Yet at once he’d thought of that evening’s performance. He couldn’t just cancel it, surely? But Evie said and Jack said too that there was no alternative, he had to go and be with his mother. They were suddenly like this other couple telling him what to do. Which only raised another question. Was Evie going to come with him? Was Evie, his future wife, who’d never met his mother, going to come with him when he went to see his mother, perhaps for the last time?
He did not ask. She did not say. It was not a test, but it seemed that she would not be accompanying him, and, all things considered, he could see her point of view. He was not going to demand it. But he suddenly felt very alone and Evie seemed to recede from him and become hard to discern, as if she were now the one seeing him off while he had to board some ominous train. Which was almost literally the case.
They said he must go. Jack said he shouldn’t give it a second thought. He would make a special announcement, of course. He would use that word that gets used in the theatre to cover all kinds of eventualities: ‘indisposed’. It was one of those words, like the phrase ‘next of kin’, that do not crop up often, yet sometimes have their moment.
Then Jack said, ‘Unless you think Evie and I should do the act for you.’ It was a bad joke in circumstances when no jokes were needed, a bad attempt to lighten a fraught situation. But he had said it.
So Ronnie Deane found himself on a train to London, and, though it was all the other way round and he had been an adult for years, he couldn’t help feeling he was really eight years old and that in some way, perhaps, he always had been. He had never grown up. He was an evacuee, there was a sort of war on again, he was on a train, but this time he was travelling towards his mother. And it was just as bad.
The difference was that when he was eight years old he had not known about magic, it had not yet come into his view. And he thought again, as he travelled towards his mother, of the absurdity and uselessness of this thing that he had nonetheless chosen to make the object of his life.
‘Magic, Ronnie, whatever fucking next?’
What next indeed? It was early August. Sussex—ripe, green, drowsy with summer—floated by, and he was travelling in the wrong direction, away from the coast, away from that happy ribbon of land set aside for holidays and fun, where people wanted, at least just once every year, only to be entertained, to play.
It had been his awkward situation now and then—sometimes on trains—to find himself in a brief conversation with a stranger in which the innocuous question arose: ‘So what do you do then?’ Sometimes he had lied. But mostly, intrepidly, he had told the truth. The word wasn’t difficult in itself.
Then they of course might think he was lying. ‘You’re having me on.’ Or they’d want him immediately to ‘do a trick’. To prove it. Or the conversation might drift into some wishful realm in which it was assumed he might do anything. Sort out this man’s problems, for example. Make money grow on trees, make dreams come true. Come on then, if you’re what you say you are. And there would be an evident disappointment, even a touch of suspicion and distrust if it emerged, as it would, that he could not do absolutely anything, there were only some things he could do.
Call yourself a magician . . .
It was depressing, even belittling. How easy, even enviable to be able to say you were a plumber or a travelling salesman. How easy it had been when he was in the army, in a uniform, not to have to go through this rigmarole or to have to explain yourself at all.
Miracles, he would feel like saying, you’re talking about miracles. Magic yes, miracles no. Miracles are for miracle-workers.
He never mentioned the word wizardry.
Now this pestering figure—there was none actually sitting beside him and he was free to just look out of the window—seemed to have become an agent of retribution lodged inside his head. Perhaps it was even his own mother, scornfully taking him to task.
So come on then, Mr Magician. Show us what you can do.
• • •
And, as it turned out, he was too late anyway. Even such powers as he might have applied, even the simple power of his presence, had miserably failed. He arrived to be told that his mother had passed away some two hours before—while he was still in fact on the train, having all those beside-the-point thoughts.
His mother was dead, gone, no longer there. Which left, apparently, an even greater challenge.
‘But of course,’ he was told, ‘you can still see her if you wish . . .’
See her? But how could he see her if she was no longer there? But then again, when the thing was put to him, how could he not? How could he have said, ‘No thanks,’ and turned around?
‘Yes, I would like to see her. Yes.’
And there she was. And wasn’t. There was a small quiet room in which his mother had been deposited and arranged. He was seeing her and he was not seeing her, though he could not beat back an even more bewildering possibility. Was she seeing him? Even judging him? Even delivering upon him her last judgement, her last unanswerable taunt.
So there you are, Ronnie. At last. Well thanks for coming anyway. What a pity we couldn’t have had a last little chat. Perhaps it wouldn’t have got us very far anyway, probably not. And in any case here’s the main item for you. Here I am. Here we
