Zoo Time (16 page)

We spent the morning at Monkey Mia playing with the dolphins. On the beach at first, waiting for them to roll out of the sea and cavort with us under the eye of the pelican. Then later in a little rowing boat which they buffeted mischievously, disappearing under us as the fancy took them, cuffing our oars, sometimes making as though they wanted to come aboard, eyeing us sideways like parrots on a pirate’s shoulder.

‘Oh, Mother, Mother, look!’ Vanessa cried.

‘Aren’t they darlings,’ Poppy cried in return.

I couldn’t have said what posed the greater risk to our stability, the frolicsomeness of the dolphins or the eurhythmic throbbings of Vanessa and her mother, through whom a single vibrating chord of sympathy with God’s creatures seemed to pass.

Myself I found them scary. Vanessa and her mother
and
the dolphins. By what right had we declared dolphins magnanimous in all weathers, not the remotest danger to us, when we knew that no creature under the sun could be relied upon never to turn nasty – to one another, never mind to us? It demeaned them, in my view, attributing to them nothing but benign intention, interpreting those strange snouty grimaces as smiles of fondness for
Homo sapiens
. One of these days, I thought, as I sat rigid in the little rowing boat, one of these days the terrible truth about what dolphins really think of us will come out. I was glad when we were back on dry land. But Vanessa and Poppy wanted never to leave. Our plan to drive off that afternoon was abandoned. We would stay another night, sleeping off the excitement before meeting again, in what was now our usual place, for dinner.

Poppy was already tipsy.

‘So where are the monkeys?’ she asked.

‘Do you think it’s drink or do you think it could be early-onset dementia?’ Vanessa whispered to me.

‘It’s excitement,’ I said. ‘It’s been a long day, after a long drive.’

‘And it’s been a long life,’ Vanessa said. I knew what came next. If
she
went silly she hoped someone would knock her on the head and finish her off. Was it time to be thinking of doing that to her mother? It half crossed my mind that she meant it, that she’d brought Poppy all this way in order to tip her into Shark Bay where the dolphins could eat her and return her to the diurnal round of nature. Who’d know it wasn’t an accident?

But she’d had her chance to do that earlier in the day and she hadn’t taken it. Anyone seeing them together in the boat could have mistaken them for lovers, Vita Sackville-West and Violet Trefusis, only more red and Rubenesque, their faces touching, their fingers on each other’s shoulders, consumed together by the wonder of it all.

Poppy looked sumptuous, tipsy or not. In the heat, her dress clung to her thighs. Breast for breast there was nothing to choose between Vanessa and her mother – full and soft as a goose-down pillow, both of them (though Poppy’s rose and showed a little higher), and unfair, shocking, even deranging, on women otherwise so slender – but for all the difference in their ages, Poppy won it when it came to thighs. Who can ever say what it is that makes that part of a woman suddenly more than a man can bear to look at? Underneath the dress her flesh was not the flesh of a young woman. I had seen her in a bathing costume and knew that her skin had lost its youthful spring. It was mottled now, ever so slightly stretched and pitted, a victim of over-prominent veins and cellulite. And yet the strain of her thighs against the thinness of the material that held it taut, that rounded slope that is never seen on a man’s body, no matter how beautiful, the fullness of her without the fatness of her, as though a fruit could ripen for a second time, or as though one of the Monkey Mia dolphins was rolling over inside her dress – I had no defences against the beauty of it. And the tipsiness – well the tipsiness only added to her wild allure.

What I did, I did because I couldn’t not do. Call it obsessive compulsive disorder. On the pretext of some natural excitement – don’t ask me to name it: the appearance of a hitherto unseen planet, a sweet aroma of chilli oil and frangipani blown in on a current of warm air from an undiscovered continent, a hundred dolphins leaping balletically, as though choreographed by Neptune, from the pellucid waters of the bay – I extended my arms, clapped my hands, and under cover of the table brought one down on the living quiver of Poppy’s flesh, just inches from her pelvis, but not so high up that my gesture could be interpreted as lewd. We deal in millimetres when it comes to taking liberties, and guided by the deep unconscious of filial regard, I was nanomillimetre-perfect.

15

I Am a Cello

In the beginning . . .

The night Poppy accepted my invitation to taste the delights of Knutsford with me, since her daughter wouldn’t, was remarkable more for the fact of her acceptance than anything else. And that could have been attributed simply to boredom. Knutsford, for Christ’s sake! Settling in Knutsford when you had hair like that.

After we’d talked about my mother I’d hoped she would quiz me about my writing practice, no matter that I hadn’t written anything. Where I got my ideas from. What time I started. When I knew I’d finished. The sorts of questions they would ask me years later in Chipping Norton before telling me that no matter how
I
knew I’d finished,
they
knew when they had, which was the minute they started. But this was before the days of book groups, and Poppy would not have been a book-group woman anyway.

It’s hard to credit intelligence to the non-bookish when books are the only measure of worth you have. I almost forgave my own mother the preposterousness of her personality on the grounds that she devoured airport novels when she wasn’t shouting in the street, no matter that what she devoured was shopping and fucking told from the other side of the counter –
selling
and fucking. It astonished me that she was able to find so many soft-porn novels about the retail trade. Did she have them written especially for her, I wondered. She sat up in bed with a scarf tied round her head, her mouth open, her electric cigarette hanging from her lips, turning pages as though she was in a competition to be the first to finish. I don’t share the general respect shown to the mechanical act of turning pages. But at least she was ingesting words, and an ingested word might stick halfway down the gullet and shock the reader into reflection. Whereas Poppy, though an intelligent and in some ways far more cultured woman than my mother, was, in this period of her life at least, book-dead. I’d dreaded, when we first began to sit down and talk in the parlour of the White Bear, that she would fail the Tolkien test in record time. I’d said what fun it was to be sitting where Signor Brunoni might have performed his magic, and when she showed she didn’t know who I was talking about I told her. Travelling magician, character in
Cranford
, by Mrs Gaskell. And why might he have performed his magic here? she wondered. I stared at her. Because we were
in
Cranford, this was it, Knutsford–Cranford, surely she . . .

Surely she nothing. She shrugged the information away from her as though a fly had landed on her collar. ‘Doesn’t sound like my kind of magic,’ she said. Whereupon I thought, here we go, Tolkien. But in fact she hadn’t even made it that far up the ladder of literacy.

‘What is?’ I asked, with my heart in my mouth.

She thought about it. ‘I’ve always liked Tommy Cooper,’ she said.

A dozen years later her answer to the same question would have been a boy wizard.

But worse was to come. Before the evening was over she had failed the Tolstoy test.

And yet the conversation leading up to it had been propitious. She was a cellist, she told me. A serious musician whose repertoire included Bach, Boccherini,
Vivaldi and Dvo
ř
ák.
I quivered a little.
Dvo
ř
ák.
She asked if I played. No. I just listened. Particularly to
Dvo
ř
ák.
She had never been a professional cellist. Not quite up to that. But she had played with an amateur orchestra in Bournemouth, and then in Washington to which her second husband, a junior diplomat named Eisenhower, had whisked her when Vanessa was still a teenager. It was in Washington that she’d done a bit of modelling, too, once famously posing nude wrapped around her cello for a poster for the Georgetown Camerata Chamber Orchestra. ‘Well, not really nude,’ she told me, presumably bethinking herself of our age difference, ‘but it looked that way. And it brought my marriage to an end.’

‘Your husband didn’t like you posing nude with your cello?’ I asked. Funny what husbands don’t like.

‘It wasn’t so much that. He was jealous of the photographer who happened to be the violinist with whom I was rehearsing Brahms’s Double Concerto at the time.’

‘At the time he took the photograph?’

‘No, at the time my husband walked in and found us.’

‘Found you . . .’

‘No, not that. Found us rehearsing. The sight of it maddened him so much he threw me out of the house.’

‘Christ! And the violinist?’

‘He threatened to kill him.’

‘This is Tolstoy,’ I said excitedly. ‘Pure Tolstoy.’

She looked at me in bewilderment. ‘Is he another of your
Cranford
crowd?’

Was it possible? Was it possible to be a good enough cellist to play Brahms’s Double Concerto and not have heard of Tolstoy? Was it possible to have got beyond the age of ten, never mind the music, and not have heard of Tolstoy?

Unless she was teasing me. She had ironic eyes. She could have been having fun at my expense. But she didn’t seem engaged enough for that. Teasing is flirting, and she wasn’t flirting.

I mentioned
The Kreutzer Sonata
,
Anna Karenina
,
War and Peace
.
Anna Karenina
appeared to ring a bell and she must have deduced the others were books because she said she hadn’t read them. ‘I’m not a reader,’ she said. ‘Vanessa reads enough for both of us.’

I didn’t say reading doesn’t work like that. I didn’t say you can no more read for another person than you can drink water for him stroke her.

I couldn’t work her out. Didn’t one artistic endeavour necessarily bleed into another? If you play Bach’s Cello Suites you read Tolstoy. It was only much later that I realised you didn’t have to be cultured to be a musician – or a writer, come to that. Art? Some of the most vulgar philistines I knew made art, and of those the most vulgar still wrote books. Refinement was mainly to be found among those who consumed or championed them, like poor Merton. But you don’t know that when you’re twenty-four and still trying to spit out your first novel.

Poppy was lying about her reading, anyway. She read avidly. Pure shit, but she read it avidly.

Ditching Tolstoy, I asked her about her life before and after the junior diplomat who dumped her in Washington. There wasn’t much to tell. Her first husband had been a naval officer who’d drunk himself into an early grave. She’d loved him, on the occasions she saw him. Vanessa the same. But the two women had been alone together a great deal, so apart from missing their annual sailing holidays off the Isle of Wight they barely noticed the change when he’d gone. Vanessa hadn’t liked it in Washington and was glad to fly home. She went to Manchester University for a year, read philosophy, changed to languages, changed to art history, changed back to philosophy, and then left. She hadn’t liked it there either. But the absence of necessity was the real reason, Poppy explained. They’d been left money by Poppy’s first husband and she’d got a good settlement from her second; they wanted for nothing; other than to dress like each other and to float about looking lovely, they were without an aim. And the cello? Yes, she still practised. Vanessa too. At home, they played Vivaldi’s Double Concerto in G Minor together.

My eyes swam. ‘Nude?’

Where I found the courage or the folly to ask that I will never know. I no sooner said it than I backed away in my chair, putting my hands up to my face, half as though expecting to be struck, half as though preventing the demons that lived inside me from uttering another word.

Poppy put her glass down and for the first time looked me straight in the eyes. Then she beckoned me to her with a crooked finger.

I had flushed the colour of her lipstick.

‘Cheeky monkey!’ she said, kissing me on the cheek.

Cellist’s thighs.

I should have remembered.

Light years later, touching the living quiver of Poppy in the heat of the Monkey Mia night, that fact should have come back to me. Cellist’s thighs.

I am a cello.

And my work-in-progress alter ego, Little Gid, would he be a cello too?

Some things you keep for yourself.

16

All the World Loves a Wedding