Wise Children Read online

  We shook our heads. No. We could see that, like ourselves, he hid nothing.

  He knotted the handkerchief and showed it to us again. A simple knot: nothing but a knot.

  We inched closer to him, fascinated.

  Ceremoniously he unknotted his handkerchief and, lo and behold! a white dove flew out, flew twice round the hall, then perched on top of the antlers on the grandfather clock, went: ‘Voo, croo!’ and, to the immense annoyance of our grandma, who just then ascended the basement staircase to find out what was going on, crapped on the carpet. Grandma had got her knickers on, thank God. Then we all went into the kitchen and drank tea and we little lady pirates sat on Peregrine Hazard’s knee and ransacked his pockets in search of more doves, finding none, but a Fuller’s walnut cake, instead, which Grandma accepted with wary politeness. Fuller’s walnut cake has gone the way of all flesh, worse luck, I wouldn’t mind a slice of Fuller’s walnut cake right now. It turned out we were all very partial to Fuller’s walnut cake so we had some slices of that and things eased up a bit, although Peregrine was thoroughly upset and embarrassed by the mission he’d undertaken out of a sense of duty to the brother he’d only just met again.

  And not even so much out of a sense of duty to Melchior as to the dead ones, the grandparents.

  Now, how had it come to pass that Peregrine Hazard, with a dove in his pocket, popped up in Brixton that glorious afternoon to make us all happy? Remember, you last saw him haring down the Great White Way out of the clutches of his Aunt Effie into –

  Into what? That’s a poser.

  Over the years, Peregrine offered us a Chinese banquet of options as to what happened to him next. He gave us all his histories, we could choose which ones we wanted – but they kept on changing, so. That was the trouble. Did he really meet up with Ambrose Bierce in a flophouse in El Paso and go off with him to fight in Mexico? (In confirmation of this, in sole confirmation, I’m bound to say, one personalised dedication in a copy of The Devil’s Dictionary.) Was it true he’d posed as Ben Traven? I knew for a fact he’d worked in circuses. Unless it was on the halls. Or else he’d perfected his stage magic, his juggling and conjuring tricks, to entertain his fellow prospectors during the long winter evenings in Alaska. Above all, how did he grow so rich?

  ‘That’s easy,’ he said and his face split in a big grin. ‘I struck gold in Alaska.’

  But he was a very good juggler. You couldn’t deny him that. He told me once that W. C. Fields taught him how to juggle, but I’m not sure I believe that.

  Grandma was pleased to see that such a handsome young man had got out of the clutches of the old men with only a flesh wound to show for it, i.e. shrapnel in the upper arm; it gave her hope for the continuance of the human race, she said. The more he and Grandma chewed the fat, the more they saw eye to eye until at last, all embarrassment, he told her the reason for his visit . . . it turned out that he’d volunteered to bear Grandma the glad tidings of Melchior’s impending marriage.

  Yes! Melchior was engaged to be married and wanted to pay us all off in case we made trouble at some future date.

  ‘He’s changed his tune,’ said Grandma. ‘I bearded the bastard in his den after a matinée of Romeo the other day; he was at a disadvantage, he’d only got his tights and some mascara on but he still denied paternity.’

  ‘Between you and me,’ confided Peregrine, ‘I do believe he’s afraid you’ll show up at the wedding with the girls in tow.’

  They roared. We kiddies didn’t understand one word, of course, but we looked from one to the other and started laughing because they were laughing. ‘Poor little innocents,’ said Grandma. The pirates’ father was joining high society – a grand wedding in St John’s Smith Square, with twelve bridesmaids, and dukes present, and the bride in white by Worth, which is when we first heard the name, Lady Atalanta Lynde.

  ‘The bride is loaded, ladies,’ Perry assured us.

  ‘Well,’ said Mrs Chance, ‘let him unload some of his ill-gotten gains on us.’ Seeing Perry’s dubious look: ‘If you haven’t got a ticket, you can’t win, me old duck. Remember the Russian proverb: “Hope for the best, expect the worst”.’

  That was her motto. Ours, too.

  But after all that, it was Peregrine himself who did the gentlemanly thing. That is, his name was on the cheques that now started to arrive the first of every month at Bard Road. When Grandma quizzed him, he went pink under his freckles and said, Melchior and he decided to give out that it was Peregrine who’d done the dirty deed, if anybody asked, and, begging her pardon, would she ever forgive him? but he’d used her name in vain. That is, Mrs Chance, our adoptive grandma and guardian, had gone down in the account books as our mother to keep the accountants happy. ‘They’ve as good as married us!’ she said. She laughed so much she fell off her chair.

  But we little girls paid no attention; we crouched over Perry’s latest gift, a phonograph, as, with the most exquisite care, Nora set down the needle on the wondrous black Bakelite pancake our Uncle Perry had told us would sing for us, if we wound up the handle. Hiss. Whirr. Then, thin, faint and as astonishing as if it were another of his tricks, out of the big horn came music – a trumpet, a trombone, a banjo, drums. A song, our song, a song that made us a promise our father never kept, though others did: ‘I can’t give you anything but love, baby.’

  At the first bars, we couldn’t help it, it was as if a voice told us to do it, we were impelled, we got up and danced. ‘Dance,’ I say, but we didn’t know how – we jumped about in time and clapped our hands. Perry watched us for a bit, smiling, then said: ‘Come on, girls, I’ll show you the real thing.’ He gave the gramophone another wind.

  I can’t give you anything but love, baby,

  That’s the only thing I’ve plenty of, baby . . .

  Grandma calmed down a bit, he held his hand out. She’d still got the rudiments, stout though she was; the way she danced was the only clue to her past she ever gave. Then we were all dancing, right there, in the breakfast room, and, as for us, we haven’t stopped dancing, yet, have we, Nora? We’ll go on dancing till we drop.

  Dream awhile, scheme awhile . . .

  What a joy it is to dance and sing!

  Perry gave us a lot more than love, in those days. He added another digit to his monthly cheque to pay for dancing lessons. He was a dutiful father. He doubled as sugar daddy, too. Every other Sunday, he arrived with parcels from Hamleys and Harrods and Selfridges, he’d pull red ribbons out of our ears and flags from his nostrils, he’d sit us on his knee and feed us Fuller’s walnut cake and then he’d wind up the gramophone and we’d dance. After that, he and Grandma would have a couple of drinks and a few laughs; they were like conspirators.

  But, pilgrim by name, pilgrim by nature, came the day the wanderlust seized him by the throat again. He must be up and off, he must be up and doing. He dropped off a crate of crème de menthe for Grandma, tap shoes for me and Nora. Then he was gone and left no forwarding address although the postcards came every month or so and every Christmas we’d get a hamper full of rotten fruit or a box of straw and shards that had been fine china when he packed it from places we could never find on the map. He never knew what would travel and what wouldn’t.

  But one last little gift arrived on its own two legs and announced itself, not with a knock on the front door but a humble little scrabble down the area, where the family went. When Grandma went to open up, there she was, a wee scrap of humanity thin as a lathe, busted shoes, no stockings, just a shawl around her shoulders and a man’s cap on her head. She’d have been fourteen, then. She thrust forth a scrap of paper and there was our address, in Perry’s hand.

  ‘He said you’d give us a job,’ she said. ‘Help look after the kids, or something. He said you’d give us a roof.’

  ‘I wasn’t planning on running a hostel for fallen women,’ said Grandma in a huff. It was pissing down with rain, Our Cyn was soaked.

  ‘I haven’t fallen yet,’ said Our Cyn. ‘But I might.’
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  Once she got her feet under the table, she never took them out again. One of the fixtures and fittings. She was a breath of fresh air. If Grandma lingered too long down the local and forgot to grate the evening carrots, Cyn would do us a couple of lamb chops, a bit of liver and bacon. Forbidden fruit! Delish. Her kids were in and out all the time after she married that cabby, the second generation to call our grandma ‘Grandma’. It was Cyn’s eldest, Mavis, who got off with a GI which resulted in our Brenda, whom we took care of when she had her bit of trouble and brought home our precious little Tiffany, the first Black in the family.

  ‘Family,’ I say. Grandma invented this family. She put it together out of whatever came to hand – a stray pair of orphaned babes, a ragamuffin in a flat cap. She created it by sheer force of personality. I only wish she’d lived to see our little Tiffany. There is a persistent history of absent fathers in our family, although Tiffany did get a daddy of her own, in the end, because Brenda married this ex-boxer, after all that. Light-heavyweight. Strict Baptist. They live round the corner, Acre Lane. Brenda’s a pillar of the community, now, you’d never think her first fellow was here today and gone tomorrow.

  Tiffany. So pretty! I never saw such a pretty baby. ‘Born for the stage,’ I said to Nora. We took her on, ballet and tap, from the age of three. We used to run a little school, in those days, the Brixton Academy of Dance. In the ground-floor front. Our Bren would bang away at the piano; she played the harmonium in church, too. We’d roll back the carpet. It’s quite a lovely room, the ground-floor front – big, with a bay. We’d done it up in a Thames green Regency-stripe wallpaper. We put in a big mirror. The little girls laboured with sweat moustaches on their upper lips. One, two, three. The cats kept out in the garden, well away. One, two, three. Not good enough for Tiffany, though, not when she got to nine, ten, eleven. She wanted to do disco and funk, that kind of thing. Greek to us, of course. After our time.

  She moved out into a flat with some other girls. After that, she blossomed out. She’d still come back to see her old aunties whenever she got a moment, wearing black leather and red eyeshadow and hairpieces down to her bum and God knows what. Her dad wouldn’t let her into the house done up like that, he’s a lay preacher, so she’d stop off at our place from the club where she was working, wash off her make-up, slip on flatties and a nice frock she kept in the spare room.

  Correction: one of the spare rooms. This house is nothing but spare rooms, these days. Wheelchair lives in the front basement, so that she can roll her appliance in and out of the breakfast room and get to the downstairs lavvy on her own. Nor’ and I take up an attic apiece. The rest is old clothes, dust, newspapers stacked in piles tied up with string, cuttings, old photographs.

  The rest is silence.

  So Tiffany dropped in one fine day and who did she find taking tea with her aunties but a handsome young man she’d never seen before and who came as a bit of a shock to Nora and me, too, because he was the first Hazard child who’d ever come to visit us.

  And no sooner did poor little Tiff set eyes on him than she fell.

  Tristram. His twin brother is called Gareth. Bloody silly Celtic names. The other one, that Gareth, is a Jesuit, he converted in his teens. Then he went off to be a missionary, or so his Old Nanny told us. His Old Nanny drops round from time to time, friend of the family, it’s a complicated connection – she used to be Wheelchair’s Old Nanny, back in the Dark Ages, before the Flood. Then she was Wheelchair’s daughter’s Old Nanny. Then Tristram and Gareth’s Old Nanny. She is, you might say, the Hazard family’s generic Old Nanny. Indestructible old girl. We rely on her for gossip, to tell the truth. Old Nanny told us how Gareth went off to the jungle, it must have been ten years ago. He’s probably been barbecued long ago, or had his head shrunk by the Jivaro.

  Gareth and Tristram, the priest and the game-show presenter. Not so different, really, I suppose. Both of them in show business. Both, in their different ways, carrying on the great tradition of the Hazard family – the willing suspension of disbelief. Both of them promise you a free gift if you play the game.

  Tristram and Gareth, the offspring of our father’s third wife. Let me recapitulate. Number One: Lady Atalanta Hazard, née Lynde (a.k.a. ‘Wheelchair’). Number Two: Miss Delia Delaney, of Hollywood, USA (a.k.a. Daisy Duck). Number Three: the girl who, once upon a time, played Cordelia to our father’s Lear; marrying your Cordelia, evidently something of a Hazard family tradition. She was just twenty-one years old, in those days, and fresh out of RADA, where she had been, oh! the betrayals of youth! Melchior’s own daughter, Saskia’s, best friend. As for Melchior, he was old enough to draw his pension, already, and freshly knighted, for his ‘services to the theatre’, so at least he made a lady of her but she and Saskia never spoke again from that day to this, although Old Nanny, she’s an indefatigable gossip, told us Saskia turned up at the boys’ christening like the wicked fairy in Sleeping Beauty, balefully eyeing the plump little bundled twins, perhaps already laying out her wicked plans for the future.

  Numero Tre, however, had her own plans for the future. She was a forward-looking woman. She looked ahead and she saw – television! In those days, all everybody else saw was a little grey rectangle the size of a cornflakes packet, with vague forms flickering across it, like Trafalgar Square in a peasouper. Who would have thought that little box of shadows would put us all out of business, singers, dancers, acrobats, Shakespearians, the lot? But Melchior’s third wife planned for the late twentieth century. She put the entire family on camera. They prospered.

  Or perhaps it was a case of, needs must. Melchior was starting to muff his lines, trip over his sword, muddle up his business so you could hardly tell his Brutus from his Antony; old age was creeping up behind him and now he started to cash in on his own fame. He deeply mined the rich new seam that opened up before him – old buffers in pipe tobacco, vintage port and miniature cigar commercials. You started to associate his face – and though I take the piss out of him from time to time, all the same I have to thank him for bequeathing me the good old Hazard bones that improve like fine wine with age – with the music of Elgar.

  His clever young wife gave up her own career to devote herself to her two wonderful sons but she often found time to pop up on the box, too, touting pan-scrubbers, washing-up liquid, toilet paper . . . ‘The Royal Family of the theatre gives its seal of approval.’ Her pièce de résistance was a turn in a long yellow frock with a ruff, standing on a rampart, gazing sternly at a half-pound pack on a dish before her: ‘To butter or not to butter . . .’ My Lady Margarine. She also did celebrity guest appearances and bazaar openings at negotiable fees. She reached middle-age quicker than any woman I ever knew.

  Not that I knew her, exactly, but we read the papers, we kept in touch. After all, the Hazards belonged to everyone. They were a national treasure.

  In the fullness of time, the older stepchildren took to television, too. Saskia, my half-sister and bête noire, started that cookery series; now she’s the TV chef par excellence. Imogen, the other one, developed a unique line as a goldfish. I kid you not. It was a series for the kiddies, set in an aquarium, about this carp called Goldie. It’s run for twenty years, now, carp live a long time. Sometimes I don’t understand the English.

  Apart from catching the odd glimpse if we mistuned the set, we never saw hair nor hide of any of the Hazards, except in the papers. Ever since his doomed production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Melchior’s one and only stab at the movies, he steered clear of us because he only had us in the film for mascots and look what a débâcle that turned out to be! We’ve sat at the same table with him only the one time since World War II, and that encounter ended in tears, too. As for My Lady Margarine, she never fancied breaking bread with her husband’s by-blows, especially since those by-blows were old enough to be mother to her. But we read in the papers how the boys went to Bedales, from whence Tristram was expelled for tippling and fornication, although Gareth, not.

  What a ru
stling of the tabloids when Tristram was expelled! Wheelchair cackled with glee. Little Tris, busted for pot in ’68, in a satin vest and velvet knickers. Titian ringlets. He danced naked on the stage in Hair. In ’76, he crashed his first Lotus Elan whilst under the influence, wearing (ever the snappy dresser) his hair in spikes and tartan bondage trousers. Ooh, he was a naughty boy and how his mother worried. Never off the gossip pages, always in the papers, sex and drugs and rock-and-roll.

  Gareth, no.

  It must have been My Lady Margarine got Tristram the job on the telly. She must have been at her wits’ end. Unless it was that Saskia, the conniving bitch. The first time he came to see us, a couple of years ago, it was before his first major investment in gents’ natty suiting, he was still at the jeans-with-necktie stage, just an assistant producer, and he wanted us, or so he said, for a chat show.

  ‘Gawd,’ said Nora. Though it was not yet the time we usually dressed, she’d slipped on a frock because he’d come on business, and had muzzed up her hair a bit. She looked quite debauched. ‘We’re as old as the hills and still you want us to show a bit of leg!’

  ‘I’m proud of my aunts,’ said Tristram. ‘When Saskia told me the legendary Chance sisters were my very own aunts, I was over the moon.’

  ‘Aunts’, see? That Saskia! We raised our eyebrows at each other but we held our peace. He’s got charm, I must say. A slippery kind of charm. I could tell Nora was almost taken with the idea, she was tapping her front teeth with her fingernail in the way she has. We could have done with a bob or two, at that juncture, too. But the very thought of us two aged ladies performing a geriatric Charleston for the delight of the viewers made me nauseous and if Saskia had anything to do with it, I smelled a rat.

  Then Tiffany came in. She’s got her own key, she can come and go. No knock. The door opened. There she was.

  What an entrance! She looked like a proper harlot, poor little thing, in her fishnets and her leather mini. Bren and Leroy always overprotected her. Nothing was too good for her. First kid in the school to have a personal stereo. ‘You just wait until she kicks over the traces!’ we always said. Only a virgin would have worn a skirt like that. Never a sweeter or more innocent girl than our Tiffany, even though she didn’t know enough not to flash her tits all over the papers. ‘Six feet two of lithe, coffee-coloured loveliness,’ said the caption on page three. She never dared tell her father but he won’t have the Sun in the house on principle, fortunately. The sweetest girl in London, but naïve.