But Ronnie knew—he turned sixteen, then seventeen—that he had to stand on his own feet.
This was an itinerant period, so different from any previously in his life, when he scraped a living somehow or other in theatres, doing whatever menial work there might be for him to do for a pittance, learning how they worked. Sometimes even revealing that he could do things himself—on stage, that is—and so starting to learn what a stage is like, what it asks of you, what a hard thing a stage can sometimes be. Learning also the ins and outs of that encompassing entity, ‘the stage’, its intricate and precarious webs of connection. Living, sleeping wherever he could, in some strange places, and—oh, he was growing up—with any girl who might have him and help him. Or sometimes vice versa. Any girl, and there were not a few of them, in the same rough, glittery, hopeful, deluded, stage-struck, thankless, magical business.
Eric Lawrence had said it would be tough. Was Ronnie ready? He’d said, and had smiled at his own doubletalk, ‘There are no magic wands, Ronnie. There are magic wands, but there are no magic wands. Do you understand me?’ Eric Lawrence had said it would take time and determination and had urged upon Ronnie that, though he had acquired now some of the basics of magic, there was something else he had to learn, and that was that he would be in the trade of entertainment.
Magic and entertainment were not always the same thing, but they had to combine if he was seriously to follow his vocation. And entertainment meant having to give the people what they wanted and not necessarily what he wanted and might be capable of doing. It meant understanding and bowing (‘In every sense, Ronnie’) to the audience. And it meant, above all, knowing about that thing called ‘the stage’. This was something he could not teach at Evergrene.
So Ronnie had had to find out for himself.
But Eric Lawrence had added, not to make Ronnie too downhearted at all these harsh admonitions, ‘And you will need a stage name. When you are on stage you will need a name—just as I was Lorenzo. What name do you think you should have?’
He had left only the slightest pause for Ronnie (who was anyway at a loss) to answer this question, as if asking it had been merely perfunctory.
‘I think you should be called Pablo, don’t you? Don’t you think Pablo would be a good name for you?’
How had he known? But had he known? Ronnie had never mentioned the parrot. Even when his father had died—for some reason even more resolutely then—he had never mentioned the parrot, which must still have been in a cage somewhere, with some new owner, or some new pet dealer (how did pet dealers fare in a war?). Or even, if it had ever managed truly to fly away, in some place known only to itself.
‘Where’s Pablo? Here I am!’
Or perhaps—but Ronnie didn’t want to think about this—perhaps it had been killed, a victim of the hostilities. Perhaps a parrot in a cage would be one of the first things to suffer, even to be brutally sacrificed, when bombs were otherwise whistling down on human beings.
But of course Eric Lawrence had another reason.
‘It’s your middle name, isn’t it, Ronnie? It’s your real name. Paul. Just like my real name was always Lawrence. I went for Lorenzo. But I think Pablo sounds rather better, don’t you?’
And could he have got anywhere by calling himself just Ronnie?
• • •
Then anyway the army caught up with him and he had to go away and do his time. Never mind Pablo or any other name, he was now plain Private Deane, with a number. As luck would have it, he managed to get through it all doing something conveniently unsoldierly, but certainly not magical.
And at least it all vaguely placated his mother. He was doing a ‘proper job’ at last, with regular pay attached to it, some of which he duly sent her. And perhaps a year and a half in the army would knock all that magic rubbish out of him and show him what was what.
As it turned out, he could even get the train up to London at weekends and go to see her. Thanks to the army, his life had never been more ordinary. The army was even teaching him, in readiness for the great normalities of life, how to be a good little office boy. But he kept quiet with his mother about his actual military duties (‘Oh, you know, marching up and down’) and never told her (or even Jack that much) about the weekends he spent with the Lawrences. He would take a different train. There was a handy connection from Bournemouth.
My, my—Private Deane. How their little Ronnie had grown. All through the war he’d lived here and now here he was, a soldier himself. He sat down again on the wall of the cold frame. There was still ginger beer. Did soldiers drink ginger beer? Mrs Lawrence, perhaps having asked herself this question, had produced a bottle of White Shield. How had she known it had become his favoured tipple? He would even drink it in the Walpole.
He told his mother that these were weekends when he had to go for special training. It wasn’t a lie. ‘Training’ was a useful word. To himself he might have used the phrase ‘refresher courses’.
And it was in the army that he met Jack Robbins, later to be known as Jack Robinson, and most of those free weekends were mainly spent in Jack’s company in London, getting up to business of one kind or another. Some of it was monkey business, but some of it really was useful business. Should he have introduced Jack to his mother?
