Since what happened with Agnes had happened in his own town, Sid was unable to escape his responsibilities in the traditional way of sailors. To his credit, though with some persuasion from Diego (Sid had once claimed that Diego intended to cut his throat), he’d shouldered these responsibilities by marrying Agnes and always returning, if after long absences, to her and his son. And he made sure that, even during his time at sea, a portion of his modest pay packet regularly reached his wife.
Thus Ronnie would remember his father as a mere visitor, a figure who might suddenly turn up, then just as suddenly be gone again. Almost because of their brevity, these periods of his father’s presence could be indelibly vivid.
• • •
Once, Sid Deane had come home with a parrot, and with all the bluster of a man who thought that coming home with a parrot would be a very good idea. The parrot’s name was Pablo, and it could even confirm it by saying so: ‘Hello, I’m Pablo!’ And Pablo was the Spanish form of Ronnie’s middle name. So—this was an important but never clearly answered question for Ronnie—was the parrot essentially a father’s gift to his son? Or was it a tribute to his mother’s Spanish ancestry?
It was a beautiful bird, its feathers a brilliant mix of green and blue with flashes of red and on its throat a bib of glowing yellow. Even if it hadn’t been able to tell you its name, could you ever forget such a creature?
Ronnie’s mother did not like the parrot. It was not welcome in her house and no sooner had his father left again than, to Ronnie’s consternation, she sold it to a pet dealer eager to acquire such a rarity.
This was not so long after Ronnie had started school, but he was present, one evening, when the man came to collect the parrot, cage and all. He watched when the man took curled-up notes from his pocket and gave them to his mother. He did not know how the price had been agreed, or the value of a parrot, and he did not know how to protest or intervene. He hadn’t been taught about such things at school, yet he was conscious that he was getting a sharp lesson in the ways of the world at which he was miserably unproficient. His helplessness made a nothing of him.
Later, lying in bed, he was full of the most vehement reckonings. He would cease trying to be a good boy. His mother was not the woman he thought he knew. Who should he hate more, her or the pet man? He imagined a scene—though it was useless to imagine it now—in which he might have forestalled all this pain in a way that was perhaps just as painful, but might have been the only decent expedient. He might have seized some moment while his mother was out and opened the door of the cage, having first opened the window or back door. He might at least have offered Pablo his freedom and choice in the matter.
‘Off you go, Pablo!’
He was barely six. These thoughts boiled up inside him, then boiled down again, but never entirely went away. And the moment had to come when his father next arrived home to find no parrot.
Ronnie wisely resolved that he would not say anything. It was up to his mother. It was the moment of truth.
Where was it then, Sid Deane had naturally enquired. Where was Pablo? In its brief residency the parrot had been capable, amazingly, of voicing both that question and its confident answer: ‘Where’s Pablo? Here I am!’
But now, to Ronnie’s astonishment, his mother had a quick answer too: ‘It flew away.’
This was a brazen lie, but, once more floored by events, Ronnie thought it best to maintain his silence—he was dumbstruck anyway—and did not say she had sold it to the pet man. Thus, in effect, he took his mother’s side, and when his father had looked at him for corroboration he had stared sheepishly at his feet as if he might even have been the one to have let the bird escape. This, after all, had been his fantasy.
He was too young to think it through, but had he adopted this pose more thoroughly and even turned his fantasy into a lie of his own, he might have self-sacrificingly reconciled his parents. Though how would that have helped him? His silence was self-sacrificing and painful enough.
In her defence Mrs Deane might have said that Sidney Deane had only left her with another mouth to feed. What did parrots eat? And it was a squawking mouth too.
When, much later, Evie asked Ronnie about his early years, she would get only certain things out of him. He was a secretive man, perhaps magicians need to be. Getting him to talk about his mother or father was not easy, and yet it had nothing, surely, to do with magic. She was happy to talk about her own parents—though there was not much to say about her father. She was even happy, when the time came, for her mother to meet Ronnie. He was her future husband, wasn’t he?
But Ronnie was a cards-to-the-chest man. For example, Evie would never know anything, though it had made a formative and lasting impression on Ronnie, about the parrot. Yet in one sense whenever she looked at Ronnie she was looking straight at it. Pablo was Ronnie’s stage name.
‘Why Pablo, Ronnie?’
‘It’s my middle name, isn’t it?’
It felt like only half an answer.
Even without the parrot as a bone of contention, those intervals when Ronnie’s father was at home could be full of altercation, and not what they ought to have been—happy and domestically complete.
