ascent indefinitely.
The floral hat appeared over the edge of the car. ‘Are we quite secure up here? It seems a long way from the stage.’
‘Don’t worry lady. It don’t take long to come down,’ someone cheerfully assured her. Thackeray eyed the winch, now secured by a simple ratchet-mechanism. One kick at the wooden support would bring the balloon-car plunging straight through the boards, the trap-floor and the canteen, to bury itself in the foundations. Anyone wanting to stage an accident here had no need of subtlety.
Then a blare of brass dismissed Albert’s mother from all immediate thoughts. The overture! Thackeray was at once assailed by an overwhelming sense of incompetence. The stage-hands in their yellow uniforms were everywhere, pulling at ropes, manhandling scenery across the stage, scaling the ladders to the fly-gallery. It was like being aboard a clipper as she set sail: incomparably thrilling— unless you were trying to pass for one of the crew. What the dickens did a C.I.D. man do in this situation? Certainly not remain where he was, anyway. Observing a large piece of scenery to his right, he backed cautiously around it, and into a situation one must hope is unparalleled in the annals of Scotland Yard.
He found himself in the thick of a close-packed group of almost naked young women. So tightly were they pressed against his person that it was quite impossible to observe what, if anything, they were wearing. He blushed to the roots of his beard. Any further movement was unthinkable. One simply had to stand shoulder to shoulder with them (as he wrote later in his diary) and submit to physical contact. An insupportable experience!
‘Careful with your whiskers, my love,’ one redheaded member of the group appealed. ‘You’re brushing the black off me eye-lashes.’
He held his chin high, his eyes closed and his hands firmly to his sides. Nothing could last for ever. Surely enough, he presently found himself still at attention, but quite unaccompanied. Purely in his role as investigator he turned to look at the stage, where the curtain had gone up. His so recent intimates were ranged in two circles and dancing like dervishes.
They were not naked after all, but it was easy to see how he had gained that impression. Gaping areas of undraped flesh gleamed brazenly in the limelight. Skirts recklessly divided from hip to hem revealed not only the black silk hose worn by the dancers, but the means of suspension as well, drawn tight across white expanses of thigh. Above the waist the only substantial garments worn were elbow-length gloves in black kid; flagrant indecency was just averted by short lengths of chiffon and large amounts of luck. ‘That’s nothing, mate,’ said a voice behind Thackeray. ‘Just wait for the living statues. If you think this is strong stuff, that’ll have you crawling up the blooming scenery. This is just the hors d’oeuvre, mate.’
He turned.
‘Sam Fagan,’ said the speaker, extending a hand. ‘Top of the bill in my time, but just a fill-in here. This class of audience don’t take to my brand of humour. It’s the spice they’ve come to sample—the tit-bits you don’t get in the penny gaffs. They’re all toffs out there, you know. Mr Plunkett don’t allow no riff-raff in the midnight house. Members of Parliament, Peers of the Realm, Field-Marshals and Generals. Now what can a cockney comic like me say to a nobby crowd like that? I tell you, they ain’t interested. It’s no good getting myself up in this toggery, neither. I might as well put on my tartan suit and red nose.’ Even so, he checked the angle of his silk hat in a mirror hanging on the wooden framework of the scenery. The strain of years of laughter-seeking showed in his face. He grinned like a gargoyle. ‘The poem ought to curl ’em up, though. Listen, if you haven’t heard it. Hey ho! Here come the girls.’
The dancers performed their last shrieking high-kicks, turned, wriggled their hips, blew kisses across the footlights and swaggered to the wings, clustering round Thackeray again, several holding his arms for balance as they loosened their boots. Waves of warmth rose from their glistening bodies. ‘What’s Plunkett got out there tonight?’ the redheaded dancer angrily demanded. ‘You show more leg than anyone’s seen outside the giraffe house and bob your bristols up and down like buoys at high water and what does the applause sound like? Two wet plaice being dropped on a marble slab. Not a ruddy whistle from anyone. You’d think it was a bleeding temperance meeting. Well wouldn’t you?’
No-one answered. Perhaps they were too short of breath. Certainly the response of the audience had been luke-warm. Thackeray surmised that if Fagan were correct and Peers and Parliamentarians really were present, the cool reception was not so remarkable. People of that class were not accustomed to such displays. Some of them had probably walked out in disgust. Plunkett would need to find something more tasteful if he hoped to attract the aristocracy to the Paragon. Sam Fagan, at least, had the wit to see that vulgarities were not in order tonight. He was reciting ‘The Cane-bottom’d Chair’.
Nobody seemed to require any heavy props, and Albert’s mother was still secure in the flies, so when the dancers had dispersed (not without winks), Thackeray gave his attention to the poem. For a small man, Sam Fagan possessed a good carrying voice. One of the prop-men on the opposite side had brought on a large potted fern and Fagan was standing beside it, addressing his audience, but turning occasionally to direct a limp hand towards the wings. As an elocutionist, he lacked the polish of more practised performers, but it was a spirited rendering, even if the emphasis seemed a little uneven in parts. The disquieting feature of the recitation was the way it was being received. Sections of the audience were openly convulsed with laughter. To Fagan’s credit he was not at all discountenanced; perhaps the rehearsal at Philbeach House had steeled him for such an ordeal.
‘It was but a moment she sat in this place.
She’d a scarf on her neck and a smile on her face.
A smile on her face and a rose in her hair,
And she sat there and bloom’d in my cane-bottom’d chair.’
He paused, actually smiling back at the mockers below, who now regrettably seemed the greater part of the audience.
‘And so I have valued my chair ever since
Like the shrine of a saint or the throne of a prince;
Saint Fanny my patroness sweet I declare,
The queen of my heart and my cane-bottom’d chair.’
Where was the humour in that? Thackeray was beginning to believe that the halls were not the place for serious poetry.
Then the lights were lowered, indubitably for effect as the final verse of the poem was recited, but the audience could scarcely contain themselves, whistling and calling out as coarsely as anyone had done at the Grampian. ‘He can’t find his Fanny!’
Someone tugged Thackeray’s sleeve. ‘Push this into the middle. Not too fast.’
On to the open stage? Good Lord! Thank heavens the place was in darkness.
He looked down at the prop. Of course—a cane-bottom’d chair! And in it he could just see a seated young woman, presumably a dramatic representation of Fanny. By George, someone at the Paragon had a genius for scenic effects. He pushed at the chair-back; it was on wheels and moved easily. Fagan was already beginning the verse:
‘When the candles burn low, and the company’s gone.
In the silence of night as I sit here alone—
I sit here alone, but we yet are a pair—
My Fanny I see in my cane-bottom’d chair.’
A spotlight streamed down from the flies, dramatically picking out the chair. Thackeray reacted with as neat a side-step as you could hope to see outside a prize-ring. He smiled in the shadows. Who would have believed it was his first night as a scene-shifter? An instant later the smile froze and he was almost bowled over. Not by the massive and unexpected roar from the audience, but by the sight which provoked it. The young woman in the chair was wearing nothing at all.
Thackeray clapped his hand to his forehead. Thirty years in the Force had to have some relevance to this situation. His first impulse was to restore order by snatching the chair back into the darkness, but that involved the considerable risk of ejecting the sitter. That was unthinkable. Then he considered treating the audience like a runaway horse, and leaping protectively in front of the chair with arms outspread and waving. In uniform he could have brought himself to do that; not in yellow satin and white stockings.
Before he could think of another expedient, someone mercifully brought down the curtain. A coat was tossed to the young woman and she got up, put it round her shoulders and walked past Thackeray and off the stage, as
