The Travelling Hornplayer

by Barbara Trapido

  I must admit that I, too, am a romantic. The rustic idyll and the exchange of eyes are ideas that work on me. In the hands of better poets than Wilhelm Müller they are capable of increasing my pulse rate.

  ‘I did but see her passing by,

  Yet will I love her till I die.’

  This is, in truth, exactly how I fell in love with Katherine and, while I may diversify, I do not waver.

  ‘Change she earth and change she sky,

  Yet will I love her till I die.’

  I too have planted bean-rows and lived in a bee-loud glade.

  But Lydia is made of sterner stuff. ‘It’s too silly,’ she says. ‘I can’t tell you the story. Not out loud.’

  Next, I suggest that she choose six poems to analyse in detail – the ones she thinks most significant. Lydia blobs jam and cream onto her scone and raises it to her mouth.

  ‘Oh yum,’ she says. ‘This is the best tea ever.’

  ‘Just pick your six favourites,’ I say.

  Lydia dimples and bites her lip. ‘You choose,’ she says. ‘I don’t know which.’

  ‘Oh come on,’ I say. ‘Give me one. There must be one that’s special.’

  After a while she says, ‘I like the one that says the stars are too high: “Die Sterne stehn zu hoch”,’ but she can’t tell me why. ‘It’s just the stars, I suppose,’ she says. ‘You know. “Star light; star bright, Would I may, would I might . . .” All that.’

  I tell her why I think she likes it. Lydia eats a little boat-shaped cake. She makes pretty eyes at me.

  ‘I’d love to be brainy,’ she says.

  ‘Ever read Goethe?’ I say. I begin to mark pages in her anthology with torn-up strips of A4. ‘Just read these,’ I say.

  ‘Goethe as well?’ she says.

  And so it goes. Finally, she’s used up both sides of her tape. When I get up to go, Lydia says, ‘Mr Goldman, do people ever really die of love?’

  The mister business is often irritating to me. ‘Jonathan,’ I say. ‘Just call me Jonathan, OK?’

  ‘Well, do they?’ she says.

  I brush her off with flippancy. ‘Only if they get syphilis,’ I say. ‘Like Schubert.’

  ‘Or Aids,’ she says. ‘Well, I know that sex can make you die. They used to be forever telling us that in Sex Ed. Are sex and love the same?’

  I refuse to commit myself here. ‘I’m too old to be giving you an answer to that question,’ I say. ‘Come on, Lydia. Time’s up.’

  Lydia gets up and we walk towards the exit. ‘I wish you weren’t,’ she says.

  ‘Weren’t what?’ I say.

  ‘Too old,’ she says. ‘Thank you so much, Jonathan.’

  Within the week, Lydia is back on the phone.

  ‘Done it,’ she says.

  This does rather take me by surprise. ‘Already?’ I say.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she says. ‘Can I please show it to you? I’d love your opinion.’

  Lydia has a winning manner. She is the girl who features in madrigals. ‘OK, post it to me,’ I say.

  ‘The thing is,’ Lydia says, ‘I happen to be in London, and I’ve got it with me.’

  Long pause. ‘OK, I’ll meet you,’ I say. ‘Same place?’

  ‘The thing is,’ Lydia says, ‘the thing is, I’m in the call-box at the end of your street.’

  Then there is bloody Sonia, who comes back from Amsterdam and gets a big buzz from quizzing me about ‘the girlie’. Having set me up to waste my time, she then takes exception to what I tell her.

  ‘I practically wrote the bloody thing for her,’ I say. ‘She recorded my every word on tape. She brought a dictaphone with her to Fortnum’s.’

  ‘Come again?’ Sonia says, sounding indignant.

  ‘Dictaphone?’ I say.

  ‘No, the other thing.’

  ‘Fortnum’s?’ I say.

  ‘So when do you take me out to Fortnum’s for tea?’ Sonia says.

  I stare at her in amazement. ‘Don’t be so bloody ridiculous,’ I say. We’re grown-ups. We’re busy. We don’t “go out” together, Sonia. For Christ’s sake, we stay in and fuck.’ But it’s a theme she returns to again and again. And again.

  3. Morgengruss

  Stella

  I’m Stella. Mad, bad Stella. Demanding Stella; deeply ungrateful Stella. Difficult Stella, who had such kind, long-suffering parents. Weren’t they paragons? Especially my mother, a sainted angel, giving me her life like that. All that input; all that expense. I was so patently not the daughter she wanted and yet no effort was spared. Well, that’s life. Kids nowadays. I didn’t ask to get born. The truth is I had made every effort against it. There was a precursor in the womb, you see – an Italian half-sister – who had made things difficult for me. Little Simonetta, who was born after a bodged high-tech labour and who then died of cot death four weeks later. Simonetta, named by my mother after Botticelli’s voguey, braided lady-love with all that voluminous blonde hair. Well, I got the hair, didn’t I? But then I had to subvert it. Typical Stella. Always perverse. Always at loggerheads with life. My hair, as you will know, is red. Carrot-tops, ginger-nuts, Orlando the Marmalade Cat – ‘Pre-Raphaelite’, as the pretentious among us will have it.

  Perhaps if my mother had not spent twenty years diverting me from the edginess and anger that buzzed in my child’s brain; had not endlessly neutralized conflict, smoothed every difficulty; had not played best friend along with saint, tutor and angel – well, then, I might have been illiterate, but better able to fight for myself along the way. I might even have been able to fight with her. As it was, she gave me skills and thereby robbed me of others. The parental double-edged sword. So I waited till her job on me was done. I grew up, I took advantage and then I gave her the brush-off. Shook the dust from my feet. How could I have been so cruel? I venture that bossy Aunt Sally and her husband are suitably scandalized.

  Perhaps I can begin with music, though you may expect me to wander from the subject. I don’t hold onto a thread too well; don’t concentrate for long. I didn’t as a child and I do not now – now that I am once again ‘unwell’. I have this uncle. Let’s call him the Fiddle Anorak. Maths dork with violin. Father’s older brother. Bossy wife Aunt Sally. They have three daughters, my girl cousins, all three striving as hell. An obscene greed for achievement that drives them hell-bent through their childhoods. They all play the violin – Claire, Sheila and Fiona. The String Trio. They talk whenever I meet them in a babble of goals achieved and striven for.

  ‘I can do French verbs – je suis, tu es, it est. Can you do French verbs? I can tell the time. I can hop twelve metres, I’m doing Grade 3. I’m doing Grade 5. What grade’s Stella doing? But Stella ain’t doin’ no grades because Stella is all thumbs. At an age when Stella’s own dear mother was sweetly knitting moss-stitch matinée jackets for the neighbour’s new baby or making her own little papier mâché Christmas tree decorations – ‘Such a quiet child, such a good child, always so imaginative, she’d play on her own for hours’; this, my maternal grandmother; not quite our class, dear; a monstrous but kindly practitioner of the suburban cliché; a person whose favourite painting is that Chinese woman with the green face – Stella, at nine, can’t thread a needle. She can’t wash her own hair. She can’t read a clock-face. She can’t do proper bows in shoe laces. She holds a pencil as if it were a javelin. She puts jigsaw puzzle pieces curly side out around the edges and she still can’t see why that’s wrong.

  The String Trio and their mother are astonished by her incompetence. All through Stella’s childhood, Aunt Sally, whenever she gets the chance, bears down upon Stella like the Playschool lady, zealous to transmit clock-reading skills: ‘The big hand is pointing straight up, so it’s something o’clock. The little hand is pointing to the . . .?’

  In random panic Stella grasps at numbers from the air. ‘It’s four o’clock,’ she says, guessing by the sun. ‘No. No, I mean it’s five. I forgot, I meant five o’clock.’ The time is, of course, three o’clock.

  W
hile the String Trio write in neat, laboured joined-up, Stella writes her name from right to left, and usually with the letters reversed:

  What she writes looks to normal people like 10,119 + 2, but the initial 10 is merely the way I write lower-case ‘a’ – a ball with a stick, you see, only here the stick has come adrift from the ball and it’s on the wrong side, that’s all. The ‘9’ is lower-case ‘e’ – a simple case of reversal. I make the ciphers huge, like buttons. Numbers, letters, they’re all hieroglyphics to me, dafty Stella. Stella’s cuneiform. Plus until she’s eight, Stella speaks with an Irish accent. This gives joy to the String Trio, who regale her with Irish jokes; the cack-handed logic of what Paddy says to Mick. Suits me. It’s conversant with my abilities.

  The String Trio do Suzuki violin. Aunt Sally drives them to their lessons near the baker’s shop. When I stay with them I go along in the car. I hate their snotty little violins but I love the smell of the bakery, and sometimes Aunt Sally buys buns. At home the String Trio play rounds on the recorder; Carl Dolmetsch around the Bechstein in the music room.

  ‘Don’t you “do” recorders at your school?’ they say. Their grade certificates from the Royal College of Music adorn the music-room walls. I make a fool of myself on one occasion because I think some of these must be for me. I think the italically inscribed ‘Sheila’ says ‘Stella’. Sheila Goldman; Stella Goldman. Both names start with ‘S’ and end with ‘a’; both have six letters; two of the intervening letters are the same, ‘e’ and ‘I’; of the remaining dissimilar letters, the ‘i’ and the ‘I’ – well – an ‘i’ is nearly like an ‘l’ only it’s not so tall. The ‘h’ is tall like the ‘t’ and with a similar curly foot.

  ‘This one says Stella,’ I say, proudly pointing. The String Trio are amused. They fall about.

  They try then to teach me the recorder, but after an hour I am still putting my right hand above my left hand instead of the other way round. I don’t know which is which.

  ‘Just think which hand your watch goes on,’ Claire says helpfully.

  ‘Just think which hand does treble,’ Sheila says, going, as she does, for overkill. She means treble on the piano. ‘Oh, I forgot,’ she says. ‘You don’t “do” piano, do you?’

  Stella did have a watch but wearing it got embarrassing when people kept asking her the time. ‘I knew yesterday. I knew how to tell the time yesterday, but I’ve forgotten.’

  The String Trio play a round that goes ‘Life is but a melancholy flower’. Life is butter; butter; melon. Life is butter; melon; cauliflower. It puns to my infinite puzzlement. Back home with Mum and Dad, I ask them, ‘What is a butter melon?’ but I don’t say why. I think of it as a sort of pumpkin.

  ‘Oh, dearest,’ Mummy says. ‘My angel-pie.’

  ‘Darling Butter Melon,’ Daddy says. He puts me on his shoulders. He lets me come fishing with him. Along the way he tells me the story of the Magic Halibut and the Greedy Fisherman’s Wife.

  ‘But your wife isn’t greedy,’ I say. ‘Mummy isn’t greedy.’

  He laughs. ‘No,’ he says. ‘Mummy is an angel.’

  * * *

  At school in Ireland my teacher is the Dragon Lady. She breathes fire and smoke. On Friday afternoons we do ‘Craft’. Sometimes Craft is knitting. Though my mother has managed her own knitwear design and textile business before I appeared to sabotage it; has supplied shops in the King’s Road and in Manhattan, I, of course, can’t knit. Stella can’t knit. For all her efforts, I don’t get the hang of it at all. Eventually, to protect me from the Dragon Lady, my mother, every Thursday evening, knits up six rows of the most irregular, lumpy-looking garter stitch she can manage and advises me to spend the half-hour pushing the stitches from one needle to the other, in the hope that the Dragon Lady will not notice.

  On this particular Friday the Dragon Lady does. She pauses beside me during her passeggiata along the aisles. I freeze. Seconds later the world implodes on the Dragon Lady’s wrath at my left ear.

  ‘Show me how you knit!’ she yells. I can’t, of course. Poor Stella. She can’t. ‘You can’t?’ she booms.

  ‘Please, Miss, I forgot,’ I say. Moron Stella’s parrot-babble. ‘I did know, I did know yesterday, but I’ve forgotten.’

  ‘Forgotten?’ she booms. ‘Shall we remind her, class? In!’ she barks. I am paralysed. ‘Round!’ she yells. I am paralysed. ‘Through!’ she booms. I gawp, I cannot move. ‘Out!’ she yells. She raises her hands like the conductor of an orchestra, encouraging class participation. ‘In – round – through – out,’ she says.

  They all begin to chant. The refrain gathers pace like a train picking up speed. ‘In – round – through – out. In – round – through – out.’ I begin to cry. Thanks to the Dragon Lady I have by now learnt to cry without making the slightest sound or movement. No hiccups, no juddering shoulders, no sniff. Just the well of tears that brim over and splash into my lap. The Dragon Lady snatches up my needles and my knitting. She unravels the lot. She dumps it on my desk – two short needles thick as pencils and a bird’s nest of pretty, twiddled wool. My wool is soft and beautiful; sky-blue with pale flecks like birds’ eggs. I can’t knit but I have the prettiest wool in the class. Of course. Stella always has the prettiest things. Stella has smocked dresses, Stella has silky ribbons, Stella has pretty shoes, Stella is spoilt, Stella is rich – richer than the other children anyway, whose parents milk cows and dig potatoes.

  The Dragon Lady hears us read every morning before assembly, two by two, one in each ear; a paragon of the old school. We stand in two lines, paired with people of roughly equivalent ability. I read last, of course, with Joyce O’Dowd, whose family is the poorest of conspicuously non-coping rural poor. With hindsight I see that Joyce is genetically debilitated, possibly through generations of incest, who knows? What is certain is that neither of us has a single clue about what the Little Red Hen is saying to her friends on the subject of the ear of wheat that she holds in her beak. We stick forever on the books that have yellow adhesive tape fixed to their spines. When you’ve done yellow then you move on to blue, then to green, then to red. Some people have passed red and they are reading ‘unclassified’. Stella has stopped even dreaming about being on ‘unclassified’.

  But Mummy and Daddy read to her lots and lots at home. Sometimes Mum lets her play hookey when things get too bad. Mum is very good at writing mendacious notes. She is always on Stella’s side. They are Best Friends; full-time best friends. Stella is very demanding.

  At home occasional adult visitors admire Stella’s chat. She is often alone with adults and speaks precociously on matters of international affairs and on aspects of the arts. She can recite The Pied Piper of Hamelin. She knows quite a bit about Italian food and about the Mountain Kingdom of Bhutan. She knows who has won the Irish Times Aer Lingus prize. She can tell early Mozart from Haydn. She can tell early Beethoven from Mozart. These are not accomplishments that pass muster with the Dragon Lady.

  * * *

  My mother’s notes are a treat: never the old ‘Stella has had a slight head cold’. It is always something original, something utterly convincing; anything from the orthodontist to suppurating verrucas. I love her, my Mummy. I love being at home, where she gives me all her time. If she turns away from me, even for one minute, to read a book, to read the paper, I panic. ‘Mummeee!’

  One day when I return to school after one of my not infrequent spells of genuine illness, a week of running a temperature of 104 at bedtime; a week punctuated by spoonsful of sweet antibiotic syrup prescribed by the GP along with a precautionary dose of my anti-convulsive medicine, I return to school and present my note to the Dragon Lady. This time she refuses to read it. She rips it up and rains the pieces theatrically over her desk. She is possessed by an inexplicable rage.

  ‘What’s been the matter with you this time?’ she booms.

  ‘I had fever,’ I say in a small, scared voice.

  ‘Fever?’ she says. ‘And what sort of fever did you have?’

>   I stand quaking alongside her. ‘Just fever,’ I say.

  ‘Scarlet fever?’ she says. ‘Rheumatic fever? Yellow fever?’ People in the class begin to titter quietly.

  ‘Just fever,’ I say, in a smaller, quieter voice.

  The mad-woman tugs at my earlobes. ‘Did you have fever in your ears?’ she says.

  I shake my head. ‘No, just fever,’ I say. By now I am scarcely audible.

  She tweaks my nose. ‘Did you have fever in your nose?’ she says.

  In my nasal passages snot squeaks against cartilage. ‘No, just fever.’

  Then the mad-woman yanks at my hair. She grabs a foot-long orange tassel in each hand and tugs so that the hair roots ache like bruises on my skull. She stamps, one by one, on each of my feet.

  ‘Did you have fever in your hair?’ she says. ‘Did you have fever in your feet?’

  Once again, tears well silently in my eyes. I shake my head. ‘No,’ I say. ‘Just fever.’ I am audible only to myself.

  ‘Go to your place and sit down,’ she booms. ‘Cry-baby.’

  I spend the day weeping quietly. Tactfully, everyone leaves me alone. I squint through tears at my neighbour’s sums and try to adjust my answers, as I usually do, erasing them by rubbing smudgy holes in the page with a damp thumb.

  After that I don’t go to school for three weeks. My parents let me stay at home. I love it, though in the evening, after I have gone to bed, I hear my Mum crying over my Dad. In the mornings Mum makes long paper-chains for me of little girls all in a row holding hands. We give them smiling faces and different hair, yellow and brown, black and orange, curly and straight. She shows me how to make them for myself, but mine never come joined together. They always come in groups of two and a half little girls, the halved girl spliced lengthways, usually with one leg or arm severed at knee or elbow. I cannot grasp the principle of leaving the figures joined at the fold. I have no spatial sense. I seem to have no sense at all, except that I can sing. Is that intuition, perhaps, not sense? I have a nice resonance and clarity and I sing with confidence. I can sing in harmony. I never lose a tune. I sing rounds. My pitch is true. My tone is pleasing.