Wise Children (5 page)

Here she is in drag as, famously, Hamlet. Black tights. Tremendous legs. Wasted on a classical actress. We’ve got the legs from her. She’s emoting with the dagger: ‘To be or not to be . . .’ The obituary in
The New York Times
– careful with it, the paper’s starting to crumble – says how she ‘owed much to her New York Horatio, a superbly athletic young American with an exceptional gift of gravitas’.

Watch out for him, he’ll pop up again. Cassius Booth. Yes. One of
those
Booths. His parents had a nerve, to call him Cassius.

The obituary hints at our paternal grandmother’s enthusiasm for ahem indoor sports in the most tactful way. ‘Generous, gallant, reckless; a woman who gave her all to life . . .’ But she didn’t so much give it away as throw it away, poor thing. She came to a sticky end, all right. This is her as Desdemona, in a white nightie with her spray of willow, just about to go into her number: ‘A poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree . . .’ This one is a real collector’s item because –

No. Wait. I’ll tell you all about it in my own good time.

Some time in or around the year 1870 (her date of birth, like that of so many actresses, a movable feast) our paternal grandmother was born in a trunk and trod the boards from toddlerhood as fairy, phantom, goblin, eventually, an old stager of eight (give or take a year or two) making her London debut as Mamillius in
The Winter’s Tale
at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, in, it says here, a ‘somewhat pedantic’ production by the younger Kean (Charles), and a costume copied from a Greek vase, rolling a hoop, a bit of business copied off another Greek vase. Lewis Carroll saw her, sent her an inscribed copy of
Alice
, invited her to tea and got her to slip her frock off after the crumpets, whereupon he snapped her in the altogether but she drew the line at imitating the action depicted upon certain other Greek vases, or so she always maintained. Here’s the evidence of the encounter. See? He called it
Sprite
. I bought it at an auction at Christie’s. Cost an arm and a leg. Couldn’t resist. Not many people can boast a photo of their grandmother posing for kiddiporn. I sold one of poor old Irish’s letters to pay for it.

Irish? Who’s he?

You’ll find out, soon enough. Suffice to say, if it hadn’t been for poor old Irish and his philanthropic passion for the education of chorus girls, I’d not be sitting here, now, writing this. He taught me one end of a pen from the other. He gave me the confidence to use a word like ‘philanthropic’. In return, I broke his heart. Fair exchange is no robbery.

When she played Mamillius, she doubled up as Columbine in the Harlequinade. Here’s the programme. ‘Little Estella.’ She could do it all – make you laugh, make you cry, dance for you, sing you a song, but she was a fool for love.

It was a hard life. I will tell you what her life was like: greasepaint, gaslight, horseshit, coal smoke, railways – change at Crewe on Sundays. She was a child star but she grew up. She worked the provincial circuits, Juliet, Rosalind, Viola, Portia, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Nottingham, a big fish in a small pond; Hermia, Bianca, Iras in London, small fish in a big pond, until, in 1888, back she came to the Haymarket, her big chance, Cordelia to the Lear of Ranulph Hazard.

Ranulph, one of the great, roaring, actor-managers such as they don’t make any more. I’ve read how, during his Macbeth, Queen Victoria gripped the curtains of the royal box until her knuckles whitened. Regicide, no fun for a reigning monarch. On his night, he’d scare you witless in the banquet scene even if his wife, caught by a fit of giggles, had her back to the audience, her shoulders shaking. (Peregrine said she’d told him she thought the Macbeths ought to sack the cook.) Ranulph Hazard’s Richard III, ‘the very incarnation of human evil,’ wrote GBS, not one to go overboard about a ham.

Don’t let’s sell Ranulph Hazard short. He was
good
on his night, although the punter never knew for sure when that night might be. Because the old man might come reeling on and slur out the words from another play altogether than that billed; or else he might be mopish, hungoverish, out of sorts and you couldn’t hear a word beyond the first-row stalls, whatever he might be saying; or then again he might be too sober by half and sunk in some deep vale of despond when he’d just walk through it. There was always that element of chance with Ranulph, he was volatility in person, you’d diagnose a manic depressive, these days, and stick him on lithium.

But, on his night, a marvel.

And Shakespeare was a kind of god for him. It was as good as idolatry. He thought the whole of human life was there.

So it was on one of his marvellous nights, he met a shooting star. What an ecstasy the two of them provoked! Rivers of tears. Tempests of applause. One famous bit of business has got into all the theatre books – when poor old Lear makes it up with his daughter at last, Ranulph always used to put his fingers to his cheek, then look at his fingertips in wonder, touch his mouth then say in a trembly, geriatrically uncertain way: ‘Be your tears wet?’ That brought out the hankies, all right. They said her smile in answer, ‘tremulous, through tears, as April sunshine’, almost, but not quite, capped it. So he and Estella fell in love. How could they resist? An old man and a prodigal daughter, the stuff that dreams are made of.

Here’s a funny thing. That was just how Tristram’s mother, Lady Hazard III, collared Melchior – by playing Cordelia to his Lear.

Old Ranulph was a good thirty years older than Estella, or more, or even much more –
his
date of birth is as variable as hers. All the same, they tied the knot
toot sweet
(as that other grandma, Grandma Chance, used to say) in St Paul’s, Covent Garden, the actors’ church, with half the profession crossing their fingers for them and the other half staying away on principle due to Ranulph owing them money or having adulterised them. She wore her red hair hanging down her back, a wreath of lilies of the valley, she was nineteen or thereabouts. Lamb to the slaughter, one might have said, seeing his grey hairs, his shaking hand, his dubious finances – he was a drunk, a bankrupt, a gambler, he’d fretted and philandered and beaten and betrayed three wives into early graves, already. But no sacrificial lamb nor shrinking violet she. She was a wild thing, even if she was always true to him in her fashion. I don’t have anything of her in me, not at all. I am the sentimental one. But Nora, sometimes.

There’s a recording of Ranulph, made on a wax cylinder, I went to that place off Kensington High Street, they played it for me. Crackle, hiss, and then his voice: ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow . . .’ A shudder ran through me, not because of sentiment, but because of the voice itself. It wasn’t what I expected, it was ugly, almost – harsh, grating, the words sounded as if they’d been wrenched out of him. And there I was, in tears, too, like the snufflers in the Haymarket all those years ago, but not just because of what he said and who he was but because of the way he said it, that sounded so alien to me, so strange in my ears, because of his flattened ‘a’s, and his consonants, that were cut, like glass. Only a hundred years ago . . . My own grandfather. Yet it was a voice from before the Flood, from another kind of life entirely, so antique-sounding that it scarcely seems possible his granddaughters now sit in silk camiknickers in the basement of a house in Brixton, drinking tea and watching on television his great-grandson address an invisible audience out of a plastic box, in that between-two-worlds, neither Brit nor Yank, twang of the game-show host:

‘Say it again for me! L
ASHINGS OF LOLLY
!’

Lo, how the mighty have fallen. An S-M game show? How low can you get?

So Ranulph and Estella were married and first of all he loved her madly and vice versa and then Barnum, P. T. Barnum, Barnum of Barnum and Bailey,
that
Barnum, struck by her legs in
As You Like It
, made her an offer.
Hamlet
in a tent in Central Park. A tent because, he prophesied, no theatre on Broadway would be big enough to hold the crowds.

She must have eyed her old man sideways, wondering how he took it; he’d been the most melancholy Dane of his generation, hadn’t he, but that had been a generation or two before, Hamlet is nothing if not a
juve
role. Ranulph, though, was all agog to give to America the tongue that Shakespeare spake. So they crossed the Atlantic and Ranulph did them proud as Hamlet’s father, while suave young Cassius Booth stepped into the limelight beside her as Hamlet’s best friend.

Hamlet
under canvas, a smash. It ran and ran and would have run ad infinitum except the twins announced that they were on the way and a female Hamlet is one thing but a pregnant prince is quite another. So twin boys, our fathers, were born in the USA. Melchior and Peregrine. What names, eh? What delusions of grandeur went into the naming of them? If you shorten them to ‘Mel’ and ‘Perry’, they’ve got a democratically twentieth-century and transatlantic ring to them but Old Ranulph, rattling old nineteenth-century romantic that he was, never did that, although Estella, with a wink, often.

Note how I call them both ‘our fathers’, as if we had the two and, in a sense, so we did. Melchior it was who did the biologically necessary, it’s true, but Peregrine
passed
as our father – that is, he was the one who publicly acknowledged us when Melchior would not. I should tell you, now, that Melchior’s entire family, Wheelchair apart, always maintained this fiction, too, which is why Saskia told Tristram we were his aunts and not his sisters. But Peregrine was so much beloved by us and behaved so much more fatherly to us, not to mention paying most of the bills, that I know I need to claim him as something more than uncle.

Speaking of illegitimacy, there was more than a hint of romantic, nay, melodramatic illegitimacy in the Hazard family long before Nora and myself took our first bows. Because Ranulph Hazard, during all his lengthy marital and extramarital career, had produced no issue, as yet, until his wife’s transvestite Hamlet met her Horatio’s exceptional gift of gravitas, not to mention his athleticism. Tongues wagged. Did Melchior lend an ear? Who can tell, at this distance in time. All the same, he loved his boys. He cast them as princes in the tower as soon as they could toddle.

One thing you must know about Ranulph. He was half mad and thought he had a Call. Now he saw the entire world as his mission field and out of all of us it has turned out that Gareth Hazard, SJ, has stayed most faithful to the family tradition of proselytising zeal, for now the old man was seized with the most imperative desire, to spread and go on spreading the Word overseas. Willy-nilly, off must go his wife and children, too, to take Shakespeare where Shakespeare had never been before.

In those days, there was so much pink on the map of the world that English was spoken everywhere. No language problem. Off to the ends of the Empire they went, rolling to the rhythms of the sea as they crossed, crisscrossed the oceans. I see it in my mind’s eye as if it were a movie – the ocean liner slipping her moorings, gliding away from the quay, the siren blaring, the crowd throwing flowers, the red-haired woman on the deck, smiling, waving, smiling.

Our Uncle Peregrine inherited her scarlet hair. So did our half-sisters, Saskia and Imogen. Tristram, too. Not us, worse luck. The red hair only went to the legit. side. As for me and Nora, first of all, we were mouse. Then we dyed it. When we stopped dyeing (black), we found out that we had, all unbeknownst to ourselves, gone grey.

Our Uncle Peregrine was his mother’s boy.

We were hurrying down the street, he told me, on tour in Australia. It was in Sydney, down by the Circular Quay. We were on our way to some ladies’ lunch club – she did guest appearances, it helped with the finances, Ranulph was chronically short of a bob. We were late, of course, because she hadn’t been able to find a clean frock but after much rummaging came up with one with only a couple of little wine stains and smear of marmalade so she pinned a bunch of frangipani over the worst of it and got her hair up, somehow. Melchior stayed behind with Father, to watch him running through Julius Caesar. We came to an organ-grinder, we stopped to admire the monkey. She gave the organ-grinder sixpence and he played ‘Daisy, Daisy’. She took my hand and we danced, right there, on the pavement. Her hairpins scattered everywhere. My celluloid collar burst in two. The monkey clapped its paws together. Everybody stared. ‘Come on!’ she said to the world in general. ‘Join in!’ Then everybody started dancing, they all took hold of the hand of the next perfect stranger. ‘I’m half crazy, all for the love of you.’ She looked upon what she had accomplished and was glad. We missed soup, we missed fish, we arrived at the table at the same time as the chicken. Her hair was down her back, she’d lost her flowers, one slipper with a broken heel, her small son collarless, tieless, and I’d got the monkey on my shoulder – she’d swapped her gold watch for it. She did them Portia’s speech, ‘The quality of mercy . . .’ She made them happy. There was mango icecream for dessert, our favourite. We had three bowlfuls each. In Melbourne, they named a sundae after her, ‘Ice-cream Estella’, mango ice-cream topped with passionfruit purée. If ever we get to Melbourne, together, Floradora, I’ll treat you to an ‘Ice-cream Estella’.

Always the lucky one, our Peregrine, even in his memories, which were full of laughter and dancing; he always remembered the good times.

Peregrine Hazard, adventurer, magician, seducer, explorer, scriptwriter, rich man, poor man – but never either beggerman or thief. At our age, Nora and I have got more friends among the dead than with the living. We often go visiting in cemeteries to trim the grass growing over the friends of our youth but we don’t even know where your grave might be, dear Perry, to go and lay a flower on it. You spent your childhood on the road, here today, gone tomorrow; you grew up a restless man. You loved change. And fornication. And trouble. And, funnily enough, towards the end, you loved butterflies. Peregrine Hazard, lost among the butterflies, lost in the jungle, vanished away as neatly and completely as if you had become the object of one of those conjuring tricks you were so fond of.