Wise Children Read online

  Vanished clean away into America and though, later on, he told a wondrous tale of all his doings and hoboings as a boy, as to what really befell him, I do not have a notion except that it can have been no cakewalk and, when he first found us, he was as rich as Croesus.

  So Peregrine ran for it, lickety-split, hell for leather, but Melchior was trapped.

  Now, Melchior had adored his father, worshipped him, even, and took away from the grand catastrophe of his parents’ lives only one little souvenir – the pasteboard crown that Ranulph wore for Lear, the one Estella made. God knows how Melchior smuggled this relic past his aunt.

  It was in his blood, wasn’t it? Every night, during the dour years of rain and porridge, as he lay in his freezing bed under the one plaid rug his aunt permitted him, he’d recite to himself word for word his father’s greatest roles. Macbeth. Hamlet. (Although never Othello, of course.) Aunt Effie’s. Highland clock – you’ve seen it for yourself, the antlered grandfather now resident at 49 Bard Road – struck twelve, then one, then two. He would so move himself with these solitary renditions he would cry himself to sleep. His aunt forbad Melchior point-blank to so much as think of the stage, although she recognised how he had sufficient talent in that direction – that is, rhetoric, etc. – to urge him to give the ministry a go and, when she became insistent, then he took matters into his own hands.

  He wrapped the pasteboard crown up in a change of shirt and underthings, tied all in a handkerchief and said goodbye to Pitlochry for ever. I can see him now, setting out to seek his fortune like Dick Whittington in panto. Miss Effie’s clock sang out five times as he shut the workhouse door behind him. It would have been bitter cold, no stars, still pitch-dark. A cart went past with a load of kale; he got a lift a mile or two. The sun would have been coming up, by then. No friends, no kin except a lost brother half a world away whom he’d never got on with. Mad with pride and ambition and nothing in the world except his dark eyes and gift of gravitas and a toy crown with the gold paint peeling off.

  And so he finally found his way to London, and, in due course, down on his uppers, nay, down on the uppers of his uppers, he arrived at this very house, which was, in those days, a boarding house that catered for theatricals, though not, I should say, theatricals of the well-heeled variety.

  Brixton, before the lights went out over Europe, hub of a wheel of theatres, music halls, Empires, Royalties, what have you. You could tram it all over from Brixton. The streets of tall, narrow houses were stuffed to the brim with stand-up comics; adagio dancers; soubrettes; conjurers; fiddlers; speciality acts with dogs, doves, goats, you name it; dancing dwarves; tenors, sopranos, baritones and basses, both solo artistes and doubled up in any of the permutations of the above as duets, trios etc. And also those who wrung a passion to tatters for a living and therefore considered themselves a cut above.

  In those days, our mother emptied the slops, filled the washstand jugs, raked out the grates, built up the fires, brought up the cans of hot water, scrubbed the back of the occasional gentleman and herself occasionally –

  or perhaps only the one time.

  Chance by name, Chance by nature. We were not planned.

  Melchior slept here. This attic, the cheapest room in the house, cheaper still because he never paid. I picture him in front of a square of mirror, trying on that shabby crown, emoting, listening to the sycamores at the end of the garden thrashing about in the wind and pretending the sound they made was applause. Desperate, ravenous, on the make, tramping round the agents day after day after day, back to the boiled cabbage at Bard Road and the hard, narrow bed. I wonder if he lent his mouth here, his arsehole there, to see if that would do the trick. I suppose my mother must have felt sorry for him. I can imagine her stripping off in the cold room, turning towards the starving boy. How did she do it? Shyly? Nervously? Lewdly?

  Then everything fades to black. I can’t bear to think any further. It hurts too much. You always like to think a bit of love, or at least a little pleasure, went into your making but I do not know, I cannot guess, if the dark-eyed stranger who put his hand up the skirt of the penniless orphan was cynical, or tender, or desperate, or carried away by the moment. Had she done it before, did she know what she was doing? Was she scared? Or full of desire? Or half raped? He was good-looking enough, God knows. Women went mad for him. Perhaps she was the first woman who went mad for him. Did she think about him when she made his bed up in the mornings? Had she pressed her cheek against the pillow and wished the pillow were his cheek?

  ‘She was only a slip of a thing but she was bold as brass,’ Grandma used to say.

  I’d like to think it went like this: She closed the door behind her, locked it. There he was on the bed, brushing up his Shakespeare. He looked up, hastily laying aside his well-thumbed copy of the Collected Works. She started pulling off her chemise. ‘Now I’ve got you where I want you!’ she said. What else could a gentleman do but succumb?

  Nine months later, her heart gave out when we were born. Apart from that, I don’t know anything about her. We don’t even know what she looked like, there isn’t a picture. She was called Kitty, like a little stray cat. Fatherless, motherless. Perhaps Mrs Chance’s house was even a haven to her, in spite of the stairs – she must have run up and down the stairs twenty times a day, thirty times a day. And the grates to be leaded, the front steps to be scoured.

  Not that Mrs Chance was what the French call exigeante. She didn’t run the fanciest boarding house in Brixton, it barely managed to cling on to respectability by the skin of its teeth, and you could have said the same of her. There were Boston ferns, in green glazed pots, on stands, and Turkey rugs, but the whole place never looked plausible. It looked like the stage set of a theatrical boarding house, as if Grandma had done it up to suit a role she’d chosen on purpose. She was a mystery, was Mrs Chance.

  Melchior Hazard slept here, but not for long. His theatre-doorstep vigils, his audition ordeals paid off. He and his cardboard crown were gone by the time our mother missed her first period. She vomited every morning, quietly, so that Mrs Chance would not hear. The war began, that August, but I don’t think our mother cared. Mrs Chance never heard the vomiting but she heard the tears.

  We came bursting out on a Monday morning, on a day of sunshine and high wind when the Zeppelins were falling. First one wee, bawling girl; then the other, while Mrs Chance did all the necessary. She’d called the doctor but he never got there. Our mother took a look, too weak to hold us, she’d been in labour since the day before yesterday, but Mrs Chance always told us she took a good look and managed a smile.

  Why should she have smiled? She was just seventeen years old, no man, no home. There was a war on. All the same, Mrs Chance always told us that she smiled and Mrs Chance was sometimes stingy with the truth but never lied. ‘Why shouldn’t she smile? She hadn’t got a mum or dad. A baby is the next best thing.’

  The sky was blue, that morning, said Mrs Chance, and there was a wind that made the washing on the clotheslines dance. Monday, washday. What a sight! All over Brixton, long black stockings stepping out with gents’ longjohns, striped shirts doing the Lambeth Walk with flannel nighties, French knickers doing the cancan with the frilly petticoats, pillowslips, sheets, towels, hankies all a-flutter, like flags and banners, everything in motion. The bombs stopped and the little kids came out to play again. The sun shone, the kids were singing. When Grandma Chance had had a couple, she sometimes sang the song they sang when we were born:

  The moon shines bright on Charlie Chaplin

  And his shoes are crackin’

  For want of blackin’

  And his little baggy trousers they need mendin’

  Before they send him

  To the Dardanelles.

  Poor old Charlie, pushing up the daisies, now. Old Charlie. Hung like a horse.

  So there was dancing and singing all along Bard Road and Mrs Chance picked us up, one on each arm, and took us to the window so the first thing we saw with our sw
imming baby eyes was sunshine and dancing. Then a seagull swooped up, past the window, up and away. She told us about the seagull so often that although I cannot really remember it, being just hatched out, all the same, I do believe I saw that seagull fly up into the sky.

  There was a little sigh behind us and she was gone.

  The doctor got there ten minutes after, he wrote out the death certificate. That was that. So Mrs Chance adopted us but never let us call her ‘mother’, out of respect for the dead. We always called her ‘Grandma’, and ‘Chance’ became our handle.

  But I don’t think for one moment that ‘Chance’ was her own name, either. All that I know about her is: she’d arrived at 49 Bard Road on New Year’s Day, 1900, with a banker’s draft for the first year’s rent and the air of a woman making a new start in a new place, a new century and, or so the evidence points, a new name. If she decided to call herself ‘Mrs’, it was part and parcel of that shaky swipe after respectability I’ve mentioned, because I never caught one whiff of husband and, to tell the truth, she never lost a rakish air.

  She wasn’t tall, about five foot two, five two and a half, but solid-built like an armoured car. She always put on so much Rachel powder she puffed out a fine cloud if you patted her. She rouged big, round spots in the middle of her cheeks. She used so much eyeblack that kiddies on Electric Avenue used to give her a chorus of ‘Two Lovely Black Eyes’ as she passed by. For all the thirty years we knew her, thanks to peroxide, she was canary-coloured blonde. She always pencilled in a big, black beauty spot below the left-hand corner of her mouth.

  For outdoors, she wore black and she never went out without one of those square oilcloth carrier bags in which she kept her fat leather purse, a clean handkerchief in an envelope she’d marked in pencil ‘clean hankercheif’, a couple of safety pins, in case, as she said, her drawers fell down, and often an empty or two on its way back to the off-licence. There’d be a little black toque on her head, with a spotted veil. And I always remember her grey lisle stockings, that she secured below each knee with two lengths of knotted elastic.

  Indoors, providing the boarders weren’t around, she never wore a stitch, as often as not. She was a convert to naturism. She thought it was good for us kiddies, to get the air and sunlight on our skins, as well, so we saved a lot of wear and tear on clothes and often gambolled naked in the backyard, to the astonishment of the neighbours, who were a proper lot. Brixton’s changed, a good deal. These days, you could stage a three-point orgy in the garden and nobody would bat an eye except that bloke with the earring next door might pipe up, ‘Got enough condoms?’

  She didn’t so much talk as elocute. She rhymed ‘sky’ with ‘bay’, and made ‘mountaynes’ out of ‘molehills’, except sometimes she forgot herself, the air turned blue. We’d been out in the market, once, stocking up on rabbit food – she’d a passion for salads, it went with all that naturism. During her strictest periods, she’d make us a meal of a cabbage, raw in summer, boiled in winter. There we were, picking over the greens, when some prim voice behind us, rudely referring to Grandma, opined: ‘. . . no better than she oughter be . . .’

  Grandma swung round, dukes up: ‘What the fuck d’you mean?’

  We never found out who set her up in Bard Road and she never volunteered the information of her own accord. She’d invented herself, she was a one-off and she kept her mystery intact until the end, although she left us everything, we owe her everything and the older we grow, the more like her we become. Triumph of nature over nurture, ducky. Only goes to show.

  To this day I swear, sometimes, late at night, I hear a soft thump, thump, her bare feet on the stairs, coming down to make sure the gas is off in the kitchen, the front door is locked, us girls are safe home. And there’s a smell of crushed mint that lingers in the breakfast room, sometimes, because her favourite tipple was crème de menthe frappé, with a sprig of mint, in season, but she’d drink whatever she could lay her hands on the rest of the time. And that boiled cabbage of hers. There’s an aroma in the area we can’t get rid of, no matter what we try. At first we thought it was the drains. We never touch cabbage, ourselves, not now we’re grown up. I couldn’t look a cabbage in the eye after what Grandma did to them. Boiled them to perdition. The abattoir is kinder to a cow.

  She took to children like a duck to water, enough to make you wonder why she’d not had any of her own. I asked her about that, once, years later; she said she’d never, not until she picked us up and cuddled us that very first morning, known what men were for. ‘I’d often wondered,’ she said. ‘When I saw you two, the penny dropped.’

  You must remember that there was a war on, when we were born. If we made her happy, then we didn’t add much to the collective sum of happiness in the whole of South London. First of all, the neighbours’ sons went marching off, sent to their deaths, God help them. Then the husbands, the brothers, the cousins, until, in the end, all the men went except the ones with one foot in the grave and those still in the cradle, so there was a female city, red-eyed, dressed in black, outside the door, and Grandma said it then, she said it again in 1939: ‘Every twenty years, it’s bound to happen. It’s to do with generations. The old men get so they can’t stand the competition and they kill off all the young men they can lay their hands on. They daren’t be seen to do it themselves, that would give the game away, the mothers wouldn’t stand for it, so all the men all over the world get together and make a deal: you kill off our boys and we’ll kill off yours. So that’s that. Soon done. Then the old men can sleep easy in their beds, again.’

  When the bombardments began, Grandma would go outside and shake her fist at the old men in the sky. She knew they hated women and children worst of all. She’d come back in and cuddle us. She lullabyed us, she fed us. She was our air-raid shelter; she was our entertainment; she was our breast.

  The boarders dwindled off. Too much babyshit in the bathroom. Naked babies crawling in the hall. Nobody made the beds, nobody made the porridge – the help all found good jobs in the armaments factories, didn’t they, much to Grandma’s disgust. They would depart while she harangued them. What did Grandma do for money? The odd, and I mean ‘odd’, lady vocalist might rent a room for an hour, to practise her scales, or a not-too-fussy adagio dancer want to put her feet up for twenty minutes, ahem, ahem. Visitors used the front door, up the front steps; we went down the area steps to the door in the basement.

  When we were just babbling our first ‘g’anma’, that clock turned up. The stag-topped grandfather. Shipped to us direct from Pitlochry, from the estate of Miss Euphemia Hazard, deceased, with a note to say that 49 Bard Road was the last known address of her nephew, Melchior, so they sent it here. She left it to him in her will. Everything else went to the poor.

  Grandma cursed and swore when she read that. She couldn’t bear to think that clock was all we’d get. She moved hell and high water to seek our father out. She left no stone unturned lest, as she told us later, she found him lurking underneath. Then, all of a sudden, it was the Armistice, and there he was, in the West End, playing Romeo, no less! so Grandma put on her toque and went to a matinée. Some acrobatic dancer who’d put up in the first-floor back while she was resting kept an eye on us while Grandma was gone, she taught us back-flips, we were having a whale of a time until Grandma came back with a face like the wrath of God. ‘You look like you need a cuppa,’ said the acrobatic dancer so they adjourned and we went on back-flipping until we fancied a bit of bread and dripping, which is when, tripping into the breakfast room, we overheard our grandma. ‘He flatly denies it and there’s sod all I can do.’ Neither Nora nor I could make head or tail of that, but both of them picked us up and hugged us. ‘Poor little things!’ And we got double rations, two slices each, and a bit of raspberry jam on it, too.

  That acrobatic dancer upped and married a peer, in the end. It’s a funny old world.

  So life went on, as usual, until, one fine day that self-same year, just a few weeks later, came a knocking at the door
.

  Knock, knock; who’s there? And off I stumped to answer it.

  Knock, knock.

  The knocker got a shock.

  A naked child greeted the stranger. Not a scrap on but for the big, blue bow in my brown hair, and a black eyepatch. There was a big scimitar of silver paper in my hand and another child perched on the stairs, the spitting image, not so much a twin, more of an optical illusion, like as two peas except that her ribbon was green and she wore a red flag with the skull and crossbones on it knotted round her shoulders as a cloak. Both of us little girls stared at the newcomer with cold, round eyes: what have we here?

  What an unwelcome! Such an unwelcome that he couldn’t help but laugh.

  Ooh, wasn’t he a handsome young man, in those days. If I find myself describing him in the language of the pulp romance, then you must forgive me – there was always that quality about Perry, especially when he was glorious in his twenties, broad of shoulder, heavy of thigh, with his unruly thatch of burnished copper hair, the lavish spattering of freckles across his nose, laughing green eyes flecked with gold. He wore a scratched, weathered flying jacket with the shoulder flash of the US Flying Corps and his left arm was in a sling. It was our Uncle Peregrine from America but we didn’t know him from Adam.

  When he saw that he was hurting our feelings he smothered his laughter but there was still a delighted little quiver playing around his lips as he dropped down to his knees so that we were all three more equal in height to inspect his new-found nieces more thoroughly. He rummaged in his pocket and produced, not candy, nor pennies, but a pristine white handkerchief which he shook out and displayed to the girls: am I hiding anything?