by Graham Swift
She looks into her mirror now as if the only person she might tell is the one staring back at her. But even that would be telling, wouldn’t it? She’d never even told Jack, though he’d pressed her a few times, before letting the whole thing go and pass into history. It’s what everyone wants to know. How is it done? ‘Come on, Evie, you can tell me. Surely you can tell me now. I won’t tell anyone else.’
He was like a man wanting to know about other men she’d slept with. Specifically in this case Ronnie Deane (all the others had passed into their own histories). But she wasn’t telling—either way. Did she ask what it had been like with Flora? All the Floras. Tell me about all that magic that went on with Flora. A new trick with each one?
She knew how most of the tricks were done with Ronnie, of course she did, but that wasn’t the point. And for some reason still wasn’t, even now.
Would Ronnie have ever told the world?
In those days, in 1959, there were plenty of beaches, though Brighton wasn’t one of them, with bits of rusted ironwork and lumps of concrete sticking up out of them and signs saying ‘Danger! Mines – Keep Out’. And there were plenty of people walking about who would never open their mouths about certain things. They’d signed up, taken the oath. And as with Official Secrets, so with magic. A condition for life.
Sorry. Can’t talk. Lips sealed. No, you won’t get it out of me, not even if you stick swords through me, not even if you saw me in half.
‘Oh come on, Evie!’ What had she been doing inside all those boxes? Leaving it to Ronnie?
But yes, more often than not, that’s exactly how it was, and even when she’d learnt how things were done it didn’t exactly stop her wondering, having her doubts. In some ways the more she knew the more she wondered. Then it would be Ronnie who would have to say, ‘It’s all right, Evie, you can trust me. Just do as I say. Just get in and leave it to me. You don’t have to worry at all. I’m never going to hurt you.’
Nor did he. It was never that way round.
And only once, during their early rehearsing at the Belmont (one day there was a whole array of collapsible yet forbidding boxes in which it seemed she was going to be successively confined), did she ever say, from inside, in the darkness, ‘Ronnie—are you still there?’ She couldn’t help it. It was an involuntary cry—it had nothing to do with magic—squeezed from her suddenly palpitating heart. And Ronnie had said, and it was just as well he said it, in a rather far-off voice, ‘Yes I am, Evie. I’m here.’ It had seemed to her, from where she was, that Ronnie too might have been speaking from inside some dark box and that he was uttering something just as irrepressibly issuing from deep inside himself.
It had seemed—and this must have been long before he slipped an engagement ring on her finger, though not long after she’d said that thing about his eyes—that some bond had just been formed between them of a kind not usually made, or even possible, between two people.
She can’t remember Ronnie ever saying, ‘Evie—are you still there?’ Of course he didn’t need to. It was a sign of his power and his trust. But perhaps he should have asked it nonetheless.
And how do you ever explain to anyone what it’s like to be levitating? Ronnie had said to her one day, ‘Now you are levitating, Evie. Trust me, you are levitating.’ She could only say what it felt like at the time: that yes she was and no she couldn’t possibly be. And what a strange thing to be doing, to be having happen to you, a kind of gift or privilege, what a strange word even. Had she ever known—though she hadn’t known so many things—that in her life she would one day levitate? Levitate!
But there they were anyway that summer, night after night, waiting behind the curtains to go on, waiting to be ‘Pablo and Eve’, sometimes drawing deep insistent breaths that the audience would never see and sometimes—the audience would never see it either and it was something else she would never tell—holding out to each other a clutching reassuring hand.
While in front of the curtains Jack would be finishing his number.
Oh honeymoon, keep a-shinin’ in June!
Sometimes, outside, after the show, there might be that real and actual magic—a silvery moon hanging over the water, glimmering on the waves as they broke on the shingle. If the rain wasn’t bucketing down or a gale blowing.
She would walk back along the boards, arm in arm with Ronnie, no longer Pablo and Eve, just Ronnie and Evie, just another holidaying couple it might seem. Though sometimes they were recognised, and it was often her they spotted first. ‘Aren’t you—?’ ‘Yes, Eve. Yes. And this is Pablo.’ She would never say ‘Ronnie’ and she couldn’t make the joke, the equivalent one, that Ronnie could make of her.
These moments when they were recognised made her proud. Ronnie might seem a little annoyed, a little aloof, and she’d tell him that was a bad attitude (she had already become a bit of a manager). He should always smile, smile, be nice to the people. They might look at him and she could hear them thinking: That’s Pablo? Really? And then thinking: But, yes, on second thoughts, that’s him.
It was surely a good sign if they could be spotted, even just on the pier. Their act must be doing well, they were ‘known’. And Ronnie began to develop anyway, over the weeks, a certain off-stage aura and style, a way of being at ease in himself, and she liked to think that some of this was because of her.
Sometimes she’d think, who needed magic, or even a stage or a costume, if she had this? Didn’t she have all a girl might want? And she’d think, even with a sort of pity, of the latest doomed girl hanging on Jack’s arm.
Jack would say, leaning on the rail with them, with or without some girl, and looking at the glinting waves, ‘You won’t get any of this, I’ll tell you, at the Palladium or the Hackney fucking Empire. You’ll get a nice little stroll down piss alley.’
Once he said, in the dressing room, when for some reason everything went quiet and they could hear the soft churning sound in their ears, ‘No, that’s not the waves, playmates, that’s the sound of tonight’s audience gnashing their teeth already.’
He was only twenty-eight, same age as Ronnie, and none of them knew then what was coming, but it was part of his function to act older than his age. He was master of ceremonies, and daddy to them all. Take it from him, he’d been around, he’d seen everything.
And it was strange how in all those shows, all those performances, a whole season’s worth, you hardly stopped to think—she never thought about it as she looked at her face in the mirror and placed the tiara, like a regular coronation, in her hair: The sea is right beneath us now. Right beneath us now the waves are swishing and swirling, the fish are darting, the seaweed is swaying this way and that. If the stage were to open up we’d all go tumbling through into the water.
* * *
—
Jack Robbins was ‘Jack Robinson’ then. In his time he would play too many roles to count or remember. Some would slip over him and be gone like mere tryings-on—the cameo parts in films—but some would stick and the problem would be how to get rid of them. How to convince the punters who recognised him on the street (it would happen) that he and they were not the same person.
Or rather, sometimes, how not. How to inwardly grit the teeth while outwardly grinning, and take that little invisible step—they wouldn’t see it—and give them the catchphrases, the lines, the gestures and faces that they wanted. Amazing! Like that chancer-cum-clown-cum-hard-pressed-family-man, Terry Treadwell in Such Is Life, the show that put him, according to George Cohen, ‘before the nation’. And Evie didn’t disagree.
If Evie was there—with the punters and pesterers, the autograph-seekers—he might feel her little prod, her squeeze of his elbow, but even if she wasn’t he would hear her whisper in his ear. ‘Go on, Jack. Do it. One more time. Be Terry Treadwell.’
The show that put quite a lot of dosh in the bank, and quite a lot of it in George’s. And made
his name. Jack Robbins. Or Terry Treadwell. Which bloody one was he?
But one day, finally, he somehow got out of ‘being’ Terry Treadwell, or Terry Treadwell, poor man, just ceased to ‘be’ himself. He wouldn’t like to put a date on when Terry Treadwell expired. He’d had his time, poor fool, then just slipped into memory. Wasn’t Jack Robbins in that sitcom thing, years ago? What was the name of it, what was that character again? Tommy somebody, Teddy somebody?
Other roles would come and some of them he would just enter like a dream, he would just float in them as if they’d always been waiting for him. Like his first big Shakespearean role, Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Speaking of dreams. Puck. No jokes please. He was a ‘brilliant Puck’. A revelation. Was this the same man, they asked, who’d been Terry Treadwell? Well yes, it was.
But that too would pass into memory. Wasn’t he Puck once, at Stratford, a great Puck (or, as he’d liked pedantically to point out, Robin Goodfellow).
And no smutty jokes please. My wife always thought I could be a great Puck, if I really tried. Like, before her, too many girls to remember. But none after. Seriously.
So who was ever going to remember Jack Robinson? Especially as that summer, that September, Jack Robinson simply ceased to be too, simply sidled away, his time was up, never to return. Who was going to remember? Except himself of course, publicly but cryptically, every time he said, ‘Oh just an old song-and-dance man.’
‘I was brought up on variety, you know. Spice of life. All a long time ago. Acting? You must be joking.’
* * *
—
But there he’d been, standing in the wings, and there was no other role for him. And this wasn’t just some part written by someone else like those he’d be offered in the future, of which George might say—but there was no George then—‘This might interest you, sunshine.’ He had invented Jack Robinson himself. How the hell had that happened? His own stupid fault. And now he had to be him. Every bloody show. It wasn’t acting? And by now, of course, they all believed he was him. And he loved and he hated the poor strutting bastard.
Now some of them were even starting to shout, ‘Where’s Jack?! Where’s Jack?!’ Well it was his own name, so which one did they mean? ‘Where’s Jack?!’ What a fucking rabble.
Some people, stage hands, seeing him standing there frozen in the wings, would think he was just milking it. There he goes again. They couldn’t see that it was one of those nights when it wasn’t just a step, it was a cliff edge, and he was sick with confusion and terror. And there was no one to push him. Except himself of course. Or once upon a time his mother, who’d hopped it long ago with a garage owner. A garage owner! I ask you, folks. His mother who’d once done music hall, who’d once been known among other names (shy little dairymaid as she’d been) as Betty Butter. ‘I’m Betty Butter and I’m all of a-flutter ...’ So she had sung once.
And there was no Evie to give him the shove. Not yet, not yet. How did you push yourself in the back?
‘Where’s Jack?! Where’s Jack?!’ They would turn it into a chant soon, and of course everyone thought it was wonderful—even he thought it was wonderful—he was milking it, creaming it, lapping it up. ‘Where’s Jack?!’
And then it would happen. How did it happen? He stepped off the edge, but was still there. Not plummeting. There was the bath of the stage lights and then, just for doing it, just for walking on, it seemed, the sea of applause. And then, before you could say—
‘Here I am! Here I am! Well I never! Well I thought I could hear someone calling. Well, are you all having a good time?’
‘Ye-es!!’
‘Well in that case I’ll be off then!’
* * *
—
He was Jack Robinson. Who else? And what would the show have been without him? Some people would have said he was the show. And yet as compere he was, like no one else, constantly in and out of it. He stepped forward from it, in front of the curtains, to have his little chats with them, to be their old mate, their old pal, then slipped back into it to do one of his numbers. Or to disappear for whole stretches—where’s Jack?—and then be back again. And he never failed to be there at the end to give them his goodnight gab and sing them his song.
‘So it’s goodnight, boys and girls, and it’s buenas noches for anyone from foreign parts, and mind how you go, folks, out there on the boards in the dark. It’s hard enough, I tell you, treading the boards up here ...’
But sometimes when he disappeared he didn’t just loiter backstage or go to the dressing room to pat off the sweat, or go outside to stand on the little screened-off bit reserved for the theatre company, to lean on the rails and flick cigarette ash into the waves and be himself (himself?) for a while.
Instead he’d cross another kind of line. He’d weave his way from backstage to front-of-house, or not quite. There was a route you could take. He’d emerge again in the darkness at the back of the stalls, while the show was still going on—and, look, it could carry on quite happily without him. He’d blend in quietly with the audience and if anyone saw he’d make a showy furtive thing of it. A finger to his lips. Yes, it’s me, but you never saw me, okay?
He’d sit in one of the empty seats in the back row, though there were fewer of these now, he noted, now the season had progressed. It was nearly August. And if there were no seats at all he’d just lean on the back wall or take one of the jump-seats used by the usherettes. He’d do the finger-to-the-lips thing for the usherette.
And one of those usherettes, by the way—but that was another story.
And he’d watch. If anyone observed carefully these visits of his—but they’d have to be one of those weird regulars, those gluttons for punishment as he was known to call them—they’d notice it was always the same act he chose to watch. Pablo and Eve. First spot after the interval. He’d just been up there in fact, to introduce them—‘And now, boys and girls’—and now he was down here, just one of them.
‘And now here’s something you’re not going to believe ...’
And he’d better make sure he was up there again in a little while for when their act was finished.
‘Didn’t I tell you, folks, didn’t I say ...?’
He’d sit and he’d watch and he’d wonder perhaps along with all the others how the tricks were done. But it wasn’t Ronnie—or Pablo—he was really watching. Of course not. Down here at the back of the auditorium he was part of the audience and he wasn’t. He was Jack Robinson and he wasn’t. He wasn’t even Jack Robbins.
In the darkness, neither in nor out of the audience, he would sometimes feel the thinness, the fakery of the plush rapt edifice around him. Plush? Turn up the lights and you’d soon see, he knew, how tatty, how shabby, how sham it all was. How it all depended on some stretch of the mind. Sometimes, beyond the stirrings and gaspings of the audience, he might think he could hear the creakings and strainings of the pier itself, like a big foundering ship. But perhaps it was more that he was the one who was going under.
Why did he make these furtive forays? Just to see what it was like, to get the effect, without all the behind-the-scenes contrivance? To be a spy and report back? Of course not. He simply needed to watch her, unobserved. Forget ‘Pablo and Eve’. Forget Pablo, forget Ronnie. Forget even all this stuff they were doing together. It was simply her. He’d stepped over a different edge and he could feel himself slipping, losing himself. All the girls, but he wanted her. He could feel himself going down like a drowning man.
* * *
—
Evie looks in the mirror. Her lips are sealed. Her lips are anyway a diminished version of what they’d once been.
And if no one could say—or wouldn’t say—then how did anyone know there was such a thing in the first place: magic? All done by mirrors.
But that would leave a big question, wouldn’t it? If there was no such thing as
magic, why become a magician?
One night after a long day in the rehearsal room behind the Belmont Theatre they’d gone back to his place and snuggled up together. It had been bound to happen sooner or later. Had it happened by magic—because Ronnie, being what he was, had made it happen? Not if she was Evie White it hadn’t, not if she’d had anything to do with it. But then would it be right to say—it would certainly be a shame—that there was nothing magical about it? Would it be wrong to say that they’d put each other under a bit of a spell?
And—to jump ahead—did Ronnie produce that ring because he just wanted to be sure, he wanted to keep what he’d caught? If he was a magician, why should he have needed to do that? Or did he produce it because she’d done something that must have seemed magical, even to him? It had made those eyes of his go suddenly wide as plates. He’d asked her a question, a question he’d never asked before in his life, and she’d said, really quite quickly, ‘Yes, Ronnie, yes!’ She’d said that word before, too many times to count, but she’d never said it like that—the biggest yes so far of her twenty-five-year life.
So: hey presto!
But one thing at a time. They’d gone back to his place. His place was a grubby little flat, but not as grubby or as little as she’d expected (that windfall again?), and anyway she’d seen worse. It was November and it was cold, one of those raw winter afternoons when night seems to fall at three o’clock. While they’d held each other, an electric fire, a Belling portable positioned not far away on the floor with its bars blazing, had thrown its warmth and its glow upon them. Now and then it clicked and twanged.
But what do you do afterwards? At least for a while you talk. Her palm had circled over his chest. It was not a bad little chest, and not so little either, and now she had the privilege of touching it and viewing it closely, she could see it came with just the right amount of not too long or thick or curly hairs. Under her hand they had a pleasing roughness-yet-silkiness, and in the light from the fire they shone with, here and there, a coppery spark.
