The Travelling Hornplayer Page 6

  Nonetheless, she is a bright, restless little thing and her mobility is extremely precocious. So are her incessantly employed verbal skills. By nine months she is walking and can scale the henhouse roof. By twenty months she can speak in perfect sentences, knows all her Puffins off by heart and delivers us short lectures on the Long March and the Sword Excalibur. Her singing voice is captivating. She combines these talents with remarkably retarded sphincter control and pees on people’s carpets, and on the floors of grocery shops and bookshops, until she’s four.

  When Katherine’s mother arrives to visit Stella at two, she comes bearing a canary yellow potty as inducement. Stella sits on it immediately and scuffs it around the floor.

  ‘Are you doing a nice wee-wee?’ Kath’s mother says.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ says the Nuisance Chip, with that exquisite, provoking toddler articulation, ‘as a matter of fact, I’m ack-shully sculling to Brighton.’ Stella has never been to Brighton. For her it is a literary concept.

  By the age of seven, the Nuisance Chip has already been firmly labelled dyslexic. She scrambles letters and numbers. Two years later, she can still neither read nor write. With regard to any practical task she has two left hands and half a brain. In school she seems incapable of learning anything. Katherine and I sneak anxious, eavesdropped glances at her in the playground, where she stands on her own near the fence, shuffling her feet and sucking on her left thumb.

  Katherine is so accommodated to the business of giving over her life to making the Nuisance Chip viable that the learning difficulties are, by now, merely an additional chapter. As the years pass, I watch Katherine teach herself everything that Stella is required to know. She becomes the child’s sole conduit of knowledge. Stella grows and the scholastic demands become more complex. So does Katherine’s commitment. She rises from my bed at five and acquaints herself with the mysteries of matrices and binomial equations. She masters molar mass. She reads the child’s every examination set book onto audiotape, either in English or, where necessary, in French or German. She becomes Stella’s bottomless resource.

  Katherine, who was running a small designer knitwear and weaving business from home up to the time of Stella’s birth, very soon packs it in. She has envisaged herself dyeing and spinning her yarns with an infant peacefully cooing in a Moses basket at her feet, but the Nuisance Chip soon disabuses her of this fantasy. She unravels the yarns, swallows the dyes and gets rushed off to Casualty. Plus she has frantic screaming fits if Katherine turns away from her for a moment. Katherine, who is a literate woman, simply gives up reading. She reads not a single line of newsprint for over four years. Stella understands that the printed page is a rival for Katherine’s attention. Her insecurities cannot co-exist with it.

  Let it be said that Stella is, and was, enchanting. She charms us. She charms our friends. She has the gift of the gab. Her looks are astonishing. Stella, perhaps to underline her status as our miracle child, has flecked pussycat eyes and orange crêpe hair which is always kept long. Heaven knows where the hair comes from. Nobody in either of our families is in possession of such an attribute. It belongs, uniquely, to Stella. Could it be a gift from some unidentified Celtic ancestor – the illegitimate issue of my mother’s Anglo-Irish antecedents? Or from the intricacies of my dear dead father’s part Sephardic DNA? God knows.

  As a young child, Stella enjoys hearing Katherine tell her that, as she sat sewing on a snowy day, she pricked her finger on a needle and wished for a little girl with skin as white as snow and hair as orange as marmalade. But, as the years advance, Stella learns to complain about her hair. Schoolteachers pick on her because of it, she says. A hundred mouse heads can be chattering in assembly and it will be, ‘You there! You with the red hair. Report to my office at once!’

  And boys, she complains – teenage boys – will always go for blondes.

  ‘Even,’ Stella says, ‘when they’ve got faces like horses. All blokes see is the hair. Well, you know what I mean, don’t you? Mum’s blonde, isn’t she?’ This is not a thing I can deny.

  At thirteen, a ranting chemistry teacher denounces Stella’s hair as ‘unhygienic’, though the hair is washed unremittingly and frequently clogs the shower. It is worn drawn away from the brow and temples and held by two stout grips. Admittedly, then, two feet of hair cascade down Stella’s back.

  ‘Do you come to school on the BUS?!’ rages the creature, as she looms over her test tubes. Stella says that she takes the train.

  ‘Only think of the GERMS you’re spreading!’ says the creature. ‘Keep it plaited or CUT IT OFF!’

  It is Katherine who passes on the details of this episode to me.

  ‘Orange hair; orange bush,’ I say. I have not, in fact, seen my post-pubertal daughter in the nude, but she has telling, orange underarm hair.

  ‘Jonathan!’ Katherine says.

  ‘Sexual jealousy,’ I say. ‘The old bat is obviously jealous.’

  ‘And what if she’s a young bat?’ Katherine says, changing sides. ‘Don’t be such a bloke.’

  The upshot is that Katherine makes plaits in Stella’s hair until the child’s head is as if painted by Botticelli. The unfortunate chemistry teacher is required to suffer the ignominy of having one of the Three Graces invade her laboratory. No ordinary plaits for the Precious Girl.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Kath,’ I say. ‘That takes you forever.’

  ‘It’s fun,’ Katherine says. ‘Fun’ is a word that she and Stella use a lot – and I can see that Katherine’s willing slavery makes for all sorts of happy bonds between them. They shop, gad, giggle, dress up and generally bounce off each other like the best of bosom buddies. Only my mother is sceptical.

  ‘Oh, my dear ones,’ she says on one occasion. ‘Katherine, my sweetheart, this is going to end in tears.’

  When the Nuisance Chip is eight – and very much for her sake; and very much at Katherine’s pleading – we abandon the rural Irish idyll and we return to England. I drag my feet all the way. Katherine is certain that Stella’s educational needs can be better served in a context of greater intellectual sophistication. Both grandmothers are ecstatic at the prospect of having Stella and Katherine closer – ‘and you too, my darling,’ as my mother observes to me in afterthought. We buy a stone cottage in a Cotswold village – a grander sort of cottage on a commuter line to Paddington – with a kitchen not unlike a smaller version of my sister-in-law’s, containing a dishwasher, an automatic washing-machine and various other gadgets that pip, rumble and squeak.

  Katherine, intimidated by Sally, who is now within striking distance, makes efforts to acquire us a cleaner, but, unlike Sally, we do not have it in us quite to master the servant relationship. I find it particularly irksome, since Katherine always escapes the cleaner by going off to work as a voluntary helper in Stella’s new school and leaves me at home to face the intruder.

  We make our way in quick succession through a scornful young Swede, who despises us for being in possession of a string mop and zinc bucket instead of a squeezy sponge on a plastic stick, and an adorable but wholly unreliable school-leaver – a bright, bookish little thing whom Katherine ends up tutoring for free through A level English and Art History. Finally, we acquire a monstrous, cone-shaped matron, weighing twenty stone, whose tiny face is close-gathered at the pinnacle end of the cone. She has a Betty Boop voice and wears her hair in two pre-teen bunches tied with ribbons and novelty bobble grips. This person’s zeal for cleanliness is so extreme that after three hours in the house she has not only removed all the varnish from the work-boards but has also dismantled the cafetière into a gleaming Meccano-set assortment of nuts, wheels, mesh disc and axle shaft. In addition, she is inconveniently phobic about a range of household pets, including, I suspect, stay-at-home husbands. I sense that she is a fundamentalist crusader in some personal gender jihad for which I am a major focus.

  ‘I had to leave one of my other jobs today,’ she says warningly, as I venture out of my room for a cup of coffee,
‘because the tortoise kept on staring at me. I don’t like to be stared at, thank you very much.’

  ‘Oh really?’ I say. ‘You’d think a tortoise would be hibernating by now.’

  ‘He can’t hibernate,’ she says. ‘He’s far too small. He needs his hormone injections before he can hibernate.’

  Hormone injections are a recurring theme with her. I begin to fantasize about the cone-shaped cleaning person keeping a syringe at the ready for me in her capacious patchwork handbag. By Christmas, Katherine is twisting her arm to stay, because it appears that I have been staring at her, along with the tortoise and the neighbour’s tabby cat.

  ‘Well,’ I point out, ‘it’s difficult not to stare at a person who comes cone-shaped. Especially one who insists on wearing bunny-rabbit bobble grips in her hair.’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Jonathan,’ Katherine says, ‘the poor thing’s terribly shy. Plus she’s a man. Surely even you can suss that?’

  ‘You’re kidding,’ I say.

  ‘Trust you to victimize a transvestite,’ she says.

  ‘What?’ I say.

  ‘Rambo,’ she says. Then she says, ‘You’re such a pussycat, Jonathan. Why do you always pretend to be such a swine?’

  We can, I suppose, be regarded as having upgraded our lifestyle since the Rosie O’Grady period. We have an idiotic emasculating address: Cottage-on-the-Green, Ashford-on-the-Heath, Bourton-in-the-Marsh. I spend my days anticipating that some wag will start addressing me as Toad-in-the-Hole.

  For all sorts of reasons – not the least among them the ever more complex demands of the Nuisance Chip – I find it increasingly difficult to work there. Katherine now gives all the creative energy she has left after nurturing Stella to making the place nice. Or nice enough to pass muster with a new, improved class of local dropper-in. She makes calico Roman blinds and rag-rolls the walls. She does cut-and-stick. She stencils tasteful twiddles on the dresser. She talks about ‘dragging’ and ‘liming’. She becomes addicted to auction sales and car boot sales and comes home with little spinner’s chairs, or with art deco clocks – or, on one occasion, with a whole set of Marcel Breuer dining-chairs that now live permanently in the outhouse because they won’t fit anywhere else. Parcels arrive in the porch from Designers Guild and from Osborne & Little. Within the year, the house is so pleasing to the eye that I spend the whole time staring at the walls while eating too many biscuits.

  Which brings me to the socio-culinary dimension. The house has a context. It has neighbours who keep on asking us to dinner, and Katherine keeps on asking the neighbours back. For these unspeakable occasions there are apparently no limits to the lengths of dedication required of the host victim. Whole days are spent marinating salmon into gravadlax – preferably salmon caught by oneself the previous weekend in the Scottish Highlands – or cleaving the intractable stones of peaches prior to steeping in marsala. Busy, high-earning career persons take time out to make their own olive bread, to grow their own coriander, and to pick their own wild mushrooms in the nearby woods.

  The company is moreover so indescribably dire that my customary defence against it is one that drives poor Katherine to shame and fury. I drink myself either into a premature sleep or, more usually, into a confrontational mindset. Katherine insists that I have insulted both of our immediate neighbours – to the right, the bikist solicitor and his wife, the fraggle-haired sociologist, and, to the left, the merchant banker twerp and his wife, the parliamentary private secretary. The bikist is a Neighbourhood Watch man whose other vehicle is a Porsche. He is the sort of cyclist who cannot set forth five paces to the corner shop without clothing himself from head to foot in black Lycra, safety helmet and a full deck of illuminated sparklers. The twerp, by contrast, possesses not even this alleviating eccentricity.

  ‘OK, so you think he’s a twerp,’ Katherine says. ‘But at least he’s got decent manners.’

  ‘Oh, Kath, for Christ’s sake,’ I say, my voice soggy with reproach. I mean to imply that time was when nothing mattered to us but necking and fishing and boiling eggs and pulling off each other’s clothes.

  ‘And,’ she says, ‘even after I had bloody dragged you from the table, and the poor man had offered to shake your hand, you still had to insult him, didn’t you? You still had to have the last word.’

  Our host, the merchant banker twerp, has, in point of fact, spent the night bending my ear with his opinions; has referred to me no less than three times as ‘you writer chappies’; has argued with me, in the face of all reasonable evidence to the contrary, that everyone in America is ‘rich’ – this because he sees a good quality of luggage in the foyer of his Manhattan hotel – and finally, in unison with the bikist, has lobbied forcefully to sign me up for Neighbourhood Watch. I am a sitting duck here, being a homebound worker, and they see no reason at all why I should not take control of the ‘Telephone Cascade’ until I tell them I consider Neighbourhood Watch to be a bourgeois vigilante organization; a smuggies’ club for people with too much stuff.

  ‘You were shouting at him,’ Katherine says. ‘You looked as though you were going to hit him.’

  She says she had to ‘drag’ me away and that when the twerp had thrust his right hand at me on parting and had said, ‘No hard feelings, old man. Will you shake me by the hand?’ I had behaved really badly.

  ‘Well, I shook him by the hand, didn’t I?’ I say.

  ‘Plus,’ Katherine says, spitting the words, ‘plus, you said, “Sure I’ll shake you by the hand. I’ve shaken hands with all sorts of arseholes in my time.” ’

  I confess I am rather pleased with this reminder. I laugh a smug, ill-timed laugh.

  ‘Well, I’m glad you think it’s so funny,’ Katherine says. ‘I have to go.’

  ‘Don’t go,’ I say.

  ‘I have to,’ she says. ‘It’s time to collect Stella.’

  Stella is at the local school on the green – quite literally on the green. She can see our garden gate from the school playground. But Katie collects her because she likes chatting with the other mothers. I have no idea, until the move, what a one my Katie is for the gaggle. Also, she collects Stella because her mind is full of child abductors and hooded axemen. They lurk round every corner in Katherine’s mind, in every country lane. They haunt the village shop, waiting to pounce on Stella, who is, admittedly, an absolute sweetheart.

  In her absence, and knowing she’ll be forever, I rustle up a batch of scones and set the kitchen table for tea with jampot and napkins and little china plates and bone-handled knives.

  When they come we are four to tea, not three, because Stella has brought a friend. The friend can be any one of four or five young persons of the moment, but current favourites are the Princess and the Tart. Today it is the Tart, who enters wearing shiny skinfit aerobics clobber, clackety, backless high heels and a necklace of boiled sweets that she sucks on, but will not share. She comes from ‘the estate’. The Tart is three months older than Stella and is an expert manipulator.

  ‘If you don’t say I can draw Woo-pert Bear better than you,’ says the Tart, ‘then you can’t come to my burfday.’ Stella is brought to heel by this transparent gamesmanship, even though she knows the Tart’s birthday celebration will encompass no more than a car ride to McDonald’s. It won’t be in the class of five-hour banquet that Katherine lays on in our house for Stella’s natal anniversaries. These come along with personalized loot bags, ballerina cakes, treasure hunts requiring labyrinths of multicoloured ribbons running up and down the stairwell, sacks full of superior prizes and an epilogue of chilled sparkling wine for collecting parents.

  A little later the Tart rips up Stella’s drawing, tacitly conceding, I suppose, that the Nuisance Chip’s draughtsmanship has some merit.

  ‘Anyway,’ says the Tart, ‘I can wide a torilla.’ She means that she can ride a two-wheeler; a bicycle. ‘You can’t,’ she says. This is true: Stella still has the stabilizers on her bicycle. Katie and I break our backs all day, bending over and running
along behind, clutching the back of the saddle while Stella screams at us, ‘Don’t let go! I said, “Don’t let go!” ’ Us she can tyrannize. Not the Tart.

  Towards evening, as Katie and I are reading Stella her nightly quota of nine to twelve bedtime stories, the Tart is astride the torilla. She rides the winding country lanes after dark, weaving perilously all over the road. Katherine and I are convinced that the Tart will come to a sticky end, but she bears a charmed life. That is, she survives long enough to get pregnant at sixteen and qualify, two years later, for her own flat on ‘the estate’. This is just as Katie is hot-housing Stella through her A levels and Stella is playing the cello all day, because she has set her heart on getting a place at the School of Music at Edinburgh University. The class system in this country stinks. The education system likewise. I have to hand it to the Tart: she was a bright, sparky girl. She deserved better. She could multiply hundreds tens and units in her head before the Nuisance Chip could add two and three.

  That night after our quarrel, Katherine and I make our peace. First I make a policy statement, while lying flat on my back on our bed under the stolen duvet. Katherine is pottering at her dressing-table. She is dabbling with her Under-Eye Cream and her High-Colour Treatment Cream. My behaviour over the last twenty-four hours has presumably provoked the high colour. She is lingering at the dressing-table too long, but she is wearing special pyjamas, not her usual old rags. They are cream satin pyjamas with splashes of red poppies and red poppy-coloured binding. They were a present from my mother, who adores Katherine and accuses me constantly of doing her down. I hope, now, that she is wearing them for me.

  ‘Kath,’ I say, ‘I care about the two of us more than my life.’ She says nothing. She still has her back to me. ‘I care about you and Stella and me,’ I say. ‘I care about having breakfast with you, and fucking you, and loving you, and all of us being together.’ Still she says nothing. I say, ‘Look, I don’t want all that other stuff in my life. I hate it. All the bloody socializing and crap. I can’t deal with it, and I won’t have it.’