Wise Children

by Angela Carter

  All of a sudden, I was feeling chipper. Then I spotted them. ‘Here, Nor’, here come the Animal Rights.’ We drew ourselves up to our full height; we’ve learned to be defensive about our trenches.

  ‘It’d look better on a fox, auntie,’ said the young man, knees poking through his trousers, shaven nape, why does he make us run the gauntlet every time?

  ‘It wouldn’t look better on this fox,’ said Nora, on her high horse. ‘Which was humanely trapped in the Arctic Circle by the age-old methods of an ecologically sound Inuit hunter circa 1935, young man, before either you or your blessed mother, even, was yet pissing on the floor, which trapper has probably succumbed to alcohol and despair due to having his traditional source of livelihood taken away from him and, anyway, these foxes would be long dead, by now, besides, and rotted, if we weren’t wearing their lovingly preserved pelts.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re feeling guilty, girls,’ said the young man.

  He slipped us the usual tract. ‘I like to sink my teeth into a nice juicy sausage, too!’ Nora confided lasciviously. He covered up his privates toot sweet.

  ‘I sometimes think Grandma was born before her time,’ I said to Nora.

  ‘At least he doesn’t picket flower stalls,’ she said.

  You can buy anything you want in Brixton market. We got stockings with little silver stars all over, ‘more stars than there are in Heaven’, recollected Nora. I shoved over a twenty for the stockings and spotted Old Bill on the back. That gave me a start, to see how Shakespeare, to whom our family owed so much, had turned into actual currency, not just on any old bank note but on a high denomination one, to boot. Though not as high as Florence Nightingale, which gives me satisfaction as a woman.

  Lovely, shiny stockings and a couple of little short tight skirts in shiny silver stuff to match, that clung on like surgical bandage, and showed off our legs. Legs, the last thing to go. We were modelling stockings as late as the late sixties, I’d have you know; Bear Brand. They had to cut us off mid-thigh, of course, so the wrinkles wouldn’t show. For women of our age, our legs still aren’t half bad. Nora toyed with a spaghetti-string boob tube in lynx-print Lycra; I thought, maybe something with feathers . . . Kids gathered round, tittering; the man at the red mullet stall shook his head, sadly. They thought the Chance sisters had gone over the top, at last. There was a sale of gold stilettos, so we treated ourselves to those. We came back with an armful of junk, earrings, beads, everything you can think of, cheap and cheerful, we haven’t laughed so much in years, and the water was hot enough for us to share a bath, by then. After that, we slipped on our towelling robes, we creamed off our morning faces, we started off from scratch.

  Foundation. Dark in the hollows of the cheeks and at the temples, blended into a lighter tone everywhere else. Rouge, except they call it ‘blusher’, nowadays. Two kinds of blusher, one to highlight the Hazard bones, another to give us rosy cheeks. Nora likes to put the faintest dab on the end of her nose, why I can’t fathom, old habits die hard. Three kinds of eyeshadow – dark blue, light blue blended together on the eyelids with the little finger, then a frosting overall of silver. Then we put on our two coats of mascara. Today, for lipstick, Rubies in the Snow by Revlon.

  It took an age but we did it; we painted the faces that we always used to have on to the faces we have now. From a distance of thirty feet with the light behind us, we looked, at first glance, just like the girl who danced with the Prince of Wales when nightingales sang in Berkeley Square on a foggy day in London Town. The deceptions of memory. That girl was smooth as an egg and the lipstick never ran down little cracks and fissures round her mouth because, in those days, there were none.

  ‘It’s every woman’s tragedy,’ said Nora, as we contemplated our painted masterpieces, ‘that, after a certain age, she looks like a female impersonator.’

  Mind you, we’ve known some lovely female impersonators, in our time.

  ‘What’s every man’s tragedy, then?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘That he doesn’t, Oscar,’ she said. She still has the capacity to surprise me. Fancy her knowing about Oscar Wilde. I did her nails, she did mine. After some debate – should we match them to our lips? – we fixed on silver, to match them to our legs. She did my hair, I did hers. Silver, too, worse luck. We disappeared behind a cloud of scent and re-emerged, transformed, looking just like what, for all those years, the bloody Hazards always thought we were, painted harlots, and over the hill, at that.

  ‘Oh, I say!’ Wheelchair murmured, tapping her lips with a tissue to set the Lancôme Bois de Rose. ‘Don’t you think you’ve gone a little far?’

  In her white ballgown and pearls, she looked quite lovely, not so much Miss Havisham, more the Ghost of Christmas past.

  ‘Got to keep up with the times, darling,’ said. Nora.

  ‘Not me,’ said Wheelchair. ‘I live mostly in the past, these days. I find it’s better.’

  Her eyes swivelled reverently round to that portrait of Melchior she’d insisted on bringing with her when she came, although we’d had to cut it down to fit it in and she no longer kept flowers in front of it because we refused point-blank to fetch her any and she couldn’t go out and get them herself.

  So she was still eating her heart out for Melchior, after all these years, was she? Don’t think she was a hypocrite, to have loved him all those abused, neglected decades, when she hadn’t been averse to a fling in her youth herself and brought home a brace of bonny babes whose biological origins owed more to A. N. Other’s DNA. If you think she was a hypocrite, then you know sod all about women. No. She loved old Melchior, all right, and, poor cow, she still loved her wicked daughters, too, for there they were, on her bedside table, beside the phials of pills and the half-bottle of Malvern water, in a rosewood frame, the darling buds of bloody May as ever was, looking as if butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths.

  Rain came and settled at the window. April showers. The twenty-third of April. Yes! The destination of Melchior had been prepared for him since birth; he was doomed to wear the pasteboard crown. Hadn’t he first seen light of day on Shakespeare’s birthday?

  So had we two, of course. But all the little children in Bard Road were singing a hymn to Charlie Chaplin the day that we were born and Grandma took us to the window to look at the shirts and bloomers dancing on the washing-lines all over Lambeth. That made a difference, you know. We were doomed to sing and dance.

  Then we did Wheelchair’s nails, just a manicure and buff, she’s never said but I know she thinks varnish is vulgar. We gave her a squirt of Arpège. The phone never rang. Each time I looked at it, it didn’t ring. And Brenda never came round again, either.

  Five

  E CROSSED OVER the river to the other side. The river lies between Brixton and glamour like a sword. I wonder why they call it Old Father Thames.

  In Regent’s Park, the bushes crouched like bears and the stands of daffs and tulips wore a pale and ghostly look as they swayed in our birthday wind, which was getting fresh, again, moist after the rain, and warmish. In the street outside the Hazard home, what a bustle! A retinue of vans, blaring lights on stands, power cables to trip you up and a muster of personnel – bald men in specs and parkas conversing in huddles, girls in jeans hither and thithering with clipboards, plus fans, the idle and the curious, rubbernecking in quantity.

  The Hazard residence was very handsome. Once or twice, we’d sauntered past it casually, just to have a little look . . . love locked out, ducky. Stuccoed, pillared and porticoed, with a bay thrust out front and a flight of stone steps to the door up which we’d often dreamed one day we might ascend and now would do so to the manner born, although we’d have to commission some staunch retainer to deal with Wheelchair.

  But Wheelchair balked at the sight of the TV crews. There she was, in the back of the cab – we’d booked a hack, we’d never have got her into a minicab – she wept and wailed. What? Transmitted all over the country on the nine o’clock news carted about like laundry? What a pu
blic humiliation! Behold, the sad decline of the most beautiful woman of her time! She set up a lament but, luckily, Nora had slipped a big white chiffon square into her gold-mesh evening bag, in case the poor old thing’s shoulders got chilly towards the end of the evening, so she dropped it over Wheelchair’s head. Instant hush. I hailed a passing minion, who was all done up in hose and doublet.

  ‘Just carry this lady up the stairs, will you, and we’ll follow with the appliance.’

  ‘Pleasure,’ he said, smiling and coaxing Wheelchair the way they do the very old, the same way they do kiddies. She was so light he hoisted her up easily in his arms in her white gown and her veil and she looked like a nun, or a ghost, or a very ancient bride until, out from under that veil, she gave him a flash of her Lynde-blue eyes and he blushed, he straightened his back, he bore her off with surprise and pride amidst a whirr of TV cameras, a staccato barrage of flashbulbs and a mutter: ‘Who’s that? Who’s she?’ because, when her eyes flashed, her beautiful old bones stuck out, suddenly, she turned back into the Lady A. of long ago and they all gaped.

  Nora struggled with the wheelchair, trying to fold it up, while I paid off the cabby.

  All round us, scenes of the kind poor Irish loved to hate were taking place. Swish cars drew up to disgorge tuxedos and long frocks from interiors that lit up at the moment of exit so each couple made a brief but striking cameo appearance. The crowd went wild. Though all the guests so far looked old crocks like us I’m bound to say there was not one body I recalled from days gone by, no doubt because they were all legitimate.

  And then I felt a tugging at my sleeve, some old cove in rags, begging. As soon as I set eyes on him, he struck a chord, although I couldn’t place him, not at first.

  At my age, memory becomes exquisitively selective. Yes; I remember, with a hallucinatory sensitivity, sense impressions. A hand on my breast, even if I cannot recall precisely whose hand. The taste of a bacon sandwich back in the days when bacon in the pan buzzed like a bee in a lavender bush. The sensation of sunlight on the tender nape the day we’d had our hair cut for the first time. But it takes an effort to dredge up anything else, I can tell you. I couldn’t for the life of me remember the brand name of Irish’s favourite tipple, when I tried, the other day, even though he chucked a bottle of it at me when we parted in lieu of farewell. A full bottle, to boot. It smashed against the wall and trickled down. ‘Oh, look,’ I said, ‘it’s left a map of Ireland.’ He couldn’t see the joke. ‘He must have loved you very much, to toss a whole bottle,’ said Nora, when I told her.

  But what was the brand? If you get little details like that right, people will believe anything.

  Old Bushmills? Perhaps it was Old Bushmills. Poor old Irish. Gone to the great distillery in the sky these many years.

  I’ve got a perfectly serviceable memory in some respects but not in others and there I was, racking my brains, when he rasped out: ‘Spare us half a bar for a cup of tea, lady.’

  He stretched out his hand and I glimpsed, between the edges of his unspeakable shirt, off which the buttons had all fallen, below the stained lapels of his ex-army greatcoat, the outlines of Europe and Africa. The penny dropped. Before me stood all that was left of Gorgeous George.

  Lo, how the mighty are fallen. Though I saw which way things were going back then, in The Dream. It was a wonder he’d hung on for another half-century. When I came to think about it, he must have been as old as Melchior, himself; as old as Perry, if Perry’d lived.

  I found I had reminded myself of untimely death and the festive mood that I was striving bravely to achieve evaporated.

  But why, in that case, had we put on our gladrags and come out into the night when our hearts were freshly broken? Good question. For our old man’s sake, I suppose. To celebrate the author of our being, even if he had relegated us to the ‘remaindered’ pile.

  I may never have known my father in the sense of an intimate acquaintance, but I knew who he was. I was a wise child, wasn’t I?

  I was stuck staring at Gorgeous George but he didn’t recognise me.

  ‘Give us a bob, then,’ he said, having relinquished some hope but not all. His voice had been destroyed by time and liquor. The harsh light of the yellow streetlamps took all the pink out of his continents. I’d got a twenty in my hand, ready to pay the cabby. Shakespeare, on the note, said: ‘Have a heart.’

  ‘Take that,’ I said and pressed his literary culture into the hand of he who once personated Bottom the Weaver. ‘Take it for the sake of The Dream. You can have it on the one condition, that you spend it all on drink.’

  He grabbed hold of the currency, all right, but gave me an old-fashioned look.

  ‘Surely you’d never think that of an old soldier,’ he reproached.

  ‘On your way,’ I said. ‘Don’t you know it’s Shakespeare’s birthday? Cry God for England, Harry and St George. Go off and drink a health to bastards.’

  He looked askance at that, as if he misunderstood my turn of phrase, but he wasn’t about to make an issue of it, not when the price of an insult was a cool twenty quid, so he toddled off, clutching his loot, scarcely able to believe his luck, no doubt.

  ‘You shouldn’t have encouraged him,’ reproved the taxi-driver.

  ‘I used to know him, once upon a time,’ I said and settled up, slipping him another Shakespeare to compensate for my generosity to the undeserving poor. I can take a hint.

  ‘Come on,’ said Nora, dancing on the spot.

  Up the steps we marched in unison, exhibiting our antique but not quite catastrophic legs with wild abandon; with one accord, we stripped off our silver-fox trenches and trailed them behind us, and all the flashes went off at once. I felt quite revived.

  Fame and beauty milled in the entrance hall below as little ladies in period cleavage took the coats and wraps. Lutenists in costume, always a feature of our father’s parties, massed on the upstairs landing and ancient music floated from above. There was, bliss! another staircase that went up in florid curves, like Mae West.

  ‘Where’s Wheelchair? What did that chap do with her?’

  ‘Search me.’

  We gave up on Wheelchair, surrendered our furs and, hand in hand, did another Hollywood ascension up the staircase although I suffered the customary nasty shock when I spotted us both in the big gilt mirror at the top – two funny old girls, paint an inch thick, clothes sixty years too young, stars on their stockings and little wee skirts skimming their buttocks. Parodies. Nora caught sight of us at the same time as I did and she stopped short, too.

  ‘Oooer, Dor’,’ she said. ‘We’ve gone and overdone it.’

  We couldn’t help it, we had to laugh at the spectacle we’d made of ourselves and, fortified by sisterly affection, strutted our stuff boldly into the ballroom. We could still show them a thing or two, even if they couldn’t stand the sight.

  That house boasted a ballroom and that ballroom was a sight to see. The bay stuck out right over the park and there were long windows at the other end. Red marble columns with gold tops held up the ceiling, which was plastered with acanthus wreaths, pineapples, harps, palm fronds, bunches of grapes and lurking cherubs. There was a ten-gallon wedding cake in the shape of a chandelier hanging by a chain, winking, blinking and sending out rainbows and it was lit with real candles. There were real candles everywhere else, too, in sconces, in branches, in single spies, in battalions, filling the air with the smell of hot wax, warming us all up, flattering complexions which were, one and all, aged, except for those of the waiters, all in doublet and hose, who circulated amongst the throng with fizzing flutes of bubbly on silver salvers, reflected upside down like a conjuring trick in the parquet underfoot.

  And my heart stood still, I was seventeen, again, I was a virgin powdering my nose with beating heart, for there was lilac, lilac, everywhere. In bowls, in jars, in cornucopias. White lilac, the evening’s floral theme. I was all misty because of the smell of lilac as we processed in the long line towards where our father was r
eceiving, in an alcove, seated on a sort of throne.

  He wasn’t wearing either monkey suit or tails, unlike most of his guests, but had on a rather majestic and heavily embroidered purple caftan. I thought, colostomy; but that caftan made a lovely contrast with his longish, pewter-coloured hair, still thick and heavy. There were rings on his fingers, like a king, or pope, and a big gold medallion round his neck. He looked regal, but festive. My heart gave a thump and the beat started to speed up.

  We waited patiently in line to wish him ‘Happy birthday’, standing between a theatrical knight and a TV presenter who babbled inanities at one another across us, which pissed us off, but we decided to tolerate the invisibility of old ladies – note that, even dressed up like fourpenny ham-bones, our age and gender still rendered us invisible – because it was a special occasion, although as a general rule, we debate invisibility hotly. I snatched at the champagne a couple of times as it waltzed past, I was bloody nervous, I can tell you.

  I looked round for Wheelchair but I couldn’t see her anywhere and would have started to worry about her if I hadn’t started to worry about myself, specifically, to worry about my bladder capacity because the theatrical knight kissed Melchior’s hand once, then twice, then yet again for the cameras because first something went wrong, then something else and life was like a loop of tape repeating itself and I wished I hadn’t had that second glass of bubbly when I remembered how I’d pissed myself from nerves the first time I met him. But Nora remained calm, although the lutenists were playing tunes to break your heart, ‘Semper Dowland, semper dolens’, ‘Lachrymae’.

  The third Lady Hazard, wearing a Vivienne Westwood somewhat too witty for her years, stood watchful guard beside her husband, her hand, weighed down by diamonds, protectively upon his shoulder but her eyes roving all round the thronged room, where the odours of expensive scent and aftershave vied with the lilac and the candle-wax and the smell of delicious cooking began to waft upstairs, too. A doublet and hose tottered past beneath a groaning tray of chicken-legs; I was starving, we’d skipped lunch, but we couldn’t kneel down and ask our father’s blessing flourishing a drumstick, could we? My Lady Margarine wore a smile so fixed it strained the stitches of her nip and tuck but you could tell she wasn’t happy.