The Girl From The Savoy

‘Running around like bored children, more like. Did you hear they had one of the clues baked into a loaf of bread in the Hovis factory?’

‘I did. And they had to take one of Miss Bankhead’s shoes from her dressing room in a scavenger hunt last month. Of course, she adores the attention. I suppose I’d be part of it if I were ten years younger. When a woman reaches her thirties it seems that she can’t be referred to as a “young” anything, bright, or otherwise.’

‘Well, I think it’s all a lot of foolish nonsense.’

I can feel my irritation with him growing. ‘I wish you were plastered all over the front page of The Times or hanging around in opium dens or literary salons.Anything would be better than hiding away in that dreadful little apartment of yours eternally stewing on things.’ I grab hold of his hand and squeeze all my frustration into it. ‘You can’t change what happened, darling. You can’t bring them back. None of us can.’

We’ve skirted around the same conversation so many times. I cannot understand Perry’s enduring guilt about what happened under his command in France and he cannot understand the apparent ease with which I have put the war behind me. If only he knew the truth.

I take a long drag from my cigarette and change the subject. ‘So, you say this maid amused you?’

A smile tugs at the edge of his lips. ‘A little. She was different. Honest. She told me I looked tired. “Knackered”, actually.’

‘Eugh. Vulgar word, but she’s right. You do.’ I lean back in my chair. ‘Was that it? She insulted you and now you can’t stop talking about her?’

He stares out of the window, watching the rain. ‘It’s you who keeps talking about her! She just seemed different, that’s all. There was something about her. Some infectious indescribable thing that made me want to know her better. For someone in her position she seemed so full of hope.’

‘Hope!’ I laugh. ‘Hope is a dangerous thing, darling. It is usually followed by disappointment and too much gin.’

He casts a wry smile from behind his teacup. ‘Anyway, that was that. She went her way and I went mine. The shortest love story ever told. Now, enough about me. Tell me about tomorrow night. Who’ll be there?’

‘Bea Balfour.’

‘Anyone else?’

‘The usual. But especially Bea.’

He crushes his spent cigarette in the cut-glass ashtray. ‘You’ll never give up, will you?’

‘Not until I see the two of you married. No.’

‘Then I’m afraid you’ll be waiting a very long time. I missed my opportunity with Bea. And anyway,’ he continues, glumly pushing crumbs around his plate, ‘she deserves better. What prospects does a struggling musical composer have to offer a woman like her?’

‘You could always go back to the bar. A successful barrister would be hard to decline.’

‘What, and give Father the opportunity to gloat and prove that he was right all along; that I would never be a good enough composer? I’d rather end my days a lonely old bachelor and see Bea happily married to someone else.’

I sigh and take a sandwich from the tray. I am simply too tired to argue with him.

We spend a tolerable hour together chatting about this and that, but like the withered autumn leaves tugged from their branches outside, my thoughts drift and swirl continually elsewhere. I think about the houselights going down and the curtain going up. I think about the third scene in Act Two. I think about a rapturous standing ovation and the cries from the gallery, ‘You’re marvellous! You’re marvellous!’ I think about the letter in my purse that I have written to Perry but cannot bear to give him.

After kissing him good-bye and imploring him to smarten himself up for tomorrow’s opening night, I take a taxi to the theatre for a final dress rehearsal. A fog has rolled up the Thames and the streets are lit by the orange lamp standards, giving everything a sense of winter. The fog makes my eyes smart and sticks to my face. I feel choked by it and long for the warmth of spring and the flowers that brighten the Embankment Gardens.

As we approach the Shaftesbury Theatre, I see a line of fans already gathered outside the ticket office. The gallery girls: factory girls and shopgirls, clerks and seamstresses, ordinary girls and women who would give anything to live my life. Their adoration and enthusiasm can make or break a star quicker than any society-magazine columnist. I know they adore me and desire my beautiful dresses. If only they knew the truth my costumes conceal.

The front of house sign blazes through the dim light: LORETTA MAY IN HOLD TIGHT! My name in lights, just as I’d imagined when I was a starry-eyed novice in the chorus. Except it isn’t my name. It is the stage name I chose in my desire to leave the real me, Virginia Clements, behind. She was the respectable daughter of an earl, the daughter who had failed to secure a suitable marriage, the daughter who was suffocated by expectation. Loretta May set me free from the starchy limitations imposed on titled young ladies such as myself. She allowed me to be somebody daring and new.

Virginia Clements. Loretta May. Just names, and yet I wonder. Who am I? Who am I really?

That’s the curious thing about discovering one is dying: it makes one question absolutely everything.

4 (#ulink_56be10b5-a405-5d43-abb6-4ca543fd2835)

Dolly (#ulink_56be10b5-a405-5d43-abb6-4ca543fd2835)

‘If only the mess we make of our lives could be tidied as easily.’

While I wriggle into my maid’s dress I learn that my roommates are Sissy, Gladys, and Mildred. Sissy does the introductions. She reminds me of Clover, all round-cheeked and generous-bosomed with bouncy blonde hair. I feel comfortable around her and know we’ll get along. Gladys is much quieter. She offers a distracted ‘hello’ as she studies her reflection in the scallop-edged powder compact I’d admired earlier. She’s very pretty with a peaches-and-cream complexion and her hair perfectly styled in chestnut waves, just like Princess Mary of York. The third girl, Mildred, barely acknowledges me as she perches on the edge of the bed beside the nightstand with the Austen novel. She is prim and rigid, like the governess in Grosvenor Square who Clover used to say was so brittle she would snap in two if she bent over. Mildred is the girl who had stared at me downstairs. Something about her is familiar, and although she busies herself, I know she has one ear firmly tuned to the conversation.

Sissy props herself up on her elbows and flicks through a well-thumbed copy of a Woman’s Weekly magazine. ‘So, where’d you come from, then?’ she asks, turning down the corner of a page with an advert for a new Max Factor mascara.

‘Grosvenor Square.’ My words are muffled as I pull the black dress over my head.

‘No, you great goose. I mean, where are you from? Not where did you get the omnibus from this morning, ’cause that’s not a London accent, or I’m the Queen of Sheba.’

I shimmy the dress down over my stomach and hips. It fits perfectly. The moiré silk fabric feels so much nicer against my skin than the starchy cotton dresses I’m used to. ‘Oh. I see. I’m from Lancashire. A small village called Mawdesley, near Ormskirk. You wouldn’t know it.’

‘So what brought you to London, then? Or should I say, who? Bet it was a soldier you met in the war. Told you he loved you and you followed him here only to find out he was already married with five children?’ She laughs at her joke. Gladys tells her to stop being a nosy cow and to mind her own. Mildred sits like a stone statue on the edge of her bed.

‘It wasn’t a soldier,’ I say, tying my apron in a neat bow at my back. ‘It was work. That’s all.’

Sissy puts down her magazine. ‘None left in Lancashire?’

‘Only the usual. Domestic service. Tea shops. Textile factories. London offered … more.’ My explanation is as limp as my damp clothes hanging beside the fire. How can I explain what really brought me here? ‘I had an aunt who worked in a private home in Grosvenor Square. I started as a maid-of-all-work and worked my way up. Gave my notice a month ago.’

‘Let me guess. It was stuffy and boring and Madam was a miserable old cow?’

I smile. ‘How did you guess?’

‘Always the same. Anyone who ends up here wants more than picture rails to dust and fires to lay and chamber pots to empty. We all fancy ourselves a cut above the ordinary housemaid. And then of course there’s some like our Gladys here who spends far too much time at the picture palaces and doesn’t think being a maid at The Savoy is good enough.’ Sissy winks at me. ‘Has her eye on Hollywood, this one does. Fancies herself as the new Lillian Gish. I keep telling her it’ll never happen. Silly dreams. That’s all.’

Gladys is plucking her eyebrows. ‘It’s not silly dreams, Sissy Roberts. It’s called ambition.’

Sissy chuckles to herself from behind her magazine, but I’m interested.

‘Did you ever audition, Gladys?’ I ask.

‘Dozens of times. Most of them turned out to be with seedy old men full of empty promises, but some Hollywood bigwig arrived last week. We think he’ll be staying for the season, and I’m going to make myself known to him. You see if I don’t.’

I’d love to talk more to Gladys but Sissy’s disregard for her ‘silly dreams’ makes me reluctant to share my own, so I say nothing and sit down on the edge of my bed, pulling a stocking over my toes before working it carefully up my leg. I don’t notice Mildred walking over to the fireplace.

‘What are these?’ she asks.

I look up. She has my photograph in her hands, and one of the pages of music. In my hurry to dress I’d forgotten all about them. I jump up from the bed and rush over to her.

‘Nothing. Just some papers that got damp on my way here.’ I snatch the page from her, gather up the rest from the hearth, and push them under my pillow.

‘That’s piano music,’ Mildred remarks. ‘Do you play?’