They do share common ground of a sort. Tracey sings in a band. He has seen her in the village in her stage gear, her out-of-work uniform: black leather mini-skirt; Dr Marten boots; and attenuated black T-shirt with random holes and tears, as though she has just been attacked by a panther. She wears dark lipstick and her eyes swim in deep pools of mascara, making her look like the Princess of Babylon portrait by Kees van Dongen. She brings with her to the cottage a clue to this other life, this afterlife, in the form of red streaks in her hair, but her idiot charm is their denial, and at first he was of a mind to draw her attention to it, as one might point out to an amateur actor, be it an insurance agent or a postman, that he had failed to remove all his make-up following an appearance in Dear Octopus the night before.
‘I see you haven’t washed up,’ she says.
Her eyes are always elsewhere in the room, her pencil always doing cartwheels through her fingers. Sometimes her double life – pen-pushing busybody and Gothic chanteuse – irritates him.
‘Why should I have?’ he asks. ‘It’s only 11 o’clock.’
She looks at her watch, an object so large and unhelpful that it might have been designed as an aid to drowning an unwanted pet. Tracey comes from farming stock. Despite the magenta highlights, he sometimes feels that her interrogations represent some backwoods attempt to make a city-dweller justify his presence. Not that long ago, her mucky forebears would have taken a shotgun to a devoted but arthritic sheepdog and blown its head off. Maybe they still would. Still do. He whispers the word ‘fey’ and sings in a low, indistinct voice: ‘Thro’ they dash’d, and hew’d, and smash’d, till fey men died awa.’ She hates that. Hates it when he’s not normal. Continuing in a Scots accent, he leans forward and explains: ‘Rabbie Burns.’ She makes an appointment for the following month.
As darkness falls, he is dreaming. In his dream, he makes his way to the caves near the Quarra river. It is his first visit. One of the villagers has told him about the drawings. Deep inside what will become known as the Stebbing Complex, he places the lamp on a ledge, as directed by one of the Mompono elders. He chuckles in the half-light, as he always does when he thinks of old Mouyondze as an ‘elder’; he barely comes up to his chest. Mouyondze’s two grandchildren, who have tagged along, are, of course, the same height as ordinary children; it is only later that their growth will cease, like something stolen in the middle of the night and never missed. The water at their feet ripples, its movement translated into shadows on the damp walls. Then there is a grunt, and someone points a finger. As he lifts the lamp and holds it closer, he makes out the figure with the primitive tshuapa. Its two strings are unmistakable. The two-stringed tshuapa, confirmed before his eyes as ancient, played before words were written down, maybe before words were properly uttered. The soft undulations of the shadows are like accompaniments to the tinkling sounds of prehistory across the arc of time.
He tried to explain this discovery and its implications, not to mention the extent of his resulting prestige, to Tracey on her first visit.
‘Very nice,’ she said, turning the tshuapa in her hands, the faintest glow flickering on her cheeks from the polished facets of its belly – polished from use, he might have added, not upkeep. ‘Can I have a go?’
‘Yes, but pluck it gently. That’s all it needs.’
She kept hold while he set the instrument in position. It was so small, almost a shelf ornament. He could tell from the way her left hand knowingly gripped the fingerboard that she had handled a guitar. But he didn’t know then that she was a member of the strident Female Eunuchs. She vibrated the strings, singly and together. There were no frets and the wire was raised too far above the board for her to depress them without cutting her fingers.
‘Ouch!’ she cried. ‘That’s sharp.’
He waited for her to smile at the unintentional pun, but she just brought her fingertips to the end of her nose and scrutinised the thin bloodless valleys. The sound had meant nothing to her; was nothing, in fact. Not now. He recalled the irate Harvey Goldberger, whose researches had been eclipsed by the Quarra River finds. Perhaps Harvey had made a similar remark on reading the Transactions of the Congo Anthroposophic Society in September 1949, especially the piece by Dr Fritz Stebbing on Recent Explorations in the Riparian Caves of Eastern Mohjato. ‘Ouch!’ he might have said. ‘That’s sharp.’ But that would have indicated a habit of resigned magnanimity to which tiny Harvey Goldberger, almost as small as Mouyondze, was eternally foreign. He was running too far ahead, almost as far as Harvey’s revenge during the Mompono Ensemble’s visit to the Festival of Britain in 1951. Some had said Professor Harvey Goldberger was miffed because of what had just happened to the Jews: professional ignominy following racial liquidation, the survivor winged by a stray bullet, as it were.
‘Fred – did you or didn’t you?’ Tracey asked, replacing the tshuapa and taking up her notebook.
He stared at her for a few seconds, believing that the question prompted any number of answers from his half-forgotten past. ‘Did or didn’t do what?’
‘Hold Mrs Anstey’s cat under the drainpipe. She says it turned up looking streamlined, as though it had just flown home. Says at night she can hear you calling it Supersonic.’ Tracey seemed to be reading this from written notes.
Florrie Anstey, a widow, is his neighbour. Their white-dipped cottages were once a pair at slightly different levels, built to house the blacksmith and gamekeeper of a large estate. They do not get on. It was Mrs Anstey who told social services of his self-neglect. Tracey on her first visit found there was some evidence for this in a raffish lifestyle. Then there was the signpost incident. He claimed Mrs Anstey’s ire was provoked when he caught her deliberately vandalising a footpath sign – one of those post-mounted direction arrows bearing a white matchstick man on the move – which directed walkers through the woodland common to both their properties. He fell silent when Tracey questioned him about this because he realised that Florrie Anstey’s desire for privacy and his advocacy of the exploratory instinct both had their merit, but the strange girl with black lips sitting opposite him beside a mug of undrinkable tea looked frightened by his gaze.
‘I might have,’ he replied cryptically, still staring. ‘But then, this is rural Wales. Strange things happen around here.’
*
He is up early because he does not sleep well. The cat seems none the worse for its baptism. It responds to his whispered call – ‘Soopersonic, Soopersonic’ – as he sits outside in his cardigan, watching the sunrise above the hill opposite. He can hear a farmer whistling in sheep – B Flat, then a glissando to the double octave, two repeats and finally C capped by a staccato triplet on D Sharp. Down below, Florrie Anstey steps out of her front door as if in response to the shepherd, takes a long drag on a cigarette and returns inside, where she has lit a fire. Thick yellow smoke begins rising to the treetops from her chimney. They’ve had a disagreement about that, too. She will have no truck with storage-heaters, not even in the interests of the environment.
He wonders what Tracey is telling them back at the council office, wonders whether there is a file on him. Once, he received her unshaven in vest and trousers with his braces hanging loose. She told him he merged into his background, by which she meant leaning towers of washing-up, Manhattans of books and boxes, eroding mounds of papers, a pair of hedge-clippers, a steam iron and long-johns on the table, food half-eaten or untouched, dead and dying flowers and net curtains sagging on overstretched cord. ‘It’s that fucking witch down there,’ he mumbled. ‘She’s put the hex on me.’ But this time he has tidied up, put stray objects in drawers and opened the windows. It’s like a spring day. He’s even wearing a tie, though there are no clean shirts. Above the fireplace, presiding over his reluctant attempt at contrition, is a photograph of him in a white linen suit, flanked on each side by three pigmies, the Mompono Ensemble. The sun has turned the lenses of his wire spectacles into white discs and he is stooping slightly with his arms expanded, as if to min
imise his height, his colour and his position as civilised broker or intermediary; the pigmies, wearing head feathers and holding thin spears, are not smiling. One of them clutches a barely visible tshuapa.
A car slows and stops on the bottom road. A door slams shut. Then he sees Tracey leaning into the steep flight of steps past Lower Clytha Cottage, her black overcoat trailing behind her. She is also wearing a Russian-style fur hat. If he had a rifle, he could halt her approaching malignancy with one pop, then fell the chain-smoking vandal as she wobbles out to investigate.
‘And how are we today?’ she asks.
‘Is that the royal “we”?’
She looks mystified, so with a sigh he beckons her indoors.
On the table, beside other items, a stone, two vases and a teapot hold down an unfurled bill poster. She already knows about the Ensemble, the tshuapa, the cave drawings appearing out of the dark like photographs developing in a tilted tray, the immemorial drip, drip in the distance, the explorer and his retinue of little folk paddling in black water.
‘Here we are, the Mompono Ensemble at Morley College, September, 1951,’ he explains, tracing the letters on the poster with a forefinger, its nail capped by a neat crescent of grime. ‘But you see’ – he looks up rheumily at her from another epoch – ‘one of them went missing.’
‘What – one of the pigmies?’
‘We were all staying in a hotel paid for by the Embassy and the British Council, off the beaten track a bit. In fact, Lambeth. Harvey Goldberger was there, with a few people from the CAS.’
Her brow furrows, but she lets him continue.
‘It was Mouyondze’s nephew who vanished, the evening after the second performance. They didn’t know where they were. They moved together down the corridors, huddled, like a breakaway shoal of fish. I think he was frightened, or curious. He got out through a lavatory window no bigger than a postage stamp. They were fascinated by the toilets, so we indulged them.’
She starts to smile. It’s more than that, because she tries to stifle it with her ring-encrusted fingers.
‘But you found him.’
‘They insisted on wearing their loincloths all the time, though we had supplied them with grey schoolboy jerseys. In those days, autumns were just brief overtures to winter. Not like now.’
As if to confirm this, the shadow of a moving branch makes merry on the whitewashed back wall.
He tells her that Harvey Goldberger never recovered from news of the Quarra River discoveries, explains how Harvey was a brilliant theorist with a speculative view of antiquity. He says he proved Harvey wrong in the most devastating and comprehensive fashion – empirically; not only had he renewed contact with the Mompono on the flimsiest reports of their existence but they had taken him into their confidence enough to vouchsafe a connection that meant nothing to them but which to him was breathtaking. He explains how Harvey grasped the opportunity to make mischief on the night of September 30, 1951 by alerting the newspapers to the disappearance, and why Harvey could not have wished for a better outcome: a Daily Mail reporter and photographer, turning into St Mary’s Gardens, spied the shivering little fellow in his pullover; he was standing still, hypnotised by his lengthening shadow, his javelin tapping nervously on the spot like a blind man’s stick.
But before the end of his story, she is yawning. He is insulted by her boredom. Yet she is not like those who cannot help themselves but are redeemed for him in other ways – no, her ignorance, her lack of sympathy, is gleeful; she revels in it.
‘Fred, you are almost ninety,’ she informs him, as though awaking from a parallel thought-journey.
For a few seconds, her announcement wavers between reminder and admonition, and the delay allows her to proceed. She holds herself erect and clears her throat.
‘Mrs Anstey saw you the other evening… well… coopying in the wood – and cleaning yourself with leaves.’
He offers no response to her pretence of approaching climax. Mention of the wood, the spinney, reminds him of the time he explained to her how his rotten family tree had been felled beneath him.
‘She’s lying,’ he says, without feeling. ‘There are no leaves to speak of. They’re late this year. Or hasn’t she noticed?’ Close to her, he becomes aware of her thicker eye shadow and the more lurid dye in her hair. Painted for the kill – or the appearance of the Female Eunuchs that night at the Memorial Hall. Her metal hoop earrings are pendulous yet fixed in space, picking up no internal quiver of commiseration or remorse; he can see himself reflected in them, twins bent to a bow’s shape. Her last words echo: ‘I’ll be back!’
*
He has heard the distant noise before, its turmoil spent in flashing lights above the edge of the village. This time, it begins at dusk, and now its element, the night, is settling all around. The dark will soon be complete, like a creek gorged by the incoming tide. He takes a billhook and a torch and descends into the spinney towards Lower Clytha Cottage. A radio at an open widow tells him that Florrie Anstey has been joined by a laughing, applauding concert party.
Then he sees it directly in front of him – a new footpath sign. He flicks on the torch and spies above his head a little lime-painted Mompono tribesman scurrying to the Quarra River caves, where the tshuapa-player, as thin as a reed, awaits his cue. And at last, accomplices of the dark and edged with frost, they begin to fall on his upturned face, leaf after leaf after leaf.
Watching the Birdie
They were approaching Porlock on the long coastal drive to St Ives. Kate’s new dad had long talked about the place in that way he had of hooking a thumb in his waistcoat and holding his cigarette away from him in his other hand as though close up it might do him an injury. Her stepbrother, Max, was with her in the back, his wiry ginger hair rippling in the breeze from the driver’s open window.
‘Do you think she’ll make it, Max?’ Mr Charlton asked, meaning Porlock Hill.
Mr Charlton always referred to cars as ‘she’. Boats too. ‘She’s a beauty!’ he’d said, on that day they saw the paddle-steamer churning up river before taking them across the Channel to Ilfracombe, when the colour of the water changed from brown to bottle-green like one of Miss Moseley’s experiments in Year Six.
He addressed many of his questions to Max, as if she and her mother were not there, but whenever she complained about this she was told to be patient – it was bound to be awkward at the start.
Max ventured no opinion on the ability of their Standard Eight to lift itself out of Porlock on to the moor. At one point, while turning a sharp bend, they seemed to be staring through the windscreen straight at the sky. Whatever the weather, Max’s nose was always bubbled with sweat. When Kate wasn’t looking directly at him, he sneaked glances at her. This she could see out of the corner of her eye, and she hated it.
The boat trip, the fortnight in Cornwall and other ‘treats’ were new. They’d never had a car when her father was alive and no money for days out in the ‘Waverley’, with its sleek pistons below deck, watched over by boys on tiptoe and men sucking pipes. She’d been with her father when he died, when his eyes went white and he’d fallen in a heap before her on the back lawn. She had felt the ground shake. Mr Charlton had told her that to have been there when it happened was a privilege she would learn to cherish, but when he’d said this she saw her mother looking at him and shaking her head.
Nevertheless, Kate liked Mr Charlton. One afternoon, they’d driven to Cheddar Gorge for a picnic, and he’d laid a little check tablecloth on a ledge high above the road. She’d heard her mother whispering that it was making her giddy, up there where people were looking at them from below, shielding their eyes from the sun. But Mr Charlton had made the danger disappear by holding the cloth at two corners and shaking it so that it floated to a perfect square on the grass, like a parachute in slow motion. She’d liked the way he’d looked around him and smiled, as if seeking applause.
Now that they were on the flat, with the sea to the right, Mr Charlton began to sing.
She wanted to join in but she didn’t know the words. Her mother had a go at the choruses.
‘How are we doing, Max?’ Mr Charlton asked, his face looking at her in the rear-view mirror. Max had few answers to his father’s questions and none were expected.
‘All right, Mrs Charlton?’ he inquired, leaning towards her mother, who was next to him in her flower-printed frock and red beret. ‘Not too hot?’
Kate could not understand why her mother looked so unhappy. Was it about being a widow for too short a time, or producing a new father out of a hat? She’d said there would be a lot to get used to in marrying Evan Charlton, the Betterware man. Each day he left for work early and arrived home late, and on weekends he organised ‘excursions’ and made lists of things to do. Her mother had even asked if she minded, as if anything Kate said could have made her act differently. At the Dancers Club, they’d had a draw one night for single members and the names of Esme Bright and Evan Charlton had been pulled out of the hat for the foxtrot. They’d had to dance alone for three minutes in a moving pool of light, because it was the rule. Soon after, her mother had brought Mr Charlton home. Even then, he had a surprise for her – a three-link chain in chromium steel, the idea being to separate the links. Before she could try it herself, he had done it for her, quickly, so that she couldn’t follow. Then he’d put the links back again with one hand and jangled the completed chain before her face, like a hypnotist. That evening, Max had stayed with one of his aunties. Soon after, they’d gone to the Charltons’ house, a big place on the edge of town that echoed and always felt cold. It had coloured glass in the front door and a porch with an iron ‘H’ for scraping mud off shoes. His wife, Max’s mother, had still been alive, divorced, but there were no pictures of her. For a while, as they’d stood in the hallway, Max had watched them from the landing.
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