Wise Children (14 page)

It turned out that Our Cyn and the cabby had got along so well together on their day out they’d decided to make a go of it so it was kisses and handshakes all round and Cyn sat in the front with him while Nora and I leaned on Perry’s shoulders as we drove back to London through the yellowish, greenish light of a Sussex evening, sweet summer coming in through the windows and the low murmur of the voices of Perry and Grandma talking softly so as not to disturb us as we trembled on the brink of sleep, for it had truly been an exhausting day, but we didn’t nod off altogether until Norbury so they had to carry us up to our little beds in the back attic which, at that time, in our white girlhood, we shared.

Cyn and the cabby wanted to go up West, to celebrate, so they dropped Perry off at Eaton Square. Eaton Square? That’s what Cyn told us. What could he be doing in Eaton Square, on the spur of the moment, the naughty boy? They left him on the front steps of a most elegant dwelling, he was straightening his tie and dusting off his jacket. He tipped his boater at them as they drove off, flashed them his great, big, cheeky grin.

Love him as I did, I must confess he had a wicked streak.

Although our half-sisters, old Wheelchair’s girls, resembled sheep with bright red fleece when grown, they were bald as any other baby when they were born, the dead spit of one another, not far away from Bard Road as the crow flies but the crow is a bit of a prole as far as the bird world goes and most other birds would think those girls were born in a different country, with Sheraton furniture, Persian rugs, constant hot water, and staff, and christened Saskia and Imogen in long lace clothes at St John’s Smith Square, shortly thereafter to be photographed with Mamma, the ‘loveliest lady in London’, by Cecil Beaton, and have their picture published in the
Sketch
, caption: ‘Darling buds of May’. For it was in May that they were born, the same day as the first of Our Cyn’s five.

We started the very same day those two were born, as it happens. Funny coincidence. I went to have a wee and there was the evidence, all over my underwear. I hotfooted it to Nora and she took a look on her own account. Same thing with her. Grandma got us some cotton wool. Although we are asymmetrical, in many ways, we always, funnily enough, came on in unison every time since that first time, barring accidents; came on in unison until we stopped, short, never to go again, the tap turned off just twenty-five years ago.

I always think there was a sort of mean connection between their birth and our puberty. Typical dirty trick that Saskia might pull on us, that we should turn into women just at the very moment when they turn into babies. Always a different generation. That’s the rub. We’ve never been equals. They’ve always had that final edge on us. So rich. So well-connected. So legitimate.

Sod all that.

So young.

‘Darling buds of May.’ Grandma Chance did sums upon her fingers and assumed an inscrutable expression but the proud parents looked pleased as punch with the new arrivals although Perry seemed strangely sad, these days, when Saskia and Imogen took the air in a high-wheeled baby carriage pushed by a ribboned nanny while Dora and Nora pounded away on splintering boards the length and breadth. Glasgow Empire. Prince’s, Edinburgh. Royalty, Perth. Freeze off a girl’s bum, the winters up there. Somebody threw a grouse on stage, once, as a gesture of appreciation. Not even a pair. That was in Aberdeen. Tight as arseholes, in Aberdeen.

We pounded the boards like nobody’s business because, by that time, Perry had lost all his moolah in the Wall Street crash, every red cent, and couldn’t keep up his contributions any more, so it was just as well we girls could earn our living because after that we had to.

When he came to say goodbye, it was by tram. Lo, how the mighty have fallen. No cab softly ticking away on the kerb, this time. No chocolates from Charbonnel & Walker. And he’d weaned us off Phul Nana (‘Phew!’) only to find he couldn’t afford to give us the French stuff any more. Not that we cared. We only thought how much we’d miss him. We sat on the arms of his chair, one on each side, and watched him eat his buttered crumpets, too down at heart to eat anything ourselves.

He’d work his passage home, he said. Home, to that part of the torso of Gorgeous George that was
not
tinted pink. He’d work his Atlantic passage on the liner doing tricks in the ballroom after dinner.

‘What will you do once you get there?’ asked Grandma Chance, shoving another pan of crumpets under the grill because he was eating as if he might not eat again until he reached Los Angeles.

‘Go into the movies,’ said Peregrine.

Dora and Nora. Two girls pounding the boards. At Christmas, we did a panto. One year we did
Jack and the Beanstalk
at Kennington. Would you believe a live theatre in Kennington, once upon a time? Alive and kicking. Beans, in green tights; our speciality number was Mexican jumping beans, in red tights. Two pounds a week each. It went a long way, in those days. Those were the days of pounds, shillings and pence. Two pounds was forty silver shillings; forty shillings was four hundred and eighty of those big, brown, cartwheel pennies that made your hands smell, and every one of those pennies had a hole ready and waiting for it to patch in the threadbare economy of 49 Bard Road. Being at Kennington was a saving on digs. We lived at home, we came home on the night tram, every bone in our body aching in concert and our feet burning, we girls half asleep, half awake, propping against one another, rain slashing the window, soaking our coats as we ran from the stop for home. If we caught cold, disaster! Even identical Mexican jumping beans were expendable so we jumped away with low fevers and septic throats and influenza and the curse, jump, jump, jump, carrying on smiling, smilin’ thru’, show those teeth, kick those legs, tote that barge, lift that bale.

We could even get home for tea after the matinée, Wednesdays and Saturdays, and that saved the money we’d have spent on a poached egg at a Lyons teashop so we’d put aside those four pennies to save up for silk stockings. Stockings were always a problem. The hours we spent, darning the bloody things.

Then, one afternoon, such a fuss and flutter backstage; what’s going on? What a shock we got. A sheep in a couture afternoon frock in a box, with a nanny in ribbons and two little russet ewe lambs. Our humble little company had been honoured by a visit from theatrical royalty.

‘I won’t go on,’ said Nora, always impetuous. She threw her sombrero on the floor and jumped on it. ‘What humiliation!’

But the first Lady Hazard was a proper lady, not like the present incumbent, and I didn’t think, even then, that she’d set out for Kennington with the gross intention of letting her baby daughters relish the spectacle of her husband’s by-blows performing high kicks. I’ve asked her about it since, of course, and she said that
he
was away on tour, again, and she was banging about all by herself in that great, big house at her wits’ end how to pass a wet Saturday afternoon and her Old Nanny, the very same Old Nanny who’d looked after her when
she
was a baby and now was looking after
her
little babies, Old Nanny wanted to take the little girls to the panto in Kennington because her, Old Nanny’s, that is, her sister lived round the corner. (And as it turned out that sister was an aunt by marriage of Our Cyn’s new husband, so a bond was forged and after Old Nanny’s sister moved to Worthing, Old Nanny used to drop in and visit Grandma.) Old Nanny thought she might pop in to see her sister after the panto and the Lady Atalanta, on the spur of the moment, said: ‘Hang on, I’ll get my hat and come, too.’

The show went on, of course, and so did we. What? Lose a day’s pay? Lose the job, too, like as not, and then back to the dreary round of agents’ waiting rooms. Anything but that.

She says, as soon as she set eyes on us, she
knew
, and then she checked the programme and was certain, because Perry told her all about us after they got together. She sent us flowers, after, anonymously, but easy to guess where they came from – forget-me-nots. I thought that was quite touching but Nora thought, bad taste. And once she asked us to tea, as well, but Nora said: ‘Not on your life.’

Our half-sisters responded to the show in ways already characteristic of their future personalities. Saskia set up a howl like a banshee the moment she saw the beans come on, as if she knew us at first sight and was all agog to steal our thunder, while Imogen fell asleep and left her mouth open through the entire proceedings, in preparation for her career as a fish. But the Lady A. watched us, or so she told me, years on, with tears in her eyes and guilt in her bosom. She may have slipped up the once, but, all the same, she truly loved our father. She
must
have loved him, her with her handle and her bank account and her father in the House of Lords, to marry a man with nothing to offer but the best legs in the British Isles.

She’d had no news from Perry, either.

Then the panto season was over and we were on the road again. Fifteen years old, now. Five foot, six inches. Little brown bobs, though Nora often talked wistfully about going blonde. She felt the future lay with blondes. Should we? Shouldn’t we? One thing was certain – she couldn’t do it unilaterally. On our own, you wouldn’t look at us twice. But, put us together. . .

We were hardened old troupers, by now. We had our printed cards: ‘Dora and Leonora, 49 Bard Road, London S.W.2.’ You always had to travel on a Sunday, when the trains went slow out of respect for the Sabbath and sometimes stopped dead in the middle of a field as if taken short. We feared not bedbugs, nor cockroaches; fleas could not daunt our spirits. We learned to despise the ‘Wood’ family, that is, the empty seats. We lived off the Scotch eggs the landladies put out for late supper, after the show. Grandma went spare when she heard about the Scotch eggs. ‘It’s only sausage meat,’ I said. ‘They wrap some sausage meat round the hard-boiled egg. You know what they make sausage meat out of, sawdust and the bits of old elastic.’ Grandma wasn’t having any. ‘Cannibals!’ she said.

But now we knew the world didn’t end when Grandma disapproved. Greatly daring, knowing what she’d say, egged on by the other girls, we finally invested in some little bits of rabbit fur to snuggle into when the wind blew chill. ‘Dead bunny,’ said Grandma when she saw. As we grew up, cracks appeared between us. She loved us but she often disapproved.

We were just slips of girls but we soon knew our way around. We had our little handbags with the little gilt powder compacts and the puffs; when in doubt, we powdered our noses, to give us time to think up repartee. A rat once ate my powder puff in the dressing room at the Nottingham Theatre Royal. We kept our make-up in the standard two-tier tin – rouge, Leichner, that solid mascara you sliced off into a tiny tin frying pan and melted over a candle. Then you put it on with a matchstick, quick, quick, quick, before it got hard.

Grandma kept the programmes, every show we ever were in, right from that first
Babes in the Wood
up to the ones from ENSA. She made up big scrapbooks. After she went, there they were, stored away in a trunk in the loft – the whole of our lives. We felt bad when we saw those scrapbooks, we remembered how we’d teased her, we’d brought home sausage rolls and crocodile handbags, but she’d kept on snipping out the cuttings, pasting them in. Piles of scrapbooks, the cuttings turned by time to the colour of the freckles on the back of an old lady’s hand. Her hand. My hand, as it is now. When you touch the old newsprint, it turns into brown dust, like the dust of bones.

The last scrapbook stops short in 1944, leaving us marooned for ever just turning thirty, on the cusp, caught up in one last pose, would you believe, done up as bulldogs.
Bulldog Breed
. For some bloody silly charity matinée, drumming-up cash to replace lost lovers, lost sons, boys dead on the Burma Road, the irreplaceable. Why did we do it, Nora? ‘We had to do something,’ she said. ‘Anyway, we entertained the troops.’

And so we did.

I can see Grandma now, sitting at the kitchen table, sticking the picture in the book, the tip of her tongue between her teeth, breathing hard, all concentration. She picks up her pen, dips in the ink, writes underneath, in her round, careful hand: ‘Duke of York’s Theatre, May 20, 1944.’

Then she reached for the stout and found the bottle empty. Oh, Grandma! Talk about the ‘fatal glass of beer’! If you’d been able to curb your thirst that night, you’d have lived to see VE-day. She pulled herself up by the back of a chair, humming a tune, humming, maybe: ‘There’ll be bluebirds over The white cliffs of Dover . . .’ or: ‘I’ll get lit up when the lights go up in London.’ She arranged her little toque with the black-dotted veil on top of her head in the fly-blown square of mirror over the sink. She touched up her beauty spot with eyeblack, stowed away the empties in that eternal lino-cloth bag. The siren blared but she wasn’t going to let Hitler inconvenience her drinking habits, was she?

She was taken out by a flying bomb on her way to the off-licence.

When we got home after the all-clear, we found the scrapbook where she left it, beside the scissors and the pot of Gloy. And the empty glass, with the lacy remnants of the foam gone hard inside it.

And that was how we lost Grandma.

It was Grandma and Guinness caused us to become brunettes. One night, when we were resting between engagements, we were all sitting round this very kitchen table, our one and only kitchen table, having a few drinks.

‘If not blonde,’ said Nora, ‘why don’t we henna it? Coppernobs. Gingernuts. Let’s face it, Dora, we need a little something extra to make us stand out.’

‘Not red,’ I said, ‘because of Saskia and Imogen.’

Grandma took a good look at us, at our big, grey eyes and our good, strong Hazard bones that would come in handy, later on, but weren’t much use to fifteen-year-olds because we never had the ingénue look. Hard as nails, they said. That’s the Chance girls.