Wise Children Read online

  If I hadn’t seen it with my own two eyes, I’d never have believed it. Displayed across his torso there was, if you took the top of his head as the North Pole and the soles of his feet as the South, a complete map of the entire world.

  He flexed his muscles and that funny little three-cornered island with appendages on the right bicep sprang out, the Irish Free State giving a little quiver. The lady accompanist hit the first few notes of ‘God Save the King’ and half the punters, from sheer force of habit, began to struggle to their feet, scattering shed gloves and chocolate papers, but soon sank down again and let him get on with it when the next thing he did was, take off his plus-fours.

  Nora and I were only girls, never seen a man without his trousers on although Grandma had drawn us pictures, and, I must say, we were quite keenly curious so we craned forward eagerly but it turned out he stripped off only to reveal a gee-string of very respectable dimensions, more of a gee-gee string, would have kept a horse decent, and it was made out of the Union Jack. Amply though the garment concealed his privates, now you could see the Cape of Good Hope situated in his navel and observe the Falkland Islands disappear down the crack of his bum when he did his grand patriotic ninety-degree rotation, to the reawakened applause that never quite died down during the entire display but sometimes rose in greater peaks than at other times.

  We gazed enraptured on the flexing pecs. ‘Rule, Britannia’ accompanied his final turn, which revealed how most of his global tattoo was filled in a brilliant pink, although the limelight turned it into morbid, raspberry colour that looked bad for his health.

  Then George made a few passes with his golf club, and simulated bayonet practice with it in his patriotic bathers for a bit, with a few more imitation drumrolls and stern cheers from the crowd. And some had tears in their eyes, I swear, and shouted: ‘Good old George! Hurrah for George!’ But we girls were bemused: what kind of a show was this? Hadn’t Grandma told us that wars were a way to get the young men out of the picture, leave all the women for the ugly old codgers who wouldn’t have got any, otherwise? So we knew what wars were for and, to tell the truth, from George’s joke, it looked as though he thought that that was what fathers always wanted, too.

  And as regards the pink bits on his bum and belly, we knew already in our bones that those of us in the left-hand line were left out of the picture; we were the offspring of the bastard king of England, if you like, and we weren’t going to inherit any of the gravy, so the hell with it.

  After his bayonet practice, Gorgeous George donned his golfing jacket once again, made a reassuringly obscene gesture with that golf club and retired backwards, kissing his hands to the hallooing crowd and murmuring: ‘God bless you!’ We were all three sweating like pigs, so we beat it, sharpish, before anyone noticed we hadn’t paid. The fishermen were out in force on the pier – somebody pulled up a mackerel that shone like a new tin can. Or perhaps it was a tin can. I misremember. It was sixty-odd years ago, you know. They used to fancy those patriotic tableaux, in those days. We didn’t know what to make of it, really. We were just girls, we’d never seen a man’s bare bum before, though one another’s, often.

  Perry ran a finger round his collar to wipe away the sweat. He looked quite dazed.

  ‘I’ll never understand the British,’ he opined, and so say all of us, ducky.

  ‘Now,’ he said to us girls after having ingested several lungfuls of fresh air, ‘you show us what you can do, my little chorines.’

  Sunshine and glitter off the sea and a little breeze and laughter all around us. People being happy. As I remember it, a band struck up out of nowhere. Lovely little band. Nothing elaborate, just three or four pieces, with a drummer. God knows how they got there, unless they’d come down from London on a cheap day excursion, to busk. Or maybe they were booked into the Grand Hotel or something like that, as cabaret. But I certainly seem to remember four Black gentlemen in suits and straw hats, trumpet, trombone, clarinet, percussion. Or perhaps it was Perry on his harmonica, all the time, who provided the music, so that we could dance for him. We danced the Black Bottom for him; we loved the Black Bottom, he’d given us a record, the one about Ma Rainey’s Big Black Bottom. We danced the dance but didn’t sing the song, that would have been presumptuous.

  Instead, we had a think, we held a consultation, we picked out a song in honour of Gorgeous George’s joke, we gave them, ‘Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby,’ and Perry went purple in the face, wanting to laugh and trying to blow at the same time. Then he stowed his harmonica, doffed his boater, took it round the crowd. I can’t remember what happened to the band. They faded away. Would you believe it, a quid? In those days, a quid was a quid. A quid less a tanner, all in small change. He counted it out and handed it over.

  ‘Buy us a cup of tea, you can afford it,’ he said. We went into town to look for a Fuller’s Tea Room because he fancied a bit of walnut cake, too, and that is how we came to find ourselves outside the Theatre Royal.

  ‘Shit,’ said Perry but he said it in American, like this: ‘Shee-it.’

  Melchior Hazard and Company

  in

  Macbeth

  His acclaimed production.

  ‘Sheer Genius.’

  The Times.

  We clustered, we stared, we were overcome, we sought the protection of his bulk, we hid our faces as if shy of the photographs.

  ‘You do know,’ Perry told us, ‘that you ain’t my babies, worse luck. I am not now nor ever have been your father. No. And you do know, don’t you, that he –’

  – gesture towards the photographs –

  ‘is.’

  We nodded. We knew that Melchior Hazard was our father and now we also knew exactly what it was a father did, and how, and where, and who he’d done it to, and what had happened after that. We knew it all. And here he was, treading the boards like billy-oh, in Shakespeare, and weren’t we fresh from singing in the streets? We’d never felt quite so illegitimate in all our lives as we did that day we were thirteen, looking at the glossy photos of Father togged up in a kilt.

  And one of my suspenders had come undone, my left stocking at half-mast.

  Perry drew out his watch, consulted it.

  ‘Birnam Wood,’ he said, ‘is just now creeping up on Dunsinane.’

  I had an inkling of what he might be at and I was frightened.

  ‘Let’s get back to Grandma Chance,’ I said in a strangled voice.

  But, more than anything else in the world, I longed and longed to push through the glass doors and feast my eyes on the sight of my father, my gloriously handsome father, my gifted, sensationally applauded genius of a father, and I knew, without speech, without even so much as glancing at her, that Nora, too, wanted it more than anything. I reached out for Nora’s hand. It was hot and sticky, still a child’s hand, although I suppose we looked like quite young ladies, already, being tall for our ages and we had on the yellow dresses Perry picked out for us in Paris, from Chanel, and the bows on our heads, more coquette than finishing school, to tell the truth. Nymphettes, I suppose they’d call us now. Jail-bait.

  Nora and I clutched each other’s hands.

  ‘Grandma will be wondering where we are,’ said Nora. ‘She’ll worry.’

  But she never budged and her voice broke on ‘worry’, she wailed. Perry looked from one to the other of us forlorn little creatures, tears standing in our eyes, love locked out.

  ‘Dammit,’ he said. ‘Come with me.’

  And grabbed our arms and raced us to the stage door, where a bank note changed hands. Whisked up a draughty backstairs, another bank note went to the dresser who let us into our father’s empty dressing room, put his finger on his lips to tell us to keep our mouths shut, and left us. Perry parked us on the sofa and we gazed with moonstruck adoration at the very towel our father had dried his hands on, the razor he’d shaved with, the greasepaint he’d put on his beloved face – all these things had far more intimate relations with him than we did and seemed almost ho
ly, in our eyes. His mirror, that had the joy and honour of reflecting him.

  I badly wanted to reach out and pinch a stick of his No. 7, to remember him by, but I didn’t dare.

  There was a photo, head and shoulders, of a sheep in a tiara; we eyed it askance. We knew full well who she was; hadn’t we seen her on his arm at the first matinée, when we fell in love with him? (Little did we know then that we’d share our twilight years with her, poor old thing.)

  But don’t think we ransacked the room. Just to sit there and breathe in air he had breathed out was more, much more than we’d ever hoped for. Now we knew for certain that Perry was better than a conjurer, was a genuine magician who could divine our most secret desire of all, the one we’d never confided even to one another because we hadn’t needed to, because I knew she knew and she knew I knew.

  God, we were humble. We’d sneaked off, now and then, now we knew what was what, paid our sixpences, sat in the gods and watched him strut and fret his hour upon the stage, happy with just the sight of him. But as soon as we were in his very dressing room, where we’d never even dared to hope we might one day find ourselves, we grew ambitious. Perhaps, discovering us here so unexpectedly, his lovely girls, lost before birth and now rediscovered on the springtime verge of blossoming (as Irish would have put it), he might let us touch his hand, even allow us to kiss his cheek . . . and we might be permitted, just the once, to say the word we’d never used in all our lives: ‘Father.’

  Father!

  The very thought made our skins prickle.

  Perry, meanwhile, was gazing absently out of the open window at the roof and chimneys and brick backs; a seagull landed on a chimneystack and mewed. There was a gust of military brass brought on the wind from the seafront bandstand: ‘Colonel Bogey’. He drummed his fingertips on the window ledge. If I hadn’t been so stunned and glorified by the prospect at last of meeting him, I might have noted that, for once, our Perry was suffering second thoughts and, if I’d done that, I might have worried more about our welcome. But I was too overwhelmed to make much of it, at the time. It was warm and close in the dressing room, our armpits moistened. All of a sudden I wanted to pee.

  Enormous volumes of applause surged through the old building and, when it faded away, then, more quickly than we thought could have been possible, so that we had no time at all to prepare ourselves, as if he’d flown from the stage to the dressing room on wires, there he was.

  He was tall, dark and handsome. God, he was handsome, in those days. And smashing legs, which a man must have for Shakespeare, especially the Scottish play; you need a good calf to get away with a kilt. I do believe we get the legs from him, as well as the cheekbones.

  I did piss myself when I saw him, in fact, but only a little bit, hardly enough to stain the sofa.

  Such eyes! Melchior’s eyes, warm and dark and sexy as the inside of a London cab in wartime. His eyes.

  But those very eyes, those knicker-shifting, unfasten-your-brassiere-from-the-back-of-the-gallery eyes, were the bitterest disappointment of my life till then. No. Of all my life, before and since. No disappointment ever after measured up to it. Because those eyes of his looked at us but did not see us, even as we sat there, glowing because we couldn’t help it; our helpless mouths started to smile.

  To see him fail to see me wiped that smile right off my face, I can tell you, and off Nora’s, too. Our father’s eyes skidded right over us, never touched us, didn’t make contact. They came to rest on Perry.

  ‘Peregrine!’ he cried. His voice still sends a shiver down my spine to this day. Up he pops on the telly, tamping down his pipe. ‘Rich, dark, fruity . . .’ You can say that, again.

  He held out his hands in greeting to Perry, to Perry only.

  ‘Peregrine . . . how nice of you to come and visit me.’ And then, and only then, we got our little crumb of attention although it shot us down like the same bullet through both hearts.

  ‘And you’ve brought your lovely daughters, too!’

  I have a memory, although I know it cannot be a true one, that Peregrine swept us up into his arms. That when our father denied us, Peregrine spread his arms as wide as wings and gathered up the orphan girls, pressed us so close we crushed against his waistcoat, bruising our cheeks on his braces’ buttons. Or perhaps he slipped us one in each pocket of his jacket. Or crushed us far inside his shirt, against his soft, warm belly, to be sustained by the thumping comfort of his heart. And then, hup! he did a back-flip out of the window with us, saving us. But I know I am imagining the back-flip and the flight.

  But, truly, what he did was, he held out his arms to us and we scampered to harbour, whimpering.

  ‘It’s a wise child that knows its own father,’ hissed Peregrine, like the gypsy’s warning. ‘But wiser yet the father who knows his own child.’

  He slammed the door behind us. Us. Unkissed, unwelcome, worse than unacknowledged. Our washers were leaking, I can tell you. How we blubbered. Cried so much we couldn’t see where we were going but all at once there we were, back on the beach, transferred from Perry to Ma Chance’s voluminous arms and she dried our eyes, sent Our Cyn for a jug of hot tea from a café, so we had some of that, to give us strength, and a cream bun or two that Perry extricated from Grandma’s cleavage along with a big puff of talc, to bring back a smile to our lips, which we managed palely, so as not to disappoint him, and we had something to nibble on, to take our minds off, but not much appetite, I can tell you.

  It turned out that Our Cyn and the cabby had got along so well together on their day out they’d decided to make a go of it so it was kisses and handshakes all round and Cyn sat in the front with him while Nora and I leaned on Perry’s shoulders as we drove back to London through the yellowish, greenish light of a Sussex evening, sweet summer coming in through the windows and the low murmur of the voices of Perry and Grandma talking softly so as not to disturb us as we trembled on the brink of sleep, for it had truly been an exhausting day, but we didn’t nod off altogether until Norbury so they had to carry us up to our little beds in the back attic which, at that time, in our white girlhood, we shared.

  Cyn and the cabby wanted to go up West, to celebrate, so they dropped Perry off at Eaton Square. Eaton Square? That’s what Cyn told us. What could he be doing in Eaton Square, on the spur of the moment, the naughty boy? They left him on the front steps of a most elegant dwelling, he was straightening his tie and dusting off his jacket. He tipped his boater at them as they drove off, flashed them his great, big, cheeky grin.

  Love him as I did, I must confess he had a wicked streak.

  Although our half-sisters, old Wheelchair’s girls, resembled sheep with bright red fleece when grown, they were bald as any other baby when they were born, the dead spit of one another, not far away from Bard Road as the crow flies but the crow is a bit of a prole as far as the bird world goes and most other birds would think those girls were born in a different country, with Sheraton furniture, Persian rugs, constant hot water, and staff, and christened Saskia and Imogen in long lace clothes at St John’s Smith Square, shortly thereafter to be photographed with Mamma, the ‘loveliest lady in London’, by Cecil Beaton, and have their picture published in the Sketch, caption: ‘Darling buds of May’. For it was in May that they were born, the same day as the first of Our Cyn’s five.

  We started the very same day those two were born, as it happens. Funny coincidence. I went to have a wee and there was the evidence, all over my underwear. I hotfooted it to Nora and she took a look on her own account. Same thing with her. Grandma got us some cotton wool. Although we are asymmetrical, in many ways, we always, funnily enough, came on in unison every time since that first time, barring accidents; came on in unison until we stopped, short, never to go again, the tap turned off just twenty-five years ago.

  I always think there was a sort of mean connection between their birth and our puberty. Typical dirty trick that Saskia might pull on us, that we should turn into women just at the very moment when they turn into bab
ies. Always a different generation. That’s the rub. We’ve never been equals. They’ve always had that final edge on us. So rich. So well-connected. So legitimate.

  Sod all that.

  So young.

  ‘Darling buds of May.’ Grandma Chance did sums upon her fingers and assumed an inscrutable expression but the proud parents looked pleased as punch with the new arrivals although Perry seemed strangely sad, these days, when Saskia and Imogen took the air in a high-wheeled baby carriage pushed by a ribboned nanny while Dora and Nora pounded away on splintering boards the length and breadth. Glasgow Empire. Prince’s, Edinburgh. Royalty, Perth. Freeze off a girl’s bum, the winters up there. Somebody threw a grouse on stage, once, as a gesture of appreciation. Not even a pair. That was in Aberdeen. Tight as arseholes, in Aberdeen.

  We pounded the boards like nobody’s business because, by that time, Perry had lost all his moolah in the Wall Street crash, every red cent, and couldn’t keep up his contributions any more, so it was just as well we girls could earn our living because after that we had to.

  When he came to say goodbye, it was by tram. Lo, how the mighty have fallen. No cab softly ticking away on the kerb, this time. No chocolates from Charbonnel & Walker. And he’d weaned us off Phul Nana (‘Phew!’) only to find he couldn’t afford to give us the French stuff any more. Not that we cared. We only thought how much we’d miss him. We sat on the arms of his chair, one on each side, and watched him eat his buttered crumpets, too down at heart to eat anything ourselves.

  He’d work his passage home, he said. Home, to that part of the torso of Gorgeous George that was not tinted pink. He’d work his Atlantic passage on the liner doing tricks in the ballroom after dinner.

  ‘What will you do once you get there?’ asked Grandma Chance, shoving another pan of crumpets under the grill because he was eating as if he might not eat again until he reached Los Angeles.

  ‘Go into the movies,’ said Peregrine.

  Dora and Nora. Two girls pounding the boards. At Christmas, we did a panto. One year we did Jack and the Beanstalk at Kennington. Would you believe a live theatre in Kennington, once upon a time? Alive and kicking. Beans, in green tights; our speciality number was Mexican jumping beans, in red tights. Two pounds a week each. It went a long way, in those days. Those were the days of pounds, shillings and pence. Two pounds was forty silver shillings; forty shillings was four hundred and eighty of those big, brown, cartwheel pennies that made your hands smell, and every one of those pennies had a hole ready and waiting for it to patch in the threadbare economy of 49 Bard Road. Being at Kennington was a saving on digs. We lived at home, we came home on the night tram, every bone in our body aching in concert and our feet burning, we girls half asleep, half awake, propping against one another, rain slashing the window, soaking our coats as we ran from the stop for home. If we caught cold, disaster! Even identical Mexican jumping beans were expendable so we jumped away with low fevers and septic throats and influenza and the curse, jump, jump, jump, carrying on smiling, smilin’ thru’, show those teeth, kick those legs, tote that barge, lift that bale.