Wise Children

by Angela Carter

  ‘Floradora! You haven’t changed one bit!’

  I was about to say him nay, draw his attention to the crow’s-feet, the grey hairs and turkey wobblers but I saw by the look in his eye that he meant what he said, that he really, truly loved us and so he saw no difference; he saw the girls we always would be under the scrawny, wizened carapace that time had forced on us for, although promiscuous, he was also faithful, and, where he loved, he never altered, nor saw any alteration. And then I wondered, was I built the same way, too? Did I see the soul of the one I loved when I saw Perry, not his body? And was his fleshly envelope, perhaps, in reality in much the same sorry shape as those of his nieces outside the magic circle of my desire?

  But when I registered I’d used those words, ‘my desire’, I stopped thinking in that direction toot sweet. I’d properly shocked myself and I had to knock off another glass of champagne to cool myself while Nora came in for her share of hugs and kisses and then Daisy Duck, and all the rest, because not since the Change had yours truly felt such a sudden rush of blood in that department, down there.

  Saskia was standoffish and turned the cold shoulder. Imogen tried to slip away but was impeded by her headgear so he grabbed hold of her and gave her such a hug the goldfish slopped out of the bowl and she went down on her knees in a puddle to pick it up again, it was slippery as soap and gave them a fine chase all over the dancefloor while the camera crews and the photographers and the reporters didn’t know where to turn next, so much grief, joy, resentment and pursuit was going on, while the multitude babbled and got in the way until suddenly Peregrine caught sight of a certain heavily veiled figure tucked away behind a pillar and stopped short with the gasping goldfish in his hand.

  ‘It isn’t . . .’ he said.

  ‘Put it back in!’ urged Imogen, kneeling at his feet. Perry absently dropped the fish back in the bowl and a hush spread in ever-increasing circles over the crowd until there was perfect silence. All eyes were focused on the invisible Lady A. Her fingers clenched and unclenched on the arms of the wheelchair. She pushed herself backwards, as if she were trying to roll offstage back into the wings, where nobody could see her, but she banged against the wall because there was nowhere to go except here.

  Melchior, sensing something was up, craned forward, leaning heavily on Margarine, so he got a good view when Perry plucked off the veil. Then came a bewildered pause. Melchior sank back on his throne, again, with a puzzled look, quite grey with exhaustion, although things were only just livening up. I don’t think he’d got the foggiest who the lady in the wheelchair was. You could hear Margarine going: ‘Who’s that? Who’s that?’ But Saskia and Imogen backed off aghast, as well they might.

  Perry said softly, ‘Hi, there, bright eyes.’

  The Lady A. said, ‘Why! It’s Peregrine!’ and twinkled.

  He wheeled her round to face the crowd.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, ‘the Lady Atalanta Hazard. The most beautiful woman of her time.’

  Suddenly she looked her old self again, but, due to her white curls, even more like a sheep, to my way of thinking, but it would seem that sheep are irresistible; everybody gasped. Perry led the applause that followed. She scrabbled at her veil, as if half-inclined to cover up again, but I could tell she was pleased. Melchior gave a jump.

  ‘Attie!’

  So now all three Lady Hazards were together in one room and I wondered if our mother’s ghost was somewhere here, too, floating in the smoky air above the cake, which was waving about, a bit, because its arms were getting tired.

  ‘I’ve brought you something special, in my trunk,’ said Peregrine to Melchior. ‘Give us a little light on the subject, if you please.’ The little pages dashed up and down relighting everything until the room was brilliant.

  Perry must have tipped the baroque trumpets because they let loose another fanfare as half a dozen stocky wee brown men in penis sheaths and feathers, friends of Perry’s from Brazil, evidently, heaved in a cabin trunk covered with labels of hotels that had long since ceased trading, shipping lines long since defunct, railways long since torn up. They hauled it into the middle of the ballroom, set it down on the parquet. Peregrine spat on his hands and rubbed, strode boldly forth and first of all I thought: He’s going to do a conjuring trick, because he put on his conjuring manner that I hadn’t seen for years: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I have nothing up my sleeve.’ He was a sprightly walker. A hundred? Never!

  ‘He’s made a pact,’ said Nora in a whisper.

  He addressed Melchior. He gave as low a bow as his paunch permitted.

  ‘Melchior, my dear brother,’ he said, ‘I give you . . . the future of the Hazard family.’

  He lifted up the lid of the trunk.

  ‘If,’ he added, ‘she’ll have you.’

  We had an intuition who it was.

  Out of that trunk stepped our little Tiff, as fresh as paint, not a tad the worse for wear except her eyes were no longer those of a dove, stabbed or whole, and she looked sound in mind and body almost to a fault. She’d changed her clothes; she’d got on a pair of overalls and those big boots, Doc Marten’s, but she looked lovelier than ever, enough to make you blink. Our Tiff as ever was, our heart’s delight.

  We were all tears and laughter. We skidded across that skating rink of a floor on our ridiculous heels and held her as if we’d never let her go while the baroque trumpets went on and on until I thought: perhaps we’ve died and gone to heaven. But the first paroxysm subsided and there we still were.

  I’ll say this for Tristram’s reflexes, he was down on his knees in front of her in a flash, laughing and crying at the same time or doing a fair simulacrum thereof.

  ‘I love you, Tiffany,’ he said. ‘Forgive me.’

  She stared down at him as if sunk deep in thought, which I was glad to see in itself – she’d never been one for reflection, before. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand, she’d picked up a dreadful cold, somewhere, though not at the bottom of the river, as it turned out.

  ‘Fat chance,’ she announced at last.

  Tristram was stunned. He sat back on his heels.

  ‘But, Tiffany, I’ll marry you!’

  ‘Not on your life, you bastard,’ she said, right out in front of all those people. God, I was proud of her at that moment! ‘Not after what you did to me in public. I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man in the world. Marry your auntie, instead.’

  A palpable hit. Saskia turned white and dropped her glass. Poor old Melchior was at sea, couldn’t make head nor tail of this bit of cut and thrust, of course, but he was pierced to the heart by the riveting sight of his son’s rejection.

  ‘Oh, my dear,’ he murmured in that thick, rich, vintage port voice. ‘Take pity on him; have pity on your own unborn child.’

  I felt quite sorry for Melchior, having his grandchild given and taken away before it was so much as born. He looked so pitiful, and, after all, it was his birthday, that Tiff might have wavered but Tristram spoiled it all. He waxed histrionic.

  ‘My baby! Think of my baby!’ He tore his hair, he gnashed his teeth.

  ‘Pull yourself together and be a man, or try to,’ said Tiffany sharply. ‘You’ve not got what it takes to be a father. There’s more to fathering than fucking, you know.’

  We each squeezed the hand we held, she squeezed back. I thought, we’ll teach the baby tap and ballet, when the time comes. Then came another banging on the door.

  ‘That’ll be my mum and dad,’ she announced confidently. All the help was in the ballroom, now, transfixed by all this real-life drama, nobody to let in the new arrivals, but a splintering crash indicated that the locked front door posed no problems to a ranked light-heavyweight. Tiff let off her parting shot.

  ‘Not that your old man and mother aren’t perfectly welcome to take a peek at the baby when it’s born but don’t you come sniffing around until you’ve dried off behind the ears, Tristram.’

  He was too stunned to get up off his knees
as Bren and Leroy stepped round him to embrace their daughter in a fusillade of flashes. The lutes started up again, Lord Somebody or Other’s Puff, I think Perry slipped them a couple of quid. Quite like old times, lights, music, action. There was a patter of applause as Tiff and Bren and Leroy departed for their cab and were followed by no photographers after Leroy sent one of them downstairs on his ear.

  Perry said he found our little Tiff by chance, wandering in the street the previous night, on his way from the airport; his taxi nearly ran her over.

  ‘So I took her back with me to the Travellers’ Club –’

  ‘Oh, Peregrine!’ I cried, struck by an awful thought. ‘You never!’

  ‘I most certainly did not,’ he huffed. ‘What a suggestion! There was a damsel in distress, if ever I saw one.’

  Tristram was crying on Saskia’s shoulder. I could tell by the look in his mother’s eye she’d no love lost for Saskia, either, even if they had been best friends at Ro-de-o-do back in the year dot. And here was bloody Saskia now, elbowing her out of her big scene with her own son. Margarine blazed away with thwarted mother love and snatched up a lump of cake, that had sunk down to the ground out of sheer weariness, pulled off a candle that had burned down to a stump, and pressed the cake into her son’s hand.

  ‘Eat something, my dear,’ she said. ‘Just a mouthful, to give you strength.’

  There was a piercing screech and crumbs everywhere because Saskia dashed the cake from Tristram’s lips and collapsed in a fit in the arms of her sister, who promptly commenced her celebrated goldfish imitation again, her lips opened, her lips closed, oh! oh! oh! but no sound came out. Perry, ever quick off the mark, seized Imogen’s goldfish bowl and dashed the water over Saskia, shocking her out of her fit and into you never saw such a shimmy as she shook that goldfish out of her vee-neck.

  Yes, she confessed; she had slipped something into the cake she’d baked with her own hands for her father’s birthday, though whether it would have made him rather ill or very ill or finished him off altogether I never found out because now such a hullabaloo broke out, lights, cameras, the wailing of that poor old man, the recriminations of his wife, the exclamations of his son, and everybody else putting their vocal tuppence ha’p’orth in as well. Even Perry looked grave and as if he were to blame, stricken with compunction, possibly for the first time in a century. He and the Lady A. drew close together, the guilty parties, when Saskia wailed to Melchior:

  ‘You never loved us!’

  It was high time that Saskia got wise. Remember Gorgeous George on Brighton Pier long ago, and the punch line of his joke? I couldn’t resist, I came out with it:

  ‘Don’t worry, darlin’, ’e’s not your father!’

  What if Horatio had whispered that to Hamlet in Act I, Scene i? And think what a difference it might have made to Cordelia. On the other hand, those last comedies would darken considerably in tone, don’t you think, if Marina and, especially, Perdita weren’t really the daughters of . . .

  Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.

  Brighton Pier broke up with mirth when Gorgeous George said, ‘’e’s not your father’; when I said the same thing in the Hazard residence, you could have heard a pin drop. Then I wished I’d held my peace and let the world wag on its old, unconscious way, for after that split second of silent, suspended time while they all took it in, if all had been hullabaloo before now it was pandemonium as Saskia sprang at Peregrine and pummelled him with her fists while the Lady A., quick as her wheels allowed, interposed her body, crying out piteously, while Imogen, now aquarium-less, thank God, trotted after the Lady A. begging for full details of the entire scenario and giggling in a hysterically retarded manner but Nora and Daisy Duck, having evidently copiously refreshed themselves from Daisy’s hip flask, were clinging to one another for dear life and, I’m sorry to say, laughing fit to bust a gut.

  Melchior flashed a ‘how could you’ illade at the Lady A., who reared up in her chair – ‘bright eyes’, indeed! more like Medusa. She got it all off her chest in one go. What a performance. Those who could secure one perched on the little gilt chairs that stood around, the rest roosted on the floor at risk to gowns and trousers and all turned into the perfect audience, quiet as mice, rustling at tense moments, indrawing breath at startling disclosures and sometimes rippling with discreet mirth, while the waiters lolled against the walls, more disengaged, professionals themselves, keeping a critical eye upon the show rather than being carried away by it.

  ‘And wasn’t it the Hazard blood?’ she cried, full-throated, clarion-like. We’d never heard her sound like that before. ‘The Hazard blood! The precious, unique Hazard blood that blinds parents to their children and turns daughter against mother!’

  Melchior coughed, spluttered and writhed upon his throne; she’d been bottling up his embarrassment for years and now, pop! bubble, bubble, bubble, or more like hubble, bubble, toil and trouble, out it came all over the floor. Perry got Saskia in a half-nelson and she hushed up, staring at the Lady A. with saucer eyes; she’d never thought her mother had so much passion in her, and neither had I.

  ‘You left me at home hugging the empty womb you couldn’t fill, Melchior!’

  Spasm of shock.

  ‘You couldn’t fill my womb, Melchior, although you’d been so profligate of your seed before me, seduced and abandoned an innocent girl, left her to die, alone, and then, to compound the betrayal, you abandoned her daughters –’

  – she gestured towards us and Nora swiftly assumed a po-face as a fresh gasp ran through the crowd and all eyes turned towards us, as with the crowd at Wimbledon. I wondered, ought we to take a bow?

  ‘– oh, yes! the daughters you never acknowledged, as though you thought the Hazard blood lost all its virtue once it was mixed with that of a chambermaid –’

  He made a furious gesture of denial. She snapped:

  ‘Oh, yes you did!’

  Touch of the pantomime; would be riposte: ‘Oh, no I didn’t!’ No such luck. She was unstoppable.

  ‘It was your blood, the Hazard blood, that went to make the “darling buds of May”, the girls you loved so dearly even when they robbed their mother of her home and money –’

  Gasps; muffled exclamations; all eyes now swivelled towards Saskia and Imogen, who flinched and quailed.

  ‘Your blood, the Hazard blood, runs in their veins but the “darling buds” never sprang from the seed of Melchior Hazard!’

  ‘Ooh!’ and ‘Aah!’ said everybody. Myself, I’d been wondering how the Lady A. would verbalise the technical aspect of her adultery, given the refinement of her vocabulary. Having made the distinction between ‘blood’ and the actual procreative juice, what would she call the latter? ‘Jism’? ‘Come’? (Or do you spell it ‘cum’, I’m never sure.) Sperm and semen seemed altogether too technical for her rhetorical mode. I was glad she’d settled on the tasteful compromise of ‘seed’, although it occurred to me, not for the first time, that a serious language problem existed between the two branches of the Hazard family.

  Don’t misunderstand me. We’ve got very fond of her. She’s always been welcome to the basement front, we’d never deny her a crust and I know she can’t help it – I truly think she’d change if only she could. But, always, the high tone, even today, when she was letting rip and all those decades of understatement were going up in smoke. The nub of what she was saying now was, she’d had a tumble with her brother-in-law, once upon a time, and, as a result, there were two more girls in the world. Sorry, pardon, Melchior. But she couldn’t just say that, could she? She had to make a meal of it. Some of the things she said were news to me, of course, and made a lot of things make sense, but she was going on about it all as if it were a matter of life and death. And how could we Chances believe that? We knew that nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death.

  ‘Not your seed, Melchior, but those girls were cast in your mould, all the same! They robbed me and turned me out of my own home and spurned the
love I felt for them just as you did yourself, Melchior!’

  She burst into tears. There was a flutter of sympathetic handkerchiefs. Peregrine’s cheeks were streaming, too, and the darling buds clung on to one another, pictures of shame and grief. When the Lady A. had composed herself, she mopped her face with Nora’s crumpled veil, blew her nose on it and continued, as if refreshed:

  ‘You left me lonely, Melchior, while you pursued that restless, thirsty quest for fame, while you engaged in that titanic contest with your dead father –’

  Titanic conquest? First I’ve heard of it, I sniffed. But how could I have heard of it, on reflection? Our father and I had never been on what you could call speaking terms.

  ‘–I was left lonely, with my empty womb. And then –’

  But she couldn’t finish the sentence, perfect lady that she was. She raised her eyes imploringly to Peregrine and in one bound he was beside her, his arms around her shoulders and her daughters, weeping, scampered over, too, and crouched at her feet in attitudes of contrition. Peregrine looked Melchior right between the eyes.

  ‘They’re mine, Melchior, little monsters that they are. Forgive me, Melchior. Forgive us all.’

  There was a patter of applause that petered out as soon as people realised that everything was real. Frail, lovely Lady A., her forces spent, exhaustedly accepted a pull at Daisy’s flask while the videotape recorded every move for posterity. Daisy was impressed and wondered aloud who held the mini-series rights.

  Meanwhile, Saskia and Imogen each seized hold of a piece of the Lady A.’s skirt, kissed it and begged her to forgive and forget, etc. etc. etc. Poor old Perry was left right out in the cold during the ensuing emotional reconciliation and I drew away a little, sunk in my own thoughts, as follows: how a mother is always a mother, since a mother is a biological fact, whilst a father is a movable feast. But Melchior, head buried in his hands, looked the picture of misery and Margarine beat the air with her hands, at a loss as to what to do to cheer him up.

  Daisy and Nora had got their heads together. Then Daisy nudged her gigolo back to life – he looked as if he’d gone off into a trance, temporarily. There was some discussion with the lutes and then they struck up all together as such a voice! the voice of an angel soared up and tickled the chandelier – a boy soprano, such purity, such vigour. A voice I’d heard before, in Hollywood but this time it was not raised to warn us against spotted snakes.