The Travelling Hornplayer

by Barbara Trapido

  ‘May I ask what on earth you think you’re doing?’ Pen says. For answer, I snatch up the entire handful of pink Migraleve, but Pen springs forward and knocks the pills out of my hand. He is wearing the dressing-gown that I saw him pack in Edinburgh, and he has flip-flops on his feet. ‘Are you insane?’ he says. ‘Stella, are you completely bloody round the bend?’

  I drop my hands into my lap, close my eyes with resignation and sigh heavily. Oh shit, I think. Better luck next time, Stella; all-thumbs Stella; bodged again.

  Pen is already scooping up my hoard and pushing it into his dressing-gown pocket. But the Third Little Pig, I think sarcastically, got up at three o’clock and he went into the field to gather turnips . . .

  ‘Have you actually swallowed any of these?’ he says. I tell him I’ve swallowed three. ‘Jesus, Stella,’ he says, still scooping away. ‘This lot must have cost you a pound or two. There’s enough stuff here to sink a battleship.’

  I say nothing. Once he has scooped up all the pills, he sits down beside me. He switches off the torch, he snuffs out the candle, which is leaning against the side of the jam jar, guttering pathetically.

  ‘Stella, why?’ he says.

  After a while I say, ‘I’m pregnant, that’s why.’

  I hear Pen whistling quietly through his teeth. ‘You really are a terrible, wicked, stupid girl,’ he says. ‘You’re pregnant. So what, Stella? So absolutely bloody what?’ I say nothing. ‘You’re pregnant,’ he says again. ‘Is that any reason to go killing yourself? Why are you always so extreme?’ Again I say nothing. ‘Izzy’s baby,’ he says. ‘For one, have you thought of telling the wretched boy? Does he know?’ When I say nothing, he says, ‘Tell him, Stella. It might be the making of him.’

  ‘Oh, fuck off,’ I say. ‘You really are a pompous twerp, aren’t you?’

  After a bit, Pen says, sounding just moderately aggrieved, ‘I’m sorry, Stella, but I don’t think I’m pompous. I really don’t accept that.’

  Then we sit in silence. ‘Do you realize how extraordinary you are?’ he says after a while. ‘You sing beautifully. You play the cello. You must, of course, know that you are stunningly beautiful. Here you are, a beautiful, talented, unusual girl and the heavens shine down upon you.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ I say.

  ‘Well, let’s think about this baby,’ Pen says. ‘Let’s think about its gene package for a start. Here’s a child with the potential for your musical talent and Izzy’s draughtsmanship. Then there’s your father’s much fêted literary ability—’

  ‘And let’s think,’ I say, through clenched teeth, ‘that if I were to bite your leg off – well, I might just infect you with The Virus, Peregrine Massingham, and wouldn’t that be nice for you?’ Then, damn it, I start to cry.

  Pen says absolutely nothing. I can tell that I’ve knocked him back. His whole body has sunk a bit, like a slowly deflating air mattress.

  Eventually I speak. ‘So what were you doing, prowling about at a quarter to four in the morning? It’s just stupid.’

  ‘I’m always up by four o’clock in the morning,’ he says. ‘I usually get up and swim at about this time. I’m afraid I heard you leave the house, Stella. I don’t like to spy on you, but I thought it rather odd. Are you sure about the virus?’

  ‘Oh sure, I’m sure,’ I say. ‘I got the blood test result today.’ Then I say, ‘But it’s perfectly all right, really. I might even feel well for a whole ten years. It might be ten years before I start to get sores and phlegm and fungus in my lungs. I can even have plenty of sex, just so long as I don’t kiss anyone. Just so long as I don’t cause them to have contact with my spittle or blood or breast milk or vaginal fluids, etcetera.’

  Pen just sits there beside me and says nothing. Finally, he says, ‘Oh dear girl, it’s utterly dire. Try not to hate me.’ Then, eventually, he says, ‘Shall I divert you for a while, Stella? Shall I tell you why I’m always up at four o’clock? Are you in the mood for a story?’

  I nod. I don’t really care. So Pen tells me that for five years between the ages of eight and twelve, he attended a Catholic prep school where he was a boarder. Two or three mornings a week, at 4 a.m., year in and year out, he was plucked from his bed in the dark by a tall, black-frocked monk who carried him in strong, muscular arms, slowly, silently, ritually, in horizontal position like a human sacrifice, from the dark dormitory, down the dimly lit corridor and into a small anteroom, where he always locked the door. There, summer and winter, he would strip Pen naked and keep him shivering on the rug, his bladder about to burst, his little pre-pubertal penis erect from desperate urge to pee.

  But he was not permitted to pee. When the monk stood in front of him, Pen came just about level with the man’s crotch, though by the time he was eleven he was having to kneel on a stool. The monk was always clothed. He would bury Pen’s naked upright person under his black skirts, the skirts making an impenetrable tent around the boy’s body. The monk’s equipment was always at the ready. Pen could not see anything under the skirts, but he was aware of gigantic rubbery appendages emerging from a thicket of coarse hair. The appendages were always scrupulously washed. They smelt and tasted of Imperial Leather.

  Pen was required to place his hands on the man’s muscly buttocks and his mouth over the man’s penis. His head was held in position by the guiding hands of the monk from the outer surface of the black tent. The hands moved in caressing gestures, even as they were coercive, and the monk recited, gently. There was a sort of mantra: ‘There now, quiet now, nearly there, my pretty.’

  On the first occasion, Pen choked on semen and peed all over the monk’s legs, which he found utterly humiliating. After that, he learnt to swallow. He also learnt to wake up fifteen minutes early and tiptoe out to the lavatory to empty his bladder and return to his bed and close his eyes before the man came for him.

  When the sessions were over, the monk would dress him, slap him affectionately on the rump, unlock the door and tell him to run along back to bed and get his ‘beauty sleep’. Pen would stumble back along the half-dark corridor and lie awake until the bell went, waiting for the daylight to dawn. He has woken early ever since.

  ‘These days I don’t hang about,’ Pen says. ‘I always get up and swim.’

  During the daytime the monk taught history. ‘Spellbinding teacher,’ Pen says. ‘Absolute turn-on. He did tend to pick on me a bit. He used to like taunting me in public about having a “weak bladder”. I don’t in fact have a weak bladder. But the business has left me impotent. One of the many agreeable things about swimming is its tendency to encourage erectile tissue.’

  ‘So you swim to get erections,’ I say.

  ‘I swim,’ Pen says, ‘for all sorts of reasons.’ But then he adds, in that chronic, slightly humorous way, ‘but I must admit that diving is pretty effective. I’m sorry about all that, sweetheart. I’m utterly appalled by your predicament. Let’s talk about it later. Oughtn’t you to go back to bed now and get yourself some sleep?’

  My beauty sleep. ‘All right,’ I say, but instead I watch him as he walks towards the diving-board, where he strips off the gown and kicks off the flip-flops. He walks naked onto the diving-board, holds out his hands, rises onto his toes and dives superbly, making a brief swallow shape in the air before his body glides smoothly downwards and into the water. I’ve never seen anything so beautiful. He swims under the water and emerges finally at the boathouse end. Then he swims back to the diving-board. I watch him do this three times, four times. Then I join him, but not in the water. I begin to cartwheel round the lake. It’s something I haven’t done for years. I cartwheel faster and faster. Pen pauses and watches me. His naked body is lovely; his penis erect.

  ‘Don’t stop,’ I call to him. ‘Keep going. Keep doing it. Don’t stop.’

  ‘Don’t stop, Stella,’ he calls back to me, ‘don’t stop.’ We begin to work it so that each time he reaches the beach end just before I get there, and he turns and heads back. Then, as I pass him at the opposite e
nd, he mounts the diving-board and plunges in.

  ‘Keep going,’ we call out to each other wildly. ‘Keep going. Don’t stop.’

  Finally, we collapse, exhausted, onto the little stretch of beach alongside the boathouse. I flop down with my head onto his wet, naked chest. Once I have recovered my breath a little, I raise my head to lick water out of his navel and off his chest. I am so turned on by his body that I can hardly keep my hands off his crotch. Instead, I kiss his pretty, gaunt cheekbone.

  ‘So how was it for you?’ I say.

  ‘Oh, sweetie,’ Pen says. He’s stroking my hair. ‘Lovely Stella. Mad, bad, crazy Stella – please, please don’t die. Stay alive, Stella. Please. Stay alive for me. Will you marry me?’

  I start to giggle. I giggle and keep on giggling. I can’t stop. I try to envisage myself dashing out at four every morning to mount a diving-board and unroll heavy-duty condoms onto Pen’s precariously erect prick. But I am phobic about diving-boards. There is absolutely no way I could ever get onto one. So what are we going to do? No mouth-to-mouth kissing, no anal, oral or penetrative sex, no shared toothbrushes.

  ‘You’re completely, absolutely bonkers,’ I say, and I keep on giggling. ‘Do you know that I can’t even swim?’

  The next day, when Dr Sachs telephones her, Stella surprises him by saying she’s decided to risk having the baby and can she please come and talk to him about AZT and the test for foetal antibodies. Then she telephones Pen at work and tells him what she’s done. Pen downs tools, seizes his jacket and breaks the speed limit to come home and catch her in his arms and dance her round the floor. That evening he tells the family that Stella has agreed to marry him and that she is four months pregnant. Everyone is delighted. Especially Aggie.

  Stella seems delighted too. She is floating in some curious neverland of commitment and denial. She is like a creature who has emerged from a chrysalis and taken on a new, winged form. She cannot, will not, contact her family. She cannot contact Izzy. She refuses point-blank. She knows that to do so will mean the end of an illusion. She knows that the wings will melt. She knows, from somewhere inside her brain, that she is living in the middle of a lie, but it is also a new kind of truth. It has to do with form. It’s a survival strategy. It has grace, commitment, structure. It offers her a kind of moral high ground. It is a way of living with disease.

  Because she knows it is important to Pen, she takes instruction from a conveniently lax priest and professes herself burning with desire for Catholic baptism. When he asks her for how long she has felt this urge, she answers calmly.

  ‘For all of my life,’ she says.

  At the altar, the priests dress her in a floor-length white robe, which she dons, accidentally, back to front, and moves forward to have them douse her head with consecrated water from a large silver scallop shell, which they dip into a font. At the altar, she renounces the devil and all his works in a cool, clear, confident voice, with her fingers crossed behind her back. She recites the Litany of the Blessed Virgin, marvelling at its moving beauty, and at the same time wondering if this impossible gobbledygook can go on forever. It astonishes her afterwards to see that the Opus Dei and the Old Thing both have tears in their eyes.

  Then Pen, to avoid complications with regard to her family, arranges for them to get married in a church in Venice, where, afterwards, they will spend their honeymoon. Stella is not unaffected by her own nuptial mass, where she has Tintoretto to the right of her and Bellini to the left. And Venice is like a sort of analogy for her own life: it is an airy veneer, a trick of the light, an elegant poetical stylizing of dark, inadmissible undercurrents.

  The streets are a teasing labyrinth that always lead to picturesque dead-ends on canal fronts. It always takes her ninety minutes in the mornings to make her way the three hundred yards from the hotel room to where she meets Pen in the appointed bar for breakfast – Pen who has already been up for hours and hours. On the way she passes churches with names that make her blink. San Samuela, San Moishe – but is there a Saint Samuel? Is there a Saint Moses?

  ‘Jewish saints?’ she says to Pen, and she laughs. One day she passes the church of San Pantalon.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ she says. She loves it that the fire engines are boats. She thinks that the duckboards, stacked in the streets, must be trestle tables for very small people to use during street parties.

  And all the time, Pen is charming, witty, knowledgeable, diplomatic, courteous and attentive. Upon their return, he visits her parents and comes back with her cello. Everything is enchanting. Everything, except that Stella is crazy to have sex with him, and Pen is completely, intractably untouchable. Any attempt at groin contact, even when he is asleep, causes Pen to leap, shaking, from under the duvet in the beautiful white and sand-coloured apartment in the old stables.

  ‘No, Stella,’ he says, ‘absolutely, definitely not. Those are the ground rules. No.’

  He goes into work all day while Stella plays the cello. He cooks and tidies while Stella plays the cello. When the baby comes, he bathes her and changes her and sees to her in the night. Later, he reads to her, or he invents bedtime stories for her, while Stella plays the cello. He hires half shares in Tiffany to undertake all the little girl’s daytime care, so that Stella can play the cello. She plays the cello all alone in the pale, gleaming, pristine space where once she envisaged Izzy’s crushed tubes of paint on the floor. She plays in beautiful clothes. She adores clothes and Stella always has the prettiest things.

  Once a week, in the evenings, she visits Dr Sachs with her cello; Dr Sachs and his wife and Lorraine, their viola-playing daughter. She loves Mrs Sachs, who bleaches her hair and has it set every week. She keeps china figurines on the sideboard and lays down quality bed linen and sexy undies in a cedarwood blanket box for the day that Lorraine finds a husband. She visits a shop called ‘Trousseau Fayre’ for all her own and Lorraine’s lingerie requirements.

  ‘You know, Stella,’ she says, during one of her moments of intimate girl-talk, ‘I think I must be losing my sex appeal.’

  ‘Nev-er,’ Stella says, who longs to be like Mrs Sachs.

  ‘Well, all my life I’ve taken a D cup,’ says Mrs Sachs, ‘and now I’m taking a C.’ Stella laughs. Her own measurement has never exceeded 32 AA.

  The child is called Holly. Holly Valentine Massingham; born on Bonfire Night, otherwise known as Guy Fawkes Day – an awkward birthday for a Catholic child – but at two months she is tested for antibodies and, mercifully, all is well. Holly is wholly unlike Stella to look at and neither does she look like Izzy. She is a blue-eyed blonde like Stella’s mother, which makes people – none of whom know Katherine – say that she looks like Pen.

  Unlike Stella in childhood, Holly is a serene, self-contained, easy child, who shows every sign of becoming the sort of little girl who will make her own papier mâché Christmas tree decorations at six, and knit matinée jackets for all the neighbours’ babies. Stella, unlike her own devoted mum, is not a hands-on mother. She feels no urge to play with Holly. She has learned to play on her own. She feels no need for quality time and very little for physical contact. Perhaps it is a habit that she now finds hard to break? No mouth-to-mouth kissing, no contact with spittle and bodily fluids, no shared toothbrushes.

  But Holly has a fall-back system. Holly will be all right. Holly has Aggie and Tiffany. And she has the Massinghams’ tenth child, Felix, as a constant companion and very nearly twin. The Old Thing breast-fed both of them, after all, since Stella, as the family says, is ‘frail’. ‘Stella is unwell,’ they say. ‘Stella is frail.’ They say it again and again. And again.

  5. Tränenregen

  Jonathan

  When Lydia comes to see me a second time, the moment is not of the best. It is, in general, not a good time for me. The Sonia experience, I begin to sense, has almost run its course. I hang on in there for the sex, but here’s the paradox. That which was sex is not sex. I have found myself, of late, warming and softening to Sonia. I have begun n
ot to be provoked to dislike by the sight of her narrow shoulders, or by the sound of her slight, blurry lisp; I have even, occasionally, found myself respecting her mind. I give quarter, increasingly, to her opinions and the more I do so, the less I feel impelled to assault her flesh.

  This is puzzling to me, because I have always found Katherine’s cleverness to be a turn-on. If Katie produces one of her pithily couched observations about – about God knows what – about pretty well anything: Sophie Grigson; Legoland; the Nation of Islam – my response is to feel my sap rising. Yet Sonia’s cleverness deflates me. I must despise her or keep my hands to myself.

  I suspect the same thing is happening for Sonia, in that I have begun to notice a certain mellowing. She has stopped winding me up. She has suddenly stopped making theatre of Fortnum’s and ‘the girlie’. I have noticed, for example, that I have begun to feature as a likeable walk-on character in one of her more personal by-lines, where she parades me as ‘Josh’ – an amiable bit of rough who washes from the waist up at the kitchen sink and quaffs PG Tips from enamelled mugs, in between committing gruffly executed acts of sex.

  While this is naturally flattering to me, as a middle-aged bourgeois pen pusher, with my roots in the German-Jewish intelligentsia and the Anglo-Irish landed gentry, it is also clear to me that I have become one of Sonia’s dubious accessories. I belong in there with all that pricey furniture banged up from railway sleepers and salvaged driftwood. I am one of her items of fake rough.

  Added to this, my own work isn’t going terribly well. It stares at me from the printouts, as if set in concrete.

  ‘Here I am,’ it says, ‘and if you don’t happen to like me very much, there’s sweet fuck-all you can do about it.’

  The result is that I leave the bedsit far too often to replenish my supplies of Wotsits and Mini-Cheddars and, once out, I discover a tendency to malinger. I visit the launderette and the newsagent’s and the bookie’s. I find myself staring through Dixons’ windows at those multiple TV screens depicting postprandial mind destroyers of the Going for Gold variety. I begin to brood on the fact that it’s a long time since I’ve done the things I really love to do. It’s an age since I’ve camped out on a river bank with my clasp knife and my Tranja Stove. It’s forever since I’ve screwed Katherine out of doors. Truth to tell, it’s some weeks since I’ve had any sex with her at all.