Or would even Jack have found her a hard audience to crack? Ronnie never met Jack’s mother either. It was not what soldiers tended to do on leave, meet each other’s mothers.
They teamed up as a double act, short-lived and doomed. ‘Jack and Pablo’? No. ‘Pablo and Jack’? No. ‘The Two Amigos’? Yes, but not for long. It was a wise and friendly parting.
More wandering in the West End wilderness and in provincial dead-ends, while Jack progressed, even turning into ‘Jack Robinson’ and finding success, even one day telling his old friend—and amigo—that if he got an assistant . . .
Easily said, and perhaps something he might have told himself. There was just one small problem.
But then Eric Lawrence had died. The Lawrences were not so old, but nor were they spring chickens. Eric Lawrence had sometimes referred—it was another reason for his abandoning the stage—to his ‘dicky ticker’. It was a blow, a sudden great gap in his world and a great clarification—magicians do die—and while having to hide his secret grief from his mother, Ronnie had gone specially, hiding this too, to see Penny Lawrence, to comfort her and to be at the funeral. He thought of the night when he had learnt that his father had died and of how Eric Lawrence had come in to comfort him and then slipped out again. How he’d found himself suddenly immersed in tears.
• • •
Evie White answered the advert.
And so she had walked like a gift (though she had no intention of offering any services for free) into the life of Ronnie Deane, just as Ronnie had once walked like a gift into the life of Eric and Penelope Lawrence. But Evie didn’t know about all that then, she didn’t know yet about the ‘sorcerer’s apprenticeship’, which was anyway only Jack’s mischievous phrase.
The man before her was slightly built and not imposing though he had a head of smooth black hair and remarkable dark eyes. He had something about him that definitely grew on you.
He said, ‘I’ve come into a little windfall, Miss White.’
Which was reassuring and interesting—both that he had such a thing and that he’d said it so soon after their saying their hellos. He hadn’t needed to say it. She didn’t need to know how he would pay her, so long as he did.
And she didn’t need to know the nature of the windfall and wouldn’t at that point have been so forward as to ask, though she was curious. She didn’t know then, though she would gradually learn these things, that Eric Lawrence had died or that he’d been known as Lorenzo, or that in his will he’d left (with his wife’s agreement) quite a tidy sum to Ronnie Deane, along with a good deal of his professional bits and pieces. That he was the sorcerer to whom Ronnie had become the apprentice.
‘Windfall’, she would think later, was a bit like saying ‘sorcerer’. It was a hocus-pocus sort of word that might mean anything. Anyone could say they’d had a windfall. And if you were a magician perhaps you could whisk one up at any time.
It was the magic bit in the advert—anyone could be an ‘assistant’—that had intrigued her and tempted her and why she was here on this October day. The idea of being involved in magic. Why not? She’d try anything once.
Though this man didn’t look all that magical, and she wasn’t entirely sure about the windfall. His saying in a modest way that it was ‘a little windfall’ could suggest that in fact it was not so little, but his saying it at all suggested that normally he might be on his uppers, which was a little like how things looked. Had he got his hands on this windfall yet?
But then, she was on her uppers too. It was another reason why she was here.
She smiled. ‘I’m very pleased to hear that, Mr Deane.’
She crossed her legs. Keep smiling, Evie, and look after your legs.
‘Suit Young Lady. Previous Stage Experience Essential.’ What girl—or young lady—would answer such an ad? Not many, it seemed. She was here alone. But she had those two stated qualifications. And it seemed that singing wouldn’t be involved.
It was a dusty rehearsal room upstairs behind the old Belmont Theatre. And was it an interview or an audition? Just the former it seemed.
‘And it’s Evie,’ she said. ‘You can call me Evie.’
From somewhere below there was the sound of stage carpenters banging. She was used to such places. They hired them out by the hour when not needed by the resident company. It seemed clear he had no office or respectable place of residence. And what girl would have gone along to some grubby bedsit or flat? The studio with the noise of carpenters felt neutrally safe. On the other hand, she was alone. There was no little line of other hopefuls waiting on the stairs, and none was to materialise. No competition then?
‘Tea?’ he said. ‘I’m having one myself. Milk? Sugar?’
Hardly magic words, but those dark eyes had something. She thought it best to accept.
He went off to some cubbyhole on the landing. If she’d got cold feet and felt like flitting that would have been her chance. He might have walked back in holding the tea only to find her gone, a disappearing act that might have impressed him, but not got her the job.
And her life might have been completely different.
‘It’s Ronnie,’ he said. ‘Please call me Ronnie. Here we are. Two mugs of char.’
Char? He was friendly anyway, he didn’t have airs.
‘I do a lot of my rehearsing here. I keep a lot of my gear here.’
Gear?
‘I used to do a spot in one of their shows. They’ve been good to me.’
It was a bare, sky-lit room. Some chairs, a table at which they now sat, a low wooden platform which served as a stage. Anywhere less ready for magic would have been
