Distant Music Read online

  Also by Charlotte Bingham:

  CORONET AMONG THE WEEDS

  LUCINDA

  CORONET AMONG THE GRASS

  BELGRAVIA

  COUNTRY LIFE

  AT HOME

  BY INVITATION

  TO HEAR A NIGHTINGALE

  THE BUSINESS

  IN SUNSHINE OR IN SHADOW

  STARDUST

  NANNY

  CHANGE OF HEART

  DEBUTANTES

  THE NIGHTINGALE SINGS

  GRAND AFFAIR

  LOVE SONG

  THE KISSING GARDEN

  THE LOVE KNOT

  THE BLUE NOTE

  THE SEASON

  SUMMERTIME

  Novels with Terence Brady:

  VICTORIA

  VICTORIA AND COMPANY

  ROSE’S STORY

  YES HONESTLY

  Television Drama Series with Terence Brady:

  TAKE THREE GIRLS

  UPSTAIRS DOWNSTAIRS

  THOMAS AND SARAH

  NANNY

  FOREVER GREEN

  Television Comedy Series with Terence Brady:

  NO HONESTLY

  YES HONESTLY

  PIG IN THE MIDDLE

  OH MADELINE! (USA)

  FATHER MATTHEW’S DAUGHTER

  Television Plays with Terence Brady:

  MAKING THE PLAY

  SUCH A SMALL WORD

  ONE OF THE FAMILY

  Films with Terence Brady:

  LOVE WITH A PERFECT STRANGER

  MAGIC MOMENTS

  Stage Plays with Terence Brady:

  I WISH I WISH

  THE SHELL SEEKERS

  (adaptation from the novel by Rosamunde Pilcher)

  DISTANT MUSIC

  Charlotte Bingham

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781409057192

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS

  61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA

  a division of The Random House Group Ltd

  RANDOM HOUSE AUSTRALIA (PTY) LTD

  20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney,

  New South Wales 2061, Australia

  RANDOM HOUSE NEW ZEALAND LTD

  18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  RANDOM HOUSE SOUTH AFRICA (PTY) LTD

  Endulini, 5a Jubilee Road, Parktown 2193, South Africa

  Published 2002 by Doubleday

  a division of Transworld Publishers

  Copyright © Charlotte Bingham 2002

  The right of Charlotte Bingham to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 0385 602677

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Charlotte Bingham

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One: The Orchestra Strikes Up

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part Two: The Waltz Begins

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Part Three: Dancing To The Tune

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Epilogue: The Carousel

  To the character actors and actresses of ‘The

  Profession’ whose voices can fill a theatre unaided,

  their art brings a play to vivid life

  Purposes of accuracy require that the first part of the book reflects the theatrical usage still in vogue in 1950s England. For a modern reader possibly the most muddling of these is the word ‘producer’. In the old days the producer had the same function as the director has now. Much of this terminology has changed, as is reflected in the book, since the lines between theatre and television became less defined.

  Charlotte Bingham

  Hardway, 2001

  People used to say that the theatre was a marsh light, leading you on and on, success and fame seemingly always deceptively close, yet in cruel reality never even within reach. Others would tell you it was like a beautiful sound to which you long to draw closer, the better to hear the music, but which, for all but the few, remained always and ever distant. Whatever the truth, for those whom the theatre calls, there is no other world.

  PART ONE

  THE ORCHESTRA STRIKES UP

  So beautiful and strange and new! Since it was to end so soon I almost wish I had never heard it…

  Kenneth Grahame, ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’

  from The Wind in the Willows

  Chapter One

  ‘It is up to you, Elsie, to restore the family fortunes, up to you entirely, you know that!’ Dottie declaimed, banging down the iron.

  Elsie nodded absently, too busy reading that week’s copy of The Stage to look up. As was their habit they had lit one of the gases on the stove to keep the kitchen warm, so the windows of the small, kipper-smelling kitchen were steamed up and dripping with small rivulets, which dashed and chased each other down the window panes. When she was little Elsie used to bet on the drips, imagining each emerging droplet to be a racehorse, and herself a rider. Nowadays life was too serious for any such imaginings, too purposeful for anything but hope.

  Elsie and Dottie, her maternal grandmother, had lived, for some many years now, together with assorted lodgers, in a tall, thin, crumbling Regency house, exactly like the other tall, thin Regency houses that made up an equally crumbling square, in a Sussex seaside town which, like the Richards family, had once seen better days.

  Cheek by jowl though they lived, however, Elsie never quite knew when Dottie would come up with her favourite line about the loss of their family fortunes and the need for Elsie to restore them, but whenever she did, it hit home as nothing else did.

  Ever since her grandfather’s death when she was four years old, and their subsequent removal from the outskirts of the seaside town to a tall terraced house, their lodgers had been a permanent feature of life, as well as a source of fascination to Elsie. Fortunately Dottie, having herself once been an actress, knew all about ‘digs’ and how to make your house a well-known stop-off for actors and actresses on tour. More than that, she knew all about what it took to become a famous theatrical landlady.

  It took wit, and staying up late, it took tolerance and a great deal of cocoa, it took sympathy and a good breakfast. The result of this knowledge was that when she took over the lease of number twenty-two Kings Square, the role of confidante
and mother, humorous friend and understanding companion – in other words the role of the ever sympathetic landlady – was most definitely a part which Dottie knew could have been written for her.

  Having reached the age of seventeen without having been made homeless, Elsie was appropriately grateful to her grandmother for both her pluck and her fighting spirit, for without it she had always known that they would have years ago had to join the dole queues. Elsie’s mother, Benita, having become an alcoholic, had long disappeared over the horizon.

  ‘Missing presumed dead,’ was the clipped pronouncement that Dottie always made when people asked after her daughter, which neatly summed up the condition of a young woman who had run off and left her daughter to be brought up by her parents.

  Left alone in the world, it had been necessary for Elsie and Dottie to weld themselves into a partnership that was bound with the indissoluble ties of the need for survival. They understood each other as no one else perhaps might or ever would, although of course they never said as much.

  Born at the beginning of the twentieth century Dottie was an Edwardian by fact and by nature, and the Edwardians, even Elsie knew, were not in the habit of showing their feelings to each other in a slushy way. Since Elsie was knee-high to a grasshopper Dottie had shown her that she loved her by one means and one means alone – her constant encouragement. Any moment when Elsie might have faltered in her struggle to get noticed at Tippy Toes, the local stage school run by Miss Tippy Morrissey, was immediately dismissed by Dottie with expressions such as lacking in gumption or oh dear, feeling sorry for little me, are we?

  At home, where Elsie really might have been tempted to feel sorry for herself when she was forced to run up and down the steep stairs of the house with trays of food or refreshments for the lodgers, her feelings of tiredness or despondency were put to the sword by a single withering look.

  ‘Oh well, you’ll just have to get on with it, like the rest of us,’ was Dottie’s inevitable comment when Elsie failed an audition, or a ballet exam.

  So that was just what Elsie learned to do. She got on with her dancing and her singing lessons, the latter provided by a Miss Belmont who had for a time occupied one of the front rooms on the first floor of their house. She got on with her dancing classes at Tippy Toes. She got on with her ballet shoes, into which, from an early age, she had learned to sew ribbons and elastic tape. She got on with the washing-up and the drying-up, with the boiling and the brewing; she got on with everything that came up, and some things which, like jobs in the theatre, did not come up, but had to be sought out.

  And in the process of doing all this, quite inevitably, she grew old before her time, which was probably what her grandmother wanted, because since she was alone in the world, and had no one to whom to turn except Elsie, it was better for both of them if most of the time they just pretended that Elsie was the same age as Dottie.

  Of course there was an unspoken acceptance between them that because Dottie had been frustrated in her ambition to be a great actress, Elsie had to become one in her place.

  Happily Elsie was a beautiful enough child for it to be entirely understandable for her grandmother to push her towards the stage. She was tall for her age, and slim, with long, slender legs, waist-length wavy blond hair, a tip-tilted nose, and a mouth that turned up at the corners, so that even when Elsie was actually feeling miserable she still looked as if she was smiling.

  Unfortunately for Elsie her worst feature was her eyes which although of a beguiling green protruded slightly, something which they both felt would definitely affect her film chances, if she ever had any. Whenever the subject raised its distressing head Elsie would merely shrug her shoulders and say to her grandmother, ‘Don’t let’s think about that yet, Dottie.’

  It was a feature of their relationship that not only had they somehow ironed out their familial relationship by first-naming each other, but they never hesitated to disagree. They told each other exactly how they felt, at all times, and in a strikingly truthful fashion; until, that is, the kitchen door opened, or the front door, or some other door in their tall, thin house, and one of their lodgers appeared, at which point they automatically became as warm and charming as any auditioning actor.

  Indeed such was the cordiality of their manners to their lodgers, such their humour and kindness, that Elsie sometimes thought that being with the lodgers had taught her more about acting than even the famous Miss Tippy Morrissey. It did not matter what the complaint, how difficult the demand, Dottie and Elsie smiled and laughed, cajoled and sweet-talked their lodgers until the kitchen door closed again, after which they instantly fell back into their usual professional talk, devoid of any bothering with charm or flattery.

  ‘It is not Jack and the Beanstalk this year, thank God, it is going to be Cinderella, so Miss Belmont got that wrong.’ Elsie looked up from her paper as Dottie nodded down at the washing-up, carefully pouring a hot kettle from the stove into the old butler’s sink with its one cold tap.

  ‘You haven’t been in Cinderella since you were a dancing mouse, oh, must be eight years ago – or was it a mushroom?’

  Elsie frowned down at the paper, willing it to be going to yield a part in the panto for her. ‘Never ever know with panto, do you, that is the trouble?’ she asked of no one except herself. ‘André Gillon is the management. Or so it says here.’

  ‘I sometimes think with panto they take out more than they put in. Nothing but specialist acts and conjuring at the expense of the story,’ Dottie agreed. ‘Still, Miss Morrissey might know. I think that André Gillon could be an old friend of hers. Yes, he must be, because he choreographed her in Peter Pan before the war.’

  Elsie was not listening, too busy trying to think where she, at seventeen, and with an already developed figure, could fit in to the forthcoming panto.

  ‘Are the rats in Cinders always boys, Dottie?’

  ‘Can’t remember. Not always, I don’t think.’

  Elsie sighed. She was good at ballet, and being slim could possibly still play an older kind of rat, if she taped her bust. She sighed again, and turned the page of the newspaper. It was always the same. The gap between what she could do, what she wanted to do, and what was on offer was about as wide as the English Channel that their seaside town and pier faced so bravely, night and day.

  ‘You going up for it, then? Going up for the panto, then?’ Dottie turned briefly from the sink as Elsie nodded.

  ‘Yes, because Mr Dimchurch on the second floor, he knows André Gillon too, except not for some years, but he said that he thought there might be something in the minor parts and to go and call, and whatever happens, to mention his name.’

  ‘Yes, but you don’t want to go up for nothing, not when there’s a bus fare involved, dear. Going up for nothing, spending sixpence and then you don’t get the part, you don’t want that, do you?’

  Elsie nodded in agreement. It was true, she did not. Just the word sixpence was a very emotive one for Elsie, because once Dottie had lost a sixpence under the sitting room sofa, and it had taken hours and both of them pulling up a floorboard to find it. Elsie never forgot that day. Even though she was only very young it had scared the livers and lights out of her, seeing that look in Dottie’s eyes, a sort of mixture of determination to find the coin and fear that it might prove lost for ever. It was then that Elsie had realised that life was not just all about not losing money, not just about not spending money, but about making it, because Dottie had said, over and over, ‘It’s taken hours to earn that, Elsie. Hours!’

  So now, knowing more than ever what it took to save up much needed money, Elsie said with a note of impatient reassurance in her voice, ‘Don’t worry, Dottie, I will walk.’

  Dottie nodded at the frying pan she was busy scrubbing.

  ‘Probably best, dear. “Tides permitting”, of course.’

  It was pouring with rain, so Elsie, having brushed and combed her long blond hair and placed her Alice in Wonderland black velvet headband across it,
pulled on her velvet two-caped coat and her fur-lined boots and started the long walk to the seaside theatre on the promenade in a necessarily philosophical mood. As she battled her way along using her small child’s umbrella as a buffer against the elements she murmured lines from speeches that she liked to rehearse when walking, finding the realisation that she was word perfect as reassuring as the weather was not.

  Elsie never liked to dwell on her next ordeal, and it was not in her nature to anticipate good fortune. It might bring on false hope, and she had enjoyed enough false hope in her short life to last her for a century. Instead, as she walked along, she let her mind wander ahead, not to the possibility, or not, of being able to audition, but to the other advertisement she had seen that morning in The Stage. It was for a young actress to join a repertory theatre. Female juvenile lead to start immediately. That was all right as far as it went. And it made no mention of exact age, so that should not be a difficulty either, because she had a feeling that she might be able to pass herself off as being older than she was, given her height, and the sophistication of her conversation. The problem was in the wording of the advertisement, which ran Own wardrobe, costumes, hats (day), own evening dresses. No one, not even Dottie, could say that Elsie was the owner of the kind of extensive wardrobe that would be considered suitable for twice weekly repertory. Most of her clothes were still sadly and rather strangely old-fashioned, which they would be, considering that most of them had been cut down from old costumes once belonging to her mother.

  It occurred to her that she might be able to hire clothes more suitable for such an engagement from the seconds shop on the corner of the square, but the cost of the hire of so much might far outrun her salary. She knew that she would be all right at the interview, because thanks to Dottie she could talk theatre better than people almost twice her age. She could talk with supreme authority about performances that she could not possibly have seen, because she had seen them; she had seen them recreated by Dottie, in a special solo performance, in their small, overheated kitchen.