‘So it’s goodnight, boys and girls, and it’s buenas noches for anyone from foreign parts, and mind how you go, folks, out there on the boards in the dark. It’s hard enough, I tell you, treading the boards up here . . .’
But sometimes when he disappeared he didn’t just loiter backstage or go to the dressing room to pat off the sweat, or go outside to stand on the little screened-off bit reserved for the theatre company, to lean on the rails and flick cigarette ash into the waves and be himself (himself?) for a while.
Instead he’d cross another kind of line. He’d weave his way from backstage to front-of-house, or not quite. There was a route you could take. He’d emerge again in the darkness at the back of the stalls, while the show was still going on—and, look, it could carry on quite happily without him. He’d blend in quietly with the audience and if anyone saw he’d make a showy furtive thing of it. A finger to his lips. Yes, it’s me, but you never saw me, okay?
He’d sit in one of the empty seats in the back row, though there were fewer of these now, he noted, now the season had progressed. It was nearly August. And if there were no seats at all he’d just lean on the back wall or take one of the jump-seats used by the usherettes. He’d do the finger-to-the-lips thing for the usherette.
And one of those usherettes, by the way—but that was another story.
And he’d watch. If anyone observed carefully these visits of his—but they’d have to be one of those weird regulars, those gluttons for punishment as he was known to call them—they’d notice it was always the same act he chose to watch. Pablo and Eve. First spot after the interval. He’d just been up there in fact, to introduce them—‘And now, boys and girls’—and now he was down here, just one of them.
‘And now here’s something you’re not going to believe . . .’
And he’d better make sure he was up there again in a little while for when their act was finished.
‘Didn’t I tell you, folks, didn’t I say . . .?’
He’d sit and he’d watch and he’d wonder perhaps along with all the others how the tricks were done. But it wasn’t Ronnie—or Pablo—he was really watching. Of course not. Down here at the back of the auditorium he was part of the audience and he wasn’t. He was Jack Robinson and he wasn’t. He wasn’t even Jack Robbins.
In the darkness, neither in nor out of the audience, he would sometimes feel the thinness, the fakery of the plush rapt edifice around him. Plush? Turn up the lights and you’d soon see, he knew, how tatty, how shabby, how sham it all was. How it all depended on some stretch of the mind. Sometimes, beyond the stirrings and gaspings of the audience, he might think he could hear the creakings and strainings of the pier itself, like a big foundering ship. But perhaps it was more that he was the one who was going under.
Why did he make these furtive forays? Just to see what it was like, to get the effect, without all the behind-the-scenes contrivance? To be a spy and report back? Of course not. He simply needed to watch her, unobserved. Forget ‘Pablo and Eve’. Forget Pablo, forget Ronnie. Forget even all this stuff they were doing together. It was simply her. He’d stepped over a different edge and he could feel himself slipping, losing himself. All the girls, but he wanted her. He could feel himself going down like a drowning man.
• • •
Evie looks in the mirror. Her lips are sealed. Her lips are anyway a diminished version of what they’d once been.
And if no one could say—or wouldn’t say—then how did anyone know there was such a thing in the first place: magic? All done by mirrors.
But that would leave a big question, wouldn’t it? If there was no such thing as magic, why become a magician?
One night after a long day in the rehearsal room behind the Belmont Theatre they’d gone back to his place and snuggled up together. It had been bound to happen sooner or later. Had it happened by magic—because Ronnie, being what he was, had made it happen? Not if she was Evie White it hadn’t, not if she’d had anything to do with it. But then would it be right to say—it would certainly be a shame—that there was nothing magical about it? Would it be wrong to say that they’d put each other under a bit of a spell?
And—to jump ahead—did Ronnie produce that ring because he just wanted to be sure, he wanted to keep what he’d caught? If he was a magician, why should he have needed to do that? Or did he produce it because she’d done something that must have seemed magical, even to him? It had made those eyes of his go suddenly wide as plates. He’d asked her a question, a question he’d never asked before in his life, and she’d said, really quite quickly, ‘Yes, Ronnie, yes!’ She’d said that word before, too many times to count, but she’d never said it like that—the biggest yes so far of her twenty-five-year life.
So: hey presto!
But one thing at a time. They’d gone back to his place. His place was a grubby little flat, but not as grubby or as little as she’d expected (that windfall again?), and anyway she’d seen worse.
