Gaiety Girl. She’d driven out to join her friend for lunch but now, looking out of the window and watching the snow crawl up the glass with quite alarming speed, she began to realise her chances of escape from Dartmoor were diminishing by the minute.
‘Your son-in-law, Geraldine? Guy? What did you do with him in the end?’
‘Bundled him off to Tangier. With just enough money to keep him away.’
‘Ah yes, I remember now.’
‘They don’t care how they treat their animals there. Beat their donkeys to death, then eat them. Or is it the other way round?’
‘Did it do him any good?’
‘It’s a hard life when you have no money,’ said Mrs Phipps, looking round for a waiter, ‘herding donkeys. Anyway, it prepared him for the jail sentence. Shocking for a mother to discover what a contemptible beast her daughter had married.1 He had it coming.’
They were sitting at an upstairs window of Wistman’s Hotel and the light was fading fast. Inside, the room was suffused with a magical glow from the fire, the candles, and the reflections from the many gilded mirrors on the walls. As the massive hall clock struck the quarter and the logs settled lower in the grate, the lines in Geraldine Phipps’ old face gently evaporated until she became young again. Though approaching her eightieth year, she was still a beauty.
‘You look lovely, Geraldine,’ said Miss Dimont. ‘Must be all that success!’
‘They were barbarians,’ laughed Mrs Phipps, looking back with relish on her triumphant summer as proprietor of the Pavilion Theatre. ‘They came, they saw, they conquered! Raped and pillaged as well, I have no doubt! Come the spring, the Temple Regis birth rate will quadruple as a result.’
She said it with a joyous lilt to her voice, as if she personally had ordained the unwanted pregnancies which startled and divided Devon’s prettiest seaside resort, in the wake of Danny Trouble and The Urge’s riotous summer season at the end of the pier.
‘Shocking,’ said Miss Dimont, shaking her corkscrew curls in disbelief. Back in the holiday season, Britain’s No. 1 beat group had grabbed the town by the scruff of its neck, shaken hard, and prepared it for the 1960s in spectacular fashion. Their six-week residency at the Pavilion, though marred by an untidy death or two, had saved the theatre from closure, and turned Mrs Phipps into an unlikely national celebrity.
DOWAGER’S DRUM-BEAT DRIVES OUT THE DODOS, yodelled Fleet Street’s headline writers, though Miss Dimont’s own publication, the Riviera Express, was less forthcoming in its support. The editor disapproved of beat groups, and he especially disapproved of lively old dames turning his bailiwick upside down.
The two friends spent lunch hopping from milestone to milestone in Mrs Phipps’ eventful life, and though it was past three o’clock there seemed so much still left unsaid. Geraldine Phipps, who was spending Christmas at the hotel, was enjoying herself immensely and ordered a Whisky Mac for her reporter friend. Her own Plymouth gin had appeared as if by magic, for she was extravagant with tips.
Terry Eagleton, the chief photographer, had driven Miss Dimont out from Temple Regis in the Minor but then disappeared off to Widecombe-in-the-Moor, probably never to be seen again – the snows over Dartmoor now enveloping all and everything.
‘I have the feeling I’ll be staying the night,’ said Miss Dimont as a heavy thud of snow, driven by the Dartmoor winds, hit the window with a crash. It was getting darker by the second.
‘That’s nice,’ said Geraldine Phipps. ‘Because I’ve got something I want to discuss with you.’
‘Tell me first what you have planned for next season, Geraldine. At the Pavilion – is there something I can write about for the Express, since it looks like I’m stuck here till the snow plough comes through?’ Judy looked out of the window but by now there was even less to see, Dartmoor’s snows having seized the day and put it to bed.
The theatre’s proprietress settled more comfortably in her chair, looked around at the darkening room festooned with ivy and fat white candles, and exhaled.
‘Part of me yearns for Pearl Carr and Teddy Johnson,’ she said, ‘sweetly crooning tunesmiths. But frankly, dear, I’ve always adored a bit of danger – and those leather-jacket boys certainly provided that last summer!’
Miss Dimont recalled the singer Danny Trouble, who missed his mum terribly during the band’s turbulent residency at the end of the pier – not too much danger there!
‘But I wonder what my editor will say if you decide to throw a spanner in the works again next summer? Some people got very upset with all that racket you made, Geraldine.’
‘What? That fellow Rhys? The buffoon who calls himself Rudyard?’
‘He only changed his name when he thought he was going to be a novelist,’ explained Judy. ‘Richard Rhys has less of a zing to it. Anyway, if not Pearl Carr, then who?’
‘Before he was arrested, Gavin told me about a young man called Gene Vincent, rides on stage on his motorbike. Revs it up a bit, the girls go crazy! Then he starts to strip his leather off.’
‘Geraldine!’ cried Miss Dimont with feigned horror. ‘You’ll be eighty soon! Motorbikes? Strip-tease? At your age? What’s the Mayor going to say?’
Mrs Phipps’ finely painted lips crept into a wicked smile.
‘My dear, when we Gaiety Girls appeared on stage way back when, it wasn’t always a Salvation Army rally, you know. Some of us deliberately forgot to put on our frillies.’
‘Surely not!’
‘The can-can was a special favourite, just think. Very popular.’
‘Honestly, Geraldine, you’re a disgrace!’
‘No, my dear, I’m not. I’m not pregnant.’
‘I’m told there are eleven unwanted babies on the way. Those Urges and their urges.’
‘They should have been more careful. Never happened in my days on the stage.’
‘Really not?’ said Miss Dimont. ‘You do surprise me!’
‘Well,’ said Geraldine Phipps, gently reminding her lips of the gin glass, ‘not unless it was necessary.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘My dear, in my days at the Gaiety Theatre there were possibly as many as thirty or forty girls – dancers like me, darling – who married a lord. Some of them were well-born, but an awful lot of them weren’t.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘The well-born ones would face no difficulty from the family should milord drop to one knee and pop the question. It was the others. The rule was – if in doubt, let nature take a hand.’
‘You mean they got pregnant deliberately?’
‘Cheaper to marry the gel than to defend a breach-of-promise action in court. You know how our noble families like to cling to their small change.’
Miss Dimont shook her head and took a sip of the Mac. It breathed fire into her chest and brought a tear to her eye. The vast first-floor sitting room, stuffed with big leather chairs and polished mahogany side tables, had emptied. Either guests had retired for a nap or had wandered off to the library to find a thriller. From where she sat in the window, Miss Dimont could see that nobody was entering or leaving the hotel by the front door – indeed, the wide semi-circular drive had altogether disappeared under the snow.
‘I’d better go and see if they have a room.’
‘Don’t worry,’ smiled Geraldine. ‘I had a word with Ethel while you were powdering your nose. You’re just down the hall from me and they’ve found you some pyjamas and things.’
I ought to phone the office, Miss Dimont