Wise Children (35 page)

Melchior flashed a ‘how could you’ illade at the Lady A., who reared up in her chair – ‘bright eyes’, indeed! more like Medusa. She got it all off her chest in one go. What a performance. Those who could secure one perched on the little gilt chairs that stood around, the rest roosted on the floor at risk to gowns and trousers and all turned into the perfect audience, quiet as mice, rustling at tense moments, indrawing breath at startling disclosures and sometimes rippling with discreet mirth, while the waiters lolled against the walls, more disengaged, professionals themselves, keeping a critical eye upon the show rather than being carried away by it.

‘And wasn’t it the Hazard blood?’ she cried, full-throated, clarion-like. We’d never heard her sound like that before. ‘The Hazard blood! The precious, unique Hazard blood that blinds parents to their children and turns daughter against mother!’

Melchior coughed, spluttered and writhed upon his throne; she’d been bottling up his embarrassment for years and now, pop! bubble, bubble, bubble, or more like hubble, bubble, toil and trouble, out it came all over the floor. Perry got Saskia in a half-nelson and she hushed up, staring at the Lady A. with saucer eyes; she’d never thought her mother had so much passion in her, and neither had I.

‘You left me at home hugging the empty womb you couldn’t fill, Melchior!’

Spasm of shock.

‘You couldn’t fill
my
womb, Melchior, although you’d been so profligate of your seed before me, seduced and abandoned an innocent girl, left her to die, alone, and then, to compound the betrayal, you abandoned her daughters –’

– she gestured towards us and Nora swiftly assumed a po-face as a fresh gasp ran through the crowd and all eyes turned towards us, as with the crowd at Wimbledon. I wondered, ought we to take a bow?

‘– oh, yes! the daughters you never acknowledged, as though you thought the Hazard blood lost all its virtue once it was mixed with that of a chambermaid –’

He made a furious gesture of denial. She snapped:

‘Oh, yes you did!’

Touch of the pantomime; would be riposte: ‘Oh, no I didn’t!’ No such luck. She was unstoppable.

‘It was your blood, the Hazard blood, that went to make the “darling buds of May”, the girls you loved so dearly even when they robbed their mother of her home and money –’

Gasps; muffled exclamations; all eyes now swivelled towards Saskia and Imogen, who flinched and quailed.

‘Your blood, the Hazard blood, runs in their veins but the “darling buds” never sprang from the
seed
of Melchior Hazard!’

‘Ooh!’ and ‘Aah!’ said everybody. Myself, I’d been wondering how the Lady A. would verbalise the technical aspect of her adultery, given the refinement of her vocabulary. Having made the distinction between ‘blood’ and the actual procreative juice, what would she call the latter? ‘Jism’? ‘Come’? (Or do you spell it ‘cum’, I’m never sure.) Sperm and semen seemed altogether too technical for her rhetorical mode. I was glad she’d settled on the tasteful compromise of ‘seed’, although it occurred to me, not for the first time, that a serious language problem existed between the two branches of the Hazard family.

Don’t misunderstand me. We’ve got very fond of her. She’s always been welcome to the basement front, we’d never deny her a crust and I know she can’t help it – I truly think she’d change if only she could. But, always, the high tone, even today, when she was letting rip and all those decades of understatement were going up in smoke. The nub of what she was saying now was, she’d had a tumble with her brother-in-law, once upon a time, and, as a result, there were two more girls in the world. Sorry, pardon, Melchior. But she couldn’t just
say
that, could she? She had to make a meal of it. Some of the things she said were news to me, of course, and made a lot of things make sense, but she was going on about it all as if it were a matter of life and death. And how could we Chances believe that? We knew that nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death.

‘Not your seed, Melchior, but those girls were cast in your mould, all the same! They robbed me and turned me out of my own home and spurned the love I felt for them just as you did yourself, Melchior!’

She burst into tears. There was a flutter of sympathetic handkerchiefs. Peregrine’s cheeks were streaming, too, and the darling buds clung on to one another, pictures of shame and grief. When the Lady A. had composed herself, she mopped her face with Nora’s crumpled veil, blew her nose on it and continued, as if refreshed:

‘You left me lonely, Melchior, while you pursued that restless, thirsty quest for fame, while you engaged in that titanic contest with your dead father –’

Titanic conquest? First I’ve heard of it, I sniffed. But how could I have heard of it, on reflection? Our father and I had never been on what you could call speaking terms.

‘–I was left lonely, with my empty womb. And then –’

But she couldn’t finish the sentence, perfect lady that she was. She raised her eyes imploringly to Peregrine and in one bound he was beside her, his arms around her shoulders and her daughters, weeping, scampered over, too, and crouched at her feet in attitudes of contrition. Peregrine looked Melchior right between the eyes.

‘They’re mine, Melchior, little monsters that they are. Forgive me, Melchior. Forgive us all.’

There was a patter of applause that petered out as soon as people realised that everything was real. Frail, lovely Lady A., her forces spent, exhaustedly accepted a pull at Daisy’s flask while the videotape recorded every move for posterity. Daisy was impressed and wondered aloud who held the mini-series rights.

Meanwhile, Saskia and Imogen each seized hold of a piece of the Lady A.’s skirt, kissed it and begged her to forgive and forget, etc. etc. etc. Poor old Perry was left right out in the cold during the ensuing emotional reconciliation and I drew away a little, sunk in my own thoughts, as follows: how a mother is always a mother, since a mother is a biological fact, whilst a father is a movable feast. But Melchior, head buried in his hands, looked the picture of misery and Margarine beat the air with her hands, at a loss as to what to do to cheer him up.

Daisy and Nora had got their heads together. Then Daisy nudged her gigolo back to life – he looked as if he’d gone off into a trance, temporarily. There was some discussion with the lutes and then they struck up all together as such a voice! the voice of an angel soared up and tickled the chandelier – a boy soprano, such purity, such vigour. A voice I’d heard before, in Hollywood but this time it was not raised to warn us against spotted snakes.

‘Oh,’ he sang, ‘my beloved father . . .’

No gigolo accompanied Daisy but he who’d once stood best man to her and Melchior. Bewigged, befuddled, still his vocal cords could move a heart of stone. She’d met him again when he presented her with her ‘lifetime contribution on the cinema’ Academy Award. He was filthy rich, and gaga, and when she told him to, he sang. ‘My very best marriage,’ she said. From Daisy Duck to Daisy Puck.

‘I love thee, yes, I love thee . . .’

Nora signed me with her eyes. It was time for me and she to go public about our paternity. Our skirts had ridden right up our crotches, we pulled them down, we patted our hair, our heels went click, click, click on the carpet, that sexy sound, but we looked like wizened children got up in our mum’s clothes for a dare and our hearts were brimming over. We pressed our cheeks against his hands. This was too much for Melchior. He melted for all to see.

‘Oh, my beloved father –’

The crystals rang with the last notes of Puck’s glorious aria. Not a dry eye in the house as Melchior raised his head and gave his girls a watery, tremulous smile.

‘I am the one deserves to weep,’ he said, and kissed us.

I could have sworn that then the curtain came down, the lights went up and there was a standing ovation but, as Nora pointed out later, there was no curtain, the lights were on already, and it would have been discourteous of that audience to applaud. So I imagined all that. But, anyway, after this inexpressibly moving reconciliation, came a short intermission. Everybody got up and stretched and vivaciously discussed the action so far while the waiters cleared the cake away. Nobody blew out the candles on this birthday, they went out of their own accord, but all our wishes had come true and we just sat there, beaming.

When the lutes settled down again after their excursion into Puccini, it was nostalgia-time. I pricked up my ears; forgotten melodies drifting up from Memory Lane . . . selections from – what else –
What? You Will!?!
We hummed along and when they came to ‘O Mistress Mine’, they did it as a foxtrot and Nora gave Melchior a nudge.

‘Here, old man,’ she said. ‘What about a dance? Give us the pleasure.’

She gave him a hand, got him on to the dancefloor. On the night of my seventeenth birthday long ago he danced with me. Tonight, on our father’s grand centenary, he took the floor with the other half of the apple and the band played music from the days when men wore hats. Not a dry eye in the house. Again. He was a touch unsteady on his pins, inclined to wobble, but she knew how to lead, and they were wreathed in smiles of foolish fondness for that which had been lost was found and so on.

But Perry was in a right old state, left out of each and every reunion. He materialised beside me, disconsolate. ‘They still don’t want to know me,’ he said. ‘And I can’t blame them. God, Dora, I’ve been a cad.’

I was feeling quite sentimental, watching Dad and Nora.

‘You were always good to us, darling,’ I reminded him. ‘Nora always thought you should have married Grandma.’

‘What?!?’

‘Made a real family for us.’

He chewed on that in stunned silence until he guffawed.

Once Nora had set the ball rolling, other couples took the floor. Margarine led out Tristram, who was still shaky on his feet but starting to get a bit of colour back. Daisy scooped up her Puck and took him through the motions, for which I was thankful, as he seemed quite out of it unless he was singing. The Lady A. was too preoccupied with her daughters and they with her to pay the dancing much attention but soon everybody else was doing it and Perry stuck out a paw:

‘How about it, Dora?’

‘I don’t fancy a foxtrot, Perry,’ I said. ‘But I wouldn’t say no to a –’

It slipped out before I thought twice. I’m not proud of it, I’m not ashamed of it although I thought, there’ll be hell to pay with Nora tomorrow morning; even though he
was
my uncle on my father’s side; and don’t think I didn’t know he got some salve to his battered old male ego out of it, apart from anything else, but I didn’t do it just to cheer him up, oh, no. Nor, I swear, was I trying to get even with Saskia. No. It was the tune, the moonlight and the scent of lilac that did it. I hadn’t felt like this for twenty years. Nobody noticed when we slipped away because they were all dancing.

The day’s exciting wind, having done its bit to liven up the evening, had died down to a little whisper from the direction of the park, full of damp earth and springtime, that blew the white linen curtains ballooning backwards into the front bedroom. It was quite chilly, I shivered. Peregrine went to close the window, then stopped. ‘Hark at the lions!’ In the distance, in the zoo, over the waving treetops, the lions were roaring their hearts out.

It was a stark white room with operating-theatre walls and a white leather disc on the end of a metal spike for an armchair, bare boards, and an enigmatic bed like something therapeutic with a steel frame. Margarine got some earringed, crewcut decorator in to do it. There were a few spare coats from the party spread on the bed, they spoiled the whole effect – you couldn’t afford to have a slipper out of place. I’d clipped the piece about that room out of
World of Interiors
to go into my Hazard dossier and, oddly enough, although it was a masterpiece of pared-down understatement, the room still had just the same self-conscious look as that other long-combusted bedroom at Lynde Court had done – it was a room designed to be looked at, like Melchior’s whole life had been, but now all the dirty secrets hidden in the cupboards had come out at last, had come to fuck in his bed, in fact. We didn’t even bother to shove off the coats.

Even in old age, it was easy to see why Peregrine had always had such success with women.

‘How long has it been, Dora?’

‘Too long, me old cock!’ I responded heartily, though, rack my brains as I might, I couldn’t for the life of me remember sleeping with him before and I shocked myself, to have forgotten that – if I
had
forgotten, that is, and if he wasn’t making a general rather than a particular enquiry, but it wasn’t the time nor place to ask him to elucidate, was it? All the same, to have forgotten so much else, so many other names, yes, all water under the bridge – but to have forgotten whether ever I slept with my beloved Perry . . . and then I thought, perhaps he can’t remember, either. But, even so.

But don’t think I thought these thoughts in a reasoned sequence and a coherent manner. Far from it.

You never forget the first time. I’ll never forget the last time, either.

At least, I’m pretty sure this is going to be the last time, but you never know what may turn up.

He cracked his old back and soughed and wheezed. ‘Whoa there, old sport! You don’t want to peg it on your birthday!’

‘Don’t care if I do,’ he says, red in the face, all of a sweat. ‘Not bad for a centenarian, eh?’

I put my arms around him, although they didn’t meet, and said: ‘I love you more than ever I loved any young kid, short pants, mother doesn’t know he’s out.’

Not bad for a centenarian.

Not bad at all.

Not bad.

Not –

Nora told me afterwards how the agitations of the steel bed began to make the chandelier downstairs directly beneath it, shiver, so that the music of the lutes, now plucking away at a selection of show tunes for the delight of the dancing guests, was almost imperceptibly augmented by the tinkle, tinkle, tinkle of all the little lustres as the tiers of glass began to sway from side to side, slopping hot wax on the dancers below, first slowly, then with a more and more determined rhythm until they shook like Josephine Baker’s bottom –