Sex and Stravinsky (17 page)

As a high-school student, Josh was small, popular and comfortable with himself; a curly-haired, myopic person measuring five foot three, who involved himself with the school orchestra and acted in all the school plays; an uncircumcised, sort of Jewish-unJewish boy from a secular, agnostic Jewish-unJewish family; a boy with a bent for Zulu harmonies and a repertoire of Apostolic hymns. And, though he was required to tolerate the odd teasing pleasantry with regard to his family’s politics – ‘Sir, sir, Silver’s reading
Pravda
, sir’ (that’s if he was ever observed reading the
New Statesman
under the desk) – Josh was never seriously picked on, except briefly in his sixteenth year and by one particular pupil: a public-school thicko, as Josh assessed him; a tall, handsome boy, who had entered the school well into the fifth form and stayed for a mere five weeks.

Josh remembered him for not much more than that he stole the red guitar and that he was endowed with an idiotic name; like something out of
Molesworth
. James Alexander Marchmont-Thomas. He was a boy who liked to waylay younger boys in the toilets and shake them down for money. He considered it the soul of wit to use curiously dated insults, such as ‘Commie’ and ‘Yid’. He had a little archaic chant that tended to stale with repetition. ‘Crikey Ike-y, King of the Jews, sold his wife for a pair of shoes.’ The boy was sent down for reasons undisclosed. Naturally, the whole class knew that it was for dealing drugs in school.

Then at university, where white males were on the whole signed up for engineering and accountancy, Josh opted for French and drama; both areas in which he was once again enfolded by clouds of pastel-clad girls, with whom he happily sketched theatrical costumes from the court of King Louis XIV and staged scenes from Molière and Lully and from Shakespeare’s late romantic plays. And, while the predominant mood was for Chekhov and Ibsen, he was more preoccupied with baroque theatre and strolling players and masques. He wanted to connect the drama he was studying with acrobatics and dance. So he was once again a bit of an oddball, but one who was proving extremely useful for playing Ariel and Puck. Then one day, hoping to sign up for lessons, he took himself off to the ballet school, which was where he met Hattie Thomas; Hattie who, on the instant, became the love of his life.

She was sitting straight-backed on the church-hall floor when he approached on a Saturday morning. He could see her through the glass panel in the door. She had placed herself in the centre of a ring of little girls; ten little girls in pink leotards. They all had their hands sticking upwards in the air, palms pressed against their temples, sitting tall and straight, as they mimed putting on their royal crowns. Next, they did wiggling their fingers. They did looking up to the ceiling; looking down to the floor; up and down; up and down. They did lying on the floor making star shapes. They did high-stepping walks; Puss-in-Boots walks, paws bent in front of them. They made frog’s legs, knees apart, bending down at the bar.

All this time, Josh, staring through the glass, was transfixed by the dainty young woman in charge. Short schoolgirl hair, sleek, dark and straight. She had large, widely spaced, velvety eyes and a circular patch of natural high colour on the wing of each high cheekbone. To Josh she was nature’s Coppélia. She was the girl in a picture sequence he’d perused, of the doll in
The Tales of Hoffmann
who must dance helplessly faster and faster. His own heart had begun to beat faster and faster, until he felt that he might faint.

‘Jesus Christ!’ he said to himself and he quickly looked away.

Then the class was over and Josh walked into the hall.

Hattie had never taught an adult before, but she agreed to give him some lessons, one-to-one. And Josh, she found, was a most apt pupil; a quick learner who was prepared to work hard. He proved himself to be lots of fun and was soon her inseparable friend. He was always at the church hall. She was forever on the campus. Josh became a feature of her twice-yearly dance shows. She became a part of his student drama productions.
Pas de deux
.

And Josh, who, after completing an MA, was awarded a London postgraduate scholarship, had high hopes of taking Hattie with him; Hattie who had revealed herself to him as a passionate anglophile; a girl for whom the mere idea of Angel tube station induced high excitement for its proximity to Sadler’s Wells.

And then things started to go wrong. Hattie appeared to get cold feet. She wavered. She fell for Herman. (‘But you’ll always be my very best friend, Josh. My best friend in all the world.’) The Aged Parents were at this time being hounded into exile; starved out; banned from doing their jobs. Bernie and Ida had clandestine plans for relocating to Dar es Salaam. They quietly began to sell off some of their things. They invited Josh to pick a favourite item, and they did the same with Jack; Jack, the maid’s boy, soon to be dispatched to a boarding school in Swaziland at the Silvers’ expense.

Prior to their flight, they made arrangements for Jack’s mother to be employed as a domestic by kindly, like-minded friends. Then Ida and Bernie crossed the border with one small suitcase each. They had made it to Botswana by the time Josh went, after dark, to the ballet school to say his goodbyes to Hattie, since his own departure was imminent. It was the bleakest night he could remember. Everything was going; going, going, or gone. And even then, in his precious last moments with Hattie, they were interrupted by a demanding male voice that jarred at them from beyond the door.

‘Excuse me a moment,’ Hattie said and she slipped out into the corridor.

Josh could hear what sounded like some sort of altercation.

‘Bitch!’ he heard the male voice say – a voice that was unplaceable but somehow familiar to him – and he stepped out into the darkness of the corridor in time to see a tall male figure swinging his way round the corner and out of sight.

Both he and Hattie stood in the silence and the dark. Then, after a minute or so, they heard the clang of the outer doors. There were footfalls on the stone pathway between the gravestones.

Hattie was rubbing her arm.

‘Chinese burns,’ she said. ‘That was my brother.’ She had only rarely mentioned her brother, a twin, from whom she was estranged. ‘Wanting to scrounge some money off me. But I didn’t have any, you see.’

But Josh had had money; quite a lot of it. Bernie had left it with him, in an envelope labelled ‘Gertrude’. The money was intended to tide over the maid until her new employers returned from their holiday. And Josh had stupidly left the envelope in the pocket of his jacket, which was hanging on a coat peg in the cloakroom. So on the following day – the day of his own departure – he went to the bank and drew out what constituted a hefty tranche of his UK scholarship money, in order to compensate the maid.

He arrived in London at dawn the next morning, a whole lot poorer than he had meant to be, and he made his way, via the
A–Z
, into the heart of Bloomsbury. And it was thanks to Marty and Keiran and Tamsin, who offered him cut-price sleeping space on the floor of their shared student house, that he survived his first few weeks; that was the very same student house in which, a year later, he met Caroline.

And now, after the opera; after the performance of
Rigoletto
, as he and his wife and his mother-in-law are on the way home, it’s twenty hours before his first flight home in almost twenty years. Caroline is finally driving down the last stretch of winding, sick-making road towards her mother’s house. And then they have dropped off his mother-in-law and have seen her safely inside.

‘I’m sorry about tonight,’ Caroline says into the silence, but Josh doesn’t respond. ‘Mum had already bought the tickets,’ she says. ‘There was nothing I could do about it.’ Briefly, she takes her left hand from the steering wheel and places it on his knee. ‘I’m really and truly sorry, Josh,’ she says. ‘I’ll make it up to you, I promise.’

Josh knows by now that this does not mean Caroline will don the silver Hollywood pyjamas and spend an evening – maybe a whole Sunday – idling in bed with him; takeaway fish-and-chip cartons and an empty bottle of Freixenet rolling about on the floor. Because lovely Caroline – lovely as ever, in that gasp-inducing way – Caroline, who, year in, year out, can make the unworkable work, has unlearned the art of idling.

‘I’ll work so hard on the house,’ she says. ‘You and Zoe will stretch your eyes with delight when you get back.’ Then she says, ‘How was the opera, by the way? I mean
your
opera.’

Josh laughs.

‘Oh
my
opera,’ he says. ‘That was fine. That was good.’ And then, in order to exorcise the Witch Woman from his thoughts, he starts to tell her about a little baroque opera house in the Czech Republic that he’s angling to visit with his students. That’s if he can get the funding.

‘It’s got all these wooden trapdoors and massive ropes and cog wheels under the floor,’ he says. ‘And pulleys in the loft space. Maybe you could come with me?’

After that, they go on to the old red bus in the farmer’s field off the Abingdon Road. By now Josh is no longer sleepy and, at three in the morning, he gets up and swaps to Zoe’s bed, fearing that his wakefulness will be disturbing to Caroline. He snaps on his daughter’s little bedside lamp and picks up one of her paperbacks.
Lola Comes to London
, by Henrietta Marchmont. He reads the biographical note on the back. The author is a former ballet teacher who lives in Durban, South Africa. She is married to an architect and has three teenage children. Marchmont, Josh is thinking to himself. As in Marchmont-Thomas? As in James Alexander Marchmont-Thomas? As in the tedious, druggie posh boy who once stole his red guitar? That person was
Hattie’s brother
?! Hattie Thomas’s twin? Of course! The ne’er-do-well; the bullying sibling; the familiar voice in the corridor. Hattie’s brother was none other than the Crikey Ike-y boy.

It takes Josh just over ninety minutes to read the whole of
Lola Comes to London
. He reads parts of it with moist eyes. Then he gets up and goes for a walk along the river from Donnington Bridge to Iffley. When he returns, it is no longer dark and the blackbirds are welcoming the dawn. He faxes the conference organisers, recommending that they issue a last-minute invitation to Henrietta Marchmont, local author and long-time dance exponent; also known as Mrs Herman Marais. Then he packs his bag.

Chapter Five

Cat

Cat is so sick of her mother that half the time she wishes the woman would literally drop dead. And she doesn’t even have to speak to drive you mad. It’s like just everything about her.
Everything
. Like that stupid ballet walk for a start. And like the way she looks in the mirror when she’s putting on her eye make-up. Like she was that dumbo Audrey Hepburn from the 1950s or something. D-R-I-P. Sort of Bambified and precious – like she was a nymph in that song ‘Where’er You Walk’ that Miss Baines got them to sing in choir. Well, that’s from when Cat still went to choir, like last term. Anyway, it’s the way her mum wears all this ‘blusher’, so she looks like a doll. Especially because she’s such a midget anyway. And the way she sort of tries not to wince when Cat walks past the china cupboard like you were an elephant, or a herd of wildebeest or something. And now that Michelle’s gone and stolen all Cat’s friends, her mother just knows that something’s wrong, so she’s forever giving Cat that kind of sideways Oh-God-you-poor-social-cripple look and thinking that you don’t notice.

And, as well as that, Cat just hates that boring Englishified crap her mother’s got in the house. That stuff she’s inherited from her revolting parents, i.e., Grandpa Ghoul and Old Mother Dribble, though Cat knows her dad’s got rid of most of it even before she and the others were born. Like none of her friends’ parents have got that kind of snobby stuff – well, that’s like when she had any friends to speak of, like before Michelle and them decided to start freezing her out. But anyway, she’s got all these old cupboards and desks and things called dopy names like ‘tallboy’ and ‘whatnot’ and ‘davenport’, just like she wanted the whole family to be wearing crinolines and living in la-la land or something.

Like if you take the kitchen – just for example – she’s got this like folksy dresser thing that nearly takes up all of one wall and it’s got these rows of flowery plates and jugs and blah, like from those kind of places in England where they used to make little kids work in factories, grinding up bones to put in the clay, and then they all got poisoned from the lead and the mercury, or they used to fall into the kilns and burn to death. And it’s nearly all stuff they never even actually use. It’s just for sitting there and looking Ye Olde.

And then she’s got these ‘mantel clocks’ and this stupid grandfather clock that drives everyone crazy because it’s forever making you late for school – but she’ll go, ‘Oh but the face is so pretty. Don’t you think so, Cattie-pie?’ Plus there are these wheelback chairs in the kitchen that, like, come to bits when you pull them out and sit on them the wrong way round, and she’ll go, ‘But the grain on that elm wood is so lovely. That’s the thing about elm.’

Then, suddenly, like last week, she goes, ‘Oh, Cattie-pie, please don’t use that gorgeous jug to wash your bike. For heaven’s sake, let me find you a plastic bucket. It’s Portmeirion, sweetheart,’ when it’s just some crappy great thing like probably from before people had washbasins indoors. And it comes like the same size as a bucket, practically. And it’s got a crack all down one side. Well, it has now.