sent her out,’ I said. ‘I wanted to talk to Louie.’
He swung round and peered at me and she tugged my sleeve warningly.
‘Miss Oliver, I did not want my wife disturbed.’
Even his accent was wearing thin and, having decided that he had finished with me, I suppose, he returned to her.
‘We’re going on to a night-club,’ he said, ‘and if you’re asked to sing, damn well sing, because it’ll probably be your last chance with the shows you’re putting up here.’
‘My God!’ I said, and I began to tell him exactly where he got off.
He stopped me.
I’ve been on the stage all my life and I’ve never heard language like it. I could hear footsteps in the corridor outside and I can see Louie’s face as she turned to him imploringly to this day.
‘You’re drunk,’ I said at last when I could get a word in.
But he wasn’t. If he had been I could have forgiven him. He wasn’t drunk. He didn’t need drink. He was like it naturally.
‘Louie, for God’s sake leave him,’ I said.
That did it. The balloon went up. I’ve never had a row like it and I’ve been in a few. I remember turning to Louie in the middle of it.
‘He’s ruining you, old girl. And you’ve ruined him. He ought never to have had more than three pounds a week in his life. You’ve given him so much corn he’s blown his head off.’
Of course it didn’t do any good. I might have known. She stuck to him and stood by him even then while a crowd of his little girl-friends were waiting for him at the stage door in his own car, anxious to get every little bit they could out of him. Even then she stood for him, poor old girl.
He threw me out—physically. Took me out by the shoulders and pitched me into the corridor. I was wild. I was beside myself.
‘I’ll kill you for this,’ I said.
But when it came to it and I did kill him I wasn’t in that mood at all.
They came to live in my house at the end of the ’twenties. We all get old and I admit that the discovery came to me as a bit of a shock, but it didn’t throw me off my balance. It was the same sort of feeling I had when I realised that I couldn’t wear a ballet skirt any longer. Something had to be done about it. It was a pity, but it couldn’t be helped.
I left the stage and bought my house with most of my little bit of money. It’s not a grand house, but it’s just the place for me and a couple of little girls to run when the boarders do most of their own work.
I won’t tell you the exact address, but it’s up Maida Vale way, nearly to Kilburn, and it stands in a row with a lot of other houses which used to be very fashionable and are still respectable, in spite of the efforts of some people whom I have to call neighbours.
There are three floors, a basement and an attic. I live in the basement. There’s a little room for me and a kitchen and a tiny spare room that used to be a pantry where I can put up an old pal who can’t afford to pay me what they’d like to.
Louie and Frank started on the first floor. That was at the beginning of the time. Then they moved upstairs, but at the time I’m talking of they were in the attic. There were two rooms, with a little gas-stove in one of them and a sink out in the passage. The windows of the rooms looked out over the parapet, which is one of the features of all the houses in our street. It’s a big yellow stucco parapet that finishes the roof off and makes the houses look like great slabs of margarine on a Sainsbury counter.
I don’t think I ever really got to know Frank until I had him in the house. Louie I seemed to know less. Every now and again I’d recognise the dear old girl she really was and I’d see a spark of the old spirit, the old friendliness that had made me love her all my life. But for the most part she was on guard against me. She wouldn’t let me get near her. She was always defensive, always frightened.
Frank was mad. I came to that conclusion when he gave the Peeler Ventriloquist Act’s parrot a great lump of bacon and killed it, and Louie and I were at our wits’ end covering the business up.
It’s difficult to explain why I should have found that so enlightening, but it wasn’t done through, ignorance and it wasn’t done as a joke, and it wasn’t even done out of maliciousness, because he had nothing against the Peeler pair except that they were living; in the rooms he used to have. But it was done out of a desire to be powerful, if you see what I mean, and after that I knew he was dangerous.
I find myself skipping the story of Louie and Frank in between that time we had a row at the Palladium and the time they finally gravitated to my attic. It’s because it’s an old story and a tragic story, the same old miserable story that any one-time star who hasn’t saved can tell you.
There were more rows, less good performances, changes in the public taste, hard times and worst of all, a dreadful moment when her old spirit came back and she gave ’em the affection that she used to give ’em, gasping and exhausted and fighting as she was and they didn’t want it any more. And there were empty seats and perhaps even a catcall or so from the gods.
There were other things too: unpleasant interviews with managers who didn’t even know the names of predecessors who’d been more than half in love with her.
And all the time there was Frank, making it worse. He’d always done silly things, but being wild with a lot of money is funny and being wild with no money is criminal.
He was never in jail. She kept him out of that somehow. Now and again she got a little engagement. At those times I had my hands full with him. If he could get down to the theatre he’d make a scene. He couldn’t help it; he just wanted to be in the picture, like a silly hysterical woman.
He was never drunk, or at least only very rarely and then only when it suited his purpose and he fancied himself doing the Garrick act. Then he’d knock her about. It looks incredible now I’ve written it down. You remember Louie Lester: can you see any man knocking her about? But he did. I’ve had the doctor in to clean up a black eye before now.
As the years went on it got worse—worse for me, I mean. She’d always had hell’s delight with him, I imagine. But he became an old man of the sea. They couldn’t pay me very much at first and they paid me less and less until they paid me nothing at all. Time and again I’d lose my temper and threaten to throw him out, and then he’d laugh at me.
‘If I go Louie goes,’ he’d say. ‘Can you see her, Polly, sitting under the Adelphi Arches?’
I couldn’t, but I could see him sitting there and her singing in the street until she could bring him something, like a poor old mother wagtail with an obscene, bald red cuckoo tucked up in her nest.
So they stayed. Times had been difficult in the theatrical profession. They still are. People have still got to live but they don’t live so well, and there are too many real business people in the boarding-house line to make it all jam for old women like me, who don’t know how to count every halfpenny and haven’t learnt how to be mean.
He began to affect my business. I haven’t brought myself to tell
