The Travelling Hornplayer Read online

Father paused. Then he said, ‘You must understand that she is not at all herself at the moment.’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘And what about Christina? How dare she do this when Christina is your wife now? Does she have the faintest clue about what has happened to Christina?’

  ‘She knew that Christina was pregnant,’ Father said. ‘I dare say she has come by the rest of it somehow, through the ether.’

  ‘Well then,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ Father said. ‘Ellen, depressed people can become quite incapable of seeing beyond themselves.’

  ‘She never could,’ I said and I started to cry.

  ‘I take your point,’ Father said. ‘Look, dearest. Don’t worry about visiting. Not if the prospect is too upsetting.’

  ‘It is too upsetting,’ I said. I thought about my mother; about with what apparent ease she had left him and moved on. Now she had entirely moved on from Peter and me. So let her, if that was how she wanted it.

  Then I thought about what Lydia and I had seen of the brief, but quite different interaction our father had had with the Stepmother – before bereavement had got in the way.

  ‘But you love Christina,’ I said. ‘You don’t even love her.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t love her,’ I said again.

  ‘Ellie,’ he said. ‘Don’t belittle the past. It’s your past as well as mine. And it’s Lydia’s. I ought not to be talking to you like this. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Yes you ought,’ I said. ‘Because I’ll tell you why Liddie and I were so giggly over that M & S lunch. Do you remember? We could tell that you loved Christina. I mean loved her. We could tell by the way you took her coat. We could tell by the way you filled her glass. It embarrassed us, don’t you see?’

  Father got up and joined me as I made ready to go. Then, on the way back, I said, ‘Are you sad about the twin babies?’

  He was a long time in answering. ‘Ellen,’ he said, ‘it has come to me recently that you and I have been trying so hard not to feel the loss of Lydia, that we have ended up scarcely able to feel anything at all.’

  ‘Phone her,’ I said. ‘Tell her to come back. Tell her to join us – just for the weekend.’

  ‘Do I have the right, I wonder?’ he said.

  ‘Phone her,’ I said, still in my big sister mode, but I had been feeling very unlike a child of late, and certainly not young. It is odd that the death of my sister should have had this effect upon me, because while Lydia lived, I think we were always far more like twins.

  The three of us spent that last weekend in Rome together. The Stepmother met us among the Saturday morning crowd in the Piazza Navona. She had had a very short haircut and she wore stylish new jeans that stopped six inches above her ankles. On her ridiculous size two feet she had new shoes – tiny red shoes like ballet pumps. She wore a red spotted snuff handkerchief tied around her throat. She looked unburdened and very much happier. She looked very Roman Holiday.

  The Stepmother mimicked the flamboyant gestures of the men on the Bernini fountain as we passed it on our way to the café. She was buoyant from a week with her sister’s small children. Her head was full of Dr Seuss books. She and I could bounce them off each other as we walked.

  ‘This one has a little star.’

  ‘This one has a little car.’

  ‘Say! what a lot of fish there are.’

  She kissed Father smoochily, jumping up at his jaw. ‘Sit down, Roland,’ she said. ‘I can’t kiss you if you stand up. You know that. Have pity on the vertically challenged.’

  Then, after the café, we made our way back to the apartment. At the entrance, I changed my mind. I employed an adult’s tact.

  ‘I’ll go for a walk,’ I said.

  Once back in the piazza, I took note of a small severe church – quite different from the extravagance of its surroundings – and I entered the graveyard, finding it quite by chance. I discovered this to have a series of underground chapels decoratively laid out with the bones of dead monks. It brought home to me how much Father and I were lacking in any assuaging flair for the theatre of death.

  When I got back, the Stepmother was making bathroom noises in the shower. My father was jauntily whistling ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ in the kitchen, where he had made a pot of tea and laid a tray. That is to say, he had made a pot of tea in a saucepan because the kitchen had no teapot. Neither did the cups have any saucers.

  ‘Alas, poor foreigners,’ I said. ‘What do they know about tea?’

  He smiled at me. ‘Thank you, Ellen,’ he said. He did not say what for. ‘You are a wise and wonderful girl,’ he said. On our last day we did the corny thing. The Stepmother coerced us. We went to St Peter’s where she made us light candles for Lydia and also for the dead babies. The approach was an avenue of outrageous kitsch where I observed that the tourist shops were selling indulgences. It brought to mind Martin Luther: ninety-five faeces nailed to the door of the church in Wittenburg. Faeces, theses, bones and pus. Will’s leg is giving him gyp. Fair gyp.

  ‘Did you know,’ I said, ‘that Nietzsche oozed a pint of pus every day?’ Father and the Stepmother looked at me, then they looked at each other. ‘Syphilis,’ I said. ‘Lydia told me that.’

  A little later, I thought of the Übermensch while staring at the gorgeous naked boys on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; boys bursting acorns from horns of plenty; boys with curls falling into their eyes; boys with sweatbands and bedroom glances, their accoutrements the colours of mango and pistachio ice-cream.

  ‘Now why do I think of Peter?’ said the Stepmother, as the crowd jostled us forward. I glanced back towards the altar where I saw that my father was staring hard at the great painting of the Last Judgement. Fire and Sleet and Candlelight. And cardboard. And bones. And hemp rope.

  ‘What did you bury her in?’ I said, as we left. ‘I mean, what was she wearing?’

  ‘Oh,’ Father said. ‘Oh—’

  ‘White T-shirt and knickers,’ the Stepmother said. ‘I thought you’d never ask.’

  After that, Ellen’s stepmother went back to her sister’s in Fiesole, while Ellen and her father returned home, where the greyhounds were very pleased to see them. In the autumn, just as the Stepmother returned, Ellen went back to her student digs in Edinburgh and entered the second year. In the circumstances, she occasionally wished herself closer to home. Yet the city, as it had done through her first year, enchanted her and sustained her with its cold and stony grandeur; with its clear and crystal light. No one would have called her a frothy person. She was no longer a particularly sociable person. She was a person who – as her stepmother had put it – had experienced amputation. But, of course, that didn’t show.

  She began to work very hard. She had a few sedate, strictly ungiggly friends. There was nobody there for her like Peregrine Massingham, the great friend of her first year, or even like Izzy, or Stella, her housemates of the previous year. They had all gone. Peregrine, her favourite companion and indispensable cooking person, had graduated and left. Izzy Tench, the painter boy, likewise – though, to her annoyance, he had left her one of his drawings in place of a cheque, as his contribution to the previous quarter’s electricity bill. The drawing had been done in red chalk on grey paper and was of his beautiful girlfriend Stella; she of the cello and the mass of orange hair.

  What puzzled Ellen was that Stella had not come back either, though she had only completed two of her four years. Someone else was due to take occupancy of the room that Stella and Izzy had shared. Yet all Stella’s stuff had been left in the storeroom as if she’d meant to come back. It was bagged up in black plastic dustbin sacks and marked with her name. And on what had been Izzy’s cruddy bedside chair, Stella had left her copy of Heart of Darkness, which Ellen took up, on that first night back, and read until four in the morning. And when she’d finished it, she read it again. And again.

  2. Das Wandern

  Jonathan

  On the day I get back to find Lydia Dent’s le
tter about her German essay, I’ve been lunching with my sister-in-law. For years now we’ve been meeting like this, Sally and I, roughly once every three months. It’s an arrangement she initiates and more or less coerces me into, but on the whole I’m not unwilling.

  Recently we’ve been meeting at a place called Oliveto near Victoria Coach Station which, for all that it spells its name with a final ‘o’, reminds me pleasantly of the old portable typewriter that I bashed to death twenty years ago in the process of typing my first novel. That was an experience of passionate and youthful excitement, equalled only by my experience, shortly thereafter, of meeting Katherine again – Katherine, who then became my wife.

  My sister-in-law lives with my brother in Oxford, but comes into London for her profession, about which I am agreeably hazy. It’s educational think-tank stuff; consultancy stuff; exam stuff; quango stuff. Not my stuff at all. Sally has a talent for committees. My sister-in-law does not have original thoughts. She has management skills. Were it not for these, I do not believe that she and my brother would ever have got married. He would not have got the thing together. Sally will have managed him into the marriage, just as she managed the catering, the florist, the music, the hairdresser and the wedding list at Peter Jones. Sally spooks Katherine by being bossy and snoopy, but I am merely entertained by it. Sally is, after all, a decent sort. My brother is lucky to have her.

  Over the years I have become quite fond of my sister-in-law – the more so because she is so emphatically not the sort of woman who could possibly ring my bells. Though she flirts with me in her rather headgirl way, I can always trust myself with her completely. And I never give anything away. We have been enjoying each other’s company now for a little over two decades, though the balance of power between us has shifted. It is not bragging to say that, for Sally, I have always offered vicarious excitement as a sort of Danger Man, because Sally plays so safe that it is not strenuous to appear a little dangerous before her.

  My brother – older brother – will, I think, have married Sally for the echoes he found in her of our mother. We have a charming but very demanding mother, to whose tune my brother always danced. Being highly intelligent, academically inclined and musically gifted, he was always bright enough to oblige her. He brought home golden reports from school for her. He played first violin in the National Youth Orchestra for her and he went on, clutching his first in mathematics from Oxford, to become the youngest college fellow for her in fifteen years. As a bonus – and as an effective disguise for his multiple emotional inadequacies – my brother is also very handsome. Roger has the sort of delicate, dark good looks that used to cause teenage girls to ambush him on his way home from school; a form of tribute that gave him no pleasure, but merely added to his torments of self-consciousness. In short, he was a beautiful, bright, sulky, Oedipal boy. He was snobbish, precious, arrogant, insecure and chockful of anxieties that he could not confront.

  He and Sally met at Oxford, married early and the sun shone down upon them. They set up a conspicuously grade A show. Handsome, musical young maths don gets hitched to English Rose. Wedding in the college chapel. House in the leafy environs of north Oxford. Three nice little daughters, Claire, Sheila and Fiona. Tree-house in the garden. Edwardian rocking-horse in the nursery window. William Morris wallpaper in the hall. Magnetic letters on the door of the fridge-freezer. High-tech kitchen with rustic implications – old pine dresser and table stripped and waxed from a superior barn-like outfit somewhere near Chipping Norton. Stalwart Mrs Thing from a smallholding in Wolvercote who, with regulation perm and headscarf, came three times a week to keep the place nice and to offer her elevating folk wisdoms to smooth over any ensuing difficulties of relative privilege.

  All this time I suppose I struck dear Sally as a bit of a perennial dosser. That is to say, I lived in a bedsit in un-smart north London, owned two shirts, collected my dole money once a week and showed no sign of wishing to change my life. Having finished at university some years earlier, I had wandered round Europe in a somewhat aimless manner, and had returned to London on the rebound from an unwise, short-lived marriage.

  In fact, the bedsit was a nice little pad, a satisfactorily uncluttered and rudimentary affair, somewhat icy in winter, with patterned fifties lino on the floor and a kitchenette en suite containing stone sink, mesh-fronted meat safe and small electric cooker on cabriole legs – all things that now feature as desirable finds on the pages of Elle Decoration. (I know this because Elle Decoration has become Katherine’s only adult reading matter.) The lavatory, ditto, across the landing, had a WC with fixed wooden seat and overhead wooden cistern, with mortice and tenon joints. It was called ‘The Jakpak’.

  My landlady, a nice old Bavarian Quaker person with swollen legs, lived in a modest flat on the ground floor and had me in from time to time for bowls of lentil and potato soup. She enjoyed my company because I could speak to her in German and she believed in me as a worthy cause because, unlike almost anyone else, she had become party to the fact that I was typing up a novel in her attic, dressed in two overcoats and wearing those fingerless gloves that you see on market traders. She thought it exciting that I should be doing such a thing in her house. Sometimes, to encourage me when I had dates with women, she went so far as to lend me her funny little front-loading bubble car, which operated not so much as an accessory to my virility but as an invariable conversation-starter.

  All this time Sally presented her place as a sort of home from home for me. She liked to imagine that I was her indigent supplicant and, as Roger lunched in college, and as she plied me with her home-made pâtés and quiches in that vast, flash kitchen full of pings and clicks, she liked to lecture me about ‘finding a nice girl’ and settling down. I should explain here that these were the days when women like Sally found it acceptable to talk about unattached female persons as ‘girls’.

  The truth is that Sally preferred me unsettled, and invited me a lot less often once Katherine had become a fixture in my life. Admittedly, Katherine’s instinct against head girls didn’t help, and she and I were, in any case, very self-contained, very smoochily rocks-and-stars in love, and we went almost nowhere, though Katherine did venture out reluctantly to her job.

  For half a year we made a passionate love-nest of the icy bedsit, snuggling under a de luxe duckdown duvet that a previous woman in my life had given me as an unsolicited Christmas present, having first gone to the trouble of stealing it for me from Heal’s. Before my air of shopsoiled middle age invades my purpose, I ought to establish right away that Katherine was, and still is, the nicest thing that has ever happened to me.

  At that time we stayed indoors, occupied with marvelling at the commonplace differences in our bodies. I experienced it as a daily miracle that her body was so very unlike mine; that it was white and smooth and hairless except for the three small clumps of light brown fuzz that had touched down so moderately upon her crotch and armpits. It was a marvel to me that what grew from her head came pale and straight, where my head grew tight spirals of black wire.

  Meanwhile, the book did well. That is, it got terrific reviews and a book club deal and several foreign sales and a film option, albeit an option on a film that never actually got made. Then, six months after its publication, my maternal grandmother died, leaving me a tiny, wonderfully isolated cottage in the west of Ireland which Katherine and I promptly set out to inhabit. I had in mind for us to go there and live out that Rosie O’Grady lifestyle that Stephen Daedalus’s friend Cranly epitomizes so charmingly towards the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

  ‘For I love sweet Rosie O’Grady

  And Rosie O’Grady loves me.’

  Katherine was pregnant with our daughter when we left. The pregnancy was not easy and she was still vulnerable and ever close to tears given the newness, at that time, of her return to Britain after a bruising love affair in Italy and the cot death of her one-month-old Italian baby. I considered it my priority, my privilege, my joy, to restore Kather
ine with all the kid glove treatment I could muster, and it may be that, for ever after, I have made a habit of behaving with her as though she might break in two, were I to confront her with my more usual, stroppy-bugger tendencies in matters of interlocution. My sweet Katie, always in need of my restoring broth and bandages.

  Ironically, it frustrates me that Katherine adopts these protective assumptions writ large in her handling of our daughter Stella. Stella, alias the Nuisance Chip, since – as potluck determines these things – our daughter; only daughter; only child; Precious Girl – comes bearing a nuisance chip in the brain.

  Hailing, as I do, from a family of six, I find it difficult to explain why Stella is quite such a full-time job. Stella is omnipresent. Stella is Katherine’s career. OK, so she’s conceived by miracle and born by Caesarean, since Katherine’s first experience of childbirth has left her reproductive equipment impaired. We start off knowing that Stella will be our only child. But, from the beginning, Stella is as if programmed for maximum nuisance capacity. She appears to have an allergy to milk – her own mother’s breast milk. She vomits after every feed and fails to thrive. Her skin erupts in such immoderately violent rashes in response to contact with her own urine that her bum becomes a proud case study in the BMJ. She appears to be allergic to water, or to whatever is in the water. She frequently develops soaring body temperatures and collapses with febrile convulsions, her eyes open, pupils fixed upon nothing. She is hyperactive, asthmatic and nasally congested to such a degree that friends visiting at night mistake the sound of Stella’s deep-sleep infant breathing for a ten-ton lorry idling in the yard.

  Before she is two years old, Stella has been rushed to hospital some twelve or thirteen times, usually with her lips turning blue. Once there, she is injected, X-rayed and placed under an all-night oxygen tent. She is dragged through lumbar punctures and a tonsillectomy. She is stuffed with so much penicillin that she not only becomes allergic to it, but develops chronic oral and vaginal thrush.