Wise Children

by Angela Carter

  Tristram knocked over his chair as he got up when she came in. He was all of a dither and no wonder. Wheelchair was widely touted as ‘the most beautiful woman in England’ in her day but she never held a candle to our Tiffany, she says so herself.

  The chat show never came off because he was offered the game show the week after on the other channel, so he took that. And he took Tiffany, too. He took her home to his flat, in a warehouse in Bermondsey, above a wine bar, and he bought her a beaded gown, and there she was, every week, with her five-year-old’s smile, offering the entire viewing public a peek down her cleavage while she sang out: ‘Yessir! Lashings of Lolly!’ with a ringing conviction that could only have been born out of true love.

  Because she fell for him, head over heels. Her dad fumed and cursed when she went home to pick up her spare underwear; she came round to our place, she wept. Brenda nipped round on the q.t., gave her a big hug. ‘I love him, Mum.’ ‘Aunty Dora, I love him.’ ‘I love him, Aunty Nora.’

  The three of us looked at each other sadly. We’d well nigh two centuries’ experience of love, between us, and the omens were not good. She sat knuckling her eyes, getting mascara everywhere. She’d got it bad and Tristram wasn’t worth the paper she wiped her bum with. So we prepared ourselves for heartbreak, but the organ was proving a touch more resilient than we’d feared. No sign of shipwreck, yet.

  Mind you, we hardly ever saw her, these days. She’d swanned down in a cab at Christmas with a bottle of gin tied up in red ribbon, printed a lipstick heart on our cheeks, left a big package for her mum and buggered off out again to some soirée or other. She was always good to her mother, mind, though Bren had to keep all the prezzies at our house so Leroy wouldn’t lay eyes on the wages of sin. Easter, she brought us some daffs.

  But Nora and I know what hoops the kept woman has to jump to work her passage and our little Tiff had looked very haggard and wan last time we saw her and kept excusing herself to go to the bathroom, too.

  Press the button for ‘Play’.

  ‘Lashings of Lolly!’ cried Tristram Hazard, live from London in a special birthday tribute to his famous father. If, God help you, you’ve seen the rotten show before, you’ll know this is the moment when Tristram introduces the lovely Tiffany. She shimmers forward in her beaded gown, smiling like a good child on its birthday, and she adds her sweet little husky voice to his: ‘Yessir! Lashings of Lolly!’

  But where is the lovely Tiffany tonight? Nowhere to be seen, although Tristram gives an expectant look towards the neon staircase down which she usually descends. No bloody Tiffany, and we’re going out live, too!

  Still, consummate pro that he is, he doesn’t miss a beat.

  ‘And I’d like you to give a very special “Lashings of Lolly” hi, there! to a truly grand old gentleman, to – Mr British Theatre, himself.’ His voice dropped a tone; he adopted a plummy smile and made a half-bow, half-curtsey, a sort of unisex obeisance. ‘My father . . . Sir Melchior Hazard.’

  Radiant, he swung round, open-armed: ‘Hi, there, Dad!’

  Roars of applause as My Lady Margarine, the face that launched a thousand pot-scourers, assisted the old man to the microphone. We felt the queasiest mixture of emotions – at seeing him in flesh and blood, after so long, in the first place; at seeing him make a fool of himself like this, in the second place; and in the third place, seeing him so silver-haired and shaky, too. But Wheelchair wasn’t so complicated. She perked right up, and said:

  ‘Well, well, well! He’s awfully well preserved, I must say! He looks quite pickled!’

  If you haven’t seen Tristram’s bastard show, it goes like this: there in the studio, which is all done up with neon palm trees for the occasion, there’s this big wheel, like a roulette wheel, or a blackjack wheel, only bigger, all over lightbulbs, with a neon arrow in the middle. This is how you play the game: you say a number and Tiffany gives the wheel a twirl. Round and round goes the bloody great wheel, pardon me, vicar, and if it stops when the arrow points to the number you’ve chosen, they give you half a grand. That’s the first round.

  Second round: double your money, triple it, quadruple it or lose it altogether, depending upon where the arrow comes to rest. Simplicity itself. It’s all about greed. The camera lingers on the faces in the audience, their eyes are popping out, they’re drooling and slobbering. Money! Money for nothing! A win on Tristram Hazard’s Lashings of Lolly, almost as good as a Civil List pension.

  Tristram starts up this slow chant as the wheel goes round; they all begin to clap their hands. ‘LASHINGS OF LOLLY!’

  Every time I catch a glimpse, I think I’ve gone mad.

  Now Tristram says to his father: ‘Are you ready to play Lotsa Birthday Lolly, Dad?’

  The old man gives a blink and looks round, as if he’s just woken up, doesn’t know where he is, startled by the lights. He might be just about to cry. God knows why he’s humiliating himself. Is it for his boy’s sake, to help out with Tristram’s pathetic career? Or just to give his ancient face another airing before the grave? Or . . . is he down on his luck at last, does he need the money?

  Funny. I never thought of that.

  Our father gathers himself together and gives us, in full measure, that wonderful old smile that goes right to the back row of the gallery, goes down to the depths of the vitals.

  Our father smiles and says: ‘I’m ready.’

  But where is Tiffany, in her purple sequin boob tube?

  Tiffany is not.

  Remember, all this is going out live, isn’t it, so Tris is in a nasty spot. You can see the panic in his eyes.

  And then a change comes over the invisible audience, the only evidence of whose existence we’ve had so far the odd cough and titter, some patters of applause. But now there is an audible shiver. They can see something that we can’t, and it bewilders them. An uneasy silence falls. And then is broken.

  I never knew our Tiff could sing. Sweet and true. La, la, la. And still you couldn’t see her, only hear her song, her wordless song that didn’t seem to have an end nor a beginning, that created the silence in which you heard it, so that an awed hush spread like ripples in a pond around that unearthly singing.

  Tristram turns his head towards the sound; there is a close-up, in which we see he looks aghast.

  Why didn’t they kill the transmission then and there? It turns out that one of the cameramen was sweet on Tiffany, thought Tristram, the legover champion of the commercial channels, treated the poor kid like shit. Which Tristram did. But, what have you, he’s a feller and I doubt this chivalrous cameraman would have done any better by her, over a period of time. Anyway, this cameraman wouldn’t let them pull the plug and he it was who now swung his lens round on to Tiffany herself as she stood at the top of the flight of neon steps.

  She was a spectacle to move the hardest heart, I must say. She didn’t have her make-up on, she hadn’t done her hair and she wore a pair of grey satin French knickers with real lace inserts, purple stilettos and one of those American footballer’s shirts with numbers on it – it was purple, too, but with a giant size 69 in red. Tristram put it in her stocking for a joke, last Christmas. Shows what he thought of her, really.

  There was a bit of wallflower stuck in her hair, over her ear, and her hands were full of flowers, daffs, bluebells, narcissi, she must have picked them out of the front gardens and the window boxes and the public parks that she’d passed by on her way to the studio during that long walk from Bermondsey.

  She wobbled something chronic on those purple shoes, she’d turned the heels right over on the way and now she kicked them off. One, two. She scored a palpable hit with the second one, though I don’t think she’d intended to, it got Tristram on the shin. (The real Tristram, sitting here beside his aunties in the flesh, let out a short, sharp cry in unison with himself on the screen, which made the cat on his lap leap up and hump off.)

  When Tristram cried out, that attracted her attention and her big, brown eyes fixed on him with some kin
d of recognition, though only in the vaguest way, as if she were remembering a dream, not a very pleasant dream, but not a nightmare. A sad dream, not a bad dream.

  The audience hadn’t the faintest what was going on and shuffled and tittered a bit, half trying to convince itself that this distraught girl was just another part of the action and would do something funny, shortly; or else take off her football shirt and give them all a treat. But she just went on singing. La, la, la.

  Then, slowly, slowly, keeping her eyes fixed on Tristram – he kept quite still, as if she’d mesmerised him – she started down the staircase.

  If Nora and I had a pound for every staircase we’d descended in our lives as showgirls, we’d be rolling in it.

  But Tiffany never came down that staircase like a star, poor kid. She wobbled so much on each step I was sure she’d fall and I leaned forward to the screen so that I could reach out and catch her if she tumbled, I was so caught up in it. Nora was crying her eyes out already and even old Wheelchair was sniffing away, reaching up her sleeve for her hankie. But, though my eyes were misting over, too, I saw the hang of our Tiff’s shirt, remembered how she’d spent her last visit with us in the toilet, and put two and two together.

  ‘You’ve put her in the club, Tristram!’ I couldn’t hold it back, I came right out with it.

  Nora turned the tap off sharpish, stopped crying in a flash and pressed the Standby button so the screen froze on our lovely Tiff in mid-teether.

  ‘What’s that? A little baby?’

  ‘I’m not ready to be a father,’ said Tristram. ‘I can’t take the responsibility. I’m not mature enough.’

  ‘No man ever is,’ announced Wheelchair, in her grande dame voice.

  We all three glowered at him. He cowered.

  ‘Aunties,’ he said. ‘Forgive me.’

  ‘It’s not for us to do the forgiving,’ said Nora. ‘It’s up to that sweet, innocent child and how you make amends to her if she can ever see it in her heart to forgive you. And you’d better make your bloody amends pronto before her father finds out you wouldn’t do the right thing or your days of close-ups are numbered. Not to mention your days of breathing. Now let’s see what foul thing you did next.’

  With that, she smartly pushed the Play button and shut him up.

  I can’t say if Tiffany knew it was Tristram down there at the bottom of the staircase or if she didn’t know him at all; whether he seemed familiar from some scarcely remembered time before her heart broke, or if his face seemed to her a new face that reminded her, just a little bit, of somebody else’s face. Somebody dead and gone. But down the stairs she came towards him, without a smile, flowers in her hair, half-naked on her poor, bare, shaky feet.

  Such pretty feet she always had, long, but perfectly formed, and pretty little piggies, nicely gradated, not like those long, root-like toes some people have. Her bare, pretty feet tracked blood behind her; she’d rubbed her heels raw on her purple stilettos. Fancy walking all the way from Bermondsey in those heels!

  Tristram looked as though he was propping old Melchior up, now, unless it was Melchior holding up his son; each clutched the other like drowning men at spars. Tristram’s career in pieces! His old man’s birthday tribute ruined! The flower-like child he’d violated turning up to shame him, mad as a hatter in front of an audience of millions! Was there no end to his troubles?

  She reached up behind her ear, fished out the bit of wallflower and offered it to Tristram. He, not knowing what to do with it, sniffed at it. That made her smile. He tried to give it back to her but she wasn’t having any.

  ‘Wallflower,’ she said. ‘You know what they say about wallflowers – many are called but few are chosen.’

  All this while, there’s the uneasy shuffling of the studio audience and every now and then some minion would dash across the set on a frenzied bid to stop the whole business in its tracks. But on it all went, and on, and on, and on.

  ‘Here,’ she says. ‘Cop hold.’

  Now she thrusts her battered little spring posy at Tristram, retaining for herself the one daffodil, which she holds to her mouth as if it were the mouthpiece of one of those sit-up-and-beg telephones we used to have, years ago. Hello, hello? Then she holds it to her ear. Nobody at home. And offers that flower to Tristram, too, with such a sad smile – a smile that changes when she looks at it again and notes that it is not, in fact, a telephone at all, to a pale giggle.

  ‘Daffy dill, daffy dilly,’ she said. And once more broke into song, but one with words, this time.

  Oh, my little sister, Lily, is a whore in Piccadilly,

  And my mother is another in the Strand –

  I thought: That’s it! They’ll fade her now, for sure! But still and still and still they didn’t, not even when, now she’d got rid of her flowers, she cried out suddenly:

  ‘Off with it! You only lent it to me! Nothing was mine, not ever!’

  And stripped off her Number 69 shirt, threw it to the floor and trampled on it. It was a shock to see her breasts under the cruel lights – long, heavy breasts, with big dark nipples, real breasts, not like the ones she’d shown off like borrowed finery to the glamour lenses. This was flesh, you could see that it would bleed, you could see how it fed babies.

  Then Melchior did something wonderful. Who’d have thought the old man had it in him? Suddenly, Melchior is in shot, holding out a blond mink stole which he must have plucked off the very shoulders of his wife. He put his hand on her bare shoulder and said, ‘Pretty, pretty lady.’

  Perhaps it was his tone of voice attracted her attention, that of a man selling old-fashioned rich black treacle toffee. When she turned towards him, he draped the stole round her shoulders, he covered her up.

  Then My Lady Margarine stepped in, too. They’d been keeping her on the sidelines, the while, so that she could come in at the end and take charge of the cheque lest her better half did something senile with it. She’s in good nick, I must say; lots of exercise does it, and the odd nip and tuck helps. Her cheeks give the game away; they’ve got that tight, full, shiny chipmunk look that spells out: facelift. You can always tell. Nevertheless, good nick. She was a brunette at her wedding, but had gone blonde with age, evidently, and now sported a pale gold chignon. She’s crying, too, possibly for the loss of her mink stole but, be fair, more likely as a tribute to the moment. If My Lady Margarine gave up the stage for the sake of her family thirty-five years ago, she must have always regretted it in a tiny corner of her heart for when Fate offered her another chance out of the blue she grabbed it with both hands.

  ‘Oh, my dear,’ she said to Tiffany. ‘We wanted him to marry you so much. I begged him, I implored him.’

  That brought Tristram out of his daze with a start, as if this was the first he’d heard of it. But Tiffany didn’t register, didn’t seem to hear. She was still shivering, in spite of the mink, but when she stroked her cheek against the fur, that made her smile, so lovely, so touching, she smiled that good child’s birthday smile and it was as if the touch of the fur gave her some of the strength of the animal, she came back together, again. She seemed to grow stronger before our very eyes; she didn’t come back to herself, exactly, but to somebody else who was in perfect control. She called out to an unseen presence off the set in a big, ringing voice: ‘Hey! Somebody call me a cab, right? A cab! Right away!’

  Then she turned towards the camera, as she did every week. The cameraman who was in love with her zoomed in as she tossed one end of the mink stole over her shoulder in a devil-may-care way, as if anything could happen, now, and she gave the viewers the full force of her big smile, the professional one that offered a view of her hundred-octane teeth as far back as the emerging wisdoms. She raised her hand. She waved.

  ‘Goodnight, everybody!’ Signing off, as she always did: ‘Sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite! Goodnight!’

  Then, in mid-wave, this new, strong, defiant person with Tiffany’s face covered her mouth with her hand as if she were going to be sick
, her face crumpled, she bolted off the set in the mink stole and the silk knickers and there they were, the Hazards, all three, left gaping like loons.

  Tristram came to himself first, although his hands were still full of flowers. But he remembered the camera was watching him and even managed to scrape up a smile.

  ‘And goodnight, too, from me, Tristram Hazard, and my very special hundredth birthday guest, Sir Melchior Hazard –’

  The good old goodbye formula. It reassured the studio audience. One or two of them started to clap, as if by doing that they could change what they had seen into what they ought to have seen.

  ‘– and his Lady –’

  More applause.

  ‘– my very own extra special Dad and Mum –’

  Applause doubled, trebled.

  ‘– and come and watch the lucky people win Lotsa Lolly! again, next week!’

  Roars. Applause. Up came the credits over the three of them bravely waving farewells to the invisible punters. Nora rose up with some ceremony and killed the tape. The set crackled. Then there was silence.

  ‘I thought Tiff might be here,’ said Tristram after a bit, snuffling and wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘We’ve looked everywhere else.’

  ‘Why didn’t you come here first of all, then?’

  ‘God, such a terrible night. . . The police. The casualty wards. We searched the night shelters.’

  ‘Who are this “we”?’ enquired Nora sharply.