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has turned out that Gareth Hazard, SJ, has stayed most faithful to the family tradition of proselytising zeal, for now the old man was seized with the most imperative desire, to spread and go on spreading the Word overseas. Willy-nilly, off must go his wife and children, too, to take Shakespeare where Shakespeare had never been before.
    In those days, there was so much pink on the map of the world that English was spoken everywhere. No language problem. Off to the ends of the Empire they went, rolling to the rhythms of the sea as they crossed, crisscrossed the oceans. I see it in my mind’s eye as if it were a movie – the ocean liner slipping her moorings, gliding away from the quay, the siren blaring, the crowd throwing flowers, the red-haired woman on the deck, smiling, waving, smiling.
    Our Uncle Peregrine inherited her scarlet hair. So did our half-sisters, Saskia and Imogen. Tristram, too. Not us, worse luck. The red hair only went to the legit. side. As for me and Nora, first of all, we were mouse. Then we dyed it. When we stopped dyeing (black), we found out that we had, all unbeknownst to ourselves, gone grey.
    Our Uncle Peregrine was his mother’s boy.
    We were hurrying down the street, he told me, on tour in Australia. It was in Sydney, down by the Circular Quay. We were on our way to some ladies’ lunch club – she did guest appearances, it helped with the finances, Ranulph was chronically short of a bob. We were late, of course, because she hadn’t been able to find a clean frock but after much rummaging came up with one with only a couple of little wine stains and smear of marmalade so she pinned a bunch of frangipani over the worst of it and got her hair up, somehow. Melchior stayed behind with Father, to watch him running through Julius Caesar. We came to an organ-grinder, we stopped to admire the monkey. She gave the organ-grinder sixpence and he played ‘Daisy, Daisy’. She took my hand and we danced, right there, on the pavement. Her hairpins scattered everywhere. My celluloid collar burst in two. The monkey clapped its paws together. Everybody stared. ‘Come on!’ she said to the world in general. ‘Join in!’ Then everybody started dancing, they all took hold of the hand of the next perfect stranger. ‘I’m half crazy, all for the love of you.’ She looked upon what she had accomplished and was glad. We missed soup, we missed fish, we arrived at the table at the same time as the chicken. Her hair was down her back, she’d lost her flowers, one slipper with a broken heel, her small son collarless, tieless, and I’d got the monkey on my shoulder – she’d swapped her gold watch for it. She did them Portia’s speech, ‘The quality of mercy . . .’ She made them happy. There was mango icecream for dessert, our favourite. We had three bowlfuls each. In Melbourne, they named a sundae after her, ‘Ice-cream Estella’, mango ice-cream topped with passionfruit purée. If ever we get to Melbourne, together, Floradora, I’ll treat you to an ‘Ice-cream Estella’.
    Always the lucky one, our Peregrine, even in his memories, which were full of laughter and dancing; he always remembered the good times.
    Peregrine Hazard, adventurer, magician, seducer, explorer, scriptwriter, rich man, poor man – but never either beggerman or thief. At our age, Nora and I have got more friends among the dead than with the living. We often go visiting in cemeteries to trim the grass growing over the friends of our youth but we don’t even know where your grave might be, dear Perry, to go and lay a flower on it. You spent your childhood on the road, here today, gone tomorrow; you grew up a restless man. You loved change. And fornication. And trouble. And, funnily enough, towards the end, you loved butterflies. Peregrine Hazard, lost among the butterflies, lost in the jungle, vanished away as neatly and completely as if you had become the object of one of those conjuring tricks you were so fond of.
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