Hadn’t she made her move and placed her bet and hadn’t it come good? Hadn’t she once long ago when, yes, he was just a song-and-dance man and when they were all, really, just small glittery fish in a big sea, found the all-important little key in the small of his back and learnt how, carefully, lovingly, to turn it, when all the others were too busy just wrapping their legs around him?
• • •
Oh the things Ronnie would do to her, every night. For how many nights? A whole summer’s worth. And for all to see. Or not exactly see. Not see at all. That was the whole point.
He would put her in a box and, while she was in it, take a sword—two, three swords—and run her through. But this was not before he’d put her in another box, all hunched up like a trussed turkey in an oven, and then locked the door, wielding first the magic key—the magic golden key!—and made her disappear. And then—another locking and relocking, another wielding of the key—made her come back again. That was kind of him. Only to run her through with swords.
But then he would put her in another box, lying down this time, her head sticking out at one end, her feet at the other. And he would take—no, he would brandish, he would wave it about—a saw. He would push one half of the box, the one with her head sticking out, round the stage, while the other half, with her legs, stayed put.
And if Evie White or ‘Eve’ didn’t know how to sing, she knew how to scream, very convincingly (and this was her idea, challenging Ronnie’s idea that the whole thing should be done in ghastly silence). Her scream could make them all gasp, sometimes even scream themselves. Her scream was worse than the saw.
Outside, on the pier, the punters could go on all sorts of contraptions—the dipper, the helter-skelter, the ghost train—that could make them scream too, scream with a kind of strange wild joy. Wasn’t this, plainly, one of the reasons why people came on holiday—to be frightened to death? So didn’t it all fit in with the general requirement: give them what they wanted?
When he locked her in that first box, all curled up, and her tail feathers got caught accidentally-on-purpose in the closing door she would give a little, a not so little, an audible ‘Ooo!’. Which made them not know what to do: giggle or wince? And that was her idea too.
Oh the things she wouldn’t submit to, the things she wouldn’t go through for Ronnie (or, as he was at the time, Pablo). Yet the strangest thing of all was that amid all this savagery and torture she would maintain her indomitable and gleaming smile. She would, whenever the boxes were opened, step forth smiling, her tiara glinting, her arms flung up in their white gloves in a gesture of triumph and delight. She would cock one knee then the other and sway her hips, and whenever she had to move from one box to another, from one position of atrocity or mere jeopardy to another, she would do so with a similarly happy display of her shining invulnerable self.
The ring that shone on her finger, gold like the magic key, only made it inevitable that Ronnie would start making the joke, whenever he introduced her to anyone who’d seen the show, ‘Meet Evie. Meet Eve. My other half. Halves.’
And if Jack, as planned, had been best man at their wedding that September he’d surely have stolen Ronnie’s joke, perhaps not preventing himself for a moment from slipping back into the role of Jack Robinson. ‘Please join me, folks, boys and girls, in drinking to Ronnie’s other half. Or should I say halves? May he always keep putting her back together again.’
Instead he stole a great deal more.
Brighton Town Hall, the Registry Office. It still might have happened, that September, if everything else had been put back together again.
And she would have been—another line for Jack?—‘married to magic’. As she would by then have understood that Ronnie was too, long before he was married to her.
But what was wrong with that? Wasn’t it what had lured her in the first place? Magician’s Assistant Wanted.
• • •
And did she find out anyway the answer to that central and enticing question? Magic: so how was it done then?
If anyone ought to have found out, it was her. But here was the crucial catch. If she’d found out, if she’d known, she could never have told, could she? Because that was the deal, the pledge, more binding and unbreakable, it seemed, than even a promise of marriage. So how would anyone ever know whether she knew or didn’t?
She looks into her mirror now as if the only person she might tell is the one staring back at her. But even that would be telling, wouldn’t it? She’d never even told Jack, though he’d pressed her a few times, before letting the whole thing go and pass into history. It’s what everyone wants to know. How is it done? ‘Come on, Evie, you can tell me. Surely you can tell me now. I won’t tell anyone else.’
He was like a man wanting to know about other men she’d slept with. Specifically in this case Ronnie Deane (all the others had passed into their own histories). But she wasn’t telling—either way. Did she ask what it had been like with Flora? All the Floras. Tell me about all that magic that
