by Graham Swift
And don’t ask her, don’t ask Evie White. Though she if anyone, apart from Ronnie himself, should have known. Even Jack had said, ‘Surely you must know. A fucking rainbow right across the stage. How the bloody hell does he do that?’ But she had shaken her head and might even have looked a little shifty and cornered as if she were being forced into some kind of betrayal. Betrayal? What betrayal? And perhaps they’d both looked a bit shabby and edgy and ashamed. Outdone, outshone by a rainbow.
But it wasn’t even the best trick of all. That was still to come.
* * *
—
‘So tell me, Evie ...’ George had begun.
Anyone can say they don’t know, profess ignorance, or, after fifty years, simply say they don’t remember. Not that George was exactly interrogating her. Or he was a sly and gentle interrogator, who’d always had, she suspected, a soft spot for her. He poured more wine. ‘All your secrets are safe with me, you know that.’ A reassuring statement if ever there was one, coming from Jack’s ‘wily’ agent. Did she ‘know’ it? And ‘all’? She could see that this lunch was going to require some negotiating.
How old was George? Sixty-eight, sixty-nine? A soft spot? Come off it. He was just trying to soften her up. Bony but creamy. He surely didn’t think that because her year of mourning was now over—
But it was all suddenly a little like that treacherous and bewildering period long ago, when she was with Ronnie, yet not with him, and yet felt loyal. When she was with Jack, yet not with him, and yet would be with him—though she didn’t know it—for most of the next fifty years. How might the matter be solved?
But the matter was solved, for them all. Ronnie solved it.
Secrets. Who doesn’t have them? And are they ever safe? Even with ourselves?
‘The Life and Times of Jack Robbins’. No, not if she could help it. Over my dead body, George. Though what was there to hide? The story of a successful career and a successful marriage, how boring was that?
‘But how about,’ she might have said to George—a cunning, yet risky diversionary tactic—‘ “The Life and Times of Ronnie Deane”?’
‘Who, Evie?’
‘You know—that “magician chap”. Otherwise known as the Great Pablo. You don’t know? Did Jack never tell you?’ Staring at George over her wine glass.
Or, she thinks now, staring into her mirror, ‘The Life and Death of Ronnie Deane’. If death was the word. Hadn’t she just seen him, in this mirror? If ‘death’ was ever the right word. And ‘gone’ or ‘missing’ or ‘not there’, these were all, she knew by now, preferable words. Preferable, if more painful.
Or how about—her mind raced, as if she might have proposed to George that she would write it herself and start work immediately—‘A Season in Brighton’? But no, she knew a better title. A mysterious title, but a better one, the best one. What was the name again, George, of that literary-agent friend of yours? That literary-agent chap. Wouldn’t he like a nice mystery story? Called ‘Evergrene’.
She thought of that impossible thread, stretched across the garden, so thin as to be almost not there, yet for a moment resisting, clutching her blundering body. She thought of that white rope stretched across the stage.
* * *
—
How much had Ronnie ever told Jack? Whatever it might have been, it had gone a year ago with Jack. She was the only true guardian now of the life and times of Ronnie Deane. The one always best equipped to tell the tale. Or to keep it to herself.
How often had she and Jack talked about Ronnie? Not much. A mutual silence about him, a guilty baffled honouring silence, was almost one of the glues—the secrets as they say—of their marriage. And, after all, how did they really know that he wasn’t still there? She never told Jack what she’d done with the ring. Though he would have seen that it was suddenly absent. He didn’t ask. He might have guessed. She hadn’t given it back to Ronnie. Ronnie hadn’t asked for it back. In fact she wore it for those last shows—for that very last show—as if it were a vital part of their act. A last little piece of shiny magic.
But then, after everything else had happened, she threw it into the sea. What else? She wept as she threw it. End of story. And yet she’d been seized, even as she threw it, by some crazy idea, some old fond belief she’d read about somewhere, that if you threw something precious into the sea it would bring something back to you.
She’d said it, into the wind, as if he might actually be out there somewhere: ‘Ronnie.’
She says it now, into the mirror. ‘Ronnie.’
And Jack never knew, unless he’d been a sort of burglar in his own home, that she’d kept the little costume of sequins and feathers. It wasn’t so difficult to put it away and hide it, once you’d taken it to pieces, once you’d removed the plumes from where they fitted. There wasn’t so much of it, really. And the tiara too, with its own white plume. And the long white gloves. They were all folded up together and carefully wrapped in tissue paper and kept somewhere locked and safe.
Now they were in the bottom drawer on the right-hand side of the dressing table where she was sitting. In all these years (she assumed) Jack had never known she still had the costume. Though once, long years ago, he’d slipped into the auditorium secretly, just to watch her wearing it.
But in fifty years she had hardly ever looked at it either. So what had she kept it for and why shouldn’t she have shared with Jack the fact that she still had it? Why keep a secret that’s almost a secret from yourself? She had sometimes thought if she opened the drawer she might discover the costume had gone.
Since Jack died she’d got it out several times. It was somehow a comfort, a need. She’d laid it out on the bed, she’d brushed it and combed the ostrich plumes and clipped them back in place. And had she—? Had she ever?
Well, that would be telling. And, anyway, how absurd.
It was the original outfit—the one she’d worn just for Ronnie at the Belmont Theatre. When, thanks to Jack, they got the Brighton season, she’d had a second one made, almost identical, so she’d always have the change right through that summer. And she’d kept the original all these years, and never told Jack. Though Jack must have seen her in one or the other of those outfits—how many times?
And she’d never told Jack about something else, though it had weighed upon her. It was much heavier in fact than a little made-of-nothing costume wrapped up in tissue paper.
* * *
—
It was February 1960. They’d got married in Camden Registry Office, back in London. The Brighton thing—the ‘investigation’—had died down by then, though could it ever, exactly, go away? Any day there might be—news.
But she was Mrs Robbins now, though she preferred to be known as plain Evie White. And Jack was Jack Robbins, as opposed to Jack Robinson. He would never be that phantom figure again. If Ronnie had gone out of their lives, then so too had Jack Robinson. Where was he? Who was he? Where had he gone?
There might, she thinks now, be another story, another racy little book. ‘The Life and Times of Jack Robinson’. Best told of course by Jack himself—or by a string of girls? Each one of them with a little chapter of her own. Or, no, just a paragraph. And each one of them with the same name.
It was 1960. Jack had been right, it was all going out with the tide, and who’d want that stuff any more when they could get it anyway from a box in the corner of their living rooms? And yet for a little while the 1960s were much like the 1950s. And what did that little box still trade in? Sunday Night at the London Palladium—with always a compere who’d become the nation’s pal and always some magician and always some troupe of bouncing leg-waving smiling girls—well, it would seem to go on for ever. So where was this boat then that they might have been missing?
‘Did Ronnie ever tell you, Jack, about a place called Evergrene?’
There. She ha
d said it.
‘Evergrene? No, Evie. Where the hell’s Evergrene?’
‘It’s a house. It’s the name of a house. Where he got sent in the war.’
‘No, I never heard him say anything about Evergrene.’
‘The Lawrences? Eric and Penny? They lived there.’
‘Ah. The sorcerer’s apprenticeship, you mean? The Wizard? That’s what he called him, you know. Seriously. I never knew his name was Eric. But I think he was still in touch. I think he was still even going to see him.’
‘Eric Lawrence died, nearly two years ago now.’
‘Ah. I didn’t know that.’
‘But I’ve been wondering.’
‘Wondering what?’
‘Do you think that’s where Ronnie went? Do you think he might be there?’
‘Where?’
‘Evergrene.’
* * *
—
Jack never took it any further. Why should he? He had his own reasons for forgetting his old friend Ronnie Deane. Let alone for not wanting to know if he might still be alive. They were Jack and Evie now. He had even given her a strange searching look. How much of this nonsense was she going to keep up?
She, too, had her reasons not to take it any further. Though was her mad theory (hope?) so mad? She hadn’t gone with Ronnie to see his mother. It was no secret now where that had led. But suppose she had gone.
She might even now, but in some place other than Albany Square, be guarding, keeping scrupulously dusted in its glass case, the career of the Great Pablo. But perhaps he would have dispensed with the ridiculous name. As he would have dispensed eventually, even at her own sensible suggestion, with his glittering stage partner, Eve. Though not with his partner for life, even manager for life. He might have got his own TV magic show. But anyway done astonishing things that made people gasp and kept up the tradition of magicianship, of there being such a thing as magic in the world.
But she hadn’t gone with him and things had turned out as they had.
And, as it also turned out, she could never have met, either, Ronnie’s other ‘second’ mother, as Ronnie himself might have thought of her: Mrs Lawrence, Penny Lawrence.
She should go there herself. She had dithered and doubted. But didn’t she have a sort of obligation? And if her intuition should prove correct? She should go and see this woman and so make up in some way for her own lapses and omissions. This woman who was the widow of the man—the Wizard—who had taught Ronnie about magic and even enabled him (by nothing more magical than a bequest in his will) to find his ‘Eve’.
She should honour the ghost of this man. And she should talk to Mrs Lawrence and even ask her—though would it even be necessary to ask her?—where Ronnie was now.
But she was too late.
* * *
—
Among the items left to Ronnie after Eric Lawrence’s death and thus among the items left by Ronnie were a few solicitors’ letters. It was not so difficult to phone up the office in Oxford, pretending to be a distant relative.
‘I’m sorry to say Mrs Lawrence is no longer alive. She died last year. Yes, that’s right, it was not very long after Mr Lawrence died.’
And the house?
‘Evergrene? Yes, that’s right. It’s on the market now. It was put up for sale by Mrs Lawrence’s brother—he lives in Canada—not so long ago.’
She’d hesitated once more. Canada? Should she simply draw the line there? But one day, when Jack was to be busy with rehearsals, she seized her opportunity. A train from Paddington.
The estate agent had said he could drive her out there, it wasn’t so far. She had to spend an hour or so in the company of an over-attentive young man, clearly pleased to be out of the office and to be showing her what he called ‘quite a posh’ house. He might have wondered why she was so interested in this particular property and, assessing her age and possible bank balance, had his doubts. But—she couldn’t act? And in any case a wedding ring (what a useful little accessory) now shone on her finger.
It still shines on her finger, embedded in its wrinkles, now. And how many times has she touched it today?
It wasn’t that posh at all, even in her own lowly judgement. It was all a strange, rather bleak disappointment. Why had she come? To destroy the image she could, now, no longer carry in her mind? It was just an Edwardian house at one end of a straggly village. The village seemed to have undergone much post-war development and become almost a suburb of Oxford. It was not a long car ride. The house was not in the depths of the country nor in splendid isolation. It was a largish house with gardens front and back, but not particularly distinctive and fairly run-down. There was nothing to suggest the mansion full of wonders that Ronnie had seemed to evoke whenever she’d got him, sometimes with much effort, to speak of it.
It was perhaps necessary to jump back somehow more than twenty years and place herself in the mind of an eight-year-old boy from Bethnal Green. But how did you do that?
It was March, the thin end of winter, and the place even looked rather grim. You would have said, very readily, that it had no magic. It had been thoroughly cleared, and inside it was drab and echoey. Floorboards creaked. She didn’t need a separate tour of the muddy and overgrown back garden. She could see it clearly from one of the upper windows. A small greenhouse and a cold frame, both with smashed glass. Beside the house there was a tumbledown wooden structure that hardly merited the description ‘garage’.
All the while she had to keep up her performance with the pressing young man. So what line was her husband in then? It was hard to get away from him, to find even a moment of contemplation, but she’d done her best. No house could have looked more gloomily empty, but she said it, and said it, necessarily, inside her head: ‘Ronnie? Are you still here?’
As her back was turned to the young man, as she looked from the window, she had felt a stab, her eyes had started with tears. Evie White. Since when had she deserved her spotless name?
But she could always say, at least to herself, that she had been there. She had done it. What more could she do? And, yes, engraved in the stone archway over the front porch, amid other decorative work—oak leaves, flowers, scrolls—was the name that must once, and for some unknown reason, have been confidently chosen and then sharply chiselled, but was now blotched and eroded by a dark-greenish mould: EVERGRENE.
She never told Jack she had gone there. It was another half-century secret. And was it still there now? And who was living in it?
18 Albany Square was still here—just about, it suddenly seemed to her. And who was living in it? As she looked in her mirror, this suddenly seemed a question you could ask too.
* * *
—
Penny Lawrence, having taken out the mug of tea and the glass of ginger beer, quickly made herself scarce. She knew by now when to vanish and when to appear. She was as good at it as those rabbits, though goodness knows how they knew what to do, when to be there or not, it was beyond her. They were about to appear now, she was sure of it. Eric had that look about him.
She had delivered the two drinks and then said, as was her way, but perhaps particularly brightly, ‘Here we are!’
Once, years ago, when the two of them were what was known as ‘courting’, he had asked her, one summer evening, to come and see his dad’s allotment in Cowley. His dad was somewhere playing cricket. He’d said there might be some spare runner beans she could have for her mum. It wasn’t the most romantic of invitations, but the allotment included a shed and she’d thought: Aye aye. But he’d done nothing more bold, at first, than to fetch out two fold-up wooden chairs, like you see in church halls.
It was a nice evening, there were swallows flying about, and it was as though they were sitting in front of their own little house. She was nineteen. It was 1916. They were lucky, the war would miss them both. His father
was a manager at the Morris works and so had found him a job there too, in the office, when it had mainly gone over to arms contracts. This had probably saved him.
Eric Lawrence, for the time being, was a bookkeeping clerk, very familiar with double-entry and the cost of hand grenades, but he said that when the war was over he wanted to do something different with his life. Quite different.
Then he said, ‘Look behind you, Penny.’
Bloody hell. And how on earth?
Then he said, ‘Now look again.’
Later he said it was his ‘magic shed’. In more ways than one. She got the strong impression that evening that Eric and his father might indeed have very different outlooks. Though Eric’s father had probably saved Eric’s life. And just as well.
And now he was about to play the same trick on Ronnie. She felt an odd twinge of jealousy, but it was mixed up with a secret excitement, even with a sudden flood of happiness. It was time. This little Ronnie of theirs (of theirs?) was about to be introduced.
Play the trick? No, do the trick. Not even trick. Eric’s word was ‘illusion’.
And of all the things. Other young men might have put on other shows, gone to other lengths (some young men even drove cars—Eric’s father, naturally, drove a Bullnose Morris) to woo a young woman. Or they might have just got on with it. But Eric had asked her one July evening to an allotment, with a promise of a bag of beans. And it had worked. It had done the trick.
Later, she’d had the strange thought that if he could do such things, then why hadn’t he just magicked her into compliance in the first place? Why the beans, why the rabbits? But then perhaps he had. How did she know that her whole life with Eric wasn’t some kind of hypnosis?
And ‘their Ronnie’? Why couldn’t Eric have found some magic, long ago, to solve their little problem? Though, true, it was more her little problem. But now, twenty-odd years later, and better late than never, they had Ronnie.
