Loving Mephistopeles Read online

  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.’