Sex and Stravinsky (41 page)

Gérard is not at home, for all that he has been forewarned of her arrival by Josh’s telephone call. They find him, taller and more filled out, playing football in the square and he is patently not best pleased to be interrupted by his erstwhile woodland ballet partner; a ghost from his former life, in the figure of a small, red-headed girl who does nothing to enhance his local street-cred.

He shakes hands politely but stiffly with Zoe’s father and with her stepmother, then with Zoe herself. He declines the offer of dinner that night in a local restaurant. He shifts unwittingly from foot to foot in his eagerness to be gone. Then his teammates summon him back to the game by means of those bullish male noises that Zoe has always found so strangely other whenever she’s heard them emanating from sports fields and recreation grounds back home. It occurs to her to be thankful that she’s not wearing the ‘Zizou’ T-shirt.

‘Gérard,’ she says. ‘About Mimi . . .’ She wants to blurt out to him that the dog should not be kept chained up, but she loses heart and gives up.

He makes a little almost-bow and then he’s gone.

The three outsiders hover to watch the game for something like half a minute.

‘Please, Dad,’ Zoe says. ‘Please. I’d like to go now, if that’s all right.’

School is never quite the same, since Mattie and Maggs are more bonded than ever and when the French exchange comes round again, Zoe, as in a game of musical chairs, is the one who is left standing. She’s of an age when she is just about to change, and adolescent introspectiveness comes with a heavy dose of introversion. It begins to dawn on Zoe that her previous, ebullient interactions with her dad – those lovely ‘silly’ times she always had with him – were quite a lot to do with the two of them reacting to Caroline’s grown-upness. The mood between them has changed with Hattie’s coming, so that things like their collections of prize news billboards have gradually dwindled until they are no more. Gone are all the ‘Brad Pitt Haircut Boys’ and ‘Cold Flat OAPs’.

All the silly stuff has quietly fallen into disuse.

‘I saw a butcher’s shop that was called a Meat Boutique.’

‘I passed a restaurant that was called The Rumblin’ Tums.’

‘I was on a bus that said “13 seated plus 2 standees”. Then it said, “OR, 11 seated plus 2 standees plus 1 wheelchair”.’

‘So it could have said, “9 seated plus 2 standees plus 2 wheelchairs”?’

‘Or “5 seated plus 2 standees plus 4 wheelchairs”?’

‘It could have not had any seated at all. And no standees either. That would have made enough room for 7½ wheelchairs.’

It all simply stopped, because it had somehow stopped being funny.

Zoe finds that she feels self-conscious, once she’s joined the ballet class, where everyone else is quite a lot younger, and she’s already missed out on acquiring a place at a school for the performing arts. Truth to tell, she’s been yearning to do ballet for so many years before her wish is granted, that she is on the edge of having exorcised the need before it gets to be realised.

She misses her mother quite a lot and, when the family move to Bristol, Zoe stays there only to finish her GCSEs, after which she returns to take up residence in the old red bus. She practises theories of self-sufficiency by resurrecting Caroline’s vegetable patch and she gets herself a chocolate Labrador pup – a bitch called Mimi – who always sleeps alongside her, like a chunky hot-water bottle.

She does voluntary work with asylum seekers and goes in for a form of minimum-impact living that on the whole works well, though she does once find her equilibrium disturbed when she uncovers the floral Birkenstocks and the T-shirt that says ‘Zizou’. Most of her friends are from the Allotment Association, and she enjoys their company. Maybe one day she’ll sign up for some form of adult education? Maybe she’ll do a course in forestry? Because, thanks to her French exchange, Zoe is still fond of trees and some proper woodland know-how would be a nice thing to have. Zoe isn’t hugely motivated. Caroline, even in her absence, remains such a difficult act to follow, that her daughter finds it easier not to try.

And then, of course, there’s Jack. Once Jack has got his DNA result he knows exactly what to do. He acquires the necessary papers as the descendant of that line of Marchmont-Thomases, one-time settler upper-crust and basket-weavers of Norfolk. Then he claims his British passport and becomes eligible for residence in the EU. He needs to serve out his two-year junior fellowship and then he can move on. From his point of view such relocation can’t come soon enough, because – who knows? – being where he is, there’s always a chance that one or other of his deadbeat parents might loom up out of the dark; a phlegmy, alcoholic street person and a dumbo domestic servant, both wanting something from him. The prospect offends his aesthetic sense. Needy, repellent persons, like those Dakar beggars he was once so deft at stepping over, on the Avenue Pompidou.

In this respect, luck is once again with him, since his recently found male parent has a mere eight weeks to live, and Gertrude, poor old Gertrude, stolid Gertrude – does anyone really care about her? – Gertrude is no more. Gertrude, respecter of racial hierarchies, schooled in subservience by previous white households, was always baffled by the Silvers’ atypical way of life; was never comfortable around them. Their constant sloppiness towards the time-honoured barriers of race; the shocking way in which they would invite black people into their home – persons, as she judged them, no better than herself, who sat all over the living-room chairs and to whom she was required to serve tea. Tea out of the same china cups that the family used for white friends. Zulu men wearing suits and ties, Zulu women with handbags and high heels, who didn’t cover their hair. Right from the start she’d had a problem with the Silvers’ repeated urgings for her to use inappropriate modes of address.

‘Yes, master,’ Gertrude said. ‘No, master.’

‘I’m not your master,’ Bernie said. ‘I am your employer, that is all. My name is Bernie Silver. How about you call me Bernie and I will call you Gertrude?’

‘Yes, master,’ Gertrude said. ‘All right, my master.’

In addition, the Silvers were extremely sloppy with regard to their wallets. At first Gertrude assumed that they left money around on purpose, as a way of catching her out. Trousers on the bathroom coat-hook, pockets jingling with coins, a handbag left on the kitchen table. No lock on the telephone. A drinks cupboard with no key. Then it began to dawn on her that the Silvers were just plain stupid. If they couldn’t take care of their own money, then they didn’t deserve to have it. They didn’t behave like normal white people, so what was there to respect? The pay was good and she did her work as thoroughly as she had been taught.

But truth to tell she missed her old billet at the Marchmont-Thomas’s house, especially as the length of garden there had made for greater privacy; greater privacy for her and the gardener. Joseph, the ancient Mozambican so approved of by Hattie’s dad. He had begun to cut her in on the money he was getting for storing stolen goods; knock-off from an electrical-appliance factory where his son Amos had a job. Amos, together with a bunch of young men, could sell the stuff on for a very good price and the old man always got his share. For Joseph, Gertrude was like a sort of daughter and he could always count on her loyalty. Then came the time when the wretched James was sent down from his boarding school and from then on he was omnipresent.

He had taken to drugging in one of the sheds alongside the servants’ quarters, which had confronted Gertrude with a problem – especially since he’d come upon her one day, concealing a stack of transistor radios under a pile of old sacks. Gertrude was not going to sacrifice old Joseph and, instead, allowed James to have her portion as a way of buying his silence. Then he demanded her savings from her and, when she had no more money to give, he’d forced himself upon her.

‘You can pay me in pussy,’ he said.

Once the pregnancy was too marked to hide, he’d stolen his father’s fountain pen and had contrived to get her sacked.

At the point where Gertrude took up her job at the Silvers’, she had not a penny left to her name and lots of catching up to do, which was not difficult around the Silvers’ house, since they never missed the odd twenty-rand note. Meanwhile the friendship with Joseph was able to continue. Joseph who, thanks to his employer’s son, had had to rethink the storage system, soon learnt to keep a sharp lookout for James Alexander Marchmont-Thomas. And so it was that the old man had happened to observe Hattie’s brother one night, removing a loose brick from the wall alongside the servants’ cistern outlet and then mortaring it crudely back into place.

It cost him some effort, that very same night, to climb on a chair and check things out, but he’d made a better fist of it than James had, eighteen years on. So Joseph found the envelope that Josh had been carrying in his pocket the night he’d gone to say his final goodbyes to Hattie Thomas. The envelope said ‘Gertrude’, so Joseph promptly handed it over to the person for whom it was intended. That was Gertrude’s windfall time because Josh, alone in his parents’ house next morning, had meanwhile been to the bank. He had handed her another envelope, also labelled ‘Gertrude’, and containing, in crisp new notes, the identical sum of money. Then, that evening, he’d headed out for the airport.

Gertrude, too, was meant to leave that night. It had been the Silvers’ plan. For her own sake they had wanted her out, just in case the Special Branch came by and made trouble for anyone left behind. Yet Gertrude’s plan was to linger there, for just one more night, so that she and Joseph, on the quiet, could gather up the Silvers’ remaining smaller items with the object of selling them on. But news unfortunately travels fast and soon Amos and his friends were there – a group of young men who were high on booze and probably drugs as well. They came prepared to cart off more ambitious volumes of stuff, for which purpose they were adequately equipped with a stolen dry-cleaner’s van. And they were making quite a lot of noise.

The commotion soon drew the next-door neighbour, who came out to investigate; the very same next-door neighbour, by now advanced in years, who had once apprehended Pru at the Silvers’ gate with the infant Josh tied to her back. Being a man who kept a gun under his pillow, he was unwise enough to bring it with him, and to brandish it as he approached the group, demanding to know their business. As soon as the old man made as if to aim, it was all too predictable that one of the hotheads would shoot him first. Then, in their need to make a hasty getaway, the gang were obliged to leave the balance of their pickings in the Silvers’ driveway, along with the bleeding old man. They all piled back into the dry-cleaner’s van, grabbing Gertrude as they did so, just in case she could have it in mind to squeal.

They drove at speed down Umbilo Road and some way beyond the Dalton Road market where, alone in the anonymous dark, they threw Gertrude out of the van. Then they reversed over her body to make sure she was dead. They took a moment to check her over for anything of value and found two identical envelopes containing identical sums of money. They also found her ID. As soon as they could, they abandoned the van and took the precaution of setting it alight. So Gertrude never appeared at the house of Bernie and Ida’s friends, the people who subsequently made such efforts to find the Silvers’ old housemaid and, failing to do so, grieved long and hard for that poor little schoolboy Jack, so alone and so far from home.

In the studio, on the morning after the weird girl, and the screaming, and the stinking tramp, Jack is relishing a second cup of espresso along with a slice of panettone. He is turning his thoughts, with a certain effort of will, to the conference on mime which is due to start that day. His studio now has a definite aura of having been violated by events of the previous night, happy as the outcome of those events has proved to be. Jack’s plan is to move out as soon as seems judicious, and find himself a different billet somewhere in the area. It won’t of course be halfway near as nice, but he is confident that in a couple of years there will be another studio. In Paris, maybe. Or Brussels. Or Ghent. In Bergamo. Or Budapest. Or, best of all, in Milan. And next time his studio will come without any of these messy and unseemly attachments. No Josh, or Hattie; no ghastly girl to leave her scent on his clothes. No repellent, stinking drunkard, or sullen barefoot housemaid. Only himself and the Vespa and the three equestrian etchings. The Giacometti poster and the Moka espresso pot. And the beautiful silver desk.

Acknowledgements

Several people were more than commonly supportive to me during the writing of this book. As always, my editor Alexandra Pringle displayed exceptional thoughtfulness, flair and sensitivity along with huge dollops of personal warmth and generosity. My agent Victoria Hobbs was always there for me. Margaret Alice Stewart-Liberty allowed herself to be my hour-by-hour, read-aloud audience at final typescript stage, always did so with a marvellous good grace and always knew which words had double consonants. Anna and Joe Trapido’s ongoing involvement with African culture kept alive for me the allure of that continent, while Cat Marais (see Chapter 10) will have caught her interest in the Futurist–Rationalist architecture of Milan from Joe. I also wish to acknowledge that Caroline Silver’s objection to Hellmann’s Mayonnaise (see Chapter 2) is a thing of the past, since that company has subsequently taken to using free-range eggs. Finally, I am most grateful both to Ledig House International Writers’ Retreat and to the Santa Maddalena Foundation, for two fruitful spells as writing fellow.