I snapped out of it sharpish and we made it to the window before the tapestries went up, which they did with a whoosh whilst we hand-over-handed it down the ivy, bringing down a deluge of snow with us. Only when we stood once more upon the lawn, chilled to the marrow, singed at the edges, half frozen cod, half barbecued spareribs, did I recall that the fire had got not only my ‘weird sister’ outfit but also his waiter’s monkey suit, so we both were ‘naked as nature intended’, to quote the title of another of the dubious vehicles of the Chance sisters’ declining years. I buried my blushes in his bosom. He stroked my hair. ‘Nora,’ he said tenderly. ‘Nora . . .’
So very tenderly the truth was on the tip of my tongue, again, but then, while Lynde Court blazed and the survivors of the party mopped and mowed upon the terrace, wringing their hands and making noise, and the clanging of the fireman’s bell announced the arrival of the engines, even in the midst of all this turmoil I felt the stirring of, ahem, his manhood and couldn’t resist. So we bundled off into the shrubbery and did it again on an uncomfortable carpet of twigs and dried earth under the cover of the rhododendrons which our enthusiasm whipped into a storm so they pelted down snow and more snow on us while all around, backwards and forwards, there passed a swift parade of running feet, churning the fall to slush. As far as ambience was concerned, it was from the sublime to the ridiculous, but needs must, it was urgent.
Surprise, surprise, we were quick about it, this time.
And, to my everlasting shame, it was only after he rolled off me and I sat up did I stop to think: ‘Oh, my God – my sister!’
Believe me, even then, when so much in love, I never, not for one moment, thought, if . . . she’s burned to a crisp . . . then . . . he’s mine for ever.
Not even for one second.
To tell the truth, I love her best and always have.
It was a proper raree show, out on the Great Lawn. All the former revellers were black with soot and the Lady A., in a scorched wig and a skeleton petticoat of black sticks and smoke, clutched one scrap to her bosom tight enough to choke her, although that scrap, being Imogen, was unconcerned, and slept, while the Lady A. wept and wailed and kept on calling for the other one, who’d made herself scarce, although I, for one, wouldn’t have put it past that Saskia to have torched the family seat out of some small pique such as not enough cream on her strawberries or having been sent to bed before the cabaret.
But of Nora I could see no trace and my heart sank.
Nor of Uncle Perry, neither, although, until his plane crashed in Amazonia and, weeks lengthening into months, then years, we were finally forced to acknowledge that he, too, owed a debt to mortality, Nor’ and I both privately thought he was indestructible.
Then I spotted Saskia. She, oblivious of her distracted mother, was tucked away under a rosebush, pigging it. She’d dragged out with her the entire carcass of the swan from the Great Hall. Its feathers were so blackened by the soot it looked more like an upstart crow but that didn’t put the little greedyguts off as she crouched, legs akimbo, disarticulating one by one its limbs and chewing off the meat with every appearance of enjoyment. Of course, later on, she made a career out of piggery. She’d half-inched a bowl of salad, too, but unaccountably left behind the haggis, no doubt upon discovering that it was hollow.
So there was Saskia. But Nora, not.
They say, if you get your leg cut off, you don’t notice it, at first, until you try to put your weight on it. Then you fall down. It was like that with me and Nora. The young man was flat on his back under the rhodies, panting heavily, lost to the world, and well might he sing out, ‘O, Mistress Mine, where are you roving?’ when he came to, for I took off in frantic search.
The fire had unleashed a kind of madness. A babble of agitated chorines cross-dressed in ruched knicks and hose had commandeered a crate of bubbly on their way out and now, pop! with a fusillade of small explosions, opened the bottles and hurled the contents into the fire, whinnying helplessly under the strain of their fruitless endeavours, while a row of chorus boys, in jester’s garb, lacking champagne, unfastened their flies and added their own liquid contributions to the great arcs of solid water directed by the stout fellows of the East Sussex Fire Brigade into the heart of the blaze, where enormous rainbows formed in the air above the jets.
The tenor and me weren’t the only ones who’d succumbed to nature, either. Nothing whets the appetite like a disaster. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Coriolanus stoutly buggering Banquo’s ghost under the pergola in the snowy rose-garden whilst, beside the snow-caked sundial, a gentleman who’d come as Cleopatra was orally pleasuring another dressed as Toby Belch. Not only that. I spied with my little eye an egg-shaped depression in a snowdrift on the parterre surmounted by the lead soubrette who was grinding away for dear life in the woman-on-top position and it turned out the moaning recipient of her favours was who else but my now definitively ex-lover, his cap was gone, but his bells were all tinkling, and he made her a star in her own right in his next production. Good for her. She said she saw him coming and tripped him up. Irish girl, from Derry. Staunch Republican, in those days. She’s a Dame of the British Empire, now.
So there was an orgiastic aspect to this night of disaster and all around the blazing mansion, lit by the red and flickering flames, milled the lamenting revellers in togas, kilts, tights, breeches, hooped skirts, winding sheets, mini-crinolines, like guests at a masquerade who’ve all gone suddenly to hell. It was a keen and icy night and the stars were sharp as needles.
I ran like one possessed from group to group of thwarted party-goers, searching for my lost limb, the best part of me, whom I’d so thoughtlessly forgotten – forgotten! – in the heat of passion. Then and there, although my nipples were still bruised with kisses, I thought, well, that’s it for passion, because, without Nora, life wasn’t worth living.
That’s sisters for you.
I was crying so much I could hardly see straight so I blundered right into Melchior, still in his hose and doublet, but black with soot all over, and gave myself a big bruise on the hip because he was pushing, pulling, grunting, heaving at a big carved chair with arms that ended up in lions’ heads. He’d salvaged it from the blaze, somehow or other, and now he was dragging it into a commanding position in the very middle of the lawn, a place that offered a front-stalls view of the fiery finale of the house he’d planned to be so famous in. ‘Give us a hand,’ he said.
When we’d got the armchair where he wanted it, down he plumped.
‘Champagne!’ he called and, marvellous to relate, a waiter popped up like a conjuring trick with a silver ice-bucket on a sterling salver. I wiped off my face with the back of my hand.
‘Dora?’ he said. ‘Or is it Nora? Come and take a glass of wine with the prince in exile, dear child.’
I stepped closer. He cracked me an enchanting smile. Not the sign of a tear. I gaped. Never seen such sang-froid as Melchior’s before.
‘I must say, you’re taking it very well, sir,’ I said. (We always called him ‘sir’ to his face.)
‘Can’t a man enjoy a glass of wine at his own fireside?’
The waiter poured one for me, so I took it. We clinked.
‘You’ve lost your eyebrows,’ he remarked.
‘Worse than that,’ I said, and sobbed. ‘I’ve lost my sister.’
‘I’ve lost,’ he said, ‘my crown.’
From the way he said it, I knew the loss of a natural daughter weighed less heavy on his heart than the loss of the old Hazard heirloom I’d just seen in his bedroom. For a weak moment, there, my unreconstructed daughter’s heart wished I could have saved it for him but, though my front was toasty warm due to the flames of Lynde Court, my backside was bitter cold and so were my spirits.
‘My crown, my foolish crown, my paper crown of a king of shreds and patches,’ he lamented. ‘The crown my father wore as Lear – to have survived so many deaths, so much heartbreak, so many travels . . . and now, gone up in smoke! Oh, my dear girl, we mummers
are such simple folk . . . superstitious as little children. The fire was welcome to take everything, the frills and furbelows, the toys and gewgaws, the oil paintings, the cloisonné, the Elizabethan oak . . . but, oh, my crown! That cardboard crown, with the gold paint peeling off. Do you know, can you guess, my dear, how much it meant to me? More than wealth, or fame, or women, or children . . .’
I’d better believe that, what he said about children. I was amazed to see him so much moved, and on account of what? A flimsy bit of make-believe. A nothing.
‘What shall I do without my crown? Othello’s occupation gone!’
He began to cry. The tears ran down his sooty cheeks like chalk down a blackboard but, and this was the funny thing, although my own tear ducts remained untickled, my palms itched and prickled like anything and I knew the only way to ease the irritation was to clap them together. Just as I was about to give the old fraud a big hand, couldn’t help it, the waiter, who was hovering by, as struck with this performance as I was, caught hold of my arm, spilling my champagne.
‘Look!’
A miracle.
Out of the heart of the blaze, through the very portals of flame that now upheld what had been the lintel of the front door of Ye Old Lynde Court, came, vaguely at first and yet his outlines growing every instant more distinct, an enormous figure.
The currents of the heat distorted his shape and size; he looked as big as the burning house, or bigger, and flames lapped and licked around him until it looked as if he were wearing fire. Something was shining; for one dreadful minute, I thought that he was dead and it was his haloed ghost approaching but, as he left the fire behind him, I saw what it was he’d got on his head.
In his arms, a girl.
‘Oh!’ went I; and, ‘Ah!’ went Melchior.
Who else could that girl be but Nora? And what else could that shining something be but a battered old crown of gilded cardboard, cocked at a rakish angle, unsinged, unmarked by fire, sootless, as Peregrine was himself and as was Peregrine’s burden.
We tried to run to meet them but found we could not, found we bounced back upon an invisible barrier of air so hot it made the hairs upon my forearms sizzle. Peregrine walked firmly towards us, leaving black footprints behind him on the lawn. He walked out of the fire, smiling at Melchior, offering up to Melchior his safe, sleeping child.
That tenor had found something to cover up his nakedness, a cashmere coat, property, it turned out, of the Hollywood producer whose cigar, abandoned on the edge of the dining table while he danced with Nora, had fallen to the floor, there to smoulder away unnoticed on the stone flags until the hem of the white tablecloth began to smoulder, too.
And, after the hem of the white tablecloth had smouldered for a while, an adventurous little blue flame licked up the side of that white linen cloth, to see what was on top of the table and, if that first little flame, satisfied with what it found, fell back, unnoticed, then the second little flame crept up a wee bit further, unnoticed, too.
Why didn’t a waiter see and stamp out the conflagration while it was in its infancy?
Because the waiter at whose station the fire had chosen to begin wasn’t a serious waiter, no pro, just a body hired for the big do, and he, as it happened, quit his post precipitately to slip upstairs with a female guest at the urgent promptings of his –
But we did not know all this until much later.
There they all were, gathering on the lawn behind us, all the guests, every one, in their rags of finery blackened as if plunged into mourning, and the Lady A. and our little cousins, whom even I could pity, now, poor homeless creatures, Saskia still sucking on a charred wing of swan, the arsonist producer, my ex-lover buttoning his fly, all the chorus, every principal, the musicians, the waiters, the cooks, the scullery-maids. Even the firemen abandoned their pumps and came to see.
All watched as Perry brought out my sister safe.
Everything held its breath.
She stirred. Her eyelids shivered.
Before I could move a muscle, my boyfriend, her boyfriend, shoved past me and scooped her up right out of Perry’s arms; he was laughing and crying all at once, hugging her and showering her face with kisses.
Now she opened her eyes, all right, but she didn’t smile to see him, nor did she kiss him back.
‘Where’s Dora?’ she said. Her first words.
‘Oh, you brave little girl!’ said that innocent young man. ‘So you went back to look for Dora! You risked your life!’
Nora looked round a touch wildly, I thought. Then – discretion is the better part – she fainted. Melchior had no eyes for her at all. He was fairly dancing with distress.
‘Give me that crown!’ he rasped, having suddenly transformed himself into Richard III. ‘Give me the crown, you bastard!’
Peregrine threw his brother a marvelling look; then he laughed out loud.
‘Now, God, stand up for bastards!’ he crowed.
He seemed to grow, to put it out in all directions – bigger, taller, wider. Huge. When he whipped off that crown and shook it like a tambourine, to tease, the famous Hazard crown, shabby as a prop in nursery charades, it was as far out of reach as if Perry had been a grown-up and Melchior a little kid, although Melchior was a tall man, ordinarily.
‘If you want it,’ said Peregrine, quaking with the joke, ‘jump for it!’
But now the focus of attention abruptly shifted to the Hollywood producer, only begetter of this inferno, who had found himself another cigar, although it was tasteless of him in the extreme, I thought, to light up again so soon after his last smoke burned down his host’s stately home. Nevertheless, his jaws were clamped around another fat cigar like a babe’s around a bottle as he announced through clenched teeth:
‘Ladies and gentlemen, out of these ashes . . .’
The whites of their eyes looked huge and livid in their blackened faces under the moonlight as all turned to look at him.
‘ . . . a work of genius will arise!
‘There’s an up-side to everything, ladies and gentlemen. I’m gonna take all of you fabulously talented people, yes, all of you! to Hollywood, USA. Yessir! Under the direction of this great genius of the English stage –’
But Melchior’s mind was only on his heirloom.
‘My crown!’
‘Jump!’ hissed Peregrine and Melchior, disconsolate, essayed a little hop that got him nowhere near.
‘– your great genius, Melchior Hazard. Script by that other great genius in the family, my friend . . . Peregrine Hazard –’
‘– my crown!’
‘Jump!’
‘– with additional dialogue by William Shakespeare!’
He puffed out a triumphant plume of smoke and the stunned throng managed a baffled patter of applause. Peregrine, evidently caught by surprise, doubled up in a raucous guffaw when he caught those last words, reeling with astonished pleasure.
‘My God!’ he said. ‘A dream come true!’
And then he just lost interest in the crown, he didn’t want to tease old Melchior any more. When Melchior wailed: ‘My crown!’ again, Perry tossed it to him negligently. He didn’t care one way or other about the crown. It was a toy, he was playing a game, Melchior was a fool to take the game so seriously, a fool to clasp the thing as if it were alive, and kiss it. A fool. When I saw how, since babyhood, they’d hated one another’s guts, it gave me a goose-walking-on-my-grave feeling.
Or perhaps it was just the cold finally getting to me. I was turning blue with it. Perry doffed his tux and covered me up, this soot- and tear-besmirched nude, his niece, as the snow began to drift down again and the company adjourned to make the long drive home.
‘Time to go, Dora,’ he said, and gave me a cuddle. ‘Time to take poor Nora home.’
Nora, apparently insensible in our boyfriend’s arms, opened one eye in order to tip me a wink. Perry told him, ‘I can give you a lift as far as Clapham Common, you can catch the night tram from there.’ So he came a bit of the wa
y with us but Perry wouldn’t let him come in and I never saw him again.
Three
E SAW IT again just the other week, hadn’t seen it for years. Haven’t been to the pictures for years, in fact, what with one thing and another, not least of which the fact the local fleapit only shows stuff in the original Serbo-Croat with subtitles, a touch tough on yours truly’s peepers. My eyes are dim, I cannot see, I have not brought my specs with me; nor do I intend to, ducky. All I have left to sustain me is my vanity. It was showing at three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, miles away, in Notting Hill. We had to take two buses, change at the Scotch Shop.
God! Times have changed. More people on the screen than in the auditorium, and fleapit’s the word, a flea bit me on the inner upper thigh, a particularly sensitive area well-nigh impossible to scratch in public without getting run in. It came on to rain while we were inside and dripped on Nora until we were forced to either raise an umbrella or to move our seats. As we got up, we spotted a bloke in the next row down on his knees at trough in his boyfriend’s fly. It was the only thing about the entire expedition that cheered me up, in fact, to think that somebody was having a bit of fun in all the damp, draughty emptiness, with the smell of mice, old tobacco, Jeyes Fluid, damp plush, because fun was the last thing I was having, sitting there in my used body, watching it when it was new.
Nora nudged me in the ribs one time. ‘Gawd!’ she said. ‘We were a pretty girl!’
Enough to make you weep.
Thin though the audience was, there was a little patter of applause when it was all over, although I nervously suspected irony, and a boy came running down the street, afterwards: ‘Can you really be the Chance sisters?’ It made our day. We signed his City Limits, then he leaned forward and asked us, confidentially, if it was true that her real name was Daisy Duck. When he got that close, I could see the little pearly drops of come – is that how you spell it? – on his moustache. They mesmerised me. I said, yes, it was true, then – couldn’t help it, could have bitten my tongue out, after – I said, had he noticed what a funny shape her mouth was? That it got that way because she’d sucked off every producer in Hollywood, so after he trotted away Nora swore I’d hurt his feelings and his mouth looked perfectly normal, to her, but he hadn’t seemed at all put out, anyway.
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