by Wesley Stace
He would have happily considered Des a father, or stepfather, or even a father figure, but this was not encouraged — Des was simply Des: chauffeur, chaperone, and champion of all things Fisher. Frankie’s longtime agent, he had bounded to her side when scandal became inevitable. They accepted him as the exception that proved the rule, a necessary evil. His had been a kindness, and for this Frankie thanked him with affection — his name was never heard without the prefixes Good and Old — but without passion. Des was Queenie’s contemporary and could only manage avuncularity with Frankie. He patted her bottom, complimented her on her hair, and gave her pocket money to buy records. It wasn’t unlike how he treated George. But now Good Old Des was gone: the family had lost their friendly chauffeur, and George was packed off to Upside.
This just left his aunt, Frankie’s sister, Sylvia, six years her junior. With her long brown hair, her ruby red lips, and her deep, throaty laugh, she was as unlike Frankie as a sister could be, at home where Frankie seemed most out of place. She had had similar aspirations but never the same success. Evie hadn’t offered this granddaughter an equal share of her support. Her reason? It didn’t come so naturally to the girl. At Queenie’s pleading, Evie had reluctantly agreed to make funds available for Sylvia to attend the Franca DeLay stage school, where Frankie had begun her career. It was something Sylvia laughed about years later. She had walked into the audition to find herself surrounded by framed lobby cards from films in which her sister, spotted in her first term at Franca DeLay’s, had starred as a child. “And,” said Sylvia, without a hint of malice, “they took one look at me next to this blond vision of innocence and said, ‘You’re her sister?’ And it was all downhill from there, particularly when one of my tap shoes flew off.” Evie had felt vindicated when the bad news landed on the doormat.
And Sylvia was sent instead to the Ashburton Drama School, where she was not spotted. In the years since, after some time on the fringe doing shows to which George was not invited and about which no great boasts were made over the dinner table, her crowning moment had been her casting as the girl in an instant-coffee commercial that was never shown and was subsequently remade with another woman in the same part. But Sylvia could always laugh at herself, and there was rarely a cup of coffee brewed in their house without reference to the catchphrase-that-never-was: “This is real, right?” (accompanied by a saucy wink at the camera). Frankie’s career, meanwhile, went from strength to strength.
And then, three years ago, George and Frankie had been in Edinburgh, the year of her greatest pantomime triumph, and when they’d returned to Cadogan Grove, there was no Sylvia, just an empty kitchen. No reasons were given to George and nothing explained beyond the fact that there had been an argument. (Evie’s “Must have been hard for her playing second fiddle” was the closest he ever got.) Sylvia’s name came up every now and then and was quickly discarded, like a black three in canasta.
“Where’s Auntie Sylvia?” he once asked Frankie.
“She has her own life now. Far away from us.”
He got the message. He theorized that Sylvia could no longer stand the rivalry with his mother, and for this reason, he thought slightly less of her, for anyone in competition with his mother was destined to lose. But there was nothing he would like more than to be with his aunt right now, to hear her smoky laugh, to see her smile, however far away she lived: the farther the better.
He pictured the women of his family one by one: his mother, nearing the end of her night’s performance; Evie, in bed, snoring in front of The Good Old Days; Queenie, clearing up the front room, perhaps recently returned from one of her parties; Sylvia, far away. By the time he thought of Des, wherever he was, George’s thoughts were muddled. Dreams took over.
2
Love at First Sound
Although I can’t say precisely when I was born, I can be most specific about the date I spoke for the first time: May 12, 1931.
I passed through at least two pairs of hands before my journey from Romando’s was over. And when I landed, I waited and I waited, gestating in that dark wooden womb.
Nothing at all happened. Time passed. A clock chimed every thirty minutes. For months.
Finally, finally, tension began to build, as though an orchestra were tuning up. Then I distinctly heard that voice: “No, no, I say no! The guest of honour must sit here, oh, and I shall put the Romando . . .” My box was swooped through the air, a baby in an eagle’s mouth. “. . . behind here.” The best silver was laid under Echo’s direction, as the hushed whispers of wary servants scurried above me. Just as it seemed that one more U-turn on the settings would drive them to murder her in cold blood, all was done, and Echo spoke with a new serenity. “There we are, thank you, thank you. Quite charming. The guests will start arriving any . . .”
With the chime of a doorbell, the party began: I was to be the main event. I was soon surrounded by merriment and spillage, by drinking, toasting, arguing, smoking, and throat clearing. A big moment was upon us. Crockery and cutlery clinked from my path as I was placed on the table. It was time.
I heard a woman’s voice: “Hey, let me out of this box!” There was laughter. “Let me out of here! Give me to Joe!” Joe! Her son was called Joe! What a rum coincidence: my father Joseph, my partner Joe. It surely boded well.
“Echo, you’ll give it away!” came a solitary complaint. “Let him see for himself!”
“Yes,” sighed Echo. “They put the wrong name, my name, on the box. I believe they actually thought that I was going to replace Narcissus — ridiculous! We’ll have that redone. Your name instead, Joey. Go on, then. Open it!”
Light poured in.
“Whatever is it, Joe? A treadle fretsaw?” some wag asked.
Joe said nothing. My feet tumbled beneath me as he lifted me by the shoulders and sat me on the edge of the box, the rest of the party behind me. Here he was — my partner, my ventriloquist; the straight man who would set me up for a million punch lines, repeat my jokes purely so people at the back could hear. I looked at him. He looked at me, but coldly, analytically, as though he had never wanted a boy to call his own. Shouldn’t he have cracked a smile by now?
“Well?” asked Echo, somewhat impatiently. Still Joe held me in scrutiny. He was twenty or twenty-one but appeared older. His was an awfully good face, I told myself. That strong chin, that gleaming head of perfectly ploughed hair, those deep sad brown eyes! “Only the best, Joe,” Echo continued, supplying the enthusiasm lacking in her son. “It’s a Romando. They’re the very finest, and Signore Romando was so honoured. I’m sure Ogilvy won’t mind. Good lord, I’ve brought him enough business over the years. If I’d had a boy that good when I began . . .” She thought better of it. “Well, happy birthday.”
“Say something, Joe,” beseeched an earnest relative, mindful of Echo’s moods.
In a lightning movement, Joe stood, put one foot on the chair, and picked me up, sitting me on his knee. He slipped one hand into my back and with the other gripped the lapel of his dinner jacket. What was he going to say? What was I going to say?
I surveyed our audience. It was as though someone had opened a tin, a party assortment of hard- and soft-centred guests, and scattered them about the room: a dependably jolly vicar, a trembling leaf of an old woman with perpetually quivering chin, a middle-aged impresario in bright yellow waistcoat, sucking the life out of a cigar, and, sitting at Echo’s side, a dashingly handsome young male lead, not many years older than Joe. Rather than her son’s friends, Echo had invited her own. All eyes were upon us.
The silence was broken by my first-ever words.
“Thank you for buying me for him, Mrs. Endor,” I said, looking at her and nodding at Joe. “He’s exactly what I’ve always wanted.” This bon mot was met with laughter and applause. My top right lip sneered, and out popped a small white wooden cheroot. More applause. I smiled and raised my eyebrows. So far, so good.
“Res ipsa loquitur!” declared the vicar.
“I thought mag
ic was his forte, Echo,” said the yellow waistcoat with a guffaw. “Watch out! He’ll be as good as you!”
Echo managed a smile. “Now, a name!” she said. The excitement of naming me raised eyebrows around the table.
“George,” I said without hesitation. There was no doubt about it. A general cooing of approval confirmed the choice.
“George?” His mother grimaced. “That was what Romando named him. How did you know that? No one wants a schoolboy called George.”
“George! That’s my name,” I said, winking at the assembled crowd, who took up my cause in a moment, claiming that such coincidences could not be easily dismissed, that I was every inch a George, and that it was still a very popular name.
“No.” Echo pouted. “Take it from me. George is wrong. I was right about Narcissus and I’m right about this. You should call him . . .” She had the name ready. “Pip Squeak.”
Pip Squeak? Pip bloody Squeak? It wasn’t even a real name. Pip might conceivably be Dickensian for Philip, but Squeak? Squeak? I didn’t sound like a mouse.
“Oh, that’s too much,” the vicar appealed to Echo. “Let the poor boy call him what he will.”
The matinée idol to Echo’s right began to repeat “George . . . George . . . George . . . George . . . ,” a tribal chant taken up around the table until Echo begged them, pleaded with them to stop.
“No more! Derek, please! Please!” She covered her ears and sighed in an unsaintly display of martyrdom. “George it is . . . but don’t blame me.”
“Well done, child.” The vicar beamed, a proud father congratulating an eight-year-old for offering the last boiled sweet to a guest. “A glimmer of charity remains despite the heathen name.” Echo groaned at this obligatory jovialism.
“Heathen?” enquired Derek earnestly. “Echo?”
“No, no. Endor,” said the vicar, delighted to be asked, installing himself for a sermon. “Ventriloquism began, one might even say found its voice, in the biblical story of the Witch of Endor: 1 Samuel 28. ‘And his servants said to Saul, Behold . . .’ ”
Echo yawned. “Cake!” she exclaimed. And in the cake was wheeled. Iced in large letters upon its vivid mint frosting was the unfortunate wish: “Happy 21st Birthday, to Joe and his new friend Pip Squeak.”
“George,” he said later that same evening, reflecting on the small victory with satisfaction as he placed me on his knee in front of the mirror in his bedroom.
It didn’t seem the room of a young man about town, more a dark and dusty theatrical museum. Show posters, some tattered and some brand-new, papered every square inch of the walls not covered by bookshelves. Outcrops of books made little islands in the sea of blue carpet.
“Hello, Joe,” I said. “Happy birthday.”
“You’re a handsome devil, aren’t you?” I hadn’t heard him use his own voice downstairs; he had spoken only through me. His seemed a little frail for his strong chin and evidently flexible vocal cords. Perhaps he needed me as much as, more than, I needed him.
“Why, thank you,” I replied. “You’re not too bad yourself.” As I’d suspected, his technique was breathtaking: you couldn’t tell. That aside, my voice was a marvel. The limitations of a mediocre ventriloquist dictate that he will, quite sensibly, choose as his partner either a drunken toff (because slurring is easier than enunciating) or a schoolboy with a high-pitched voice (because good voice production is daunting). But my voice was rich in tone: it was cheeky, yes, charming too (if I say so myself), and quite, quite clear. “Introductions, then. I’m George, as you know. How did you know my name was George?”
“How did I know your name was George?”
“Yes, how did you know my name was George?” Best to play along. This crackling rapid-fire dialogue, our two voices so perfectly distinct, was spellbinding.
“Receipt on the inside of the case.” There it was. George, sold to Echo Endor with the date (and the price, of course — a snip too). “You’re George; I’m Joe Fisher. I’m twenty-one today, and you’re my present.”
“My father was called Joseph,” I said, keen to reignite the banter.
“I’m just Joe. I’m named after one of your forebears. The most famous of all.”
I thought about this for a second before the penny dropped: “You’re named after Coster Joe?” He nodded. “Your mother is Echo Endor and she named you after a ventriloquist dummy?”
Fred Russell and Coster Joe. I could see them as clear as day: Joe in his pearly gear with a voice that could cut glass, and Fred Russell, softly spoken, clean shaven, and immaculate in evening dress. The world had not seen their like when they walked onstage together at the Palace in 1886. Fred was the father of modern ventriloquism; their act was the Original. But still, you shouldn’t name your son after a . . . dummy. “Well, look on the bright side: at least she didn’t call you Naughty Narcissus.”
At the mention of the name, his fingers slackened inside me.
“George, I have bad news.” My head moved around slowly so I was facing him. “I don’t want you.” He didn’t what? If it was a joke, he wasn’t smiling. His eyes never left mine. “I don’t want you,” he repeated.
“But . . . but . . . ,” I spluttered. “But you could be the greatest ventriloquist in the world. The technique, the lips, the manipulation: you’ve got it all.”
We were interrupted by two loud knocks on the door, which (without invitation) opened to reveal Echo in oriental nightdress of tangerine and plum. She lifted her arms above her head, twirling like a human flame, before she came to rest, one hand on each side of the door. Joe snapped to attention, caught red-handed.
“Darling, you’re already hard at work. What a wonderful, wonderful present. But I will say: don’t be foolhardy. I always warn of the hazards of premature laryngeal overexertion.” She floated in and kissed him, depositing an outsize aubergine smudge on his forehead, which she then rubbed distractedly with the heel of her right hand as she considered the furnishings. “Let’s decorate!” she proclaimed, and with a final birthday wish, made her exit. The room breathed a sigh of relief.
“Is that why you don’t want to be a ventriloquist?” I asked when the coast was clear.
“Who said I didn’t want to be a ventriloquist? I’m going to be the greatest of all time.”
At last! This was more like it. This was what we wanted.
“So you were only joking. You do want me.”
“No, I don’t.”
“But if you want to be a ventriloquist, you need me. You need a boy. I’m the focal point. Everyone thinks the voice is coming from me. It’s genius! Fred Russell and Coster Joe . . . Coram and Jerry Fisher . . .”
“Echo Endor and Nauseating Narcissus. I know.”
“So what do you want if you don’t want me?” Surely not a girl or some species of animal assistant. It was too perverse to contemplate. The audience would never stand for it.
“I don’t want anything, George. You’re a nice boy, but . . .” He paused. “The dummy is the death of ventriloquism.” He was a good ventriloquist, and no mistake, but evidently something of a crackpot.
“The dummy is ventriloquism!” I snorted in disbelief.
“You might be forgiven for thinking that, George. Have you ever heard of my grandfather?”
“Vox Knight?”
“Yes.”
“No. Never heard of him.”
“Vox Knight didn’t need a boy. He only needed a voice.”
“A voice?”
“A lone voice. Oh!” Joe interrupted himself. “There’s someone at the door.”
As he pointed, I turned around. There was a little knock, followed by a muffled voice that I took to be Echo’s, telling us to be quiet: “Practice tomorrow, darling. Bedtime for Jojo!”
“Shut up!” yelled Joe.
“Shh! Don’t say that to your mother!” I begged, secretly impressed by his spunk.
“Mind your own business! Go back to Narcissus and Derek,” said Joe, getting up and going towards the doo
r. I accompanied him unwillingly, closing my eyes like the child who thinks no one can see him. As he threw the door open, I winced in the face of the impending confrontation. Nothing. Nobody was there.
“Where is she?” I said. He popped my head out, and I looked left and right down the hall.
“She was never there,” he said, and smiled before announcing, “I’m going to be the greatest ventriloquist in the world.”
“How did you do that?” I asked, narrowing my eyes as I checked the hall one final time.
“Distant-voice ventriloquism. I threw my voice.”
“Out there?”
“Yes.”
“From back there?”
“Yes.”
I thought about it as he closed the door.
“It’s good,” I said, impressed. “What an act!” Then I remembered that the act excluded me. “So you’re taking me back to Romando’s?”
“I can’t. You were a gift.”
“I’m staying?” He nodded. “Can I stay out? Watch you practise? No need to put me back in the box, is there? Perhaps there’s a way,” I continued. “I mean, with the distant voice, and you, and me. If you . . .”
But there was no time to finish the thought. He had set me down on a burgundy armchair next to a pile of books. At eye level was The Memoirs and Adventures of Mr Love the Celebrated Ventriloquist, above it a hefty green volume called The Adventures of Valentine Vox the Ventriloquist.
