He would pick up the glass of water and take a sip, just to show that it was only that, a simple tumbler of water. He would put it back on the table. He would pull from his breast pocket his big white shiny handkerchief. Nothing unusual so far. He would give the audience one of his stares. You think so, you think so—nothing unusual? Then he would drape the handkerchief over the glass and you’d see the handkerchief move, twitch by itself. That was because the glass had turned into a white dove.
Not so unusual either (though try it yourself).
Then he’d lift off the handkerchief, pick up the dove, let it perch for a moment on his fingers before tossing it, fluttering, over the heads of the audience. And it would be gone. It would not be there. How? Had they really seen it in the first place?
But all this was nothing.
He would take the white handkerchief and hold it by the corners between his hands and pass it in front of the table (it was such slick actions that made Evie think of a toreador) and then there would be the glass of water again. He would pick it up and drink, all of it this time, then put the glass back on the table.
Then it would seem that something was nudging, struggling inside his mouth, trying to get out. He’d pull at it. Something white. The white dove? Surely not. The white handkerchief? No, that was back in his pocket. It was the end of a white rope, a thin white rope, just the start. He’d pull out a bit more. Then some more. That’s when she would stop watching and step forward—not without pausing to cock a knee and shake her plumes—and take the end of the rope and carry on the pulling.
Or rather she didn’t pull so much as walk backwards across the stage—some stops again to shimmy and smile as if she knew something the audience didn’t—holding the end of the rope while it still kept coming, more and more, out of Ronnie’s mouth, while Ronnie himself stepped back to his side of the stage as if to make room for this white tongue of rope.
Evie might have said to him, while they were rehearsing—but ‘rehearsing’ by those days was hardly the right word—‘Bloody hell, Ronnie, how do you get so much rope in your mouth?’ But did she dare ask any such silly questions now?
The strange thing was that the rope wasn’t wet or slimy, it was a soft silky thin white rope, white as her own name was Evie White. She would remember the look and the feel of it even half a century later as she sat at a dressing table removing a pearl necklace, letting it slither over her fingers. And the strange thing was that it was like so many things that appeared now in their act. She never saw where they had been beforehand, where they were kept. They just appeared. Like the white dove. Or was there more than one of them? Was there a new one every night?
But the white dove was nothing.
With his mouth full of rope, Ronnie could hardly have answered that question of hers anyway. He just made a gesture with his eyes that she should keep on pulling and walking. It was what he said in any case before they started rehearsing. ‘All you have to do is pull and walk away.’ It seemed like some strange surrendering statement of fact, not just an instruction, so that when she started pulling and the rope just kept coming she had the peculiar and uncomfortable feeling that she was pulling the very stuffing, the very life out of him, and he was letting her do it.
Well, she had let him saw her in half.
All you have to do, Evie, is just pull and walk away. So, every night, she just kept on pulling.
Down in the pit, as the rope kept coming, the drummer would have started up again, with a slow crescendo, his wait-and-see whisking and thrumming. Ronnie would be on the other side of the stage and there would be a stage-width of rope between them before Ronnie finally took his end (so it had an end) out of his mouth and held it. Then a strange thing would happen. They’d each hold their end of the rope and start to swing it forward and back, and then to whirl it round and round, faster and faster, like an enormous skipping rope. And the drummer would be doing his stuff, louder and louder. And then—
Then the rope would just disappear, it wouldn’t be there any more, but between them, arching between them, there would be a rainbow. A rainbow, there wasn’t anything else to call it. Stretching right across the stage: a rainbow. The drummer would have stopped, as if himself struck dumb. You could hear the silence, the sound of amazement. And then from somewhere out of the back of the stage would come—was it? Yes it was—the white dove, flying under the rainbow, and it would land on the rim of the glass, looking a bit dazed and as if it could do with a drink. Then there would be a big drum crash (Ronnie must have had a word with Arthur, he must have bought him a pint or two) and all would go black. No rainbow. End of act.
Except for the bows of course, when the lights came up again—Ronnie standing still and just solemnly dipping his head, but she’d be scissoring with her knees and throwing up her white-gloved arms and generally prancing and cavorting round him and egging the audience on in their applause, as if he really might be the Wizard of Oz.
And perhaps he was.
Was there ever applause like it—they had all seen a rainbow—and could there ever have been such a heralding of a career, a
