Which brings me to Katherine and the Nuisance Chip: Katherine has gone a bit remote of late and the Nuisance Chip, who is now ensconced in Edinburgh, has managed to be as preoccupying as ever, through a system of remote control.
I had, I confess, been looking forward to an upturn in my domestic existence with dear Stella’s relocation. I foolishly envisaged that Katie’s intensive, Suzuki-parent performance would be accomplished once, between them, they had got the child through her A levels and into the Music Department of Edinburgh University. I fancied that I would move back into the gap and kiss goodbye to Stella’s grade-A support person and syllabus expert. I would reclaim my Rosie O’Grady.
But, from the first, it is clear that Stella is not happy in Edinburgh. She cannot find a niche among her peers. This ought not to surprise me, given that the Precious Girl is by now honed for exclusive minority taste. She is not only formidably articulate and intellectually intimidating, but she is of intimidating appearance. This is thanks partly to her own, miragelike beauty, and partly to Katherine’s ridiculous indulgence towards her in matters of dress.
Little dyslexic Stella is now a tall, pale, translucent vision with two foot of silk crêpe hair and a wardrobe that upstages undergraduates everywhere. Added to this, her curious combination of insecurity and arrogance makes her unable to engage in eye-contact. The flecked pussycat eyes always veer sideways; always slightly off target. It takes far more confidence than most undergraduates can summon in a month of Sundays, merely to greet her in the library. Most will simply pretend she isn’t there.
All this is troubling to Stella, who – thanks to Katherine’s two decades of four-star quality time – has extremely high expectations of the input she can expect from those around her. She anticipates, for example, that undergraduate conversation will be all about Kodály and Kierkegaard. Instead, of course, it centres round whether or not to install a luminous condom machine in the ladies’ lavatory.
Furthermore, Stella has become driven. She is single-minded and scholarly. She practises the cello six and seven hours a day. She seems quite unable to recognize the signs of her own physical and emotional exhaustion when Katherine isn’t there to punctuate her day with nutrients, diversions and treats – and exhaustion heightens her unhappiness. In short, Stella, who has always been fragile, complex and demanding, continues to be fragile, complex and demanding from a distance of two hundred miles.
Katherine, once Stella is ensconced in her student room in Edinburgh, goes off and gets herself a part-time job, but she soon gives it up again, since she decides it is necessary for her to make frequent trips to Edinburgh for the purpose of buoying up the child’s flagging spirits. If she does not do so, she says – and probably quite rightly – Stella will simply drop out before she has given the place a chance.
This means that Katherine now spends approximately one-third of her time north of the border, going through money that I’m not earning while the aforesaid bloody book is busy setting itself in concrete. She spends it, not only on the rail fare and the sleeping car, but on a form of comfort psychology for the Nuisance Chip that necessitates constant treats – visits to restaurants, theatres, shoe shops and beauticians’ counters. The result is that the Precious Girl’s running costs don’t come cheap.
Yet I cannot deny that we are rewarded, at the end of Stella’s first year, by the knowledge that – fingers crossed, eyes crossed, toes crossed – the child has stayed the course.
As the summer term comes to a close, Stella suddenly makes a forceful case for living out, à deux, in a rented flat with a girl she has met called Grania. Such a move, Stella asserts, will dramatically change her life. Yet Katherine discovers, through tearful disclosures on the eve of the vacation, that the girls have failed to secure the flat in question and by now there’s nothing else. Each blames the other and, in short, they have screwed up.
Katherine possesses a dire, female instinct to play rescuer – though, in this case, both I and my mother try to stop her.
‘Rescuers, Katherine dear,’ my mother tells her, ‘always become victims.’ But Katie has the bit between her teeth.
Having made a comprehensive one-day survey of letting agencies in the city, she finds, of course, that the student pigsties have all been taken and that no commercial letting agency of sane mind will submit its property to the husbandry of students. Katherine’s solution is to take the lease herself on a well-equipped, newly appointed flat and to masquerade as Madame Tenant. She supplies a bank reference, a character reference and a hefty cheque as deposit. In signing the contract, she submits herself not only to a rigorous inventory, but to the prospect of twice-termly inspections by the landlord’s agent – a clause which requires her to make even more trips up to Edinburgh, these last at twenty-four hours’ notice.
In preparation for these inspections, she will arrive off the sleeper at Waverley Station and make her way at dawn to the apartment, armed with rubber gloves, bin-bags, steel wool, cleaning cloths, Windolene, stain remover, several litres of Mr Muscle and a can of spray-on oven cleaner.
She lets herself in while both girls sleep, dons the gloves and wades knee-deep through discarded wine bottles and stinking milk cartons, her feet sticking to the floor through patches of spilt beer. She confronts, at high speed, the half-dozen pots containing encrusted bolognese sauce and the indeterminate dried gunk that coats all the hobs and the pedal bin. She cleans out the prodigious supply of pudding bowls, tumblers, teacups and violated storage jar lids that the inmates and their friends have pressed into service as ashtrays. She clears the grate and chisels red candlewax off the chimneypiece. She attacks windows, ledges and work surfaces. She squares up the sprawl of undergraduate books and papers, and tidies away the CDs. Having vacuumed, cleaned and dusted, she sprays the ground floor woodwork with polish and buffs it up, leaving on the air the reassuring whiff of beeswax.
Then she gathers up the potted dead geraniums and walks the hundred yards to the corner plant shop to replace them with new ones. At the same time, she buys cut flowers, which she places in a jug. She carts out six large bin-bags of debris and distributes these equitably amongst the neighbours’ wheelie-bins.
At this point Katherine pauses for a cup of instant coffee, before making her way through to the bedrooms, where she wakes the girls with some difficulty and urges them into their clothes. She makes them cups of coffee and, when they have drunk it, dispatches them to the library with instructions not to return until after 4.30. Then she confronts the bathroom. She repairs the broken shower head, sorts their various oozing pots, tubes and jars, removes tidemarks and human hairs from the fixtures, polishes the taps, cleans the glass and confronts a lavatory bowl whose condition, she is convinced, threatens the Athens of the North with a second cholera epidemic.
In the girls’ separate bedrooms, Katherine bags up their quantities of strewn, unwashed knickers along with their tights and jeans. She folds and stores jumpers. She stacks shoes in the cupboard. She flings open windows. She hangs up shirts and jackets. She changes bed linen and, once again, she hoovers and dusts. She takes down the girls’ telling, age-determining posters and re-hangs the landlord’s vacuous pastel-framed Athena reproductions of fin de siècle fashion prints on all the requisite hooks.
Finally, she bathes and changes her clothes. With a Mozart horn concerto on the CD player and with quantities of blusher on her cheeks to cover the signs of her exhaustion, Katherine then sits down tête-à-tête with the landlord’s agent over a pot of Darjeeling and a plate of Brontë biscuits; Mrs Middle-aged Tenant with her sober and impeccable domestic habits.
Afterwards, perhaps to apologize for her intrusion into their squalor, Katherine sees fit to treat the girls to an evening out in a restaurant – even though she is left speechless by Stella’s choice of flatmate. Grania, her black hair close-cropped to her fine, shapely cranium, raises a plucked eyebrow as she lights up Sobranies in the no-smoke section of the restaurant.
‘Frankly,’ she says, �
��I fail to understand why you don’t tell the landlord’s agent to fuck off. It’s none of his bloody business who’s living in his pathetic little Do-It-All flat.’ Katherine endeavours to grit her teeth in a smile as Grania continues. ‘Still,’ she says, ‘it doesn’t have patterned carpets. There is that to be grateful for.’
In the event the project is of no use to Stella, who becomes progressively more depressed. By the beginning of the second term she has fled from the apartment, which results in my bearing incredulous witness as Katie not only continues to pay Stella’s half of the rent, thus subsidizing the flat-sharer who is now in sole occupation, but continues to make her twice-termly visits for the purpose of cleaning up after somebody else’s daughter.
‘Well, I can’t evict the girl before her exams,’ Katherine says. ‘And if I do, we’ll only be stuck with having to pay all the rent on the place ourselves until the end of June.’
True. This is true. But it is also true, as I point out, that to do so would save Katherine from the ignominy of having to prostrate herself before someone else’s adolescent filthpacket. Yet, all the while, as I mock her and plead with her and score points off her, I know that both Katherine and I would put our heads on the railway line to see our beloved Stella happy. This, as they say in media speak, is the bottom line.
And then the Precious Girl obliges us. Her life turns around. She falls in love. She becomes visibly happy and, in doing so, she does herself proud. She plays, she sings, she wins golden opinions. And, appropriately perhaps, given her name, Stella falls in love with a star – because it does not take Katherine and me long at the School of Art degree show to deduce that Ishmael Valentine Tench is no ordinary under-sized, inarticulate, chain-smoking prole. Izzy Tench is a star and his star is surely rising. But I anticipate a little.
When Lydia telephones from the end of my street, the time is early May, and the School of Art degree show is still almost two months away. I am, in truth, all too ready to take a break from thoughts of my domestic life; and of Sonia; and of the concrete novel. I am also, for the moment, wishing to avoid thoughts of Sheila, my niece – of all people – who has recently, and most awkwardly, thrown a spanner into our lives. But more of this later.
This time I arrange to meet Lydia in the greasy spoon two steps down the street. Once again, she wears a mini-skirt and Doc Marten’s. Once again, though the hour is ten thirty in the morning, we order tea and cakes; tea that comes the colour of Newcastle Brown and wedges of sawdust cake.
‘Oh yum,’ Lydia says. She likes the sawdust cake and almost immediately gets crumbs of it in her buoyant, curly brown hair. ‘These are the best,’ she says. ‘Oh yum.’
The draft she pulls out of a small leather backpack is singlespaced and printed with a cartridge suffering signs of chronic anaemia. The combination threatens death to my myopic mid-life eyesight.
‘I expect it’s crap,’ she says, sounding remarkably untroubled.
‘I’m sure it’s not,’ I say.
But I speak too soon. Perhaps a degree of romanticism in me about Lydia – sweet Lydia, nut-brown country maid of fruit and flowers – makes it inevitable that the draft will be a disappointment to me. I will not say that it is unbelievably bad, but the truth is, it is quite bad. It is nothing but slightly off-beam lumps of my own improvised spoutings – none of these elaborated, or properly integrated – interspersed with unnecessarily long sequences of quotation. The essay lacks shape. It is not so much an essay as a pile of not-very-wonderful notes towards an essay.
For an hour over tea, I attempt the pedagogical mode, while Lydia bites her lip, blushes, shrugs, giggles, smiles and yawns. Mainly smiles and yawns. To correct the thing on the page, close printed as it is and with practically no margins, becomes increasingly impossible.
‘Told you,’ Lydia says cheerfully. ‘Told you it’d be wrong from beginning to end.’
I laugh. ‘It’s not “wrong”,’ I say. ‘That’s not the point.’
Since Lydia has sensibly brought her disk, I suggest that we return with it to my place and sit down with it at the keyboard, improving it as we go along.
This is not a good move. When two people are at the word processor, one will seize the initiative. The other will become passive. Inevitably, because of my superior experience and knowledge, not to say intellect, it is I who seize the initiative. Before long, Lydia disengages completely. She begins to look around the room.
‘Is that your wife?’ she says. She screws her head backwards towards the framed photograph of Katherine on the bedside table.
‘Yes,’ I say. Then I ask her to tell me the difference between image and metaphor.
Lydia yawns. She is full of yawns this morning. ‘She’s pretty, isn’t she?’ she says. Then she says, ‘Gosh, um. Sorry. I really am quite thick about poetry, aren’t I?’
I suspect her of having come to me direct from an all-night party, which turns out to be the case. One of her school friends’ parents has a house in Belsize Park where adolescents have been carousing till the second cock. This explains her early appearance in my street.
When the telephone rings, Lydia moves gratefully from her little hard stool to the adjacent armchair.
‘Jonathan,’ Sally says.
‘Sally,’ I say. Sally is sounding terrible; intense and tragic, but she discloses nothing except to say that she’s got to see me – has got to – and can we please, please have lunch that very day. Same time, same place. It’s important. I look at my watch and hesitate.
‘Jon,’ Sally says, ‘Please.’ We arrange for half past two, before I abruptly effect closure.
‘Sorry,’ I say, turning back to Lydia.
‘Is Sally your wife?’ Lydia says, trying to vamp up her exhausted slouch as I find myself registering that, unlike the two women I sleep with, Lydia has proper breasts; breasts that rise and fall with her breathing. Katherine has very small breasts, and Sonia has none at all.
Just then the telephone rings. ‘Sonia,’ I say.
‘Is Sonia your wife?’ Lydia says, out loud, and she giggles.
‘You have company,’ Sonia says. ‘Oh, I say.’
We exchange some words about Puccini. Sonia is diversifying and has been to the opera two nights running. Plus she is going to see Norma on Thursday. All expenses paid. She comes over terrifically sociological about the Wild West and the Left Bank and Colonialism, etcetera. There is an attractive purity about the newness of her responses here – because, for some reason, it surprises her that Puccini should be taking on the contemporary scene.
‘And then schmaltzing it up,’ I say. ‘And playing it oh so safe.’
‘Spoilsport,’ Sonia says, but her mood is remarkably sanguine.
‘There’s a man-eating woman waiting for you in Thursday’s production,’ I say.
‘Oh goodie,’ Sonia says. ‘Goodie’ is one of those words that Katherine and Stella use a lot when they’re together, but it’s fairly new to Sonia. ‘Goodie’ is, I believe, entirely gender-specific. By the time Sonia’s off my telephone, Lydia is asleep in my armchair.
Oh shit, I think. Oh shit. Having now got the bit between my teeth, with regard to Wilhelm Müller and his mooching mill man, I find this latest development somewhat frustrating. I’ve begun to enjoy Lydia’s essay as an escape from my own stuff. I have made the discovery that A level essays are a lot nicer and easier for grown-ups to write. They offer a quick-fix illusion of facility and cleverness. So, I think, what the hell. Let’s get the kid off my back. I’ve got two hours. Who gives a bugger if she’s awake or asleep? Let’s abandon all pretence of collaboration here. Let’s just keep on going.
I speed up, shorten, re-phrase, nip and tuck. I tidy the links. I define the hypothesis. I clarify the conclusion. Without Lydia to hold me back, it takes me precisely ninety-eight minutes to polish off the essay. I press the button to save it. Then I print it out. I read it through and shove it into her backpack along with her disk. I grab my jacket and make myself ready for lunch with Sall
y. Then I shake sweet Lydia from her rosy sleep. I lead her, yawning and rumpled, to the front door.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she says. ‘Oh God. How could I? What happened?’ She stumbles down the stairs, leaning heavily on my arm. ‘Where are we going?’ she says. She’s still yawning. ‘How long have I been asleep?’
‘About two hours,’ I say and I laugh. ‘Further suggested revisions to your essay are in your backpack. You are going that way to the tube station, Lydia, OK?’ I point her across the street to where the road runs uphill alongside a small park with a man-made lake; pond, more like. ‘I’m going for the bus,’ I say. ‘Don’t leave your backpack on the train, all right?’
‘Thanks, Jonathan,’ she says. We part just beyond the greasy spoon. ‘You’re a star,’ she says. From across the street she waves both hands at me and blows kisses which I blow back. She calls out and does a funny little dance. I am much diverted by her, but I can’t hear a word she says.
‘What’s that?’ I say, cupping my ear.
‘I’m singing, die Sterne stehn zu hoch,’ she says. ‘Look at me. I’m tap-dancing to Schubert.’ Then she crosses her eyes and pulls gargoyle faces at me. I watch her until she’s through. Then I wave her off and turn right. Next stop, unhappy Sally. My spirits slump abruptly. My hope is merely that she has no wish to discuss her daughter Sheila, who has been billeted, none too successfully, in my outhouse – mine and Katherine’s.
The outhouse. A boring topic; a Home Improvement; a minor but preoccupying property owner’s headache. I eschew all talk of dampcourse and soakaway, but the question of its occupancy has some bearing upon events.
The Travelling Hornplayer Page 19