by Graham Swift
‘So why magic, Ronnie? How did it all begin?’
He did not say, as she herself might have said in answer to most questions about her life, ‘My mother.’ But they would get round to his mother eventually. He was not a shy or hesitant man (what were they doing right then?), but he could be very careful about some things. You had to draw them gently out of him.
It seemed that Ronnie had become a magician more by chance than intention, though once the seed was sown, the wish had taken hold of him completely. Perhaps the sowing of the seed was itself a stroke of magic.
‘Where was this, Ronnie?’
She caressed his chest. She was, herself, about to become not a little enchanted.
‘It was at a place called Evergrene.’
‘Evergrene?’
‘Evergrene.’
He said it with a big full stop. He said it as if he might also have said, ‘And doesn’t everyone know about Evergrene? And doesn’t that explain everything?’
‘You’ll have to do a bit better than that. You’ll have to tell me where Evergrene is.’
‘It’s in Oxfordshire. It was where I was in the war. You’re talking to a fully qualified evacuee. How about you?’
She quickly dealt with that. No, never an evacuee. She and her mum had stuck it out in Woking. A long way from the docks, and—look—no damage. Besides, her mother had had her daughter’s theatrical career to think about. ‘This war will be over one day, Evie, and then what? Then what?’ But this was her story, it could wait.
No, she’d never been an evacuee. Though now she was rather beginning to wish she had.
‘Come on, Ronnie. Evergrene.’
* * *
—
It seemed from the way he began so cagily to speak about it that it might have been a six-year holiday, that it might have been where—all before there were hairs on his chest—he’d had the time of his life. He was reluctant to talk about it perhaps because it all sounded too good to be true. It did. Perhaps he was making it all up and having her on. But it gradually dawned on her that he spoke about these years of his life with such shiftiness and struggle because he’d never spoken about them to anyone before. She was the one, she was the first.
And must also have been the last.
She would never anyway have any other source or corroboration for her knowledge of the life of Ronnie Deane than Jack Robbins. Hadn’t Jack known him for something like ten years? But she would be able to tell at once that it was more the other way round. Jack might know a hundred things that she didn’t, but he didn’t know these things that Ronnie had told only her and that she, in turn, would never tell Jack.
Jack would only say, making a little bundle of jokes of it, ‘He went to Oxford, Evie. Cut above. He took a degree in magic. He met the Wizard of Oxford. Sorcerer’s apprentice.’
In any case she was yet to meet Jack Robbins.
She stroked Ronnie’s chest, feeling that—despite the hairs—she might be stroking the chest of an eight-, a nine-year-old boy.
It turned out that he’d had two childhoods—almost, you might say, two lives—and the second had taken over from the first. He’d been taken in by this couple called the Lawrences and raised by them as if he were their own. And, to cap it all, Mr Lawrence, Eric Lawrence, had turned out to be a temporarily underoccupied magician.
But then the war had come to an end and this—what to call it?—magical life had had to stop, even go into reverse. Or not exactly, since Ronnie wanted to be a magician too and, up to a point, already was one.
It was not so difficult now to guess, before Ronnie told her, that Ronnie’s ‘little windfall’, of which she herself was an indirect beneficiary, had come from this same Eric Lawrence, who, he said, had recently died. It became gradually apparent that another reason why all this information was emerging with such painfulness from Ronnie was that he was still in a state of mourning.
She wouldn’t be lying here—they wouldn’t be lying here—without Eric Lawrence’s money. Never mind magic.
* * *
—
But it wasn’t as simple as that. She wanted to ask about the rest of Ronnie’s childhood, the ‘real’ one. There was so much, it seemed, he was still keeping from her.
And how anyway—to jump forward—had he got to call himself Pablo?
‘It’s my middle name, isn’t it, it’s my real name? My middle name is Paul.’
‘Yes. But.’
He said, ‘Spanish blood, Evie.’
Which was almost as mysterious as his saying ‘Evergrene’.
Though, yes, to look at him—and she was having a good look at him now—you might have guessed that too. Those eyes in particular.
‘Don’t laugh, Evie, but my mother’s middle name is Dolores.’
Well that was something, and it conjured up in her mind an image of Ronnie’s mother—colourful, exotic, even theatrical—that made her quite want to meet her, and even made her think that her own mother, who was only called Mabel, might like to meet her too.
But this was seriously to jump ahead, and how wrong she was.
‘So where is she now, Ronnie, your mother? What does she do?’
‘She’s a couple of miles from where we are now. She’s a charwoman in Bethnal Green. Do you want to go and see her?’
It was the only time, as it would turn out, that Ronnie would extend this invitation, and it was clear that he didn’t really mean it. It was also of course the last thing she wanted to do at that moment.
‘No, not just now, Ronnie.’
But later, when she had time to think about it, it was not difficult to put herself in Mrs Deane’s shoes and imagine how it would have felt to receive back her one and only son in Bethnal Green and discover that he’d changed altogether. Not just changed, he wanted to be a magician.
It didn’t take much to see that there had been a rift.
And a rift that had only widened when Ronnie attempted to repair it. This all suddenly escaped from him too that afternoon, while the electric fire continued its pinging and buzzing.
When the all-important windfall had come his way—and they were now up to very recent times—he had, with the best of motives, offered the larger part of it to his mother, by way of recompense for all damage and division. But his mother had refused it. She had even, as it were, thrown it back in his face. Strong words had been spoken.
Ronnie had used another expression which it seemed he’d been storing up. ‘Spanish passion, Evie.’
And did she still want to pop round and see her?
‘What’s her first name, Ronnie?’
‘Agnes.’
Agnes Dolores. It made the mind again paint pictures.
‘And your father?’
There was a long pause. It was a simple question.
‘Sid.’
There was another long pause.
‘He’s at the bottom of the sea, Evie. Merchant navy. 1940.’
And that closed the conversation. But at least they were more or less as one there. She couldn’t give as many facts about her own father. For all she knew of his whereabouts (she believed he had been called Bill), he might as well have been at the bottom of the sea too.
Poor Agnes. Poor Mabel.
* * *
—
She never disclosed any of this to her own mother. One thing at a time. And time enough, she would think, for Ronnie perhaps to get round to telling her himself. First she had to tell her mother about Ronnie anyway, and she left that for a while, to be sure of her ground. But one day, using one of the phones at the Belmont Theatre, she said, ‘Guess what, Mum, I’m working with a magician.’
And then, not so very long after that, she said, ‘Guess what, Mum, I’m going to marry him.’
This was not perhaps what every mother want
s to hear from her only daughter, but her mother’s answer was simple and heartfelt. ‘Oh how wonderful, sweetheart. And when am I going to meet him?’
No such breathless messages ever passed, it seemed, between Ronnie and his mother. She would come to wonder if Ronnie’s mother ever knew of her future daughter-in-law’s existence. And just as well, she would also come to think.
Yet for a few fond months of her life she, Evie White, was the fool who thought that her impending marriage to Ronnie might achieve two ends. She would, of course, marry Ronnie. But might not this happy union, even in prospect, be the means of bringing about a happy reunion between mother and son? When she pictured Ronnie’s mother, she pictured two mothers at bitter war with each other in the same person. One called Agnes, with a heart of stone, one called Dolores, with a heart only waiting to melt.
She, Evie White, with a heart, she thought, that was simple and undivided, was a fool for ever making (of someone she’d never met) such a childish analysis. A fool for ever believing in such hokum.
* * *
—
One morning in early July 1959, two weeks into the season, Mabel White stepped off the Brighton Belle onto Brighton Station. She carried a small white suitcase, wore a loudly cheerful summer frock (both things newly purchased) and a sunhat that seemed to come with its own small garden. She strode boldly down the platform, pausing halfway to give a look of sudden joy followed by some vigorous waving.
Here was a woman who knew how to make an entrance and who clearly intended to enjoy herself during her seaside weekend. The nervousness Evie had felt as she waited with Ronnie at the barrier fled before this vivid approaching presence. As Evie well knew, Mabel had had her disappointments, yet here she was, almost fifty, like a brash sea breeze herself.
She might have turned to Ronnie and said, as if fulfilling her part of a bargain, ‘There you are, that’s my mother for you.’
But soon she was saying, while Mabel beamed, ‘Mum, this is Ronnie.’
Evie didn’t know (and never would) the particular associations that railway stations and mothers held for Ronnie, that his own nervousness was complicated, but she could see from the sometimes daunted look on his face during this otherwise bracing visit that Ronnie’s mother and her own must be a million miles apart.
And had Mabel really taken to Ronnie?
‘So this is—the magician!’
Her mother was always direct. She wore a pair of little white gloves.
After the show that evening—‘Oh but you were amazing, darlings!’—when Mabel was introduced to Jack, it became clear to Evie that, had her mother been twenty years younger, she might have readily joined the line of Floras. She whispered in Evie’s ear, ‘He’s a one, isn’t he?’ Meaning Jack, not Ronnie.
It was late and her mother was a little drunk—this was in the bar of the seafront hotel they’d booked for her—and might have been forgiven for forgetting the chief purpose of her visit to Brighton, but Evie had felt momentarily troubled. She told herself that her mum and Jack were getting along like a house on fire because Jack, as she knew by now, also had a ‘theatrical’ mother. But this only raised again the issue of how different Ronnie’s mother must be. She wondered how Ronnie must feel, sitting there while his mother-in-law-to-be made eyes at Jack, and she reached under the table to squeeze Ronnie’s hand.
When they’d seen Mabel off at the station she had showered them both with kisses and called them her ‘chickens’. The weekend had been a general success, but it had underscored a problem. To Evie, invigorated by her mother’s undiminished buoyancy, the solution seemed obvious. Surely an equivalent visit by Ronnie’s mother was needed. Evie was prepared to take on all the challenges and even saw herself as being—with the help of sea air and free tickets to the show—the agent of reconciliation. She had her own share of her mother’s sunniness.
But she soon stopped putting forward her suggestion. It was plain, for all the enthusiasm Ronnie expressed for it, that such a visit was never going to happen. She stopped asking about Ronnie’s mother, though she did not stop thinking about her, forming stern pictures of her and comparing them with those so recently reprinted of her own mother, and wondering—fingering her engagement ring—what she might be getting into.
It was her first teetering. Why had she said her yes so quickly?
She heard her mother’s words again—no one else had heard them—tickling in her ear: ‘He’s a one, isn’t he?’
Surely she would have to meet Ronnie’s mum somehow—somewhere—some time? But this line of thinking was soon replaced by a whole different kind of questioning. To this day, sitting alone in her bedroom, she can never have the answer, though the question stays with her.
How could she know—how could either of them know—that Mrs Deane hadn’t in fact come to Brighton? Hadn’t come, secretly and of her own accord, to see for herself this woman her son had chosen, and at the same time to see all this nonsense, this magic poppycock that he got up to. There was a simple way of achieving all this. All she had to do was get the train to Brighton, buy a ticket for the show and slip in unnoticed.
Had she sat, hidden in the dark, and cast her stony judgement on the two of them, on the whole ridiculous enterprise, and then slipped out again? They would never have known that her eyes were upon them.
And what might she have thought while she sat there? That’s my Ronnie up there, calling himself ‘Pablo’ and sawing his future wife in half. A fine way of going about getting married. And who’s she, anyway, when she’s at home, the one with all the sequins and feathers and precious little else, looking like she’ll never stop smiling?
But then it became clear, though there was still about half of the season left and their act was going from strength to strength, that, whether she’d done this or not, she wouldn’t be coming now anyway, secretly or otherwise, because Mrs Deane—Agnes Dolores Deane—had died.
* * *
—
The show must always go on, but sometimes things happen and it can’t. It was now early August, the crowds were thickening in Brighton and the audiences for the pier show were swelling. When Jack slipped back to do his watching there might be no spare seats. And by now there was no denying it, ‘Pablo and Eve’ had become one of the top attractions. On the billboards their names now appeared higher up and in larger lettering, and crude little photographed faces—Pablo fiercely staring, Eve serenely smiling—floated beside them.
Eddie Costello, in his Arts and Entertainments column, had waggishly put it that ‘They not only did magic but they had it.’ And had added that one should hope so too, since it was no secret they were engaged to be married. This little fairy tale hovered round their act like some parallel piece of conjuring. And no harm in it surely, since it was true. Though it was not true, as Eddie had implied, that theirs was a Brighton romance, that they’d met on the pier, as it were, and plighted their troth to the sound of the waves. But let Brighton believe it. Only Ronnie and Evie—or Pablo and Eve—might know that they’d plighted their troth, to all intents and purposes, in Finsbury, off the City Road, in the glow of a Belling portable.
And, anyway, the tricks (as everyone called them, you can’t stop people calling them tricks) were quite something, and were performed now with an ever slicker and more adventurous style. Ronnie, to the disappointment of some, had begun scaling down all that stuff with boxes and swords—‘old-hat stuff’ he called it—and was bringing into the act more things with his own—their own—trademark upon them. Things you couldn’t get from other magicians. He was taking risks perhaps, but it was working. Give the people what they want, yes, but why not give them something truly amazing?
In short, though only Ronnie himself could have put it this way, he was moving from magic towards wizardry. There was a difference, a difference in ambition, but a difference in the very nature of the two things. There was a perilous
line between the two, and Ronnie recognised in himself the ability to cross it. He could see the land of wizardry beckoning to him. Who knew what lay in it? And perhaps there might be no stepping back. And it was not simply a show-business region, he knew this, it was a different world altogether, it had different laws, it made different demands. But he was still young, and who knew what he might yet be capable of?
As he contemplated his progress to this other zone only one thing, and it was not a lack of courage, made him pause. How might he take Evie with him? How might he—and should he even—reach out his hand to her and ask her to take this leap with him? Yet how could he not? He did not underestimate his own powers and yet he knew now, it had become a fact of life, that he could not do anything without her.
Beneath his growing on-stage bravura, he was torn and confounded. Eric Lawrence, though he had imparted many words of wisdom, had never said, ‘Get yourself an assistant.’ That had been Jack’s idea. So how, Ronnie had sometimes wondered but never felt able to ask, had Eric found his Penny?
While Evie never ceased to sparkle on stage, he could sometimes see a troubled look in her eyes, like someone hesitating to jump. Their rehearsals, when he tried to teach her his latest wild idea, became edgy. ‘It’s beyond me,’ Evie would say or, ‘You’re losing me, Ronnie.’
He remembered how she’d said, with such excitement in her face, that it was all ‘a new departure’ for her too.
Sometimes during the show Ronnie’s eyes would take on a quite possessed quality. He might fix the audience with them, as if to say, ‘You think I can’t do this, you think this can’t happen?’ Yet to his smouldering concentration Evie’s smiling radiance provided exactly the right balance. To the audience it seemed—and what else mattered?—that they simply worked together, and amazed together. It would be hard to say exactly when each new ‘trick’ (to use that word) was added and an old one dropped away. The act had become a fluid phenomenon, yet full of a thrilling tension. You never knew what might happen next. This in itself became part of the attraction.