by Wesley Stace
Once we were alone, Joe inspected himself in the mirror and caught my eye.
“A boy can be nervous, can’t he?” I gulped. “It’s my first time.”
The spacious backstage afforded us ample opportunity for privacy. Joe and Bobbie were to enter from different sides, so we took our place in the wings stage left. Joe cleared his throat rather more forcefully than usual as the chairman announced: “My lords, ladies and gentlemen. Order! Order! Welcome to this evening’s benefit, a unique entertainment in the annals of the Gaiety Gala. Tonight, two great favourites. You have enjoyed them separately . . .”
“Oooh!” went the crowd.
“And now you can enjoy them together! Hush! Hush!” begged the chairman when the house cheered. “There are ladies present.” A roomful of men cheered. “May I present to you — in their début on the same stage — firstly, Gorgeous, Garrulous George and his assistant, King Fisher . . .” The curtain swept up, and we walked on to terrific applause, assuming our usual position. “. . . who will be joined by that Veritable Venus of Ventriloquial Virtuosity: none other than the very beautiful, the very bawdy, the very British Bobbie Sheridan and everybody’s favourite wooden Dame Sans Merci, Belle!”
On they swept to an even greater roar. I had eyes for no one but Belle — her poise, her grace, her jodhpurs — and it was only after I managed to wrench my gaze away that I noticed she was carried by a tall, elegant woman wearing a flowing white gown and a sparkling tiara. Who was this mysterious interloper? Where on earth was Bobbie? Sitting down demurely, with Belle on her lap, the ventriloquiste threw me a refined smile. She really was most attractive. And familiar . . .
Hold on a mo, I thought.
Laughter rippled through the crowd.
Our first words were bound to bring the house down. There are certain moments when you can’t go wrong. I don’t like yours! for example. Bingo!
I kept looking at her to make sure, then back at Joe. Joe attempted to get the ball rolling, but, certain I wasn’t mistaken, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t putting my foot in it. “Joe!” I said, and gesticulated over my shoulder. “What happened to Bobbie?”
“What do you mean, what happened to Bobbie?”
“Well, he’s . . .” I wasn’t sure I could brazen it out as Joe was prepared to. I lowered my voice so everyone in the house could hear me perfectly clearly: “He’s wearing a dress!” There was a huge cheer. Bobbie was pretending not to notice a word, admiring his makeup in a little compact. I could barely make myself heard over the audience’s rowdy approval.
“Doesn’t she look lovely, George?”
“Oh yes, she looks lovely!” Then I added sotto voce, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“And Belle . . . Now, she really does look lovely, doesn’t she?”
“Oh, yes,” I enthused. Joe whistled to himself, not innocently. I did my special reserve triple take. “Hold on hold on hold on hold on. Do you mean to tell me . . .” Big laughs.
And then she spoke, the first time ever I heard her voice. “Makes you wonder though, doesn’t it, George?” she said. Her voice was soft, almost tragic in its innocence, with the slightest hint of an American accent, and my heart melted. Belle batted her lovely eyelashes at me, and the crowd started to whistle. Bobbie was doing a good job — gimmick acts can sometimes rely a little too much on the device at the expense of the basics, but not this one. The house was spellbound. So was I. “It’s what’s inside that counts,” said Belle. “We’re all the same. That’s the beauty of it.”
I gulped and stuttered, “Hello, B . . . B . . . B . . . B . . .”
“Belle,” she said.
“Ding dong!” I kicked my legs out underneath me.
“You’re blushing, George.”
I loved the way she said my name. If only she would call me my Georgie, like Bobbie. Joe loosened my collar.
“These two boys don’t know quite what to think,” said Bobbie, to whoops of encouragement. “Perhaps Belle and I can do a little song for the lads at the back. So, boys, you just stand there and look handsome . . . and, maestro, how about a little ‘I Would If I Could But I Know That I Can’t’?”
The band started up, and Belle’s dainty feet pointed right and left in a gesture at dance. As the first verse began (“My mother knew it from the minute I was born”), I wondered at Bobbie’s poise and beauty, the source of Belle’s. The crowd sang along in the chorus, and Belle swished her crop, taking a few lines here and there. They really were the perfect partnership. It was only a pity the song had to end, but by the last chord, I was raring to go.
We were on stage for twenty glorious minutes, the longest Joe and I had ever performed, and applauded back three times. Backstage, there was bubbly and more congratulations. Joe placed me next to Belle beneath the dressing-room mirror.
“We’ll leave those two lovebirds to themselves, I reckon,” said Bobbie.
Belle and I sat together, basking in the afterglow, watched over by our partners and their friends.
And so it was the next night, the next night, and the night after that. It became a beautiful habit, a ritual of courtship: we were Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, Heloise and Abelard, Laurel and Hardy. To my great joy, Joe stopped taking me home — presumably Queenie and Pip were able to cope with the parties on their own — and my nocturnal torment came to an end. Long might it last.
After the Saturday night, a three-show triumph, we were taken to a grand restaurant, shimmering with crystal and candles. As a symbol of the evening’s success — box office records — Belle and I were seated at the head of our party, hand in hand, on matching wooden high chairs, she wearing Bobbie’s tiara and I covered in streamers from a high-spirited backstage ambush. Our presence drew queer looks from well-dressed Charlies at adjacent tables, but these were dismissed by Ralph Ward, the sturdy, elated owner of the Gaiety Gala, and 50 percent of the team of Duke Duval, the other half even gloomier than usual. The bandleader, Fred Sharp, with his companion, and the chairman, a Cockney called Len, rounded out our party. Bobbie was wearing a light purple blazer with a white shirt and an aquamarine tie, a hint of slap still sparkling about his cheeks. Drinks were arriving freely, and his movements were even more languid than usual.
“To the greatest team the Gaiety has ever known,” said Ward, and raised his flute high, merrily slopping champers all over the table.
“Yes,” said Duke. “To the two of you, the four of you. A triumph, my dears, a triumph.”
“Here’s how!” toasted Len, his nose as brutalized as Bobbie’s was perfect.
“Aye,” said Duval, tossing a cigarette butt into a nearby wineglass to fizz in the dregs. “A shame it all has to end.”
“Now,” said Bobbie, pointing a long forefinger in accusation, “you are going to be quiet. I am not having tonight spoiled by that bloody war. It’s going to ruin us all sooner or later, but tonight we will live as we may. What’s life without a good bayonet, anyway?” And he squealed as if jabbed from below.
“Hear, hear!” said Duke, and raised his glass to the rest of the table. “Hear, hear!”
“A last hurrah, is it?” said Duval. “Before the bombs fall?”
Bobbie almost cracked a plate with his knife. The restaurant, in our immediate vicinity, fell quiet. “You stop,” he said sharply. “Or I go.”
“Franchot, dear,” said Duke, whispering into his ear, as the other diners strained to hear. “Do please, please, let us be. Go home if you can’t get into the swing.”
“I wish this one would hurry up and start,” said Duval. “It’ll be a relief. Wasn’t like this last time.” He lit another cigarette.
“We wouldn’t know. We can’t remember that far back,” said Ward, and raised his glass towards us at the end of the table. “To George! To Belle! To business!”
Duval subdued, conversation resumed. Joe was getting drunk. Bobbie always had a slight air of inebriation about him in his parodies of grandiloquence and lavishness of gesture. Sobriety reined him in unf
airly, and drink gave him an acceptable excuse to be as he truly was. Joe, on the other hand, being fundamentally shy, and without me at hand to help him along with the quips, fielded questions politely and kept drinking. It was the kind of establishment where, when one of the clientele took so much as a sip, his glass was immediately, almost supernaturally, replenished. The champagne disappeared, but this only meant a change to red wine.
“No more bubbles?” asked Joe. Echo and Queenie would never have heard him say anything like it.
“No more bubbles,” said Bobbie with an overabundance of sympathy.
“Bubbles!” said Joe. “Bubbles!”
“Oh, let him have bubbles,” said Ward, and motioned to a waiter.
“But I do like this one,” said Joe. “Fruity.”
“Very fruity,” said Ward, and dismissed the waiter.
Despite the merriment, Duval was still not quite done. Out of the blue, while a lengthy debate raged as to whether someone I had never heard of was the greatest living Englishman, Duval lobbed a question at Joe: “And when were you going to tell us about Echo Endor?”
“Oh, I can tell you about Echo Endor!” said Bobbie with a shriek of amusement. “An absolutely marvellous old star. Worked with her once, and I’ve rather modelled myself on her. Old-fashioned, I hear you say? What? What?”
“I asked Joe,” said Duval, cutting Bobbie short.
“Oh,” said Joe, raising his empty wineglass. “She’s my mother.”
“I knew there was a reason you were happy to play second fiddle to laughing boy,” said Duval, referring to me. A thoroughly objectionable man.
“You had to,” Duke muttered to Duval. “You had to. You just couldn’t let it alone.”
“Your mother?” asked Bobbie, delighted to be at the epicentre of such revelations. “Show business royalty?”
Joe, being drunk, was more than a little pleased with himself. “Yes, my mother. Evangeline Fisher. Echo Endor. But I wanted to make it on my own. I didn’t need her help.”
“Of course you didn’t,” Bobbie said compassionately, lobbying the table for support. “Of course he didn’t. He wanted to go his own way. What a brave boy!”
Joe raised his glass again and hiccuped. “She gave me George.”
“Good business!” thought Ward aloud. “Echo Endor’s son!”
“Could business be any better?” asked Duke. “One visit from the law and you’d be out of business altogether!”
“Bugger business!” said Joe, not noticing that he had just thrown the contents of his glass of red wine across the table.
“Fighting talk! They ought to enlist you to fire the first shot,” said Ward with a laugh.
Two frustrated diners came to the table to remonstrate with the rowdy show folk intent on making everyone else’s meal a misery. Bobbie shooed them away, hens clucking around his feet. Rebuffed, they took their complaint to the head waiter.
“I can’t believe it,” said Bobbie. “I wish my mother were someone fascinating. It’s too good to be true.”
“And that isn’t all that’s too good to be true,” said Duval ominously.
“I don’t think I can stand the excitement,” said Bobbie, blithely ignoring the respectfully fuming waiter who stood to the side of his chair.
“No, I don’t think you can,” said Duval.
“Duval,” sighed Duke with an air of defeat.
The head waiter was hovering so effectively that even Joe, in his befuddled state, tried to see what he wanted. But the official would not negotiate with the wine thrower himself, and everyone else was too engrossed in the escalating conflict between Bobbie and Duval to pay him the blindest bit of attention.
“Let me see . . . ,” said Bobbie. “I wonder how a vicious old queen’s mind works, Duval. Hmm.”
“Sir,” said the head waiter. Bobbie ignored him.
“What would upset Bobbie? That’s what you’re thinking. I wonder what it can possibly be.” If Bobbie was in any way anxious, he was concealing it. Joe’s head slumped to the table, but this had nothing to do with the conversation.
“Sir!”
Finally the head waiter had spoken loudly enough that it had reached Bobbie, who stood up and screeched, “What? What? What? What? Whaaaaaaaat?”
“Sir, your table is disturbing our other customers.”
“If you insist, we’ll leave.” There was a murmur of approval.
“I’ll get your bill, sir.”
“We are being forcibly evicted. We are not paying a thing.”
The head waiter fumed and said through gritted teeth, “Go. Quickly. Now.”
“And never darken our napkins again!” Bobbie turned round to the table and said with total calm: “Always works. Now we leave. Pack up George and Belle. Quickly, dears, as the management suggests.” Joe was attempting to sit up without success. “And you,” Bobbie said. “You’re in no fit state to go home. You’re coming back to Bobbie’s for a nice hot mug of cocoa.” He addressed his next remark to Duval, though he was talking to Joe. “Can’t let your wife see you in that state, can we?”
“Sorry, Bobbie,” said Duval, with considerable prodding from Duke. “We were concerned. We didn’t want to see you . . .”
“Concerned, my eye. Duval, you’re pitiful. I didn’t think about it. . . . Well, I won’t lie. But not in the real world. Not in this lifetime.” His mood changed entirely as he considered the glittering chandelier in the lobby. “It’s very nice here. And the price was right. I’d come again. I like a prix fixe, but I’m always willing to go à la carte.”
There were surprisingly few pictures of our host on the walls of Bobbie’s rooms. The furniture was spotless, the antimacassar headrests perfectly symmetrical on the sofa. Joe had been sobered somewhat by a swift walk around the block and the wind gusting onto his face in the backseat of the cab. Both Belle and I, symbols of the earlier triumph, were also given some air.
“You just sit there,” said Bobbie. “I’ll be in the kitchen.”
“I don’t much want to be alone,” moaned Joe.
“I’m only through here,” Bobbie called from the kitchen. “I’ll open this wee hatch, and you won’t even have to take your eyes off me.”
“I’m sorry,” said Joe. At least his eyes were now open. “I don’t quite know why I got so drunk.”
“It was probably the alcohol, lovey,” said Bobbie. His theme song drifted through the hatch: “My mother knew it from the minute I was born, / She thought it best to tell my pa, so he was duly warned . . .”
“Sorry,” Joe said again when Bobbie came through.
“Don’t you worry, my pet,” said Bobbie. “Happens to the best of us. Drink some of this. It’s the antidote.”
“I don’t think I can,” said Joe. “I feel all right, but I want to lie down.”
“Well, I’ll bring it through here, then. Stay there.” Bobbie turned the light on in an adjacent room. “Come on, then, Mr. Fisher.” Joe moved slowly to his feet, the arm of the sofa his crutch. “Come on, then, son of Echo Endor,” said Bobbie, offering a firm elbow. They made their way to the guest room. “You’ll be comfy in here.”
“Light,” I heard Joe complain, and the light went off as Bobbie emerged. He left the door open a crack, sat down to drink his tea, and opened a book. Fifteen minutes later, he took a quick look in at Joe, shook his head in amusement, and closed the door quietly. Before he went to his own room, he turned around to Belle and me: “And you two, keep it down!”
We were lying next to each other on the dining table, our only light the single bar of an electric heater and whatever the moon shone into the second-storey window, our bottom sheet a tablecloth covered in romantic drawings of Japanese bridges and teahouses.
“Are you awake?” I heard in the darkness. Despite the long night, I was awake and alert. Up until that moment I might have been ready to do nothing, to lie there in blissful silence.
“Yes?”
“Don’t be scared.”
“Of w
hat?”
“You know.”
I looked out of the window. If this was all left up to me, there was no way forward. She said nothing.
“I’m not scared. I don’t know what to do.”
“Shh!” she said. “Lie still.”
“But . . .”
“We’re all the same. That’s the beauty. I’m just like you.”
We lay next to each other.
“Do you want to try?” I heard her ask.
“Yes.”
I could see nothing of her against the light, only her shadow.
Old Boys’ News
George left Upside in disgrace, a cheat and a vandal, but this went unmentioned at home. Rather, the early family reunion was celebrated as a triumph for good sense. If any Fisher felt otherwise, she did not say.
An education would now detain George no longer than necessary. He spent the spring and summer at home, in imaginary convalescence after his great escape. His strict regimen with his grandfather’s books gave a scholarly appearance, and this looked like a proper education to Queenie. Frankie came home to fulfil some commitments — a weekly singing spot at a cabaret. It was like old times, at first, as if Upside had never intruded.
The next September, two months before he turned thirteen, George started at a local comprehensive, an unfortunate necessity for which Frankie could summon no enthusiasm. Hand in hand, they considered the building, a two-storey edifice entirely of huge sheets of glass, partitioned by once-white columns, window frames, and grey slate beneath a flat brown roof. Part greenhouse, part fish tank, Malcolm Collins School and Technology College was spared from resembling an experiment in monotone geometry only by children’s art taped to classroom windows.
“Better go in on your own, Georgie,” Frankie said considerately.
At this school of no great ambition, George had only to take care of the most basic requirements: uniform was not compulsory, tests spoken of but rarely set, attendance apparently negotiable. O levels were too far off to merit consideration. There was no chapel, no school play, no vetting of paperbacks, and no library; in fact, few amenities at all. The playing fields, accessible only by bus, had a different postal code — those who didn’t care to participate in games saved the school the bother of carting them to and fro. As far as George was concerned, Malcolm Collins was perfect.