Wise Children by Angela Carter Page B

going to say, before I was so rudely interrupted, was . . . as long as a fiddle!’
    They pounded the floorboards with their feet.
    ‘“Looks like I’ll never get married, Mum.” “Why’s that, son?” He told her all about it, she says: “You just go ahead and marry who you like, son –”’
    Split-second timing. That pause. Perfect.
    ‘ ’E ’s not your father!’
    They stamped and pounded so you would have thought the floor was going to give way. Perry gazed on, amazed. ‘Well, God bless the bloody British,’ he said. ‘I never thought they had it in them.’
    When the audience quieted down, they put a pink filter on the spot so Gorgeous George flushed all over. He put on a lugubrious look and sucked in his cheeks. It was time for his tenor number. The lady accompanist, one of Mrs Worthington’s ilk, gave the piano a good thump. George clasped his hands together on his club, adopted a reverential air, and, would you believe it, there, in his pink suit in the pink spot, on the end of Brighton Pier, on August bank bloody holiday, he gave out with ‘Rose of England’.
    Rose of England, breathing England’s air,
    Flower of majesty beyond compare . . .
    The Pierrots, all turned pink themselves, formed groups reminiscent of posies and nosegays and sank to their knees for the throbbing finale. You couldn’t get away with that sort of thing, these days, not unless it was what they call ‘camp’. Then George held up his hand to quell the applause and, stepping forward, announced in a voice heavy with emotion:
    ‘Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls . . . long live the King!’
    The lady accompanist struck up ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ in spite of a couple of bum notes in the bass and George shouldered his golf club as if it were a rifle and commenced to march round and round the stage in military fashion, the mauve tongues of his suede brogues lolling voluptuously half a beat behind him.
    Left, right, halt.
    He salutes the audience under the spot, which is now bright white again, the limelight falling on his shoulders like dandruff. The lady accompanist simulates a drumroll, to the best of her ability. Off comes his satin cap.
    Nora and I looked at one another, puzzled. What on earth was going on?
    Another drumroll.
    Off comes his rose-pink jacket.
    Odder and odder.
    And it turned out that George himself, in himself, in his skin, is the prime spectacle on offer, this afternoon.
    For George was not a comic at all but an enormous statement.
    If I hadn’t seen it with my own two eyes, I’d never have believed it. Displayed across his torso there was, if you took the top of his head as the North Pole and the soles of his feet as the South, a complete map of the entire world.
    He flexed his muscles and that funny little three-cornered island with appendages on the right bicep sprang out, the Irish Free State giving a little quiver. The lady accompanist hit the first few notes of ‘God Save the King’ and half the punters, from sheer force of habit, began to struggle to their feet, scattering shed gloves and chocolate papers, but soon sank down again and let him get on with it when the next thing he did was, take off his plus-fours.
    Nora and I were only girls, never seen a man without his trousers on although Grandma had drawn us pictures, and, I must say, we were quite keenly curious so we craned forward eagerly but it turned out he stripped off only to reveal a gee-string of very respectable dimensions, more of a gee-gee string, would have kept a horse decent, and it was made out of the Union Jack. Amply though the garment concealed his privates, now you could see the Cape of Good Hope situated in his navel and observe the Falkland Islands disappear down the crack of his bum when he did his grand patriotic ninety-degree rotation, to the reawakened applause that never quite died down during the entire display but sometimes rose in greater peaks than at other times.
    We gazed enraptured on the