Bourbon Creams and Tattered Dreams Read online

  ‘And there’s a bag of broken in there for the boys, and tell ’em to make the most of ’em cos they’re the last I’ll be able to get.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ll be getting me cards.’

  ‘Oh, love, I’m sorry. What happened?’ Matty was puzzled by the undeniable twinkle in Winnie’s eyes and barely concealed smile. ‘You don’t look too unhappy about it.’

  ‘I don’t want to lose me job, love, but it could be worse.’ She banged on the table. ‘Shhhh, everyone. I’ve got an announcement to make.’ The chattering and laughter went on. ‘Shut yer cake’oles, you lot!’ Winnie bellowed and finally the Tiller Girls stopped their conversation, putting down their glasses, attentive faces turned to Winnie.

  ‘Well, gels, I shall be getting me cards and me knife!’

  The girls jumped up as one, eager to congratulate Winnie, and finally Matty was able to hug her friend. For when Peek’s presented a woman with her cards and a knife it meant only one thing: she was getting married. These days, the ‘Modern Woman at Work’ could never include a married one and the firm sacked every woman for the sin of matrimony. They sweetened the pill of losing an income with the gift of a knife to cut the wedding cake.

  ‘Winnie! You’re getting married to Wally the Wonder Wheel? When did all this happen?’ Matty said, admiring Winnie’s ability to keep a secret.

  Winnie laughed. ‘Walter proposed at Winchester – he fell arse over tit off your penny-farthing and I caught him! You was too busy with our Tom to notice.’

  ‘Oh, Win, I’m so happy for you. But what’ll your mum and dad do without your wages coming in?’

  ‘I reckon they’ll be better off. They’ll get more relief when I move out and Wally’s lovely – he says we’ll help them out. Lucky he’s good at selling, eh?’

  Winnie knew all the jokes about Wally being good at everything but his specialty act.

  ‘Win, you do know all about his selling?’ For Wally supplemented his work collecting for penny insurance policies by offering clients whatever contraband was doing the rounds of the Bermondsey pubs.

  ‘That’s what I meant, you silly mare! You didn’t think I was talking about insurance, did you?’

  ***

  Matty and Tom sat at a table with a view of the dark Thames flowing beneath the window. A string of lamps on the far embankment spread flickering pathways of light, which reached long fingers of flame across the river. The old Angel pub was full of nooks and crannies, where dimly lit tables and high-backed benches provided some seclusion away from the noisy bar. Matty imagined him reaching across the table, taking her hand and raising it to his lips. It was what he would have done, once, but now she dropped her hands to her lap.

  ‘Were you jealous?’ he asked.

  ‘Don’t be an idiot. Why would I be jealous? I don’t want to get married...’ Matty paused, as Tom’s expression froze. She didn’t respond well to game-playing. If he wanted just to be friends, then he should learn to steer clear of asking about her feelings.

  ‘Of course you don’t,’ Tom said, giving his white tie a vigorous tug.

  ‘Leave it alone, you look very dashing. You’re spoiling the suave look.’ Matty relented. He’d at least been trying to be civil, and he’d been the one who’d offered to come along tonight for moral support. Straightening the tie, she sang a snatch: ‘I’m tying up my white tie, polishing my nails...’

  ‘I was pleased for them,’ she went on. ‘I just wondered why you hadn’t told me about your own sister getting engaged.’

  ‘I only found out the day before you, and besides, we never have time to talk at work.’

  Though they spent each day together and they’d managed to maintain a civil relationship at work, still, she missed talking with him. She felt cheated as she tried to stifle her rekindled love, and now she remembered that old excitement of being courted by him. Tonight he looked especially handsome. He wore the same evening suit he’d hired for the Fonstone house party, for tonight they were going to Neville’s private club in the West End, where Matty was making her debut as a torch singer.

  ‘Come on, we should go. Neville will be waiting,’ Matty said, and allowed Tom to drape her black feather-trimmed stole across her shoulders.

  The streets around the pub were narrow, cobbled and dark, a canyon of warehouses and quaysides. The pair should have been out of place in evening wear, but there were others in the pub dressed, like them, for a night in the West End. While Matty had been away, the few habitable houses directly fronting this stretch of the river had been taken over by a select group of bohemians and theatrical types. The roughness of the dirty riverside streets, coupled with the ancient flow of the Thames, seemed to provide the sort of romance that couldn’t be bought in Mayfair.

  Neville Piper’s bolt-hole was an ancient, narrow, steep-staired maritime house, with a bow window on the upper floor jutting out over the river, giving a spectacular view of the wide sweep of the Thames up to Tower Bridge. The room was ablaze with candlelight that bounced off piano and mirrors, reflecting a hundred flames in each bottle pane of the window. Neville greeted them with cocktails and warm words of encouragement for Matty.

  ‘You aren’t nervous are you, darling? It will be a very intimate crowd. They’ll adore you!’

  But Matty wasn’t nervous; she was buzzing with excitement. She’d loved singing to crowds of five hundred or a thousand from an upturned stool beside the cinemotor, getting them to join in, being swept along by their exuberance and banter, yet Neville had spotted something she’d barely admitted to herself: the old hankering for the spotlit glamour of a proper stage, however small, had returned. Tonight’s venue, the Blue Lotus, was a private cabaret and dining club near Piccadilly, where Neville often performed his own songs. An appearance there was bound to get her noticed again in theatre circles, but she’d stressed to Neville that publicity should be at a minimum and he’d promised to limit it to word of mouth.

  River fog rolled around them as they dipped into the warmth of the taxi.

  ‘How did you get a cab to come down here?’ Matty asked Neville as they set off along Bermondsey Wall. ‘Normally taxis won’t come near this place.’

  ‘Oh, they know me by now, darling, and I always pay them danger money!’ Neville had a high tinkling laugh; he was an odd mixture of toughness and sensitivity. Anyone looking as he did would be a target for verbal if not physical abuse in these rough backstreets, but he seemed oblivious.

  As the taxi crossed Tower Bridge, she went through her set with him and he advised changing a few of the downbeat songs to cheerier ones.

  ‘You don’t want to have them too depressed, my darling. They like to be made blue, but by the time they stumble out into the night they should also believe in the power of true love to conquer all!’

  Matty gave a small smile. ‘But surely they’ll only believe that if I do, Neville.’

  Tom shot her a look in the dim interior of the cab and she turned her own gaze to the murky river, feeling the disconcerting bump as they passed over the small gap between the two bascules of the bridge, a place that had always made her feel slightly queasy and unstable.

  The club was half empty when they arrived. Double glass doors led into a gallery bar that overlooked the restaurant and stage area, where a single pianist was playing softly. They descended a curving chrome and glass staircase to the restaurant, where a few diners, couples mostly, sat at booths round the edge. But the tables in the centre of the floor, facing the small stage, were still empty.

  ‘Don’t look so worried, darling.’ Neville put a guiding arm round her shoulders. ‘You won’t be playing to an empty house. We attract the after-theatre crowd here. You’ll have plenty of time to settle in before the place fills up.’

  Neville led them backstage, where Matty was surprised to find a smart dressing room, far better than some of the cupboards she’d been used to in large theatres.

  ‘I’ll leave you to freshen your war paint, Matty darling.’ He k
issed her as if she were his oldest friend and let his hand linger a little too long in the small of her back.

  ‘Now don’t forget what I said about your set – true love conquers all at the end!’

  After he’d left with a waft of expensive brilliantine and cigarette smoke, she saw Tom’s eyes on her.

  ‘I suppose all theatricals are over-friendly,’ Tom said reasonably, and she could see he was struggling to mask his jealousy. ‘I’m so happy for you, Matty,’ he said finally. ‘Something’s changed – your eyes, they’ve come alive. All this, it gives you something our films never could...’

  ‘It’s exciting, Tom. But it’s not the “everything” it used to be. What we’re doing with the films feels solid, as if it will last. This...’ she blew on the black feathers of her stole, ‘could be blown away tomorrow and no one would know the difference, but our work’s saving lives. Look at our Billy.’

  ‘Perhaps you can have both?’ Tom suggested and she loved him for it. Wanting nothing more than to fling her arms around his neck, instead she held that yearning in her throat. Not so much that it would rob her voice of power, but just enough to give her the edge required to draw up a performance that would move her listeners. This was what she’d missed, the emotional dance with an audience set in motion by her own voice. The Bermondsey street crowds reflected back humour, sometimes frustration, but rarely deep emotion. Mostly Matty’s task was to educate and Dr Connan’s verses sung to the tune of ‘My Sweet Hortense’, though it might give her satisfaction, could never feed her soul.

  And as she discovered, Neville hadn’t lied. By eleven thirty, the place was packed. The members had downed their first cocktails and been served with food, and now a purple cloud of cigarette smoke hung over the tables. Tom wished her luck and went out into the restaurant. She walked into the spotlight on the stage and was revealed in a swirl of smoke. She smiled to herself as she began low and even, with a new sultry torch song that she’d only just learned, called ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’. Gradually she sensed the chatter subside and felt the attention of the room turning towards her, as she moved on to ‘You’ve got me crying again, you’ve got me sighing again’, and segued into ‘Call it woman’s intuition but it can’t go on like this’. She went through the repertoire of newer songs she’d been learning ever since Neville invited her to sing at the Blue Lotus. At one point she dipped into an even darker mood with an English version of ‘Mack the Knife’, but she could see the lyrics about Macheath’s flashing shark’s teeth and his hidden knife were not fitting the crowd. The song was weakening their attention so she tugged on their strings with some lighter more romantic songs and ended with ‘The Clouds Will Soon Roll By’. When she sang ‘Somewhere the sun is shining. So, honey, don’t you cry. We’ll find a silver lining. The clouds will soon roll by’, she hoped she’d done enough to heed Neville’s warning and convinced her listeners that love would indeed conquer all in the end.

  The applause was instantaneous and when people started jumping to their feet, she felt Neville at her side. He was hissing in her ear, ‘They want an encore, darling. Have you got something?’ She hadn’t expected this, so asked the pianist for the first song that came to mind: as she sang ‘I’ll See You in My Dreams’, she was aware only of Tom’s face shining up at her. She felt a surge of life and energy as she left the stage and joined Tom at his table. Perhaps she had done enough.

  ‘You were sensational, Matty,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks, Tom. I really need a gin, though,’ she said, resisting the impulse to kiss him and instead pulling the stole up around her shoulders, for now she was out of the spotlight she felt suddenly chilly. Left at the table while Tom went to get drinks, she dropped her chin into the black feathers. Something other than the normal after-show anti-climax was niggling, like a pearl in an oyster, and a sick feeling threatened her sense of triumph. She probed for a reason and as she mentally ran through her songs she realized that all, bar the final two, reminded her of the way she’d felt with Frank. That simmering unease, which she’d once mistaken for excitement, now gave her an unsteady feeling, the sort she got when she crossed Tower Bridge and felt an instant of danger as the bascules just failed to meet, revealing the river far below. She remembered ‘Mack the Knife’. She’d only included the song at the last moment, thinking it might please the sophisticated crowd, but only now did she realize with a shudder that the lyrics too reminded her of Frank, with his sharp white teeth and, of course, his knife.

  Resenting Frank’s power to invade the most precious moments of her life, she shook her head to rid herself of him.

  ‘Penny for them?’ Tom handed her the glass. ‘Neville asked us to join him. Lots of his friends want to meet you.’ He smiled, his first genuine smile for her in a long time. ‘You should enjoy the moment, Matty. I’m so proud of you.’

  And Matty felt the cold draught of Frank’s memory receding.

  *

  They didn’t leave the Blue Lotus until the early hours, for she hadn’t wanted the night to end. Walking down Piccadilly, they reached the Strand, passing the odd group of early morning revellers. At Covent Garden they stopped while Tom went to hail a taxi. Porters were already unloading vans in side streets and transporting fruit baskets on their heads to the market. Matty noticed a group of down-at-heel men hanging around the lorries, leaning on walls or lounging in doorways, seemingly idle. Their papery faces had a wary look and their idleness was taut with watchfulness. Matty realized why when one of them approached a porter.

  ‘Got any specks, mate?’

  ‘Sorry, it’s all good stuff.’

  ‘Nothing for the kids?’ the man persisted, but the porter waved him away, not unkindly, just intent on getting his load transported to the market.

  The man pulled his cap down and retired with a resigned look, but then the porter missstepped, sending his load of fruit tumbling to the cobbles. The men were on the scattering fruit in a wasp-like frenzy, stuffing as much booty into their pockets as they could, some running off, others settling back to wait for the next windfall.

  Though she’d been on relief herself, Matty felt the contrast between those desperate men and her own good fortune. Her stage finery felt like an accusation and she went to join Tom at the street corner, grateful that he’d found them a cab.

  By the time Matty and Tom were approaching Tower Bridge in the taxi, dawn was breaking. A sky of pale rose and gold hung over the Tower of London, its once white walls black with the soot and grime of ages.

  ‘Tom, let’s get out here and walk across,’ Matty suggested.

  ‘It’s chilly,’ Tom warned. ‘Are you sure?’

  Matty nodded and he asked the driver to stop the cab at the foot of the bridge. Tom quickly paid the cabbie and they hurried on, Matty drawing up her stole against the cold wind whipping up from the river. As they reached the central span, she stopped and walked to the thick wooden railing. Deliberately she made for the gap between the bascules and when Tom joined her, he gave her a puzzled look. ‘What’s brought this on?’

  ‘Did I ever tell you I was always frightened of walking over this gap?’ Matty asked.

  ‘No, you never did.’ Tom looked doubtful. ‘Not that I’d have believed it. You always seemed like you could take on the world back then, Matty.’

  Matty was silent for a while. ‘Well, I couldn’t and I found out there were far worse things to be frightened of than the middle of Tower Bridge.’ She turned a serious face towards him. ‘But I don’t want to be frightened any more.’

  He looked down at her and now his eyes brimmed with undeniable love.

  ‘Matty, I’m sorry I forced you to tell me about that film. I swore to myself when you went away that if you ever gave me another chance I’d just let you be yourself...’

  ‘You didn’t force me to tell you.’

  ‘Perhaps not, but I’ve put you through the mill since you did. I’ve not been fair. Give me another chance, Matty, and I promise... I’ll let you keep your secrets.’
He drew her into a tight embrace and she shivered in his arms. ‘I don’t need to know everything he did to you, Matty, but I do know you need never be frightened of him again. I’m going to look after you. I love you.’

  They kissed on the central span of the bridge and Matty allowed herself to believe that Tom’s love could save her from her past. She forgot about the long drop to the fast-flowing current below, she forgot the ever-swaying span beneath her feet as traffic started to rumble past, she forgot the cold wind chasing up the Thames – she forgot everything but the sweetness of his lips and the warmth of his arms, and when she finally pulled away from his embrace, the morning had turned from gold to pale turquoise and her eyes were fixed only on the brightening sky.

  21

  Moving On

  March–April 1932

  Matty became a regular at the Blue Lotus, singing there once a week or sometimes at club members’ private parties. The low-key nature of the work fitted in with their continuing filming of the Modern Woman series. Tom had given them a tight schedule of producing three films before the summer screenings began. Sometimes Tom would come with her to the nightclub, but when a deadline loomed he would spend his evenings planning storyboards and organizing shooting schedules. Their first film, The Modern Woman and Work, had already been edited and they were waiting for the final print from the film company. They’d made the voice-over recording and D.M. was delighted with her take on ‘He’s Only a Working Man’, which she’d turned on its head, making it into a song about the ideal working woman.

  It seemed that Tom’s prediction had come true. She could have both – a life on stage and a life on screen. She could sing her heart out by night and by day she could produce films that made a difference. They were in the middle of planning The Modern Woman and Home when an idea came to her.

  ‘Why don’t we film a move from one of the old condemned streets to a new flat?’ she suggested to Tom. ‘We could show a woman coping with the evils of the old houses – rats, bedbugs, damp, overcrowding. And then we could show her in one of the new council flats – plenty of room, electricity, running hot water, a bath – paradise on earth really!’