Wise Children (19 page)

And, after the hem of the white tablecloth had smouldered for a while, an adventurous little blue flame licked up the side of that white linen cloth, to see what was on top of the table and, if that first little flame, satisfied with what it found, fell back, unnoticed, then the second little flame crept up a wee bit further, unnoticed, too.

Why didn’t a waiter see and stamp out the conflagration while it was in its infancy?

Because the waiter at whose station the fire had chosen to begin wasn’t a
serious
waiter, no pro, just a body hired for the big do, and he, as it happened, quit his post precipitately to slip upstairs with a female guest at the urgent promptings of his –

But we did not know all this until much later.

There they all were, gathering on the lawn behind us, all the guests, every one, in their rags of finery blackened as if plunged into mourning, and the Lady A. and our little cousins, whom even I could pity, now, poor homeless creatures, Saskia still sucking on a charred wing of swan, the arsonist producer, my ex-lover buttoning his fly, all the chorus, every principal, the musicians, the waiters, the cooks, the scullery-maids. Even the firemen abandoned their pumps and came to see.

All watched as Perry brought out my sister safe.

Everything held its breath.

She stirred. Her eyelids shivered.

Before I could move a muscle, my boyfriend,
her
boyfriend, shoved past me and scooped her up right out of Perry’s arms; he was laughing and crying all at once, hugging her and showering her face with kisses.

Now she opened her eyes, all right, but she didn’t smile to see him, nor did she kiss him back.

‘Where’s Dora?’ she said. Her first words.

‘Oh, you brave little girl!’ said that innocent young man. ‘So you went back to look for Dora! You risked your life!’

Nora looked round a touch wildly, I thought. Then – discretion is the better part – she fainted. Melchior had no eyes for her at all. He was fairly dancing with distress.

‘Give me that crown!’ he rasped, having suddenly transformed himself into Richard III. ‘Give me the crown, you bastard!’

Peregrine threw his brother a marvelling look; then he laughed out loud.

‘Now, God, stand up for bastards!’ he crowed.

He seemed to grow, to put it out in all directions – bigger, taller, wider. Huge. When he whipped off that crown and shook it like a tambourine, to tease, the famous Hazard crown, shabby as a prop in nursery charades, it was as far out of reach as if Perry had been a grown-up and Melchior a little kid, although Melchior was a tall man, ordinarily.

‘If you want it,’ said Peregrine, quaking with the joke, ‘jump for it!’

But now the focus of attention abruptly shifted to the Hollywood producer, only begetter of this inferno, who had found himself another cigar, although it was tasteless of him in the extreme, I thought, to light up again so soon after his last smoke burned down his host’s stately home. Nevertheless, his jaws were clamped around another fat cigar like a babe’s around a bottle as he announced through clenched teeth:

‘Ladies and gentlemen, out of these ashes . . .’

The whites of their eyes looked huge and livid in their blackened faces under the moonlight as all turned to look at him.

‘ . . . a work of genius will arise!

‘There’s an up-side to everything, ladies and gentlemen. I’m gonna take all of you fabulously talented people, yes, all of you! to Hollywood, USA. Yessir! Under the direction of this great genius of the English stage –’

But Melchior’s mind was only on his heirloom.

‘My crown!’

‘Jump!’ hissed Peregrine and Melchior, disconsolate, essayed a little hop that got him nowhere near.

‘– your great genius, Melchior Hazard. Script by that other great genius in the family, my friend . . . Peregrine Hazard –’

‘– my crown!’

‘Jump!’

‘– with additional dialogue by William Shakespeare!’

He puffed out a triumphant plume of smoke and the stunned throng managed a baffled patter of applause. Peregrine, evidently caught by surprise, doubled up in a raucous guffaw when he caught those last words, reeling with astonished pleasure.

‘My God!’ he said. ‘A dream come true!’

And then he just lost interest in the crown, he didn’t want to tease old Melchior any more. When Melchior wailed: ‘My crown!’ again, Perry tossed it to him negligently. He didn’t care one way or other about the crown. It was a toy, he was playing a game, Melchior was a fool to take the game so seriously, a fool to clasp the thing as if it were alive, and kiss it. A fool. When I saw how, since babyhood, they’d hated one another’s guts, it gave me a goose-walking-on-my-grave feeling.

Or perhaps it was just the cold finally getting to me. I was turning blue with it. Perry doffed his tux and covered me up, this soot- and tear-besmirched nude, his niece, as the snow began to drift down again and the company adjourned to make the long drive home.

‘Time to go, Dora,’ he said, and gave me a cuddle. ‘Time to take poor Nora home.’

Nora, apparently insensible in our boyfriend’s arms, opened one eye in order to tip me a wink. Perry told him, ‘I can give you a lift as far as Clapham Common, you can catch the night tram from there.’ So he came a bit of the way with us but Perry wouldn’t let him come in and I never saw him again.

Three

E SAW IT
again just the other week, hadn’t seen it for years. Haven’t been to the pictures for years, in fact, what with one thing and another, not least of which the fact the local fleapit only shows stuff in the original Serbo-Croat with subtitles, a touch tough on yours truly’s peepers. My eyes are dim, I cannot see, I have not brought my specs with me; nor do I intend to, ducky. All I have left to sustain me is my vanity. It was showing at three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, miles away, in Notting Hill. We had to take two buses, change at the Scotch Shop.

God! Times have changed. More people on the screen than in the auditorium, and fleapit’s the word, a flea bit me on the inner upper thigh, a particularly sensitive area well-nigh impossible to scratch in public without getting run in. It came on to rain while we were inside and dripped on Nora until we were forced to either raise an umbrella or to move our seats. As we got up, we spotted a bloke in the next row down on his knees at trough in his boyfriend’s fly. It was the only thing about the entire expedition that cheered me up, in fact, to think that
somebody
was having a bit of fun in all the damp, draughty emptiness, with the smell of mice, old tobacco, Jeyes Fluid, damp plush, because fun was the last thing I was having, sitting there in my used body, watching it when it was new.

Nora nudged me in the ribs one time. ‘Gawd!’ she said. ‘We were a pretty girl!’

Enough to make you weep.

Thin though the audience was, there was a little patter of applause when it was all over, although I nervously suspected irony, and a boy came running down the street, afterwards: ‘Can you really be the Chance sisters?’ It made our day. We signed his
City Limits
, then he leaned forward and asked us, confidentially, if it was true that
her
real name was Daisy Duck. When he got that close, I could see the little pearly drops of come – is that how you spell it? – on his moustache. They mesmerised me. I said, yes, it
was
true, then – couldn’t help it, could have bitten my tongue out, after – I said, had he noticed what a funny shape her mouth was? That it got that way because she’d sucked off every producer in Hollywood, so after he trotted away Nora swore I’d hurt his feelings and
his
mouth looked perfectly normal, to her, but he hadn’t seemed at all put out, anyway.

Nora was squinting away at a leaflet she’d picked up on her way out of the cinema.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, dir. Melchior Hazard, Hollywood, USA. ‘Dora,’ she said, ‘why do they call it a “masterpiece of kitsch”?’

We went to look for somewhere to have a cup of tea, but no more Joe Lyonses, gone the way of all flesh. Do you remember the Lyons teashops? Thick, curly white plaster on the shopfronts, like walking into a wedding cake, and the name in gold: J. Lyons. Poached eggs on toast keeping snug in little tin pigeon holes as you shuffled down the counter. The moist and fruity Bath buns with crumbs of rock candy glistening on the top, and a little pat of butter lined up alongside. The girl would pour hot water, whoosh! in a steaming column into a fat white pot and there you were, your good, hot cup of tea, with the leaves left in the bottom of the cup, afterwards, to tell your fortune with.

I haven’t had a cup of tea with leaves in it for years. For decades. I wonder what the fortune-tellers do, these days. Palms?

Fancy getting nostalgic for a Joe Lyons. We only ever used them for a spot of lunch when times were hard, when we were tramping the rounds, agents, stage doors, etc. Then we’d expend a tanner each on something with chips, a banger, some beans.

You only miss an institution like a Joe Lyons teashop when it’s gone.

But we couldn’t find a place to get a cup of tea at all, nowhere on the Hill, after all that, so we had a gin, instead, to fortify us, in that great, draughty barn of a place down the Portobello. Outside, it was raining still, and the dark coming on. I sometimes wonder why we go on living.

In those days, four farthings made a penny and Britain was entirely surrounded by water; in these days, there is no such thing as a penny any more and it is as if this foggy old three-cornered island were dangling from a cloud – now we’re in the air. You feel that you could pucker up and
blow
away the miles between 49 Bard Road and that apartment in New York where I could be tomorrow morning, if the apartment still existed, if Peregrine still existed, if the past weren’t deeper than the sea, more difficult to cross.

The only time I ever flew was in a harness at the end of a steel cable, on the set of
The Dream
, in Hollywood, USA. Hollywood was a long haul from London, in those days; it took weeks, transatlantic, transcontinental. First leg, we went by water, Nor’ and I, and so arrived in Manhattan, the gateway to our father’s dream, early in the morning and stood at the rail, gawping.

Never seen anything like it. What we’d seen at the pictures had been a pale shadow. All the high towers, in long rows, shifting and parting in front of us as we came into port. Everything seemed to rise up before us out of the sea like a lost city coming up for air. Our hearts began to pound. We thought that anything might happen.

We leaned on the rail and gawped, like mere trippers, although we were smart as paint and I can prove it, I’ve got the cutting here. There we are, see? On the front page of the
New York Post
, in our best suits – Schiaparelli, I kid you not – charcoal wool, fox wrap collar and cuffs, buttons, typical Schiap touch, in the shape of crochets and quavers, soft little high-crowned hats pulled down over our left eyes. Look hot, stay cool, we’d instructed one another; we’d got the stance to match the suits off pat, you stuck your hipbone forward, let your shoulders droop, put all your weight on the one leg.

Look at the headline: ‘New York welcomes Shakespeare treasure.’ Sub-head: ‘Twins bear precious gift.’ See that thing in Nora’s arms, that looks like a decapitated doll? You’ll never believe it. It was a pot, a sort of jar, about the size of the ones they use for ashes in the crematoria, and it was hollow inside and in the shape of a bust of, that’s right, William Shakespeare; our father had had it specially made, in Stoke-on-Trent, and the bald patch lifted off, that was the lid.

And what did this bizarre vessel contain?

Earth.

We travelled with a box of earth, like Dracula, and never let it out of sight. Earth from Stratford-upon-Avon, dug out of the grounds of that big theatre by some reverential sidekick and then entrusted to Nora and myself, a sacred mission, to bear the precious dust to the New World so that Melchior could sprinkle it on the set of
The Dream
on the first day of the shoot.