by Graham Swift
‘Where’s Pablo? Here I am!’
Or perhaps—but Ronnie didn’t want to think about this—perhaps it had been killed, a victim of the hostilities. Perhaps a parrot in a cage would be one of the first things to suffer, even to be brutally sacrificed, when bombs were otherwise whistling down on human beings.
But of course Eric Lawrence had another reason.
‘It’s your middle name, isn’t it, Ronnie? It’s your real name. Paul. Just like my real name was always Lawrence. I went for Lorenzo. But I think Pablo sounds rather better, don’t you?’
And could he have got anywhere by calling himself just Ronnie?
* * *
—
Then anyway the army caught up with him and he had to go away and do his time. Never mind Pablo or any other name, he was now plain Private Deane, with a number. As luck would have it, he managed to get through it all doing something conveniently unsoldierly, but certainly not magical.
And at least it all vaguely placated his mother. He was doing a ‘proper job’ at last, with regular pay attached to it, some of which he duly sent her. And perhaps a year and a half in the army would knock all that magic rubbish out of him and show him what was what.
As it turned out, he could even get the train up to London at weekends and go to see her. Thanks to the army, his life had never been more ordinary. The army was even teaching him, in readiness for the great normalities of life, how to be a good little office boy. But he kept quiet with his mother about his actual military duties (‘Oh, you know, marching up and down’) and never told her (or even Jack that much) about the weekends he spent with the Lawrences. He would take a different train. There was a handy connection from Bournemouth.
My, my—Private Deane. How their little Ronnie had grown. All through the war he’d lived here and now here he was, a soldier himself. He sat down again on the wall of the cold frame. There was still ginger beer. Did soldiers drink ginger beer? Mrs Lawrence, perhaps having asked herself this question, had produced a bottle of White Shield. How had she known it had become his favoured tipple? He would even drink it in the Walpole.
He told his mother that these were weekends when he had to go for special training. It wasn’t a lie. ‘Training’ was a useful word. To himself he might have used the phrase ‘refresher courses’.
And it was in the army that he met Jack Robbins, later to be known as Jack Robinson, and most of those free weekends were mainly spent in Jack’s company in London, getting up to business of one kind or another. Some of it was monkey business, but some of it really was useful business. Should he have introduced Jack to his mother? Would Jack have charmed her and convinced her of the multiple merits of a career in entertainment?
Or would even Jack have found her a hard audience to crack? Ronnie never met Jack’s mother either. It was not what soldiers tended to do on leave, meet each other’s mothers.
They teamed up as a double act, short-lived and doomed. ‘Jack and Pablo’? No. ‘Pablo and Jack’? No. ‘The Two Amigos’? Yes, but not for long. It was a wise and friendly parting.
More wandering in the West End wilderness and in provincial dead-ends, while Jack progressed, even turning into ‘Jack Robinson’ and finding success, even one day telling his old friend—and amigo—that if he got an assistant ...
Easily said, and perhaps something he might have told himself. There was just one small problem.
But then Eric Lawrence had died. The Lawrences were not so old, but nor were they spring chickens. Eric Lawrence had sometimes referred—it was another reason for his abandoning the stage—to his ‘dicky ticker’. It was a blow, a sudden great gap in his world and a great clarification—magicians do die—and while having to hide his secret grief from his mother, Ronnie had gone specially, hiding this too, to see Penny Lawrence, to comfort her and to be at the funeral. He thought of the night when he had learnt that his father had died and of how Eric Lawrence had come in to comfort him and then slipped out again. How he’d found himself suddenly immersed in tears.
* * *
—
Evie White answered the advert.
And so she had walked like a gift (though she had no intention of offering any services for free) into the life of Ronnie Deane, just as Ronnie had once walked like a gift into the life of Eric and Penelope Lawrence. But Evie didn’t know about all that then, she didn’t know yet about the ‘sorcerer’s apprenticeship’, which was anyway only Jack’s mischievous phrase.
The man before her was slightly built and not imposing though he had a head of smooth black hair and remarkable dark eyes. He had something about him that definitely grew on you.
He said, ‘I’ve come into a little windfall, Miss White.’
Which was reassuring and interesting—both that he had such a thing and that he’d said it so soon after their saying their hellos. He hadn’t needed to say it. She didn’t need to know how he would pay her, so long as he did.
And she didn’t need to know the nature of the windfall and wouldn’t at that point have been so forward as to ask, though she was curious. She didn’t know then, though she would gradually learn these things, that Eric Lawrence had died or that he’d been known as Lorenzo, or that in his will he’d left (with his wife’s agreement) quite a tidy sum to Ronnie Deane, along with a good deal of his professional bits and pieces. That he was the sorcerer to whom Ronnie had become the apprentice.
‘Windfall’, she would think later, was a bit like saying ‘sorcerer’. It was a hocus-pocus sort of word that might mean anything. Anyone could say they’d had a windfall. And if you were a magician perhaps you could whisk one up at any time.
It was the magic bit in the advert—anyone could be an ‘assistant’—that had intrigued her and tempted her and why she was here on this October day. The idea of being involved in magic. Why not? She’d try anything once.
Though this man didn’t look all that magical, and she wasn’t entirely sure about the windfall. His saying in a modest way that it was ‘a little windfall’ could suggest that in fact it was not so little, but his saying it at all suggested that normally he might be on his uppers, which was a little like how things looked. Had he got his hands on this windfall yet?
But then, she was on her uppers too. It was another reason why she was here.
She smiled. ‘I’m very pleased to hear that, Mr Deane.’
She crossed her legs. Keep smiling, Evie, and look after your legs.
‘Suit Young Lady. Previous Stage Experience Essential.’ What girl—or young lady—would answer such an ad? Not many, it seemed. She was here alone. But she had those two stated qualifications. And it seemed that singing wouldn’t be involved.
It was a dusty rehearsal room upstairs behind the old Belmont Theatre. And was it an interview or an audition? Just the former it seemed.
‘And it’s Evie,’ she said. ‘You can call me Evie.’
From somewhere below there was the sound of stage carpenters banging. She was used to such places. They hired them out by the hour when not needed by the resident company. It seemed clear he had no office or respectable place of residence. And what girl would have gone along to some grubby bedsit or flat? The studio with the noise of carpenters felt neutrally safe. On the other hand, she was alone. There was no little line of other hopefuls waiting on the stairs, and none was to materialise. No competition then?
‘Tea?’ he said. ‘I’m having one myself. Milk? Sugar?’
Hardly magic words, but those dark eyes had something. She thought it best to accept.
He went off to some cubbyhole on the landing. If she’d got cold feet and felt like flitting that would have been her chance. He might have walked back in holding the tea only to find her gone, a disappearing act that might have impressed him, but not got her the job.
And her life might have been completely different.
‘It’s Ronnie,’ he said. ‘Please call me Ronnie. Here we are. Two mugs of char.’
Char? He was friendly anyway, he didn’t have airs.
‘I do a lot of my rehearsing here. I keep a lot of my gear here.’
Gear?
‘I used to do a spot in one of their shows. They’ve been good to me.’
It was a bare, sky-lit room. Some chairs, a table at which they now sat, a low wooden platform which served as a stage. Anywhere less ready for magic would have been hard to find.
‘Of course, all the rehearsing so far has been for my solo act. I’ve never worked with an assistant before.’
Ah.
He had seemed to pause over the word ‘assistant’ as if he should have come up with a better one, but now at least they were getting down to business. This was her opportunity to ask a question or two. And what would she be required to do?
‘Regular magic stuff,’ he said, unhelpfully. What on earth was ‘regular magic stuff’?
‘Stuff the public want. You have to give the public what they want and expect.’
This was a lesson she’d well learnt herself, though it was not really why she was here. There was something appealing about his slightly weary confidingness. But then was magic ever what people expected?
‘I’ll need to work out the material. But I’m always working on new illusions.’
Illusions?
He lifted his mug with a half-toasting gesture. ‘We’ll work it out together.’
Was that saying she’d got the job? It was certainly saying something. Work it out together. Over the rim of his mug, his eyes were particularly strong. The upper half of his face was the striking part. He seemed an unassuming and vague man in some ways, and on the underfed side. Perhaps to be a magician you had to be a bit dreamy. Yet in other ways he seemed quite sure of himself and he moved—she’d noticed it even as he walked in bearing the tea—with a certain poise. And the eyes were actually quite mesmerising.
The question, she realised, might have been not what did he want her to do, but what did he want to do with her?
He was sizing her up, she could tell. Fair enough. She was used to it. She was under no ‘illusions’ herself. She supposed that the principal role of a magician’s assistant might be adornment. But she already felt an infectious sense of participation, of partnership in whatever it was they might do together.
And wasn’t she sizing him up too?
‘It will be a new departure for me as well, Ronnie.’
She was rather pleased with her sudden impressive turn of phrase: ‘new departure’. Where had that come from?
But wasn’t there anything he wanted her to do now? Interview or audition? It was a rehearsal room, after all. She couldn’t of course perform any magic, but, for what it was worth, she might get up and show him what she could do. There had been no talk of bringing a costume, but she might hitch up her skirt and do a few turns and kicks, and that might clinch things, if they needed clinching. That might do the trick.
Had he even thought about a costume? She was going to need one, wasn’t she? But there we are: she was already, in her head, getting in a huddle with him, even taking a coaxing lead. It was quite exciting. If the question of a costume was to come up, then she could easily supply one. Though should it be up to her? But any chorus girl worth her salt knew how to get, borrow, steal or simply possess a costume.
And when the moment did come, when he saw it—or rather saw her in it (and she could put on a show)—you could tell he thought his lucky day had really arrived. First a windfall, then this. Ding!
Magic? She couldn’t do it herself? And why, when you thought about it, hadn’t every man come up with the same simple crafty idea? ‘Magician’s Assistant Wanted.’ When, later, she was on stage with Ronnie—performing, doing magic—she wasn’t so unassuming herself as not to guess that every man in the audience was looking more at her than at him. Yes, the tricks were good, but she was the best trick of the lot. Or alternatively that they were thinking, of Ronnie: Wish I had his magic.
And of course if they were looking at her, they wouldn’t be looking at the cunning things Ronnie was doing. It served a function. It was called, he would tell her one day, as if it were one of the most obvious and tedious principles of magic, ‘diverting attention’. In the same apologetic way he would talk about ‘the power of suggestion’.
He didn’t ask her, that October day, to do anything. It was just the ‘interview’—such as it was. And the tea. A bare, dusty, chilly rehearsal room on an autumn morning. But how oddly cosy and purposeful it became. Was this some little spell he had cast? They clasped their mugs of tea like workmen round a brazier.
‘All in good time,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we meet here next week? Tuesday? I can book us two hours on a Tuesday. We can get to work.’
So—she had got the job then? He had that unhurried way of men who’d spent a lot of time avoiding things, dodging things—not volunteering for them—in the army. You could spot it. They were a breed. He couldn’t yet be thirty, not much older than her. And she wondered how that might have worked: a magician in the army. It was hard to imagine this man being a soldier. But then it was quite hard to imagine him being a magician.
Should she have asked him to do a trick, just to test him?
Finally, as if he might have forgotten—she had coughed a bit and it was clear he’d never employed anyone before—he got round to the subject of what he would pay her. It was more than she’d expected. But she pretended it wasn’t, and accepted.
He said, ‘If we can work up an act over the winter, I know someone who might get us a slot in the Brighton season next summer.’
Everyone knows someone who knows someone. Everyone has a friend. It was something else she had learnt.
‘By the way,’ he said, ‘my stage name is Pablo.’
She might almost have laughed. It was quite a switch, from Ronnie to Pablo, but he said it without a flicker of awkwardness, even, she felt, with a touch of pride. And Ronnie, it was true, was not a good stage name. And ‘Pablo’—it went with the dark hair and those eyes, and that unexpected poise.
‘And I think you should be “Eve”.’ There was not a hint of hesitation here either. ‘Evie just doesn’t work, does it? Eve. Pablo and Eve.’
And he was right. Evie was the same as Ronnie. And Pablo and Eve, yes, it had a certain ring.
* * *
—
It can’t have been on that first Tuesday or even the second one, it must have been some other time, but it was in that rehearsal room anyway that she found herself saying, ‘Ronnie, has anyone ever told you that you have smashing eyes?’ It was bold and forward of her even then. But she was Evie White, who’d never been slow in coming forward and would give anything a go at least once.
It was in one of their tea breaks. It was all rather odd. One moment they were doing magic—they really were—next, they were stopping for tea. She sometimes made it herself now, they took it in turns. And it must have looked very odd too, a woman sometimes in little more than sequins and plumes in that cubbyhole, with its stained and smelly sink, filling the kettle, warming the pot. Her plumes could get in the way and upset things if she wasn’t careful, but she’d learnt long ago to be aware of her attachments as an animal must be aware of its tail. Every chorus girl had this sixth sense.
Working with Ronnie was fun. She’d never thought magic might involve laughter, and perhaps Ronnie had never really thought it either. When performing, he could adopt the most serious, even scary expressions, she’d discovered, he could really change, but they would laugh a lot in their breaks. He was a magician and yet he could find all sorts of ordinary things strange or funny.
He began to say, now and then, about this or that, ‘Fucking ’ell, Evie, fucking ’ell.’ She didn’t mind. If you don’t like language then don’t
work in the theatre. She even felt slightly privileged. She felt he might have wanted to say it when he first saw her in her costume. ‘Fucking ’ell, Evie.’ And there was something oddly innocent about it. It was not so different from her mother saying, as she did about all kinds of things, ‘Ooo-er!’
Was it when they were both blowing the steam off their mugs? No doubt she would have been using her own eyes too. He had got quite used to her now being around him in her costume. To having to allow for the feathers himself. There was a blanket she draped round herself, more practical than a dressing gown. It was like being a horse.
‘Has anyone ever told you, Ronnie, that you have smashing eyes?’
Well, she had now. And anyway he gave his answer. Had she been asking for it—or for some answer with similar effect? And was she complaining?
‘It’s not the eyes, Evie, it’s what they’re looking at.’
And they didn’t blink at all. Hers might have fluttered a bit.
His friend, his ‘someone’ who might give them work, was Jack Robbins, stage name Jack Robinson. He’d been slow in getting round to saying that.
But he wasn’t slow in getting round to other things. When he first took her to meet Jack (who’d been away on tour up north) she wasn’t of course wearing her costume, but she was wearing something else that was special. And perhaps both these precautions were just as well. If she were a man with a friend like Jack Robbins she too might have been slow in making the introductions, or at least wanted to take out some insurance first.
‘Pablo and Eve’. Yes, it had a ring to it. And now she was wearing a ring. Ronnie had only just presented it to her, and it cemented the notion that though they were Pablo and Eve they were also Ronnie and Evie. She supposed he must have bought the ring with that windfall money as well, but that was not the right way to think about it.
An engagement ring with a little diamond bright as a star.
* * *
