by Graham Swift
It was not one of Eric’s ‘warden’ nights, but their own blackout curtains were meticulously in place, with the regular curtains closed before them. For all they knew, this might have been the night on which the Luftwaffe chose to shift its own attention from London or Liverpool to pulverise Oxford instead (in fact it was the turn of Coventry). But for the time being the sitting room at Evergrene had turned into a little hushed theatre, the drawn curtains and just the light of two standard lamps, with their gold-fringed shades, adding to the mood.
Ronnie had thought about it carefully: what should appear on the table? His idea was perhaps not the most original one, yet it would do the work and enable him to add a special touch that might be more than just showmanly, and it had taken some preparing in advance.
Now, having done his circlings, he stood in front of the table and before Eric and Penny and extended his arms wide, palms flattened as if to confirm there was nothing—nothing—suspicious around him. Yet as he did this he felt a strange power. It was the power of this moment of performance, but he could not separate it from some thrilling capacity that he had actually acquired in himself and would always, from now on, simply have.
He felt too the strange power of his silence. He had not spoken a word and had not needed to—he had merely moved. And his silence seemed to have silenced his audience.
But now he made a sound that he’d never been intending. Out it came spontaneously and forcefully, a sudden ‘Hah!’ or mere explosive gush of air from his lungs. At the same time he gave a flick of the wand—inertly lodged till now like an idle drumstick between two fingers—and brought his hands together above his head and clapped them. Then with a sweep of his arms and his whole body he stepped to one side.
On the table, at its centre, was a vase containing several large red roses. They were, as it happened, the last unwilted roses left on one of the bushes in the garden, surviving—perhaps because of some power Ernie had—well into November. Ronnie could see them from his bedroom window and as he pondered his forthcoming event they had suddenly called to him.
He had nonetheless thought it only right to seek Ernie’s discreet permission. Ernie had said, ‘All yours, Ronnie, ain’t my roses.’ He’d got the impression that Ernie somehow knew exactly what he was up to.
So, earlier this day, he had snipped off the best roses—five in all—and secreted them, as he’d secreted the vase.
And the result of it all was that Eric and Penny were now clapping energetically and even emitting the kind of squeals and gasps of delight that audiences generally, though Ronnie did not yet have the experience to know it, can emit. And he felt that their excitement was wholly genuine, they weren’t putting it on, though they might easily have done, just for him.
It was his first taste of applause. Fucking ’ell.
But this was not all. Still with his suave and gliding movements and as if it were all part of the same act and perhaps, in its way, a kind of magic too, he took two roses from the vase and, stepping forward even as they continued clapping, presented one to Penny and one to Eric, in that order of course, with a little bow to each.
It had been a test, an audition, his first-ever performance, but he hoped that this final double gesture would have another meaning that though invisible—unlike, now, the vase of roses—they would yet ‘see’.
As they took their roses they seemed quite overcome and he felt it again: there was no feeling like it. He had not merely done something that might be admired in an ordinary way, as a child might be admired for learning how to ride a bicycle. He’d done something quite out of the ordinary, even ‘impossible’, and the power to do it was with him. It was not just that a vase of flowers had appeared from nowhere. He himself had become a different person.
* * *
—
Jack had to make the announcement two nights running. ‘Indisposed.’ The groans of disappointment, even of disgruntlement, that this produced told him how much of a draw Pablo and Eve had now become.
‘Yes, I know, I know,’ he said. ‘You’ll just have to put up with more of me.’
He did not say of course why Ronnie (or Pablo) was ‘indisposed’. He did not want to dampen their holiday mood further. And he did not answer the question, though it was not actually shouted out: ‘What about Eve?’ He extended his preceding act—‘Silvery Moon’. He made a few more jokes. He said, ‘You see, boys and girls, even magicians themselves sometimes have to disappear.’
‘But don’t you worry,’ he said, ‘he’ll be back, Pablo will be back.’ Which didn’t, he knew, help those who’d bought tickets for that particular night. For some reason it came magnanimously into his mind that when Ronnie returned he should become the Great Pablo.
Improvising on the theme of moonlight, he threw in a whole extra soupy, though seasonal number: ‘Shine On, Harvest Moon’. He’d negotiated unsuccessfully with the Rockabye Boys as to whether he might do an extra number with them (leather jacket, quiff and all: that would either show them up or send them up, he thought), but Doris Lane did condescend to allow him to perform a soft-shoe shuffle adoringly round her, provided she could do an extra number—‘I’ve Got a Crush on You’. (It was like dancing round Queen Victoria and crush might have been the word, he was later reported to have said.)
At the end of the show he beefed up his farewell routine, giving added oomph—some might even have said surprising urgency—to ‘Red, Red Robin’. Live, love, laugh and be happy! He did his best, all told, to make up for the sad gap in the evening’s performance, but there were many—and who could blame them?—who simply felt that they hadn’t got what they’d paid for.
To make matters worse, though it was hardly part of some malign conspiracy, the fine weather of the past few days broke and the pier was battered by heavy showers, the sea frothed. Which hardly eased audience dissatisfaction. But the seaside is like that: one moment gaiety and laughter, the next sodden misery.
A bit like show business.
And of course these were two nights when he could not have slipped back into the auditorium to cease to be Jack Robinson and become just a pair of eyes in the dark. Though on the other hand it was on the first of these two nights—and he didn’t have to do it—that he confessed to Evie that this was just what, from time to time, he’d done. And even why.
Just an old song-and-dance man? But that wouldn’t stop him, in the decades to come, having the long and distinguished career he would have, as an actor and then even as one of those who, off stage, put on, create the shows themselves. Just Jack Robinson, picking up girls whenever he liked? That usherette standing there. You never saw me, but why don’t you come and see me after the show? But that didn’t stop him, fortunately or unfortunately, from being a man who could fall in love. Or even from telling Evie White so.
‘It wasn’t the act I wanted to watch, Evie. It was you.’
And Evie, when she was suddenly but not so passively or helplessly on the receiving end of all this, could not help thinking: This is what he does, of course, with all of them. He makes them feel special, he makes them feel that they’re the one. Hadn’t she seen it happen enough times? And wasn’t he now, blatantly, only seizing his opportunity? Ronnie was not there. The sheer obviousness of it all.
But she couldn’t help feeling that she had a better measure of Jack than all the others, and that she had this same opportunity too. And why—it was a good, if uncomfortable question—hadn’t she gone with Ronnie, to hold his hand, to see his mother, to be with him in his time of need? Be careful, she might have thought, you might just be Flora for the night. Though would that have been so awful, if nobody knew? It might even have been the better (or less bad) thing.
Yet she couldn’t help feeling either—and this was the real push and dare of it—that she might really be the special one for Jack. If what he was saying to her now, about slipping back into the auditorium, was t
rue, then she wasn’t just some passing thing he’d only noticed yesterday.
And, fortunately or unfortunately, it was true. And, fortunately or unfortunately, she was right.
And hadn’t it turned out in the end, and for nearly fifty years, to be entirely fortunately?
* * *
—
She looks in her mirror now and sees herself as she was then. Hardly a slip of seventeen not knowing what she was doing, and an engagement ring winking on her finger.
Ronnie had phoned. He’d said, ‘I was too late, Evie. She’s gone.’
It was the voice, strangely, of a man who’d done something wrong, and was now awaiting his punishment.
‘Oh I’m so sorry, my darling. You mustn’t blame yourself. Do you want me to come and be with you?’
And these were all the right words, except she might have been with him in the first place. Then everything would have been different.
He said he would be okay. He said it might mean a couple of nights. There were things he had to do, sort out.
She said, ‘Take care, my darling, I’ll be thinking of you.’
And that same night, after Ronnie had phoned, after Ronnie’s mother had died, after the show in which she didn’t appear, she’d got into bed with Jack Robbins. She’d thought of her own mother, her sunhat and frock. One day there might have to be some explaining. Guess what, Mum.
In the dark they’d talked about mothers. Everyone has to have one. It was the topic of the day. How strange, her head now lay on Jack’s chest, her fingers wandered over it.
And as soon as Ronnie had returned he’d looked into her face and he’d seen. She knew it. She even had the feeling he’d looked into her face before he’d left and known it then, somehow, impossibly, beforehand. And she might simply have said in the first place, ‘I’m coming with you.’
He just looked into her face and she knew that he knew. He didn’t say anything. Nor, of course, did she. And wasn’t the important thing to be talking about his mother?
‘I’m so sorry, my darling.’
She might have been saying it on either account.
She’d got into bed with Jack Robbins. She’d known what she was doing. She’d even known that sooner or later it was bound to happen, as Jack had known. As much as anything can be bound to happen in life.
It was a Friday night, and she got to know Jack a lot more, even to know, a little bit, his mother, though she’d never met Jack’s mother either. ‘Mothers, Evie, who’d have ’em?’ His chest rose and fell beneath her cheek. When she’d pressed her hand to the small of his back, he must have felt the prod of the ring against his spine. The weather had changed, but the storms kept away. All that night there were little blinks of light, just enough to make the curtains flicker for an instant, followed by low rumbles that never became louder, far out at sea.
But Ronnie did say one thing when he returned. He saw and he knew, and what he said, given that he knew, was close to what she might have expected him to say, but it was strange.
He said, ‘I saw something, Evie.’
She waited a little, even prepared herself.
‘You saw something?’
‘Yes, I saw something. From the train.’
* * *
—
She looks in the mirror. Had her face, then, been so transparent? Not even like a face in a mirror, but like glass itself?
She could dance, she could smile, but she could never sing, and all her life she could never act either. No? She could not do that thing that all his life Jack could do—or so he’d make it seem—as easy as walking, as if for him it was no trouble at all to step out of himself, even to step through a mirror.
But then Jack had once said in one of his interviews—one of those moments of startling candour when you might have said he wasn’t acting: ‘Acting? We all do it, don’t we? We all do it all the time.’
On the TV screen, she couldn’t help noticing, his own face was showing its age.
This morning she’d done a strange thing. Anyone looking from one of the neighbouring houses in Albany Square might have thought it a weird performance. But then who would have been looking? It was very early. Which only made it weirder.
She’d woken and known at once what day it was, and what she must do. The thought and the deed were the same. She was wide awake, but she might have been sleepwalking. She got up and put on her dressing gown and, of all things, a pair of old trainers from the days when she used to do gym classes. She’d tied the dressing gown carefully round her and gone downstairs, through the quiet kitchen and into the garden. It was a still, clear morning, the sort that can mean an immaculate day to come, but it was not long after dawn and the low sun was only just creeping, dazzlingly, into the garden. The air was sharp and cold.
But she needed to do this thing that anyone watching would not even have been able to see. To carry with her, inside her dressing gown, the warmth of the bed—the bed where Jack had died one year ago—out to the place where, if he was anywhere, Jack was now. She must do it quickly before the warmth she was carrying was stolen from her.
But before she knew it, or saw it, she had stepped into the impossibly thin thread, slung between two shrubs, from which hung a complete spider’s web. As she breasted the thread and as it stretched and then gave way, she saw for a second, from the corner of her eye, the intricate dew-silvered structure for which it had been spun, first in its agitated entirety, then in wilting collapse as it vanished into shadowed air. She had to flail with her arms to make sure she was not now enmeshed in its wreckage. And then she’d seen that the garden was dotted with the things, glistening and apparently hovering in the low shafts of sunlight.
It was the season for them, or for seeing them, and though a spider’s web was one of the most familiar of mental pictures—who has not at some point doodled a spider’s web?—the actuality was bewitching. How on earth was it done? How on earth were they conceived and constructed, these entrancing, lethal things?
She had not anticipated that the garden would be decked out like this, as if just for her. And look what she’d done. Intent on something else, she’d walked straight into one of these wonders and ruined it.
She’d thought, for an instant, of the silver tiara she used to wear, trapped above her fringe in her blonde hair.
* * *
—
Early September. Exactly fifty years ago the show had closed. The end of the season: the crowds departing, the light on the waves changing, the waves themselves, even in the way they gnawed at the beach, seeming to know something. Time to stack up the deckchairs and put them away.
September 1959: when she and Ronnie should have got married. Let’s give it the season, let’s give ourselves and the act the season. And wasn’t their act, by that September—even by the middle of August—quite something, a success? What couldn’t they do next?
There was something else Jack had said to her, when it all happened, when Ronnie was with his mum, or as it had turned out, not exactly with her. He’d said, ‘Don’t you think, Evie, that all this stuff, the pier, the show, the whole bag of tricks, it’s had its day? It’s not what they’ll want for much longer. The future’s elsewhere, don’t you think?’
Only that last bit might have been part of some declaration to do with them. The rest was hard-nosed, if slightly sad. It was all a far cry from Jack Robinson, the man on the end of a pier, singing his song. It seemed she was with more than one person—two, three people—at the same time. And what might he have thought of her?
They were on the pier then, in that little reserved bit, and it was just the two of them. It was where, some weeks later, she dropped the ring. It was the morning after. The morning after he’d made the first announcement of the two announcements: ‘Indisposed.’ The morning after she hadn’t had to perform—who did she have to perform with? But t
hey’d gone off together, as she’d known they would, after the show.
And how had poor Ronnie slept, all alone, that night?
Yet what Jack was saying now didn’t feel wrong at all, it felt shrewd. In her sharp little heart she could feel it was true. The weather had changed, but the storms had passed by and the sea, for the moment, was calm and sparkling. ‘The whole bag of tricks’, that’s what he’d said. He had put his arm round her as if she was all his now, and she hadn’t tried to remove it.
She’d got into bed with Jack Robbins one night in 1959 and the truth of it was that she’d never got out of it until a year ago. And she’d even, this morning, wanted to carry out to him the warmth of that same bed. It was all she could think of doing. She’d gone out into the garden, only to be ambushed by a network of shimmering gossamer. Her breath itself had glinted and swirled like silver dust in the cold air.
Exactly a year ago she’d woken up—from whatever dream she’d never remember though she might wish to be permanently back in it—and put out her arm. Jack was there, of course he was. But he wasn’t. Something even in her fingertips had told her. He was there, but had gone. She didn’t want to think about the seconds, the moments that had followed, yet every morning and every middle of the night she’d have to repeat this innocent, terrible act of waking up.
As if a year’s worth of them would reprieve her now. As if, after all, he might really be there.
When she’d collected the ashes she’d dithered and wondered. Jack, ever helpful, had never said anything, had left nothing written down. She’d wanted anyway at first to have the pathetic feeling that she’d brought him back home to Albany Square. Perhaps she might just keep the ashes here with her in their jar, here in this bedroom. Under the bed. Better still, not even under. Perhaps she might just sleep with her husband’s ashes. For several nights, she actually had. The things that we do.
