Wise Children (33 page)

‘Now, my darlings, you must refresh my memory . . . which of you is it who uses Shalimar and which Mitsouko?’

That smile! And, dammit, we fell in love with him, again, just as we’d done that August bank holiday all those years ago, when he first broke our hearts when he was scared and young and foolish. We saw that he was none of these things, now. We fell head over heels. We didn’t need any words. Words would have been no good. His smile. Nora was chucking down buckets and he stretched out his old, veined, freckled hand and touched her cheek hesitantly, tremulously, so as to break your heart.

‘You shouldn’t cry,’ he said. ‘Not at our birthday party.’

That did it. Now I was at it too.

‘Dad,’ said Nora, and I said, ‘Dad.’ He gave us another hug. ‘My lovely girls.’ I don’t know what changed him. Perhaps . . . perhaps, when he saw poor little Tiff distracted on the game show, he thought of Pretty Kitty for the first time in decades. Perhaps. He kept his profile at an angle so the cameras wouldn’t shoot his double chin, he couldn’t help it, it was in his blood. Just because he repented in public with half England watching didn’t mean it wasn’t genuine. He gave us another hug, and another, making up for all the hugs we never got. One fine night filled with white lilac when I was seventeen, he’d asked me to dance and now, by rights, he ought to close the circle, take the floor with Nora, but that TV presenter behind us was pushing and shoving to make his presence felt so we said: ‘See you later, Dad,’ and pushed off.

We got ourselves another drink and hid behind a pillar to compose ourselves. We were grinning away like Cheshire cats, we couldn’t help it. Not that he’d said anything. Not that anything had changed. But we’d had a bit of love.

The chicken passed by, she lifted a thigh off. ‘I could eat a horse.’ She bit into the flesh. ‘Delish.’ She was recovering her equanimity. A spike of herb trapped between her front teeth; she hooked it out with her fingernail and looked at it.

‘Rosemary,’ she said. ‘
At Table in Tuscany
, BBC i, Friday evenings, eight thirty. That Saskia’s doing the catering.’

She dropped the thigh half-eaten in an ashtray.

‘Your mascara’s run something awful,’ I said. I was dying for a pee, too, so we went off to the ladies’ toilet and there we found the Lady A., turned back into Wheelchair as if by some bad spell and tucked away behind the bidet, still veiled, quivering, with Old Nanny done up to look like Juliet’s Nurse soothing her with gentle murmurs. They’d stationed Old Nanny in the toilet, evidently, so that she could deal with drunks.

‘I couldn’t face him,’ said the Lady A. ‘Not after what I did to him. I loved him but I betrayed him.’

‘You need a stiffener,’ said Nora. Old Nanny pursed her lips at first but she knocked a quick one back herself once Nora got the gin out of her gilt-mesh bag and we got Wheelchair into the ballroom at last, between us, although she quivered well-nigh to the point of shaking to pieces whenever the crowds parted and she caught sight of Melchior, so we parked her behind a Canova nude, where she had another snifter and settled down to see what on earth would happen next.

What happened next was, Daisy Duck.

There was a fanfare of baroque trumpets. No kidding. I hadn’t heard a baroque trumpet in the flesh since the wrap party for
The Dream
. There was a general hushing and muttering and the crowd pressed back but the Lady A. became unwontedly animated and craned forward, would have had her veil off for a better view but I stayed her hand – I had an inkling the time wasn’t right, yet, for her to show herself. She grumbled and mumbled but covered up again and settled down to watch the royal entrance happily enough, even if as through a mist.

And royal entrance it was. Tootle, tootle, tootle, too! went the trumpets. Then the lutenists, unaccustomed to the tuning and with a good many bum notes, had a go at ‘Hello, Dolly!’ and in she came, to a round of cheers. People stood on chairs. She looked a million dollars, I must admit, even if in well-used notes. Tiny as ever, five foot nothing in her heels, but a stunning advertisement for hormone replacement therapy, I must say, not a line on that skin but, then, sharkskin doesn’t wrinkle, does it, don’t be a bitch, Dora. She was brown and glossy, like a Sunday roast, plump brown shoulders, bright brown hair with a few grey strands – she was smart enough not to try to look as though she were thirty-five, she’d settle happily for forty. Teeth like a Bechstein grand, I blinked in the glare of her smile. In the slinky wake of her white satin sheath staggered a tiny figure almost invisible under the weight of her bouquet, a hundred red roses. I thought it must be Daisy’s gigolo, he came in like a tacked-on afterthought, but he wasn’t
my
idea of a gigolo – tiny little man, ill-fitting peroxide hair, one of those grey silk Italian suits that glow in the dark, face like an old child. I hoped for her sake he’d got hidden talents.

Good old Daisy. I could tell at a glance she was tight as a tick.

She got to the middle of the floor and then she stopped. She raised her arms above her head in an extrovert gesture and turned her nonstop, whiter-than-white smile to all four corners before she blasted Melchior with it. ‘Hello, Dolly!’ stopped at last, thank God. Roars of applause.

Melchior managed to stagger to his feet, wobbled off the podium and hugged her, making it up in public with her after all those years just as he’d done with us but they spent more time negotiating their profiles to advantage than we had done and Daisy won because, even if half seas over, she was compos mentis.

Because it grieves me but I must admit it – I fear our father’s softening of the heart was not unconnected to the softening of his brain. Old Nanny told us he’d never been the same since, one day, he was in the Tube on the way to the Garrick Club and some old codger grasped him by the hand and cried out, so all the carriage heard: ‘Good God, weren’t you Melchior Hazard, once?’ He started to mope, after that, to suffer from uncertainty, refused to go out, even hid away that precious old cardboard crown of his and swore he was too old to wear it any more. He was getting a touch dottled. But there you are; no silver lining without a cloud.

Dear old Daisy. She caught sight of us during the camera call, abandoned him in mid-embrace. The media people hallooed after her: what’s she doing, kissing those two bedizened bag ladies? We’d been younger than her, once upon a time, but she was wearing well, and worth a bob or two, of course.

The gigolo trailed unhappily a few steps, then unhappily back, carting his roses, at a loss, until Melchior was kind, beckoned him over, relieved him of the roses and, in a spontaneous improvisation, gave them to My Lady Margarine, who looked shocked, and thrust them at that TV presenter, who was still hanging around, who got rid of them to some deliquescent thesp in a Jean-Paul Gaulthier cat suit, and then that bunch of roses started to play pass-the-parcel all round the ballroom until a serving wench retrieved it and took it to the Ladies’, where Old Nanny, ever resourceful, stuck it down a toilet bowl for the duration of the party, since there was no other receptacle ample enough to receive it.

Daisy shrieked with joy when she caught sight of Wheelchair in her shroud but no time to catch up because the press now left us in a body and cantered to the door as Margarine pointed like a terrier and began to shake and whimper: here came the prodigal son at last!

How could anyone have thought that Tristram might find it in his heart to skip his father’s centenary, even if that very day he’d lost his lover and his child? Wasn’t it heart-warming? Heartwarming, my foot. The only decent thing young Tristram could have done was hara-kiri, in my opinion. But the show must go on, must it not?

Tristram looked wrecked. In a d.j., all right, but greenish in the face, as if he’d been throwing up all day, and very tottery on his feet, held up by an aunt on either side. We hadn’t spoken to the darling buds since the fateful twenty-first birthday party, only the occasional sighting in a department store. The Lady A. moaned and clutched the arms of her chair. ‘Calm down!’ we hissed. She sucked in a mouthful of her veil and gagged herself. Daisy produced a silver hip flask from her handbag and offered her a pull; chewing chiffon, the Lady A. shook her head. I was glad to see that time had healed the wounds between these two.

But time does not necessarily heal everything. I felt that old, familiar shudder of distress when I saw Saskia, with her hair redder than ever, done up in a French pleat, looking quite lissom in a putty-coloured sliver of something by Jean Muir. As for Imogen, she’d gone right over the top. She’d got a fishbowl on her head with a fish in it. I kid you not. A live fish. The flashes popped and flared like Guy Fawkes’ Night and Imogen turned this way and that, nodding, bowing and smiling and acknowledging the attention, the goldfish slopping around at considerable danger to itself. I furiously pondered the significance of the fish, then it clicked:
Goldie the Goldfish
– her kiddies’ programme. She had come to the party as a commercial for herself. She had on a bronze shift sequined in scales and she greeted her father in a manner appropriate to her heroine, she opened and shut her mouth a lot, and it was just as well she’d come along in costume and mimed her birthday greeting to him as a goldfish because it lightened up the mood.

As it was, after the girls – ‘girls’, I call them; they wouldn’t see sixty, again; show us your bus pass, ladies – gave the old man their birthday kisses, one on each cheek, he wept, again, and they retreated, leaving Tristram behind. That was the moment the paparazzi had been waiting for, when he tumbled forward on his knees, his face in Melchior’s lap. His shoulders shook. Over the plangent lutes, I heard the sound of sobbing. The cameramen surged round to get a closer view.

His mother crouched down and cuddled him, Melchior cradled his head. Old Melchior did something pathetic, he tried to wave the cameras away, tried to get them to leave them alone so they could endure the moment without the world, his wife and dog looking on, but it was too late in their lives for that. Smile in public, cry in public, live in public, die in public. There was a raw emotion on their faces that you don’t see on actors’. Tonight, they were in the newsreel. The worst thing, to see your children suffer.

But when I remembered Brenda’s face, that morning, I knew there was an even worse thing and then I cheerfully could have slaughtered Tristram Hazard.

Still the bloody show went on.

Saskia, who was well in control of the situation being, unique amongst mammals, a cold-blooded cow, telegraphed a signal with her eyebrows and the baroque trumpets rang out again. A host of little boys from the Italia Conte School in mini-ruffs and slashed knickers ran round snuffing out the scones with their fingers, releasing dozens of puffs of acrid smoke.

In came the cake.

I should have realised that Saskia would bake the cake. It was her masterpiece. It was enormous. It was a model of the Globe Theatre, I tell no lie. It was spherical, in tiers, roofed with chocolate frosting ridged to simulate tiles. It was big enough to ring a hundred candles all around the roof and they were blazing away as a dozen little pageboys bore in this edifice at shoulder-height, on a sort of litter, amidst roars of applause in which Daisy enthusiastically joined, after parking her bag and hip flask with the gigolo, but the Lady A. was sobbing very quietly and discreetly to herself under her veil and
we
didn’t feel like applauding ourselves, not at all, at all.

A pageboy handed Saskia a sword, the kind they fence with. Nora and I sharply ingested breath, recalling another birthday, another cake, a sudden act of shocking violence – but, in what was obviously a well-rehearsed routine, she offered it by the hilt to Melchior, who, well done, old stager! gently thrust Tristram to one side with his foot and rose tottering to his feet.

The only light, that fluttering of birthday candles on the cake, casting weird shadows, making the old man look haggard.

There was a hush; there was a drumroll.

My Lady Margarine, who was distractedly patting Tristram’s hand, belatedly remembered her cue.

‘A happy hundredth birthday, darling!’ You could tell, from the power of her smile,
that
cake wasn’t made with butter. Another fine trouper.

Our father lifted up the sword. I felt for him, you could see it was an effort. He lifted up the sword and –

– and –

I would like to be able to say that at this thrilling point, drumroll, celebration, flames, sudden hush, the big cake blew up or cracked open and out popped –

– but, if I did, I would be lying.

What happened was this: drumroll, flames, hush, uplifted cake knife but, before it could descend, came a tremendous knocking at the front door.
TREMENDOUS
. Such a knocking that the birthday candles dipped and swayed and dropped wax on the chocolate tiles; the boughs of lilac tossed, scattering nodes of bloom; the very parquet underneath us seemed to tremble, about to rise up.

A thrill ran through the room. Something unscripted is about to happen.

They let the wind in when they opened the door. The same amazing wind that whipped up the leaves and Dora Chance’s weary corpuscles this morning came roaring and galloping up the stairs into the ballroom, blowing up skirts, so women squealed, buffeting the candle-flames almost to extinction then whipping them back to life, again, whirling the Lady A.’s veil this way and that way, threatening to blow it away altogether, but she trapped it in her mouth. Laughter like sweet thunder blew on the wind in front of him and every head turned to see whom it might be, arriving late, in such a genial tempest.

Who else could it have been?

Remember the old song he used to sing with Irish, ‘In Dublin town lived Michael Finnegan . . .’ and the corpse jumps up at the wake, a resurrection. And the last line went like this:

‘Thunder and lightning!’ sang our Peregrine. ‘Did yez think I was dead?’