Ellie (32 page)

Bonnie flounced out, without so much as a backward glance. Lydia waited until she heard her footsteps overhead. She took out her cigarettes, took one herself and handed one to Jack. Once he’d lit them both she sat back in her chair and looked hard at him.

Jack was normally a very relaxed lad, but now his hand trembled, his knees were braced as if ready to spring out of the chair and his brown eyes were wide with alarm. Lydia had a great deal of affection for Jack. He was endearingly ugly with his squashed-looking nose, red spiky hair and those freckles. Anyone meeting him for the first time could be pardoned for assuming he was a thug – his shoulders rippled with muscle, his hands were like two great hams. An unfortunate appearance for someone with so many fine qualities.

‘Don’t lie to me, Jack,’ she said. ‘Bonny lies easier than she breathes, but I expect better of you. Have you had relations with her tonight?’

Jack blushed scarlet at such a direct question. It was tempting to deny it but he knew Miss Wynter better than that. ‘We didn’t mean to,’ he mumbled. ‘It just happened.’

Lydia nodded; she’d had her own moments of being carried away in the past. His honesty was at least admirable. ‘Setting aside the law, which makes it a crime to have relations with an under-age girl,’ she said coolly, ‘perhaps you should consider that such an act might lead to pregnancy.’

Jack gulped. ‘I’d marry her,’ he said immediately. ‘I want to anyway.’

Lydia shook her head, her expression one of pity now rather than anger. ‘Jack! Bonny’s fifteen. A spoilt, selfish girl who is no more capable of looking after a baby than I am of stripping down an engine. I’ve grown to love her,’ Lydia sighed. ‘But I’m not blind to her faults. We’d better both pray hard she isn’t pregnant, because I can’t think of anyone who’d make a worse mother.’

‘But I love her, Miss Wynter,’ Jack protested. ‘And she loves me.’

‘I believe you truly love her,’ Lydia said sadly. ‘But I don’t believe Bonny loves anyone but herself. I’m telling you this, Jack, because I care for you, not to be spiteful. She may change as she grows up – I certainly hope so. But for now she is a mass of contradictions with the body of a woman, but the mind of a child.’

To Jack’s shame, he began to cry. He tried to prevent it but tears just cascaded down his cheeks.

Lydia got up and went over to him, laying one hand on his shoulder. ‘Poor Jack,’ she said softly. She could guess what he was feeling; one moment a glimpse of paradise, the next cruel reality. Tom between the army and being close to Bonny. But she had to warn him. In her heart Lydia knew Bonny was just using him for practice, that in a few months he would be discarded like yesterday’s news. ‘Go off to the army, Jack, look around the world and enjoy your youth and freedom. Maybe one day it will work out for you and Bonny, but don’t count on it.’

‘Link arms, step and kick,’ Ambrose shouted from below the stage. ‘Get those legs higher, head up and smile. Now break arms and turn, faces towards the audience and high kicks again.’

The girls held on to each others’ waists and kicked their way into the wings.

‘Come back,’ Ambrose yelled again. ‘To make this look right
all
your legs must reach the same height. At the moment you look like a drunken centipede. From the beginning again. This time I want it right.’

The pianist pounded the introductory bars yet again. Once more the girls lined up to repeat the entire routine.

Bonny’s back ached, her legs were stiff and her face felt set in a permanent false smile. This was nothing like Lydia’s lessons, it was torture. She could do the high kicks effortlessly, but she wasn’t used to dancing as a team. She was soaked in sweat, she was hungry and thirsty and they still had another two hours of rehearsal.

‘Ten-minute break,’ Ambrose yelled, just as she thought she might keel over. ‘Outside, get some fresh air.’

Out in the tiny yard behind the café the girls sank on to the many empty crates and boxes. One of the café girls brought out mugs of tea on a tray and a pile of damp, grey sandwiches.

‘They’re all we’ve got,’ she said apologetically. ‘Corned beef again.’

Bonny leaned back on the wall and closed her eyes. Right now she wished she was back at Mayfield, fresh and clean in her pink and white frock, doing nothing more arduous than tapping a business letter into the typewriter.

She had achieved her objective of being one of ‘The Cover Girls’, but somehow she felt she’d lost something precious in the process.

Her parents had eventually reluctantly agreed, just as they did to all her demands, yet their obvious disappointment in her had taken the edge off her pleasure. Aunt Lydia was still cool and had made some very stinging comments that Bonny didn’t choose to dwell on. Worse still, the other girls in the troupe seemed hell-bent on breaking her confidence.

Bonny realised too late that sucking up to Ambrose Dingle was a mistake. It hadn’t made him nicer to her and now the girls went out of their way to show her up. Most of them were better singers than her, many of them danced just as well and she’d learnt to her cost that an inexperienced dancer with no friends was in for a rough ride.

‘Stop whining,’ one girl said to her when she dared to complain at being kicked in the shins.

‘Ambrose will keep you practising till your feet bleed.’ Another grinned maliciously when a blister the side of a half-crown came up on her heel.

The afternoon sun slanted down into the yard, hitting Bonny squarely in the face, but every patch of shade was taken by the other girls. They had all formed tight little groups – one of the six girls who’d toured with Ambrose before, the remaining nine split into two more – but Bonny was excluded from all of them. Their laughter and chatter, the smell of shared cigarettes, wafted over her, making her feel isolated and vulnerable, and she hadn’t the least idea how to go about gaining acceptance.

On top of this was Jack. Next week he would be off to Aldershot and it might be months before she saw him again. Aunt Lydia had been so cruel about her and Jack. First spelling out in graphic detail what pregnancy meant and then accusing Bonny of playing with Jack’s emotions. Fortunately her period had turned up, but she didn’t really understand what Aunt Lydia meant about playing with emotions. Surely the way Bonny felt now was love? She couldn’t stop thinking about what they did that night, she kept imagining his hands on her body, she wanted him. If that wasn’t love, what was it?

‘Are you all ready?’ Ambrose Dingle walked along the line of girls, looking them up and down. Sally, a statuesque brunette who led the sixteen girls, was right in the wings, waiting for the cue to lead them on. The line went right back to the dressing-room. Bonny was in the middle, a position she was secretly convinced had been given her because she was the prettiest. ‘Now, please remember to smile, smile, smile. They’ll forgive you if you stumble but not for looking sour. Forget that this is the dress rehearsal – there’s fifty wounded servicemen out there all trying to forget what they saw in Normandy. Dazzle them!’

Bonny looked down at her costume. The opening number of the show was ‘Lullaby of Broadway’. She could only suppose that the flimsy chiffon shifts worn over skin-tight shorts and sequinned bra tops were supposed to look somewhere between evening gowns and nightdresses, but to her they were just plain tacky. Worse still, they were so old her shorts had been patched and she shuddered to think how many times they’d been worn and never washed.

Jack was out there tonight, with Beryl Baker and Aunt Lydia, along with most of the other girls’ relatives and the servicemen. Tonight was Jack’s last night in Sussex; tomorrow he’d be in the barracks at Aldershot.

‘The orchestra’s tuning up.’ Frances, the girl next in line to Bonny, turned to her, grinning broadly. In fact there was a pianist, a drummer, two very old violinists, an enormously fat lady playing cello and a saxophonist. ‘Are you nervous, Bonny?’

Frances was the only one of the girls who was coming round, but perhaps this was because she was a misfit too. She was just a bit plump, with raven black curly hair, and very posh. Most of the other girls came from quite poor backgrounds and they were suspicious of the way Frances threw money around.

‘A bit,’ Bonny agreed. She wasn’t, in fact, but in two weeks of rehearsals and being left out of everything, she’d learnt not to look too confident.

A whisper was being passed down the line of girls from Sally, who was peeping through a hole in the curtain at the audience. She had been giving a running commentary since they lined up, particularly on the men arriving.

‘An awful looking red-haired bloke just sat down with two older women right in the front row,’ Frances whispered word for word to Bonny. ‘Sal wants to know who he belongs to.’

Bonny’s heart sank. It had to be Jack; she’d made sure he and Lydia had seats in the front. She hesitated, blushing furiously. To admit he belonged to her might make her a laughing stock, yet if she passed on the whisper that would be denying him. Until now she’d never considered how Jack looked to others and she’d implied to the girls that her boyfriend was something special.

‘Pass it on,’ Frances nudged her.

Bonny turned to Muriel, a sharp-faced brunette, and whispered the message, trying hard not to think how hurt Jack would be by her disloyalty.

As the overture struck up, the girls braced themselves and moved closer together, ready to start. Bonny wished she’d gone to the lavatory one last time, but it was too late now.

They strolled on, arm in arm in pairs, singing, swirling their chiffon shifts with one hand.

Once out there, Bonny forgot everything but the joy of singing and dancing in front of the footlights. She caught a glimpse of Jack’s rapt face and Lydia’s broad smile, but looked right out over their heads and concentrated on the rows of servicemen behind.

Despite all Ambrose’s pronouncements that they were the worst troupe of chorus girls he’d ever worked with, somehow the performance was perfect. The high kicks were all uniformly chest high, the girls all turned as one and Bonny, Frances, Mary and Sally, who were the only four tap-dancing, synchronised their steps as they never had in rehearsal. As they swept off to the whispering of ‘
Good-night, good-night
’, the applause was deafening.

‘Brilliant, girls!’ Ambrose beamed at them as they came off. ‘Well done, all of you.’

Back in the dressing-room it was chaos as they changed for the next number. Sixteen girls in a room some eight by twelve with one small mirror.

‘I’ve got a hole in my tights,’ Sally moaned.

‘My bow-tie’s gone,’ yelled Margaret.

‘Has anyone got any STs?’ shouted another girl. They could hear the singer Larry Lewis singing ‘You Can’t Run Away from Love Tonight’, and half the girls had to be back on stage for his next number. ‘Oh You Beautiful Doll’, changed into long, slinky dresses.

Bonny wasn’t in on that number, so she helped those who were get ready, fastening paste necklaces, fixing feathers in hair and handing them their gloves and parasols.

‘Anyone discover who the red-haired horror belongs to?’ Sally called out the moment half the troupe had disappeared out the door. ‘He was looking at you the whole time, Bonny, is he your fella?’

Bonny wanted the floor to open up and swallow her. If she said no and the girls spotted him waiting for her at the end, they’d be laughing at her for weeks. ‘He’s my cousin actually,’ she said, turning her face away so they wouldn’t see her blush. ‘He’s come with my aunt because he’s joining up tomorrow.’

For just a second she knew how Judas must have felt. For two weeks she’d been insisting to herself she was in love with Jack, she couldn’t get her mind off making love to him and now she had relegated him to a mere cousin.

‘I won’t ask if he’s got a brother,’ Sally laughed. ‘Never could stand men with red hair.’

Bonny side-stepped Jack’s enthusiastic hug at the Pavilion door and hurried towards Aunt Lydia and Mrs Baker in the car. The other girls were coming out and although the road was pitch black she wasn’t taking any chances.

‘What did you think of the show?’ Bonny asked Lydia the moment she was in the back of the car, Jack beside her.

‘Much better than I expected,’ Lydia said thoughtfully. ‘The dance routines were very slick, all you girls looked very disciplined. The singer Larry what’s-his-name wasn’t terribly good and the comedian didn’t make me laugh. But the show as a whole was better than average for a summer seaside entertainment.’

Jack saw that Bonny was disappointed in Miss Wynter’s opinion. ‘I thought it was brilliant, especially you.’

‘So did I, love.’ Mrs Baker turned to pat Bonny’s knee. ‘Your little feet twinkled and you looked so nice in that spangly waistcoat in the last number. I can’t imagine how you remember all the steps.’

‘Mr Dingle’s found me digs.’ Bonny thought she’d better bring this up while she had Jack and Mrs Baker’s support. ‘I’ll be sharing a room with Sally and Frances. They say the food’s not bad. I’ll move in tomorrow afternoon.’

‘Well, it looks like it’s an end of an era, Beryl.’ Lydia looked sideways at the older woman as she drove. ‘Your Jack off to the army and Bonny to the stage.’

‘The village will be so quiet.’ Beryl looked round at Bonny and Jack holding hands in the back. Bonny was surprised to see she had tears in her eyes. ‘You’ve been a pair of scallywags and no mistake, but it won’t be the same without you both.’

Beryl Baker had put aside her wariness of Bonny tonight because she loved Jack. All through the show she’d been remembering how she’d felt at being separated from Bert in the First War and she was big-hearted enough to hope it would work out for them both.

It was raining hard at eight the next morning as Bonny ran down towards Houghton Bridge. Saying goodbye last night to Jack in the stationhouse with the Bakers and Aunt Lydia looking on wasn’t enough. She had to see him one more time, alone.

His train was leaving at half-past nine and she’d slipped out without a word to Aunt Lydia. She wished now she’d thought to bring an umbrella; her old school raincoat was already sopping wet and her hair felt like wet seaweed.