The Travelling Hornplayer Read online

  ‘The point is,’ Katherine says, still not turning round. ‘The point is, you’re brilliant at it. They ask us because of you. Even the twerp as you call him. He’s flattered to have you insult him.’

  ‘Well, I can’t deal with it,’ I say again. ‘I don’t exist to flatter and insult twerps. I’m saying it has to stop. Just promise me it will stop. Don’t keep saying yes to these people. Or tell them your husband won’t come. Tell them he’s a bastard, all right?’

  ‘All right,’ Katherine says, after a very long silence.

  ‘I mean it,’ I say. ‘Katie, I’m serious.’ Katherine says nothing. She still sits with her back to me.

  ‘Do you love me?’ I say.

  She says nothing for a long time. She sighs. ‘Yes,’ she says crossly. Then she says, ‘It’s not always easy for me.’

  Oh shit, I think, irritably. Oh yeah? And how easy is it for any of us? Bloody women, I think. Then I feel ashamed. I change my tack. I am encouraged by the poppy-splashed pyjamas.

  ‘Come here and commit oral sex with me,’ I say. I say it to provoke her, but she comes. Katherine is great at sex but oral sex is not a big thing with her. She doesn’t like the gloop in her mouth, to quote her. But she agrees, as usual, to some initial mammalian sucklings and nibblings, before the gloop becomes an issue, so to speak.

  I emit a range of gorilla groans until I can bear what she does no longer. Then I bed her in the mattress and heave myself on top of her like the big needy primate that I am, and we hump until we judder together, feeling, as always, ecstatic about our unfailing cleverness at making it so brilliantly in unison.

  ‘That was nice,’ Katherine says and she laughs a little at her own understatement. I promptly flatten her, groping across her breasts for the Kleenex so that the dear thing won’t have to sleep on my splat as it goes cold on the sheet under her thighs. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ she says. ‘I’m already using your socks.’

  Great, I think. My very own intractable oyster-globs on my wool-rich navy ribbed hosiery. Then I think – Oh Jesus – how extraordinary is my love for this woman. Trout fishing and having sex are my only serious hobbies, now that I have given up even intermittently playing the flute. I fall, as I always do, into a heavy, ungracious sleep, even as I shift myself from Katherine’s body. When I stir, briefly, thereafter, it is to find that she is planting kisses on my bum. I quiz her about this in a mumbly sort of way.

  ‘You don’t jump me when you’re asleep,’ she says. Very Katie. Very put-down.

  The next day I take the bull by the horns. I contact the Bavarian Quaker landlady who, now almost wholly immobile, is nonetheless once again happy to have me rent her attic. The plan is not to abandon my family, though I cannot pretend that I’m not abandoning my weekday timeshare in the Nuisance Chip. I am constructing a system which will allow me to get on with my work. From the following week, I go there, Monday to Friday, enjoying the solitude and the unchanged lino on the floor and the fraying donkey-brown blanket that I hang up over the window at night and my own blissfully un-fussed catering. I eat chorizos out of the bag and chunks of Galician cheese. I eat hard-boiled eggs with blobs of Hellmann’s and packets of Mini-Cheddars. I eat those delicious polystyrene caterpillars rolled in orange granules, called Wotsits.

  And I write. Sometimes I write all day. Sometimes I write between two and five in the morning. The system works really well and, within the year, I’ve written my fifth novel – Have Horn; Will Travel – easier than all the others, both to read and to write. It gains me a new kind of audience and is subsequently filmed. It sparks itself into existence one night as I sit at a Lieder recital with my mother and Katherine, contemplating the stock characters and rustic stereotyping of those somewhat so-so lyrics of Wilhelm Müller’s upon which Lydia Dent now wishes to write her A level essay – and which Schubert, under the cloud of his own recently diagnosed syphilis, managed so brilliantly to layer and elevate into a profound, bombarding symbiosis of love and death.

  Basically, the novel asks whether we ever die of love. It brings tears to the eyes of schoolgirls who write to me on lined pages ripped from school exercise books – though none has thus far written to me quite as charmingly as Lydia Dent.

  My return to London is something that Sally cottons on to pretty soon and we re-adopt the habit of lunching together, though now we always do so in the neutral space of restaurants. By the time we begin our Oliveto phase, Sally’s children are twenty, eighteen and sixteen, while even my little Stella is coming up seventeen.

  Twenty years on from her early marriage, I am no longer in need of Sally’s pâtés and quiches, while she, on the other hand, has a need of me. She is not given to therapists. She believes in pulling herself together. Plus, she unloads on me – almost always about the oddities of her husband. I am bound to say that this has made her a less rewarding companion, so that our meetings, from my point of view, are now more duty than pleasure. God knows, I cannot claim to have found the running of my own life a hazard-free process. I have never claimed the blueprint for getting it right, but I don’t spill the beans like Sally. I am cagier, perhaps. I am discreet. I am satisfied that Sally, after all these years, knows precious little about me.

  My brother, predictably enough, since he was always a premature eccentric for those with eyes to see beyond the prettiness of his face, has become increasingly peculiar with age. He has developed some ingenious techniques, of late, which have made him an increasingly slippery customer for efficient Sally to control. He has discovered oblique forms of obstruction. He has become a saboteur.

  And the home computer has helped to do for him, since it has allowed him to commune less with his colleagues and more with his electronic subordinate. Roger has an addictive relationship with the subordinate which keeps him permanently in bondage. He cannot produce his next great work because he will only be able to do so when he and the machine have achieved nirvana. And the laptop is an innovation which has significantly reduced the circumstances in which Roger need ever get out of bed – his and Sally’s bed, that is. The marriage bed.

  Roger, all through childhood, was a monumental slob but, oddly enough, this has come as a recent surprise to Sally, who, throughout all the years of her marriage, has managed to have him mime the habits of a tidy person. Now, in his middle age, Roger has reverted to type. He will no longer dance to Sally’s tune. The Master Bedroom, Sally tells me, has become a health hazard. What she describes is what I remember as Roger’s routine stockpile of old newspapers, sheet music and specialist journals rolled round with mouldering coffee cups and apple cores, brown and festering, growing into the rugs. Roger, she tells me, has taken to chewing a brand of sugar-free spearmint gum which glues itself permanently to the carpet nap.

  The bedroom has become a no-go area for Mrs Thing, who is now almost seventy-eight. Yet for Sally to gather up Roger’s laundry – the balled socks stuck down the foot-end of the duvet cover, the underpants abandoned in the grate along with old envelopes and oily food wrappings and (just once, she says) a packet of wild bird food – has become a form of mortification. It is a thing she takes amiss, given her status as a busy commuting worker with three nearly grown-up daughters. Then there are Roger’s recent nutritional theories.

  ‘He’s got this really funny diet,’ she says to me one day. ‘His bedside table is stuffed with these quack pills’ – pills that spill, capless of course, all over the floor, where they mingle with the ooze of the festering apple cores. Since Roger these days likes to work at home, he has no particular reason to get dressed and wanders, naked, into the kitchen to make himself plates of snack food. Or he wears an egg-stained pullover that stops short of his genitals.

  ‘So he’s not wearing any trousers?’ I say.

  ‘Oh, no,’ Sally says. ‘After all, one doesn’t wear trousers in bed, does one?’

  Old Mrs Thing has begun to treat my brother as if he were a recalcitrant two-year-old grandson. ‘One day, the ducks will have that,’ she says, speaking o
f what she calls Roger’s ‘winkle’.

  Roger, Sally says, allows himself a single brand of coffee and a single cup, once a day – after which he dumps the soggy grounds straight from his Moka gadget onto whatever happens to be already in the sink, thus coating it all with a layer of fine brown grit.

  ‘I’ve asked him not to,’ Sally says, querulously, as I eagerly consult the menu and urge her to make her choice. Sally is a conventional woman, the child of an East Anglian vicarage. ‘I’ve tried to tell him it makes everything gritty,’ she says.

  Roger’s reply to this particular complaint, she says, is to observe that what is ‘soggy’ cannot also be ‘gritty’; a dubious quip, perhaps, when one’s wife is telling one to leave it out in no uncertain terms. In short, Roger has decided to re-launch himself as a disobliging nutcase with a set of unlikeable habits. He has devised a system for ruling his family where, in the past, Sally has always had the upper hand. He has become an underground worker.

  I observe to my sister-in-law – hoping to woo her into a more mellow generality – that Roger sounds not unlike one of those rural Irish dowagers that Katherine and I occasionally encountered years back, who had ‘taken to the bed’ with strongbox and chamber-pot, from thence to call all the shots. Sally is neither diverted nor particularly interested. She peremptorily makes her menu choice. Then she returns to her theme.

  ‘Talking of chamber-pots,’ she says, ‘Roger pees in all my Kilner jars. He gets them out of the shed. They stand in a row along the bedroom fender. He never empties them, of course, and I need hardly tell you that they stink.’

  The quack pills have come concurrently with Roger’s new dietary beliefs, which have, I suspect, been constructed for Sally’s maximum inconvenience. These have entrenched and extended themselves over the months and, for a mathematician, Roger is making what sound like rather simplistic connections between cause and effect. If he has a headache, for example, he will attribute it quite arbitrarily to his having eaten chestnut purée in the previous evening’s meal. If his hands show patches of dry skin, then it is because Sally, contrary to his explicit instructions, has added a half-teaspoon of sugar to her homemade tomato sauce.

  These days, Roger’s eating habits feature somewhat obsessionally in Sally’s hierarchy of grumbles. From being a person who was once fond of cooking – albeit she is one of those vicarage English women for whom Coronation Chicken and Summer Pudding hold ominous attractions – poor Sal now finds it a penance, as my brother interrogates her about the content of every cup and plateful. Roger’s diet, she says, requires her to cook without sugar, without wheat, without yeast, without dairy produce, without vinegar, without fruit peel, without fruit juice, without raisins, without grapes, without chocolate, without alcohol and without tinned food.

  ‘He’s found this doctor in Basingstoke,’ Sally says. ‘He’s a born-again Southern Baptist with hair replacements. I’ve seen him. He relays charismatic hymns over a tannoy.’ The Southern Baptist healer, she says, has disconcerting, hirsute implants that sprout gridwise from his pate in tufts arranged at intervals of exactly one centimetre.

  ‘It’s not that I haven’t tried,’ Sally says, and she promptly kills the Oliveto inkfish pasta stone dead for me, running through the demise of all her sensible, cheap, family dishes. She has struggled, poor Sal, to make soups without cream, stews without wine, salads without vinegar, pasta without cheese and puddings without fruit, sugar, chocolate, custard or pastry. She has baked loaves of wheat-free, yeast-free bread, using cornmeal and rice flour and millet. It all tastes foul, she says, and the girls have begun to rebel. Sally is worried because her two younger daughters swipe money from her purse and stuff themselves, night after night, at the doner kebab van. She is especially worried about Sheila, the sparkiest of my nieces, who has begun to stay away all night. Naturally, she blames my brother.

  My advice to Sally has not always been of the best. I tell her to make Roger cook for himself but, on our next meeting, Sally reveals that this has merely given Roger the opening to commandeer the kitchen at moments of peak inconvenience for the preparation of his own brand of Fungus the Bogeyman cuisine.

  ‘It’s driving me round the bend,’ she says. ‘He does these high-protein breakfasts. He does offal and smoked fish.’

  Since Roger has never related to food in any sensual way – he has related to nothing, I believe, in any properly sensual way, except perhaps to the violin and to our mother – he has no way of understanding that his productions are unacceptable. In no time at all, he has burnt his way through all the superior, last-a-lifetime cookware that came Sally’s way via the wedding list at Peter Jones.

  ‘If all he’s cooking is one tiny little scrap of lamb’s liver,’ Sally says to me, ‘then why does he need to use a frying-pan that’s fifteen inches in diameter?’

  Roger’s method is to pour enough oil into the pan to drown a stack of chapattis. Then he will pitch in his morsel of liver and leave it on maximum heat to smoke and stink until it looks like a small dried turd. Meanwhile, the entire extraneously lubricated surface of the pan is blackened to no purpose.

  ‘Unless,’ Sally says viciously, ‘he scrambles an egg into the smoke.’ Sometimes, she says, he likes to scramble an egg into the blood instead, thus turning his egg from yellow to pink.

  ‘Washed in the Blood of the Lamb,’ I say, to annoy her high church sensibilities. We are eating tender medallions of venison as we speak, but Sally is too far gone to try enjoying them.

  ‘Or he scrambles eggs into his fried kipper ooze,’ she says. ‘Normal people poach kippers.’ She begins to play with her fork. Roger fries his kippers into a bakelite carapace, she says. Then he eats them with his fingers – bones, skin, eye sockets and all.

  ‘The girls say he looks like a giant eating a cockroach,’ she says.

  Roger, thanks to my advice, has now become a demon with the family pressure cooker, which he uses for the preparation of his daily ration of scorched pulses.

  ‘That’s if he gets round to cooking them,’ she says. ‘Sometimes they just stand around in smelly water, going fizzy.’

  I have a sudden, unpleasant vision of Sally’s bedroom as a vaporous Fuseli witch-landscape where chickpeas steep and bubble in outsize Kilner jars brim-full of stale pee. I abandon the remains of my venison and promptly decline the sorbet. I take a swig of red wine. So Roger has slipped away from her, I muse, perhaps a little smugly, after all those years of Sally’s rhetoric of rotas and role flexibility.

  Next thing, Sally is doing a postscript on Roger’s clothes. He wears his evening shoes on muddy walks, ‘Deliberately,’ she says, sounding like a prefect giving out order marks, ‘in the hour before the college feast.’

  I call for the bill. ‘Do you have sex?’ I say. Unfortunately I say it just as the waiter comes. I pull out my Visa card and chuck it into the saucer along with the bill.

  Sally is rattled. She starts to pull rank on me in matters of marital deportment.

  ‘I don’t intend to leave him,’ she says. ‘We both believe in marriage, Jonathan. We both believe in loyalty. Don’t think I’d ever be unfaithful to him.’ I wonder, for a moment, whether Sally could possibly be offering me her body. Does she offer anyone her body? ‘I don’t philander, Jonathan,’ she says, ‘and neither does your brother. I will say that for him.’

  ‘Heave him out, Sal,’ I say. ‘Give yourself a break. Pack his bag and leave it for him at the college lodge.’ As a piece of advice, I consider this to have more future than the cooking suggestion. Roger is driving them crazy. Plus Sheila, Sally tells me, has now upped and left school. Perhaps to her credit, she has refused to apply for any of that array of hire-and-fire skivvy jobs with which our leaders have so effectively replaced proper work. Sheila refuses to sell hot dogs from a cart or scrape food off plates for two pounds fifty an hour. She has fixed her hair into dusty ropes with superglue and has made several holes along her earlobes. I admire her for having thus rendered herself unemployable, but I don�
��t say so to Sally. To do so would be to drive her into an extended, moralizing frenzy.

  ‘Sal,’ I say. ‘I’ve got to go.’ This is true. I have to go, but when I look up, I see that Sally has tears in her eyes. Oh Christ.

  ‘Jonathan,’ she says, ‘he has this photograph of me beside the bed. It’s from when I was – you know – young and pretty.’ Sally was, and still is, very pretty. Admittedly she has begun to get that formidable, WI look; that sort of look that, I imagine, would make old colonels call her ‘a fine figure of a woman’.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Sal,’ I say, ‘you’re pretty.’

  ‘Jonathan,’ she says, ‘it ought to be in a frame. He ought to have put it in a frame.’

  ‘Do yourself a favour, lovey,’ I say. ‘Swipe it back or put it in a frame yourself.’ I say this because expecting Roger to frame a photograph is like expecting a cat to walk on its hind legs.

  ‘If it was Katherine,’ she says, ‘you’d have put it in a frame.’

  Things are getting heavy here. Heavy but true. I may desert my wife all week in order to tread ancient lino underfoot, but I keep my photograph of Katherine in a small, leaf-patterned pewter frame beside my bed in north London, where its presence is irksome to Sonia. Sonia is a clandestine presence in my life about whom Sally, of course, knows nothing. Sonia is the woman who isn’t my wife, with whom I have sex on a regular basis.

  ‘Sal,’ I say again, ‘I have to go.’ The same Sonia will be on her way to me and will not appreciate being kept waiting on the Quaker landlady’s doorstep. She is a highly paid professional woman who believes that her time is money.

  My first meeting with Sonia is at a party in London on the top floor of a high-rise glass box off Euston Road. It does me no credit to say that we are drawn together by strong mutual dislike. I dislike everything about her appearance, for a start. I dislike the hint of childhood about the in-turned toes. I dislike her hollow thighs. I dislike the Mabel Lucie Attwell face, framed in dark brown toddler curls. I know, without having to hear her voice, that the speech will come with a lisp. I dislike her self-satisfied pekinesey smirk and the hint of puppy fat disposed about her chest that deputizes for breasts.