Wise Children (36 page)

‘What a clatter!’ said Nora. ‘Like cymbals, darling. Don’t you think I didn’t guess what you were up to?’

There was just one ecstatic moment, she opined, when she thought the grand bouncing on the bed upstairs – remember, Perry was a
big
man – would bring down that chandelier and all its candles, smash, bang, clatter, and the swagged ceiling, too; bring the house down, fuck the house down, come (‘cum’?) all over the posh frocks and the monkey jackets and the poisoned cake and the lovers, mothers, sisters, shatter the lenses that turned our lives into peepshows, scatter little candle-flames like an epiphany on every head, cover over all the family, the friends, the camera crews, with plaster dust and come and fire.

But such was not to be. There are limits to the power of laughter and though I may hint at them from time to time, I do not propose to step over them.

Perry and I had no idea what was going on below, of course.

Not bad for a centenarian at all, at all.

But do not think I went to bed with the ribald ancient who’d arrived with my darling godchild in a box an hour before. Oh, no. I lay in the arms of that russet-mopped young flyer in the weathered leather jacket who’d knocked at the door of 49 Bard Road, and saved us all from gloom the day the war to end all wars ended, just twenty years before the next one started. And wars are facts we cannot fuck away, Perry; nor laugh away, either.

Do you hear me, Perry?

No.

He was himself, when young; and also, while we were making love, he turned into, of all people, that blue-eyed boy who’d never known my proper name. Then who else but Irish passed briefly through the bed; fancy meeting you. There was a whiff of Trumper’s Essence of Lime but not Perry, this time, instead, that Free Pole the night I caught a flea in the Ritz. And then a visit from Mr Piano Man, only he’d used a powerful mouthwash, thank goodness. Don’t think I’d gone wandering off down Memory Lane in the midst of it all; but Peregrine wasn’t only the one dear man, tonight, but a kaleidoscope of faces, gestures, caresses. He was not the love of my life but all the loves of my life at once, the curtain call of my career as lover.

And who was I?

I saw myself reflected in those bracken-coloured eyes of his. I was a lanky girl with a green bow in her mouse-brown hair, blinking away the first, worst disappointment of her life in the sun on Brighton Prom.

When I was just thirteen years old, Perry! You dirty beast!

Evidently, back downstairs in the ballroom, the chandelier, after a last, terrifyingly violent paroxysm, commenced to decelerate until one final chink and tinkle and then it was as morose and static as it ever was, the candles settled down again and everybody had another glass of bubbly.

‘And what were
you
doing, Nora?’

‘Sitting on our dad’s knee, like a good daughter ought to on her old man’s birthday, Dora.’

What would have happened if we
had
brought the house down? Wrecked the whole lot, roof blown off, floor caved in, all the people blown out of the blown-out windows . . . sent it all sky high, destroyed all the terms of every contract, set all the old books on fire, wiped the slate clean. As if, when the young king meets up again with Jack Falstaff in
Henry IV, Part Two
, he doesn’t send him packing but digs him in the ribs, says: ‘Have I got a job for you!’

While we were doing it, everything seemed possible, I must say. But that is the illusion of the act. Now I remember how everything seemed possible when I was doing it, but as soon as I stopped, not, as if fucking itself were the origin of illusion.

‘Life’s a carnival,’ he said. He was an illusionist, remember.

‘The carnival’s got to stop, some time, Perry,’ I said. ‘You listen to the news, that’ll take the smile off your face.’

‘News? What news?’

I saw he was incorrigible but I gave him a big kiss all the same. When he got his breath back, he wiped us both off with a silk scarf he reached for and picked up where it had fallen on the floor, Gucci or Pucci or something like that. It was Saskia’s, must have dropped out of her pocket. I discovered I was lying on her mink. She hadn’t trusted her fur coat to the promiscuous crush of the downstairs cloakroom, had she, she must have thought the help might nick it, but look at the horrid stains it had acquired upstairs! When I saw what I had done to Saskia’s coat, my cup of happiness ran over.

Then I was seized with panic, and a crippling doubt.

‘’Ere, Perry . . . you’re not, by any chance, my father, are you?’

He was quite taken aback, for a moment. Then he laughed until he choked so I had to beat him on the back. He laughed and shook his head and laughed and coughed and sputtered.

‘Dora, Dora, I’ve got
some
standards! I never set eyes on either you or your Grandma until the Armistice, I promise!’

‘I thought I’d ask,’ I said, ‘seeing as how you’re everybody else’s.’

He reached out for his trousers.

‘I’m not your father, Dora. I spent seventy-odd years regretting it, my precious, but mighty glad I am of it, this minute.’ Always the
mot juste
, our Perry. He stood up. He commenced to dress.

‘But . . . has it ever occurred to you that your mother might not be your mother?’

I was putting on my tights. There was a ladder running from a star. I stood stock-still with one leg stuck up in the air.

‘What?’

‘Did you ever see your mother’s grave, Dora?’

‘What are you trying to get at, Perry?’

‘I’m not sure,’ he said slowly. ‘I’ve got no concrete evidence. But sometimes I used to wonder about your Grandma.’

‘Grandma?’

‘Her last fling,’ suggested Perry. ‘Pinning old Melchior down on the mattress and –’

‘You’ve got a very filthy mind, I must say, Perry.’ I tucked my tits away neatly into my lynx-print top. ‘Possible but not probable. Grandma was fifty if she was a day when we came along and she’d have been proud as a peacock, she’d never have made up some cock and bull story about a chambermaid to explain us away, why should she?’

‘Just a thought,’ he said. ‘She never talked about your mother. I asked her, a couple of times, but she clammed up. She liked to keep her secrets. I asked her, once, where she came from herself and she said, “Out of a bottle, like a bloody genie, dearie.’”

‘Come off it, Perry. “Father” is a hypothesis but “mother” is a fact. Grandma never buried her, she didn’t believe in people’s bodies lying around cluttering up the place once the owners were through with them. She had our mum cremated and put the ashes in the garden. We put Grandma’s there, too. It’s everso good for the roses.’

‘Mother is as mother does,’ said Perry. ‘She loved you just as much as if –’

‘Don’t start me off, again. Talk about April showers.’ I dabbed my eyes carefully on account of the three shades of eyeshadow. He put his flying jacket on. We looked each other up and down. We couldn’t stop smiling. I’d known in my bones today would be a red-letter day.

‘Come on back downstairs,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a little present for you and Nora. Would I forget your birthdays?’

‘Just a sec –’

For then I knew what I must do.

Not that I believe in telepathy but Perry caught on at once and we turned that room over together. Not that there was much to turn, since it was so minimal, but then we found that Margarine tucked away all the evidence of Melchior in a slip of a room next door, with a little narrow bed, a brown fug of theatrical prints and a faint aroma hinting at incontinence. The
Interiors
photographer never got wind of its existence.

When I saw that picture on the wall, first off, I thought it was the man himself, because it was of an old man in purple who looked just like. But then I saw how thick and brown the varnish was, how grandiose and nineteenth-century the brushwork. And
this
man wore a crown. It was older by far than Melchior and there was the legend on the frame: ‘Ranulph Hazard, “Never, never, never, never, never . . .”’

Here was the source of all that regal, tragic fancy dress – the purple robe, the rings, the pendant. On his hundredth birthday, a man may indulge in any whim he chooses; Melchior had donned the costume of his father. The slandered, the abused, the cuckolded Ranulph. Ranulph, wife-murderer, friend-murderer, self-murderer, ‘a little more than kin and less than kind’. You can say that again. The son put on the lost father’s clothes and when I saw what he had done I could have cried because I’d never taken into consideration that he’d got problems of his own where family was concerned. His childhood, which stopped short at ten years old, never to go again, like grandfather’s clock (only not like
our
grandfather’s clock, which is still in very fair fettle, thank you very much). No love, no nothing. And, tonight of all nights, he’d chosen to become his own father, hadn’t he, as if the child had not been the father of the man, in his case, but, during his whole long life, the man had waited to become the father of himself.

When, later on, we finally got ourselves home after the wonderful events of the night, I confided some of these thoughts to Nora. She knitted her brows.

‘If the child is father of the man,’ she asked, ‘then who is the mother of the woman?’

Speaking of which, has it ever occurred to you to spare a passing thought as to the character of the deceased
Mrs
Lear? Didn’t it ever occur to you that Cordelia might have taken after her mother while the other girls . . .

Melchior had dressed up as his father but had left off that crown. Peregrine climbed up on a stool and rooted round on the highest shelves of Melchior’s closet and first he found a box of stiff collars, and then a box of spats, and then a box that once contained a topper. And there it was, inside. Melchior must have come home and hidden it away with all his other posthumous clothing the day the man on the Underground thought he was dead.

It was battered and tattered and the gilt was peeling off but Perry made a few magic passes over it and it came up lovely.

‘I made him jump for it, once,’ he said. ‘You can give it to him for nothing, today.’

Downstairs it was only family. Not one media person left, nor guests, just dirty glasses fallen on their sides, crumpled serviettes, chicken-bones, wilting lilac, candles keeling over. The lutenists were gone, the waiters gone, the serving wenches and the pages were gone, Perry’s Brazilian friends adjourned to their rooms in the Travellers’ Club, but Old Nanny had emerged from the ladies’ toilet to take her rightful place amongst us and they were all sitting round convivially picking away at a big platter of left-over chicken. When I saw the chicken, I felt peckish, but there was a little ceremony I must perform before I could eat it.

I picked a cushion off one of the gilt chairs and shook it. Broken glass fell out. They were all ignoring us with elaborate politeness, except for Nora, who winked, so nobody was looking when I plumped up that cushion and set that old crown nicely out upon it. Where were the baroque trumpeters now that I needed a fanfare? But when I said:

‘Father, look what I’ve found!’ and processed towards him bearing aloft my cushion, Perry began to imitate a drumroll to perfection: ‘Rub-a-dub-a-dub-a-dub.’ Nora, sitting on his knee, looked sentimental. Daisy smacked away the wandering hand her aged husband had, from force of habit, placed in her bosom and adopted a reverential air. Everybody sat with drumsticks suspended halfway to their mouths as Perry brought the imaginary drumroll to a magnificent conclusion and said, in a round, rich, mahogany-coloured voice well-suited to the occasion:

‘Prince of players! Reclaim your crown!’

I stood up on tiptoe. I placed the crown on his long, grey hair. Sometimes you know it’s sentimental and sometimes you just don’t care. I was a touch long in the tooth for Cordelia but there you are.

‘My princesses,’ he said. ‘My two dancing princesses.’ No, he did. Really! If only our mother could have been there to see. But – which mother? Pretty Kitty? Grandma? That’s a problem. I don’t know what Pretty Kitty might have said, but Grandma would have managed something acid. The Lady A. looked pleased. My Lady Margarine looked pissed off. The darling buds looked chastened.

Yet Nora and I were well content. We’d finally wormed our way into the heart of the family we’d always wanted to be part of. They’d asked us on the stage and let us join in, legit. at last. There was a house we all had in common and it was called, the past, even though we’d lived in different rooms. Then Perry, wearing his conjuring smile, said:

‘Look in my pocket, Nora.’

Her lipstick was all over the place because she’d been at the chicken, her hair was coming down, she looked ribald. I daresay I did, too.

‘In your pocket, eh?’ she said, richly. She had a feel. Then her face changed. I’d never seen her look like that before, not in all the years we’ve been together. She looked as if she were about to fall in love, was teetering on the brink – but more so. As if about to fall in love terminally, once and for all, as if she’d met the perfect stranger.

‘Oh, Perry!’ She expelled a sigh and pulled it out.

Brown as a quail, round as an egg, sleepy as a pear. I’ll never know how he got it in his pocket.

‘Look in the other one, Dora.’

One each. They were twins, of course, three months old, by the look of them.

‘
Oooh
, Perry!’ said Nora. ‘Just what I always wanted.’

‘Gareth’s,’ said Peregrine to Melchior. So it turned out the Hazard dynasty wasn’t at its last gasp at all but was bursting out in every direction and, to add to the hypothetical, disputed, absent father that was such a feature of our history, now you could add a holy father, too. Put it down to liberation theology.

Margarine grabbed hold of Perry: have you seen him? How is he? Who is the mother? Where is she?

But who she was or where they both were do not belong to the world of comedy. Perry told us, of course, because we were family, but I don’t propose to tell
you
, not now, when the barren heath was bloomed, the fire that was almost out sprung back to life and Nora a mother at last at seventy-five years old and all laughter, forgiveness, generosity, reconciliation.