Wise Children Read online

  But Nora’s own first sexual encounter, cold and drunken, down a dark alley, as Dora reports it, as it happens, is with a married man, yes, but also a pantomime goose. Some might want to call it cheap and squalid realism, she suggests, but panto is full of wish-fulfilment and life can be larger than itself, if we choose to let it.

  Carter liked, herself, to be a bit unexpectedly larger-than-life. She notes, in one of her last introductions to her books, the liberation in being ‘notoriously foul-mouthed’, a ‘soft-spoken, middle-aged English gentlewoman who swears like a trooper when roused.’8 More than a decade earlier she’d written to Lorna Sage about a particular legacy of wisdom she’d like to leave any daughter she might have. Having met the drunken, self-lacerating novelist, Elizabeth Smart, at a literary party and having been prompted by this to remember her own dislike of what she saw as a self-indulgent, self-hurting streak in some writers who happened to be women, she wrote to Sage about why she’d decided to take a place on the board of the brand new venture in publishing that would become Virago books. ‘I am moved towards it by the desire that no daughter of mine should ever be in a position to be able to write BY GRAND CENTRAL STATION I SAT DOWN AND WEPT, exquisite prose though it might contain. BY GRAND CENTRAL STATION I TORE OFF HIS BALLS would be more like it, I should hope.’9

  The buoyancy in Wise Children is all to do with what you might call an equivalent largeness of voice – and with its darker twin, its mirror opposite, silence. ‘The rest is silence’ is a line straight out of tragedy. The trick of the live voice is to refuse, like Austen, to dwell on guilt and misery. The life and soul of Wise Children is Dora, whom Carter herself called ‘Englishness as a persona,’10 and Dora’s personality is her indefatigable first-person delivery – her voice. ‘It’s the American tragedy in a nutshell. They look around the world and think: “There must be something better!” But there isn’t. Sorry, chum. This is it. What you see is what you get. Only the here and now,’ as she says, in chapter three, whose theme is heaven and its impossibility, in a voice careful to soften and humanise its own blow with every cliché.

  Cliché is always larger than life, and a kind of oral communal agreement in itself. Carter was particularly drawn to the politics of voice – how the oral tradition often outwits, and is often the live source, for the written. ‘It’s an accident of the twentieth century that I’m literate,’ she said, recalling her own family history, since literacy was had by chance, in the shape of an early Scottish education for members of her father’s family and, on her mother’s side, a much later education via ‘that Education Act in the 1880s . . . This elevation of the named writer has always seemed to me very very unfair on something like 95% of the human race, who didn’t have the ability to write, but which didn’t stop them, you know, inventing things . . . One of the things I’ve always deeply respected about Shakespeare – it was obvious he didn’t very much care whether he was published or not. I mean it seems to me that he really is in many respects something rather archaic in that he did actually write for the voice.’11

  Dora Chance is the only completely female first-person protagonist in Carter’s novels – one who knows, like Carter, that ‘we carry our history on our tongues,’ and knows too that she’s very much an illegitimate chronicler, that the female voice has had much less chance to be recorded over time, history being what it is. A brilliant creation, Dora’s voice infers a double act, individual and communal at once, speaking for an experience communally had, a life communally lived. She loves cliché, which keeps so many dangerous stories survivable: ‘What hoops the kept woman has to jump to work her passage.’ And cliché can be sexy: ‘to travel hopefully is better than to arrive, as Uncle Perry used to say. I always preferred foreplay too.’

  ‘The unofficial chronicler’ is the more literary sister in a duo whose names summon connections with twentieth-century male giants of thought and literature, Freud and Joyce, and whose characters escape the fates of their inferred namesakes. This particular Dora is a writer able to take issue with her own literary ‘education’ at the hands of her American boyfriend, Irish (a thinly disguised F. Scott Fitzgerald): ‘a man of parts even if some of them didn’t work too well.’ Finally, Dora’s role as narrator is a double-edged one, as Carter, who saw Dora’s voice as close to a stand-up performance, likes to remind us from time to time. Is she maybe nothing more than a batty, drunk old woman, ‘in her ratty old fur and poster paint, her orange (Persian Melon) toenails sticking out of her snakeskin peep-toes, reeking of liquor’ who wants you to buy her a drink and to regale you with her life story? Because if she is – even if she’s the female twentieth-century version of the Ancient Mariner – then she’ll also, the very next moment, be the author of a knowing literary jolt of a paragraph like this:

  But truthfully, these glorious pauses do, sometimes, occur in the discordant but complementary narratives of our lives and if you choose to stop the story there, at such a pause, and refuse to take it any further, then you can call it a happy ending.

  In that essay on Colette, Carter wrote about the moment in Simone de Beauvoir’s memoirs when she records the surreality of her being in the same room as (if not actually speaking to) Colette. ‘Of course,’ Carter mused, ‘Colette could no more have written The Second Sex than de Beauvoir could have danced naked on a public stage, which precisely defines the limitations of both these great ladies.’12 Carter’s final great creation is a lot closer than either of them to being capable of both.

  Wise Children’s insouciance is near stoic. A book about old ladies is, helplessly, going to be a book about ‘the way of all flesh’. ‘Whence came we? Whither goeth we? I know the answer to the second question, of course. Bound for oblivion, nor leave a wrack behind.’ It’s a limelight novel that knows the dark, that ‘wars are facts we cannot fuck away’. Its insouciance is its response in the face of tragedy, poverty, illegitimacy, hierarchy, and most grave of all, ‘untimely death.’ What to do? ‘We’ll go on singing and dancing until we drop in our tracks, won’t we kids?’ In her critical writings Carter associates lightness with stoicism more than once. She comments on one of the movie stars she was most fascinated by, Louise Brooks, who, in Pabst’s Pandora’s Box, ‘typifies the subversive violence inherent in beauty and a light heart.’13 In a book as much about the degeneration game as it is about generation and generations, Dora and Nora, in their seventies, at the fag end of the British empire, go to a broken-down old cinema and see the film of their young selves in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ‘two batty old tarts with their eyes glued to their own ghosts.’

  In the face of this, a book whose celebration of the life-force is so very forceful, whose countless births and birthdays and rebirths from the dead crescendo in its great fertile explosion of an ending, is a designed kindness. Wise Children is, from start to finish, a performance – an act. And what an act. It’s an act of love. It’s an act of suspension of disbelief – in other words, an act which invites belief. It’s an act of survival. It’s an act of voice against silence. It’s an act of communality – and the proof that a role like mother, father, even self, can be taken by more than one person, in other words, can be shared. And it’s an act of mending broken things of the past, too, a backhand gift to history from a writer who liked, in her wisdom, to demonstrate that the given shape of things can – if we use our imaginations – be altered. ‘Hope for the best, expect the worst.’ By the end this catchphrase has been turned on its head. It ends in hope.

  Carter’s last heroine knows how to role-reverse. She takes the potentially abject story of her own mother, Kitty, a mere ghost of a gone girl, and gives her a presence and a sexual power that’s ‘bold as brass’. ‘My Aunt Cynthia,’ Carter told Paul Bailey in the late radio interview, not long before she died,

  we called her Kitty. My Aunt Kitty was a desperately unhappy and unfulfilled woman who went mad, spectacularly, in her sixties, and died . . . in Springfield Mental Hospital . . . She had a soubrette personality . . . which had always
been thwarted. She was at a secondary school round here towards the end of the 1914 war and my grandmother was asked in and they wondered what they were going to do with Kit, what she was going to do when she left school, and my grandmother said, in all innocence and seriousness, well, we always thought she could go on the halls . . . and she never did, I mean the headmistress thought that my grandmother had suggested that she should go on the streets . . . and Kit became a clerk, and was very unhappy, as I say. And I thought, you know, that maybe I would send her on the halls.14

  Wise Children lets the lost be found and the old be young. It invents impossible fertilities. It renews everything it touches. It bursts with energy, passion, wit, hilarity, hope, skill, art and love. Resurrective in so many ways, it’s Carter’s final legacy, and it’s a legacy of good, fierce, raucous potential. What a wisdom. What a joy.

  Ali Smith, 2006

  One

  WHY IS LONDON like Budapest?

  A. Because it is two cities divided by a river.

  Good morning! Let me introduce myself. My name is Dora Chance. Welcome to the wrong side of the tracks.

  Put it another way. If you’re from the States, think of Manhattan. Then think of Brooklyn. See what I mean? Or, for a Parisian, it might be a question of rive gauche, rive droite. With London, it’s the North and South divide. Me and Nora, that’s my sister, we’ve always lived on the left-hand side, the side the tourist rarely sees, the bastard side of Old Father Thames.

  Once upon a time, you could make a crude distinction, thus: the rich lived amidst pleasant verdure in the North speedily whisked to exclusive shopping by abundant public transport while the poor eked out miserable existences in the South in circumstances of urban deprivation condemned to wait for hours at windswept bus-stops while sounds of marital violence, breaking glass and drunken song echoed around and it was cold and dark and smelled of fish and chips. But you can’t trust things to stay the same. There’s been a diaspora of the affluent, they jumped into their diesel Saabs and dispersed throughout the city. You’d never believe the price of a house round here, these days. And what does the robin do then, poor thing?

  Bugger the robin! What would have become of us, if Grandma hadn’t left us this house? 49 Bard Road, Brixton, London, South West Two. Bless this house. If it wasn’t for this house, Nora and I would be on the streets by now, hauling our worldlies up and down in plastic bags, sucking on the bottle for comfort like babes unweaned, bursting into songs of joy when finally admitted to the night shelter and therefore chucked out again immediately for disturbing the peace, to gasp and freeze and finally snuff it disregarded on the street and blow away like rags. That’s a thought for a girl’s seventy-fifth birthday, what?

  Yes! Seventy-five. Happy birthday to me. Born in this house, indeed, this very attic, just seventy-five years ago, today. I made my bow five minutes ahead of Nora who is, at this very moment, downstairs, getting breakfast. My dearest sister. Happy birthday to us.

  This is my room. We don’t share. We’ve always respected one another’s privacy. Identical, well and good; Siamese, no. Everything slightly soiled, I’m sorry to say. Can’t be doing with wash, wash, wash, polish, polish, polish, these days, when time is so precious, but take a good look at the signed photos stuck in the dressing-table mirror – Ivor; Noel; Fred and Adèle; Jack; Ginger; Fred and Ginger; Anna, Jessie, Sonnie, Binnie. All friends and colleagues, once upon a time. See the newest one, a tall girl, slender, black curls, enormous eyes, no drawers, ‘your very own Tiffany’ and lots of XXXXXs. Isn’t she lovely? Our beloved godchild. We tried to put her off show business but she wasn’t having any. ‘What’s good enough for you two is good enough for me.’ ‘Show business’, right enough; a prettier girl than little Tiff you never saw but she’s showed her all.

  What did we do? Got it in one. We used to be song and dance girls. We can still lift a leg higher than your average dog, if called for.

  Hello, hello . . . here comes one of the pussy cats, out of the wardrobe, stretching and yawning. She can smell the bacon. There’s another, white, with marmalade patches, sleeping on my pillow. Dozens more roam freely. The house smells of cat, a bit, but more of geriatric chorine – cold cream, face powder, dress preservers, old fags, stale tea.

  ‘Come and have a cuddle, Pussy.’

  You’ve got to have something to cuddle. Does Pussy want its breakfast, then? Give us a minute, Puss, let’s have a look out of the window.

  Cold, bright, windy, spring weather, just like the day that we were born, when the Zeppelins were falling. Lovely blue sky, a birthday present in itself. I knew a boy, once, with eyes that colour, years ago. Bare as a rose, not a hair on him; he was too young for body hair. And sky-blue eyes.

  You can see for miles, out of this window. You can see right across the river. There’s Westminster Abbey, see? Flying the St George’s cross, today. St Paul’s, the single breast. Big Ben, winking its golden eye. Not much else familiar, these days. This is about the time that comes in every century when they reach out for all that they can grab of dear old London, and pull it down. Then they build it up again, like London Bridge in the nursery rhyme, goodbye, hello, but it’s never the same. Even the railway stations, changed out of recognition, turned into souks. Waterloo. Victoria. Nowhere you can get a decent cup of tea, all they give you is Harvey Wallbangers, filthy cappuccino. Stocking shops and knicker outlets everywhere you look. I said to Nora: ‘Remember Brief Encounter, how I cried buckets? Nowhere for them to meet on a station, nowadays, except in a bloody knicker shop. Their hands would have to shyly touch under cover of a pair of Union Jack boxer shorts.’

  ‘Come off it, you sentimental sod,’ said Nora. ‘The only brief encounter you had during the war was a fling with a Yank behind the public convenience on Liverpool Street Station.’

  ‘I was only doing my bit for the war effort,’ I replied sedately, but she wasn’t listening, she started to giggle.

  ‘’ere, Dor’, smashing name for a lingerie shop – Brief Encounter.’ She doubled up.

  Sometimes I think, if I look hard enough, I can see back into the past. There goes the wind, again. Crash. Over goes the dustbin, all the trash spills out . . . empty cat-food cans, cornflakes packets, laddered tights, tea leaves . . . I am at present working on my memoirs and researching family history – see the word processor, the filing cabinet, the card indexes, right hand, left hand, right side, left side, all the dirt on everybody. What a wind! Whooping and banging all along the street, the kind of wind that blows everything topsy-turvy.

  Seventy-five, today, and a topsy-turvy day of wind and sunshine. The kind of wind that gets into the blood and drives you wild. Wild!

  And I give a little shiver because suddenly I know, I know it in my ancient water, that something will happen today. Something exciting. Something nice, something nasty, I don’t give a monkey’s. Just as long as something happens to remind us we’re still in the land of the living.

  We boast the only castrato grandfather clock in London.

  The plaque on the dial of our grandfather in the front hall says it was made in Inverness in 1846 and, as far as I know, it is a unique example of an authentic Highland-style grandfather clock and as such was exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Its High-landness consists of a full set of antlers, eight points, on top of it. Sometimes we use the antlers as a hat rack, if either of us happens to go out wearing a hat, which doesn’t happen often, but now and then, when it rains. This clock has got a lot of sentimental value for Nora and me. It came to us from our father. His only gift and even then it came by accident. Great, tall, butch, horny mahogany thing, but it gives out the hours in a funny little falsetto ping and always the wrong hour, always out by one. We never got round to fixing it. To tell the truth, it makes us laugh, always has. It was all right until Grandma fixed it. All she did was tap it and the weights dropped off. She always had that effect on gentlemen.

  But, as I passed by our grandfather clock this windy birthday morning, cats scamper
ing in front of me maddened by the smell of bacon, it struck. And struck. And struck. And this time got it right, straight on the nosey – eight o’clock!

  ‘Nor’! Nor’! Something’s up! Granddad in the hall got the right time, for once!’

  ‘Something else is up, too,’ Nora says in a gratified voice and slings me a thick, white envelope with a crest on the back. ‘Our invites have arrived at last.’

  She starts to pour out tea, while Wheelchair fizzes and stutters when I pull out that stiff, white card we thought would never come.

  The Misses Dora and Leonora Chance

  are invited

  to a celebration to mark the one hundredth birthday

  of

  Sir Melchior Hazard

  ‘One Man in his Time Plays Many Parts.’

  Wheelchair fizzed, sputtered and boiled right over; she screeched fit to bust but Nora consoled her:

  ‘Hold hard, ducky, we’re never going to leave you behind! Yes, Cinders, you shall go to the ball, even if you aren’t mentioned by name on the invite. Let’s have all the skeletons out of the closet, today, of all days! God knows, we deserve a spot of bubbly after all these years.’

  I squinted at the RSVP, to that posh house in Regent’s Park and Lady Hazard, the third and present spouse. Whereas our poor old Wheelchair, here, was his first, which accounts for her spleen, as ex, at failing to feature personally on the invitation. And the Misses Leonora and Dora, that is, yours truly, are, of course, Sir Melchior Hazard’s daughters, though not, ahem, by any of his wives. We are his natural daughters, as they say, as if only unmarried couples do it the way that nature intended. His never-by-him officially recognised daughters, with whom, by a bizarre coincidence, he shares a birthday.