‘Of course there’s nothing like massage, I always say that, but you’ve got to be careful of your diet. That there’s no doubt about at all.’
‘Diet!’ she thought.
‘When I’m sixty I shall let myself go.
I shall eat all the bread and butter I like. I’ll have hot rolls for breakfast, I’ll have potatoes for lunch and potatoes for dinner.
And beer.
God, how I like beer.
Pea soup and tomato soup; treacle pudding and cherry tart.
Cream, cream, cream.
And so help me God, I’ll never eat spinach again as long as I live.’
When the massage was finished Evie brought her a cup of tea, a slice of ham from which the fat had been cut, and some dry toast.
Julia got up, dressed, and went down with Michael to the theatre.
She liked to be there an hour before the curtain rang up.
Michael went on to dine at his club.
Evie had preceded her in a cab and when she got into her dressing-room everything was ready for her.
She undressed once more and put on a dressinggown.
As she sat down at her dressing-table to make up she noticed some fresh flowers in a vase.
‘Hulloa, who sent them?
Mrs de Vries?’
Dolly always sent her a huge basket on her first nights, and on the hundredth night, and the two hundredth if there was one, and in between, whenever she ordered flowers for her own house, had some sent to Julia.
‘No, miss.’
‘Lord Charles?’
Lord Charles Tamerley was the oldest and the most constant of Julia’s admirers, and when he passed a florist’s he was very apt to drop in and order some roses for her.
‘Here’s the card,’ said Evie.
Julia looked at it.
Mr Thomas Fennell.
Tavistock Square.
‘What a place to live.
Who the hell d’you suppose he is, Evie?’
‘Some feller knocked all of a heap by your fatal beauty, I expect.’
‘They must have cost all of a pound.
Tavistock Square doesn’t look very prosperous to me.
For all you know he may have gone without his dinner for a week to buy them.’
‘I don’t think.’
Julia plastered her face with grease paint.
‘You’re so damned unromantic, Evie.
Just because I’m not a chorus girl you can’t understand why anyone should send me flowers.
And God knows, I’ve got better legs than most of them.’
‘You and your legs,’ said Evie.
‘Well, I don’t mind telling you I think it’s a bit of all right having an unknown young man sending me flowers at my time of life.
I mean it just shows you.’
‘If he saw you now ’e wouldn’t, not if I know anything about men.’
‘Go to hell,’ said Julia.
But when she was made up to her satisfaction, and Evie had put on her stockings and her shoes, having a few minutes still to spare she sat down at her desk and in her straggling bold hand wrote to Mr. Thomas Fennell a gushing note of thanks for his beautiful flowers.
She was naturally polite and it was, besides, a principle with her to answer all fan letters.
That was how she kept in touch with her public.
Having addressed the envelope she threw the card in the wastepaper basket and was ready to slip into her first act dress.
The call-boy came round knocking at the dressing-room doors.
‘Beginners, please.’
Those words, though heaven only knew how often she had heard them, still gave her a thrill.
They braced her like a tonic.