The Maud Allan Affair

By Russell James

Maud Allan, the famous exotic dancer was destroyed by the infamous libel trial brought by charismatic British Member of Parliament. and pilot, Noel Pemberton-Billing.In this wonderfully written book, Russell James charts her rise and fall from the days when she saved the 1908 London Olympics from failure to the outrageous miscarriage of justice of her trial which knocked the dark days of the First World War off the front pages of the national newspapers.In his gripping narrative, Russell seamlessly moves from the days when Maud was courted by society to the end when her friends, apart from former PMs wife, Margot Asquith, shunned her in case they, too, were labeled as sexual deviants. The trial was based on the existence of the notorious (and fictional?). German black book and its list of 47,000 sexually depraved people who could be used by the Germans to defeat the British in War. Names included Herbert and Margot Asquith and the judge himself. Maud Allan did not stand a chance.A fantastic read brought out in time for the 2008 Beijing Olympics which will be looking ahead to the next London Olympics, in four years time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 21, 2009
• ISBN: 9781844684564

Russell James

Russell has been a published writer for some 25 years, is an ex-Chairman of the Crime Writers Association, and has written a dozen and a half novels in the crime and historical genres. He has also published various non-fiction works, including 4 illustrated biographical encyclopaedias: Great British Fictional Detectives and its companion work, Great British Fictional Villains, followed by the Pocket Guide to Victorian Writers & Poets, and its companion, the Pocket Guide to Victorian Artists & Their Models. His books include: IN A TOWN NEAR YOU (Prospero) THE CAPTAIN'S WARD (Prospero) AFTER SHE DROWNED (Prospero) STORIES I CAN'T TELL (with Maggie King) (Prospero) THE NEWLY DISCOVERED DIARIES OF DOCTOR KRISTAL (Prospero) EXIT 39 (Prospero) RAFAEL'S GOLD (Prospero) THE EXHIBITIONISTS (G-Press) POCKET GUIDE TO VICTORIAN ARTISTS & MODELS (Pen & Sword) POCKET GUIDE TO VICTORIAN WRITERS & POETS (Pen & Sword) GREAT BRITISH FICTIONAL VILLAINS (Pen & Sword) GREAT BRITISH FICTIONAL DETECTIVES (Pen & Sword) THE MAUD ALLAN AFFAIR (Pen & Sword) MY BULLET SWEETLY SINGS (Prospero) REQUIEM FOR A DAUGHTER (Prospero) NO ONE GETS HURT (Do Not Press) PICK ANY TITLE (Do Not Press) THE ANNEX (Five Star Mysteries) PAINTING IN THE DARK (Do Not Press) OH NO, NOT MY BABY (Do Not Press) COUNT ME OUT (Serpent's Tail) SLAUGHTER MUSIC (Alison & Busby) PAYBACK (Gollancz) DAYLIGHT (Gollancz) UNDERGROUND (Gollancz)

Book preview

Dancer.’

THE FIRST VEIL

‘If to her share some female errors fall

Look on her face, and you'll forget ’em all.’

Alexander Pope

1

The packed theatre was eager for her entrance. With tickets in short supply and the possibility of artistic nudity, few people arrived late. They milled in the foyers, took their seats, and dressed almost as finely as for the Opera. The Palace auditorium was alive with hubbub and, as people chatted, they kept an eye on the thick red draped curtain. Anticipation mounted. Maud Allan might not dance nude – but if there was a moment (not that they'd come for that, oh no) if there was a moment when her veil slipped, it might be tonight. Would there be any nudity?

Was it art?

While the audience settled, the small orchestra played an overture barely heard above the voices. Nobody hushed until the lights dimmed. Then came a pause in the darkness for several seconds, and the curtain opened on a simple set suggesting a woodland glade. From the hidden orchestra came a familiar tune, and people who didn't recall its name peered at their programmes to remind themselves that it was Felix Mendelssohn's Spring Song. The stage lighting was of dawn. Into the copse of trees floated a ghost-like figure, a young girl classically draped in flowing white, with a garland of flowers in her hair. Her thin muslin dress seemed insubstantial, barely attached to her slender body. Scooped low at the front, it hung like a gossamer nightgown to her delicate ankles. Not a Salome dress, not yet. The simple shift was gauze: lit from the front it seemed opaque, but where the stage light faded and back-light shone through the flimsy material, it vanished to reveal what was inside. At the edge of the glade the frontal lights were dim, to give a rising dawn effect behind. Every time Maud floated to the front battens the drifting muslin hid her form. Rear footlights shone through the material and although nothing indecent could be seen, her shape and girlish body appeared in smudgy silhouette, brief and tantalising. This was the Spring Song, this was dawn. Later that sultry evening, announced the printed programme, she would perform her Vision of Salome.

That sensuous dance, spawned and perfected in the theatres of Berlin and Vienna, was the talk of London: the success – or for some, the scandal – of the season. Maud Allan was not the only oriental dancer; in Vienna she had pitted her performances against both Ruth St Dennis with her Dance of the Sense of Touch, and Mata Hari, whose costumes showed more than Maud's. Each woman climaxed her show with routines gleaned from idealised portraits of Middle Eastern dancing girls; each wore a costume formed of diaphanous gauze over encrusted breastplates; each wore dangling beads and painted toenails and bare feet. In foreign capitals Maud learned both to perfect her dances and outperform her competitors. Mata Hari was more outrageous (as Maud took care not to tell her London public) but Maud's dance was wilder, more abandoned. Mata Hari showed her body, but Maud Allan bequeathed hers to the audience. In Paris she debuted The Vision simultaneously with a celebrated performance of Richard Strauss's Salome, and that made it difficult for anyone to call her dance decadent – as if anyone would in Paris, which saw itself as the sophisticated capital of Europe.

Maud was determined to be more than a mock Middle Eastern dancer. She had extended her repertoire beyond Salome and spoke of her art as the pure spirit of dance, the liberation of the soul. She was a classical dancer, not a burlesque, as classical as a ballerina – not that ballet dancers were thought respectable. Though she'd had no formal training and was unconstrained by tradition, she had learned pageant, spectacle, and the drama of tramoya.

Hers was not the Salome of the bible – she was Herod's daughter, yes, but a more seductive version. People said she'd danced privately before King Edward and was his mistress. Was she? It was a delicious prospect, suggesting that tonight the audience might be privileged to gaze from their plush seats to see what the King saw in his bedchamber. There she was, dancing in her nightdress – and this was only the opening number. On the subtly lit stage they saw a woodland nymph who epitomised the feminine and vulnerable. Far from brazen, this gentle girl seemed soft and artless, light and ethereal. Her delicate, pensive movements were as if she'd never danced like this before, as if this was her first time, she was giving herself for the first time. There had been no previous performances – not in the Palace Theatre, not in Paris, Vienna nor Berlin. This was for you.

*   *   *

‘Women's Sunday – June 21 – Cabinet Ministers Specially Invited’. Mrs Drummond's banner flapped from a steam launch on the Thames moored off the terrace of the House of Commons, and the day was bright and sunny. Thousands of women who had come by train from all over the country to march on Hyde Park were watched by crowds lining the streets. For the crowds it was an excellent day out, but for the women it was Britain's biggest and most important suffrage demonstration. Most wore white dresses trimmed with ribbon and sprays of flowers. Guides and marshals had their own regalias of violet, white and green. Placards and banners jostled. The glamorous and hugely popular Christabel Pankhurst spoke from a wagon, but after the first few sentences her platform was rocked and shaken by groups of youths singing anti-suffrage songs. Hundreds of police on special duty tried to stem the disorder, and although some of the less well known speakers were heard, Christabel and her mother were drowned out and buffeted by gangs. Fights began, and the planned climax to the day – a ‘Great Shout’ for suffrage – was lost in melees and confusion. Christabel left surrounded by a police escort, Mrs Pankhurst disappeared, but thousands of suffrage supporters – by no means all women – remained in the park for a vast impromptu picnic. Mothers and fathers and their children sat on the grass – and it was that picnic, said much of the press the following morning, that brought the day to a quietly impressive end. Half a million people, they said, came to the park.

Some days later a deputation of women marched through cheering crowds from Caxton Hall to Parliament. But at the Strangers’ Entrance Mrs Pankhurst was met by a policeman who said the Prime Minister wouldn't see them. He returned the letter she'd delivered. Mr Asquith didn't need to read it: he knew its demands and would be reminded of them in tomorrow's papers.

That evening a small group of Suffragettes rallied outside the House and repeated their message with megaphones. Police made thirty arrests. Later, two Suffragettes were arrested for breaking windows at Number 10 Downing Street. Mrs Pankhurst visited the police station and told the women they had done right. The Press did not agree: letters and demonstrations were one thing, they said, but windows were government property. In the newspapers the following day most reports spoke of broken glass.

2

When Maud told the press she would attend the Olympic Games, the response of the public was as if she were opening them afresh. The first days had drawn disappointing crowds, for the Games weren't seen as a world spectacle. Created for the modern age in Greece in 1896, the Games had flopped since in both Paris and St Louis. 1908’s Games should have been in Rome, but in 1906 Italy had decided that she would not be able to mount them. London was given twenty months to build a stadium and make all necessary arrangements to host a world event. A 90,000 seat stadium was up and running inside two years.

But the organisers could not prevent the stormy July weather. Rain and unseasonable cold kept crowds away. The press was encouraged to hype the spectacle, advertising was increased, but only when a clutch of stage personalities, then the King and Queen, then the infamous Maud Allan promised to attend, did crowds emerge. They had heard of these people, but not the athletes. The King and Queen were a draw, but when Maud Allan – the scarlet princess – appeared, the crowds cheered as if the stadium had been erected especially for her. When she entered the Royal Box with the Prime Minister's wife, she waved to her largest audience.

*   *   *

And it was my audience – it really was. I don't pretend 90,000 sports-lovers came to see me, but I was the draw. Because so far, the Games have not lit much of a fire, have they? They've been a damp squib, like the weather. But when folk heard that the PM's wife and I would make guest appearances they came – oh, how they came – and they didn't come to see Margot Asquith. She was a feature, but I topped the bill.

I've played some big theaters, some strange arenas, but this place, this vast oval arena – lit by daylight! No drapes, no gauze, and there I am, a tiny dot in the Royal Box, beside several other tiny dots, and I'm dressed in a striking white Greekish number in homage, you might say, to the Peloponnesian Games in Olympia. (See, I've read the program!) At that moment, when I stepped forward to greet the crowd, I was a goddess, and I sensed Margot step back to let me accept the plaudits on my own. How d'you like that? The Prime Minister's wife leaves me to greet the crowd as if I'd won a race myself.

‘Enjoy this moment,’ Margot murmured. ‘It's not often Life curtseys at your feet.’

I smiled – graciously, I guess. She's telling me to hold the moment? I gazed down at the crowd and I knew I'd never forget. Guardians of public decency might protest at my being in the Royal Box – but my shows sell out, and the Shepherd's Bush stadium has sold out too. 90,000 people roaring approval. What do I care for guardians of public decency?

Margot and I came to the Games in the back of an open-topped sixseater automobile – though, given the weather, the open top was a mistake. While we acknowledged the onlookers, she and I were forced to hold on to our hats, even though we'd anchored them to our hair with jeweled hatpins. To hell with the weather, brother – this was fun!

‘Crowds love celebrity,’ Margot said. ‘America didn't realize. That's why your St Louis Games were such a flop.’

‘They should've invited me.’

‘America is such a new country.’ I don't know why Margot bangs on about the States: she knows I'm Canadian. ‘So brash, so sure of itself. But I blame Christopher Columbus. If I'd discovered America I'd have taken jolly good care not to tell anyone.’

I smiled. She has this way with her. Talks like she's quoting from Oscar Wilde. The air is blustery, but for an occasion like this I'd sit out in a squall. This is my day, just as it's been my season. I'm making so much money. Not only am I breaking records at the Palace Theater but I'm giving private performances, each of which earns me a lip-smacking two hundred and fifty pounds. Though sometimes I'm canny enough to appear for free. Today, for instance, I showed up at the Olympic Games for free, as I will later this month at the Veterans’ Fête at the Chelsea Royal Hospital – because let me tell you, that's a high profile, high society affair, when the rich come out for charity.

I'll enjoy that, let me tell you. I've arrived.

*   *   *

Lieutenant Colonel Charles à Court Repington had not seen the famous dancer for several weeks, not since the garden party when she'd smacked Lord Alfred Douglas. He'd missed seeing her at the Olympics, but at the bright and sunny Veteran's Fête she gave a compelling turn and the aged Vets approved lustily, though the whole performance, Lettice Fairfax told him, had a touch of the second rate. Didn't he agree? He smiled politely. Dear Lettice – green with envy. He watched Maud Allan. She danced the Spring Song, Chopin's Waltzes and Rubinstein's Valse Caprice, but not Salome. It was a charity gala – she wouldn't give that for free.

She was magnificent, thought Repington, though he didn't say so to Miss Fairfax. On stage she seemed so vulnerable, so young. At the garden party she'd looked young – mid-twenties perhaps – but on stage she looked nineteen. She didn't act nineteen – which was why women slated her, he thought.

‘Who's the actress with her?’ Lettice asked. This was afterwards, when the gala guests mingled with performers and Chelsea pensioners. Maud was across the hall.

‘The actress with her,’ purred Charles Repington, ‘is the Prime Minister's wife.’

‘She's not even pretty.’

The Colonel whispered in her ear. His words didn't matter; attention mattered. He was watching Maud and Margot. Maud's dark looks were compelling, whatever Lettice said, but Margot Asquith was striking in her way: tall, erect, with a Roman nose to enhance her beauty. Intelligent, extravagant and flighty, an extraordinary match for the dry patrician H. H. Asquith. He had only that year become Prime Minister, but he had the gravitas of a man who might remain PM for years to come.

Even if he was a Liberal.

Margot, they said, led him a dance. Younger, uncontrollable, doyen of society, she'd married the widowed Asquith before he achieved high office. Perhaps he'd always been tipped for power. Though did he have real power? H. H. was not here today and it was hard to imagine him beside lively Margot. To Repington, Margot – Margot Tennant as she had been – wore power like a mink stole on her shoulders. Families like hers were rulers. Though they tolerated politicians their real interest lay in themselves. And they had only a passing interest in the shining stars of stage and newspapers. Paper stars. Illuminated stars.

Repington was much the same. He had a penchant for chorus girls, who he found easier than top stars, and more fun. He liked the stage artistes’ free attitude to life – though he would never be foolish enough to marry an actress. He had been married once – still was indeed, since Melloney refused to grant him a divorce – and he'd replaced her with a full-time mistress, against whom Lettice was an entr'acte. It amused him to see high-born men fall for glamour and marry their heart-throbs. Men sought excitement and the artistes sought security.

Lettice pulled his arm. He made himself stop looking at Maud Allan and smiled instead at his blonde actress. Actresses changed lovers as often as they changed shows. New cast, new playmates. He was temporary, he knew, but he was happy with that. Lettice wanted him to introduce her to people who mattered, because he knew everybody. He was handsome, well connected, and could smooth her passage into that world.

*   *   *

When the suffragettes were released from jail, they were met at the Holloway gates by a singing band of women who hustled their smiling heroines into a carriage bedecked with ribbons and suffrage slogans. Their procession to the West End had been trailed in the morning papers and if the streets weren't packed, there were still enough supporters at every kerbside to cheer and whistle strong encouragement. The carriage was pulled by six white horses, but with so many Suffragettes inside, the poor horses struggled with their load and some women had to run to the rear and help push the wagon. Men laughed and jeered but were out-shouted by shoppers, shopgirls and riotous children. The carnival atmosphere helped convert spectators to the cause. One was a fifteen-year-old, black-haired, vehement girl called Hannah Bolt.

3

In October the Palace Theatre mounted the 250th performance of The Vision of Salome . The house was full despite the swirling fog outside, a fog that threatened an early winter, and when the curtain rose on the first act/movement/display (no one quite knew what to call it) the chill outside seemed to permeate the stage – for Maud had opened with a melancholy dance of mourning. Her famously hedonistic form was masked with grey draperies, the dim light was streaked with mist, and the shrunken body of the sensual dancer seemed weighted down with pain and loneliness. Though the theatre was crowded, the air inside had not warmed, and latecomers kept their coats on until the first dance concluded.

Maud's was not a long programme; she was a solo dancer, and her dances were interspersed with classical excerpts from the small scratch orchestra. Parts of the programme could be thought boring, but everyone knew that the early part of the show, interesting as it might be to dance aficionados, was the build-up. When the climactic dance began and Marcel Remy's haunting music seeped into the auditorium, the curtain opened to reveal a young girl trembling at the edge of an Eastern garden, an unreal garden in pantomimic colours, decorated with jewel-like flowers and fringed with tall trees and Arabian obelisks. The unreal light was moonlight – cold, like the night outside. Maud was in her famous costume. Beneath an open network of cord she wore nothing above the waist – nothing except two bold, provocative breastplates, emphasising what was cupped inside. Chains of rattling beads and pearls swung from her hips.

Salome.

As Maud glided forward her feet scarcely seemed to move. Her body swayed. Then her body convulsed from an upright posture into a broken tableau vivant. For two or three seconds she held what seemed an impossible pose like a fractured doll. How could she stand like that?

She twitched, as if her frozen posture felt a jolt of heat. Now she danced with such fluidity the air transported her; she seemed to drift in the clear waters of a pool. Her flowing hands were weeds, her arms waves. She transformed herself from moment to moment – now a water-nymph, now a cat; now a maiden, now a temptress. King Herod's favourite daughter became an animal aroused, a vampire. She craved the blood of John the Baptist. Those who knew the story knew that when the King ordered Salome to dance she demanded the prophet's head as her reward, and Herod, besotted with lust for his wanton stepdaughter, could refuse her nothing – what was a prisoner's head? Only as Salome danced would Herod realise that she too was besotted – but not with him. John had refused Salome in life, so she would have him when he died. Herod ordered John to be executed, and the frenzied Salome dedicated her Dance of the Veils not to Herod but to the freshly slaughtered Baptist. As the tempo of her dance increased, her grief exploded into reckless concupiscence and she demanded her gory prize: ‘Bring me the head of John the Baptist.’

Maud's dance followed the sweep of Oscar Wilde's play. First the crazed girl displayed her thwarted lust, then she snatched up and flaunted the severed head of the prophet who would not love her. ‘I will bite thy lips,’ she said in Wilde's play. ‘I have kissed thy mouth.’

It was the vampiric climax to her dance. Salome saw the head lying centre stage, she rushed across, seized and bore it front-stage, so the footlights glittered on dark blood. Then she collapsed, holding the head in her hands while she writhed in ecstasy and passion. In kissing her lover's head she had become a tortured maenad. The curtain fell.

Nothing could follow. There could only be applause. When the curtain rose, Maud curtseyed sweetly and seemed demure, a modest young girl. But she was still dressed in that amazing costume, and the curtain calls were the last chance for the audience to gaze on the flesh-revealing net, the gossamer, the chains of beads and skimpy undies. Between her outrageous breastplates lay a skin of almost invisible gold mesh. The plates themselves were studded with virginal white pearls.

To keep her on stage the men kept cheering.

This 250th performance coincided with the publication of Maud's autobiography, an enjoyable but freely fictionalised story – prompting Punch to ask wryly if the book would be issued naked, without a jacket. An equally fictional book – a mere 36 pages, called, without irony, Maud Allan and her Art – was slapped together by soft-porn author Frank Harris (he whose My Life And Loves would keep generations of schoolboys awake at night for the next few decades). Edwardians had a craze for picture postcards, and pictures of Maud flooded the mail, joining and for a while eclipsing hundreds of thousands of snaps of chorus girls and actresses in unlikely garb. Few could match Miss Maud Allan. Practically every postcard featured her Salome costume; she was seen full-length, in profile, head and shoulders, with and without the Baptist's head, almost always in her eye-catching costume. In photographs, she wore less than she wore on stage. Between the small pearl-studded breastplates she showed bare cleavage and her upper chest was exposed, though when she performed on stage she secured the wobbling breastplates with a strong mesh strap. In her most provocative photographs she faced the camera full-on to present the notorious cleavage; her cool, sexual stare challenged, and her lustrous eyes flaunted the secret freedoms of a new century. For one brief summer season Maud was more famous than the Queen.

*   *   *

Hannah Bolt's brother gave her a postcard. Salome was famous but not obscene, and although the cards could be bought in most stationers’ shops Hannah hid the card in her own private drawer. She was lucky to have a private drawer; most of her friends had shared bedrooms but Daniel and Hannah, fifteen years old, were too old to share and had the luxury of living in a rambling terraced house off Garrat Lane in Wandsworth, near the mental hospital. The house was above and at times part of the shop below – their parents’ Dress Agency, or as it was known in the area, the second-hand clothes shop. Second-hand clothes were displayed on the ground floor, with surplus stock crammed into another room at the rear. When supplies outstripped demand, as they often did in that desperate trade, bales of clothes were dragged upstairs and dumped in corners of the living quarters. They lined the halls. Though untidy and often grubby, the clothes were the family's source of income, and neither Hannah, Daniel nor their parents resented their presence. Those clothes, money to come, were reassurance. They had always been around the house, and when Hannah and Daniel were young they used the clothes as an inexhaustible resource for play.

Now, fifteen years old, Hannah was dressing up again. A Sunday luxury. Daniel was out. Hannah had their friend Eileen in the house and the two girls, inspired by the postcard, had taken a pile of suitable-looking clothes into her bedroom to create costumes which would help them imitate Salome. Knowing they were alone, they had slipped off their outer clothes and replaced them with lace curtain skirts and, in lieu of better, some hand-made paper breastplates. They laughed at each other and danced in clumsy imitation of the way they imagined Maud Allan might dance. They had no music. The only gramophone, large and heavy with a metal horn, lived downstairs, and in those days it did not occur to anyone that they should have music in their bedrooms. Hannah and Eileen tra-la-la'd a vaguely Arabian melody.

Eileen giggled. ‘Daniel might walk in.’

When Hannah said he was out Eileen hid her disappointment. She thought Daniel rather nice. It was odd that he and Hannah were twins, but he was a boy and she a girl and they were not really identical, so there wasn't a problem telling them apart, but it was odd. Their faces were similar and they laughed the same and had expressions so alike that it was strange to see Daniel's grin on Hannah's face.

Eileen was used to Hannah's house. Despite the clothes stacked all around and despite the shabby shop, Eileen suspected it was more prosperous than it looked. Hannah was Jewish, and clearly Bolt's Dress Agency earned enough to support this large old house. It was crammed with stuff, even if most was for sale, and was enormous compared to the hideous pair of rooms she shared with her own mother. Eileen hated her mother's place. She never invited friends there. She was ashamed of those two rooms, her mother, their lack of money, their lack of class, and she looked up to Hannah Bolt who, to Eileen, was middle class. She had known Hannah less than a year and was determined they would always be best friends.

‘D'you think it's true about Miss Allan?’ Eileen asked. They were still dancing, each taking turns to improvise the wailing melody. Though they wore little, the dancing kept them warm. ‘People say that in the real shows she's not like the photos – she's naked above the waist.’

‘Not down below?’

Eileen hooted. ‘I bet she was naked for the King.’

Hannah's eyes blazed. She pulled off her flimsy paper shields and danced topless – wild and clumsy in her movements. ‘Like this, you mean?’

Eileen giggled, shocked at her friend's forwardness. It was all right to talk about it, but … she thought she was the forward one. And here was Hannah – my gosh. Eileen hadn't seen another girl's breasts before – but Hannah didn't seem to care. Hannah was dark with olive skin, which must be why her nipples looked darker than Eileen's own. Dark red, almost brown. Perhaps they were Jewish nipples. Hannah kept dancing. She was Jewish-looking, when Eileen thought about it, though she hadn't realised till Hannah told her. That meant Daniel was Jewish too. Hannah looked fiercer than her brother, but they both had lovely smiles.

‘Come on, Salome,’ Hannah cried. She skipped closer and pulled at Eileen's breastplates. Being paper, they tore immediately. Eileen instinctively clasped her hands across her chest, but felt silly and after a slight hesitation followed Hannah in the dance.

‘Hope no one comes in.’

But Hannah wore a dare-devil grin – just like her brother: Eileen still found that strange. She was moving closer. ‘Let's waltz,’ Hannah purred.

Before Eileen realised what she meant, Hannah had taken her by the arms and pulled her closer still. The two girls rubbed together, chest to chest – only for a moment, till Eileen stepped away. ‘Gosh. It doesn't seem …‘

Hannah laughed at her. Hannah raised her hands and placed them on her head, like Salome in the photograph. She took a step forward, but Eileen moved away. Hannah stayed where she was. She stood with her feet apart, swaying from the waist. ‘That's what it must feel like, with a man. You know, flesh to flesh.’

Eileen wasn't sure where to look. ‘Oh, I know all that.’

Hannah grinned. She didn't believe her. Well, she wouldn't believe her, Eileen realised, it was a stupid thing to say: she was only sixteen; Hannah was fifteen. How could she know?

Suddenly Hannah seemed bored. She stopped dancing and flung herself on the narrow bed. ‘Come and sit by me.’ Eileen didn't move. ‘Come on, Eileen, tell me – have you ever, you know, with a boy?’

‘No,’ she cried, embarrassed. It was hardly surprising: they had almost nothing on. And they were talking about boys. But she was older than Hannah and she wasn't a prude by any means. ‘I don't have a brother. You're lucky.’ Hannah raised an eyebrow. Eileen blustered on: ‘Have you ever … tried anything with him?’

‘Tried anything?’

‘Well. I mean, danced or something?’

‘Daniel?’ Hannah laughed. She was half lying, half sitting on the bed, as if fully dressed. ‘I love Daniel, of course, but I'm not interested in him. Anyway, he's too young.’

‘He's your age.’

‘Obviously. But boys don't know anything, do they?’

Eileen would rather have slipped her blouse back on, but she couldn't, not while Hannah was lounging on the bed like a whatever-you-call-it in a harem. ‘Some boys know things.’

‘Oh? Do tell.’

Eileen's fingers strayed to cover her breast but she made herself pull her hand away. ‘Have you ever, you know, kissed a man?’

‘A man?’

‘A boy, then – anyone?’

Hannah paused a moment. ‘I haven't wanted to, really. How about you?’

Eileen tried to look mature. She was the older girl. She had a job; she worked in an office, while Hannah just helped in her parents’ shop. Yet Hannah seemed to know things. ‘Well, you know.’

‘Show me.’

‘Show you?’

‘How it's done.’ Hannah smiled. She had lost her fierce look. ‘Girls have to practice. And it's better to practice on another girl.’

Eileen was nervous. ‘Safer, I'll give you that.’

‘So kiss me.’ Hannah held her gaze.

‘No!’

‘We'll kiss each other. No one will know.’

Eileen frowned, realising she had lost control to the younger girl. ‘You're scared,’ said Hannah, smiling at Eileen in such an oddly superior way that Eileen felt she had to show she wasn't completely outclassed. She dropped her head and kissed Hannah quickly on the lips, then pulled back. Hannah watched from the bed. ‘Is that all there is?’

‘Well.’ Eileen stood erect. ‘If you give a boy more than that he'll think … Anything could happen.’

Hannah nodded. ‘You could get pregnant.’ Eileen blushed. ‘That's the word for it,’ said Hannah airily. ‘But you can't get pregnant from me!’

‘I don't want to.’

‘Get pregnant – or kiss me?’ Hannah shrugged, then looked away. ‘You're scared, aren't you? But you have to practice some time.’

‘So you say.’

‘Because it's true.’ Hannah waited till Eileen sat on the bed. They faced each other. Eileen was trembling, acutely aware of Hannah's nakedness, of her own nakedness. ‘It is cold,’ Hannah agreed. When she opened her arms her breasts moved. Gosh, like muscles, Eileen thought. Hannah reached towards her. ‘Come and get warm.’

Eileen had her pride. She wasn't a schoolgirl; she shouldn't act like a schoolgirl on the bed. She eased forward slightly – and as she moved she realised that, of all things, she was aroused. Only a little. Just the two of them. Nothing could happen, could it? It was only practice.

In the silent room she heard a child's voice calling in the street. Then the outside was swept away. Hannah took her arms and pulled her forward. From her awkward position Eileen half lost her balance and slipped slightly and her nipples brushed against Hannah's breast and Hannah clasped her in a tight embrace. Eileen gasped and flushed. She was aflame with – what? – nervousness. Fear. Embarrassment.

Hannah's kiss was a long slow lingering kiss. Hannah kissed as if she'd kissed before, as if she really wanted to kiss Eileen, as if she'd never stop. Her tongue was inside Eileen's mouth. The feeling was extraordinary. Not horrible, it was almost …

Eileen broke away. ‘You don't need to practise,’ she said.

4

It was a chilly morning, and Lilian was grateful. The men would think she was shivering from cold, not fear. They were wheeling her husband's extraordinary contraption, his flying machine, out of the large wooden shed to see daylight for the first time. Like a fledging bird, she thought, pushed from the nest and immediately told to fly. Not that it looked like a bird: its fuselage, shaped like a cigar tube, was no more than a series of hoops covered with paper, as fragile as an overgrown Chinese lantern; the wings shivered as she was shivering, and they drooped. It couldn't fly, surely – yet a bird was fragile. Only last week Lilian had caught a sparrow in their kitchen and had held it cupped in both hands while she took it outside. So fragile, tiny and insubstantial. Noel's monoplane was so light and its skin so thin that a fist would go right through it; a puff of wind would blow it away. A puff of wind would take his paper bird and carry it up and away out of the field, across the hedge and above the trees, over the neighbouring countryside and out to sea. How would he come down? She remembered the glider he'd built, a lifetime ago – four years, a year after they married – the glider he'd launched from the roof of their little house at East Grinstead. He'd nearly killed himself. He'd been obsessed by flight from the day in 1903 when he'd heard that the Wright brothers in America had taken a powered aeroplane off the ground. Barely a year and he'd built his glider. Another two – was it? – and he'd built his own heavier-than-air flying machine: the first, Noel insisted, the first British flying machine to fly by engine-power for sixty feet. She'd never forget it landing, a kind of crash, yet a success despite it. Now he was about to go up for ‘a proper flight’ in his own powered monoplane. Obsessed by flight? Noel was obsessed by everything, obsessed by life. Whatever he did he dived into with such verve and enthusiasm that she fell in love with him again.

And here he was: he rushed across, laughing, sweeping her into his arms. The big kiss was happiness, no more – and for others to see: the two men who worked for him, their wives and a little boy, the several onlookers. She tried to hold him but he was gone. When he clambered up in the machine it dipped sideways, then rocked as he settled. The plane rattled, the cloth skin crackled. Noel raised a hand, shouted, then waited for the man at the front to make the propeller spin. The rackety engine coughed into life. She could smell fuel.

One of the onlookers was a press photographer. She wasn't surprised. Noel was a genius for publicity and would want his photograph in a newspaper. Someone would see it, someone would come – just as Howard Wright had come after Noel's first powered flight – and Noel wouldn't wait for someone to spot it in a newspaper, he would circulate the article with a letter containing details to everyone who mattered. Somebody would realise. Noel said he was going to start his own magazine, The Aerocraft, which would contain the latest news about flying machines all over the world.

The plane tottered forward like an old lady learning to roller skate. To see it moving was as astounding as when Lilian had seen her first motor car ten years or so before. The new century was less than ten years old, yet already the motor car was becoming commonplace – even out here she saw one almost every day. Astonishing inventions: aeroplanes, dirigible balloons, wireless telegraphy. And her Noel was a brilliant inventor, she was convinced. He'd built not only the first British powered aeroplane and his man-lifting glider, but also a wonderful digit typewriter that could be operated with just one finger, and a calculating pencil, and a petrol automatic gun. He'd invented self-lighting cigarettes as well, but there hadn't been much call for those. He'd been a boxer, soldier, actor, farmer – she shuddered at the memory of their wretched ten-acre farm – and had so much energy Lilian knew that before long her handsome husband would succeed.

His noisy aeroplane gathered speed, bumping and shuddering across the damp grass, faster, faster, until for no reason Lilian could see, it lifted into the air. One moment it was on the ground, the next there was air beneath it. The machine flew awkwardly – like a chicken, she thought: it went over the hedge, dipped alarmingly, then righted itself and rose upwards, veering to one side as it turned in a slow arc to avoid oncoming trees. But Noel was too high to hit the trees; he could fly straight over their tops. He continued to rise. She was amazed. Far better, she knew, to be amazed at his achievement than to think how perilously he hung a hundred feet above the ground. Far better to watch and smile as if she shared her husband's determined optimism.

*   *   *

On Wimbledon Common a light mist hovered over Queen's Mere. Although it was Sunday, there were few other people walking the wild spaces, and those who had come out were some distance away across the empty common. But beside the small lake two small boys knelt at the bank fishing for tiddlers. Eileen could tell they'd be there for ages. The only thing that might tear them from the water's edge would be the prospect of ragging a courting couple. Not that she and Daniel Bolt were courting, but they were a couple, which was all small boys needed.

She led Daniel from the Mere to the cemetery. The gate was some way off, the wall low, so she asked Daniel to help her over. He didn't query her request – but then, he had a tomboy sister, he'd have seen Hannah climbing walls. She probably wouldn't let him help her – but Eileen would. That was the point. She could have hiked herself on top but she smiled in her most feminine way and asked Daniel to put his hands on her waist and lift. She stumbled. Instead of perching on the wall she slumped against his chest. ‘Oops,’ she said. They tried again.

Once they were over, they walked among the graves, reading headstones. ‘Just think,’ breathed Eileen. ‘They were people once.’

Daniel nodded. ‘Everyone ends up in some cold plot of ground.’

It was colder in the graveyard than on the common. There was no breeze that day and what little sun there was had not warmed the stones. Hardly romantic, Eileen thought, and yet, in a Wuthering Heights way, among the graves beneath the yew trees, they were out of sight of other people and in touch with infinity. Daniel was brooding over headstones. ‘We're the only ones alive.’

‘No one can see us,’ she whispered meaningfully.

She gave him the full strength of her gaze and even Daniel could not mistake it. He chewed his bottom lip – a flash of white teeth – and she wanted to grab him, he looked so gorgeous. But she couldn't: he'd think her forward.

‘Look, I say,’ he said, and blushed. He didn't know what to do. Eileen knew what he would like to do – she hoped so, anyway – but he looked awkward. That was a sure sign. Daniel never looked awkward. He might be only fifteen but he had the demeanour of a man. The trouble was, Eileen suspected, that he looked on her as his sister's friend. She stepped towards him. As Hannah said, a girl needs practice. She wanted to tell him he could kiss her if he liked – how had Hannah put it? She wouldn't think of that. She could only do what any girl might: stand close and stare into his face. And wait.

‘Look here, Eileen.’

‘What?’ She smiled encouragingly.

‘I want to kiss you.’

She tried to look surprised but was standing so close she could only open her brown eyes wider. She did not try to move away. She didn't answer. But Daniel seemed to be waiting for her to reply. She sighed. Would he never kiss her? She couldn't tell him what to do.

Then he kissed her.

Eileen let him kiss a second time but when he drew away to gaze at her she caught an expression in his eyes which reminded her of his sister. Well, they were twins, they would look similar. When he kissed a third time she began to respond but found she couldn't lose the picture of Hannah's face, of Hannah kissing her. Kissing Daniel was like kissing Hannah. It felt wrong.

She pulled away.

But Daniel had lost his gauche timidity and was tugging her closer and trying to kiss again. It was nice, Daniel felt warm, but she struggled in his arms. She pressed her hands against his chest and pushed away. ‘Stop it,’ she said.

He wouldn't. Eileen was confused: she wanted to kiss again but needed a moment to think about it, to sort herself out. Daniel had no such doubts. Eileen broke from his grip and backed a pace away. ‘I don't want to.’

He followed. ‘Come on –’

‘Stop it.’

He did. He stared and she felt furious – oh God, what did she want? He looked so darkly handsome, so ready, but she couldn't kiss him now she felt stirred up.

Then his face changed. ‘I'm sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘I shouldn't have done that.’

‘No, I –’

‘You're a good girl,’ he stammered. ‘I know. I shouldn't have … taken advantage of you that way.’

He dropped his hands, smiled nervously and looked away. Daniel had thought she was defending her maiden honour – as she would if he'd tried anything more than kissing. But he hadn't. Not that he would. Not that any decent boy would. It was the first time they had kissed. And it was freezing in the graveyard.

*   *   *

Hannah herself was with grown-up women. She hadn't expected to be let in, but the police and officials outside the Albert Hall were anxious to avoid confrontation. The new Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, had taken the bold step of agreeing to address a meeting of the Women's Liberal Federation on the subject of women's suffrage. His intention was to distance the Women's Federation from suffrage militants, but in the Hall the front rows of seats had been occupied by members of Mrs Pankhurst's WSPU, the Women's Social and Political Union – a band of angry women, the Chancellor thought but didn't say. Before the meeting began, the Albert Hall organist, in a bizarre attempt to lighten the tension, had played a medley of jolly airs. To no avail.

As Lloyd George rose to speak, the Suffragettes at the front rose as well. When they took off their obscuring overcoats they showed that they were wearing imitation prison garb. Ignoring the flurry in the Hall, the WSPU women quickly tied white prison bonnets on their heads. Then they took their seats again like prisoners and stared.

Hannah almost laughed aloud. Mrs Pankhurst was still in prison, and whatever Lloyd George said, her imprisonment could not be ignored. Perhaps he hoped the silent demonstration was all the Suffragettes intended but, as he started to speak, women in the audience began to shout. Stewards tried to remove hecklers. Lloyd George waited for the commotion to die down but when he started again his words were drowned out with cries of ‘Deeds not words! Deeds not words!’ For more than an hour Lloyd George tried to talk the hecklers down. Hannah found it thrilling. For a long time his speech – and he was a powerful orator – was countered with loud interruptions. Stewards struggled to maintain order. At first, they tried to treat protestors with firm respect, but when an hour passed and the disruption showed little sign of ending, the stewards started to get tough. First they rammed their hands across protestors’ mouths, then they started hitting them. Hannah watched horrified as a steward nearby punched a woman beneath the chin. Men in the audience egged the stewards on: ‘Knock ’em down, give it to ’em hot!’

Hannah scrambled to the end of her crowded row, where two stewards were dragging a woman up the aisle. The woman had blood running down her face. Hannah flung herself at the men, one of whom kicked out at her – but his kick was weak and she clung doggedly to his leg. Another woman joined in. More stewards. Noise from the auditorium drowned out the speaker. Hannah was carried by four cursing men, one to each limb, carrying her as if she'd been a drunken fighter thrown from a pub. When they dragged her out of the rioting Hall she heard the organ strike up again, thumping out another cheerful tune. Carried helplessly by four men, she found herself repeating its stupid melody: ‘Oh dear, what can the matter be?’

Hannah and the other ejected women stumbled out of the Albert Hall and tried to ignore the jeering crowd. Press photographers took gleeful shots of dishevelled women with bleeding noses and torn clothes. By the time Lloyd George reached the climax of his speech, all the protestors had been thrown out. They never heard him promise that in the Prime Minister's Electoral Reform Bill there would be new provisions for women. They never heard Lloyd George make that promise but, if they had, they would have shouted him down.

Hannah straightened her clothes. She wasn't bleeding, but she'd tasted blood.

*   *   *

I shall put the book down; it takes me over. Oscar's perfumed words could almost be my own. I drift, I dream. And it's dangerous to read another's words when you're trying to find your own. How would he put it? My studio has filled with the rich odor of roses and, when the light autumn wind outside stirs through the trees, I imagine the heavy scent of lilac or the more delicate perfume of a pink flowering thorn. From the corner of the divan where I drape my Persian shawl I can see through the window the falling leaves of a laburnum whose tremulous branches seem unable to hold the browning leaves. That's what he'd say. Leaves snap and flutter through the air, falling to lie where pale yellow flowers drifted months ago. First the yellow, now the green. Without its leaves, that tree will become a dense unwieldy shape, tangled with ugly branches and straggling twigs.

The dim roar of London is like the drone of a distant organ.

I do so love to be alone. In my rented flat I can let my public mask slip away. When I take this small mirror from my purse to check my face I see no sign of an ageing woman. And believe me, brother, I study my face critically. In society salons and sunlit gardens I see other women stare at me looking for cracks, while men stare and hope I will smile. Men and women wonder who and what I am, how old, and I work hard to give the impression that I am imbued with the secrets of eternal woman. On stage, they tell me, I look barely twenty; off-stage, perhaps five years older. What would they say if they knew I was ten years older, thirty-five?

Here in this flatteringly lit studio, the light from my flickering gas jet is soft – blue petals of flame rimmed with white fire – and in such a light, I think, any woman not too advanced in age can appear seductive and lose her years, even if out in the harsher glare she'd be exposed. In metropolitan cities some women never appear in daytime – but I do. I mock with sparkling eyes. I taunt with unblemished skin and full red lips. I am eternal woman.

Yet I'm a traveling shoe-maker's daughter. In that poor area of San Francisco where I trained, how old was I? Twenty-two, when I sailed for Berlin to complete my musical education. The cold uncarpeted Hochshule für Musik where I scraped a student's living. Oh, please don't stop me now: indulge my reminiscences. It's comforting to look back on life. More than comforting, an extravagance, a luxury – and legitimate. It is. If I'm to write my autobiography I have to get my notes in order.

So, those early days … Every life story needs its early days of penury. Think of chorus girl biographies: days of penury, talent recognised, then marriage into aristocracy. My life story won't be like theirs.

Early days, then … Listen, listen. Let me speak. For several years in what we now call fin de siècle Europe I worked as a seamstress and artist's model, and I sold a few drawings of my own. It wasn't a romantic life. I sold drawings, taught piano and I progressed from music into dance – first for that famous pianist, Ferruccio Busoni, then for Marcel Remy, who could never quite decide whether he was an agent or composer and who, because I shan't deny him this, launched my dance career in Vienna. And suddenly I was a success – unique and extraordinary. Everything changed. When I returned to Berlin in 1905 the Berliner Tageblatt said I had greater musical talent, my movements were better suited to the music, it said, I had better control over my body, than Isadora Duncan! Such days. (I must get a copy: I must quote accurately.)

According to rumor, I once danced naked before royalty, I danced in a lion's cage, and at one performance of my Vision of Salome I was ambushed on stage with a freshly severed head that dripped with real blood – which I continued with, and used, as the head of John the Baptist! Oh yeah, my dance was decadent, even then – I courted scandal, drove men mad. Were any of those stories true?

A woman has her secrets.

*   *   *

Light as a twelve-year-old in the rented flat, Maud rose from the divan, left the sitting room and opened the tiny cupboard beneath the stairs. It was just large enough for the travelling trunk which stood upright, its hinged lid opening like a door to reveal the contents. The trunk was almost empty, her clothes and toilet things removed, but it stood ready to be filled again, for the lid to close and bands to fasten. Then it would be ready to accompany her on her ceaseless journeys. A travelling life was tiring, and in theatres around the world, troops of performers had their own old trunks and, no matter how exhausted they were, the perky actresses, singers and chorus girls skipped out on stage every show as fresh and lissom as fairy children. They relied on make-up, but Maud needed none. Almost none. A little kohl and a touch of lipstick.

In the lid of the trunk were shelves, and in some of the shelves were little compartments fastened with poppers on strips of cloth. They gave no security; only the case itself was locked; but the compartments held a traveller's miscellanea, small items that if left loose would rattle. Maud unfastened a tiny cloth door and took out a small parcel wrapped in red velvet and tied with old frayed silk. Though small, the parcel had to be wedged in sideways, corner to corner, to squeeze inside. Maud was alone in the flat, yet instinctively she glanced across her shoulder before lowering her head and pulling the fraying ribbon. She untied the silken knot, drew back the velvet wrap and revealed an oval frame. The velvet fell away and draped her pale white hand. Like a child at her toy cupboard, Maud knelt in silence and, as she gazed at the portrait, she became as still and lifeless as an ivory doll.

THE SECOND VEIL

‘An age that melts in unperceiv'd decay

And glides in modest innocence away’

Samuel Johnson

5

The doors were closed, the room sealed against the world. In a curtained alcove – curtains drawn to prevent musicians from seeing inside the room – the six men of the small orchestra worked through their assigned programme. A curious mixture from Ketelby to Debussy, with a vaguely oriental feel, few of the numbers required all six to play every bar. While the violins held the melody, the oboist and flautist were free. While the woodwinds played – seldom simultaneously – the two violinists were free. The pianist worked hardest – though not continually – and the timpanist had long pauses between runs on his glockenspiel and bells. So all six had opportunities to creep from their chairs and peep through the red curtains. The flautist knew what they'd see; he'd played at a similar do last year, and on that occasion the salon orchestra had been hidden behind an inadequate screen of hothouse palms and flowers.

In the main room this evening, at several dining tables, the women wore fancy dress – fancy undress, the flautist called it – their costumes based, albeit loosely, on the harem fantasy. This was their second Maud Allan Dinner Dance for women only, created to allow free spirits among society ladies to play out the fantasy. They wore beads and gossamer, breastplates, sandals and pearls. They danced to the music, vying with each other to be the most outrageous, or in the case of the older women, most amusing. What made this year even more exciting – daunting for some – was that Margot had persuaded Maud herself to appear. Wisely, Maud had chosen to school the others rather than dance herself and outdo them. She had come in costume but in a more decorous, evening dress version – again, not to compete. She was teacher, they the pupils. And she had been paid to appear.

Maud had been to similar evenings, though this was her first repeat appearance, and she was amused to see that several of the women had been practising – as if society women could learn the art of modern dance from one lesson! But they had practised, she saw. They had little else to do.

The atmosphere in the room, bathed in music, was not that of a dance studio. Too little sweat; too much politeness. Some of the glances were languorous – dancers can be languorous – but few were as fiercely competitive, as sharply critical as in a professional studio. This was play. To an impartial observer – like the musicians, who Maud knew would be