I’m none of those things, Freda thought. I’m a girl.
She had garnered rather a lot of experience with older men now. Owen Varley was never far from her mind, but at least this time she was prepared for any onslaught, although the worst she had suffered by the end of the first night was a badly bruised big toe.
“Worse things happen at sea,” Mrs. Coker said, which was a ridiculous thing to say, but Freda didn’t mind because when the club was closing Mrs. Coker raked ten shillings in coins out of a tin and handed them all to her. Ten shillings! Mrs. Coker said it came from the goodness of her heart as she usually paid the girls at the end of the week, but she hadn’t decided whether or not to take Freda on. She was “on probation” apparently, which Freda thought was something that happened to criminals.
“Well, you can come back tomorrow,” Nellie Coker said, “and we’ll see how you get on.”
The amazing thing was that she had made even more in tips. She’d had no idea that you got tips for a dance until the first ungainly quickstepper pressed a shilling into her palm, leaving his moist paw in her hand just a little too long for comfort. And then another man tipped her, and another. Not quite riches beyond compare, but enough to stop starvation, although in fact she need never go hungry again if she worked at the Amethyst because there was a little side room where the dance hostesses went when it was quiet (which was never) or when they couldn’t go on any longer without collapsing from exhaustion. A table was laid out with ham and cheese and cream crackers and jugs of water and a big pot of tea. “Got to keep the horses watered,” Nellie said. (Not a horse either, a girl!) There were two kinds of jam as well. And biscuits. Florence would have loved it here, apart from the dancing, of course. Where was she? What if she was stuck somewhere with nothing to eat? Not even a humbug.
Freda had nowhere to sleep that first night, but by dint of some cunning hide-and-seek (she thought of Vanda, disappearing inside the magician’s box), she managed to stay behind unnoticed when the club was locked up and make herself a little nest in a warm corner of the kitchen. It was much less troubling to be sleeping with the big pots and pans and the smells of stale fat than it had been spending the night with the old gravestones in Drury Lane Gardens.
The next morning, she slipped out before anyone appeared and had breakfast in a café in Dean Street, just around the corner from the Amethyst. The money she had earnt meant that she could feast on any number of sausages and she could barely get up from the table when she had finished.
The sensible thing to do then would have been to start a search for lodgings, but instead Freda was determined to return to the pawnbroker’s in Meard Street, on a mission to redeem the little bluebird brooch. It seemed imperative somehow, almost as if it would be Florence herself who would be returned on production of the carefully treasured pawnbroker’s ticket.
No Florence, of course, but also no bluebird brooch. Not just that, but the man behind the counter denied ever having taken the brooch into his guardianship. “But I have the ticket,” Freda said, waving the little creased piece of paper at him. Despite this evidence, he claimed that she was mistaken. Freda wanted to scream with frustration, indeed she did exactly that, and the pawnbroker took out a cricket bat from behind the counter and threatened to “knock her for six” if she didn’t leave his premises. “Go to the police, why don’t you?” he said scathingly. No, thank you, Freda thought, remembering the horrid policeman who had robbed her of the half-crown and advised her to go to Tisbury Court.
The pawnbroker had sold the brooch, of course. He was supposed to keep it for a month and he must have sold it at the very first opportunity. What a wicked thing to do, and now some woman other than Mrs. Ingram was sporting the little bird. Freda thought how sad Mrs. Ingram would be at the loss. It was not as great as her loss of Florence, of course, but the two were all mixed up in Freda’s head as she trudged miserably along Wardour Street.
And yet, for all she knew, Florence might have already returned home, simply caught a train and gone back to York, no longer interested in London or Freda. The thought cheered Freda. All would be forgiven by the Ingrams, even the loss of the pearls and the little bluebird, and Florence would take up her life where she had left off. Perhaps one day she would regale her own children with the tale of how she had once run away to London. Because, of course, Florence would go on to marry and have children (Freda imagined them adenoidal with large feet) and would never want for money or food or a roof over her head because someone else would always provide the necessities. The nearest that Florence would probably get to the stage in the future would be when she took those selfsame children to the pantomime at York Theatre Royal at Christmas. Would she think of Freda when she watched the village children dancing and singing around Aladdin or Jack and his pocketful of beans?
Freda had quite convinced herself of this future for Florence and was already feeling annoyed with her for not having found a way to tell Freda that she was safely back in the bosom of her family. She could at least have dashed off one of her dratted “Sights of London” postcards. But then it would have been delivered to Henrietta Street and Mrs. Darling would probably have thrown it on the fire.
However, now that she had some money, Freda could telephone the Ingrams, couldn’t she? Ask to talk to Florence and set her mind at rest. The more she imagined it, the more she was convinced that Florence was back home, sitting on the plush moquette of the Ingrams’ sofa, raking her fingers through the little silver dish of sugared almonds. Filigree, Freda thought.
She made her way to Broad Street, to the new telephone kiosks that had been installed on the pavement there, and fed two pennies into the mouth of the box inside. She was startled by Mr. Ingram answering straight away, as if he had been standing next to the telephone in his oak-panelled hallway. “Who is this?” he shouted before Freda had a chance to say anything. “Florrie, is that you?” Freda could hear the note of desperation in his voice. And then he startled her even further by saying, “Is that you, Freda?” (He couldn’t see her down the telephone wires, could he?) “Do you know where Florrie is?” he asked. “Freda? Freda?”
She didn’t press “button B” to talk to him, instead she fled. She didn’t even bother retrieving her tuppence.
* * *
—
She felt too downcast to tramp around the streets looking for a room to rent and she spent most of the rest of the day in one Lyons or another, as they seemed the most likely places to spot the errant Florence, although in her heart she knew that, like the bluebird brooch, Florence had flown away.
In Piccadilly, trudging between Corner Houses, she passed a car showroom next to the Ritz. Like the hotel itself, it seemed to gleam with lacquered wealth. Freda was just idly wondering how it was possible to get a car behind the plate-glass windows when she gasped at the sight of one of them. It was the same car that Florence had got into on the Strand on the day of Freda’s cursed audition.
The sight of it pulled her inside the showroom and she stood next to the car, staring at it as if hypnotized by it. It was impossible not to reach out a hand to stroke the shining bonnet of the machine and it was only when a snooty salesman hurried up to her and said, “Excuse me, miss, can I help you in some way?” in a very sarcastic manner that she woke from the trance the car had sent her into.
* * *