by Graham Swift
* * *
—
One instance of the loving-kindness Ronnie would never forget. In all this dizzying uncertainty as to who his effective parents were, it fell to the Lawrences to tell Ronnie that his real, his true yet so often unseen father was—no more.
How this news had been passed on to Eric and Penelope Ronnie would never know, but the couple clearly understood that they must be the breakers of the news and that, with no experience of raising a child yet with all their years, they must take on whatever this might entail.
They were surprised at Ronnie’s lack of response, his muteness, his containment, as if this thing might have had nothing to do with him or as if he had simply not registered it at all. It was all just shock perhaps.
Perhaps, and this might be their own fault, the poor boy simply didn’t know what to believe.
His father had been ‘lost at sea’. He was ‘missing’. These were the official phrases that conveyed yet muddled the truth. The Lawrences had wished, for considered reasons, to avoid any more definite words. So had any of it sunk in? Which was an unfortunate way even of framing the question.
It was only when that evening Eric Lawrence went to tuck Ronnie in and see if he was all right, that emotion suddenly spilled—surprising even Ronnie himself with its flow and force. Mr Lawrence had thought of Ronnie lying alone, having to make his own voyage through the night while understanding (perhaps) that his father would never voyage again. Perhaps he wouldn’t be able to sleep.
Mr Lawrence had gone up and sat on the edge of Ronnie’s bed. Ronnie might have said, in one of those never-written letters, that it was a very nice comfortable bed with a pale-green bedspread, in a very nice big bedroom with curtains matching the bedspread, though they now took second place to the familiar blackout curtain. The window overlooked a huge garden.
Ronnie had never communicated any of these things to his mother and Mr Lawrence for his own part had no notion of the pokiness of the sleeping accommodation in Bethnal Green. But he’d wondered if Ronnie, apart from thinking of his father, had also been thinking of his mother and whether she too (this was October 1940 and the Blitz was in full swing) was able to get to sleep.
He put his hand on Ronnie’s forehead, cupping its smallness with his palm. It was a spontaneous gesture not intended, perhaps, to be fatherly and more like the action of a doctor feeling for a fever, but Ronnie realised that his own father had never done anything so tender, even though he might have been capable of it.
The hand on his brow had a strange tingling power.
‘You must go to sleep, Ronnie. It is the best thing. Just to sleep.’
Ronnie had almost at once felt his eyes droop, but Mr Lawrence had added, ‘I think perhaps that’s how you should think of it. That he is sleeping too, among the fishes.’
It was these words, the idea that both he and his father might just be sleeping, or it was the vision of lots of glittering fish, but there had sprung from Ronnie—though it was only when Mr Lawrence had kissed his forehead and crept out—a sudden convulsive upwelling of tears. He could not stop them, they went on and on, enveloping him till he fell asleep. So that his last thought perhaps was that his own tears were like the deep salt water, if only a tiny part of it, under which his father lay slumbering and submerged.
Why had he cried? For his father certainly, but also for some great swamping confusion—confusing yet kind. For this extraordinary metamorphosis that had occurred in his life. For the boy, weeping before on a train, who’d not known any of this was to come—who’d cried then for his mother, for whom he was not crying now. From guilt and dismay that he could cry now for his father yet feel that he had another already to replace him. From drowning gratitude that he’d been taken and dropped down in so much goodness.
But more than this. More than all this bewildering bounty. He had discovered by now his purpose in life. He had discovered, or it had been revealed to him, that Mr Lawrence was not just the owner with his wife of an enchanted place called Evergrene, but, though currently forced to work in a limited way (there was a war on: ‘There isn’t much call, Ronnie’), he was an accomplished magician.
* * *
—
One day Ronnie sat with Eric Lawrence on the low brick wall of the cold frame. He knew by now what a cold frame was, but one of its incidental functions was to serve as a convenient place to sit on warm days. Mr Lawrence, while they sat, was enjoying a mug of tea and Ronnie was enjoying a glass of ginger beer. The ginger beer was made by the Lawrences themselves—was there no end to the amazements of this place? The recipe had been given them, he was told, by Ernie, who seemed to have talents beyond gardening and who today was nowhere to be seen. Ronnie was now used to this. Sometimes Ernie was there, sometimes he wasn’t.
Mrs Lawrence, after bringing out the drinks, had made herself scarce, as if aware that there was to be some man-to-man talk. Mrs Lawrence had a very nice way of saying whenever she proffered something, or sometimes for no clear reason at all, ‘Here we are!’ And Ronnie had come to love this bright and strangely echoing phrase. Here we are! How happy. And true.
And Eric Lawrence did indeed have something special to impart.
After sipping some tea he smacked his lips and looked around.
‘The great trouble with this garden, Ronnie, is the rabbits. They come and they eat everything.’
This was a strange remark because though the garden backed onto fields and woods Ronnie had never seen any rabbits in it. Perhaps he hadn’t been looking. Perhaps they were something else that Ernie dealt with. They had more than once eaten rabbit pie—something Ronnie had never eaten in Bethnal Green, but which in the country seemed to be a wartime staple.
Mrs Lawrence had once said, when serving it, ‘What would we do without Ernie?’ She’d looked very fondly at Ronnie while putting a serving of pie on his plate, so that he’d almost thought she’d said, ‘What would we do without Ronnie?’ It was a pleasing mistake, as was the idea that he and Ernie might have changed places. If he’d been an older and more polished being, Ronnie might have said to Mrs Lawrence, ‘Ah—but what would we do without your wonderful cooking?’ And Mrs Lawrence might have felt a catch in her throat.
But he’d never seen any rabbits in the garden.
After his emphatic complaint about the invading rabbits, Mr Lawrence suddenly said, ‘Well bless me!’ He would use such cosy expressions—they were a bit like Mrs Lawrence’s ‘Here we are!’s. They made Ronnie feel all the more alert about his inner ‘Fucking ’ell’s.
‘Bless me,’ Mr Lawrence said, ‘there are some of the devils right now.’
Ronnie looked this way and that—the vegetable patch, the lawn—but he couldn’t see a single rabbit.
‘No, Ronnie. I mean the ones behind you.’
Ronnie turned and there, within the low brick confines of the cold frame and beneath its half-raised glass panels, were one, two, three—no, four rabbits. And each one of them was pure white. It looked as if there had been a remarkable and remarkably localised snowfall. But the snow was alive.
They had not been there before. They really had not been there just before. They seemed not at all shy, happily munching at some just-shooting lettuces.
‘You see what I mean,’ Mr Lawrence nonchalantly said. Then he said abruptly, ‘But what was that?’ and pointed at something seemingly in mid-air. Ronnie could not help but be drawn to his straightened finger.
‘Look again, Ronnie. Turn around.’
The rabbits were gone.
It was the beginning. Even perhaps—after more than one start already—the true start of his life.
‘Would you like to know how that was done, Ronnie? Would you like to know how that happened?’ He had taken a quick sip of his tea. ‘One step at a time of course.’
* * *
—
So it was that Ro
nnie began what Jack Robbins would call his ‘sorcerer’s apprenticeship’. So it was that years later, having pursued with dogged and solitary determination but with no great profit what he would sometimes speak of as his ‘calling’, Ronnie put an advert, following Jack’s advice, in one or two appropriate places.
‘Magician’s Assistant Wanted. Suit Young Lady. Previous Stage Experience Essential.’
And Evie White had answered it.
In the many years in between, Ronnie had become, thanks to Mr Lawrence’s exclusive instruction, a promising and competent magician, but Mr Lawrence had stressed that it was a long and not necessarily lucrative road, and was Ronnie sure? (Ronnie was certain.)
Mr Lawrence’s tutelage could not last for ever. It was governed by the course of the war. This applied to other things even more exercising than magic. As the war drew to its close Ronnie felt a new qualm enter his life, the reverse of and more complicated than the one he’d felt when his mother had taken him to Paddington and to an unknown fate.
He was fourteen now, a big boy. Was he still a good one? The Lawrences would have said that he was. Was he a changed and even improved one? Yes. Setting aside that he had learnt how to perform magic—something his mother had no knowledge of and couldn’t possibly have imagined—his time at Evergrene had been an education. He had attended more than one local school and had learnt things, not just magic, directly from Mr and Mrs Lawrence, educated people themselves. Another wonder of the house was that it was sprinkled with books.
But Ronnie had picked up from the air at Evergrene, from his very habitation of it, a sense of things, a taste for things that he knew—he still had memories that enabled him to know—were going to seem distressingly foreign when he returned to London. Yet this would be just his side of it.
He could at least begin to see it, though he did not want to, from his mother’s point of view. She might scoffingly say he’d ‘gone up in the world’, he’d ‘got ideas about himself’—she who’d taken him to school, assuring him it would lead to a better life. She might feel only humiliated by these other loftier parents who’d taken over. Under the guise of being a deserving case for protection (though it had been her decision), he had, in effect, deserted her.
Moreover, she was a widow now. She had survived bombs, she had trembled in shelters. He had known not merely shelter, but—she didn’t yet know it—a privileged, even a charmed existence.
Such thoughts began to gnaw at him. As the war seemed to be ending he was guilty again of wanting it to go on, or of hoping for some other way of prolonging his time at Evergrene, so that the issue of his mother would not have to be faced.
Mr and Mrs Lawrence too secretly wished that his stay with them might continue, would have arranged it if they could. They had got used to him, their little Ronnie—though he was no longer so little. They were about to be bereaved.
Even the availability of magic, it seemed, could not solve everything. It could bring about extraordinary transformations, but not alter the fundamentals of life. It was a lesson a budding magician would be wise to heed. Perhaps Mr Lawrence had tried to instil it. Or perhaps he was too afraid himself of waking up from this dream of having a child—a protégé, a pupil. Or of dashing Ronnie’s own fledgling ambitions.
* * *
—
On a June day in 1945 Ronnie Deane boarded a train at Oxford, a city still remarkably untouched, to go to a city of rubble. And now it was Mr and Mrs Lawrence who tearfully waved goodbye.
Ronnie returned to a London transformed—what on earth had been going on?—and to a mother, it seemed to him, damaged and altered too, not beaten or even essentially changed, but hardened.
And after nearly six years how did he look to her? Improved, enhanced? Softened? Perhaps even a little soft in the head?
She was not going to stand for any nonsense anyway. He was nearly fifteen now and, since events had interrupted his education, was in the unfortunate position, while possessing no qualifications, of needing to earn a living. So what was he going to do about it?
Ronnie had his innocent answer and, cosseted by so much time away from the big city, he naively let out his secret.
‘A magician, Ronnie? A magician! Please tell me you’re having me on! Please tell me you’re joking!’
His mother’s language and manner became even harsher. In her head was the thought: Jesus Christ, it had been bad enough being married to a sailor. And Ronnie must have read her mind, since he had the sudden realisation: was he not now like his father, back from a long and absconding voyage?
‘Jesus Christ, Ronnie! Jesus Christ!’
Then his mother had said something he’d never heard cross her lips and that would never have crossed his own in front of her, though he’d many times said it to himself, even in polite company.
‘Fucking hell, Ronnie! Magic! Whatever fucking next?’
Oh he was back home all right, he was back in London, and what a welcome he was getting.
Having exploded, his mother had soon erupted into tears. It was a familiar cycle. But she wasn’t asking to be comforted. It was another form of venting. Hardened? Like a stone, even when undergoing a wetting. And Ronnie might have burst into tears himself, but he was coming up to fifteen and couldn’t.
* * *
—
But more than all this. More than this initial cutting down to size. The little house in Bethnal Green—how little it seemed—enclosed him like a prison. It was mostly unchanged and it was unscathed (other houses along the street were not there any more), and its humble endurance, like his mother’s, might have spoken to him. But it was like a confinement. He felt guilty—why shouldn’t he, returning to a prison cell? It had once housed his tiniest self. It had once briefly housed a parrot, which, according to his blatantly lying mother, had flown away. But how right she was now to be aggrieved.
And how he identified with that caged bird.
There followed a year or so in which mother and son attempted, somehow, to live with each other. The unbudging truth was that they did not know each other. Or it was more—Ronnie had to accept this—that Mrs Deane didn’t know her son. She hadn’t moved, she hadn’t gone anywhere. She was still a charwoman. He pined for the Lawrences and all that he had now been separated from. She didn’t understand, and wouldn’t have sympathised if she had. And yet she knew he had found another home, another, better life. She felt shamed and wounded.
He acknowledged all this. He had done it to her. But he had been only one of the blameless objects (and fortunately not a victim) of a great historical emergency. He felt—it was a terrible thing to admit to himself—a stranger to his own mother. They did not know each other? They did not own each other. They even disowned each other.
There followed another period in which Ronnie ‘left home’ again, though he was never far from Bethnal Green and sometimes miserably slunk back again—he needed a bed somewhere. Might he have stolen back to the Lawrences, and might they have received him? With difficulty, yet with joy—yes.
But Ronnie knew—he turned sixteen, then seventeen—that he had to stand on his own feet.
This was an itinerant period, so different from any previously in his life, when he scraped a living somehow or other in theatres, doing whatever menial work there might be for him to do for a pittance, learning how they worked. Sometimes even revealing that he could do things himself—on stage, that is—and so starting to learn what a stage is like, what it asks of you, what a hard thing a stage can sometimes be. Learning also the ins and outs of that encompassing entity, ‘the stage’, its intricate and precarious webs of connection. Living, sleeping wherever he could, in some strange places, and—oh, he was growing up—with any girl who might have him and help him. Or sometimes vice versa. Any girl, and there were not a few of them, in the same rough, glittery, hopeful, deluded, stage-struck, thankless, magical business.
/> Eric Lawrence had said it would be tough. Was Ronnie ready? He’d said, and had smiled at his own doubletalk, ‘There are no magic wands, Ronnie. There are magic wands, but there are no magic wands. Do you understand me?’ Eric Lawrence had said it would take time and determination and had urged upon Ronnie that, though he had acquired now some of the basics of magic, there was something else he had to learn, and that was that he would be in the trade of entertainment.
Magic and entertainment were not always the same thing, but they had to combine if he was seriously to follow his vocation. And entertainment meant having to give the people what they wanted and not necessarily what he wanted and might be capable of doing. It meant understanding and bowing (‘In every sense, Ronnie’) to the audience. And it meant, above all, knowing about that thing called ‘the stage’. This was something he could not teach at Evergrene.
So Ronnie had had to find out for himself.
But Eric Lawrence had added, not to make Ronnie too downhearted at all these harsh admonitions, ‘And you will need a stage name. When you are on stage you will need a name—just as I was Lorenzo. What name do you think you should have?’
He had left only the slightest pause for Ronnie (who was anyway at a loss) to answer this question, as if asking it had been merely perfunctory.
‘I think you should be called Pablo, don’t you? Don’t you think Pablo would be a good name for you?’
How had he known? But had he known? Ronnie had never mentioned the parrot. Even when his father had died—for some reason even more resolutely then—he had never mentioned the parrot, which must still have been in a cage somewhere, with some new owner, or some new pet dealer (how did pet dealers fare in a war?). Or even, if it had ever managed truly to fly away, in some place known only to itself.