Wise Children (27 page)

The iris closes.

Everything went blank.

I knew I should have gone to comfort Nora but I couldn’t take any more, I was punch-drunk. I clawed my way out through the nightmare party into the cool, dark outdoors and blundered straight into, was almost winded by –

‘I say, steady on,’ she said.

My nostrils filled with the aroma I loved best in all the world, surpassing all others – that consummate blend of gin, cabbage, stale undergarments, mothballs.

‘Grandma!’

Flash! A passing paparazzo took a picture of an old lady who looked like St Pancras Station, monumental, grimy, full of Gothic detail, startled in the arms of a half-man, half-donkey.

‘Who the fuck are you?’ she said.

She seemed to fill up all the space available, so there wasn’t any room left in the whole of southern California for insecurity. She had her oilcloth carrier with her, evidently her only luggage. Daisy’s white cat, who had been sleeping peacefully on a bank of wild thyme the while, now made its appearance like a cork from a bottle out of that madhouse behind us. It stopped short when it saw Grandma. It rubbed its head against her knee and started to purr. She bent down and picked it up.

‘I feel the need of something to cuddle,’ she said.

She’d flown, as it turned out, the intrepid old cow. She’d pawned the grandfather clock and flown. Not all the way, of course, only from New York, but it got her here in half the time. As soon as she’d got our telegrams, she’d gone to Thomas Cook’s in Piccadilly. ‘Get me to Hollywood
toot sweet
.’

We took the white cat to Brixton with us, in the end. It didn’t have any time for Daisy any more. It never showed much sign of either sex while it lived with Daisy but it turned out she never got pregnant because Daisy would lock her in a wardrobe when she came on heat and as soon as that cat arrived at Bard Road, it turned into a breeding machine. The founding mother of the Chance cat dynasty. We had her all through the blitz. Six kittens twice a year, regular, until the cat flu took her off in ’51. She was our only souvenir of Hollywood unless you count our silver-fox trenches, about which the less said the better, and a few signatures in a few books.

So we went home with Grandma, sadder and wiser girls. Tony’s Mamma prevailed, of course. What? Her son marry a born-again virgin? Not good enough for Little Italy! Nora was so angry she never shed a tear but broke his jaw when he came round to take back the engagement ring and went on packing. Meanwhile, Genghis Khan and the imitation Dora lived happily ever after, once he’d got over the shock, and if you believe that, you’ll believe anything, but I do know, for a fact, he never got together with Daisy again and though he tried to ruin her career, she didn’t give a damn. It finished Melchior in the movies, though. Kaput. The end.

Furthermore, it turned out, after all that, that Daisy
wasn’t
pregnant, just a touch of dysmenorrhoea and a twinge of indigestion. She came on with a vengeance in the middle of the wedding night and by the end of the honeymoon they were fighting like terriers so Daisy went to Mexico again and Melchior came home to London, wifeless, childless, jobless, hopeless, quenched. Then war was declared in the nick of time; he joined up pronto and turned into a war hero. The Fleet Air Arm. No, really. Who’d have thought it?

But Hollywood was a closed book to him, thereafter.

Daisy still sends us a card at Christmas. Not a shred of malice in her. Turn on the telly, you’ll see her. She’s worn well. She never had the looks to lose and so she never lost them. Still blonde, still with that same rude joke of a mouth. She does the matriarchs in soaps, these days. She gives good décolleté, for an octogenarian.

Still on the go. I was always fond of Daisy.

Four

ET OTHER PENS
dwell on guilt and misery.’ A., for Austen, Jane.
Mansfield Park.
I do not wish to talk about the war. Suffice to say it was no carnival, not the hostilities. No carnival.

Yes, indeed; I have my memories, but I prefer to keep them to myself, thank you very much. Though there are some things I never can forget. The cock that used to crow, early in the morning, in Bond Street. And I saw a zebra, once, he was galloping down Camden High Street, one night, about midnight, in the blackout – the moon was up, his stripes fluoresced. I was in some garret with a Free Norwegian. And the purple flowers that would pop up on the bomb-sites almost before the ruins stopped smoking, as if to say, life goes on, even if you don’t.

We kept a patriotic pig in the back garden, fed him with swill – potato peelings, tea leaves. Grandma loved that pig and wouldn’t listen to one word about the slaughterhouse, of course, but it ended up the funeral baked meats after Grandma copped it. She’d have created something shocking if she’d known we’d feasted off her beloved porker, nicely roasted, as soon as we’d cremated her, but what else could we have done for the funeral tea? People had come for miles, we couldn’t give them grated cabbage. Old Nanny brought up a bushel of apples for the sauce from the Lady A., who’d retreated to the sticks in a state of disarray. No flowers, by request; we stuck to Grandma’s principles on that score, at least.

Cyn and her kids were there but not the cabby, he was in North Africa and there he stayed, poor chap, under the desert in a box. Cyn never got over it, she faded away, after that, until the Asian flu took her off in ’49. Ex-tenants by the score – geriatric adagio dancers, antique sopranos. Neighbours. The man who ran the salad stall in Brixton market. Publicans galore. Half the cast of
What? You Will?
came, plus the composer’s mother, in her new black coat. I half thought that blond tenor might have heard about it on the grapevine and turned up but no such luck.

We missed Peregrine something shocking but he was off being heroic in the Secret Service. God knows what it was but they gave him a medal for it. God knows
where
he was, either; we put a notice in
The Times
and there was a knock at the door, a jeep, an army driver, a dozen crates of crème de menthe, a barrel of Guinness, so the mourners all went home with grease on their chins and strong drink on their breath and that was how Peregrine paid his respects to Grandma.

Once we’d burned the bones – because that pig met its fate strictly on the q.t., it was a hanging matter, to slaughter your own meat in wartime – Nora and I sat down right here, in the breakfast room, in these very leather armchairs, and listened to the silence in that long, narrow house where we would live alone, in future, and had a good cry, just the two of us, for this was childhood’s end with a vengeance and we were truly on our own, now, good and proper.

We hadn’t just lost Grandma, either. She was the only witness of the day our mother died when we were born, and she took with her the last living memory of that ghost without a face. All our childhood went with her into oblivion, so we were bereft both of her in person and of a good deal of ourselves, too, and when we remembered how we’d mocked her nakedness in her old age we were ashamed.

Now we were on the high road to our third decade, though, looking back from my present great pinnacle and eminence of years, I can scarcely credit it, that, once upon a time, we thought our lives would end when we reached thirty; at the time it felt like the end of the road, all right, even if there hadn’t been a war on, and we were never the same again after the war was over, either.

After the war was over, it was always chilly. Our fingers were pale blue for years. Before the war, we were young, and then we were in sunny California; during the war, adrenalin kept you going and there was always some fella or other around to warm you up. But afterwards, there was a weariness, and the blood was a touch thinner, and people said it was the Age of Austerity – yet I do believe that chilliness we felt was more to do with Grandma being gone than with the economic policies of Stafford Cripps or the cold winters of the late forties and all that.

Without Grandma in it, minding the fires, leaving the lights on for us at nights, up in the morning putting on the kettle, banging the big brass gong to tell us she’d scrambled the dried eggs already, and they were congealing on the plate, the house was nothing but a barn and we rattled around uncomfortably, piles of dirty dishes in the sink, the steps filthy, baked beans fossilising at their leisure in the bottoms of pans on the cold stove, etc. etc. etc.

We let the house go. We’d come back to sleep, that was all. Sometimes we’d burn ourselves a slice of toast. The heart went out of this house when Grandma died. The draughts raced through the hall and the rugs rose up and shimmied, we never changed the sheets so they were grey and stained and full of crumbs. Times were a touch hard for hoofers, too, although we put a brave face on it.

Then began those dreary days of touring shows, smaller and smaller theatres, fewer and fewer punters, the showgirls wearing less and less, the days of our decline. The nadir, a nude show-cum-pantomime in Bolton,
Goldilocks and the Three Bares
. ‘Take off your trousers, call it
Goldibollocks
,’ said Nora to the a.s.m., but he wouldn’t. Those nude shows! Music hall’s last gasp. There was a law that said, a girl could show her all provided she didn’t move, not twitch a muscle, stir an inch – just stand there, starkers, letting herself be looked at. That’s what the halls had sunk to, after the war. No more costumes by Oliver Messel, sets by Cecil Beaton. We always kept our gee-strings and our panties on, mind. Never stripped. We’d still sing, we’d still dance. But we felt our art was swirling down the plughole and those were the days when high culture was booming, our father cutting a swathe with the senior citizen roles in Shakespeare – Timon, Caesar, John of Gaunt – but he still didn’t want anything to do with us, as ever was.

It is a characteristic of human beings, one I’ve often noticed, that if they don’t have a family of their own, they will invent one. Now we often found ourselves slipping down to Sussex to visit the Lady A. Lynde Court was just a pile of blackened bricks, and they’d sold up the Eaton Square place when they divorced so after the Lady A. came home from California she turfed the tenant out of the Lynde Court Home Farm and moved in with the Aga and the exposed beams. She always kept a full-length portrait of Melchior in her sitting room. That portrait took up most of one wall and cast gloom in spite of the gilt frame because there he was, as Richard III, Tricky Dicky, all in black with an evil glint in his eye. She fixed up a light over it, which she kept on all the time, and always a little bunch of flowers in a glass jar on a footstool in front of it – wild daffs in March, wallflowers, daisies, according to season, always fresh. Even when the snow lay on the ground, out she’d go, scouring the Downs for celandines, early violets, snowdrops, headscarf and wellington boots, always a little dog yapping behind her.

That bitter winter of ’46, me and Nora couldn’t stand it, to think of her rooting about among the snowdrifts, so we took her a big bunch of hothouse carnations. Cost more than a supper at the Savoy Grill. Bloody Saskia was there, fresh and frisky. Imogen, too. Doing their stint at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, were Saskia and Imogen, and Saskia’d brought her best friend with her, some prinking minx in black velvet slax and ballet slippers. Saskia laughed like anything when she saw those carnations.

‘How apt!’ she said. ‘“. . . which some call nature’s bastards.”
Winter’s Tale
, Act IV, Scene iii.’

Little did she know it was a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Her mother was mortified and tried to cover up.

‘My little Saskia’s playing Perdita this term. Isn’t it lovely?’

But if that was the kind of thing they taught her girls at Ra-di-bloody-da, then Nora and I didn’t want to know. Such cheap gibes! We rose above.

The girls might be away at RADA but there was Old Nanny to keep her company and a woman in from the village to do the heavy work and I was always tickled when concerned weekend guests asked her: ‘How do you survive out here all on your own, Attie?’ You could hardly move for help, you even tripped over a little old man crouched above the herbaceous border on your way to the outside lavvy. But the Lady A. would give a little smile and say, she’d got used to solitude, and make some reference to the garden. She was always out there in a big hat telling the gardener what to do. There were articles in magazines. She was famous for her clematis. In the evenings she’d sit stitching away at her embroidery hoop with Melchior glowering on the wall and listen to records on her gramophone the same way she does now, in the front basement of 49 Bard Road. Then Old Nanny used to come to tuck her up in bed at ten, with Horlicks.