Wise Children

by Angela Carter

  Now we were on the high road to our third decade, though, looking back from my present great pinnacle and eminence of years, I can scarcely credit it, that, once upon a time, we thought our lives would end when we reached thirty; at the time it felt like the end of the road, all right, even if there hadn’t been a war on, and we were never the same again after the war was over, either.

  After the war was over, it was always chilly. Our fingers were pale blue for years. Before the war, we were young, and then we were in sunny California; during the war, adrenalin kept you going and there was always some fella or other around to warm you up. But afterwards, there was a weariness, and the blood was a touch thinner, and people said it was the Age of Austerity – yet I do believe that chilliness we felt was more to do with Grandma being gone than with the economic policies of Stafford Cripps or the cold winters of the late forties and all that.

  Without Grandma in it, minding the fires, leaving the lights on for us at nights, up in the morning putting on the kettle, banging the big brass gong to tell us she’d scrambled the dried eggs already, and they were congealing on the plate, the house was nothing but a barn and we rattled around uncomfortably, piles of dirty dishes in the sink, the steps filthy, baked beans fossilising at their leisure in the bottoms of pans on the cold stove, etc. etc. etc.

  We let the house go. We’d come back to sleep, that was all. Sometimes we’d burn ourselves a slice of toast. The heart went out of this house when Grandma died. The draughts raced through the hall and the rugs rose up and shimmied, we never changed the sheets so they were grey and stained and full of crumbs. Times were a touch hard for hoofers, too, although we put a brave face on it.

  Then began those dreary days of touring shows, smaller and smaller theatres, fewer and fewer punters, the showgirls wearing less and less, the days of our decline. The nadir, a nude show-cum-pantomime in Bolton, Goldilocks and the Three Bares. ‘Take off your trousers, call it Goldibollocks,’ said Nora to the a.s.m., but he wouldn’t. Those nude shows! Music hall’s last gasp. There was a law that said, a girl could show her all provided she didn’t move, not twitch a muscle, stir an inch – just stand there, starkers, letting herself be looked at. That’s what the halls had sunk to, after the war. No more costumes by Oliver Messel, sets by Cecil Beaton. We always kept our gee-strings and our panties on, mind. Never stripped. We’d still sing, we’d still dance. But we felt our art was swirling down the plughole and those were the days when high culture was booming, our father cutting a swathe with the senior citizen roles in Shakespeare – Timon, Caesar, John of Gaunt – but he still didn’t want anything to do with us, as ever was.

  It is a characteristic of human beings, one I’ve often noticed, that if they don’t have a family of their own, they will invent one. Now we often found ourselves slipping down to Sussex to visit the Lady A. Lynde Court was just a pile of blackened bricks, and they’d sold up the Eaton Square place when they divorced so after the Lady A. came home from California she turfed the tenant out of the Lynde Court Home Farm and moved in with the Aga and the exposed beams. She always kept a full-length portrait of Melchior in her sitting room. That portrait took up most of one wall and cast gloom in spite of the gilt frame because there he was, as Richard III, Tricky Dicky, all in black with an evil glint in his eye. She fixed up a light over it, which she kept on all the time, and always a little bunch of flowers in a glass jar on a footstool in front of it – wild daffs in March, wallflowers, daisies, according to season, always fresh. Even when the snow lay on the ground, out she’d go, scouring the Downs for celandines, early violets, snowdrops, headscarf and wellington boots, always a little dog yapping behind her.

  That bitter winter of ’46, me and Nora couldn’t stand it, to think of her rooting about among the snowdrifts, so we took her a big bunch of hothouse carnations. Cost more than a supper at the Savoy Grill. Bloody Saskia was there, fresh and frisky. Imogen, too. Doing their stint at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, were Saskia and Imogen, and Saskia’d brought her best friend with her, some prinking minx in black velvet slax and ballet slippers. Saskia laughed like anything when she saw those carnations.

  ‘How apt!’ she said. ‘“. . . which some call nature’s bastards.” Winter’s Tale, Act IV, Scene iii.’

  Little did she know it was a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Her mother was mortified and tried to cover up.

  ‘My little Saskia’s playing Perdita this term. Isn’t it lovely?’

  But if that was the kind of thing they taught her girls at Ra-di-bloody-da, then Nora and I didn’t want to know. Such cheap gibes! We rose above.

  The girls might be away at RADA but there was Old Nanny to keep her company and a woman in from the village to do the heavy work and I was always tickled when concerned weekend guests asked her: ‘How do you survive out here all on your own, Attie?’ You could hardly move for help, you even tripped over a little old man crouched above the herbaceous border on your way to the outside lavvy. But the Lady A. would give a little smile and say, she’d got used to solitude, and make some reference to the garden. She was always out there in a big hat telling the gardener what to do. There were articles in magazines. She was famous for her clematis. In the evenings she’d sit stitching away at her embroidery hoop with Melchior glowering on the wall and listen to records on her gramophone the same way she does now, in the front basement of 49 Bard Road. Then Old Nanny used to come to tuck her up in bed at ten, with Horlicks.

  Her girls would go and visit their father, sometimes, and come back with new wristwatches and gold crucifixes once owned by Sarah Bernhardt and The Duse and copies of the Complete Works signed by Ellen Terry but never so much as a Christmas card arrived for her from Melchior, as though it had been her fault they split up.

  As the Lady A. grew older, so she looked more and more British. Her features became more transparent, her expression ever more modestly valiant. She started to wear cardigans. She’d begun to look sad even before the war broke out; sadness became her, like pastel shades. She developed a reputation for sadness in spite of, or perhaps because of, her indomitable smile, real Mrs Miniver smile.

  That farmhouse was lovely. Mellow brick, lichened tile, nestling in a Down, the vista rimmed with English Channel. There was a little walled orchard with lambs in it. I always think of that orchard in early spring, primroses among the roots of the apple trees, first buds, blue smoke rising from the chimney and Nor’ and me getting out of the village taxi, red morocco heels, mud.

  I’ve never been so cold in all my life as in that farmhouse. Cold and scared. Not even in air-raid shelters. At night, we’d huddle up in our cold bed with our silver-fox trenches spread out on top of the quilts for extra warmth, bruising our toes on the stone hot-water bottles Old Nanny had tucked in for our comfort, watching the moonlight through the lattice, listening to night-birds hoot and shrieks of mice and voles when owls pounced. Things were killing one another all around. We were stiff with cold and frozen with terror. Give me Railton Road at half past Saturday midnight, any time.

  To tell the truth, picturesque and evocative as that farmhouse was, we only went down there because we were fond of her.

  She’d put us up in the one bed, in always the same white-washed room, Old Nanny used it as a sewing room – iron bedstead, pitch-pine washstand and a dressmaker’s dummy which cast a headless shadow that gave me the willies. I’ll draw a veil over the bathroom, with the iron tub that formed an informal vivarium for every spider in Sussex. We never ventured into the darling buds’ room but the Lady A.’s was a shrine to Guess Who, all the photographs of him, plus one, just one, of Perry, snapped drawing Saskia out of a top hat. There was a steep staircase of narrow steps of polished oak – the Lady A. wouldn’t have carpeting, she said she loved the living wood – down which Nora and I would pick and slither, fully aware that Saskia and Imogen, if they were home, were laughing at our shoes.

  A big Chinese bowl full of pot-pourri on a worm-eaten oak chest in the hall gave out a sad
, pungent smell of old ladies and heartbreak. There were watercolours everywhere perpetrated by Lyndes of long ago in Venice, the Alps, the lakes; faded chintz; old rugs worn to a web. Everywhere a threadbare, expensive shabbiness that had a class to which we knew we never could aspire. Not the Lucky Chances. We were doomed to either flash or squalor.

  The food was nothing much. We lived in hopes she’d get the East Sussex black market organised but Old Nanny always asked us to be sure to bring our coupons and served up cottage pie, shepherd’s pie, nothing ever looked like whatever it was made of although the plates were Chelsea and the knives and forks were silver, knobbed, blackened, engraved with the Lynde seal, a pelican pecking at its breast. Rotten food. All the same, we were still nervous as to which ancestral fork to use.

  And always bloody freezing, not just in bed. We’d sit at table in our fur coats in spite of the satirical gaze of Saskia and Imogen in their ballerina-length dirndls, turtlenecks and inherited upper-class capacity to withstand extremes of temperature. No love lost, and they could scarcely abide to see we’d got our feet under the table, at last, not now that they’d been abandoned, too. So when the Lady A. said, could we possibly come down for Saskia and Imogen’s twenty-first, Nora said satirically: ‘Go on!’

  ‘No, truly, my dears,’ said the Lady A. ‘I want you both to be there.’ Then she twinkled, just a little, but it was a rare sight these days and I was glad to see it. ‘It’ll be a real family affair!’

  A nod is as good as a wink. We’d not seen hair nor hide of Perry since VJ Day, except a postcard from Rio de Janeiro showing a macaw, but I knew the Lady A. still kept a soft spot for him after all these years and I’d even hoped that she and Perry might make a go of it, one fine day. I taxed her with it, once, when we were having Lapsang in the orchard. It was May and the apple blossom was out but, all the same, I kept my coat on.

  ‘Don’t you ever miss Perry?’ I asked her tactfully.

  She had the grace to twinkle right up at the very thought of him but she twinkled dismissively.

  ‘One doesn’t marry a man like that, my dear,’ she said. Faded blue eyes, broken veins, a straw hat tied under her chin with a silk paisley scarf. The dowager sheep. But she knew a thing or two about Perry. Here today and gone tomorrow, not so much a man, more of a travelling carnival. I warmed my fingers on her china cup, since I had no option – it didn’t have a handle, although it did have a big crack down the side – and wondered if my own mother had thought the same thing about Melchior, that he was splendid over the short haul but would never go the distance.

  My feeling was, neither of the brothers were built to be good husbands. But I didn’t say a word. A lot was left unsaid at the Lady A.’s. I’ve never known such profound silences as those Lynde silences especially when her daughters were there, silences in which the unspoken hung like fog that got into your lungs and choked you.

  ‘God knows why we keep on going down there, anyway,’ said Nora. ‘We could stay up here on a Sunday, have a bath, do our hair.’

  She hadn’t the slightest desire to grace the darling buds’ twenty-first, not she. Perry can come to us, she said. She was adamant. ‘No! No! And no!’ Then our Uncle Perry called us up and said he’d drive us down, we could be back to Brixton that same night.

  ‘But not birthday presents,’ said Nora. ‘Not for those vipers. I draw the line at birthday presents.’

  Because we were going down exclusively for the Lady A.’s sake, weren’t we? We took her a bottle of Scotch. So there was Peregrine, blowing the horn outside in Bard Road in a bloody great Bentley convertible ready to take us to Lynde Court Home Farm for the worst Sunday lunch of our lives.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said. ‘I slipped in a quick visit to a friend in Gunter Grove.’ Big wink, the reprobate. But it was only twenty minutes.

  Perry was bigger than ever and brown as a berry from the Brazilian sun and you’d never have believed, from the cut of his jib, that he’d turned sixty, nor that his twin brother was just at the time rehearsing Lear. Not one grey hair in all that russet mop, nor yet a crow’s-foot among the freckles, and as full of bounce and bonhomie as when he first knocked on the front door. Of course, his fortunes had turned, again, since he struck oil.

  Yes. Oil. That bit of semi-arid scrub he’d bought out of sentiment with his money from The Dream, his ranch in Hazard, Texas. Oil. He was filthy rich again and the back of the Bentley was stacked with cans and packages and bottles, most with labels from Rio, Paris and New York, I was glad to see, because, back here in Brixton, it was still half a rasher of bacon a week, a little pat of butter, that was your lot, that was rationing.

  He sat and beeped the horn and there was a general rustle of net curtains all along Bard Road as the old biddies sneaked a peek at our escort.

  He gave us the biggest hugs and kisses but he wasn’t his usual self, I could tell. It was my turn to sit in front and he was all of a twitter, nervous, joyful, on edge, abstracted, all at once. He jumped red lights; the speedometer touched ninety, once, and when he braked to miss a fox, Nora, in the back with a box of Belgian chox, shot forward, got her nose stuck in a violet cream. Sometimes he broke into snatches of song; sometimes he did not hear a question and needed his arm tugged. After a few miles, Nora and I maintained a sympathetic silence. ‘Hope for the best, expect the worst.’ I knew in my water there’d be tears before bedtime so I crossed my fingers and so did Nora because we didn’t want the old devil’s feelings hurt, nor those of the Lady A., either, this day of all days, but I couldn’t see how else the day might end.

  Of course, we’d always known deep down inside he was their father. We tried to pretend otherwise. I was jealous as hell of it, but there you are. Biology is biology. You can’t fool a sperm. I’m not sure that Melchior ever knew. If ‘his’ daughters were redheads, then so had his own mother been and, besides, who’d have thought it of the Lady A., Caesar’s wife in person? Perhaps those girls themselves smelled a rat and were unhappy; you might put all the bad behaviour down to that, if you felt so inclined, though you wouldn’t have felt half so magnanimous if you’d met them.

  Streatham, Norbury, Thornton Heath, Croydon. Nora had eaten all her chocolates by Redhill and said she was lonely in the back so she climbed over the seat and inserted herself between us. He’d brought the sunshine with him, we put the hood down and sang: ‘Please direct your feet To the sunny sunny sunny side of the street.’ He perked up. We were still girls, only just past thirty; we cut a dash, the three of us. Little did we know it was to be our last ride together.

  He started to open up a bit by the time we got to Three Bridges and told us about Brazil. That was his new enthusiasm, the jungle and its denizens. He was going to give a lecture at the Royal Society, wasn’t he, about the butterflies he’d discovered in the jungle and after he’d given this lecture he was going to go right back and look for more.

  ‘I’m going,’ he announced grandly, ‘to devote the rest of my life to lepidoptera.’

  We raised our brows at one another. Another fad. Like conjuring. Like movies. Like oil. Like espionage. How soon would he reach his boredom threshold in the jungle? We didn’t know, we never could have guessed, that he would reach oblivion first.

  Saskia, it turned out, was doing the honours in the kitchen. She’d just, that winter, made her first appearance on any stage in one of her father’s productions, a witch in Macbeth, typecasting, along with her velvet-slacked best friend, but she’d shown more interest in the contents of her cauldron than her name in lights and so it came to pass that her best friend, the RADA Gold Medal winner, was picked out to play as Melchior’s Cordelia, while Saskia tinkered with the pans.

  She’s ended up as television’s top cook, of course. Every time I switch on the set there she is, eviscerating something, skinning something else, having a go at some harmless piece of meat with her little chopper.

  Old Nanny had been banished from the kitchen and Saskia was catering her own lunch party, trying out a roast duck and
green peas, and the Lady A., not of the class or generation that cooked, itself, was nevertheless doing her fumbling, incompetent best to help, because it was the girls’ birthday, and Old Nanny was sitting in the orchard in a deck-chair with her feet up and a copy of Tatler and that was Old Nanny’s treat, before she stirred her stumps to serve up. Even Imogen had roused herself and was out in the garden laying the table because they’d decided to eat outside since it was such a lovely day and Imogen was weighing the napkins down with pebbles so they wouldn’t blow away. There was a bunch of pinks in a glass jar in the middle of the starched white cloth under an arbour of old-fashioned roses and the lilacs were out, the Lady Attie’s famous white lilacs, that featured in Country Life, once.

  As we drew up, I saw a Roller, parked already, and was overcome with that indigestible mix of emotions I always felt each time that he came near me – joy, terror, heartsick, lovesick. The white lilacs didn’t help. That perfume. I felt as if someone had taken hold of my heart and squeezed it.

  There was a grey wing over each ear; our father had aged more evidently than his brother, but very graciously. We were all a little frigid with one another, at first, although the Lady A. was twinkling away valiantly, but Perry popped a cork and we drank a toast: ‘To the girls!’ before we sat down and I joined in, much as I disliked them, and so did Nora, because, however randomly we’d been assembled, we were all family, and they were the only family we had. After the second bottle, things began to thaw, a bit.

  Soup. Old Nanny was now pressed back into service and bore a steaming tureen out of the kitchen, more proud of Saskia’s handiwork than she’d ever been of her own, so we had some of that, to start with, a nettle soup Saskia had discovered in an old book, or so she said. An old, Elizabethan soup. Perhaps Shakespeare had eaten just such a soup! When she said that, she gave her ‘father’ a special smile, she and Imogen worshipped the ground, etc. etc. etc. Shakespeare may well have eaten that filthy soup but I doubt he’d kept it down. I forced in a spoon or two out of politeness and it was very, very bitter, but the men, foolish fond, drank it all and Perry asked for seconds.