The Wonderful Dream Read online

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Seville has been called the ‘one City in Spain that no visitor should miss’.

  There is something in the air of Seville that immediately communicates itself to every visitor.

  It has been described as a sense of romance, of joie de vivre, a sense of colour and of life.

  I found Seville fascinating and, as I was there just before Easter, I saw the famous procession start on Palm Sunday, which continues until Easter Day.

  Every balcony near the famous Cathedral was hung with palm branches and there were strange figures in every street.

  There were penitents, ranging from small children to tall men, each carrying a lighted candle in the procession.

  The statues themselves are fantastic. The pasos, which are all the Stations of the Cross as well as the Madonna, were dressed in capes of satin or damask glittering with precious jewels.

  Spanish ladies empty their jewel caskets and shower the Virgin with gifts and the pasos, mounted on platforms, are carried through the City by five or six dozen bearers.

  They are so heavy that they have to stop every few yards to let their bearers have a rest.

  Love is an all-important question in Seville, the City of Don Juan. He was actually called Miguel de Manara. He was rich, licentious and careless of his life and wealth.

  He has, however, remained in people’s minds as a great lover.

  But few people know that Miguel de Manara renounced his worldly goods and joined the Brotherhood of the Caridad.

  Their unsavoury task it was to collect the bodies of executed men and bury them.

  It is perhaps this that has made the Andalusians, with their love of life, have a morbid preoccupation with death.

  Everywhere in Seville one has little glimpses of what the Moors left behind.

  The sunken garden pools and painted ceramic tiles make one remember that a great deal of the City’s beauty comes not from the Spanish but from those who at one time were their conquerors.

  The Torre de Oro (The Tower of Gold) was formerly linked to Alcazar by a subterranean passage because the Palaces of their Kings served as fortresses.

  Catholic monks added their own embellishments to where Sultans received their tribute of young virgins.

  King Charles V built a small Palace and a hall where splendid tapestries depicted his triumphant expedition to Tunisia.

  The gardens with their high walls covered with bougainvillaea are adorned with an Eastern grotto, fountains and in every patio there are high naked windows through which the concubines peeped at their Masters.

  CHAPTER ONE 1881

  ‘What shall I do?’

  Claudia asked herself the question for the hundredth time until it seemed to echo and re-echo in her ears.

  ‘What shall I do?’

  She had thought after her father and mother were burned to death, when the theatre where he was performing collapsed, that her whole world had come to an end.

  Now, yet again, Fate had dealt her a terrible blow over which she had no control.

  She had seen her father and mother off to the theatre.

  She had stayed at home, although it was the first night of Hamlet, because she had a cold.

  “I will take you another night, darling,” her mother had promised.

  She would never allow Claudia to go backstage in the theatre as her father was determined that neither she nor her mother should have anything to do with the actors and actresses he worked with.

  It always seemed a little strange to Claudia.

  But because she was used to obeying Walter Wilton, as he was known professionally, she did not protest.

  Her mother explained to her when she was quite young that he wished to keep his life as an actor completely separate from that of being a husband and father.

  “You see, darling,” she said gently, “your father is famous in the theatre and people make a great fuss of him. When he comes home, he just wants to be himself and so we must do what he wants and look after him with love.”

  There was no doubt that was the care Walter Wilton received from his wife.’

  Claudia knew that her mother waited every evening for the sound of horses’ hoofs and wheels outside the door.

  Then she would run eagerly down the stairs and be waiting for her husband as he came in.

  He would close the door, take his wife in his arms and kiss her possessively.

  It was almost as if he had been half-afraid that she would not be there when he returned.

  Claudia used to think that no two people could be happier together or more in love.

  They would sit hand-in-hand on the sofa and they would talk to each other across the dining room table in a manner that made every word seem a caress.

  No girl, she thought, could have a more handsome father or a more beautiful mother.

  Walter Wilton had been the son of the Headmaster of a large boys’ school.

  He had therefore received an excellent education and had won a scholarship to Cambridge University.

  There he had been one of the students who enjoyed acting and during his time at the school they had put on two Shakespearean plays with Walter in the lead.

  The parents and many other people came to watch them.

  And then one night the owner of two theatres in the West End of London had been in the audience.

  He was impressed by Walter’s amazing ability as an actor and from that moment his future was assured.

  He became, as the years passed, the most acclaimed Shakespearean actor on the London stage.

  People flocked to see him.

  Not only because his acting was so superb, but also because he was so handsome.

  “He looks like a young Adonis!” women would coo as he left the theatre.

  They would go back night after night to see him again.

  Walter had the common sense to realise that his career as an actor did not assure him a place in Society.

  Not even in his father’s world.

  Anderson was Walter’s real name and his father explained rather uncomfortably to his son that he was not welcome at the school on Speech Day.

  “They admire you across the footlights, dear boy,” he had said, “but the parents do not wish their sons, and certainly not their daughters, to be mixed up with anyone who is an actor.”

  Walter had laughed, but he had felt somewhat humiliated.

  Therefore, when he fell in love with Claudia’s very beautiful mother, he was determined that she should not be contaminated by the life he lived on the stage.

  Claudia had been sent to an expensive school in Kensington.

  The Headmistress, however, had no idea that she was the daughter of Walter Wilton.

  Claudia Anderson would certainly not have been accepted as a pupil had she known.

  Her mother had explained to her how important it was that she should just be the daughter of two ordinary people.

  She was warned never to speak of her father to anyone, however friendly they became.

  “It seems strange, Mama,” Claudia said. “The other girls talk about their fathers, but I can never mention mine.”

  “Just say he is often away from home,” her mother told her.

  As she grew older, Claudia understood why she must be so secretive.

  At the same time it was impossible not to admire her father and know that on the stage he was breathtaking.

  When he was speaking, the whole audience would sit in rapt silence.

  Night after night he was applauded and brought back to take bow after bow before the curtain finally came down.

  Then disaster had struck.

  Walter Wilton was performing in one of the oldest theatres in London. It was in the
Drury Lane area.

  After the fire that destroyed it, everyone claimed that they should have realised in how dangerous a state the building was.

  To lose her father and her mother in such a terrible way was to Claudia like receiving a blow on her head.

  It was impossible for her to think clearly.

  She had been at home in the little house in Chelsea nursing her cold.

  She was in the middle of preparing a drink of lemon and honey for her mother in case she should catch it too.

  Someone hammered loudly at the door and, as there was no one else in the house, she opened it.

  A man from the theatre had been sent to tell her that her father would not be returning.

  He was almost incoherent because he too was so shocked by what had occurred.

  The owner of the theatre had managed to escape and he had been kind enough to think that Walter Wilton’s household must be told that he was dead.

  What nobody had realised at the time was that Claudia’s mother was in the audience.

  At first Claudia hoped against hope that her mother had survived.

  Finally, from the newspapers, she learned the truth.

  The headlines were so flattering, she thought, that her father would have been proud of them.

  They read,

  WALTER WILTON DEAD.

  GREATEST ACTOR OF ALL TIME KILLED WHEN THEATRE COLLAPSES.

  WALTER WILTON – A LOSS TO ENGLAND AND THE WORLD.

  HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN TO WALTER WILTON?

  She read them with Kitty, the daily maid who came in to clean the floors and brought the newspapers to her every day.

  Kitty was crying because she had been very proud of her Master.

  “’Ow could it ’appen to ’im, of all people, Miss Claudia?” she asked. “It ain’t fair ’e should ’ave been struck down like that!”

  It was what Claudia felt herself.

  She read through those reports and all the others.

  Apparently her father had played the part of Hamlet more brilliantly than anyone had ever done before.

  He was going back to take his tenth curtain call and the whole audience was cheering and shouting,

  “Bravo! Bravo!”

  Suddenly there was a crash and the roofing above the stage collapsed.

  One of the beams had struck Walter Wilton on the head.

  Then people were screaming as smoke came billowing out, not only from the back of the stage but also from one side of the auditorium.

  It was the side, Claudia was to learn later, on which her mother had been sitting in one of the boxes.

  She had been suffocated by the fumes before the fire got completely out of control.

  Later her body had been found, burned almost beyond recognition.

  Over fifty people lost their lives that night in the disaster and a great number of others had suffered severe burns and other injuries.

  It had been a tragedy that had shocked the whole country.

  Walter Wilton was buried with his wife and practically everybody from the theatre world had attended the funeral.

  No one took any notice of Claudia who stood in the background.

  She had been overwhelmed by the mountains of flowers that were placed on her father and mother’s grave.

  She would have liked to thank all the people who had sent them, but she knew that this would be something that her father and mother would not approve of.

  It would have revealed what he had always kept secret – that he had a daughter.

  Claudia had learnt from what she read in the newspapers that the journalists were unaware until now that he even had a wife.

  When Walter was interviewed in his dressing room, he never talked about his private life.

  Claudia found that they merely referred to her mother as ‘Janet Wilton’ and they had little or nothing to say about her.

  ‘It is what Papa would have wanted,’ she thought.

  But she could not help wondering what she herself should do.

  The day after the funeral she sat at her father’s desk and tried to discover what money he had.

  She found his cheque book, but she could not find any Bank statements.

  When it was announced when the funeral was to take place, she expected that a Solicitor would appear.

  He would be able to tell her if her father had made a will. It was something that had never struck her before as being necessary.

  Her father was still a comparatively young man.

  Because he was so handsome and virile, it was impossible even to conceive the thought of his dying.

  ‘He must have provided for Mama!’ Claudia told herself.

  She continued to go through the drawers, one after another and she was sure that she would find something that would be of help.

  She had always known that her father was over- generous towards those he acted with.

  Her mother had remonstrated with him over and over again.

  “You have not given away all your money, darling?” she would ask.

  “Not all of it, my precious,” her father would reply. “But poor old Henry was in dire straits and I could not let him leave the theatre empty-handed. I know that he has no a chance of getting another part.”

  “That is his own fault,” Claudia’s mother had said. “After all, you told me yourself he was drunk on the night of your benefit. No Manager is going to take a risk with one of his leading men behaving like that.”

  “I know, I know,” Walter Wilton agreed. “At the same time I feel sorry for him because he has not someone like you to look after him.”

  There was nothing that her mother could say after that, Claudia thought.

  Except as usual to show her father without words how much she adored him.

  If ‘poor old Henry’ needed money, there were regularly a dozen other men like him.

  And Claudia was sure that there were also women who cried on her father’s shoulder because they knew he would help them.

  All actors depended on benefits and Walter Wilton enjoyed them frequently.

  But he would share the money he received with the other actors and actresses in the play.

  “Your father is always thinking of other people,” Claudia’s mother said to her a dozen times, “and, while I would not want him any different, it means that you and I have to scrimp and save.”

  Looking back Claudia could not remember one moment in her life when her father and mother had not been supremely happy.

  The house, small though it was, seemed to be filled with love.

  When Walter Wilton was not working they would go and stay in the country in some small but comfortable inn.

  They would walk over the fields and he would play hide and seek with her in the woods.

  Her mother would tell her stories of the fairies and goblins who lurked there.

  And it was they who became Claudia’s companions.

  It was only when she was older that she thought it rather strange that, while they had a very comfortable little home, there were never any visitors.

  The only occasions when her father had people coming to see him were when they came from the theatre.

  They would discuss a new part for him and invariably she and her mother would sit in the bedroom until they had left.

  “Why can we not meet Papa’s visitors?” Claudia had asked when she was still quite young.

  “Because your father wishes to keep us all to himself,” her mother answered, “and when you are older you will understand.”

  Claudia had grown older, but she had not understood.

  She had still thought it strange.

  Her father, as he grew more and more famous, was asked to a great number of parties to which he never took her mother.

  “Do you not mind staying at home, Mama?” Claudia had asked once.

  “No, darling, and that is the truth,” her mother replied. “Your father keeps the two worlds he moves in apart and I am perfectly content wit
h the one which consists of just you and me.”

  There was no doubt that her mother was speaking the truth.

  At the same time Claudia, when she left school, thought a little wistfully that she would like to go to some of the parties where her father was the Guest of Honour.

  They were not only theatrical parties.

  In fact they were often given by Lords, Earls, Marquises and Dukes.

  Claudia then discovered that the aristocrats who entertained her father did not have their wives at the parties they gave for him.

  Instead there were attractive actresses from other theatres.

  Claudia found that few of the girls who became her friends at school had ever been allowed to visit the theatres in the West End of London.

  They were occasionally taken to an opera or concert if it was considered suitable for them.

  Even the plays of Shakespeare were banned as being too sensational for a girl who would be in a few years a Society debutante.

  After the funeral Claudia, sitting alone at home, realised that she had no real friends.

  When she was at school, she had been out once or twice to tea with girls with whom she was friendly.

  Her mother, however, had not encouraged her to accept such invitations because she could not ask anyone back.

  “Why not, Mama? Why can they not come here when Papa is performing at a matinée?”

  “Because if they did, dearest, someone would learn sooner or later that Walter Wilton is your father. In which case you would no longer be able to attend the school.”

  “How could anybody think that Papa was like those ignorant actors I hear you talking about?” Claudia asked indignantly.

  “It’s difficult to explain,” her mother replied, “but the stage and Society do not mix. Therefore, my darling, you must refuse that invitation you have just received from Lady Letchmore’s daughter and say that your father and mother are taking you to the country on that day.”

  Grudgingly, because she wanted to go to the party, Claudia did as she was told.

  When she was alone, she realised that not only had she lost her father and mother.

  But the whole world that had been hers since she was a child had come to an end.

  ‘What am I to do – what am I to do?’ she asked herself again and again.

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