Sex and Stravinsky Page 10

  So Hattie did as she was told. The peas, as usual, came a virulent green, since Mrs Marchmont-Thomas liked to add a spoon of bicarb to the cooking water; a handy trick that Gertrude would be carrying with her, along the road to nowhere.

  By the time Hattie had reached her sixteenth birthday, her father had decided to stop paying for his daughter’s ballet lessons. The decision came just as she had managed to win a trio of coveted medals at the annual national eisteddfod. She had had her photograph in all the papers, wearing a tutu that her teacher had given her – ‘Only for you, dear Hattie’ – a treasured item that had once belonged to her previous star pupil, Margaret Barbieri. A local girl who was, by then, a principal dancer with the Royal Ballet in London.

  ‘And we’re planning for you to follow in her footsteps,’ the teacher said to Hattie. ‘I have my eye on you.’

  But right then there was James, who needed his parents’ money to buy him into the beginnings of a career, of sorts, in business. Something to keep him on the straight and narrow, but his record was such that the effort was proving both difficult and expensive. It was also requiring the twisting of several influential arms. Hattie’s teacher was incensed by Hattie’s most recent disheartening intelligence, and, on this occasion, she kept her pupil company all the way home.

  There she confronted Mr Marchmont-Thomas and offered to waive Hattie’s fees.

  ‘Your daughter, as you must surely know, is really talented,’ she said. ‘It’s a privilege for me to teach her. And we have plans for her future, she and I. Don’t we, Hattie dear?’

  Mr Marchmont-Thomas was deeply affronted and asked her to leave at once. Then he sent his daughter to her room.

  ‘The cheek of the woman!’ he said to his wife. ‘As if we were beggars, Kathleen.’

  ‘She meant it for the best,’ said Mrs Marchmont-Thomas, on one of her martyred sighs. ‘It was kind of her to make the offer.’

  ‘It’s completely out of the question,’ Mr Marchmont-Thomas replied. ‘Hattie must simply start pulling her weight. It’s time she left school and found employment. That’s until she gets married.’

  Mr Marchmont-Thomas had not been employed since the recent closure of the last of the gentlemen’s outfitters, though he was wont to don his business suit each morning and bustle off to his club.

  ‘Oh blah!’ said Hattie’s ballet teacher, when she was informed of this decision. ‘Forgive me, Hattie. I know he’s your father, but what is the matter with that man? I tell you what, my darling. I’ll employ you – full-time and from today. But you must make me two solemn promises. No handouts to that brother of yours and we’re going to drop all this “hyphen-Marchmont” business. Lose it, all right, Hattie?’

  So Hattie left school and became Hattie Thomas. She gave classes while she prepared herself for a scholarship to London’s Central School of Ballet.

  ‘We are going to get you there,’ her teacher said with conviction. ‘Upward and onward, Hattie! But we’ve got to toughen you up, my dear. You need to be tough in this profession and you’re a bit too much of a pushover.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ Hattie said.

  And Hattie duly won the scholarship, but her success coincided with an unfortunate event that neither Mr Marchmont-Thomas nor his wife could sweep under one of their mould-green carpets. James, having been wheedled into the offices of one of his father’s one-time business associates, had soon been discovered with his fingers in the safe and, furthermore, he was concurrently in the Juvenile Court on a charge of stealing a sports car. Hattie’s mother was taking this very badly and had had to get pills from the doctor. She had hardly risen from her bed in fourteen days and she’d been refusing food. Her blood pressure was rising and she had begun to suffer from a constant buzzing in the ears.

  ‘Your mother is not at all well, Henrietta,’ Mr Marchmont-Thomas told his daughter. ‘We are all of us having to make sacrifices and that must include you. The scholarship is out of the question. You are badly needed at home.’

  Then, some years later, when her teacher retired, she’d handed over the school to the pupil for whom she had once had such high hopes.

  And Hattie, pliable, pushover Hattie, who has spent her years between sixteen and thirty-four giving ballet classes to children, now writes ballet stories for girls. She keeps Margaret Barbieri’s tutu hanging over the desk where she writes. Lola, her heroine, is a strong-minded girl, who leaves her home on the east coast of Africa, against the wishes of her family. She takes up a scholarship at the Central School of Ballet in London, where she toughs it out through hardship and success. The first book Hattie dedicates to her little daughter Cat, who just then is eager to start lessons, but within the year Cat has packed it in.

  Once Cat has done with her breakfast Coco Pops, and has so effectively slapped down her mother, she dons her regulation school hat and takes herself off to high school. Hattie makes herself a piece of toast, which she nibbles as she proceeds upstairs to the turret, where she sits down to deal with her correspondence. Then she takes a shower and she puts on her clothes. She sets off on foot for the local shopping mall, but meets the postman at her gate, who hands her a sheaf of envelopes.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says. She stuffs the envelopes into her bag and walks on.

  Once there, she enters the music shop, where she buys herself the CD of Stravinsky’s Pulcinella. Then she sits down at a café table with a mug of cappuccino. Hattie loves this little ritual of lingering alone in cafés; loves the anonymity of it; loves getting out of the house. She takes the notes from the sleeve and starts to read the words. It isn’t ‘screw-gender’ that she’s heard, of course. What she’s heard is ‘struggendo’. ‘Struggendo si va. Per voi il core struggendo si va.’ For you my heart languishes. Then she glances through the letters. All of them are for Herman except for one, which she opens and reads. It’s from the drama department of the local university and it’s asking her, with apologies for the shortness of notice, to take part in their conference on mime.

  Hattie blinks. She reads the letter again, feeling a twinge of excitement. Me? she’s thinking to herself. Me? Speak at a conference?

  Then, as she reads it a third time, she takes note that someone is planting an overlarge tuna sandwich on the table, which is almost making contact with her letter. Blast! How she hates this, especially as the café isn’t even particularly full. The sandwich is quartered and it comes on an oval platter festooned with rocket leaves. It is soon followed by a tall fluted glass of what looks to her like guava juice.

  ‘May I?’ says a familiar voice; a voice from way back, but one that so recently has happened to gatecrash her sleeping brain. ‘It is you, isn’t it?’ says the voice. ‘Of course it is.’

  When Hattie looks up, she sees that Josh Silver is standing there and he’s staring at her hard. Josh Silver, in the flesh; tousled curls, turned half-and-half to grey; the chestnut almost leached out. Same glasses; Stravinsky’s glasses. Thick lenses that shrink his eyes. Her hand flies to her mouth as she looks up at him. Then it falls back on to the tabletop, on to the open letter, and she smiles at him with pleasure.

  He unhitches a canvas backpack from his left shoulder and eases it to the floor. Then he leans across the table and kisses her cheek.

  ‘Hat,’ he says. ‘How amazing. This is amazing. I saw you from the counter. Well, I thought I did. I couldn’t be sure. But of course I’m sure. You’re so –’ He stops and glances down at the letter and the sleeve notes.

  ‘Pulcinella,’ he says, and he laughs.

  ‘I’ve just been asked to this conference,’ she says.

  ‘Great!’ he says. ‘That’s great. Me too. It’s why I’m here. Only I’ve come early. I’ve got this little room near the beach, but I took one of those combi-taxis up the hill. You know. To prowl old haunts. I just walked past your church hall.’

  And then – oh no! – she has to go. Has to. Herman’s tenant will, at this moment, be arriving at her front door.

  Josh is visibly f
lustered.

  ‘Give me your phone number,’ he says. ‘Please, Hat.’

  She watches with a sinking heart as he writes the number in biro on his hand. Will he maybe forget and wash his hands?

  ‘I’m still in the same house,’ she says, as back-up.

  ‘Can we meet up later?’ he says. ‘Anywhere. Mitchell Park, maybe?’

  Mitchell Park, where the mynah birds will be doing their Hitchcock screeching as they home in, en masse, to roost.

  ‘Yes,’ she says, and she gathers up her stuff. ‘Yes, I’d love that. Call me. I’ll be at home all day.’ And then she’s off, on her little dancer’s feet; off at speed to meet Herman’s tenant. Giacomo Moroni.

  Chapter Four

  Josh

  The night before Josh leaves for South Africa to attend that conference on mime, he’s in the car, returning home with Caroline and his mother-in-law. Zoe, his darling lookalike daughter, has already left for her French exchange, and he hates it that he wasn’t there to wave her off. He was tied up in Bristol. Opera production. Joint production with the music department. And now, on his first free evening in weeks – his wedding anniversary, no less – the woman has seen fit to take control of the occasion. Tickets for the opera in London. Splashy treats courtesy of Caroline’s money; their money, of which they have precious little, thanks to the Witch Woman’s monthly allowance and mortgage payments – but Josh has long since ceased to air this grudge directly. He’s never coped well with confrontation, and what’s the point if you can’t win?

  ‘It’s your bronze, my darlings,’ he hears the woman say. (Or did she say tin? Or copper? Or plastic?) He wasn’t listening to her, because who gives a bugger about this sort of rubbish? Bronze, lead, zinc, chrome, uranium. Trust the Witch Woman to know this sort of crap. She who evidently drove her own husband to an early grave.

  And it’s been three tickets for the opera, not two, because Mrs McCleod likes to see ‘les jeunes enjoying themselves’, as she says. And she wouldn’t be able to see them, would she? Not if they’d gone off on their own. Caroline, as usual – prodigious Caroline, who can hold almost anyone in the palm of her hand – has not uttered a word to deter her mother from the opera project; Caroline, who, since taking on the headship of a local comprehensive school, can hold in thrall six hundred adolescents as a matter of daily routine.

  ‘Mum’s lonely,’ Caroline says to Josh.

  And there is every good reason why she should be lonely, Josh thinks, because any person of sound mind will be giving her a wide berth. Plus it really gets on his nerves when the old woman calls them ‘les jeunes’, because, leaving aside that he has recently turned forty-two, it brings him up against her idiotic assertion that ‘spiritually’ she’s French.

  ‘My heritage is Scottish,’ she says. ‘But in my soul I’m French.’ Josh is never quite sure which he hates more: ‘les jeunes’ or ‘the bairns’, but either way, he’s aware that her intent is to disempower. And, to underline his disempowerment, Josh is right now seated in the back of his own car because, thanks to his lousy eyesight, Caroline does all the night driving and his mother-in-law, by long-established tradition, claims rights to the front passenger seat.

  ‘When you bairns get a car with four doors . . .’ she says.

  Josh hates to travel long distances by car. It always makes him feel sick. Without Caroline’s mother they could be travelling home by train, but Mrs McCleod is of the opinion that public transport is exclusively for plebs.

  Rigoletto. That’s what they’ve been to see. ‘I know how much you like clowns, Josh,’ she has explained to him earlier that evening. And, sure as God, she must also know how much he hates these big, boom-boom operatic affairs. He likes early opera, for heaven’s sake; chamber opera; tightly plotted comedies in which everyone is in love with somebody else’s betrothed and sundry marriage contracts are called into question by a range of incompetent stage lawyers. Foppish drunken halfwits or scheming rogues. He likes it when the entire dramatis personae is cheating, spying, playing dead, and dressing up in other people’s clothes. He likes those stagy assignations in moonlit shrubberies and the constant dropping of love letters in regulation privet hedges, where the wrong people are always destined to pick them up. He likes precipitous conclusions in which all is resolved by timely revelation. A telling birthmark. An ancient nun with a very long memory. A mysterious stranger with a significant secret. A twin brother lost and found. Life redeemed through wit and coincidence, heady plot lines and acrobatic dexterity.

  Josh has just produced such an opera. Aged Tutor loves Beautiful Orphan. Hideous Crone loves Aged Tutor. Beautiful Orphan loves Twin Brother X. Twin Brother X loves Hideous Crone’s Daughter. Twin Brother Y loves Beautiful Orphan. Hideous Crone’s Daughter loves Twin Brother Y. A perfect balance of cruelty and choreography. Six people dancing in a box. Dance, dance, for there is only the dance. Josh likes entanglements with rope ladders and chairs. And he’s especially irritable right now, because, on this night – this very night – and not half a mile from where he has sat squirming through Rigoletto, was the last performance of that wild, astonishing Schoenberg, in which Pulcinella, in a frenzied dance, wrestles the moon from his clothes.

  So now, after the opera and from the back seat of his car, Josh is exercising the futile rhetoric of the ineffectual. He’s indulging in a degree of sarcastic carping after the event.

  ‘Time was,’ he says, ‘when Italian street actors dressed up in clown masks and threw piss pots at each other all over the piazza. Or they beat each other over the head. That was before the French got hold of the idea and – being French – they turned the clown into this toxic, self-obsessed introvert. So they end up with Pierrot. He of the chalk-white face and the painted teardrop. “Look at me. Feel sorry for me. Me, me and me. I’m so lonely. I’m so sad. And, by the way, I’m a psycho. But it’s all because nobody loves me.” ’

  Josh is aware, throughout this wind-up, that he actually adores French theatre; that what he’s doing is attacking the Witch Woman’s claim to a French ‘soul’. He’s also aware that Zoe has a white-faced Pierrot doll, given to her by Caroline’s mother. It sits on her bookshelf in the old red bus, alongside the plaster Beatrix Potter figures and the collection of little glass Bambis.

  And, yes, they are still living in the bus, but not for very much longer, because, for the second time in sixteen years of saving, Caroline’s dream of the little Victorian house is just about to come true. Within the month, they have ‘completed’ on the purchase of a house. Two up, two down and a lean-to kitchen at the back – and no need, after all, for the fireman’s pole. Caroline’s plan, throughout the period of Josh’s absence in South Africa, is to sand the floors, paint the walls and make improvements to the kitchen. She has plans to re-pot her clematis and honeysuckle, and to run up calico Roman blinds for all of the five sash windows. She will move the necessary furniture and effects while her husband and daughter are abroad.

  ‘It’ll be easier that way,’ she says. Infallible, put-down Caroline. Meanwhile, the bus will stay in the farmer’s field, to do service as a communal study. ‘And I’ll keep up the vegetable garden, of course,’ Caroline says. Of course.

  ‘Thank you, Mum, for a lovely evening,’ Josh hears her say. ‘It’s really been a very special treat.’

  ‘Well, I should say so,’ says the old woman. ‘I won’t embarrass you both with the price of the tickets.’

  ‘Then the French sell their psycho-clown back to the Italians,’ Josh continues, though he senses that no one is listening to him. ‘And that’s how we get to Rigoletto. Hey presto. The clown has become a serial killer.’

  Caroline’s mother responds by snapping on the radio, just in time for them to hear the tearful father of a runaway twelve-year-old being questioned about his feelings. His daughter has made it from Scunthorpe to Calais in the company of a forty-year-old penpal, before being recovered by the police.

  ‘How do I feel?’ the dad is saying. ‘I dunno. Joy. Exalta
tion. All the adjectives.’

  ‘Those aren’t adjectives,’ Josh says. ‘Those are abstract nouns.’

  ‘Think if it was Zoe,’ the Witch Woman says. ‘I mean these people she’s staying with in France. Do you know anything about them?’

  Josh lapses into brooding silence. There’s a car game he and Zoe like to play, in which they compete to spot entertaining news billboards, or outlets with idiotic names. Recently, because the signs have got too easy, they’ve given themselves a handicap. All words on the billboards have got to be monosyllabic. So ‘Brad Pitt Haircut Boy Banned from School’ was one they’d had to forgo, though Zoe had quibbled for a while over ‘haircut’. ‘It’s “hair cut”,’ she said.

  ‘Lottery Dinner Lady Charged with Theft’ was another to bite the dust. ‘Man Mugged at Mum’s Grave’ was one of Zoe’s triumphs, as was ‘School Run Dad has Mug of Gin’. And, right now, as they finally enter the outer reaches of Oxford’s townscape, Josh’s eye catches a gem in the brightly lit forecourt of his mother-in-law’s local Sainsbury’s.

  ‘Yess! ’ he says out loud. ‘Yes!! “Cold Flat OAP Found Dead”.’ He pronounces OAP as ‘Ope’.

  ‘You don’t say “Ope”. You say “Oh-Ay-Pee”,’ Caroline says. She who has never before deigned to play along. ‘ “Cold Flat Oh-Ay-Pee”.’

  ‘Well, I say “Ope”,’ Josh says.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ Caroline says. ‘You say “Oh-Ay-Pee”, just like everyone else.’

  ‘I don’t,’ Josh says. ‘I say “Ope”.’

  ‘Please,’ says Witch Woman, massaging her temples. ‘Bairns. Bairns, both of you. We’ve had such a lovely evening. Give me a break. It’s late.’

  Given Josh’s early life experience, it’s no surprise that he avoids confrontation; avoids rejection; prefers emotion contained and stylised, as in those ingenious comedic structures. He prefers life choreographed by acrobats and floating on verbal dexterity. He has long ago shaken off his past, hasn’t he? He has moved on. It’s Caroline who is in thrall to her family, as the Witch Woman’s rapacious and looming presence these eleven years past bears witness. Yet now, what with the trip coming up – his first journey ‘home’ in almost two decades – Josh finds himself intermittently exhuming elements of his past: Hattie Thomas and little Jack, who so inexplicably vanished. He thinks about Bernie Silver (dead) and Ida (dead) and (long-dead) loving Pru. And then there’s the drama department, where now, in the post-apartheid dawn, the conference is to take place. There’s the jacaranda tree beyond the Silvers’ front veranda and back, beyond that – but only rarely and in dreams – he has been surprised of late to find himself groping blindly in a sulphurous, theatrical mist towards a shadowy figure: a distant woman in layers of clothes – clothes that appear to be made of dust – who is always walking with her back to him; walking further and further away; as if back into her own past.