Sex and Stravinsky Read online

  Caroline’s mother, on the other hand, spry and just turned sixty, has already expressed her family’s unwillingness to make the trip. She has done so in one of what Josh does not yet know are her characteristically brief and poisonous letters.

  Dear Caroline

  About the wedding, what a surprise, it doesn’t sound much of a do. Dad will be much too busy to come and I’ve got my health to consider. Your sister as you will appreciate is much too delicate to travel all that way, especially now what with all her schoolwork it has become so hard for her, because healthwise Janet as you should try to remember has always been less fortunate than you.

  Love Mum

  Then she’s added a postscript.

  When you send Janet a birthday card this year I hope you make it a special one, not home-made as usual, do NOT forget because this time it’s her sixteenth!! Quite a milestone, sweet sixteen!!! Mum

  ‘Oh well,’ Caroline says, sounding to Josh, for the very first time, a little less than invincible.

  The letter is somewhat puzzling to Josh, because why on earth should one sister’s birthday take precedence over another sister’s wedding?

  ‘What’s the matter with your sister?’ he says.

  ‘Oh,’ Caroline says. ‘She’s frail.’

  ‘Frail?’ Josh says.

  ‘Yes, frail,’ Caroline says, beginning to sound edgy. ‘She needs to take care, that’s all.’

  ‘Are you saying she’s mentally unstable?’ Josh says, after a pause.

  ‘Of course not,’ Caroline says. ‘Of course she’s not mentally unstable. She was always sickly as a child, for heaven’s sake. Aren’t people allowed to be frail?’

  ‘Yes,’ Josh says. ‘But –’

  ‘Look. Stop interrogating me, all right?’ Caroline says.

  The episode causes Josh a flash of memory that has to do with Hattie Thomas. The unfavoured sister. Another talented girl of his acquaintance who was possessed of a preferred sibling of whom she almost never spoke. Weird that he should have found his way to both of them. Weird that they should both be so reluctant to open up. Josh finds this impossible to comprehend; he whose adoptive parents spoke of anything and everything and usually over dinner. From circumcision rituals to the theory of surplus value. From Non-conformism in Adam Bede, to the trafficking of women. By the time Josh is ten years old, he knows that his own birth mother had herself been effectively trafficked; tricked into a proxy marriage with a sleazy gold-digging stranger.

  ‘I’m sorry, Caroline,’ he says. ‘But I hate to see you upset.’

  ‘I’m not upset,’ she says. ‘End of story.’

  And that afternoon she embarks upon a birthday card for her sister; a labour-intensive and highly skilled affair; a pull-out concertina construction made of thick, antique-white etching paper with intricate cut-out sections giving a filigree effect. Each frame depicts a stage in her sister’s growing up. Janet at four with a new puppy. Janet at eight with a bicycle. Janet at twelve in a party dress. Janet, Janet.

  Josh has never before been witness to this particular aspect of Caroline’s talent.

  ‘Christ,’ he says. ‘You’re not going to give that card away? Caroline, I reckon it should be hanging in the Tate. Anyway, didn’t your mother say not to send “home-made”?’

  Caroline makes the envelope out of the same thick etching paper. He watches her address the envelope in her large italic hand. ‘Miss Janet Abigail McCleod.’

  ‘I thought perhaps if it was especially nice,’ she says. ‘I mean, the bought ones are usually so crappy, aren’t they? That’s unless you’ve got fortunes to spend, which, as you know, I have not.’

  Caroline makes her wedding dress from five yards of cream-coloured crêpe de Chine that have been left behind, as an accidental bonus, in a small chest of drawers she’s bought in the Animal Sanctuary shop. She’s stripped the chest with Nitromors but not before encasing the crêpe de Chine in a linen pillowcase and putting it through a cold wash in the college launderette machine to remove a faint, rust-coloured fold-mark.

  The day before the wedding party, Caroline sends Josh to pick strawberries from a farm on the edge of Port Meadow, while she bakes a ham and makes a vat of potato salad. She makes two large, buttery onion tarts and prepares bowls of tzatziki and hummus. She devises a way of poaching a salmon in the absence of a fish kettle. Having first rigorously scrubbed the small steel sink in the student kitchen, she places the fish within it and covers it with boiling water. Then she seals the sink with a sheet of baking foil, which she weighs down at each corner with a large baking potato.

  Josh, who stays over with her in Oxford that night, discovers that Caroline has also made these amazing nuptial pyjamas out of a pre-war satin bedspread. Silver Hollywood pyjamas which she puts on the night before the wedding. Josh is knocked out by Caroline in the pyjamas. He finds them incredibly provocative and, with hindsight, remembers them as the high point of his marriage. She is like a lithe and slippery silver fish, and next morning, lying with his face in the crumpled satin folds of her crotch, as she sits, knees apart, hands around a cup of coffee, it comes to him that Caroline is glimmering; glimmering, like that disappearing dream-girl in the Yeats poem about the hazel wood. A girl who, transformed from a silver fish, then vanishes on the air. There’s that bit about the golden and the silver apples belonging to the sun and the moon. An old man looking back. His life consumed with yearning; with seeking out the object of desire, through hollow and hilly lands.

  Josh, at that moment, does not know quite how quickly the hollow lands will hove into view, or that the hilly lands are just around the corner.

  ‘There was this beautiful quilted medallion in the centre of the bedspread,’ Caroline is saying. ‘I’ve kept it because I’ll maybe make it into a fire screen. For one day when we’ve got our very own house.’

  ‘Yes,’ Josh says.

  ‘I want us to have one of those little Victorian terraced houses that’s got a fireplace with pretty tiles and a garden with climbing roses,’ she says. ‘Two up, two down. That’s all. It would be bliss to decorate a house.’

  Josh has had no thoughts, to date, on the subject of interior decoration and probably never will have, so in this respect Caroline faces a future of unimpeded freedom to pursue her own vision of homemaking, though he’s noticed that, between the historical tomes, Caroline keeps a stack of glossy magazines with pictures of bedrooms and gardens and bathrooms. These are items she plucks from around the back of a local hairdressing salon, which means they are always just a month out of date.

  It has never crossed his mind before that such things could play a part in the life of a woman with a serious brain. The Silvers’ furniture, beyond Bernie’s remarkable over-large desk and his collection of interesting art works, had the look of having been chosen randomly and for purely functional purposes. And the art works – mainly local – had on the whole been gifts over the years, in repayment for endless small loans and handouts to impecunious black artists. Josh could remember Bernie once laughing in the face of a gallery owner who had paid a visit in hopes of prising a particular painting from him; a painting of three rusted shanties on a windswept Eastern Cape wasteland.

  ‘So it’s the fashion these days for the bourgeoisie to have a slum hanging in the house?’ he said. At the time he had no intention to sell, but in the end it was the sale of all the paintings that made paying Jack’s school fees possible.

  ‘And let’s have a dear little baby,’ Caroline is saying. ‘I mean, just as soon as we can. Actually, can we have four? I’ve always wanted lots of children.’ Then she laughs and says, ‘I suppose we’d have to make an extra bedroom in the roof? A “loft conversion” with a little spiral staircase. Kids would love a spiral staircase.’

  ‘Or a fireman’s pole,’ Josh says, who has not as yet considered having children; hasn’t quite got his head around the idea of being a grown-up himself, and he right now assumes that Caroline’s speaking of making babies is merely a form of pil
low-talk, which is certainly having its effect.

  But Caroline is quite serious, though she doesn’t question why. She remembers vividly being seven years old and awaiting her sister’s birth. She remembers a fistful of drawings made in tribute to the baby and her almost unbearable eagerness to push the baby in its new pram. But after that she has a large blank. Before Janet. After Janet. She has no conscious memory of being pushed out to the periphery; of being that small child who went through a ruthless withdrawal of maternal love; an experience that would have triggered her strategy of trying ever harder and harder – and, given her natural abilities, it materialised as a strategy that always paid off handsomely with schoolteachers and sports coaches and university lecturers. It paid off repeatedly with committees that gave out prizes. Essay prizes; art prizes; scholarships.

  Caroline has no memory of when such strategies began. They are simply too much a part of the person she has become. And, along with it, she carries a strong urge to have a baby. Another baby. A baby to love and cherish, and to be loved and cherished in return. She has a need to go back into that blank space and fill it with hope and light, as people do in the case of certain dreams; dreams in which they urge themselves back in, because they are in hopes of changing the outcome.

  ‘A fireman’s pole would be good,’ she says. ‘I suppose I ought to get dressed.’

  ‘Don’t,’ Josh says. ‘Don’t get dressed. Caroline, will you marry me in these slippery silver pyjamas?’

  ‘Wait till you see my dress,’ she says.

  ‘Is that right?’ he says. He’s thinking that her hair, especially first thing in the morning, before she’s brushed it, is something quite extraordinary. Voluminous, like Mary Magdalene’s hair. Hair that grew and grew so that, all through the saint’s years of desert exile, as her clothes fell from her in rags, she was protected from exposure.

  ‘Think The Philadelphia Story,’ Caroline says. ‘You are going to love it.’

  And then there’s the buzz of the doorbell. Someone in the street has pressed the buzzer for Caroline’s room.

  ‘It’ll be some dosser,’ Caroline says, sounding somewhat brisk. ‘You get the whole bang shoot around here. Old winos, young druggies, drunk foreign-student kids. It’s sort of like those buttons are all yelling, “Please press me.” Especially at 4 a.m.’ Then she gets up and leans out of the window. He watches her suddenly stiffen. ‘Oh my God,’ she says. ‘I don’t believe it. It’s Mum. And my sister. Josh, you’ll have to make yourself scarce.’ She’s already begun to gather up his clothes.

  ‘But why?’ Josh says. ‘I mean, we’re getting married today.’

  ‘Quick!’ she says. He can see that she is shaking. ‘Please, Josh. Go and get dressed, but not in here. Go to the bathroom at the far end, OK? Then come back in twenty minutes. But go downstairs and press the buzzer. That way they’ll think you’ve just arrived. And – oh Christ, Josh – please remember to shave.’

  When Josh returns, sluiced, shaved and dressed, Caroline’s mother and sister are seated in the two oyster-painted chairs with the pillow-ticking seats; two dumpy, mouse-haired women who have the look of visiting the same hairdresser for a weekly wash and set. Caroline has evidently made the bed in haste, which is now playing host to a large suitcase, alongside which Caroline is perched. She is still in the silver pyjamas. Her mother is evidently in mid-flow, filling the air with down-home small talk, while Janet emits the odd whingeing refrain and looks perpetually down-in-the-mouth.

  They pause, momentarily, in this symbiotic double act, to acknowledge Josh’s arrival and follow through with a brief shaking of hands. Then the performance continues, just as if he were not there. Mother is the talky partner, daughter the silent back-up. It reminds Josh of those Jehovah’s Witnesses who always come to the door in pairs. Caroline, he decides there and then, must take after her absent father because, while mother and younger daughter are remarkably alike, in neither can he see the smallest trace of his beautiful girlfriend. Of the two, Janet has the weedier handshake. Otherwise, she’s a clone. To take her hand is like grasping the body of a dead herring.

  ‘Yes, it’s a shame about Dad,’ Caroline’s mother is venturing. ‘But we decided on coming at the very last minute, so there wasn’t the time to make contact. He was off at work, as usual. Quite an adventure, wasn’t it, Janet? Coming to the UK. But, of course, we told Mrs Dodds next door, and she’ll have passed on the news to Dad by now.’ Then she says, ‘Mrs Dodds seemed quite excited, by the way – I mean about you getting married, but then she always did play favourites, didn’t she? She’s sent you a tea cosy, Caroline. It’s one she made herself, so you’ll remember to write her a thank-you note, won’t you? Just a notelet will do.’

  ‘Yes, Mum,’ Caroline says. ‘I will.’ Caroline, recent maker of scissor-work greeting cards and ruched, Thai-silk ball gowns.

  ‘We’d have got you something in the duty-free,’ the matriarch continues, but you’ll appreciate that Janet was much too tired before the flight. When it comes to stamina she’s always been so much less fortunate than you.’ Then she turns to Josh. ‘I hope you’ll call me Mum,’ she says. ‘I’ve always been very informal. I’m very easy-going, Josh. I take people as they come. I must say, you’re not very tall, now, are you?’

  It appears that Caroline’s less fortunate younger sister was born with a cleft palate which was successfully treated in infancy, as was her childhood asthma. Other than that, there is nothing at all wrong with Janet, except for her markedly less fortunate personality. Josh can’t quite see the point of Janet, other than that she evidently exists to act as sidekick and backup to Caroline’s mother, along with offering that lady the means to induce guilt in her beautiful and brilliant elder daughter. In short, he finds his in-laws to be a couple of grotesques.

  The mother has the daughter on a length of invisible string – both daughters, come to that – and she certainly knows how to sabotage the spontaneity of the wedding feast by constantly diverting poor, conscientious Caroline with what seem to him idiotic and spoilt-brat demands for special treatment. Janet is cold. May she please change seats? Borrow a cardigan? Move out of the draught? And how many eggs are in this quiche? Thanks but no thanks. Only one egg a week. Those are my doctor’s orders. And onions have a nasty habit of repeating on me. Not exactly the thing for one’s wedding night, if I may say so. Fish? No thank you. I’ve never been one for fish. As you will appreciate, I’ve never been a fussy woman, but fish has always been a no-no with me. Caroline, could I possibly have a smaller fork? A sharper knife? A riper tomato? Eton Mess you call this? I must say, it certainly looks rather a mess! No thank you, dear. Not unless it’s low-fat cream. And Janet can’t eat strawberries, as you surely will remember. Caroline, is this decaff? Sorry, but caffeine is not for me.

  By nightfall it has become horribly apparent that the ghoulish pair have made no arrangements regarding accommodation and that Caroline’s mother is making it clear that it’s her daughter’s job to play host.

  ‘Well, you surely didn’t expect us to go traipsing about in the cold, looking for a hotel?’ she says. ‘What with Janet having one of her colds coming on, after sitting in all that draught. You do have a cold coming, don’t you, Janet? And mark my words, it’ll turn to bronchitis if we don’t take care.’

  ‘A-tish-oo,’ Janet says.

  ‘And aren’t the two of you “going away”?’ she says. ‘I naturally assumed we’d have the use of your room, what with us having come all this way. Whatever happened to hospitality? Not to mention the honeymoon?’

  ‘You see, Mum,’ Caroline says, sounding, as she has all day, both submissive and apologetic. ‘You see, it’s not the vacation yet and I’ve got my field trip to budget for. I’m going to Iran next term and –’

  ‘Well!’ her mother says, cutting her short. ‘I must say, it’s all been so romantic, it makes me want to get married all over again – I don’t think! I can’t imagine your sister making such a poor fist of things. That’s when h
er “special day” comes along.’

  ‘Josh,’ Caroline is saying in whispers as, together with a handful of friends, they are clearing up the party debris. ‘Josh, we’ve got to give them my room. After all, she is my mother.’

  ‘But it’s our wedding night,’ he says.

  ‘Oh never mind,’ Caroline says. ‘Look. We’ve got the rest of our lives together.’

  ‘Yes,’ Josh says. ‘But . . .’

  ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘It’ll be fine. I’ll work something out. You’ll see.’

  And it is. She does. It all works out, because Caroline is nothing if not a prodigious problem-solver. Two of her friends, Sam and Jen, are an artist couple who live in a decommissioned red double-decker bus that they park in the field of a local farmer, just up the Abingdon Road. And Horst, the physics post-doc from Freiburg, has a two-person tent along with camping equipment. So the newly-weds bike out to pitch camp alongside the artists’ vegetable patch and bed down to watch a star-studded night sky through the lean isosceles triangle of the tent’s open access.

  In the balmy summer morning they make coffee and heat up a tin of baked beans on Horst’s little Trangia stove. They watch sheep graze in a field. Caroline is in the slippery silver pyjamas and Josh is wrapped in a flowered kanga. Beachwear from his home town.

  ‘We’re having a honeymoon after all,’ Josh observes. ‘You are a genius, Caroline.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she says.

  Then they go for a second cup of coffee, with Sam and Jen inside the bus. Both Josh and Caroline are enchanted by the bus, with its shiny metal footplate, which now constitutes the floor of the porch, and its ting-ting conductor’s bell, which is still in working order. The lower deck, now minus its passenger seats, makes a long kitchen-living room, while up the narrow winding stairs is an elongated, many-windowed bedroom with a tiny shower room. Sam has made a stepping-stone path from the bus to the farm track. Jen’s vegetable patch is bordered with tall sunflowers.