Wise Children (31 page)

Then there were the frocks. Some things we’d put away in plastic bags: bias-cut silk jersey, beaded sheaths that weighed a ton. Others we’d covered up with sheets, the big net skirts, the taffeta crinolines, halter necks, strapless, backless, etc. etc. etc., all heaped high on Grandma’s bed.

‘Half a century of evening wear,’ said Nora. ‘A history of the world in party frocks.’

‘We ought to donate it to the V and A,’ I said.

‘Why should somebody pay good money to look at my old clothes?’

‘They used to pay to see you without them.’

‘They ought put
us
into a museum.’

‘We ought to turn this house into a museum.’

‘Museum of dust.’

Nora rummaged among the rags and gave a soft little chuckle. She held up a foamy white georgette number with crystal beads.

‘The Super-Chief!’ she said. ‘Remember?’

‘“She wore something sheer and white and deceptively virginal, that emitted a hard glitter when she moved, a subtle, ambigudus cobweb softness veined with a secret of ice. ‘Got a light?’ Half trusting, half insolent, a hoarse voice, older than that pale face with its purple heart of lipstick, flourishing its rasp of gutter like a flag, with pride.”’ I for Irish, Ross ‘Irish’ O’Flaherty.
Hollywood Elegies.
The very frock! He never knew I’d borrowed it from Daisy.

‘Why don’t you sell it to that library in Texas? I read in the paper they bought a crate of his empties.’

But I’d spotted an ambivalent memento of hers, to tease her with.

‘Here, Nora . . . I never knew you kept this.’

‘Gimme!’

She snatched it out of my hands, the veil they’d brought out of wardrobe on
The Dream
set for her to marry Tony in.

‘The bastard,’ she said. ‘I hope he’s six feet deep in concrete.’

She stuffed the veil out of sight under her air-raid warden’s siren suit and something chiffon slithered to the floor.

‘Dora? Remember this?’

She held it up. Floral print, big splashy roses, rhodies, peonies, muted tones, dusky pinks, soft mauves, lavender. I pressed it to my face, it was as soft as dust. First kiss, first love, eyes as blue as sugar paper and skin like cream.

‘I pray you, love, remember.’

He never came back from the Burma Road. Some comic told me, backstage,
Nude Frolics
’52, in Sheffield.

‘Here, Dora, nothing to cry about.’

‘Do
you
remember his name?’

She asked me, whose name, with her eyebrows.

‘You gave me a present the day we were seventeen, remember? Today’s our anniversary, fifty-eight years ago today. It was my first time, remember?’

She tried and tried but she could only remember her own first time and the goose and the miscarriage and then the corners of her mouth turned down.

‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I feel a little lonely in the world. Don’t you ever feel a little lonely, too, Dora? No father, no mother, no chick nor darling child. Don’t you even want something to cuddle?’

No darling child. Which was the nub of it, as far as she was concerned, as well I knew, but no use crying over spilled milk, although that be not the appropriate metaphor in this instance. Too late to do anything about it, now.

‘I must admit, sometimes, it gets everso lonely, especially when you’re stuck up in your room tapping away at that bloody word processor lost in the past while I’m shut up in the basement with old age.’

‘Don’t talk like that about poor Wheelchair.’

‘I don’t mean Wheelchair and well you know it. I mean
our
old age, the fourth guest at the table.’

‘Look on the bright side,’ I counselled her. ‘I’ve got you and you’ve got me and we’ve both got Wheelchair and you could call her our geriatric little girl, seeing as we bathe her, feed her, change her nappies, even. Our father might have reneged on the job but we
did
have a right old sugar daddy in our Uncle Perry and well you know it. We never knew our mother but Grandma filled the gap and you can say that again.’

The bulb flickered on, off, on again as if to signify Grandma’s assent.

‘All the same,’ she said, ‘I wish . . .’

She crumpled up that old chiffon and cradled it to her bosom.

‘If little Tiff had come to us,’ she said, rocking the chiffon baby in her arms, ‘I’d –’

I knuckled out my swimming eyes. No more tears, today.

Then a funny thing happened. Something leapt off the shelf where the hats were. No, not leapt; ‘propelled itself’, is better because it came whizzing out like a flying saucer, slicing across the room as if about to knock our heads off, so we ducked. It knocked against the opposite wall, bounced down to the ground, fluttered and was still.

It was her hat, her little toque, with the spotted veil, that had spun out like a discus. And as we nervously inspected it, there came an avalanche of gloves – all her gloves, all slithery leather thumbs and fingers, whirling around as if inhabited by hands, pelting us, assaulting us, smacking our faces, so that we clutched hands for protection and retreated like scared kids as more and more of Grandma’s bits and pieces – oilcloth carriers, corsets, bloomers like sails, stockings hissing like snakes – cascaded out of the wardrobe on top of us. We backed off until our calves hit the side of the bed with a shock of cold metal and then the wardrobe door closed of its own accord upon its own emptiness with a ghastly creak, leaving us looking at our scared faces looking back out of the dust.

‘Grandma’s trying to tell us something,’ said Nora in an awed voice.

Creak, creak went the door.

‘She’s telling us Memory Lane is a dead end,’ I said. I could hear her voice clear as a bell: ‘Come off it, girls! Pluck the day! You ain’t dead, yet! You’ve got a party to go to! Expect the worst, hope for the best!’

We threw caution to the winds and raided the jam jar where we keep the seventy-plus emergency fund, that is, cash for wreaths for sudden funerals and taxis to hospices, etc. etc. etc. The shops were still open, we threw on our silver-fox trenches, we dashed off to the market. Down Electric Avenue, past the vegetable stalls. ‘Here, gel, fancy a widow’s comfort?’ he says, thrusting forth an aubergine. ‘Is that the best you can do?’ I riposted.

All of a sudden, I was feeling chipper. Then I spotted them. ‘Here, Nor’, here come the Animal Rights.’ We drew ourselves up to our full height; we’ve learned to be defensive about our trenches.

‘It’d look better on a fox, auntie,’ said the young man, knees poking through his trousers, shaven nape, why does he make us run the gauntlet every time?

‘It wouldn’t look better on
this
fox,’ said Nora, on her high horse. ‘Which was humanely trapped in the Arctic Circle by the age-old methods of an ecologically sound Inuit hunter circa 1935, young man, before either you or your blessed mother, even, was yet pissing on the floor, which trapper has probably succumbed to alcohol and despair due to having his traditional source of livelihood taken away from him and, anyway, these foxes would be long dead, by now, besides, and rotted, if we weren’t wearing their lovingly preserved pelts.’

‘I’m glad you’re feeling guilty, girls,’ said the young man.

He slipped us the usual tract. ‘I like to sink my teeth into a nice juicy sausage, too!’ Nora confided lasciviously. He covered up his privates
toot sweet.

‘I sometimes think Grandma was born before her time,’ I said to Nora.

‘At least he doesn’t picket flower stalls,’ she said.

You can buy anything you want in Brixton market. We got stockings with little silver stars all over, ‘more stars than there are in Heaven’, recollected Nora. I shoved over a twenty for the stockings and spotted Old Bill on the back. That gave me a start, to see how Shakespeare, to whom our family owed so much, had turned into actual currency, not just on any old bank note but on a high denomination one, to boot. Though not as high as Florence Nightingale, which gives me satisfaction as a woman.

Lovely, shiny stockings and a couple of little short tight skirts in shiny silver stuff to match, that clung on like surgical bandage, and showed off our legs. Legs, the last thing to go. We were modelling stockings as late as the late sixties, I’d have you know; Bear Brand. They had to cut us off mid-thigh, of course, so the wrinkles wouldn’t show. For women of our age, our legs still aren’t half bad. Nora toyed with a spaghetti-string boob tube in lynx-print Lycra; I thought, maybe something with feathers . . . Kids gathered round, tittering; the man at the red mullet stall shook his head, sadly. They thought the Chance sisters had gone over the top, at last. There was a sale of gold stilettos, so we treated ourselves to those. We came back with an armful of junk, earrings, beads, everything you can think of, cheap and cheerful, we haven’t laughed so much in years, and the water was hot enough for us to share a bath, by then. After that, we slipped on our towelling robes, we creamed off our morning faces, we started off from scratch.

Foundation. Dark in the hollows of the cheeks and at the temples, blended into a lighter tone everywhere else. Rouge, except they call it ‘blusher’, nowadays. Two kinds of blusher, one to highlight the Hazard bones, another to give us rosy cheeks. Nora likes to put the faintest dab on the end of her nose, why I can’t fathom, old habits die hard. Three kinds of eyeshadow – dark blue, light blue blended together on the eyelids with the little finger, then a frosting overall of silver. Then we put on our two coats of mascara. Today, for lipstick, Rubies in the Snow by Revlon.

It took an age but we did it; we painted the faces that we always used to have on to the faces we have now. From a distance of thirty feet with the light behind us, we looked, at first glance, just like the girl who danced with the Prince of Wales when nightingales sang in Berkeley Square on a foggy day in London Town. The deceptions of memory. That girl was smooth as an egg and the lipstick never ran down little cracks and fissures round her mouth because, in those days, there were none.

‘It’s every woman’s tragedy,’ said Nora, as we contemplated our painted masterpieces, ‘that, after a certain age, she looks like a female impersonator.’

Mind you, we’ve known some lovely female impersonators, in our time.

‘What’s every man’s tragedy, then?’ I wanted to know.

‘That
he
doesn’t, Oscar,’ she said. She still has the capacity to surprise me. Fancy her knowing about Oscar Wilde. I did her nails, she did mine. After some debate – should we match them to our lips? – we fixed on silver, to match them to our legs. She did my hair, I did hers. Silver, too, worse luck. We disappeared behind a cloud of scent and re-emerged, transformed, looking just like what, for all those years, the bloody Hazards always thought we were, painted harlots, and over the hill, at that.

‘Oh, I say!’ Wheelchair murmured, tapping her lips with a tissue to set the Lancôme Bois de Rose. ‘Don’t you think you’ve gone a little far?’

In her white ballgown and pearls, she looked quite lovely, not so much Miss Havisham, more the Ghost of Christmas past.

‘Got to keep up with the times, darling,’ said. Nora.

‘Not me,’ said Wheelchair. ‘I live mostly in the past, these days. I find it’s better.’

Her eyes swivelled reverently round to that portrait of Melchior she’d insisted on bringing with her when she came, although we’d had to cut it down to fit it in and she no longer kept flowers in front of it because we refused point-blank to fetch her any and she couldn’t go out and get them herself.

So she was still eating her heart out for Melchior, after all these years, was she? Don’t think she was a hypocrite, to have loved him all those abused, neglected decades, when she hadn’t been averse to a fling in her youth herself and brought home a brace of bonny babes whose biological origins owed more to A. N. Other’s DNA. If you think she was a hypocrite, then you know sod all about women. No. She loved old Melchior, all right, and, poor cow, she still loved her wicked daughters, too, for there they were, on her bedside table, beside the phials of pills and the half-bottle of Malvern water, in a rosewood frame, the darling buds of bloody May as ever was, looking as if butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths.

Rain came and settled at the window. April showers. The twenty-third of April. Yes! The destination of Melchior had been prepared for him since birth; he was doomed to wear the pasteboard crown. Hadn’t he first seen light of day on Shakespeare’s birthday?

So had we two, of course. But all the little children in Bard Road were singing a hymn to Charlie Chaplin the day that we were born and Grandma took us to the window to look at the shirts and bloomers dancing on the washing-lines all over Lambeth. That made a difference, you know. We were doomed to sing and dance.

Then we did Wheelchair’s nails, just a manicure and buff, she’s never said but I know she thinks varnish is vulgar. We gave her a squirt of Arpège. The phone never rang. Each time I looked at it, it didn’t ring. And Brenda never came round again, either.

Five