Wise Children

by Angela Carter

  She was revenged upon her father’s wife, and on her father, too. The twins never forgave him for cutting off their allowances. Old Nanny told us how he’d given the girls this glad news after we left, that afternoon of their twenty-first. Cool as you please, he’d told them he couldn’t afford to support two families and now the girls were old enough to earn their keep, he’d see they got nice jobs. As they sat gaping, he assured them they weren’t losing a friend but gaining a mother and then it came on to rain so he hopped in his Roller and was off while they were still stunned with shock, before they had a chance to berate him. And that was the root cause, according to Old Nanny, of the dreadful quarrel over funds that transformed the whilom Lady A. into our Wheelchair and left her homeless, penniless, reliant on the left-hand line.

  Old Nanny told us everything, of course. She went on telling us everything even after she moved in with Melchior to raise little Tristram and little Gareth. What else could she do, poor old cow, she was stuck. The Lady A. hadn’t the cash to keep her, now, and what would we have done with an Old Nanny clicking her tongue against her teeth when she saw the gin bottles in the wastepaper basket and the condoms in the toilet?

  Though, alas, the little rubber swimmers sadly declined in numbers during the sixties and dropped off altogether in the subsequent decade, which was nothing to do with the Pill, everything to do with lack of opportunity.

  Old Nanny often picked up the 137 bus in Camden Town and popped over the river and when she told us the news about Saskia and Tristram, the Lady A. dropped her embroidery frame with a shocked squeak. He was a babe, just seventeen, in those days, while Saskia had pushed forty aside some time before and was now steering towards her climacteric. Yet it wasn’t the May and December aspect of their union that affected us so much, we were quite French about that; it was that we all knew Saskia. Old Nanny had reservations of her own, however.

  ‘Prohibited degrees,’ said Old Nanny. She was drinking a cup of tea. I noticed how she always drank her tea from the wrong side of the cup, in our house. Admittedly, Nora was a careless washer-up, especially after sundown, but Old Nanny never went to the lavatory in our house, either, not even when you could tell she was busting for a wee. I wondered, are we letting standards slip?

  ‘Prohibited degrees.’

  ‘Cheer up, Nana. Remember, Melchior’s not her –’

  But Wheelchair put her finger to her lips because Old Nanny wasn’t supposed to know. (Although she did know, of course; she it was who personally confirmed our worst suspicions, years ago. But Wheelchair never knew she knew and thought she ought to keep it from the servants.)

  ‘But, then,’ said Nora, ‘perhaps Perry –’

  Why hadn’t we thought of it before? The wicked old man! ‘Just been visiting a friend in Gunter Grove’, indeed! But how had he met My Lady Margarine and why had they done it? Was Peregrine bent on perpetrating the Hazard tradition of disputed paternity even unto the bitter end? But none of us had any means of checking out the theory, since Peregrine was gone, and only Old Nanny on speaking terms with the third Lady H., and she wasn’t intimate, so we could only speculate, thus: that Tristram was red as fire, in the mould of Peregrine and of poor, passionate, murdered Estella, while gaunt and hollow-eyed Gareth had raven hair and Bovril eyes – the boys, in fact, the duplicates of Peregrine and Melchior themselves, in person, at least, though not in personality. So who had been the master of ceremonies was anybody’s guess.

  Not that we’d ever met Gareth. He was a mystery. He converted when he was seventeen, found God the same time Tristram discovered sex, and departed to a seminary shortly after. Never a word from that department, not a letter nor a Christmas card, for the actor and the priest might have a good deal in common but the Jesuit and the chorus girl, outside lewd jest, not.

  Perhaps that Saskia put something in young Tristram’s food, some love potion she’d got out of the same old book in which she found that emetic Shakespearian nettle soup we’d had on her birthday. Back he went to her, back and back and back. It remained a deadly secret outside the family, of course. He boasted a wide variety of official girlfriends, of whom our little Tiffany had the highest profile, headlines in the News of the World, and, do you know, I think he really loved her.

  Love. What is love? What do I mean by love? For a while he wanted her nearby. But it turned out she was not sufficient to break him of the Saskia habit, even if Saskia was sixty if she was a day. His sexuagenarian mistress. Saskia, the sexy sexuagenarian.

  ‘Come off it, Dor’, you wouldn’t have said no to a chap when you were sixty, if you’d had any offers,’ reproved Nora. She thought I was jealous.

  Perhaps I am.

  Saskia.

  But Wheelchair grieved about it, too, and all the more because her daughters had now maintained their radical indifference to her for well-nigh forty years and she thought she’d snuff it without another sight of them, so we knew we’d have to take her with us when the invitation to our father’s birthday party came at last, even if she wasn’t on the official list, and this is just what we are about to do, as soon as we’ve got ourselves suitably tarted up.

  ‘What shall we wear tonight?’ said Nora.

  No problem for Wheelchair. She’d got a lovely Norman Hartnell gown left over from the forties we could still fork her into, she ate like a sparrow, she never put on a milligram. White satin bodice, tulle skirt, which we would fluff up so as to conceal her carriage. Pearls. Her daughters robbed her blind, stuffing pillowslips with bibelots, but they’d refrained from snatching the pearls off her neck. We gave her a bath with her favourite Floris’s Tuberoses poured in. What a business that bath was! Nora took one arm, I took the other, we lowered her. Nora scrubbed her back with a flannel. Then we wrapped her up in a big, soft towel and Nora did her hair.

  ‘You’re very good to me,’ said Wheelchair with a suspicious quiver.

  ‘Pipe down, you old bag,’ said Nora. You’ve got to be firm with her, or else she cries. We dusted her with talc, tucked her in a rug and left her in the kitchen with the fire on and a fresh pot of tea, watching Brief Encounter on afternoon television. We had to wait for the water to heat up again until we could have our own baths. I picked up a scent bottle and inhaled nostalgia.

  ‘Tell you what,’ I said to Nora. ‘You put on some Shalimar, tonight; I’ll use Mitsouko.’

  ‘Quite like old times,’ she said with a glint.

  ‘Don’t let’s exaggerate.’

  Because here was a couple of scraggy hags about to ease into frocks that first saw light about the year our Tiff was born, for we had bought no evening wear since then, having no need for it in middle age; and it was our little Tiff who’d brought us our lovely scent, for old times’ sake, bless her little heart, got it for us from the duty-free when Tristram took her to Tuscany for a week.

  That was an ill-fated trip. Although he must have loved her, for a little while, at least, because she was the first girl he was ever brave enough to take to visit Saskia.

  Saskia’s villa was perched on a hill between Florence and Siena, among the fields of Chianti, pine trees up the drive, you know the kind of thing. You may even have seen it featuring in her bloody programme. She wrote it off against her taxes because she’d done a series there, In Bocca Toscana. I caught it once, repeated in the afternoons, I was housebound with a stinking cold, there was Saskia, caressing a ham. ‘Lucky the porkers of Parma!’ she intoned. ‘They dine every day on curds and whey, like so many little Miss Muffets, and posthumously achieve porcine apotheosis – prosciutto!’

  I questioned Tiff closely when they got back and she rabbited on about ripe figs and fresh basil for a while before she admitted she’d been incapacitated with the runs for the greater part of their stay, confined to bed in the spacious room with the tiled floor and view of vineyards, her only entertainment a stack of Saskia’s videos, which she’d been forced to watch endlessly, not being of a reading temperament, but which had given her so much confidence, although she�
�d never even boiled an egg before, that she proposed fixing for us, then and there, a spaghetti carbonara, only we said, no way.

  These gastric disorders sounded to me as though Saskia had slipped a little something extra into the trippa fiorentina, but, all the same, Saskia had been sufficiently polite to this unexpected wee scrap as to arouse my suspicions, because she was a snob and a half, ordinarily. But Tiffany suspected nothing and was over the moon. ‘His family has started to accept me! See how his aunt has taken me to her bosom!’

  Bosom of flint. Tiff didn’t know, how could she, that a history existed already between Tristram and that woman and I must admit she was good-looking, still, had always been good-looking, with that pale skin and red hair, even if she always had to paint in her eyebrows and eyelashes. Half the drama went out of her appearance once she’d had a good wash. But little Tiff looked best of all with no make-up on, with her hair just hanging down her back and –

  – and there I go, again, thinking of little Tiff when it behooves the Chance girls to put on their brightest smiles, check out their wardrobes for their smartest gowns, and celebrate their father’s centenary.

  I thought, there must be something upstairs we can wear because we’ve never thrown a stitch away but stowed the old schmutter in Grandma’s room, the big first-floor front with the bay window, the best room in the house, although neither of us had the heart to take it over and move in after she went, so all her old stuff was still there, too.

  It was perishing cold in Grandma’s bedroom and gloaming, only the one forty-watt bulb, but I didn’t want to open the curtains, as if the light might scare away the smell of mothballs, boiled cabbage and gin hanging in the air, by which we liked to think she made her posthumous presence felt. Her photos were still lined up on the mantelpiece. Peregrine in pride of place, in the middle, in his conjuring suit, with a dove perched on every plane surface, like a statue in a public square, and a smile you could warm your hands on, even though it was a photograph and he was dead. Lots of pix of us, stark naked in babyhood in the backyard with, if you looked carefully, a neighbour at once outraged and prurient peering through the fence. As baby sparrows in our very first panto, when we were half-pints. In black tights and blonde bobbed wigs from What! You Will! Even a still of Peaseblossom and Mustardseed, all moonlit in the wood, and a lovely snap from the Forest of Arden, partying it around the pool with Peregrine. In sailors’ hats, as forces’ sweethearts. Always the two of us, together, forever young on Grandma’s mantelpiece.

  She never liked that portrait Cecil Beaton did for Vogue, she always kept it in the dressing-table drawer. He’d done us up as painted dolls, rouged spots on our cheeks and terrible artificial grins, sitting on the floor in frills with our legs at angles, as if they were made of wood. Rich men’s playthings. Very subtle. His Nanny used to hold the flash, you know.

  Our Cyn was on the mantelpiece, on her wedding day; Our Cyn with one, two, three, in arms and various stages of toddlerhood; I was glad Grandma went before the Asian flu took Cynthia in ’49, she never wanted to outlive any of us.

  And there was her enormous bed she never shared, to my knowledge, all the time we knew her except, towards the end, with the occasional cat. Her bed, stripped, the naked pillows huddled like a corpse. We felt we ought to hush and tiptoe.

  As we opened up the wardrobe, we saw ourselves swimming in the mirrored door as if in a pool of dust and, for a split second, in soft focus, we truly looked like girls, again. And going through those cast-offs was a trip down Memory Lane and a half, I can tell you. First, there was the lingerie – silk, satin, lace, eau de nil, blush rose, flesh, black and red ribbons, straight up and down things from the twenties, slithering things from the thirties, curvy things from the forties, waspies, merry widows, uplift bras. At the very bottom of the pile, I seized on something navy blue – the bloomers from our dancing class! From Miss Worthington’s dancing class! To think that Grandma had kept our old bloomers!

  Then there were the frocks. Some things we’d put away in plastic bags: bias-cut silk jersey, beaded sheaths that weighed a ton. Others we’d covered up with sheets, the big net skirts, the taffeta crinolines, halter necks, strapless, backless, etc. etc. etc., all heaped high on Grandma’s bed.

  ‘Half a century of evening wear,’ said Nora. ‘A history of the world in party frocks.’

  ‘We ought to donate it to the V and A,’ I said.

  ‘Why should somebody pay good money to look at my old clothes?’

  ‘They used to pay to see you without them.’

  ‘They ought put us into a museum.’

  ‘We ought to turn this house into a museum.’

  ‘Museum of dust.’

  Nora rummaged among the rags and gave a soft little chuckle. She held up a foamy white georgette number with crystal beads.

  ‘The Super-Chief!’ she said. ‘Remember?’

  ‘“She wore something sheer and white and deceptively virginal, that emitted a hard glitter when she moved, a subtle, ambigudus cobweb softness veined with a secret of ice. ‘Got a light?’ Half trusting, half insolent, a hoarse voice, older than that pale face with its purple heart of lipstick, flourishing its rasp of gutter like a flag, with pride.”’ I for Irish, Ross ‘Irish’ O’Flaherty. Hollywood Elegies. The very frock! He never knew I’d borrowed it from Daisy.

  ‘Why don’t you sell it to that library in Texas? I read in the paper they bought a crate of his empties.’

  But I’d spotted an ambivalent memento of hers, to tease her with.

  ‘Here, Nora . . . I never knew you kept this.’

  ‘Gimme!’

  She snatched it out of my hands, the veil they’d brought out of wardrobe on The Dream set for her to marry Tony in.

  ‘The bastard,’ she said. ‘I hope he’s six feet deep in concrete.’

  She stuffed the veil out of sight under her air-raid warden’s siren suit and something chiffon slithered to the floor.

  ‘Dora? Remember this?’

  She held it up. Floral print, big splashy roses, rhodies, peonies, muted tones, dusky pinks, soft mauves, lavender. I pressed it to my face, it was as soft as dust. First kiss, first love, eyes as blue as sugar paper and skin like cream.

  ‘I pray you, love, remember.’

  He never came back from the Burma Road. Some comic told me, backstage, Nude Frolics ’52, in Sheffield.

  ‘Here, Dora, nothing to cry about.’

  ‘Do you remember his name?’

  She asked me, whose name, with her eyebrows.

  ‘You gave me a present the day we were seventeen, remember? Today’s our anniversary, fifty-eight years ago today. It was my first time, remember?’

  She tried and tried but she could only remember her own first time and the goose and the miscarriage and then the corners of her mouth turned down.

  ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I feel a little lonely in the world. Don’t you ever feel a little lonely, too, Dora? No father, no mother, no chick nor darling child. Don’t you even want something to cuddle?’

  No darling child. Which was the nub of it, as far as she was concerned, as well I knew, but no use crying over spilled milk, although that be not the appropriate metaphor in this instance. Too late to do anything about it, now.

  ‘I must admit, sometimes, it gets everso lonely, especially when you’re stuck up in your room tapping away at that bloody word processor lost in the past while I’m shut up in the basement with old age.’

  ‘Don’t talk like that about poor Wheelchair.’

  ‘I don’t mean Wheelchair and well you know it. I mean our old age, the fourth guest at the table.’

  ‘Look on the bright side,’ I counselled her. ‘I’ve got you and you’ve got me and we’ve both got Wheelchair and you could call her our geriatric little girl, seeing as we bathe her, feed her, change her nappies, even. Our father might have reneged on the job but we did have a right old sugar daddy in our Uncle Perry and well you know it. We never knew our mother but Grandma filled the g
ap and you can say that again.’

  The bulb flickered on, off, on again as if to signify Grandma’s assent.

  ‘All the same,’ she said, ‘I wish . . .’

  She crumpled up that old chiffon and cradled it to her bosom.

  ‘If little Tiff had come to us,’ she said, rocking the chiffon baby in her arms, ‘I’d –’

  I knuckled out my swimming eyes. No more tears, today.

  Then a funny thing happened. Something leapt off the shelf where the hats were. No, not leapt; ‘propelled itself’, is better because it came whizzing out like a flying saucer, slicing across the room as if about to knock our heads off, so we ducked. It knocked against the opposite wall, bounced down to the ground, fluttered and was still.

  It was her hat, her little toque, with the spotted veil, that had spun out like a discus. And as we nervously inspected it, there came an avalanche of gloves – all her gloves, all slithery leather thumbs and fingers, whirling around as if inhabited by hands, pelting us, assaulting us, smacking our faces, so that we clutched hands for protection and retreated like scared kids as more and more of Grandma’s bits and pieces – oilcloth carriers, corsets, bloomers like sails, stockings hissing like snakes – cascaded out of the wardrobe on top of us. We backed off until our calves hit the side of the bed with a shock of cold metal and then the wardrobe door closed of its own accord upon its own emptiness with a ghastly creak, leaving us looking at our scared faces looking back out of the dust.

  ‘Grandma’s trying to tell us something,’ said Nora in an awed voice.

  Creak, creak went the door.

  ‘She’s telling us Memory Lane is a dead end,’ I said. I could hear her voice clear as a bell: ‘Come off it, girls! Pluck the day! You ain’t dead, yet! You’ve got a party to go to! Expect the worst, hope for the best!’

  We threw caution to the winds and raided the jam jar where we keep the seventy-plus emergency fund, that is, cash for wreaths for sudden funerals and taxis to hospices, etc. etc. etc. The shops were still open, we threw on our silver-fox trenches, we dashed off to the market. Down Electric Avenue, past the vegetable stalls. ‘Here, gel, fancy a widow’s comfort?’ he says, thrusting forth an aubergine. ‘Is that the best you can do?’ I riposted.