Wise Children (37 page)

Yes.

Hard to swallow, huh?

Well, you might have known what you were about to let yourself in for when you let Dora Chance in her ratty old fur and poster paint, her orange (Persian Melon) toenails sticking out of her snakeskin peep-toes, reeking of liquor, accost you in the Coach and Horses and let her tell you a tale.

I’ve got a tale and a half to tell, all right!

But, truthfully, these glorious pauses do, sometimes, occur in the discordant but complementary narratives of our lives and if you choose to stop the story there, at such a pause, and refuse to take it any further, then you can call it a happy ending.

There was a full moon out over Regent’s Park when we piled into Saskia’s van, that she’d brought the food in; the inside still smelled of rosemary. Such was the power of Peregrine’s personality that nobody, not even Margarine, the official grandmother, nor better yet, Old Nanny, dreamed for one moment of contesting Nora’s possession of the newest Hazard twins who, as she found out when she changed their nappies, she let out a squawk – were boy and girl, a new thing in our family.

Not only that. Margarine went personally up to the attic to fetch us a double pram, the one that Tristram and Gareth had when they were babies, so our babies would ride home like royalty, and we planned to stop off at the all-night Boots in Piccadilly for formula and bottles.

Perry took Tristram to one side and asked him, did he want to go back to South America with him to help look for Gareth. Tristram took a big gulp and said, ‘Yes.’ So that’s what’s going to become of Tristram. Perhaps he will come back fit to be a father and take up his responsibilities; and perhaps not. Margarine and Melchior looked scared and proud; they loved him. I am not sure if this is a happy ending. I cross my fingers.

The chauffeur came and Daisy and he between them carried Puck down to Daisy’s limo, he was well away, borne up and elsewhere on the lovely wind of his own voice.

Off he went downstairs; when I went to open the window to let the fug out, they were loading him into the car and he was still singing:

‘. . .  but my heart belongs to daddy.’

‘Oh, very apt,’ said Nora, but I thought it was bad taste.

The Lady A. nodded off in her wheelchair while we were fixing up the pram business because she was getting very frail, poor old thing, and the evening had tired her out, no wonder, so Perry carried her up to the spare room in his arms, a very touching sight to see. Saskia said, did we need a lift and I was sufficiently overcome by the prevailing spirit of goodwill that I said, take us as far as the Elephant, we’ll walk from there, because it’s a lovely night and we could do with a walk, clear our heads.

Margarine was going round snuffing out the candles when we bade them our farewells and she kissed the babies and made as if about to kiss us, too, but thought better of it and backed off. The jury is still out on the question of her boys’ paternity. But in my heart I think, not. Not her and Perry. No way. He must have known someone else in Gunter Grove. Melchior with his crown still on, though much askew by now, came to the window to wave and then we got into the back of the van along with several plastic vats of salad which Saskia had forgotten to serve up, so much had been going on.

Tristram was staying in his own old room for the night, to his mother’s soft, glowing satisfaction, and Saskia had sufficient savvy to know when not to press him but I could tell by the look in her eyes that if we all stopped short at this point it wouldn’t be a happy ending for her, no, sir! She hadn’t finished with the boy, by any means, so I thought, the sooner he gets off to Amazonia, the better.

Yet, no matter how fragile or brief it might be, there was a truce that night between the Chance girls and the Hazard sisters. We never said one word about the past, the taunts, the farmhouse, the chicanery, the staircase. Imogen sat in the front, next to Saskia, with the fishbowl on her knee. She looked content enough but she was always a strange one. Now and then she did those goldfish movements with her mouth.

‘What are you saying?’ Saskia asked her.

‘Goldie say: “Goodnight! God bless!”’ she said. I felt nauseous. Truce! I reminded myself. Truce!

Nora pushed the pram. I carried the Boots’ bag. Gawd, it was heavy. A heart-shaped glow appeared to surround our Nora in the night but you mustn’t go away thinking I wasn’t pleased about our babies, too.

But coming so late in our lives and so unexpectedly . . .

‘What shall we do about the cats, Nora?’

‘I thought we might clear out Grandma’s old room for a nursery,’ said Nora, ignoring my question. ‘Get rid of all that junk. Get a bloke in to paint it all white, with maybe a Beatrix Potter frieze. What do you think?’

‘We won’t be able to go out in the evenings, Nora.’

‘
You
can go out, dear,’ she said magnanimously. ‘I’ll be perfectly content to stay at home with these little cherubs.’

She must have thought she heard a coo, because she bent down over the pram to peer under the hoods.

‘Babies!’ she said, and cackled with glee.

‘No fun, going out without you,’ I said.

‘Come off it, Dora. Grow up.’

‘It’s all very well for you, Nora. You always wanted kids. Now you’ve got them.’

She cackled again.

‘We’re both of us mothers and both of us fathers,’ she said. ‘They’ll be wise children, all right.’

She peered in at the babies, again; they slept on undisturbed. No sound but the whirring of the rubber wheels and a cat, somewhere, giving a mating call. I told Nora what was on my mind.

‘Here, Nora . . .’

She cocked her head.

‘Nora . . . don’t you think our father looked two-dimensional, tonight?’

She gave me a look that said, tell me more.

‘Too kind, too handsome, too repentant. After all those years without a word. Remember that terrible bank holiday when he pretended to our faces that he thought we were Perry’s? And tonight, he had an imitation look, even when he was crying, especially when he was crying, like one of those great, big, papier-mâché heads they have in the Notting Hill parade, larger than life, but not lifelike.’

Nora sunk in thought for a hundred yards.

‘D’you know, I sometimes wonder if we haven’t been making him up all along,’ she said. ‘If he isn’t just a collection of our hopes and dreams and wishful thinking in the afternoons. Something to set our lives by, like the old clock in the hall, which is real enough, in itself, but which we’ve got to wind up to make it go.’

‘Oh, very profound. Very deep.’

‘Think about it,’ she said. ‘We can tell these little darlings here whatever we like about their mum and dad if Perry doesn’t find them but whatever we tell them, they’ll make up their own romance out of it.’

But thinking of the twins put me in mind of something more pressing than family romances.

‘Here, Nora . . . if we’ve got those twins to look out for, we can’t afford to die for a least another twenty years.’

‘Thank goodness we’re a long-lived family.’ She’d thought of that herself.

We went past the Oval; we were doomed to a century. Just when I’d been thinking it was high time for the final curtain. Which only goes to show, you never know in the morning what the night will bring and I’d had a little bonus of my own, hadn’t I, but Nora never pried because twins we may be but we respect each other’s secrets. So we turned into Bard Road, at last, when there came a wee stirring from the depths of the pram.

‘What’s up, small fry?’

They mewed and rustled.

‘I say, Dora, let’s give them a song. After all we’re song-and-dance girls, aren’t we?’

‘We’re dancing princesses,’ said Nora. ‘What an old fraud he is!’

‘You wouldn’t want him any different.’

‘I used to want him dead.’

We put our handbags in the pram, for safety’s sake. Then and there, we couldn’t wait, we broke into harmony, we serenaded the new arrivals:

The window on the second-floor front window of 41 Bard Road went up, a head came out. Dreadlocks. That Rastafarian.

‘You two, again,’ he said.

‘Have a heart!’ we said. ‘We’ve got something to celebrate, tonight!’

‘Well, you just watch it, in case a squad car comes by,’ he said. ‘Drunk in charge of a baby carriage, at your age.’

We’d got so many songs to sing to our babies, all our old songs, that we didn’t pay him any attention. ‘Gee, we’d like to see you looking swell, babies!’ and the Hazard theme song, ‘Is You Is or Is You Ain’t’. Then there were songs from the show that nobody else remembers. ‘2b or not 2b’, ‘Hey nonny bloody no’, ‘Mistress Mine’, and Broadway tunes, and paper moons, and lilacs in the spring, again. We went on dancing and singing. ‘Diamond bracelets Woolworths doesn’t sell.’ Besides, it was our birthday, wasn’t it, we’d got to sing them the silly old song about Charlie Chaplin and his comedy boots all the little kids were singing and dancing in the street the day we were born. There was dancing and singing all along Bard Road that day and we’ll go on singing and dancing until we drop in our tracks, won’t we, kids.

What a joy it is to dance and sing!

 
Dramatis Personae
(in order of appearance)

In no particular order of appearance: rough children, cats, chorus girls, chorus boys, nudes, spear-carriers, comics, fans, Free French, Free Poles, Free Norwegians, soldiers, sailors, airmen of all nations, media personalities, television crews, market traders, pupils of the Italia Conte School, Amazonian tribesmen, photographers, film buffs, the public, extras.

Notes

Introduction