But what do you do afterwards? At least for a while you talk. Her palm had circled over his chest. It was not a bad little chest, and not so little either, and now she had the privilege of touching it and viewing it closely, she could see it came with just the right amount of not too long or thick or curly hairs. Under her hand they had a pleasing roughness-yet-silkiness, and in the light from the fire they shone with, here and there, a coppery spark.
‘So why magic, Ronnie? How did it all begin?’
He did not say, as she herself might have said in answer to most questions about her life, ‘My mother.’ But they would get round to his mother eventually. He was not a shy or hesitant man (what were they doing right then?), but he could be very careful about some things. You had to draw them gently out of him.
It seemed that Ronnie had become a magician more by chance than intention, though once the seed was sown, the wish had taken hold of him completely. Perhaps the sowing of the seed was itself a stroke of magic.
‘Where was this, Ronnie?’
She caressed his chest. She was, herself, about to become not a little enchanted.
‘It was at a place called Evergrene.’
‘Evergrene?’
‘Evergrene.’
He said it with a big full stop. He said it as if he might also have said, ‘And doesn’t everyone know about Evergrene? And doesn’t that explain everything?’
‘You’ll have to do a bit better than that. You’ll have to tell me where Evergrene is.’
‘It’s in Oxfordshire. It was where I was in the war. You’re talking to a fully qualified evacuee. How about you?’
She quickly dealt with that. No, never an evacuee. She and her mum had stuck it out in Woking. A long way from the docks, and—look—no damage. Besides, her mother had had her daughter’s theatrical career to think about. ‘This war will be over one day, Evie, and then what? Then what?’ But this was her story, it could wait.
No, she’d never been an evacuee. Though now she was rather beginning to wish she had.
‘Come on, Ronnie. Evergrene.’
• • •
It seemed from the way he began so cagily to speak about it that it might have been a six-year holiday, that it might have been where—all before there were hairs on his chest—he’d had the time of his life. He was reluctant to talk about it perhaps because it all sounded too good to be true. It did. Perhaps he was making it all up and having her on. But it gradually dawned on her that he spoke about these years of his life with such shiftiness and struggle because he’d never spoken about them to anyone before. She was the one, she was the first.
And must also have been the last.
She would never anyway have any other source or corroboration for her knowledge of the life of Ronnie Deane than Jack Robbins. Hadn’t Jack known him for something like ten years? But she would be able to tell at once that it was more the other way round. Jack might know a hundred things that she didn’t, but he didn’t know these things that Ronnie had told only her and that she, in turn, would never tell Jack.
Jack would only say, making a little bundle of jokes of it, ‘He went to Oxford, Evie. Cut above. He took a degree in magic. He met the Wizard of Oxford. Sorcerer’s apprentice.’
In any case she was yet to meet Jack Robbins.
She stroked Ronnie’s chest, feeling that—despite the hairs—she might be stroking the chest of an eight-, a nine-year-old boy.
It turned out that he’d had two childhoods—almost, you might say, two lives—and the second had taken over from the first. He’d been taken in by this couple called the Lawrences and raised by them as if he were their own. And, to cap it all, Mr Lawrence, Eric Lawrence, had turned out to be a temporarily underoccupied magician.
But then the war had come to an end and this—what to call it?—magical life had had to stop, even go into reverse. Or not exactly, since Ronnie wanted to be a magician too and, up to a point, already was one.
It was not so difficult now to guess, before Ronnie told her, that Ronnie’s ‘little windfall’, of which she herself was an indirect beneficiary, had come from this same Eric Lawrence, who, he said, had recently died. It became gradually apparent that another reason why all this information was emerging with such painfulness from Ronnie was that he was still in a state of mourning.
She wouldn’t be lying here—they wouldn’t be lying here—without Eric Lawrence’s money. Never mind magic.
• • •
But it wasn’t as simple as that. She wanted to ask about the rest of Ronnie’s childhood, the ‘real’ one. There was so much, it seemed, he was still keeping from her.
And how anyway—to jump forward—had he got to call himself Pablo?
‘It’s my middle name, isn’t it, it’s my real name? My middle name is Paul.’
‘Yes. But.’
He said, ‘Spanish blood, Evie.’
Which was almost as mysterious as his saying ‘Evergrene’.
Though, yes, to look at him—and she was having a good look at him now—you might have guessed that too. Those eyes in particular.
‘Don’t laugh, Evie, but my mother’s middle name is Dolores.’
Well that was something, and it conjured up in her mind an image of Ronnie’s mother—colourful, exotic, even theatrical—that made her quite want to meet her, and even made her think that her own mother, who was only called Mabel, might like to meet her too.
But this was seriously to jump ahead, and how wrong she was.
‘So where is she now,
