She knew how most of the tricks were done with Ronnie, of course she did, but that wasn’t the point. And for some reason still wasn’t, even now.
Would Ronnie have ever told the world?
In those days, in 1959, there were plenty of beaches, though Brighton wasn’t one of them, with bits of rusted ironwork and lumps of concrete sticking up out of them and signs saying ‘Danger! Mines – Keep Out’. And there were plenty of people walking about who would never open their mouths about certain things. They’d signed up, taken the oath. And as with Official Secrets, so with magic. A condition for life.
Sorry. Can’t talk. Lips sealed. No, you won’t get it out of me, not even if you stick swords through me, not even if you saw me in half.
‘Oh come on, Evie!’ What had she been doing inside all those boxes? Leaving it to Ronnie?
But yes, more often than not, that’s exactly how it was, and even when she’d learnt how things were done it didn’t exactly stop her wondering, having her doubts. In some ways the more she knew the more she wondered. Then it would be Ronnie who would have to say, ‘It’s all right, Evie, you can trust me. Just do as I say. Just get in and leave it to me. You don’t have to worry at all. I’m never going to hurt you.’
Nor did he. It was never that way round.
And only once, during their early rehearsing at the Belmont (one day there was a whole array of collapsible yet forbidding boxes in which it seemed she was going to be successively confined), did she ever say, from inside, in the darkness, ‘Ronnie—are you still there?’ She couldn’t help it. It was an involuntary cry—it had nothing to do with magic—squeezed from her suddenly palpitating heart. And Ronnie had said, and it was just as well he said it, in a rather far-off voice, ‘Yes I am, Evie. I’m here.’ It had seemed to her, from where she was, that Ronnie too might have been speaking from inside some dark box and that he was uttering something just as irrepressibly issuing from deep inside himself.
It had seemed—and this must have been long before he slipped an engagement ring on her finger, though not long after she’d said that thing about his eyes—that some bond had just been formed between them of a kind not usually made, or even possible, between two people.
She can’t remember Ronnie ever saying, ‘Evie—are you still there?’ Of course he didn’t need to. It was a sign of his power and his trust. But perhaps he should have asked it nonetheless.
And how do you ever explain to anyone what it’s like to be levitating? Ronnie had said to her one day, ‘Now you are levitating, Evie. Trust me, you are levitating.’ She could only say what it felt like at the time: that yes she was and no she couldn’t possibly be. And what a strange thing to be doing, to be having happen to you, a kind of gift or privilege, what a strange word even. Had she ever known—though she hadn’t known so many things—that in her life she would one day levitate? Levitate!
But there they were anyway that summer, night after night, waiting behind the curtains to go on, waiting to be ‘Pablo and Eve’, sometimes drawing deep insistent breaths that the audience would never see and sometimes—the audience would never see it either and it was something else she would never tell—holding out to each other a clutching reassuring hand.
While in front of the curtains Jack would be finishing his number.
Oh honeymoon, keep a-shinin’ in June!
Sometimes, outside, after the show, there might be that real and actual magic—a silvery moon hanging over the water, glimmering on the waves as they broke on the shingle. If the rain wasn’t bucketing down or a gale blowing.
She would walk back along the boards, arm in arm with Ronnie, no longer Pablo and Eve, just Ronnie and Evie, just another holidaying couple it might seem. Though sometimes they were recognised, and it was often her they spotted first. ‘Aren’t you—?’ ‘Yes, Eve. Yes. And this is Pablo.’ She would never say ‘Ronnie’ and she couldn’t make the joke, the equivalent one, that Ronnie could make of her.
These moments when they were recognised made her proud. Ronnie might seem a little annoyed, a little aloof, and she’d tell him that was a bad attitude (she had already become a bit of a manager). He should always smile, smile, be nice to the people. They might look at him and she could hear them thinking: That’s Pablo? Really? And then thinking: But, yes, on second thoughts, that’s him.
It was surely a good sign if they could be spotted, even just on the pier. Their act must be doing well, they were ‘known’. And Ronnie began to develop anyway, over the weeks, a certain off-stage aura and style, a way of being at ease in himself, and she liked to think that some of this was because of her.
Sometimes she’d think, who needed magic, or even a stage or a costume, if she had this? Didn’t she have all a girl might want? And she’d think, even with a sort of pity, of the latest doomed girl hanging on Jack’s arm.
Jack would say, leaning on the rail with them, with or without some girl, and looking at the glinting waves, ‘You won’t get any of this, I’ll tell you, at the Palladium or the Hackney fucking Empire. You’ll get a nice little stroll down piss alley.’
Once he said, in the dressing room, when for some reason everything went quiet and they could hear the soft churning sound in their ears, ‘No, that’s not the waves, playmates, that’s the sound of tonight’s audience gnashing their teeth already.’
He was only twenty-eight, same age as Ronnie, and none of them knew then what
