While Evie never ceased to sparkle on stage, he could sometimes see a troubled look in her eyes, like someone hesitating to jump. Their rehearsals, when he tried to teach her his latest wild idea, became edgy. ‘It’s beyond me,’ Evie would say or, ‘You’re losing me, Ronnie.’
He remembered how she’d said, with such excitement in her face, that it was all ‘a new departure’ for her too.
Sometimes during the show Ronnie’s eyes would take on a quite possessed quality. He might fix the audience with them, as if to say, ‘You think I can’t do this, you think this can’t happen?’ Yet to his smouldering concentration Evie’s smiling radiance provided exactly the right balance. To the audience it seemed—and what else mattered?—that they simply worked together, and amazed together. It would be hard to say exactly when each new ‘trick’ (to use that word) was added and an old one dropped away. The act had become a fluid phenomenon, yet full of a thrilling tension. You never knew what might happen next. This in itself became part of the attraction.
The billboards now carried above their names the little embellishment, ‘Come and See!’ But one day—it was simply a sudden idea of Jack’s—there was something much bolder.
‘Why don’t you call yourself the Great Pablo, Ronnie? Why don’t you think big?’
Ronnie had looked for a while at his friend, but in the circumstances hadn’t objected. Nor had the show’s presenters. Nor had Brighton and its holiday-making public.
‘Come and See! Come and See the Great Pablo!’
But Eve was always just Eve. And Jack was just Jack.
‘And now, folks, I want you to see something that will make your eyes pop, something you’re not going to believe. I want you to meet a very special friend of mine, the Great—yes I said the Great—Pablo! He doesn’t talk very much, but you’ll see why he doesn’t need to. And I want you to meet—and she’ll make your eyes pop too, gents—the delightful, the delectable, the delorious—Eve!’
It would be hard to say exactly when Ronnie began to think about one big trick, one sensational feat to really make them the talk of the town. But it must have been around the time that he metamorphosed into the Great Pablo. Was it before or after those two shows that, to the dismay of the theatre-goers, he and Evie were regrettably compelled to miss? When exactly was that? It would anyway seem—it was almost like some canny piece of stagecraft itself—that Pablo had only made himself scarce for forty-eight hours in order to return with new force and in new form as the Great Pablo. And, yes, with another new trick. And quite a trick too.
He had never liked the word, even despised it. It was perhaps around this time—when he was assuming greatness—that he made his views on the matter particularly plain, one day in the Walpole. Or he put a new slant on them. He said people did tricks, didn’t they, all the time? People were always playing tricks. But magicians—he’d say it one more time—did illusions. And when, after saying this, he’d gone to the bar in something of a huff to fetch drinks, Jack had leant over to Evie and said, ‘Tricks? Illusions? What’s the difference, Evie? You tell me.’ He’d leant close enough to make it a whisper and as his breath brushed her ear he’d thought for a moment of the sound of the sea they say you can hear in a shell. And then he’d thought that you couldn’t call that a trick, the right word was illusion, but he didn’t take back what he’d just said to Evie.
• • •
It was unfortunate anyway that it was around this time that Ronnie got word from a hospital in London that his mother was ill. The actual words were ‘gravely ill’. It was one of those messages in a readily understood code: ‘You’d better come at once, or you might never—’
It was a heart condition. He thought of Eric Lawrence’s ‘dicky ticker’, as if there might have been some bizarre connection. Ronnie had never known that his mother had a heart condition. Nor, presumably, had she. And he had almost forgotten that he’d sent her a phone number where she could contact him, if for any reason . . .
These unspecified reasons might have included a sudden wish (never before expressed) to come and see her son performing in a show, and at the same time meet the woman who was going to be his wife—things which might have swelled both a mother’s and a son’s heart. But whether Ronnie had ever actually extended such an invitation to his mother or whether he had even told her that he was now engaged to be married, only Ronnie knew.
There had been no telephone calls, either way, until now, but he supposed that his mother must have given the number to the hospital people or that they’d simply discovered it somehow. He was that person he’d never before thought of himself as being: ‘next of kin’.
Had his mother, in her dire situation, wanted him to know? ‘My Ronnie must be told.’ He would never know this. Even as he answered this sobering phone call he thought of all those calls that had never been made between them when they were apart in the war. But they had been apart ever since really. Then he thought—it seemed like yesterday—of those white handkerchiefs being waved by all the mothers while he was being bundled onto his train. A sudden snow of handkerchiefs: he couldn’t tell which one, if any, was hers. Then he thought of her hand squeezing his when she’d left him at the school gates.
‘Tell her I’m on my way.’
What else
