Wise Children (6 page)

If an ice-cream sundae was named after Estella in Melbourne, then an entire dried-out township in New South Wales was renamed Hazard, after she and Runulph put on al fresco
Coriolanus.
A street in Hobart, Tasmania. And they toured India, not once, but several times – crossing, crisscrossing the subcontinent. The gleaming rails sliding beneath the churning wheels, the puffing smokestack, the leaves falling off the calendar and blowing away in the wind . . . A maharajah gave the boys a baby elephant but they couldn’t take it with them on the train. He fell in love with Estella, and promised her her weight in rubies if she would stay behind and recite him every night Viola’s ‘willow cabin’ speech. What did she do? we asked. She made him happy, said Peregrine. She had a gift for that. She made him happy, then she left him. She had a gift for leaving, too.

The red-haired woman, smiling, waving to the disappearing shore. She left the maharajah; she left innumerable other lights o’ passing love in towns and cities and theatres and railway stations all over the world. But Melchior she did not leave.

A theatre, long since demolished, named the Hazard, in Shanghai. Then Hong Kong. Then Singapore. Everything a little threadbare, now, a little shabby. The ocean, again. North America, again – Montreal. Toronto. Crossing, crisscrossing the prairies. Hazard, Alberta, flat as a plateful of snow. Hazard, North Dakota – no township too small to receive them, nor to reciprocate the honour by rechristening itself. The touring was turning into a kind of madness. In Arkansas, the Hazards’ patched and ravaged tent went up in the spaces vacated by the travelling evangelicals: Ranulph, lean, haggard, bearded, more and more resembled John the Baptist had John the Baptist reached old age.

They arrived at last in the south-west and pitched their tent in arid scrub in a town called Gun Barrel, Texas, renamed Hazard, after the Hazards played
Macbeth
there with a hired band of campesinos as the Scottish army, holding spiked ears of prickly pear above their heads to mimic Birnam Wood. Of all these wild, strange and various places, Hazard, Texas, was the one that Perry remembered best; he went back there, later, a grizzled old-timer or two wept in his beer to recall how Estella made him happy, they made her son an honorary sheriff.

Props and costumes were lost or stolen or fell to pieces and then were begged or improvised or patched and darned. Ranulph drank and gambled and declaimed; he was going to pieces, too. He shouted at America but it would no longer listen to him. One night, in a bar at Tucson, Arizona, he gambled away his crown from
Lear
and Estella put together a new one for him out of a bit of cardboard. She dabbed on some gold paint. ‘Here you are.’

Why did she stay with him? Perish the thought, perhaps she truly loved him; perhaps all those people she made happy were just so many sideshows. But she’d lost the knack of making Melchior happy.

Then, one day, deep in the Midwest, as they were setting up in a townlet where they had hopes of a decent-sized audience since all there was to do in the evenings, otherwise, was to watch the corn grow, Ranulph received a cable from New York. While the Hazards roamed themselves to rags for the greater glory of Shakespeare, Cassius Booth, Estella’s old Horatio, stayed in one place and prospered. Now he was an actor-manager himself, with his very own theatre on the Great White Way. And was he a man to forget old friends? Not he! Estella looked enigmatic and she smiled, said Perry. She was still a girl, remember. No more than thirty. Or, at most, thirty-five. While Old Ranulph was pushing seventy and staked his final gamble on it, on one last triumphant prayer meeting. He’d show ’em all! He’d flare up one last incandescent time on Broadway in a sort of Shakespearian funeral pyre. But the play he picked on was, alas,
Othello.

Thirty or thirty-five, whatever she was, she doesn’t look more than a schoolgirl in the picture on the postcard, in her nightie, with her hair down her back. ‘Sing willow, willow, willow.’ Cassius Booth played lago. There is no handkerchief in this story. All the same, her husband killed them both, first her, then him. They’d slipped out together during the first-night party. Old acquaintances. Perhaps, by then, Old Ranulph couldn’t tell the difference between Shakespeare and living. Next morning, the notices were magnificent but the murder itself had to wait for the noon editions because the chambermaid didn’t find the bodies on the bed in Estella’s hotel room until she brought up late breakfast. Three bodies. He shot them both and then he shot himself.

Exeunt omnes
. She’d always had a gift for exits.

But life goes on.

The two little boys were stranded in New York, poor tragic waifs, and there they almost expired themselves, or so Perry said, because they were so stuffed with candy, hot dogs and pie à la mode by the lovely ladies with low-slung bosoms and feathered hats who went about their business in the hotel lobby. There was no money left as such, only an actor’s inheritance of unpaid bills, paste jewellery, flash attitudes, but the Plaza extended them credit and so they learned to live beyond their means.

Now, although these two were twins, they were
not
alike as two peas. Melchior, at ten, was dark and brooding, registering already the beginnings of the profile which would dominate Shaftesbury Avenue. That profile was to Melchior what Clark Gable’s ears were to him. Dark eyes, lashes of the kind they say are ‘wasted on a boy’ and a physique that turned out to be ready-made for leaping and fencing and climbing up to balconies and all the things a Shakespearian actor needs to do. I know that all these things, not forgetting his ‘splendid gift of gravitas’, all together point the finger at Cassius Booth as his father, but don’t forget that poor old Ranulph had been a matinée idol, too, in his day, even if in his day women wore crinolines, and there remains a gigantic question mark over the question of their paternity, although whoever it was who contributed the actual jism, no child need ever have been ashamed of either contender and, as for me, the grandchild, I like to think
both
of them had a hand in it, if you follow me.

But Peregrine was a holy terror and couldn’t keep a straight face, just like his mother. As young Macduff, he’d entered with a piss-pot on his head and given an audience of sheepshearers outside Perth their best moment of the evening. Melchior never let him on the stage again. Even as little scraps, Melchior was all for art and Peregrine was out for fun. Don’t think that, just because they were brothers, they liked one another. Far from it. Chalk and cheese.

They lived on room service and the kindness of strangers until the boat docked from Leith and off it came their comeuppance – Miss Euphemia Hazard, dour as hell, Presbyterian to the backbone, their aunt. Warden of a workhouse near Pitlochry and sworn enemy of the stage and all who trod it, who never shed a tear for brother or for sister-in-law because she thought their violent ends were the Lord’s revenge, a kind of wild justice. She grabbed Melchior by the scruff, stuffed him shrieking into a trunk marked ‘Not wanted on voyage’, and reached out for Peregrine but he gave a shrug and a wriggle and left his old tweed jacket in her hand while he himself was gone, whoosh! out of the window, down the fire escape, a shirtsleeved, carrot-topped ten-year-old hurtling helter-skelter down the pavement, sending a hot-dog stand flying, a bootblack sprawling and . . . he vanished.

Vanished clean away into America and though, later on, he told a wondrous tale of all his doings and hoboings as a boy, as to what
really
befell him, I do not have a notion except that it can have been no cakewalk and, when he first found us, he was as rich as Croesus.

So Peregrine ran for it, lickety-split, hell for leather, but Melchior was trapped.

Now, Melchior had adored his father, worshipped him, even, and took away from the grand catastrophe of his parents’ lives only one little souvenir – the pasteboard crown that Ranulph wore for Lear, the one Estella made. God knows how Melchior smuggled this relic past his aunt.

It was in his blood, wasn’t it? Every night, during the dour years of rain and porridge, as he lay in his freezing bed under the one plaid rug his aunt permitted him, he’d recite to himself word for word his father’s greatest roles. Macbeth. Hamlet. (Although never Othello, of course.) Aunt Effie’s. Highland clock – you’ve seen it for yourself, the antlered grandfather now resident at 49 Bard Road – struck twelve, then one, then two. He would so move himself with these solitary renditions he would cry himself to sleep. His aunt forbad Melchior point-blank to so much as think of the stage, although she recognised how he had sufficient talent in that direction – that is, rhetoric, etc. – to urge him to give the ministry a go and, when she became insistent, then he took matters into his own hands.

He wrapped the pasteboard crown up in a change of shirt and underthings, tied all in a handkerchief and said goodbye to Pitlochry for ever. I can see him now, setting out to seek his fortune like Dick Whittington in panto. Miss Effie’s clock sang out five times as he shut the workhouse door behind him. It would have been bitter cold, no stars, still pitch-dark. A cart went past with a load of kale; he got a lift a mile or two. The sun would have been coming up, by then. No friends, no kin except a lost brother half a world away whom he’d never got on with. Mad with pride and ambition and nothing in the world except his dark eyes and gift of gravitas and a toy crown with the gold paint peeling off.

And so he finally found his way to London, and, in due course, down on his uppers, nay, down on the uppers of his uppers, he arrived at this very house, which was, in those days, a boarding house that catered for theatricals, though not, I should say, theatricals of the well-heeled variety.

Brixton, before the lights went out over Europe, hub of a wheel of theatres, music halls, Empires, Royalties, what have you. You could tram it all over from Brixton. The streets of tall, narrow houses were stuffed to the brim with stand-up comics; adagio dancers; soubrettes; conjurers; fiddlers; speciality acts with dogs, doves, goats, you name it; dancing dwarves; tenors, sopranos, baritones and basses, both solo artistes and doubled up in any of the permutations of the above as duets, trios etc. And also those who wrung a passion to tatters for a living and therefore considered themselves a cut above.

In those days, our mother emptied the slops, filled the washstand jugs, raked out the grates, built up the fires, brought up the cans of hot water, scrubbed the back of the occasional gentleman and herself occasionally –

or perhaps only the one time.

Chance by name, Chance by nature. We were not planned.

Melchior slept here. This attic, the cheapest room in the house, cheaper still because he never paid. I picture him in front of a square of mirror, trying on that shabby crown, emoting, listening to the sycamores at the end of the garden thrashing about in the wind and pretending the sound they made was applause. Desperate, ravenous, on the make, tramping round the agents day after day after day, back to the boiled cabbage at Bard Road and the hard, narrow bed. I wonder if he lent his mouth here, his arsehole there, to see if that would do the trick. I suppose my mother must have felt sorry for him. I can imagine her stripping off in the cold room, turning towards the starving boy. How did she do it? Shyly? Nervously? Lewdly?

Then everything fades to black. I can’t bear to think any further. It hurts too much. You always like to think a bit of love, or at least a little pleasure, went into your making but I do not know, I cannot guess, if the dark-eyed stranger who put his hand up the skirt of the penniless orphan was cynical, or tender, or desperate, or carried away by the moment. Had she done it before, did she know what she was doing? Was she scared? Or full of desire? Or half raped? He was good-looking enough, God knows. Women went mad for him. Perhaps she was the first woman who went mad for him. Did she think about him when she made his bed up in the mornings? Had she pressed her cheek against the pillow and wished the pillow were his cheek?

‘She was only a slip of a thing but she was bold as brass,’ Grandma used to say.

I’d like to think it went like this: She closed the door behind her, locked it. There he was on the bed, brushing up his Shakespeare. He looked up, hastily laying aside his well-thumbed copy of the
Collected Works.
She started pulling off her chemise. ‘Now I’ve got you where I want you!’ she said. What else could a gentleman do but succumb?

Nine months later, her heart gave out when we were born. Apart from that, I don’t know anything about her. We don’t even know what she looked like, there isn’t a picture. She was called Kitty, like a little stray cat. Fatherless, motherless. Perhaps Mrs Chance’s house was even a haven to her, in spite of the stairs – she must have run up and down the stairs twenty times a day, thirty times a day. And the grates to be leaded, the front steps to be scoured.

Not that Mrs Chance was what the French call
exigeante.
She didn’t run the fanciest boarding house in Brixton, it barely managed to cling on to respectability by the skin of its teeth, and you could have said the same of her. There were Boston ferns, in green glazed pots, on stands, and Turkey rugs, but the whole place never looked
plausible
. It looked like the stage set of a theatrical boarding house, as if Grandma had done it up to suit a role she’d chosen on purpose. She was a mystery, was Mrs Chance.

Melchior Hazard slept here, but not for long. His theatre-doorstep vigils, his audition ordeals paid off. He and his cardboard crown were gone by the time our mother missed her first period. She vomited every morning, quietly, so that Mrs Chance would not hear. The war began, that August, but I don’t think our mother cared. Mrs Chance never heard the vomiting but she heard the tears.

We came bursting out on a Monday morning, on a day of sunshine and high wind when the Zeppelins were falling. First one wee, bawling girl; then the other, while Mrs Chance did all the necessary. She’d called the doctor but he never got there. Our mother took a look, too weak to hold us, she’d been in labour since the day before yesterday, but Mrs Chance always told us she took a good look and managed a smile.