Sex and Stravinsky (34 page)

‘Oh may I?’ she says, turning to the ladder.

She climbs up to the halfway platform, which is gridded with little hexagons, so that Herman, standing below her in a shaft of sunlight, is patterned all over in small stars. From her vantage point she can look down, not only on Herman, but on to the heads of two large old Nigerian wooden figures that are standing below her, exhibiting a solidity that is something like Herman himself. Near by, in a heavy old wooden mortar, is a bamboo plant twelve foot high.

Once she is back at ground-level, Herman opens a second door for her, which gives on to a cave-like and dimly lit shower room, in which the floor and walls are lined with slate. The foreground, comprising a sort of anteroom, contains a raised slate slab, topped with a plain white linen mattress, and beyond the slab is a ‘wet’ area, where Caroline, once alone, strips and sluices herself, intrigued that the water should flow over her person in angled, waterfall sheets. Afterwards she wraps herself in a white waffle-cloth towel and emerges, barefoot, into the bright light of the study, where Herman, now with his back to her, is standing alongside his desk at the far end of the room. He is ripping open envelopes from a pile of accumulated mail.

For a while Caroline remains transfixed. Then she projects her voice to reach him across the room.

‘I’m actually not sleepy,’ she says. ‘So I won’t make use of the bed. Your beautiful tombstone bed.’

Herman turns from the desk and smiles at her. Fabulous teeth. For just a second she finds herself wondering about a time when Herman would have had hair. Blond hair, like her own, going by the nap on his tanned, sinewy forearms. And then he has put down the envelopes and has crossed the room to where she’s standing. He has taken her naked shoulders in both his hands.

‘Your shower is quite an experience,’ she says, with a little catch in her voice. And then he is manoeuvring her backwards; back through the door into the slate-grey wet room, where he deposits her on the raised slab. The texture of the linen feels curiously papery. It’s the feel of well-pressed starch. She watches him intently, her hands under her head, as he peels off his clothes. She sees the garments drop on to the slate in the gloom. The place, given the outside temperature, is wonderfully cool.

‘Herman –’ she says. ‘Ought we to –?’

‘I don’t have the virus,’ he says. ‘And how’s about you yourself?’ But he’s merely teasing her because, as in most things, Herman is a serious grown-up. He is not a person ever to be inadequately equipped.

‘Me?’ she says, with feeling. ‘Christ, Herman –’

But then she feels no need to tell him about what a relentless goody-goody she is. Has always been. Teacher’s pet. Mrs Goody Two Shoes. Uniformly monogamous, self-denying, stiff-necked; a professional thou-shalt-not. She desists because she knows right away that a phase of her life is over. She knows that, whatever should happen to her from this moment on, wherever she should find herself, a version of her own self is sloughed off and gone.

Afterwards, Herman shows her his orchids. Then they sit on a veranda at the back where they finish the Sauvignon Blanc. Herman follows up on the wine by mixing a couple of Martinis. They eat macadamia nuts and watch the sun go down; that incredible, high-speed African sun that drops, almost as fast as she can blink, below the line of Herman’s green garden and switches off its light. Then, as if on cue, she hears the shrill of crickets. Caroline, dressy Caroline, has, just for the fun of it, shed the yellow sundress and put on the gauzy blue Vivienne Westwood. There is still no sign of Herman’s wife, nor his daughter; nor of Zoe, come to that, who must still be catching up on sleep.

‘I’ve got a story I’ll tell you,’ Caroline says eventually. ‘It may be I shouldn’t, but I will.’

And she tells him all about the Witch Woman and her sister Janet, the Less Fortunate, and about her wedding party in the Oxford college, after which she and Josh had camped out in a field, because the ghoulish pair had swooped down and claimed her bed for two nights running. And then she tells about the sixteen ensuing years of scrimping and saving, and the mortgage she took out for her mother who either couldn’t or wouldn’t go home. And the monthly direct debits to her mother’s bank account and the clothes she was forever making for herself out of other people’s curtains and about how she and her family have been living, all these years, in a decommissioned double-decker bus.

She tells him about how she recently discovered her mother’s will, and about how she found out she’d been given away by her real mother on a bus – yet again, a bus – somewhere between nowhere and nowhere. And how the woman, all the while, had not been poor at all. She’d been putting away the money for Janet, along with bequeathing her the house. And how she, Caroline, had been so furious about it all, she’d smashed up her mother’s Hummel figurines with a meat mallet on the kitchen floor.

And – oh dear me – she tells him about the daily withdrawals of two hundred pounds that she’s stashed underneath the newly sanded floorboards of the mouse house and how the airfares for herself and her little crosspatch Zoe, along with a pair of Eurostar tickets and a nice hotel in Paris, were bought, over the telephone, on her mother’s Visa Card. Then she tells him that she shredded the will, even though she’d realised by then that the thing had not been witnessed and probably wouldn’t count for peanuts in any court of law.

‘I bought the shredder with my mother’s credit card,’ she says. ‘I did it merely because it gave me so much pleasure.’ She doesn’t tell him about the ashes in the refuse bin. To that extent she censors. She thinks it’s just possibly in poor taste. She thinks it might be too shocking for him. She finds it pretty shocking herself.

And, having concluded her narration, she realises that Herman is shaking with laughter; that this, the story of her thwarted life, has become a virtuoso party piece.

‘My God,’ he says. ‘
You!
I could listen to you for ever.
Ach
, I shouldn’t be laughing, Caroline, but you are the funniest person. You’re a star. Do you know that? You totally knock me out.’ Then he reaches out and places his left hand on hers as it lies, palm downwards, on the table. ‘The funniest and the most beautiful,’ he says. ‘And, my God, sexy as hell!’

Caroline knows that she is beautiful. This comes as no surprise to her. And ‘sexy’? Well, it’s not a thing she has felt herself to be for quite a long time; not until this afternoon, though the new clothes, the hair, the money have all acted as a sort of prelude. But
funny
? Never! ‘Funny’ is a wholly new experience. ‘Funny’ is simply not ‘her’. Being the funny person, the entertainer, the wit – she has left all that to Josh and she knows exactly why. Because to be funny is to expose oneself; to lay oneself open; to reveal oneself as vulnerable. It’s not the grown-up thing to do. To be the jester is to place oneself in the power of another and that’s exactly what she’s up to right now. She is finding it a most blissful thing to place herself in someone else’s power. Caroline is so tired of being always in charge and Herman has such large and capable hands.

‘I suppose I thought it was payback time,’ she says, laughing lightly at herself. ‘I went a bit overboard. I felt so betrayed and I went bonkers. It wouldn’t have happened had I not been left so entirely on my own.’ And then they sit in silence for a while, holding hands across the table.

‘Last week the toxic sister uttered the word “probate”,’ Caroline says. ‘She threw it out over the phone. Ought I to be worried, I wonder? Ought I to be shaking in my shoes?’

‘
Ach
,’ Herman says. ‘Please. It’s nonsense. You can talk to my solicitor. That’s my company solicitor. We’ve got these guys in London. They’re the best. It’s all no problem.’ Then he says, ‘It’s a great place, London. I always love to visit there.’ Oh, Perfidious Albion, but then isn’t history sometimes ‘best forgotten’? His company, he says, keeps a flat there, in Canary Wharf. ‘I’d love for you to make use of it,’ he says.

This is not an offer he has ever made to Hattie, who doesn’t know of the flat’s existence, but as he says it he realises that, Christ Almighty, there is no way that this woman is ever going there without him. No way is she going to be walking back into her old life. It’s just not on. He’s not going to let it happen. Not this great-fuck, class-act Ozzie blonde. She with the longest legs and the spot-on fabulous clothes. And brainy. And sparky. Shit! Like nobody’s business. Not like poor old Hattie, his china-shepherdess wife.

Herman has not been feeling too great about himself with regard to the china shepherdess, who, over recent years, has become to him more and more of a turn-off. He doesn’t like what her presence is doing to him; has even noticed himself, on occasion, becoming a shade sadistic, but then it’s as if she’s inviting it. Like the way he effected that takeover of the one-time servants’ quarters. Project Studio. But he couldn’t stomach that way she kept on calling it ‘the cottage’. Just the thought of her messing up that promising, austere space; filling it full of all her old-lady clutter and chintz. It’s enough already that, of all the rooms in this fabulous house that he’s so admirably remodelled, she chooses to work in the turret, just as if she was Rapunzel, or as if she was yearning to spend her life inside one of those little Beatrix Potter books that she’s got in first editions. And where, just by the way, has the woman got to right now; now that time is so strangely standing still; blessing him with this benign and lovely vacuum, into which the fabulous Ozzie Wonder Woman has walked?

‘You hungry?’ Herman says suddenly, because he’s always had a healthy appetite and it’s come round to that time of day when he’d normally be throwing the china shepherdess out of the kitchen for fear of having her embark on something to do with mince. Christ, is it any wonder that Cat goes off her food? ‘Pasta?’ he says. ‘Linguini?’

And that’s when they hear the scream; a loud, non-stop screaming that rises above the shrill hum of the crickets; a sound that Herman recognises as the voice of his younger daughter. He vaults the veranda in one bound and Caroline is not slow to follow. One behind the other, they run like the wind across the grass, the tiny pinprick lawn lights clicking on as they go. They streak down the length of the garden towards the studio, from whence the sound comes. And little silver flowers of light are blooming where they tread.

Chapter Nine

Eight People

Jack hears the scream as he returns from another long day in the drama department; a day on which, as with all his days here, he feels himself to be uncomfortably alien; a feeling which is all the more intense for the fact that he is back in the place where he was born. ‘One day at a time,’ he says to himself each morning, in the lovely private haven of the studio, where he lingers as long as he can over a second espresso and a small slice of panettone; a thing that he finds to buy – thank God – in the local shopping centre.

Jack doesn’t ‘do’ emotion and yet to his annoyance he continues to find himself unsettled. Being back is difficult, even, at times, painful. It conjures occasional thoughts of his mother and his grandmother, both of whom cause him poisoning rushes of loathing where he strives to feel indifference. And the predominant local accent – that white-person accent – brings goosebumps to his skin, the more so because it is the very same accent in which he himself, many years earlier, had addressed the local shopkeepers. They were always needled by it; he, the uppity brown boy who talked like a white boy. So let us wind him up; take him down. Let us refuse to give him his change when he buys a bar of chocolate. Let us claim not to have in stock those much-favoured honeycomb sweets that Jack could very well see for himself, winking at him from behind the counter. Let us claim that we cannot sell him the aspirins that his mother has dispatched him to buy.

Right now, largely thanks to his grandmother’s village, he is made equally uncomfortable by the local Zulu predominance. Unlike Ida and Bernie Silver, Jack was never in his youth disturbed by the existence of the disadvantaged; merely by the occasions on which he’d been made to feel he was one of them by the accident of his pigmentation. So he feels himself strange here; always strange.

He casts his mind back over his own sixteen-year-old self; that person who had walked so easily out of his familiar life and stepped into another. He runs his mind over that exhilarating experience; the pillion ride through Mozambique; then crossing the Rovuma River into Tanzania. ‘Welcome to our country.’ The three nights and days he’d spent on a beach in Dar es Salaam; the frisson of elation as he’d fallen in line at the airport behind that man who was carrying a kora. Then the square, plastic in-flight plates and the bright little blue-painted bus that had conveyed him, via the university campus and the Plateau, from the Airport Léopold Sédar Sénghor to the Palais de Justice in the centre of Dakar. He remembers how his spirit danced in the air around his head as he walked the streets on that first day; as he took in the colour and the sound, the smell, the fabulous urban Frenchness of it. Then it was all about a richness and strangeness of which he so easily became a part. Now it has all to do with an alienating and somewhat unpleasant familiarity.

Jack remembers those years in Dakar as half a decade of heaven; years that had to do with adventure and fulfilment, where the present has to do with capitulation and compromise. Then he had only to billet himself over the first three nights in the cheapest brothel-type hotel and step out, his backpack worn lightly over his shoulder, to slake his thirst on hibiscus juice and to choose between the seductive plates of available roadside food. Lebanese or North African? Dainty meat-and-onion pies or perfumy fish and rice? Spicy tomato-and-okra stew lying on a bed of rice? Everyone around him was drinking a beer called Flag.