I wondered, as I glanced to left and right in the glass, whether I could realistically present the Conrad Scholar with a constant left profile throughout the duration of the interview – a profile like that of a painted figure on the wall of an Egyptian tomb. Then I thought, what the hell, warts and all, Ellen. Your face is as God made it. I have inherited from my father not only my height and my colouring, but a distinctly Protestant ethic – or so I am assured by dearest Peter, my half-brother.
Having carefully replaced in the box file the draft of my sister’s letter to The Novelist, I tiptoed to the kitchen and made myself some coffee. The two greyhounds, after they had slapped their tails twice each on the kitchen floor in token acknowledgement of my entry, kept their eyes shut and continued with their sleep. Neither was as early a riser as I. Then, at around 6.30, I heard stirrings from the two little girls, my half-sisters, who slept together in the bedroom directly above the kitchen – a bedroom that had once been Lydia’s and my nursery. And, when the stirrings had turned to grumblings, I heard the sound of the Stepmother’s size two feet on the floorboards, as she crossed the room to her daughters.
The little girls were aged two and a half and eighteen months. Born within a year of each other, they seemed, like Lydia and me, to be each other’s closest friend – a trait that I have come to observe with a killjoy degree of caution. Any day now, I thought, as I sipped my coffee, they would be blowing their little noses on the cornflower-sprigged curtains, just as we had done when our parents were not looking. And perhaps they were already sticking their bogeys onto the back of the captain’s chest between the beds? The chest that held their little vests and tights, just as it had once held ours.
The girls even looked almost exactly like Lydia and me, from which I can conclude that my father has formidably dominant genes. Any photograph taken of us, aged eighteen months and two, is pretty well interchangeable with any one taken of them.
Lizzie and Phoebe – these were the two little girls who had been born to the Stepmother during my time in Edinburgh. They had taken the place of the stillborn male twins who had fetched up, one under the oak tree, and one in a hospital incinerator. And my father, I have noticed, is inclined to treat Lizzie and Phoebe as if they were two halves of the same pantomime horse. Neither little girl has thus far exhibited any interest in model aeroplanes or cricket.
The Stepmother has continued with her teaching job in ‘the Smoke’, and will not countenance the idea of a live-in nanny. She rises an hour earlier than of old, and drops the girls at a child-minder on her way into work. The Stepmother is head of department and is on the way to becoming school deputy. On the previous evening she had offered to drop me off as well – at the railway station in Worcester – so that I could take the train to Oxford and be there ‘in good time’.
The Stepmother is big on punctuality. She is an efficient, restless, energetic little person who, strangely enough, seems to suit my father well. In her concern to get me to my interview on time, I think she may have been confusing the journey to Oxford with the one she sometimes makes to Cambridge, where she visits an old friend. Cambridge is, of course, much further from Worcester, as I know only too well, since not only did Lydia and I get sent to school near there, aged twelve and thirteen – once our mother had shipped out in that direction – but these days I go to Cambridge to pay regular visits of my own.
My mother; our mother; Lydia’s and my once so imposing, elegant, grey-eyed mother – always so composed, so collected – is not quite what she was. The Stepmother has confided to me that, years back, she thought of our mother as the ‘Mermaid Woman’, for her cool grey eyes and her cool grey clothes, and her apparently cool unfeelingness. But, since her accident, my mother has more frequently been referred to as ‘poor Gentille’.
I hope that I do not visit her merely out of duty, nor out of guilt, though I am quite tedious, these days, as Peter tells me, in the way that I take on burdens.
‘You’re doing penance again, Ellie,’ he says, ‘penance for being alive.’ He warns me that I am no longer particularly good company – that is, for anyone but himself and his motley hounds.
What happened ensued from what my father once hinted at to my unreceptive ear; what happened was that, when Lydia died, my mother went to pieces. This was the last thing that anyone would have expected since, as my father had observed to me on the Spanish Steps in Rome, she was always ‘so controlled’. Besides, my mother was accustomed to having people die around her. It had become a way of life. Her own antecedents had proved themselves extremely capable in this area.
She had been living in Paris when my father met her – a young French photo-journalist – but her grandmother had been from a Polish Jewish family, the only survivor of the Nazi occupation; a woman who had managed, almost literally, to walk to France with her very small, fragile baby. Once there, she had made a marriage of convenience with an ageing shopkeeper who had soon thereafter died. The baby had grown up to marry a man who was carried off, within twenty-four hours, by a bout of viral pneumonia. His little daughter, my mother, was six months old at the time. My mother had then, in her turn, married an Italian racing driver, who had duly died, aged thirty-two, at the wheel of a burning car. The racing driver, who was Peter’s father, was dead before Peter was two.
‘Death,’ as Peter once observed to me, ‘is a serial killer in our family.’ After the racing driver, our mother had then met and married Father, who has thus far stubbornly refused to die. She had fallen for him while undertaking an assignment on an English beach one summer. And this was the woman who, after Lydia’s death, had become alarmingly unhinged with grief – far more so, I think, than even my father had realized at the time.
I am fairly certain that the languid Hugo Campbell, my mother’s third husband, had not expected to find himself suddenly married to a ball of raging emotions. He had married the Mermaid Woman, after all. He had not married Phèdre. He had always struck Lydia and me as a man much inclined towards recumbency and he exhibited, like Madame Récamier, a great partiality for the chaise-longue.
Yet his origins in the Scottish landowning class were enough to make him rise from the aforesaid chaise-longue once a year and take the train to Berwick-on-Tweed for his annual bird-shooting spree. For this purpose he kept a twelve-bore shotgun on the floor of his hanging cupboard, where it proved to be a most unsuitable object for a desperate, unhappy, bereaved woman to encounter in his absence.
Having, as I understand it, managed to balance the gun more or less upright on the floor, while she herself leaned over it with the barrel gripped in her left hand, my mother had then made the mistake that I have been told novices make. That is to say, she put the barrel to her forehead instead of in her mouth. Even taking into account the difficulty of managing the trigger – given the gun’s length – had she done the latter, she might have achieved her object and blown herself to oblivion. As it was, she made a mess of her head and impaired parts of her brain.
At this point, it is my impression that Hugo Campbell simply copped out. Having returned to the house, he had seen her from the bedroom doorway and had retreated at once to summon the doctor, who in turn had summoned the ambulance. Within the month Hugo had sold the house and had moved into a top floor flat in a building that had no lift – presumably to ensure that my mother would never again be capable of joining him – and all contact with her ceased.
I visit my mother in a residential nursing-home, roughly every eight weeks. I have done so for over two years. Perhaps, as Peter suggests, I do it in an attitude of penance for not having done so when my father first suggested it. At the time I had, of course, turned him down with an unambiguous vehemence. My mother’s mobility is limited and her vision is somewhat blurred. She oozes water continually from her eyes – though the nurses have assured me that this apparently chronic distress is merely tear-duct malfunction. Nonetheless, it is difficult for me not to associate the constant tears with grief.
Neither is it gratify
ing to visit her, since my mother, even now, appears incapable of acknowledging me. I tell her that I am Ellen and she tells me, as if it were coincidence, that she has a daughter called Ellen – and another daughter called Lydia.
‘Do you know my daughters?’ she says. Now that she is accustomed to my visits, she will say, ‘You are the other Ellen,’ and perhaps I am. The other Ellen; the doppelgänger; the secret sharer, the ‘hypocrite lecteur’.
Sometimes she will tell me that her husband is a headmaster – and, naturally, I have never told her that her husband is a Cambridge don called Hugo Campbell who lives in mortal fear of having any involvement with her. Noli me tangere. It is my father’s and the Stepmother’s earnings, or perhaps more realistically the Stepmother’s trust fund, that pays for the high quality of my mother’s residential care.
Whenever I can, I visit with Peter and the Übermensch, both of whom manage a more upbeat attitude and have a greater capacity for good cheer. For example, I have never taken the greyhounds to visit my mother, since she is not – was never – an ‘animal’ person. But Peter and the Übermensch will always take along one or other of their current canine puffballs and plonk it right in her lap. They unwrap beribboned sweetie boxes and push French bonbons into her mouth. They take her for manic wheelchair rides around the nursing-home grounds, until they and she are exhausted. Then they linger in the TV room, drinking tea, making small talk with the inmates, watching Aussie soaps and stuffing themselves with a miscellany of eagerly proffered chocolates.
‘Life’s a bitch,’ Peter said to me, the last time we drove off together, ‘and then we die. Cheer up, Ellen. Please do.’
‘Life. She is a beach,’ said the Übermensch, who likes to polish his accent along with his very special syntax. ‘And Ellen she ‘ave always the mange.’
‘Psoriasis,’ I said crossly, ‘and I only get it when I’m visiting my mother. Or you.’
‘My dearest,’ Peter said. ‘Gaiety, song and dance. Come on, try it. You’re far too much like your father, Ellen. Do you realize that? Buttoned-up old ramrod. Perhaps we ought to find you a nice boyfriend?’
‘Oh, piss off, Peter,’ I said.
‘Whatever happened to those cute boys you shared with in Edinburgh?’ he said. ‘The Catholic engineer was very nice.’
‘Peregrine Massingham and the Guttersnipe,’ I said. ‘Peregrine has gone on to be somebody’s husband, and the Guttersnipe has gone on to be somebody famous. You’d know that if ever you read the papers. He’s off making his mark for Cool Britannia.’ And at that point the puffball was sick into my lap. The nursing-home’s inmates were always inclined to stuff Peter’s dogs with most unsuitable, sugary biscuits – and the ensuing mess in this instance looked predominantly like half-masticated bourbon creams.
The ‘cute boys’ I’d shared with in Edinburgh. Oh dear. Of the two, Pen had remained a sort of friend – though I hadn’t actually seen him in years. He had become what I might punningly call a pen friend, but life, I suppose, moves on. In Edinburgh he had taught me how to cook, and this is something that has made me quite useful at home. I make up batches of soups and stews, and store them in the Stepmother’s fridge. Without me – who knows? – my father and my half-sisters might be reduced to living off the ‘serving suggestions’ on the sides of cracker boxes and off tins of Kashmiri Lamb Curry.
Pen taught me all the most basic things: how to cook rice and pasta without making glue; how to hard-boil eggs without getting black rings around the yolk; how to ‘melt’ onions, not frazzle them; how to glaze vegetables, or stir-fry them, or boil them, without destroying their bite. He taught me how to make a decent salad dressing. He taught me how to make stock. Pen taught me a half-dozen pasta sauces, and how to make risotto and biryani. He taught me not to be afraid to cook fish. He taught me how to make a béchamel sauce without getting lumps. He taught me how to make shortcrust pastry, using lashings of butter and lard.
We had always cooked the evening meal together, at first for three, and then for four, to include Izzy and also Stella, but Pen would banish the two of them, like children, from ‘our’ kitchen – and they were always completely willing to be excluded. Looking back, those culinary sessions were some of the nicest times I’ve had. The only thing that marred them was my sense that Pen was keen on me. But perhaps this was simply a misplaced hunch. That is to say, he never acted upon it, but it caused me a constant, attendant fear that Pen would one day spoil our friendship by grabbing me in a smoochy embrace, and declaring his passion for me.
In the event, this never happened. Perhaps because I had thrown out once too often that I did not go for blond men. Or, perhaps, because our friendship itself had simply got in the way. Pen would kiss me in public, but always on the cheek. He took an interest in the boys that I dated, but he never invaded my privacy. In short he was an absolute sweetie and was probably the nicest man I’ll ever get to meet.
On the night that Lydia died, Pen came with me to the airport and he sat with me at the departure gate while I wept into his shirt. After that, until I left for Fiesole and Rome, he telephoned me every day in an effort to help me through. Then, on my return, he wrote. Though his marriage to Stella some months later came as a big surprise, it did not altogether trouble me beyond a small twinge of possessiveness, which very soon fell away.
And Pen has continued to write. He writes to me roughly every five weeks – always briefly – always on plain white postcards. He writes from his place of work, and it is to his place of work that I therefore reply. He calls this correspondence our ‘Soup of the Month Club’ – and one side of his postcard always contains a recipe. It can be anything from parsnip soup, to paella, to peperonata. Because the Stepmother is vegetarian, Pen concentrates on veg. Invariably, I try out the recipes before I sit down to reply.
On the reverse side of his card Pen will tell me, briefly, about all sorts of ordinary things – that the rocket he has been growing in his vegetable garden has been beset by early summer frosts; that Holly, his little girl, has learnt to speak in sentences; that he is travelling on business to Tokyo or to Budapest; that he has taken his family to the West Highland coast for five days of bucket-and-spade holiday; that Stella is ‘frail’ and often ‘unwell’, but that she nonetheless manages her weekly string quartet; that Stella sings solo with her choir and has recently sung a Handel aria at his sister Julia’s wedding. He tells me whether she is rehearsing Mussorgsky, or Schubert, or Bartók. He tells me that his sister Anastasia has had impacted wisdom teeth.
From Izzy, by contrast, I have heard nothing, though I concede, now, that he was completely right in assuming the worth of his drawing to be in excess of the fuel bill. To my shame, I had kept the drawing for two months in a plastic bag under my bed in my student bedroom. Then I stuck it to the back of my door with hefty gobs of Blu-Tack pressed to its four corners. One day, finding that it had grown on me and feeling a little spendthrift on my way back from a morning lecture, I had lashed out on a cheapo perspex clip-frame, and had hung Izzy’s drawing on the wall.
In my final year I had been surprised to get a letter from Izzy’s agent, asking if the drawing was still in my possession and, if so, whether I would consider lending it for exhibition in Jerusalem and Vienna. Naturally, I said that I would. A local gallery representative came for it, as arranged, and clearly could not disguise his disdain that the drawing had not been properly mounted and framed. Contact with the perspex could be damaging, he said.
‘Sorry,’ was all that I said.
‘This sort of frame,’ he said, indicating the perspex with a slight shudder, ‘this sort of frame is best kept for high street poster art – and for Happy Snaps.’ Then he asked me whether I had thought to have the drawing insured. The annual premium on the sum he suggested would have cleaned out two months’ living allowance.
Thanks to the Stepmother, I was in Oxford far too early. I had made my way from the station on foot to New College Lane, where I’d had in mind to pass time in New College gard
en – having remembered it as particularly beautiful. Then I planned to take a walk around the college cloisters. Having done these things, I entered the chapel. From my position beside the Epstein statue of Lazarus, I saw that someone else was in the chapel, staring at the plaque containing the names of college members who had died in the two world wars. The person in question struck me as noteworthy because he was dressed in djellabah and Arab head-dress. But when he turned and came towards the statue, I saw that he was blond. We made brief, routine eye-contact and blinked and looked away. Then we both looked up again and stared.
‘Excuse me,’ said the blond Arab, and he bowed slightly from the waist. ‘Is it Miss Ellen Dent?’ He spoke English with a strong German accent.
‘Why do I know you?’ I said. ‘I do know you, don’t I?’ Then, as I spoke, even before he could answer, the man’s identity came flooding back to me. The lederhosen and the squeeze-box, the trumpet and the Easter Bunny. Frau Mutti White Mouse and the Infidel repulsed at the Siege of Vienna. Ellen doesn’t like blond men.
‘You’re Hubert-und-Norbert,’ I said, and I could not but hold out my hand. The blond man laughed. He took my hand for just a moment, then he gripped my shoulders in a brief, rather stiffly choreographed greeting ritual, before he released me and stepped back.
‘I am Ahmed Hamman,’ he said. ‘Yes, I was once Hubert. Norbert is my brother, who is, since three years, dead from a motor accident.’ We both of us fixed our eyes on the pale Hopwood stone; on the column of Lazarus rising. Then, staring at the loosening graveclothes, my heart pounding in my chest, I replied to him, hearing myself on some idiot impulse echo his un-English syntax.
‘My sister Lydia is also three years dead,’ I said, ‘and also from a motor accident.’
The mood was one of passing strangeness. I looked at my watch. ‘I thought I might get a cup of coffee,’ I said. ‘I have an interview in one hour.’
The Travelling Hornplayer Page 23