She had chosen her outfit carefully. After much consideration, she had settled on a tartan skirt and a broderie anglaise blouse beneath her favourite cardigan, cherry-red, hand-knitted in a complicated stitch, with tiny shell buttons in the shape of daisies. It was a tight fit nowadays but had a sentimental value that she hoped would bring luck. It had been the last thing that she had modelled for the Knits, an appearance in Grimsby, and Freda thought of it as a farewell gift from Adele, even though Adele knew nothing about its pilfering. To Freda it felt like a gift, whether it was or not.
Freda had taken an extra bath this week in preparation for the audition. She went with Florence once a week to the public baths on Marshall Street, where they splashed out sixpence for a first-class warm bath, taking it in turns as to who should go in the water first. In honour of her audition, Freda had paid tuppence yesterday for a second-class bath and had the luxury of having it all to herself. The washing facilities in Henrietta Street were limited—they shared a cold-water sink on the landing and a water closet that was always stained and smelling of urine. Mrs. Darling was a stranger to cleanliness. She also seemed to have an intense dislike for people and yet, even far away in the attic, they could hear, day and night, the rat-a-tat-tat of the demonic doorknocker.
Miss Sherbourne had finally managed to secure a proper audition for Freda, at the Adelphi Theatre in the Strand, for the chorus of a show called Betty in Mayfair. “I pulled a lot of strings to get you this audition,” she said, “so mind you do your best to impress them.” I always do, Freda thought.
Since running away from home, the bright light of success that Freda thought of as her follow-spot had slowly begun to fade. But now everything was about to change, the light was burning brightly—Freda Murgatroyd was on the road to stardom! At last!
* * *
—
Her cardigan stretched tightly as Freda struggled to fasten the little shell daisy buttons. “You look nice,” Florence said, still lying lazily in bed, even though the day was in full swing around them in the boarding house. “They’ll be impressed at the Adelphi.”
“Thank you,” Freda said, doing a twirl and dipping a little curtsey. Florence insisted that she pin Mrs. Ingram’s little bluebird brooch to the red cardigan. “For luck,” she said. Freda didn’t see how it could be lucky to wear stolen goods, but she complied as it seemed to make Florence happy.
“What will you do while I’m at the Adelphi?” she asked Florence. (What did Florence do with her time?)
“Oh, this and that,” Florence said. “I’ll meet you afterwards in the Lyons on Coventry Street and you can tell me all about the audition.”
Freda felt a sudden chill. She imagined this was how people must feel on the morning of their execution. The moment of reckoning was upon her. There was a fork in the road ahead. On one side was a path that glimmered with the gold it was paved with, leading to fame and success. On the other side was a soot-smirched alleyway that led to despair. What if that was the path she was forced to take? What then?
“Don’t be such a dramatic cuckoo,” Florence said, untangling herself from the bedsheets. “Come on, let’s go and get some breakfast.”
* * *
—
After they had eaten, they wandered around for a bit until it began to rain. They parted on the Strand, near the Adelphi. “Fingers and toes crossed,” Florence said, giving Freda a hug. She smelt of the mint humbugs that she ate all day long. Florence would turn into a mint humbug if she wasn’t careful.
Freda watched Florence crossing the road in the rain. She was expecting her to go back to Henrietta Street or, more likely, find shelter from the weather in a café somewhere (Florence should have had shares in Lyons Corner Houses). She did neither, but hovered uncertainly on the pavement outside the Coal Hole pub. A car drew up and Florence stepped forward and seemed to be in conversation with the driver. He was older, but not as old as Mr. Birdwhistle. Freda didn’t see what happened next because an omnibus stopped in front of her, blocking her view. By the time the omnibus had loaded itself with passengers and moved on, both the car and Florence had disappeared. Surely Florence knew not to step into a stranger’s car? But then Freda thought of Florence’s trusting bovine face and knew that it would probably take little more than the offer of a humbug to seduce her.
* * *
—
Two or three girls—the beginning of an early snake of hopefuls—were already queueing at the stage door, waiting for an open audition. Clearly, they had no Miss Sherbourne to recommend them and they cast envious looks in Freda’s direction as she walked straight past them and into the holy sepulchre. They probably mistook her for a cast member, Freda thought, preening. The Adelphi’s stage door was almost next door to Corpus Christi, perhaps she should have asked Florence to light a candle for her for luck. “You don’t light them for luck,” Florence said. “You light them for someone else, not yourself.”
Freda was so excited that she failed to notice that there were no playbills for Betty in Mayfair adorning the front of the theatre.
At the stage door, Freda found the doorman, who was squeezed into a small booth at the entrance. “It’s off,” he said when she interrupted his solemn perusal of racing tips in the Daily Mail to enquire about Betty in Mayfair.
“Off?”
“Yes, off. Transferred to Shaftesbury Avenue. We’ve got The Green Hat on now, didn’t you see the playbills outside?”
Apparently not. Still, Freda supposed, one show was as good as another.
“I’ve got a letter, inviting me for an audition,” she said. She didn’t, Miss Sherbourne had arranged the audition over the telephone, but it was the same thing really. The doorman seemed the indolent sort and, indeed, he returned to his newspaper and, without looking up, reached out his hand to a telephone on the wall and asked whoever was on the other end to send Mr. Lionel. “There’s a girl here,” he added.
After rather a long wait, Mr. Lionel appeared. He didn’t seem to be much older than Freda herself. He was quite yellow-looking, as if he needed a good dose of liver salts (something Vanda swore by). Was Lionel his Christian name or his surname?, she wondered. He said impatiently to the doorman, “What now, Alfred?” Mr. Lionel and the doorman appeared to be at loggerheads over something. A series of barbed comments was exchanged, the subject of which seemed to be a key that had gone missing. The more operatic Mr. Lionel grew on the subject, the more taciturn the doorman became. They seemed to have forgotten all about Freda until she gave a little cough to remind them. “I have an audition,” she said, and Mr. Lionel gave a long-suffering sigh, as if he couldn’t think of anything more tiresome.
“The management, I suppose?” he said to her.
“Yes, the management,” Freda agreed, not entirely sure what that meant in the context of the Adelphi. Her father had been in management, but the Adelphi wasn’t a chocolate factory.
The doorman gave a little snort of contempt at the word “management.”
“Follow me, then,” Mr. Lionel said to Freda, with magnificent indifference.
“The belly of the beast,” he said as he led her into this mysterious realm, a place that was cavernous and cramped by turns. York’s Theatre Royal was much better organized. The Adelphi was dark and dusty, not to mention chaotic, and Mr. Lionel was continually warning her about obstacles that they had to negotiate—coils of rope, enormous costume baskets, a large toolbox, even a small dog that regarded her with disinterest. “It’s a ratter” was said by way of explanation.
Eventually they fought their way through to an office, where he handed her over to a woman wearing pince-nez who was sitting at a desk amongst a jumble of paperwork. Freda quashed her instinct to tidy. She was Miss Young, she said (she wasn’t, she was very old, at least forty by Freda’s reckoning). She was also extremely cross. Had something happened to make everyone bad-tempered, Freda wondered, or was this just what the West End was like?
“There’s no chorus in The Green Hat,” Miss Young said. “No dancing at all.”
“But I was invited for an audition,” Freda persisted. “For a waiting list, maybe? You audition girls all the time.”