Skylark (17 page)

Annie chuckled. She was a tough woman, Annie: not born to the boards, as we say, but a true musician, who grew up in an ordinary, non-performing family. So much life she had lived, and much of it sad.

‘Lily,’ she said to me once (she was the only one who called me Lily: we had shared our stories of the Bendigo goldfields), ‘what possesses me to fall in love with musicians? My first — my singing teacher, an older man — left me a widow when I was hardly out of childhood. You’d think I would have been warned off, but no, I had to fall for my Charles, who will never settle, I suppose.’

Charles was not an easy man to live with. Genial, certainly, and clever, outrageously handsome with his golden hair parted down the centre, eyes the colour of cornflowers, and his trimmed yellow moustache that the barber must keep just so. But he was even more wedded to the bottle than my Bully. The two men would drink all hours of the night. Several nights at the Prince, poor tired Annie, having sung her items and given three encores of ‘The Mocking Bird’, which was her special, would have to sit on a stool at the side of the stage, prompting her husband, who was too drunk to remember the lines of his latest creation. Annie and I sometimes sang duets together at the Prince, competing to see whose voice could rise higher or louder. The diggers would cheer us on, even laying bets on their favourite. We would get the giggles sometimes and have to stop mid-line. But it was all good fun and a tonic for me to have a friend.

Charles could sniff out the mood of these diggers and produce a song to suit every time. He could overstep the mark, mind. Once Annie had to charm the local land agent, whom the Inimitable had enraged, into dropping a libel suit.

‘Oh never mind,’ she said on that occasion, when I
commiserated
with her. ‘We won’t be here much longer. Your Bully tricked us into believing his establishment was booming. It is certainly not. Charles’s sharp nose for a richer vein will take us away soon, count on it.’

She could laugh and sing sweetly on stage, but the Annie I knew was sadder, lonelier. Like me.

That particular night, as we soaked our feet together, she was in good spirits, though. ‘I hear,’ she pursued, watching me closely, ‘that there is a prize offered to a barber who will settle the matter of the ear.’

I nodded primly, but couldn’t stifle a little giggle.

‘Does Bully know about the wager?’ Annie was as persistent as a mosquito, probing, probing. She loved a gossip, did Annie. In truth I never knew an entertainer who didn’t.

‘He does not,’ I said with a warning frown. ‘Nor should he,
otherwise he’ll never set foot in any barber’s. So mum’s the word, if you please.’

We dried our feet and went wearily off to our separate beds. I admired Annie. She managed to appear freshly laundered, ruffled and ribboned every night, though the floor was mud, the canvas roof mildewed and the diggers filthy. She would sing her songs and flash her painted eyes at the men, while never letting a one of them within a yard of her pretty dress or shapely ankle. A true professional. Annie wore her dark hair in little ringlets each side of her face and was as fussy as the Inimitable about her looks. I suppose I looked rougher in those days, though I did my best. We could have been sisters, Annie and me; both dark hair and eyes, both slim and not particularly tall. Annie was the older, by my guess, though she never said her age. She had refined manners, eating with a knife and fork, and patting her little mouth with a napkin after every few bites, but for all that she had the knack of turning it on for the men — enjoying it, too — then stepping away from all the ugliness and drunken behaviour, to become a proper well-bred lady, as if someone had rung a bell: ding dong, time’s up! I tried to learn the knack, but was younger, and of course near term with child. It all seemed too hard.

The day came when Mr Jones the barber stepped out from his little shack to stop me in the street. He wiped the sharp blade of his razor and nodded in a friendly way. I guessed what was coming, but pretended innocence.

‘Good morning, Mrs Hayes,’ he said, all polite. To see a smile on that sour face was as unlikely as a woman’s bonnet on his knobby head.

I nodded to him and drew my shawl closer over the bulge of my baby. The sight of that sharp razor, which never left his hand, terrified me.

‘Your husband, now, Mrs Hayes,’ the rough fellow said, ‘could do with a shave and a smarten up. Mr Thatcher has been to me today and is looking his best. Why not send your good man down, while I have a moment to spare?’

I kept a straight face. ‘My husband is not a man to take orders from his wife, Mr Jones, as I am sure you will be aware. But I will pass on your suggestion.’ Or some such polite rejoinder.

So here was my chance to move the matter ahead. It was a bitter, grey day: autumn had scarcely touched the Arrow. We seemed to be sliding from a puny summer directly into
iron-hard
frosts and violent winds. I hurried back up the rutted road, beating against the rising southerly.

Bully was at breakfast, having risen late. He seemed to need little sleep, but what he took was always in the morning. He smiled at me through a mouthful of bacon.

‘Well, Mrs Hayes, how is my son this morning?’ Bully always spoke of the baby as a son. I believe he had a daughter or two elsewhere, unloved, discarded. He wanted a son to bring up in the wild, seafaring, piratical ways of his father. Bully gestured to me to sit and eat. I made an effort to stuff down a mouthful of the greasy, tainted stuff. Vegetables or a fresh piece of fruit was all I could think of in those days.

Luckily Bully was in a good mood. I made conversation for a moment or two, and then passed on the barber’s invitation.

‘It’s true,’ I said casually, ‘that Mr Thatcher is looking smart today. A good clean chin and trim locks.’

Bully passed a greasy hand over his long hair, which was roughly tied behind with a leather thong. He fingered his cheeks and felt the coarseness of several days’ stubble.

‘Well, I might go,’ he said, and continued with his eating.

I left it at that. Dragged my weary bones to the wash-stand where last night’s bedraggled gown waited for a sprucing up. A dab here and there and a brush down was the best I could manage. I possessed but two costumes and both of them tattered. What wouldn’t I give to have the freedom of Mrs Foley’s trunk of silks and satins!

I didn’t dare go down to the barber’s to watch. Bully must not suspect me. But Annie saw it all.

‘I’d heard a whisper that the deed was to be done,’ she said to
me that night, before the show, after all hell had broken loose. Though I was still reeling from Bully’s fury, and not to mention black and blue, I was dying to hear the full story.

‘Charles and I just happened to be wandering down towards the river,’ said Annie with a wicked grin. ‘Seems quite a few others had the same idea. Oh, Lily, you should have been there!’ Then, remembering that Bully was my husband, ‘Well, perhaps not! That Jones fellow had set up his stool and basin outside his little shack — to allow the customers to enjoy the sun while it shines, so he said. Bully sat there, chatting to a passerby or two, enjoying what he imagined was his popularity, the poor fool. Excuse the term, Lily, but he is not the brightest star in the firmament.’

I could have put her right there: Bully was as cunning as a rat when it came to his plans. It was his vanity that let him down — or so I had hoped in this case. I urged her on. In the bar room beyond, a noisy crowd was gathering, calling for the lamps to be lit and the entertainment to begin. Soon we would be called on to sing. Bully sulked in our little back room, his head bandaged and a large tot of brandy helping to salve his wounded pride.

‘Well,’ Annie continued, me glued to every word, ‘that barber flourished his blade and made a great show of his skill around the chops, taking care to leave the moustache and little beard intact. “Now a little trim of the hair, Sir?” asked Mr Jones, all professional, his face set like jelly, not a hint of what was in store. We all heard Bully instruct him to leave the locks long about the ears, just a little tidy up on top. Oh Lily, it was hard to keep a straight face. My Charles stepped up and asked him a question or two about the evening’s performance, and Bully, pleased to be in the company of a famous man, preened and laughed and left the barber to his snipping. Well, and you have heard of the uproar that followed.’

We both had to stifle our laughter lest Bully heard.

Annie whispered the final act in the scene. ‘That giant of a fellow, George Honeywell, you know him, Lily, one of our regulars, steps up and peers at the now smart Bully Hayes, standing proudly beside my Charles. “Oh Bully,” says George
Honeywell, “What’s that up there by your ear?” Then he steps back, feigning dismay. “Oh I am so sorry, Bully, I don’t mean to pry.” And turning to the others who are gathering, flies to boiled mutton, he says in a voice that surely reached right down to the Chinese settlement. “Dear-oh-dear, our poor Bully has lost an ear. However did that happen? Was yer born like that Bully, deformed like, or did someone remove it for yer?” Another in the crowd shouted out, “I heard that they chop the ears of cheaters and thieves back in Australie. Maybe that was the sad fact, eh Bully?” And back skips Mr Honeywell, Lily, before your husband can clip him one.’

Annie did all the accents and speech as if it were a play, and I could just hear the farce that would develop when the Buckingham boys worked it up. Oh, I have to admit that my traitorous heart was singing! I could fill in Annie on the next scene. There was I, fidgeting at home, in a lather — ha ha! — to know if the plan had worked. Soon I was left in no doubt. Bully rushed in, buzzing like an angry hornet. I played my part with words of comfort and shock. Wrapped a bandage around his livid earhole. He could not bear for a soul to see it. Off he charged again into town, threatening to kill Stanley Jones, me waddling behind showing concern like any decent wife. The barber was a good six inches taller than Bully and stood his ground, his flashing razor held high in one hand and the leather strop in the other. A fearsome sight.

‘Now, Bully,’ growled Mr Jones, ‘I may have trimmed a little too far on that side, but how was I to know those locks hid such a hideous sight?’

‘Hideous?’ screeched Bully. ‘I’ll show you hideous!’ He looked around for a weapon.

But the barber advanced into the street, not one whit afeared, and made to strop his razor on Bully’s face. Bully reared backwards and fell in the mud, humiliated all over again. To be honest I felt sorry then, and went to help him up. But that man, enraged by his impotence, took it out on his own weak wife. With a roar he struck at me. I went sprawling, cumbersome as I was with the child:
otherwise I could have turned it into a stunt and flipped over him. My so-called husband, Bully by name, bully by deed, left me struggling there, my one good dress smeared with mud, and blood trickling into my eye where his ring had cut me.

That was the end of any soft feeling on my part for Captain Bully Hayes.

The farce was a triumph.
The Barberous Barber: Or The Lather and the Shave
they called it. I wrote two songs, a bawdy chorus and another sweeter one which Emily performed, playing myself, the pitiful wife knocked down in the street. The Provincial played to full houses every night. You could hear the guffaws ringing across the street and echoing in our empty Prince of Wales.

[Archivist’s Note: It has been pointed out to me (by my ever-vigilant editor) that orthodox biographers (!) of the celebrated incident with the razor have the Inimitable Thatcher and Annie Vitelli arriving to perform at the Arrow goldfields shortly after Bully’s ear was unmasked, not before, as Lily’s journal suggests. I have checked the records. Unfortunately, copies of advertisements and newspapers of the time are not complete. I believe an assumption has been made by earlier biographers, based on those incomplete records. Lily says they were there. Surely she would know. E. de M.]

Bully raged about the town in his bandaged head, looking for a culprit, cursing the Buckinghams, drinking himself stupid every night. The Thatchers decided to leave town.

I walked with Annie and Charles down to the stagecoach. Oh how I wished I was leaving too. Annie was not well that morning — the baby inside giving her some grief — and Charles was the attentive husband, taking her arm and making kind conversation to keep her spirits up, even though he had been up most of the night drinking and was surely feeling the worse for wear. I thought of Maria’s advice back in Auckland: that an entertainer must marry someone of like occupation; that travelling was the way of life for us and could not be denied. Was I only courting disaster to be thinking of Jack?

‘Good luck with your baby,’ said Annie sadly as they climbed
aboard. ‘I suspect we are both doomed to give birth in the slums of a goldfield.’

That remark chilled me to the bone. My mother died in childbirth at Bendigo. I determined to escape to a more civilised place before I was due.

The weather and the dwindling gold assisted my plans rather more than the ridicule directed at Bully. I had thought he would surely leave immediately, but he was a stubborn man, Bully Hayes. He was not of a mind to be thought a coward.

The winter was bitter. Several diggers died of scurvy and other ailments, others simply froze to death. Those who managed to struggle down to our little township from Macetown told of fearsome conditions up that narrow mountainous valley: snow and ice, searing winds, hunger. One skeleton of a fellow who begged a crust at our back door told how his pan froze solid to the ground each night if he didn’t take it into his tent and sleep with it! A chilly sort of a wife, he said, trying to force the joke through his chapped lips. Even the hardiest diggers were losing heart and drifting off to kinder goldfields. Business slumped. The famous farce began to lose its audience.

Then came the night of the great storm. All day the wind had howled through the valley, picking up any loose dish or piece of washing and whirling it skywards. By evening several tents had torn loose from their moorings, to be chased down the street by their despairing owners. Bully was still sulking, still wrapping his head in a bandage. We had no entertainment that night, which was just as well, as it turned out. Even the toughest of the dancing girls cowered in their accommodation, afraid to walk down the lane for fear of what flying debris might strike them.