Tandia (44 page)

'The point is, I couldn't give a fuck about any of you! I simply wanted to bind you all into a fraternity so in the years to come I could lean on you in the name of Oxford, the Odd Bodleian Society and the successful outcome of Peekay's world-title fight. What you see in me is a supreme opportunist, a user!'

It was almost as though an electric shock had passed through the room. Suddenly they all understood. A chap named Jamie Jardine whose great grandfather had helped pioneer the China opium trade, stood up, holding his pint high, almost under his chin, his stomach pushed out. He was a fat, ginger sort of chap practically custom designed to be persecuted at any boarding school he might have attended. He was reputed to be a brilliant mathematician and a superb violinist but looked as thick as an ox and at the moment appeared somewhat inebriated.

'I say, that's a bit sniffy, old chap! A bit on the nose!' He possessed a slight lisp and his remark was delivered in a plummy public-school accent which would have been comic anywhere else.

'You're quite right, Jardine. It was contemptible,' Hymie said softly.

Jardine, who had probably never in his life been allowed to be right, stuck his premature paunch out even further at the same time lifting his chin. 'You ought to be ffrashed!' he said pompously.

There was a murmur around the room, even some laughter. 'I say, steady on, Jam Jar!' somebody called. 'You're pissed again. Sit down old chap!'

Peekay rose and turned to face the others in the room. 'We apologise to all of you. I am as much to blame as Hymie.' Peekay lowered his head. 'It was a cynical thing to do. I am deeply ashamed.'

There was the scrape of a chair as Jardine sat heavily. The room became totally, embarrassingly still. Peekay looked up again. 'May I make a suggestion?' Several heads nodded, grateful that he had broken the silence. 'That you carry on with the idea of the Odd Bodleian Society?' He paused and grinned wryly. 'I guess we're all misfits. I want to become a barrister and the world welterweight boxing champion. Frankly, I don't blame people for thinking I'm a bit strange, a bit potty.' Peekay moved over and stood beside Hymie. 'Hymie and I will, of course, resign immediately and you will naturally choose some other cause.'

Milstein jumped up and walked over to where Hymie and Peekay were standing. He turned to address the room. 'Listen you guys, I don't know how you feel, but what I've been listening to is a crock of shit!' Several of the chaps in the room grinned, relieved that the tension had been eased. 'Peekay's right, it's a damn good idea and I, for one, don't want it modified. Friendship isn't something you buy! It's not an obligation obtained through a fraternal past. It's something you feel, something you give willingly, or not at all. I've known Hymie more than a year. If he doesn't give a shit about me then he's made a damn good job of hiding this fact. He's been kind, considerate and generous to me on a number of occasions.' He turned to Peekay. 'With the greatest respect, Peekay, I joined the Odd Bodleians because of him. Personally I find boxing repugnant. On the other hand, I find your determination to prevail an inspiration. I'm sure there are others here who feel the same way.' He paused to take a breath. 'I even think I understand why Hymie acted the way he did.'

He looked about the room. 'I don't suppose I'm the only other Jew here, but I do know what it's like. You can never quite believe a Gentile can possibly like and respect you for who you are. You spend your whole goddamn life compensating. What others seem to be given willingly in comradeship and trust you have to earn, sometimes even by scheming.'

Milstein turned to Peekay. 'You're absolutely right. I've been a misfit all my life, the clever kid nobody liked. A smart-ass with all the answers. In my high-school class book, under my name it said cryptically: "Will go far!" Somebody wrote on my personal copy: "Yes please!'"

The room broke into sudden laughter and Milstein grinned. 'Anyways, I reckon we change nothing. This is the best chance I've had in my whole life to make a few good friends.' Grinning suddenly, he added, 'Whom, by the way, I intend to exploit shamelessly in years to come!' He turned back to Hymie and Peekay, 'And included among my friends is the dynamic duo, The Tadpole Angel and Attila the Rabbi!'

The room erupted into laughter and applause, with a dozen or so enthusiastic 'Hear, hears!' added. Milstein waited until the applause had died before turning to Hymie.

'Well, Mr President, aren't you going to buy your fellow Odd Bodleians an inaugural pint?'

Jam Jar rose unsteadily to his feet. 'Bloody poor show! Ought to be flogged! I'll have a pint of Morrell's special please, Mr President.'

Harriet seldom talked to others about her work although Hymie assured Peekay that it was considered very good.

She'd had an exhibition of her drawings at a small contemporary art gallery in Cambridge, and a critic from the
Manchester Guardian
had declared 'Miss Clive's charcoal sketches are both impressive and heroic with a surprising strength, which gives promise of good work to come.'

Extrovert in so many things, Harriet considered it slightly vulgar to discuss her work. But on one occasion, late in the spring term, when Peekay had agreed to model for her as the rider of the larger of the two horses, she'd talked freely about sculpture and what it meant to her. It was almost as though she was prepared to state her philosophy once only, after which the evidence would either speak for itself or remain mute.

'My father builds bridges,' she explained. 'Bridges have to be structurally sound but they can also be beautiful. People don't need to be told when a bridge is beautiful. They don't gradually acquire a taste for the way a bridge looks. They simply know it's beautiful by the way it's a part of the river or ocean landscape, a part of the early morning light and the sunset, the mist and the rain and the water which flows beneath it. Bridges are pieces of sculpture with a purpose, but nonetheless sculpture - and, like bridges, all sculpture should have a purpose.'

Peekay was sitting astride a carpenter's horse over which Harriet had folded the patchwork quilt from her bed to simulate the rounded back of a horse. She'd worked from first light until it grew too dark to see for three weeks in her stable studio and she'd almost completed the shaping of the first horse in the setting of her two horses and a rider. Now she was working on the armature of the rider, bending and shaping the thin steel rods and threading them together with wire to make the beginnings of the torso. She worked with a small pair of bolt cutters and a pair of pliers and her movements were confident and skilful.

'What do you mean by a sculpture having a purpose? Do you mean to celebrate an event, such as a great battle or a general on his horse in the park, or Lord Nelson standing on that dirty great big doric column in Trafalgar Square, that sort of thing?' Peekay asked.

'Heavens no! That's almost exactly what sculpture shouldn't be made to do. Good sculpture should please the eye because it is a part of the landscape, whether it happens to be the urban landscape or park land.' Harriet pointed to the near completed shape of the horse she'd been working on. 'See how it's standing?'

Peekay looked at the plaster-of-Paris shape of the horse standing in the centre of a tarpaulin in the middle of the studio. To the side of it was the beginning of the second slightly smaller horse. Its shape was roughly formed by an armature of steel rods covered with chicken wire; this was how the nearly completed horse beside it had started its life. Harriet had bangaged the chicken wire with strips of coarse hessian dipped in plaster-of-Paris, building up layer after layer and allowing it to dry. When it was completely built up she'd commenced to shape the plaster-of-Paris as though it was a solid medium. The effect gave the horse's appearance a solidarity and astonishing strength. It stood with its neck craned and ears swept back, its forelegs wide and firmly positioned on the ground, its rump pushed slightly backwards as though it was baulking at someone or something unseen.

'See the way it's so animated? It isn't a heroic horse on a plinth, it's a horse suddenly anxious about its forward progress. Something has arrested its attention and made it tentative. The rider will try to exert this will on the horse, make it move forward and overcome its anxiety. The drama is between the rider and the horse. It's an intensely private thing.'

'I can See that!' Peekay said, excited by the explanation.

'You're right, your horse isn't an exact down-to-the-last-tiny detail replica of how a horse looks; it's simply a wonderful expression of how a horse feels.'

Harriet seemed pleased. 'It's the sort of horse which should be naturally set into a park among the trees with its hooves on the grass, where to the eye, it seems to belong; and where, at any distance at all, it seems to be quite real.'

'That's what you mean about a piece of sculpture having a purpose?'

Harriet nodded, her expression serious. 'The second horse, following slightly behind, will enhance the feeling, as though the bareback rider has taken the horses down to a stream to drink and they've all had a swim and now they're going home. If someone were suddenly to look up, say a little girl playing on a swing in a housing estate, and she saw my horses and rider through the trees, she'd know exactly what it would feel like if they were real, because, you see, in a sense they are real. Horses and people riding have always been a natural part of the dreaming landscape. Do you know when I first knew I wanted to become a sculptor?' Harriet asked suddenly. She stopped working on the torso and sat on an upturned tea chest. 'I was twelve and on holiday with my parents in Italy a year after the war. We'd driven into a small village in Tuscany which was reputed to have a beautiful church. My father's potty about churches. As usual the church was the main building in the piazza but this one was surrounded by huge trees, wonderful big old fig trees. It was the local saint's day, I forget which saint, and the village people were all out, playing bola, gossiping in small groups, mothers wet-nursing their babies, people seated at tables under the trees drinking wine, the men smoking. Under several of the trees stood a man playing a piano accordion, each musician taking turns to play a few chords before the others joined in so they all played the same melody.

'I can remember how hot it was, how the women sat on chairs with their skirts hauled up to their knees, fanning themselves with small paddle fans dyed pink and green, which seemed to be made of plaited bamboo and carried the name of a brand of tinned tomatoes.' Harriet laughed. 'I know I'm telling it in detail, but that's how I remember it. The people seemed so natural, so easy with themselves and, although I was only twelve, I sensed, despite the war, I mean them losing it, that nothing much had changed in their lives. There was a sort of internal combustion that worked for them collectively as though the mass was greater than the individual and time had been previously arranged and there seemed no good reason to tamper with it.

'We hadn't been long in the piazza when the bells sounded and the people started to flock towards the church. To my astonishment I realised that many of the people were pushing wheelchairs, while others hobbled towards the church on crutches. A boy of about my own age passed me pushing a man who had no legs in a wheelbarrow. They gathered around a huge stone statue of the virgin mounted on a plinth which stood outside the church. The plinth was stepped to hold hundreds of lighted candles. The enormous statue showed the virgin aloof, towering above the women, many of whom were ululating while others had thrown themselves at the base of the stepped plinth and seemed to be imploring the mother of Christ to heal their sick and cause their lame to walk again. In a few moments the piazza had changed from a natural and eternal village scene to one of frantic and frenetic people playing out an arcane ritual to the rigid, cold and unforgiving mother of God.

'It wasn't love I felt emanating from the blessed virgin. It was fear, deeply atavistic pagan fear. The church which taught love had mastered only fear. The Mother of God, who represented the warmth and continuity of motherhood, had become a monstrous apparition of power. In the piazza, with the washed-blue Italian sky above the warm cobblestones and dark shade under the giant fig trees, where moments before there had been music and laughter and soft afternoon drowsiness, now there was hysteria and madness. The hands and minds which had fashioned this virgin mother of God had been corrupted. New hands were needed, hands which would fashion a virgin to walk amongst the village people, one who nodded and smiled and stopped to listen to a bit of gossip, exchange a recipe, run her hand through a small boy's hair or comfort a mother whose child had been stillborn. A virgin mother of God with her feet on the ground.' Harriet bent down and picked up the maquette of two horses and a rider. She placed it on her lap, absently running her hands across the back of the smaller, riderless horse. 'It was at that moment, I think, that in my mind anyway, I became a sculptor.'

Peekay was silent for some time, obviously thinking about what she'd said. 'Harriet, in Africa we would call you a visionary and the people would make songs up about you and as the women shucked corn or stamped meal or fed their infants they would sing them, sing about the woman who took the feet of the mother of God and placed them on the ground.'

Harriet blushed, 'You are sweet, Peekay. The truth is, I'm fearfully retarded. While the other kids in kindergarten went on to better things, I never quite got over playing with plasticine.'

Harriet rose from the tea chest and, walking over to him, she sat astride the wooden saw horse facing him. There was only just enough room for them both and the inside of her thighs and knees touched his own. Peekay's heart began to pound furiously as Harriet rested her arms on either side of his shoulders, She leaned forward, her breasts not quite touching his chest, and" closing her eyes, she kissed him. Then she pulled back, her face only inches from his. 'Peekay, how much longer must I wait for you to ask me to make love?'

Peekay blushed furiously. A lump had grown in his throat which made it almost impossible for him to speak. 'But…but, you belong to Hymie,' he croaked.

Harriet looked shocked. 'I belong to me, Peekay. I love you but I'll always belong to me.' She didn't wait for Peekay's reply, aware that her response would embarrass him even further. Instead she kissed him again, slightly opening her mouth, allowing her kiss to melt softly, lovingly over his lips, opening his own so that their lips fused.

Peekay's whole body was a confusion. His mind reeled with the shame of his presumption, his heart thumped like Mojaji's drums and his maleness rose within him, the very heat of it like nothing his wildest, most erotic fantasies had ever conjured up. Mickey Spillane hadn't mentioned this part, this sudden overwhelming paralysis, when only one part of you seemed to work, draining the strength and heat from all the other parts so that the sum of everything became an urgent, blinding desire.

Harriet pulled her head away slowly, breaking the contact carefully, as though too sudden a movement might shatter something; the air around them, time, movement, distance, the kiss itself. 'When you said, "That's the only way you're going to hit me, shithead!" that was the moment…that was the moment I fell in love with you,' she said. Peekay looked confused. 'Huh?'

'When Peter Best fouled you after Hymie had called the end of the round, the first day we met, that's what you said after he'd hit you. That was the moment!' Harriet began to unbutton the cardigan Peekay was wearing. It was cold in the studio and she'd made him put it on after he'd posed for a while with his torso bare. 'This old cardigan of Daddy'S, it doesn't suit you at all,' she said, slipping it over his shoulders.

Peekay's arms came up to her, pulling her against him and holding her. 'Oh, oh, Harriet you're so beautiful, please, please can we make love?' His face was buried in her hair, which smelt clean and slightly perfumed.

Harriet pushed him away gently and rose, her legs still straddling the saw horse. Then she smiled a wicked little smile and lifted her arms so that Peekay could remove her sweater. Peekay stood up, oblivious of his erection, and pulled the sweater over Harriet's head, whereupon Harriet swivelled her torso so that her back was facing Peekay, her bra strap firmly clipped in the centre of a flawless, elegant back.

Peekay's hands suddenly trembled. 'Oh fuck! Push to the right…pull to the left! Shit no! That was when you worked from the front! Pull to the right, push to the left! Jesus!' The bra came away into Peekay's hands. For a moment he looked at either end of the bra strap, not quite believing his eyes. Then he let the bra fall from his fingers. He was in control. Harriet had turned back to face him, planting tiny kisses on his face, her fingers working at his belt buckle. Peekay's hands rose and cupped her wondrous breasts, 'Oh, oh, Jesus!' They both stepped over the saw horse together and Peekay, removing one hand, dragged the large, colourful eiderdown from it to the floor.