Wise Children

by Angela Carter

  Once that jacket arrived I hadn’t the heart to give it back although Grandma cut up something terrible. I’ve got it still, it’s in the big wardrobe in Grandma’s room that we don’t use any more, wrapped up in a white sheet, there’s a ghost of antique Mitsouko clinging to the hairs, mothballs in one pocket, in the other the dehydrated skeleton of a gardenia left where I stuffed it after a Certain Distinguished Person took it out of his buttonhole and slipped it down my cleavage, such as it was, not that Nora and I were ever over-endowed in the bosom department, but, if I’d had a cleavage, that is what his nose would have come up to, he was only a little chap.

  Grandma was apoplectic when I got home. The juxtaposition of flora and fauna on my person was too much for her. ‘You wouldn’t cut off a baby’s head and stick it on your best friend’s flayed corpse for decoration, would you?’ ‘I never met a squirrel socially,’ I said. I cheeked her. I brazened it out. Perry guffawed but Grandma blew down her nose, huff huff huff, and when she found out who it was that gave me the gardenia, her fury knew no bounds. She had a real down on the Royal Family.

  You know the song about the girl who ‘danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales’? I was the original girl. Nora, too. He couldn’t tell the difference any more than anybody else could.

  He dearly loved to tango. He’d have tangoed all night, if he could. He’d tango on remorselessly for a good half-hour at a time, it was a real test of your stamina. The band had to go on playing as long as he could keep it up, since he was royalty, but a tango normally lasts just the four minutes so it was as much of an ordeal as anything, especially if you’d done two shows and a matinée already. We preferred to do it in the afternoons, at the Ritz, tango teas, after they brought in dancing in the restaurant. I once picked up a flea at the Ritz in the Marie Antoinette Suite but that was later on, during the war, when I was entertaining the Free French.

  Now we frequented fashionable nightclubs, smart restaurants and flash hotels. Perry took us all to the Savoy Grill on our birthday, that year, not forgetting Grandma, although she hated going into town, these days, we’d had to push and prod her into her corset and bribe her with gin into the taxi. She’d overdone the rouge, perhaps because she’d overdone the gin, and she looked rakish as hell, sneering at the waiters on two fronts – she despised them for being servile but was the first to take umbrage if they spoke out of turn. And there we were, us girls, done up to the nines, little navy suits, gloves to match, red hats with big brims down over one eye, nice shoes, nice handbags, trying to look as if she didn’t belong to us, and Peregrine, at ease, as ever, enjoying every minute, the bastard.

  The waiter hovered: ‘For the first course may I suggest oysters, caviar, smoked salmon . . .’ ‘That sounds quayte nayce, thanks very much,’ she said so she had all three, washing them festively down with crème de menthe, lifting her pinky like a dog lifts its leg as she raised her glass. ‘Bottoms up, ducky!’ she said to Peregrine. ‘Just say the word, babes!’ he replied, clinking. He led her on. We could have dropped through the floor.

  She kept her clothes on more and more. I noticed that. She came into the bathroom, once, she never dreamed of knocking, she hadn’t got a stitch on. Me neither, I was just drying off after my bath. There we both were, captured in the mirror, me young and slim and trim and tender, she vast, sagging, wrinkled, quivering. I couldn’t help but giggle. I shouldn’t have. I could have slapped myself, afterwards. But I couldn’t take that giggle back.

  ‘That’s all very well, Dora,’ she said, ‘but one fine day, you’ll wake up and find you’re old and ugly, just like me.’

  Then she cackled. I’d never even thought that, years back, she might have been pretty. She cackled and she cackled. All the same, she went to get a dressing gown before she came back to have her wee and there was a coolness between us, after that, lasted for months.

  I see it, now, as a defeat that we, her beloved grandchildren, inflicted upon her out of heedlessness and vanity and youth. A nudist might be able to grow old gracefully in the company of other ageing nudists, but she had the misfortune to live with two teenage sexpots, didn’t she, who weren’t about to honour their Grandma’s naturism when it offended their aesthetics and, worse still, might put off any of the young men who came to pick us up and drop us off if they caught sight of it. Nevertheless, we should have spared her feelings more.

  All that spring, all that summer, the telephone rang for the Lucky Chances and Grandma took our messages in a wheezing, grumbling, ungracious manner, occasionally announcing our abode as: ‘Battersea Dogs’ Home’.

  She was our grandma and we loved her but, at times, during our year of grace, not much.

  I can see, now, that we were a la mode, that year, because we were something piquant, something new; there’s a kind of style you can only acquire on the wrong side of the tracks and our grace was a scrawny, alley-cat grace, even if we thought that we were really something. We never saw what other people saw. I would look at Nora, faithful as my looking glass, and see a suave sophisticate with geranium lips and that faux-naïve Dutch doll hairdo which had become our trademark. Yet when I flick back through Grandma’s scrapbooks, the pictures I see are of a couple of street urchins decked up like Christmas trees in all kinds of risky, frisky, flighty, unbecoming gladrags that they wear as if it were a joke.

  We looked as if we had dressed up as grown-ups to go out on the town and, such was the force of our innocence, the champagne they poured out for us would turn to ginger pop the moment it touched our pretty little, silly little lips.

  Fate continued to deal kindly with Melchior. Not only had our greatest living Shakespearian triumphed in musical comedy, he was rolling in money. The revue was a licence to print it. He lived in considerable style. Besides the big house in Eaton Square (to which I couldn’t help but note we’d never been invited except the once, and then unilaterally by the Lady A., for nursery bloody tea, to which we hadn’t gone), there was a major estate in Sussex that had been in the Lady A.’s family since Guillaume Brede de Lynde knocked out some Saxon yokel the year after the Battle of Hastings, and the big house that went with it, plus the Home Farm, assorted hovels for the plebs and a village or two. He’d used his new wealth to do a lot of work on Lynde Court, done it out as befitted the country residence of the Royal Family of the British Theatre – that is, palatially.

  But his heredity was too strong for him. He couldn’t help it, but that manor house always retained a look of here today, gone tomorrow; he was a player to his marrow so he lived in a permanent stage set. He wanted a house that looked as if each leather armchair in the library had been there at least a half a century, where a misty patina of age softened the reflections in the mirror so they would be kind to the crow’s-feet as they gently settled round his eyes, poor old thing, but the Mayfair peeress he’d got in to do it up for him incorporated into the interior just that little bit extra you need for the stage, as if in tribute to his profession. So the aged leather was cracked and fissured a little bit more than was absolutely necessary; the mirrors were distressed so much as to look quite marbled; and the walls turned out the colours of very rare roast beef and gravy, too Garrick Club for words.

  ‘He has given himself,’ said Peregrine, looking at the picture papers, ‘marginally too august a setting.’ Grandma went off in shrieks.

  Now I am old, I think I know why Grandma didn’t like us at eighteen – we felt no irony; how easily we were impressed!

  In this ‘marginally too august a setting’ Melchior gave the performance of his life as Lord of the Manor, even if the Lady A., though ever at his side, always showed faint signs of embarrassment and little Saskia plus, when she hadn’t nodded off, little Imogen gave spirited impersonations of imps of Satan for, amongst the suits of armour, the dead fish in glass cases, the antique weapons crossed upon the panelling, there was always a place to hide and then jump out of with ear-splitting screeches, something priceless to caress with sticky fingers,
a stuffed fox to look for maggots in at dinner-time, and guests, so many guests, to torture at leisure during the extended rural incarceration of the English country-house weekend. Holly in the beds, frogs in the bathtubs. On one memorable occasion, or so I was told, frogspawn in the porridge.

  Not that we were ever invited down there for the weekend.

  So I have to admit, although through gritted teeth, we were thrilled – although we were suspicious – when, that first, triumphant Christmas of the run of What You Will, we were bidden, though more in the manner of a royal command than an invitation, to attend the Lynde Court Twelfth Night Costume Ball.

  We would drive down, after the show, and join in the fun as if by right and it turned out we didn’t even need to worry, ‘What to wear?’ since we were told to keep on our ‘weird sister’ sporrans and be prepared to burst out of a bloody great Hogmanay haggis at a given signal clutching lumps of coal and first-foot them with a brisk jig. Melchior’s social secretary assured us we would find the stone-flagged floor of the Great Hall admirably suited to this purpose.

  ‘If they want us to sing for our supper,’ said Nora, ‘they can stuff it.’

  ‘Don’t you realise who’ll be there?’ said my friend, the famous composer, tingling all over. ‘Half Hollywood will be there!’

  Don’t misunderstand me, his breath didn’t smell bad; nevertheless, the smell of his breath so repulsed me by now that whenever I paid off an instalment on my squirrel jacket I had to turn my back, to which he, having been to public school, was nothing loath.

  Perry laughed and slapped his belly.

  ‘Hurray for Hollywood! Who d’ya think invited these guys? This could be your big break, girls!’

  We understood at last that Melchior’s party was the cover for a gigantic audition and it behooved us to polish up our tap-shoes until we snugged ourselves in rugs and piled into my soi-disant or now virtually ex-lover’s sports car after the show, clutching a greasy paper package of bacon sandwiches we’d picked up from the cabbies’ coffee-stall the other side of Battersea Bridge to sustain us en route, because it was a two-hour drive through a raging blizzard and I was starving, again, when we arrived.

  The snow had finished falling, there was a muffled hush. Everything gleamed because of the icy moon, up high, and not even later on, in Hollywood, at MGM, whose slogan was, ‘More stars than there are in Heaven’, never did I see so many. The ancient lawns wore thick pelts of snow, the rose trees loaded with it. A terrace, with statues in capes and hats of snow; a choked fountain. Lynde Court was built in the eclectic style, that is, a little bit of this and that, but all of it ancient, turrets and pediments snow-capped, swagged cornices and fairy-tale lattices caked and frosted. I never saw a house look lovelier. It took my breath away.

  All relocated to Memory Lane, now, of course, lock, stock and barrel.

  To greet us on the steps, a consort of lutes, in costume, plucking away at some ancient air. Oh, very tasteful, very sweet. Their breath smoked, their noses glowed; the only discordant note, the horn-rimmed spectacles. We’d been to some smart parties since we got the star on our door but never one as smart as this. We clutched hands, we were intimidated, we hung back.

  But then we saw our Uncle Perry, who’d gone down earlier with the hosts, bursting genially out of his white tie and tails, blazing away in the middle of the snow like a hot stove, caught in the act of withdrawing a rabbit from a bass viol. And even though the rabbit instantly turned into our little cousin, Saskia, whom he kissed and cuddled with an enthusiasm that filled us with a jealous rage, the sight of him gave us enough heart to jump out of the motor and run towards him.

  As soon as she saw us coming, Saskia wriggled out of his arms, pouting, shaking herself like a wet dog, and legged it. Perry was downcast; he could turn her into a rabbit at will but he could never make her love him. He cheered up when he saw us, picked us up one after the other and swung us off our feet up in the air, as he used to do to us when we were Saskia’s age but she, evidently, never let him do it to her. I could see her at a distance, glowering malevolently at us.

  We made our entrance into the Great Hall in style, on either arm of Perry’s. All around there was a rustle and a whisper: ‘Here come the Lucky Chances. Of course, they’re really Peregrine’s daughters, you know.’ They all believed it. Only the immediately affected parties knew it wasn’t so.

  The Lady A., in full Gloriana wig and frock, and Melchior, as – you’ve guessed! – received their motley guests, all garbed consistently with the Shakespearian motif. A kiss and a handshake, respectively. We were not excluded; we got our kiss and our handshake like everybody else and then we got a glass of bubbly and trooped off into the Great Hall, where my beau, done up in cap and bells, was already installed at a white grand piano tinkling away at a selection of songs from the show while glossy women propped their cleavages on the Bechstein lid.

  There was a log fire in a hearth that took up half one wall and a sky like Bristol glass outside the leaded windows and stuffed swan on the buffet, I kid you not. The waiter carved for me, I gagged. Nora, I noticed, was already deep in vivacious conversation with a little, bald, fat man who’d come in boots and riding breeches, I couldn’t think as what, who, as he talked, sketched wide circles in the air with his cigar.

  ‘I couldn’t fancy swan,’ I said to the waiter. ‘Too many feathers. Have you got anything else a girl could nibble?’

  He raised his face from the carving knife. Those eyes. My heart went pit-a-pat.

  ‘Fancy meeting you,’ I said, I stammered, so full of joy I could have wept.

  ‘Times are hard,’ he said. ‘Too many tenors, not sufficient songs.’

  So he was doubling as a waiter. We could not stop looking at each other. Behind my back, my sister’s voice was raised in song and, glory be, she’d borrowed mine: ‘In delay, there lies no plenty, So come kiss me . . .’

  ‘Nora,’ he said to me.

  ‘. . . sweet and twenty.’

  We leaned towards each other across the carcass of the violated swan. There was a great press of people. We hid behind the feathers, we kissed, and kissed, and kissed, until by unspoken but mutual consent we ducked under the tablecloth, dropped down on all fours and ran along the whole length of the buffet, under the table. The big, white tablecloth hung down on either side, it was like bolting down a hospital corridor. I put that midnight date with the haggis out of my mind; I’d got other fish to fry. When we came out the other end, Nora was dancing with the bald, fat man; he must have put his cigar down, somewhere, to leave his mouth free so he could nuzzle her neck while the hand that did not stroke her bare back was beating a tattoo on her bum.

  My boy and I held hands. We ran up the black oak staircase, everything in monochrome, moonlight, shadow, snow, past carved wreaths of bay and piles of fruit and big-bosomed women with garlands on their heads, until we found what we were looking for, the master bedroom – instantly recognisable by my father’s fetish, the cardboard crown once worn by Old Ranulph in Lear, under a glass case on the mantelpiece.

  There was a log fire glowing away here, too, and the bedcover turned back, and a little draught came down the chimney gently agitating the stumpwork curtains on the fourposter so that Samson and Delilah, Judith and Holofernes, all the needlework men and women moved a little as we lay down as if those old lovers were greeting these ones who now were hastening to renew their acquaintance with one another.

  I offed the false eyelashes, snitched a handful of the Lady A.’s cotton wool to wipe off my make-up. Tonight, this night of all nights, I wanted to look like myself, whoever that was.

  ‘I dye my hair,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  To die for love runs in the family. My grandmother did it; so did my mother. And that night was the one time in all my life I thought that such a thing might be worth while. He took his time and I took mine. In the time we’d been apart, a little crown of golden hairs had sprung up around his nipples but not so that you’
d notice, unless you were looking hard.

  ‘Nora,’ he said, as we lay wet and panting. ‘Nora . . . you’ve changed your perfume.’

  I only had to speak, to say: ‘Not Nora, my darling, but Dora, who loves you only.’ And there would have been one more happy housewife behind some garden fence in Slough or Cheam, and a bellyful of kids. Those words that would have changed everything were on the tip of my tongue, would you believe; but there they stayed, because, at that very moment, my lover crinkled up his nose.

  ‘Can you smell burning?’

  I pointed to the cosy logs. He shook his head.

  ‘Not that. . .’

  Came a big red scream from down below:

  ‘FIRE!’

  After that, pandemonium. Shouting, cries, screams. A crashing of smashing plates from overturned tables; clattering footsteps; and all the lutes went out of tune in unison when dropped in haste. And, yes; now I could hear the roar of the flames.

  We were up and running for the door toot sweet, I can tell you, but the old oak felt warm and when we got it open a huge hot wind tossed us backwards, we saw the stairwell was alight already. The gargoyles on the beam ends sparked, glowed and blackened; there was a crash below as a ceiling gave way and in the middle of all the rest of the noise I could tell it fell on the grand piano because of one last jangled chord before it expired with a noise like an angel falling off its harp.

  A long tongue of flame licked up the stairs, in through the bedroom door; up went the bed curtains behind us – flaming so soon after we got off the mattress that you might have thought the bed caught fire due to what we had got up to on it. I was stuck staring at my little sporran, tossed up and spinning round in the fierce winds that came with the fire, and then the fire snapped it up like a frog snaps a gnat. He gave me a big shove.

  ‘Quick.’