Wise Children

by Angela Carter

  Nora always had respect for Genghis after that because he took one look at the gun, one look at her, switched on his intercom and told the secretary everything was fine.

  ‘I’d feel everso much more comfortable if you’d put your shirt back on, Mr Khan,’ she said, so he did and then something inside him broke, he grovelled, he said his heart was broken and he wanted his revenge on Melchior, etc. etc. etc. Then he said: ‘Well, if you won’t, how about your sister?’ Then he said, could she put in a good word for him with Daisy, anyway?

  But Genghis Khan was yesterday’s papers as far as Daisy was concerned. She vowed she’d marry Melchior if it was the last thing she did. We tried to stop her but she leapt into her white roadster again as soon as she’d gobbled up her bagel and roared off in the direction of Hacienda Hazard.

  ‘She’s everso overwrought,’ said Nora. ‘Do you think we ought to go, too, Dora, to make sure she’s all right?’

  I reached to ring a cab.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘Oh, bloody yes. Try and keep me away!’

  By chance, the English Colony had foregathered in its entirety at the Hazard place that sunny forenoon in order to consume the contents of a box of kippers that had arrived, like us, on the Super-Chief, and, brunch done, to play a game of cricket on the extensive lawn so there they all were, in the Santa Fe-style dining hall, picking away at bones and spreading the Cooper’s Oxford on their toast, the men with their monocles, the women in gloves, while the Lady A. presided behind a silver teapot.

  Enter Daisy.

  She overshot the drive and screeched to a halt on the cricket pitch, demolishing a wicket. Then in she burst through the French windows, spilling out of her nightie in all directions, hair like knitting the kittens had got at. Besides, you wouldn’t recognise her without her make-up, she was a plain little thing, under all that.

  It was the Lady A. that I felt sorry for. I could even find it in my heart, at that moment, to feel sorry for Imogen and Saskia. The girls clung to their mother’s skirts (she was wearing a lovely mid-calf pink floral crepe de Chine with fichu plus a wide-brimmed straw with an old rose ribbon), too scared to cry, too overwhelmed by the horror of it, the madwoman in her underwear, the screams, the tears, the recriminations. Meanwhile, the English Colony, ever unflappable, took their final bites of kipper and laid their knives and forks together on their plates.

  ‘Such kippers, Attie! Delish. Quite like home.’

  ‘Lovely party, Attie. Must run!’

  ‘Darling Attie, ‘byee. Don’t forget, our place next week. Roast beef!’

  They made their excuses and left; you’d never have thought Daisy was raving all the while, improvising innumerable variations on the theme of: ‘It’s your baby, I swear it! Your baby! This baby’s got a right to a father!’

  Nora and I held hands, at that, and could not bear to look at Melchior. The Lady A., too British or too embarrassed to bring up the rights of her own babies, gave the girls a little hug and said:

  ‘Now, you just run upstairs, and see what Nanny’s doing.’

  They wore white organdie. Saskia had a pink sash, Imogen a blue one. They wore their hair in braids. At their age, we were keeping our Grandma.

  ‘Be off with you, like good chicks,’ said Melchior, undergoing stress.

  ‘Scoot!’ said Daisy, with menace.

  The Lady A. felt the side of the teapot. Evidently the temperature was no longer satisfactory. She rang a handbell.

  ‘I’m sure we’d all feel better for a cup of tea.’

  That stopped Daisy in her tracks. She rolled her eyes.

  ‘I can’t believe this!’

  And sat down suddenly on the chintz settee with a big, hissing sigh, as though expending all the air inside her. She was deflated. The Lady A. held out her arms to my sister and me.

  ‘Nora . . . Dora . . . How lovely to see you!’ She smelled of Arpége. And that’s another reason why we took the old trout in, because she gave us a hug and kissed us each on the cheek as if we were family. Then she let Daisy Duck take away her husband. She didn’t even put up a fight. She smiled bravely and let him go. By the time the shadows lay along the lawn everything was settled. A swift, Mexican divorce for both parties, to be fitted in while the second unit dealt with Hermia, Helena, Lysander and Demetrius, and then Oberon and Titania could make it legal. They call it ‘serial monogamy’. Daisy gave us a lift back to the Forest of Arden; she was planning her new wedding already. She wanted us to be bridesmaids but we said, bad taste.

  So that was that.

  I do believe that Melchior thought he knew what he was doing when he offed with the old, onned with the new in such spectacular fashion; I think he thought that he was marrying, not into Hollywood but Hollywood itself, taking over the entire factory, thus acquiring control of the major public dreaming facility in the whole world. Shakespeare’s revenge for the War of Independence. Once Melchior was in charge of this fabulous machine, he would bestride the globe.

  And now I come to think of it, his father passed on in America, didn’t he? Did that have something to do with his ambition, which now reached its peak? He was drunk with glory. He left The Dream largely to its own devices, to Mascara’s inventions, to Genghis’s interventions. He was certain it could come to no harm, that he could do no wrong.

  But some sixth sense told me we’d passed that fine line that divides the socko from the flopperoo some time before; now the production headed faster and faster towards disaster.

  But what about Genghis?

  ‘You can deal with Genghis,’ I said. ‘He wants to make a mother of you, after all.’

  ‘Oh, no, I can’t deal with Genghis. Tony would kill me. You deal with Genghis. He’ll never tell the difference?’

  ‘What about poor old Irish?’

  ‘I thought you weren’t seeing Irish any more. Oh, go on, Dora; you can do it. My opinion is, that Genghis Khan will ring us up and propose to whichever one of us answers the telephone in’ – and here she consulted her watch – ‘about fifteen minutes’ time, as soon as Daisy gets home and tells him he’s been relegated to second division.’

  And so it turned out. I didn’t want to do it but Nora was inexorable. That’s how I knew she was in love.

  We decided to announce all three engagements – Daisy to Melchior, myself to Genghis, Nora to Tony – at the end-of-shoot party on the ‘wood near Athens’ set. I sent a telegram to Grandma: ‘I’m going to marry the most powerful man in Hollywood when his divorce comes through.’ I had brushed up my Shakespeare; I recognised for what it was the game that Nora and I had played out once before as romance. And now we’d perform the ‘substitute bride’ bit, as in Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well, as farce. I didn’t want to do it. I broke down in the post office when we went to send the telegram. But Nora wouldn’t let me off the hook. I’d never known her quite this way before. She said that when the shoot was over, she was going to take instruction. ‘They’re a very devout family, Dora.’

  She sent a telegram to Grandma, too. ‘I’m going to marry the most wonderful man in the world as soon as I’ve converted.’

  He telephoned her every night when we came in from work; he chattered away impenetrably in Sicilian and she never understood one word but she would stand there blushing while he was talking to her. She would look pliant and voluptuous. She clutched the receiver as tenderly as if it were his prick but that she kept her hands off. The plan was, a white wedding. I was at a loss for words.

  The studio publicity went to town on me and Genghis. Hedda Hopper hinted coyly at romance. Rumours were dropped of secret dates and private suppers. All the US asked: ‘Will this great man of the cinema propose to little Miss Nobody from Nowhere, England?’ Louella Parsons ran a piece about the first Mrs Khan, the poor old Brooklyn wife: ‘I knew it would never last with Delia but I thought that he would come back to his senses in the end and come home to me.’ Louella ran a piece about me: ‘I’m planning on a beige and ecru trousseau.’ She ra
n a picture of me, except that it was Nora’s picture, by mistake. Photoplay ran a spread. Hedda Hopper scooped; she ran an interview with Genghis: ‘My English rose: this time its for keeps, says Mr Hollywood.’

  Genghis and I were a hot number on paper. In the flesh, no. Now I was a fiancée, he put me on a pedestal. No nooky until the ring was on my finger, he declared, and I wasn’t going to argue with that. I’d gone on to automatic, I felt I didn’t have a will of my own. I did what Nora wanted because I loved her best.

  The telephone began to ring for me, too, every night. It was a phantom caller. Just heavy breathing and sometimes a sob, sometimes as if she’d started saying something and then choked it back, not knowing what to say. I had inherited the Brooklyn wife. I saw that raincoat whisking round the lot; I felt unseen eyes upon me.

  I waited for a sign from Grandma, a letter, a telegram. Nothing doing. I waited in vain but still I waited because I knew what she’d say. ‘Come off it, gel. It just won’t do. Come home.’ But now I was so mixed up in it all, I couldn’t get out by myself. I told my German teacher everything. ‘Go ahead and marry him,’ he advised me. ‘Marry him and ruin them. That’s the way to do it. What I say is, fuck the bourgeoisie.’ It was a dizzying prospect. Did I have the temperament for a Delilah?

  If ever I ran into Irish on the lot, he’d turn away.

  And God alone knows where Peregrine had got to.

  Daisy’s beloved cat now took to sleeping on my chair. That cat knew in its bones how Genghis’s wife was a better bet for an ongoing cat-food supply than Melchior’s wife. Not that it would have taken a cat of more than average intelligence to foresee the cash The Dream would lose.

  We wrapped up with the rude mechanicals. They were another catastrophe, more mechanical than rude, worse luck – like robots. Lifeless. There’s a kind of reverence the custard-pie brigade can’t keep out of its voice when it plays Shakespeare and it scuppered the entire proceedings in that department, although Melchior had personally imported the rudest man in England to play Bottom.

  Yes! Gorgeous George.

  George had gone from strength to strength since Nora and I first caught his act, that time, on Brighton Pier. ‘Clown Number One to the British Empire.’ He’d started a riot at the Royal Variety Show when he held up a couple of spuds and said: ‘King Edwards.’ That was just before the abdication. Peregrine had a theory and convinced his brother of it, as follows: all the comic roles in Shakespeare were originally intended for stand-up comedians. Melchior swallowed it whole. First of all, Melchior wanted George to get his clothes off, somehow, as a little reminder, according to Melchior, of the essential Englishness of Shakespeare, but Peregrine had managed to persuade his brother that Bottom was supposed to be a citizen of Athens, Greece, and hence unlikely to sport a map of the British Isles on his pecs, let alone Africa on his abdomen. They let him keep his famous plus-fours, too; at least, those plus-fours were famous in the UK, and or so Melchior thought, in his folly and delusion, soon to be famous in the USA, to boot.

  So there was George, in golfing garb, plus brogues, all pink and purple, he should have been in Technicolor; you burst out laughing just to look but when he opened his mouth, he took the smile right off your face. He was like a fine wine if only in the one respect, he didn’t travel. The moment he stepped off his native soil, he stopped being funny. In California, he was not bawdy, he was lewd. Genghis Khan caught the rushes and kicked up hell; not Genghis Khan’s idea of a class act, no, indeed! So Bottom’s part was cut to pieces, until he had almost as little to do as Daisy and, these days, he wore a baffled look as if, when nobody laughed, he didn’t know what to do with himself.

  Gorgeous George’s stab at global fame was dying on its feet. Melchior, at his wits’ end, adopted the following stratagem: fairies, all around, peeking through the leaves to watch, the idea being, if the audience sees the fairies laughing, then it might even bring itself to raise a titter, too. But it was hard going, I can tell you.

  ‘Thisbe,’ said Bottom, ‘the flower of odious savouries sweet –’

  ‘Savours! Savours!’ bellowed Melchoir through his megaphone. He cut a dashing figure in his snakeskin tights; he’d dressed ready for the party afterwards and, in former days, George would have been quick with the repartee, I can tell you, but now poor old George was shillyshallying with nerves. I thought, the poor sod’s on the skids, he should never have come to Hollywood.

  ‘Thisbe, the flower of odours savours sweet –’

  He must have thought, to hell with it! Because, suddenly, a flicker of authentic George illuminated his now cadaverous features. His eyebrows worked and he gave his bum a wiggle to ram home the idea of ‘Bottom’. He sang out his line in grand style and he gave that ‘odours’ the full force of all his genius for innuendo. I blushed. Perry had another theory: that a truly great comedian could make a laundry list sound filthy. George touched greatness at this moment.

  ‘– odours savours sweet –’

  ‘Cut!’ cried Melchior, white with rage.

  The wretched business wasn’t in the can until past seven but could we then adjourn to hot baths and stiff drinks? Could we, hell. The doors burst open and in came a torchlit procession, those bloody lutenists, again, in costume as ever was; plus the entire English faculty of UCLA in their graduation robes; and a hundred-voice boys’ choir drafted in for the occasion, piping up in trebles: ‘The Boar’s Head in Hand Bear I.’

  So they all came in, plus an Elizabethan feast borne by blue-chinned men in shirts slashed to the waist and knee breeches; it turned out Tony’s uncle catered it and not quite seasonal, also, overdoing the garlic and marinara sauce. The fairies stumped over en masse to the bar and started on the serious drinking. Nanny came for Saskia and Imogen because the Lady A. thought it would be in the worst possible taste for the girls to attend their father’s engagement party and Imogen went quietly but Saskia cried and clung to her father’s leg until Daisy lost her temper and snapped: ‘Beat it, kid!’ At which Saskia’s eyes spat fire but what could she do? She was only twelve and had no rights.

  Then Irish came in on a bender, white of face and red of eye and upright only with the greatest difficulty, to press into my hands his poisoned gift, the page proofs of Hollywood Elegies, inscribed to his ‘gilded fly’, and signed with his full name, thank God. I sold it at Sotheby’s last winter when we were a touch pressed as to how to pay the electricity bill.

  ‘If I’m a fly,’ I said to him, ‘what does that make you? Flypaper?’

  Then, big-hearted me, I introduced him to the Helena. She’d come out from an East Coast stock company, she was a Bryn Mawr graduate, English major, low mileage, only one careful boyfriend. I wanted nothing but happiness for poor old Irish. I was really very fond of him. But what he wanted for himself was, an infinitely renewable virgin – one he could do every night who’d be untouched again by morning. My German teacher said it was inherently a metaphysical desire and I agree with him. His needs were much simpler and we parted friends.

  Journalists in hats came in. Harlots, actresses and wives in satin frocks came in. The English Colony in its entirety in gloves and pearls came in. An entire swing band plus leader in d.j. and baton came in, to battle it out musically with the massed pluckers; Genghis confided he’d had it up to here with lutes. Tony came in in a nice black suit and black fedora and Nora ran to his side, blushing and giggling. An Italian tenor came in with a mandolin and sang ‘Come Back to Sorrento’ in high counterpoint to the swing band playing ‘Satin Doll’ and the consort of lutes still having a valiant go at ‘Fine Knacks for Ladies’, while Gorgeous George, having stayed himself with a flagon, was trying out a chorus of ‘Rose of England’ in a defiant and self-conscious manner.

  In those days, with Irish’s hideous example ever before me, I was quite abstemious but when Genghis Khan took from his jodhpur pocket a little box and showed me the ring inside, I thought: If I don’t get drunk tonight, I’ll kill myself.

  It wasn’t a diamond as big as
the Ritz, only the size of the Algonquin. It sat on my hand like a knuckleduster as we took the floor to foxtrot amidst an explosion of flashbulbs. My chin skidded the top of his head, he trod on my feet – he wasn’t looking where he was going, he was gazing helplessly at Daisy in her Titania gown, wrapped round Melchior like skin round sausage. I tried to laugh but it was wry. I felt sad.

  Sad. Nothing more than sad. Let’s not call it a tragedy; a broken heart is never a tragedy. Only untimely death is a tragedy. And war, which, before we knew it, would be upon us; replace the comic mask with the one whose mouth turns down and close the theatre, because I refuse point-blank to play in tragedy.

  So tragedy it wasn’t. But I couldn’t help thinking of that blond tenor and the last time I’d swapped beds with Nora, which made me sentimental. And I do believe old Genghis thought his heart was breaking, he lurched, he stumbled, I led, I steered him, picking my way with care among the towering foxgloves, the swollen daisies, the vicious conkers on the silver gravel floor. Genghis patted my behind but I knew his heart was not in it; he gazed at Daisy and burned with vengeance.

  Hope for the best, expect the worst, as Grandma used to say. I hoped that Genghis Khan would think he’d had enough revenge by marrying Daisy’s lover’s daughter; I did hope so, I was always partial to Daisy. But what I thought he’d really do was, smash them.

  High above the heads of the convivial throng I saw the crown of spikes that showed me where my father was. Hither and thither, the perfect host, graciousness personified. I caught a glimpse of Irish as Helena helped him from the scene. Little did he know that she would play herself in the movie based on his final years; I forget who it was played me. Some painted harlot. Poor old Irish didn’t have long left. Keeled over at The Dream premiere, outside Grauman’s Chinese. Dicky ticker. Nora and I had gone home, by then. ‘Don’t worry,’ they said, carting him out of the way of the stars, ‘it’s only a writer.’ Then Hollywood Elegies came out, but what’s the point of a posthumous Pulitzer? Ross O’Flaherty, RIP.