And not all the remembered voices that had once filled this house—the parties! the evenings!—can make its silence now any less crushing.
Once her mother had said to her that life was unfair, but her turn would come. And look what a turn it had turned out to be. Fifty years with Jack Robbins. Or not quite. Forty-nine. How unfair. But now, anyway, here she was, sitting pretty in Albany Square, guardian, curator and beneficiary of her late husband’s shining career.
If you can be sitting pretty at seventy-five. If you can be sitting pretty in a state of unrelenting bereavement.
Gone. ‘I’ll just be gone for a while, Evie.’ As if he might have simply said it. And so, any moment now . . .
She was to marry Ronnie that September, and hadn’t her turn already arrived? Every night she decked herself out before a mirror bordered with glaring light bulbs that would be cruel now. At least her dressing-table mirror can be kindly angled and at least she can still summon up in it—it’s not magic, it’s merely memory—the tiara with the white plume, her carefully combed blonde fringe, the sparkling earrings, her bare powdered shoulders, the long white gloves almost reaching her armpits.
Beneath her then, extraordinarily, was the sea, swirling and splashing, and her silver sequins might have made her think of the glistening scales of fish, but she can’t remember ever having had that thought then, even while the sea sploshed beneath her. Evie White: silvery and slippery as a fish.
The last thing she would put on was her smile, though did she really need to? Wasn’t it just part of her, like her flashing blue eyes? In a moment she would get up and turn and, glancing over her shoulder, check herself from behind. She would place her palms on her hips, run her fingers under the rims of her tight costume, pull and pluck if necessary. She would give a little sober shimmy to test the other fanning plumes that might be called her tail. All this in a few seconds and by quick routine. Or she might use, in the same way, Ronnie as her mirror. Are my seams straight, Ronnie, are my feathers all right? Every night he might have this task and pleasure, but in a few moments the whole audience would have it. That was the idea.
The quivering feathers, no less than her smile or her eyes, would simply seem part of her.
Ronnie, meanwhile, would have given the final tweaks to his bow tie, pulled on his own white gloves. He would have put on his cape and checked its fastening. He would need to be able to undo and flourish his cape all in one movement. He would check everything he had in his pockets. That was important too. With his make-up on, his dark eyes would look all the more intense. He had become ‘Pablo’ now. She had become ‘Eve’. With his make-up on too, his face would have acquired its peculiar stage gravity. She had to keep smiling and twirl and wiggle.
Neither of them had to speak. Or sing. Hadn’t she found her perfect situation?
It was Jack who used to say that Ronnie in his stage get-up looked like Count Dracula’s little brother. He never said what she looked like. Jack simply looked like Jack Robinson. But she used to imagine Ronnie privately (she never told him) as some swerving toreador, in a tight glittering costume to match her own. He had the red-lined cape after all and the bullfighter eyes. And the borrowed name. You would not believe this man came from Bethnal Green. And on stage he had the bold fluid movements too. He could dance in his own special way. She often thought that, whatever else their act was, it was a kind of dance, a ballet of silent intersecting actions. They never exactly planned it, it just happened. Ronnie would change on stage. He had learnt to do it. A separate kind of magic.
‘All set, Evie?’
He would place his hand under her feathers and give her silver backside a pat, a little squeeze. It was his privilege. Then they’d make their way up to the wings, to be in their positions behind the curtains, and before they got there they could already hear Jack doing his after-the-interval number, dancing and singing—he could do both things—in front of the curtains, in the silver spotlight, before it was their turn.
By the light
. . . tappity-tap tappity-tap . . .
Of the silvery moon
. . . tappity-tap tappity-tap . . .
I like to spoon
. . . tappity-tappity-tappity-tap . . .
• • •
But life is unfair. Jack had died, exactly a year ago. In this bedroom, in the bed behind her. In the bed, beside her. She had not known he had died, since she was asleep. Perhaps he hadn’t known either, for the same reason. She hoped so. It was the death we would all want.
But it was not, in her case, the awakening anyone would wish for. She hated remembering that awakening. Whenever it popped into her head, which it did constantly, she thrust it aside immediately. She often wished she might go to sleep and not wake up, just as Jack had done. But not wished.
George had rung last week and said, ‘No pressure, Evie, no pressure at all, you may have other plans, you may want to be alone, but I haven’t forgotten what day it is next Thursday. Would you like to have lunch? Would you like to raise a glass or two with me to the old boy?’
So she had put on her pearls and gone. She did not like George’s expression ‘old boy’, but George, despite being—as Jack had sometimes affectionately called him—Jack’s ‘fast and loose’ or ‘wily’ or even ‘cut-throat’ agent, was a kind, a considerate man.
And still the devoted agent of Jack’s ghost.
Jack Robbins. Seventy-seven. Jack Robbins CBE. Never,
