Sex and Stravinsky Page 7
Then they go to a vodka bar, where they do lots of under-age drinking before going on to this revolting basement club down some broken stone steps, where they smoke like mad and drink some pink alcoholic stuff that comes in cone-shaped glasses. After that they get very pushy and loud, and they start giving grown-up men the come-on.
Some of the men come over and sit down at their table and, suddenly, thank God, they’re all gone – but still with Zoe’s Moschino jacket. Even so, it’s a little while before Zoe realises she’s been abandoned for the evening. She’s been sitting there alone until this lechy guy comes up and she can’t understand what he’s saying, so all she can think to do is to flee back to McDonald’s and seek shelter under the big yellow M. She heads for the Ladies’ and washes her face and drags a comb through her hair. Then she finds the bus stop and heads back to the conifer house – though she hasn’t even got a front-door key in the event of no one being at home.
It’s really hard to see where the bus is going now that the sun has gone down and the distances between the stops are getting longer and longer. She rings the bell suddenly, but it turns out she’s already gone too far. She’s only just begun to realise where she is, once the bus is bowling alongside the woodland at quite a lick. Cold and scared, Zoe remembers the map which is still inside her backpack. She spreads it out on the verge under the light of the bus-stop lamp and, sure enough, there is the housing development, there the street, winding its way more or less against the leftmost edge of the woodland. And here must be exactly where she finds herself standing now. There’s a dotted line showing a not very long footpath going through the wood that will take her right into the back end of the housing development.
Zoe sighs with relief. She’s thinking Maggs was so right when she said that Caroline was brilliant – especially for getting her the maps. And there’s the little torch as well, in case it gets darker along the path. For the moment, the bus-stop lamp is casting quite a bit of reassuring light as she heads off among the trees.
It’s not long, of course, before the woods get seriously dark and the light from the little torch doesn’t spread very far in the circumstances, though a couple of times it stops her from tripping over tree roots and falling down rabbit holes. But the walk is surely taking her much too long – like about an hour, maybe? She begins to realise that she must have got it wrong, because by now she should be seeing the lights from the housing development. In fact she should have managed to walk the distance twice over, whereas all that’s happening is it’s getting darker and darker and, every now and again, there’s a scary sort of night noise that’s like somewhere in the woods there’s an animal murdering another animal. Well, that’s if it’s not the hooded axe-man having a go at a human baby. Oh my God.
And she’s no sooner begun to think these thoughts than she can hear kind of heavy-breathing noises following her and she’s much too scared to turn round and look, so she tries to stop breathing for a bit to see if it’s coming from herself. Then there’s something brushing against her leg, and she nearly has heart failure, but all of a sudden she can see that it’s just a dog.
It’s a lovely, waggy-tail, chunky Labrador and it’s very pleased to be meeting her, because it’s sniffing her like mad, and it jumps up and does sloppy kisses on her face. So they sit down together for a minute while she strokes its ears. It clambers all over her, because it seems quite young and bouncy, and it’s soon pestering for them to get up and get going. Or maybe it thinks she’s going to start throwing sticks for it in the dark?
Meanwhile Zoe’s shone a light onto its collar and, as well as seeing that its coat is chocolate brown, she’s noticed that it’s got a phone number and its name on a metal strip. ‘Mimi’! So no wonder it’s being so licky and friendly, because, by now, she must stink of the conifer house, all mixed up with the smell of Maman’s Gitanes. Zoe is so relieved that she’s practically crying with joy and, on top of everything, she’s extra pleased because the dog is a girl.
‘You’re a girl dog,’ she says, and she gives the dog a big hug. Then she follows it, because she’s sure that it’s going to lead her straight back to the house.
But the dog doesn’t take her to the dwarf-conifer house, though they eventually reach a bit of a clearing where she can see a glimmery sort of light. It’s not like electric light at all, and it’s coming from a small wooden hut, which has surely got to be one of the ‘forest hats’ that she’s noticed on the map. Scuffly noises are coming from inside, along with a kind of slurred, drunk-man speech.
The dog trots right up to the hut and scrapes a paw on the wood, but nobody inside seems to hear it. Zoe hesitates, before she draws close up and peers in cautiously at the window, where the scene that meets her eyes is a bit like Pap Meets the Angel of Death in Huckleberry Finn, because a thick-set man is wrestling with a boy, and the man is obviously drunk. He’s trying to punch the boy in the face, but all he does is knock over a stool, while a spirit lamp on a small rough table wobbles and rights itself. In the light of the lamp, Zoe can see two empty brandy bottles and a tempting little still life with two apples and a heel of bread, and a clasp knife, and a wedge of cheese.
The man, having lunged at the boy, has lost his balance and fallen to the ground, where he goes very quiet within seconds – in fact, he subsides so fast that she can hardly believe it, but it looks as if he’s fallen asleep. Soon she can even hear the rhythm of his loud snores. The boy rolls him gently on to a sleeping bag and takes off his boots. Then he covers the man with a coat.
After that he turns round. Zoe can see that the boy is tall and that he’s got short, very curly brown hair. It’s slightly chestnut hair, a bit like hers, and he’s even got the same kind of freckles. Only, right now, he’s looking anything but merry.
Then he steps outside to greet the dog and he looks to the left, and sees her.
‘Je m’appelle Zoe Silver,’ she says quickly. ‘Je suis – um – lost.’ Then she says, ‘Perdue?’ and the boy holds out his hand.
‘Je m’appelle Gérard,’ he says. ‘Good night. You have hunger?’
‘Oui,’ she says, nodding vigorously. ‘I’m actually starving.’
So he goes back inside the hut and gets the bread and cheese and the apples. They seat themselves side by side on a log and munch in silence.
Then he says, ‘Ne t’inquiète-pas. I can – t’accompagner – à la – house? Yes? It is très facile.’
‘Thank you,’ she says.
He doesn’t say much on the walk back to the house, except that twice he says his father is ‘triste’.
Then he says, ‘My father, he is ne va pas bien.’ Meanwhile he’s got a much more effective torch than Zoe’s inadequate effort and he’s carrying a stout stick. ‘There is sometimes les sangliers,’ he says, by way of explanation. ‘Pig?’ he says, so that Zoe doesn’t find out until much later that there are wild boar in the woods, because she’s envisaging the odd friendly Gloucester Old Spot pursuing his cultural heritage as he roots for those Gallic truffles that Caroline’s told her about.
And when they finally get to the house, it’s plunged in darkness. And it’s locked, because by now it’s really late, but Gérard indicates that she should wait alongside the back door with Mimi, while he shins up the drainpipe that gives on to the window of his bedroom. After that, he tiptoes downstairs and opens the door to let her in. The only thing is, she’s a bit surprised to see that he’s not only clutching the T-shirt that says ‘Zizou’, but he’s got Ballet Class under his arm.
‘I can read this book?’ he says politely. Then he says, ‘Since tomorrow? OK?’
‘OK,’ Zoe says and the Tall Merry Fellow does a gracious little almost-bow.
‘Visit with me tomorrow,’ he says and he indicates the pathway back towards the forest hat.
Then he’s gone and she creeps, mouse-quiet, into her little boxroom, where she falls asleep, except that, next morning, Véronique has obviously told her mother that Zoe gave her the slip the previous nig
ht. So Maman is going ‘Rant-rant-blah-blah-l’imbécile’ all the way along the stop-start-lurch-puke route to the tarmac playground, from which – once Véronique’s back is safely turned, and once she has got Maggs and Mattie on side to tell the teacher she’s got ‘la grippe’ – Zoe walks straight to the stop where the bus will take her back to Gérard, and the forest hat, and Mimi, and the très triste dad, which is where she means to play hookey for the first time in her life.
Chapter Three
Hattie
Hattie Marais has once again fallen asleep with the radio on because Herman is off on one of his business trips. He’s absent quite a lot these days so the all-night radio has become a bit of a habit. She’s also taken to sprawling her little eight-stone person all over the king-size bed. When Herman is there, Hattie sleeps – has slept, now, for eighteen years – in a contained foetal ball, strictly on her own side of the bed, because Herman is quite a light sleeper. He likes a no-man’s-land between himself and his bedfellow, along with one of those fancy mattresses where each side functions independently of the other. My craters are not thy craters.
When he’s at home, he always takes care to let down the Roman blinds that make a blackout between the room and the east-facing veranda where the morning light comes in. But now the same light is dappling her eyelids as it dances through the unveiled French windows, via the hibiscus and the clambering bougainvillea. And she can see the feathery leaves of the flame tree dipping and rising on a light breeze, which has come at last to moderate the sweaty, subtropical heat.
‘See you probably two weeks-ish, Snoeks,’ Herman says – always says – giving Hattie a brief conjugal peck on the cheek before he takes off, carting work stuff, golf stuff, diving stuff; fishing stuff, ski stuff; white-water rafting stuff, riding stuff, biking stuff. Bloke stuff in some form. Business or pleasure? Work hard. Play hard. Herman is very good at both. One of the many pay-offs is that, precisely because Herman is such a bloke, he’s also a bit of a techie, which means he likes high-quality equipment. So whereas Hattie, left to herself, would still be making do with her crackly Roberts radio, circa 1960, the item now residing in style alongside her marriage bed – Herman’s side of the bed, admittedly – is a superior, multichannelled, digital affair that means Hattie can now punctuate her sleep with impeccable transmissions from the BBC’s Radio 3: snatches of Tom Stoppard interviews; Bach fugues; extracts from Mozart’s letters to his female cousin; reappraisals of Samuel Barber (or was it Samuel Palmer? Lots of it is what she hears in her half-conscious waking moments), even, coming full circle, she listens to the aged Mahotella Queens in conversation with Andy Kershaw. Hattie likes to envisage the Queens in Central London, sitting regally in their Zulu headgear and short grass skirts, in the foyer of that BBC building in Portland Place, with the Eric Gill sculpture over the doorway.
And now, on this particular morning, she stirs around 5 a.m. to hear the minuet from the end of Stravinsky’s Pulcinella ballet; that slowed-up, seductive version of the Pergolesi music that Stravinsky ‘recomposed’, as he put it – except that her friend Josh Silver from way back once told her that chunks of it were not, in fact, composed by Pergolesi. They were written by somebody else. Stravinsky wrote that he felt ‘a sensory and mental kinship’ with Pergolesi and also how lucky he’d been that, when he went on the trip to Naples with Picasso, he had found these precious Pergolesi fragments, which had so far eluded the academics. So, maybe, had they not eluded the academics, the misattributions would have been detected before Stravinsky got to recompose them? But, in the event, so what?
As Josh had gone on to observe, inspired people’s mistakes are usually in themselves inspiring. That’s why he liked it that, when Jesus said whatever it was that he’d said to Mary Magdalene in Aramaic, he hadn’t said, ‘Noli me tangere.’ He hadn’t meant, ‘Touch me not.’ It was a mistranslation that had inspired a hundred Old Master paintings. And Moses, Josh said, was probably not even Jewish. That’s what he’d read in Freud. He was very likely a prince of Egypt with an adoption fantasy. Or had the Egyptian princess and her maidens been stringing Pharaoh along? Look what we found floating down the Nile in a basket. Yeah. Right. A handy story when you’d got yourself in trouble.
The Pergolesi business merely served to underline that the whole, brilliant ballet was about things being not what they seem; about layers of illusion; masks, disguises and deceptions. If you’re performing in a mask, as Hattie knows from her dancing days, then your face can’t show any emotion. All emotion is gesture. Emotion equals movement. I love: I pull. I hate: I push. Touch me. Touch me not. Noli me tangere.
Josh was so passionate about that Pulcinella time in Paris, when all the talent of the modern world seemed to be right in there, throwing itself at the Russian Ballet. Hattie knew that he was there in spirit, on the gad with Picasso and Stravinsky as they set out for Naples to find the perfect Neapolitan comedy on which to base their ballet. He was with them in the hole-and-corner junk shops and when they were watching the acrobats in the street. ‘Who is the third that walks always beside you?’ Funny how Josh, with his secular, left-wing parents, could always quote more of the Bible than she ever could, even after a decade of regular attendance at the St Thomas’s Anglican Church Sunday School.
Now she’s back, drowsing again, as the recomposed Pergolesi is turning from pastoral yearning into those rasping Stravinsky discords and dark dance rhythms. And, through her sleep, she’s hearing this one word from the text that sounds a bit like ‘screw-gender’, but it isn’t, of course, because the songs are in Italian. Hattie is no good at foreign languages and her knowledge of Italian is confined to the odd tourist-phrase-book item. ‘A che ora arriva il treno?’ That kind of thing. And, until she met Josh, she’d never heard of a ballet with songs.
The second time Hattie wakes, it’s after a surprising two-second dream, and just before the six o’clock news. The dream hasn’t got any narrative; just a flash of audio-visual clarity. Josh Silver is offering her his glasses; those goggly little glasses that he always used to wear. Maybe still does? He’s holding them out to her. ‘Take them,’ he’s saying, right out loud, so that she can hear his voice quite distinctly. ‘Go on.’ The connection will be Stravinsky. For a couple of weeks in his final year, Josh spent time carrying around an autobiography of Stravinsky. It had a photograph of the composer on the dust jacket. One day he’d come with a story about how, at supper the previous night, his mother had cast her eye over the dust jacket and had seen fit to remark that Stravinsky was ‘obviously Jewish’.
‘No, he isn’t,’ Josh said to his mother. ‘What you mean is you think he looks Jewish. But it’s just because he’s Russian.’
Josh suspected his mother – adoptive mother – of wishing to claim various persons of distinction for her own ethnic birth-group, even though she believed religion to be the opium of the people and she’d taught him the words of ‘The Internationale’.
In the daytime Josh’s mother was a human rights lawyer. She operated in a man’s world, taking on all manner of bully-boy white-racist employers, which half the time meant incurring the wrath of the bully-boy white-racist state. But once she was home, she turned into this person who grated raw potatoes for latkes and who liked to make her own sauerkraut. She made her own cream cheese as well, which is why, the one time Hattie went there for supper, there was this oozy little bag of milk curds hanging over one of the taps at the Silvers’ kitchen sink. There was also this cute little Afro kid who was going mad for Mrs Silver’s cream cheese on rye and he loved the potato latkes. He probably liked chicken soup with barley as well.
‘This is Jack,’ Josh said to Hattie.
The child belonged to the housemaid, but the family often had him to stay over in the house on Saturdays and Sundays, because his mother had the weekends off. Hattie had never heard of a black child sleeping over in a white person’s house, which was surely against the law? The place was quite alarming for Hattie, but it was also, in its way, a breath of fresh
air. And she was especially impressed that Mrs Silver, on top of all her professional obligations, found the energy to start arguments at the supper table.
So she was always entertained when Josh regaled her with his family’s mealtime talk, because at her own parents’ dining table, all through her growing up, the four of them sat in glum silence listening to the shuffling feet of the maid who moved in and out with the dishes, sort of like a serf. And then there was the ticking of the grandfather clock – the same pretty clock that still ticks and bongs in the selfsame hall, even though its time-keeping drives Herman up the wall.
They would be eating that dreary boarding-house food in the room that Herman, since those days, has opened up into a big, bright space, all in one with the kitchen. Then he’s added those two glass prisms that run down each side of the house, like Toblerone boxes for giants. Herman’s fern-and-orchid houses. Her parents’ carpets have all gone, except for one large Baluchi rug, because Herman right away called them ‘mould green’ and ‘disgusting’ and he said they stank of old mutton fat and pipe smoke and cabbage. Instead, he exposed and waxed the beautiful wide floorboards – indigenous old hardwood, he said – that had been lurking, all through Hattie’s childhood, under two layers of cracked lino, which, in turn, had been lurking under the mould-green carpets.
Meanwhile, back to Josh, who was setting the dinner-table scene for her, in which old Prof Silver was busy providing instruction for his wife. There was no such thing as ‘looking Jewish’, he said. Italian Jews looked Italian and Iraqi Jews looked Iraqi. And Polish Jews looked Polish. And those Eastern European Ashkenazi settlers in Israel – well, they looked like Eastern Europeans. And those Jews who had always been there from before the biblical diaspora – well, they were indistinguishable from Palestinian Arabs, he said, except for their beard and hats.