Wise Children

Yes, indeed; I have my memories, but I prefer to keep them to myself, thank you very much. Though there are some things I never can forget. The cock that used to crow, early in the morning, in Bond Street. And I saw a zebra, once, he was galloping down Camden High Street, one night, about midnight, in the blackout – the moon was up, his stripes fluoresced. I was in some garret with a Free Norwegian. And the purple flowers that would pop up on the bomb-sites almost before the ruins stopped smoking, as if to say, life goes on, even if you don’t.

We kept a patriotic pig in the back garden, fed him with swill – potato peelings, tea leaves. Grandma loved that pig and wouldn’t listen to one word about the slaughterhouse, of course, but it ended up the funeral baked meats after Grandma copped it. She’d have created something shocking if she’d known we’d feasted off her beloved porker, nicely roasted, as soon as we’d cremated her, but what else could we have done for the funeral tea? People had come for miles, we couldn’t give them grated cabbage. Old Nanny brought up a bushel of apples for the sauce from the Lady A., who’d retreated to the sticks in a state of disarray. No flowers, by request; we stuck to Grandma’s principles on that score, at least.

Cyn and her kids were there but not the cabby, he was in North Africa and there he stayed, poor chap, under the desert in a box. Cyn never got over it, she faded away, after that, until the Asian flu took her off in ’49. Ex-tenants by the score – geriatric adagio dancers, antique sopranos. Neighbours. The man who ran the salad stall in Brixton market. Publicans galore. Half the cast of What? You Will? came, plus the composer’s mother, in her new black coat. I half thought that blond tenor might have heard about it on the grapevine and turned up but no such luck.

We missed Peregrine something shocking but he was off being heroic in the Secret Service. God knows what it was but they gave him a medal for it. God knows where he was, either; we put a notice in The Times and there was a knock at the door, a jeep, an army driver, a dozen crates of crème de menthe, a barrel of Guinness, so the mourners all went home with grease on their chins and strong drink on their breath and that was how Peregrine paid his respects to Grandma.

Once we’d burned the bones – because that pig met its fate strictly on the q.t., it was a hanging matter, to slaughter your own meat in wartime – Nora and I sat down right here, in the breakfast room, in these very leather armchairs, and listened to the silence in that long, narrow house where we would live alone, in future, and had a good cry, just the two of us, for this was childhood’s end with a vengeance and we were truly on our own, now, good and proper.

We hadn’t just lost Grandma, either. She was the only witness of the day our mother died when we were born, and she took with her the last living memory of that ghost without a face. All our childhood went with her into oblivion, so we were bereft both of her in person and of a good deal of ourselves, too, and when we remembered how we’d mocked her nakedness in her old age we were ashamed.

Now we were on the high road to our third decade, though, looking back from my present great pinnacle and eminence of years, I can scarcely credit it, that, once upon a time, we thought our lives would end when we reached thirty; at the time it felt like the end of the road, all right, even if there hadn’t been a war on, and we were never the same again after the war was over, either.

After the war was over, it was always chilly. Our fingers were pale blue for years. Before the war, we were young, and then we were in sunny California; during the war, adrenalin kept you going and there was always some fella or other around to warm you up. But afterwards, there was a weariness, and the blood was a touch thinner, and people said it was the Age of Austerity – yet I do believe that chilliness we felt was more to do with Grandma being gone than with the economic policies of Stafford Cripps or the cold winters of the late forties and all that.

Without Grandma in it, minding the fires, leaving the lights on for us at nights, up in the morning putting on the kettle, banging the big brass gong to tell us she’d scrambled the dried eggs already, and they were congealing on the plate, the house was nothing but a barn and we rattled around uncomfortably, piles of dirty dishes in the sink, the steps filthy, baked beans fossilising at their leisure in the bottoms of pans on the cold stove, etc. etc. etc.

We let the house go. We’d come back to sleep, that was all. Sometimes we’d burn ourselves a slice of toast. The heart went out of this house when Grandma died. The draughts raced through the hall and the rugs rose up and shimmied, we never changed the sheets so they were grey and stained and full of crumbs. Times were a touch hard for hoofers, too, although we put a brave face on it.

Then began those dreary days of touring shows, smaller and smaller theatres, fewer and fewer punters, the showgirls wearing less and less, the days of our decline. The nadir, a nude show-cum-pantomime in Bolton, Goldilocks and the Three Bares. ‘Take off your trousers, call it Goldibollocks,’ said Nora to the a.s.m., but he wouldn’t. Those nude shows! Music hall’s last gasp. There was a law that said, a girl could show her all provided she didn’t move, not twitch a muscle, stir an inch – just stand there, starkers, letting herself be looked at. That’s what the halls had sunk to, after the war. No more costumes by Oliver Messel, sets by Cecil Beaton. We always kept our gee-strings and our panties on, mind. Never stripped. We’d still sing, we’d still dance. But we felt our art was swirling down the plughole and those were the days when high culture was booming, our father cutting a swathe with the senior citizen roles in Shakespeare – Timon, Caesar, John of Gaunt – but he still didn’t want anything to do with us, as ever was.

It is a characteristic of human beings, one I’ve often noticed, that if they don’t have a family of their own, they will invent one. Now we often found ourselves slipping down to Sussex to visit the Lady A. Lynde Court was just a pile of blackened bricks, and they’d sold up the Eaton Square place when they divorced so after the Lady A. came home from California she turfed the tenant out of the Lynde Court Home Farm and moved in with the Aga and the exposed beams. She always kept a full-length portrait of Melchior in her sitting room. That portrait took up most of one wall and cast gloom in spite of the gilt frame because there he was, as Richard III, Tricky Dicky, all in black with an evil glint in his eye. She fixed up a light over it, which she kept on all the time, and always a little bunch of flowers in a glass jar on a footstool in front of it – wild daffs in March, wallflowers, daisies, according to season, always fresh. Even when the snow lay on the ground, out she’d go, scouring the Downs for celandines, early violets, snowdrops, headscarf and wellington boots, always a little dog yapping behind her.

That bitter winter of ’46, me and Nora couldn’t stand it, to think of her rooting about among the snowdrifts, so we took her a big bunch of hothouse carnations. Cost more than a supper at the Savoy Grill. Bloody Saskia was there, fresh and frisky. Imogen, too. Doing their stint at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, were Saskia and Imogen, and Saskia’d brought her best friend with her, some prinking minx in black velvet slax and ballet slippers. Saskia laughed like anything when she saw those carnations.

‘How apt!’ she said. ‘“. . . which some call nature’s bastards.” Winter’s Tale, Act IV, Scene iii.’

Little did she know it was a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Her mother was mortified and tried to cover up.

‘My little Saskia’s playing Perdita this term. Isn’t it lovely?’

But if that was the kind of thing they taught her girls at Ra-di-bloody-da, then Nora and I didn’t want to know. Such cheap gibes! We rose above.

The girls might be away at RADA but there was Old Nanny to keep her company and a woman in from the village to do the heavy work and I was always tickled when concerned weekend guests asked her: ‘How do you survive out here all on your own, Attie?’ You could hardly move for help, you even tripped over a little old man crouched above the herbaceous border on your way to the outside lavvy. But the Lady A. would give a little smile and say, she’d got used to solitude, and make some reference to the garden. She was always out there in a big hat telling the gardener what to do. There were articles in magazines. She was famous for her clematis. In the evenings she’d sit stitching away at her embroidery hoop with Melchior glowering on the wall and listen to records on her gramophone the same way she does now, in the front basement of 49 Bard Road. Then Old Nanny used to come to tuck her up in bed at ten, with Horlicks.

Her girls would go and visit their father, sometimes, and come back with new wristwatches and gold crucifixes once owned by Sarah Bernhardt and The Duse and copies of the Complete Works signed by Ellen Terry but never so much as a Christmas card arrived for her from Melchior, as though it had been her fault they split up.

As the Lady A. grew older, so she looked more and more British. Her features became more transparent, her expression ever more modestly valiant. She started to wear cardigans. She’d begun to look sad even before the war broke out; sadness became her, like pastel shades. She developed a reputation for sadness in spite of, or perhaps because of, her indomitable smile, real Mrs Miniver smile.

That farmhouse was lovely. Mellow brick, lichened tile, nestling in a Down, the vista rimmed with English Channel. There was a little walled orchard with lambs in it. I always think of that orchard in early spring, primroses among the roots of the apple trees, first buds, blue smoke rising from the chimney and Nor’ and me getting out of the village taxi, red morocco heels, mud.

I’ve never been so cold in all my life as in that farmhouse. Cold and scared. Not even in air-raid shelters. At night, we’d huddle up in our cold bed with our silver-fox trenches spread out on top of the quilts for extra warmth, bruising our toes on the stone hot-water bottles Old Nanny had tucked in for our comfort, watching the moonlight through the lattice, listening to night-birds hoot and shrieks of mice and voles when owls pounced. Things were killing one another all around. We were stiff with cold and frozen with terror. Give me Railton Road at half past Saturday midnight, any time.

To tell the truth, picturesque and evocative as that farmhouse was, we only went down there because we were fond of her.

She’d put us up in the one bed, in always the same white-washed room, Old Nanny used it as a sewing room – iron bedstead, pitch-pine washstand and a dressmaker’s dummy which cast a headless shadow that gave me the willies. I’ll draw a veil over the bathroom, with the iron tub that formed an informal vivarium for every spider in Sussex. We never ventured into the darling buds’ room but the Lady A.’s was a shrine to Guess Who, all the photographs of him, plus one, just one, of Perry, snapped drawing Saskia out of a top hat. There was a steep staircase of narrow steps of polished oak – the Lady A. wouldn’t have carpeting, she said she loved the living wood – down which Nora and I would pick and slither, fully aware that Saskia and Imogen, if they were home, were laughing at our shoes.

A big Chinese bowl full of pot-pourri on a worm-eaten oak chest in the hall gave out a sad, pungent smell of old ladies and heartbreak. There were watercolours everywhere perpetrated by Lyndes of long ago in Venice, the Alps, the lakes; faded chintz; old rugs worn to a web. Everywhere a threadbare, expensive shabbiness that had a class to which we knew we never could aspire. Not the Lucky Chances. We were doomed to either flash or squalor.

The food was nothing much. We lived in hopes she’d get the East Sussex black market organised but Old Nanny always asked us to be sure to bring our coupons and served up cottage pie, shepherd’s pie, nothing ever looked like whatever it was made of although the plates were Chelsea and the knives and forks were silver, knobbed, blackened, engraved with the Lynde seal, a pelican pecking at its breast. Rotten food. All the same, we were still nervous as to which ancestral fork to use.

And always bloody freezing, not just in bed. We’d sit at table in our fur coats in spite of the satirical gaze of Saskia and Imogen in their ballerina-length dirndls, turtlenecks and inherited upper-class capacity to withstand extremes of temperature. No love lost, and they could scarcely abide to see we’d got our feet under the table, at last, not now that they’d been abandoned, too. So when the Lady A. said, could we possibly come down for Saskia and Imogen’s twenty-first, Nora said satirically: ‘Go on!’

‘No, truly, my dears,’ said the Lady A. ‘I want you both to be there.’ Then she twinkled, just a little, but it was a rare sight these days and I was glad to see it. ‘It’ll be a real family affair!’

A nod is as good as a wink. We’d not seen hair nor hide of Perry since VJ Day, except a postcard from Rio de Janeiro showing a macaw, but I knew the Lady A. still kept a soft spot for him after all these years and I’d even hoped that she and Perry might make a go of it, one fine day. I taxed her with it, once, when we were having Lapsang in the orchard. It was May and the apple blossom was out but, all the same, I kept my coat on.

‘Don’t you ever miss Perry?’ I asked her tactfully.

She had the grace to twinkle right up at the very thought of him but she twinkled dismissively.

‘One doesn’t marry a man like that, my dear,’ she said. Faded blue eyes, broken veins, a straw hat tied under her chin with a silk paisley scarf. The dowager sheep. But she knew a thing or two about Perry. Here today and gone tomorrow, not so much a man, more of a travelling carnival. I warmed my fingers on her china cup, since I had no option – it didn’t have a handle, although it did have a big crack down the side – and wondered if my own mother had thought the same thing about Melchior, that he was splendid over the short haul but would never go the distance.

My feeling was, neither of the brothers were built to be good husbands. But I didn’t say a word. A lot was left unsaid at the Lady A.’s. I’ve never known such profound silences as those Lynde silences especially when her daughters were there, silences in which the unspoken hung like fog that got into your lungs and choked you.

‘God knows why we keep on going down there, anyway,’ said Nora. ‘We could stay up here on a Sunday, have a bath, do our hair.’

She hadn’t the slightest desire to grace the darling buds’ twenty-first, not she. Perry can come to us, she said. She was adamant. ‘No! No! And no!’ Then our Uncle Perry called us up and said he’d drive us down, we could be back to Brixton that same night.

‘But not birthday presents,’ said Nora. ‘Not for those vipers. I draw the line at birthday presents.’

Because we were going down exclusively for the Lady A.’s sake, weren’t we? We took her a bottle of Scotch. So there was Peregrine, blowing the horn outside in Bard Road in a bloody great Bentley convertible ready to take us to Lynde Court Home Farm for the worst Sunday lunch of our lives.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said. ‘I slipped in a quick visit to a friend in Gunter Grove.’ Big wink, the reprobate. But it was only twenty minutes.

Perry was bigger than ever and brown as a berry from the Brazilian sun and you’d never have believed, from the cut of his jib, that he’d turned sixty, nor that his twin brother was just at the time rehearsing Lear. Not one grey hair in all that russet mop, nor yet a crow’s-foot among the freckles, and as full of bounce and bonhomie as when he first knocked on the front door. Of course, his fortunes had turned, again, since he struck oil.

Yes. Oil. That bit of semi-arid scrub he’d bought out of sentiment with his money from The Dream, his ranch in Hazard, Texas. Oil. He was filthy rich again and the back of the Bentley was stacked with cans and packages and bottles, most with labels from Rio, Paris and New York, I was glad to see, because, back here in Brixton, it was still half a rasher of bacon a week, a little pat of butter, that was your lot, that was rationing.

He sat and beeped the horn and there was a general rustle of net curtains all along Bard Road as the old biddies sneaked a peek at our escort.

He gave us the biggest hugs and kisses but he wasn’t his usual self, I could tell. It was my turn to sit in front and he was all of a twitter, nervous, joyful, on edge, abstracted, all at once. He jumped red lights; the speedometer touched ninety, once, and when he braked to miss a fox, Nora, in the back with a box of Belgian chox, shot forward, got her nose stuck in a violet cream. Sometimes he broke into snatches of song; sometimes he did not hear a question and needed his arm tugged. After a few miles, Nora and I maintained a sympathetic silence. ‘Hope for the best, expect the worst.’ I knew in my water there’d be tears before bedtime so I crossed my fingers and so did Nora because we didn’t want the old devil’s feelings hurt, nor those of the Lady A., either, this day of all days, but I couldn’t see how else the day might end.

Of course, we’d always known deep down inside he was their father. We tried to pretend otherwise. I was jealous as hell of it, but there you are. Biology is biology. You can’t fool a sperm. I’m not sure that Melchior ever knew. If ‘his’ daughters were redheads, then so had his own mother been and, besides, who’d have thought it of the Lady A., Caesar’s wife in person? Perhaps those girls themselves smelled a rat and were unhappy; you might put all the bad behaviour down to that, if you felt so inclined, though you wouldn’t have felt half so magnanimous if you’d met them.

Streatham, Norbury, Thornton Heath, Croydon. Nora had eaten all her chocolates by Redhill and said she was lonely in the back so she climbed over the seat and inserted herself between us. He’d brought the sunshine with him, we put the hood down and sang: ‘Please direct your feet To the sunny sunny sunny side of the street.’ He perked up. We were still girls, only just past thirty; we cut a dash, the three of us. Little did we know it was to be our last ride together.

He started to open up a bit by the time we got to Three Bridges and told us about Brazil. That was his new enthusiasm, the jungle and its denizens. He was going to give a lecture at the Royal Society, wasn’t he, about the butterflies he’d discovered in the jungle and after he’d given this lecture he was going to go right back and look for more.

‘I’m going,’ he announced grandly, ‘to devote the rest of my life to lepidoptera.’

We raised our brows at one another. Another fad. Like conjuring. Like movies. Like oil. Like espionage. How soon would he reach his boredom threshold in the jungle? We didn’t know, we never could have guessed, that he would reach oblivion first.

Saskia, it turned out, was doing the honours in the kitchen. She’d just, that winter, made her first appearance on any stage in one of her father’s productions, a witch in Macbeth, typecasting, along with her velvet-slacked best friend, but she’d shown more interest in the contents of her cauldron than her name in lights and so it came to pass that her best friend, the RADA Gold Medal winner, was picked out to play as Melchior’s Cordelia, while Saskia tinkered with the pans.

She’s ended up as television’s top cook, of course. Every time I switch on the set there she is, eviscerating something, skinning something else, having a go at some harmless piece of meat with her little chopper.

Old Nanny had been banished from the kitchen and Saskia was catering her own lunch party, trying out a roast duck and green peas, and the Lady A., not of the class or generation that cooked, itself, was nevertheless doing her fumbling, incompetent best to help, because it was the girls’ birthday, and Old Nanny was sitting in the orchard in a deck-chair with her feet up and a copy of Tatler and that was Old Nanny’s treat, before she stirred her stumps to serve up. Even Imogen had roused herself and was out in the garden laying the table because they’d decided to eat outside since it was such a lovely day and Imogen was weighing the napkins down with pebbles so they wouldn’t blow away. There was a bunch of pinks in a glass jar in the middle of the starched white cloth under an arbour of old-fashioned roses and the lilacs were out, the Lady Attie’s famous white lilacs, that featured in Country Life, once.

As we drew up, I saw a Roller, parked already, and was overcome with that indigestible mix of emotions I always felt each time that he came near me – joy, terror, heartsick, lovesick. The white lilacs didn’t help. That perfume. I felt as if someone had taken hold of my heart and squeezed it.

There was a grey wing over each ear; our father had aged more evidently than his brother, but very graciously. We were all a little frigid with one another, at first, although the Lady A. was twinkling away valiantly, but Perry popped a cork and we drank a toast: ‘To the girls!’ before we sat down and I joined in, much as I disliked them, and so did Nora, because, however randomly we’d been assembled, we were all family, and they were the only family we had. After the second bottle, things began to thaw, a bit.

Soup. Old Nanny was now pressed back into service and bore a steaming tureen out of the kitchen, more proud of Saskia’s handiwork than she’d ever been of her own, so we had some of that, to start with, a nettle soup Saskia had discovered in an old book, or so she said. An old, Elizabethan soup. Perhaps Shakespeare had eaten just such a soup! When she said that, she gave her ‘father’ a special smile, she and Imogen worshipped the ground, etc. etc. etc. Shakespeare may well have eaten that filthy soup but I doubt he’d kept it down. I forced in a spoon or two out of politeness and it was very, very bitter, but the men, foolish fond, drank it all and Perry asked for seconds.

Then the duck came in, swimming in blood. I gagged, had a spot more champagne, to fortify myself, picked out, for my share, the merest sliver of blackened skin – that duck was certainly well-cooked on the outside – but the peas, when I helped myself, bounced off the server and Saskia gave me a dirty look, as if she’d known I’d show my true colours at some point during her elegant repast so, to spite her, I scooped the peas up and ate them with my pudding spoon. But the men finished off that duck between them, engaging in a battle as to who could eat most and praise her best although I was racked with hunger and heartburn until it occurred to me: ‘Has she done it on purpose?’ A poison meat! Her face gave nothing away, calm and oval as a cake of soap.

She’d done her hair up in a huge, soft chignon. If only we’d inherited that red, red hair. We were still brunettes, at that time, but permed by then, of course. Poodle-cuts. She’d got on a twinset of heather-coloured wool and pearls but Imogen, always the fey one, had ‘dressed up to match the Downs around us’, she simpered, in an eighteenth-century shepherdess’s dress, complete with crook with a blue bow on it. Happily, I saw no sign about her person of her pet white rat, although it said in the William Hickey column she never went anywhere without it.

‘Delicious, darling,’ said the Lady A. ‘Clever Saskia!’ But she ate like a bird, herself.

It was a peculiar meal. The ugly food, the flies, and little stinging creatures and ants crawling up your leg – all the discomfort of eating in the garden – and the precarious peace among the Hazard clan all gave the occasion a special flavour, sweet and sour, like Chinese pork. After we’d toyed with a disgusting syllabub, came a cake, ordered from Harrods, thank God, with twenty-one candles. They blew, we clapped. Perry brushed his eyes with his hands and I saw that he was on the verge of tears.

I never thought what it might be to be a father until that moment, when I saw Perry almost cry. Yet, truly, I think he loved Nora and myself as much as he loved Saskia and Imogen, if not more. But not, you understand, in the same way. We were not flesh of his flesh.

But then, again, a person isn’t flesh of its father’s flesh, is it? One little sperm out of millions swims up the cervix and it is so very, very easy to forget how it has happened. And Melchior, whose flesh we were, or, rather, whose emission sparked off our being, felt for us only occasional pity and now and then a vague affection that seemed to puzzle him as to the cause. But he was head over heels in love with Saskia and Imogen, too, and when they blew out their birthday candles, I saw his eyes were moist, as well.

I wished we’d come by train and got a taxi from the station, as per usual. Then we could have buzzed off, pronto. As it was, we’d have to stay until Perry was good and ready to depart, which might be hours.

Then the Lady A. rapped her glass with her knife and said that Peregrine wanted to give a little speech. He got up on his feet, his face an April study of joy and sadness, as Irish might have put it, and he said:

‘My lovely girls, all four of you’ – his eyes crinkled round the edges as he raised his glass in our direction, but Saskia looked daggers – ‘I can’t tell you how much it means to this old sinner to be among you all on the day you two precious copperknobs finally reach your majorities, key of the door, licence to marry . . . but don’t rush off and marry too quickly, dearest ones, and leave us all lonely.’

They smirked.

‘It was tough, I can tell you, to think of a present fine enough for you two on this day of days. I cast around in my mind for a long time, I furrowed this old brow. Not baubles, or bangles, or beads, but something that would last, something as beautiful as you both that would go on for ever. So . . . here you are, with all my love.’

His eyes were swimming, now, as he took from each jacket pocket a wrapped box just diamond bracelet size. They smirked in pleasurable anticipation.

‘Look what’s inside, my darlings!’

He watched expectantly as they tore off the wrappings. The boxes were of metal, it turned out, with little holes drilled in the top. Curiouser and curiouser. Imogen got hers open first, peered in, then gave a little scream and dropped it. Saskia looked at hers and said: ‘Good God!’

Inside each box was a little nest of leaves and, inside the nest, a caterpillar.

‘Named after you,’ said Peregrine. ‘Saskia Hazard. Imogen Hazard. Two of the most beautiful butterflies in all the rainforest. You’ll go down in all the textbooks. As long as people love butterflies, your names will be on their lips, you’ll have a kind of beautiful eternity. They are rare species, just like you both.’

Saskia and Imogen stared blankly at their boxes. No doubt they’d hoped for a little oil well each.

‘Is that all?’ said Imogen. She poked the caterpillar with her fork. It did not stir. ‘I think mine’s dead,’ she said.

Saskia snapped her box shut and dropped it on the table.

‘Thanks a lot,’ she said, with heavy irony.

Peregrine’s face crumpled. All at once he looked his age. More. He looked a hundred. He looked a hundred and ten. And he deflated. Instantly, within his suit, as if somebody had stuck a pin in him and let the energy out. Perhaps Melchior was fond of him, after all, in his way; anyway, he hurried up to smooth things over. He got up, too, and raised his glass.

‘To your birthdays, my darling buds of May!’ We all knocked back another glass and then he said: ‘I, too, have prepared a very special present for my best beloved daughters . . . a new –’

Such timing. All eyes were upon him.

‘– stepmother!’

Then, oh! was I glad I’d come, all right! What a picture! Their jaws flew open, their eyes popped out. Imogen let out a wail. Saskia rose up and seized the cake knife. Her chignon unravelled. Red snakes of hair flew out around her head while hairpins rattled down like hail.

‘What’s this?’

Melchior stood his ground.

‘I’m going to marry my Cordelia,’ he said, tenderly. His tongue caressed the ‘I’ and rolled it round.

‘Your Cordelia,’ repeated Saskia flatly. Her rage departed her, replaced by amazement. She let the cake knife drop. ‘Your Cordelia!’

‘Your Cordelia!’ echoed Imogen, a beat behind. ‘But your Cordelia is –’

‘– is my best friend!’ wailed Saskia.

And so she was. The RADA Gold Medallist, plucked from obscurity to play against Melchior’s Lear and now to marry him, in spite of the horrid shadow that a superstitious person might have seen cast over them by the union of Ranulph Hazard and Estella Ranelagh, which also kicked off with such a May/December union and ended in tears both before, after and during bedtime. At least Melchior hadn’t tucked Cordelia into the boot and brought her along to show her off at this psychologically inappropriate moment but he must have realised what a bomb-shell his news would be. Even the Lady A. looked green around the gills but Perry lightened up wonderfully and clapped his brother on the shoulder.

‘No fool like an old fool!’ he bellowed.

‘Why,’ gritted Saskia between her teeth, ‘that scheming little bitch, I’ll –’

‘Oh, Saskia, Saskia,’ said the Lady A. ‘Don’t stand in the way of your father’s last chance of happiness –’

Saskia picked up the birthday cake on its plate and pitched it against an apple tree. It shattered. Crumbs and candles scattered everywhere. Then she started to break the pots, throwing the dessert plates on the ground and stamping on them. Imogen, giggling in a febrile manner, laid about her smashing glasses with her ribboned crook, sparing nothing. When he saw his caterpillars reduced to pulp, Perry gave a piteous whimper. The Lady A., apprehending carnage among her heritage tableware, started to wring her hands and ululate while Saskia’s wails approached hysteria, whereupon Melchior smartly smacked her cheek, the way they do in the movies.

‘Stop that, young lady!’

She shut up at once, put her hand to her cheek, stared at him incredulously with her blue Lynde eyes. Then, tears. He took her in his arms, murmuring, ‘Hush, hush, darling.’ She shook him off and flounced into the house, slamming the door behind her, followed a minute or two later by Imogen, except that Imogen had to open the door her sister had just slammed before she could slam it herself. The rest of us were left staring at one another across the broken crockery and I never felt more spare in all my life and neither did Nora. We got up in unison.

‘I’m going to call a bloody taxi,’ I said. ‘I’ve had enough of this.’

‘Don’t go before you’ve had coffee,’ said the Lady A. heroically but Perry was pushing back his wicker chair so peremptorily it fell over, briefly trapping beneath it a small, yapping dog, probably a Yorkshire terrier.

‘I’m off, too,’ he announced. ‘Back to the jungle. Now. This minute. I’ll look forward to the company of crocodiles, after the bosom of my family.’

We found the bottle of Scotch we’d planned to give the Lady A. rolling around forgotten in the back of the car so we drew up on a verge and passed it round. Perry looked like the picture of Dorian Gray, I’m sorry to say, a ghastly sight. The sky closed in, the sun disappeared and all was cold and grey as we went home.

‘And yet I love them,’ he said. ‘God, I love them. That’s my punishment, isn’t it? My crime is my punishment.’

He wouldn’t come in with us. He sat in the car and watched us climb the steps with a face a mile long. We turned and blew him kisses and waved goodbye but he didn’t budge. Finally we were so chilled we went inside and closed the door. I had a premonition: ‘We won’t see him again.’ His hair was still bright, foxy red. It was twilight, the lamps just coming on. There he sat, in that grand car that was about to bear him off on his last journey.

We peered out between the curtains and watched him draw away, at last, into the dusk. He went back to his rooms in the Albany and packed a bag. He cancelled his lecture at the Royal Society; he left for Southampton that very night, he was good as his word. After the Lady A.’s accident, we tried the police. We even tried Interpol. They couldn’t find him, he was travelling incognito, he’d erased himself.

That was that.

If he babbled of green fields in Cuzco or Iquitos, we never heard.

Our footsteps echoed in the hall of 49 Bard Road with an inconsolable sound. ‘Empty,’ the echoes said. ‘Empty.’

‘They should have made a go of it,’ Nora said. ‘In spite of everything.’

‘She told me once, “One doesn’t marry a man like that!”’

‘I didn’t mean him and the Lady A. I meant him and Grandma.’

We were singing and dancing and loud music playing and both of us a touch tiddly when the phone rang and it was the Lady A.’s Old Nanny and so it came to pass, in the fullness of time, that the Lady A. moved into the front basement minus the use of her legs, because what Nanny had to tell us was, the Lady A. had taken a tumble down those very shiny and uncarpeted stairs we’d warned her about so often, come cracking on her bum to land on the stone flags in the hall and so jarred, snagged or dislocated her spine that she’d never walk again, but we didn’t know that, then, only that the Lady A. had gone arse over tip and Old Nanny didn’t know which way to turn.

‘Have you called the ambulance?’

She’d had the presence of mind to do that, at least.

‘What about Saskia and Imogen?’

She burst into such a harangue I couldn’t make out one word and had to hold the receiver some distance from my ear, the noise was causing me such distress. But when I finally got the gist, I scarcely could believe it, because it turned out they’d buggered off.

It seemed that Melchior had left them shortly after we did, under a cloud, and the Lady A. had taken to her bed, emotionally prostrate. Old Nanny, doing the washing-up, crouched over a sinkful of dishes, heard raised voices in the room above and then a godalmighty crash, bang, wallop! and she went flying out of the kitchen with the drying-up cloth in her hand to find the Lady A. moaning in her Viyella nightie all of a heap at the stairfoot.

Then the girls came flying down the stairs, both of them clutching kit-bags, carriers, pillowslips, bulging with this and that, and pushed Old Nanny brusquely aside, off into the night they went. They hiked down to the village in their little flatties and knocked up the baker who, out of a brute feudal loyalty to the Lynde clan and their kin, drove them to the station in the bread van, unaware of the terrible accident that had just occurred back at Lynde Court Home Farm.

Did she fall or was she pushed? That was the question. But not a word, not a whisper upon the subject ever wormed its way through the Lady A.’s stiff upper lip. If ever we raised it, even if everso tactfully, she would look teddibly, teddibly British and, quietly but firmly, change the subject. But I do know those dreadful girls had just made her sign the Home Farm over to them both, plus all that remained of her last bit of capital, before she took her tumble. We couldn’t help but be aware of that because now she hadn’t got a penny to bless herself, and nowhere to go, either.

Peregrine was gone. I called my father but it turned out he was overnighting at his fiancée’s basement flat in Gunter Grove, so no joy there, either. The Lady A. lay flat on her back in Lewes General Hospital with one tear trickling out of the corner of her left eye, enough to break your heart.

And that was how we came to inherit the Lady A., though she’s no trouble, really, even if she used to thump on the ceiling with the head of her silver-knobbed cane: ‘Stop that racket immediately!’ during the one, two, three, hop! days of the Brixton Academy of Dance.

She used to babysit our little Tiff, too, when she was a toddler. She used to sing her a lullaby, about horses, all the pretty little horses. ‘Sing,’ I say; more of a tuneless hum, but Tiff went to sleep, anyway. She taught her how to cross-stitch, though I can’t say it’s a talent Tiff’s ever used.

I always thought Saskia’s fame was to do, mostly, with the back of her neck. She had a lovely nape, on which that knot of scarlet hair sat like a Rhode Island red on a clutch and her nape was on display in all she did, intimate, exposed and sexy as she bent over the stove to poke around with a spoon suggestively in a pot or stick a prong into a drumstick with quite sadistic glee. I never saw anything so rude as her TV shows, not even Gorgeous George at the Royal Variety Performance.

We watched her jug a hare, once, on television, years ago, when she was just getting into her stride. She cut the thing up with slow, voluptuous strokes. ‘Make sure your blade is up to it!’ she husked, running her finger up and down the edge, although the spectacle of Saskia with a cleaver couldn’t help but remind me and Nora of how she’d run amok with the cake knife on her twenty-first. Next, she lovingly prepared a bath for the hare, she minced up shallots, garlic, onions, added a bouquet garni and a pint of claret and sat the poor dismembered beast in that for a day and a half. Then she condescended to sauté the parts briskly in a hot pan over a high flame until they singed. Then it all went into the oven for the best part of another day. She sealed the lid of the pot with a flour-and-water paste. ‘Don’t be a naughty thing and peek!’ she warned with a teasing wink. Time to decant at last! The hare had been half-rotted, then cremated, then consumed. If there is a god and she is of the rabbit family, then Saskia will be in deep doodoo on Judgment Day. ‘Delicious,’ she moaned, dipping her finger in the juice and sucking. She licked her lips, letting her pink tongue-tip linger. ‘Mmmm . . .’

As we watched this genuinely disgusting transmission, the ghost of Grandma manifested itself in a sharp blast of cabbage. When we saw what Saskia did to that hare, we knew that we did wrong by eating meat.

Why do we go on doing it, then? I’ll tell you straight. We’re scared that, if we eat too much salad, one fine day, we’ll find we’ve turned into Grandma.

Saskia jugged a hare for Tristram, once, that cooked his goose. She was living in a bijou houselet in Chelsea, in those days, penning the occasional article for Harper’s Bazaar. (‘Eel . . . oh, curvaceous, curvilinear, cursive denizen of the deep!’ and etc. etc. etc.) She must have thought long and hard as to how to revenge herself upon the third Lady Hazard for taking away her father and finally she wrote to little Tristram, then only a lad, at Bedales, hinting at Hazard mysteries to which only she, Saskia, held the key. God knows what she wrote or promised, who can tell; or whether he came ringing her doorbell on his half-term holiday out of prurience or duty, but she had his bondage trousers off before you could say crème renversée, although she was old enough to be his mother.

In fact, exactly the same age as his mother and now she felt she’d evened scores and she and My Lady Margarine made friends, again, and once even did a ketchup commercial together but Saskia never forgave a grudge and, when we ran into one another, which we did now and again, at the stocking counter in Peter Jones’ store, once, another time waiting for a taxi in Sloane Square, I could tell from the look in her Lynde-blue eye that when she saw me she still thought of only one thing: ‘Cascara evacuant’.

She was revenged upon her father’s wife, and on her father, too. The twins never forgave him for cutting off their allowances. Old Nanny told us how he’d given the girls this glad news after we left, that afternoon of their twenty-first. Cool as you please, he’d told them he couldn’t afford to support two families and now the girls were old enough to earn their keep, he’d see they got nice jobs. As they sat gaping, he assured them they weren’t losing a friend but gaining a mother and then it came on to rain so he hopped in his Roller and was off while they were still stunned with shock, before they had a chance to berate him. And that was the root cause, according to Old Nanny, of the dreadful quarrel over funds that transformed the whilom Lady A. into our Wheelchair and left her homeless, penniless, reliant on the left-hand line.

Old Nanny told us everything, of course. She went on telling us everything even after she moved in with Melchior to raise little Tristram and little Gareth. What else could she do, poor old cow, she was stuck. The Lady A. hadn’t the cash to keep her, now, and what would we have done with an Old Nanny clicking her tongue against her teeth when she saw the gin bottles in the wastepaper basket and the condoms in the toilet?

Though, alas, the little rubber swimmers sadly declined in numbers during the sixties and dropped off altogether in the subsequent decade, which was nothing to do with the Pill, everything to do with lack of opportunity.

Old Nanny often picked up the 137 bus in Camden Town and popped over the river and when she told us the news about Saskia and Tristram, the Lady A. dropped her embroidery frame with a shocked squeak. He was a babe, just seventeen, in those days, while Saskia had pushed forty aside some time before and was now steering towards her climacteric. Yet it wasn’t the May and December aspect of their union that affected us so much, we were quite French about that; it was that we all knew Saskia. Old Nanny had reservations of her own, however.

‘Prohibited degrees,’ said Old Nanny. She was drinking a cup of tea. I noticed how she always drank her tea from the wrong side of the cup, in our house. Admittedly, Nora was a careless washer-up, especially after sundown, but Old Nanny never went to the lavatory in our house, either, not even when you could tell she was busting for a wee. I wondered, are we letting standards slip?

‘Prohibited degrees.’

‘Cheer up, Nana. Remember, Melchior’s not her –’

But Wheelchair put her finger to her lips because Old Nanny wasn’t supposed to know. (Although she did know, of course; she it was who personally confirmed our worst suspicions, years ago. But Wheelchair never knew she knew and thought she ought to keep it from the servants.)

‘But, then,’ said Nora, ‘perhaps Perry –’

Why hadn’t we thought of it before? The wicked old man! ‘Just been visiting a friend in Gunter Grove’, indeed! But how had he met My Lady Margarine and why had they done it? Was Peregrine bent on perpetrating the Hazard tradition of disputed paternity even unto the bitter end? But none of us had any means of checking out the theory, since Peregrine was gone, and only Old Nanny on speaking terms with the third Lady H., and she wasn’t intimate, so we could only speculate, thus: that Tristram was red as fire, in the mould of Peregrine and of poor, passionate, murdered Estella, while gaunt and hollow-eyed Gareth had raven hair and Bovril eyes – the boys, in fact, the duplicates of Peregrine and Melchior themselves, in person, at least, though not in personality. So who had been the master of ceremonies was anybody’s guess.

Not that we’d ever met Gareth. He was a mystery. He converted when he was seventeen, found God the same time Tristram discovered sex, and departed to a seminary shortly after. Never a word from that department, not a letter nor a Christmas card, for the actor and the priest might have a good deal in common but the Jesuit and the chorus girl, outside lewd jest, not.

Love. What is love? What do I mean by love? For a while he wanted her nearby. But it turned out she was not sufficient to break him of the Saskia habit, even if Saskia was sixty if she was a day. His sexuagenarian mistress. Saskia, the sexy sexuagenarian.

‘Come off it, Dor’, you wouldn’t have said no to a chap when you were sixty, if you’d had any offers,’ reproved Nora. She thought I was jealous.

Perhaps I am.

Saskia.

But Wheelchair grieved about it, too, and all the more because her daughters had now maintained their radical indifference to her for well-nigh forty years and she thought she’d snuff it without another sight of them, so we knew we’d have to take her with us when the invitation to our father’s birthday party came at last, even if she wasn’t on the official list, and this is just what we are about to do, as soon as we’ve got ourselves suitably tarted up.

‘What shall we wear tonight?’ said Nora.

No problem for Wheelchair. She’d got a lovely Norman Hartnell gown left over from the forties we could still fork her into, she ate like a sparrow, she never put on a milligram. White satin bodice, tulle skirt, which we would fluff up so as to conceal her carriage. Pearls. Her daughters robbed her blind, stuffing pillowslips with bibelots, but they’d refrained from snatching the pearls off her neck. We gave her a bath with her favourite Floris’s Tuberoses poured in. What a business that bath was! Nora took one arm, I took the other, we lowered her. Nora scrubbed her back with a flannel. Then we wrapped her up in a big, soft towel and Nora did her hair.

‘You’re very good to me,’ said Wheelchair with a suspicious quiver.

‘Pipe down, you old bag,’ said Nora. You’ve got to be firm with her, or else she cries. We dusted her with talc, tucked her in a rug and left her in the kitchen with the fire on and a fresh pot of tea, watching Brief Encounter on afternoon television. We had to wait for the water to heat up again until we could have our own baths. I picked up a scent bottle and inhaled nostalgia.

‘Tell you what,’ I said to Nora. ‘You put on some Shalimar, tonight; I’ll use Mitsouko.’

‘Quite like old times,’ she said with a glint.

‘Don’t let’s exaggerate.’

Because here was a couple of scraggy hags about to ease into frocks that first saw light about the year our Tiff was born, for we had bought no evening wear since then, having no need for it in middle age; and it was our little Tiff who’d brought us our lovely scent, for old times’ sake, bless her little heart, got it for us from the duty-free when Tristram took her to Tuscany for a week.

That was an ill-fated trip. Although he must have loved her, for a little while, at least, because she was the first girl he was ever brave enough to take to visit Saskia.

Saskia’s villa was perched on a hill between Florence and Siena, among the fields of Chianti, pine trees up the drive, you know the kind of thing. You may even have seen it featuring in her bloody programme. She wrote it off against her taxes because she’d done a series there, In Bocca Toscana. I caught it once, repeated in the afternoons, I was housebound with a stinking cold, there was Saskia, caressing a ham. ‘Lucky the porkers of Parma!’ she intoned. ‘They dine every day on curds and whey, like so many little Miss Muffets, and posthumously achieve porcine apotheosis – prosciutto!’

I questioned Tiff closely when they got back and she rabbited on about ripe figs and fresh basil for a while before she admitted she’d been incapacitated with the runs for the greater part of their stay, confined to bed in the spacious room with the tiled floor and view of vineyards, her only entertainment a stack of Saskia’s videos, which she’d been forced to watch endlessly, not being of a reading temperament, but which had given her so much confidence, although she’d never even boiled an egg before, that she proposed fixing for us, then and there, a spaghetti carbonara, only we said, no way.

These gastric disorders sounded to me as though Saskia had slipped a little something extra into the trippa fiorentina, but, all the same, Saskia had been sufficiently polite to this unexpected wee scrap as to arouse my suspicions, because she was a snob and a half, ordinarily. But Tiffany suspected nothing and was over the moon. ‘His family has started to accept me! See how his aunt has taken me to her bosom!’

Bosom of flint. Tiff didn’t know, how could she, that a history existed already between Tristram and that woman and I must admit she was good-looking, still, had always been good-looking, with that pale skin and red hair, even if she always had to paint in her eyebrows and eyelashes. Half the drama went out of her appearance once she’d had a good wash. But little Tiff looked best of all with no make-up on, with her hair just hanging down her back and –

– and there I go, again, thinking of little Tiff when it behooves the Chance girls to put on their brightest smiles, check out their wardrobes for their smartest gowns, and celebrate their father’s centenary.

It was perishing cold in Grandma’s bedroom and gloaming, only the one forty-watt bulb, but I didn’t want to open the curtains, as if the light might scare away the smell of mothballs, boiled cabbage and gin hanging in the air, by which we liked to think she made her posthumous presence felt. Her photos were still lined up on the mantelpiece. Peregrine in pride of place, in the middle, in his conjuring suit, with a dove perched on every plane surface, like a statue in a public square, and a smile you could warm your hands on, even though it was a photograph and he was dead. Lots of pix of us, stark naked in babyhood in the backyard with, if you looked carefully, a neighbour at once outraged and prurient peering through the fence. As baby sparrows in our very first panto, when we were half-pints. In black tights and blonde bobbed wigs from What! You Will! Even a still of Peaseblossom and Mustardseed, all moonlit in the wood, and a lovely snap from the Forest of Arden, partying it around the pool with Peregrine. In sailors’ hats, as forces’ sweethearts. Always the two of us, together, forever young on Grandma’s mantelpiece.

She never liked that portrait Cecil Beaton did for Vogue, she always kept it in the dressing-table drawer. He’d done us up as painted dolls, rouged spots on our cheeks and terrible artificial grins, sitting on the floor in frills with our legs at angles, as if they were made of wood. Rich men’s playthings. Very subtle. His Nanny used to hold the flash, you know.

Our Cyn was on the mantelpiece, on her wedding day; Our Cyn with one, two, three, in arms and various stages of toddlerhood; I was glad Grandma went before the Asian flu took Cynthia in ’49, she never wanted to outlive any of us.

And there was her enormous bed she never shared, to my knowledge, all the time we knew her except, towards the end, with the occasional cat. Her bed, stripped, the naked pillows huddled like a corpse. We felt we ought to hush and tiptoe.

As we opened up the wardrobe, we saw ourselves swimming in the mirrored door as if in a pool of dust and, for a split second, in soft focus, we truly looked like girls, again. And going through those cast-offs was a trip down Memory Lane and a half, I can tell you. First, there was the lingerie – silk, satin, lace, eau de nil, blush rose, flesh, black and red ribbons, straight up and down things from the twenties, slithering things from the thirties, curvy things from the forties, waspies, merry widows, uplift bras. At the very bottom of the pile, I seized on something navy blue – the bloomers from our dancing class! From Miss Worthington’s dancing class! To think that Grandma had kept our old bloomers!

Then there were the frocks. Some things we’d put away in plastic bags: bias-cut silk jersey, beaded sheaths that weighed a ton. Others we’d covered up with sheets, the big net skirts, the taffeta crinolines, halter necks, strapless, backless, etc. etc. etc., all heaped high on Grandma’s bed.

‘Half a century of evening wear,’ said Nora. ‘A history of the world in party frocks.’

‘We ought to donate it to the V and A,’ I said.

‘Why should somebody pay good money to look at my old clothes?’

‘They used to pay to see you without them.’

‘They ought put us into a museum.’

‘We ought to turn this house into a museum.’

‘Museum of dust.’

Nora rummaged among the rags and gave a soft little chuckle. She held up a foamy white georgette number with crystal beads.

‘The Super-Chief!’ she said. ‘Remember?’

‘“She wore something sheer and white and deceptively virginal, that emitted a hard glitter when she moved, a subtle, ambigudus cobweb softness veined with a secret of ice. ‘Got a light?’ Half trusting, half insolent, a hoarse voice, older than that pale face with its purple heart of lipstick, flourishing its rasp of gutter like a flag, with pride.”’ I for Irish, Ross ‘Irish’ O’Flaherty. Hollywood Elegies. The very frock! He never knew I’d borrowed it from Daisy.

‘Why don’t you sell it to that library in Texas? I read in the paper they bought a crate of his empties.’

But I’d spotted an ambivalent memento of hers, to tease her with.

‘Here, Nora . . . I never knew you kept this.’

‘Gimme!’

She snatched it out of my hands, the veil they’d brought out of wardrobe on The Dream set for her to marry Tony in.

‘The bastard,’ she said. ‘I hope he’s six feet deep in concrete.’

She stuffed the veil out of sight under her air-raid warden’s siren suit and something chiffon slithered to the floor.

‘Dora? Remember this?’

She held it up. Floral print, big splashy roses, rhodies, peonies, muted tones, dusky pinks, soft mauves, lavender. I pressed it to my face, it was as soft as dust. First kiss, first love, eyes as blue as sugar paper and skin like cream.

‘I pray you, love, remember.’

He never came back from the Burma Road. Some comic told me, backstage, Nude Frolics ’52, in Sheffield.

‘Here, Dora, nothing to cry about.’

‘Do you remember his name?’

She asked me, whose name, with her eyebrows.

‘You gave me a present the day we were seventeen, remember? Today’s our anniversary, fifty-eight years ago today. It was my first time, remember?’

She tried and tried but she could only remember her own first time and the goose and the miscarriage and then the corners of her mouth turned down.

‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I feel a little lonely in the world. Don’t you ever feel a little lonely, too, Dora? No father, no mother, no chick nor darling child. Don’t you even want something to cuddle?’

No darling child. Which was the nub of it, as far as she was concerned, as well I knew, but no use crying over spilled milk, although that be not the appropriate metaphor in this instance. Too late to do anything about it, now.

‘I must admit, sometimes, it gets everso lonely, especially when you’re stuck up in your room tapping away at that bloody word processor lost in the past while I’m shut up in the basement with old age.’

‘Don’t talk like that about poor Wheelchair.’

‘I don’t mean Wheelchair and well you know it. I mean our old age, the fourth guest at the table.’

‘Look on the bright side,’ I counselled her. ‘I’ve got you and you’ve got me and we’ve both got Wheelchair and you could call her our geriatric little girl, seeing as we bathe her, feed her, change her nappies, even. Our father might have reneged on the job but we did have a right old sugar daddy in our Uncle Perry and well you know it. We never knew our mother but Grandma filled the gap and you can say that again.’

The bulb flickered on, off, on again as if to signify Grandma’s assent.

‘All the same,’ she said, ‘I wish . . .’

She crumpled up that old chiffon and cradled it to her bosom.

‘If little Tiff had come to us,’ she said, rocking the chiffon baby in her arms, ‘I’d –’

I knuckled out my swimming eyes. No more tears, today.

Then a funny thing happened. Something leapt off the shelf where the hats were. No, not leapt; ‘propelled itself’, is better because it came whizzing out like a flying saucer, slicing across the room as if about to knock our heads off, so we ducked. It knocked against the opposite wall, bounced down to the ground, fluttered and was still.

It was her hat, her little toque, with the spotted veil, that had spun out like a discus. And as we nervously inspected it, there came an avalanche of gloves – all her gloves, all slithery leather thumbs and fingers, whirling around as if inhabited by hands, pelting us, assaulting us, smacking our faces, so that we clutched hands for protection and retreated like scared kids as more and more of Grandma’s bits and pieces – oilcloth carriers, corsets, bloomers like sails, stockings hissing like snakes – cascaded out of the wardrobe on top of us. We backed off until our calves hit the side of the bed with a shock of cold metal and then the wardrobe door closed of its own accord upon its own emptiness with a ghastly creak, leaving us looking at our scared faces looking back out of the dust.

‘Grandma’s trying to tell us something,’ said Nora in an awed voice.

Creak, creak went the door.

‘She’s telling us Memory Lane is a dead end,’ I said. I could hear her voice clear as a bell: ‘Come off it, girls! Pluck the day! You ain’t dead, yet! You’ve got a party to go to! Expect the worst, hope for the best!’

We threw caution to the winds and raided the jam jar where we keep the seventy-plus emergency fund, that is, cash for wreaths for sudden funerals and taxis to hospices, etc. etc. etc. The shops were still open, we threw on our silver-fox trenches, we dashed off to the market. Down Electric Avenue, past the vegetable stalls. ‘Here, gel, fancy a widow’s comfort?’ he says, thrusting forth an aubergine. ‘Is that the best you can do?’ I riposted.

All of a sudden, I was feeling chipper. Then I spotted them. ‘Here, Nor’, here come the Animal Rights.’ We drew ourselves up to our full height; we’ve learned to be defensive about our trenches.

‘It’d look better on a fox, auntie,’ said the young man, knees poking through his trousers, shaven nape, why does he make us run the gauntlet every time?

‘It wouldn’t look better on this fox,’ said Nora, on her high horse. ‘Which was humanely trapped in the Arctic Circle by the age-old methods of an ecologically sound Inuit hunter circa 1935, young man, before either you or your blessed mother, even, was yet pissing on the floor, which trapper has probably succumbed to alcohol and despair due to having his traditional source of livelihood taken away from him and, anyway, these foxes would be long dead, by now, besides, and rotted, if we weren’t wearing their lovingly preserved pelts.’

‘I’m glad you’re feeling guilty, girls,’ said the young man.

He slipped us the usual tract. ‘I like to sink my teeth into a nice juicy sausage, too!’ Nora confided lasciviously. He covered up his privates toot sweet.

‘I sometimes think Grandma was born before her time,’ I said to Nora.

‘At least he doesn’t picket flower stalls,’ she said.

You can buy anything you want in Brixton market. We got stockings with little silver stars all over, ‘more stars than there are in Heaven’, recollected Nora. I shoved over a twenty for the stockings and spotted Old Bill on the back. That gave me a start, to see how Shakespeare, to whom our family owed so much, had turned into actual currency, not just on any old bank note but on a high denomination one, to boot. Though not as high as Florence Nightingale, which gives me satisfaction as a woman.

Lovely, shiny stockings and a couple of little short tight skirts in shiny silver stuff to match, that clung on like surgical bandage, and showed off our legs. Legs, the last thing to go. We were modelling stockings as late as the late sixties, I’d have you know; Bear Brand. They had to cut us off mid-thigh, of course, so the wrinkles wouldn’t show. For women of our age, our legs still aren’t half bad. Nora toyed with a spaghetti-string boob tube in lynx-print Lycra; I thought, maybe something with feathers . . . Kids gathered round, tittering; the man at the red mullet stall shook his head, sadly. They thought the Chance sisters had gone over the top, at last. There was a sale of gold stilettos, so we treated ourselves to those. We came back with an armful of junk, earrings, beads, everything you can think of, cheap and cheerful, we haven’t laughed so much in years, and the water was hot enough for us to share a bath, by then. After that, we slipped on our towelling robes, we creamed off our morning faces, we started off from scratch.

Foundation. Dark in the hollows of the cheeks and at the temples, blended into a lighter tone everywhere else. Rouge, except they call it ‘blusher’, nowadays. Two kinds of blusher, one to highlight the Hazard bones, another to give us rosy cheeks. Nora likes to put the faintest dab on the end of her nose, why I can’t fathom, old habits die hard. Three kinds of eyeshadow – dark blue, light blue blended together on the eyelids with the little finger, then a frosting overall of silver. Then we put on our two coats of mascara. Today, for lipstick, Rubies in the Snow by Revlon.

It took an age but we did it; we painted the faces that we always used to have on to the faces we have now. From a distance of thirty feet with the light behind us, we looked, at first glance, just like the girl who danced with the Prince of Wales when nightingales sang in Berkeley Square on a foggy day in London Town. The deceptions of memory. That girl was smooth as an egg and the lipstick never ran down little cracks and fissures round her mouth because, in those days, there were none.

‘It’s every woman’s tragedy,’ said Nora, as we contemplated our painted masterpieces, ‘that, after a certain age, she looks like a female impersonator.’

Mind you, we’ve known some lovely female impersonators, in our time.

‘What’s every man’s tragedy, then?’ I wanted to know.

‘That he doesn’t, Oscar,’ she said. She still has the capacity to surprise me. Fancy her knowing about Oscar Wilde. I did her nails, she did mine. After some debate – should we match them to our lips? – we fixed on silver, to match them to our legs. She did my hair, I did hers. Silver, too, worse luck. We disappeared behind a cloud of scent and re-emerged, transformed, looking just like what, for all those years, the bloody Hazards always thought we were, painted harlots, and over the hill, at that.

‘Oh, I say!’ Wheelchair murmured, tapping her lips with a tissue to set the Lancôme Bois de Rose. ‘Don’t you think you’ve gone a little far?’

In her white ballgown and pearls, she looked quite lovely, not so much Miss Havisham, more the Ghost of Christmas past.

‘Got to keep up with the times, darling,’ said. Nora.

‘Not me,’ said Wheelchair. ‘I live mostly in the past, these days. I find it’s better.’

Her eyes swivelled reverently round to that portrait of Melchior she’d insisted on bringing with her when she came, although we’d had to cut it down to fit it in and she no longer kept flowers in front of it because we refused point-blank to fetch her any and she couldn’t go out and get them herself.

So she was still eating her heart out for Melchior, after all these years, was she? Don’t think she was a hypocrite, to have loved him all those abused, neglected decades, when she hadn’t been averse to a fling in her youth herself and brought home a brace of bonny babes whose biological origins owed more to A. N. Other’s DNA. If you think she was a hypocrite, then you know sod all about women. No. She loved old Melchior, all right, and, poor cow, she still loved her wicked daughters, too, for there they were, on her bedside table, beside the phials of pills and the half-bottle of Malvern water, in a rosewood frame, the darling buds of bloody May as ever was, looking as if butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths.

Rain came and settled at the window. April showers. The twenty-third of April. Yes! The destination of Melchior had been prepared for him since birth; he was doomed to wear the pasteboard crown. Hadn’t he first seen light of day on Shakespeare’s birthday?

So had we two, of course. But all the little children in Bard Road were singing a hymn to Charlie Chaplin the day that we were born and Grandma took us to the window to look at the shirts and bloomers dancing on the washing-lines all over Lambeth. That made a difference, you know. We were doomed to sing and dance.

Then we did Wheelchair’s nails, just a manicure and buff, she’s never said but I know she thinks varnish is vulgar. We gave her a squirt of Arpège. The phone never rang. Each time I looked at it, it didn’t ring. And Brenda never came round again, either.