When they’d seen Mabel off at the station she had showered them both with kisses and called them her ‘chickens’. The weekend had been a general success, but it had underscored a problem. To Evie, invigorated by her mother’s undiminished buoyancy, the solution seemed obvious. Surely an equivalent visit by Ronnie’s mother was needed. Evie was prepared to take on all the challenges and even saw herself as being—with the help of sea air and free tickets to the show—the agent of reconciliation. She had her own share of her mother’s sunniness.
But she soon stopped putting forward her suggestion. It was plain, for all the enthusiasm Ronnie expressed for it, that such a visit was never going to happen. She stopped asking about Ronnie’s mother, though she did not stop thinking about her, forming stern pictures of her and comparing them with those so recently reprinted of her own mother, and wondering—fingering her engagement ring—what she might be getting into.
It was her first teetering. Why had she said her yes so quickly?
She heard her mother’s words again—no one else had heard them—tickling in her ear: ‘He’s a one, isn’t he?’
Surely she would have to meet Ronnie’s mum somehow—somewhere—some time? But this line of thinking was soon replaced by a whole different kind of questioning. To this day, sitting alone in her bedroom, she can never have the answer, though the question stays with her.
How could she know—how could either of them know—that Mrs Deane hadn’t in fact come to Brighton? Hadn’t come, secretly and of her own accord, to see for herself this woman her son had chosen, and at the same time to see all this nonsense, this magic poppycock that he got up to. There was a simple way of achieving all this. All she had to do was get the train to Brighton, buy a ticket for the show and slip in unnoticed.
Had she sat, hidden in the dark, and cast her stony judgement on the two of them, on the whole ridiculous enterprise, and then slipped out again? They would never have known that her eyes were upon them.
And what might she have thought while she sat there? That’s my Ronnie up there, calling himself ‘Pablo’ and sawing his future wife in half. A fine way of going about getting married. And who’s she, anyway, when she’s at home, the one with all the sequins and feathers and precious little else, looking like she’ll never stop smiling?
But then it became clear, though there was still about half of the season left and their act was going from strength to strength, that, whether she’d done this or not, she wouldn’t be coming now anyway, secretly or otherwise, because Mrs Deane—Agnes Dolores Deane—had died.
• • •
The show must always go on, but sometimes things happen and it can’t. It was now early August, the crowds were thickening in Brighton and the audiences for the pier show were swelling. When Jack slipped back to do his watching there might be no spare seats. And by now there was no denying it, ‘Pablo and Eve’ had become one of the top attractions. On the billboards their names now appeared higher up and in larger lettering, and crude little photographed faces—Pablo fiercely staring, Eve serenely smiling—floated beside them.
Eddie Costello, in his Arts and Entertainments column, had waggishly put it that ‘They not only did magic but they had it.’ And had added that one should hope so too, since it was no secret they were engaged to be married. This little fairy tale hovered round their act like some parallel piece of conjuring. And no harm in it surely, since it was true. Though it was not true, as Eddie had implied, that theirs was a Brighton romance, that they’d met on the pier, as it were, and plighted their troth to the sound of the waves. But let Brighton believe it. Only Ronnie and Evie—or Pablo and Eve—might know that they’d plighted their troth, to all intents and purposes, in Finsbury, off the City Road, in the glow of a Belling portable.
And, anyway, the tricks (as everyone called them, you can’t stop people calling them tricks) were quite something, and were performed now with an ever slicker and more adventurous style. Ronnie, to the disappointment of some, had begun scaling down all that stuff with boxes and swords—‘old-hat stuff’ he called it—and was bringing into the act more things with his own—their own—trademark upon them. Things you couldn’t get from other magicians. He was taking risks perhaps, but it was working. Give the people what they want, yes, but why not give them something truly amazing?
In short, though only Ronnie himself could have put it this way, he was moving from magic towards wizardry. There was a difference, a difference in ambition, but a difference in the very nature of the two things. There was a perilous line between the two, and Ronnie recognised in himself the ability to cross it. He could see the land of wizardry beckoning to him. Who knew what lay in it? And perhaps there might be no stepping back. And it was not simply a show-business region, he knew this, it was a different world altogether, it had different laws, it made different demands. But he was still young, and who knew what he might yet be capable of?
As he contemplated his progress to this other zone only one thing, and it was not a lack of courage, made him pause. How might he take Evie with him? How might he—and should he even—reach out his hand to her and ask her to take this leap with him? Yet how could he not? He did not underestimate his own powers and yet he knew now, it had become a fact of life, that he could not do anything without her.
Beneath
