The Travelling Hornplayer

by Barbara Trapido

He kisses her, leaving her mouth like a sucked boiled sweet. He has an erection. He looks like a stick insect with one absurd Dalek antenna.

  ‘D’ye fuck?’ he says. Then he says, ‘Who’s Grania?’

  Pen is not a girl called Penelope. He is a final-year engineering student called Peregrine Massingham and he has a room in the flat. He has made a very decent carrot soup, which he and Ellen serve with chunks of crusty bread and butter. Stella assesses that he either is, or would like to be, Ellen’s consort. Ellen is pretty. She’s the ultimate girl-next-door. Pen speaks the King’s English and wears a necktie like a cravat. Stella assumes that he is one of those upper-class Scots who gets sent to school in England and who wears a kilt at the hunt ball – a sort of tartan Hooray Henry. But he is from Northumberland.

  ‘He’s named after a bird,’ Izzy says rudely, slurping his soup.

  ‘He’s named after a pilgrim, you idiot,’ Ellen says.

  When they have finished, Izzy says, ‘Come on, Stella, back to work.’

  ‘You don’t have to go, you know,’ Ellen says, but Stella goes. She tries to play the cello but she can’t. She collapses onto Izzy’s bed and falls asleep. For the first time in her life she leaves the cello out of its case. The boy paints through the night with his hip-hop on the tape recorder. He takes occasional cat-naps on the floor. He is undoubtedly something extraordinary. He almost never sleeps. He smokes. His productivity is phenomenal. Though he is the most talented student at the Art School, he prefers to eschew the bright lofty studios and work in the clutter of his bedsitting room, especially now, with Stella.

  Stella has become his project, his obsession. Stella will be his degree show. He paints her and draws her day and night. The work stacks up against the walls. He has an extraordinary visual memory. His draughtsmanship is exhilarating. He draws her in every possible attitude: Stella asleep, Stella having a pee, Stella having a bath, Stella laying the fire, Stella playing the cello, Stella fucking. Above all, Stella fucks. She is almost always, but not invariably, naked.

  He draws on pale manila cardboard, or on faded grey or blue paper. He draws with black, red or white chalk, sometimes with all three. Sometimes he uses the chalk with grey colour-washes. And he paints. He paints with oils on canvas – canvas nailed untidily to the frame. He paints quickly, aggressively, using the paint very thick. He trowels, he incises and gouges. Where the drawings have an extraordinary tenderness, the paintings look harsh, cruel, obsessive, dissecting. Stella is the subject, she and her cello. She is dissected, exposed. Red hair, red bush, white legs, white breasts, cello. She is gouged onto the canvas. The paintings are like nothing except themselves, though at moments Stella thinks they are maybe just a bit like Auerbach; maybe just slightly like Auerbach crossed with Egon Schiele. ‘Who’s Auerbach?’ Izzy says. He is mind-bogglingly ignorant, she thinks; mind-bogglingly indifferent to what anybody else does.

  Stella and Izzy are an item. She moves permanently into the muddly room that smells of turps and tobacco. Fearing the return of her childhood asthma, she takes the doggy bedding to the laundry. She goes to the doctor and gets herself a prescription for oral contraceptive pills. She and he go together in a taxi to beard Grania and collect her things; her clothes, her lovely duvet in its undyed calico cover, kingsize with tog rating 14.5. Curiously, among the books she gathers up she finds that she still has the Uncle Fiddle Anorak’s Heart of Darkness.

  * * *

  Stella is riding high. She has managed to persuade the department that her voice will be her second instrument for examination purposes. She has been having voice lessons as well as cello lessons all along. She argues that she could not afford piano lessons as well, and that, in consequence, her keyboard skills have ‘lapsed’. She makes her case with her fingers crossed, but all goes well. Recently she has sung solo in St John’s Church on Princes Street; a Bach cantata – ‘Gott soll allein mein Herze haben’ – though in truth it is Izzy who alone has her heart.

  Izzy doesn’t come to hear her, though Ellen and Pen do. He doesn’t like church, he says. He doesn’t like the sound of her singing either. He prefers the sound of hip-hop. When she practises in the bedsit he tells her to be quiet.

  Then Izzy has his degree show. He is older than Stella, older than he looks. The work is mounted or framed. She and Izzy go into the Art School, past the rows of classical statues and the friezes along the wide, noble corridors. They work all night for three nights running at making window mounts in mounting card with Stanley knives. Stella has paid for the mounting card and the Stanley knives. Some of the drawings are wall-mounted, others are presented stacked in a cradle.

  The paintings are no longer hoarded against the walls in the bedsit. They are hung on the vast, white, bright walls of the Art School studios; Stella incised and gouged; Stella fucking; Stella asleep; Stella with cello. Stella. Red hair. Red bush. White legs. The paintings cause quite a stir. Gallery owners won’t leave Izzy alone.

  Stella’s parents come up to Edinburgh and take the young people out to lunch. They go to a French restaurant with pink tablecloths called La Bagatelle. They are so glad that Stella is happy, that she is in love, that she has put the Grania business behind her. And they are amazed by Izzy’s paintings. They are amazed by his talent. They are urbane, emancipated people. They display no obvious unease at the memory of their daughter depicted in red chalk with splayed thighs; their daughter depicted on the job with little Brother Dundee. The restaurant bill comes to just over a hundred pounds, which surprises nobody except Izzy.

  When the summer vacation comes along, Izzy and Stella pack their stuff into large black bin-bags and shove it into the lock-up in the basement area, marking it all with sticky labels. Izzy’s artwork has been boxed and sent for exhibition, first to Napier Street in Edinburgh and then on to London. He and Stella have a plan to spend a week with her parents in the Cotswolds. Then they hope to travel. They don’t yet know where. Izzy favours Israel, Egypt, the Middle East. Stella thinks France or Spain. She has an overwhelming desire to plant Izzy in the middle of a room full of paintings by Rubens; vast canvases, floor to ceiling; vast women, all with orange hair, orange pubes; all for Izzy.

  She is becoming towards him the way her mother is with her – constant treats and stimuli, never saying no. She dedicates herself to the contemplation of what Izzy would like best. It does not cross her mind that Izzy is beginning to perceive her with the same degree of callousness as she perceives her mother; as something of an endless resource.

  They take the train to Euston, each with a backpack, plus Stella has her cello and her Kenyan basket. Izzy has a plastic bag, from the bookseller James Thin, with a small sketchbook and pencils.

  At Euston, Stella has a plan. Instead of heading straight for Paddington and the Cotswolds, she suggests that she and Izzy make use of the left luggage and that they trawl the galleries around Cork Street. Then she will take him to tea at Fortnum’s. They will have Big Treat Day.

  The galleries on the whole do not excite him. Izzy won’t even enter one that has Dubuffet in the window – turd-coloured doodles, he says. It is nothing to do with him. He consents to enter a small gallery exhibiting the work of a young Spaniard whose predominant colour is like that of old rubies, or perhaps of old blood. His partially obscured figures, like fractured icons, perhaps ghosts, perhaps torture victims, all eyes and no mouths, are seen as if through dark glass.

  Then they go to Fortnum’s. They move through the jewelled halls to find a table in the corner of the tea-room far away from the door. Stella is excited and happy, her love for Izzy brims over. They order Darjeeling and the waitress brings tea with sandwiches. Then she brings scones and jam and cream, then cakes. Each time the waitress brings something new, Izzy and Stella say yes, yes please. They each choose a glazed French tart with summer berries and segments of tangerine. Izzy has a chocolate wedge as well. They eat and eat. Then Izzy needs to pee. He places the James Thin carrier bag carefully on the table and goes in search of the Gents.

/>   When he has gone, Stella reaches for the sketchbook and draws it out of the bag. The sketches are done in soft graphite on pale grey paper with a faint pin-stripe. The sketches are all of Grania: Grania naked but for her boots; Grania naked but for her hat. Grania removing her bra; Grania sprawled on a bed; Grania asleep; Grania naked but for a man’s tie; Grania putting on her stockings.

  Stella believes that Izzy has willed her to look. She understands that the sketches are more than merely life drawings. They are a message for her. She reads them as betrayal. She reads them as rejection. Grania, she can see, is not a good artist’s model, though she may well be a good fuck. She is too inescapably Harper’s & Queen, even without her clothes on.

  Stella replaces the book in the James Thin plastic bag, though her hand shakes. Her eyes swim with tears. She gropes for twenty pounds from her purse and leaves it on the table. She turns to go, but stops. Through the blur of her tearful eyes she sees what has to be a mirage, but it is not. At a table near the door her father and a woman are making ready to leave. The woman is glamorous. She has a slash of red lipstick and shapely hair. She wears a sage-green buttoned sheath dress with a Chinese collar. She has white button earrings and white sling-back shoes with heels.

  Even as they gather their things to go, they are explicitly sexual in their interaction. The woman is all over him. She kisses him across the table. As they leave she is literally licking his cheek. She makes kissy mouths and darting movements at his face at which he laughs. She is a bright, shiny, exciting bird. Her arm is clutched around his sleeve. The sleeve is that of the greatcoat that her mother once made for him – a real labour of love. Stella remembers the paper pattern stretched out on the kitchen table, and the chalk and the tailor’s tacks, like funny white butterflies, on the dark grey cloth. Her whole being surges with anger, against Izzy, against herself, against her mother, who is a sucker, a sacrifice.

  She darts out of the side door with her basket until she sees Izzy come back to the table. Then she turns the corner and re-enters by the front, taking the lift to the Ladies’ Room where, having had a quick pee, she sees that a hundred Stellas are shaking slightly in the glass, their faces chalk-white, framed in a cloud of orange crêpe hair. Then she leaves. She takes the underground to her father’s flat. She has to speak to him; she is frantic to attack him; challenge him; rage at him; cry over him. She knows that he will be there, since he is always there on Wednesdays. She knows he will eventually return there.

  There is no reply to the speaky thing, so she lets herself in with her key and climbs the stairs. At the top she knocks. No reply. Inside is nobody. She waits, she looks around. On the desk, alongside her father’s keyboard, are two silly plastic champagne flutes and a bottle of Rémy Martin. Plus there is a bunch of poncy-looking flowers, just dumped there, alongside, still in their wrapping. Then she rips the duvet angrily from the bed, where she stares at a severed, flesh-pink suspender on the sheet. Stella hates it. She finds it disgusting. She herself would never wear such a thing. Yet, most of all, she hates herself. She weeps for Izzy – her lovely, vicious, brilliant, selfish boy who doesn’t want her any more. Without him she has no wish to be alive. She throws herself onto the bed and cries.

  Then the doorbell rings and the grille from the intercom speaks. ‘Jonathan,’ says the woman’s voice, all breathlessly sweet and starstruck. Stella stiffens with hatred as she listens. She gets goosebumps on her arms. ‘Jonathan, it’s Lydia,’ says the voice. ‘Can you let me in? I’m so happy and it’s all thanks to you.’

  Stella storms to the grille, her face blousy with weeping. ‘Bugger off, do you hear me?’ she says. ‘And don’t you ever dare come here again. Don’t you dare, you stupid bitch, or the police will have you for harassment. Just you leave my family alone.’

  She does not wait to hear the girlish, strangulated gasp that follows her outburst. She throws herself onto the bed and cries herself to sleep.

  When she wakes it is two hours later. The answerphone is speaking to her. It’s her father, sounding terrible.

  ‘Stella, it’s Dad. For Christ’s sake, if you’re there, sweetie, please respond. Izzy is here with us. He’s just come. He says he lost you somewhere in a café.’

  Stella ignores it. She gets up, straightens the bed and leaves promptly. At the front door she heads briskly for the underground. She can see that, on the far side of the road, the police have erected bollards and plastic tape, but she pays it no attention. At the left luggage she finds that Izzy has taken her stuff with him on the train to the Cotswolds, but she’s past caring. All she has is the Kenyan basket.

  She uses her return ticket on the night train back to Edinburgh. She cries to herself, on and off, pretty well all night, though she falls asleep somewhere near Newcastle. In the morning she heads straight for Ellen’s flat and makes herself some coffee. There is a message in Pen’s writing, left from the previous night. The message asks her to phone home.

  Half an hour later Pen comes in. His hair is damp.

  ‘Is it raining?’ Stella says.

  ‘Stella,’ he says. ‘Good God. Have you telephoned home? There was a message. I think it’s urgent.’ He looks pretty terrible too. Everyone is terrible.

  ‘Where’s Ellen?’ Stella says. ‘Is she asleep?’

  ‘Ellen’s gone,’ he says. ‘I took her to the airport late last night. Her sister’s been killed in a road accident. In London.’ Then he says, ‘She’s distraught. They were terribly close. She was beside herself.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ Stella says, going cold all over. She bursts into tears. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake.’ She cries and cries. She can hardly believe that life can be so horrible, so malicious, to her and to Ellen. And all in a single day.

  She begins to tell him about Izzy and Grania, and about her father and the woman in Fortnum’s. She tells him as she watches him pack. His stuff is already folded on the bed, his trunk open on the floor, his things folded sleeves to middles in neat, flat, square parcels, classified in groups. They look like items in an old-fashioned gentlemen’s outfitters. He puts dirty things in a linen drawstring bag marked ‘Linen’. He has special cloth bags for his shoes. He has a wooden box with shoe polish. Putting the things into his trunk takes him five minutes. Then he folds his duvet carefully and puts it on top of everything.

  ‘Stella,’ he says, ‘telephone home.’ He clicks shut the clasps of the trunk.

  ‘I haven’t even got my cello any more,’ she says, ‘but I don’t care.’

  ‘Stella,’ Pen says, ‘you must telephone your parents.’

  ‘No,’ Stella says. ‘No, I can’t, and I can’t go home either. It’s not possible. Really, I’d rather die.’

  ‘Stella,’ he says, ‘they’ll have the police out by now. Frankly, I’m very surprised that you weren’t stopped at the station.’ Finally he says, ‘Look, Stella, I’ll phone them. I’ll say you’re coming home with me.’

  ‘But,’ she says, ‘but I . . .’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ he says. ‘I’ll call them.’

  The call is brief. Pen tells her father that various things have happened to change Stella’s plans. He says that she’ll call home when she’s ready.

  ‘Look,’ Pen says, in response to what Stella assumes is a degree of pressure from her father. ‘Here is my parents’ telephone number in Northumberland. I’m afraid that’s the best I can do.’

  When he has put the phone down, he says to her, ‘They have reported you missing, as a matter of fact. I think we might avoid a pep talk from the constabulary if we make our departure pretty quick.’ Then he phones his parents. He calls his mother ‘Old Thing’.

  ‘Listen, Old Thing,’ he says. ‘Small complication. I’ll have a guest, all right? Yes,’ he says, ‘a girl. No,’ he says, ‘not Ellen.’ He says yes and no to a couple more questions that Stella does not hear. The matter is resolved.

  They step out and hail a cab. Pen gets the driver to stop near MacSween’s haggis shop so that he can buy things
for his mother. The shop is full of tartan.

  ‘Do Scots like tartan, do you suppose?’ Stella asks Pen. ‘Or do they just think they have to have it?’ Then she remembers something. ‘There’s a thing I need to buy as well,’ Stella says. She darts round the corner to the chemist’s. She makes her purchase quickly and flings it into the Kenyan basket before joining Pen in the taxi, but it falls out onto the floor, when the driver lurches at a traffic light. She has, at last, bought the pregnancy testing kit she’s been meaning to buy for weeks. Pen picks it up and hands it to her.

  ‘Keep that under wraps, there’s a dear,’ he says, ‘or the Old Thing just might go ballistic. We’re awfully Catholic, I’m afraid.’

  Stella stuffs it back in her basket but, on the next lurch, and the next, it falls out again. And again.

  4. Wohin?

  Stella

  The journey from Edinburgh to Pen’s house is nowhere near as long as the journey I have just undertaken through the night. But for me, right now, its shortness has no advantage. I’d prefer to be contained indefinitely. I yearn for a distance between nowhere and nowhere. And then a steward in the dining-car places an omelette before me on the starched cloth, along with a pot of tea and a four-slice rack of toast.

  ‘Marmalade, Madam?’ he says. This is not railway cuisine as I have ever experienced it, and I have never been called ‘Madam’ before. It has to do with Pen, who carries the air of adulthood and knows how to tip with aplomb.

  ‘Comfort food,’ Pen says. ‘Eat up, Stella dear.’ Perhaps there is, after all, something a bit reassuring about the heavy, battered cutlery showing patches of brass. It calls to mind Grandma’s bathtaps.

  Pen has elected for us to occupy the ninety minutes between Edinburgh and Newcastle consuming the full breakfast. He imagines that this will lift my spirits. He is convivial as he spends his money on me and plays mother over the teapot. I might as well admit right away that Pen has always puzzled me. For one, I find him sexually unfathomable, and I suspect him of professional virginity. His relationship with Ellen is impossible to decode. On one level, they behave like newly-weds, laughing together as they busy themselves at the sink and at the chopping board, and exchanging what look like friendly conjugal kisses. Yet Ellen has lots of boyfriends and Pen, in the evenings, goes out without her, to do I know not what.