Loving Mephistopheles E-Book

Miranda Miller

• Herausgeber: Peter Owen Publishers
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Jenny is a third-rate music-hall chanteuse living in Edwardian London. When she remarks to her mentor and lover Leo that she never wants to grow old, she is unwittingly making a pact with the Devil. Her contract to love him will reside at the Metaphysical Bank in High Street Kensington. For ever. Leo has lived through thousands of years in numerous incarnations. As he gleefully exploits what twentieth century London has to offer - as a magician ('the Great Pantoffsky'), fighter pilot, coke dealer, city banker - Jenny finds that the joy of eternal youth is short-lived. Her unchanging appearance provokes questions and Jenny has to move abroad or constantly reinvent herself. For sixty years she has to pass herself off as her own offspring. When she bears a real daughter that may or may not be Leo's, his destructive nature comes to the fore. She flees from him and destroys the contract that she has never read. At the same time Leo understands that Jenny is the one woman that he has truly loved and that perhaps it is time the Devil made a stab at family life, whatever the consequences . . . A compelling journey through twentieth-century Europe and beyond, Miranda Miller's ingenious take on the Faust story is by turns humorous, erotic and terrifying.

Leseprobe

When Jenny, a pretty but third-rate music-hall chanteuse in Edwardian London, remarks to her mentor and lover Leo, known also as the Great Pantoffsky, that she never wants to grow old she has no idea who he is. But her contract to love him will reside at the Metaphysical Bank in High Street Kensington for ever.

As Leo gleefully exploits the rich offerings of twentieth-century Europe – as a magician, fighter pilot, cocaine dealer and city banker – Jenny finds that the joys of eternal youth are more ambiguous than one might think. With the strain of constantly having to reinvent herself as her own offspring and watching friends, lovers and family live out their natural lives, she begins to regret her decision to sell her soul for immortality. But it is only when she becomes pregnant with a daughter that Leo’s true nature and that of her pact with him are finally revealed …

A compelling and fantastic journey in time and space, Miranda Miller’s ingenious reworking of the Faustian legend is by turns humorous, erotic and terrifying.

‘Miller’s intricate fictions are lit by the dark flicker of a strong and original imagination.’ – Hilary Mantel

MIRANDA MILLER was born in London in 1950 and has lived in Italy, Japan, Libya and Saudi Arabia. She has published six novels to date – including Loving Mephistopheles and Nina in Utopia (both published by Peter Owen) – a book of short stories about Saudi Arabia, A Thousand and One Coffee Mornings (Peter Owen), and a work of non-fiction that examines the effects of homelessness on women. She now lives in north London with her second husband, a musician, and is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the Courtauld Institute.

www.mirandamiller.info

Praise for Loving Mephistopheles

‘A wonderfully generous novel, several books wrapped into one, and I would have been very happy to stay with any of the strands or in any of the places it takes us to – I was particularly struck by the recreations of Edwardian London and of the London of the modern homeless. It’s an epic narrative full of energy, with the wild and joyful inventiveness of an Angela Carter story. It is enjoyable and ingenious, and I hope it will find many readers.’ – Hilary Mantel

‘The legendary pact always allures. I much enjoyed this spirited mingling of familiar wars, poverty, celebrity glitter with unearthly mischief, cynicism and self-transformations … Oddly angled history is laced with fantasy now strange, now macabre; surely an imaginative feat of storytelling.’– Peter Vansittart

‘A brilliantly ambitious novel unlike any other; a London we recognize both lives and breathes amusingly and painfully … an absorbing read.’– Lyndall Gordon

‘A truly remarkable novel, I read it with fascination’ – John Bayley

Contents

Part 1: Jenny and Leo

Jenny Mankowitz

Leo

Jenny Manette

The Bargain

Eugenie

Virginia

Leo’s War

Rapallo

London

George

Lizzie

Molly

On the Make

The Metaphysical Bank

Beautiful People

Femunculus

1983

Leo in Love

Doors Open

A Modest Proposal

David

The Contract

A Child Is Given

More Accidents

Feelings

Leaving

Midnight

Part 2: Abbie in the Underworld

The Sandringham

Leo and David

The House in Phillimore Gardens

Sibyl

Down the Plughole

Lunch

Mothers

Lost Children

Time Bites

Abbie in Love

In the Bunker

Flashback

Part 3: An Island in the Moon

2075

Organicists

Down to Earth

Genetic Love

I would like to thank the following people, whose encouragement and advice while I was writing this novel were invaluable: John Bayley, Martin Goodman, Lyndall Gordon, Bill Hamilton, Tim Hyman, Rebecca Miller, Antonia Owen, Judith Ravenscroft and Leslie Wilson. I am also indebted to the following texts: Dr Faustus by Christopher Marlowe, Howard Brenton’s translation of Goethe’s Faust Parts I and II; Europe’s Inner Demons by Norman Cohn, Marie Lloyd by Richard Baker and Max Beerbohm by N. John Hall. Hammer Horror films were also an important influence.

Prologue

‘Do you remember where we met?’

‘Down there, you mean? Hanoi, Hoxton, Hong Kong? All under water now, anyway.’

‘I’ve been trying to remember.’

‘Dangerous stuff, memory. Let me know if it hurts and we’ll cut out any malignancy.’

‘I thought I might keep it all. Write it down, even. Don’t you feel any nostalgia?’

‘You’re the only one I’d miss. And I have you. You’re not getting restless?’

‘No. I’ll stay up here now.’

For ever.

This conversation took place in bed. We still make love. Last week Leo’s penis dropped off, but we got him another one from the Metaphysical Bank.

Outside the window I watch our child playing among the fountains and unicorns and elves. Last year it was caves and vampires and dragons, but fairy-tales are very sentimental this season. Although this Abbie, of course, looks exactly like that other Abbie, she is more placid. I love her just as much but differently. Leo fusses over her absurdly. Neither of us can quite believe, even now, that there really are no dangers here.

Of course, those of us who are eternally young and rich have always hovered just above the earth, as if in balloons, observing with curiosity and, sometimes, compassion. Now that science has caught up with science fiction we have cut the ropes, and here on Luna Minor the earth is the stuff of nightmares. After a good dinner we exclaim with horror and raise our eyebrows at the latest catalogue of disasters down there: meteors, earthquakes, floods, famine, drought. Such a masochistic planet, you’d think those one-lifers would make the best of what little time they have instead of wallowing in misery. We send down ships full of food and old clothes but no longer go ourselves. Not after the last time.

Yet the London of my imagination still has great power. If I was properly old I suppose I’d be forgetting it all. Now, instead of dementia I experience a kind of volcanic recall; memories erupt so intensely that I can hardly believe those events happened so long ago. They’re still scalding hot, their power undiminished. Imagine what it’s like for Leo who’s been around for centuries. He never wants to talk about the past.

‘What are you thinking?’ he asks with that anxious note in his voice that still surprises me. Once, he would have known but wouldn’t have cared.

‘I was thinking about – our daughter.’ I usually avoid referring to her as Abbie.

‘She’s so talented and inventive, a wonderful child. Perhaps you were right to insist on all that revolting blood and slime. I’m sure the computer-generated children aren’t so original.’

‘For her birthday she wants to orchestrate the meteors.’

‘Why not? My little Mozart!’ You’d think he’d always adored children and been the most indulgent of fathers.

Now that she is nearly eleven it all comes flowing back. Three little girls triplicated in time and space. At the same age that other Abbie had to struggle with poverty and I was blind and couldn’t help her; a century before that I was a child myself, not that childhood was much gushed over in Hoxton at the beginning of the twentieth century.

My past is a film I play back to myself each night as I lie beside Leo. Pictures, colours, arbitrary memories – I’ve been telling my story to myself in grand operatic events: love and death and vicissitudes of fortune. But it’s the ordinary moments that my memory savours and replays to me now, refusing to accept my own judgement of what was important. Those moments are so intense that they draw me into a perpetual present, a river that carries me back to London. My city resurrects itself and so do the people, who will live for as long as I refuse to forget them.

Two hundred years ago, ten seconds ago.

PART 1

Jenny and Leo

Jenny Mankowitz

My mother and father sit together over my sister Lizzie’s cradle. A rare moment of intimacy in their mutual destruction, which usually leaves Ma alone with two little girls in small, bare rooms while our father goes out drinking. But this is an image of tenderness, the two beautiful faces leaning over the wooden crib. My father is a classically handsome Jew, tall and slim with curly black hair, huge dark eyes, olive skin and a long harmonious face. My mother is also tall, with wavy light-brown hair swept up in a magnificent Edwardian chignon, creamy skin, green eyes and a bustle of vitality and purpose that make her thrilling to watch.

I’m not in the picture, of course, because I’m holding the camera of memory, filtering their long-dead faces through the merciless eyes of a jealous three-year-old. This is the first time I’ve thought of my parents as lovers, as a sexual couple. Lizzie and I must have been conceived in passion.

Quarrels and sulks as the handsome, feckless couple sink into debt. My father has just enough determination to reject his Orthodox background but not enough to accept responsibility for his young family or decide whether he wants to be a musician or a tailor or a baker. My mother soon comes to despise his weakness more than she loves his charm and good looks.

A game I play with Lizzie on summer evenings in our back yard: we put blankets over a clothes-horse and sit cross-legged in the dark tent it makes, then dare each other to run into the kitchen and steal pans, plates, raw carrots and lumps of dough for ‘our house’. Ma hates domesticity, poverty, children and noise. I already know this, so I hide, disappear – as my mother will do herself a few years later when she sails off to Shangri-La via Jo’burg.

Under the dark blankets Lizzie and I inhale the stuffiness, the smell of old bodies and tea and bacon – for my father enjoyed flouting the taboos of his parents – and watch sunlight filtered in tiny needles. Our scabby knees and elbows touch as we whisper, giggle and squabble. We love it when the roof falls in, when the blankets collapse and tangle with our pots and food. Then we have to get up and rebuild our house, weighing the corners of the blankets with stones and crawling back through a flap. Inside, the rich darkness encloses us again, hugging us in our own thoughts, smells and dreams.

Two sisters in white night-dresses in bare rooms, dreaming and squabbling and kicking each other in the single bed we share every night. It’s so cold that the condensation freezes on the cracked window-pane and streams down the walls. Lizzie brushes her long black hair with the hairbrush we share and squabble over, splashing her face with cold water before jumping into bed to kick me.

Our parents must have married young. There’s a much older brother I can hardly remember, Spencer, a name associated with beautiful stamps and financial hopes. At fourteen he was sent off to South Africa to seek his fortune. I imagine him, a huge shadow wrapped in an envelope, sailing across the ocean with a bundle tied up in a handkerchief like Dick Whittington. Spencer has found his fortune, a warm shiny word. Ma and Pa have fallen from genteel heights, but Spencer’s fortune is going to lift them up again. The less money there is, the more my parents talk about it.

‘Looking for work and hoping to God he doesn’t find it,’ Ma says of my feckless father. Every few months we change rooms and schools. The rooms get smaller and the schools rougher. I know landlords are bastards, jobs are slavery, schools are pigsties, pubs are where the money goes, pawnbrokers cheat you and other children hit you if you don’t hit them first. Pa hates religion, all of it, Jewish or Christian. When he ran off with Ma – who was Jewish, too, but never went to synagogue – he fled from his family, who lived in a hebra in Bethnal Green with other families from the same shtetl in Poland. Although all he has fled to is more poverty, my father says he’s glad to have escaped from the Talmud. Won’t let us have anything to do with the missionaries who flock to save our degraded East End souls. I always want to go along and have tea and cake and sermons, but we aren’t allowed.

Sometimes the battle between Ma and Pa spreads. One night I look out of the window and see the whole street erupt into a fight – like a party, only with fists instead of buns. Softly illuminated, like dancers on the gas-lit cobbles, men and women punch and claw at each other. Through the cracked glass I see heads hit the cobblestones, noses squashed like tomatoes, a straw hat torn off with a clump of hair attached to it. Pa has left again, and behind me I hear Ma’s voice. ‘These people are scum; they don’t know any better. Don’t look at them, Jenny.’

Pa doesn’t happen any more. We move again, and Ma shares a bed with us, snoring and sobbing and smelling like Pa did when he came home. Lizzie and I think it’s wonderful to have her in bed with us; we don’t care how smelly and noisy she is.

Then Ma goes off to South Africa to be with Spencer, who we always knew was her favourite just because he was a boy. I’m twelve, three years older than Lizzie, and we go to live with Auntie Flo, who isn’t our aunt but some kind of relation. She’s quite kind really, but I can’t forgive her for not being my mother. I can see her street, the chandler’s and the beer shop and baker’s. Little brick houses with ‘Mangling done here’ signs in the windows. We think Auntie Flo’s rich because she has the whole house and doesn’t do mangling.

Auntie Flo’s crappery down at the end of the yard, frozen in winter and flyblown in summer, is so terrifying in the middle of the night that Lizzie and I refuse to use it and develop bladder infections. The chamber pot’s icy, too, and most nights it’s too cold to pee or do anything except huddle against Lizzie’s back in bed. We squabble over which side of the lumpy mattress to sleep on and who used the curling tongs and which one of us was to leave the breakfast tray for Mr Barnabus, the only one of Auntie Flo’s lodgers who isn’t downright hideous. Lizzie thinks it’s the end of the world when I kiss him.

Every morning my sister and I walk to the Bath Street School, where we don’t learn anything, but at least for two whole years we live in the same house and go to the same school. When I come home I search the table in the murky hall for the letter from Ma that never comes. I think my glamorous mother in South Africa is proud of me, misses me. I think she has only left us because she had to and because our big brother Spencer is going to make lots of money and send for us.

Only she doesn’t. The envelopes with beautiful stamps arrive every few months, but they’re not addressed to me or Lizzie. They’re for Auntie Flo, full of money to pay for our keep, so we must be worth something.

On my fourteenth birthday, when I have to leave school, my horizons barely fill the grimy window of the room I share with Lizzie. Auntie Flo takes in lodgers and sometimes works as a barmaid at the Falstaff. Ma didn’t work because she was a lady really. I can just about imagine working in the hat shop in Kingsland Road. I’d have to wear a black frock and stand rigidly to attention and call other women madam. A job like that would be posh, grand, swish, compared with the only alternatives, which are the baby-boot or feather-curling factories.

All I know is I hate babies and I want to be the one who wears the hats and the feathers. I know men stare at me, and there’s money in that. On the other side of London, where I’ve never been, there are theatres and carriages and jewellery that might as well be worn by me as by engravings in illustrated newspapers. I’ve been to music halls, and the only women I’ve ever heard of who did anything except have babies are Queen Victoria, Marie Lloyd and Vesta Tilley. If you can’t get a job as a queen you can always learn to sing and dance. Auntie Flo says girls who go on the stage aren’t much good – although with a nod and a wink and a leer, implying that being good isn’t much fun.

Leo

‘Leopold M. Bishop, professional Tutor and Agent, prepares ladies for Theatres or Music Halls and procures Engagements. Easy payments. Stamped agreements given to every Pupil.’

Leo always did like contracts.

I’ve chosen him out of a list of men claiming to teach acting because his name is Bishop and I think bishops are safe. I go to see him, clutching his advertisement from the local paper and my only white gloves. I’m afraid they’ll get dirty if I wear them.

I’ve never seen these streets before. Bloomsbury. Huge white houses like slabs of blooming cake, the dark pavements shiny with rain. London still feels imperial and pleased with itself. These houses are full of objects and people that know their place. You can tell at once they don’t do mangling, they don’t even put their own clothes on or cook their own food. I can smell the rain, the sap in all these trees that aren’t allowed to grow in Hoxton and my lavender perfume that I saved up for weeks to buy. My heart gallops with terror as I approach his house.

A uniformed maid like a bossy penguin shows me into a comfortable overcrowded room. Behind a carved desk is a tall, thin man with brown hair and dark-blue eyes, well dressed. He looks about thirty, more than twice my age but not old; looks so like the dream lover I’ve been imagining since I was twelve that I at once feel naked, as if he’s been spying on my fantasies. I’m sure he knows my stays are too tight and my shoes and blouse and skirt are ridiculously big, borrowed from Auntie Flo. But I haven’t come all this way just to be sent packing, so I walk straight up to him and say, ‘I want you to teach me how to act. I want to be like Marie Lloyd.’

‘Nobody is like her. That is why she is a great performer.’

Clumsily I audition, and he agrees to teach me.

For a year I give him most of the money I earn curling feathers and sewing them on to hats, boas and evening cloaks. My fingers are sore, and I hate each slippery feather as if it’s a spiteful bird sneering at me. I’m determined that one day I’ll wear these garments I’m sewing for other, richer women. Twelve hours a day I sleep-walk at the factory, and for two hours a week, on Sunday evenings, I wake up. Leo teaches me how to walk, speak, read, act, sing, dance, dress and breathe.

One afternoon, when my elocution lesson is over, instead of going home, I turn to the man behind the desk. ‘You married?’

‘No.’

‘Always lived alone, ’ave ya?’

‘I have,’ he says in the exquisite, stilted accent I’m supposed to imitate. But although it’s his teaching voice he no longer has his teaching face. I stand over him with one hand on my hip, staring into the eyes that are suddenly evasive as he fidgets with his blotter. ‘It’s time for you to go home, my dear.’

‘Don’t feel like it. And you ’aven’t got no other pupils Sundays. You told me so.’

We sit beside the fire and talk. I ask all the questions. After months of lessons I don’t know anything about him but feel he can see straight through me. When Lizzie asks what my posh teacher is like, I reply, ‘He talks lovely.’

Now I fire brash questions about his career, his childhood, his friends and what he does when I’m not here. Mr Bishop is awkward, as if he has never answered these very obvious questions before. I sit in a low chair opposite him, staring straight into his dark-blue eyes, which look devious and surprised. I try to memorize his face for Lizzie so that I can tell her once and for all whether he’s handsome or ugly. It’s a long, thin, clever face, with a sharp nose and thin lips, like a greyhound, and as I continue my interrogation he looks so nervous I think he might go racing off. He sidles out from behind his fortress desk and sits in one of the two green leather armchairs by the fire.

I pursue him to the other one and sit opposite him. I stop trying to force him to talk and stare at him in the darkening room. Suddenly he looks at me so hard that I see myself: a dark, skinny girl of fifteen in a white blouse tucked into a navy-blue skirt, cheeks flushed from the firelight and the excitement of being with him. I see my whole life until now reflected in his eyes, a very small thing, and also see that those eyes aren’t indifferent to me any more.

He drops to his knees and holds out his arms to me. We kneel together on the shabby red Turkish carpet in front of the fire and kiss. His face feels scratchy and alien, yet warm and comforting, too, as if a part of myself I’ve lost has been restored.

After that our lessons change a bit. I still do the singing and dancing and acting, but somehow we always end up over by the fire with half our clothes off. He fondles my breasts, strokes my bare legs, talks about Garrick and Irving and Sarah Bernhardt and Ellen Terry, about painting and music and philosophy. You can’t say it isn’t educational. Our lessons stretch from two hours to four to half the night.

‘How long’ve you been in the theatre?’

‘I was in the theatre long before you were born.’

‘Go on, you’re not that old!’

‘Have you ever heard of Arlecchino?’

‘Arlywot?’

‘Harlequin. Wonderful part. I’ve still got the costume.’ He goes to a chest in the corner of his room and comes back with some old rags.

‘Bit of a mess, isn’t it? Like a patchwork quilt gone wrong. Could do with a wash.’ Leo sits in his chair by the fire, stroking his old costume. ‘I’ve lost the mask. I used to love that mask. It was only a papier-mâché half-mask, but when I put it on I felt his personality flow into me. His comic delight in his own folly, his genius for wriggling out of awkward situations. And the audiences loved me; they applauded me in Bergamo and Venice and Mantua and Vienna and Warsaw and Moscow. Suddenly my tricks and lies were lovable. In this costume, wearing that mask, I was capable of the most amazing acrobatics. I could turn a back flip holding a glass of wine and not spill a drop; I could walk upside down to the imperial box where Catherine the Great was waiting with open arms –’

‘Who’s she then?’ I ask jealously.

‘A skeleton.’ He leaps up. ‘I’d come strutting on to the stage like this, perhaps do a few cartwheels like this. Never at a loss for words, gossiping about local scandals and politics, as Harlequin I could say anything. Always improvising, disguising myself – in one play I’m in a tomb after a jealous rival has poisoned me. I wake up beside the beautiful Eularia – she looked a bit like you, as a matter of fact – she’s been poisoned, too. She says, “I am a woman, alas, brought low by a jealous lover on whom I doted too much.” Then I say, “And I am a man poisoned by a madly jealous rival.” Then I look at her like this and say, “Come over here. Although I’m dead I find I still have a taste for the ladies.” Shall I show you what happens next?’

‘All right.’

I’m so wet with desire for him that I have to turn away from Lizzie in bed each night to masturbate silently. Leo’s sensuality is always under control; he never quite gives me the satisfaction of losing my virginity. He trains me to respond with my mouth, hands and cunt to his casual depravity until, one day, I become the seducer.

One Sunday evening my lesson ends with us both lying, almost naked, in front of his fire. Flames throw liquid red reflections over our arched bodies and the blood-red Turkish rug. Outside the window I can see the dark, foggy night I don’t want to be expelled into. This room has become my centre; all week at the feather factory I languish, waiting for his voice and hands and mouth to make me real again. I know he has other female pupils, and I’m frantically jealous of them. I consider chaining myself to his desk like the crazy women who chain themselves to the railings at Westminster. The girls at the factory laugh at them. Give me the spondoodles and a good-looking fella and sod the vote – that’s our politics.

‘I don’t want to go home.’

‘It’s late. Your aunt will be worried.’

‘No she won’t. She doesn’t give a bugger.’

‘Don’t swear. It isn’t lady-like.’

‘What about those tricks you’ve taught me, then? Putting my mouth and hands in places I never dreamt of. Is that what ladies do?’

‘Behind closed doors, I believe, it has been known.’

‘What about your other pupils then, them as comes after me. Do they all end up stripped to their petticoats?’

‘I’m your teacher, my dear, not your husband.’

‘Lock the door. I want an extra lesson.’

We finally consummate our sexual games and lie panting on the Turkish rug by the fire. ‘So that’s what all the giggling and whispering and wait-until-you’re-older was about. Well, it’s worth waiting for.’

‘I’ve always thought so.’

‘Do it again.’

You are my universe. I internalize you as surely as you slither deep inside me during our wild lovemaking. Loving you, I love the world and throw myself at it greedily.

Jenny Manette

‘Trouble with you, Jenny-nose-in-the-air, you fink you’re better than the rest of us. I’ve a mind to write and tell Ma what you’re really up to with that Leo.’

‘If Ma’d been worried about our morals she wouldn’t of left us with Auntie Flo.’

‘She says she’ll send for us when Spencer’s made some money.’

‘Catch me going off to bloody Jo’burg. Give me London any day. Help me with my hair, will ya? Must run. I’m meeting Leo at Giulini’s at eight.’

‘Take me with you, Jenny.’

‘No. You’re too young. Make your own life.’

‘Please, Jenny.’

Lizzie isn’t really too young, she’s fourteen, same age as me when I met Leo. But she isn’t pretty or quick-witted, and I don’t want her tagging along, whinging and blabbing. I’ve told Leo about my family, but selectively, and Lizzie isn’t one of the bits I’ve selected. It’s more romantic to be an orphan, all alone in the world except for my beautiful Aunt Florence, a retired opera singer. Auntie Flo’s idea of careers advice: I don’t worry about you, Jenny, when you don’t come back at night, because I know a young girl can always find a bed somewhere.

And I do, God knows I do. By the time I’m seventeen I’m earning enough to pay the rent on a room in Gower Street. Not much better than the room at Auntie Flo’s, but I don’t have to share a bed with busybody Lizzie any more, I’m just around the corner from Leo and it’s not as far to walk home late at night. My room is all chocolate brown and bottle green, what Mark Twain would have called a hospital for incurable furniture, but I’m so proud to be independent. I’m not rich, but I’m definitely on the way up. I’ve just had a banana with Lady Diana – lords were always more my thing than ladies, and we had a bit more than a banana.

When the acting lessons don’t pay, Leo reinvents himself as a conjuror, the Great Pantoffsky, Master Phantasist, in a top hat, white gloves, a white silk scarf and a black cloak lined with scarlet. I watch from the wings, fascinated, as he releases a dozen turtle doves from the hat of a lady in the front row and flies off with them. Then he reappears in one of the boxes at the side of the stage and opens up his black-lacquer cane to reveal a bunch of red roses that turn into an enormous red silk balloon. Leo climbs in and floats off over the audience, waving down at them.

‘How do you do them tricks, then?’ I ask later when we’re sitting in Giulini’s, our favourite restaurant.

‘Those tricks. They require a lot of practice. Centuries.’

‘Go on. You can’t be that old. How old are you, anyway?’ He smiles at me as we raise our glasses of wine, and I get that feeling again, that sinking, drowning sense that he isn’t what he seems, that after four years I don’t know anything about my teacher, agent, manager, lover and friend.

When we get our first bookings at the Chelsea Palace I feel like the bee’s knees. Two pounds ten a week. It isn’t the Drury Lane panto but it’s one up on the Stepney Paragon and the Penge Empire where I started out, when they gave me the bird and threw trotter bones at me. Now I’m not quite bottom of the bill: Miss Jenny Manette, the Charming Soprano Vocalist. I know I’m a nice little performer, but I’ll never be a headliner. Leo says I have to drop Mankowitz during the Great War because French is popular and Polish Jewish isn’t. So, I say, what about the Great Pantoffsky, then? That’s all right, he says, magicians can get away with being foreign and sinister. You have to be very careful during the war. Brunnhilde the Banjo Belle gets arrested as a German spy, and we all have to use Clarko greasepaint because Leichner’s is unpatriotic.

I’m on my way to a rehearsal one morning when I see a bloody great crater in front of Swan and Edgar. Later, people said the Zeppelin raids were nothing compared with the Blitz, but they were bad enough for me. A lot of the old halls go dark during the war, it’s harder to get bookings and we have to keep changing our acts. I have to dress up in a khaki uniform, go all coy and hold up a white feather as I sing, ‘We don’t want to lose you, / But we think you ought to go.’ Too damn right we don’t want to lose them. They’re bums on seats and they pay the rent.

Leo and I are quite hard up during the war. The three Rs – Ragtime, Russian ballet and Revue – are putting the last nails in music hall’s coffin. The bioscope used to be a turn at the end of the show, but now they show it in a special building and audiences flock to see them. Leo wangles us contracts at the Holborn Empire and the Balham Duchess, and Tommy-on-leave still wants the old songs. We go over to the Facial Hospital in Kennington to do special shows for the Tommies that can’t get to the theatre. Boys younger than me on the wards in their dressing-gowns. When I first hear them laugh I think they must be shamming. They sound so full of life, warmest audience I ever had. Then when I look a bit closer I see they’ve lost their eyes or legs or the hands they should be clapping with.

By the time the Great War ends I’ve spent six years on the stage – well, on it and off it and under it and behind it. Leo isn’t possessive, says he believes in free love, but if I can get them to pay me for it so much the better. Leo arranges it all – helping me with my career he calls it. Sex is one of the skills I need, like singing in tune and tap-dancing. It’s love when I make it with Leo, on my side anyway; his thin, hard body, his bossy manner and the way he defines my wants and needs, tells me what I think and feel before I know myself.

All that guff about fallen women. You just try working twelve-hour shifts in a feather factory for six bob a week. Doors open and behind each one is Leo and, behind him, other men’s hands, lips, hot sticky desires – after a while you stop counting, let alone remembering their names.

Can’t remember meeting George. He’s just there, waiting at the stage door. When I finish my act and look out over the audience it’s his round, pink, silly face I’m looking for, and if he isn’t there I miss him. Leo wants me for what he’s made me. His midnight-blue eyes see every fault, every wobble in my talent. But George just thinks I’m marvellous. In his eyes – also blue but milky and glazed with devotion – I see a new Jenny who is sophisticated (not just a little trollop), talented (not just a monkey performing for Leo) and witty. George has gentleman written right through him like Brighton through a stick of rock. There’s nothing sneaky about George; he just comes straight up to me and hands me his heart on a plate.

Me and Leo have a good laugh at him. We let him pay our bills once or twice and play gooseberry when the three of us go out together. And, while we’re talking fruit, I have his cherry – and very sweet it is, too – on a mattress around the back of the stage at the old Balham Duchess after the show one night. Sometimes when Leo’s not around I let George come back to my room in Gower Street. He’s only a few years younger than me, but I feel like his mother. His real mother hates me, of course, thinks her little boy has survived the last few months in the trenches only to be eaten alive by the Whore of Babylon. Thinks I want to marry him, silly cow. George has no money to speak of, and I’m having far too good a time to want to settle down – and if I did I’d want at least a title and a couple of houses. One of my admirers, Binkie, died in the war and left me two thousand quid. Leo has made me invest it, and I feel rich.

The Bargain

It’s 1922, and Leo and I have finally made it to the West End. We’re both on the bill at the Holborn Empire, and we usually go to Giulini’s in Drury Lane for supper after the show. I love coming out of the theatre and finding them both there. Leo hasn’t changed out of his Pantoffsky outfit. He’s still in his tails and topper and red-silk-lined evening cloak, swinging his black-lacquer cane. I think he’s the most handsome man in London, but I don’t tell him so because he’s quite conceited enough. George looks awkward in his evening clothes; they’re too tight and he always cuts himself shaving. His blood drips down on to his white wing-collar, his tie’s never straight and he stammers and blushes when I kiss him on the cheek. Then I turn to kiss Leo on the lips. I’m so happy, walking down the street with a man on either arm and giving an eyeful to any nimminy-pimminies from the National Vigilance Association that might be watching. George is on my left, and on my other side Leo is indulging in one of his arias.

‘You didn’t show enough leg in your first number, and, what’s worse, you didn’t smile. Haven’t I been telling you for the last ten years: your face isn’t the pink dimpled confectionery the morons in the gods like to lick. You’re too pale, too thin, too foreign-looking. To seduce these West End philistines you have to ooze charm, make love to them with every pore and nerve, open your heart and legs to them like –’

‘Like the poor bitch they buried today,’ I say in my own voice, the one I only use with them, instead of my new elocutionized drawl. ‘Marvellous Merry Marie. Thank Gawd we’re here. I’m starving.’

Giulini greets us warmly – we’re an established triangle – and leads us to the panelled room where we always sit, beneath French prints of fat-arsed Cupid aiming at plump targets in frilly petticoats. There’s a lot of drinking and banter between the two men, but food and words stick in my throat, and at the end of the meal Leo asks, ‘What’s the matter, Jenny?’

‘You wouldn’t understand. George would, but he’s pissed again. Can’t get a peep out of him.’

‘There’s not much there. Knock-knock. Is George at home? No, he turned into a poodle and chased off after a Jenny wren. What’s that? A giggle or a sob? Tell me.’

‘You always make me tell you things and then you turn it into a joke.’

‘Only to comfort you. You know how I adore you.’

‘Now that is funny.’

‘Who do you love, Jenny?’

‘Not you. You’re too hard and sharp.’

‘George?’

‘Too soft and dull.’

‘Yourself?’

‘Too – stupid. Women get caught by the same old lies again and again. You’re full of tricks, and I fall for them every time. I did love her, though. Fell in love with her when I was seven and my big brother passed on the boots she bought him before I was born. Did you ever hear that story? She bought hundreds of pairs of boots and gave them to the poor in Hoxton. Us, that was. And now she’s dead.’

‘Brilliant performer.’

‘And a stupid woman. Couldn’t read or write properly, drank too much, gave away all her money and loved a fellow as couldn’t love her back. Just like me.’

‘Well, what do you expect me to do about it?’

‘You could help me, if you wanted to. You could do anything.’

‘Nonsense!’

‘If you did help me to stay young I’d give you all I’ve got.’

‘Not much. I seem to have had it already.’

‘That’s what I mean about you. You’re cruel, Leo, you don’t care.’

‘Don’t play the tragedy queen. It doesn’t suit you. Your nose goes red and your powder clogs. You remind me of poor Dan Leno who wanted to play Hamlet. Not that you have a tenth of his talent. What is it you want?’

‘I want to stay young. I don’t want the gin to fog my brain, don’t want to end up broken at fifty like Marie Lloyd. Please.’

‘Let’s examine this little transaction. Are you religious?’

‘My auntie took me to the synagogue once. There was chanting and candles and men downstairs with beards and funny hats.’

‘So much for your soul. And your talent as an artiste?’

‘What about it?’

‘Ten years’ hard labour I’ve invested in you. And at the end of it you can just about carry a tune and show your legs and bust to advantage. At least you’re not bottom of the bill any more.’

‘I know I’ll never be a real headliner. But what good did it do her? Fifty thousand people at her funeral this morning, there was. Twelve cars full of flowers, there was a model of a stage and her old cock linnet’s cage, with the door open, all done in roses and carnations. And on top of her hearse there was the ebony cane with the diamante top she used for “The Directoire Dress”. Dillon was all on his lonesome in one of the cars, and the crowd booed and groaned at him, the pot-house blackguard. And all the pubs in Golders Green was draped in black –’

‘Well, she was a pretty good customer.’

‘Don’t laugh! I went to see her at the Bedford a few months back. Did I tell you? She looked ancient, although she was only fifty-two. Long yellow teeth, came waddling on to the stage like an old man in drag. “One of the Ruins that Cromwell knocked about a bit” … Her voice was so weak the other artists had to sing along with her. I cried. And the whole bloody audience roared with laughter. They all knew Dillon knocked her about.’

‘Well, I may have my faults, but I don’t beat you. Anyway, why should you worry? You’re young and beautiful and successful.’

‘Now – with you to push and bully me and fight for my contracts. I’m not half as good as her anyway. Dunno why you bother.’

‘You amuse me. Not much does. But you’re not amusing when you’re miserable like this. How can I cheer you up?’

‘Don’t let me get old.’

‘You’re only twenty-five, you silly girl.’

‘And after a few more years like this, working the provincial halls and boozing, I’ll look forty. Don’t let that happen.’

‘How can I stop it?’

‘You can, you know you can. You can do anything.’

‘Pure fantasy. You’re not entirely without talent. Men like you.’

‘Is that a talent?’

‘Most certainly. Would you give up your ha’penny-worth of stardom to stay twenty-five for ever?’

‘’Course I would. But what would you get out of it?’

‘Company. A warm heart in a chilly world.’

‘And what would I have to do?’

‘Very little. Play the eternal ingénue. And, of course, you would have to love me.’

‘I don’t love you, you bastard.’

‘Then your duties should be quite light. Are you sure you really want to go ahead with this?’

‘’Course I do. If it’s a joke it’s a bloody good one. How could I turn it down?’

‘Exactly. Now this won’t hurt.’

‘What the hell are you doing to me now?’

‘Just a prick. Blood’s a very special kind of ink. As they say.’

‘Blood? No! Leo, this isn’t funny any more …’

He leans over me, and there’s blood – or is it red wine? – on the white table-cloth. Red where my pale arm meets the shiny jet beads of my dress. Leo stoops over me with creamy parchment in his hand and makes me sign something. Then he swells until his shadow fills the ceiling, the candles are extinguished and Leo and I disappear in a kind of giant flambé, an explosion of light. As we float away I see George staring up at us, looking very small and puzzled.

Eugenie

A few months later the first accident happens. Leo doesn’t like the stage manager at the Holborn Empire, Gerry, a fat little ginger beer, very good at his job but not much charm about him. He likes to know everything that’s happening backstage, and he keeps asking Leo how his act works. Leo can’t abide questions – after ten years he still hasn’t told me where he was born or where his family is or whether he’s ever been married. Thing about Leo is, you have to handle him carefully, and I do. I reckon he’s been good to me and we still have a great time in bed, so I don’t ask too many questions.

But Gerry keeps asking questions, like how can he do all those tricks without any wires or special lighting effects. One evening before the show I’m in Leo’s dressing-room when Gerry comes in and starts up again. ‘I’ve been thinking about what you said this afternoon, and I’m not happy about it.’ Leo’s just putting on his greasepaint, he’s glued on half his moustachios and one side of his face is all white and red and black. He fixes his eyes on Gerry in the mirror, and I want to warn the poor little sod. ‘It’s simply impossible, what you do.’

‘Are you complaining about Pantoffsky’s act?’ I’m in my Little Dutch Girl costume. My clogs are killing me, but I give him a smile that’s meant to disarm him. ‘Seems to me he gets more applause than any of us.’

‘I’m not denying the audiences like it, but I want an explanation. I’m responsible for what happens in this theatre, and I like to feel I’m in control.’

Leo laughs. I don’t like the sound of that laugh at all, only I have to go on so I leave them to it.

I finish my act and the audience liked me, so I’m high on that hot tingly feeling, like I’ve just made love to five hundred people. I hang around in the wings giggling and gossiping with the other girls. Gerry’s like a bloody sergeant major backstage; he fines us for talking or smoking or drinking. You can tell he’s not here tonight because we’re all having a good time. Then one of the boys needs help shifting the scenery from windmills to Lambeth for the ‘Coster’s Serenade’, and Miss May Mason the Miraculous Living Marionette can’t find her strings, so we start to look for Gerry.

They find him strung up from the flies at the top of the theatre with a wire around his neck and a note stuck to his forehead saying, ‘How did he do it?’ We finish the show, of course. We’re pros after all, but there’s police all over the building and we’re not allowed to leave the theatre.

I’m sitting in my dressing-room, half naked, with my face smothered in cold cream, when there’s a knock and I think it’s Leo being politer than usual. It’s a policeman, plain clothes, so I know he means business. I show him all I’ve got and hope he’ll take advantage of me, give me time to think up a few boomers, but he starts firing questions at me right away. Who is this Great Pantoffsky? What’s his real name? How long have I known him? Was there any bad feeling between him and the deceased? I just have to answer quick as I can, and it’s just as well I don’t know much, but I am shocked. I’m no angel and I’ve seen violence all my life, but murder’s out of my league and I want it to stay there.

I’m shaking when I leave the theatre, and I’m glad George isn’t waiting at the stage door. I wouldn’t want him mixed up in this. I always thought the police were stupid, but when I get to Leo’s rooms in Fitzroy Street at one in the morning they’ve been and gone. Those rooms that once impressed me so much are a pigsty. There’s papers everywhere, and that Turkish rug and the leather armchairs I learnt so much on are all slashed to pieces. The landlady tries to get me to pay for the damage. She chases me downstairs demanding money, and by the time I get home to my room in Gower Street I’m terrified.

The newspapers love it, of course. They’re at the theatre every day, then they find out where I live and wait for me outside my front door, too. Mysterious Murdering Magician’s Floozy. I thought it would be a lark to be famous, but I hate this. Can’t sleep or eat or concentrate, and I fluff and stumble in my act and the management are looking for an excuse to sack me when the show folds anyway. I won’t talk to anybody, and when I do all I say is it was an accident and Leo and I had a purely professional relationship. George turns up at the stage door on my last night, but I can’t face anybody so I pretend I haven’t seen him, go back upstairs, sneak out down the fire escape stairs, go home and lock myself in my room.

Thing about being with Leo was I never had to be afraid of anything. He always knew what to do and say, how to get money and food and clothes. It takes me a few weeks to realize he really has disappeared, and I don’t know what I feel. Love? I miss him, but I don’t know who it is I’m missing. I’m angry with him for leaving me in the lurch. It’s like Ma all over again, only this time I really am alone. Can’t go back to Auntie Flo, and all I know about Lizzie is she’s gone off to South Africa.

London audiences want musical comedies now, with plots and characters, however absurd. I’ve auditioned for a couple, but I didn’t get the parts. Magicians and charming soprano vocalists are going on tour in the provinces, doing theatres at the ends of piers in summer, and I don’t fancy that. Leo was my agent as well as everything else, so if I’m going to work in the theatre I’ll have to find myself a new agent as well as a new name.

Luckily Binkie’s investments have gone up, so if I can find somewhere cheap to live I won’t need to work, which is, I imagine, the height of glamour; to have my own house abroad, expensive clothes and time and space and servants – the fantasy of the chorus girl who marries a duke only without the nuisance of the duke himself. If Vesta Tilley can become Lady de Frece, why shouldn’t I live it up on the Riviera, too? The only French I know is ‘twiggy voo’ and I’ve never even been to the ‘Naughty Continong’.

I get a passport in the name of Mrs Eugenie Bishop. A widow’s more stylish than an out-of-work chanteuse; all the prettiest women in the twenties are war widows. I find our marriage certificate under my bed. Leo produced it one weekend when we wanted to stay in a stuffy hotel in Cheltenham – but I don’t allow myself to think of him.

I don’t tell anybody I’m leaving the country because I know the police are still pursuing their inquiries and I don’t want them pursuing me. I pack my Louis Vuitton trunk, get a taxi to Victoria and take the boat train late one night. Northern France looks too much like England, so I just keep going south until I get to the Riviera.

Although I’m not exactly the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo I’ve enough to buy new clothes, stay in good hotels and eat wonderfully in restaurants. I soon make friends and learn to flirt in French and Italian. I never knew there was a place like this, where it’s perpetual summer and nobody works. That’s not quite true of course; the fishermen and hoteliers and waiters work hard to pamper the rest of us, guests at a never-ending party. The Riviera is still a string of fishing villages, mellow slabs of colour baking in that golden Mediterranean light. There’s no grey in the sea or the sky or the faces around me; sun and colour go to my head, I gulp beauty down, inhale it, dive into it as I learn to swim in the generous sea that links the jewels of this coast.

For a year I explore, moving from village to village, hardly able to believe my freedom and happiness. One afternoon I take the train to Rapallo, and when I see those ochre, rose, yellow and burnt-sienna houses reflected in the bay I know I want to stay here. I rent a villa in the hills behind the town.

The Villa Ginestra is a crumbling rose-pink building set in the green, rocky hillside studded with its namesake broom. There’s a terrace overlooking the bay, and whenever I look out over my view I see Auntie Flo’s house like a shadow behind the glory of sapphire, turquoise, emerald, yellow and pink. Can’t remember hiring Assunta. I’ve never had a servant before, and she isn’t one really, more of a friend.

If you’re going to eat lotuses, Italy’s the place to do it. I enjoy being Eugenie. That extra syllable raises my head and makes me feel dignified. Italians take people at face value, so when I tell everybody I’ve been a famous music-hall star I become one. My husband was a handsome young officer killed at Ypres. Not so long ago I’d have said ‘Wipers’, but my French and Italian have become fluent and my English is improving, too. Vowels and aitches flow naturally now, and words that would once have defeated me come sailing out of my mouth.

At first I think our paradise is classless, but I soon learn the invisible ropes. At the top there are the kosher aristocrats and the genuine artists whose work they buy. They sit in the same bars and restaurants as me, but I don’t dare talk to them. My friends are flappers and flibbertigibbets and gamblers and drunks, younger sons and divorcees, poets and painters who never quite get around to writing or painting. We have wonderful parties in my villa that start with booze and end up in bed or on the beach.

I avoid the casinos along that coast because my memories of poverty are too vivid to allow me to play with money. But one day Assunta says, ‘You should buy your house, signora.’

‘Can’t afford to.’ My investments have survived the 1929 crash, when so many of my drinking companions disappeared, but my income is barely enough for rent, booze and food.

‘I will show you where money is piled like ripe fruit at the foot of a tree.’ Assunta has a very poetic way of expressing herself. Sometimes I wonder why she doesn’t get a better job. I think she’s joking, but the next afternoon she lays out my green Schiaparelli dress and tells me she’s ordered a car to take us into Monte. On the ravishing drive she sits beside me in her black dress, her black hair drawn back into a bun, her brown, oval face fierce with concentration as if she is drawing all the brilliant colour and energy out of the landscape and into herself.

At the casino I’m nervous and cling to Assunta. I don’t understand the games that whizz and rattle and whisper in the smoky darkness. If I were alone I would run away from this ritual, from the chanting croupier priests and the silent initiates, the radiant and the ruined. Assunta takes my arm and guides me to a long green-baize-covered table where faces are illuminated moons floating amid the shadows. The other women, like me, wear vivid evening dresses, heavy makeup and jewellery. Assunta in her plain dark clothes is almost invisible, like a Bunraku puppet master.

Assunta asks me for ten thousand lire, changes them into chips, piles them in front of me, whispers a number, tells me to back it and push the chips forward. We join in the collective gasp as the roulette wheel spins capriciously. When it stops hers is the only stifled laugh of triumph as the chips are raked towards me.

My passive silence is rewarded with more money than I could have earned in forty years in the feather factory. After a couple of hours she leans over to me and whispers, ‘You have the price of your house. We can go now.’

In the car on the way home she looks exhausted. ‘Congratulations, signora.’

‘But I didn’t do anything.’

‘You won.’

‘No, you did. This money should belong to you. Are you a gambler, Assunta?’

‘Not this time.’

Later that month I buy the Villa Ginestra and also, for Assunta, the cottage on the beach where she lives with Stefano, her fisherman lover.

All this time I miss you, Leo. I don’t know who you are or where you are or even if you’re still alive, but my other lovers – and there are many – can’t replace you. When I think of London it’s you I remember, our love-making and fights and passionate reconciliations. You were never violent with me, and I no longer believe you could have killed poor Gerry. You are the one I talk to in my head, the face I search for in the crowd. You know me better than anybody.

But I don’t miss Lizzie, and when she writes to say that she has returned from South Africa and wants to see me I don’t bother to reply. Her semi-literate note and whining tone remind me of a self I want to obliterate.

You always said it was dangerous to be blind to politics. The Fascist youth parades in Rapallo throughout the twenties and thirties seem as remote as the Changing of the Guard, games played by people in silly costumes. I stay out of the arguments that rage around me over Franco and Hitler and Musso and Stalin and never read newspapers.

I go on ignoring Fascism until the summer of 1939, when it comes to my doorstep in the form of an Italian officer who asks me to use my ‘famous voice’ to broadcast propaganda. Although the officer is handsome I don’t like his script, full of platitudes about love of nation and family. I don’t give a damn about either and object to his bombastic style, so I refuse to cooperate. Nobody here knows I’m Jewish, but I hate their anti-Semitic rants. It’s as if I’ve just woken up after years of sleep-walking. The light musical comedy I thought I was starring in has turned to heavy tragedy, and there are no parts for me. I’m not a bit heroic but I am bloody-minded enough to risk my property, which, I know, will be requisitioned as soon as I leave Italy. I suddenly long to return to London, to find you and my friends, if any of you are still alive. I know George is because I’ve had a couple of letters from him.

If I’m going to return to London I have to decide who will be returning. One night after my bath I stare at myself in the long mirror in my dressing-room. My biological age, forty-two, is about twenty years older than my reflection. I could wear a wig, ageing makeup, dress dowdily, but all these options seem perverse, like a millionaire who refuses to spend any money. For the first time I believe in that bargain I struck with you that night at Giulini’s. I want to enjoy every moment of my eternal youth. So I invent my daughter, Virginia, a shy young thing whose mother has sent her to safety in London. I’ve had enough of glorious isolation. I’ve proved that I can live without you and now I want you again.

Italy is a country of bureaucracy and forged documents, and I have no trouble at all buying a passport for my alter ego.

‘Come with me,’ I say to Assunta as I lean out of the window of the train to hug her goodbye.

‘No, he wouldn’t like that.’

‘Who?’

But she’s shrinking, receding, a waving insect and then a speck of dust in the sunset bathing the town I never expect to see again.

Virginia

The prospect of having to fend for myself in London, of being open to surprises again, is so exciting that I can’t sleep a wink on the train.

I arrive at Victoria with a crocodile handbag stuffed with cash and my trunk packed with clothes and jewellery, wearing a deep-blue coat as if I’ve brought a piece of the Mediterranean with me. The murky gloom of my city is at first a shock, but I’m deliriously happy to be back.

You are on the platform in a blue Air Force uniform.

‘You’re not really here,’ I say, squeezing and pinching you as we kiss. ‘You can’t be. Nobody knew I was coming.’

‘Do you like my uniform?’

‘No. The opera cloak and the Harlequin costume were melodramatic but they suited you. The idea of you as a soldier –’

‘A pilot.’

‘An anything that takes orders. Anyway, why join up now? There might not even be a war.’

‘I like to be ahead of the game.’

‘Where are we going?’ I ask as we get into a taxi.

‘I’ve bought a little flat in St James’s Square.’