Wild Lavender (17 page)

After the dance practice we were taken to the hall where the stage was lit with working lights and a man sat at the rehearsal piano sorting the music from a list of names. Raoul directed us into the wings and told us to be quiet. As we filed past the front row of seats, I noticed two men sitting there and assumed they were Monsieur Derval, the proprietor, and Monsieur Lemarchand, the producer. The sight of them did not calm my nerves. Both men were
immaculately dressed: Monsieur Derval with a black jacket over pinstriped trousers; and Monsieur Lemarchand looking every part the
bon viveur
in his double-breasted suit with a handkerchief in the pocket.

I felt sorry for the pair of dancers who were called up first. One was a statuesque girl with strawberry blonde hair who was incongruously coupled with a petite redhead in a skimpy chemise. I peeked through the curtains to watch the reaction of the judges. After Raoul had introduced the girls and Monsieur Lemarchand had noted their names, the pianist struck up a tune. The tall girl was a natural dancer; her body rippled to the music. Her smile wasn’t forced, but I knew she couldn’t really be having the time of her life considering the nature of the audition. Her partner was a good dancer too but her style bordered on risqué. She added hip gyrations where there were none and kicked her legs a fraction too wide for modesty. Monsieur Derval noticed but his expression showed neither pleasure nor disgust. Monsieur Lemarchand kept his eyes fixed on the other girl.

The routine ended with a graceful pose but, just before they reached it, the tall girl slipped and almost fell off the stage. She quickly recovered her balance but not her composure. Her companion was dismissed with a ‘Thank you, that will be all, Mademoiselle Duhamel,’ but the tall girl was asked to perform her song. Despite having been asked to continue, she could not get over her mistake. Her voice was good but her eyelids twitched as if she had something stuck in her lashes and she didn’t look at the men. The girl next to me smiled. She was pleased that the tall girl was becoming unravelled, but it unnerved me. I performed better when the people around me were at their best.

‘That was nice, but not for this show,’ said Monsieur Lemarchand. The girl thanked the men and left the stage. I felt the tremble in her legs when she brushed past me on her way out. I thought I was going to be sick.

The next pair of girls fared better. They ended their routine with true showgirl flair, posing with concave
stomachs and pointed toes, a hand on one hip and the other reaching gracefully towards the ceiling. Monsieur Derval was delighted with them. When they had finished their songs they were asked to stay. The next two girls were good dancers too, but while one was classically beautiful with a radiant smile, the other was heavy in the legs. The second girl was the better dancer: she moved with the music, while the first girl kicked her legs mechanically. But the more beautiful girl was asked to stay on for the next part of the audition and the other one was dismissed.

My heart lurched in my throat when I was called up. My partner and I took our places on the stage but the pianist didn’t start the tune because Monsieur Derval and Monsieur Lemarchand had their heads together in discussion. We were left standing with frozen smiles on our faces and our arms in the air. The room began to sway and the lights burned into my eyes. I thought that if we didn’t move soon, I would faint.

Monsieur Derval whispered something to Raoul who nodded then turned to us. ‘As the singing parts are causing the most problems, we’ve decided to change the order. We’ll do the songs first and then do the dance segment,’ he said. He gestured for my partner to move towards the front of the stage to perform her song. It took all my effort to keep still. Her voice was so high that it was childlike, but rather than being horrified by the earsplitting noise, Monsieur Derval seemed charmed by it. The girl was asked to wait for the dance segment.

Okay, this is it, I told myself when I was called forward. I tried to remember the feeling I’d had the last night I sang at Le Chat Espiègle. To my delight, my voice came out confidently and with a vibrancy that resounded through the hall. I forced myself to look around the room as if I were singing to a real audience, and particularly at the two men. Monsieur Lemarchand smiled back at me, but Monsieur Derval wasn’t watching, he was picking at a loose thread on his sleeve. Although we were only required to sing a few bars for the first round, neither man stopped me so I
continued with the chorus. It was only when the first verse repeated itself that Monsieur Derval held up his hand.

‘Thank you, Mademoiselle Fleurier,’ Raoul said. ‘Move to the back of the stage and we’ll see you dance.’

I was nervous from singing but threw myself into the dance alongside my partner. I needn’t have bothered; Monsieur Lemarchand and Monsieur Derval weren’t looking at us. They were having an argument about something, leaning over the backs of their chairs so they couldn’t be heard, but their conflict played out in a series of hand gestures and shakes of their heads. Even when my partner and I came to our finishing pose, the men continued their discussion. Monsieur Lemarchand glanced in my direction and I understood that they were talking about me. My partner and I had no choice but to hold our poses. Raoul folded his arms and strode back and forth across the stage in front of us, trying to distract attention from the discussion, but I caught the telling phrases.

Monsieur Lemarchand said, ‘She’s charming. Different. What a voice!’ To which Monsieur Derval replied, ‘She’s not beautiful enough for the Folies Bergère.’

The discussion ceased and Monsieur Derval turned back to us and smiled. ‘Thank you, Mademoiselle Fleurier, that will be all,’ he said.

Not beautiful enough for the Folies Bergère!
The voices of the other
métro
passengers faded while I played the audition over again in my head, turning it into more of a catastrophe than it actually had been. The girls in their rehearsal costumes became lurid stripes of pink and black; the piano music sounded tinny and distorted; Raoul transformed into a lurking giant; and the faces of Messieurs Derval and Lemarchand melted together into one grotesque mouth shouting ‘Not beautiful enough!’

I coughed and stared out the window at the black spinning past me. Hadn’t Aunt Augustine warned me that
I didn’t have Camille’s music hall looks? A hunger spasm clenched my belly and I thought about the cold room waiting for me in Montparnasse. Then I imagined my mother and Bernard sitting at the kitchen table on the farm. Aunt Yvette was cooking potatoes in the fire. The light from the flames flickered on the walls and reflected on the glasses of wine on the table. Wouldn’t it be easier to go back?

I shrugged the thought away. It
would
be easier to go back and be surrounded by people who loved me, to sleep in a warm bed and to have a full stomach. But the girl who had been content with wandering the hills of Pays de Sault and dreaming of the lavender harvest didn’t exist any more. I wanted to be on stage.

By the time I reached Châtelet to change trains, I had exhausted myself with dramatic thoughts and had turned into a paragon of stoicism. I decided that I had to forget the Folies Bergère audition. Hadn’t I failed my audition at Le Chat Espiègle and still got the part in the end? And hadn’t Monsieur Lemarchand, one of the greatest artistic directors in Paris, praised my voice?

The train for Vavin pulled into the station. Besides, I thought, taking a seat in the middle carriage, I do not want to be some feathered bird strutting around the stage, no matter how prestigious Monsieur Etienne thinks that is. I opened my purse and took out the audition schedule. The next one was for the following evening at a nightclub in Pigalle.

There, I said to myself, glancing at the number of singers used in the show. There are only three singers, not sixteen. It is practically a solo part!

I
left for my audition the following night in good spirits. I had spent the morning scrubbing the walls and floor of my room. I had then caught the
métro
to Ménilmontant to buy some blankets at a market there and a thin cotton mattress over which I would put a second mattress when I had more money. I had rested in the afternoon, preparing myself for the audition and running over the ballads I had chosen from ‘Scheherazade’. I thought a smaller venue would want a more intimate performance.

It was almost ten o’clock when I exited the
métro
at Pigalle. I was amazed to see how much the village atmosphere of the Right Bank’s entertainment quarter changed in the evening. The tumbledown streets were jumping with music: accordions, violins and guitars; soprano and contralto voices; songs in French and English. The music bellowed out of cafés and throbbed out of clubs. Foreigners crowded the streets—Scandinavians, Germans and British. But more than any of those combined were Americans. One man, too young for the cane he was leaning on, was talking to a group of men and women in evening wear. He began his sentences with ‘
Yawl
’ while they all ended theirs in ‘
schure
’.

‘
Yawl. Schure
,’ I repeated to myself, walking along Boulevard de Clichy. The women of the night were out in force, their skirts girded up despite the cold. I passed a bar with a sign, ‘Café des Americains’, above the door. People were sitting on the windowsills and spilling out the door. Music blurted from the windows. I was struck by the
energy and dynamism of it—a piano, drum set, trumpet and trombone. They sounded like a marching band, but less orderly. The singer started up.
Boo-boobly-boo-boo.
I couldn’t tell if he was singing in a foreign language or simply making sounds. But I liked the way he bent his voice then returned it to pitch.

The nightclub I was looking for was off the main street, down an alley that stank of cat urine. I had trouble finding the door, but when I did I realised there was no handle. I knocked and waited. Nothing happened. I wondered if there was another entrance from the main street. I checked but there wasn’t. I returned and this time pounded my fist against the door. After a minute it opened and I found myself face to face with a woman with her hair coiled into a bun on top of her head and a chin that sagged to her neck.

‘I’m here for the audition,’ I said.

The woman jerked her thumb over her shoulder. ‘Come inside.’

I followed her through a corridor into the club. A cloud of tobacco smoke stung my eyes and it took me a few seconds to register the murky brown walls and the bottles lined up on the counter. The club was full of men, alone or in small groups, huddled over their drinks or card games. One of them glanced over his shoulder and scowled at me. I turned away and found myself looking at what I guessed must be the venue’s stage: some boards propped up on a couple of fragile-looking trestles. The dip in the middle wasn’t reassuring.

‘Hey, René,’ the woman shouted to a man cleaning glasses behind the counter. ‘Your performer’s here.’

The man flipped open the counter and stepped towards us. I did my best not to stare at his stomach which was straining the buttons of his shirt. ‘The cellar,’ he said, hissing his vinegary breath into my face. ‘The audition’s in there.’

He pointed to a flight of stairs that descended into a dimly lit room. If I hadn’t been so desperate for a job, and
so disorientated by Paris, I might have had the sense to leave then. Instead, I felt my way down the stairwell, pressing my hands against the damp walls. When I reached the bottom step I saw that the room was lined with barrels. I thought that I must have taken the wrong stairs, then I heard a man’s voice behind me. ‘Ah, you’re here.’

I turned around. Sitting at an upright piano was an old man, as dusty as his surroundings. ‘Deirdre will join us soon,’ he said, smiling through stained teeth. ‘You’re the only one trying out tonight.’

The man’s translucent face and bloodless lips made him seem unreal: a ghost trapped in the cellar with his piano. If it hadn’t been for the sound of a table crashing to the floor upstairs and men’s voices fighting to bring me to my senses, I might not have been able to speak at all.

‘I have music,’ I said, handing him my songs.

He took the sheets from me and flicked through them. He was holding them upside down but that didn’t seem to bother him.

‘Merde!’
I heard the proprietor’s voice shout upstairs.

‘Very nice,’ said the old man, handing the music back to me. ‘But we have our own songs here. I’ll sing you the song and then you sing it after me, all right?’

I nodded.

The man’s fingers hovered over the keys for a minute before he began playing. The piano was out of tune.

My doggie’s tail, it wags

Tra-la-la-la

My landlady’s mouth, it nags

Tra-la-la-la

The Eiffel Tower, it stands

Tra-la-la-la

Ah Paris, isn’t it grand?

The man lifted his hands from the keys. ‘Now, do you think you can sing that?’ he asked, wiping spittle from the corner of his mouth. ‘Let’s try. Sing along with me.’

He played the tune again. I sang along as best I could, twisting my hands behind my back. My bewilderment came through in my wavering voice.

‘Nice. Very nice,’ the old man said, smiling. ‘But how about making it a bit more jolly. Our patrons like their fun.’

A bottle smashed upstairs. Something heavy fell to the floor. Footsteps clumped on the steps. A few seconds later the woman with the bun, who I assumed was Deirdre, stepped into the cellar.

‘Is she ready?’ she asked.

He nodded. ‘She’s got a good voice. Sweet.’

Deirdre threw her head back and glared at me. ‘Are you going to wear that outfit?’

My hand fell to the dress Camille had given me. ‘Yes,’ I stuttered, dumbfounded at how my best dress could be met with such disapproval. It was nicer than the smock Deirdre was wearing.

She reached into her sleeve and pulled out a card. ‘If you get the job, you’ll need to wear a black gown. Here’s the name of our costume-maker.’

I took the card and nodded, too inexperienced to know about the racket run by disreputable café-concerts. Naive performers with stars in their eyes were made to buy costumes from dressmakers who gave the café manager a cut on the deal.

‘Do you know your song?’ Deirdre asked me.

The old man let out a spooky laugh. ‘She does. Well enough.’

‘Come on then,’ Deirdre said, gesturing for me to follow her. ‘If you pass the audition you can keep any tips you make tonight. Remember, it’s only when I leave the stage that you or one of the other girls step in. I’m the star.’

‘Other girls?’ I asked, following Deirdre’s enormous girth up the stairs. I had thought that the club only had three singers.

Deirdre turned around when we reached the top of the stairs. ‘If the girls are busy talking with customers, then
you get up there and sing. And if not, you let them. They were here first. Got it?’

I nodded although I wasn’t sure if I had ‘got it’ at all. My heart was beating so violently that it was making me sick. It dawned on me that my audition was going to be before an audience.

Deirdre pointed to the four stools that had been set up on the stage and told me to sit on the one on the left. I did as I was told, slipping my bag and coat under it. I looked out at the audience. Amongst the men there were now women watching the card games or sipping drinks. The smell of unwashed bodies and musty clothes was suffocating. A man with a scar down the side of his face bawled at a waiter to bring him a drink. When it was sent to him he turned his attention to me, his gaze moving up from my feet to my breasts. I stared at the picture of the hog on the back wall, trying to avoid his eyes. To my relief, two other girls stepped onto the stage and took their places on the stools and the scar-faced man turned his attention to them. One of the girls was a brunette with pimples on her chin. Her eyes were swollen as if she had been crying. The other was a bleached blonde whose black eyebrows stood out like stripes on her forehead. The ghost man came up from the cellar and sat down at a piano near the stage. He ran his fingers over the keys. To my relief the instrument was in tune.

Deirdre hitched up her skirt and wobbled her massive bosom. My heart sank as soon as she hit the first note. Her voice was a cross between a parrot and a goat and for most of the song she was a couple of bars ahead of the piano. She shook her legs and shimmied her hips. No one paid her any attention, except for the scar-faced man who continued to leer.

An argument broke out at one of the tables. A man with a stain down the front of his shirt turned around and yelled at Deirdre, ‘Shut up, you ugly mutt! I can’t hear the call.’ Another man, sitting by himself at a table near the front, spat an olive stone at her. It missed Deirdre and hit me on
the chin. I wiped away the residue, not quite able to hide my disgust. But if Deirdre was concerned at the lack of respect given to her star position, she didn’t show it. She continued for three more songs, including a shrill version of ‘Valencia’ to which she also performed a sort of bobbing dance that reminded me of a pigeon pecking for food, before bowing and stepping off the stage.

I was thankful to see that the other girls were still on their chairs. The brunette stood up and sang ‘
Mon Paris
’ in a throaty voice that wasn’t too bad except it didn’t carry. That kept the card players happy while the rest of the audience ignored her or called out, ‘Sing up!’ Even the scar-faced man transferred his attention to a broad-shouldered streetwalker. The brunette finished her song and stepped off the stage, sitting down next to the man who had spat the olive stone. He grinned, showing a gap where his front teeth should have been, and threw his arm around her the way a man might do if he were trying to headlock a vicious dog.

I turned back to the stage and noticed that the blonde girl wasn’t there—she was sitting on the lap of a card player—and that the pianist was nodding at me. I slipped off my stool and edged my way to the front of the stage. I smoothed down my dress and cleared my throat. ‘
My doggie’s tail, it wags. Tra-la-la-la
.’ I was so terrified, my arms and legs stiffened and I sang the entire song frozen to the spot. But this was an audition I didn’t care if I failed; I only wanted to get out of that place alive.

When I reached the end of my number, I made a grab for my stool but the pianist played the tune over again and I had no choice but to sing it again. To my horror, everyone who wasn’t playing cards stopped talking and turned to watch me. ‘
The Eiffel Tower, it stands. Tra-la-la-la. Ah Paris, isn’t it grand?
’ My voice didn’t sound like my own, it was strained with nerves. But compared to the other girls, there was no arguing that it was good. The scar-faced man clapped. ‘Sing it again,’ he shouted. A table of people sharing a bottle of wine joined in his
applause. One of the men stepped forward and tossed a few coins in the jar on the piano. The other men at his table followed suit. René glanced up from the bar and winked. The pianist whispered, ‘They like you. You’re really good.’ For a moment everything seemed fine. I never wanted to set foot in the place again, but tonight at least there might be money for a new dress or a rug for the floor. I sang the ditty again, this time more boldly, and lifted my voice to carry through the room.

A man with a broken nose who was playing cards turned around and shouted, ‘Will someone make that bitch shut up? I can’t think!’

‘Yeah,’ slurred his female companion, lifting her head from her beau’s shoulder. ‘She stinks.’

‘Not like you, ya mongrel,’ the scar-faced man shouted back at her. ‘You stink like a rotting fish.’

A few people in the audience laughed. The broken-nosed man rushed to the bar and seized the scar-faced man by the throat. But his target was too fast—before the broken-nosed man could strangle him, the scar-faced man flattened him with a blow to the stomach. More punches flew. The broken-nosed man’s friends ran to his aid. The proprietor swept the bottles from the counter; he was just in time. The card players picked up the scar-faced man and threw him over the counter into the mirror. His supporters retaliated by picking up chairs and smashing them across the backs of the card players.

The pianist smiled at me and continued playing my tune. I stood at the front of the stage, too scared to move. Something sharp jabbed into my stomach. I glanced down. The olive-spitter had a blade pressed against my ribs. His eyes were bloodshot. I stared at his cavernous mouth, his ruby-red lips. I was sure he was going to kill me for no reason other than it was something to do.

‘Get out, bitch,’ he said. ‘You squawk like a dying bird and nobody likes you.’

I gave a cry and tried to get off the stage, but my feet wouldn’t move. The man made a swiping action with the
blade. The gesture spurred me into action. I grabbed my bag and coat, jumped to the floor and ran through the crowd, dodging flying bottles and chairs. I raced through the door and up the boulevard, nearly knocking people over in my panic to get away. It was only when I reached the brightly lit
métro
station that I stopped to catch my breath.

Back in my freezing apartment in Montparnasse I threw myself onto my bed, covered my head with a pillow and wept.

By the following morning, the events of the previous evening were beginning to seem like a deranged dream. Grotesque faces with scars, broken noses, missing teeth and double chins loomed up before me and I felt the sharpness of a blade pressing into my skin. Had any of that actually happened? I found it hard to believe that a reputable agent would have sent anyone to such a disreputable establishment, and I walked all the way to Rue Saint Dominique with the intention of telling Monsieur Etienne so.

To my surprise it was Monsieur Etienne, and not Mademoiselle Franck, who answered my impatient ring of the buzzer.

‘Now then, what’s wrong?’ he asked, ushering me into the reception room. ‘Something’s the matter—I can tell by your face. And you missed your audition last night.’