Wise Children Read online

  It was a hard life. I will tell you what her life was like: greasepaint, gaslight, horseshit, coal smoke, railways – change at Crewe on Sundays. She was a child star but she grew up. She worked the provincial circuits, Juliet, Rosalind, Viola, Portia, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Nottingham, a big fish in a small pond; Hermia, Bianca, Iras in London, small fish in a big pond, until, in 1888, back she came to the Haymarket, her big chance, Cordelia to the Lear of Ranulph Hazard.

  Ranulph, one of the great, roaring, actor-managers such as they don’t make any more. I’ve read how, during his Macbeth, Queen Victoria gripped the curtains of the royal box until her knuckles whitened. Regicide, no fun for a reigning monarch. On his night, he’d scare you witless in the banquet scene even if his wife, caught by a fit of giggles, had her back to the audience, her shoulders shaking. (Peregrine said she’d told him she thought the Macbeths ought to sack the cook.) Ranulph Hazard’s Richard III, ‘the very incarnation of human evil,’ wrote GBS, not one to go overboard about a ham.

  Don’t let’s sell Ranulph Hazard short. He was good on his night, although the punter never knew for sure when that night might be. Because the old man might come reeling on and slur out the words from another play altogether than that billed; or else he might be mopish, hungoverish, out of sorts and you couldn’t hear a word beyond the first-row stalls, whatever he might be saying; or then again he might be too sober by half and sunk in some deep vale of despond when he’d just walk through it. There was always that element of chance with Ranulph, he was volatility in person, you’d diagnose a manic depressive, these days, and stick him on lithium.

  But, on his night, a marvel.

  And Shakespeare was a kind of god for him. It was as good as idolatry. He thought the whole of human life was there.

  So it was on one of his marvellous nights, he met a shooting star. What an ecstasy the two of them provoked! Rivers of tears. Tempests of applause. One famous bit of business has got into all the theatre books – when poor old Lear makes it up with his daughter at last, Ranulph always used to put his fingers to his cheek, then look at his fingertips in wonder, touch his mouth then say in a trembly, geriatrically uncertain way: ‘Be your tears wet?’ That brought out the hankies, all right. They said her smile in answer, ‘tremulous, through tears, as April sunshine’, almost, but not quite, capped it. So he and Estella fell in love. How could they resist? An old man and a prodigal daughter, the stuff that dreams are made of.

  Here’s a funny thing. That was just how Tristram’s mother, Lady Hazard III, collared Melchior – by playing Cordelia to his Lear.

  Old Ranulph was a good thirty years older than Estella, or more, or even much more – his date of birth is as variable as hers. All the same, they tied the knot toot sweet (as that other grandma, Grandma Chance, used to say) in St Paul’s, Covent Garden, the actors’ church, with half the profession crossing their fingers for them and the other half staying away on principle due to Ranulph owing them money or having adulterised them. She wore her red hair hanging down her back, a wreath of lilies of the valley, she was nineteen or thereabouts. Lamb to the slaughter, one might have said, seeing his grey hairs, his shaking hand, his dubious finances – he was a drunk, a bankrupt, a gambler, he’d fretted and philandered and beaten and betrayed three wives into early graves, already. But no sacrificial lamb nor shrinking violet she. She was a wild thing, even if she was always true to him in her fashion. I don’t have anything of her in me, not at all. I am the sentimental one. But Nora, sometimes.

  There’s a recording of Ranulph, made on a wax cylinder, I went to that place off Kensington High Street, they played it for me. Crackle, hiss, and then his voice: ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow . . .’ A shudder ran through me, not because of sentiment, but because of the voice itself. It wasn’t what I expected, it was ugly, almost – harsh, grating, the words sounded as if they’d been wrenched out of him. And there I was, in tears, too, like the snufflers in the Haymarket all those years ago, but not just because of what he said and who he was but because of the way he said it, that sounded so alien to me, so strange in my ears, because of his flattened ‘a’s, and his consonants, that were cut, like glass. Only a hundred years ago . . . My own grandfather. Yet it was a voice from before the Flood, from another kind of life entirely, so antique-sounding that it scarcely seems possible his granddaughters now sit in silk camiknickers in the basement of a house in Brixton, drinking tea and watching on television his great-grandson address an invisible audience out of a plastic box, in that between-two-worlds, neither Brit nor Yank, twang of the game-show host:

  ‘Say it again for me! LASHINGS OF LOLLY!’

  Lo, how the mighty have fallen. An S-M game show? How low can you get?

  So Ranulph and Estella were married and first of all he loved her madly and vice versa and then Barnum, P. T. Barnum, Barnum of Barnum and Bailey, that Barnum, struck by her legs in As You Like It, made her an offer. Hamlet in a tent in Central Park. A tent because, he prophesied, no theatre on Broadway would be big enough to hold the crowds.

  She must have eyed her old man sideways, wondering how he took it; he’d been the most melancholy Dane of his generation, hadn’t he, but that had been a generation or two before, Hamlet is nothing if not a juve role. Ranulph, though, was all agog to give to America the tongue that Shakespeare spake. So they crossed the Atlantic and Ranulph did them proud as Hamlet’s father, while suave young Cassius Booth stepped into the limelight beside her as Hamlet’s best friend.

  Hamlet under canvas, a smash. It ran and ran and would have run ad infinitum except the twins announced that they were on the way and a female Hamlet is one thing but a pregnant prince is quite another. So twin boys, our fathers, were born in the USA. Melchior and Peregrine. What names, eh? What delusions of grandeur went into the naming of them? If you shorten them to ‘Mel’ and ‘Perry’, they’ve got a democratically twentieth-century and transatlantic ring to them but Old Ranulph, rattling old nineteenth-century romantic that he was, never did that, although Estella, with a wink, often.

  Note how I call them both ‘our fathers’, as if we had the two and, in a sense, so we did. Melchior it was who did the biologically necessary, it’s true, but Peregrine passed as our father – that is, he was the one who publicly acknowledged us when Melchior would not. I should tell you, now, that Melchior’s entire family, Wheelchair apart, always maintained this fiction, too, which is why Saskia told Tristram we were his aunts and not his sisters. But Peregrine was so much beloved by us and behaved so much more fatherly to us, not to mention paying most of the bills, that I know I need to claim him as something more than uncle.

  Speaking of illegitimacy, there was more than a hint of romantic, nay, melodramatic illegitimacy in the Hazard family long before Nora and myself took our first bows. Because Ranulph Hazard, during all his lengthy marital and extramarital career, had produced no issue, as yet, until his wife’s transvestite Hamlet met her Horatio’s exceptional gift of gravitas, not to mention his athleticism. Tongues wagged. Did Melchior lend an ear? Who can tell, at this distance in time. All the same, he loved his boys. He cast them as princes in the tower as soon as they could toddle.

  One thing you must know about Ranulph. He was half mad and thought he had a Call. Now he saw the entire world as his mission field and out of all of us it has turned out that Gareth Hazard, SJ, has stayed most faithful to the family tradition of proselytising zeal, for now the old man was seized with the most imperative desire, to spread and go on spreading the Word overseas. Willy-nilly, off must go his wife and children, too, to take Shakespeare where Shakespeare had never been before.

  In those days, there was so much pink on the map of the world that English was spoken everywhere. No language problem. Off to the ends of the Empire they went, rolling to the rhythms of the sea as they crossed, crisscrossed the oceans. I see it in my mind’s eye as if it were a movie – the ocean liner slipping her moorings, gliding away from the quay, the siren blaring, the crowd throwing
flowers, the red-haired woman on the deck, smiling, waving, smiling.

  Our Uncle Peregrine inherited her scarlet hair. So did our half-sisters, Saskia and Imogen. Tristram, too. Not us, worse luck. The red hair only went to the legit. side. As for me and Nora, first of all, we were mouse. Then we dyed it. When we stopped dyeing (black), we found out that we had, all unbeknownst to ourselves, gone grey.

  Our Uncle Peregrine was his mother’s boy.

  We were hurrying down the street, he told me, on tour in Australia. It was in Sydney, down by the Circular Quay. We were on our way to some ladies’ lunch club – she did guest appearances, it helped with the finances, Ranulph was chronically short of a bob. We were late, of course, because she hadn’t been able to find a clean frock but after much rummaging came up with one with only a couple of little wine stains and smear of marmalade so she pinned a bunch of frangipani over the worst of it and got her hair up, somehow. Melchior stayed behind with Father, to watch him running through Julius Caesar. We came to an organ-grinder, we stopped to admire the monkey. She gave the organ-grinder sixpence and he played ‘Daisy, Daisy’. She took my hand and we danced, right there, on the pavement. Her hairpins scattered everywhere. My celluloid collar burst in two. The monkey clapped its paws together. Everybody stared. ‘Come on!’ she said to the world in general. ‘Join in!’ Then everybody started dancing, they all took hold of the hand of the next perfect stranger. ‘I’m half crazy, all for the love of you.’ She looked upon what she had accomplished and was glad. We missed soup, we missed fish, we arrived at the table at the same time as the chicken. Her hair was down her back, she’d lost her flowers, one slipper with a broken heel, her small son collarless, tieless, and I’d got the monkey on my shoulder – she’d swapped her gold watch for it. She did them Portia’s speech, ‘The quality of mercy . . .’ She made them happy. There was mango icecream for dessert, our favourite. We had three bowlfuls each. In Melbourne, they named a sundae after her, ‘Ice-cream Estella’, mango ice-cream topped with passionfruit purée. If ever we get to Melbourne, together, Floradora, I’ll treat you to an ‘Ice-cream Estella’.

  Always the lucky one, our Peregrine, even in his memories, which were full of laughter and dancing; he always remembered the good times.

  Peregrine Hazard, adventurer, magician, seducer, explorer, scriptwriter, rich man, poor man – but never either beggerman or thief. At our age, Nora and I have got more friends among the dead than with the living. We often go visiting in cemeteries to trim the grass growing over the friends of our youth but we don’t even know where your grave might be, dear Perry, to go and lay a flower on it. You spent your childhood on the road, here today, gone tomorrow; you grew up a restless man. You loved change. And fornication. And trouble. And, funnily enough, towards the end, you loved butterflies. Peregrine Hazard, lost among the butterflies, lost in the jungle, vanished away as neatly and completely as if you had become the object of one of those conjuring tricks you were so fond of.

  If an ice-cream sundae was named after Estella in Melbourne, then an entire dried-out township in New South Wales was renamed Hazard, after she and Runulph put on al fresco Coriolanus. A street in Hobart, Tasmania. And they toured India, not once, but several times – crossing, crisscrossing the subcontinent. The gleaming rails sliding beneath the churning wheels, the puffing smokestack, the leaves falling off the calendar and blowing away in the wind . . . A maharajah gave the boys a baby elephant but they couldn’t take it with them on the train. He fell in love with Estella, and promised her her weight in rubies if she would stay behind and recite him every night Viola’s ‘willow cabin’ speech. What did she do? we asked. She made him happy, said Peregrine. She had a gift for that. She made him happy, then she left him. She had a gift for leaving, too.

  The red-haired woman, smiling, waving to the disappearing shore. She left the maharajah; she left innumerable other lights o’ passing love in towns and cities and theatres and railway stations all over the world. But Melchior she did not leave.

  A theatre, long since demolished, named the Hazard, in Shanghai. Then Hong Kong. Then Singapore. Everything a little threadbare, now, a little shabby. The ocean, again. North America, again – Montreal. Toronto. Crossing, crisscrossing the prairies. Hazard, Alberta, flat as a plateful of snow. Hazard, North Dakota – no township too small to receive them, nor to reciprocate the honour by rechristening itself. The touring was turning into a kind of madness. In Arkansas, the Hazards’ patched and ravaged tent went up in the spaces vacated by the travelling evangelicals: Ranulph, lean, haggard, bearded, more and more resembled John the Baptist had John the Baptist reached old age.

  They arrived at last in the south-west and pitched their tent in arid scrub in a town called Gun Barrel, Texas, renamed Hazard, after the Hazards played Macbeth there with a hired band of campesinos as the Scottish army, holding spiked ears of prickly pear above their heads to mimic Birnam Wood. Of all these wild, strange and various places, Hazard, Texas, was the one that Perry remembered best; he went back there, later, a grizzled old-timer or two wept in his beer to recall how Estella made him happy, they made her son an honorary sheriff.

  Props and costumes were lost or stolen or fell to pieces and then were begged or improvised or patched and darned. Ranulph drank and gambled and declaimed; he was going to pieces, too. He shouted at America but it would no longer listen to him. One night, in a bar at Tucson, Arizona, he gambled away his crown from Lear and Estella put together a new one for him out of a bit of cardboard. She dabbed on some gold paint. ‘Here you are.’

  Why did she stay with him? Perish the thought, perhaps she truly loved him; perhaps all those people she made happy were just so many sideshows. But she’d lost the knack of making Melchior happy.

  Then, one day, deep in the Midwest, as they were setting up in a townlet where they had hopes of a decent-sized audience since all there was to do in the evenings, otherwise, was to watch the corn grow, Ranulph received a cable from New York. While the Hazards roamed themselves to rags for the greater glory of Shakespeare, Cassius Booth, Estella’s old Horatio, stayed in one place and prospered. Now he was an actor-manager himself, with his very own theatre on the Great White Way. And was he a man to forget old friends? Not he! Estella looked enigmatic and she smiled, said Perry. She was still a girl, remember. No more than thirty. Or, at most, thirty-five. While Old Ranulph was pushing seventy and staked his final gamble on it, on one last triumphant prayer meeting. He’d show ’em all! He’d flare up one last incandescent time on Broadway in a sort of Shakespearian funeral pyre. But the play he picked on was, alas, Othello.

  Thirty or thirty-five, whatever she was, she doesn’t look more than a schoolgirl in the picture on the postcard, in her nightie, with her hair down her back. ‘Sing willow, willow, willow.’ Cassius Booth played lago. There is no handkerchief in this story. All the same, her husband killed them both, first her, then him. They’d slipped out together during the first-night party. Old acquaintances. Perhaps, by then, Old Ranulph couldn’t tell the difference between Shakespeare and living. Next morning, the notices were magnificent but the murder itself had to wait for the noon editions because the chambermaid didn’t find the bodies on the bed in Estella’s hotel room until she brought up late breakfast. Three bodies. He shot them both and then he shot himself.

  Exeunt omnes. She’d always had a gift for exits.

  But life goes on.

  The two little boys were stranded in New York, poor tragic waifs, and there they almost expired themselves, or so Perry said, because they were so stuffed with candy, hot dogs and pie à la mode by the lovely ladies with low-slung bosoms and feathered hats who went about their business in the hotel lobby. There was no money left as such, only an actor’s inheritance of unpaid bills, paste jewellery, flash attitudes, but the Plaza extended them credit and so they learned to live beyond their means.

  Now, although these two were twins, they were not alike as two peas. Melchior, at ten, was dark and brooding, registering already the
beginnings of the profile which would dominate Shaftesbury Avenue. That profile was to Melchior what Clark Gable’s ears were to him. Dark eyes, lashes of the kind they say are ‘wasted on a boy’ and a physique that turned out to be ready-made for leaping and fencing and climbing up to balconies and all the things a Shakespearian actor needs to do. I know that all these things, not forgetting his ‘splendid gift of gravitas’, all together point the finger at Cassius Booth as his father, but don’t forget that poor old Ranulph had been a matinée idol, too, in his day, even if in his day women wore crinolines, and there remains a gigantic question mark over the question of their paternity, although whoever it was who contributed the actual jism, no child need ever have been ashamed of either contender and, as for me, the grandchild, I like to think both of them had a hand in it, if you follow me.

  But Peregrine was a holy terror and couldn’t keep a straight face, just like his mother. As young Macduff, he’d entered with a piss-pot on his head and given an audience of sheepshearers outside Perth their best moment of the evening. Melchior never let him on the stage again. Even as little scraps, Melchior was all for art and Peregrine was out for fun. Don’t think that, just because they were brothers, they liked one another. Far from it. Chalk and cheese.

  They lived on room service and the kindness of strangers until the boat docked from Leith and off it came their comeuppance – Miss Euphemia Hazard, dour as hell, Presbyterian to the backbone, their aunt. Warden of a workhouse near Pitlochry and sworn enemy of the stage and all who trod it, who never shed a tear for brother or for sister-in-law because she thought their violent ends were the Lord’s revenge, a kind of wild justice. She grabbed Melchior by the scruff, stuffed him shrieking into a trunk marked ‘Not wanted on voyage’, and reached out for Peregrine but he gave a shrug and a wriggle and left his old tweed jacket in her hand while he himself was gone, whoosh! out of the window, down the fire escape, a shirtsleeved, carrot-topped ten-year-old hurtling helter-skelter down the pavement, sending a hot-dog stand flying, a bootblack sprawling and . . . he vanished.