The Travelling Hornplayer

by Barbara Trapido

  To be brief, Katherine and I have, recently, upgraded what was referred to in the particulars pertaining to the Cottage-on-the-Green as ‘potential for development as granny flat or studio’. In plain language, the house has a slate-roofed single-storey stone outhouse, like a row of three superior sheds joined together, and it comes with planning permission to convert this into a dwelling. We have no sooner done so, now, in Stella’s second year of university – and with a view to renting it out as a way of recouping on some of her costs – than we use it, in emergency, to house my brother’s daughter Sheila.

  The future for poor old sparky Sheila is not looking good. I run into her in a shop doorway and cart her off to the burger dump to stuff her with instant food – after which she declares herself in need of my help in weaning herself off the druggy boyfriend who is also, of course, her supplier. She will no longer speak to either of her parents.

  ‘My dad’s scared stiff of me,’ she says, ‘and my mum just rabbits on about body piercing.’

  After consultation with Katherine, and after a morning spent wrestling with the medical bureaucracy, we fix her up with a sojourn in a clinic to be followed up by a spell of rehab in our outhouse, but billeting Sheila soon materializes as a pretty terrible idea. All my formidably laid ground rules nothwithstanding, Sheila discharges herself almost immediately from the clinic and the boyfriend is in there within the week, along with several friends and a pair of indeterminate wolflike dogs, neither of whom have collars.

  The party comes and goes in a noisy, clapped-out Vauxhall Astra fitted with giant speakers and sporting one door painted matt oxblood. Intellectual consistency not being a major side-effect of addiction, Sheila now appears to welcome this development with enthusiasm and is instantly re-assimilated so that, within twelve hours, Katie and I are The Enemy; the landlord and the landlord’s moll; the bad custodians. That’s us.

  The twerp and the bikist immediately lobby us over the Vauxhall Astra, which they consider lowering to the tone of the green and, further to that, the canines’ prodigious crapping habits bring the fraggle-haired sociologist to a state of understandable frenzy. By day three, the Telephone Cascade has transformed itself into an avalanche, as the party embarks upon its day job, which is, of course, breaking and entering. Then the police come along and take the matter out of our hands.

  But the business not only leaves a bad taste. It draws us into proximity with the fraggle-haired sociologist, who clearly fears the possibility of having alienated my wife, and comes to make her peace. By the next day, in my absence, she has offered Katherine an olive branch in the form of an ideal tenant for us: a lady academic from London, a colleague, she says, who is taking up a job at Oxford in October. During that summer for two to three months, this paragon will need somewhere to live while her own place is being made ready. Market rates, cash on the nail, rent in advance, the works. Katie meets the tenant during the following week and declares her utterly charming. The deal is struck in the week preceding my meeting with Lydia in the greasy spoon, and Katherine banks the money with relief.

  And I, too, am soon to be on the move. Having succumbed to the idea of the three-year writer’s fellowship, I have finally informed my dear Quaker landlady of my intention to give up the bedsit from the end of July. It is no longer really working for me. Plus our house is now empty of the Nuisance Chip and the fellowship, due to start in October, comes with a college room overlooking cobbled lanes and Christchurch Meadow. The hope, too, is that to move back home will bring me closer to Katherine.

  Katherine has once again got herself a job, this time working in the art bookshop in Oxford. The sight of my sweet Katie kitted out in her working clothes of a Monday morning never fails to inflame me – though there is, of course, something utterly perverse about propositioning a person who is about to fly out for the train.

  Katherine’s new clothes bring back to me what a glossy, dressy girl she always was when I first met her; what flair she invariably displayed in getting her kit together – before I sank her in the Irish idyll and forced her into hiking jumpers and thermal vests; before she embarked upon the vicarious activity of glamming up the Nuisance Chip. In addition, Katherine has resumed the habit of reading books. Proper books. Not Casebook-Studies-in-English-Literature-for-A-Level sort of books. Yet Katherine, as I say, has become inexplicably remote.

  When I get home, she is either bubbly-remote, or clapped-out-remote. She is tired from gadding with ‘friends’. Or she is just about to go out to meet up with ‘friends’. Sometimes she goes out, like Little Red Riding Hood, with a basket over her arm. She has plastic tubs of food in the basket and a folded pinny on the top. She is helping out ‘friends’, she says.

  So, unsurprisingly, Katherine is not in the house on the evening when I return home two days early. It is a Wednesday. It is the evening in late June on which my daughter is due home with Izzy Tench. It is the evening of the day on which, four hours earlier, I have met with Sonia and have finally taken her to Fortnum’s. It is the evening upon which, all unbeknown to me, poor, sweet Lydia Dent comes to see me in my absence, and dies on my doorstep.

  Let us imagine for a moment that I do not know of Lydia’s accident; that I do not know that I have seen her for the last time – or that, when I next ‘see’ her, I do not, in fact, see her. What I see is a plain cardboard coffin set at the front of a chapel which is full of red-eyed schoolgirls. Let us imagine that I have licence, still, to dwell upon other matters which converge with that appalling occurrence. There is the matter of Sonia and Fortnum’s.

  Sonia has been so busy since the Amsterdam TV interview that I have not seen all that much of her. And I have not – until this very day – seen her at all since the middle of May; not since the week after her opera week. She has been out of town quite a bit – here and there – and has telephoned to cancel twice. But today, midweek, mid-afternoon, Sonia appears in excellent form. She has a sort of smiley glow that ought to put me on my guard, and her fine sensitive skin is looking good. She enters with a bottle of Veuve Clicquot and with a bunch of those newfangled, up-market, politically incorrect flowers that look as though they’ve been taking lessons from one of Katie’s Jocasta Innes manuals. She kisses me on the cheek.

  ‘What are we celebrating?’ I say, once I’ve closed the door behind her and smooched her mouth clean of her lipstick that today comes Jane Russell red.

  ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘this and that. Let’s just call it your fellowship, Jonathan.’ Having handed me the flowers, she places the palm of her hand four-square on my trouser zip and she sighs a little sigh.

  I find that Sonia is, right now, a pleasing presence. Not only is she remarkably unspiky, but, for once, I really like her clothes. She is wearing a sage-green linen sheath dress with a Chinese collar and little slits up the sides. A vertical row of off-white buttons runs the length of the front from throat to hem. It’s exactly the sort of dress that Katherine might choose. She has white button earrings and white high-heeled slingbacks on her feet. Her hair has been newly dealt with in the style of a post-war Coke ad and it gives off a faint whiff of shellac. She looks like a fifties movie star. I am so busy admiring the hair and the skin and the dress that it takes me a while to realize that there is something different about Sonia because, today, Sonia has boobs.

  Meanwhile, she draws two plastic champagne flutes from her white beadwork handbag and sets them on my work table. One has a lime-green barley-sugar stem and the other has a vertical row of blue sparkly balls, each ball standing on the north pole of the ball below it.

  ‘Open it,’ Sonia says. ‘Come on. Hurry up.’ While I do so, she dumps the flowers carelessly on the table, leaving them constricted by their wrapping. ‘Who gives a bugger for flowers?’ she says. ‘Bimbos, all of them. Cunts where their brains ought to be. Isn’t that right? They do sex with their heads, don’t they? Why do their lives have to be so easy?’ And Sonia sighs another little sigh.

  I hand her the barley-sugar glass and I take the
bauble one for myself. ‘Is something the matter?’ I say.

  ‘Oh no,’ she says and she raises her glass. ‘Jonathan, here’s to us.’

  After a bit she kicks off her shoes and presses her pelvis into mine. In response, I plant my free hand on her bum. In doing so, I discover her to be a woman devoid of buttocks. She is encased, under the slim, Chinese sheath dress, in some sort of tubular carapace with hard vertical spines spaced at eight-centimetre intervals. This apparatus doubtless accounts for why she has boobs.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Sonia,’ I say, ‘what the hell are you wearing?’ I make a start on the buttons of the sheath dress. I keep going until she is divested of it and is then standing before me in this copious, severely elasticated item, flesh-coloured and punctuated with awesome seams of whalebone. The central panel is made of nasty, tarnished satin. The thing looks like a peculiarly punitive exhibit from a surgical appliance museum. It sports a ‘modesty panel’ which runs in a straight horizontal line across the top of Sonia’s thighs, and flesh-coloured suspenders, three to a side, emerge from below this panel to clamp Sonia’s stocking-tops in horrible scoops and swags.

  The conical boob compartments, shaped like coolies’ hats – and completely hollow in Sonia’s case – are made from satin-covered milliner’s buckram backed with perishing flesh-coloured foam rubber. The rubber smells like old school erasers and it gives off granules at a touch.

  ‘My mother wore this on the day I was conceived,’ Sonia says. ‘I have a fancy to be ravished in it.’

  ‘Get it off, for God’s sake,’ I say, before I realize that Sonia is quite serious. For reasons that I cannot quite fathom, getting laid in the carapace seems to signify – though I know Sonia admires her mother; her mother and her grandmother. They are, including herself, three generations of strong, non-marrying women, she asserts. They have always made their own way.

  So I steer her towards the bed and make efforts to oblige her, but the carapace defeats me. It’s like trying to commit sex with an armadillo. The suspender clamps bother my aesthetic sense, as do the rotting boob compartments, which instantly turn concave with the pressure of my body. Having discovered the thing to be fixed along its left side seam with a hundred hooks and eyes, I endeavour, then, to wrench the hooks towards me – thus displacing its panelled sections and causing the right false boob compartment to lodge itself under Sonia’s right arm, while the left is now four-square over her sternum. The thing looks ever more repellent to me.

  I give up on the hooks and turn to loosening the suspenders, though their obduracy makes me irritable and I promptly wrench one suspender entirely free of the carapace.

  ‘Temper, temper,’ Sonia says, letting slip some of her old gladiatorial style.

  Even with loosened suspenders, the modesty panel operates effectively to keep me from Sonia’s treasures. It rolls itself into a stubborn wadded ring that clamps itself tight around Sonia’s thighs. By now I am ready to rip the bloody thing off her with a breadknife, but instead I return to wrestle with the hooks and eyes. These are now aligned, off centre, down Sonia’s left front.

  When I have got the thing off her, I fling it angrily into a corner, where, for a moment, it stands up on its own, looking like an object one might use to saddle a malformed horse. The ultrasensitive skin of Sonia’s chest has begun to get one of its nasty rashes from the rubbery granules, plus her body is by now vertically indented, at eight-centimetre intervals, with a brutal pattern of whalebone. I find that my desire has entirely left me.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ Sonia says, eyeing my shrunken crotch somewhat gloatingly. ‘Oh, dear. Is that impotence or detumescence?’

  Perhaps I am too defensive in response. ‘Let’s forget it,’ I say quickly. ‘Let’s just get bloody dressed and go to bloody Fortnum’s.’

  Sonia sits up and smiles at me. She employs the goodie word with additions. ‘Oh, goodie gumdrops,’ she says and she climbs back into the carapace.

  All the way to the tea-room Sonia is merry and skittish. She drapes herself over me, taking on a slightly ironic role as besotted honeymoon wife. She has made repairs to her hair and her lipstick and the high Chinese collar is obscuring the rash across her chest. There is no doubt that Sonia is looking great.

  ‘I’m so glad we’re “going out”,’ she says. In the tea-room, she insists on a table bang near the door. She plays footsie with me. She plants a kiss on my cheek, she picks food from my plate. She frequently touches my sleeve.

  ‘I really like you, Jonathan,’ she says, suddenly. ‘You jammy bastard.’ And she kicks me under the table.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I say, but Sonia will only smile; the radiant Jane Russell smile.

  Once I have paid the bill and we have got up to go, Sonia turns to me, her arm linked with mine. ‘Do you often “go out” with women?’ she says. ‘Or only when you can’t get it up?’ But when I turn and look at her, she adds, ‘Ignore that, Jonathan. Consider it sour grapes.’

  Once in the street, she detaches herself from me with a suddenness that momentarily confuses me, and she hails herself a cab. She makes it clear that I am to get my own. ‘No hard feelings,’ she says. ‘It’s been great, but I think you will agree with me that the time has come.’

  I stand and watch her go. As I do so I feel decisively outwitted. Bloody women, I think and, though it is only Wednesday, I am sufficiently pissed off not to wish to return to the bedsit and face the lone, flesh-pink suspender. Instead I decide to make my way direct to Paddington, with the intention of returning home to my wife.

  On the train I seek out a nice un-peopled nook, but I am joined, just as the whistle blows, by a casually clothed lager man of enormous dimensions, who seats himself opposite me and places two steel crutches, as a barrier, across the aisle. He possesses, aside from his encroaching girth, a can of Stella Dry, a mobile telephone and a broken leg encased in plaster from groin to instep, which emerges from a sawn-off trouser leg.

  He heaves the leg onto the seat beside me, his naked toes invading my personal space. The toes are unpleasantly cheesy, since the lager man has evidently been obliged to perform somewhat restricted ablutions from the advent of the plaster cast. Quite a while, I decide, from the doggy look of it and from the mass of idiot scrawlings thereon. On the shin, directly in my line of vision, a female person has written ‘Bad luck Ucle Perce love Nina.’ A small heart-shape deputizes for the dot over the ‘i’ in Nina. This is what my Stella refers to as ‘Sharon writing’.

  Somewhere near Slough, Ucle Perce sees fit to make a call on the mobile phone. ‘I’m sat here on the train with me can of Stella and me broken leg, and I’m just coming into Slough,’ he says. Then he says, ‘Cheers, mate,’ and he signs off. Sometime later, when nearing Maidenhead, he makes another call: ‘I’m sat here on the train with me can of Stella and me broken leg,’ he says, ‘and I’m just coming into Maidenhead.’ Then he says, ‘Cheers, mate,’ and signs off.

  I find myself loathing and despising this man. I loathe his phone. I loathe his niece with her moron spelling and her Holly Hobbit calligraphy. By Reading, I am fit to sever Ucle Perce’s head. Fascistic and élitist. I know. Think I own the world. I know. But I am out of sorts with human kind.

  Sonia is a shining light and I have managed to lose her. Bloody Sally has been on my telephone again, but, for the moment, I have stalled her. She has ‘things to tell me’, she says. The last time she also had ‘things to tell me’ – things which right now rise to knock me sideways as they bang me over the head.

  Roger, Sally has told me, has decisively shipped out. Without her managerial assistance, he has risen from his bed, packed his clothes, his papers, his desktop and his laptop, and he has moved it all, along with himself, into his rooms in college. She assumes he is also eating his meals in the college dining-hall, where alcohol, dairy produce, sugar, fruit juice, mushrooms, tea, coffee, chocolate, yeast and wheat flour are presumably no longer an issue, she remarks.

  ‘I think,’ Sally says – and it’s
the afternoon of the day, in early May, on which I’ve polished off Lydia’s essay – ‘I think, Jonathan, that Roger is having an affair.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Sal,’ I say. ‘An affair? My brother?’ At the time, the idea strikes me as utterly ludicrous. Now, in a flash, it is all too alarmingly credible.

  Time for me to come clean. My brother Roger – scourge of Sally’s pressure cooker and demon offal-eater; maths nerd and inexplicable heart-throb – was Katie’s first great love, just as she, gorgeous creature, was mine. I had no sooner caught a distant glimpse, from my schoolboy bike saddle, of this exquisite female creature stepping from – of all things – a white Alfa Romeo in my parents’ drive; a creature all legs and strappy shoes and pale, shampoo ad hair, than I discovered her, half an hour later, in the family kitchen, with her eyes fixed upon my brother. I was sixteen and Roger, like Katherine, was eighteen. At the time it made all the difference in the world.

  Katherine was a philosophy student, a pupil of my dear, late father, who had been brought to the house, through a series of coincidences, by an old friend of the family. That day she fell instantly and heavily for Roger, who promptly annexed her, only to sharpen his insecurities and his snobberies on her. He determinedly read her interest in clothes as evidence of her frivolity, and her origins as a north London greengrocer’s daughter as evidence of her intellectual inferiority. I suppose, looking back, that poor old Roger, his beauty notwithstanding, simply thought that any woman who agreed to append herself to him couldn’t be worth the having. But there it was.

  Over most of their time at university, Roger managed simultaneously to monopolize her and to make her miserable, until at last he dumped her for Sally’s somewhat short-lived predecessor – a lank-haired, posh-voiced music student whose father owned a publishing house – while rejection drove Katherine precipitously to Rome, at a time when my back was turned. I met her again ten years later. Her Roman love life had come to grief and her very young baby had been found dead in its cot. Perhaps I can be said to have ‘rescued’ her?