by George

by Wesley Stace

  “You’d understand if you were in the orchestra, my lad!”

  “Bernie!” she growled. “Stop.”

  Frankie breathed a sigh of relief as she shut the dressing-room door behind them. Then she clapped her hands together and squealed: a pile of Christmas presents lay beneath the radiator. “Look! But don’t touch!”

  A muffled moan of frustration came from the adjacent dressing room.

  There was only one performance on Christmas Eve, and the show was down by seven p.m. Frankie and George hadn’t been home much until then — every day began with a hearty breakfast before the daily dash to Wimbledon, and they rarely returned before midnight — and that night was the first they spent together as a family.

  Already Reg was one of them, as though there had been a space reserved for him. He had taken the spare room, although there were still no curtains, and George wondered how he slept in the morning. As Frankie had suggested, Reg was more than a lodger; he was a friend for Queenie, a chauffeur for her jobs, but also someone she could look after. He took a special pleasure in settling into the old leather armchair by the fire — in other houses, it would have certainly been called the man’s chair — where he philosophically worked a toothpick round his gums.

  Frankie made a great show of domesticity at family gatherings. She solicitously offered tangerines, nuts, tea, sandwiches. “Here’s my favourite bit coming up,” she said, glancing at the television as she left the room to fetch another round of mince pies. When she’d finally settled down, the movie done, Reg announced an early Christmas present for Queenie, who raised her eyebrows: “On Christmas Eve? Aren’t I special.” Reg handed her a small package, which she unwrapped. She smiled at him, and her eyes filled with tears.

  “Do you really want an old girl like me?” she asked, as Reg made to kneel in front of her. “Stop, you’ll never get back up!”

  “You’d make me the happiest man in the world. I’ve waited too long, girl. We’ve been apart too long. It’s now or never.”

  “Of course I will. Come over here.”

  “Oh, Mum!” said Frankie, dabbing the corners of her eyes with a serviette. “Did you know? She knew!”

  “Well, I may have had an inkling . . . ,” said Queenie, who wouldn’t let go of Reg’s hand, which she had firmly in her lap.

  “You’ll have to call him Uncle Reg now,” said Frankie to George, sobbing happiness.

  “No Uncles here, not for a grown lad,” said Reg, who poured everyone, including the grown lad, a celebratory drop of scotch. “George, you’d make an ideal best man.”

  “You’ll have to give a speech, mind,” said Queenie.

  “Unaccustomed as I am . . . ,” intoned Reg. Everyone laughed — the generosity of the house was such that anything offered as humour, however unoriginal, was suitably rewarded, particularly at Christmas. “I’ve been waiting a long time for this,” said Reg, toasting his good fortune. “Too long.”

  Caught up in the moment, George remembered what was missing. “I wish Evie could have been here to see this.”

  There was dead silence, silence as had never been heard among Fishers unless mandated by a script. Queenie, glancing at Reg, seemed on the point of an announcement, but Frankie interrupted: “Yes, if only Evie were here, eh?”

  “God rest her soul,” said Reg, as a toast. “This is for you, Echo Endor, wherever you are.” He said it with a smile, but as he tipped his glass forward in salute, it seemed to angle away from heaven.

  George always had trouble sleeping on Christmas Eve, but this year was different. Aladdin had him exhausted, and he woke later than he ever had.

  “Look at Sleepyhead,” said Reg, from a breakfast table laden with smoked salmon, bubbling with champagne.

  A fire roared throughout the day, and everything possible was done to keep the world at bay, to keep Christmas in its Victorian time capsule. When the phone rang in the early afternoon, only Reg, in his yellow crown, was fool enough to answer. “I’m cooking,” Queenie yelled. “They can call back.” The day turned slowly through stockings, pillowcases, the women cooking while the men relaxed, and then a late lunch, punctuated by crackers and a flaming pudding from which each family member received the traditional silver threepenny bit. (The coins weren’t baked into the pudding like at Upside. Queenie palmed them into each serving to make sure nobody was disappointed.) By the last bite, everyone had lost the will for anything but sleep.

  Queenie had evidently saved a little treat for herself and Reg. “Shall I?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “You should.” Queenie excused herself and went to the phone, while Frankie and George amused themselves with a little plastic puzzle, of an impossible factor of difficulty due to the cheapness of its manufacture, recently fallen from a cracker. Reg looked at his fiancée with pride as she dialled, but when she didn’t turn round with a smile of her own, he grew more serious.

  On her return, she simply shook her head. “No, I’m afraid not. She won’t.”

  “Not yet,” said Reg.

  “She won’t talk yet,” said Queenie. That was her only glimmer of hope.

  “Who?” asked George. Frankie frowned and shook her head confidentially.

  “Not even now,” said Reg, shaking his head.

  “Who?”

  “Come on, Mum,” said Frankie, her attention elsewhere. “It’s all right. She’ll come round.”

  “Who?” asked George. This would never have happened with Evie alive. They all looked at him.

  Frankie sighed and stopped trying to get the tiny metal balls to drop into the correct holes. “Sylvia,” she said.

  “My daughter,” said Reg. “The daughter I don’t know.” Reg felt Frankie’s and Queenie’s eyes on him and asked innocently: “What? The boy’s old enough. George, I’ve been in love with your beautiful grandma since the war, and Sylvia is our daughter.”

  It was like a light at the end of a tunnel George hadn’t known he was in: Sylvia and his mother, so different; Reg, so strangely familiar. “Why haven’t you seen her?” he asked involuntarily.

  Frankie was nodding, her eyes half closed in scrutiny of the situation. “Tell him if you have to,” she said. “But not a bad word about Evie. I won’t hear it.”

  “Just the truth,” said Queenie, as though on oath. “George, Frankie’s father was away in the war, and the long and the short of it is that Reg and I, we, fell in love. And we were blessed with Sylvia. And then Joe died. . . .” She reached for Reg’s hand. “And that made for a horrible guilt every day. Not only that, but . . .” She looked at Frankie. “Evie made me feel it. I’m sorry, but she did. We depended on her, me and Frankie and Sylvia, for everything. And after we got the bad news, Evie forbade me to see Reg at all, wouldn’t hear his name.”

  “She did more than that,” said Reg firmly, as he massaged Queenie’s engagement ring around her finger.

  “You don’t know,” said Frankie, looking away.

  “George,” said Reg. “I did quite a stretch in jail.”

  George gave a cry of disbelief. “What for?”

  Reg nodded, acknowledging that it was a reasonable question. “Looting.”

  “All you did was rescue stuff,” said Queenie.

  “You called it rescuing; they called it looting. Trouble is, they were right. I thought it was fair game, kind of a public service, if you like. The question is: how did they find out?”

  “Mum! Reg!” said Frankie through gritted teeth. “It’s not needed anymore. It doesn’t help.” It was as though Evie had bequeathed Frankie all her influence.

  “No, you’re right, darling. Anyway, Evie put her foot down,” said Queenie. “She said she’d take Frankie. And I had to stay, I had to, for the girls. There was no choice.” Then she added with a smile, “I was getting no help from the Prisoner of Zenda here.”

  “Yes,” admitted Reg, counting passing years on his fingers, “ ’cos then I was away for a little longer, like. Completely unrelated,” he assured them, adding in mit
igation: “Well, it was a difficult time. I didn’t have a lot to live for.”

  “My marriage had been quite difficult for both me and Joe,” said Queenie. “We were rather thrown together. But with Reg . . .” She looked at him circumspectly and smiled. “Well, hard to believe now, I know, but . . .” It was easy to tell the story; she had been practising for so long. “Evie wanted me to stay lonely, in memory of her son. And that was hard when I’d found someone, but it was the only way she’d put up with Sylvia, and put up was all she ever did. And when we could, when he was back out, Reg and I did see each other, though she could never know about it — and New Year that year, we went away together when you were up in Edinburgh, and she found out. Through nobody’s fault, I’m sure.” Frankie was staring at the game from the cracker as though she could make the balls slot home with her mental energy alone. “And she told Sylvia there and then, told her what she’d told me never to tell her.”

  “And the girl upped and went,” said Reg. “Don’t want nothing to do with us.”

  “Yet,” said Queenie.

  “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” said Reg.

  There was silence. Frankie was chewing the inside of her cheek. “Merry Christmas,” she said with a smile around the table, as she sought permission to end the conversation. “And God bless us, each and every one.”

  But Queenie wasn’t quite done. “And, Georgie, that’s why when you said it was a shame that Evie wasn’t here to see it, well, I had to explain that it could never have been. Sad to say: it’s only because she’s not that we can. And he waited for me all those years.”

  “We should have run away years ago and eloped,” said Reg.

  “Anteloped?”

  “Anteloped. Back then. Mind you, it got a bit easier when she couldn’t get out of bed no more.”

  “Reg!” said Frankie in mock horror. She had regained her equilibrium almost immediately. “Can we get back to the business of Christmas?”

  “It’s better out in the open,” said Queenie. “We wouldn’t want to keep anything from you, would we, Georgie?”

  “That’s right,” said Reg.

  “There’s a Christmas to be had!” exclaimed Frankie. The three of them started moving dishes to the kitchen.

  George sat back, weighed down by turkey, brandy butter, news. Strangest of all, none of it was unexpected. He was happy for Queenie and Reg, sad for Sylvia, relieved that everything was known. It was Evie he was muddled about — no wonder there had always been friction with Queenie, living in the same house all that time, juggling the two sisters; and Frankie — she’d known all along and pretended otherwise, just like during the interval at Peter Pan. Presumably, she had her reasons; perhaps she was just being kind, thinking George too young.

  Exhausted, they sat back and recounted the day to one another, sorting through the mountain of wrapping paper, Queenie separating the reusable from the useless, folding the former as neatly as possible, and Reg torching the rest.

  The subject turned to Upside, Reg pretending to choke on his cold turkey when George said that he helped the groundsman. “What is it, a slave camp?” George changed the subject when they asked about schoolwork, and started to tell them about Valentine Vox, how the book got him interested in ventriloquism; he was just about to tell them about the Ventrilo, when Frankie clapped her hands and interrupted.

  “We’ll have to follow family tradition and buy you a dummy. That’s what Evie would have wanted. But you can’t really have schoolboys anymore. They look a bit old-fashioned, creepy.”

  “You want something like what Queenie’s got,” said Reg, referring to Mikey, the bright green monkey who was a cross between a fur rug and an alien.

  “Thank you,” said George. “But I was thinking of the other kind of ventriloquism, not with the figure — not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. . . .”

  “Perish the thought!” said Queenie, in an impression of Evie, which honoured her memory as it lightly mocked her. It was Queenie’s recognition that despite everything, regular attitudes had reestablished themselves, that the family compass hadn’t lost magnetic north.

  “I want to make voices appear out of nowhere, so people can’t believe their own ears. I want to make a voice come from behind there” — he pointed to the grandfather clock — “and over there, and over there.”

  “Blimey,” said Reg, with a splutter of scotch. “You’re not just a chip, you’re the ’ole bleedin’ block!”

  “Darling, that’s wonderful,” said Frankie, as she crawled over to hug him.

  George hadn’t been expecting such an ovation. He’d thought they would react as they had when he had told them he was building a large model train set in his bedroom. Queenie, who hadn’t said a word, left, returning with a stack of books that she placed on the floor. It was Frankie who spoke.

  “You remember Evie had some special things for you? Here they are. You never knew my dad. Death Wish Fisher! All his life, he had one dream — just what you’ve been talking about. And when Evie was looking through her things, she found his notebooks, on how to do magic and all sorts, in his tiny writing. His life’s work, I reckon.”

  Frankie pulled out the first book. What had once been black with a burgundy cloth binding was now washed-out grey and pink. It was tied together with string, and the covers, acting more as a portfolio around the interleaved extra pages, were badly bowed. Queenie produced her always handy nail scissors, and Frankie cut the string, declaring the book open, and turned to a page of faded blue ink.

  “See, look. And . . .” On the first page, there was the date 1940 and the inscription:

  Imaginations, fantasies, illusions,

  In which the things that cannot be take shape,

  And seem to be, and for the moment are.

  “Longfellow, I think,” said Queenie. “He loved his little bits of poetry: Shakespeare and that. Always quoting Dickens too, he was.” Beneath that was written in the same faded ink: For my Grandson. “And that,” she added, “is you. And if anyone knew how to throw his voice, Joe Fisher did.”

  “Shall I tell you what I always remember about him?” His handwriting had tripped a memory in Frankie. “His voice, reading to me, when I was just a baby.”

  “What was he reading?” asked Reg. “You remember?”

  “I do, yes. Beatrix Potter. We had a lovely set of those, a little miniature library. I wonder what’s happened to them.”

  Queenie shrugged. George, however, was barely listening. The books were calling out to him, and he was already putting them in chronological order. Gifts had appeared from unexpected places this Christmas, but his family had saved the best present for last.

  Boxing Day was back to work.

  The pantomime lingered on almost until the beginning of term, adapting its references from Christmas to New Year to Back to School. Audiences dwindled as Christmas became an expensive memory.

  Also lingering was Ricky Mitchell, Des’s nephew and successor. A slightly overweight man of thirty-three, with a neatly cropped beard too grown-up for his boyish pudgy face, he had been little more than the office boy at the Mitchell agency, but the further Des had sunk into cosy retirement in the bosom of the Fishers, the more Ricky had insinuated himself, until his uncle relented and left him the company. Ricky had also inherited those clients (one of whom was Frankie) who stayed out of loyalty or laziness after his uncle’s death. Des’s stylish sleight of hand had been to make the nuts and bolts of business vanish — Frankie should worry about nothing but her art — but Ricky had no such trick up his sleeve. He thought only of the lowest common denominator, the bottom line: meat and potatoes, he once said, were his bread and butter. He was always on the lookout for, and ready to discuss at length, an angle, a package, a strategy, an extra percentage point (as, in his civilian life, he was obsessed with a better rate and a quicker route). Inviting himself into the dressing room, he would expect from Frankie a level of interest in, and an understanding of, perce
ntages, net and gross, deposits and back end, box office trends, and taxes that his golden goose was quite unable to give, and that was perhaps beyond her. George found him a bore, laughing at the way he shaved his beard high so it gave the impression of a jawline, but Frankie was flattered, and somewhat relieved, by the plans Ricky had for her and, by encouraging him to involve her, flattered him in return.

  Though the excitement of the stage never wore off, George had a new focus. He lived in Frankie’s dressing room, no longer interested in pestering the dame for information he didn’t have. Frankie chatted away, in between Ricky’s frequent interruptions, but George’s attention was elsewhere. He was reading his grandfather’s book in bed, backstage, in the sitting room, over breakfast. He wanted to learn everything his grandfather had to teach.

  Until now, Joe King Fisher had been a legend. George had stared at the medals and the famous photo above the fireplace: Joe in his uniform, little Frankie perched between his outspread legs, saluting. The two George Crosses were displayed close by, the most frequently dusted items in the house. For Gallantry, said the medal, as St. George hacked at the dragon. But who was this gallant hero?

  Now here he was, the man himself in inky relief. He was never spoken of without reverence in the Fisher family: they idolized him, though the worship came exclusively from Frankie and Evie, who had regularly referred to him as “our war hero.” George remembered sitting on Evie’s bed while she flicked through her crisp yellowed press cuttings, black-and-white memories protected by see-through leaves. The whole story of their family was told in those gold-covered albums, Evie’s lifeblood. Predating Joe was the Echo Endor Story, and even some dusty mementos of her father, Vox. She had looked back at the pictures of herself when she was the great Echo and told George the stories that accompanied every one.

  “Why can’t I call you Echo?” he once asked.

  “Because now I am just an Echo, a memory, and I certainly don’t want to be reminded of the fact.”