Wise Children Read online

  ‘Finally, well, I just passed out,’ said Tristram. ‘I couldn’t cope any more. She took me back to her place.’

  ‘Who,’ I asked, more sharply still, ‘is this “she”?’

  As if we didn’t know. He was too scared to say out loud or else he wanted to keep it from Wheelchair. Then, again, he’d never shown any consideration for her sensibilities in the past; why did he want to start now? But Nora leaned forward and, with her long, lean fingertips, delicately plucked from his lapel one single hair, as red as his own hair but very, very much longer. She held it high, she let it dangle, proof positive that last night of all nights he’d spent with –

  And that is the single, most unmentionable secret in this entire family’s bulging closetful of skeletons, that ever since he was little, Tristram and Saskia, although she is his half-sister and old enough to be his mother, in fact, his mother’s best friend, once upon a time . . . I thought our Tiff had weaned him off the nipple, but here was the evidence to prove the contrary.

  ‘Like a dog,’ said Nora, sneering at the hair, ‘returning to its own vomit.’

  ‘Oh, God!’ said Tristram. ‘Try to be a little understanding. Tiffany had vanished clean away, I was half mad with fear –’

  The area door slammed, such a bang the back windows shuddered. Came heavy footsteps down the passage. We harkened. Brenda always let herself in.

  ‘I suppose,’ said Nora with heavy irony, for she knew swift retribution was at hand, ‘it never occurred to you to ask at her mother’s, did it?’

  The kitchen door burst open. You could tell by the look on her face that she had seen his Porsche outside. She’d been a real slip of a thing, when she was a girl, but she’d put on a lot of weight after the kids, now she could give Leroy a pound or two, and strong as a horse, with it. She still had her rollers in, her carpet slippers on, but she was past grief, white with rage.

  At least Tristram was spared the task of telling Brenda, the police had done that already. Leroy tried Tristram in his absence and found grounds for a verdict of justifiable homicide. When Bren told him that: ‘If her Dad gets his hands on you . . .’ she aimed a big whack at him and I thought I’d slip outside and put the kettle on, leave them to get on with it.

  All of a sudden, I felt my age. If the youngest goes before you . . .

  There’s a photo of Evelyn Laye on the wall above the tea caddy. ‘To twenty twinkling toes, with loads of love.’ I thought of Tiffany, ‘this little piggy goes to market’. And her feet, leaving blood behind them as she came down the staircase. She’d have made a cracking dancer, if she’d put her mind to it.

  Then my heart felt as if a hand had squeezed it because I’d thought of our darling Tiffany in the past tense, hadn’t I?

  Little Tiff.

  Nora came out into the scullery and slipped her arm through mine. We watched the kettle bounce and hiss on the gas and listened to the sounds of fracas coming from the breakfast room. Smash! There goes a plate. The cats trampled themselves underfoot as they streaked out of the cat door. ‘Not good enough, was she!’ Muffled cry of pain from Tristram. ‘Treat her like dirt, did you! Well, see where it gets you!’ Then the telephone rang. I looked at Nora. She shut her eyes. We knew that ring meant bad news.

  We took the tea in. Wheelchair was dealing with the telephone because the others hadn’t noticed it, in the heat of battle – Tristram, black eye, bloody nose, ripped jacket, torn shirt and it looked as if she’d tried to throttle him with his necktie but that was the worst of the damage, he was still conscious. The breakfast things had been trashed in the course of the tussle, bacon fat everywhere, but Brenda was spent, her hands hung limp, she was whimpering. ‘In her knickers, on the telly, in front of all those people, singing dirty songs. Her dad was watching everything. I can’t ever forgive you. Never.’ Wheelchair put the telephone down. One look at her face told us the worst.

  ‘That was the police, dear,’ she said to Brenda. You’ve got to hand it to the old girl, she’s got the manner pat, cool but not cold, sympathetic without slobbering. ‘Do sit down. I’m afraid it’s bad news.’

  Brenda did not sit down, as if she thought that if she did, she’d never summon the heart to get up again; she hung onto the chair like grim death, making little noises in the back of her throat.

  ‘They found the body of a young girl in the river, this morning.’

  There was a whoosh of rubber tyres as Wheelchair made a compassionate swoop upon Brenda, put her arms around as much of her lower torso as she could grapple. Ever the lady social worker.

  ‘Poor darling, prepare yourself. It’s something very terrible.’

  In the war, in the mornings after air raids, you saw people look like Brenda looked, just then.

  ‘She hasn’t got a face left, Brenda. Evidently a police launch, the propellers –’

  I remember that thin, high scream from the war, too.

  Then she pulled herself together and had a cup of hot, sweet tea, which you give them for shock although she didn’t seem to notice drinking it and she and Tristram went off to the morgue in his Porsche. No point in rowing with him, now, was there? All he could say was: ‘I’m most frightfully sorry.’ He kept saying it over and over again. I’d have clocked him one for that, alone, if I’d been Brenda, but I don’t think the poor girl could so much as see him, now, couldn’t hear him, could think of nothing but our Tiff in the cold store drowned dead with the baby inside her drowned dead, too.

  Wheelchair made her excuses and wheeled off into the basement front and after a while her gramophone started up, she’s got her own in there, there’d be bloodshed if we had to share. She’d put on a bit of funeral music, classical stuff, lugubrious, a big, brown, lugubrious voice: ‘What is life for me without thee?’

  She’s overdoing it, a bit. I thought. She didn’t know Tiff that well. And I wish she could have picked a less affecting song.

  What is life for me without thee?

  What is left if thou art gone?

  Nora lifted off the lid of the teapot and poured in a tot of rum.

  ‘That’ll set us up.’

  ‘D’you think we ought to ring up Saskia and tell her where her boyfriend’s gone?’

  ‘We haven’t spoken to Saskia for forty years, don’t see why we should start now. Let her stew in her own juice. It’s all her bloody fault, anyway. If she hadn’t got her claws into Tristram . . .’

  The singer on Wheelchair’s gramophone reprised the query, what would be left; then she sang: ‘Eurydice . . .’ The saddest sound. ‘Eurydice!’

  Nora made a dismissing gesture and fell silent. We left the clearing away till after dinner, we put our feet up. Grey skies. Still that big wind, banging away outside. To think, this morning, I thought that wind would blow us an adventure, it wouldn’t matter what. Now look what it had blown us! Rain came in gusts over the garden, buffeting the forsythia. Forsythia, the exact colour of peroxide blond. Whenever I see forsythia, I think of Grandma.

  ‘He’s left his cassette behind,’ said Nora. ‘Worth a bit, I should think.’

  But she didn’t sound too keen. Our blackmailing days are long gone.

  ‘Do you think they’ll cancel the party?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Nora. ‘I mean, she wasn’t really family, was she? Only in the family way.’

  We put more rum in the tea. After all, it was our birthday.

  ‘What about us? Are we still going to the party?’

  ‘Life must go on,’ said Nora, all of a sudden full of life. ‘I wouldn’t miss it for a hundred million pounds.’

  Two

  NE, TWO, THREE, hop! See me dance the polka. Once upon a time, there was an old woman in splitting black satin pounding away at an upright piano in a room over a haberdasher’s shop in Clapham High Street and her daughter in a pink tutu and wrinkled tights slapped at your ankles with a cane if you didn’t pick up your feet high enough. Once a week, every Saturday morning, Grandma Chance would wash us, brush us and do up our hair in sausage
curls. We had long, brown stockings strung up to our liberty bodices by suspenders. Grandma Chance would take firm hold of one hand of each of us, then – ho! for the dancing class; off we’d trot to catch the tram.

  We always took the tram from Brixton to Clapham High Street. The stately progress of the tram, occupying by right of bulk and majesty the centre of the road, not veering to the left nor right upon its way but sometimes swaying every now and then with a sickening lurch, like Grandma, coming home from the pub.

  One, two, three, hop.

  Big mirrors blooming like plums with dust along the walls. I can see us now, in our vests and knickers and our little pink dancing slippers, dipping a curtsey to our reflections. Grandma sat by the door with her bag in her lap, squinting at us between the spots on her veil. She looked grieving, as if she was scared we might sprain ourselves, but this was because she was sucking on a Fox’s glacier mint. Everything smelled of sweat and gas fire. The old woman thumped the piano and Miss Worthington in her droopy tutu showed us how to fouetté, poor thing, sixty if she was a day.

  One, two, three, hop! See us cover the ground.

  We did our exercises at the barre. Nora’s bum in her navy-blue bloomers jiggled away in front of me like two hard-boiled eggs in a handkerchief. We’d turn around, then she could feast her eyes on mine. Outside, a tram went by with a whirr and a click, knocking out sparks from the overhead cables.

  To tell the truth, we lived for that dancing class. We thought that was what the week was for, for Saturday mornings.

  Then we were seven.

  There was a cake with seven candles in the larder iced up to the eyebrows, its stunning pink and white beauty marred only by one little fingerprint – Nora, unable to resist. It sat in state in the larder, awaiting our return from our birthday treat, our first matinée. Our Cyn waved us off. We had our best coats on, green tweed, quite hairy, with velvet collars so the tweed didn’t scratch our necks, and little hats to match. Grandma dressed us like princesses. We always had glacé kid gloves, for best.

  Grandma lashed out, she got us seats in the stalls. It was almost too much for me and Nora. We were mute with ecstasy. The plaster cherubs lifting aloft gilt swags and crystal candelabra on the walls; the red plush; the floral and pastel silks of the afternoon frocks of the ladies in the stalls, from whom mingled odours of talc and scent and toilet soap arose; and the wonderful curtain that hung between us and pleasure, the curtain that, in a delicious agony of anticipation, we knew would soon rise and then and then . . . what wonderful secrets would be revealed to us, then?

  ‘You just wait and see,’ said Grandma.

  The lights went down, the bottom of the curtain glowed. I loved it and have always loved it best of all, the moment when the lights go down, the curtain glows, you know that something wonderful is going to happen. It doesn’t matter if what happens next spoils everything; the anticipation itself is always pure.

  To travel hopefully is better than to arrive, as Uncle Perry used to say. I always preferred foreplay, too.

  Well. Not always.

  When the lights went down and the curtain glowed that first time of all, Nora and I gave one another a look. Our little hearts went pit-a-pat.

  Up went the curtain; there were Fred and Adèle, evicted, out on the street with all their bits and pieces. She set out the chairs, she straightened the sofa, she hung a sign on the lamppost: ‘Bless this house’. We thought that we would die of pleasure. We clung on to one another’s hands like grim death, we thought we might wake up and find out we had been dreaming. Nora liked Adèle best; she liked it when she dressed up like a Mexican widow and did her Spanish dance, but it was old Fred for me, then and for ever, with his funny little nutcracker face and the Eton crop that looked painted on, it shone so, and not a hair ever moved. Who’d have thought we’d be on ‘Hi, Fred,’ ‘Hi, girls’ terms when we grew up?

  God knows what sixth sense made Grandma pick out Lady Be Good for our seventh birthday treat. ‘I was looking for a nayce musical comedy,’ she said, ‘but nothing with that Jessie Matthews in it.’ She thought Jessie Matthews was common although I always found her a perfect lady. But Lady Be Good showed us the way. It was the Damascus road for us. We spent hours, at home, afterwards, in the ground-floor front, rolling back the rug, getting the numbers off pat. That finale, she in her Tyrolean costume, him like a sailor doll. We took it in turns to be the lady.

  ‘You’ve got stars in your eyes, girls,’ said Grandma in the interval.

  Then tea on a tray arrived, no expense spared. Hotel silver service, cucumber sandwiches. Grandma rolled her veil up over her nose and slipped an iced fancy in between her magenta lips. Even in those days, we always felt defiant of the world when we went out with Grandma, we knew she looked a bit of a funniosity. Just as we were brushing off the crumbs came something of a commotion in the dress circle. Grandma was handing the tray back to the waitress when she froze, the way a dog does when it sees a rabbit. The girl caught hold of the tea-things just in time; Grandma rose up and raised her hand, she pointed.

  If you’d drawn a line straight from the end of her finger up into the dress circle, it would have landed on the nose of a man, a very handsome young man, a tall, dark, young man with big, dark eyes, well turned out, red rose in his buttonhole, black hair just a touch long therefore bespeaking an artistic profession. He was escorting a fair-haired lady with a sheep’s profile in a chic afternoon frock of lavender wool and they’d evidently freshly arrived, come to kill the hour before cocktails at the smartest show in town, no doubt; they cut a bit of a swathe as they ‘excuse me’d’ their way along the row. Glances, stares, even the odd ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’. They were young and glamorous. Everybody there knew who they were but us. The lights were going down, the band was tuning up. Grandma still stood there, quivering.

  ‘That man is . . . ybur father!’

  Her revelation didn’t have the force it might have had for us because, at that age, we still weren’t sure just what it was that fathers did. Since we didn’t know how to put one and one together to make two, we didn’t know we were different, either. You’d think, wouldn’t you, the neighbours would have nudged and winked a bit but Grandma kept her lip buttoned and maintained the outward appearance of propriety, at least in the hours before opening time, although if the milkman or the postie ever peeked in through the net curtains in the middle of the morning, they might have spotted her doing the dusting in her altogether and then there would have been talk.

  So when Grandma announced so dramatically, that’s your father! we dutifully took a look because she told us to but then the curtain glowed, the overture began.

  ‘I say, do sit down, madame,’ said a bloke in the row behind so she subsided mutinously. But it ruined the second half for her. She kept craning round, she was muttering the filthiest things under her breath but we had been transported to a different world, we were oblivious. For us, Fred and Adèle were everything.

  There was such a press of people, at the end, and it took so long to get our coats, and we were in such a dream because of the dance and song that we missed them. We got out on to the pavement as our father and his missus sailed off in a cab leaving Grandma waving her umbrella uselessly after them.

  ‘Damn,’ said Grandma. ‘Damn, damn, damn.’

  Her face told you that she meant it.

  Now that the spell of the show was broken, we had time to ponder her words.

  ‘Grandma,’ said Nora. ‘Tell us some more about fathers.’

  On top of the tram, on the way home, she told us the lot. She was a naturist, she was a vegetarian, she was a pacifist; when it came to sex education, what do you expect? But we found it hard to believe, neither what she said about the prong and how it could change its shape, etc., but also what she said the prong came in handy for. We thought she made it up to tease us. To think that we girls were in the world because a man we’d never met did that to a girl we didn’t remember, once upon a time! What we knew for certain was, our
grandma loved us and we had the best uncle in the world. Although Our Cyn, the worldly one, thought that Perry was our father.

  But something took root in us that afternoon, some kind of curiosity. At first it was a niggling thing. We’d spot his picture in the paper and exclaim. When we went up West to buy new dancing shoes at Freed’s, we’d make a detour round Shaftesbury Avenue, to look at the photographs wherever he was playing. Over the years, the curiosity turned into a yearning, a longing. I tucked a postcard of him in ermine as Richard II into a secret place at the back of the drawer where I kept my underwear, and, it was the one thing Nora kept from me, she only told me this afternoon, she did the same with one of him as young Prince Hal on the q.t. You could say, I suppose, that we had a crush on Melchior Hazard, like lots of girls. You could say he was our first romance, and bittersweet it turned out to be, in the end.

  Anyway, that was the first time we ever saw our father. And the first time we saw Fred Astaire. And the first time we spent a penny – that is, used a public convenience. The one at Piccadilly Circus, with white tiles and a little old lady in a white pinny to take your penny off you and put it in the lock so you wouldn’t soil your hands. A child remembers these things. It was a red-letter day all round and its wonders were by no means over. When we got home, the cake had moved out of the larder on to the kitchen table, its candles were blazing and, in our absence, a packing case that took up half the kitchen had arrived. Our Cyn pointed to the label: ‘For my two lovely girls.’

  ‘He hasn’t forgotten,’ she said, pleased for our sakes and also pleased for the sake of fatherhood – that Perry might be errant but did his duty, all the same. Little did she know.

  In that packing case there was a toy theatre. It was a lovely one, a marvel, an antique – he’d got hold of it in Venice. In the middle of the gilt proscenium arch there they were, side by side, the comic mask, the tragic mask, one mouth turned up at the ends, the other down, the presiding geniuses – just like life. The commedia, that’s life, isn’t it?