Top billing. And for those last two or three weeks the billboards actually said, ‘Come and See the Famous Rainbow Trick!’ Ronnie let the word ‘trick’ pass. It was the common word. And did he, really, have anything to complain about?
And don’t ask her, don’t ask Evie White. Though she if anyone, apart from Ronnie himself, should have known. Even Jack had said, ‘Surely you must know. A fucking rainbow right across the stage. How the bloody hell does he do that?’ But she had shaken her head and might even have looked a little shifty and cornered as if she were being forced into some kind of betrayal. Betrayal? What betrayal? And perhaps they’d both looked a bit shabby and edgy and ashamed. Outdone, outshone by a rainbow.
But it wasn’t even the best trick of all. That was still to come.
• • •
‘So tell me, Evie . . .’ George had begun.
Anyone can say they don’t know, profess ignorance, or, after fifty years, simply say they don’t remember. Not that George was exactly interrogating her. Or he was a sly and gentle interrogator, who’d always had, she suspected, a soft spot for her. He poured more wine. ‘All your secrets are safe with me, you know that.’ A reassuring statement if ever there was one, coming from Jack’s ‘wily’ agent. Did she ‘know’ it? And ‘all’? She could see that this lunch was going to require some negotiating.
How old was George? Sixty-eight, sixty-nine? A soft spot? Come off it. He was just trying to soften her up. Bony but creamy. He surely didn’t think that because her year of mourning was now over—
But it was all suddenly a little like that treacherous and bewildering period long ago, when she was with Ronnie, yet not with him, and yet felt loyal. When she was with Jack, yet not with him, and yet would be with him—though she didn’t know it—for most of the next fifty years. How might the matter be solved?
But the matter was solved, for them all. Ronnie solved it.
Secrets. Who doesn’t have them? And are they ever safe? Even with ourselves?
‘The Life and Times of Jack Robbins’. No, not if she could help it. Over my dead body, George. Though what was there to hide? The story of a successful career and a successful marriage, how boring was that?
‘But how about,’ she might have said to George—a cunning, yet risky diversionary tactic—‘ “The Life and Times of Ronnie Deane”?’
‘Who, Evie?’
‘You know—that “magician chap”. Otherwise known as the Great Pablo. You don’t know? Did Jack never tell you?’ Staring at George over her wine glass.
Or, she thinks now, staring into her mirror, ‘The Life and Death of Ronnie Deane’. If death was the word. Hadn’t she just seen him, in this mirror? If ‘death’ was ever the right word. And ‘gone’ or ‘missing’ or ‘not there’, these were all, she knew by now, preferable words. Preferable, if more painful.
Or how about—her mind raced, as if she might have proposed to George that she would write it herself and start work immediately—‘A Season in Brighton’? But no, she knew a better title. A mysterious title, but a better one, the best one. What was the name again, George, of that literary-agent friend of yours? That literary-agent chap. Wouldn’t he like a nice mystery story? Called ‘Evergrene’.
She thought of that impossible thread, stretched across the garden, so thin as to be almost not there, yet for a moment resisting, clutching her blundering body. She thought of that white rope stretched across the stage.
• • •
How much had Ronnie ever told Jack? Whatever it might have been, it had gone a year ago with Jack. She was the only true guardian now of the life and times of Ronnie Deane. The one always best equipped to tell the tale. Or to keep it to herself.
How often had she and Jack talked about Ronnie? Not much. A mutual silence about him, a guilty baffled honouring silence, was almost one of the glues—the secrets as they say—of their marriage. And, after all, how did they really know that he wasn’t still there? She never told Jack what she’d done with the ring. Though he would have seen that it was suddenly absent. He didn’t ask. He might have guessed. She hadn’t given it back to Ronnie. Ronnie hadn’t asked for it back. In fact she wore it for those last shows—for that very last show—as if it were a vital part of their act. A last little piece of shiny magic.
But then, after everything else had happened, she threw it into the sea. What else? She wept as she threw it. End of story. And yet she’d been seized, even as she threw it, by some crazy idea, some old fond belief she’d read about somewhere, that if you threw something precious into the sea it would bring something back to you.
She’d said it, into the wind, as if he might actually be out there somewhere: ‘Ronnie.’
She says it now, into the mirror. ‘Ronnie.’
And Jack never knew, unless he’d been a sort of burglar in his own home, that she’d kept the little costume of sequins and feathers. It wasn’t so difficult to put it away and hide it, once you’d taken it to pieces, once you’d removed the plumes from where they fitted. There wasn’t so much of it, really. And the tiara too, with its own white plume. And the long white gloves. They were all folded up together and carefully wrapped in tissue paper and kept somewhere locked and safe.
Now they were in the bottom drawer on the right-hand side of the dressing table where she was sitting. In all these years (she assumed) Jack had never known she still had the costume. Though once, long years ago, he’d slipped into the auditorium secretly, just to watch her wearing it.
But in fifty years she had hardly ever looked at it either. So what had she kept it for and why shouldn’t she have shared with Jack
