Wise Children Page 3

  ‘They’ve not given us much time to reply,’ I complained. ‘It’s only tonight, isn’t it?’

  ‘Something makes you think they don’t want us to go?’ Nora’s lost a couple of back molars, you can’t help but notice when she laughs. I’ve kept all mine. Otherwise, like as two peas, as ever was. Years ago, the only way you could tell us apart was by our perfume. She used Shalimar, me, Mitsouko.

  All the same, identical we may be, but symmetrical – never. For the body itself isn’t symmetrical. One of your feet is bound to be bigger than the other, one ear will leak more wax. Nora is fluxy; me, constipated. She was always free with her money, squandered it on the fellers, poor thing, whereas I tried to put a bit by. Her menstrual flow was copious to a fault; mine, meagre. She said: ‘Yes!’ to life and I said, ‘Maybe . . .’ But we’re both in the same boat, now. Stuck with each other. Two batty old hags, buy us a drink and we’ll sing you a song. Even manage, a knees-up, on occasion, such as New Year’s Eve or a publican’s grandbaby.

  What a joy it is to dance and sing!

  We’re stuck in the period at which we peaked, of course. All women do. We’d feel mutilated if you made us wipe off our Joan Crawford mouths and we always do our hair up in great big Victory rolls when we go out. We’ve still got lots of it, thank God, iron grey though it may be and tucked away in scarves, turban-style, this very moment, to hide the curlers. We always make an effort. We paint an inch thick. We put on our faces before we come down to breakfast, the Max Factor Pan-Stik, the false eyelashes with the three coats of mascara, everything. We used to polish our eyelids with Vaseline, when we were girls, but we gave up on that during the war and now use just a simple mushroom shadow for day plus a hint of tobacco brown, to deepen the tone, and a charcoal eyeliner. Our fingernails match our toenails match our lipstick match our rouge. Revlon, Fire and Ice. The habit of applying warpaint outlasts the battle; haven’t had a man for yonks but still we slap it on. Nobody could say the Chance girls were going gently into that good night.

  We’d got our best kimonos on, because it was our birthday. Real silk, mine mauve with a plum-blossom design on the back, Nora’s crimson with a chrysanthemum. Our beloved Uncle Perry, that is, the late, and by his nieces grievously lamented, Peregrine Hazard, sent us back our kimonos from Nagasaki, years ago, before Pearl Harbor, when he was on one of his trips. Underneath, camiknickers with a French lace trim, lilac satin for me, crushed rose crepe for her. Tasty, eh? Course, we were wearing camiknickers before they came back.

  Our hipbones stick out more than they used to; we look quite gaunt in our undies, these days, but she’s the only one who sees me in the altogether, and me her, and we pass muster with our clothes on. Our cheekbones stick out more than they used to, too, but they’re the very best cheekbones, I’d have you know – these cheekbones are descended from some of the most profitable calcium deposits in the world. Like all those who spend much time before the public eye, our father has always been dependent on his bone structure. God bless the Hazard calcium; it’s kept osteoporosis at bay. Long and lean we always were and long and lean we are now, thank God. Some superannuated hoofers put on the avoirdupois like nobody’s business.

  ‘What shall we wear tonight?’ asked Nora, stubbing her fag out in her saucer, pouring herself another cup. She’s a regular teapot. Wheelchair moaned a little.

  ‘Don’t fret, dear,’ Nora soothed. ‘You can wear your Normal Hartnell and the pearls, all right? We’ll do you up something lovely.’

  That calmed it down, poor old stick. Known to us as Wheelchair, known to the world, once upon a time, as Lady Atalanta Hazard. A Lady in her own right, she’d have you know, a perfect lady, unlike our father’s next two wives. She married Melchior Hazard when he was just a matinée idol, and divorced him long before that knighthood they gave him for ‘services to the theatre’. Née Lady Atalanta Lynde, ‘the most beautiful woman of her time’, born with a silver spoon, etc. etc. etc. but now an antique divorcee in reduced circumstances, to whit, the basement front of 49 Bard Road.

  All in good time I shall reveal to you how it has come to pass that we inherited, in her dotage and, come to that, in ours, the first wife of our illegitimate father. Suffice to say that nobody else would have her. Least of all her own two daughters. Bloody cows. ‘The lovely Hazard girls’, they used to call them. Huh. Lovely is as lovely does; if they looked like what they behave like, they’d frighten little children.

  We’ve been storing Wheelchair in the basement for well-nigh thirty years. We’ve got quite attached to her. Earlier on, Nora used to take her out shopping, give her some fresh air and that, until she nearly starts a riot, she says to the bloke at the salad stall: ‘Have you got anything in the shape of a cucumber, my good fellow?’ After that, we had to keep her home for her own sake.

  Sometimes she goes on a bit, on and on, on and on and bloody on, in fact, worrying away at how Melchior took the best years of her life then deserted her for a Hollywood harlot – his Number Two bride – and how the ‘lovely Hazard girls’ did her out of all her money and how she fell downstairs and can never walk again and on and on and on and on until you want to throw a blanket over her, like you do to shut up a parrot. But there’s not a scrap of harm in her and, besides, we owe her one from way back.

  I had a go at the teapot, too, but too late, got half a cup of sodden leaves, went out to the scullery to put the kettle on, again. Here we sit, in our negligées, in the breakfast room in the leather armchairs by the Readicole electric fire. Sometimes we sit there all day, drink tea, chew the fat. Wheelchair plays solitaire, does tapestry. The cats come and go.

  At six we switch to gin.

  Sometimes when we’ve had our supper we plug Wheelchair into the TV – she loves the commercials, she watches out for the ones with Melchior in them, then she heckles the screen – we go and don some bits and bobs of former finery such as, for example, those matching silver-fox trench coats Howard Hughes gave us, and we sally forth to the local, where we are occasionally invited to perform one of the numbers that brought us fame, once upon a time. And sometimes we perform uninvited.

  ‘Anything else in the mail?’

  Nora shoved across the bundle. The electricity bill, again; Neighbourhood Watch, again; next door complaining about the cats, again; some kid in New Jersey wanting to interview us for his Ph.D., Film Studies, bloody Midsummer Night’s Dream, again. At our age, you feel you’ve seen it all before. I note that little Tiff, our darling love, our chick, our cherished one, our goddaughter, is too preoccupied with her Big Affair at present to drop us birthday greetings. Youth, youth.

  Then the doorbell rang and made me jump. The gas man? Never the gas man, he never leans on the bell with all his weight like that, he just gives a reticent little tinkle ever since he got Nora in her altogether except for her nail polish, she’d jumped straight out of the bath, she’d thought he was a telegram. No. This was a fierce, long ring. Then another. And another. We started up, we stiffened. Then he on the doorstep hammers with his fists and shouts:

  ‘Aunties!’

  Our father’s youngest son, young Tristram Hazard. Why does he call us ‘aunties’ when we are, in fact, his half-sisters, even if on the wrong side of the blanket? You will find out in due course. And has he come to wish us ‘Happy birthday’? If so, why the panic? He shouted so, I was all of a flutter. I fumbled with the lock, the bolts, the chain – like Fort Knox, round here. You can’t be too careful, these days. We had a mass breakout from Brixton Nick last year, they came over the garden wall like formation dancers.

  Young Tristram fell into my arms as if legless when I got the door open. Unshaven, mad-eyed and all his red hair was coming out of his funny little pigtail and blowing about in the wind that was blowing all the garbage in at the front gate. He looked deranged. And he’d put on a lot of weight since I last saw him, too. He hung on to me, panting for breath.

  ‘Tiffany . . .’ (pant, heave, pant) ‘ . . . is Tiffany here?’

  ‘Do pu
ll yourself together, Tristram, you’ve made a big, wet patch on my silk,’ I said sharply.

  ‘Didn’t you catch last night’s programme?’

  ‘You wouldn’t catch me dead watching your poxy programme.’

  But Wheelchair catches it from time to time, cackling away in her genteel fashion, rejoicing even in her approaching senility at how low the house of Hazard has sunk in this its last generation – or, as she sometimes wittily puts it, cackling harder than ever, ‘the final degeneration of the House of Hazard’. And we did watch the first five minutes, once, we felt we ought to take in our little Tiff’s television debut.

  Tiffany is the ‘hostess’, whatever that means. She smiles a lot, she shows her tits. What a waste. She’d have made a lovely dancer, if only she’d stuck with it. We watched her first five minutes. Five minutes was enough, I can tell you; then we adjourned to the boozer, muttering. His programme goes out live. That’s its speciality.

  ‘They’d get better ratings if he was dead,’ said Nora. ‘The only posthumous presenter on TV. What a coup.’

  Tristram wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and then I saw he had been crying.

  ‘Tiffany’s missing,’ he said.

  That took the smile off my face, I can tell you. Nora yelled up from the kitchen. ‘What’s biting young Lochinvar?’ He was in a state, blubbering and babbling, Scotch on his breath to knock you over. When we got him settled in an armchair, he thrust a cassette into my hand.

  ‘Have a look,’ he says. ‘I can’t explain. Watch it, see what happened.’

  Then he spotted the photo of little Tiff in the silver frame that we keep on the breakfast-room mantelpiece and the waterworks started up again. I felt quite sorry for the poor kid. ‘Kid’, I say. He’s all of thirty-five; he’ll be pushing forty in no time. All the same, his stock in trade is boyish charm. God knows what he’ll do when he loses that. But we were all a-tremble, all anxiety; what the fuck was going on? So Nora bunged his cassette in the VCR sharpish.

  We got the VCR to catch up with those Busby Berkeley musicals they put out Saturday afternoons. We tape them, watch them over and over, freeze-frame our favourite bits. It drives Wheelchair mad. And Fred and Ginger, of course. Good old Fred. Nostalgia, the vice of the aged. We watch so many old movies our memories come in monochrome.

  A burst of buzz and static shocked Wheelchair out of the trance she falls into when she’s nicely greased with bacon after breakfast. ‘What’s happening? What’s he doing here?’ She fixed Tristram with a suspicious eye, for he was no kin of hers, while the picture settled down on a flight of neon steps in a burst of canned applause as he came bounding down with his red hair slicked back, his top-of-the-milk-coloured rumpled linen Giorgio Armani whistle and flute, Tristram Hazard, weak but charming, game-show presenter and television personality, last gasp of the imperial Hazard dynasty that bestrode the British theatre like a colossus for a century and a half. Tristram, youngest son of the great Melchior Hazard, ‘prince of players’; grandson of those tragic giants of the Victorian stage, Ranulph and Estella ‘A star danced’ Hazard. Lo, how the mighty have fallen.

  ‘Hi, there! I’m Tristram!’

  The camera closes in as he sings out, ‘Hi, there, lolly lovers! I’m Tristram Hazard and I’ve come to bring you . . .’ Now he throws back his head, showing off his throat, he’s got a real, old-fashioned, full-bodied, Ivory Novello-type throat, he throws his head back and cries out in the voice of an ecstatic: ‘LASHINGS OF LOLLY! LASHINGS OF LOLLY!’

  The show begins.

  Freeze-frame.

  Let us pause awhile in the unfolding story of Tristram and Tiffany so that I can fill you in on the background. High time! you must be saying. Just who is this Melchior Hazard and his clan, his wives, his children, his hangers-on? It is in order to provide some of the answers to those questions that I, Dora Chance, in the course of assembling notes towards my own autobiography, have inadvertently become the chronicler of all the Hazards, although I should think that my career as such will go as publicly unacknowledged by the rest of the dynasty as my biological career has done for not only are Nora and I, as I have already told you, by-blows, but our father was a pillar of the legit. theatre and we girls are illegitimate in every way – not only born out of wedlock, but we went on the halls, didn’t we!

  Romantic illegitimacy, always a seller. It ought to copper-bottom the sales of my memoirs. But, to tell the truth, there was sod all romantic about our illegitimacy. At best, it was a farce, at worst, a tragedy, and a chronic inconvenience the rest of the time. But the urge has come upon me before I drop to seek out an answer to the question that always teased me, as if the answer were hidden, somewhere, behind a curtain: whence came we? Whither goeth we?

  I know the answer to the second question, of course. Bound for oblivion, nor leave a wrack behind. Never spawned, neither of us, although Nora wanted to, everso, and towards the end of her menstrual life greeted each flow with tears. Me, no. I was pleased as Punch each time I saw it and even more so when it stopped, short, never to go again, like grandfather’s clock in the old song though not at all like our grandfather clock, which remains in fine if high-pitched fettle, thank you very much.

  But, as to the question of origins and past history, let me plunge deep into the archaeology of my desk, casting aside the photo of Ruby Keeler (‘To Nora and Dora, four fabulous feet, from your Ruby’).

  Here it is. A fraying envelope stuffed with antique picture postcards. We’ve put together quite a collection over the years, bought, begged, borrowed, some sepia-toned, some tinted to show off her red, red hair. Our paternal grandmother, the one fixed point in our fathers’ genealogy. Indeed, the one fixed point in our entire genealogy; our maternal side founders in a wilderness of unknowability and our other grandmother, Grandma, Grandma Chance, the grandma who fixed the grandfather clock, the grandma whose name we carry, she was no blood relation at all, to make confusion worse confounded. Grandma raised us, not out of duty, or due to history, but because of pure love, it was a genuine family romance, she fell in love with us the moment she clapped her eyes on us.

  But we never met our real grandmother and only know her as you see her here, captured in the eternal youth of the publicity photo. ‘A star danced and she was born,’ they said. She was called Estella. Here she is as Juliet, as Portia, as Beatrice. See that ‘Come hither!’ smile. As Lady Macbeth, she manages to summon up a stern frown, quite the Miss Whiplash, but you can see a wicked little twinkle if you look hard.

  She wasn’t your Edwardian drayhorse type, she was little and skinny, with enormous eyes. She was a will-o’-the-wisp, all air and fire, and she could break your heart with one single sob but her son, our Uncle Perry, said she used to get the giggles, sometimes, in the middle of some big scene, the casket scene, the sleep-walking scene, she’d double up, everybody else would have to cover for her. Her hair was always coming undone, too, tumbling down her back, spraying out hairpins in all directions, her stockings at half-mast, her petticoat would come adrift in the middle of the street, her drawers start drooping. She was a marvel and she was a mess.

  Here she is in drag as, famously, Hamlet. Black tights. Tremendous legs. Wasted on a classical actress. We’ve got the legs from her. She’s emoting with the dagger: ‘To be or not to be . . .’ The obituary in The New York Times – careful with it, the paper’s starting to crumble – says how she ‘owed much to her New York Horatio, a superbly athletic young American with an exceptional gift of gravitas’.

  Watch out for him, he’ll pop up again. Cassius Booth. Yes. One of those Booths. His parents had a nerve, to call him Cassius.

  The obituary hints at our paternal grandmother’s enthusiasm for ahem indoor sports in the most tactful way. ‘Generous, gallant, reckless; a woman who gave her all to life . . .’ But she didn’t so much give it away as throw it away, poor thing. She came to a sticky end, all right. This is her as Desdemona, in a white nightie with her spray of willow, just about to go into her number:
‘A poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree . . .’ This one is a real collector’s item because –

  No. Wait. I’ll tell you all about it in my own good time.

  Some time in or around the year 1870 (her date of birth, like that of so many actresses, a movable feast) our paternal grandmother was born in a trunk and trod the boards from toddlerhood as fairy, phantom, goblin, eventually, an old stager of eight (give or take a year or two) making her London debut as Mamillius in The Winter’s Tale at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, in, it says here, a ‘somewhat pedantic’ production by the younger Kean (Charles), and a costume copied from a Greek vase, rolling a hoop, a bit of business copied off another Greek vase. Lewis Carroll saw her, sent her an inscribed copy of Alice, invited her to tea and got her to slip her frock off after the crumpets, whereupon he snapped her in the altogether but she drew the line at imitating the action depicted upon certain other Greek vases, or so she always maintained. Here’s the evidence of the encounter. See? He called it Sprite. I bought it at an auction at Christie’s. Cost an arm and a leg. Couldn’t resist. Not many people can boast a photo of their grandmother posing for kiddiporn. I sold one of poor old Irish’s letters to pay for it.

  Irish? Who’s he?

  You’ll find out, soon enough. Suffice to say, if it hadn’t been for poor old Irish and his philanthropic passion for the education of chorus girls, I’d not be sitting here, now, writing this. He taught me one end of a pen from the other. He gave me the confidence to use a word like ‘philanthropic’. In return, I broke his heart. Fair exchange is no robbery.

  When she played Mamillius, she doubled up as Columbine in the Harlequinade. Here’s the programme. ‘Little Estella.’ She could do it all – make you laugh, make you cry, dance for you, sing you a song, but she was a fool for love.