The scene takes place in a café in London’s West End in 1905. Merry & Gaye are two jobbing actresses, drawn together more by circumstance than genuine friendship. Merry, the daughter of a brigadier, is tall, imperious and upper class. She has been disowned by her family since she decided to become an actress. By contrast Gaye, also known as Gigi, is the product of a music hall comedian and his wife and has worked in show business since she was a child. The two characters featured in my previous book ‘The Makings of Violet Frogg’. This is the first time we meet them in ‘Mrs Morphett’.
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‘London is hell if you’re poor,’ said Merry.
‘Anywhere’s hell if you’re poor,’ said Gaye.
‘But London most of all. Nobody cares about the poor here. We’re invisible. We don’t exist.’
Merry picked up her napkin and wiped the condensation from the window of the café in which the two women were sitting and peered out at the street. She was watching a lady in a scarlet dress and matching hat descending from a brougham. It took two footmen to aid her – one to hold the door, the other to take her hand as she came down the steps, followed by a snappily-dressed gentleman – and to pass her to said gentleman like an object, a precious piece of china, so it looked to Meredith.
‘So how poor are you, exactly?’ Gigi demanded. She was tucking into a large bun covered in pink icing. ‘Want some?’ she offered, as Merry turned her attention away from the scene outside the window.
Merry shook her head. ‘Poor enough,’ she said.
‘So poor you are sitting inside a café with a hot chocolate,’ said Gaye. ‘Or am I paying for it?’
Merry shrugged miserably. ‘It wasn’t how I imagined it.’
‘I can’t see as why you imagined it any different.’
‘You’re doing all right, aren’t you?’ Merry rested her arms on the table. Her eyes were on her friend’s iced bun, but her mind was far away.
‘So, what are you doing for a crust?’ Gigi asked.
‘Working in a hat shop.’ Merry looked up and around at the other customers. The sheer cheerfulness of the place oppressed her.
‘A hat shop? Blimey, what a turn-up! What’s it like, working in a hat shop?’
‘There are women,’ said Merry, ‘with all the time in the world, and all the money, and their favourite activity is to spend hours in a hat shop trying on everything they can lay their hands on, and then leaving without buying anything.’
‘And you envy them?’
‘Who said I envied them?’
‘You did, as good as.’
Merry placed her elbow on the table and her chin on her hand. She had to lean at a considerable angle to do this, such was her prodigious height. ‘I despise them, I don’t envy them.’
‘In that case, you should be happy to be poor. Speaking for myself, I don’t hate nothing in the world so much as boredom.’ Gaye cupped her hands around her steaming cup of cocoa. ‘I’d rather sweep the streets than spend all morning shopping and not buying anything.’
Merry nodded in half-hearted agreement. She picked up a teaspoon and toyed with it.
‘You’re a right bleedin’ bundle of misery today,’ said her companion. ‘You’re not thinking of giving up, are you?’
‘Giving up the stage?’ Merry thought about this for a moment. She looked close to tears. ‘What else am I good for?’
‘You could go on working in the hat shop. You could open up a shop of your own.’
Merry did not respond to this.
‘Anyway, you can always just watch,’ Gaye went on. ‘Us actresses should always observe people. Who knows, one day you might find yourself playing a rich, bored tart with nothing better to do than waste time in hat shops!’ She laughed.
‘I didn’t think it would be like this,’ said Merry. ‘I thought once you’d reached the West End stage that was it. There was no looking back.’
‘Dunno who told you that. My da used to say the entertainment biz is like a fishbowl, and we’re all fish, swimming up and down, and sometimes we’re down there on the sea bed and sometimes we’re up near the surface and that’s the way it is.’
‘The only fish at the top of a fishbowl are dead fish,’ said Merry.
‘Oh yeah, clever clogs. You know what I mean.’ Gaye blew on her cocoa, ‘It’s here today and gone tomorrow in the entertainment biz, always was and always will be. No rhyme nor reason to it.’
‘You’ve done all right,’ said Merry.
‘That’s because I don’t care what I do. Haymarket one day, Daly’s the next. I’m not a snob like you.’ She looked at Merry over the top of her cup, but her friend did not react.
‘There’s always work at Daly’s,’ Gigi went on. ‘It may not be hoity-toity but it’s work, and the pay’s not bad. They’re always looking for girls for the chorus.’
‘The chorus,’ said Merry. ‘I’d fit well into a chorus, wouldn’t I? I’m about a foot taller than anyone else.’
‘True enough.’
‘Besides, I can’t dance.’
‘Anyone with legs and arms can dance,’ said Gigi.
They sat in silence for a while, each bent over her cocoa, locked in private contemplation of something or other.
‘I’m not a snob,’ said Merry eventually. ‘I just don’t want to take on any old engagement for the sake of taking on an engagement. Once you get known as a Gaiety Girl that’s it.’
Gaye laughed merrily. Or perhaps that should be gaily. ‘I can’t see you as a Gaiety Girl, not in a million years.’
‘Well there you are then.’
‘I can put in a word for you at Daly’s,’ she said. ‘And who knows, you might get a proposal out of it.’
‘A proposal? What sort of proposal?’
‘It happens all the time. You’d be surprised at the audiences we get. The best. Or maybe not the best but the flashiest, if you see what I mean. Not the sort you find at His Maj’s, or even the Haymarket, but richer, you know. Bigger jewellery, bigger hats, bigger everything. And the only reason them young lads is there for is the girls. I’ve had the odd proposal myself.’ She fluttered her eyelashes coquettishly. ‘From an earl, no less.’
‘Why would I want to be proposed to?’ Merry looked genuinely perplexed.
‘Sometimes it’s the only way out. If all else fails,’ Gaye shrugged, ‘a girl can always get hooked.’
‘God forbid!’
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