The Travelling Hornplayer Read online

  Instead, I began to shiver and scratch my arms. Then I left. I turned silently from the graveside and took the path through the churchyard to the lych-gate and I walked up through the village.

  As I arrived at the crossing opposite the pub, a decrepit-looking wino whom I had never seen before began to yell something at me, from the other side of the street. He was calling me ‘lady’ and waving his arms. I could tell that Dilly was becoming restless and I knew that Lydia’s burial had distressed her. Greyhounds have small narrow heads and easily slip their collars. Dilly, at this moment, chose to slip her collar. She bounded hazardously across the street and leapt at the wino. I remember screaming and screaming her name, as a small bus narrowly missed her and swerved in to pull up at the bus-stop. For a moment there was a van blocking my view and it was only when it moved forward that I realized the wino and Dilly had made a pact. I saw the two of them simply moving off towards the bus and all I could do was stand and scream. I suppose I was hysterical. Just then, a man who had emerged from the phone-box alongside the pub made a grab for Dilly and held her until I and the puppy had crossed the street. I tried to fit her collar, but my hands were shaking so violently that my rescuer was obliged to take it over.

  Meanwhile the old wino merely hovered and gabbled. He was still calling me ‘lady’. ‘Lady, you’re a fine one,’ he said. ‘Aye, you’re a fine one. Isn’t she a fine one?’

  I was not in a frame of mind to give him my attention. I didn’t even look at him. ‘But lady, you’re a fine one,’ he said. ‘Aye, but you’re all right.’

  ‘Are you OK?’ said the phone-call man. I think I nodded ungraciously before I fled.

  Once at home, I kept on shivering and scratching. I’d developed a sort of psoriasis which still plagues me from time to time. The skin on my arms and legs became a meshwork of goosebumps and then of red weals. I had disfiguring patches on the right side of my face.

  Recollecting Lydia’s funeral in the weeks that followed, I became aware of strange, disturbing things. It occurred to me, but only after the event, that my mother had almost totally ignored me. I suppose this is called disengagement. She had also ignored Peter. Yet we two were so much preoccupied with loss and grief that we didn’t immediately take her rejection on board. Conversely, she seemed once more to be powerfully drawn towards my father; drawn, no doubt, by the torment of the shared dead child. There she was, pale, beautiful and alone, since, perhaps understandably, her new husband had not accompanied her. Her grey eyes were huge and haunted as she clung to Father’s arm.

  My mother has ignored me ever since. I have become the expendable half of something that once was whole. From that day all semblance of her custodial role in me has lapsed. I have since then heard newly single people say that after separation all invitations cease; that friends, accustomed to a couple, are not able to take on board the singularity of their oneness. This is something I am able, from experience, to understand.

  At the funeral, while Father behaved supportively with my mother, I and the Stepmother had both of us clung to Peter. The Übermensch had hung back, weeping copiously, wetting the front of his shirt. He, too, has since then found me something of an affront. He does not care for me without Lydia since I do not entertain him. Our value for him was as a double-act and now I am minus my partner. I tend to wear a February face, for which he has no use.

  It was months, too, before it dawned on me that the old wino for whom Dilly had displayed such enthusiasm had not been addressing me, but the dog. He had been calling ‘Lady’, not ‘lady’ and she – as dogs will – had entirely failed to judge him for having reduced her to the ingestion of supermarket plastic bags on an abandoned camp-site.

  Within the month, just as I had at last begun to stop shivering, the poor little Stepmother miscarried. She did so at a time when the space for grief was consumed by the greater loss of Lydia. The worst of it was that she miscarried, not once, but twice within five days. The first miscarriage happened at home over a weekend, when the Stepmother passed a perfect four-month-old male foetus, which she buried at nightfall, wrapped in a scrap of blanket, under an oak tree in the garden. For this purpose, my father, at her request, dug a deep hole. Afterwards, as the two of us women watched, he dragged a weighty stone paving slab over the grave.

  The second miscarriage happened suddenly during the following week, when the Stepmother was taken acutely ill during an end-of-term theatrical performance at her school. This time she was rushed into whichever down-at-heel female surgical ward ‘the Smoke’ still had on offer, and there it was that she passed a foetid brown object, a poor wizened reptile of a thing, a hapless twin, who had evidently lain dead and undiagnosed within her for some days before the first miscarriage. According to the doctors, it was this, the second twin, whose dying had caused the toxins that had proved fatal to that more amiable foetus that now lay beneath the slab under the oak tree.

  After that, a silence enveloped the subject of the Stepmother’s maternal needs and she became quite as besotted as I was with the greyhound and the puppy – though the latter was an apprehensive little thing, who always piddled on the hall rugs in deference to the Stepmother’s daily return from ‘the Smoke’.

  I don’t suppose that Lydia’s dying could have done much for the Stepmother’s newly-wed sex life. They were, in themselves, so very different, my father and the Stepmother. Now, after my four years away at university, I can see that my father is conservative by nature. He honours, more than is fashionable, the traditions of family, church, state and monarchy in which he was, perhaps anachronistically, reared. The Stepmother is by nature an iconoclast. She is against religion, perhaps because her parents were practising Catholics. She is against eating meat, perhaps because her father was a gourmet carnivore. She is a rigorous egalitarian, perhaps because her parents are very comfortable.

  Some months after Lydia’s dying, the Stepmother announced, towards the end of one of the horrible, plate-scrapingly silent meals we went in for through that summer, that she had been exploring the possibility of us going to Italy for a break.

  ‘Just the three of us,’ she said. ‘Come on, it couldn’t hurt, could it? It couldn’t make us feel any worse.’

  ‘What about the dogs?’ was all that Father said. He forked up some limp, waterlogged cauliflower as he spoke, because the Stepmother couldn’t cook either. It was giving off that unpleasant armpit odour.

  ‘There’s Peter,’ said the Stepmother. ‘I’ve already asked him, and he’s game.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Father, ‘that’s true. There’s Peter.’

  The Stepmother would doubtless have appreciated a more committed response. She has a married sister who lives with her family in Fiesole. Furthermore, the Stepmother speaks a more than adequate Italian through her paternal connection with ethnically conscientious Italian Americans. The sister had expressed a wish – had positively pleaded with the Stepmother – to have us come as guests for a week, and had already followed up this suggestion by procuring a flat for us thereafter, rent free, in Rome. Not any old flat, but a beautiful apartment belonging to a friend in the Via Sistina. It lay between the Quattro Fontane and the Spanish Steps, the Stepmother said. Pearls before swine. To our shame, this coup meant nothing to Father and me. We had neither of us ever been to Rome and we simply continued to stare into our plates.

  ‘So?’ said the Stepmother after a moment, when she ought to have thrown the cauliflower mush at us. ‘So, is it yes?’

  ‘My dear,’ Father began, ‘my dear Christina—’

  ‘Yes?’ said the Stepmother.

  Father sighed. ‘Very well,’ he said. Perhaps it was that neither he nor I wanted to put the sea between ourselves and Lydia’s grave. The poor woman might have been proposing a trip to the chiropodist, for all the enthusiasm she provoked. ‘That,’ said Father, ‘is if Ellen has no objection.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ I said, and I continued to stare into my plate.

  The Stepmother took us first to stay wit
h her sister’s family in Fiesole, the most magical of old towns, from which the boy Fra Angelico would have been able to see the skyline of Florence as the golden beckoning cupolas of the heavenly city. The dear couple could not have been kinder to us, nor more solicitous. They laid tables before us on their little roof terrace under a vine and, unlike the Stepmother, they could cook. They sat with us in the shell of the ancient Roman theatre while their two small children, Bruno and Cosima, romped happily on the grass against a backdrop of the Etruscan city wall. They led us through ancient cypress trees, past a tiny chapel in an orchard, to an extraordinary old convent where a friar, dressed in sackcloth and sucking upon Tic-tacs, led us past a dimpled della Robbia madonna and several terracotta saints. They ascended with us into a steep, strange woodland, featuring the cells and grottoes of long-dead hermits.

  In Florence, they steered us skilfully away from the summer crowds around the Uffizi, to the quiet of the Brancacci Chapel and the monastery of San Marco. Yet of the latter I have a single memory: that of my father, sitting glumly in the courtyard beside the great bell that rang out the execution of Savonarola. And, in the former, I remember that the Stepmother took hold of Father’s arm and planted him four-square in front of Masaccio’s The Tribute Money.

  ‘There,’ she said, as brightly as she could. ‘The best Sunday-school picture ever painted. Admire it, please.’ She pointed its stages for him. ‘See,’ she said. ‘Here are the Lord and his disciples with the taxman. But, look, they have no money to pay him. Here Jesus tells Peter, “Go to the lake and pluck out a little silver fish. In its belly you will find a coin.”’ With her hand she echoed the gesture of the Christly indicating arm. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘here is Peter, crouching by the lake. And, bingo, he has the fish. See him, with his little slippery silver fish? And here they are, handing the coin to the taxman. Now they can enter the city.’

  I stared at the taxman, who, with his back to us, was exhibiting Nureyev legs and the sort of shell-pink blouson that male Florentines of the time evidently went in for. Father was nodding and nodding, saying nothing.

  ‘There’s no such story in the Bible,’ I said. I saw the Stepmother and the sister’s husband exchange slightly arch looks.

  ‘But there are plenty of fish stories in the Bible,’ said the husband. ‘One more, one less. What the hell, Ellen? There is a noble family in this country,’ he added, hoping to amuse me, ‘which claims descent from the sexual union of Our Lord and Mary Magdalene.’

  ‘Lighten up, Ellen,’ said the Stepmother, showing a moment’s irritation with me. ‘It’s a propaganda piece for tax gathering. God pays his taxes, and so must all good citizens. Now you can’t say there aren’t any tax gatherers in the Bible.’ Then, to curry my favour, she said, ‘But look at the beauty of St John, Ellen. Isn’t he a gorgeous man?’

  I stared sternly at St John, with his corkscrew blond curls, and his profile, and his clear, sea-green eyes. I thought he looked like a celebrity footballer, with a styled perm and highlights.

  ‘I don’t like blond men,’ I said. As we left, we all walked past the expelled Adam and Eve, pretending not to register the howling, inconsolable depths of their loss.

  The Stepmother’s sister had taken two days off to guide us round Pisa and Lucca, where we walked through a maze of moonbright squares, their strangely Moorish white lace buildings like mirages. It was like dream-wanderings choreographed by Peter Green-away, but Father and I, having established, ploddingly, that the Leaning Tower leaned, unwrapped our crusty sandwiches glumly on the grass outside the great Duomo, and longed for Allinson’s pre-sliced stoneground. Bread wi’ nowt tekken owt.

  Finally, poor things, the sister and her family put us on the train for Rome, with a bag of star-shaped bread rolls, and a whole salami, and a paper carton of nectarines, and a bottle of Brunello di Montalcino.

  ‘Skip the churches,’ said the sister’s husband astutely into the ear of the Stepmother. ‘Take Himself straight to the Forum.’

  There were kisses and hugs on parting; there were tears in the Stepmother’s eyes – but, once at the Forum, Father stared out over that awesome vista of tall palm trees and colossal broken columns, and sighed, and said nothing. It was evident that what the columns confirmed for him was that all good things had passed away from the earth.

  For the next few days we stared at several fountains, as directed by the Stepmother. We remarked upon the thickness of the Pantheon’s walls. We observed that the buses and the taxis were bumpier because the streets were cobbled. We were impatient with the crowds near the apartment.

  After a week we were all agreed that we were still missing the greyhounds. None of us dared quite to say out loud that we were most of all missing Lydia. Then the Stepmother surprised us.

  ‘Look,’ she said. She spoke bravely but with several pauses and gulps. ‘I know I ought not to, but I feel that I’m an intruder. I’m the gatecrasher on your grief.’

  ‘Christina, please,’ Father said.

  ‘It’s a fact,’ she said. ‘I know this is my own marriage. I know this isn’t what I ought to be feeling, but that’s the way it is. Lydia was a honey. Lydia was the sweetest thing. I don’t say I don’t miss her. I don’t say it doesn’t hurt. But there’s no way I’m going to feel about her the way you guys feel. It’s not like having a part of my body lopped off. It’s not like amputation . . .’ She was evidently holding back tears. She stopped and reformulated: ‘I feel that I owe it to the miscarriages,’ she said, ‘that I have any rights here at all.’

  ‘But this is appalling,’ Father said. The Stepmother sniffed and wiped her nose and her eyes with her hand.

  ‘I know that the dead babies are not comparable,’ she said. She held out her hand to prevent any approach or expression of sympathy. ‘But I need to go away and be sad about them someplace where that doesn’t make me feel so unworthy.’

  ‘We’ve failed you,’ Father said miserably.

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘I’m going back to my sister’s. I’m packed. The thing’s all fixed. I’ll stay there just as long as I feel I need to.’

  Father and I looked helplessly at each other. I sensed that alarm bells were ringing in his brain.

  ‘See out the fortnight here without me,’ she said. ‘You’ll manage. There’s really no sense in us bouncing our miseries off each other.’ There was nothing more to be said. She went into the bedroom and got her bag. ‘I’ll see you guys back in England,’ she said. She kissed us both once and walked over to the door. ‘I will come back,’ she said. ‘You needn’t doubt me.’ Then she was gone.

  Without the Stepmother, things were suddenly easier. The two of us stopped feeling the need to put on faces for each other. On our own, we just mooched. We mooched for days. And, all around us, the privacy of the alien language soothed us like a balm. It is the closest I have ever been to my father; the closeness during that time, when we developed our own half-life rhythm. We became more like siblings. In the absence of Lydia, I became my father’s older sister. This is perhaps not surprising, since he is the youngest in a family of sisters and I am the elder of what was once two.

  Some days we didn’t go out at all; some days we did no more than find the nearest supermarket and throw food into a basket, and pass without words through the checkout. One day we sat at the very top of the Spanish Steps near the apartment, staring far down at the ant-sized tourists clustered around the icecream vans. We sat with our heads propped in our hands, our elbows on our knees.

  ‘Ellen,’ Father said eventually, ‘I must tell you that I am really rather at sea.’

  I stared at the stones between my feet. Then I remembered ‘Dover Beach’. It came back to me, wearing a label that said, ‘This Book is NOT Literature’ from a Christmas morning many years earlier. Off the top of my head, I began to recite the poem with its exhortation that we be true to one another, because the world that lies about us like a world of dreams is, in reality, nothing; null and void, a darkling plain. I recited it deadpan, h
aving always shared with Lydia a horror of poetry recited ‘with expression’.

  ‘There,’ I said when I’d finished. ‘Perhaps you paid me to learn that off by heart.’ Father put his arm around me. ‘Does it bother you that I look so much like her?’ I said.

  He turned his head and stared at me. ‘You don’t look like her,’ he said. ‘Strangers always thought that you looked alike. You never did to me.’

  Then we kept on sitting there until our buttocks were numb and cold. We must have sat there for well over an hour. The Fiats and taxis way down below us had gradually leached their colour into the encroaching dusk.

  ‘Ellie,’ Father said, ‘your mother has an extraordinary notion. She wants to come back to me.’

  ‘To you, maybe,’ I said, a little bitterly, ‘but certainly not to me.’ I spoke before I had quite assimilated what he was saying.

  ‘It’s nonsense, of course,’ he said, ‘but we must go carefully. Liddie’s death has unlocked something alarming. I must tell you that she writes to me and telephones constantly.’

  I got up. ‘Well, she can’t come back,’ I said. I surprised myself with my own anger. ‘How dare she even suggest it?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ Father said. ‘Water under the bridge. It’s absolutely not on. It’s distressing, that’s all. I have told her that the calls must stop.’ Then he said, ‘She’s always been so controlled, Ellen. I wonder now if you could possibly think of going to see her?’

  ‘Me?’ I said, ‘I’m not going to see her. I’m not. She doesn’t even like me. She probably wishes it was me that was dead.’