A Night of Gaiety Read online

  A NIGHT OF GAIETY

  Barbara Cartland

  AUTHOR’S NOTES

  I knew many of the Gaiety Girls when I came out in the 1920s. One dear friend was the Marchioness of Headfort, who was Rosie Boote. She came from Tipperary and her father had been a gentleman of independent means. She first appeared in The Shop Girl in 1895. She worked hard, never slacked, and never gave an indifferent performance.

  The Marquis of Headfort had a prominent place in the Irish Peerage and was very popular at Court. His family strenuously opposed the marriage; but Rosie stepped into her high position with such grace and charm that everyone loved her. She and her husband were very happy.

  I knew the Countess Poulett, who was Sylvia Storey, and the lovely Denise Orme, who married first Lord Churston and as her third husband the Duke of Leinster, but my greatest friend was the fascinating Zena Dare.

  She married the Hon. Maurice Brett, and one of their daughters was one of my bridesmaids. After her husband’s death, Zena went back on the stage and played in My Fair lady for nine years, as the mother of Professor Higgins, without missing a performance.

  She only gave up when she was over eighty but still slim, lovely, fascinating, and carried herself magnificently, like a goddess—or, should I say, a Gaiety Girl?

  Chapter One

  1891

  “Is that all?” Davita asked.

  “I am afraid so, Miss Kilcraig,” the Solicitor replied. “It is extremely regrettable that your father was so extravagant during the last years of his life. I am afraid he ignored any suggestions from me or my partners that he should economise.”

  Davita did not reply because she knew that what Mr. Stirling was saying was that this last year her father had been so intent on drinking away his sorrows that he did not heed anything anybody said to him.

  More than once she had tried to talk to him about their financial position, but he would always tell her not to interfere, and now that he was dead, what she had feared had happened.

  The bills had mounted and mounted.

  They had been bad enough before her Stepmother had left, but afterwards her father had seemed to enjoy throwing his money about in ridiculous ways, or else being too sodden with whisky to know what he was doing.

  But even in her most depressed moment, Davita had not imagined that she would find herself with just under two hundred pounds and literally nothing else. The Castle which had belonged to the Kilcraigs for several hundred years had been mortgaged up to the hilt, and what was left of the furniture had now been sold.

  The better pieces, like the paintings and some rather fine gold-framed mirrors, her father had already sold soon after he married Katie Kingston.

  This past year when her father had become more and more irresponsible, Davita had often thought that she should hate her Stepmother, but instead she could not help feeling that in many ways there was a good excuse for her behaviour.

  After her own mother had died three years ago, when Davita was only fifteen, her father had found the loneliness intolerable, and he had gone off first to Edinburgh and then to London in search of amusement.

  Davita had thought even then that she could understand that her father had often craved for the gay life he had known as a young man in London before he had inherited the Baronetcy and come to Scotland to marry and what people called “settle down.”

  Because he had been very much in love with his wife, he had found it tolerable to live in an ancient, crumbling Castle with a thousand unproductive acres of moorland and only a few neighbours.

  Somehow he and Davita’s mother had managed to amuse themselves, fishing in the river, shooting over the moors, and every so often going off on a spree to Edinburgh and even occasionally to London.

  But her mother worried because these trips cost money.

  “We cannot really afford it, Iain,” she would say when her husband suggested they should leave Davita in charge of the servants and have what he called a “second honeymoon.”

  “We are only young once,” he would reply.

  Then her mother would forget her qualms of conscience, there would be a scuffle to get their best clothes packed, and they would drive away looking, Davita thought, very much like a honeymoon couple.

  Then her mother had died one cold winter when the winds blowing from the North Sea and down from the snow-peaked mountains seemed to catch at one’s throat.

  Her father had been so distraught that it had in fact been a relief when he said he could stand the gloom of Scotland no longer and intended to go South.

  “Go to London, Papa, and see your friends,” Davita had said. “I shall be all right, and when I am older perhaps I shall be able to come with you.”

  Her father had smiled.

  “I do not think you would be able to accompany me to any of my old haunts,” he had said, “but I will think about it. In the meantime, get on with your lessons. You might just as well be clever as well as beautiful.”

  Davita had flushed at the word because she thought it a compliment, but she knew that she did in fact resemble her mother, and no-one could ever deny that Lady Kilcraig had been a very beautiful woman.

  When Davita looked up at the portrait of her mother which hung over the mantelpiece in the Drawing-Room, she would pray that she would grow more and more like her.

  They had the same colour hair with its fiery lights, and it was certainly not the ugly, gingery red that was characteristic of so many Scots. It was the deep red of the first autumn leaves which seemed to hold the sunshine.

  Her eyes, again like her mother’s, were grey in some lights and green in others, and, where Davita was concerned, they were clear and innocent as a trout-stream.

  Because she was very young she had a child-like beauty. It may have been the curves of her face or the softness of her mouth, but there was something flowerlike about her which belied her red hair and the green of her eyes.

  “With your colouring,” her father once said, “you ought to look like a seductive siren. But instead, my sweet, you look like a fairy-child who has been left behind amidst the toad-stools where the fairies dance.”

  Davita had always loved it when her father talked to her of the myths and stories that circulated amongst the Scottish crofters.

  They had learnt them from the Bards, and in the long winter evenings they told their children tales of the feuds between the Chieftains, interspersed with legends, superstitions, and stories which were all a part of their being “fey.”

  It had been so much a part of her own childhood that she often found it difficult to know where her knowledge ended and her imagination began.

  Her mother added to her fantasies because her parents, both Scots, came from the Western Isles and her grandmother had been Irish.

  “Your mother brought the leprechauns with her!” her father would sometimes say teasingly, when something vanished mysteriously or her mother had a presentiment that something strange was going to happen.

  Davita had not been able to comfort her father in his grief, and now she imagined that she had been partially to blame for the fact that, desperate in his loneliness, he had married again when he was in London.

  It had seemed inconceivable that he should have chosen as his second wife a Gaiety Girl, but when Davita saw Katie Kingston, which had been her stage-name, after the first shock of finding that any woman had taken her mother’s place, and an actress at that, she had liked her.

  She was certainly very attractive, although her mascaraed eye-lashes, her crimson mouth, and her rouged cheeks had been somewhat of a surprise in Scotland.

  But her laughter and her voice, which had a distinct lilt in it, seemed to vibrate through the house like sunshine coming through the clouds.

&nb
sp; Then, as might have been expected, Katie began to be bored.

  Davita could understand that it had been one thing in London to marry a Baronet with all the leading actors and actresses of the Gaiety present, but quite another to have no audience but a few crofters, a stepdaughter, and a husband who, now that he was home, occupied most of his hours with sport.

  “What shall we do today?” she would ask Davita as she sat up in the big oak four-poster bed, eating her breakfast and looking somewhat disconsolately out the window at the moors.

  “What do you want to do?” Davita would ask.

  “If I were in London,” her Stepmother replied, “I’d go shopping in Bond Street, promenade down Regent’s Street, and then have lunch with an admirer at Romano’s.”

  She gave a little sigh before she went on:

  “Best of all, I would know that at six o’clock this evening I should be popping in at the stage-door and climbing up to my dressing-room to put on my makeup.”

  There was a yearning note in her voice which Davita began to listen for, and it would intensify as she went on to relate what it was like behind the scenes of the Gaiety.

  Katie was already thirty-six—which was another reason why she had married while she had the chance—so she had seen many of the great changes that had taken place at the Gaiety over the years.

  “You’ve never seen anything like it,” she told Davita once, “when Hollingshead, who was the Boss in those days, installed electric light at the Theatre.”

  Katie’s blue eyes were gleaming as she went on:

  “It was nine o’clock on August second in 1878 that the current was switched on. Lamps sizzled and flickered, then it brought the crowds hurrying into the Strand to look at the Gaiety.”

  It was not only the Theatre she described to Davita; she would tell her about the Stage-Door Johnnies, young men who would arrive in hansoms, “all dolled up” with their evening-dress capes, their silk Opera-hats, white gloves in their hands, and patent-leather boots shining like jet.

  “They were all waiting after the Show to take us out to supper,” Katie would say rapturously. “They sent flowers that filled the dressing-rooms and often gave us expensive presents.”

  “It must have been very exciting!” Davita would cry breathlessly.

  “There’s never been actresses anywhere in the world that had the glamour and the allure of us Gaiety Girls!” Katie boasted. “The newspapers say that we’re the ‘Spirit of the London Gaiety incarnate,’ and that’s what we are! The Guv’nor knows that we bring in the Nobs to the Theatre, so he doesn’t economise on us, oh no! Only the best for a Gaiety Girl!”

  Katie would show Davita her gowns that she wore on stage, some of which had been a present from the “Guv’nor,” George Edwardes, when she left.

  They were all made of the most expensive silks and satins, her petticoats were trimmed with real lace, and her hats were ornamented with the finest ostrich-feathers obtainable.

  “We Gaiety Girls are famous!” Katie boasted.

  Davita began to understand that what Katie was saying was that whether a man was rich or poor, young or elderly, to take a Gaiety Girl out to supper, to drive her home in a hansom, or to propel her in a punt at Maidenhead was to touch the wings of ecstatic romance.

  What Katie did not tell Davita, Hector, who had been her father’s valet for years and was now getting old, added after she was gone.

  “Ye canna cage a song-bird, Miss Davita,” he had said with his broad Scots accent. “Them Gaiety gals are not like th’ other actresses. Th’ gentlemen go mad over ’em and it’s no surprising.”

  “Are they really so lovely, Hector?” Davita asked curiously.

  “They be chosen for their looks,” Hector said, “but some o’ them are canny as weel, and there’s nothing of the old Music Hall aboot them.”

  It took Davita some time to understand that the women who performed at the Music Hall were often coarse and vulgar, while the Gaiety Girls were ostensibly ladylike and refined.

  Not that she found Katie particularly refined when she compared her with her mother.

  At the same time, she could understand that it was her joie de vivre which her father had found fascinating and which had made him determined that he would not return to Scotland without her.

  While Katie was struggling to adjust herself to her new life—Davita knew she had at first made a real effort—it was Violet, her daughter, who faced facts fairly and squarely when, six months after the marriage, she arrived to stay.

  If Davita had thought her Stepmother attractive, she found herself staring wide-eyed at Violet.

  She learnt that there were always eight outstandingly beautiful girls in every Gaiety production who moved about the stage wearing gorgeous gowns but were not performers in any other way.

  They were not part of the corps de ballet, nor did they have anything to say; they just looked and were beautiful.

  Violet was one of these, and when she appeared in Scotland she seemed to Davita like a goddess from another planet.

  She had fair hair and blue eyes like her mother, her features were perfect, and when she smiled it was as if the Venus de Milo had suddenly become human.

  “Why, I could hardly believe my eyes when I got your telegram!” Katie exclaimed, flinging her arms round her daughter.

  “We’ve got a fortnight’s holiday before we start rehearsals for the next Show, and I thought I’d come and see you. I’ve brought Harry with me. I hope you can put us up?”

  Harry was an exceedingly handsome actor, and Katie made him as welcome as her daughter.

  “He’s getting on a bit,” she said to Davita when they were talking about him. “He wants to ‘go straight’ rather than keep to the Juvenile leads which entail so much singing and dancing.”

  Harry had done well and had been billed as leading-man in the last three Shows at the Gaiety, besides becoming a draw at the Music Halls.

  He seemed to have more to say to Katie than to her daughter, and it had been left to Davita to entertain Violet.

  “Do you like the Theatre?” she had asked.

  Violet’s blue eyes lit up.

  “I adore it! I’d not leave the Gaiety if a Duke asked me to run away with him, let alone a Baronet!”

  She spoke without thinking, and added apologetically:

  “I suppose I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “I understand,” Davita said with a smile.

  “I don’t know how Mum sticks it,” Violet went on. “All this space!”

  She looked out over the moors.

  “I like to see houses out the window. You must be cut off here in the winter.”

  Davita laughed.

  “You will be back in London before that.”

  “I sincerely hope so!” Violet exclaimed fervently.

  ““Your mother is very happy with my father,” Davita said quickly, “although she misses London sometimes.”

  “I’m not surprised!”

  Violet made herself very pleasant and Davita liked her.

  Actually there was not very much difference in their ages, because Violet, having been, as Katie said “a little mistake” when she was only seventeen, had just passed her eighteenth birthday.

  Davita could never quite understand what had happened to her father, Katie’s first husband, whose name had been Lock.

  “Good-looking he was,” Katie had once said reminiscently, “with dark eyes that always seemed to have a smouldering fire in them, and that’s why the audience went mad about him! But Lord knows he was dull when he got home! I was very young and very stupid, but Violet’s got her head screwed on all right. I’ve seen to that!”

  Davita did not quite understand the innuendoes in this conversation, but she gathered that Mr. Lock had left Katie before Violet was born.

  Although she had never seen him again, he had not died until three years ago, leaving Katie free to marry Sir Iain Kilcraig.

  “It must have been very difficult for you br
inging up Violet all by yourself,” Davita said sympathetically. ,

  “I was lucky, I had very good—friends,” Katie said briefly, and left it at that.

  Violet learnt to fish while she was staying in Scotland. She soon picked up the art of casting and was thrilled with the first salmon she caught.

  Davita persuaded her to walk up to the top of the moors and for a short time she forgot that she was an actress from the Gaiety Theatre and became just a young girl enjoying the exercise and, when it grew hot, paddling with Davita in the burns.

  They went riding on the sure-footed small ponies that Davita had ridden ever since she was a child, talked to the crofters, and shopped in the village which was over two miles from the Castle.

  It was only afterwards that Davita realised that while she was enjoying her time with Violet, Katie was spending her time with Harry.

  Her father had been busy because it was the lambing season and he always made a point of assisting the shepherds. Moreover, unfortunately as it turned out, there was a run of salmon, which meant that the fishing was good, and he had spent a good part of each day by the river.

  Even so, Davita thought that what happened was inevitable and it was only a question of Katie finding the right moment.

  Soon after Violet had returned to London and Harry went with her, Katie disappeared.

  She left a note for her husband saying that she had an irresistible urge to see her friends, and she had not told him so to his face because she could not face a scene! She promised to write to him later.

  When she did write, and the letter arrived just as Sir Iain was determined to go and find her, it was to say that she was sorry but she could not leave the stage.

  She had the chance of going to America with a part on Broadway, and it was something she could not refuse.

  It was Hector who revealed that that was where Harry also had gone.

  “He talked aboot it a great deal, Miss Davita, while I was putting out his clothes. He said it was the chance of a lifetime an’ something he’d no intention o’ missing.”

  In a way, Davita could understand that it had been the “chance of a lifetime” for Katie as well, but her father behaved at first like a madman, then settled down to drown his sorrows.