Since Jack died she’d got it out several times. It was somehow a comfort, a need. She’d laid it out on the bed, she’d brushed it and combed the ostrich plumes and clipped them back in place. And had she—? Had she ever?
Well, that would be telling. And, anyway, how absurd.
It was the original outfit—the one she’d worn just for Ronnie at the Belmont Theatre. When, thanks to Jack, they got the Brighton season, she’d had a second one made, almost identical, so she’d always have the change right through that summer. And she’d kept the original all these years, and never told Jack. Though Jack must have seen her in one or the other of those outfits—how many times?
And she’d never told Jack about something else, though it had weighed upon her. It was much heavier in fact than a little made-of-nothing costume wrapped up in tissue paper.
• • •
It was February 1960. They’d got married in Camden Registry Office, back in London. The Brighton thing—the ‘investigation’—had died down by then, though could it ever, exactly, go away? Any day there might be—news.
But she was Mrs Robbins now, though she preferred to be known as plain Evie White. And Jack was Jack Robbins, as opposed to Jack Robinson. He would never be that phantom figure again. If Ronnie had gone out of their lives, then so too had Jack Robinson. Where was he? Who was he? Where had he gone?
There might, she thinks now, be another story, another racy little book. ‘The Life and Times of Jack Robinson’. Best told of course by Jack himself—or by a string of girls? Each one of them with a little chapter of her own. Or, no, just a paragraph. And each one of them with the same name.
It was 1960. Jack had been right, it was all going out with the tide, and who’d want that stuff any more when they could get it anyway from a box in the corner of their living rooms? And yet for a little while the 1960s were much like the 1950s. And what did that little box still trade in? Sunday Night at the London Palladium—with always a compere who’d become the nation’s pal and always some magician and always some troupe of bouncing leg-waving smiling girls—well, it would seem to go on for ever. So where was this boat then that they might have been missing?
‘Did Ronnie ever tell you, Jack, about a place called Evergrene?’
There. She had said it.
‘Evergrene? No, Evie. Where the hell’s Evergrene?’
‘It’s a house. It’s the name of a house. Where he got sent in the war.’
‘No, I never heard him say anything about Evergrene.’
‘The Lawrences? Eric and Penny? They lived there.’
‘Ah. The sorcerer’s apprenticeship, you mean? The Wizard? That’s what he called him, you know. Seriously. I never knew his name was Eric. But I think he was still in touch. I think he was still even going to see him.’
‘Eric Lawrence died, nearly two years ago now.’
‘Ah. I didn’t know that.’
‘But I’ve been wondering.’
‘Wondering what?’
‘Do you think that’s where Ronnie went? Do you think he might be there?’
‘Where?’
‘Evergrene.’
• • •
Jack never took it any further. Why should he? He had his own reasons for forgetting his old friend Ronnie Deane. Let alone for not wanting to know if he might still be alive. They were Jack and Evie now. He had even given her a strange searching look. How much of this nonsense was she going to keep up?
She, too, had her reasons not to take it any further. Though was her mad theory (hope?) so mad? She hadn’t gone with Ronnie to see his mother. It was no secret now where that had led. But suppose she had gone.
She might even now, but in some place other than Albany Square, be guarding, keeping scrupulously dusted in its glass case, the career of the Great Pablo. But perhaps he would have dispensed with the ridiculous name. As he would have dispensed eventually, even at her own sensible suggestion, with his glittering stage partner, Eve. Though not with his partner for life, even manager for life. He might have got his own TV magic show. But anyway done astonishing things that made people gasp and kept up the tradition of magicianship, of there being such a thing as magic in the world.
But she hadn’t gone with him and things had turned out as they had.
And, as it also turned out, she could never have met, either, Ronnie’s other ‘second’ mother, as Ronnie himself might have thought of her: Mrs Lawrence, Penny Lawrence.
She should go there herself. She had dithered and doubted. But didn’t she have a sort of obligation? And if her intuition should prove correct? She should go and see this woman and so make up in some way for her own lapses and omissions. This woman who was the widow of the man—the wizard—who had taught Ronnie about magic and even enabled him (by nothing more magical than a bequest in his will) to find his ‘Eve’.
She should honour the ghost of this man. And she should talk to Mrs Lawrence and even ask her—though would it even be necessary to ask her?—where Ronnie was now.
But she was too late.
• • •
Among the items left to Ronnie after Eric Lawrence’s death and thus among the items left by Ronnie were a few solicitors’ letters. It was not so difficult to phone up the office in Oxford, pretending to be a distant relative.
‘I’m sorry to say Mrs Lawrence is no longer alive. She died last year. Yes, that’s right, it was not very long after Mr Lawrence died.’
And the house?
‘Evergrene? Yes, that’s right. It’s on the market now. It was put up for sale by Mrs Lawrence’s brother—he lives in Canada—not so long ago.’
She’d hesitated once more. Canada? Should she simply draw
