Sex and Stravinsky (33 page)

‘Hat –’ Josh says.

‘And then along came Herman and saved me. Boom, boom, boom.
King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid
. He’s incredibly decisive, you see. And he’s a brilliant entrepreneur. He always was, even then. He picked me up, told me I was going to marry him, bailed out my parents and saved their faces; bought the house off them, which kept it in “the family”. Then he transformed it. Herman absolutely loves that house. At the time, he was also quite genuinely drawn to me. I was his “English Rose”. Payback for the Boer War. Herman’s great-grandfather once led a Boer commando, though he’d migrated rather late in the day from the Cape. He’d been head-hunted by the Transvaal Republic as a legal adviser. His first wife and daughter died in the camps. Their property was razed.’ She pauses and looks up at him in the darkness. ‘But enough. Really and truly, what is the matter with us, Josh? I mean
us
. Just what exactly is happening to us here? Are we simply regressing, and is it because there’s no moon? Is this a joint mid-life crisis? You’re the brainy one, Josh Silver. I need you to tell me.’

‘Hat,’ Josh says. ‘All I can say is that I love you. I’ve never stopped loving you and right now I’m hoping that you love me.’ Once again, he thinks she’s not going to speak.

‘But what are we going to do about it?’ she says.

‘I don’t know,’ Josh says. ‘I’m sorry to say that I’m not like Herman Marais. All today I’ve been wondering if, just this once, we can both of us clap our hands and change the world. If I dance, will you follow me, Hattie? And, likewise, will I follow you? Can we face this thing down? Are we brave enough?’ Then he kisses her on the forehead, on the palms of both her little gloved hands, on each of those bright Coppélia patches on her cheeks, which, right now, he can barely see.

‘We’d better go,’ she says. ‘Statistically, we are quite likely to get ourselves carjacked in this place.’ And she switches on the engine. She says, ‘I do love you, Josh. I do. And I also really love England, by the way. Do you?’

‘I don’t know if I’d call it love,’ he says, after a pause. ‘But being back here has confirmed for me that England is “home”. It’s become my place. It’s where I live. The first week I got here, I did all those predictable things. Stared at the outside of the house in Boksburg. Felt nothing. Went to Pru’s old house and to where she took me to church. Wept like mad. Even got to see the inside of Bernie and Ida’s house. My house. Awfully smart these days. Backyard’s got a pool.’ Then he says, ‘I went to see my parents once, in Tanzania. Way back. I remember wavering at the time; thinking, Maybe this is my place? Here on the east coast of Africa. But not any more.’

‘I went to England last Christmas,’ Hattie says. ‘For the first time in years. Ironically, it’s Herman who goes there all the time, when it’s me who’s the pathetic settler loyalist. I really love the tone of English life. It’s always felt more like “home” to me than home.’ Then she says, ‘Crumbs! Do I sound like my parents? Come to think of it, you never met my parents.’

‘No,’ Josh says. ‘But I did actually coincide with your brother for a few weeks in high school. He nicked my electric guitar.’ Then he says, ‘Hat, tell me something. That night before I left the country? In the church hall. That person who came by – that was your brother?’

‘He wanted money,’ she says. ‘Sorry about that. You didn’t deserve the intrusion. As it happens, I didn’t have any money.’

‘I had money,’ Josh says. ‘I had all of Gertrude’s money. It had been left with me by my parents. It was in the pocket of my jacket; an envelope with Gertrude’s name on it. Then, when I got home it was gone.’

‘Oh no,’ Hattie says. ‘Oh no. And your guitar as well.’

Josh merely laughs.

‘Water under the bridge,’ he says. ‘Oh Hat! So much water under the bridge.’

And then they drive back in silence, until they reach Hattie’s remote-control gates, which open for them, and Hattie drives through. She pulls up in front of the house. Neither makes a move.

‘About us,’ Josh says, and he sighs. ‘Let’s take a look at us. We’ve done OK, the two of us, haven’t we? Especially you, dearest girl. We’ve got by. We’ve put one foot in front of the other. We’ve “achieved” things. We’ve got things done.’

‘Yes,’ Hattie says.

‘But, frankly, that’s not good enough,’ he says. ‘Wouldn’t you agree? It’s all been a bit of a screw-up. What we need to ask ourselves is, are our real lives ever going to happen?’

‘Yes,’ Hattie says. And that’s when they hear the scream. Both of them pause for one split second. Then they leap out of the car. Doors slam and then they are running; running towards the bottom of the garden; towards the studio. And little, earthbound stars of light are clicking on where they tread.

Caroline’s day has been interesting from the moment she stepped off the plane. Putting behind her that frustrating experience at Josh’s mismanaged hotel, she persuades herself not to fret about it; to relish the unaccustomed comfort of Herman’s air-conditioned BMW, as the car rises from the shoreline to the ridge. Then there are the gates and the elegant sweep of drive between the palm trees; the stone terraces of Herman’s garden, the green lawns, the bright splashes of subtropical flowers, the spreading, shady trees. A pool flashes past to her left; set deep within an artful hollow, so that it resides in a green ravine. A gardener in a straw hat looks up and puts down his hose before approaching the car to take charge of the luggage. There’s a wooden veranda, heavy with hibiscus and bougainvillea. Then the wide, chequered hallway and that vast white living space, all filled with air and light.

‘Oh my goodness!’ Caroline says, standing enchanted in the middle of Herman’s floor. ‘Oh! What can I say?’ And she throws her arms out wide. ‘Air and space!’ she says.

‘Who’s Aaron Space?’ Zoe says, on a half-stifled yawn from just behind her, and she throws herself gratefully on to one of Herman’s sofas.

‘Get up, Zoe!’ Caroline says sharply. ‘Our host has offered you lunch.’

‘But I’m sleepy,’ Zoe says, in desperation. ‘And you
know
I don’t like fish.’

‘This really isn’t like you, Zoe,’ Caroline says, but she’s feeling rather unlike herself.

Then Herman dispatches her daughter and offers her the phone. She makes a call to the drama department where – yes; yes, indeed – Josh has called by that very day, but only for a moment. He’d mentioned his intention to attend a lunchtime jazz concert on campus before going off on a day trip. He’d picked up his ‘conference pack’ and collected a key for his room – the room, booked from the following day, in a university hall of residence. Caroline is promptly given the name, address and telephone number.

‘Thank you,’ she says. She doesn’t leave a message. Sod you, Josh, she’s thinking, but her mood is mellowing by the minute.

Everything about this place, this house, this terrain, this climate, this abundant vegetation, this wonderful, throw-back experience of outgoing southern hospitality, is causing Caroline to confront the person she once was; once might have been; might possibly still become. She casts her mind back to that tall, beautiful, brainy girl from Oz who, nearly two decades earlier, endowed with an overlarge colonial cringe, courtesy of her mother’s incessant and obsequious propaganda, was drawn inexorably to the idea of ‘the Motherland’. And what better way to fulfil that aspiration than to take up a DPhil studentship at an ancient and prestigious British university, in a place that she has, ever since, determinedly espoused?

But have her seventeen years of northern-hemisphere existence been all the time running counter to her nature; counter to the things she truly loves? Years of struggling towards the ownership of a tiny Victorian mouse house; a terraced workman’s cottage of total area eighty square yards, upon which she has so recently expended such immoderate effort? A house in which she will exercise her gardening skills in window boxes and old fish kettles? Can do; will do. What has all that been about? Make do and mend. Make do while living in a bus; make do while walking in the rain. Feed the family on forty-five pounds a week. Think good thoughts about thrifty camping holidays in grey English drizzle. Then there’s been the constant, day-to-day striding forth into the graffitied forecourts of a down-at-heel British state school. Schoolmarm Caroline. Oh, for God’s sake, what for?

And then, of course, there is Josh. Was he simply another departure from her natural inclination? Small, arty, sweet-natured Josh, so unlike the tall blond athletes who’d competed to date her back home in her undergraduate life. Self-deprecating, eccentric Josh, who doesn’t dare drive at night. Josh who can’t play tennis because of his wonky eyes; who can’t do DIY. Josh with his girly, balletic PhD; his constant Pergolesi and
Pulcinella
; his so-what Stravinsky jokes, his Arcadian counter-tenor CDs. Josh, with his little weirdo chamber operas and his Neapolitan street plays. His back-seat word games to do with shop names and news billboards. ‘School Cook Saves Dog.’ ‘Sex Pest Gets Wed.’ What does all or any of that have to do with her? Except perhaps that, as it turns out, both of them were adopted. Good God! Did they not so much fall for each other as cling together through some unconscious neediness? And was it all yesterday?

So now she stands, breathing deeply, in the middle of Herman’s floor; stands there in the yellow Marc Jacobs sundress, her eyes fixed on a painting of horizontal undulating lines. Under, over, under, over; tangerine and cyclamen; sea green, yellow and blue.

‘Kids, hey?’ Herman says from behind her, once Zoe has made her way upstairs. ‘My youngest – she’s my special girl, I admit. She’s Daddy’s Girl, for sure – but she drives her mother up the wall.’

‘I’m sorry about Zoe,’ Caroline says. ‘I had to pull her away early from her French exchange and I fear she is not best pleased. That was when my mother died, you see. She died just a week ago.’

Herman’s living space has two enormous white sofas that face each other across an expanse of floor. Hanging over each white sofa is an equally enormous, unpainted white canvas, encased in a perspex box. On the wall facing her is the painting of the undulating lines that is making her mind lift and dance. There’s a strange, pale, bentwood chair, whose tangle of fluid lines takes the eye on an intricate and winding journey, its bleached wood like ribbons of tagliatelle. A second chair is made of solid iron. The seat and back are two heavy plates like outsize slotted spatulas, hammered in a giant’s forge. The arms and legs are two continuous iron curves to the right and left of the spatulas; upside-down U-shapes that remind Caroline of gymnasts doing back bends. She, herself, was once a prodigious doer of back bends.

‘That chair,’ she says. ‘Tell me, was it wrested from the Ancient Kingdom of Benin?’

‘Not quite,’ Herman says. His eyes are intensely blue. He finds that he can’t stop himself from fixing them on this fabulous tall woman in the perfect yellow dress. Short skirt. Long legs. And he loves the ropy shoes.

‘I bought it from an art-school degree show,’ he says, standing alongside her and rather close. ‘It’s the student’s take on a chair he saw in Burkina Faso. On a field trip.’ Then, briefly, he touches her arm. ‘Excuse me,’ he says. ‘I’ll go and see to the fish.’

Caroline returns her focus to those horizontal undulating lines. Under, over; under, over; tangerine and cyclamen; sea green, yellow and blue. She feels her heart, like a paper boat, lift and bob with their rise and fall.

Then Herman is back.

‘Drinks,’ he says. ‘Food. This way.’

And they cross the hall into his expanse of kitchen in which, somewhat unexpectedly, there is a large, countrified dresser, dense with dainty old English bone china of the more flowery sort. The kitchen table is twelve foot long and has a curious brass measuring stick, marked out in feet and inches, running the length of its near side. Surrounding it are a dozen elm-wood wheelback chairs.

‘The wife’s family were in the clothing business,’ Herman says, observing that Caroline is running her index finger along the brass of the table edge. He parks a bottle of cold Sauvignon Blanc on the table along with two glasses and he proceeds to pour. ‘Gentlemen’s outfitter’s,’ he says. ‘It came out of one of their shops.’ Then he adds, somewhat indifferently, ‘All history now. The shops became obsolete. Suffice it to say they were not the sort of outlets where a lady such as yourself would have gone for her retail experience.’

He places a dish of baby tomatoes and basil leaves on the table, which he anoints with quick sloshes of balsamic vinegar and olive oil. Then he serves up the fish.

‘Yellowtail,’ he says. ‘I go sea fishing some weekends. This fish, I’m sorry to say, is what I had frozen from last time – but thank God for refrigeration, hey?’

Caroline watches beads of water condense on her wine glass.

‘When I first got to England,’ she says, aware that she is colluding, ‘there were places where, if you asked for a “cold” beer, or even a “cold” Coke, it didn’t come out of a fridge. “Cold” meant that the publican had been keeping it out the back in a place where there wasn’t any heating.’ After that, she raises her glass and says, ‘Cheers.’

Once they have eaten, Herman suggests that she might like to take a shower.

‘Or take a kip. Whatever. Feel free,’ he says.

He shepherds her from the kitchen, through a door towards the back of the house, into a thrilling double-volume work room that is evidently his private space. Light is coming in, not only from the windows, but also through a shallow glass dome in the ceiling. The room, she assesses, must be almost twenty foot high, and has a wall of floor-to-ceiling steel shelves with a steel fire-escape ladder running up to a halfway platform, to make the higher shelves accessible. The room is unexpected and it excites her laughter.