Sex and Stravinsky (13 page)

Hattie, that afternoon, had been regressing in her reading, since the high-summer weather was somewhat enervating. She had put down her school copy of
Silas Marner
in order to reread one of her childhood favourites,
Ballet Shoes
. She had just got to where the new lodger had gained the three girls entry into Mademoiselle’s ballet school, where Posy was to prove herself a star. But after witnessing the Gertrude episode, Hattie found herself too troubled to read on. She felt impelled to chase after Gertrude and say a proper goodbye. She wanted to give her money, but she didn’t really have any to hand. Things, perhaps? Valuable things? There was nothing she could hand to Gertrude that wouldn’t make her a suspect. ‘Hey, you? Native girl? Where from you get this gold watch?’

At supper that evening, it materialised that Hattie had been mistaken. It was not so much Gertrude’s pregnancy that had led to her dismissal. It was theft. Gertrude had evidently helped herself to the heirloom fountain pen from Hattie’s father’s desk, because it was gone; missing without a trace. It was an item that until this day had always sat in a special green marble tray, alongside that blue-black bottle of Quink that Hattie found so pleasing, for the wide prism of its shape. Gertrude had obviously stolen the pen, even though she could hardly write. Because who else could possibly have done so?

Supper was more than usually glum, and her father spoke abruptly to his daughter.

‘Henrietta, will you shift yourself there and help your poor mother in the kitchen?’ he said.

And in the kitchen, Hattie found her mother was on a roll with martyred sighs.

‘Now I shall have all the work of training up some raw young native girl, straight from the kraal,’ she said. ‘Just as I had to do with Gertrude. Honestly, Hattie, you get no thanks from these people. I hope you’ll remember that when your time comes to keep house.’

‘Is Father certain that Gertrude took the pen?’ Hattie ventured, but her mother was in full flow.

‘They can’t help themselves, these people,’ she said. ‘They’ll steal anything that isn’t screwed down. Do carry the peas through for me, Hattie, would you?’

So Hattie did as she was told. The peas, as usual, came a virulent green, since Mrs Marchmont-Thomas liked to add a spoon of bicarb to the cooking water; a handy trick that Gertrude would be carrying with her, along the road to nowhere.

By the time Hattie had reached her sixteenth birthday, her father had decided to stop paying for his daughter’s ballet lessons. The decision came just as she had managed to win a trio of coveted medals at the annual national eisteddfod. She had had her photograph in all the papers, wearing a tutu that her teacher had given her – ‘Only for you, dear Hattie’ – a treasured item that had once belonged to her previous star pupil, Margaret Barbieri. A local girl who was, by then, a principal dancer with the Royal Ballet in London.

‘And we’re planning for you to follow in her footsteps,’ the teacher said to Hattie. ‘I have my eye on you.’

But right then there was James, who needed his parents’ money to buy him into the beginnings of a career, of sorts, in business. Something to keep him on the straight and narrow, but his record was such that the effort was proving both difficult and expensive. It was also requiring the twisting of several influential arms. Hattie’s teacher was incensed by Hattie’s most recent disheartening intelligence, and, on this occasion, she kept her pupil company all the way home.

There she confronted Mr Marchmont-Thomas and offered to waive Hattie’s fees.

‘Your daughter, as you must surely know, is really talented,’ she said. ‘It’s a privilege for me to teach her. And we have plans for her future, she and I. Don’t we, Hattie dear?’

Mr Marchmont-Thomas was deeply affronted and asked her to leave at once. Then he sent his daughter to her room.

‘The cheek of the woman!’ he said to his wife. ‘As if we were beggars, Kathleen.’

‘She meant it for the best,’ said Mrs Marchmont-Thomas, on one of her martyred sighs. ‘It was kind of her to make the offer.’

‘It’s completely out of the question,’ Mr Marchmont-Thomas replied. ‘Hattie must simply start pulling her weight. It’s time she left school and found employment. That’s until she gets married.’

Mr Marchmont-Thomas had not been employed since the recent closure of the last of the gentlemen’s outfitters, though he was wont to don his business suit each morning and bustle off to his club.

‘Oh blah!’ said Hattie’s ballet teacher, when she was informed of this decision. ‘Forgive me, Hattie. I know he’s your father, but what is the matter with that man? I tell you what, my darling. I’ll employ you – full-time and from today. But you must make me two solemn promises. No handouts to that brother of yours and we’re going to drop all this “hyphen-Marchmont” business. Lose it, all right, Hattie?’

So Hattie left school and became Hattie Thomas. She gave classes while she prepared herself for a scholarship to London’s Central School of Ballet.

‘We are going to get you there,’ her teacher said with conviction. ‘Upward and onward, Hattie! But we’ve got to toughen you up, my dear. You need to be tough in this profession and you’re a bit too much of a pushover.’

‘Do you think so?’ Hattie said.

And Hattie duly won the scholarship, but her success coincided with an unfortunate event that neither Mr Marchmont-Thomas nor his wife could sweep under one of their mould-green carpets. James, having been wheedled into the offices of one of his father’s one-time business associates, had soon been discovered with his fingers in the safe and, furthermore, he was concurrently in the Juvenile Court on a charge of stealing a sports car. Hattie’s mother was taking this very badly and had had to get pills from the doctor. She had hardly risen from her bed in fourteen days and she’d been refusing food. Her blood pressure was rising and she had begun to suffer from a constant buzzing in the ears.

‘Your mother is not at all well, Henrietta,’ Mr Marchmont-Thomas told his daughter. ‘We are all of us having to make sacrifices and that must include you. The scholarship is out of the question. You are badly needed at home.’

Then, some years later, when her teacher retired, she’d handed over the school to the pupil for whom she had once had such high hopes.

And Hattie, pliable, pushover Hattie, who has spent her years between sixteen and thirty-four giving ballet classes to children, now writes ballet stories for girls. She keeps Margaret Barbieri’s tutu hanging over the desk where she writes. Lola, her heroine, is a strong-minded girl, who leaves her home on the east coast of Africa, against the wishes of her family. She takes up a scholarship at the Central School of Ballet in London, where she toughs it out through hardship and success. The first book Hattie dedicates to her little daughter Cat, who just then is eager to start lessons, but within the year Cat has packed it in.

Once Cat has done with her breakfast Coco Pops, and has so effectively slapped down her mother, she dons her regulation school hat and takes herself off to high school. Hattie makes herself a piece of toast, which she nibbles as she proceeds upstairs to the turret, where she sits down to deal with her correspondence. Then she takes a shower and she puts on her clothes. She sets off on foot for the local shopping mall, but meets the postman at her gate, who hands her a sheaf of envelopes.

‘Thank you,’ she says. She stuffs the envelopes into her bag and walks on.

Once there, she enters the music shop, where she buys herself the CD of Stravinsky’s
Pulcinella
. Then she sits down at a café table with a mug of cappuccino. Hattie loves this little ritual of lingering alone in cafés; loves the anonymity of it; loves getting out of the house. She takes the notes from the sleeve and starts to read the words. It isn’t ‘screw-gender’ that she’s heard, of course. What she’s heard is ‘
struggendo
’. ‘
Struggendo si va
.
Per voi il core struggendo si va
.’ For you my heart languishes. Then she glances through the letters. All of them are for Herman except for one, which she opens and reads. It’s from the drama department of the local university and it’s asking her, with apologies for the shortness of notice, to take part in their conference on mime.

Hattie blinks. She reads the letter again, feeling a twinge of excitement. Me? she’s thinking to herself. Me? Speak at a conference?

Then, as she reads it a third time, she takes note that someone is planting an overlarge tuna sandwich on the table, which is almost making contact with her letter. Blast! How she hates this, especially as the café isn’t even particularly full. The sandwich is quartered and it comes on an oval platter festooned with rocket leaves. It is soon followed by a tall fluted glass of what looks to her like guava juice.

‘May I?’ says a familiar voice; a voice from way back, but one that so recently has happened to gatecrash her sleeping brain. ‘It
is
you, isn’t it?’ says the voice. ‘Of course it is.’

When Hattie looks up, she sees that Josh Silver is standing there and he’s staring at her hard. Josh Silver, in the flesh; tousled curls, turned half-and-half to grey; the chestnut almost leached out. Same glasses; Stravinsky’s glasses. Thick lenses that shrink his eyes. Her hand flies to her mouth as she looks up at him. Then it falls back on to the tabletop, on to the open letter, and she smiles at him with pleasure.

He unhitches a canvas backpack from his left shoulder and eases it to the floor. Then he leans across the table and kisses her cheek.

‘Hat,’ he says. ‘How amazing. This is amazing. I saw you from the counter. Well, I thought I did. I couldn’t be sure. But of course I’m sure. You’re so –’ He stops and glances down at the letter and the sleeve notes.

‘
Pulcinella
,’ he says, and he laughs.

‘I’ve just been asked to this conference,’ she says.

‘Great!’ he says. ‘That’s great. Me too. It’s why I’m here. Only I’ve come early. I’ve got this little room near the beach, but I took one of those combi-taxis up the hill. You know. To prowl old haunts. I just walked past your church hall.’

And then – oh no! – she has to go.
Has to
. Herman’s tenant will, at this moment, be arriving at her front door.

Josh is visibly flustered.

‘Give me your phone number,’ he says. ‘Please, Hat.’

She watches with a sinking heart as he writes the number in biro on his hand. Will he maybe forget and wash his hands?

‘I’m still in the same house,’ she says, as back-up.

‘Can we meet up later?’ he says. ‘Anywhere. Mitchell Park, maybe?’

Mitchell Park, where the mynah birds will be doing their Hitchcock screeching as they home in, en masse, to roost.

‘Yes,’ she says, and she gathers up her stuff. ‘Yes, I’d love that. Call me. I’ll be at home all day.’ And then she’s off, on her little dancer’s feet; off at speed to meet Herman’s tenant. Giacomo Moroni.

Chapter Four

Josh

The night before Josh leaves for South Africa to attend that conference on mime, he’s in the car, returning home with Caroline and his mother-in-law. Zoe, his darling lookalike daughter, has already left for her French exchange, and he hates it that he wasn’t there to wave her off. He was tied up in Bristol. Opera production. Joint production with the music department. And now, on his first free evening in weeks – his wedding anniversary, no less – the woman has seen fit to take control of the occasion. Tickets for the opera in London. Splashy treats courtesy of Caroline’s money;
their
money, of which they have precious little, thanks to the Witch Woman’s monthly allowance and mortgage payments – but Josh has long since ceased to air this grudge directly. He’s never coped well with confrontation, and what’s the point if you can’t win?

‘It’s your bronze, my darlings,’ he hears the woman say. (Or did she say tin? Or copper? Or plastic?) He wasn’t listening to her, because who gives a bugger about this sort of rubbish? Bronze, lead, zinc, chrome, uranium. Trust the Witch Woman to know this sort of crap. She who evidently drove her own husband to an early grave.

And it’s been three tickets for the opera, not two, because Mrs McCleod likes to see ‘
les jeunes
enjoying themselves’, as she says. And she wouldn’t be able to see them, would she? Not if they’d gone off on their own. Caroline, as usual – prodigious Caroline, who can hold almost anyone in the palm of her hand – has not uttered a word to deter her mother from the opera project; Caroline, who, since taking on the headship of a local comprehensive school, can hold in thrall six hundred adolescents as a matter of daily routine.

‘Mum’s lonely,’ Caroline says to Josh.

And there is every good reason why she should be lonely, Josh thinks, because any person of sound mind will be giving her a wide berth. Plus it really gets on his nerves when the old woman calls them ‘
les jeunes
’, because, leaving aside that he has recently turned forty-two, it brings him up against her idiotic assertion that ‘spiritually’ she’s French.

‘My heritage is Scottish,’ she says. ‘But in my soul I’m French.’ Josh is never quite sure which he hates more: ‘
les jeunes
’ or ‘the bairns’, but either way, he’s aware that her intent is to disempower. And, to underline his disempowerment, Josh is right now seated in the back of his own car because, thanks to his lousy eyesight, Caroline does all the night driving and his mother-in-law, by long-established tradition, claims rights to the front passenger seat.