Wise Children (32 page)

E CROSSED OVER
the river to the other side. The river lies between Brixton and glamour like a sword. I wonder why they call it Old
Father
Thames.

In Regent’s Park, the bushes crouched like bears and the stands of daffs and tulips wore a pale and ghostly look as they swayed in our birthday wind, which was getting fresh, again, moist after the rain, and warmish. In the street outside the Hazard home, what a bustle! A retinue of vans, blaring lights on stands, power cables to trip you up and a muster of personnel – bald men in specs and parkas conversing in huddles, girls in jeans hither and thithering with clipboards, plus fans, the idle and the curious, rubbernecking in quantity.

The Hazard residence was very handsome. Once or twice, we’d sauntered past it casually, just to have a little look . . . love locked out, ducky. Stuccoed, pillared and porticoed, with a bay thrust out front and a flight of stone steps to the door up which we’d often dreamed one day we might ascend and now would do so to the manner born, although we’d have to commission some staunch retainer to deal with Wheelchair.

But Wheelchair balked at the sight of the TV crews. There she was, in the back of the cab – we’d booked a hack, we’d never have got her into a minicab – she wept and wailed. What? Transmitted all over the country on the nine o’clock news carted about like laundry? What a public humiliation! Behold, the sad decline of the most beautiful woman of her time! She set up a lament but, luckily, Nora had slipped a big white chiffon square into her gold-mesh evening bag, in case the poor old thing’s shoulders got chilly towards the end of the evening, so she dropped it over Wheelchair’s head. Instant hush. I hailed a passing minion, who was all done up in hose and doublet.

‘Just carry this lady up the stairs, will you, and we’ll follow with the appliance.’

‘Pleasure,’ he said, smiling and coaxing Wheelchair the way they do the very old, the same way they do kiddies. She was so light he hoisted her up easily in his arms in her white gown and her veil and she looked like a nun, or a ghost, or a very ancient bride until, out from under that veil, she gave him a flash of her Lynde-blue eyes and he blushed, he straightened his back, he bore her off with surprise and pride amidst a whirr of TV cameras, a staccato barrage of flashbulbs and a mutter: ‘Who’s that? Who’s she?’ because, when her eyes flashed, her beautiful old bones stuck out, suddenly, she turned back into the Lady A. of long ago and they all gaped.

Nora struggled with the wheelchair, trying to fold it up, while I paid off the cabby.

All round us, scenes of the kind poor Irish loved to hate were taking place. Swish cars drew up to disgorge tuxedos and long frocks from interiors that lit up at the moment of exit so each couple made a brief but striking cameo appearance. The crowd went wild. Though all the guests so far looked old crocks like us I’m bound to say there was not one body I recalled from days gone by, no doubt because they were all legitimate.

And then I felt a tugging at my sleeve, some old cove in rags, begging. As soon as I set eyes on him, he struck a chord, although I couldn’t place him, not at first.

At my age, memory becomes exquisitively selective. Yes; I remember, with a hallucinatory sensitivity, sense impressions. A hand on my breast, even if I cannot recall precisely whose hand. The taste of a bacon sandwich back in the days when bacon in the pan buzzed like a bee in a lavender bush. The sensation of sunlight on the tender nape the day we’d had our hair cut for the first time. But it takes an effort to dredge up anything else, I can tell you. I couldn’t for the life of me remember the brand name of Irish’s favourite tipple, when I tried, the other day, even though he chucked a bottle of it at me when we parted in lieu of farewell. A full bottle, to boot. It smashed against the wall and trickled down. ‘Oh, look,’ I said, ‘it’s left a map of Ireland.’ He couldn’t see the joke. ‘He must have loved you very much, to toss a whole bottle,’ said Nora, when I told her.

But what was the brand? If you get little details like that right, people will believe anything.

Old Bushmills? Perhaps it was Old Bushmills. Poor old Irish. Gone to the great distillery in the sky these many years.

I’ve got a perfectly serviceable memory in some respects but not in others and there I was, racking my brains, when he rasped out: ‘Spare us half a bar for a cup of tea, lady.’

He stretched out his hand and I glimpsed, between the edges of his unspeakable shirt, off which the buttons had all fallen, below the stained lapels of his ex-army greatcoat, the outlines of Europe and Africa. The penny dropped. Before me stood all that was left of Gorgeous George.

Lo, how the mighty are fallen. Though I saw which way things were going back then, in
The Dream
. It was a wonder he’d hung on for another half-century. When I came to think about it, he must have been as old as Melchior, himself; as old as Perry, if Perry’d lived.

I found I had reminded myself of untimely death and the festive mood that I was striving bravely to achieve evaporated.

But why, in that case, had we put on our gladrags and come out into the night when our hearts were freshly broken? Good question. For our old man’s sake, I suppose. To celebrate the author of our being, even if he had relegated us to the ‘remaindered’ pile.

I may never have known my father in the sense of an intimate acquaintance, but I knew who he was. I was a wise child, wasn’t I?

I was stuck staring at Gorgeous George but he didn’t recognise me.

‘Give us a bob, then,’ he said, having relinquished some hope but not all. His voice had been destroyed by time and liquor. The harsh light of the yellow streetlamps took all the pink out of his continents. I’d got a twenty in my hand, ready to pay the cabby. Shakespeare, on the note, said: ‘Have a heart.’

‘Take that,’ I said and pressed his literary culture into the hand of he who once personated Bottom the Weaver. ‘Take it for the sake of
The Dream
. You can have it on the one condition, that you spend it all on drink.’

He grabbed hold of the currency, all right, but gave me an old-fashioned look.

‘Surely you’d never think that of an old soldier,’ he reproached.

‘On your way,’ I said. ‘Don’t you know it’s Shakespeare’s birthday? Cry God for England, Harry and St George. Go off and drink a health to bastards.’

He looked askance at that, as if he misunderstood my turn of phrase, but he wasn’t about to make an issue of it, not when the price of an insult was a cool twenty quid, so he toddled off, clutching his loot, scarcely able to believe his luck, no doubt.

‘You shouldn’t have encouraged him,’ reproved the taxi-driver.

‘I used to know him, once upon a time,’ I said and settled up, slipping him another Shakespeare to compensate for my generosity to the undeserving poor. I can take a hint.

‘Come
on
,’ said Nora, dancing on the spot.

Up the steps we marched in unison, exhibiting our antique but not quite catastrophic legs with wild abandon; with one accord, we stripped off our silver-fox trenches and trailed them behind us, and all the flashes went off at once. I felt quite revived.

Fame and beauty milled in the entrance hall below as little ladies in period cleavage took the coats and wraps. Lutenists in costume, always a feature of our father’s parties, massed on the upstairs landing and ancient music floated from above. There was, bliss! another staircase that went up in florid curves, like Mae West.

‘Where’s Wheelchair? What did that chap do with her?’

‘Search me.’

We gave up on Wheelchair, surrendered our furs and, hand in hand, did another Hollywood ascension up the staircase although I suffered the customary nasty shock when I spotted us both in the big gilt mirror at the top – two funny old girls, paint an inch thick, clothes sixty years too young, stars on their stockings and little wee skirts skimming their buttocks. Parodies. Nora caught sight of us at the same time as I did and she stopped short, too.

‘Oooer, Dor’,’ she said. ‘We’ve gone and overdone it.’

We couldn’t help it, we had to laugh at the spectacle we’d made of ourselves and, fortified by sisterly affection, strutted our stuff boldly into the ballroom. We could still show them a thing or two, even if they couldn’t stand the sight.

That house boasted a ballroom and that ballroom was a sight to see. The bay stuck out right over the park and there were long windows at the other end. Red marble columns with gold tops held up the ceiling, which was plastered with acanthus wreaths, pineapples, harps, palm fronds, bunches of grapes and lurking cherubs. There was a ten-gallon wedding cake in the shape of a chandelier hanging by a chain, winking, blinking and sending out rainbows and it was lit with real candles. There were real candles everywhere else, too, in sconces, in branches, in single spies, in battalions, filling the air with the smell of hot wax, warming us all up, flattering complexions which were, one and all, aged, except for those of the waiters, all in doublet and hose, who circulated amongst the throng with fizzing flutes of bubbly on silver salvers, reflected upside down like a conjuring trick in the parquet underfoot.

And my heart stood still, I was seventeen, again, I was a virgin powdering my nose with beating heart, for there was lilac, lilac, everywhere. In bowls, in jars, in cornucopias. White lilac, the evening’s floral theme. I was all misty because of the smell of lilac as we processed in the long line towards where our father was receiving, in an alcove, seated on a sort of throne.

He wasn’t wearing either monkey suit or tails, unlike most of his guests, but had on a rather majestic and heavily embroidered purple caftan. I thought, colostomy; but that caftan made a lovely contrast with his longish, pewter-coloured hair, still thick and heavy. There were rings on his fingers, like a king, or pope, and a big gold medallion round his neck. He looked regal, but festive. My heart gave a thump and the beat started to speed up.

We waited patiently in line to wish him ‘Happy birthday’, standing between a theatrical knight and a TV presenter who babbled inanities at one another across us, which pissed us off, but we decided to tolerate the invisibility of old ladies – note that, even dressed up like fourpenny ham-bones, our age and gender still rendered us invisible – because it was a special occasion, although as a general rule, we debate invisibility hotly. I snatched at the champagne a couple of times as it waltzed past, I was bloody nervous, I can tell you.

I looked round for Wheelchair but I couldn’t see her anywhere and would have started to worry about her if I hadn’t started to worry about myself, specifically, to worry about my bladder capacity because the theatrical knight kissed Melchior’s hand once, then twice, then yet again for the cameras because first something went wrong, then something else and life was like a loop of tape repeating itself and I wished I hadn’t had that second glass of bubbly when I remembered how I’d pissed myself from nerves the first time I met him. But Nora remained calm, although the lutenists were playing tunes to break your heart, ‘Semper Dowland, semper dolens’, ‘Lachrymae’.

The third Lady Hazard, wearing a Vivienne Westwood somewhat too witty for her years, stood watchful guard beside her husband, her hand, weighed down by diamonds, protectively upon his shoulder but her eyes roving all round the thronged room, where the odours of expensive scent and aftershave vied with the lilac and the candle-wax and the smell of delicious cooking began to waft upstairs, too. A doublet and hose tottered past beneath a groaning tray of chicken-legs; I was starving, we’d skipped lunch, but we couldn’t kneel down and ask our father’s blessing flourishing a drumstick, could we? My Lady Margarine wore a smile so fixed it strained the stitches of her nip and tuck but you could tell she wasn’t happy.

Of course! She was looking out for Tristram.

Of whom no sign.

I wondered if the mysterious Father Gareth Hazard SJ were going to turn up and, if so, if he would do so in his canonicals. I suffered from a powerful curiosity about Father Gareth; I’d never set eyes on him and would have given a lot to do so in my capacity as unofficial chronicler of the Hazard family because, given the history of fathers in our family, it seemed only right and proper we should have finally turned up a celibate one – a non-combatant, as it were.

The cameramen were everywhere, like flies. You never knew when you’d find one poking his proboscis in your drink. I gleaned from a waiter the info that the entire party, from first hello to last hiccup, was being taped for posterity; our father was bent on making an exhibition of himself until the bitter end.

‘Peaseblossom!’ he exclaimed. ‘And Mustardseed!’

He put an arm round each of us while My Lady Margarine smiled on remorselessly, she didn’t pause to change her smile between clients and her thoughts were unquestionably elsewhere or she’d have asked us who the fuck we were, we miniskirted senior citizens on our teetering heels. She no longer knew us from Adam although we remembered
her
, all right, on Sundays at the Lynde Court Home Farm in a patchwork dirndl giggling sycophantically at some barbed jibe of Saskia’s. But Melchior gave us each as big a hug as he could manage, sitting down. Then he closed his eyes and inhaled deeply.