The Angel in the Corner - Monica Dickens [13]
She found her way past ropes and pieces of scenery and gimcrack boats and coaches to a narrow stone passage-way, which led to a twisting flight of green stone stairs. Flattening herself against the wall as an avalanche of sturdy girls in feathers and cockatoo bustles clattered past her with darned woollen shawls over their shoulders, she climbed the stairs to an upper passage where the dressing-rooms were. She walked along the scarred and peeling doors, which appeared to be always kicked open, and looked at the half-obliterated numbers. There were no names on any of them.
A man came out of one of the rooms in a tail-coat with frayed satin lapels, his dickey and clip-on white bow-tie stained with ochre grease-paint. When Virginia inquired for Doris Miller’s room, he asked: ‘You her daughter?’
‘I? No, of course not.’
‘Well, kid, I just thought. She’s got a grown-up daughter, I know. Sings in cabaret up West. But I don’t suppose she’d let her come down here. She doesn’t like to be seen with her, they say. Made the girl take a different name, so no one would know she had a daughter that old.’ He lit a cigarette and leaned against the scribbled wall, holding the cigarette downwards into the palm of his nicotine-stained hand.
‘What’s she like?’
The man seemed friendly. His painted smile was wide, showing chipped, badly-spaced teeth. ‘The daughter? Bit of all right, from her pictures.’
‘No, I mean Miss Miller.’
‘Her. Oh, kid, she’s a sow. One of the original pigs. I’ve met some cows in my time, but never such a horse-faced goat as our Doris.’
‘I’m supposed to interview her,’ Virginia said, ‘for my newspaper. Which is her room?’
‘You born yesterday?’ The man shuffled his cracked patent-leather shoes in a tiny dance step, without moving his shoulders from the wall. ‘You’ve got a hope. You think she wants it splashed on the front page that she’s coming down to appearing in a tenth-rate show like this? She’s only doing it because she’s practically down and out. But she’s keeping it dark. She’s always thinking she’s going to make a big come-back up West. You know what these old-timers are. She doesn’t know she’s finished. They never do. Anyway,’ he added casually, dropping his cigarette and turning his foot on it, ‘she’s gone home.’
‘Oh, no!’ Virginia was aghast. ‘I can’t go back to the office and say I haven’t seen her. This was a sort of trial for me. The first big job I’ve been sent on. I can’t mess it up like this.’
‘I used to feel like that once,’ the man said. He looked at the end of his cigarette and gave a short laugh. ‘Thought I’d die of shame if I bungled a step. Now I dance like a bull’s foot most of the time, but I don’t care as long as I can hang on to the job. Time was though, when I –’
Virginia cut him short. Nice as he was, and with a life, no doubt, seamed by tragic disillusionment, she had no time to get nostalgic with him. ‘Do something for me,’ she said. ‘Tell me where that woman lives, and I’ll get her at home. I’ll make her see me. I won’t be beaten by her.’
The man winked at her. ‘As it happens, I know,’ he said. ‘She’d have me shot for telling you, but if you won’t let on, and since I’ve a daughter myself – here, got a pencil? Ambassador Hotel, Lulgate Square. That’s somewhere in Paddington, I think. Look, kid, she won’t see you. She’s a bitch on wheels. I’m telling you.’
‘What do you bet she won’t? Get the Northgate Gazette on Saturday and see if I didn’t get my story!’
*
Lulgate Square was across the Paddington railway tracks, between the Harrow Road and Edgware Road. The tall Edwardian houses, with stone steps rising over the basement entrance, had been built in the Square’s palmier days, when servants toiled up and down the many stairs, and nursemaids walked prim children in the little