Strange Music (6 page)

May looked at Eric. ‘Sorry, chum! I didn't know this was going to come up.' Then, to the others: ‘I have to go up to town with Arthur tomorrow. Eric has to go into the village to collect their car. It fitted nicely.'

‘Don't worry,' Eric assured them. ‘I shall put all sides of the case with such forensic clarity that they will have no possible way of reaching the correct conclusion. But it will be fun!'

‘So!' Isabella said. ‘You'll just have to find your gardening shoes before tomorrow. You're not going in those.'

‘If I were an animal,' Eric said as he set off through the coppice with Sam, Hannah, and Tommy, ‘what animal would I be?'

‘A human!' Sam told him. ‘All humans are animals.'

‘Not me,' Hannah assured him.

‘It's true.'

‘'Tisn't!'

‘'Tis!'

‘Stoppit you two! I mean any animal
other
than a human. Would I be a fish? Or a bird?'

‘A pig,' Tommy said. ‘Look at your shoes already.'

‘Oh, shhh . . . sugar! I was supposed to change. Never mind. You, Tommy, would be an eagle, because you've got the sharpest eyes.'

‘What would I be?' Hannah asked.

‘You tell me.'

‘A peacock. Because I'd have all those gorgeous colours.'

‘No, this isn't a wishing game. You might
want
to be a peacock but I think you'd actually be a squirrel, because you're very good at hiding things.'

Hannah laughed. ‘How d'you know?'

‘Because,' Eric said, ‘I see all the games you play out of my studio window. And when you all play Hot or Cold, you always pick the best places to hide what's Hot.'

Condensed mist fell from every branch; sodden twigs refused to snap but broke with a dull crackle among the no-longer-colourful leaf mould. A pheasant startled them, rising from almost underfoot with a harsh clatter of feathery alarm. It flew high, swiftly breaking clear of the leafless canopy and heading south beneath the leaden sky.

‘A wild pheasant,' Tommy said.

‘How d'you know?' Eric asked.

‘They always fly high, the wild ones. The ones they rear for shooting don't. A beater told me that at the last shoot.'

‘You'd be an elephant, Tommy, because elephants never forget.'

They crossed the waterlogged ditch by the ‘new bridge' – a couple of felled trees, trimmed of branches and laid side by side. ‘Let's play the same game only with fruit,' Tommy suggested. ‘What sort of fruit would I be?'

‘Sort of like that!' Sam mimed a dumb-bell shape in the air. ‘'Cos you've got a big head and a big bum!'

‘Oh, yeah? Well, you'd be the same only gone rotten 'cos you've got a smelly bum!'

They dissolved in fits of giggles, chanting, ‘Smelly bum! Smelly bum!' at each other and glancing slyly at Eric in hope of a reprimand. Hannah looked at him with weary sympathy.

‘You'd be an apple at the top of a tree,' he told her.

‘Why?'

‘Because you're a good girl – one of the best, and that's where all the best apples are. But it gets pretty lonely up there because the boys are all lazy and they find it easier to pick the apples on the ground – the windfalls. But it pays to wait for the boys who only want to climb to the top; they're the cream.'

‘I climb to the top of the apple trees,' Tommy assured them.

Sam put his face right up close and said, ‘And all the apples cry out “Smelly bum! Smelly bum!” and then they all faint!' He flung himself backward among the autumn stubble with a force that would have dislocated an adult spine and raised all four limbs in the air – the way they drew dead dogs and cats in the
Dandy
.

‘Oh, just look at you!' his sister yelled. ‘How d'you expect to go into Miss Dooley's class like that?'

‘Easy.' He sprang to his feet and mimed the opening of a door and shutting it behind him; then he raced ahead of them with a Chaplin-esque gait, feet at right angles, head in the air.

‘Would Betty be an apple at the top of the tree?' Hannah asked Eric.

‘Why Betty?' he replied.

‘I miss her.'

‘Oh,
do
you? What about you, Tommy? D'you miss Betty?'

He stared ahead for three or four paces, eyes fixed on the stile between this ploughed field and the road, where Sam now sat, wearing an assumed air of boredom. ‘She was good when they lived at the Dower House,' he said.

‘But not since then?'

‘Todd and Gracie won't let her come back and play with us.'

‘Nor Charley,' Tommy put in. ‘I miss Charley.'

‘I believe that. Racing all alone on the top of the walled-garden wall isn't much cop, is it! So d'you want someone to talk to Todd and Gracie and try to change their minds?'

‘Yes!' they both said.

‘And,' he asked Hannah, ‘d'you think Betty should apologize to Tommy before she's allowed back, because she said . . .'

‘Yes,' Hannah said.

‘No,' Tommy said.

‘Well, that's something you youngsters will have to sort out among yourselves – as usual.'

They had arrived at the stile.

‘Smelly bum!' Sam taunted.

The other two, feeling almost grown-up by now, looked at him with a disdain that was a far more effective silencer than annoyance or disgust would have been.

‘Can you take us to school
every
day?' Tommy asked as they set out along the short stretch of road.

‘D'you know how to catch a pink elephant?' Eric asked them.

‘No!' they chorused, laughing.

‘D'you know how to catch a
black
elephant?'

‘No!' The laughter was louder, wilder.

‘Using binoculars, a matchbox, a pair of tweezers, and a telephone directory – you don't know that?'

‘No!' Louder yet and wilder.

‘Dear-oh-dear! Don't they teach you
anything
useful at that school? Oh! I see it has turned into
this
school – we've arrived. No time left to tell you how to catch a black elephant. I can see I shall have to collect you this afternoon and tell you the secret. Now I must go and get my car and I think I'll just call on Gracie and see if I can clean these elegant shoes up a bit.'

That afternoon, Eric and Gracie (whom he had invited back to the Dower House for tea) led five children out of the coppice.

‘Remember,' he warned them for the umpteenth time, ‘this is how to catch a
pink
elephant. Not a
black
elephant – because . . .'

‘. . .
everybody
knows how to catch a black elephant,' the other six parroted with weary exasperation – and for the umpteenth time, too.

‘So, on the laaaast day, you tie the piece of rope round your very laaaast plum cake and let it float down the river and round the bend. And you hear the cry, “Oh! Goody-goody-goody – plum cake, plum cake!” and so you know the pink elephant has taken the bait. So you start hauling in on the rope as fast as you can, and the pink elephant comes charging upstream after it. Only this time you haul it
right round the bend
. And so, when the pink elephant comes after it, he sees you! For the first time, he
sees
you! And then he realizes you've been playing tricks with him all those other times. And what does he do? Why, he turns
black
with rage, of course. And everybody . . .?'

‘. . . KNOWS HOW TO CATCH A BLACK ELEPHANT! Do-o-o-h.'

They mimed weary collapse, the way people always do after a shaggy-dog story.

Then: ‘Again! Tell us again! Pleeeeease!'

Betty and Tommy were hand-in-hand.

Thursday, 8 December 1949

Chris Riley-Potter was due to move into the Fergusons' old flat shortly before that Christmas of 1949; but long before then he had made it unrecognizable to anyone who had known it originally. The first time he saw the place, shortly after Todd and Gracie had moved out at Michaelmas, he said, ‘I'm sure they are perfectly wonderful people – and but for them I'd be having to paint portraits of Oswald Moseley – but I really cannot breathe surrounded by this wallpaper.'

He had studied art for three years at Maidstone until 1939, when he volunteered for the Army Service Corps and trained as a ‘Don-R' – a dispatch rider, in which capacity he had served throughout the war, refusing all promotions above corporal because he had become addicted to motorbikes. Being among the first in at the start of the war, he was among the first out when it ended. He had then followed a three-year painting course at the Slade, culminating in the much-coveted diploma in that same summer. Unfortunately his ex-serviceman's grant had run out a month or two earlier, forcing him to rely on his girlfriend, Nina – half-Danish, half-Egyptian – who did ‘some sort of work' around the Danish Embassy.

‘
At
the embassy?' people sometimes asked.

‘Connected with it,' she would reply.

Whatever it was, it obviously paid well.

‘Have you
seen
her!' Felix asked Eric the first time the couple came out to strip the wallpaper in their flat.

‘No one has ever seen
her
,' Eric claimed, and it was true that she did wear an astonishing amount and variety of make-up.

Their decorative scheme for the flat could not have been simpler: paint everything black except the floor. When, some weekends later, they finished the sitting room, they realized that it did look ever so slightly stark and depressing. Eric, in his ground-floor studio immediately below, was the first to become aware that they had found a solution. It began with a scream, followed by a heavy thump on his ceiling, followed by laughter.

He dashed upstairs to apply first aid, only to discover the pair of them – naked – lying in helpless laughter in the middle of the empty sitting-room floor.

‘No, no! Come in!' Chris called out as he saw Eric trying to tiptoe away. ‘Tell us what you think.'

Gingerly Eric sidled into the room.

A cheerful fire burned in the hearth, illuminating a bucket full of bright orange distemper. There were bright orange spills here and there upon the floorboards. Nina's feet and legs, halfway up to her knees, were bright orange. And a trail of bright orange footprints – hers, obviously – traced a path up the wall and halfway across the ceiling.

‘I couldn't hold her up any longer,' Chris explained. ‘Still, the way they finish halfway across the ceiling adds a sort of sense of mystery. What d'you think?'

‘We haven't finished,' Nina added.

‘I was going to say,' Eric replied. ‘It needs more.'

‘Like what?'

‘What was the original idea, with the black?'

‘A new start. From nothing – blackness – sort of like the womb.'

‘Long time since I was there,' Eric confessed. ‘Take your word for it.' Then, quite suddenly, he caught himself entering into the spirit of the thing. ‘Try two orange caryatids,' he suggested. ‘One each side of the fireplace.'

‘Paint them?' Chris was doubtful.

‘No. In body prints. Just like the footprints. Paint each other's bodies and press yourselves against the wall.' The idea took hold and he added, ‘Your front sides beside the fireplace and your backsides on the opposite wall. So the opposing images are sort of frozen points on a timeline of your trajectory in space, penetrating the womb of this room. Have you enough gas for the bathroom geyser? Oh, never mind – you can have a shower in our place. Come down when you're done.'

‘No, no, mate. It's your idea. You've got to paint us. There's a big distemper brush on the window sill.'

And so Eric found himself standing a mere two feet before naked and voluptuous Nina, painting anything that jutted out enough to print itself bright orange on the wall. Her Nefertiti lips curled in a knowing smile; her dark, Queen of Sheba eyes sparkled with feminine certainties. ‘You have a delicate touch, dear Eric,' she murmured.

All he dared do was clear his throat.

‘God, you've silenced the bugger!' Chris said admiringly.

Eric found his voice then. ‘I'm coming to you in a minute, mate.'

‘Enough!' Nina wafted him aside and approached the wall. ‘Here?'

‘As close to the fireplace as you can get.' Eric-the-director reasserted himself. ‘Arms above your head as if you're holding something up – like a real caryatid.'

‘Print me, then! Come on!' she said. ‘Hard as you can.'

The two men pressed every tangible portion of her to the wall, while she guessed whose hand it might be: ‘Eric . . . Chris . . . Chris again . . . Eric . . . Eric? Chris –
you
should be pressing that bit.'

The result was extraordinary – Indian erotic art (the breasts and torso) reinterpreted by someone who had supped on all the horrors of the war (the skeletal limbs and severed ankles of a Giacometti).

‘Christ!' Nina murmured as they stared at the result in awe. This
jeu d'ésprit
was going somewhere.

Eric tried to rekindle the horseplay when it came to painting Chris's front, lingering suggestively over his nipples and penis; but all he proved was that cold, wet distemper, no matter how brightly orange, has no aphrodisiac qualities to speak of. When they had printed him on the wall on the other side of the fireplace, the awe-inducing effect of the iconography was more than doubled.

‘Fucking fantastic, mate!' Chris said. ‘We could be on to a new
Guernica
here, d'you realize? A post-war
Guernica
!'

They completed the ‘timeline' by printing their head-to-heel backsides on the opposite wall and then they joined the two by planting orange footprints across the floorboards between their images – except that Chris's footprints linked Nina's two body-prints and hers linked his – ‘to symbolize the crossing of our paths in life,' Chris explained.