Wise Children

A richly comic tale of the tangled fortunes of two theatrical families, the Hazards and Chances, Angela Carter’s witty and bawdy novel is populated with as many sets of twins and mistaken identities as any Shakespeare comedy, and celebrates the magic of over a century of show business.

About the Author

Angela Carter was born in 1940. She read English at Bristol University, and from 1976–8 was a fellow in Creative Writing at Sheffield University. She lived in Japan, the United States and Australia. Her first novel, Shadow Dance, was published in 1965, followed by The Magic Toyshop (1967, John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Several Perceptions (1968, Somerset Maugham Award), Heroes and Villains (1969), Love (1971), The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), The Passion of New Eve (1977), Nights at the Circus (1984, James Tait Black Memorial Prize) and Wise Children (1991). Four collections of her short stories have been published: Fireworks (1974), The Bloody Chamber (1979, Cheltenham Festival of Literature Award), Black Venus (1985) and American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (1993). She was the author of The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (1979), and two collections of journalism, Nothing Sacred (1982) and Expletives Deleted (1992). She died in February 1992.

ALSO BY ANGELA CARTER

Wise Children

Angela Carter

With an Introduction by Ali Smith

Introduction

What exactly is the wisdom advocated in Angela Carter’s final novel, Wise Children? First, there’s its blatant demand that we lighten up. ‘What a joy it is to dance and sing!’ Then there’s a much less exclamatory kind of wisdom. Take the word ‘child’. Carter, a writer fond of what words mean, will have known that for much of its history it was specifically a provincial word for ‘girl’. ‘Mercy on’s, a barne; a very pretty barne! A boy or a child, I wonder?’ as the old shepherd says when he finds, by chance, on the shores of Bohemia, the abandoned baby Perdita in Shakespeare’s late romance of birth, death and rebirth, The Winter’s Tale.

Wisdom and innocence. Innocence and knowing. Wise Children is a knowing text, packed with interlayered allusion and literary embedding – most of all wise to the fertility there is in any notion of ‘embedding’. Cheerfully bawdy, it’s Carter’s most glorious, most comic, most fulfilled, certainly her most generously and happily orgiastic, fictional performance. By chance it was also her last novel. She died young, at only 51, the year after its publication, so it takes crowning place in her now recognisably revolutionary literary project.

‘Most intellectual development depends on new readings of old texts,’ she wrote in 1983. ‘I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the new wine makes the old bottles explode.’¹ She was a committed feminist and socialist, ‘the pure product of an advanced, industrialised, post-imperialist country in decline,’² and someone who saw all art as helplessly political, because made by history and belonging to its time. Her feminism and socialism form a twinned impetus in her work. ‘Flesh comes to us out of history,’ she wrote in her ground-breaking study of women and gender-codification, The Sadeian Woman (1979), one of the books which caused even more than the usual critical alarm and outrage at its writer on its publication. After her first highly praised and steadily award-winning novels of the 1960s, her baroque, gaudy and often violent rejection of British realism in book after fearless book filled with nasty tyrant-puppeteers, falling and failing civilisations and clever lost heroines strung between violence or madness, had earned her a critical reputation as maddeningly uncategorisable. In the end critics liked to label her as tricksy magical-realist. This was a term she scorned in the same way that she scorned the notion that realism was the only available version of ‘real’. ‘I’ve got nothing against realism. But there is realism and realism. The questions that I ask myself, I think they are very much to do with reality.’³

Lorna Sage, Carter’s great friend and most assiduous critic, noted that 1979, the year in which she published not just The Sadeian Woman but also her most celebrated collection of short stories, The Bloody Chamber – the first of her collections in which she explicitly changed the endings of traditional tales to let, for instance, Bluebeard’s bride beard Bluebeard or Red Riding Hood seduce the wolf – was the year her interest in transformation as a theme became most accessible to her readers. After this a new laughter, a greater verve, and a sharper keenness to banish puritan constraint, entered her work.

The critics certainly felt a lot safer with her final two novels, tending to see the worlds of a feathered barmaid and high-kicking hoofers in Nights at the Circus and Wise Children as ‘more benign’⁴ on the whole than the earlier work where, typically and casually, in works like The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972) and The Passion of New Eve (1977), a male protagonist is every bit as likely to shift gender or be gang-raped by a troupe of male acrobats as the literary canon is to be questioned, satirised and rewritten.

But from her first novel, Shadow Dance (1966), all the way to Wise Children (1991), Carter’s work goes out of its way to take to pieces the powerful machineries of romanticism, desire, dominant narrative and social codification, as well as the machineries of fiction itself, to lay them bare before a reader and show her or him how those machineries are working.

From its sprightly opening riddle onwards, everything in Wise Children is about duality – and most immediately, Carter suggests, social duality. The aging birthday girl narrator is one half of a duo: Nora and Dora, ‘the legendary Chance sisters’. They’re from ‘the wrong side’ of a two-track city (and a two-track family and a two-track art form and a two-track tradition and a two-track culture and a two-track world). ‘Once upon a time you could make a crude distinction thus,’ Dora says, making a fairy tale of the real, of the complications of the coming of affluence to this always poorer, always hybrid South of the city. There’s nothing else to do but to bless their chance ownership of a small patch of it, number 49 Bard Road. ‘If it wasn’t for this house, Nora and I would be on the streets by now, hauling our worldlies up and down in plastic bags . . . bursting into songs of joy when finally admitted to the night shelter and therefore chucked out immediately to gasp and freeze and finally snuff it disregarded on the street and blow away like rags.’

Never has the joy of dancing and singing been made so darkly and lightly relative in the same instant as in the opening pages of this all-singing, all-dancing delight of a novel which, in five chapters, or five good farcical theatrical acts, travels from morning to evening of a single day and from one end of the twentieth century to the other, in a paean to, well, pretty much everything entertaining that ever happened, in a blend of literature, classical theatre, cheap vaudeville and Hollywood cinema.

Mostly, though, it’s a celebration of the champion English alchemist of fused high-and-low art, Shakespeare, whose windy spring birthday the twin old girls – and their twin father and uncle before them, and various other (twin, of course) members of their family – share. So all life is here in this virtuoso performance, whose chapters end in transformations, whose separate sentences resound with internal rhyme and rhythm, whose eye and ear are on Englishness and tradition, whose spirit is out for ‘a bit of fun’, and whose themes are the Shakespearian dualities – twins and doubling, fathers and daughters, lost family and found family, comedy and tragedy. But Wise Children’s aesthetic landscape is determinedly beyond tragedy – as Dora says, with a quite violent insistence, ‘I refuse point blank to play in tragedy’ – and beyond comedy too. Instead the novel is deep-steeped in the later romance plays, like Cymbeline, The Tempest, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, where the yoked opposites of life and death are the crux of the story, but rebirth is the art.

Carter’s Chance girls are illegitimate twice (of course) – first when it comes to their natural father, the noble Shakespearian actor Melchior Hazard, king of the ‘Royal family’ of British theatre (and twin brother of the most benign of Carter’s Prospero figures, the magician Peregrine) – and second, in the twin unacceptability of their own ‘dramatic art’ – their hoofing it at the ‘fag end of vaudeville’ and their being girls on the halls, to boot. Although their real grandmother in her time played all the heroines in Shakespeare and even played Hamlet, they’ve ended up discarded illegitimate brats, named by chance (what’s a Hazard anyway, but a posh word for Chance, in another of Carter’s glorious, casual redefinings). They exist by the thread of chance, by the kindness, imagination and invention of Grandma Chance, only one of the remarkable old-lady-survivors in a book full of them. ‘Grandma invented this family. She put it together out of whatever came to hand – a stray pair of orphaned babes, a ragamuffin in a flat cap. She created it by sheer force of personality . . . 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.’

Each chapter celebrates the inventiveness of the imagination. In Nora’s and Dora’s journey from young pirates to old interlopers Carter entertains us with an extraordinary interlaying of art and popular culture that breaches both’s so-called boundaries – and suggests that you need ‘smashing legs’ to play Shakespeare. The interlayered (and sometimes actual cameo) ‘appearances’ from Austen, Milton, Coward, Dickens, Carroll, Wordsworth, Fitzgerald, Brecht and Shaw (to name only a few of the writers whose work is woven somewhere into the text) rub up against the fleeting starry presences of Fred Astaire, Ruby Keeler, W.C. Fields, Howard Hughes, Charlie Chaplin (resurrected and priapic, ‘hung like a horse’) – a litany of greater and lesser known stars in a book which thoroughly parodies Hollywood’s own 1930s version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (only one of the many Shakespeare plays that Carter card-shuffles into her novel in the space of roughly 240 pages). ‘I was attempting to encompass something from every Shakespeare,’ she said in a radio interview with the writer Paul Bailey only months before she died. ‘I mean, I couldn’t actually at all . . . I mean, you know, Titus Andronicus was very difficult . . . But I got a lot in!’⁵

Each chapter also celebrates a family affair. Each celebrates a birthday. Each celebrates vulgar, forceful life, typically turning a sentence like ‘there he was, on the bed, brushing up his Shakespeare’ into its own funny, sexy innuendo. The key concept here is celebration, which, though never uncomplicated, is always merry, carnivalesque. ‘Something nice, something nasty, I don’t give a monkeys. Just as long as something happens to remind us we’re still in the land of the living’ as Dora puts it; these wise children know very young that performance is about an openness to potential, a hope, which Dora calls anticipation. ‘I . . . have always loved it best of all, the moment when the lights go down, the curtain glows, you know that something wonderful is going to happen. It doesn’t matter if what happens next spoils everything; the anticipation itself is always pure.’

In 1980, in a very fine essay about the writer Colette and her years of notoriety and survival on the French stage, Carter reveals herself as fascinated by the life, ‘as picaresque as a woman’s may be without putting herself in a state of hazard.’ She sees Colette’s 1910 novel about stage-life, La Vagabonde, as ‘still one of the most truthful expositions of the dilemma of a free woman in a male-dominated society.’⁶ Elsewhere in Carter’s work, theatres burn angrily and liberatingly down. But in Wise Children and Nights at the Circus, she positively uses the space – she makes something else of it, with characters who use it and make a living by it in a world where it’s hard to make a living if you’re a girl and you’re poor. Take the horrific graffiti representation of a woman as a zero, passive, a ring-shaped ‘O’, a ‘sign for nothing’, ‘a dumb mouth from which the teeth have been pulled,’ as Carter puts it in the first pages of The Sadeian Woman, a nothing from whose ‘elemental iconography may be derived the whole metaphysic of sexual differences.’⁷ If you compare this to what Carter does in her final two novels with the circus ring, the theatre – the space were we act – then a whole new performative metaphysic of potential becomes possible.

Elsewhere in her work, girls and women are hugely troubled by their mirror images and what to make of them. Here, the mirror-image comes to mean more and differently than it has before. It means sisterhood, family, the kind of love that makes Dora want to survive – and it means strength. ‘Neither of us anything special on our own – skinny things with mouse-brown bobs – but, put us together, we turned heads.’ The duo is an inspired image for the power of the communal. ‘On our own, you wouldn’t look at us twice. But put us together . . .’ and something legendary happens.

This doesn’t mean that Carter is any less sharp – in a world where Shakespeare’s head is on the money, as it were – in her delineation of the social position of girls and women. ‘Hope for the best, expect the worst.’ Money, class and gender are tightly bound together in her take on the girls’ Freudian descents of endless showbiz staircases (particularly in the case of Tiffany, with ‘her feet leaving blood behind them as she came down’); in her reading of Hollywood as ‘a very peculiar brothel, where all the girls for sale were shadows’; and perhaps most particularly in this novel’s ghost, the fleeting near-invisible presence of Kitty, the girls’ birth-mother, a thin rag of a girl who works emptying the slops in a poor theatrical lodging house, is made pregnant by chance or the usual design, and dies very young.

But Nora’s own first sexual encounter, cold and drunken, down a dark alley, as Dora reports it, as it happens, is with a married man, yes, but also a pantomime goose. Some might want to call it cheap and squalid realism, she suggests, but panto is full of wish-fulfilment and life can be larger than itself, if we choose to let it.

Carter liked, herself, to be a bit unexpectedly larger-than-life. She notes, in one of her last introductions to her books, the liberation in being ‘notoriously foul-mouthed’, a ‘soft-spoken, middle-aged English gentlewoman who swears like a trooper when roused.’⁸ More than a decade earlier she’d written to Lorna Sage about a particular legacy of wisdom she’d like to leave any daughter she might have. Having met the drunken, self-lacerating novelist, Elizabeth Smart, at a literary party and having been prompted by this to remember her own dislike of what she saw as a self-indulgent, self-hurting streak in some writers who happened to be women, she wrote to Sage about why she’d decided to take a place on the board of the brand new venture in publishing that would become Virago books. ‘I am moved towards it by the desire that no daughter of mine should ever be in a position to be able to write BY GRAND CENTRAL STATION I SAT DOWN AND WEPT, exquisite prose though it might contain. BY GRAND CENTRAL STATION I TORE OFF HIS BALLS would be more like it, I should hope.’⁹

The buoyancy in Wise Children is all to do with what you might call an equivalent largeness of voice – and with its darker twin, its mirror opposite, silence. ‘The rest is silence’ is a line straight out of tragedy. The trick of the live voice is to refuse, like Austen, to dwell on guilt and misery. The life and soul of Wise Children is Dora, whom Carter herself called ‘Englishness as a persona,’¹⁰ and Dora’s personality is her indefatigable first-person delivery – her voice. ‘It’s the American tragedy in a nutshell. They look around the world and think: “There must be something better!” But there isn’t. Sorry, chum. This is it. What you see is what you get. Only the here and now,’ as she says, in chapter three, whose theme is heaven and its impossibility, in a voice careful to soften and humanise its own blow with every cliché.

Cliché is always larger than life, and a kind of oral communal agreement in itself. Carter was particularly drawn to the politics of voice – how the oral tradition often outwits, and is often the live source, for the written. ‘It’s an accident of the twentieth century that I’m literate,’ she said, recalling her own family history, since literacy was had by chance, in the shape of an early Scottish education for members of her father’s family and, on her mother’s side, a much later education via ‘that Education Act in the 1880s . . . This elevation of the named writer has always seemed to me very very unfair on something like 95% of the human race, who didn’t have the ability to write, but which didn’t stop them, you know, inventing things . . . One of the things I’ve always deeply respected about Shakespeare – it was obvious he didn’t very much care whether he was published or not. I mean it seems to me that he really is in many respects something rather archaic in that he did actually write for the voice.’¹¹

Dora Chance is the only completely female first-person protagonist in Carter’s novels – one who knows, like Carter, that ‘we carry our history on our tongues,’ and knows too that she’s very much an illegitimate chronicler, that the female voice has had much less chance to be recorded over time, history being what it is. A brilliant creation, Dora’s voice infers a double act, individual and communal at once, speaking for an experience communally had, a life communally lived. She loves cliché, which keeps so many dangerous stories survivable: ‘What hoops the kept woman has to jump to work her passage.’ And cliché can be sexy: ‘to travel hopefully is better than to arrive, as Uncle Perry used to say. I always preferred foreplay too.’

‘The unofficial chronicler’ is the more literary sister in a duo whose names summon connections with twentieth-century male giants of thought and literature, Freud and Joyce, and whose characters escape the fates of their inferred namesakes. This particular Dora is a writer able to take issue with her own literary ‘education’ at the hands of her American boyfriend, Irish (a thinly disguised F. Scott Fitzgerald): ‘a man of parts even if some of them didn’t work too well.’ Finally, Dora’s role as narrator is a double-edged one, as Carter, who saw Dora’s voice as close to a stand-up performance, likes to remind us from time to time. Is she maybe nothing more than a batty, drunk old woman, ‘in her ratty old fur and poster paint, her orange (Persian Melon) toenails sticking out of her snakeskin peep-toes, reeking of liquor’ who wants you to buy her a drink and to regale you with her life story? Because if she is – even if she’s the female twentieth-century version of the Ancient Mariner – then she’ll also, the very next moment, be the author of a knowing literary jolt of a paragraph like this:

But truthfully, these glorious pauses do, sometimes, occur in the discordant but complementary narratives of our lives and if you choose to stop the story there, at such a pause, and refuse to take it any further, then you can call it a happy ending.

In that essay on Colette, Carter wrote about the moment in Simone de Beauvoir’s memoirs when she records the surreality of her being in the same room as (if not actually speaking to) Colette. ‘Of course,’ Carter mused, ‘Colette could no more have written The Second Sex than de Beauvoir could have danced naked on a public stage, which precisely defines the limitations of both these great ladies.’¹² Carter’s final great creation is a lot closer than either of them to being capable of both.

Wise Children’s insouciance is near stoic. A book about old ladies is, helplessly, going to be a book about ‘the way of all flesh’. ‘Whence came we? Whither goeth we? I know the answer to the second question, of course. Bound for oblivion, nor leave a wrack behind.’ It’s a limelight novel that knows the dark, that ‘wars are facts we cannot fuck away’. Its insouciance is its response in the face of tragedy, poverty, illegitimacy, hierarchy, and most grave of all, ‘untimely death.’ What to do? ‘We’ll go on singing and dancing until we drop in our tracks, won’t we kids?’ In her critical writings Carter associates lightness with stoicism more than once. She comments on one of the movie stars she was most fascinated by, Louise Brooks, who, in Pabst’s Pandora’s Box, ‘typifies the subversive violence inherent in beauty and a light heart.’¹³ In a book as much about the degeneration game as it is about generation and generations, Dora and Nora, in their seventies, at the fag end of the British empire, go to a broken-down old cinema and see the film of their young selves in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ‘two batty old tarts with their eyes glued to their own ghosts.’

In the face of this, a book whose celebration of the life-force is so very forceful, whose countless births and birthdays and rebirths from the dead crescendo in its great fertile explosion of an ending, is a designed kindness. Wise Children is, from start to finish, a performance – an act. And what an act. It’s an act of love. It’s an act of suspension of disbelief – in other words, an act which invites belief. It’s an act of survival. It’s an act of voice against silence. It’s an act of communality – and the proof that a role like mother, father, even self, can be taken by more than one person, in other words, can be shared. And it’s an act of mending broken things of the past, too, a backhand gift to history from a writer who liked, in her wisdom, to demonstrate that the given shape of things can – if we use our imaginations – be altered. ‘Hope for the best, expect the worst.’ By the end this catchphrase has been turned on its head. It ends in hope.

Carter’s last heroine knows how to role-reverse. She takes the potentially abject story of her own mother, Kitty, a mere ghost of a gone girl, and gives her a presence and a sexual power that’s ‘bold as brass’. ‘My Aunt Cynthia,’ Carter told Paul Bailey in the late radio interview, not long before she died,

we called her Kitty. My Aunt Kitty was a desperately unhappy and unfulfilled woman who went mad, spectacularly, in her sixties, and died . . . in Springfield Mental Hospital . . . She had a soubrette personality . . . which had always been thwarted. She was at a secondary school round here towards the end of the 1914 war and my grandmother was asked in and they wondered what they were going to do with Kit, what she was going to do when she left school, and my grandmother said, in all innocence and seriousness, well, we always thought she could go on the halls . . . and she never did, I mean the headmistress thought that my grandmother had suggested that she should go on the streets . . . and Kit became a clerk, and was very unhappy, as I say. And I thought, you know, that maybe I would send her on the halls.¹⁴

Wise Children lets the lost be found and the old be young. It invents impossible fertilities. It renews everything it touches. It bursts with energy, passion, wit, hilarity, hope, skill, art and love. Resurrective in so many ways, it’s Carter’s final legacy, and it’s a legacy of good, fierce, raucous potential. What a wisdom. What a joy.

1 Angela Carter, Shaking a Leg: Selected Journalism and Writings (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997), p. 37.

3 ‘Omnibus: Angela Carter’s Curious Room’, BBC transmission script, 15 September 1992, p. 24.

4 Entry on Angela Carter, The Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English, ed. Lorna Sage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 116.

5 ‘The Third Ear’, Interview with Paul Bailey, BBC Radio 4, June 1991. (I use this interview, in which Carter talks a great deal about Wise Children, which had just been published, throughout this introduction, and am much indebted to Paul Bailey for finding me a copy.)

7 Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History, (London: Virago Press, 1979) pp. 4–5.

9 Lorna Sage, Good As Her Word: Selected Journalism, (London: Fourth Estate, 2003), p. 75.

One

Good morning! Let me introduce myself. My name is Dora Chance. Welcome to the wrong side of the tracks.

Put it another way. If you’re from the States, think of Manhattan. Then think of Brooklyn. See what I mean? Or, for a Parisian, it might be a question of rive gauche, rive droite. With London, it’s the North and South divide. Me and Nora, that’s my sister, we’ve always lived on the left-hand side, the side the tourist rarely sees, the bastard side of Old Father Thames.

Once upon a time, you could make a crude distinction, thus: the rich lived amidst pleasant verdure in the North speedily whisked to exclusive shopping by abundant public transport while the poor eked out miserable existences in the South in circumstances of urban deprivation condemned to wait for hours at windswept bus-stops while sounds of marital violence, breaking glass and drunken song echoed around and it was cold and dark and smelled of fish and chips. But you can’t trust things to stay the same. There’s been a diaspora of the affluent, they jumped into their diesel Saabs and dispersed throughout the city. You’d never believe the price of a house round here, these days. And what does the robin do then, poor thing?

Bugger the robin! What would have become of us, if Grandma hadn’t left us this house? 49 Bard Road, Brixton, London, South West Two. Bless this house. If it wasn’t for this house, Nora and I would be on the streets by now, hauling our worldlies up and down in plastic bags, sucking on the bottle for comfort like babes unweaned, bursting into songs of joy when finally admitted to the night shelter and therefore chucked out again immediately for disturbing the peace, to gasp and freeze and finally snuff it disregarded on the street and blow away like rags. That’s a thought for a girl’s seventy-fifth birthday, what?

Yes! Seventy-five. Happy birthday to me. Born in this house, indeed, this very attic, just seventy-five years ago, today. I made my bow five minutes ahead of Nora who is, at this very moment, downstairs, getting breakfast. My dearest sister. Happy birthday to us.

This is my room. We don’t share. We’ve always respected one another’s privacy. Identical, well and good; Siamese, no. Everything slightly soiled, I’m sorry to say. Can’t be doing with wash, wash, wash, polish, polish, polish, these days, when time is so precious, but take a good look at the signed photos stuck in the dressing-table mirror – Ivor; Noel; Fred and Adèle; Jack; Ginger; Fred and Ginger; Anna, Jessie, Sonnie, Binnie. All friends and colleagues, once upon a time. See the newest one, a tall girl, slender, black curls, enormous eyes, no drawers, ‘your very own Tiffany’ and lots of XXXXXs. Isn’t she lovely? Our beloved godchild. We tried to put her off show business but she wasn’t having any. ‘What’s good enough for you two is good enough for me.’ ‘Show business’, right enough; a prettier girl than little Tiff you never saw but she’s showed her all.

What did we do? Got it in one. We used to be song and dance girls. We can still lift a leg higher than your average dog, if called for.

Hello, hello . . . here comes one of the pussy cats, out of the wardrobe, stretching and yawning. She can smell the bacon. There’s another, white, with marmalade patches, sleeping on my pillow. Dozens more roam freely. The house smells of cat, a bit, but more of geriatric chorine – cold cream, face powder, dress preservers, old fags, stale tea.

You’ve got to have something to cuddle. Does Pussy want its breakfast, then? Give us a minute, Puss, let’s have a look out of the window.

Cold, bright, windy, spring weather, just like the day that we were born, when the Zeppelins were falling. Lovely blue sky, a birthday present in itself. I knew a boy, once, with eyes that colour, years ago. Bare as a rose, not a hair on him; he was too young for body hair. And sky-blue eyes.

You can see for miles, out of this window. You can see right across the river. There’s Westminster Abbey, see? Flying the St George’s cross, today. St Paul’s, the single breast. Big Ben, winking its golden eye. Not much else familiar, these days. This is about the time that comes in every century when they reach out for all that they can grab of dear old London, and pull it down. Then they build it up again, like London Bridge in the nursery rhyme, goodbye, hello, but it’s never the same. Even the railway stations, changed out of recognition, turned into souks. Waterloo. Victoria. Nowhere you can get a decent cup of tea, all they give you is Harvey Wallbangers, filthy cappuccino. Stocking shops and knicker outlets everywhere you look. I said to Nora: ‘Remember Brief Encounter, how I cried buckets? Nowhere for them to meet on a station, nowadays, except in a bloody knicker shop. Their hands would have to shyly touch under cover of a pair of Union Jack boxer shorts.’

‘Come off it, you sentimental sod,’ said Nora. ‘The only brief encounter you had during the war was a fling with a Yank behind the public convenience on Liverpool Street Station.’

‘I was only doing my bit for the war effort,’ I replied sedately, but she wasn’t listening, she started to giggle.

‘’ere, Dor’, smashing name for a lingerie shop – Brief Encounter.’ She doubled up.

Sometimes I think, if I look hard enough, I can see back into the past. There goes the wind, again. Crash. Over goes the dustbin, all the trash spills out . . . empty cat-food cans, cornflakes packets, laddered tights, tea leaves . . . I am at present working on my memoirs and researching family history – see the word processor, the filing cabinet, the card indexes, right hand, left hand, right side, left side, all the dirt on everybody. What a wind! Whooping and banging all along the street, the kind of wind that blows everything topsy-turvy.

Seventy-five, today, and a topsy-turvy day of wind and sunshine. The kind of wind that gets into the blood and drives you wild. Wild!

And I give a little shiver because suddenly I know, I know it in my ancient water, that something will happen today. Something exciting. Something nice, something nasty, I don’t give a monkey’s. Just as long as something happens to remind us we’re still in the land of the living.

The plaque on the dial of our grandfather in the front hall says it was made in Inverness in 1846 and, as far as I know, it is a unique example of an authentic Highland-style grandfather clock and as such was exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Its High-landness consists of a full set of antlers, eight points, on top of it. Sometimes we use the antlers as a hat rack, if either of us happens to go out wearing a hat, which doesn’t happen often, but now and then, when it rains. This clock has got a lot of sentimental value for Nora and me. It came to us from our father. His only gift and even then it came by accident. Great, tall, butch, horny mahogany thing, but it gives out the hours in a funny little falsetto ping and always the wrong hour, always out by one. We never got round to fixing it. To tell the truth, it makes us laugh, always has. It was all right until Grandma fixed it. All she did was tap it and the weights dropped off. She always had that effect on gentlemen.

But, as I passed by our grandfather clock this windy birthday morning, cats scampering in front of me maddened by the smell of bacon, it struck. And struck. And struck. And this time got it right, straight on the nosey – eight o’clock!

‘Nor’! Nor’! Something’s up! Granddad in the hall got the right time, for once!’

‘Something else is up, too,’ Nora says in a gratified voice and slings me a thick, white envelope with a crest on the back. ‘Our invites have arrived at last.’

She starts to pour out tea, while Wheelchair fizzes and stutters when I pull out that stiff, white card we thought would never come.

The Misses Dora and Leonora Chance

are invited

to a celebration to mark the one hundredth birthday

Sir Melchior Hazard

‘One Man in his Time Plays Many Parts.’

Wheelchair fizzed, sputtered and boiled right over; she screeched fit to bust but Nora consoled her:

‘Hold hard, ducky, we’re never going to leave you behind! Yes, Cinders, you shall go to the ball, even if you aren’t mentioned by name on the invite. Let’s have all the skeletons out of the closet, today, of all days! God knows, we deserve a spot of bubbly after all these years.’

I squinted at the RSVP, to that posh house in Regent’s Park and Lady Hazard, the third and present spouse. Whereas our poor old Wheelchair, here, was his first, which accounts for her spleen, as ex, at failing to feature personally on the invitation. And the Misses Leonora and Dora, that is, yours truly, are, of course, Sir Melchior Hazard’s daughters, though not, ahem, by any of his wives. We are his natural daughters, as they say, as if only unmarried couples do it the way that nature intended. His never-by-him officially recognised daughters, with whom, by a bizarre coincidence, he shares a birthday.

‘They’ve not given us much time to reply,’ I complained. ‘It’s only tonight, isn’t it?’

‘Something makes you think they don’t want us to go?’ Nora’s lost a couple of back molars, you can’t help but notice when she laughs. I’ve kept all mine. Otherwise, like as two peas, as ever was. Years ago, the only way you could tell us apart was by our perfume. She used Shalimar, me, Mitsouko.

All the same, identical we may be, but symmetrical – never. For the body itself isn’t symmetrical. One of your feet is bound to be bigger than the other, one ear will leak more wax. Nora is fluxy; me, constipated. She was always free with her money, squandered it on the fellers, poor thing, whereas I tried to put a bit by. Her menstrual flow was copious to a fault; mine, meagre. She said: ‘Yes!’ to life and I said, ‘Maybe . . .’ But we’re both in the same boat, now. Stuck with each other. Two batty old hags, buy us a drink and we’ll sing you a song. Even manage, a knees-up, on occasion, such as New Year’s Eve or a publican’s grandbaby.

We’re stuck in the period at which we peaked, of course. All women do. We’d feel mutilated if you made us wipe off our Joan Crawford mouths and we always do our hair up in great big Victory rolls when we go out. We’ve still got lots of it, thank God, iron grey though it may be and tucked away in scarves, turban-style, this very moment, to hide the curlers. We always make an effort. We paint an inch thick. We put on our faces before we come down to breakfast, the Max Factor Pan-Stik, the false eyelashes with the three coats of mascara, everything. We used to polish our eyelids with Vaseline, when we were girls, but we gave up on that during the war and now use just a simple mushroom shadow for day plus a hint of tobacco brown, to deepen the tone, and a charcoal eyeliner. Our fingernails match our toenails match our lipstick match our rouge. Revlon, Fire and Ice. The habit of applying warpaint outlasts the battle; haven’t had a man for yonks but still we slap it on. Nobody could say the Chance girls were going gently into that good night.

We’d got our best kimonos on, because it was our birthday. Real silk, mine mauve with a plum-blossom design on the back, Nora’s crimson with a chrysanthemum. Our beloved Uncle Perry, that is, the late, and by his nieces grievously lamented, Peregrine Hazard, sent us back our kimonos from Nagasaki, years ago, before Pearl Harbor, when he was on one of his trips. Underneath, camiknickers with a French lace trim, lilac satin for me, crushed rose crepe for her. Tasty, eh? Course, we were wearing camiknickers before they came back.

Our hipbones stick out more than they used to; we look quite gaunt in our undies, these days, but she’s the only one who sees me in the altogether, and me her, and we pass muster with our clothes on. Our cheekbones stick out more than they used to, too, but they’re the very best cheekbones, I’d have you know – these cheekbones are descended from some of the most profitable calcium deposits in the world. Like all those who spend much time before the public eye, our father has always been dependent on his bone structure. God bless the Hazard calcium; it’s kept osteoporosis at bay. Long and lean we always were and long and lean we are now, thank God. Some superannuated hoofers put on the avoirdupois like nobody’s business.

‘What shall we wear tonight?’ asked Nora, stubbing her fag out in her saucer, pouring herself another cup. She’s a regular teapot. Wheelchair moaned a little.

‘Don’t fret, dear,’ Nora soothed. ‘You can wear your Normal Hartnell and the pearls, all right? We’ll do you up something lovely.’

That calmed it down, poor old stick. Known to us as Wheelchair, known to the world, once upon a time, as Lady Atalanta Hazard. A Lady in her own right, she’d have you know, a perfect lady, unlike our father’s next two wives. She married Melchior Hazard when he was just a matinée idol, and divorced him long before that knighthood they gave him for ‘services to the theatre’. Née Lady Atalanta Lynde, ‘the most beautiful woman of her time’, born with a silver spoon, etc. etc. etc. but now an antique divorcee in reduced circumstances, to whit, the basement front of 49 Bard Road.

All in good time I shall reveal to you how it has come to pass that we inherited, in her dotage and, come to that, in ours, the first wife of our illegitimate father. Suffice to say that nobody else would have her. Least of all her own two daughters. Bloody cows. ‘The lovely Hazard girls’, they used to call them. Huh. Lovely is as lovely does; if they looked like what they behave like, they’d frighten little children.

We’ve been storing Wheelchair in the basement for well-nigh thirty years. We’ve got quite attached to her. Earlier on, Nora used to take her out shopping, give her some fresh air and that, until she nearly starts a riot, she says to the bloke at the salad stall: ‘Have you got anything in the shape of a cucumber, my good fellow?’ After that, we had to keep her home for her own sake.

Sometimes she goes on a bit, on and on, on and on and bloody on, in fact, worrying away at how Melchior took the best years of her life then deserted her for a Hollywood harlot – his Number Two bride – and how the ‘lovely Hazard girls’ did her out of all her money and how she fell downstairs and can never walk again and on and on and on and on until you want to throw a blanket over her, like you do to shut up a parrot. But there’s not a scrap of harm in her and, besides, we owe her one from way back.

I had a go at the teapot, too, but too late, got half a cup of sodden leaves, went out to the scullery to put the kettle on, again. Here we sit, in our negligées, in the breakfast room in the leather armchairs by the Readicole electric fire. Sometimes we sit there all day, drink tea, chew the fat. Wheelchair plays solitaire, does tapestry. The cats come and go.

Sometimes when we’ve had our supper we plug Wheelchair into the TV – she loves the commercials, she watches out for the ones with Melchior in them, then she heckles the screen – we go and don some bits and bobs of former finery such as, for example, those matching silver-fox trench coats Howard Hughes gave us, and we sally forth to the local, where we are occasionally invited to perform one of the numbers that brought us fame, once upon a time. And sometimes we perform uninvited.

Nora shoved across the bundle. The electricity bill, again; Neighbourhood Watch, again; next door complaining about the cats, again; some kid in New Jersey wanting to interview us for his Ph.D., Film Studies, bloody Midsummer Night’s Dream, again. At our age, you feel you’ve seen it all before. I note that little Tiff, our darling love, our chick, our cherished one, our goddaughter, is too preoccupied with her Big Affair at present to drop us birthday greetings. Youth, youth.

Then the doorbell rang and made me jump. The gas man? Never the gas man, he never leans on the bell with all his weight like that, he just gives a reticent little tinkle ever since he got Nora in her altogether except for her nail polish, she’d jumped straight out of the bath, she’d thought he was a telegram. No. This was a fierce, long ring. Then another. And another. We started up, we stiffened. Then he on the doorstep hammers with his fists and shouts:

Our father’s youngest son, young Tristram Hazard. Why does he call us ‘aunties’ when we are, in fact, his half-sisters, even if on the wrong side of the blanket? You will find out in due course. And has he come to wish us ‘Happy birthday’? If so, why the panic? He shouted so, I was all of a flutter. I fumbled with the lock, the bolts, the chain – like Fort Knox, round here. You can’t be too careful, these days. We had a mass breakout from Brixton Nick last year, they came over the garden wall like formation dancers.

Young Tristram fell into my arms as if legless when I got the door open. Unshaven, mad-eyed and all his red hair was coming out of his funny little pigtail and blowing about in the wind that was blowing all the garbage in at the front gate. He looked deranged. And he’d put on a lot of weight since I last saw him, too. He hung on to me, panting for breath.

‘Do pull yourself together, Tristram, you’ve made a big, wet patch on my silk,’ I said sharply.

But Wheelchair catches it from time to time, cackling away in her genteel fashion, rejoicing even in her approaching senility at how low the house of Hazard has sunk in this its last generation – or, as she sometimes wittily puts it, cackling harder than ever, ‘the final degeneration of the House of Hazard’. And we did watch the first five minutes, once, we felt we ought to take in our little Tiff’s television debut.

Tiffany is the ‘hostess’, whatever that means. She smiles a lot, she shows her tits. What a waste. She’d have made a lovely dancer, if only she’d stuck with it. We watched her first five minutes. Five minutes was enough, I can tell you; then we adjourned to the boozer, muttering. His programme goes out live. That’s its speciality.

‘They’d get better ratings if he was dead,’ said Nora. ‘The only posthumous presenter on TV. What a coup.’

Tristram wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and then I saw he had been crying.

That took the smile off my face, I can tell you. Nora yelled up from the kitchen. ‘What’s biting young Lochinvar?’ He was in a state, blubbering and babbling, Scotch on his breath to knock you over. When we got him settled in an armchair, he thrust a cassette into my hand.

‘Have a look,’ he says. ‘I can’t explain. Watch it, see what happened.’

Then he spotted the photo of little Tiff in the silver frame that we keep on the breakfast-room mantelpiece and the waterworks started up again. I felt quite sorry for the poor kid. ‘Kid’, I say. He’s all of thirty-five; he’ll be pushing forty in no time. All the same, his stock in trade is boyish charm. God knows what he’ll do when he loses that. But we were all a-tremble, all anxiety; what the fuck was going on? So Nora bunged his cassette in the VCR sharpish.

We got the VCR to catch up with those Busby Berkeley musicals they put out Saturday afternoons. We tape them, watch them over and over, freeze-frame our favourite bits. It drives Wheelchair mad. And Fred and Ginger, of course. Good old Fred. Nostalgia, the vice of the aged. We watch so many old movies our memories come in monochrome.

A burst of buzz and static shocked Wheelchair out of the trance she falls into when she’s nicely greased with bacon after breakfast. ‘What’s happening? What’s he doing here?’ She fixed Tristram with a suspicious eye, for he was no kin of hers, while the picture settled down on a flight of neon steps in a burst of canned applause as he came bounding down with his red hair slicked back, his top-of-the-milk-coloured rumpled linen Giorgio Armani whistle and flute, Tristram Hazard, weak but charming, game-show presenter and television personality, last gasp of the imperial Hazard dynasty that bestrode the British theatre like a colossus for a century and a half. Tristram, youngest son of the great Melchior Hazard, ‘prince of players’; grandson of those tragic giants of the Victorian stage, Ranulph and Estella ‘A star danced’ Hazard. Lo, how the mighty have fallen.

The camera closes in as he sings out, ‘Hi, there, lolly lovers! I’m Tristram Hazard and I’ve come to bring you . . .’ Now he throws back his head, showing off his throat, he’s got a real, old-fashioned, full-bodied, Ivory Novello-type throat, he throws his head back and cries out in the voice of an ecstatic: ‘LASHINGS OF LOLLY! LASHINGS OF LOLLY!’

Let us pause awhile in the unfolding story of Tristram and Tiffany so that I can fill you in on the background. High time! you must be saying. Just who is this Melchior Hazard and his clan, his wives, his children, his hangers-on? It is in order to provide some of the answers to those questions that I, Dora Chance, in the course of assembling notes towards my own autobiography, have inadvertently become the chronicler of all the Hazards, although I should think that my career as such will go as publicly unacknowledged by the rest of the dynasty as my biological career has done for not only are Nora and I, as I have already told you, by-blows, but our father was a pillar of the legit. theatre and we girls are illegitimate in every way – not only born out of wedlock, but we went on the halls, didn’t we!

Romantic illegitimacy, always a seller. It ought to copper-bottom the sales of my memoirs. But, to tell the truth, there was sod all romantic about our illegitimacy. At best, it was a farce, at worst, a tragedy, and a chronic inconvenience the rest of the time. But the urge has come upon me before I drop to seek out an answer to the question that always teased me, as if the answer were hidden, somewhere, behind a curtain: whence came we? Whither goeth we?

I know the answer to the second question, of course. Bound for oblivion, nor leave a wrack behind. Never spawned, neither of us, although Nora wanted to, everso, and towards the end of her menstrual life greeted each flow with tears. Me, no. I was pleased as Punch each time I saw it and even more so when it stopped, short, never to go again, like grandfather’s clock in the old song though not at all like our grandfather clock, which remains in fine if high-pitched fettle, thank you very much.

But, as to the question of origins and past history, let me plunge deep into the archaeology of my desk, casting aside the photo of Ruby Keeler (‘To Nora and Dora, four fabulous feet, from your Ruby’).

About the Book

About the Author

ALSO BY ANGELA CARTER

Wise Children

Angela Carter

With an Introduction by Ali Smith

Introduction

One