What could he do? Say things to her? The little room, with its curious drapery, had the effect of something pointedly, elaborately staged. Say he was sorry? Say he was sorry for everything, everything he’d done or not done. He seemed suddenly to grasp in his very flesh—then the comprehension deserted him—the most simple yet ungraspable of truths. This was his mother and he would not—could not—be here, standing here, were it not for her. This was his mother, yet she had vanished. Yet she was still here. How could anyone, anything, just vanish?
He bent to kiss her forehead. It was cold to his lips and she made no sign—no smile or frown or flinch—that she knew what he was doing. And he felt that his lips were touching also the cold surface of the water, the deep heedless water under which his father lay, unknowing too.
• • •
He had to stay another two nights to sort out some immediate things. It had been her heart, yes, her heart. She was only forty-nine. He might have chosen to sleep in the house in Bethnal Green, but he slept in the old flat in Finsbury—he had kept it on—where he and Evie had often slept together. He was both intensely glad that Evie wasn’t there now and intensely conscious of her absence. It seemed an age since he and she had gone back that first time from the Belmont Theatre and she had asked him—at such a time—about his mother.
He had to go anyway, for practical reasons, to the house in Bethnal Green. He felt, while he was in it, in the house where his own life had begun and where his earliest memories had formed, like an intruder, an imposter, a thief.
These were two of the worst days of his life, but worse was to come. Did he have any inkling of it?
At Victoria Station, on his return, he saw that the Brighton platform was crowded with cheerful trippers heading for the coast, and he did a rare thing. He bought a first-class ticket, so that he could sit in shielded repose and gaze again out of the window. He heard his mother’s voice distinctly. ‘You come to see your dead mother, Ronnie, and you get a first-class ticket on the way back!’ He was leaving her again. It was the right way round this time, or, more profoundly, the wrong way. He was going to Evergrene again with a label round his neck. No he wasn’t.
As he sped back towards Brighton he found himself taking stock of his life almost as if it too might be over. This was preposterous, he knew. His life was all ahead of him. In a few weeks’ time he would be marrying Evie. Yet in the space of little more than a year he had been twice visited by death. Once—with its blessing, its gift—in the form of Eric Lawrence. Now, with its condemnation, in the form of his mother. He was the complete orphan. He had lost even his foster-father, his mentor, with no final words of wisdom to help him. Truly, to believe in magic, let alone make it your occupation, you had to be a little mad.
Yet he still wanted to perform wonders, things that people would not believe.
His life was all ahead of him? Well, perhaps. His mother had been only forty-nine. His father, poor man, torpedoed by a German submarine, had been only thirty.
Parrots are supposed to have very long lives, but they are just birds. And they fly away.
As he peered through his first-class window, his nose pressed to the glass (no one would have seen his face), his eyes had filled with tears, yet at the same time he had asked himself a legitimate question: but aren’t you happy? Didn’t he have every reason to be happy? Hadn’t he found in his still short life his purpose in it? Hadn’t he found the woman he loved? Hadn’t he had once a happy childhood, a wonderful unexpected second childhood? Perhaps his mother had always known.
People didn’t like to say they were happy because they thought that then something bad might happen. But something bad had happened, so he was in the clear. Though how could he say he was happy, even if he was, when his mother had just died? ‘You come to see your dead mother, Ronnie, and then you go away and travel first-class and say you are happy!’
People didn’t like to believe in magic and yet they could be so superstitious.
Outside, the suburbs gave way to green fields, Surrey became Sussex. Fields of wheat passed by, yellowed and glossy, waiting for the cut. But, sadly for the harvesters and for the holidaymakers packing this train, the sky was not the blue and benign one of his outward journey. Thick clouds had built up as they so often do in an English summer, and suddenly everything, flashing past him as it was, became tempestuous and dramatic. Rain lashed his window, the greenery before him became awash and blurred, so that his own watering eyes seemed silly.
But then, just as suddenly, while in one part of the sky rain kept falling, gleaming needles against still-dark clouds, half the world was full of sunshine again.
• • •
One evening at Evergrene, when he’d just turned ten, he had stood in the sitting room before Eric and Penny, who had positioned their armchairs next to each other. They were in a little row, he had an audience of two, and he stood facing them, the green-topped table beside him. He knew by now that the surface was called ‘baize’, a nice word, but he knew also that the table was not what it seemed. It was a table and not a table, and this might be true of a great many things. It was the first door that you had
