The Town in Bloom

by Dodie Smith

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

A determined young Lancashire girl arrives in London intent on a stage career - this tale from the author of I Capture the Castle is told with the candour and authenticity that derives from Dodie Smith's own experience of the theatre world. Mouse never did fully suit her nickname. Tiny she may have been, but timid never. After less than twenty-four hours in London she had bluffed her way into an audition at a famous theatre, infuriated its forceful young stage director, and amused its kind if quite amoral actor-manager. She had finally landed not a part but a toehold as a junior secretary. During her involvement in the engrossing affairs of the Crossway Theatre she met her friends Molly, a baby-faced six-footer; and elegant, ambitious Lilian, who was fated to clash disastrously with Mouse. Later, there was also Zelle, rich, generous, enigmatic, and responsible for an outing to Suffolk village pageant which proved a turning point for them all. Life was always surprising the fearless Mouse: when she unexpectedly got to a chance to act she made an unforgettable impression, though not the one she had intended. However, nothing prepared her for the assault of first love, highly unsuitable, but welcomed by her in a way which was to have far-reaching consequences. Only when she looks back after a reunion luncheon does she realise the full effects of that shared summer on her friends and herself. A startlingly frank yet nostalgic read, this is a charming novel about coming of age and the healing effects of time.

Release date: March 15, 2012

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

It was near the top of The Times Personal column:


Calling Moll Byblow, the Mouse and the Gazelle. Madam Lily de Luxe reminds you of a long-standing luncheon engagement, at one p.m. next Thursday. The window table is reserved. Do not fail. This may be the last reunion.

I read it on Saturday morning, Lilian having sent me a cutting from Friday’s Times. (She’d repeat the advertisement up to the morning of the lunch party.) I felt sure that Molly, too, would have received one. I rang her up and found she had.


I said, ‘What did you think of it?’

‘Darling Lilian being a wee bit hot-making, perhaps?’

Lilian would never have permitted herself such a dated expression. Molly would barely know it was dated – and certainly would not mind.

‘More than a wee bit, surely.’

‘Still, I couldn’t care less. Hardly anyone but ourselves will remember the old names now. And they just might fetch Zelle. None of Lilian’s dignified reminders ever have.’

‘Probably Zelle never saw them, though she did sometimes read The Times; also Dracula and the Bible.’


‘That’s more than I have. Of course you’re coming on Thursday?’

‘I suppose so, or Lilian will never forgive me. But it’s a bit of an effort.’

‘Quite time you made one,’ said Molly. ‘We haven’t met for ages. If you drive, be sure to park the car outside the West End. We always do now.’

‘Me, too – not that I’ve been up this year. Molly, how long is it since you saw Lilian? Is she all right?’

‘Of course she is. I had tea with her the week before last, when I went up to the dentist, and she looked blooming. Why wouldn’t she be all right?’

‘I just thought – well, it worried me that she put in “This may be the last reunion.”’

‘Oh, that’s just an extra effort to attract Zelle,’ said Molly. ‘Lilian couldn’t be better – anyway, physically; mentally she’s a bit peculiar and one can’t altogether blame her, the life she leads now. And all this nostalgia for the past …’

I said I sometimes suffered from that myself.

‘But you, dear child, have so many pasts and anyway you seldom talk about them. Lilian focuses on that one little period when we knew Zelle, and this last year she’s never stopped talking about it, sort of putting it through a fine sieve.’


‘Have you ever discovered why?’

‘Well, she did once try to explain but I can’t go into that now. This call’s costing you money.’

‘I don’t mind. What did she say?’

Molly, addressing shouting children and barking dogs, all of whom I could hear, said: ‘Quiet, fiends!’ in a tone which neither expected nor got results. Then she told me she couldn’t remember what Lilian had said – ‘Probably because it didn’t make sense. Anyway, don’t worry. She’ll be all right once the reunion lunch is over.’


‘Thank God she only holds them every five years.’

‘Oh, I quite enjoy them. Now will you excuse me? There’s a dogfight starting and childfight. They’ll probably end in a foursome. I must dash.’


Never had I seen Molly so much as hurry, let alone dash.

I considered telephoning Lilian to let her know she could count on me, then decided a postcard would do. Telephone calls to Lilian were apt to prove ruinous. And I’d some more telephoning to do. If I had to go to London I must make good use of the trip.

On Thursday I woke to find a perfect September morning, summer with the first gentle hint of autumn, exactly the wrong day to be away from the country. I would have gone for an enormous walk – except that, while in the bath, I saw exactly how to finish the book I was writing, after being stuck for weeks; though as things turned out, I doubt if I should have walked or written, because during breakfast I suddenly knew how to paint the view framed by my open window. I had been threatening to paint for months, sometimes seeing myself as a primitive, sometimes as an abstractionist. Today the primitive mood was in the ascendant. I saw the white fence, with flat flowers against it, and the grey lane on top of the fence, with a flat child cycling along it, and the green field on top of the grey lane, with flat cows against it, and a blue sky on top of the green field, with flat white clouds. I knew not only the whole of the composition but the actual brush strokes I would use. So eager and confident was I that, on my way to London, I stopped at the first little town and laid in a stock of paints – oils; I had once tried water colours and they ran about too much.


Regret at leaving the country lasted as long as the country lasted. Then, as usual with me, the pull of London began, growing stronger whenever I drove through places where there were fairly large shops. It would be pleasant to do some shopping in the afternoon if Lilian would permit it. Not that I hankered to buy anything in the shops I was passing. I just wanted to paint them, particularly the gaudiest clothes shops; I got the chance to study one while I was held up by traffic lights. But could paint simulate the astonishingly vivid dyes now popular? Perhaps I could achieve a kaleidoscopic effect with dots, dashes, triangles of colour; a little Klee-like? I had stopped being a primitive. Then, in the outer suburbs, I gave up my mental painting, needing to concentrate completely on my driving; it was nearly a year since I had coped with so much traffic.

As always I had allowed myself two hours to reach St John’s Wood, where I usually left my little car. Today the drive had taken longer. And it was some time before I could find anywhere to park. Then I took a taxi to the hotel.

Molly and Lilian were there ahead of me, talking to the head porter. I saw them before they saw me and, as so often before, felt a pang because they looked older than my mind’s-eye picture of them. Then they became the no-age, or all-ages, of friends one has known from their youth. Now, as then, Molly looked large, beautiful and placid. Now, as then, Lilian looked slight, beautiful and anything but placid. When alone with Lilian I thought of her as tall; next to Molly she seemed barely of medium height.


‘Dear child, you get smaller and smaller,’ said Molly, turning to envelop me in an embrace.

‘You’re late,’ said Lilian, before offering her cheek to be kissed. I was one of the few people she kissed in return.

‘No luck with Zelle, I suppose?’

‘Oh, there’s time yet.’ Lilian’s tone sounded defensive. ‘Actually, I’ve one of my “feelings” that she’ll come today.’

‘And we all know dear Lilian’s “feelings”,’ said Molly. ‘Count on them and they let you down. Jeer at them and they come true. Could we eat? I’m ravenous.’

Lilian had a last word with the head porter. ‘You’ll be on the look-out for our friend? She’s very fair.’

‘How do you know she’s still fair?’ I asked as we walked towards the restaurant.

‘Oh, that colour of hair looks fair even when it’s turning grey. She’d only need a fair rinse.’

If there is any grey amidst the night-black of Lilian’s hair only she and her hairdresser know about it. There really is no grey amidst my unspectacular mouse-brown. I often remind myself that does not prove I am young for my age.


Lilian, her mind like mine still on hair, went on, ‘Isn’t that the perfect hat for Molly? Exactly the right shade.’

It was a close-fitting cap of russet velvet leaves.

‘Well, I like to pretend I’m still a red-head,’ said Molly. ‘But the tide of white flows in.’

‘You’re a fool to let it,’ said Lilian.

The restaurant always looked to me just as on our first visit; beautiful, formal, dignified yet light-hearted, gleaming with silver, damask and glass, and flooded with light from its tall windows. Beyond them stretched the park, where the grass was still dried by summer, the trees still in full leaf, though the autumn seemed just a little nearer here than it had seemed in the country.


We were shown to our usual window table. Our reception conveyed that we were honoured guests of many years’ standing and that this was an important occasion. The table was laid for four and our waiter made no attempt to remove the setting we did not need. Five years before he had been prevented from doing so by the head waiter, who had told him another lady was expected. As I sat down I mentally counted up how many times Zelle’s place had remained unoccupied.

It was no use hoping for a menu. Lilian would have ordered the lunch in advance and it would be an exact replica of our first lunch. Smoked salmon would be followed by chicken and chicken by a pudding of extreme richness which Lilian – though often slimming sternly and unnecessarily – would finish to the last mouthful. It was as well she did not know what vintage of champagne we had originally drunk as she could hardly have gone on repeating it throughout the years. She settled for the same name.


I began a normal conversation with Molly but was cut short by Lilian.

‘You’re not to talk about the present. You’re to think yourselves into the past – so that the past becomes the present. I’m twenty-three, Molly’s twenty-one. And you, Mouse, are eighteen.’

‘Must you call me Mouse?’


‘I must for today. And I always think of you as Mouse. What have you against it?’

‘I never felt it particularly suited me. And as one grows older, comic nicknames seem a bit ridiculous. Anyway, they’re dead out of fashion now.’

‘Since when have you cared what was in fashion or out?’

Come to think of it, what name did I most recognise as mine? Certainly not my real, much too long Christian name; though for years now I had nagged Molly and Lilian to use it, or corruptions of it. And I could remember at least half a dozen nicknames, acquired at different periods of my life. But was there any name more ‘me’ than any other? I found myself accepting ‘Mouse’ – for today, anyway. Lilian’s mood was catching.

She was determinedly recreating the past. Unable to remember much that had been said at the first lunch, she was inventing what might have been said. This presented difficulties, seeing that she and I had then been keeping our innermost thoughts to ourselves. So had Zelle. Only Molly had been hiding nothing, and she’d been too happy to feel the need to talk of her happiness.

I have a better memory than Lilian has (though hers is no slouch, nostalgia and memory being blood brothers) so I helped her out. I was beginning to feel very sorry for her; there could be little doubt that Zelle was not going to turn up. Again and again poor Lilian looked at her watch and then, entreatingly, at the door. Already we were finishing the smoked salmon.

Molly, eating her last slice of brown bread and butter, said, ‘Whatever happened to Veda bread? Do either of you remember it?’


What joy for Lilian, a new-minted bit of nostalgia! The three of us at once pooled our memories of Veda bread. I said, ‘You two fed it to me the first night I spent at the Club. Wonderful! But even better when we could toast it.’

‘How did we toast it?’ said Lilian. ‘There were no gas fires in our cubicles.’

‘It was later, after Zelle came. There was a gas fire in her room. Oh, Molly, I have such a vivid mental picture of you kneeling in front of it.’

‘So have I, now,’ said Lilian.

‘I wonder why they stopped making Veda,’ said Molly, ‘and when they stopped. Funny, I can’t remember when it vanished from my life.’

Lilian’s dark eyes, so often restless, had a visionary stillness. I guessed she was seeing Zelle’s attic at the Club. After a moment she said, ‘That was our last meeting with Zelle, at one of those Veda toast sessions. Oh, dear!’ She looked at her watch again, then shook her head sadly. After that she obviously accepted the fact that Zelle was not coming and the conversation was allowed to drift from the past into the present.

For a while we chatted casually. This was pleasant enough but not particularly interesting as none of us had any important news to tell. Half my mind was occupied in wondering why, among the many women I had met, they had remained my closest friends. It was not merely a matter of affection; I had felt affection for many friends, both men and women, and yet let them drift out of my life. Was it Lilian’s tenacity that held us together? It seemed to me that the tenacity was the result, not the cause, of the mysterious fixative in our friendship. And there was no doubt that the little period of summer months which so obsessed her had been of the utmost importance to our lives; to Zelle’s too, surely, yet for her the fixative had not worked.


I was thinking of this, gazing across the park and giving little attention to Molly and Lilian, who were now exploring one of my least favourite subjects: their recent minor ailments. They then drifted into a discussion of the blatant sexual laxity of present-day youth. I was about to join in by reminding them there had been as much laxity in our own youth, if rather less blatancy – and blatancy could be equated with honesty – when I noticed an odd-looking woman seated on one of the park chairs some thirty yards away. Her crouched figure suggested old age; and her clothes, of extreme shabbiness, were at least two decades out of date. One could see little of her face as a battered hat came down to her ears, a mangy-looking bit of fur rose up to them, and in between fur and hat was a large pair of steel-rimmed spectacles. She was knitting something only recognizable as grey. I found myself reminded of the crones said to have sat knitting round the guillotine during the Reign of Terror.


She looked up – straight at me, it seemed – then quickly looked back at her knitting. I felt ashamed to be finishing an enormous lunch when there were still women as poor as that around. Should one go out and present her with a few bob? But perhaps she was merely eccentric; would a real down-and-out be knitting? I had another look at her, rather a longer one. It would have been even longer if Lilian had not asked what I was staring at.


I said – absurdly keeping my voice low, ‘Now listen carefully and, whatever I say, don’t look out of the window. There’s a woman in the park who just might be Zelle. Lilian! I told you not to look!’


‘Well, she couldn’t possibly have seen a flicker of a glance like that,’ said Lilian. ‘Anyway, I only saw an old woman.’

‘She’s not a normal old woman. She’s an absolute crone – and surely there aren’t any real crones nowadays. I just thought Zelle might have dressed up. You’d better have a real look now but be prepared to look away if she looks up.’

Lilian did it very cleverly. She got a handkerchief out of her bag and dabbed her nose, while taking a number of swift looks rather than a long one. Then she said: ‘Zelle couldn’t be as awful as that, however hard she tried. And there are still crones. I saw one the other night, after coming out of a theatre. She was huddled in a doorway, asleep. I put some money beside her without waking the poor old girl.’


I said, ‘Well, this woman can’t be quite broke or she wouldn’t have chosen a chair she’ll have to pay for sitting on. There are plenty of free benches. And why is she sitting facing us? There aren’t any other chairs facing this way.’

Molly was delving in her outsize handbag. She said she had exactly what was needed – ‘My tiny pair of opera glasses.’

I stopped her hastily. ‘If you look at her through those you’ll scare her even if she isn’t Zelle. Just take a casual glance.’

‘Without some kind of glasses I’d barely see the park, let alone anyone in it,’ said Molly. ‘But I’ll be crafty.’ She took a shopping list from her bag. ‘Now, I’ll pretend I’m reading this but I’ll use my long distance lenses and really look over the top of it.’


This complicated operation took some minutes. Then Molly reported she was on my side. ‘That crone’s too croney to be true. And she’s taking a suspicious interest in us. I saw her look up – twice.’

Lilian said, ‘Wouldn’t it be ghastly if it’s Zelle and she’s not in disguise – if those clothes are the best she’s got? That coat, with those square shoulders, has been a good one. She might have saved it from her better days. Suppose she’s sunk to the depths? She’d never let us know, not after the way things ended.’

‘Well, anyway, I don’t see what we can do,’ said Molly. ‘Either it isn’t Zelle, or it is and she doesn’t want to meet us – in which case we can hardly rush out and force ourselves on her.’

I suggested one of us should walk past the woman quite casually.

‘You do it,’ said Lilian. ‘Zelle would be more willing to meet you than us. It was you she left the note for. Oh, God, she’s moving. We’re too late.’

I sprang up. ‘Perhaps I can overtake her.’

‘You’ll have to run,’ said Lilian. ‘She’s walking fast.’

It is not the kind of hotel one runs in, but I ran – along the corridor, across the hall and out into the street, then back along the front of the hotel until I could turn into the park. The woman was a considerable way ahead of me but I thought I could catch her if I ran full tilt. The distance between us was narrowing when she looked over her shoulder at me and then herself began to run. That settled it for me: she must be Zelle. I tried to increase my speed – how many years was it since I had run like that? Zelle’s legs were longer than mine but she wasn’t running as fast as I was. I should catch her—


Then she reached an exit from the park. I followed her through it only in time to see her getting on a bus.

A cruising taxi slowed up beside me. As I opened its door the driver said, ‘Thought you might need me. Saw you sprinting.’

I jumped in and said, ‘Follow that bus!’ It sounded so melodramatic that I felt I’d better explain. ‘There’s someone on it I want to catch, a friend I’ve lost touch with.’

The driver said the bus would probably get held up at the next traffic lights and so should we. ‘Do you want to get out then and jump on it?’

Did I? No, I couldn’t talk to Zelle amidst other people. I said I wanted to follow the bus until my friend got off it. ‘And then we’ll follow her and I’ll make up my mind what to do. What I want most is to find out where she lives. I’m not really sure I ought to rush at her. You see, she was running away from me.’

He was a kind man and quick on the uptake; I always seem to get nice taxi-drivers. He asked if my friend was the old girl he’d seen hop on the bus – ‘Looked as if she’d come down in the world, and that can make people touchy.’

‘Exactly. So it might be wiser to write to her rather than force her to talk to me now.’

‘Hope the bus doesn’t get through traffic lights where I get held up.’

By good luck that never happened; and in not much more than five minutes Zelle got off the bus and turned into a street lined with expensive flats.


‘Now we’ve got to be clever,’ said the driver. ‘If she knows we’re following her she might give us the slip. Lucky there are no shops round here where she can go in at one door and out at another. That’s the way you lose them.’

I asked if he often had to follow people and he said quite a lot of it had come his way. ‘Usually detectives following husbands or wives – though sometimes wives do their own sleuthing. Needs a bit of knack when you’re following someone who’s walking or they spot you. I don’t think your friend has yet, still we’d better pull up and let her get ahead.’

He waited until she turned the next corner, then drove on quickly. When next we caught sight of Zelle she was crossing a well-kept old square. I said, ‘Surely she can’t be as poor as she looks if she lives near here? Not, of course, that I can be sure she’s going home.’ I’d only just thought of that.

‘Anyway, there’s a street of tenement flats behind this square,’ said the driver. ‘She might be making for that. Yes, I bet you she is.’ Zelle had left the square and turned a corner. ‘Not sure she didn’t catch sight of us then – see her look over her shoulder? We’ll have to hurry now or we may lose her.’

When we followed her round the corner I saw that, as so often in London, a shabby district was embedded in the heart of an expensive one. The tenement flats occupied land which must by now be fabulously valuable. We were just in time to see Zelle go in at a doorway.

‘Now we’ll go past and you can get the number,’ said the driver. ‘And then I’ll take you into the next street and you can make up your mind what you want to do.’


The block of flats Zelle had entered was of red brick with yellow facings, dark now with London soot. I looked at the windows, hoping to spot some touch of individuality which might indicate where Zelle lived but the curtains were of an almost uniform drabness. This was no slum but, to me, it was more depressing than one. There is often a touch of drama, even gaiety, in the life of a teeming slum; here there was only a grim, grubby respectability.

I noted the doorway Zelle had entered, and saw that it served eight flats. If I wrote to her it might not matter that I did not know the number of her flat. But it now struck me that I did not even know her present name – most likely she had married. And even if my letter reached her she might ignore it. The only certain way of getting in touch with her was to enquire at each of the flats until I found her. Was I going to?

The taxi-driver, having turned the next corner, had pulled up and sat patiently waiting. I tried to think things out. Zelle had not wanted to meet us. She had run away from me. But might she not feel differently after even a few minutes’ conversation? And surely we ought to help her? I still had a hope that she might be in disguise – that mangy-looking fur was a bit too fantastic – but she could hardly be well off if she lived in this dreary place. I could only do a little for her myself but Molly and Lilian could afford to do plenty. And Lilian desperately longed to see her. Yet somehow …

One thing I was sure of: I must not let Lilian know where Zelle could be found without Zelle’s permission. But suppose she would not give it? Could I face telling that to Lilian – and withstand her demands? Or could I, having talked to Zelle, lie and say she had escaped me? My thoughts went on and on, considering possibilities. And always I was conscious that the girls were waiting at the hotel. ‘The girls’ – absurd phrase for us now but it still came naturally to me. And for an instant I saw us as we had been when we first lunched at that window table, with Zelle as hostess. So soon after that the break with her had come. Had she felt bitter? Perhaps she still did. But she had come to have a look at us.


It was no use. I should never make up my mind while the driver sat waiting, tactfully silent though he was. Besides, the steadily ticking-up meter was unnerving. Just across the road was a café, a poor little place but it would do to think in, over a cup of coffee. I paid off my kind driver.

‘Bet you look her up in the end,’ he said. ‘After all, she can only show you the door. Still, if the old girl ran away from you….’ He shook his head. ‘Pride can mean a lot to people, all the more when they’re poor. Did you know her well?’

‘Very well, but not for long and it’s a long time ago.’

And had I really known her well? I found myself wondering, while I waited for my coffee. Certainly not in the way I had known Molly and Lilian. Of course I had known them earlier, months before that July day when we all, so unexpectedly, met Zelle…. Retrospection beckoned but was rebuffed; no doubt my problem was rooted in the past but it would have to be decided in the present – and quickly. And anyway, I didn’t approve of retrospection; hadn’t for years. Why exactly? Because it le. . .