‘She’s a couple of miles from where we are now. She’s a charwoman in Bethnal Green. Do you want to go and see her?’
It was the only time, as it would turn out, that Ronnie would extend this invitation, and it was clear that he didn’t really mean it. It was also of course the last thing she wanted to do at that moment.
‘No, not just now, Ronnie.’
But later, when she had time to think about it, it was not difficult to put herself in Mrs Deane’s shoes and imagine how it would have felt to receive back her one and only son in Bethnal Green and discover that he’d changed altogether. Not just changed, he wanted to be a magician.
It didn’t take much to see that there had been a rift.
And a rift that had only widened when Ronnie attempted to repair it. This all suddenly escaped from him too that afternoon, while the electric fire continued its pinging and buzzing.
When the all-important windfall had come his way—and they were now up to very recent times—he had, with the best of motives, offered the larger part of it to his mother, by way of recompense for all damage and division. But his mother had refused it. She had even, as it were, thrown it back in his face. Strong words had been spoken.
Ronnie had used another expression which it seemed he’d been storing up. ‘Spanish passion, Evie.’
And did she still want to pop round and see her?
‘What’s her first name, Ronnie?’
‘Agnes.’
Agnes Dolores. It made the mind again paint pictures.
‘And your father?’
There was a long pause. It was a simple question.
‘Sid.’
There was another long pause.
‘He’s at the bottom of the sea, Evie. Merchant navy. 1940.’
And that closed the conversation. But at least they were more or less as one there. She couldn’t give as many facts about her own father. For all she knew of his whereabouts (she believed he had been called Bill), he might as well have been at the bottom of the sea too.
Poor Agnes. Poor Mabel.
• • •
She never disclosed any of this to her own mother. One thing at a time. And time enough, she would think, for Ronnie perhaps to get round to telling her himself. First she had to tell her mother about Ronnie anyway, and she left that for a while, to be sure of her ground. But one day, using one of the phones at the Belmont Theatre, she said, ‘Guess what, Mum, I’m working with a magician.’
And then, not so very long after that, she said, ‘Guess what, Mum, I’m going to marry him.’
This was not perhaps what every mother wants to hear from her only daughter, but her mother’s answer was simple and heartfelt. ‘Oh how wonderful, sweetheart. And when am I going to meet him?’
No such breathless messages ever passed, it seemed, between Ronnie and his mother. She would come to wonder if Ronnie’s mother ever knew of her future daughter-in-law’s existence. And just as well, she would also come to think.
Yet for a few fond months of her life she, Evie White, was the fool who thought that her impending marriage to Ronnie might achieve two ends. She would, of course, marry Ronnie. But might not this happy union, even in prospect, be the means of bringing about a happy reunion between mother and son? When she pictured Ronnie’s mother, she pictured two mothers at bitter war with each other in the same person. One called Agnes, with a heart of stone, one called Dolores, with a heart only waiting to melt.
She, Evie White, with a heart, she thought, that was simple and undivided, was a fool for ever making (of someone she’d never met) such a childish analysis. A fool for ever believing in such hokum.
• • •
One morning in early July 1959, two weeks into the season, Mabel White stepped off the Brighton Belle onto Brighton Station. She carried a small white suitcase, wore a loudly cheerful summer frock (both things newly purchased) and a sunhat that seemed to come with its own small garden. She strode boldly down the platform, pausing halfway to give a look of sudden joy followed by some vigorous waving.
Here was a woman who knew how to make an entrance and who clearly intended to enjoy herself during her seaside weekend. The nervousness Evie had felt as she waited with Ronnie at the barrier fled before this vivid approaching presence. As Evie well knew, Mabel had had her disappointments, yet here she was, almost fifty, like a brash sea breeze herself.
She might have turned to Ronnie and said, as if fulfilling her part of a bargain, ‘There you are, that’s my mother for you.’
But soon she was saying, while Mabel beamed, ‘Mum, this is Ronnie.’
Evie didn’t know (and never would) the particular associations that railway stations and mothers held for Ronnie, that his own nervousness was complicated, but she could see from the sometimes daunted look on his face during this otherwise bracing visit that Ronnie’s mother and her own must be a million miles apart.
And had Mabel really taken to Ronnie?
‘So this is—the magician!’
Her mother was always direct. She wore a pair of little white gloves.
After the show that evening—‘Oh but you were amazing, darlings!’—when Mabel was introduced to Jack, it became clear to Evie that, had her mother been twenty years younger, she might have readily joined the line of Floras. She whispered in Evie’s ear, ‘He’s a one, isn’t he?’ Meaning Jack, not Ronnie.
It was late and her mother was a little drunk—this was in the bar of the seafront hotel they’d booked for her—and might have been forgiven for forgetting the chief purpose of her visit to Brighton, but Evie had felt momentarily troubled. She told herself that her mum and Jack were getting along like a house on fire because Jack, as she knew by now, also had a ‘theatrical’ mother. But this only raised again the issue of how different Ronnie’s mother
