Wise Children

by Angela Carter

  We could even get home for tea after the matinée, Wednesdays and Saturdays, and that saved the money we’d have spent on a poached egg at a Lyons teashop so we’d put aside those four pennies to save up for silk stockings. Stockings were always a problem. The hours we spent, darning the bloody things.

  Then, one afternoon, such a fuss and flutter backstage; what’s going on? What a shock we got. A sheep in a couture afternoon frock in a box, with a nanny in ribbons and two little russet ewe lambs. Our humble little company had been honoured by a visit from theatrical royalty.

  ‘I won’t go on,’ said Nora, always impetuous. She threw her sombrero on the floor and jumped on it. ‘What humiliation!’

  But the first Lady Hazard was a proper lady, not like the present incumbent, and I didn’t think, even then, that she’d set out for Kennington with the gross intention of letting her baby daughters relish the spectacle of her husband’s by-blows performing high kicks. I’ve asked her about it since, of course, and she said that he was away on tour, again, and she was banging about all by herself in that great, big house at her wits’ end how to pass a wet Saturday afternoon and her Old Nanny, the very same Old Nanny who’d looked after her when she was a baby and now was looking after her little babies, Old Nanny wanted to take the little girls to the panto in Kennington because her, Old Nanny’s, that is, her sister lived round the corner. (And as it turned out that sister was an aunt by marriage of Our Cyn’s new husband, so a bond was forged and after Old Nanny’s sister moved to Worthing, Old Nanny used to drop in and visit Grandma.) Old Nanny thought she might pop in to see her sister after the panto and the Lady Atalanta, on the spur of the moment, said: ‘Hang on, I’ll get my hat and come, too.’

  The show went on, of course, and so did we. What? Lose a day’s pay? Lose the job, too, like as not, and then back to the dreary round of agents’ waiting rooms. Anything but that.

  She says, as soon as she set eyes on us, she knew, and then she checked the programme and was certain, because Perry told her all about us after they got together. She sent us flowers, after, anonymously, but easy to guess where they came from – forget-me-nots. I thought that was quite touching but Nora thought, bad taste. And once she asked us to tea, as well, but Nora said: ‘Not on your life.’

  Our half-sisters responded to the show in ways already characteristic of their future personalities. Saskia set up a howl like a banshee the moment she saw the beans come on, as if she knew us at first sight and was all agog to steal our thunder, while Imogen fell asleep and left her mouth open through the entire proceedings, in preparation for her career as a fish. But the Lady A. watched us, or so she told me, years on, with tears in her eyes and guilt in her bosom. She may have slipped up the once, but, all the same, she truly loved our father. She must have loved him, her with her handle and her bank account and her father in the House of Lords, to marry a man with nothing to offer but the best legs in the British Isles.

  She’d had no news from Perry, either.

  Then the panto season was over and we were on the road again. Fifteen years old, now. Five foot, six inches. Little brown bobs, though Nora often talked wistfully about going blonde. She felt the future lay with blondes. Should we? Shouldn’t we? One thing was certain – she couldn’t do it unilaterally. On our own, you wouldn’t look at us twice. But, put us together. . .

  We were hardened old troupers, by now. We had our printed cards: ‘Dora and Leonora, 49 Bard Road, London S.W.2.’ You always had to travel on a Sunday, when the trains went slow out of respect for the Sabbath and sometimes stopped dead in the middle of a field as if taken short. We feared not bedbugs, nor cockroaches; fleas could not daunt our spirits. We learned to despise the ‘Wood’ family, that is, the empty seats. We lived off the Scotch eggs the landladies put out for late supper, after the show. Grandma went spare when she heard about the Scotch eggs. ‘It’s only sausage meat,’ I said. ‘They wrap some sausage meat round the hard-boiled egg. You know what they make sausage meat out of, sawdust and the bits of old elastic.’ Grandma wasn’t having any. ‘Cannibals!’ she said.

  But now we knew the world didn’t end when Grandma disapproved. Greatly daring, knowing what she’d say, egged on by the other girls, we finally invested in some little bits of rabbit fur to snuggle into when the wind blew chill. ‘Dead bunny,’ said Grandma when she saw. As we grew up, cracks appeared between us. She loved us but she often disapproved.

  We were just slips of girls but we soon knew our way around. We had our little handbags with the little gilt powder compacts and the puffs; when in doubt, we powdered our noses, to give us time to think up repartee. A rat once ate my powder puff in the dressing room at the Nottingham Theatre Royal. We kept our make-up in the standard two-tier tin – rouge, Leichner, that solid mascara you sliced off into a tiny tin frying pan and melted over a candle. Then you put it on with a matchstick, quick, quick, quick, before it got hard.

  Grandma kept the programmes, every show we ever were in, right from that first Babes in the Wood up to the ones from ENSA. She made up big scrapbooks. After she went, there they were, stored away in a trunk in the loft – the whole of our lives. We felt bad when we saw those scrapbooks, we remembered how we’d teased her, we’d brought home sausage rolls and crocodile handbags, but she’d kept on snipping out the cuttings, pasting them in. Piles of scrapbooks, the cuttings turned by time to the colour of the freckles on the back of an old lady’s hand. Her hand. My hand, as it is now. When you touch the old newsprint, it turns into brown dust, like the dust of bones.

  The last scrapbook stops short in 1944, leaving us marooned for ever just turning thirty, on the cusp, caught up in one last pose, would you believe, done up as bulldogs. Bulldog Breed. For some bloody silly charity matinée, drumming-up cash to replace lost lovers, lost sons, boys dead on the Burma Road, the irreplaceable. Why did we do it, Nora? ‘We had to do something,’ she said. ‘Anyway, we entertained the troops.’

  And so we did.

  I can see Grandma now, sitting at the kitchen table, sticking the picture in the book, the tip of her tongue between her teeth, breathing hard, all concentration. She picks up her pen, dips in the ink, writes underneath, in her round, careful hand: ‘Duke of York’s Theatre, May 20, 1944.’

  Then she reached for the stout and found the bottle empty. Oh, Grandma! Talk about the ‘fatal glass of beer’! If you’d been able to curb your thirst that night, you’d have lived to see VE-day. She pulled herself up by the back of a chair, humming a tune, humming, maybe: ‘There’ll be bluebirds over The white cliffs of Dover . . .’ or: ‘I’ll get lit up when the lights go up in London.’ She arranged her little toque with the black-dotted veil on top of her head in the fly-blown square of mirror over the sink. She touched up her beauty spot with eyeblack, stowed away the empties in that eternal lino-cloth bag. The siren blared but she wasn’t going to let Hitler inconvenience her drinking habits, was she?

  She was taken out by a flying bomb on her way to the off-licence.

  When we got home after the all-clear, we found the scrapbook where she left it, beside the scissors and the pot of Gloy. And the empty glass, with the lacy remnants of the foam gone hard inside it.

  And that was how we lost Grandma.

  It was Grandma and Guinness caused us to become brunettes. One night, when we were resting between engagements, we were all sitting round this very kitchen table, our one and only kitchen table, having a few drinks.

  ‘If not blonde,’ said Nora, ‘why don’t we henna it? Coppernobs. Gingernuts. Let’s face it, Dora, we need a little something extra to make us stand out.’

  ‘Not red,’ I said, ‘because of Saskia and Imogen.’

  Grandma took a good look at us, at our big, grey eyes and our good, strong Hazard bones that would come in handy, later on, but weren’t much use to fifteen-year-olds because we never had the ingénue look. Hard as nails, they said. That’s the Chance girls.

  Grandma was partaking of the bottled stout she never knew would later p
rove her downfall.

  ‘Not red,’ said Grandma, eyeing her glass. ‘Black.’

  The dye came in a bottle labelled ‘Spanish Ebony’. The bathroom was as cold as hell. Still is. We stood there, shivering in our camisoles, eyeing the dye as if there were a genie in the bottle and we were scared to let it out. This was a big step for us, remember. We were about to change our entire personality.

  ‘In for a penny, in for a pound,’ said Nora, at last, and plunged her head into the washbasin, and I anointed her, poured on the colour, rubbed it in, thick, black stuff, it gave me mourning fingernails for weeks. When she straightened up, big drips ran down her forehead, got in her eyes, stung them, she wept. The splashes got everywhere, the towels looked like bath night at the Minstrel Show and we had to cut ourselves fringes when our hair dried out because of the five o’clock shadow on our foreheads that never washed off. So she was crying off the whole idea before it came to my turn but if one of us dyed, so did the other, no choice, that was that. Then we slipped on our kimonos, cleaned up the bathroom as best we could – but we never got the marks off the towels – put each other’s hair in pins to fix the kiss curls and went down to have a cuppa with Grandma looking so downhearted she made us lace it with a spot of the brandy she’d just opened on account of the cold snap.

  ‘Very unseasonal weather for July,’ she said, topping up.

  But when it dried out and we’d given it a good brush, we didn’t know ourselves. Half a yard of black satin that turned into our cheeks like commas. It was the turning point. We called ourselves ‘The Lucky Chances’ after that. After that, we were a featured turn. After that, we were sixteen and we were legal.

  Nora was always free with it and threw her heart away as if it were a used bus ticket. Either she was head over heels in love or else she was broken-hearted. She had it off first with the pantomime goose, when we were Mother Goose’s goslings that year in Newcastle upon Tyne. The goose was old enough to be her father and Grandma would have plucked him, stuck an apple up his bum and roasted him if she’d found out and so would the goose’s wife, who happened to be principal boy. So finding a place to, as Irish might have put it, consummate their passion (although Irish abhorred a split infinitive) was something of a problem for them because it was before the days we could boast a dressing room to ourselves and his wife was eversuch a hairy woman, always a fresh growth between her eyebrows, under her arms, on her legs, to pluck or shave so she was always holed up in the one she shared with the goose, depilating herself.

  The goose had Nora up against the wall in the alley outside the stage door one foggy night, couldn’t see your hand in front of your face, happily for them. You don’t get fogs like that, these days. It was after the cast Christmas party. I looked round the Green Room but they’d gone.

  Don’t be sad for her. Don’t run away with the idea that it was a squalid, furtive, miserable thing, to make love for the first time on a cold night in a back alley with a married man with strong drink on his breath. He was the one she wanted, warts and all, she would have him, by hook or by crook. She had a passion to know about Life, all its dirty corners, and this is how she started, in at the deep end, for better or worse, while I stood shivering on the edge like the poor cat in the adage.

  When she saw her man was gone, the plume-hatted goose-wife slapped her thigh. There was a jealous madness in that woman. I took the bull by the horns and started off the masquerade – I answered to the name of Nora and kept out of the same place as myself until Nora came back to the party, ripped stockings, smelling of dead fish, smiling like the cat that got the cream, and pregnant.

  But we never found out she was pregnant until she lost it in Nottingham, the Royalty, when she haemorrhaged during a fouetté, we were a pair of spinning tops. Nothing like real blood in the middle of the song-and-dance act. It was long past pantotime, the goose gone off to Glasgow to do a Chu Chin Chow, he never wrote. Nora cried her eyes out but not because she’d lost the goose. She blazed and then she cooled; she’d always blaze, she’d always cool. No. She wept the loss of the baby.

  Oh, my poor Nora! She was a martyr to fertility. After that miscarriage, I took steps, got her to get herself fitted up with the full equipment, but Nora never bothered with the diaphragm, not when she got carried away. A sort of grand carelessness possessed her each time she fell in love. She opened up, she melted down at the first touch, the first kiss; each time she fell in love, she fell in love for the first time, no matter how many times she fell in love and, when she fell in love, a Dutch cap was the last thing on her mind. I was in charge of the chequebook, too. She didn’t trust herself with that, either.

  After the miscarriage, she went round with a face like a month of Sundays for all of three weeks, then, whoops! head over heels, again, this time with the man who played the drums in the pit band and he was old enough to be her grandfather. She was particularly attracted to older men, in those days. Even if her diaphragm always stayed in its little box, the drummer took good care, always pulled out in time, and that went on for half a year, on and off, depending on the touring, although sometimes, when she stripped off, she’d be black and blue. ‘Love-taps,’ she said. I thought, preserve me from the passion of a percussionist.

  The more I saw of love, the less I liked the look of it. I might well have reached the age of consent but that didn’t mean I had to consent to it, whether I wanted to or not. Until that fateful engagement in Croydon, when I fell. Such was the effect of our new haircuts and our new, bubbling, brunette personalities that we now had second billing and a number in white satin pyjamas sitting side by side on a crescent moon. And, bliss! a dressing room of our very own. Nibbles from London managements. And we always liked Croydon, although it was a dump, just a dormitory town, just outside London, but we could get the late tram home and save on digs. I told you, Brixton used to be everso convenient for public transport.

  I felt as if I’d met him somewhere else before, although I never had. I didn’t think of love or passion when I thought of him; I only thought about the down on his delicious cheek.

  As if it were yesterday. The show was called Over to You. Nora was ready for a change. She ditched the aged drummer and took up with a wee scrap of a lad pale as a lily, blond as a chick. He didn’t know what hit him. Nora used to give her all. Because we shared the dressing room, I used to have to sit on the stairs outside and listen to them through the wall going at it like hammer and tongs on the horsehair sofa where we were supposed to put our feet up between shows. He muttered broken phrases, sometimes sobbed. Something about him touched my heart. Nora said, he was young enough to be grateful but it wasn’t that.

  I sat on the stairs outside and listened to them and my mind began to change, until I came to a decision: by hook or by crook, I said to myself, come what may, the day that I am seventeen, I’ll do it on that horsehair sofa.

  Do what on the horsehair sofa?

  What do you think?

  It was late April but still chilly. Little cold winds whipped round the wings and the bare backstage corners. We turned up our gas fire and plucked our eyebrows. There was a bunch of flowers for our birthday and a cake with candles ready for the party after the show.

  ‘Nora . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Give me your fella for a birthday present.’

  She put down her tweezers and gave me a look.

  ‘Get your own fella,’ she said.

  They’d sent us early lilac. The scent of white lilac always brings it back. Seventeen hurts.

  ‘He’s the only one I want, Nora.’

  I’ll only do it once, I said. He’s really stuck on you, Nora, he’s crazy about you and he’s never given me a second look. But won’t he be able to tell the difference? I don’t know, we won’t know until we try; but why should he notice any difference? Same eyes, same mouth, same hair. If it was only the once and if I keep my mouth shut . . . he is as innocent as asparagus, his heart as pure as Epps’ cocoa, poor lamb. Why should he guess?


  ‘Nora, I want him so.’

  ‘Oh, Dora,’ she said, for then she knew that only he would do.

  She put on my Mitsouko and I put on her Shalimar. She had a new dress, floral chiffon, peonies, rhodies, dusty pink and misty blue and mauve, long skirts were back, I looked romantic. We took big breaths and blew out the candles on the cake; our wish at seven had come true and ever since I was a true believer in birthday-candle magic so you can guess what it was I wished for at seventeen. I smelled the unfamiliar perfume on my skin and felt voluptuous. As soon as they started to call me Nora, I found that I could kiss the boys and hug the principals with gay abandon because all that came quite naturally to her. To me, no. I was ever the introspective one.

  As for Nora/Dora, she kept herself to herself until she’d had a couple and then she forgot to behave herself and carried on in her usual fashion but by the time she started dancing on the table most of the party was plastered so nobody noticed she was behaving out of character and that’s how Dora got off with the pianist, to my considerable embarrassment in subsequent months.