Wise Children (15 page)

Grandma was partaking of the bottled stout she never knew would later prove her downfall.

‘Not red,’ said Grandma, eyeing her glass. ‘Black.’

The dye came in a bottle labelled ‘Spanish Ebony’. The bathroom was as cold as hell. Still is. We stood there, shivering in our camisoles, eyeing the dye as if there were a genie in the bottle and we were scared to let it out. This was a big step for us, remember. We were about to change our entire personality.

‘In for a penny, in for a pound,’ said Nora, at last, and plunged her head into the washbasin, and I anointed her, poured on the colour, rubbed it in, thick, black stuff, it gave me mourning fingernails for weeks. When she straightened up, big drips ran down her forehead, got in her eyes, stung them, she wept. The splashes got everywhere, the towels looked like bath night at the Minstrel Show and we had to cut ourselves fringes when our hair dried out because of the five o’clock shadow on our foreheads that never washed off. So she was crying off the whole idea before it came to my turn but if one of us dyed, so did the other, no choice, that was that. Then we slipped on our kimonos, cleaned up the bathroom as best we could – but we never got the marks off the towels – put each other’s hair in pins to fix the kiss curls and went down to have a cuppa with Grandma looking so downhearted she made us lace it with a spot of the brandy she’d just opened on account of the cold snap.

‘Very unseasonal weather for July,’ she said, topping up.

But when it dried out and we’d given it a good brush, we didn’t know ourselves. Half a yard of black satin that turned into our cheeks like commas. It was the turning point. We called ourselves ‘The Lucky Chances’ after that. After that, we were a featured turn. After that, we were sixteen and we were legal.

Nora was always free with it and threw her heart away as if it were a used bus ticket. Either she was head over heels in love or else she was broken-hearted. She had it off first with the pantomime goose, when we were Mother Goose’s goslings that year in Newcastle upon Tyne. The goose was old enough to be her father and Grandma would have plucked him, stuck an apple up his bum and roasted him if she’d found out and so would the goose’s wife, who happened to be principal boy. So finding a place to, as Irish might have put it, consummate their passion (although Irish abhorred a split infinitive) was something of a problem for them because it was before the days we could boast a dressing room to ourselves and his wife was eversuch a hairy woman, always a fresh growth between her eyebrows, under her arms, on her legs, to pluck or shave so she was always holed up in the one she shared with the goose, depilating herself.

The goose had Nora up against the wall in the alley outside the stage door one foggy night, couldn’t see your hand in front of your face, happily for them. You don’t get fogs like that, these days. It was after the cast Christmas party. I looked round the Green Room but they’d gone.

Don’t be sad for her. Don’t run away with the idea that it was a squalid, furtive, miserable thing, to make love for the first time on a cold night in a back alley with a married man with strong drink on his breath. He was the one she wanted, warts and all, she
would
have him, by hook or by crook. She had a passion to know about Life, all its dirty corners, and this is how she started, in at the deep end, for better or worse, while I stood shivering on the edge like the poor cat in the adage.

When she saw her man was gone, the plume-hatted goose-wife slapped her thigh. There was a jealous madness in that woman. I took the bull by the horns and started off the masquerade – I answered to the name of Nora and kept out of the same place as myself until Nora came back to the party, ripped stockings, smelling of dead fish, smiling like the cat that got the cream, and pregnant.

But we never found out she was pregnant until she lost it in Nottingham, the Royalty, when she haemorrhaged during a
fouetté
, we were a pair of spinning tops. Nothing like real blood in the middle of the song-and-dance act. It was long past pantotime, the goose gone off to Glasgow to do a
Chu Chin Chow
, he never wrote. Nora cried her eyes out but not because she’d lost the goose. She blazed and then she cooled; she’d always blaze, she’d always cool. No. She wept the loss of the baby.

Oh, my poor Nora! She was a martyr to fertility. After that miscarriage, I took steps, got her to get herself fitted up with the full equipment, but Nora never bothered with the diaphragm, not when she got carried away. A sort of grand carelessness possessed her each time she fell in love. She opened up, she melted down at the first touch, the first kiss; each time she fell in love, she fell in love for the first time, no matter how many times she fell in love and, when she fell in love, a Dutch cap was the last thing on her mind. I was in charge of the chequebook, too. She didn’t trust herself with that, either.

After the miscarriage, she went round with a face like a month of Sundays for all of three weeks, then, whoops! head over heels, again, this time with the man who played the drums in the pit band and
he
was old enough to be her grandfather. She was particularly attracted to older men, in those days. Even if her diaphragm always stayed in its little box, the drummer took good care, always pulled out in time, and that went on for half a year, on and off, depending on the touring, although sometimes, when she stripped off, she’d be black and blue. ‘Love-taps,’ she said. I thought, preserve me from the passion of a percussionist.

The more I saw of love, the less I liked the look of it. I might well have reached the age of consent but that didn’t mean I
had
to consent to it, whether I wanted to or not. Until that fateful engagement in Croydon, when I fell. Such was the effect of our new haircuts and our new, bubbling, brunette personalities that we now had second billing and a number in white satin pyjamas sitting side by side on a crescent moon. And, bliss! a dressing room of our very own. Nibbles from London managements. And we always liked Croydon, although it was a dump, just a dormitory town, just outside London, but we could get the late tram home and save on digs. I told you, Brixton used to be everso convenient for public transport.

I felt as if I’d met him somewhere else before, although I never had. I didn’t think of love or passion when I thought of him; I only thought about the down on his delicious cheek.

As if it were yesterday. The show was called
Over to You
. Nora was ready for a change. She ditched the aged drummer and took up with a wee scrap of a lad pale as a lily, blond as a chick. He didn’t know what hit him. Nora used to give her all. Because we shared the dressing room, I used to have to sit on the stairs outside and listen to them through the wall going at it like hammer and tongs on the horsehair sofa where we were supposed to put our feet up between shows. He muttered broken phrases, sometimes sobbed. Something about him touched my heart. Nora said, he was young enough to be grateful but it wasn’t that.

I sat on the stairs outside and listened to them and my mind began to change, until I came to a decision: by hook or by crook, I said to myself, come what may, the day that I am seventeen, I’ll do it on that horsehair sofa.

Do
what
on the horsehair sofa?

What do you think?

It was late April but still chilly. Little cold winds whipped round the wings and the bare backstage corners. We turned up our gas fire and plucked our eyebrows. There was a bunch of flowers for our birthday and a cake with candles ready for the party after the show.

‘Nora . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘Give me your fella for a birthday present.’

She put down her tweezers and gave me a look.

‘Get your own fella,’ she said.

They’d sent us early lilac. The scent of white lilac always brings it back. Seventeen hurts.

‘He’s the only one I want, Nora.’

I’ll only do it once, I said. He’s really stuck on you, Nora, he’s crazy about you and he’s never given me a second look. But won’t he be able to tell the difference? I don’t know, we won’t know until we try; but why should he notice any difference? Same eyes, same mouth, same hair. If it was only the once and if I keep my mouth shut . . . he is as innocent as asparagus, his heart as pure as Epps’ cocoa, poor lamb. Why should he guess?

‘Nora, I want him so.’

‘Oh,
Dora
,’ she said, for then she knew that only he would do.

She put on my Mitsouko and I put on her Shalimar. She had a new dress, floral chiffon, peonies, rhodies, dusty pink and misty blue and mauve, long skirts were back, I looked romantic. We took big breaths and blew out the candles on the cake; our wish at seven had come true and ever since I was a true believer in birthday-candle magic so you can guess what it was I wished for at seventeen. I smelled the unfamiliar perfume on my skin and felt voluptuous. As soon as they started to call me Nora, I found that I could kiss the boys and hug the principals with gay abandon because all that came quite naturally to her. To me, no. I was ever the introspective one.

As for Nora/Dora, she kept herself to herself until she’d had a couple and then she forgot to behave herself and carried on in her usual fashion but by the time she started dancing on the table most of the party was plastered so nobody noticed she was behaving out of character and that’s how Dora got off with the pianist, to my considerable embarrassment in subsequent months.

There was a scratchy gramophone going full tilt. I laid claim to my birthday present as soon as he came shyly through the door. His face was still shining with cold cream. I took his hand. ‘Let’s dance,’ I said.

‘Nothing for me but to love you, just the way you look tonight . . .’ sang the voice on the gramophone.

I know I wanted him more than anything, that his sweet face and his silken floss of flaxen hair moved me like nothing else had done in the masculine line before, but, all the same, I scarcely knew what it was I wanted, when all is said and done, in spite of Grandma’s comprehensive sex education and all I’d seen during my life in the chorus and, more than all that, I’d seen my sister cry for love, and nearly bleed to death for love, and I’d listened while the one she loved made her shout out loud, when I was full of envy and desire. I thought I knew the lot, didn’t I?

And yet I didn’t know a thing.

Lilac; and a wind blowing in through the window they’d opened to let the fug out; and the smoke of the candles that I’d just blown out, still lingering in the room, catching at the throat; and the first kiss. I nearly fainted when we kissed, I was scared witless, I thought he’d recognise the ruse at once and suddenly I didn’t want to go through with it. I wanted to go home to Grandma, to go back to yesterday’s things we’d lost already – back to Mrs Worthington’s piano, to our shorn sausage curls, to pick up our discarded liberty bodices and encase ourselves again in them. But he was just my own age, just seventeen, a child, too; nothing to be afraid of. And for the purpose of the act, I wasn’t Dora, any more, was I? Now I was Nora, who was afraid of nothing provided it was a man.

So I kissed him back and we slipped off.

He went to have a wash in the basin, first, while I stripped off and lay on the sofa watching him, the back of his neck bent humbly as he attended to himself. The water purled. Just the lights round the mirror were burning. A cab stopped outside and panted like a dog; there was a chink of coins: ‘Ta, guv’nor.’ These sounds might have come from another world.

He was too young for body hair. His tender flesh was all rosy in the light behind him. He smiled as he came towards me. It stuck out like a chapel hat peg. What did? What do you think? I couldn’t keep my eyes off it. I’d never seen a naked man before although Grandma had drawn us pictures. There was a little clear drop of moisture trembling on the tip, it came to me to lick it off. He gave a gasp. His nipples were quite stiff, too. He was shivering a bit, not that it was cold, we’d left the gas fire on.

He never said: ‘Nora, there’s something different about you, something more enchanting, tonight.’ I never wanted him to, either. I’d have been ashamed. I’ll never know if he could tell the difference. If he did, he was too much of a gent to say. Skin like suede. Eyes the blue of the paper bags they used to sell you sugar in, years ago. I never bled or hurt; a decade and a half of
fouettés, jetés
and high kicks had done in the membrane without leaving a trace. He used a French letter, don’t ever believe them if they tell you it takes away the romance. He sighed, his eyes rolled back so you could see the whites. Eyelashes a foot long.

Some things you can’t describe.

Afterwards, I pretended to be asleep, I didn’t dare talk. He spread my dressing gown on top of me, to keep the draughts off, and kissed my cheek. After a bit, he got up and put his clothes on, singing softly under his breath snatches of the song we’d danced to. ‘That laugh that wrinkles your nose, touches my foolish heart . . .’ I watched him secretly between my lashes. He gave me another kiss and a big smile he thought I couldn’t see and went to catch the late trolley home to his mum and dad in Camberwell. Off he went, smelling of Shalimar and sex, and I lay on the sofa and breathed in the smells of him and me that were really the smells of him and Nora and I kept a little sentimental tryst with silence and the night and the full moon over Croydon and he never would have done it if he’d known I wasn’t Nora. He was the faithful type.

Did we betray the innocence of the boy with our deception? Of course we did. Does it matter? Let the one without sin cast the first stone. He really thought I was the one he loved so he was not deceived. And I got the birthday present that I wanted and then I gave him back to Nora and if Nora’s heart had been less easily distracted, they would have gone on together, and on . . . until they stopped.

As it was, they went on together until they stopped, anyway. So that was that.