The Travelling Hornplayer Page 8

  I catch her eye while staring at her hard from the other end of the room. I’m staring in order to work out why a woman about whom I know absolutely nothing is capable of irritating the hell out of me. Just as she begins to cross the room towards me, I decode the cause of my irritation: it has to do with conflicting messages and I take these to indicate duplicity.

  The tight strapless Lycra tank top (worn under a wisp of what Sonia calls ‘dévoré’) says, ‘I’m explicit, I’m sexy,’ but the flat chest and the cutey-pie, turned-in toes say, ‘I’m still a girlie.’ The yellow bleached streak to the front of her hair says, ‘I’m adventurous, try me,’ but the fact that she intermittently sucks on the end of it says, ‘Baby me, I’m little.’ The narrow shoulders say, ‘I’m fragile. Be rough with me and I’ll get asthma.’ The kohl-work around the eyes says, ‘I’m easy,’ but the smudges say, ‘Someone has blacked my eye. Maybe it’s Daddy. Maybe it’s you. It’s men. Join the crowd. Abuse me.’ The skin, from a distance, is peaches and cream, but from close up the patches of rosiness on the cheeks look like areas of slight irritation. A wine rash, perhaps. They say, ‘I’m sensitive. I am allergic to one hundred substances. Pamper me. Buy me my own special soap.’ The shoes are Shirley Temple, but the get-up, including the jewellery, says, ‘My annual income is seriously grown-up and I spend it on nobody but myself.’

  Sonia is a development economist at a college of London University. She has recently been elevated to Reader. She has also made it fairly big in the media, through a by-line in a mass market Sunday tabloid, and from there she has invaded various glossies, specialist publications and broadsheets. She also appears on television. In short, Sonia has become one of that clutch of female style-gurus that I hardly need describe. She peddles fellatio and knicker-sniffing with a sociological slant. It is, most of it, a sort of look-at-me consumerism in the guise of the cutting edge. It concentrates on matters relating to sex, gender, bishops, gender, celebrity divorce, gender, and personal lifestyle: style holidays, style food, style art, style clothing and style feminism. It may be tomorrow’s kindling but, in Sonia’s case, it has the effect of doubling her academic salary for an additional five hours’ work a week. In between, Sonia collects air miles attending Third World conferences. She has been known, in my experience, to climb into her designer tart’s kit for a beanfest called a Poverty Banquet.

  In matters of pick-up, Sonia works fast. We leave the party early. I help her into her coat, which is made from the pelts of dead animals. Sonia tells me, when I comment on this, that she has had the bad luck the previous week to run into a brigade of pickets on her way back from a gallery where she has recorded her thoughts on the recent work of Sir Eduardo Paolozzi. By the time we are in the lift together descending to the street, Sonia turns and says to me, ‘Your place or mine?’ She is no slouch, is Sonia. She employs a cliché with aplomb.

  It is because I find her place so gruesome at this, our first seduction event, so rigorously interior-designed – her furniture like great splintery lumps of driftwood and railway sleeper, all banged together with nails exhibiting large, pyramidal heads; her huge bed as if constructed from unreconstituted builder’s pallets; her bathroom full of ersatz verdigris and distressed wood – that I make the mistake of inviting her to my place three days later and I give her the address.

  I hurry from my lunch with Sally, but Sonia is not on the doorstep. She is inside the house, sitting, fully clothed, under The Jakpak, on the wooden seat of the lavatory on my upper landing. The landlady has let her in. She has her feet splayed, toes as usual turned inward, her feet clothed in one of the fifty-odd pairs of designer bondage shoes that her wardrobe can yield up. Sonia’s shoes come in categories. That is to say, I have categorized them. They come as bondage, Minnie Mouse, Ginger Rogers and Prince Valiant.

  She is immersed in reading the day’s letters – my letters – and doesn’t bother to look up.

  ‘So what the hell do you think you’re doing?’ I say. The only post that comes to me at the bedsit is that re-directed by my publisher.

  ‘There’s a bloke here from the Buddhist clappies,’ Sonia says. ‘He says that you are a manifestation of grace in his life.’

  ‘Sonia,’ I say extraneously, ‘are those my letters?’

  ‘He writes to you on saffron paper,’ she says, ‘to match his robes.’ She waves the sheet of cheap, pumpkin-yellow photocopy paper briefly in the air before putting it to the bottom of the pile and proceeding to the next. ‘And here’s this other bloke,’ she says. ‘He says you write that Yeovil is in Dorset (see page 73, line 49) when you ought to know that it’s in Somerset.’

  ‘So it’s on the bloody border, for Christ’s sake,’ I say.

  ‘On the bloody border,’ Sonia says, ‘but nonetheless in Somerset.’

  ‘As any fule kno,’ I say, sarcastically. ‘Sonia, just what exactly do you think that you’re doing?’

  ‘Also, he says that you say “fit” (see page 86, line 12) when what you ought to say is “seizure”.’

  ‘Sonia—’ I say.

  ‘Seizure,’ she says, ‘is more correct. In fact, he’s amazed that they gave you a prize for it, and frankly so am I.’

  ‘Look,’ I say irritably, ‘just go fuck yourself, will you?’

  ‘I didn’t come here to “fuck myself”,’ Sonia says, and she pauses to look up at me before planting my letters in a careless sprawl on the floor. ‘And you’d better get your skates on, lover boy,’ she says. ‘I’ve an interview in Amsterdam this evening.’ Involuntarily, I look at my watch. ‘I’m on television,’ she says, ‘so you’ve got less than an hour before my cab arrives to take me to the airport.’

  Sonia has recently become a minor cultural icon for what I confess I still think of as the International Femintern.

  ‘Your third letter,’ she says, ‘is from St Austin’s College, Oxford. They’re offering you a three-year fellowship – a writer’s fellowship.’

  ‘Sonia—’ I say.

  ‘And your fourth letter,’ she says, ‘is from a girlie.’ She nods again towards the pile on the floor. ‘She met you last summer in her godmother’s house. She wants help with an essay and she fancies you something rotten.’

  I reach down, pick up the letters and stuff them into the pocket of my greatcoat, along with their ravaged envelopes. I am wearing the coat unbuttoned and hanging open to the floor. Katherine made the greatcoat. She has these prodigious tailoring skills which she learnt in some terrible private girls’ school in Hendon. Along with the tailoring skills, she can still remember all five verses of the school song. Katherine, who has a degree in philosophy, will still occasionally turn her hand to an epauletted, virtuoso Good Soldier Schweik number like this – lined, panelled, placketed, double-breasted and all.

  I yank Sonia irritably across the hall, unlock my front door and, leaving the keys impatiently dangling in the lock, propel her swiftly through it. Given that time is at a premium, we short-circuit the bed and confront each other standing upright, Sonia with her back against the door. Sonia is instantly accessible, thanks to her preference for tart’s underclothing, though I believe the marketing word is lingerie. Sheer stockings, with lacy tops, that hold themselves up, and one of those all-in-one stretch babygro things with poppers in the crotch.

  Katherine’s undergarments, which might once have rivalled Sonia’s, before the advent of the Nuisance Chip, are something else altogether. She wears the same white cotton knickers decade upon decade, until they drop in rags, their elastic swagged and sagging. She says that anything more glamorous will only be swiped off her by Stella. Sometimes she has a safety-pin at the hip to keep them from falling off. My Katie is a great believer in safety-pins, and pounces with joy in old haberdashers upon those obsolete nappy pins that come with pastel blue or pink safety hoods fitted over the clasps. Eventually, when even she admits that her knickers are done for, they will end up behind the lavatories or the washbasins, or in the shoe-polish cupboard, as cleaning rags, hacked into rough
squares, their fabric striated with ladders. In the winter, she goes bra-less under a demure little singlet of unisex construction and encases her nether regions in quality Wolford tights. But I digress.

  Our passion spent, Sonia does some preliminary feminine abluting with her travel pack of hypo-allergenic wet wipes, before proceeding to her usual method of squatting with splayed crotch over my plastic wash-up basin, which she fills with warm water at the sink, before placing it on my floor. She always brings her own soap. She looks almost appealing, like an infant caught short on a car journey and obliged to pee in a layby, her female parts sweetly unassailed by childbirth. I watch, slumped in a chair, still in the unbuttoned greatcoat with the letters jutting from the pocket.

  It is only once she is doing up the poppers of the babygro that I notice she has that duo of much-travestied Raphael child-angels distorting in Lycra across her pubic mound. Trust Sonia, I think irritably, to wear the Sistine Madonna’s accessories on her twat and think that by doing so she is striking a blow against two thousand years of patriarchal Christianity. I wonder where the hell she bought such a thing. In the National Gallery shop?

  Sonia is quite knowledgeable in a lumpen sort of way. That is to say she knows a little about a wide range of things and she will spread this knowledge confidently among a great multitude. Fine Art is an area she has begun to colonize quite recently and she has just completed a piece for a popular art magazine explaining that Mantegna’s Christ Entering the Mouth of Hell is, in reality, a paranoid male nightmare about being sucked into a giant vagina. Sonia is the White Goddess’s answer to all those blokes who see, in the Chrysler Building, a monument to their own phallic potency.

  Sonia watches me watching her. ‘Do you like what you see, lover boy?’ she says. Dark pubic hairs are exposing themselves between the poppers of the babygro and curling round the edges of its angel gusset.

  ‘Bleach it,’ I say, just for the hell of it, because Sonia’s greed for tribute always invites put-down. I envisage that this will be done by her beautician, as she lies on a day-bed, planning one of her Third World lectures with cucumbers on her eyelids and Nile mud all over where her tits ought to be.

  Sonia pulls down her skinny-rib skirt, adjusts her scarf and draws on her silk jersey gloves. With a gloved hand, she smooths her hair, which, in deference to the Amsterdam TV interview, she has had styled into what she calls ‘Marcel waves’. She looks, around the head, like an illustration in an Angela Brazil school story. The Marcel waves, she has explained to me, are achieved by her hairdresser, who employs purpose-built bulldog clips which he clamps in horizontal tiers around her head, to produce an effect like contour ploughing. Having smoothed her hair, she gives me the noblesse oblige Windsor wave from four to five yards off.

  ‘À bientôt,’ she says. ‘Think about the writer’s fellowship, Jonathan. It’s a feather in your cap and money for jam.’ Then she says, ‘And please have fun with the girlie.’

  For reasons best known to herself, Sonia playfully locks my door from the outside and pockets the keys, so that I have to telephone down to the poor old landlady, who heaves herself, puffing and blowing, up the stairs to relieve me and to provide me with her spare keys, which I immediately go out and have copied before I get on with my day.

  First thing is, I skim all my letters. I separate Lydia’s letter and the letter from the Oxford college. Then I read Lydia’s properly and even draft a reply. This is unusual, because I have a system with mail that is perhaps not all it should be.

  First, I isolate all necessary and pressing communications and place them on a spike. The rest I throw into a plastic intray. Then, when the intray is full, I empty its contents into a cardboard box. When the cardboard box is full, I stuff it into a cupboard. Then I start a new box. Once the cupboard is full, I ship the boxes down to the landlady’s cellar, where their contents swiftly become so damp that to handle them is disagreeable. Only then do I concede that the letters will remain unanswered.

  Lydia’s letter charms me, coming with all its bubble, after the Buddhist and the geographer. Something about its youthfulness, in the immediate wake of Sally and Sonia; something about my knowing that the writer is a person who has never opened a bank account, never visited the family planning clinic, never filled in a tax return, never endured the horrors of a parent-teacher association meeting, never grown coriander to impress a dinner party. There is something purifying about it.

  I suggest in my reply that she meet me at Fortnum & Mason, and that she do so during her half-term holiday, after arranging it with me by telephone. Two factors govern this suggestion: one, I like to make appointments as far away as possible from the bedsit and, two, the venue is one to which I have occasionally taken my daughter Stella who is of roughly similar age.

  I need not have bothered with my letter. The very next day, at 3 p.m., the girl is on my doorstep.

  ‘I hope I’m not too early,’ she says, but my surprise is difficult to disguise. ‘You were expecting me? Your PA did assure me that she’d put it in your diary.’

  At this I can’t help laughing. ‘PA?’ I say. Bloody Sonia! She will have taken down Lydia’s particulars from the letter before I got back from lunching with Sally. Then she will have taken the trouble to make a call to Lydia from Heathrow – just for what? To be capricious? Is she a mad-woman? I mean, what for, for Christ’s sake?

  ‘I’m embarrassed,’ Lydia says. ‘It’s terribly inconvenient.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘No, not in the least. It’s fine.’ I sit her on the carpeted bottom step while I return upstairs for my jacket and my wallet. Then I come back.

  ‘OK,’ I say, ‘let’s go.’ We step out and begin to look out for a cab.

  And I do remember her from that day at her godmother’s, when she had been dressed in sweatshirt and jeans. Now she has dressed up. She wears a jersey-knit mini dress in broad horizontal bands of pink and grey, with crazy bright pink tights and clumpy black lace-ups. It’s exactly the kind of dress that causes my snotty little Stella to mouth ‘Topshop’, but Lydia looks terrific in it; Lydia looks great. With none of Stella’s strange, fragile beauty, she is robustly pretty. She has the pleasing air of one who plans to pass easily through this life, collecting admirers at tennis parties. Lydia strikes me as the Miss Joan Hunter-Dunn of the upper sixth. I admire her already.

  ‘I’ve borrowed a dictaphone,’ she says, once we’ve settled in a quiet corner. ‘You’re not going to mind, I hope?’ I laugh. I don’t mind a bit. If the child has a value for my off-the-cuff remarks, well, good luck to her, I think.

  Assisting with the construction of A level essays is Katherine’s cabbage patch, not mine. I am a novice here. However, the first thing I confront is Lydia’s subject matter. I tell her it’s far too wide and I suggest that we reformulate her title as: Love and Death at the Mill: Twenty Poems from the Posthumous Papers of a Travelling Hornplayer – this being a combination of Müller’s anthology title and the number of his Müllerin poems that Schubert saw fit to set.

  Lydia looks aghast. ‘Four thousand words on twenty poems?’ she says. ‘But that’s about two hundred words on each. I can’t write two hundred words on a poem!’

  From this I deduce that Lydia’s number concept is well in place, even if her lit. crit. is dodgy. I suggest that she begin with an introductory page on German Romanticism – and I tell her what to write. Then I say she must place Müller’s poems in this context – and I tell her what to write. Lydia, meanwhile, pours tea and smiles and eats one of her dainty little sandwiches.

  ‘This is fun,’ she says. ‘This is really interesting.’

  ‘Now,’ I say. ‘If I were you, I’d tell the story. Can you do that? Just tell me the story.’

  Lydia begins on another little sandwich. ‘You don’t mean now?’ she says. ‘You don’t mean out loud?’ Then she smiles at me again and says nothing.

  Perhaps it is not inappropriate, at this point, for me to tell you the story of Müller’s poetic sequence. It is parl
our-game romanticism. Müller wrote it as part of a Sunday afternoon role play exercise for a small group of intellectuals and artists of which he was one. Another was the young man soon to become Fanie Mendelssohn’s husband. Participants were allotted the roles of miller, huntsman and gardener and required to play their parts as aspirant lovers of the beautiful mill-maid, who was, in real life, the pretty seventeen-year-old daughter of their salon host – a girl exactly of an age with Lydia.

  The miller, the ‘white’ man, is struck by wanderlust. The stream, with its constant rushing movement, eggs him on. Nothing stands still – not the water, not the mill blades, not the wheel, not the heavy millstones themselves. Everything exists in a dance of restlessness. Everything spins, churns, rotates, lifts and grinds. The poem that describes this is rather good.

  The miller, for whom the stream has become friend and confidante, follows the water’s winding path until he comes upon a mill-house whose windows wink at him in welcome. Windows are eyes and eyes are windows. Eyes are the windows of the soul. He falls in love at once, with the blue-eyed mill-girl who lives within, and he decides to put down roots. The girl is represented by the small blue flowers – the blaue Blümelein – that grow around her cottage and border the water. She is the constant focus of his urgent, passionate need.

  It is not long, of course, before the miller’s rival appears, in the form of the huntsman, the boar-scourging predator, the ‘green’ man who emerges from the woods to trample the vegetable patch and to steal the mill-girl’s heart. The miller, who has previously made her a present of the green ribbon that fixed his lute to the wall, now sees the mill-girl wear it as a pennant for her newer, wilder love. His response, though he plays with some nice literary conceits, is instant defeatism. He, too, will become a hunter, but the beast he will hunt is Death. He sinks down into a watery grave and dies on a hope that the blue flowers will reappear after the winter, to border the water and to remind his beloved of the man who loved her so well.