Never Look Back (74 page)

The whole stage was built, then had to come down again because it wasn’t supported strongly enough. The men who came to dig the well had three false tries before they finally found water. And when the glazier arrived to fit the windows, a young apprentice fell out of the first-floor window and broke his arm. Every day seemed to be fraught with anxiety, and although Zandra reminded Matilda again and again that she had four other partners, and they shared the problems and could solve them together, Matilda still felt responsible for everything that went wrong.

Yet however full her life was, however exciting the future looked, missing her children was something which never went away, and she often felt stabs of terrible guilt because she knew she hadn’t come here entirely for their benefit. This knowledge left her with an inner feeling of worthlessness as a mother, and as a result she plunged herself into working even harder, to justify herself.

It was Zandra who pointed this out to her one evening in early April when their grand opening was only a week away.

The exterior of London Lil’s was complete, except for the sign
which would be placed over the doors just a day before the opening. It sat proudly up on the hill, reminiscent of the grand plantation houses in the Southern states. Painted white, with green tiles on the roof, and the veranda balustrade and window-frames a glossy red, it could be seen clearly for miles.

Inside, the central stage was yet to have its final coats of varnish, but the walls had already had a coat of paint, and the artist who had been commissioned to reproduce street scenes of London, copied from a book of sketches Zandra had lent, was hard at work.

A long bar with mirrors behind ran along the entire right-hand side of the main room, this too was waiting for varnish. The left-hand side was to be the dance floor. A wide staircase led up from the back on to a narrow gallery which would give a better view of the shows on the stage for those booking a table in advance, and also give Matilda a place from which to view the entire lower floor. Two small rooms were up here too, intended for private poker games. A further door led to Matilda’s apartment, four rooms and a small kitchen. The back of the building was taken up with store-rooms, a large kitchen, washroom and changing room for performers, and a few smaller rooms intended for staff. A large cellar ran right under the building, and the privies were up a small path.

‘Put those books down, come over here and put your feet up,’ Zandra ordered Matilda as for yet another evening she had found her friend squinting at the accounts books by candlelight with a worried expression on her face.

‘I can’t, I haven’t got time,’ Matilda said in a weary voice. ‘We’ve spent well over the budget and I need to get the exact figure to give to Charles tomorrow.’

The building costs were just over 3,000 dollars, all of which had been paid, but the stock, equipment, furniture and all the incidentals came to well over another 1,500, and a great many of these bills were still outstanding.

Zandra just laughed, came over to the table, snapped the books shut, snatched the pencil from Matilda’s hand and pointed to the couch by the fire.

‘Charles won’t care. We all know it’s over budget, but the first week we’re open will take care of that. I want to talk to you.’

When Zandra used that imperious tone everyone obeyed her, including Matilda. Reluctantly she moved to the couch.

‘Shoes off, feet up!’ Zandra said sharply. ‘And I’ve poured you a glass of brandy.’

Matilda picked up the large goblet from the side table and sipped it cautiously. She had developed a taste for it since Zandra introduced her to it, but she still had a feeling hard liquor was dangerous.

‘In the last few weeks you have never stopped,’ Zandra said. ‘You can’t go on working at that pace, Matty, you’ll get sick, and then where will we be?’

‘I won’t get sick, I’m as strong as a horse,’ Matilda retorted.

‘I used to say that,’ Zandra smiled. ‘But then we are very alike in many ways. Working till you are on the point of collapse is a good way of avoiding one’s problems and heartaches. But I assure you, if you do collapse, they’ll come bounding up to hit you in the face.’

‘I don’t have any problems,’ Matilda said indignantly. ‘Other than worrying about whether everything will be finished in time, and whether the dancing girls will turn up for the opening.’

‘You do, you feel you are a bad mother.’

That bald statement made Matilda’s head jerk up in surprise.

‘I’m right of course, so don’t deny it,’ Zandra said, waving one hand at Matilda. ‘I can’t possibly say anything to make you believe this isn’t so, but I can tell you I know how you feel, and that you’ve got to come to terms with your decision to leave your children. If you don’t, then you will become more and more unhappy, and when that happens to a woman the consequences can be disastrous.’

Matilda looked at the brandy glass in her hand and wondered if Zandra meant she might get to like that too much.

‘Yes, that’s one way you could go,’ Zandra said, raising an eyebrow. ‘There’s allowing the wrong men into your life, spending more than you earn, even resorting to opiates. I know because I’ve been down all those roads.’

Matilda was on the point of retorting that she wasn’t that big a fool, but she stopped herself, remembering Zandra had said she knew how she felt.

The bond between her and Zandra had grown steadily strong in the past weeks. She no longer noticed that Zandra was old,
wrinkled, with bad legs and few teeth, what she saw now was just a dear friend, someone she could trust, a woman who like herself had to have come through a great deal of personal suffering to be as knowledgeable and understanding as she was.

‘Did you leave a child?’ she said in little more than a whisper.

Zandra nodded.

‘Can you tell me about it?’

Zandra sighed. ‘I have never told anyone this before, Matty. So you must promise that even if we fall out one day it will remain a secret between us.’

‘Of course,’ Matilda replied.

‘I was seduced at seventeen by our coachman. My father horse-whipped him, and sent me off in disgrace to live with my aunt in Somerset,’ she said quickly as if by telling it fast she wouldn’t be able to feel the pain of it again now.

‘When I realized I was carrying a child I knew I could expect no help from my family, so I slipped off one night and made my way to Bath. I had been there once or twice before, and it appeared such a jolly place I suppose I thought someone there would help me. Someone did. I met a very distinguished gentleman, who seemed smitten with me. He had a big country estate, and when I told him my situation he said he would take care of everything.’ She winced and faltered. Clearly even rattling it out didn’t stop it hurting.

‘That care meant he had his way with me at any time, in any manner he chose, right up until my son Piers was born. Then he gave me an ultimatum. I was to have my “brat” as he called him farmed out, which he would pay for, and stay with him in luxury, or I was to get out immediately. Needless to say I left, unwisely taking a few of his valuables with me.’

Matilda half smiled. ‘I would have done too.’

Zandra shrugged. ‘He got some men to trace me, I had just settled in a little cottage, and they took everything away, not just what belonged to him, but my jewellery, and most of my clothes too. Suddenly for the first time in my life I was absolutely destitute. Alone with a baby I was looking after by instinct alone, for I certainly had no experience of caring for a child.’

She stopped again, her eyes brimming with tears.

‘I can’t bear to tell you about what happened to me in that terrible year, Matty. Suffice it to say I suffered every kind of
humiliation. I was hungry, dirty and desperate. Then, fearing my son would die of starvation, I finally wrote to my father and begged him to help me’

‘Don’t tell me he turned you away?’ Matilda exclaimed.

‘He refused to see me himself, but he sent me a little money and said I was to go and see his lawyer in London. It was there I had the proposition put to me. A friend of my father’s, another extremely wealthy man, was desperate for a son and heir. His wife had carried five until the seventh month, then each of them had been stillborn. They were willing to take Piers and bring him up as their own. I knew these people well, Matty, and I knew them to be kind and honourable. Anyway, the deal was that I was to hand Piers over to the lawyer and would be given two hundred pounds on the understanding I left the country and never came back.’

She paused, and gave Matilda a defiant look. ‘I agreed. I chose to go to Paris because I spoke fluent French. The money I’d been given set me up to enter the only profession I had any qualifications for. I kept my end of the bargain and never went back.’

Matilda moved over to kneel in front of Zandra. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered.

Zandra shrugged and dabbed at her eyes. ‘I don’t regret giving my son away, if I had refused I doubt he would even have seen his second birthday. But what I do regret is taking that two hundred pounds,’ she said. ‘That’s my guilt, Matty. Even some fifty years later it still eats away at me.’

‘I don’t think you had much choice,’ she said.

‘I did,’ Zandra said. ‘I could have handed him over and walked away, but I took it because I knew without money behind me I’d die in the gutter.

‘Now, you chose to come here and leave your children with Cissie, no one forced you. And like me you have to live with that decision. It’s different for you, you haven’t given them away and walked out of their life for good, you certainly haven’t taken money for them, and I know you’ll be paying for their keep. But I know it troubles you deeply just the same. However, you must find a way of forgiving yourself, Matty, because if you don’t you’ll become hard and ruthless, just like me.’

‘I don’t think you are hard or ruthless,’ Matilda said, and she
stroked the older woman’s face tenderly. ‘Maybe that was my first impression but it soon left.’

‘My first impression of you was a woman with a big heart,’ Zandra said softly. ‘That impression has remained in place, just make sure it stays there.’

On opening night the flaming torches outside London Lil’s were lit at eight and the band struck up a merry jig as the doors were opened. The huge crowd which had been gradually gathering in the past hour burst in like a flood.

There were those who had said no one would want to walk up the steep hill for a drink, not even if dancing girls and fire-eaters were thrown in, but they did walk up the hill, rode horses and mules and drove carts and carriages – everyone wanted to take a look.

Dolores had arranged Matilda’s hair into fat curls on the top of her head, and she could hardly believe that the sophisticated woman staring back at her in the looking-glass was really her. Her dress was a present from Zandra, an old dress of her own, but taken apart and remade by the dressmaker who had once made her girls’ gowns. It was blue velvet, indecently low cut over her bosom, or so she thought, but Zandra insisted that she couldn’t look like a school marm, and besides, it was the latest fashion in Paris. She’d dyed some elbow-length lace gloves to match, and beneath her dress, holding up her stockings, were red garters, a present Charles had given her. He’d laughed at her shocked expression when she opened the box. He said she might be proper and demure on the outside, but he knew she had a wicked streak and she was to wear them for luck. Somehow just putting them on made her feel reckless and naughty, and she liked the feeling.

‘Here’s to a night to remember,’ Charles said, bringing over a bottle of champagne to the table on the balcony where she was sitting with Henry, Simeon and Zandra. ‘Just look at that crowd!’

Men stood at the bar six deep, jostling and pushing to get a drink, elsewhere every inch of space was taken, and their faces all held similar expressions of wonder at the decor.

‘There’s a great many women,’ Matilda said in some surprise. At a quick count she estimated there might be as many as fifty, and most of them very well dressed. She had expected all the
prostitutes in town to come. No doubt they’d heard that the owner of this place had trawled around among them to find waitresses, and wanted to see for themselves if their friends were in fact merely operating their old business from here. They would be disappointed to find this wasn’t so. Matilda had interviewed over forty girls and women, of whom she’d taken on only ten, for various roles. Each one of these had confided in her they wanted to take a step up in life, and she’d offered them the chance to prove it. She didn’t doubt some would fall by the wayside, that a pretty dress, a clean bed, food and wages wouldn’t be enough for the greedier ones. But as she’d told them, they’d be back out on the streets if that was their choice.

‘Who are all the women, Henry? Do you know any of them?’

‘Some of them are actually wives,’ Henry said with a grin, his one good eye on her and the other wavering uncertainly round the room. ‘I’m astounded to see some of them, but I guess they felt they had to unbend tonight at least, and see if there’s any truth in the rumour that this isn’t a bordello.’

All the partners had stuck fast to the idea that London Lil’s would never stoop to the lowest kind of entertainment seen elsewhere in the town. It was important that they made a niche for themselves as a place for good, clean fun, where men could bring their wives and sweethearts without fear of fights, crude-ness or profanity to embarrass them. Women were to be encouraged to come in, for single women were beginning to arrive in the town, and both Matilda and Zandra felt it was important that they should have somewhere to go where they could make friends and meet young men in safety.

‘Is Alicia coming later?’ Matilda asked with some trepidation. She had seen Alicia several times in the past few months, but the woman was always very cool with her, and had never extended any invitations to her home. Henry had confided in Matilda on several occasions that Alicia disapproved of his new venture, particularly because Zandra was involved.

His smile faded. ‘No, she’s playing ill,’ he said. ‘I half expected she would find some excuse not to come. She has so many ways of making me feel guilty, and this is her favourite one.’