Wise Children

by Angela Carter

  ‘Oh,’ he sang, ‘my beloved father . . .’

  No gigolo accompanied Daisy but he who’d once stood best man to her and Melchior. Bewigged, befuddled, still his vocal cords could move a heart of stone. She’d met him again when he presented her with her ‘lifetime contribution on the cinema’ Academy Award. He was filthy rich, and gaga, and when she told him to, he sang. ‘My very best marriage,’ she said. From Daisy Duck to Daisy Puck.

  ‘I love thee, yes, I love thee . . .’

  Nora signed me with her eyes. It was time for me and she to go public about our paternity. Our skirts had ridden right up our crotches, we pulled them down, we patted our hair, our heels went click, click, click on the carpet, that sexy sound, but we looked like wizened children got up in our mum’s clothes for a dare and our hearts were brimming over. We pressed our cheeks against his hands. This was too much for Melchior. He melted for all to see.

  ‘Oh, my beloved father –’

  The crystals rang with the last notes of Puck’s glorious aria. Not a dry eye in the house as Melchior raised his head and gave his girls a watery, tremulous smile.

  ‘I am the one deserves to weep,’ he said, and kissed us.

  I could have sworn that then the curtain came down, the lights went up and there was a standing ovation but, as Nora pointed out later, there was no curtain, the lights were on already, and it would have been discourteous of that audience to applaud. So I imagined all that. But, anyway, after this inexpressibly moving reconciliation, came a short intermission. Everybody got up and stretched and vivaciously discussed the action so far while the waiters cleared the cake away. Nobody blew out the candles on this birthday, they went out of their own accord, but all our wishes had come true and we just sat there, beaming.

  When the lutes settled down again after their excursion into Puccini, it was nostalgia-time. I pricked up my ears; forgotten melodies drifting up from Memory Lane . . . selections from – what else – What? You Will!?! We hummed along and when they came to ‘O Mistress Mine’, they did it as a foxtrot and Nora gave Melchior a nudge.

  ‘Here, old man,’ she said. ‘What about a dance? Give us the pleasure.’

  She gave him a hand, got him on to the dancefloor. On the night of my seventeenth birthday long ago he danced with me. Tonight, on our father’s grand centenary, he took the floor with the other half of the apple and the band played music from the days when men wore hats. Not a dry eye in the house. Again. He was a touch unsteady on his pins, inclined to wobble, but she knew how to lead, and they were wreathed in smiles of foolish fondness for that which had been lost was found and so on.

  But Perry was in a right old state, left out of each and every reunion. He materialised beside me, disconsolate. ‘They still don’t want to know me,’ he said. ‘And I can’t blame them. God, Dora, I’ve been a cad.’

  I was feeling quite sentimental, watching Dad and Nora.

  ‘You were always good to us, darling,’ I reminded him. ‘Nora always thought you should have married Grandma.’

  ‘What?!?’

  ‘Made a real family for us.’

  He chewed on that in stunned silence until he guffawed.

  Once Nora had set the ball rolling, other couples took the floor. Margarine led out Tristram, who was still shaky on his feet but starting to get a bit of colour back. Daisy scooped up her Puck and took him through the motions, for which I was thankful, as he seemed quite out of it unless he was singing. The Lady A. was too preoccupied with her daughters and they with her to pay the dancing much attention but soon everybody else was doing it and Perry stuck out a paw:

  ‘How about it, Dora?’

  ‘I don’t fancy a foxtrot, Perry,’ I said. ‘But I wouldn’t say no to a –’

  It slipped out before I thought twice. I’m not proud of it, I’m not ashamed of it although I thought, there’ll be hell to pay with Nora tomorrow morning; even though he was my uncle on my father’s side; and don’t think I didn’t know he got some salve to his battered old male ego out of it, apart from anything else, but I didn’t do it just to cheer him up, oh, no. Nor, I swear, was I trying to get even with Saskia. No. It was the tune, the moonlight and the scent of lilac that did it. I hadn’t felt like this for twenty years. Nobody noticed when we slipped away because they were all dancing.

  The day’s exciting wind, having done its bit to liven up the evening, had died down to a little whisper from the direction of the park, full of damp earth and springtime, that blew the white linen curtains ballooning backwards into the front bedroom. It was quite chilly, I shivered. Peregrine went to close the window, then stopped. ‘Hark at the lions!’ In the distance, in the zoo, over the waving treetops, the lions were roaring their hearts out.

  It was a stark white room with operating-theatre walls and a white leather disc on the end of a metal spike for an armchair, bare boards, and an enigmatic bed like something therapeutic with a steel frame. Margarine got some earringed, crewcut decorator in to do it. There were a few spare coats from the party spread on the bed, they spoiled the whole effect – you couldn’t afford to have a slipper out of place. I’d clipped the piece about that room out of World of Interiors to go into my Hazard dossier and, oddly enough, although it was a masterpiece of pared-down understatement, the room still had just the same self-conscious look as that other long-combusted bedroom at Lynde Court had done – it was a room designed to be looked at, like Melchior’s whole life had been, but now all the dirty secrets hidden in the cupboards had come out at last, had come to fuck in his bed, in fact. We didn’t even bother to shove off the coats.

  Even in old age, it was easy to see why Peregrine had always had such success with women.

  ‘How long has it been, Dora?’

  ‘Too long, me old cock!’ I responded heartily, though, rack my brains as I might, I couldn’t for the life of me remember sleeping with him before and I shocked myself, to have forgotten that – if I had forgotten, that is, and if he wasn’t making a general rather than a particular enquiry, but it wasn’t the time nor place to ask him to elucidate, was it? All the same, to have forgotten so much else, so many other names, yes, all water under the bridge – but to have forgotten whether ever I slept with my beloved Perry . . . and then I thought, perhaps he can’t remember, either. But, even so.

  But don’t think I thought these thoughts in a reasoned sequence and a coherent manner. Far from it.

  You never forget the first time. I’ll never forget the last time, either.

  At least, I’m pretty sure this is going to be the last time, but you never know what may turn up.

  He cracked his old back and soughed and wheezed. ‘Whoa there, old sport! You don’t want to peg it on your birthday!’

  ‘Don’t care if I do,’ he says, red in the face, all of a sweat. ‘Not bad for a centenarian, eh?’

  I put my arms around him, although they didn’t meet, and said: ‘I love you more than ever I loved any young kid, short pants, mother doesn’t know he’s out.’

  Not bad for a centenarian.

  Not bad at all.

  Not bad.

  Not –

  Nora told me afterwards how the agitations of the steel bed began to make the chandelier downstairs directly beneath it, shiver, so that the music of the lutes, now plucking away at a selection of show tunes for the delight of the dancing guests, was almost imperceptibly augmented by the tinkle, tinkle, tinkle of all the little lustres as the tiers of glass began to sway from side to side, slopping hot wax on the dancers below, first slowly, then with a more and more determined rhythm until they shook like Josephine Baker’s bottom –

  ‘What a clatter!’ said Nora. ‘Like cymbals, darling. Don’t you think I didn’t guess what you were up to?’

  There was just one ecstatic moment, she opined, when she thought the grand bouncing on the bed upstairs – remember, Perry was a big man – would bring down that chandelier and all its candles, smash, bang, clatter, and the swagged ceiling, too; bring the house down,
fuck the house down, come (‘cum’?) all over the posh frocks and the monkey jackets and the poisoned cake and the lovers, mothers, sisters, shatter the lenses that turned our lives into peepshows, scatter little candle-flames like an epiphany on every head, cover over all the family, the friends, the camera crews, with plaster dust and come and fire.

  But such was not to be. There are limits to the power of laughter and though I may hint at them from time to time, I do not propose to step over them.

  Perry and I had no idea what was going on below, of course.

  Not bad for a centenarian at all, at all.

  But do not think I went to bed with the ribald ancient who’d arrived with my darling godchild in a box an hour before. Oh, no. I lay in the arms of that russet-mopped young flyer in the weathered leather jacket who’d knocked at the door of 49 Bard Road, and saved us all from gloom the day the war to end all wars ended, just twenty years before the next one started. And wars are facts we cannot fuck away, Perry; nor laugh away, either.

  Do you hear me, Perry?

  No.

  He was himself, when young; and also, while we were making love, he turned into, of all people, that blue-eyed boy who’d never known my proper name. Then who else but Irish passed briefly through the bed; fancy meeting you. There was a whiff of Trumper’s Essence of Lime but not Perry, this time, instead, that Free Pole the night I caught a flea in the Ritz. And then a visit from Mr Piano Man, only he’d used a powerful mouthwash, thank goodness. Don’t think I’d gone wandering off down Memory Lane in the midst of it all; but Peregrine wasn’t only the one dear man, tonight, but a kaleidoscope of faces, gestures, caresses. He was not the love of my life but all the loves of my life at once, the curtain call of my career as lover.

  And who was I?

  I saw myself reflected in those bracken-coloured eyes of his. I was a lanky girl with a green bow in her mouse-brown hair, blinking away the first, worst disappointment of her life in the sun on Brighton Prom.

  When I was just thirteen years old, Perry! You dirty beast!

  Evidently, back downstairs in the ballroom, the chandelier, after a last, terrifyingly violent paroxysm, commenced to decelerate until one final chink and tinkle and then it was as morose and static as it ever was, the candles settled down again and everybody had another glass of bubbly.

  ‘And what were you doing, Nora?’

  ‘Sitting on our dad’s knee, like a good daughter ought to on her old man’s birthday, Dora.’

  What would have happened if we had brought the house down? Wrecked the whole lot, roof blown off, floor caved in, all the people blown out of the blown-out windows . . . sent it all sky high, destroyed all the terms of every contract, set all the old books on fire, wiped the slate clean. As if, when the young king meets up again with Jack Falstaff in Henry IV, Part Two, he doesn’t send him packing but digs him in the ribs, says: ‘Have I got a job for you!’

  While we were doing it, everything seemed possible, I must say. But that is the illusion of the act. Now I remember how everything seemed possible when I was doing it, but as soon as I stopped, not, as if fucking itself were the origin of illusion.

  ‘Life’s a carnival,’ he said. He was an illusionist, remember.

  ‘The carnival’s got to stop, some time, Perry,’ I said. ‘You listen to the news, that’ll take the smile off your face.’

  ‘News? What news?’

  I saw he was incorrigible but I gave him a big kiss all the same. When he got his breath back, he wiped us both off with a silk scarf he reached for and picked up where it had fallen on the floor, Gucci or Pucci or something like that. It was Saskia’s, must have dropped out of her pocket. I discovered I was lying on her mink. She hadn’t trusted her fur coat to the promiscuous crush of the downstairs cloakroom, had she, she must have thought the help might nick it, but look at the horrid stains it had acquired upstairs! When I saw what I had done to Saskia’s coat, my cup of happiness ran over.

  Then I was seized with panic, and a crippling doubt.

  ‘’Ere, Perry . . . you’re not, by any chance, my father, are you?’

  He was quite taken aback, for a moment. Then he laughed until he choked so I had to beat him on the back. He laughed and shook his head and laughed and coughed and sputtered.

  ‘Dora, Dora, I’ve got some standards! I never set eyes on either you or your Grandma until the Armistice, I promise!’

  ‘I thought I’d ask,’ I said, ‘seeing as how you’re everybody else’s.’

  He reached out for his trousers.

  ‘I’m not your father, Dora. I spent seventy-odd years regretting it, my precious, but mighty glad I am of it, this minute.’ Always the mot juste, our Perry. He stood up. He commenced to dress.

  ‘But . . . has it ever occurred to you that your mother might not be your mother?’

  I was putting on my tights. There was a ladder running from a star. I stood stock-still with one leg stuck up in the air.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Did you ever see your mother’s grave, Dora?’

  ‘What are you trying to get at, Perry?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he said slowly. ‘I’ve got no concrete evidence. But sometimes I used to wonder about your Grandma.’

  ‘Grandma?’

  ‘Her last fling,’ suggested Perry. ‘Pinning old Melchior down on the mattress and –’

  ‘You’ve got a very filthy mind, I must say, Perry.’ I tucked my tits away neatly into my lynx-print top. ‘Possible but not probable. Grandma was fifty if she was a day when we came along and she’d have been proud as a peacock, she’d never have made up some cock and bull story about a chambermaid to explain us away, why should she?’

  ‘Just a thought,’ he said. ‘She never talked about your mother. I asked her, a couple of times, but she clammed up. She liked to keep her secrets. I asked her, once, where she came from herself and she said, “Out of a bottle, like a bloody genie, dearie.’”

  ‘Come off it, Perry. “Father” is a hypothesis but “mother” is a fact. Grandma never buried her, she didn’t believe in people’s bodies lying around cluttering up the place once the owners were through with them. She had our mum cremated and put the ashes in the garden. We put Grandma’s there, too. It’s everso good for the roses.’

  ‘Mother is as mother does,’ said Perry. ‘She loved you just as much as if –’

  ‘Don’t start me off, again. Talk about April showers.’ I dabbed my eyes carefully on account of the three shades of eyeshadow. He put his flying jacket on. We looked each other up and down. We couldn’t stop smiling. I’d known in my bones today would be a red-letter day.

  ‘Come on back downstairs,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a little present for you and Nora. Would I forget your birthdays?’

  ‘Just a sec –’

  For then I knew what I must do.

  Not that I believe in telepathy but Perry caught on at once and we turned that room over together. Not that there was much to turn, since it was so minimal, but then we found that Margarine tucked away all the evidence of Melchior in a slip of a room next door, with a little narrow bed, a brown fug of theatrical prints and a faint aroma hinting at incontinence. The Interiors photographer never got wind of its existence.

  When I saw that picture on the wall, first off, I thought it was the man himself, because it was of an old man in purple who looked just like. But then I saw how thick and brown the varnish was, how grandiose and nineteenth-century the brushwork. And this man wore a crown. It was older by far than Melchior and there was the legend on the frame: ‘Ranulph Hazard, “Never, never, never, never, never . . .”’

  Here was the source of all that regal, tragic fancy dress – the purple robe, the rings, the pendant. On his hundredth birthday, a man may indulge in any whim he chooses; Melchior had donned the costume of his father. The slandered, the abused, the cuckolded Ranulph. Ranulph, wife-murderer, friend-murderer, self-murderer, ‘a little more than kin and less than kind’. You can say that again. The son put on
the lost father’s clothes and when I saw what he had done I could have cried because I’d never taken into consideration that he’d got problems of his own where family was concerned. His childhood, which stopped short at ten years old, never to go again, like grandfather’s clock (only not like our grandfather’s clock, which is still in very fair fettle, thank you very much). No love, no nothing. And, tonight of all nights, he’d chosen to become his own father, hadn’t he, as if the child had not been the father of the man, in his case, but, during his whole long life, the man had waited to become the father of himself.

  When, later on, we finally got ourselves home after the wonderful events of the night, I confided some of these thoughts to Nora. She knitted her brows.

  ‘If the child is father of the man,’ she asked, ‘then who is the mother of the woman?’

  Speaking of which, has it ever occurred to you to spare a passing thought as to the character of the deceased Mrs Lear? Didn’t it ever occur to you that Cordelia might have taken after her mother while the other girls . . .

  Melchior had dressed up as his father but had left off that crown. Peregrine climbed up on a stool and rooted round on the highest shelves of Melchior’s closet and first he found a box of stiff collars, and then a box of spats, and then a box that once contained a topper. And there it was, inside. Melchior must have come home and hidden it away with all his other posthumous clothing the day the man on the Underground thought he was dead.

  It was battered and tattered and the gilt was peeling off but Perry made a few magic passes over it and it came up lovely.

  ‘I made him jump for it, once,’ he said. ‘You can give it to him for nothing, today.’

  Downstairs it was only family. Not one media person left, nor guests, just dirty glasses fallen on their sides, crumpled serviettes, chicken-bones, wilting lilac, candles keeling over. The lutenists were gone, the waiters gone, the serving wenches and the pages were gone, Perry’s Brazilian friends adjourned to their rooms in the Travellers’ Club, but Old Nanny had emerged from the ladies’ toilet to take her rightful place amongst us and they were all sitting round convivially picking away at a big platter of left-over chicken. When I saw the chicken, I felt peckish, but there was a little ceremony I must perform before I could eat it.