The Travelling Hornplayer

by Barbara Trapido

  ‘“Ich frage keine Blume,”’ he says, ‘“Ich frage keinen Stern.”’

  ‘Oh God,’ Ellen says. ‘Must you?’ Then she translates, out loud, a little haltingly. ‘“I do not ask a flower,” ’ she says, ‘“I do not ask a star.” I know where this comes from, by the way, and, please, I’d really rather you didn’t. I can hardly believe that this is happening to me. I came here to talk about Joseph Conrad.’

  ‘“Sie können mir alle nicht sagen,”’ says the Dreamboat, ‘“Was ich erführ so gern.”’

  ‘“They can none of them tell me,” ‘Ellen says, with her heart in her mouth, ‘“what I . . . er . . . feel so . . . um . . . keenly?” ‘

  ‘No,’ says the Dreamboat, ‘not “feel”. What I “yearn to know”.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Ellen says. ‘This isn’t my language you know, and I’ve already copped some flak for that today.’

  ‘“Ich bin ja auch kein Gärtner,”’ says the Dreamboat, un-deflected.

  ‘“I am no gardener,” ’ Ellen says, ‘and the next bit is that bit about the stars – and don’t say it, please, I beg you. Do not say it to me, do you hear?’ Ellen is shaking slightly. She hasn’t had any lunch. She is thinking that if the Dreamboat says the line – that line – out loud, then she and her life might cease to be. The Dreamboat turns and kisses her again. Then he strokes her right cheek, where she knows, without having to look, that the scaly rash is falling away like the graveclothes from the Epstein Lazarus.

  ‘“Die Sterne stehn zu hoch,” ’ he says. He says it cautiously, sensing that it signifies and that he has no need to understand why. There is so much that neither of them understands – though among the miscellany of muddled thoughts that passes through the Dreamboat’s mind is the thought that his mother, whom he loves, will love this woman.

  ‘Are you fond of gardening?’ he says.

  Ellen isn’t listening, because her mind is still on the poem. ‘That line,’ she says. ‘My sister said it to me this morning. But the thing is, my sister is dead.’ Then she starts to cry, though this is in itself strange, because Ellen seldom cries. ‘My sister is dead,’ she says, just as if it had happened yesterday, and her sobs gain momentum. ‘My sister is dead.’ She says it again and again. And again.

  7.

  Danksagung an den Bach

  The college feast is no ordinary affair. This particular feast is an occasion that spreads itself beyond college members and their partners. It goes for the wider trawl. Sonia has read it as one for charming captains of industry into parting with their money, so the rich are present in force. She has also invited, as her special guests, two people whose achievements she admires. They flank her now to left and right at the high table, under a line of portraits that add up to six hundred years of all-male college head. Not for much longer, because to her left is Ishmael Valentine Tench, who has recently been commissioned by the college to undertake her portrait.

  Artist and prospective sitter are getting on very well. Sonia is enlivened by Izzy’s hint of rough, while Izzy goes for Sonia’s get-up. He is intrigued by her dress as a feat of engineering, because she has taken advantage of her non-existent breasts to wear a neckline that plunges in a narrow ravine, almost to her waist – and yet it does not gape to reveal her nipples. Izzy has never much gone for female breasts. They don’t attract him. He regards their absence as an asset and wonders, occasionally, what one is supposed to do with them during the act of sex – these inflated bovine obstructions. Stuff them sideways into the woman’s armpits, or what? Most of all, Izzy goes for the Master’s footwear. She has four-inch stiletto heels and lots of sequinned black straps that criss-cross her instep and ankle like the gateway to the seraglio.

  Skinny Izzy is also pleased with his own appearance this evening. In the past, where evening dress has been unavoidable, he has always hired his kit, but for this occasion he has gone to the trouble of purchasing his own. He considers it theatrical costume and he enjoys the fact that his choice leans towards the vulgar, boasting too much newness. He likes it that the fabric has a trashy, all-over sheen and that his jacket lapels are made of polyester satin. He likes it that his non-iron shirt-front is not so much pleated as ruffled. He enjoys, though they are not visible, his grass-green Pocahontas braces.

  Ahmed Hamman, to Sonia’s right, has wisely ignored the dress code. He wears his robes, which give him a gravitas beyond that provided by a stiff shirt and what look to him like regulation postman’s trousers. He finds it difficult to interact with the Master, and his conversation with her is thus characterized by a worthy, stiff sobriety – so different, he thinks, from the sparky dialectic, peppered with insular colloquialisms, which he perceives as taking place between the Master and her other guest of honour. Ahmed, who cannot decode the underlying rudeness of Izzy’s staccato ripostes, can, therefore, not appreciate that Izzy is simply unable to construct a complex sentence.

  Across the room he notes that one of those present is Ellen Dent, the handsome dark girl with the bold eyebrows and the scowl who was once his family’s guest. But Ellen is not scowling now, and neither did she scowl at him that morning when he met her in the chapel. How strange that she should be always popping up like this, like the Cheshire cat in his boyhood copy of Alice in Wonderland.

  Seated in the body of the dining-hall, at right angles to Ahmed, Sonia and Izzy, are Mr and Mrs Peregrine Massingham, who have been on the guest list for months. They have accepted the invitation in place of Mr and Mrs Edward Massingham, since the Opus Dei’s ill health this last year has caused him to decline all such opportunities and obligations. And right now the old man is in hospital convalescing from minor abdominal surgery. Sonia has a particular interest in the family. Besides, she knows it is wealthy and that it may be disposed to endow a hall of residence or a nicely proportioned repository for the college’s collection of Middle Eastern antiquities. She knows there is a Massingham daughter who is about to enter the first year to read Law. Anastasia. Peregrine and Anastasia. What idiotic, pompous names, Sonia thinks. Curiously, though she has grieved with the Goldmans over the estrangement of their daughter, she does not know that it is Peregrine Massingham who is Stella Goldman’s husband.

  Naturally, when Jonathan and Katherine accept the invitation they have no idea that this will bring them face to face with their only daughter for the first time in three years. Jonathan’s writer’s fellowship is about to end and the Feast will constitute his last social commitment to the college. His last academic commitment he has honoured that same morning, when the Conrad Scholar suggested that he sit in on a graduate interview.

  ‘This might be up your street,’ says the Conrad Scholar. ‘Do join me, if you’d care to.’ Jonathan, after three years on the premises, reads the Conrad Scholar’s offer as strictly non-optional – and it is on the way to the Conrad Scholar’s room that he passes through the senior common room, where he notices the seating plan for the evening’s event.

  Naturally, Jonathan’s heart leaps straight into his mouth. He is due to appear in two minutes at the Conrad Scholar’s door. He is quite unresolved about what to do. Will Stella be aware that her parents, too, are guests? He decides that this is highly unlikely, given that she will have no knowledge of his recent connection with the college. So what, then, ought he to do? Should Katherine be forewarned of Stella’s presence, or should he allow the confrontation to occur spontaneously, in a spirit of mutual astonishment?

  He will see Katherine within the hour, since they plan, as they so often do, to meet for lunch in a pie-and-chips café much frequented by chain-smoking traffic wardens and members of the city police.

  Jonathan likes to be there early and watch Katherine come in. Lovely, dressy Katherine, who is walking taller now – now that she has finally stared down the awful fact of severance from her daughter. Now that she has found a medium for her creative talent beyond that of dressing up the Nuisance Chip and crackle-painting the porch. It gives him joy to reflect upon the fact that Katherine and h
e have come through. They have survived. He likes to sit at the back of the café and take a long view of Katherine’s entry through the smoke. He likes to imagine that he is seeing her for the first time.

  ‘I did but see her passing by,

  Yet will I love her till I die.’

  With the end of the writer’s fellowship, both Jonathan and Katherine have intermittent thoughts of returning to the west of Ireland, but both separately sense that there is one enormous obstacle. The obstacle is Stella. Ireland would put the sea between themselves and their only daughter. And, while they no longer expect it, no longer jump up to converge upon a ringing telephone, each separately thinks – or hopes – that, one day, when the telephone rings in the Cottage-on-the-Green, the caller will be Stella. At the end of the line, from somewhere outside Newcastle, will be the voice of Mrs Peregrine Massingham.

  Jonathan reaches the Conrad Scholar’s room in a state of heightened emotion and, naturally, it does not help that the prospective graduate student is Lydia’s look-alike; Lydia’s sister; Diana of the Uplands; the graveyard girl. And not only that. Lydia’s sister is, in temperament, wholly unlike Lydia. She is better informed – this is not surprising – but she has none of Lydia’s bubble. Miss Ellen Dent, God help him, is inclined to bring on the heavy guns. Miss Ellen Dent is earnest.

  Jonathan reacts against her – and he reacts against the emotionally retracted style of the Conrad Scholar, who suffers from an irritating rigor mortis of the jaw. Pain and anger and confusion collide to produce in Jonathan a formidable mindset. His tone with the girl is challenging. ‘Come on, come on,’ he is thinking. ‘Woman, you’ve read your stuff. Scintillate, lighten up, observe the etiquette here. When I throw a ball at you, for God’s sake throw it back.’

  And then he sees – just before the Conrad Scholar looks up at the girl in puzzlement – that Miss Dent has called his bluff. She sees that the Conrad Scholar is a drybones, meshed with veins of ink. She sees him, Jonathan, as a smart-arse, building a spurious house of cards, in the hope that she will blow it all to pieces.

  ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ she says, or words to that effect. ‘I’d rather go and take a cordon bleu cookery course.’

  Contrition speeds his steps as he makes a dash across the quad to stay her hand. And, after that, he goes to meet Katherine – and misses his moment, and says nothing.

  So that evening, while Katherine is composed and ready in her new, chocolate-brown lace dress and her new, chocolate-brown lace party shoes, Jonathan cuts himself while shaving and loses a cuff-link down the back of the bedroom radiator.

  ‘Oh, fuck,’ he says and he pokes at it with a broom. He gets black Kiwi shoe polish stuck underneath his fingernails.

  ‘Oh, fuck and buggery,’ he says. He screams, ‘Kath! I need a nail-brush. Where the fuck is the bloody nail-brush?’

  ‘Sorry?’ Katherine says, as she comes in. ‘What is it you want?’

  ‘Oh, forget it, all right?’ he says. By now he is wrestling with his bow tie. ‘Christ,’ he says. ‘I bloody hate these fucking things.’

  Katherine starts to laugh. She pats him on the bum in a gesture of wifely affection, laced with a touch of come-on. But Jonathan twitches quite unnecessarily and loses the half-way point in his knot.

  ‘Kate-ee!’ he says. ‘Now look what you’ve gone and made me do.’

  He lets her do the tie. ‘Jon,’ she says, ‘it’s been nice having you around.’

  ‘What?’ he says, on the edge of paranoia. ‘And what is that supposed to mean?’

  ‘God, Jonathan,’ she says. ‘You tell me what it means. I mean that it’s been nice having you around. You know. Having you not go into London all the time. What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Jonathan says. ‘Christ, but don’t you hate these bloody dos?’

  In the Bath Place Hotel – so conveniently close to the college – Peregrine, who has showered and shaved, dresses quickly and without incident. He has no problem with his cuff-links, nor with his bow tie. Somebody else has polished his beautiful, handmade shoes. His only source of wavering has to do with his mobile phone. Shall he, or shall he not, carry it? He knows his concern is unnecessary, but he worries about the Old Man. He slips the thing into his inside pocket and settles down to read the paper. After a while, he looks at his watch.

  ‘Come on, sweetie,’ he calls to Stella, raising his voice to carry through the bathroom door. ‘We’ll end up being late.’

  Stella is dawdling in the bathtub, her mind ranging over her past. She feels the strangeness of being back on home ground, and she toys with the idea of telephoning Michelle. Dare she? Or will Michelle tell her parents that she’s been in town? For a moment she almost wishes that she had brought her little daughter, so that she and Michelle could play at being mothers – storybook mothers, taking Max and Holly to feed the ducks in the University Parks. But Holly, of course, has ducks on the lake at home. Perhaps even nicer will be if she and Michelle can meet for lunch in a café, like two proper grown-up ladies.

  Stella smiles to herself. She stares down at her slim white schoolgirl body, whiter and slimmer for being under the water. The Fairy Princess hair is wound up in a band to keep it out of her neck. She wiggles her long white toes. Stella’s beauty is ever more extraordinary. It has, if anything, increased with illness, childbirth and frailty. It has the effect, as it always had, of setting her apart. It compounds her isolation. Brambles have wound themselves between her and other people. She has withdrawn almost completely into Pen’s immediate family and she depends, especially, on Pen and Aggie and the Old Thing. And then, of course, there are Dr and Mrs Sachs, especially now that Lorraine has married and is living in Honolulu.

  ‘Come on, sweetie,’ Pen says again. He knocks and enters the bathroom. He takes her hands and coaxes her to her feet. Then he wraps her in a large white bath towel. ‘We’re about to be late,’ he says.

  ‘Does it matter?’ Stella says. And then she says, ‘I hate it when you make that mouth. Pen, I wish you’d stop it.’ What Stella means is that she would dearly love to commit rape upon Pen’s mouth. She would like to go at it with her tongue and her teeth and her spittle.

  Stella is a quick dresser. She steps into her knickers, then feet-first into her dress, then into her shoes. She shakes her hair free from the band and brushes it in seven long strokes. She wears no bra, no stockings, no make-up. She carries no handbag. She pauses only to swallow four of the twenty-four pills that she is obliged to swallow every day.

  ‘There,’ she says. ‘Look. I’m ready.’

  Her unpainted eyelashes and eyebrows are gingery pale against her milk-white skin, her mouth is the colour of bruised violets. Her dress, which is Thai silk, is the colour of her mouth. The neckline is low and severely horizontal, the sleeves enormous, the bodice tight and elongated, the skirt full and rustling. In the dress, Stella is a romantic figure; a sixteenth-century oil portrait; a slim, white, orange-haired, wasted Virgin Queen.

  They are, of course, within seconds of being seriously late. There is no time to linger in the anteroom over a drink. A college servant ushers them straight into the dining-hall and to their appointed places, where Stella finds herself seated between her husband and the Uncle Fiddle Anorak – since the Dreamboat’s eleventh-hour lady guest has required his relocation from the high table. To Pen’s right, Stella registers with shock, are her mother and then her father. And, to her uncle’s left, most mercifully, is Ellen.

  The convergence affects the company in several different ways. Pen and Ellen are overjoyed to see each other and lean sideways to embrace briefly behind the backs of Stella and the Dreamboat. Then Pen turns to his parents-in-law, where he mimes normality with a creditable suavity.

  ‘What a very pleasant surprise,’ he says. ‘I hope you are well, Mrs Goldman.’ But Katherine is silent and shaking. She is glancing anxiously beyond him towards her thin, white, ice-queen daughter who will not look at her. In the glances, and in the set of her wide blue eyes,
Pen sees that she is the image of his beloved little Holly, and his heart goes out to her. It pains him that Stella’s own particular method of coping is to pretend that her parents are not in the room.

  Stella has closed in on Ellen and her uncle, and has turned her back to her husband. She is meanwhile buffing up her best Grania style. Stella bubbles and laughs and chats. Though she normally drinks no alcohol, she downs the contents of her wine glass quickly – and it is then quickly refilled.

  ‘But isn’t this just too wonderful?’ Ellen says, being happily innocent of the subtext. ‘And to think that even Izzy is here.’

  ‘Where?’ Stella says.

  It is at Ellen’s direction that Stella looks up towards the high table and, immediately, she laughs out loud. ‘God in heaven,’ she says, ‘and what does he think he’s wearing? Has the Liberace fan club been selling off the shirts?’ Then she says, ‘And there’s a bloke up there who’s wearing a drying-up cloth on his head.’ Pen, who has picked up on the cause of her louder speech, has tried removing her wine glass. He hopes that she will not notice, but Stella observes it at once and reaches out across his plate to snatch up his, instead.

  ‘All right. I’ll have yours,’ she says. ‘Look. There’s lots more in it.’ She laughs, again, at her own wit. Then she turns back to Ellen.

  ‘And, oh boy!’ she says. ‘Do I know that woman – or do I know that woman!’

  ‘Which woman?’ Ellen says.

  ‘That woman,’ Stella says.

  ‘Sshh,’ Ellen says, because Stella’s volume is beginning to attract a bit of unwelcome attention.

  Stella drinks deeply from her husband’s wine glass. ‘That woman flirting with Izzy,’ she says. ‘Lydia somebody. When I last saw her, she was in Fortnum’s, kissing my father.’