Oh yes, put Ronnie down beside this friend of his, Jack Robbins, and which one would any foolish girl go for? If she was a foolish girl. But Ronnie had something, Evie knew it by now. And didn’t they anyway just have something between them? Their act was becoming quite a success, and wasn’t this its simple secret? They had something anyway. They were good together, they were a natural pair. You know this, you feel it. She liked to think that when they were on stage people could see this something they had. And look, there was even her engagement ring, glinting on her finger, to clinch it.
The girl would blink back at Evie’s smile and, still gripping Jack’s arm, bury her nose in her drink.
When Jack introduced their act, whether as first spot after the interval or in its later enhanced status, he would sometimes say, ever the soul of magnanimity, ‘And now, boys and girls, I want you to meet the real Mr Magic. Not like me, eh?’ And give the nutcracker grin.
• • •
Jack Robbins and Evie White were two of a kind and perhaps, in those days, of a quite numerous breed. Like her, Evie would discover, Jack had had a mother who’d wound him up from the earliest age, like a little toy, to go on stage.
It was an option. If you had nothing else, you had at least your own person, you might use it to perform and entertain. Mothers of a certain upbringing themselves seemed to know this and, especially if there was no father any longer available—here too Evie and Jack would discover they were similar—might be keen to pass this knowledge on.
Evie had had such a mother, who had coaxed her and coached her and taken her along to little cattle-market auditions. Evie would always remember her mother saying after these occasions, ‘Life is unfair, my darling, always was, always will be,’ but then saying, with a beaming smile, ‘but don’t you worry, my sweetheart, your turn will come.’
What was she to believe in: the unfairness or the turn that was coming? And what did ‘turn’ mean? It sounded temporary. It sounded like what she did anyway. Easy! She could get up and, without hesitation and almost by second nature, twirl and smile and do things with her arms and even, in the right shoes, click her little heels and toes, and open her mouth to sing. But so far none of the men and sometimes women who sat at the tables with their pencils had singled her out from all the other striving elbowing girls of eleven or twelve, all primed and tarted up by their mothers, who could do much the same. Or better. ‘Next please!’
‘You must look after your legs, Evie. But I think they can look after themselves. And you must keep smiling, never forget your smile. You have the legs and you have the looks, my angel, but I think it’s your voice we must work on.’
It was true. She had the legs, they would only get longer and lovelier, and she had the looks and knew how to use them. She could smile, she could dance, but—life is unfair—she could never sing, no matter how much she opened her mouth and struggled to use it. So she would have to do things that wouldn’t expose this deficiency.
Which wasn’t in fact so difficult when she found herself at last locking arms with some of those other girls who’d once been eleven and twelve, high-kicking and wheeling and swaying this way and that with them—and always smiling, smiling! If they had to sing, well, she could let the others carry her while she mimed enthusiastically.
Keep your sunny side—up—up!
Evie White. Wasn’t she just a chorus girl once? Wasn’t she in some act once? In variety.
But Jack, who’d had the same sort of start in life and gone through the same early maternal training, could do all sorts of things and could sing too.
There’ll be no more sobbin’ when he starts throbbin’ . . .
• • •
Ronnie Deane was a different kettle of fish and as Evie, but only with some persistence, would find out, had had a different introduction to the world of entertainment, and a different kind of mother.
Once, when he was only five, Ronnie’s mother had taken him, gripping his hand, round a few corners from where they lived to the gates of a school, where she believed he would learn things that would guarantee him a better life than either his put-upon mother or his father, who was not often to be seen, had achieved.
Those mornings, sometimes touched by a bracing frost, would seem later to Agnes Deane to have been some of the few bright interludes in her parental life.
‘Be good, Ronnie, be a good boy,’ she would say, with a final squeeze of his hand. A sound and well-meant instruction, and Ronnie was up for abiding by it. Soon he would be able to take himself, eagerly and proudly, to those once-feared school gates. But it would not be long before his mother, once again clutching his hand and still trying to assuage his fears (as well as her own), would have to take him to another place of depositing.
Agnes Deane. Life had not been fair and never would again. She lived with Ronnie and, if only occasionally, with Ronnie’s father in the humblest of houses in Bethnal Green, but it was at least a house. It even had a tiny backyard that contained a necessary outhouse, an ever-diminishing heap of coal and, propped against the outhouse wall, a tin tub which was the only means of general ablution.
Ronnie’s father was called Sid. Agnes’s father was called Diego. Sid was a merchant seaman. Agnes was a charwoman. Though she was
