But Ronnie had picked up from the air at Evergrene, from his very habitation of it, a sense of things, a taste for things that he knew—he still had memories that enabled him to know—were going to seem distressingly foreign when he returned to London. Yet this would be just his side of it.
He could at least begin to see it, though he did not want to, from his mother’s point of view. She might scoffingly say he’d ‘gone up in the world’, he’d ‘got ideas about himself’—she who’d taken him to school, assuring him it would lead to a better life. She might feel only humiliated by these other loftier parents who’d taken over. Under the guise of being a deserving case for protection (though it had been her decision), he had, in effect, deserted her.
Moreover, she was a widow now. She had survived bombs, she had trembled in shelters. He had known not merely shelter, but—she didn’t yet know it—a privileged, even a charmed existence.
Such thoughts began to gnaw at him. As the war seemed to be ending he was guilty again of wanting it to go on, or of hoping for some other way of prolonging his time at Evergrene, so that the issue of his mother would not have to be faced.
Mr and Mrs Lawrence too secretly wished that his stay with them might continue, would have arranged it if they could. They had got used to him, their little Ronnie—though he was no longer so little. They were about to be bereaved.
Even the availability of magic, it seemed, could not solve everything. It could bring about extraordinary transformations, but not alter the fundamentals of life. It was a lesson a budding magician would be wise to heed. Perhaps Mr Lawrence had tried to instil it. Or perhaps he was too afraid himself of waking up from this dream of having a child—a protégé, a pupil. Or of dashing Ronnie’s own fledgling ambitions.
• • •
On a June day in 1945 Ronnie Deane boarded a train at Oxford, a city still remarkably untouched, to go to a city of rubble. And now it was Mr and Mrs Lawrence who tearfully waved goodbye.
Ronnie returned to a London transformed—what on earth had been going on?—and to a mother, it seemed to him, damaged and altered too, not beaten or even essentially changed, but hardened.
And after nearly six years how did he look to her? Improved, enhanced? Softened? Perhaps even a little soft in the head?
She was not going to stand for any nonsense anyway. He was nearly fifteen now and, since events had interrupted his education, was in the unfortunate position, while possessing no qualifications, of needing to earn a living. So what was he going to do about it?
Ronnie had his innocent answer and, cosseted by so much time away from the big city, he naively let out his secret.
‘A magician, Ronnie? A magician! Please tell me you’re having me on! Please tell me you’re joking!’
His mother’s language and manner became even harsher. In her head was the thought: Jesus Christ, it had been bad enough being married to a sailor. And Ronnie must have read her mind, since he had the sudden realisation: was he not now like his father, back from a long and absconding voyage?
‘Jesus Christ, Ronnie! Jesus Christ!’
Then his mother had said something he’d never heard cross her lips and that would never have crossed his own in front of her, though he’d many times said it to himself, even in polite company.
‘Fucking hell, Ronnie! Magic! Whatever fucking next?’
Oh he was back home all right, he was back in London, and what a welcome he was getting.
Having exploded, his mother had soon erupted into tears. It was a familiar cycle. But she wasn’t asking to be comforted. It was another form of venting. Hardened? Like a stone, even when undergoing a wetting. And Ronnie might have burst into tears himself, but he was coming up to fifteen and couldn’t.
• • •
But more than all this. More than this initial cutting down to size. The little house in Bethnal Green—how little it seemed—enclosed him like a prison. It was mostly unchanged and it was unscathed (other houses along the street were not there any more), and its humble endurance, like his mother’s, might have spoken to him. But it was like a confinement. He felt guilty—why shouldn’t he, returning to a prison cell? It had once housed his tiniest self. It had once briefly housed a parrot, which, according to his blatantly lying mother, had flown away. But how right she was now to be aggrieved.
And how he identified with that caged bird.
There followed a year or so in which mother and son attempted, somehow, to live with each other. The unbudging truth was that they did not know each other. Or it was more—Ronnie had to accept this—that Mrs Deane didn’t know her son. She hadn’t moved, she hadn’t gone anywhere. She was still a charwoman. He pined for the Lawrences and all that he had now been separated from. She didn’t understand, and wouldn’t have sympathised if she had. And yet she knew he had found another home, another, better life. She felt shamed and wounded.
He acknowledged all this. He had done it to her. But he had been only one of the blameless objects (and fortunately not a victim) of a great historical emergency. He felt—it was a terrible thing to admit to himself—a stranger to his own mother. They did not know each other? They did not own each other. They even disowned each other.
There followed another period in which Ronnie ‘left home’ again, though he was never far from Bethnal
