Sex and Stravinsky Read online

  ‘But the Arabs have got nicer hats,’ Josh observed in an aside to Hattie. ‘Don’t you think so?’

  Hattie hadn’t a clue about the hats, but by the time he had recounted the episode they had covered the distance between the admin block and the student-union café, where, though she wasn’t a student there, but a young working ballet teacher, she was his frequent guest.

  She remembered him placing the Stravinsky book on the table while he unwound a Chelsea bun. Both of them were nineteen.

  ‘So what do you think?’ he said. ‘Does Stravinsky look Jewish then, or what?’

  ‘Well,’ Hattie said, ‘I think his glasses maybe look quite Jewish. Actually, Josh, they’re just like your glasses.’

  She knew Josh wasn’t really Jewish, because he’d told her he was adopted. His parents took him in, aged three, when his mother went round the bend. He had this wild story about being got by a crooked Greek upon a Lebanese convent girl in a mining town called Boksburg. He couldn’t remember his time in Boksburg. He was too young. He couldn’t remember a thing about his mother, except that she’d been dead since nearly for ever. But he could remember a little bit about Dora the teenage housemaid and a lot more about Dora’s mother Pru, who had taken him to her own outdoor church, where they did trance states and sang gospel songs and people got baptised by total immersion. He thought he could maybe remember the rattly long-distance bus, designated for black persons, that had taken him from Boksburg to Durban, where Dora’s mother lived, but he knew that, in reality, it was probably because Pru had told him about it. He knew that it was little Dora who had saved his life.

  ‘I don’t remember very much from before I became a white person,’ Josh said.

  Hattie had never been to Boksburg. She only knew it from a joke she’d once heard, about a man who kept on missing the train to it.

  Josh seemed quite pleased about Stravinsky’s glasses.

  ‘So what do you think?’ he said. ‘Does he look sexy then, or what?’

  Hattie knew that Josh was really keen on her, but even though he was her absolutely best friend – the nicest person she’d ever known; the person with whom she felt ‘a sensory and mental kinship’ – was she in love with him? She wasn’t sure how you could tell. And was it all right to fall for a person of dubious provenance, with dangerous adoptive parents? I mean, what would her own parents have thought? A man who made jokes about being white? Well he was white, of course. Lebanese people and Greeks counted as white. Sort of.

  That was when Herman had suddenly come up and joined them in the student café. Six foot five and powerfully built; shaking sunlight from his thick blond hair; the hair that didn’t last. Final-year star student at the architectural school. Blue eyes. White teeth. Penetrating stare. Very in-your-face.

  ‘Hey, Josh,’ he said. ‘So are you going to introduce me to your friend?’

  Suddenly Hattie is properly awake – wide awake and bolt upright – because the six o’clock news is on the BBC and will be happening at eight o’clock – of course – given that she’s in a different hemisphere and she’s two hours ahead of GMT. And right now she can hear her sixteen-year-old daughter Cat beginning to bang about in the kitchen the way she does these days.

  ‘Crumbs!’ Hattie says to herself. ‘The time!’ She gets up and pulls on a thin kimono over her nakedness. ‘Please God,’ she says, somewhat fervently. ‘Let me please not fight with Cat today.’

  In the passage, on her way to the kitchen, she takes down The Oxford Companion to Music and enters the kitchen, where she leans the book on the dresser. Stravinsky. There is the photograph – the very same dust-jacket photograph – reproduced on the page. So does Stravinsky look sexy then, or what? Well, yes, she decides, he does, even though he looks quite a lot like Papa Mouse in Mouse Tales by Arnold Lobel. Papa Mouse is ‘obviously Jewish’; a mouse patriarch in braces. Hattie once wrote a fan letter to Arnold Lobel, but he died before she’d posted it. Mouse Tales is a book that she can still recite by heart because she used to read it ten times a day to Cat, who loved all the stories, but especially the one about the mouse who buys himself new feet. That was a decade ago, when Cat was six; when Cat was sweet. Hattie tries not to brood about Cat too much these days, which is maybe why she’s concentrating so hard on Stravinsky’s glasses.

  ‘Hey, what you doing, Ma?’ Cat says, in that single-volume shout voice she has recourse to these days whenever she talks to her mother.

  ‘Hi, Cat,’ Hattie says, hating the sound of her own voice; that slightly fake-cheerful, Children’s Hour tone.

  ‘So what are you doing?’ Cat says again. Her consonants are fuzzy and she’s dribbling breakfast cereal from her mouth as she speaks.

  Hattie can tell at once that it’s the horrible chocolate-flavoured stuff, because brown milk is leaking down her chin. Cat may be sixteen, but she still has an infant’s sweet tooth. She’ll add extra sugar to Coco Pops and she’ll sprinkle sugar on those already cloyingly sweet pink yogurts. Cat sometimes talks with her mouth full these days, which is pretty hard to take. She does it because, while she munches and stuffs, she seldom swallows anything, as far as Hattie can see, so her mouth is always full.

  Hattie would rather Cat didn’t pretend to be eating, but she clearly likes the taste of food too much not to put it in her mouth. So for the past few weeks she’s been pursuing a policy of shovelling spoonloads into her mouth, one after the other, without pausing to swallow. She stores the spoonloads hamsterwise in the pouches of her cheeks. That’s until congestion causes bits to start falling out. Then Cat will do one of three things. The first is she’ll feign a choking fit and spew the chewed pile on to her plate.

  She’ll follow this with some bogus accusation that she directs at her mother.

  ‘I nearly choked because of you,’ she’ll shriek. ‘There are bones in this. There are peppercorns in this. What are these disgusting leaf things?’

  The second thing is, she’ll dash for the bathroom, where Hattie is pretty certain that Cat is disgorging the hamster hoard into the lavatory bowl. This is because she hears the cistern flush, not once, but twice. And thirdly, just occasionally, Cat will actually swallow. When she swallows, most of the hoard goes down in one huge gulp. She’ll jerk her head like a turkey, then there’ll be a bobbing in her throat and her eyes will start to water. Sometimes a coughing fit ensues. Yet Cat isn’t exactly skin and bones – not yet – though she has got slightly thinner. She’s still got quite big boobs and that pretty, little-girlish round face. Cat comes off the same production line as Herman’s tribe of rosy blonde sisters. Except that, whereas they are always smiling their dimpled smiles, poor old Cat looks a constant crosspatch these days.

  And Herman, of course, just keeps on denying that there’s anything amiss with Cat. Daddy’s best baby girl.

  ‘Just because you’re such a titch,’ he says. ‘Calm down, Snoeks. She’s OK. No worries. Her eating’s just fine. She doesn’t like your cooking, that’s all.’

  Hattie finds it a bit of a wind-up these days, the way he’s never stopped calling her Snoeks.

  ‘I said, what are you doing, Ma?’ Cat says. ‘Are you deaf, or something?’

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ Hattie says. ‘I heard this music on the radio.’

  ‘So what?’ Cat says. ‘Who cares about what music you heard on the radio?’

  ‘It’s a ballet with songs and masks,’ Hattie says. ‘It’s a Harlequin story, called Pulcinella.’

  ‘So what?’ Cat says again.

  Then, while her mother still has her eyes on the book, she makes a move for the pedal bin, where she deftly relieves herself of the hamster hoard, before resuming her pose of breakfasting normality, spoon once more in hand.

  ‘Say, Cat?’ Hattie says, turning from her book. ‘What about masks? That art project of yours. It’s just an idea, but what about doing it on African masks?’

  Cat makes an irritated noise in her throat.

  ‘Masks, for Chrissakes!’ she says. ‘Pur-
leez! Like what have masks got to do with anything? You don’t know what you’re talking about, so just butt out, OK?’

  Twelve years ago Hattie went to Venice with Cat for a treat, leaving the two older children with Herman and the maid. First they went to England to visit her schoolmaster uncle and her engineer cousin in Norfolk. Then, after that they went, just the two of them, to Venice. A four-day indulgence for herself and her little blonde daughter. Cat was a big hit in Venice, where the waiters kept saying, ‘Che bella!’

  ‘But I’m not Kay and I’m not Bella,’ Cat would explain to them repeatedly. ‘I’m Cat.’

  By coincidence her two best friends back home in the preschool playgroup were called Kay and Bella. Cat, who was four at the time of the visit, now says she can’t remember going to Venice.

  She stroppily denies having been there, even though she still has the Venetian-glass bonbons she chose, sitting in a bowl on her windowsill. She says that her dad brought them back for her. But Hattie can’t forget. She remembers Cat’s enchanted little face pressed up against the windows of the tourist shops with carnival masks; beaky plague masks, Harlequin masks, leather masks with knobbly foreheads. Pulcinella. And she remembers Cat carefully choosing each little glass bonbon, one by one.

  Cat has been incessantly unloading moans about the art project ever since the school term began. And she’s in a dilemma, poor girl. Hattie appreciates that. She can’t bear to admit any interest in things that her mother might find gratifying and yet she really wants good grades. Cat is immensely able and she wants to get into the architectural school to become an architect like her dad, so she knows that the project will have to be good. And it’s got to have an African theme, because that’s where she lives, all right? In Africa. No more Eurocentric projects, thank you. This is the New South Africa.

  Cat has always been Daddy’s Girl. She’s always preferred Herman to her mother, and now so much of the time he’s not here. It appears to be no longer possible for Hattie to offer Cat anything. All it does is make her abusive – and, when Cat’s in a bad mood, she starts to thunder about so formidably, making the floorboards vibrate so that Hattie can hear her great-grandmother’s china start to tremble and jingle in the cupboards.

  All Hattie’s three children are big, like Herman, but right now the older two are carrying it more comfortably than Cat. Then again, they’ve always had each other. Twins. It runs in the family. Jonno and Suz are imposing, tall, and efficient. They are strong, confident eighteen-year-olds, sporty and big-boned, delighting in their new undergraduate lives. Hattie, by contrast, has always been small; marked out from infancy as a dainty ballet girl. And, having spent eighteen years of her adult life teaching at the local ballet school, it’s eight years since she’s packed it in, first to take an arts degree and then to start writing her series of ballet stories for girls.

  Unlike most of her women friends, who have broadened around the pelvis, Hattie can still buy her jeans in the children’s department at Stuttaford’s, but this gives her little satisfaction these days, since, like Cat, she’s begun to have doubts about her size. She wonders whether her couplings with Herman were maybe inappropriate all along. Perhaps they were like those of the little shivery whippet she once saw getting it together with a St Bernard in the park? Is this why Herman keeps going off on trips? Could it be that her size has become repellent to him? Has it got anything to do with why Cat hates her? Is it her size that’s recently made her daughter start doing all this funny stuff with food? Hattie once saw a photograph of a post-war classroom in Saigon. Six doll-like Vietnamese eight-year-olds were sitting around a table, along with one little eight-year-old giant. The giant was a pale-brown Afro girl whose mother had got it together during the war with a seven-foot black GI.

  What’s slightly unsettling Hattie right now, apart from Cat, is that she’s completely stopped minding about not going along with Herman on some of his trips, where once she would have felt rejected. She likes the way it liberates those parts of herself that she puts on hold when she’s playing Mrs Wife. It means that, as well as sprawling across the bed and listening to the all-night radio, she can more easily get on with her writing.

  ‘Snoeks, it’s not worth it,’ he began saying – that is, when he still felt it incumbent upon him to make excuses. ‘Snoeks, it’s not much of a trip.’ ‘Snoeks, I promise it’ll bore you stiff.’

  He promised her that she would be bored stiff on the trip to Mauritius – that short hop from their home on the east coast of South Africa to the island in the Indian Ocean; white sands and feasts of seafood; indigenous pink pigeons on the terrace; blue-and-white enamelled street signs to make one feel one was in France.

  She would get in the way of the golf, Herman said. Golf, as he has repeatedly explained to her, is never simply golf. There is nothing quite like it for clinching a deal. He’s assured her, over the years, that she’d be bored rigid by his business trips to Lagos and New Orleans and Tokyo. Too much golf. Once he took his favourite sister instead. Lettie. Five foot nine and bossy to a degree – that’s under all the master-race charm and the radiant, dimpled smiles. Scary with a tennis racket in her strong right hand.

  ‘Listen, Snoeks, don’t knock the golf, all right?’ Herman says. ‘It’s always worked for me. Every move I make translates to the boardroom. And what do you think is paying for the kids to be at uni?’

  The ‘kids’, to be sure, are pretty high-maintenance. Always have been. It’s the way Herman’s enjoyed bringing them up. Like him, they have always been addicted to those huge American refrigerators with double doors like wardrobes, crammed with iced drinks and top-range snacks. They like tennis coaching and Pony Club and skiing and white-water rafting and deep-sea fishing and holidays in Thailand. They like stuff. High-quality stuff. Electronics and digital stuff and constant, unremitting upgrades. They like clothes with labels. The right labels. They like cars and boats. And now that Jonno and Suz are both at university in the Cape, their dad has seen fit to buy them each their own little brand-new car and their own little brand-new apartment.

  ‘The halls of residence are not what they were in my day,’ Herman says. ‘You can’t expect our kids to live in places like that.’

  By which Herman means to say that, now the halls of residence are racially integrated, the room next door may be occupied by a needy black student on state funding, whose three even needier country cousins will be dossing illicitly on the floor. And the country cousins (unemployed) will not necessarily be familiar with the workings of first-world accessories. The flush toilet, for example.

  ‘It’s not racist, for heaven’s sake, Snoeks,’ he says. ‘It’s about the great unwashed.’

  To be sure, in times past, it could have been the Irish, or Romanian Jews, or itinerant Greeks, like Josh Silver’s father – or poor white Afrikaners, come to that.

  And Hattie, for sure, needs no convincing that it’s never been her ballet classes that have funded the children’s lifestyle. Nor, more recently, the royalties from her children’s books, though these have begun to pick up. Even so, it irks her a little that Herman persists in regarding her writing as a little bit of a hobby, now that she’s done with the ballet school. And when, two years ago, she aired the idea of converting the unoccupied servants’ rooms into a work space for herself, Herman didn’t appear to take the idea on board as a serious proposition. He merely said, ‘No worries, Snoeks. One of these days we’ll make a plan.’

  Then he suddenly went ahead, without consulting her. He drew up the plans and transformed the servants’ rooms, not into a work room for his wife; not even into the standard ‘garden cottage’. What has emerged within the last few months is a fabulous, opened-up space, a machine for singleton living, which he has arranged to rent out to a young Italian academic. It’s become one of Herman’s projects and Herman loves a project. Naturally, he has no recall with regard to Hattie’s original suggestion. And it’s not as though he needs the rent, but Herman likes to utilise his assets. The tena
nt is due to arrive during his absence. In fact, on this very day. Giacomo Moroni. Somebody new and junior in the drama department who has come from Milan – and Hattie is expecting him at noon.

  ‘Snoeks,’ Herman has assured her, just prior to that parting peck on the cheek, ‘my hunch is that you’ll love him. He sounds right up your street.’

  By which, she assumes, he means that the tenant, being a drama type, is probably fond of the ballet. Or he’s gay. Or both. A gay boy aesthete would be just the person to take good care of Herman’s property.

  Someone in Herman’s company has done the actual conversion, but Herman has managed to carve out the time to be quite hands-on about it, even though he’s on several government committees. He advises the Housing Ministry about this, that and the other. Herman goes fishing with prominent members of the new ANC government. And Hattie can’t not admire his energy, along with his amazing genius for always being in the right place. It’s weird, she reflects, a little sadly, that people like Josh’s adoptive parents – people who spent their whole lives working, at great risk to their personal safety, for the kind of social change that the new government now espouses – have either melted into exile, or invisibility, or they’ve quietly died. And people like Herman, the well-off sons of white farmers; yesterday’s eager upholders of the apartheid state, are now the best of buddies with the new black elite. But of course. One should have predicted it. Because those persons who have the flair to be in there with the in-crowd – those are going to be the same persons who will always be right in there, no matter who’s in charge.

  ‘Get real,’ Herman says. ‘It’s the way of the world. Anyway, Sam’s a good bloke.’ ‘Sam’ being an ethnic Zulu and Herman’s favourite government minister. ‘He’s a drinking buddy, no more.’

  Little point in carping that Herman, along with his parents and the whole tribe of jolly sisters, was yesterday’s comfortable advocate of the prohibition laws. That is to say, the prohibition against the sale of alcohol to black persons.