All That Glitters (15 page)

‘All right. But only if you let me pay for yours next week.’

‘You strapped for cash? But of course, how stupid of me, you must be. Working a week in hand is a real killer, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ she agreed shortly.

‘And I don’t suppose your people could give you much to tide you over?’

‘Nothing.’

‘So that’s why Phyllis took you in.’

‘It’s not charity. I’ll pay back every penny before I move on.’

‘Hey.’ He held up his hands as though he were warding off blows. ‘Did I say you wouldn’t?’

‘No, but I can see what you’re thinking. It’s all too easy for people to assume that a girl on her own is out for everything she can get.’

‘Sounds like you’ve been listening to Ponty people talking about the girls in the show.’ He turned the corner and walked down Leyshon Street towards Fred’s fish and chip shop. ‘Two threepennyworths of chips, please, Fred!’ he shouted as he walked through the door.

‘Only just caught me, Haydn. I was ready to close up.’ Fred picked up an iron shovel and pushed it into the warm cabinet of cooked chips. ‘Working hard?’ Fred winked suggestively, not seeing Jane behind Haydn.

‘You know how it is. Nose to the grindstone. Nothing but singing, champagne, beautiful girls and the high life.’

‘If you ever want to unload your work troubles, remember your old mates.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind but for the moment I’ll struggle on.’

‘Salt and vinegar?’ Fred held up a giant battered tin salt cellar.

‘Jane?’ Haydn looked down at the girl. She really was preposterously small, more like a child than a grown woman.

‘Please.’

‘Sorry if I said anything to offend you, Miss,’ Fred apologised. ‘I didn’t realise Haydn had a young lady with him.’

‘This is Jane, our new lodger,’ Haydn introduced her, hoping to scotch any rumours of romance before they started. He was prepared to cope with the odd raised eyebrow over his relationship with Rusty, or Babs, but not the small-town gossip that would ensue if he was suspected of courting a ‘decent’ girl.

‘Pleased to me you, Jane.’

Jane shook Fred’s hand before taking the chips he handed her, and leaving the shop.

‘Best chips in the country.’ Haydn blew on his fingers after trying to pick one up. ‘I know, I’ve tried all the others.’

‘It must be fun touring the country.’

‘You think so? Different digs, different town every week. No one close to talk to …’

‘Except the twenty-odd people in the show.’

‘Even they change. One whiff of a better engagement in the offing, and all you see is the dust at their heels.’

‘Is that what you would do?’

‘I’m doing it. Leaving the Revue at the end of next week for Summer Variety. It’s a simple case of self-preservation. The Revue only has two more weeks to run in the provinces before being disbanded, and the Variety’s booked in the Town Hall for a season.’

‘And if something better than the Summer Variety comes up?’

‘I’ll be gone the minute they can replace me.’ He looked across at her. She’d only eaten one or two of her chips, while there was nothing but hard crumbs left in his paper. He screwed it into a ball, and lifting the lid of a dustbin pushed it in. ‘One word about these to Phyllis, or one mouthful of the meal she’s cooked left on your plate and I’ll brain you.’

‘I’m not a tattle-tell.’

‘You’re not?’

They were under the lamp that burned outside the Graig Hotel. Something in the tone of his voice made her look up. She was glad she did. The expression on his face made her remember the story she’d told Phyllis about Haydn and Rusty last night, before he’d walked into the kitchen and she’d realised he was Evan’s son.

‘So that’s why you wanted to walk me home!’ she retorted angrily, suspicion clearing her mind. ‘To ask me not to carry any more theatre gossip back to your family.’

‘It might help to make my stay in Pontypridd run a little more smoothly.’

She wrapped her chips in the newspaper that Fred had left open so she could dip into them as she walked. ‘I suppose Phyllis said something to you about cavorting with naked girls in your dressing room.’

‘She mentioned that she hoped I knew what I was doing, so I guessed that you’d told her about Rusty. There’s no point in you upsetting the family over nothing.’

‘Nothing! And I suppose that kiss you gave Mandy tonight when you came off stage and she was waiting in the wings, was nothing either?’

‘Theatre people kiss and hug each other all the time, it doesn’t mean a thing. And even if it did, what are you getting so worked up about? What I do is my affair and none of yours.’

‘I never said it was. I didn’t even know you were related to Evan when I told Phyllis about you and Rusty last night. If I had, I wouldn’t have said a word. And I’ll tell you something else for nothing, Haydn Powell. I’m not a gossip. And the last thing I want is to be associated with you, lest I get mistaken for one of your … your …’ she remembered reading
The Arabian Nights
and found the word she was searching for ‘... concubines. And if you thought you could buy me off with a walk home and a few pennyworth of chips, you have another thing coming. Keep your damned chips.’ She dumped them in his hands. ‘And in future I’ll walk myself home.’ Striding ahead, she stepped into a puddle of water.

Haydn watched her go, shaking his head and cursing Phyllis for bringing a girl into the house who worked in the Town Hall and had a mouth he couldn’t control.

‘Here’s everyone’s mending,’ Jane handed the parcel to Mandy, hoping she would do the same as she had done the rest of the week and pay the whole bill, the other girls’ as well as her own. Today’s was half a crown. Once the rest of the chorus girls had seen the neat stitching on Mandy’s blouse they had queued up to hand over their own chemises, petticoats and fine lingerie.

‘Thanks, you’re a gem,’ Mandy opened her bag and took out her purse. Reading the label, she handed over two shillings and sixpence. ‘You haven’t forgotten about coming to the dressing room after the matinee, have you?’

‘No,’ Jane assured her, trying to keep her mind on the ten pounds she might earn, and not the prospect of taking her clothes off in front of a male photographer.

‘I hate bloody matinees!’ Judy complained as, cigarette in mouth, she left the dressing room in search of a light. ‘Locked up here all day with no one to talk to except Billy. Nothing to do except listen to Haydn and Rusty banging away through the wall. Nothing decent to eat except chocolate bars and cold sandwiches …’

‘There’s a shop down the road that sells hot pasties. I could get you one after the first show,’ Jane offered.

‘Now, that’s an idea. I’ll give you the money.’

‘I’ll get it with this,’ Jane held up the money Mandy had just given her. ‘You can pay me when I bring it.’

‘Bring one for me too,’ Mandy asked. ‘And I bet the others will want some too.’

‘I’ll come back afterwards to see how many you want.’ Slipping the money into her pocket Jane went to the manager’s office, sealed it into an envelope and put it in his safe lest it get mixed up with her tray money.

‘We’re going to be bored rigid this afternoon,’ Avril grumbled. ‘No one will risk being seen by their neighbours coming to a show like this in broad daylight.’

‘The men of Pontypridd might give us a wide berth,’ Ann agreed, ‘but those who live further afield won’t. We’ll be inundated with boys from the top end of the valleys, and Abercynon and Aberdare. The trains will be fuller today than they are for a rugby match.’

Ann’s prediction proved correct. As soon as the doors opened, the by now familiar masculine horde surged up the stairs. ‘Quick,’ Ann sniggered as one man glanced over his shoulder, ‘before you’re seen by a scandalmonger who’ll tell the wife.’

Jane had no time to think about the transformation Mandy and Judy were going to effect on her between the shows. The interval had to be extended by ten minutes for all the usherettes to refill their trays, an unheard-of phenomenon in a matinee. At the end of the performance the hall resounded with claps, cheers, wolf whistles and demands for encores, but Haydn wasn’t egotistical enough to think the audience wanted to see or hear any more from him. He retired gracefully after the final curtain, leaving the girls alone on stage to stand through two more curtain calls.

The increase in ice-cream and sweet sales brought a corresponding swell in rubbish. Jane filled a sack entirely by herself before she was finally able to take her break.

‘An hour before we’re on duty again,’ Avril sighed wearily, pushing a cigarette into her mouth as she sank down on a bar stool. ‘Mine’s an orange juice, Des.’

‘I’ll have mine later please, Des, I promised to get the girls hot pasties from Charlie’s meat shop.’

‘That sounds a good idea, Jane, get me one too.’ Avril pulled her purse from her pocket.

‘And me,’ Ann and Des chimed together.

Jane ran down to the manager’s office to get her half-crown.

‘We want twenty,’ Mandy called out as Jane tried to force her way to the dressing rooms through the milling crowd of half-dressed girls.

‘I haven’t enough money for that many.’

‘How much are they each.’

‘Twopence halfpenny,’ Jane said, forgetting the discount the boy had offered her for bulk.

‘Here’s ten bob, we’ll square up when you come back.’

Even the air in Saturday’s crowded Market Square felt clean and invigorating after the stuffy confines of the Town Hall. Jane suddenly realised just how little time she’d spent outside since she’d left the workhouse. There, she’d seemed to spend every waking minute when she wasn’t eating, scrubbing down the outside steps, and yards. And because she’d worked through the height of the winter, the skin on her hands and face had become red and roughened, and her feet plastered with chilblains. Now, in warm summer, she spent her days cooped up in the artificial darkness of the Town Hall. She looked up at the clear blue sky. Whoever was organising her life should try to do better.

Pushing her way through the crowds, she shivered in her thin, short-sleeved dress. Although the air was warm, it was colder than the moist, steamy atmosphere of the theatre. Next week, if the sewing kept coming in, she resolved to ask Wilf Horton to look out for a coat for her. She hadn’t taken Phyllis’s today, because Phyllis needed it to go shopping.

There was a long queue in Charlie’s shop. The good-looking dark boy who’d given her the misshapen pasty was serving alongside an attractive auburn-haired woman. By giving up her place to an old woman, she managed to be served by him again.

‘Twenty-three pasties please.’

‘You must have liked the last one.’

‘I did, thanks.’

‘And it looks as though you’re doing better than you were?’

‘I can’t complain.’

The auburn-haired woman looked at him. He picked up a pair of tongs and began to pile warm pasties into brown paper bags.

‘Twenty-three pasties will cost you four shillings and three pence halfpenny. Twenty four, four shillings. Cheaper by the dozen, remember.’

‘In that case I’ll have two dozen, please.’ She did some more mental arithmetic. Twopence each when bought in dozens, two pence halfpenny when bought singly. She’d made sixpence on the first dozen, threepence halfpenny on the eleven and had a free one thrown in for herself into the bargain. It might be worth trying to make the pasty trip a regular run. It was certainly a quicker and easier way of making money than sewing.

The boy bagged the last of the pasties and handed them to her. ‘Careful now, they’re hot,’ he warned as he took the ten-shilling note.

‘I’ll be careful.’ She waited for her change.

‘You working round here then?’

‘Not too far away.’

‘Eddie, there’s customers waiting,’ his fellow assistant reprimanded.

‘Two slices of pickled tongue, cut extra thin mind,’ A woman wearing a hat with a glass-eyed bird balanced precariously on the crown, ordered brusquely, clearly none too pleased at being kept waiting while Eddie flirted.

‘Right, soon as we finish these,’ Mandy held up her pasty, ‘we’ll see what we can do with you.’

‘I will be able to get the make-up off afterwards, won’t I?’ Jane asked, looking from Mandy’s glossy, luridly painted face to Judy’s.

‘Of course.’ Judy held up a jar of cold cream. ‘All we have to do is plaster this over you.’

‘I’ll just take these pasties to the girls in the bar.’

Jane dashed into the corridor, straight into Haydn who was demonstrating a complicated dance step to Billy and four adoring chorus girls.

‘Look it’s easy. So easy, you don’t need any formal dance training to follow it.’ He sidestepped past Billy and the girls and took Jane’s arm, sweeping her in front of him down the corridor.

‘Let me go,’ she hissed between clenched teeth, trying to hold on to the pasties and keep them from getting crushed at the same time.

‘One thing you should know about me, I get upset when people don’t like me,’ he whispered into her ear.

‘I couldn’t give a damn.’

‘Language! Struggle any more and people will think there is something going on between us. That’s it,’ he shouted in a louder voice for the benefit of the watching girls. ‘One two three, one two three …’

‘If I drop these pasties you’re going to have to pay for them.’

‘Take them off her, Billy, there’s a good man while we show you how it’s done.’

Billy grabbed the bag and Haydn locked his fingers firmly into Jane’s. With Haydn gripping her hands and the girls cutting off her retreat, Jane had no choice but to go along with him.

‘Right, look down,’ he ordered, holding her out stiffly at arm’s length, ‘watch my feet and do everything I do. And a
one
and
two
,’ Haydn’s taps echoed on the floor of the corridor, Jane’s soft-soled shuffle following one step behind.

‘You know, that girl’s definitely got something,’ Billy commented thoughtfully, as Jane finally capitulated and began to copy Haydn’s steps.

‘She’s certainly quicker and lighter on her feet than you, Billy,’ Mandy laughed.

‘Probably because she’s got something more than sawdust between her ears,’ Rusty commented nastily, frowning at the attention Haydn was paying to the usherette.