Wise Children

by Angela Carter

  Who’d gone to all that bother? We found out later it was the Mexican cleaning lady. Catholic. Ever so Catholic. She thought there must be a holy relic in the casket, because it was packed with such care, and she treated it accordingly. We hardly liked to disturb the casket, but we thought we ought to check the earth was still intact so we opened it up. Whew! No wonder she’d lit up incense. She must have thought the relic was starting to rot. As soon as we lifted the lid, a rank aroma wafted from the pot and filled the little improvised chapel with an unmistakable smell.

  And that was how we found out where Daisy’s Persian cat did wee-wee whilst on the Super-Chief.

  We tipped Pussy’s night-soil out the window but whatever were we to do now that the sacred earth, thoroughly desecrated, was gone for good? Easy. We filled the casket up again with soil from the Forest of Arden, from the facsimile Elizabethan knot garden itself; we thought that would make it more authentic. So there was the sacred earth, as good as new; and Melchior’s plan was, the first day of the shoot, to sprinkle it all over the wood near Athens, as a consecration of the grounds, a dedication of the actors and a photo-opportunity of the first water.

  I remember that day, the day The Dream began, as if it were yesterday. We all arrived in costume – we were a motley crew and no mistake. None of your soppy fairies with butterfly wings and floral wreaths. No, sir. As Peaseblossom and Mustardseed, our bras and knicks had leaves appliquéd at the stress points, there were little lights in our shaggy wigs, and when we saw how the rest had fared in the wardrobe, we thought we’d got off lightly, I must say, because some had antlers sprouting out of their foreheads and fur patches covering up the rude bits; others were done up as flying beetles, in stiff, shiny bodices split up at the back; and one or two with boughs, not arms, plus a lavish use of leather and feathers all round.

  Furthermore, remember that not fairies alone inhabited the wood near Athens. A giant mouse, saddled and bridled, trotted past. A bunny, in a wedding wreath and veil. Some dragonflies, in masks. Several enormous frogs. Dwarfs, giants, children, all mixed up together. Suddenly I had a sinking feeling; I knew it in my bones. This film is going to lose a fortune.

  Genghis Khan had dug deep into his pocket for this opening spectacle. There was a hundred-piece orchestra of ancient instruments in situ, he’d brought them down from Berkeley and dressed them up in tights and ruffs. One wore a yarmulke. Lutes are a bugger to tune, one reason why they went out, so the wood near Athens twanged and pinged with discords as they tried to get them all in tune.

  Puck somersaulted past and goosed me. Irish blew a kiss. Drunk as a skunk and clutching his briefcase to his bosom, soon he would be drunker. He’d fallen off the wagon because I’d missed a date. He didn’t own me, you know. He’d got a nerve. I’d only started taking German lessons, hadn’t I? One lunchtime when Nora was having a quick linguine and cunnilingus chez Tony, I’d taken the book of the day to share with my hot dog in the commissary. This runty little German chap with cropped hair and smelly feet, baggy blue suit, no tie, some kind of script consultant somewhere, he took one look at the title of my book. ‘Schopenhauer!’ he sneered. His conversation was brusque and surprising. He always looked on the black side. He was a tonic in Hollywood. He kept my feet on the ground.

  Irish blew me an ironic kiss. Peregrine had an arm round Irish’s shoulders, not only to express affection but to help keep him upright. The Lady A. was there, in a Lanvin frock and pearls, her role in this production was only that of the director’s wife, but her daughters were there in costume. Melchior had given his little Saskia a cameo. The Indian prince.

  For Oberon is passing fell and wrath

  Because that she as her attendant hath

  A lovely boy, stol’n from an Indian king.

  That Indian prince, in gold lamé pyjamas and matching turban with purple feather fastened with an amethyst pin. Pure jail-bait. Imogen was just another fairy, with the one line: ‘And I.’ But the assistant director, the besotted Peregrine, twisted the wardrobe’s arm until off came the owl mask and feather camisole of the original design and on went a tiny pink tutu, so Imogen stuck out like a sore thumb.

  There was a newsreel team, energising a wisecrack out of Daisy Duck in her fairy queen frock, tulle and spangles, look! no panty-line, while Genghis Khan, in his usual jodhpurs accessorised with whip, straddled a canvas chair and gloated upon the fairyland that he had built. Journalists, photographers, secretaries, sycophants, script girls, continuity girls, and set dressers milled and stirred around him, activity, according to Irish’s acid-tipped pen, irresistibly reminiscent of the movements of maggots upon rotting meat.

  But there was one figure in all this mêlée who didn’t quite belong, who drew attention to itself by being so inconspicuous, so that it caught my eye – huddled in raincoat, dark glasses, headscarf, as if wardrobe had equipped her with a ‘disguise’ outfit from a B-feature. Everywhere that Daisy went, this sad little shadow would go, slipping after her, dissolving into the crowd if ever Daisy looked in her direction. That was odd. What was going on?

  Then the ancient musicians gathered themselves together at last at the behest of the conductor: what power on earth had got Stokowski into tights? Amid a welter of twangs, all embarked upon a mass rendition of, possibly, a galliard, although it sounded as if the lute section might have been making a stab at a pavane. When it ground to a halt, Melchior stepped out from among the trees in a burst of flashbulbs to address us, bearing aloft, on a crimson velvet cushion with gold fringe that I knew for a fact, because wardrobe told me, came off the set of Elizabeth and Essex, the Shakespeare pot that held, and you know I kid you not, veritable soil, rich with association, from the Forest of Arden.

  Melchior smiled upon us, I had to put a hand out and steady myself on Nora’s arm just the same time she put her hand out for my arm. He smiled and then he said: ‘Friends,’ in his voice like Hershey’s Syrup, and although the old enchantment instantly overcame me, I quivered with anxiety: would he now continue, ‘Romans, countrymen’, so tense with the significance of the moment that he cued himself into the other speech? But he did not get the chance to get it wrong.

  ‘Friends!’

  Genghis Khan dragged his eyes off Daisy, took one look at Melchior and leapt up as if shot.

  ‘Cut!’

  Melchior clutched the casket and gaped.

  ‘Take five minutes break, you guys,’ said Genghis.

  The lutenists left off anxiously trying to tune up on the q.t., the photographers stopped snapping. There was a babble of surprise. Peregrine and Irish rocked together, overcome with mirth. The Lady A. exhibited puzzle and affront, but not half so much as her husband did, who dropped his dignity pronto, and snapped at Genghis: ‘What is the meaning of. . .’

  ‘Get ’em off!’ roared Genghis. Daisy, I saw, was stuffing her hankie in her mouth or else she would have burst out laughing, too.

  ‘What?’

  I thought his costume was a masterpiece, myself. It was balletic, really; there was a high, spiky crown of what might have been fishbones. And a long, black wig, down his back. And a fur bolero over his chest, which was bare. And a necklace of what looked like babies’ skulls. And snakeskin tights.

  How well he filled those tights!

  ‘Get ’em off!’

  Because the way that Melchior filled those tights was the snag; Genghis hadn’t gone to all this expense so that his wife would be upstaged by her co-star’s package, and he explained, in loud and rasping tones, that, before the show went on again, Melchior must retire to his dressing room and don an extra heavy-duty athletic supporter. Or even two.

  ‘Get it?’

  Otherwise, one felt, Genghis would tear off the offending parts with his bare teeth. And now all present were too scared to laugh. Even Irish sobered up, although Daisy wasn’t the only one red in the face and chewing on a hankie, I can tell you. It took a moment or two for her husband’s predicament to sink into the Lady A.’s gentility and then she took a daugh
ter by each hand and swept off with some dignity. I admired her for that. It was suddenly so quiet on the stage you could hear little Saskia’s voice trailing behind them: ‘Mummy, what had Daddy done? Mummy? Why are we going away? Mummy, why is everybody angry with Daddy?’

  First Melchior went bright red. Then he went stark white. His dark eyes glowed like hot coals. He clutched his casket of sacred soil and glared at Genghis, mute with fury. If he’d had any class, I mean, real class, he’d have turned upon his heel and stalked off then and there. But that’s unfair. Think what was at stake. The entire production was at stake. His Hollywood future – that is, his chance to take North America back for England, Shakespeare and St George. That is, to make his father’s old dream everybody’s dream. And his chance to make an awful lot of money, too. Don’t let’s forget the money.

  But, for the moment, it was a Mexican standoff. Genghis glared. Melchior glared. They went on glaring at each other under the fascinated attention of the fairies and the fools and the scriptwriters until Peregrine it was who broke the tension, and he broke it with a trick. Although his belly was still agitating with suppressed merriment, he kept his presence of mind, picked his way over the electric cables, among the lights and cameras, knelt down in front of his brother, then and there, with Genghis and the rest of us looking on.

  ‘I know what’s causing the trouble,’ said Peregrine.

  With one swift pass of his hand he removed, from the problematic portion of Melchior’s costume, a scarlet macaw.

  He rose up, bowed to every quarter of the compass, every section of the audience, presenting the macaw upon his finger to us all as it flexed its wings and turned its head inquisitively from side to side. Something about its sharp little beady eyes reminded me of Grandma.

  ‘I think you’ll find everything perfectly acceptable, now,’ said Peregrine to Genghis, who was lost for words.

  But the macaw wasn’t lost for words. It cocked its head to one side and announced in stentorian tones: ‘It ain’t no sin!’

  It hopped off Peregrine’s finger, took to the air and landed on Daisy’s shoulder, which gave the poor girl a chance to laugh, which was just as well as she was just about to choke.

  ‘It ain’t no sin!’ said the macaw again, dancing from foot to foot and winking. ‘It ain’t no sin!’

  And then, thank God, reprieve. First Genghis Khan chuckled reluctantly, then he let rip a coarse guffaw. The cameras clicked, the cameras whirred, the cameras flashed and the show was on the road again. Thank God for that macaw. It saved the situation. It was trained up for a Mae West promotion, apparently, It was an escape.

  In the midst of all this, I saw that one of the gorillas from studio security had got hold of Daisy’s raincoated shadow, clamped one of its great, hairy paws over her mouth to stop her noise, was escorting her outside in the most unceremonious way, in a fireman’s lift, but he also looked quite bored about it, as if he’d done the same to her before. What on earth was going on? But now a heavy silence suddenly fell; all eyes were turned towards Melchior, as he held aloft the Shakespeare pot as if it were the Holy Grail.

  ‘Friends, we are gathered here together in remembrance of a sacred name – the name of Shakespeare.’

  Irish, I noticed, was raising a brown paper bag to his lips in a spontaneous toast to Peregrine. The macaw had taken off again and was flapping about somewhere under the roof. Peregrine got hold of the brown paper bag and drank a toast to the macaw.

  ‘I bear here, in this quaintly shaped casket – a casket in the image of, for me, the greatest of all our English heroes – only a little bit of earth. Nothing more. Earth. And yet it is especially precious to me because it is English earth, perhaps some of the most English earth of all, precious above rubies, above the love of women. For it is earth from William Shakespeare’s own home town, far away, yes! Sleepy old Stratford-upon-Avon, earth gathered up and borne hither as tenderly as if it were a baby by two lovely young Englishwomen, nymphs, roses, almost as precious to me as my own daughters . . . my nieces. Peaseblossom! Mustardseed!’

  He called us and we knew what we must do, although he’d betrayed us once again, and this time, in public. Even so, we flitted up to him and knelt one on each side, coiling round his knee, Nora in yellow, I in pink, both of us near tears. Almost as precious as his own daughters, indeed!

  ‘Dora . . . Leonora . . .’

  He got us wrong, of course. He didn’t even know us well enough to smell the difference, but he was well away, now it was family time. He waved his arm towards Peregrine, exiled among the writers.

  ‘And my brother, my own brother . . . welcome! Welcome to our great enterprise, in which you’ve played so noble a part! And welcome, welcome, to all of you come together here, so many, many folk, to engage with us in the great task at hand, to ransack all the treasuries of this great industry of yours to create a glorious, an everlasting monument to the genius of that poet whose name will be reverenced as long as English is spoken, the man who knew the truth about us all and spoke those universal truths in every phrase . . . who left the English language just a little bit more glorious than he found it, and let some of that glory rub off on us old Englishmen too, as they set sail around the globe, bearing with them on that mission the tongue that Shakespeare spoke!’

  When he said that, as it came rolling out, you could almost see the tongue, on a red satin cushion, under glass.

  Melchior now swung on his heel and made a sort of obeisance; his voice switched to a mellifluous croon.

  ‘Let us hail the vision of this great man . . .’

  Genghis Khan, thwacking the crop against his thigh, stood up and took a bow, sneaking a peak at Melchior’s crotch to make sure all was still in order.

  ‘This great man, who first came to me in London and said, “Let us give the world the splendour of your art, and, what is more, let us dedicate that splendour to Shakespeare!”’

  Everybody clapped, having no option, except Irish, who had got his paper bag back and formed a permanent attachment to it.

  ‘And let us hail the Queen of Fairyland herself – Titania!’

  Daisy Duck parked her bum on the arm of her chair, gave the cameras a friendly wave, plus a glimpse of cleavage, and climbed up to the dais next to Melchior. Puck had managed to keep his hands to himself for ten whole minutes, but now he goosed a passing vole, who squealed. The macaw, high on a strut, abruptly extruded a greenish, semi-liquid substance that gathered sufficient impetus as it sped downwards to announce its arrival on terra firma with a lingering SPLAT!

  ‘Now, we poor players, let us all take hands.’

  He clasped Daisy Duck’s hands very firmly and gave her the full force of his lovely smile, hot and brown as Bovril, and she fluttered. Tough as old boots, yet she visibly fluttered. There was a universal satisfied stir and contented rustle in the studio. It was as if he’d put them under a spell, that voice, such glamour. Everybody reached out to catch hold of everybody else as if it were New Year’s Eve, time to sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’. Fairy clutched Amazon, Amazon clutched Athenian, rude mechanical clutched lover, Nora and I clutched one another but not before that Puck copped hold of my spare hand.

  Give me your hands, if we be friends,

  And Robin shall restore amends.

  Melchior raised his face to the bright lights on this concluding piece of nonsense, with his lips a little bit ajar in that selfsame knicker-shifting smile that must have been the downfall of my poor mother. Daisy looked at him as if the heavens had opened and she’d glimpsed inside. Smitten. The thunderbolt had struck. Cameras whirred, clicked, flashed. But Puck cried out with rage, dropped my hand like a hot brick and commenced to pummel with his little fists in the disputed region of Melchior’s athletic supporter, yelping the while: ‘That’s my line, you bastard!’

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Irish lean over and throw up.

  Genghis Khan struck down Puck’s hands with one cut of his crop and hissed: ‘Ever heard of the face on the cutting-ro
om floor?’ That shut Puck up. He fell back. Then Melchior raised aloft the casket of earth in the hand that was not holding on to Daisy Duck.

  Every fairy takes his gait,

  And each several chamber bless,

  Through this palace, with sweet peace . . .

  In the blessed name of . . . SHAKESPEARE!

  He looked deep into Daisy’s eyes and she looked deep back. Then he let go of her, dipped his hand in the pot, scattered the earth from the Forest of Arden around him on the floor in a lovely, stately gesture and raised two fingers in benediction. What a splendid pontiff he would have made, given half the chance. Then the ancient instruments started up again and I saw Daisy furtively wipe away a tear because it had all been so very lovely and, furthermore, while Peregrine assisted Irish from the scene as the best boy tipped sand from a fire-bucket over Irish’s deposit, little Miss Sharp Eyes here was privileged to witness a positive disturbance in Melchior Hazard’s perhaps not wholly well-functioning jockstrap that boded ill for marital bliss all round.

  Ghengis Khan’s office was full of orchids, he grew them himself. He liked the carnivores best and often fed them flies while some little actress quaked on the couch on the other side of his desk, where he kept a photograph of Daisy in a silver frame displayed conspicuously to show the poor things to what dizzy heights Genghis Khan could take a girl if she was nice to him. The very sight of Daisy made them drop their drawers. It was all a dream come true for Genghis. Crude power. He was the Master/Madam of a very peculiar brothel, where all the girls for sale were shadows; he bought and sold them, but the cash involved was just as real as the cash he used to pocket long ago, in Brooklyn, when he had all his hair and the Brooklyn wife he’d left for Daisy and had started out in life as a trolley-car conductor. They used to thank him at the garage when he brought his vehicle back at night. I mean to say, he could have sold it for scrap, couldn’t he? How could a boy of such vision resist Hollywood? So out he came and made his dreams come true. Literally. That was how he made his living, making dreams come true.