‘Of course, all the rehearsing so far has been for my solo act. I’ve never worked with an assistant before.’
Ah.
He had seemed to pause over the word ‘assistant’ as if he should have come up with a better one, but now at least they were getting down to business. This was her opportunity to ask a question or two. And what would she be required to do?
‘Regular magic stuff,’ he said, unhelpfully. What on earth was ‘regular magic stuff’?
‘Stuff the public want. You have to give the public what they want and expect.’
This was a lesson she’d well learnt herself, though it was not really why she was here. There was something appealing about his slightly weary confidingness. But then was magic ever what people expected?
‘I’ll need to work out the material. But I’m always working on new illusions.’
Illusions?
He lifted his mug with a half-toasting gesture. ‘We’ll work it out together.’
Was that saying she’d got the job? It was certainly saying something. Work it out together. Over the rim of his mug, his eyes were particularly strong. The upper half of his face was the striking part. He seemed an unassuming and vague man in some ways, and on the underfed side. Perhaps to be a magician you had to be a bit dreamy. Yet in other ways he seemed quite sure of himself and he moved—she’d noticed it even as he walked in bearing the tea—with a certain poise. And the eyes were actually quite mesmerising.
The question, she realised, might have been not what did he want her to do, but what did he want to do with her?
He was sizing her up, she could tell. Fair enough. She was used to it. She was under no ‘illusions’ herself. She supposed that the principal role of a magician’s assistant might be adornment. But she already felt an infectious sense of participation, of partnership in whatever it was they might do together.
And wasn’t she sizing him up too?
‘It will be a new departure for me as well, Ronnie.’
She was rather pleased with her sudden impressive turn of phrase: ‘new departure’. Where had that come from?
But wasn’t there anything he wanted her to do now? Interview or audition? It was a rehearsal room, after all. She couldn’t of course perform any magic, but, for what it was worth, she might get up and show him what she could do. There had been no talk of bringing a costume, but she might hitch up her skirt and do a few turns and kicks, and that might clinch things, if they needed clinching. That might do the trick.
Had he even thought about a costume? She was going to need one, wasn’t she? But there we are: she was already, in her head, getting in a huddle with him, even taking a coaxing lead. It was quite exciting. If the question of a costume was to come up, then she could easily supply one. Though should it be up to her? But any chorus girl worth her salt knew how to get, borrow, steal or simply possess a costume.
And when the moment did come, when he saw it—or rather saw her in it (and she could put on a show)—you could tell he thought his lucky day had really arrived. First a windfall, then this. Ding!
Magic? She couldn’t do it herself? And why, when you thought about it, hadn’t every man come up with the same simple crafty idea? ‘Magician’s Assistant Wanted.’ When, later, she was on stage with Ronnie—performing, doing magic—she wasn’t so unassuming herself as not to guess that every man in the audience was looking more at her than at him. Yes, the tricks were good, but she was the best trick of the lot. Or alternatively that they were thinking, of Ronnie: Wish I had his magic.
And of course if they were looking at her, they wouldn’t be looking at the cunning things Ronnie was doing. It served a function. It was called, he would tell her one day, as if it were one of the most obvious and tedious principles of magic, ‘diverting attention’. In the same apologetic way he would talk about ‘the power of suggestion’.
He didn’t ask her, that October day, to do anything. It was just the ‘interview’—such as it was. And the tea. A bare, dusty, chilly rehearsal room on an autumn morning. But how oddly cosy and purposeful it became. Was this some little spell he had cast? They clasped their mugs of tea like workmen round a brazier.
‘All in good time,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we meet here next week? Tuesday? I can book us two hours on a Tuesday. We can get to work.’
So—she had got the job then? He had that unhurried way of men who’d spent a lot of time avoiding things, dodging things—not volunteering for them—in the army. You could spot it. They were a breed. He couldn’t yet be thirty, not much older than her. And she wondered how that might have worked: a magician in the army. It was hard to imagine this man being a soldier. But then it was quite hard to imagine him being a magician.
Should she have asked him to do a trick, just to test him?
Finally, as if he might have forgotten—she had coughed a bit and it was clear he’d never employed anyone before—he got round to the subject of what he would pay her. It was more than she’d expected. But she pretended it wasn’t, and accepted.
He said, ‘If we can work up an act over the winter, I know someone who might get us a slot in the Brighton season next summer.’
Everyone knows someone who knows someone. Everyone has a friend. It was something else she had learnt.
‘By the way,’ he said, ‘my stage name is Pablo.’
She might almost have laughed. It was quite a switch, from Ronnie to Pablo, but he said it without a flicker of awkwardness, even, she felt, with a touch of pride.
