Wise Children (11 page)

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?

Backdrops of trees and flowers and fountains, a moony night, blue clouds, a carnival, a bedroom, a feast, and little men and women on metal rods, Harlequin, Columbine, Pantaloon, all the old-timers. It was a plaything for princesses and we unpacked it out of its woodshavings with a kind of solemn delight; we hadn’t known until that very moment it was exactly what we wanted.

We treasured that toy theatre. We played with it as if we were in church, always on Sunday afternoons, never any other time; we washed our hands, after dinner we put our best frocks on. I cried my eyes out when we were forced to part with it. It went to Sotheby’s when Brenda had her bit of trouble. You wouldn’t believe what we got for it. It kept young Tiffany in disposables until she learned to piss in a pot.

Grandma lit the candles on our cake.

‘Make a wish and blow,’ she said. You can guess what wish it was these stagestruck children made.

We closed our eyes and there we were, under the painted moon on the other side of the curtain, where the painted clouds will never move and everything is two-dimensional. Nora looked at me and I at Nora; frills, sequins, fishnet tights, high heels and feathers in our hair. We smiled. We raised our right legs, thus . . . ready for the orchestra.

Let’s face the music and –

Of course, we didn’t know, then, how the Hazards would always upstage us. Tragedy, eternally more class than comedy. How could mere song-and-dance girls aspire so high? We were destined, from birth, to be the lovely ephemera of the theatre, we’d rise and shine like birthday candles, then blow out. But, that birthday tea-time sixty-eight years ago, we blew out all our birthday candles with one breath and, yes, indeed! life gave us our birthday wish, in due course, because the Lucky Chances faced the music and they danced for well-nigh half a century, although we would always be on the left-hand line, hoofers, thrushes, the light relief, as you might say; bring on the bears!

Or, bares. Our careers went down the toilet along with the profession itself. We ended up showing a leg at the fag end of vaudeville in all those touring revues with titles such as
Nudes, Ahoy! Here Come the Nine O’clock Nudes! Nudes of the World!
and so on, backing up Archie Rice and other comics of that ilk. The showgirls would stand there, topless, living statues, and we would do our number in and out the nipples in our tasselled bras. I saw more nipples in those last five years of touring after World War II than in all my life till then and I was brought up by a naturist, don’t you forget.

We had a raddled middle age, all right, but I swear to you we were respectable, in youth. There was nothing so stuffy as the lives of small-time theatricals, in those days, and South London was a ghetto of chorus girls and boys and what not. In the semis, behind the dusty privet hedges, they rested between engagements, sitting on a piece of the leatherette suite in the sitting room where the fumed oak sideboard contained a single bottle of sweet sherry and half a dozen dusty glasses stood on a tarnished silver tray inscribed ‘To a great little trouper from the Merry Martins, Frinton-on-Sea, 1919’, or something like that, beneath framed photographs of girls with big thighs in tights and men in crepe hair signed with Xs galore and framed colour reproductions on the walls of scenes depicting red-nosed monks eating big meals of venison and boar.

We begged and pleaded until Grandma stood us extra classes and after that we were the teacher’s pets, while Grandma and Miss Worthington and her old mother, who played piano, often enjoyed a port and lemon or two under the picture of ‘Simon the Cellarer’ in the back parlour behind the dance studio, as Miss Worthington chose to call it. Grandma with her little finger hoist aloft, on her best behaviour, all smiles, spitting out her famous vowels like cherrystones; she’d give a big belch in the street, afterwards, glare around, say: ‘Who let that out?’