Women and War (2 page)

At first she had come here in her search for Mammy, hanging around the stage door and watching the comings and goings of the theatre people. It was a bit grand for Mammy, she supposed, but Mammy was a singer and perhaps she had come up in the world. That could be the reason why she had left Tara – because she was ashamed of her. Tara had thrust that thought aside swiftly. The days had passed and Mammy had not come out of the stage door, nor was her picture ever amongst those outside the main entrance, but still Tara went to the theatre whenever she could.

Tonight the magic of it was stronger than ever. Music wafted out through the partly opened door and with it the soaring voice of a woman singing. Tara looked at the portraits wondering which of the artistes it belonged to. One of the women was very beautiful, a lovely tilted face above bare shoulders. It was probably she who was singing, Tara decided, and as the excitement stirred in her again it seemed that the features transmuted and changed so that they were no longer the features of a stranger but her own, grown older and more beautiful.

Mammy might never have sung here but one day I will, Tara promised herself. One day it will be my picture up there, just see if it's not. And Mammy will come back to see me and I'll make her so proud of me. Oh I will, I will.…

She lifted her chin and felt the rain mingling with the tears on her cheeks. With the back of her hand she brushed them away and turned to walk back to Darlinghurst.

The Rolls Royce purred up the wide tree-lined street in Toorak, Melbourne, turned in at a gateway marked out in the camphor laurel hedge by a pair of well-shaped cypress trees and came to a stop on the laundered gravel drive which curved between velvet lawns and flowerbeds bright with spring flowers.

From her vantage point hidden behind the rhododendron bushes Alys Peterson saw the chauffeur open the rear doors for the well-heeled occupant to disembark, and pulled a face.

Mrs Ahearne-Smythe, leading light amongst the English community in Melbourne, come to visit Mother. She had been expected, of course. An hour ago Alys and Beverley, her elder sister, had been instructed to wash and change into their best dresses and Alys had been treated to a lecture on how to behave herself like a young lady. Such lectures were totally unnecessary as far as Beverley was concerned. From her superior age of eleven Beverley was totally incapable of behaving any other way, Alys thought with disgust, while she herself seemed to roll from one scrape to another.

‘You are clean and tidy, Alys, please endeavour to stay that way,' her mother had pleaded. ‘And try to behave in a manner which will not make your father and I ashamed of you.'

Alys had scuffed the toe of her sandal against the leg of an exquisite Chippendale chair and said nothing. She did not know how she managed to get into so much trouble. She always set out with the intention of being good and modelling herself on Beverley. But somewhere along the way something always went wrong.

Perhaps it was because she was so easily bored. She couldn't content herself to play with dolls as Beverley did when there were so many other far more exciting things to do. Or had been, before they moved to Toorak.

Alys squirmed a little further under the rhododendron bush watching Mrs Ahearne-Smythe's plump feet, encased in their tight fitting and slightly old fashioned looking black leather shoes, move away from the car and suppressed the urge to call out something very loud and very shocking. In their old house Alys had often hidden behind the hedge and made weird noises as people passed by, stifling her laughter as they looked around to try to discover where the sound had come from. That sort of thing could not be done in Toorak, especially if your father was Daniel Peterson, banker and businessman extraordinaire, and your house was the grandest in a street of grand houses.

Toorak was the most select suburb of Melbourne, Mother said, and she was probably right. The houses here had been built in the heady days when fortunes were being made in the Victorian goldfields, she had explained to the children, and each one reflected the taste – or the homeland – of the man who had built it. For a while the fantasy of that idea had fascinated Alys and she had explored eagerly, stopping to look at a hacienda-style house with flowers in stone pots to provide bright splashes of colour against the glaring white walls, an eccentric ‘wedding cake' house so fragile looking that Alys imagined the winds sweeping in from Port Phillip Bay could blow it away, and a turretted mini-castle. But Mother had not approved of Alys standing on the pavements where the cherry trees drifted pink and white blossoms like so much confetti, gazing in at the houses between the shielding spruce and chestnut, laburnum and sycamore. People were entitled to their privacy, she said. And little ladies who knew their mannners did not stare. So Alys had had to content herself with inspecting the gargoyles wearing mitres who guarded the Church of St John in Toorak Road – a much less interesting occupation.

Today, however, she was confined to the house – and now, into her prison, had come this big gleaming Rolls. Motor cars fascinated Alys even more than the fantastic array of houses had done. She could not understand that while the few boys she knew were allowed to play with cars and engines she was expected to make do with dolls. Last Christmas all she had wanted – begged for – was a toy garage, but instead she had been given a life size baby doll with a china face, a lace-hung cradle and a workbox. She still smarted from the injustice of it.

From the rhododendron bushes she watched now as Mrs Ahearne-Smythe's chauffeur lifted the bonnet of the Rolls and fiddled for a moment or two. Then he collected a large container from the boot and set out around the side of the house in the direction of the servants' entrance.

The car was unattended now, the bonnet still raised. Alys crept out from behind the rhododendron, heedless of the dirt on her knees and the bits of twig sticking to her best dress. Nobody was in sight. She could take a peep under the bonnet of the Rolls.

She gazed at the intricacies of the engine in undisguised wonder. So many parts! Carefully she leaned inside and touched one of them. Black grease came off onto her finger.

‘Hey what do you think you're doing?' The chauffeur had returned, unnoticed by Alys. She jumped and her greasy fingers brushed against her skirt.

‘Oh, I only wanted to look …'

A grin spread across his leathery features. ‘You're the Peterson kid aren't you?'

‘I'm Alys. Yes.'

‘You like cars?'

She nodded enthusiastically, her bright gold hair bouncing round her face.

‘Yes. But I've never seen inside one before.'

‘Well, now's your chance.'

‘You mean you'll show me?'

‘No worries. Here, hold onto this for me …' He handed her the container of water, leaned inside the bonnet and fiddled. ‘Now look, this is where the water goes. It keeps the engine cool …'

She craned closer, excitement bubbling in her, as he pointed out the workings of the engine.

‘Alys!' Her mother's voice called to her from the front porch. She jumped. Water slurped from the container onto her skirt and socks.

‘Oh, I'll have to go. Thank you.' She ran towards the house. ‘I'm sorry, I was only …'

‘Alys!' Her mother's voice was coldly furious, her face a mask of controlled anger. ‘What do you think you have been doing?'

‘Just looking at the car.'

‘You are filthy! Filthy! What on earth is the matter with you? Is it impossible for you to do as you are told just once? Get inside. Go to your room and clean yourself up at once.'

‘I'm sorry …' Alys said, looking down at her dress in surprise and dismay. ‘Really I didn't think.'

‘You never do. You will be the death of me, Alys.'

She turned and swept into the house; Miserably, Alys followed. Oh no, she'd done it again. Made Mother angry with her. And she did so hate it when Mother was angry. She wouldn't have her beaten, of course. She wouldn't raise a finger to her. But she would treat her to a display of cold disapproval that would last perhaps for several days. And beneath the disapproval would be outraged hurt as if the incident had been a personal affront to her. It would last until Mother was satisfied she had made Alys squirm with guilt for causing her so much trouble, until Alys was ready to cry and beg her forgiveness not simply with words but with her whole heart. And she would, in the end. For Alys, at eight, nothing in the world was more important than her mother's approval. Not even a Rolls Royce motor car.

The Canary Club was dim and smoky. A bar padded with red plush ran the length of one wall; above it gilt framed mirrors reflected the rest of the room – dark glass topped tables, chairs upholstered in the same red plush, curtained alcoves, softly glowing pink wall lamps in the shape of seashells. At one end of the room a softly downbeat jazz rhythm was being played on a piano, background music only to the hum of conversation, the muted laughter and the chink of glasses, though on the small square of vacant floor between the tables a few couples were dancing, their bodies pressed into intimate contact.

The piano and a little of the dancefloor was all that Tara Kelly could see from the screened doorway where she stood waiting to make her entrance, but she could picture the rest of the club well enough, and picture it not only as it looked now to the clients who had signed in at the small makeshift desk on the landing above but as it looked during the daytime too when the light filtering down into the cellar through the pavement gratings showed up the seedy imperfections that the soft illuminations hid at night – just how threadbare the carpet really was and how worn and faded the red plush. She knew how dusty it would smell then as the cleaners beat about a bit with carpet sweeper and broom and how the stale cigarette smoke would hang in the air, impregnating the curtains and furnishings; she knew that behind the bar even these smells would pale into insignificance beside the lingering whiffs of spirits and beer, enough to turn the stomach of anyone who had drunk a little too much themselves the previous night.

She knew all this and did not care. For her nothing could detract from the glamour of the place. For as long as she could remember the one dream she had cherished was that she would be a singer – and here the dream had become reality. The Canary Club wasn't the Capitol, of course, but it was a beginning.

It was two months now since she had first walked down the steep stairs where more than one drunken client had come to grief, her heart beating a nervous tattoo, her head held high in a desperate show of bravado, and she'd marched up to Ed Donelly, the owner, and announced her availability.

How close he had been to telling her he was not interested she would never know; that morning he had felt faded and hungover, worried about paying his protection money to the Sydney racketeers and the demands his ex-wife was making on what little remained of his profits. But two days earlier his resident singer had told him she was going to marry a rich punter whose house in Vaucluse gave a dress circle view of the harbour, and something about the look of the girl in the skin tight sweater and skirt had attracted him. She was young, too young for this game, but his jaded customers liked fresh youth and the dim light showed him a heart-shaped face beneath a mass of jet-black curls, eyes sparkling blue behind a fringing of sooty lashes and a well-developed figure which the tight sweater and skirt did nothing to hide.

‘All right,' he had said. ‘Let's hear what you can do.'

The moment she began to sing he knew he had been right to give her a chance. She had it – that mysterious indefinable something which lifted her out of the ordinary, and her voice caught at some forgotten chord deep inside him. He glanced at Chips Magee, his talented but broken down piano player, and saw that he felt it too. There was excitement in the bloodshot eyes and a lift to the pouchy face dragged out of shape by too much whisky and too many cheap cigarettes.

‘When can you start?' It was the only question he asked. Had he probed further he would have learned that Tara Kelly was only fourteen years old, younger even than either he or Chips had dreamed, but by the time he did discover how young she was he had merely sworn to himself and decided to forget it. Tara was good and she was pulling in the customers. He was not sure what the law would say if they discovered her on his premises but the law had never bothered Ed unduly.

Tonight, as she stood behind the screen waiting to make her entrance, Tara experienced the same thrill she had experienced twice nightly for the last two months. Chips was playing that interminable slow jazz piece that would give way to her introductory music and when it did she would move out of the darkness into the beam of the spotlight. As she waited the adrenalin began to flow through her veins like a potent drug and she clenched and unclenched trembling hands, taking long steadying breaths of the smoky air and running over the opening lines of her first number: ‘My heart tells me this is just a fling / But your love to me means everything …'

She caught herself up as the introduction began, harnessed the adrenalin and moved out into that rosy path of light, feeling it warm upon her bare shoulders and narrowing her eyes slightly against its glare.

As soon as she was in view the sounds of chat and laughter spluttered into silence. Tara had heard it continue throughout the smutty patter of the resident comic and was always terrified that one night it might go on during her own act, but so far it never had. The moment she began to sing everyone stopped to listen and the realization of this lifted her onto a heady cloud.

The first two numbers she sang beside the piano, for the third she was expected to move slowly between the tables singing to the customers, smiling at them, making them feel good. This was the part of the act she liked least for sometimes the men made advances to her, touching her or sometimes, if they were drunk enough, trying to pull her down onto their laps. At first this had worried her – she was afraid to risk losing her job because she had slapped some lecherous patron's face – but she was not old or experienced enough to know how to deal tactfully with such advances. One thing she was determined about however – she was not going to put up with that sort of thing. She had seen too much of it when men came home with Maggie. She complained to Ed and soon the word had gone around. Molesting the singer was taboo and would result in instant ejection by the ex-boxers who guarded the entrance to the club. If the patrons wanted a girl for the evening one would be found but it would not be Tara Kelly.