by Graham Swift
Eric had one day turned into Lorenzo (whatever next?) and now Eric, or Lorenzo, had almost stopped doing his stage work because of the war. Magicians weren’t wanted in a war. You’d think they might be needed all the more. But he clearly hadn’t stopped altogether. They don’t stop, or retire, or even give it a rest. It was a thing for life. And she’d long ago come to appreciate that nothing was surprising. Nothing.
He’d signed up as an air-raid warden, so as to do his bit. Magicians can be air-raid wardens too. And there was already talk going around (which turned out to be not so silly) that the Germans were never going to touch Oxford, even with the Cowley works close by.
Every other night he went out after dark with his helmet and his whistle—and his wand?
She sometimes fancied she could write a book: ‘I Married a Magician’. It might be interesting for some people, it might shed some light. But of course she’d never write such a book, because it would involve telling, and you could never tell. It was forbidden. Her part in it all, even her part now with the rabbits and the cold frame, you’d never get it from her. Though one thing she might say—it was a different sort of telling—was that it could all get very demanding. What about normal life?
But it could also get exciting. It could even get wonderful.
She watched Eric talking. She watched Ronnie’s dark little head turn. There we are! There we go! Her heart went out to him—even more than usual. She knew he had his real mother, called Agnes, but she wasn’t here to see or know, was she?
And normal life? What was that anyway? Here they were in another war, the second of their lives. It was going on right now, though, looking at this scene before her, you’d never know. And yet it was the whole point with this young guest of theirs (she didn’t like to dwell on it): if it wasn’t for a war.
She had an older brother, Roy, in Canada, who’d done well for himself and never ceased to remind her of it, and had two boys, one of them coming up to eighteen. Well, Canada was in this war too. And this little Ronnie’s father, it seemed, was out there on a ship somewhere (she didn’t like to think about this either) bringing in supplies—quite possibly from Canada.
Roy had always scoffed that if she’d married a magician she could have anything she liked, couldn’t she? She only had to say. But at twenty-one she’d had a nasty miscarriage which had wrecked her chances of ever having babies again and there was no magic, it seemed, that could put that right. Though shouldn’t she be glad now not to have a young boy or two coming up to eighteen?
There was no magic for some things, it seemed. It couldn’t stop wars, and though it was a selfish, even a wicked thought to have, she couldn’t help being glad about that now. Producing white rabbits out of nowhere was certainly something, but it was nothing compared with this little Ronnie Deane who’d turned up so late in the day.
So let them keep on fighting, that was her secret thought. And what war anyway? She couldn’t see one. Ronnie’s mum had sent him to the best place, all right, even if she didn’t know it and it had all just been the luck of the draw. She’d sent him to the best place, as far as she, Penny Lawrence, was concerned.
She saw his head turn back again and she knew his eyes would be wide and wondering now. He had beautiful dark eyes too, enough to melt your heart.
* * *
—
It had started to be called the ‘Rainbow Trick’, even the ‘Famous Rainbow Trick’, and God knows how it was done. But it wasn’t, even so, the biggest trick of all. That was saved for the last night, the last show of the season, Saturday 12th September.
Ronnie had said before they went on, ‘It’s the last night, Evie, so let’s give it a bit of extra whirl.’ His eyes had never looked at her—or looked through her—so intently. And, yes, they’d given the rope some extra whirl. She could feel Ronnie, at the other end, through the rope itself, urging her, insisting. More, more! Faster, faster! And when it had appeared—there was always that gasp when it appeared—the rainbow had glowed even more brightly, every colour in it had shone more distinctly, and it had remained visible just a bit longer before disappearing. It was always like a real rainbow in that respect, it would just suddenly appear, then just as suddenly vanish.
But that night, and only that night, there was something else different—or new altogether. Unless it was all imagined. Though how could it have been imagined, if people agreed that they had clearly seen it?
But Ronnie, beforehand, had given her no warning, he’d said nothing.
It wasn’t a white dove that flew out from under the rainbow and landed on the empty tumbler. It was something that looked at first almost like some broken-off whirring piece of the rainbow itself. It had feathers of all colours, blue and red and yellow, but mainly a vivid brilliant green.
It was a parrot.
Drum crash, darkness. More gasps. Cries even. Then the lights came back on again, for their bow, their final bow. A thundering of applause, and both of them looking this time a little dizzy and dazed, as if they’d astonished even themselves. And an extra touch, an extra twist, or mystery. Perched on Ronnie’s lifted hand, on his knuckles, even as he took his bow, was the parrot.
So—they had really seen it. As they’d really seen the rainbow. With his other hand he held hers, in traditional chivalrous bow-taking style, but now, as the applause roared on, he moved towards her, lifting her clutched wrist, and kissed it. Oh Ronnie could dance, their whole act was a dance. The parrot, which she’d never seen before, was still raised up on his other hand. Then he released hers and took the parrot and launched it out towards the audience like some bouquet that was theirs to catch. But it was gone. Gone.
As was Ronnie.
When did it happen? How did it happen? It was their last bow, but there was still Jack’s goodnight routine to come. Though how could you follow such a thing?
It was the last show and it couldn’t end without Jack Robinson’s last farewell. There’d been talk too of some general final curtain call. So they should remain in costume just in case. For that reason she’d stayed with the rest of them in the wings, even as Jack came on. He brushed past her and said quickly in her ear, ‘Jesus Christ, Evie—a fucking parrot!’ Then when she looked round Ronnie was gone. Back to the dressing room, she supposed, to take a breather.
But no, he would never be seen again in the dressing room either.
She stayed in the wings to watch Jack, thinking Ronnie would rejoin her. On stage, Jack was giving his own last number a bit of extra whirl too, a bit of extra zing and punch. He was getting them all to join in. Even in the wings they were singing along (the voice of Doris Lane piercing through everyone else’s).
Wake up, wake up, you sleepy head!
He was giving it his all.
Get up, get up, get out of bed!
But Ronnie was gone. Really gone.
He might have been sitting, exhausted, in the dressing room, wiping off his make-up. He’d given it his all too, hadn’t he? Taken his final bow. And, yes—follow that. And he was the Great Pablo, wasn’t he?
But no. He was nowhere to be found.
* * *
—
Everyone looked, of course they did. The whole theatre looked, the whole pier looked. The Brighton police began to look. In time it seemed that half of Brighton was looking. Enquiries were extended to London. His flat was broken into and searched, likewise his late mother’s house. Jack, while Evie had to remain, went up to town to do some sombre searching of his own, taking with him a list of theatres, headed by the Belmont.
But nothing. Ronnie Deane had not been seen and was nowhere to be found. The most puzzling thing, for some, was that nor was his outfit—the red-lined cape, the white gloves and so on—nor were his personal magical bits and bobs, his actual bag of tricks. It was an ordinary brown-leather holdall, but contained such things as a wand, a string of special handk
erchiefs, a large shiny key. And a white rope?
None of these things was found, nor the holdall itself. Nor any doves. Nor a parrot.
The police wanted to know—and naturally she came in for the closest questioning—about the parrot. They had not been at the show themselves and were inclined to disbelieve it all. A parrot? A rainbow? Being the police, they were professionally inclined to disbelieve anything they couldn’t see, so to speak, with their own eyes. On the other hand, they had to deal with what they were told.
A parrot? But it was usually a dove? So where did he keep them then, the parrots and the doves? Where were they now? Perhaps because they had so little other evidence, they seemed to become quite compelled by this line of questioning, as if, despite themselves, their inquiry had shifted to one into the nature of magic—or rather into the exposure of its fraudulence. Magic, in fact, might be the culprit they were looking for. And Evie had found herself coming in for the kind of interrogation that she’d only previously envisaged in some dark recess of her mind.
Was this then her punishment? Punishment or test?
So how did he do all these things, they had said. How were they done? When she said she really didn’t know, it seemed only to place her under increasing suspicion. Didn’t know, or was just trying to hide something? They looked at the ring on her finger. They looked, it seemed, into her deepest motivations. For a while at least, it seemed that the police suspected they might be being elaborately fooled. Or tricked.
But there’s a point where a trick ceases to be a mere trick. It was all a gift, of course, for the local, then even the national press. ‘Magician Vanishes’. ‘Seaside Sorcerer’s Mystery Disappearing Act’. But it was not a matter for cheap humour. And there was the inevitable if distressing and unwanted thought: The sea. The sea itself. The end of the pier? He’d jumped?
Jack had once jokingly said, when the show opened, ‘And if things get really bad, playmates, we can always all take a running jump. You can’t do that at the fucking Hackney Empire either.’
They searched. There were police boats, divers. The seaside generally and not just Brighton can be prone to those incidents when someone, it unaccountably seems, simply ‘takes to the water’ to be seen no more. A little pile of clothes, perhaps, left on the shingle. But surely a red-lined cloak and other such garments would not have been hard to spot lying on Brighton beach. And surely a man wandering round the streets in such attire, and carrying a brown-leather holdall, could not have got very far.
He’d just disappeared. He was never seen again. It’s a magician’s prerogative and ultimate recourse perhaps.
‘And you really can’t think, Miss White, you’re absolutely sure, of any reason why ...?’
No, she couldn’t. No. Didn’t know or just wasn’t telling? And to Jack she had to say the same thing, though in a different and more agonised way, ‘Don’t ask me, don’t ask me. How should I know?’
Which is just what she might have said to Ronnie when he came back that day from seeing his dead mother, when he’d looked into her eyes and she’d known what he’d seen there. ‘Don’t ask me, Ronnie, don’t ask me.’
He was never found, he’d just disappeared. Which meant of course that no one actually knew. Or ever would. He was like his own poor father who was only ever officially listed as missing. So, in theory ...
Soon enough the police lost interest. There was no corpse, no crime. There was scarcely any evidence of anything at all. He was a grown man, not a lost child (and Brighton every summer had its fair share of those). To vanish was not illegal.
And it was not for the police, even while their investigations were intense, to note the simultaneous cooling off—though it was more like a jolt, a shakenness—in the relations of Evie White, Ronnie Deane’s distressed assistant and fiancée, and Jack Robbins, compere of the show.
When Jack went up to London Evie knew it was as much to enable a contrite separation as anything else. They spoke on the phone, when they might have spoken in his bed, in his digs where once the lightning flashes had lit the curtains. When he phoned she thought of Ronnie’s call from London barely a month before. Under police restriction, if not exactly under detention, she kept to her own digs, to the bed that had been hers and Ronnie’s but was now just hers. How dreadful was that time. How dreadfully, decades later, it would loom in her memory.
Yet when the police wound up their inquiry and said she was free to travel, there she was again, and thankfully, in Jack’s bed. Two final nights in Brighton, their fortnight’s mutual avoidance like the quaint agreement of couples not to see each other on the eve of a wedding.
* * *
—
He would be seventy-eight now, Ronnie Deane. Or the Great Pablo. He might at any time just walk through the door.
But then she has had that same thought too, and too many times to count, about Jack. It’s one of the temptations, the tortures of grief. Any moment now ... But how could you bear it, live with it, without that teasing, rescuing illusion?
‘You know, Evie,’ George had said, ‘I think he could just walk into this restaurant right now and sit right here at this table.’
Her eyes had sprung with tears. He saw at once it had been a big mistake to say it. He put a gentle hand on her wrist. Out from his breast pocket came the silk handkerchief.
‘No, George, it’s all right. I think it myself. All the bloody time.’ She’d given a brave little laugh. ‘Sometimes I think I can hear him say, “I fooled you all, didn’t I?” ’
And sometimes, she might have said to George, she’d thought he really had walked back into the house. Or someone had. She might have called out—perhaps she really had—quite simply and naturally and unalarmed, as if time had simply somersaulted backwards, ‘Jack, is that you?’
And if Jack, then why not Ronnie? Would it be so extraordinary, given what he’d given his life to?
‘Hello, Evie. It’s been a while. Here I am. Here we are.’
She is feeling very tired. The evening is fading outside. The leaves on the crab-apple are losing their colour. She hasn’t put on any lights and even her own face in the mirror seems ghostly. And was that really him she’d seen behind her? She might just take a nap, a little nap. Such a demanding day. She takes off her blouse and skirt and leaves them in a puddle on the chair. She slips under the duvet as if under a receiving wave. She drifts off to sleep very quickly, but before she does—or perhaps it’s a dream—she puts out an arm and feels the warm familiar weight. So it’s all right, everything is all right, he’s still there.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Graham Swift was born in 1949 and is the author of eleven novels; two collections of short stories; and Making an Elephant, a book of essays, portraits, poetry and reflections on his life in writing. With Waterland he won The Guardian Fiction Award, and with Last Orders the Booker Prize. Both novels have since been made into films. His work has appeared in more than thirty languages.
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