by Graham Swift
The billboards now carried above their names the little embellishment, ‘Come and See!’ But one day—it was simply a sudden idea of Jack’s—there was something much bolder.
‘Why don’t you call yourself the Great Pablo, Ronnie? Why don’t you think big?’
Ronnie had looked for a while at his friend, but in the circumstances hadn’t objected. Nor had the show’s presenters. Nor had Brighton and its holiday-making public.
‘Come and See! Come and See the Great Pablo!’
But Eve was always just Eve. And Jack was just Jack.
‘And now, folks, I want you to see something that will make your eyes pop, something you’re not going to believe. I want you to meet a very special friend of mine, the Great—yes I said the Great—Pablo! He doesn’t talk very much, but you’ll see why he doesn’t need to. And I want you to meet—and she’ll make your eyes pop too, gents—the delightful, the delectable, the delorious—Eve!’
It would be hard to say exactly when Ronnie began to think about one big trick, one sensational feat to really make them the talk of the town. But it must have been around the time that he metamorphosed into the Great Pablo. Was it before or after those two shows that, to the dismay of the theatre-goers, he and Evie were regrettably compelled to miss? When exactly was that? It would anyway seem—it was almost like some canny piece of stagecraft itself—that Pablo had only made himself scarce for forty-eight hours in order to return with new force and in new form as the Great Pablo. And, yes, with another new trick. And quite a trick too.
He had never liked the word, even despised it. It was perhaps around this time—when he was assuming greatness—that he made his views on the matter particularly plain, one day in the Walpole. Or he put a new slant on them. He said people did tricks, didn’t they, all the time? People were always playing tricks. But magicians—he’d say it one more time—did illusions. And when, after saying this, he’d gone to the bar in something of a huff to fetch drinks, Jack had leant over to Evie and said, ‘Tricks? Illusions? What’s the difference, Evie? You tell me.’ He’d leant close enough to make it a whisper and as his breath brushed her ear he’d thought for a moment of the sound of the sea they say you can hear in a shell. And then he’d thought that you couldn’t call that a trick, the right word was illusion, but he didn’t take back what he’d just said to Evie.
* * *
—
It was unfortunate anyway that it was around this time that Ronnie got word from a hospital in London that his mother was ill. The actual words were ‘gravely ill’. It was one of those messages in a readily understood code: ‘You’d better come at once, or you might never—’
It was a heart condition. He thought of Eric Lawrence’s ‘dicky ticker’, as if there might have been some bizarre connection. Ronnie had never known that his mother had a heart condition. Nor, presumably, had she. And he had almost forgotten that he’d sent her a phone number where she could contact him, if for any reason ...
These unspecified reasons might have included a sudden wish (never before expressed) to come and see her son performing in a show, and at the same time meet the woman who was going to be his wife—things which might have swelled both a mother’s and a son’s heart. But whether Ronnie had ever actually extended such an invitation to his mother or whether he had even told her that he was now engaged to be married, only Ronnie knew.
There had been no telephone calls, either way, until now, but he supposed that his mother must have given the number to the hospital people or that they’d simply discovered it somehow. He was that person he’d never before thought of himself as being: ‘next of kin’.
Had his mother, in her dire situation, wanted him to know? ‘My Ronnie must be told.’ He would never know this. Even as he answered this sobering phone call he thought of all those calls that had never been made between them when they were apart in the war. But they had been apart ever since really. Then he thought—it seemed like yesterday—of those white handkerchiefs being waved by all the mothers while he was being bundled onto his train. A sudden snow of handkerchiefs: he couldn’t tell which one, if any, was hers. Then he thought of her hand squeezing his when she’d left him at the school gates.
‘Tell her I’m on my way.’
What else could he say? ‘I am a magician’? Tell her that I’m coming with my magic wand. And even my supply of special white handkerchiefs.
Yet at once he’d thought of that evening’s performance. He couldn’t just cancel it, surely? But Evie said and Jack said too that there was no alternative, he had to go and be with his mother. They were suddenly like this other couple telling him what to do. Which only raised another question. Was Evie going to come with him? Was Evie, his future wife, who’d never met his mother, going to come with him when he went to see his mother, perhaps for the last time?
He did not ask. She did not say. It was not a test, but it seemed that she would not be accompanying him, and, all things considered, he could see her point of view. He was not going to demand it. But he suddenly felt very alone and Evie seemed to recede from him and become hard to discern, as if she were now the one seeing him off while he had to board some ominous train. Which was almost literally the case.
They said he must go. Jack said he shouldn’t give it a second thought. He would make a special announcement, of course. He would use that word that gets used in the theatre to cover all kinds of eventualities: ‘indisposed’. It was one of those words, like the phrase ‘next of kin’, that do not crop up often, yet sometimes have their moment.
Then Jack said, ‘Unless you think Evie and I should do the act for you.’ It was a bad joke in circumstances when no jokes were needed, a bad attempt to lighten a fraught situation. But he had said it.
So Ronnie Deane found himself on a train to London, and, though it was all the other way round and he had been an adult for years, he couldn’t help feeling he was really eight years old and that in some way, perhaps, he always had been. He had never grown up. He was an evacuee, there was a sort of war on again, he was on a train, but this time he was travelling towards his mother. And it was just as bad.
The difference was that when he was eight years old he had not known about magic, it had not yet come into his view. And he thought again, as he travelled towards his mother, of the absurdity and uselessness of this thing that he had nonetheless chosen to make the object of his life.
‘Magic, Ronnie, whatever fucking next?’
What next indeed? It was early August. Sussex—ripe, green, drowsy with summer—floated by, and he was travelling in the wrong direction, away from the coast, away from that happy ribbon of land set aside for holidays and fun, where people wanted, at least just once every year, only to be entertained, to play.
It had been his awkward situation now and then—sometimes on trains—to find himself in a brief conversation with a stranger in which the innocuous question arose: ‘So what do you do then?’ Sometimes he had lied. But mostly, intrepidly, he had told the truth. The word wasn’t difficult in itself.
Then they of course might think he was lying. ‘You’re having me on.’ Or they’d want him immediately to ‘do a trick’. To prove it. Or the conversation might drift into some wishful realm in which it was assumed he might do anything. Sort out this man’s problems, for example. Make money grow on trees, make dreams come true. Come on then, if you’re what you say you are. And there would be an evident disappointment, even a touch of suspicion and distrust if it emerged, as it would, that he could not do absolutely anything, there were only some things he could do.
Call yourself a magician ...
It was depressing, even belittling. How easy, even enviable to be able to say you were a plumber or a travelling salesman. How easy it had been when he was in the army, in a uniform, not to have to go through this rigmarole or to have to explain yourself at all.
Miracles, he woul
d feel like saying, you’re talking about miracles. Magic yes, miracles no. Miracles are for miracle-workers.
He never mentioned the word ‘wizardry’.
Now this pestering figure—there was none actually sitting beside him and he was free to just look out of the window—seemed to have become an agent of retribution lodged inside his head. Perhaps it was even his own mother, scornfully taking him to task.
So come on then, Mr Magician. Show us what you can do.
* * *
—
And, as it turned out, he was too late anyway. Even such powers as he might have applied, even the simple power of his presence, had miserably failed. He arrived to be told that his mother had passed away some two hours before—while he was still in fact on the train, having all those beside-the-point thoughts.
His mother was dead, gone, no longer there. Which left, apparently, an even greater challenge.
‘But of course,’ he was told, ‘you can still see her if you wish ...’
See her? But how could he see her if she was no longer there? But then again, when the thing was put to him, how could he not? How could he have said, ‘No thanks,’ and turned around?
‘Yes, I would like to see her. Yes.’
And there she was. And wasn’t. There was a small quiet room in which his mother had been deposited and arranged. He was seeing her and he was not seeing her, though he could not beat back an even more bewildering possibility. Was she seeing him? Even judging him? Even delivering upon him her last judgement, her last unanswerable taunt.
So there you are, Ronnie. At last. Well thanks for coming anyway. What a pity we couldn’t have had a last little chat. Perhaps it wouldn’t have got us very far anyway, probably not. And in any case here’s the main item for you. Here I am. Here we are. This is your mother, Agnes. And here’s a fine little trick for you to perform, if you’re up for it. So come on.
What could he do? Say things to her? The little room, with its curious drapery, had the effect of something pointedly, elaborately staged. Say he was sorry? Say he was sorry for everything, everything he’d done or not done. He seemed suddenly to grasp in his very flesh—then the comprehension deserted him—the most simple yet ungraspable of truths. This was his mother and he would not—could not—be here, standing here, were it not for her. This was his mother, yet she had vanished. Yet she was still here. How could anyone, anything, just vanish?
He bent to kiss her forehead. It was cold to his lips and she made no sign—no smile or frown or flinch—that she knew what he was doing. And he felt that his lips were touching also the cold surface of the water, the deep heedless water under which his father lay, unknowing too.
* * *
—
He had to stay another two nights to sort out some immediate things. It had been her heart, yes, her heart. She was only forty-nine. He might have chosen to sleep in the house in Bethnal Green, but he slept in the old flat in Finsbury—he had kept it on—where he and Evie had often slept together. He was both intensely glad that Evie wasn’t there now and intensely conscious of her absence. It seemed an age since he and she had gone back that first time from the Belmont Theatre and she had asked him—at such a time—about his mother.
He had to go anyway, for practical reasons, to the house in Bethnal Green. He felt, while he was in it, in the house where his own life had begun and where his earliest memories had formed, like an intruder, an imposter, a thief.
These were two of the worst days of his life, but worse was to come. Did he have any inkling of it?
At Victoria Station, on his return, he saw that the Brighton platform was crowded with cheerful trippers heading for the coast, and he did a rare thing. He bought a first-class ticket, so that he could sit in shielded repose and gaze again out of the window. He heard his mother’s voice distinctly. ‘You come to see your dead mother, Ronnie, and you get a first-class ticket on the way back!’ He was leaving her again. It was the right way round this time, or, more profoundly, the wrong way. He was going to Evergrene again with a label round his neck. No he wasn’t.
As he sped back towards Brighton he found himself taking stock of his life almost as if it too might be over. This was preposterous, he knew. His life was all ahead of him. In a few weeks’ time he would be marrying Evie. Yet in the space of little more than a year he had been twice visited by death. Once—with its blessing, its gift—in the form of Eric Lawrence. Now, with its condemnation, in the form of his mother. He was the complete orphan. He had lost even his foster-father, his mentor, with no final words of wisdom to help him. Truly, to believe in magic, let alone make it your occupation, you had to be a little mad.
Yet he still wanted to perform wonders, things that people would not believe.
His life was all ahead of him? Well, perhaps. His mother had been only forty-nine. His father, poor man, torpedoed by a German submarine, had been only thirty.
Parrots are supposed to have very long lives, but they are just birds. And they fly away.
As he peered through his first-class window, his nose pressed to the glass (no one would have seen his face), his eyes had filled with tears, yet at the same time he had asked himself a legitimate question: but aren’t you happy? Didn’t he have every reason to be happy? Hadn’t he found in his still short life his purpose in it? Hadn’t he found the woman he loved? Hadn’t he had once a happy childhood, a wonderful unexpected second childhood? Perhaps his mother had always known.
People didn’t like to say they were happy because they thought that then something bad might happen. But something bad had happened, so he was in the clear. Though how could he say he was happy, even if he was, when his mother had just died? ‘You come to see your dead mother, Ronnie, and then you go away and travel first-class and say you are happy!’
People didn’t like to believe in magic and yet they could be so superstitious.
Outside, the suburbs gave way to green fields, Surrey became Sussex. Fields of wheat passed by, yellowed and glossy, waiting for the cut. But, sadly for the harvesters and for the holidaymakers packing this train, the sky was not the blue and benign one of his outward journey. Thick clouds had built up as they so often do in an English summer, and suddenly everything, flashing past him as it was, became tempestuous and dramatic. Rain lashed his window, the greenery before him became awash and blurred, so that his own watering eyes seemed silly.
But then, just as suddenly, while in one part of the sky rain kept falling, gleaming needles against still-dark clouds, half the world was full of sunshine again.
* * *
—
One evening at Evergrene, when he’d just turned ten, he had stood in the sitting room before Eric and Penny, who had positioned their armchairs next to each other. They were in a little row, he had an audience of two, and he stood facing them, the green-topped table beside him. He knew by now that the surface was called ‘baize’, a nice word, but he knew also that the table was not what it seemed. It was a table and not a table, and this might be true of a great many things. It was the first door that you had to pass through, as it were, into a new way of thinking about everything around you.
The table was just a table and it was plain to see that its green surface had nothing on it and that its legs were of the spindly collapsing kind that enabled the whole thing to be folded up and stored away. It was a card table, after all, only to be brought out when needed. But no one could see—because why should they?—that there were other foldings, closings and expandings involved in this table that were in the very space it occupied and around it. There was a whole other secret furniture available and it was the challenge to make any audience not see.
And, as Ronnie would later learn, what short-sighted fools they could be.
He tapped the table with his wand, then ran his hand several times across and around its surface. Then he tapped with his wand the spindly legs
and waved the wand between them, all to show that the table was only a table and occupied nothing but air. He did these things with fluid unhurried movements—this was very important—making much play with his hands and arms. This was all to show that he was to be trusted, he was confident, he was in command—he was the performer here. But it was also to achieve certain other unseen things besides.
Then he walked round the table, first in one direction, then the other, circling it, again to show there was only air, but also to show that the table might in some way obey him, it was like a creature he had tamed.
His little audience of two would now be focusing on the table, regarding it inquisitively and keenly, and yet, unwittingly, being distracted in their very intentness in a way that he wanted them to be. Of course his audience, Eric and Penny, weren’t like a real audience because they knew how the thing was done, but they were here to pretend that they didn’t, and to see if he could do it and make even them not notice. It was a test, even you might say an audition. Eric felt that the time had arrived.
It was a simple task in the catalogue of magicianship. Make something appear on the table, something that hadn’t been there a moment ago. What kind of object it might be is up to you. Surprise us. And remember: all the time make a show. Don’t overdo it, but make a show.
It was dark outside, a late November evening, several weeks since Ronnie had been told that his father was ‘missing’, and he had almost got used to that fact by now. He had always been missing, after all. What was the difference? But there was a difference and Ronnie still struggled to understand it.
While he was hopeful on this evening that he could make something appear seemingly from nowhere—he had learnt how to do it—he knew he could not make his father appear. Or at least such a thing was not within his abilities yet, he was only an eager beginner. His recent intensified application to magic was itself, as Ronnie could only dimly see—but Eric and Penny could see it—a means of diverting attention, of distracting him from the pain of thinking about his father.
