Ellie was miserable too. She thought about Marleen a great deal, wishing she was nearer so she could visit her. A nurse wrote Marleen’s letters for her and they were unfailingly cheerful, but Ellie suspected this was a smokescreen and that she was far more poorly than she claimed. She still thought about Charley a great deal, wishing she could turn the clock back and start again. Sometimes she was even tempted to write and tell him she’d made a terrible mistake, but how could she? He would think it was only because her career had taken a downturn.
Because of what had happened between her and Charley, Ellie felt badly about the way Bonny treated Jack. She had him on a piece of string, callously writing him love letters while going out with other men. He was due to be demobbed in April. His letters were all full of his plans to go back to Amberley, to take over the garage where he used to work, and his hopes that they could get married in a year or two.
She knew she wasn’t really responsible for Bonny but she couldn’t just sit back and watch a dear friend who wasn’t even seventeen yet ruin herself.
Ellie got out of bed as she heard a car draw up outside, and went over to the window. She rubbed off the ice with the end of her nightdress and saw Bonny getting out of the taxi. Her blue satin cocktail dress and short fur jacket in a setting as dismal as Marshall Street were incongruous even at night, but viewed on a grey, cold, early morning, no one could have been blamed for seeing the girl with tousled blonde hair as a trollop, returning from a night on the tiles.
Ellie wrapped her dressing-gown round her tighter as Bonny came clattering up the stairs. She was already wearing a cardigan over her nightdress and thick wool socks because it was so cold. She wanted to have a wash before Mrs Arkwright surfaced, but just the thought of going down to the icy scullery made her shiver.
‘Got an aspirin?’ Bonny asked the moment she was in the door, flinging her handbag down on the bed, showing no surprise that Ellie wasn’t still asleep. ‘I’ve got such a hangover.’
‘Where have you been all night?’ Ellie asked. Bonny had gone out straight from the theatre, for supper, she’d said.
‘With Stan, of course.’ Bonny didn’t even look at Ellie, just began rummaging amongst the cosmetics littering the top of the chest of drawers.
‘You didn’t sleep with him?’ Ellie’s nose wrinkled in disgust.
‘Well of course I did,’ Bonny retorted. She found some aspirin and popped them in her mouth, grimacing as she swallowed them. She moved over to the mirror and ran her fingers through her hair. Both girls had had a permanent wave last week, but while Ellie’s were in a loose, natural style, prompting people to remark she looked like Hedy Lamarr, Bonny’s waves were more rigid and she could pass for twenty-one at least. ‘What did you think I did with him? Walk on the moors in the moonlight?’
Ellie just stared in horror. Bonny had a new bracelet on her wrist. It looked like real gold. ‘How could you, Bonny?’ she said in a small voice. ‘He’s not even nice and he’s married.’
‘What business is it of yours?’ Bonny snapped back. ‘Do I criticise you for hanging around with a bloody fairy?’
Ellie decided there was little point in biting back on the insult to Edward before she’d said her piece. ‘Sit down and tell me why you’re doing this.’ This was an order, not a request.
‘It’s too bloody cold to sit down,’ Bonny said, throwing her jacket down, unzipping her dress and dropping it on to the bed. She picked up her dressing-gown and put it on, then climbed into Ellie’s bed, which was still warm. ‘This is better. But I don’t want to talk, I want to sleep.’
‘We will talk about you or I find a job on my own and leave you here,’ Ellie threatened. ‘I could’ve had a good part in Cinderella, as you well know. But I turned it down so I could be with you. So that gives me the right to ask questions, doesn’t it?’
Bonny just crossed her arms and looked at the ceiling with studied insolence.
‘It’s all to do with what the doctor told you in Great Yarmouth, isn’t it?’ Ellie sat down beside her, tucking the eiderdown round her knees. ‘You’ve got wilder and wilder since then and it doesn’t take a great brain to figure it out.’
‘Rubbish. I don’t care if I can’t have kids,’ Bonny said stubbornly, reaching out for a cigarette. ‘Who wants them? They’re nothing but trouble. I just like having a good time.’
‘I think you do care about it,’ Ellie said carefully, trying hard not to lose patience. ‘Deep down you feel worthless – that’s why you pick on men you can use. But the more you do this, the worse you’ll feel inside.’
Ellie felt a little out of her depth discussing such things when her own sexual experience amounted to an unsatisfying fumble with Charley and relations with an American while she was unconscious. She had no wish ever to try again with another man, not unless she was truly in love, but she realised Bonny was a far more physical person than she was.
‘Me, feel worthless!’ Bonny snorted derisively, cigarette smoke coming down her nostrils. ‘I’m just making the most of opportunities. If you had any sense you’d do it too. Stan offered to set me up in a flat last night, he doesn’t like to think of me living like this.’ To illustrate her point Bonny waved her hand towards the black mould on the wallpaper beneath the window.
‘Stan is over forty, he’s got a pot belly, a balding head and three children,’ Ellie said coldly. ‘Aside from all that stacked against him, he’s a crude, loudmouthed show-off. The only attraction to you is that he’s got money. You might as well be a prostitute.’
‘He’s good fun,’ Bonny said indignantly. ‘What’s more, he’s good in bed.’
Ellie shook her head in bewilderment. Stan Unsworth owned a brewery and several public houses in Sheffield. He had brought his children to see the pantomime just after Christmas and being a pushy sort of man he’d taken them backstage to meet the cast. Within a day or two the first bouquet of flowers arrived for Bonny, quickly followed by chocolates, a bottle of champagne and a dinner invitation.
‘He is good in bed.’ Bonny grinned impishly, sure she could make Ellie laugh and forget the lecture. ‘It’s like having a sex-slave, he does anything I want him to.’
She waited for a moment, sure Ellie was going to ask for details. Bonny was dying to tell her that Stan had given her three orgasms during the night in a lovely country house hotel out near Buxton and that the funniest thing of all was he couldn’t even get an erection.
‘I don’t want to know.’ Ellie turned her head away. Bonny loved telling her spicy secrets, but she didn’t want to picture that nasty little man slobbering over her friend. ‘You’ve got a serious problem, Bonny, and if you don’t face up to it soon you’ll end up like my Auntie Marleen.’
‘I’m not the only one with problems,’ Bonny sniffed, taking another deep drag on her cigarette. ‘Look at you! You won’t let any man get near you except Edward the queer.’
‘Don’t call him that,’ Ellie riled up. ‘He isn’t queer.’
‘Isn’t he?’ Bonny smirked, lifting one fair eyebrow. ‘I reckon he is! So he gets girls now and then, but haven’t you noticed they’re always boyish? He wouldn’t know what to do with a real woman. I bet he puts rubber gloves on before he touches them.’
‘That’s a horrible thing to say.’ Ellie was sickened by Bonny’s cruelty, even if there was a thin thread of truth in what she said. ‘Besides Edward and his love-life is nothing to do with you or me.’
Bonny gave a peal of laughter and dropped her cigarette into Ellie’s late-night cocoa mug. ‘Nothing to do with you or me, eh! It’s got everything to do with us. He’s obsessed by you, Ellie, and he hates me because he thinks you’re the same way about me. A ménage à trois is what the French call it. Except none of us is having sex with each other. No wonder I go out and really do it with normal, red-blooded men. You two give me the creeps sometimes.’
Ellie was too shocked to come back with anything.
‘Well, answer then!’ Bonny was flushed, her eyes almost jumpi
ng out of her head.
‘I can’t. I don’t know what to say,’ Ellie said weakly. ‘You say such wicked, spiteful things, Bonny, and I don’t understand why. Edward isn’t obsessed with me, we’re friends, good friends. And he doesn’t think I have some weird thing about you, neither does he hate you. Who paid for you to stay in our digs in Lowestoft until we all got the job in Manchester? Not me Ellie, but Edward. If you remember, I thought you ought to go home to your parents.’
‘I’m sick of this.’ Bonny turned over on to her side, pulling the pillow over her face.
Ellie snatched it off. Bonny was very good at avoiding things she didn’t like. But this time Ellie had no intention of letting her. ‘Listen to me,’ she ordered her, leaning over Bonny and pressing both her arms down on the bed so she couldn’t move. ‘I’ve told you a little about my Auntie Marleen, but not the whole thing. She started out like you, bags of talent, pretty and funny and she lived off men for years. I’ve never told you what she was like just before our flat was bombed. But I’m going to tell you now.’
Ellie took a deep breath. Marleen might not live for much longer and it didn’t seem right to tell anyone about her past. But Marleen would be the first to admit how she’d sunk to the gutter if she might save another girl from going the same way.
‘She used to come home too drunk to know what she was doing, brick dust on her clothes from having it off on a bomb-site, smelling like a polecat,’ Ellie hissed into her friend’s face. ‘Sometimes she’d lost her knickers, her stockings were torn and she had vomit on her clothes. I loved her, Bonny, but she sickened me. I learned what the smell of sex is like long before I ever kissed a man. It was enough to put anyone off for ever. You’re not even seventeen yet, but you’re going the same way. You drink too much already. You’ve been with at least six different men that I know of just since you had the abortion. Go on the way you’re doing and you’ll end up just like her.’
Bonny’s eyes welled up and spilled over, great round tears rolling down her cheeks, bringing with them sooty mascara.
‘I care about you, Bonny.’ Ellie began to cry herself, slumping down beside her friend, hugging her tightly. ‘I know you’re unhappy deep inside you and I want to help. But please give me a chance, tell me what it is you want?’
There was silence for a moment. Ellie heard a horse come clip-clopping up the street. A bell rang, followed by the wheezy cry of ‘ragabone’. From downstairs she could hear the sound of Mrs Arkwright scrubbing some clothes against her washboard and the smell of boiling handkerchiefs and shirts. It was a reminder of life in Alder Street, of how as a little girl she used to go to sleep dreaming of singing on a stage, wearing beautiful clothes.
Ellie’s dreams were still alive in her. She was singing and dancing now, although she had a long way to go. She wanted to know what Bonny’s dreams were, and if they could make them happen together.
‘I don’t know any more what I really want,’ Bonny said in a strangled voice. ‘It used to be to get to Hollywood, but I don’t think of that now. It’s just faded.’
‘But you must’ve replaced it with something,’ Ellie whispered.
‘I only think of living in a lovely house like Briar Bank.’ Bonny turned her face into Ellie’s shoulder. ‘One where there’s lots of sunshine, the table laid beautifully for dinner and upstairs the bedrooms all sweet and fresh.’
‘What about dancing?’
‘I don’t care about that so much, not any more.’ Bonny’s voice sounded strangled. ‘I like to think of other things, like a little girl outside on a swing and a baby boy in a playpen. I like to imagine a man pulling up in his car and me running out to meet him.’
Ellie didn’t snort with disbelief. She instinctively knew this was the truth; all that surprised her was that Bonny wanted something so commonplace. ‘Jack?’ she asked.
‘I wish it was.’ Bonny made a little hiccuping sound and wiped her eyes on the sheet. ‘But I can’t truly love him, can I? Not the way I treat him. Besides, how could I marry him without telling him first that I can’t have children? Will any man ever want me as a wife, knowing that?’
Ellie’s eyes prickled. As she suspected, the doctor’s words in Great Yarmouth were at the bottom of everything. ‘That doctor didn’t say it was impossible for you to have children, only unlikely. That isn’t the same,’ she said soothingly. ‘And when you find the right man he won’t care about your past. You can always adopt a child.’
‘Why are you always such an optimist?’ Bonny asked, leaning up on one elbow and looking down at Ellie. ‘And why don’t you admit I’ve fouled things up for you more than once?’
‘Where I came from you had to be an optimist to survive,’ Ellie said glumly. ‘I remember once Edna who lived downstairs had her window broken by some kid with a cricket ball. She went for him like a mad woman. Mum stepped in to calm things down and do you know what she said?’
‘What?’ Bonny smiled – she liked Ellie telling her things about Alder Street.
‘She said, “Never mind, Edna, think of it this way, luv, you ain’t bin able to see out of it fer years ’cos of the dirt on it. Now you’ve got a clear view of the neighbours.” Edna fell about laughing. I thought she was having a fit.’
Bonny giggled, not just at the content of the story but at the way Ellie could revert to a cockney accent at will. ‘What gem have you got for me fouling up your life then?’
‘You’re the kid with the cricket ball.’ Ellie smiled affectionately. ‘If I hadn’t met you I’d probably be married to Charley now. I wouldn’t be lying here in this icebox of a room, or wondering where we’re going to end up next month. But I’ve got a view now and I’ve seen some sights.’
Bonny smiled. She made a mistake in sometimes thinking she knew everything about Ellie. Almost daily she discovered some new facet to her character, or some new story from the past. Ellie could be brave and fiery, like she was that day with Ambrose; she could be as soft as melting butter and yet as tough as Mrs Arkwright’s beef stew. To look into her face was to see it all, those passionate dark eyes, the softness of her lips and skin, yet the strength and determination in her little pointed chin.
‘Do you still think about Charley?’ Bonny asked, all at once aware that she’d rarely concerned herself with her friend’s needs or problems.
‘Yes,’ Ellie sighed, a flicker of pain in her eyes. ‘All the time. But it’s done now, just as your abortion is. We have to live with our mistakes, and go on.’
‘Should I write to Jack and tell him it’s over?’ Bonny sat up and drew the dressing-gown round her tighter. ‘I think part of the reason I’ve been so bad is because I felt guilty about him. It isn’t fair to let him go on dreaming of a life with me, is it? Not when I know it won’t happen.’
‘No, it isn’t,’ Ellie agreed, pleased that on one point at least Bonny was being adult. ‘And better to do it now while he’s still in the army, he’ll have his mates to help him through it.’
‘We were such good friends though,’ Bonny said wistfully. ‘Did I tell you it all started when he saved me from drowning?’
Ellie listened as Bonny told the story.
‘We were always an unlikely pair,’ she concluded. ‘Me so spoilt, him a ragamuffin with a mother who couldn’t care less. My mum will be thrilled once she gets the news I’ve given him up for good. She said once, “But he’s so common, and he’s got red hair.” She’s quite forgotten she came from Bethnal Green, and that Jack is a good man just like Dad.’
A week later Ellie got a letter from Frances, posted from her parents’ home in Oxford. Her uncle, Archie Biggs, had passed on Ellie’s address in Sheffield and she had written not only to pass on gossip about the show at the Phoenix, but also in the hope that Ellie and Bonny might join a new one in Oxford with her.
Ellie read the part of the letter about Ambrose aloud to Edward and Bonny over a cup of tea before they left for the matinée at the Playhouse. ‘Jimbo Jameson pulled out as backer not long after you thr
ee left,’ she read. ‘He tried everywhere apparently to get someone else, but no one wanted to know as the audiences were falling off. After Christmas he couldn’t pay any of us. Most of us girls stayed on a week, hoping something would turn up, but Riccardo left, and then Buster. Apparently Jimbo’s in some serious trouble himself, something to do with the black market, we don’t know exactly. Anyway when the second week’s wages didn’t materialise we all hot-footed it out of there. Ambrose is savage! Bankrupt too by all accounts, and I have to say I’m glad, because he was evil to us all.’
‘Just deserts.’ Edward grinned, but Bonny shrieked with laughter.
‘I hope he ends up sleeping under the bridges by Charing Cross station,’ she said maliciously. ‘Serves him right.’
Maybe if they hadn’t had to rush off to the theatre, Ellie might have revealed the rest of the letter eventually that afternoon. But she needed time to think what she was going to say to Edward first.
Frances was going for an audition for a revue at the Arcadia in Oxford the following week, and she had invited Bonny and Ellie to join her as there were sixteen dancers needed. She warmly invited them both to stay at her parents’ home, which wasn’t far from the theatre, and pointed out they would be found permanent digs immediately if they were accepted.
Bonny felt she must jump at this chance. Oxford was quite close to Stoke Mandeville Hospital, so she could visit Marleen easily. On top of that, no other offers had come their way and Aladdin was finishing next week.
Ellie reached the stage-door at ten-thirty that night, just in time to see Bonny, despite her promises, getting into Stan Unsworth’s car. It was snowing, and judging by the two-inch blanket hiding the ugliness of the street had been all evening.
‘It actually looks pretty for once,’ Edward said behind her, then spotting Bonny in the black car just pulling away, he put his hand on Ellie’s shoulder. ‘She’ll never change, that’s just the way she is.’