called out, holding up ten fingers.
Nodding, Fran headed for the stage, where their compère was already announcing her.
Fran was dripping with sweat as she came offstage, her heart racing and skipping, gripped by the familiar high of knowing that she had reached out to her audience and touched their emotions.
No matter how cynical she might feel when she was not on stage, once she was, her desire to sing to her audience, and their desire to hear her sing, worked like a special magical spell that never failed to reach deep within Fran, to release a poignancy to her singing that drew those listening to her and to call her back for encore after encore. When she was singing Fran became the song, the instrument via which its words and music flowed into the hearts of others. That was her special gift.
Now, as the night air hit her, the familiar process of her euphoria giving way to exhaustion and emptiness was already taking place.
In her ‘dressing room’ Fran started to remove her stage makeup, though her work for the evening wasn’t over yet. There was still the after-show ‘party’ to attend – a duty more than a pleasure but an important one for the morale of the serving men.
Fran had just removed the last of her makeup, but was still wearing the robe she had pulled on when she had taken off her stage dress, when she heard the major calling her name outside.
‘Yes, I’m here, Major,’ she called back.
The dressing room wasn’t very big, Fran’s precious jar of cold cream was still out on top of the makeshift ‘dressing table’ – an upturned barrel with a pillowcase over it, on which Fran had placed the photograph of Jack that travelled everywhere with her.
‘I’ve just been speaking to the camp’s commanding officer and he’s asked if you will have time to go round the san tent and have a word with the men there who weren’t well enough to see the show?’
It wasn’t an unfamiliar request and Fran responded automatically, ‘Of course.’
The major nodded and turned towards the exit to the tent, but as he did so, somehow or other he caught the edge of the photograph frame, sending it falling to the floor.
They both dived for it together, but the major got there first, apologising as he did so.
‘I’m sorry, clumsy of me.’
Fran’s heart was thudding heavily with a mixture of emotions she didn’t want to analyse, but which were dominated by her fierce need to reach out and hold Jack’s photograph protectively to her body. As she hadn’t done Jack himself. She couldn’t trust herself to speak, not even to make a polite response to the major’s comment, so instead she simply held out her hand for Jack’s photograph, gripping her bottom lip between her teeth when she saw how badly her hand was trembling.
‘Nice-looking boy – a relative?’ the major asked casually as he handed the photograph back to her.
All she wanted was for him to go, so that she could smooth her fingers over the frame in reassurance, the only reassurance she could give Jack – and herself – now. And yet she also felt a very different and even more desperate need, which she had to struggle to suppress.
‘Yes, he’s my …’ You’d have thought after all the years – ten of them – of saying ‘my nephew’ that the lie would slip easily off her tongue but it never did and tonight, whether through tiredness or the pain of constantly having to deny him, and her own guilt and need, Fran heard herself saying proudly, ‘He’s my son. Or at least he was. He’s dead now. A bomb hit the farmhouse where he’d been evacuated. He was ten.’
The words, hard with pain, cut into her heart like shards of glass, the mere speaking of them emotionally lacerating her throat. It was just as well she couldn’t speak because she didn’t trust herself to say anything else, Francine admitted.
The photograph lay held between them. Tears blurred Fran’s vision.
‘It hurts like hell, doesn’t it?’ The major’s voice was unexpectedly kind and understanding.
Fran looked up at him.
‘I lost my wife and the child we were expecting in the first wave of bombs that dropped on London,’ he told her simply.
They looked at one another, and somehow Francine couldn’t – didn’t want to – look away. Like an invisible bridge stretching across a dangerous chasm the major’s gaze held her own.
A need to talk about her past, about Jack and herself and what had happened, overwhelmed her, coming out of nowhere like a fierce desert storm, unstoppable and overpowering.
Still looking at him, Francine began slowly, ‘Jack was born when I was sixteen.’
His steady regard was still fixed on her.
‘His father was a married man.’ Not a flicker of rejection or disgust. ‘Not that I knew that when I fell for him; plain daft, I was, fancying that we were meant for one another and that he loved me when all he wanted was a bit of fun.’
The bridge was holding steady and she was clinging to that calm uncritical gaze.
‘Of course, the truth came out when his wife got to know and came storming down to the theatre to warn me off. I hadn’t been the first and I won’t have been the last. Poor woman, I pity her being married to him.
‘I didn’t know then that there was to be a child, and when I realised I was that scared. My mother wasn’t well as it was, and my father was already dead. One of my sisters always reckoned that the shame and disgrace of what I’d done killed Mum.’
She was trembling inside with all the emotion, all the things she had never said and had kept inside herself for so long. It was as though once she’d started unburdening herself to him she couldn’t stop, like poison bursting from a painful wound.
She made an effort to check herself, pulling a face and saying in a shaky voice, ‘It isn’t a pretty story, is it?’
‘Life seldom is a pretty story. You paid a heavy price for being young, trusting and naïve.’
‘I dare say if Con hadn’t been married pressure would have been put on him to do the decent thing, but he was married, and when my sister Vi offered to have the baby, and bring him up as her own, it seemed the best thing to do, especially for Jack. Vi and her husband already had two children and Edwin, Vi’s husband, was doing well for himself. Vi said that she and Edwin could give Jack so much more than I could, and that if I kept him everyone would know that I wasn’t married and that he’d suffer because of that. I hated the thought of giving Jack up but I thought I was doing the right thing – the best thing for him. I loved him so much, you see, and I wanted to make it up to him, do something right for him after all that I’d done wrong, so I agreed that Vi should have him, and then I went to America to work, to have a fresh start. But of course you can’t walk away from something like that. I’d left a part of myself behind in Liverpool, literally as well as figuratively. You don’t realise until you have a child just what it means.’
For the first time the steady gaze flickered. Remorse filled her, but she sensed that he didn’t want her to say anything, so instead of apologising to him she continued unsteadily, ‘I never stopped missing Jack or loving him, and in the end it got too much for me. I’d been working in America but when I got the chance to go home to Liverpool I did. When I found out how unhappy Jack was, and how badly he was being treated by my sister and her husband, it broke my heart. I felt so guilty. I thought I’d given Jack the best chance of a future I could give him but instead … I’ll never forgive myself for what happened to him.’
The major took the photograph from her and stood it gently on her ‘dressing table’, before placing his free hand comfortingly on her shoulder.
‘I feel the much the same about my wife.’
It was her turn to hold the bridge for him now, her gaze every bit as steady for him as his had been for her.
‘She’d wanted to leave London, but she was so close to her time I was worried about her travelling. I begged her to wait until after the baby. They were both killed three days later when a bomb made a direct hit on the friend’s house where she was staying.’
Francine could hear the rawness in his voice and her heart ached for him.
‘Do you think it ever ends – the pain and the guilt, I mean?’ she asked him.
The major shook his head. ‘Perhaps if you want it to, but something tells me that you don’t.’
‘Do you?’ Fran challenged him.
This time he didn’t answer her.