The Travelling Hornplayer

by Barbara Trapido

  It is always lowering to hear one’s mother’s maxims reverberating in one’s head – and, right now, whilst sitting opposite the odious Ucle Perce, I hear that penetrating, maternal RP voice. It burns a hole in my brain. ‘Rescuers, Katherine dear, always become victims.’

  I am not temperamentally given to perceiving myself as victim. ‘Cocky’ is what my dear mother is habitually pleased to call me. But right now, I don’t feel quite the king of the farmyard. Not two hours ago, I have shed Sonia Middleton – and in circumstances denting to the male ego. Right now, and far more dreadfully, the fact confronts me that I have once again lost Katherine to my brother.

  I have for a while been staring glumly at my own reflection in the carriage window as a means of avoiding Ucle Perce’s toes along with Nina’s inscription. I stare hard, understanding, at last, why it is that Katherine and I have been passing, of late, like the weatherhouse man and the weatherhouse lady, never quite coinciding. I understand why it is that Katherine shies away from my embraces. I understand the new swing she has in her step and the new interest she takes in her appearance. I understand how it is that Katherine comes in so late from her job and how it is that she is constantly helping ‘friends’ with their interiors, or ‘friends’ with their catering requirements. It is precisely because Roger cannot make a bed, or hang a curtain. It is because Roger cannot cook. And I, of all people, should know the lingering power of a person’s first love.

  ‘Cheer up, mate,’ says Ucle Perce, clanking his crutches as he struggles to make his exit at Reading. ‘It may never happen.’ He leaves his crushed lager can on the seat beside me.

  I do something then that I have never done before. With my index finger I write in the steam of the carriage windowpane. I write, ‘Nina is a slag.’ I do it deftly in mirror-writing, hoping that Ucle Perce will see it as he heaves himself down the platform. I hope that he will twirl his crutches madly about his head in rage. ‘Crippled passenger found prostrated on Platform 8.’ ‘“Disabled customer” is more proper,’ I say, but I mumble the words unintelligibly to myself.

  By the time I reach home, I am in a state of high agitation. Katherine is not in the house, but I find her, eventually, in the outhouse, where I succeed in stoking a row. She is piling up stacks of matching bath towels and duvet covers, playing chambermaid for the new tenant who plans to take up residence in ten days’ time. It seems to me that there is nothing Katherine likes better, now that she is finally shot of skivvying for Stella, than to place herself under somebody’s feet. It’s a habit she cannot break.

  ‘That isn’t necessary,’ I say. She ignores me and carries on stacking. ‘You don’t have to do that,’ I say. After a pause, I say, pathetically, ‘You’re never in the house when I get home.’

  ‘What?’ Katherine says.

  I admit that this is a pretty lame form of attack, no less so because it is true. Katherine is forever on the gad these days. She has even become rather matey with the prospective tenant. She has told me so on the phone. They have tried on dresses in Whistles together. They have visited an outlet called Stella Mannering together, where they pick over Tricia Guild soft furnishings. Then they drink cappuccinos and banana milkshakes – milkshakes! – in Brown’s Restaurant across the road.

  ‘That’s rich,’ Katherine says, ‘coming from you.’ She goes on bustling with her items of household linen.

  ‘Katherine,’ I say, ‘we have to talk.’

  She makes a great show of counting pillowcases. ‘Personally,’ she says, ‘I’d rather watch the Channel Four News.’

  ‘Katie,’ I say. ‘I don’t happen to walk around with a white stick. Not yet.’

  ‘Sorry?’ Katherine says. Her hair, newly bobbed, swings divinely as she turns her head. What an utter sweetheart she is.

  ‘What I’m saying,’ I say, ‘is that you don’t have to pretend to me that there’s nothing going on.’

  At this point she dumps the pile of stuff on the bed. ‘Between whom?’ she says. ‘Just what exactly are you saying to me, Jonathan?’

  Oh Christ. ‘Come on, Katherine,’ I say, bulldozing on. ‘(a) You’re never at home any more. (b) When you are, you’re walking on air and it’s sure as hell not for me. (c) Your clothes are all different. (d) You scurry off like Little bloody Red Riding Hood with your basket full of treats—’

  ‘Oh I see,’ she says. ‘Is that what I do? And I do it in enumerated subsections (a) to (d). Well, well. Are you saying that you’d prefer me to be at home in my undies waiting for you with parted lips and my KY Jelly at the ready?’

  This last is very Katie. She has never used KY Jelly, but her rhetoric is pretty down-putting once her anger is up.

  ‘Mrs Dishcloth Goldman,’ she says, ‘stirring the porridge pot for you in her frillies? Give me a break, Jonathan. For one thing, I have a job to go to these days. It requires me to climb out of my tracky bottoms. I go to work five mornings a week, though it’s not surprising you haven’t noticed. As for points (b) and (d), I’m really not prepared to talk to you about it. Not while you adopt this stupid, confrontational tone. Just go get lost, duckie. Just go into the house and calm down. Maybe you’re hungry? There’s a seafood risotto I’ve made. It’s on the stove. There’s lots of it, so don’t go eating it all.’

  ‘It’s interesting that you’ve made so much of it,’ I say. ‘Does Roger happen to like seafood risotto?’

  Katherine gulps and swallows. She takes a deep breath. Then she lets it out again. She says nothing. She shuts her eyes and purses her lips. Finally, she deigns to speak.

  ‘You’ll notice if you look at it carefully,’ she says, ‘that it’s full of the things that Roger can’t eat. It has mushrooms, wine, butter, Parmesan cheese and God knows what—’

  ‘So you’re pretty clued up on his dietary fads, then,’ I say.

  Katie sits down on the bed. ‘OK,’ she says. ‘I see your brother. I work about four minutes’ walk from his college. And, OK, I cook for him occasionally. I make up batches of the food he can eat and I take it to the college chef who stores it for him in the freezer. Sometimes I even eat lunch with him, just the way you eat out with Sally. He’s depressed, Jonathan. And he’s ill. He’s been ill for years. The man is rehabilitating himself. Do you ever think of what his life’s been like, living with that woman? Plus the three King Lear daughters – all of them control freaks like Sally? And one of them turned serious druggie? Try thinking about it, if you can stop thinking about yourself for five minutes.’

  ‘Oh please—’ I say.

  ‘He’s lethargic, Jonathan,’ Katherine says. ‘You don’t know what that means, you lucky bastard. You’ve always been tough as old boots. For two years he’s hardly been able to get himself out of bed. He’s found a doctor, at last, who’s begun to make him better and all Sally has done meanwhile is sabotage and undermine – and gang up with those witch girls. If you don’t believe me about your nieces, just try asking poor little Stella.’

  ‘Katherine—’ I say, but she rolls on.

  ‘So finally Roger has made it to get up and leave the house. And, yes, I helped him pack up his stuff. And now, since he has no energy, I’ve helped him sort out his rooms. And now, because he’s on a diet, I’ve helped him with some of his menus. Look, Jonathan, he can’t cook – but I’d have been afraid to touch the pots in that house. She’d have made me all thumbs. Even if nothing scares you, Jonno, I want you to understand that Sally scares me. She’s got that place set up like the bloody Berkeley Homes Show House. Miss the perforations while tearing off a strip of bog paper and you’d be breaking the house rules. She’s been out to kill his creativity for years. She’s had no wish to nurture his talent. Well, he is very able, Jonathan. And women like her are two a penny—’

  ‘Oh, give the poor girl a break,’ I say. ‘So she’s not your type. She’s not mine either. She’s a decent, conventional Englishwoman – and cohabiting with a loony like Roger has totally blown her mind. Besides, she has an honest job to get on with. She’s
a competent, busy professional woman. She’s been going out to work all these years while Roger’s been lying in bed lobbing apple cores into the grate and pissing into old jam jars.’

  Katie looks absolute daggers at me. ‘If all this “competent professional woman” stuff is another swipe at my under-achievement, Jonathan, I’d like to ask you where you think Stella would be if I had gone gadding off to London with a briefcase and a bunch of files like Sally these twenty years. I’d also like to ask you what you actually know about Sally’s job.’

  I’m on dodgy ground here, but I brazen it out as is my wont. ‘She’s an educational consultant,’ I say. ‘Something boring; something worthy. Who cares? And can we please stop talking about Sally? I came home to talk about us.’

  ‘She’s a spy,’ Katherine says, which slightly knocks the breath out of me. ‘Her job is to sniff out illegal immigrants. Sure, she worked as an “educational consultant” – something like a hundred years ago.’ I stare at her in blank disbelief. ‘Oh, she’s not the person who bashes down people’s doors and drags them away from their families,’ she says. ‘She has underlings who do that for her.’ After a pause, she says, ‘You can go pretty far in the Civil Service these days with that Home-Counties-and-Oxbridge air that Sally has. So long as you’re right-wing enough and xenophobic enough and stuffed with enough pathetic outmoded notions of what England ought to be. But, as you say, Sally is a conventional English Rose.’

  Then, as I gawp at her, Katherine says, ‘Izzy Tench’s father was a Lebanese engineer, by the way. Stella told me. He was deported when Izzy was two. So the boy grew up with one of those evil single mothers who scrounge off us all on benefits. He’s never met his father.’

  Before I can observe that this is hardly Sally’s fault, Katherine drops her bombshell. ‘Sonia’s grandfather too,’ she says casually. ‘He was a German POW; a woodcarver who wanted nothing more than to settle down and marry his pregnant girlfriend in Northumberland.’

  I say nothing. I watch her pause to savour her impact before squaring up the bedcover.

  ‘There are always enough school prefects around, like Sally,’ she says, ‘to ensure that people can’t simply be happy together.’ Then she says, ‘You don’t really drink PG Tips, do you, Jonathan? I do hope not. They’re the people who abuse chimpanzees in their advertisements. Anyway, I always thought you were a Twinings man, myself.’ Oh goodie.

  When I say nothing for long enough, Katherine invites me to sit down with her on the bed. ‘She’s our tenant, by the way,’ Katherine says. ‘And I really like her a lot. And I must say that, to her credit, she came clean about you right away – the moment she made the connection. Well, the moment she’d sussed that Sally had made the connection too and would be onto me without delay. She tells me that it’s over and I would like to believe her.’

  But, before I can say a word, Katie says, ‘Sonia met Sally through her recent efforts to trace her German grandfather. Apparently, after he’d been deported, Sonia’s pregnant grandmother walked out on her somewhat grand family and tried several times to find him, but she always drew a blank. Naturally, Sally has access to all sorts of interesting files.’ Then she says, ‘Sonia stayed with me last week, by the way, while we got our heads together over refurbishing the Master’s Lodgings.’

  The Master’s Lodgings. Sonia. Right. I do not damage my already disadvantaged position by supplicating for an explanation at this point, but I begin to realize what exactly it was Sonia and I were celebrating.

  ‘All I will say,’ Katherine says, ‘is, you touch her under my roof, Jonathan, and I’m out of here. Do you understand me?’

  I maintain my silence for so long that she adds, ‘You do know who I’m talking about, of course? I’m talking about Sonia Middleton. Professor Sonia Middleton. Newly appointed Master of St Austin’s College, Oxford – the college which is honouring you from October with a temporary writer’s fellowship.’ Ouch. ‘The college where your brother is a distinguished and much valued maths fellow; the fourth most cited mathematician in the world, incidentally.’ Ouch. ‘I looked him up on the Internet,’ Katie says.

  ‘“The Internet?” ’ I say, finally finding my voice. I’m thinking what the hell has my Rosie O’Grady got to do with the Internet.

  ‘And, yes,’ Katherine says, ‘I can use the Internet even if you can’t. My job requires it of me. I’ve been promoted, by the way. And little wonder, when most of my colleagues can’t tell Jacob Epstein from Brian “Epsteen”. All they know is Klimt and other such undergraduate fads. Now, if you’ll excuse me, my daughter is coming home this evening with her boyfriend, and – though I may not be young and sweet any more – I would still like to primp a bit and try my best to look nice. Plus, I’m tired of this conversation. If you think I’ve got the time and energy for sexual adventure, why don’t you first try checking out my libido and what twenty years of family life has done for it?’

  Then my sweet, lovely Katherine starts to cry. And I have done this. I have made her cry. I move to comfort her, but she backs off and aborts the tears with a quick, proud sniff.

  ‘Kath,’ I say, ‘what can I say to you? I’m abject and contrite. I don’t deserve you. I worship you. I always have. In that sense there has never been anyone else.’

  ‘Yes,’ Katherine says. ‘I know that. But I think I’ve also always known that you screw around. It doesn’t seem to cross your mind that it’s not only hurtful to me, but it’s dangerous. And I won’t have it. Not any more. These are the nineties, Jonathan.’ She pats the same bloody cushion for the umpteenth time. Then she says, ‘I’ve had an Aids test, by the way, and I want you to have one too. Why do you think I’ve stopped having sex with you?’

  I stare at her hard. ‘Are you being serious?’ I say.

  ‘Well, if you imagine it’s because I’m lusting after your brother,’ Katherine says, ‘let me reassure you. I wouldn’t care to have him in my bed. Not these days. OK, so he has the sort of pin-up good looks that adolescent girls go mad for. And tomorrow is my fiftieth birthday. And, thank you, I don’t want any presents. Not from you. Nor any facile compliments either.’

  It is at this point that we both become aware that Izzy Valentine Tench, the boy genius, is standing in the doorway and that he is carrying two backpacks and a James Thin carrier bag, along with Stella’s cello.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says, ‘but have you seen Stella? I lost her in a café.’

  And that was three years ago. Neither Katie nor I has seen Stella for over a thousand days. She will neither speak to us, nor write to us, nor grant us an audience. We know that in that time she has given birth to a daughter, called Holly, who was born on Bonfire Night, two and a half years ago. This makes her eight hundred and seventy days old.

  Izzy Tench stayed with us through that first week, but he would not elaborate nor speculate on the circumstances of their getting separated. Izzy’s medium is visual, not verbal. ‘I lost her in a café’ was all he could come up with. After that, he moved on to roam the Middle East.

  Thanks to another of Stella’s Edinburgh housemates, one Peregrine Massingham, we were not kept in doubt of her whereabouts beyond one dreadful night. He told us that, for reasons he could not disclose, she had returned promptly to Edinburgh and would then accompany him home to Northumberland. She subsequently dropped out of her degree course. She has never honoured us with an explanation.

  We know that Stella is still there with the Massingham family in Northumberland, and we conjecture, between the lines, that she has most likely had a serious nervous breakdown. We know that she has married Peregrine and I take this to be a marriage of convenience.

  We know this, in the first instance, thanks to Sally, who telephones, hot-foot, one morning as Katherine and I are about to have our breakfast. ‘If you haven’t read the personal columns of today’s Times,’ she says, ‘then I suggest you do so right away.’

  The Times in question carries a notice of the wedding, which has taken place in Venice. And, to Peregri
ne’s credit, we receive, by post that morning, a brief three-line communication telling us of the marriage. Peregrine, who is somewhat proper, not to say stuffed-shirt, in these matters, refers to Stella as ‘frail’, or ‘unwell’. His is a family of wealthy Catholic industrialists, and his parents have ten children. He and Stella live, independently, in the grounds of a country estate. At our most emotionally low, it cuts us deeply, Katherine and me, that among such an excess of progeny these people should have inherited not only our precious only daughter, but also our only grandchild.

  The message that comes at regular intervals is that Stella, whether rightly or wrongly, feels that, for her own emotional health, she can neither see us nor communicate with us. Peregrine, I have had to deduce, has behaved fairly well. A part of me holds him suspect, but Katherine urges me not to, because that way madness lies. He came to see us once, two years ago, and has volunteered to come again.

  Remembering that occasion, I suppose I did not behave terribly well. Something about being telephoned by a young Ampleforth snot who has become the custodian of one’s daughter and one’s grandchild. He is staying overnight in the Randolph Hotel, he says, having been in London on business. He has come up in the hopes of meeting with us. He suggests that we join him at his hotel for dinner, but I insist, cussedly, that he come to us instead, which he does, poor boy, in a hastily hired car and at no small inconvenience to himself.

  The food is inappropriately un-special and poor Katie drops gollops of tears into her plate. She finds it impossible not to weep almost non-stop throughout the evening, while I all but freeze him out. I suspect him and his family of laying claim to Stella’s mind. They do, after all, belong to what I regard as a highly sinister and authoritarian religious organization.

  When Peregrine asks us, as he takes his leave, whether he might carry with him Stella’s cello, both Katherine and I stiffen, but then, of course, we agree. If the Precious Girl has want of her cello – well, when have we ever denied her anything? Peregrine, on that occasion, comes with photographs for us, both of Stella and of the child – and he has been true to his word in sending photographs with regularity, ever since. The child is a little blonde sweetheart and looks quite excruciatingly like Katherine.