Authors: Grace Wynne-Jones
I smile. I never realised my close relatives were going to be
quite this supportive. It seems that some of them also find Marie’s
parties rather awkward. I really wish I’d known this earlier.
‘Marie’s gatherings have got very staid,’ Aggie continues, almost
as if I’ve prompted her. ‘There’s no real
oomph
to them any more.
Joseph used to bring along jazz records when you were younger.’
I wish she hadn’t mentioned his name. Jazz records… yes, I vaguely remember the strange, floaty music livening up my enjoyment of fizzy lemonade and crisps and sausage rolls.
‘I’ve asked Fabrice to come along, to give the whole thing a bit
more style and bounce. A bit more
fun,’
Aggie says firmly. ‘She’s
such a dear friend, and I think she’s rather lonely.’
I don’t know what to say.
‘She says she might even do some songs from the shows.’
‘
What shows?’ I frown, somewhat irritably.
‘Oh, you know – the big shows.’
‘Can she sing?’
‘I don’t know.’ Aggie chuckles happily. ‘Anyway, she’s been so
kind to me, I feel I owe her a little treat. She has no real family of
her own, you see.’
I bite my lip. Aggie never mentions DeeDee any more. It’s as if she’s decided to forget her because she knows she will never meet
her again. Who am I to complain if she has turned to Fabrice for
comfort and friendship? But I still resent it somehow. I don’t like
Fabrice, especially now that I know she’s become so pally with Nathaniel too. There’s something odd about her.
‘Well, that’s nice,’ I say, lying politely. ‘Maybe I should invite
my friend Erika along and get her to play her guitar.’
I laugh ruefully, but Aggie says, ‘Perhaps they could do the songs from the shows together.’
‘No, I don’t think I’ll invite her, actually,’ I reply quickly. ‘She’s
not very good at remembering the words to songs, and she can’t
really play the guitar.’
Aggie chuckles. ‘Did you bring any mints?’
‘Yes.’ I hand her the bag.
She unwraps one and pops it into her mouth. ‘Well, at least Marie’s party should be a bit livelier this year,’ she smiles.
‘Yes,’ I find myself agreeing. ‘In fact, it might be the least boring party Marie’s ever given.’
Chapter
Forty-Three
‘I love you.’ ‘I
love you,’ I repeat very carefully. I am in a large and
somewhat shabby room near central Dublin, teaching English to
Erika’s refugees. Time seems to have flown since I returned from London: it’s September already, and Marie’s party is tomorrow. I
suppose I should be glad I’m not at home fretting about it.
They are not, of course,
Erika’s
refugees, if one is to be strictly accurate; but, in a way, we have all become refugees from Erika
herself – or from her guitar-playing and singing, to be precise. She
persuaded me to come to her first class, and as we listened to her
wailing, I felt these poor people had been through quite enough already. She sang ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ over and over
again, and then kept trying to get her students to discuss the lyrics.
Since it is a rather sad song, this wasn’t particularly uplifting. She
also didn’t remember all of the words and kept asking me to prompt her. No one laughed; they just watched us solemnly.
‘I think it’s a bit too advanced for them,’ Erika hissed at me. ‘What should we do?’
‘What about just… just general conversation?’ I suggested.
‘But what
is
a general conversation?’ Erika enquired. She can
be rather pedantic at times.
‘It’s about anything, anything at all.’
Erika stood up before the group, visibly quivering with nerves.
She has a fear of public speaking, but not of public singing – which is ironic, since she has quite a nice speaking voice. ‘How much English do you actually know?’
No one answered. ‘English,’ I said, standing up myself. ‘Speak?
You?’ I pointed at them.
There was a long silence, and then someone mentioned the name of a pop song. A rather dashing young man stood up and
said, ‘This is the BBC World Service’ in a very gentrified Home
Counties accent. He had obviously listened to this announcement many times. ‘Please have exact fare ready,’ someone else commented. ‘Stand clear of the doors,’ one woman remarked.
‘Guinness is nice thing,’ a young girl giggled. Soon they were all
giggling. Some of them were almost falling off their seats with laughter.
‘They’re getting out of control,’ Erika whispered nervously. ‘Should I start playing the guitar again?’
‘No,’ I said firmly, because if she did there would be an exodus,
and I had noticed that some of them were talking to each other –
and they appeared to be speaking very broken English. The
laughter was easing their self-consciousness. I decided to address
the confident-looking young woman who was sitting nearest me.
‘What is your name?’
‘Katya.’
‘It is nice to meet you, Katya.’ I held out my hand and she shook it. Then I turned to the class and said, ‘It is nice to meet you,’ and they stared at me blankly.
‘It is nice to meet you,’ Katya replied suddenly. Then she turned
to her classmates and waved her arms around like a conductor. ‘It
is nice to meet you,’ she said encouragingly.
‘It is nice to meet you,’ they chorused in unison. We clearly had
a leader in our midst.
‘What would you like to talk about, Katya?’ I asked her, thinking I would have to repeat the sentence several times and possibly draw a diagram.
‘Love,’ she replied, her big brown eyes shining. ‘I very much
need talk love. And forms.’
‘Forms?’ I enquired.
‘Yes, forms you fill after.’
‘Fill in,’ Erika corrected her.
‘Yes, many forms.’
‘Do you have the forms with you?’ I asked. This was clearly just the sort of practical help she required.
‘No,’ she sighed.
‘Bring them next time,’ Erika said.
‘Yes,’ I said, speaking very slowly, to the class. ‘Make a list of
the things you most need to talk about.’ I thought of the
bewildering array of bureaucracy they must have encountered. ‘And give it to us at the end of the class, so that we can prepare next week’s lesson.’
‘Love,’ a middle-aged woman said. ‘She need talk love, too.’
And so the entire class learned of Katya’s attraction to a man
called Sergei – a man with big legs and arms and ‘many
shoulders’.
‘Not many,’ Erika corrected. ‘People do not have many
shoulders.’
‘Broad shoulders?’ I suggested.
‘Big, like so.’ Katya made an expansive gesture. ‘And white
teeth and many hairs.’ The language of love was losing something
in translation, but the class seemed eager for more details.
It turned out that Sergei was staying in the same B&B as Katya
and her family. Sometimes he gave her his fried tomatoes at breakfast. This was clearly enough reason to desire him – or at
least it had to be, because her grasp of English wasn’t sufficient to
go into greater detail.
This is how I have found myself trying to improve her vocabulary. ‘I love you.’ I say it many times.
‘I love you,’ a young man near the front says. ‘Your arse, it is
like a rhino’s.’
‘No! Don’t say that,’ Erika says firmly, while I try not to giggle.
‘Whoever told you to say that was… was very naughty.’
There follows a long, and sometimes virtually incompre
hensible, discussion about whether Katya loves Sergei or simply
likes him, in which case she should say, ‘I like you,’ or perhaps just, ‘Thank you very much for the tomatoes, Sergei, you are a very nice man.’ I begin to get rather worried about Katya and
Sergei. What if he just wants her as a friend? What if he already
has many other admirers he hasn’t told her about?
‘Sex,’ a matronly women comments. ‘Men, that is thing they want.’
I begin to feel rather frustrated that most of the people in this
room don’t speak better English. We could have a most
interesting philosophical discussion. I might even ask them what
I should do about Nathaniel. Should I say, ‘I love you,’ and see
how he reacts? He hasn’t phoned me in weeks – not since we got
back from London. Surely that tells me everything I need to know. I gaze sadly out the window. Maybe he’s beginning to
realise how much I care about him, and he doesn’t want to
mislead me. Maybe Greta has had a word with him and told him
he needs to be more careful with his affections.
Erika is saying, ‘Not all men just want sex. Some can be very
kind and considerate and… and forgiving.’ She is clearly talking
about Lionel. He’s growing on her. I knew he would.
The class ends shortly afterwards. As we spill out onto the
street, I realise I have enjoyed myself. This was better than sitting
at home worrying about April and DeeDee and whether I want Diarmuid’s slimmed-down kitchen cabinet – not to mention
Nathaniel. In the circumstances, it’s probably best not to mention
Nathaniel at all.
When I get back to the cottage I get a call from Mum.
Apparently April has decided to get a later flight and won’t be arriving in Ireland until tomorrow morning, the day of Marie’s
party. So they won’t be able to take her out to dinner and give her
the Waterford crystal bowl and discuss where and when they should tell people about Al. She’s going to take a taxi straight from the airport to Marie’s house.
‘Oh, God,’ I moan. ‘Oh, well… I suppose the plane could be delayed.’
‘Don’t say that, dear!’ Mum exclaims. ‘Everyone is so looking
forward to seeing her.’
Mum obviously still believes April will not make her grand announcement. But, judging from the conversation I had with April yesterday, she hasn’t changed her mind about it at all.
‘I even suggested to Mum that she just tell Marie to start with,’
April said. ‘That would have been enough for me – for the
moment, anyway. But she wouldn’t even do that. She just went on
about some special birthday present she’s bought me.’ April sounded almost tearful. ‘I don’t think she plans to tell anyone – not ever.’