Ellie (83 page)

Since Bonny’s wedding, Ellie’s letters had been infrequent and short. She said little about her predicament, and it seemed as if she was just taking one day at a time, hoping for some miracle which would solve her problem overnight. Usually her news was all centred on the cast of
Oklahoma
– funny, light-hearted stories about the girls in the chorus, or her digs.

But as Bonny read this letter she grew alarmed, quite forgetting her own worries. She could sense that Ellie was nearly at the end of her tether. Even though she tried to make jokes about it, Bonny knew she couldn’t possibly cope in such a situation.

It started off cheerfully enough, a funny story about colliding with a piece of scenery in the middle of ‘I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No’. But then she began to write about Edward, who had a walk-on part as a butler in a West End play.

‘I caught the matinée the other day. I found myself just watching him, wondering if I could tell him about the baby and get him to marry me. I bet he would too! But that’s a bit like shooting yourself through the foot. It might save me from disgrace and give the baby a name, but I still wouldn’t be able to work.’

From then on the letter became even more disturbing. She spoke of finding a cheap room and eking out her savings with some waitressing or cleaning work until the last possible moment. Then she went on to say how she’d discovered that most hospitals could arrange adoptions, even taking the baby at the moment of birth. There was no agonising over whether she could really bear to do this, just that level-headed acceptance that this was her only possible route.

But finally, at the end of the letter, she dropped all pretence of stoic optimism. ‘I just don’t know what to do, Bonny. Sometimes I think I’m going to just fall apart with worry. I can’t possibly hope to conceal it after October. I’m lacing myself into a tight corset now and sometimes I can barely breathe, let alone sing and dance. I’ve got to come up with some good reason for leaving. If I just disappear without any adequate explanation I’ll never get work again after the baby’s born. You were always good at making up plausible stories, work on that one for me!’

‘You won’t go to a cheap room,’ Bonny said aloud as she put down the letter. One of the three spare bedrooms upstairs was in quite good shape, the only one which hadn’t been damaged by the leaking roof. She would set to work today and clean it out. ‘You’ll come here, Ellie Forester. I owe you.’

Ellie clattered down the stairs from the dressing-rooms after the matinée with an enormous sense of relief. It was now the end of September and at lunchtime she’d been in to see the producer with the tale that she had to go to Canada to see an old aunt who was terminally ill. Mr Brascott had been very understanding, asking only that she stayed on another couple of weeks. He had been extremely complimentary and had even suggested she contact him again when she returned to England.

Ellie intended to go and have something to eat, then telephone Bonny to tell her the plan she’d devised had worked, before returning to the theatre for the evening performance. She wasn’t absolutely certain about Bonny’s idea that she should go and stay in Somerset with her. But she thought she might make for a city like Bristol where no one would know her, find a room and a job and contact a welfare organisation.

She refused to even think of any alternative but adoption for her baby. She didn’t dare. If she let herself imagine holding it, she knew she would waver. Being an unmarried mother wasn’t just frowned on, but considered almost a crime. Now she fully understood why her mother had taken Tom Forester’s name and acted the part of a widow. That really was the only way of protecting her child and herself from malicious gossip.

Ellie didn’t immediately see Sir Miles as she reached the stage door area. A group of dancers and several stage-hands had gathered to chat there and the one light was rather dim.

‘Miss Forester!’ The booming voice made her jerk her head round just as she was about to open the door to leave. ‘I’m glad I caught you. Have you got a moment?’

Ellie could never see the man, even from a distance, without feeling a lurch in her stomach. At Bonny’s wedding they had spoken briefly, but meeting him at a social event hadn’t made things easier. He still addressed her formally, as ‘Miss Forester’.

‘I was just going to get something to eat,’ she said, colouring up.

He was as formidable to her now as he had been at their first meeting. He wasn’t a man given to smiling much and his ruddy complexion, heavy jowls and bulbous nose all seemed to speak of a bad temper. Today he wore a rather flamboyant embroidered waistcoat beneath his dark suit. Although it accentuated his big belly, it also suggested he wasn’t quite the reserved man she’d initially taken him for.

‘Well, let’s talk while you eat,’ he said. ‘I know of a little place quite nearby.’

Ellie was relieved that the place he took her to was only an ordinary café as she wasn’t sure whether he intended to treat her to the meal.

‘I can recommend the Toad in the Hole,’ he said as they sat down at a table by the window. ‘I quite often come in here for supper. They make superb gravy.’

‘Are you hungry?’ Ellie asked. She was surprised that a man in his position ate in such places. It was clean and bright, but not very smart.

He smiled then, as if guessing she would be embarrassed to eat if he wasn’t. He looked so much nicer when he smiled; the sternness vanished and his eyes became softer.

‘I think I can manage a portion of toad,’ he said, patting his fat stomach and looking down at it in mock dismay. ‘It’s that weakness for food which caused this. But my wife’s out playing bridge this evening and I don’t relish the cold cuts I’ll have left out for me.’

They spoke of general things until their meal arrived, but the moment the waitress had put down their plates he asked her about leaving for Canada.

‘You haven’t picked a very good time to vanish,’ he said, as he cut into the batter surrounding the sausage. ‘Your star is just rising, Miss Forester. Is it wise to leave England now?’

Ellie came back with the well-rehearsed excuses she’d offered Mr Brascott: that this was her only living relation, whom she hadn’t seen since before the war, that it was a chance to see a little of Canada.

‘My Auntie Betty lives in Burnaby, near Vancouver,’ she said. ‘She was a dancer too, and so anxious to see me again. I can’t say no, can I?’

‘No I suppose not,’ he agreed. ‘But make sure you are back before February. I have plans for you.’

It was while he was speaking of a film he intended to back that Ellie suddenly knew for certain he was her father. It wasn’t in his face, or his mannerisms, just the excitement and enthusiasm in his voice. She saw her own character mirrored in that voice. His was deep and growling, each word so perfectly enunciated, yet she could hear herself. It was just the way she spoke when she had a passion about something.

She had read
Soho
, the book the film would be based on. It had been a best-seller for two years after the war, and Ellie had sobbed over it. There were so many parallels with her own life in the character of Megan, a young Welsh girl who leaves the valleys for London and becomes embroiled in the wartime Soho underworld.

‘You would be perfect for the part of Megan,’ he said. ‘I thought of you all the while I was reading the script.’

Ellie forgot the dinner on the table, forgot even the tightly laced corset holding her in and the problems which lay before her. She looked into his face and felt she must be dreaming. ‘Are you serious?’ she gasped.

‘Never more so, my dear,’ he said, his eyes twinkling at her astonishment. ‘I’m not the only person who thinks the part was written for you. My wife agreed entirely, as do several other interested parties.’

‘I don’t know what to say.’ Her voice seemed like someone else’s. She knew she should ask sensible questions but she couldn’t think of one.

‘Just promise me you’ll be back in London by February,’ he said, then moved on to tell her casually that the part of Joe Lamprey, the airman who seduces Megan, would be played by Dean Dailey, an American heartthrob. ‘It will be a low budget film shot mainly out at Ealing Studios, but all of us involved in it are sure it will be a huge hit. The book was a colossal success, the film can’t miss.’

Ellie thought she was being strangled. She couldn’t see her assailant’s face, but the hands around her neck were squeezing the life out of her. She was struggling to get free, waving her arms helplessly, then suddenly a crash woke her.

She reached out for the string above the bed to switch on the light. The sheet was wrapped around her neck, she was dripping with sweat and fighting for breath. It was one in the morning. She’d only been in bed for an hour.

Throwing off the covers, she got out of bed. The crash had just been a book falling off the bedside table. She hoped she hadn’t woken anyone else in the house.

Sitting down by the open window, she looked out into the dark street, waiting for the breathlessness to leave her. Having no one to discuss her symptoms with made the fright much worse. Was it normal to feel that only half your lungs were working? To be so hot all the time, when everyone else was complaining how cold it was getting? Only a couple of days ago Aggie, her landlady here in Highbury Place, had asked how she could bear sitting in her room with the window wide open.

The wind was cold now – it gave her bare arms goose bumps – but it didn’t cool her inside. It had been like this at night for weeks now. She would fall asleep, only to wake like this, dripping with sweat, a million nameless horrors filling her mind. This was the first time she’d dreamt she was being strangled, but the dream was nonetheless easy to interpret. She was being strangled by lies and deceit.

Until her meeting earlier in the day with Sir Miles, getting through the next three of four months had been her only concern. Now his offer of the part of Megan had added further complications. It was like glimpsing an island after being cast away at sea for weeks. That island held everything she’d dreamed of since childhood, a chance that might never come again. But the admission fee was so very high.

It was almost like a pact with the devil: everything she desired in exchange for her baby. True, she had always intended to give the baby away, but until now no one had been twisting her arm to do so. How ironic it was that her own father was inadvertently doing the twisting!

‘Your mother chose you rather than fame and fortune,’ Ellie reminded herself. But would she have done so if she’d known that twelve years later she would still be in Alder Street? Had she hoped that someone would wave a magic wand and that all at once they’d be transported to a pretty house with enough money that they would never go hungry again?

Ellie remembered that hunger sharply: lying in bed listening to her stomach growling, knowing there was nothing in the house to eat; watching the dancers in the Holborn Empire eating fish and chips, hoping against hope that one of them wouldn’t be able to manage it all. She could still see Polly picking up bruised fruit and vegetables on her way through Covent Garden, slipping them into her pockets when no one was looking.

‘I don’t know the first thing about babies,’ Ellie murmured, putting her hand on her swollen belly and stroking it tenderly. She could feel tentative flutters of movement inside her, like holding a butterfly in her hand. It brought on a yearning, loving feeling that she hadn’t made allowances for and added yet another perspective to her confusion.

‘How can I keep you?’ she whispered, stroking her stomach soothingly, tears rolling down her cheeks. ‘I’d be no good to you as a mother. You’ll be happier without me.’

Chapter Thirty

October 1949

Ellie struggled off the train with her heavy suitcase and slammed the door behind her. The guard blew his whistle and the train chugged out, leaving her alone on a deserted, dimly lit platform.

It had been a long exhausting journey from London to Wells, and only the expectation of Bonny waiting for her at the end of it had kept her spirits up. Now, finding herself stranded, apparently miles from anywhere, the tears which had threatened all day welled up and spilled over. She dropped her suitcase and groped in her coat pocket for a handkerchief.

‘Ellie!’

The figure running towards her down the platform shrouded in a voluminous hooded brown mackintosh bore no resemblance to Bonny, but her voice was unmistakable.

‘I’m sorry I’m late. The bus was so slow,’ she gasped breathlessly, then as she saw Ellie’s stricken face she enveloped her in a clammy, fierce hug. ‘You didn’t think I’d forgotten, you chump? I’ve been counting the hours till I saw you.’

‘Just a moment of panic,’ Ellie sniffed, feeling a little foolish. ‘The station looks like something out of a horror film. I half expected Boris Karloff to lurch out of the waiting-room.’

Bonny giggled. ‘I’ll tell the hunchbacked coach driver to get lost and take you by taxi to The Chestnuts then. Oh, it’s so good to see you again!’

‘John won’t mind me staying until I get fixed up somewhere?’ Ellie asked as Bonny picked up her case and tucked her spare hand through Ellie’s arm, leading her towards the deserted ticket barrier.

‘I haven’t told him.’ Bonny grinned impishly. ‘As he’s in America and you’re supposed to be in Canada I saw no point. We’ll decide what to do in a day or two.’

Branches swishing against the side of the taxi gave Ellie the impression they were driving through very narrow winding lanes, but heavy rain and darkness obliterated everything but a few feet of road caught in the headlamps. Bonny chattered constantly, mostly about her house and John. Ellie was glad just to sit back and listen. She supposed Bonny was avoiding any conversation that might make the driver prick up his ears, and she was so very tired.

‘We’re here!’ Ellie woke to find Bonny shaking her arm and the car stopped. ‘Was I that boring? I should’ve left the light on in the porch. You can’t see anything.’

Ellie sleepily followed Bonny through the rain and darkness. The taxi had already reversed out of the drive. She could hear its engine still, but its lights had vanished. Wet leaves brushed against her legs and she could hear trees creaking in the wind.