by George

by Wesley Stace

  Things improved when she was in the provinces. Joe emerged like an animal newly out of hibernation to range through the wider spaces of the house. He left his door open, lingering downstairs rather than scurrying back to the safety of his den. It was during one of these safe periods that, on a whim, he took me for company on an excursion.

  Number 34, Cadogan Grove was a draughty town house of four floors, unmistakably the home of a diva. The colours were rich and earthy, like glazed pottery, the furniture draped in coverings of different lace, shawls she could snatch up at a moment’s notice. As we descended, her perfume, a distinctive fragrance she had sent up from Brighton, grew more and more overwhelming; in the parlour, the bloodred velvet curtains, trimmed and sashed in gold, were so extravagant that they might have been exacted from a West End theatre in lieu of payment.

  Every available surface, horizontal or vertical, was crowded with photographs in frames of varying size and magnificence, jostling for position, commuters elbowing their way onto the escalator at rush hour. On any given table, only the faces in the front row could be seen: behind those, nothing more than a selection of hairstyles. If one frame fell, the rest would topple like dominoes. And this happened often, for Echo loved to shuffle them — she called it dusting, and it was all the housework she managed — bringing new ones to prominence, depending upon which stories were at the forefront of her mind, flattered which guest, or suited which suitor. Yet, despite the quantity of pictures, few showed any two members of the Fisher family together. Most were not of family at all but admiring associates: “Darling Echo, Speak through me. Your greatest fan, L. H. Curzon.”

  There they were, she and her favourite boy, stage left or right, before curtains closed or raised, standing in front of radio microphones of all heights and descriptions. Some of these pictures flattered their subjects, retouched to smooth away the crevices in Narcissus’s and perhaps Echo’s face too.

  Nor did the collection gloss over the many Memorable Moments of their career. In these more candid pictures, the smiles were less clenched, the figures smaller, the crannies deeper. Here they were presented to the king, who shook Narcissus’s hand with regal forbearance; there, with none other than crown prince of funny men Pick Eurone. Other pictures were taken in army camps and hospitals, where even the mummified patient, though little more than a human hammock suspended from the ceiling, smiled gratefully.

  Wandering through the exhibition, Joe took particular care to introduce me to his father, a few pictures of whom were scattered among the frozen smiles. Joe remembered little more than a presence: some pinstripe trousers, a waft of thick cigar smoke, and a fur collar, which tickled Joe’s nose when his father hoisted him into his arms in the hallway upon his return from work.

  There were two photos of Joe: one as a baby, his mother holding him up, not unlike the way she held Narcissus but without the same intimacy, and another of an early foray into conjuring — there he was, aged six, beneath an oversize top hat; in front of him, a table on which were two packs of playing cards, an eggcup, some sugar cubes, and two matchboxes. In his right hand, he held a wand, which, at that split second, he brandished towards the heavens in mid-abracadabra. The trick was going to work: you could see it in his eyes, fixed on eternity somewhere behind us, far beyond the lens of the camera.

  There were pictures of another baby too: his brother, Clifford, who died, aged two, in the whooping cough epidemic. And a sickly little thing he was, barely strong enough for his image to register on the film.

  We had yet to see half the wonders of the house when we were climbing the stairs once more, as if we had been on a day trip to the seaside, and when the sun finally came out midafternoon, Father insisted that we head home before the traffic got too bad.

  Back in Joe’s room, nothing changed. All dedicated to closeness and the bettering of his mind, he thought of me so rarely. It was my added misfortune to be a gift from his mother. And what is worse than being an unwanted gift?

  I was marooned, gathering dust, nothing more.

  And one day, there she was again at the door, in full primary orientalia. Joe did not feel he owed her the favour of acknowledging her presence, and continued reading. She let her head fall to one side in mourning.

  “Darling, darling, darling, darling, darling, darling, darling, darling, darling, darling, darling, darling.” It would be impossible to describe the unleashing of this torrent of love and pity, but by the end of her apostrophe, she was croaking through tears. “Whatever should your father have said, darling Jojo?” She swept in, her own chorus line. “Curtain up!” she exclaimed, features obscure as the harsh light flooded in. “You can’t sit up here all day, reading and writing. You can’t breathe. Let the world in!” She opened a very small window and asked in defeat, “What are we to do with you, Joe?”

  “Mother . . .”

  “I can’t hear! I am deaf!” She froze. She searched the room with the desperate eyes of a silent actress. “Soft! Soft! Is this a voice I hear?”

  “Echo,” he obliged. He couldn’t even call her Mother.

  “Joe.” Her manner softened. She smiled her charming smile and sat on the windowsill, hugging her legs to her chest.

  “I’m working” was his gentle plea.

  “Working, working, working, Joe, yes. But playing, playing, playing. Where is life, where pleasure, where friends?”

  “I don’t have friends.”

  “And what of me?” she asked in high dudgeon. “What of Derek? Narcissus? Polly? The vicar?” As evidence to the contrary, she had managed only to name herself, her young male companion, a ventriloquist’s dummy, a serving maid, and a man of God whom even she didn’t like. Joe could only shrug. He was too shy, too happy in his own world to be anything but lonely.

  “I’m busy.”

  “Oh, Joe,” she said at this shameful confession. “Whatever are we to do?” She turned around and fixed a tragic gaze beyond. Five seconds later, with an abrupt change of mood, she chirped airily, “I tried!”

  Under normal circumstances, this would clearly have signalled the conclusion of the conversation ritual, Echo’s own cue to glide out. But, in the silence, her eyes alighted upon me. I was to be her final roll of the dice.

  “And how are you getting on with your new friend . . . George?” She put great emphasis on my name, to eradicate any thought that I might have been called Pip Squeak; in her mind, this was an act of selfless generosity bound to win Joe over, but it served merely as a reminder. Despite this, the question caught him off guard, and he had no immediate answer, since he wasn’t getting on with me at all. “We have a famous family name, you know. It precedes us. You don’t remember your grandfather, but he too was a great star in his day.”

  Joe finally put his book aside. She had managed to pique his interest. “I’m interested in Grandfather. I’ve been reading about him.”

  “If,” she said, ignoring him, “you’ll only show me that you’re ready, I’ll . . .” She stopped. Her double take involved a repetition of the whole sentence, then: “I beg your pardon?”

  “I’ve been reading about Vox Knight.”

  “Darling, tell Mother.”

  “I have been working on something.”

  “Your book?” She tried not to sound critical.

  “An . . . act.” He had been working up to this, and it was going to take all his determination.

  “An act?”

  “An original act.”

  She gasped and clapped her hands together. “What are you saying, Joe? Oh, this is the best early birthday present I could ever have. This is marvellous! I knew it!” I wondered whether she did. Perhaps he was lying, playing for time. “With George? Joe and George?” Her own vision immediately subsumed his, and her mind was clearly brimming with narratives: how she would build his career, help him through the early heartbreak as he paid his dues, give him a leg up, of course (but never one that would earn him the resentment of his peers), pass on the benefit of her years of experience, ye
s, but never reveal the real secrets: that was for his own good. He would learn for himself, make his own mistakes, and be all the better for it. She was delighted, absolutely delighted.

  “The act is more like Grandfather’s, like Vox’s.”

  “What do you mean, Joe?”

  “I intend to reintroduce the most skilful of the vocal arts, that of polyphony.”

  “But, darling . . .” Joe missed the note of caution in her voice as he warmed to his theme. She yielded the floor because it appeared from his somewhat oratorical stance that her son was readying to hold forth, to give her a unique insight into his mind. What he delivered was a speech, rather in the manner of a theatrical prologue.

  “I will make voices appear from nowhere, from out of the air and under the stage, the balcony and stalls, working without the aid of puppet to deceive the eye or beard to conceal the movement of my lips. Like Vattemare of old, who at the age of eleven entertained the emperor Napoleon himself, my act shall be comic, vocalic, mimetic, multiformical, and maniloquious. I shall work with only the gifts that God Himself intended for me.” Echo was laughing in a self-consciously generous way. She tried once more to punctuate his address with whatever caveat she had for him but failed. “Voices will appear in each corner of the theatre, in persons so distinct from my own that the audience will not believe that the entire spectacle is the work of one man. Like William Edward Love and the unsurpassed vocalion ‘Vox’ Knight, who entertained kings and queens with his polyphonic . . .”

  “But darling. Darling!” She had to shout to be heard, unable to restrain herself any longer. “It’s a wonderful idea, darling. Wonderful.” She clearly thought it anything but. “How can I put this? That business went out with the ark.”

  “Perhaps . . .” He had finally been ready to prove himself, to show off, to make her proud, but whatever confidence the speech had conjured vanished with her interruption.

  “No perhaps about it. No one wants it, darling. It’s gone the way of the dodo. When Father died, he couldn’t even get on a stage.”

  Joe slumped on the floor among his books. He’d known she would do this; he’d foreseen the torture she would inflict for daring to impress her. All his work: useless.

  “Listen to me, Jojo. I don’t know everything, but I can tell you about this. Look at me.” He wouldn’t, so she got down on her hands and knees, a gaudy scarlet tent of dragons and flowers, and took him in her arms, where he hung limply, an animal on her gibbet.

  “I love you, darling.” Silence. “Joe, please, listen. I’m saying this for your own good.” Silence. “Joe, if you won’t speak for yourself, I’ll speak for you.” Silence. She continued in his voice: “Yes, Echo, I’m sorry. I know you’re only . . .” She had barely begun the sentence when he fought his way out of her arms.

  “No!” he said through clenched teeth, eyes wild. This was all the participation she required, and she continued in her most reasonable voice.

  “Well, then. Not talking at all does no one any good. Listen, Joey. It’s a nice idea, but you’d never find a producer or an audience, except perhaps in Nana’s nursing home. Believe me, I know.” She spoke the words like a lullaby, soothing him back to sleep after a horrible dream. “I’ll tell you a story.” She patted the floor next to her.

  “Once upon a time, long before there were boys, geniuses like Vox Knight filled the theatres with no more than their voices. And they filled the seats too. A Thousand and One Knights, Vox’s greatest show, ran for three hundred and sixty-five consecutive performances at the Egyptian. Three hundred and sixty-five! Those were the days: one man, a thousand and one voices. Vox was everything: polyphonist, ventriloquist, mimic, comedian, quick-change artist, and he could carry a tune too. A genius. A true artiste.” She put her arm around Joe. “And then the dummies came, not boys yet like Narcissus, but life-size dummies, and now there was something more than a voice in the rafters — there was something that trapped the audience’s attention, something that you could see from the back of the vast auditorium.” She pointed to an imaginary stage and affected the voice of the ordinary punter, who was (as usual) Cockney: “ ‘Lor! That’s where those voices are coming from! That mouth!’ The old-timers, and Vox wasn’t the only one, continued to do their show, the one that had played to the crowned heads of Europe, but the crowds weren’t there anymore. Besides: where was the dummy? The vogue for Vox, for the lone voice, was over. And that was the end of the great Vox Knight.

  “Then the first boy came along: a boy, a real portable boy, not a row of dummies. This was what we had all been waiting for. All you needed was a puppet and a stool. Forget the scenery and all that bother; this was perfect for a ten-minute spot on the end of the pier. And suddenly the boy became the whole focus. Vox knew it the first time we saw Fred Russell and Coster Joe at the Palace. ‘Get yourself one of them, my gal!’ he said. I can hear him now, good old Pa. And Narcissus came for my twenty-first birthday.

  “And since then, nothing has changed. The boy is the act now, you’re the straight man, and that’s what people want. When Tonight’s the Knight, his last show for smaller halls, was ailing, Vox and Nana and I, we were living with three other families in one house on the Cut. Now look at us. It’s the house that Echo built, and the house that Narcissus built too.

  “You have the name, Joe Fisher, you have the talent, and I know you have the technique, but do you have the will, the personality? It’s not good for you, sitting in here, writing all the time. When you’re ready, Joey, let me put you in front of someone. They’ll take my word, of course, but . . .”

  “I am ready.”

  “Show me!” she begged.

  “But I have nothing to say with George.”

  “Yes, it’s trickier with a boy, isn’t it?” If she was mocking him, challenging him, the accompanying laugh was all sweetness. “Be pragmatic, Joey! You want to be the lone voice in unbounded space? If that’s your dream, you have to start somewhere: you’ll have to seduce people, and perhaps when you’ve got something worked out with George, then you’ll have the opportunity to introduce a little of the other. And now is where we will start. . . . Audition for me.”

  Joe unwrapped himself from her and walked towards me.

  She had done it! She had appealed to him as a mother. He picked me up and sat in the armchair. His fingers entwined with my mechanism, and I was just about to speak when she interrupted.

  “Joe. You’ll want me to tell you exactly what I think, of course you will, but remember: I am also a mother. Oh, this is so exciting! Begin.”

  “He’s got no material,” I complained. “Nothing. He just reads, and writes those books all day, leaves me sitting here . . . like a dummy.” I looked at her, then at him, and crossed my eyes in boredom.

  “Splendid!” said Echo, clapping her hands.

  “Is she going to comment on every single thing that I do?” I asked. He nodded. “Guess we won’t have to wait for the review in tomorrow’s papers.”

  “Speak to each other,” she implored.

  “He doesn’t want to talk,” I said. Joe was looking far away, out of the window, his head turned from me. He sipped from a glass of water.

  “Joe, say something. You have to talk.”

  “He’s got nothing to say,” I said. “Give him a break. Let him do what he wants.”

  “Joe, you have to talk. George needs someone to spar with; he needs a straight man.”

  “We don’t have any material.”

  “Do one of my routines. You know them by heart.”

  “OK, shall we do one?” I asked.

  He nodded without enthusiasm, rolling his eyes. He sat me rather too upright and placed himself next to me in a self-consciously formal posture.

  “Hello,” he said, as though we had never met. “How are you?”

  “Very poor.”

  (“Good choice!” said Echo.)

  “Are you not feeling well, George?”

  “No, I haven’t got any money.”

 
“Ah, so you’re not poorly, you’re poor.”

  “That’s what I said, ainnit? Besides, I can’t afford any food.”

  And so the sketch went on. At length. It was a strange choice of material — corny, childish — and by halfway, even I was bored. We performed proficiently, but we didn’t spark as we had in front of the mirror. I looked at her in expectation. Echo hadn’t laughed once during the routine and was now at a loss for words. I cleared my throat and had a cigarette. She finally spoke.

  “This is difficult, Joe. I have to tell you one thing, and I hope this isn’t a surprise: technique for its own sake is empty.”

  “It’s good to move your lips a little, so they know it’s you. . . .” My mimicry was ill advised. Now she was irritated.

  “Listen. You can’t be a great artiste on technique alone. You need more than that. . . .”

  “Oh, really,” I said. “You need teeth and a tongue and a little patience. Then practise, practise, practise.”

  “I’m surprised at you. It’s very sad that you think that’s all it comes down to. And it’s naive. What about personality, charisma? What makes a star? What made me?”

  “Teeth and a tongue,” I said. “And a little boy sitting on your knee.”

  She let this pass, but she was on a slow boil, annoyed by the slight to her fame.

  Joe interrupted: “We have one more bit. Could be a good audition.”

  Echo was still seething and said nothing as Joe put his legs on top of mine, so he was sitting on my lap. He moved us closer together, took my right arm and placed it behind his back, wedging it into the belt of his trousers, and grabbed my cap from my head, perching it on his own.

  It was the same script we had just performed. I said his lines, in a voice that sounded like nothing I should be made to produce, and he said mine, in a reedy falsetto, his mouth snapping up and down. And then my head was spinning, as he twirled my spine around and around with laughter. Whatever had precisely happened, Echo was beside herself with anger.

  She shouted at the top of her voice: “Joseph, I am the greatest living ventriloquiste, certainly the best in England, voted such by my peers three years running. I have respected the traditions and I have forged ahead.” She stood up suddenly, borne on her fury. Her maternal feelings had been treading water but were now drowning, pushed under by her wounded pride. “And I will not have my life’s work belittled by an amateur, even if he is my son. Here is the truth.” She was calmer now, but it was the dignified calm of the slighted, not real calm, and she struggled to moderate her tone. “On a stage, in the halls, you must be nothing but yourself. It is a world free of pretence. And if you can put it over, sell it, then the thing you are selling, and the thing that people love, is you, your self. And a great artiste, a great star, will find within himself the personality that wins the laughter, that deserves the applause and the love. It is personality that makes business, and if you don’t have it, you will be found out. All the greats have this gift, and they give it freely, share it, pour all that charisma into their song or their turn, their partner or their boy. And through their act, they reach out to the audience, so that the audience can feel their essence, taste it, breathe it in. That is what makes it in the halls. Personality.” She was working herself up again. “Why do you think I am telling you this?”