Wise Children Read Online Free PDF Page B

doesn’t look more than a schoolgirl in the picture on the postcard, in her nightie, with her hair down her back. ‘Sing willow, willow, willow.’ Cassius Booth played lago. There is no handkerchief in this story. All the same, her husband killed them both, first her, then him. They’d slipped out together during the first-night party. Old acquaintances. Perhaps, by then, Old Ranulph couldn’t tell the difference between Shakespeare and living. Next morning, the notices were magnificent but the murder itself had to wait for the noon editions because the chambermaid didn’t find the bodies on the bed in Estella’s hotel room until she brought up late breakfast. Three bodies. He shot them both and then he shot himself.
    Exeunt omnes . She’d always had a gift for exits.
    But life goes on.
    The two little boys were stranded in New York, poor tragic waifs, and there they almost expired themselves, or so Perry said, because they were so stuffed with candy, hot dogs and pie à la mode by the lovely ladies with low-slung bosoms and feathered hats who went about their business in the hotel lobby. There was no money left as such, only an actor’s inheritance of unpaid bills, paste jewellery, flash attitudes, but the Plaza extended them credit and so they learned to live beyond their means.
    Now, although these two were twins, they were not alike as two peas. Melchior, at ten, was dark and brooding, registering already the beginnings of the profile which would dominate Shaftesbury Avenue. That profile was to Melchior what Clark Gable’s ears were to him. Dark eyes, lashes of the kind they say are ‘wasted on a boy’ and a physique that turned out to be ready-made for leaping and fencing and climbing up to balconies and all the things a Shakespearian actor needs to do. I know that all these things, not forgetting his ‘splendid gift of gravitas’, all together point the finger at Cassius Booth as his father, but don’t forget that poor old Ranulph had been a matinée idol, too, in his day, even if in his day women wore crinolines, and there remains a gigantic question mark over the question of their paternity, although whoever it was who contributed the actual jism, no child need ever have been ashamed of either contender and, as for me, the grandchild, I like to think both of them had a hand in it, if you follow me.
    But Peregrine was a holy terror and couldn’t keep a straight face, just like his mother. As young Macduff, he’d entered with a piss-pot on his head and given an audience of sheepshearers outside Perth their best moment of the evening. Melchior never let him on the stage again. Even as little scraps, Melchior was all for art and Peregrine was out for fun. Don’t think that, just because they were brothers, they liked one another. Far from it. Chalk and cheese.
    They lived on room service and the kindness of strangers until the boat docked from Leith and off it came their comeuppance – Miss Euphemia Hazard, dour as hell, Presbyterian to the backbone, their aunt. Warden of a workhouse near Pitlochry and sworn enemy of the stage and all who trod it, who never shed a tear for brother or for sister-in-law because she thought their violent ends were the Lord’s revenge, a kind of wild justice. She grabbed Melchior by the scruff, stuffed him shrieking into a trunk marked ‘Not wanted on voyage’, and reached out for Peregrine but he gave a shrug and a wriggle and left his old tweed jacket in her hand while he himself was gone, whoosh! out of the window, down the fire escape, a shirtsleeved, carrot-topped ten-year-old hurtling helter-skelter down the pavement, sending a hot-dog stand flying, a bootblack sprawling and . . . he vanished.
    Vanished clean away into America and though, later on, he told a wondrous tale of all his doings and hoboings as a boy, as to what really befell him, I do not have a notion except that it can have been no cakewalk and, when he first found us, he was as rich as Croesus.
    So