Ellie and The Harp-Maker

by Hazel Prior

  ‘Are you saying he’s not really boyfriend material?’

  ‘No, no. It’s more that I don’t see him as a man who would particularly want or need a girlfriend.’ There. Maybe that’s what was troubling me; I made a wrong judgement.

  ‘Have you mentioned anything to Clive yet?’

  ‘No. I can’t seem to coax myself to come clean. Honesty doesn’t seem a good policy … but neither does dishonesty.’

  ‘I bet you’re guilt-tripping.’

  ‘Yup.’ For me guilt is not so much a habit as an addiction. I blame my parents. My mother, anyway. She was relentless. Stalwart moral values are all very well but when the merest whiff of fun brings on a scolding …

  ‘Hey, Ellie! Your harp-playing is a good thing,’ Christina insists.

  ‘But my secrecy is a bad thing.’

  ‘Sometimes it’s good to be bad.’

  I do like Christina so much.

  When I replace the receiver I realize I haven’t asked about Christina’s day at the shop, or about Alex. I tell myself it’s OK; she’s used me as a sounding board enough times so it’s fine to do the same to her every once in a while. But I’m not impressed with myself.

  The longer I leave it the more difficult it’s going to be. If I say something now he’ll already be hurt – and when Clive is hurt he hits out. If only I could find a way of telling him without mentioning Dan. I’m on slippery ground; I don’t have many male friends but if I so much as mention them Clive gets shirty. I suppose it’s not surprising in view of his history.

  When I first met him, Clive was dating my colleague Jayne. It was the library staff’s Christmas meal and Clive was Jayne’s ‘plus one’. I didn’t have a ‘plus one’ of my own at the time and felt rather a misfit. The struggle of staff party small talk wasn’t as bad as usual, however, because I was sitting opposite Jayne – fun, chatty Jayne. Hair jumping out of her pigtail, lipstick clashing with her jumper, she was all bubbles and chaos. I was impressed that she was with this crisply dressed Clive guy, who seemed to me a very cool, smart sort of a person. He’d kept everyone’s glasses topped up. He and Jayne aired their views on the films made from classic books. The newer version of The Thirty-Nine Steps wasn’t bad, they said. Nobody had produced a Great Expectations as good as the book. As for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Jayne (who had written a thesis on children’s literature) approved of the film and was prepared to put forward its merits until her jaw ached. Clive affectionately disagreed. They were both keen to hear my opinions but I hadn’t seen it. I tried not to look at Clive too much. What was it about him that fascinated me? The intensity of his eyes? The faint stubble on his chin? The pronounced line of his jaw? I came to the conclusion it wasn’t so much his physical attributes as his combination of sensitivity and firmness.

  ‘Clive seems nice,’ I commented to Jayne at work the following week as we were cataloguing books together.

  ‘You think so, do you?’ she said with bitterness.

  ‘What’s wrong, Jayne? Has something happened between you?’

  She curled her hand into a fist. ‘That man! I hate his guts.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked, bemused.

  ‘He only went and smashed my Beatrix Potters! Every last one.’

  I looked at her quizzically.

  She told me how she’d been collecting Beatrix Potter china for years. She adored the stuff. Peter Rabbit plates, Squirrel Nutkin mugs and Jeremy Fisher eggcups were all on show in her flat. But apparently, after a flaming row, Clive had laid into her collection with a hammer.

  I was horrified. How could such a pleasant, well-mannered guy behave so violently? I started to hate him too. I didn’t know Jayne that well but I did my best to comfort her. She was pretty upset – though more, it seemed, over her broken Mrs Tiggy-Winkle teapot than her broken relationship.

  Not long after our conversation I spotted Clive in the street. There was a greyness to the skin around his eyes and a heaviness in his walk. I would have hurried on in view of his appalling treatment of Jayne, but he hailed me at once.

  ‘Hello, there! Ellie, isn’t it?’

  ‘Hello, Clive,’ I said frostily.

  He sensed that I was fending off any further dialogue. ‘Did Jayne tell you?’

  I nodded.

  ‘She was …’ His face darkened. ‘She …’ He couldn’t finish his sentence. I watched him suffer for a full two minutes, until at last he managed to shape the words. ‘She was sleeping with another man behind my back.’

  ‘Oh! She didn’t tell me that!’

  ‘He was a friend of mine. A close friend. That’s what I thought, anyway.’

  I saw the pain. I couldn’t condone his way of dealing with it but a shard of sympathy slipped into my heart. I suggested coffee.

  ‘I won’t be very good company,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Doesn’t matter!’ I told him.

  We ended up opposite each other in the Apple Tree Café, sipping cappuccinos and carefully skirting around any topics that verged on the personal. Christmas jingles pumped out relentlessly from the loud speakers. I sat rearranging the brown paper cylinders of sugar in their bowl, reviewing my opinion of Jayne. At the same time I was keenly aware that this man was now single. Available. Not that I was interested, not when I knew what he was capable of. And yet …

  As we talked, his manner was brightening. He seemed to be gathering strength, building himself up again.

  I decided I should ask something about his job. I’d spouted on for ages about how much I loved being a librarian and he’d honoured me with flattering levels of attention.

  ‘So what … um … what is an actuary?’ (I’d asked the very same question to Jayne when she started going out with him and her answer was ‘dull’.)

  Clive’s eyes narrowed. A look spread over his face that started off defensive, passed through apologetic and then settled for resigned.

  ‘Do you really want to know? Jayne was never very interested.’

  ‘I am,’ I told him, seizing the opportunity to demonstrate exactly how much nicer I was than Jayne.

  He took a gulp of coffee. ‘OK, then, I’ll tell you. It’s number-crunching and statistics. It’s masses and masses of spreadsheets. It’s trying to explain complicated concepts with the aid of overly simplistic diagrams to clients who haven’t a hope in hell of understanding. It’s working for a company that rips people off big-time. In my case it also involves having a boss who’s an obnoxious git. But the salary’s good.’

  I was silenced, but I appreciated the fact he didn’t overwhelm me with technical details.

  He paid for the coffees. I didn’t protest in view of his large salary.

  ‘Well, this has been nice, Ellie,’ he said. ‘We must do it again some time.’

  I wondered if we would.

  At home, I googled ‘actuary’. Wikipedia informed me that there are two components of risk assessment: the magnitude of potential loss and the probability that loss will occur. The price of your insurance is worked out on these. Clive must be very good at calculating probabilities, I thought. What are things worth and how likely are you to lose them? Life’s relevant questions.

  I’m no good at making calculations myself when it comes to risk. I might agonize but in the end it’s always my guts that dictate whether I dive in or hold back. Clive, I decided, must be way more logical in his approach.

  When he rang the next day to ask me out I said yes. Then fretted. I still hadn’t processed my feelings towards him. But I was flattered. Worried. Excited. Would I tell Jayne? I thought not.

  Clive was on the rebound and I questioned if he would have liked me otherwise. It mattered what he thought of me. I was bound to be a disappointment, wasn’t I? He’d think I was dippy. I’d never find enough intelligent things to say. I chose a few topics and rehearsed conversations in my head.

  During the date I forgot everything I’d rehearsed, but it didn’t matter because Clive did the work. He was entertaining in a way I hadn’t expected. Hi
s mother, I learned, had a habit of adopting sickly dogs and her house was permanently filled with limping terriers. Smelly ones. Clive said they’d replaced his father, who also stank (metaphorically; his father had run off with his secretary years earlier). I told him about my own parents. My mother, who at that stage was still criticizing my every move, who often said, ‘When Ellie walks into a room things go wrong.’ My father, who winked at me but would never contradict her.

  ‘Well, I’m contradicting her!’ Clive said. ‘Nothing’s gone wrong here since you walked in, has it? Quite the reverse!’ With a look that melted me.

  We also talked about Jayne and … was it that date or the next that he told me I was worth twenty Jaynes?

  It felt so good to be appreciated, as if a warm, furry animal was nestling inside me.

  Six months later Clive supported me through a big crisis. Due to a new automated system, my job at the library became redundant. I was devastated. Jayne had already moved on to work in a university library and was no longer in touch, though I heard she was doing well. I had never told her I was dating Clive.

  I wished I had Jayne’s self-assurance. I applied for lots of jobs I didn’t really want with very little success. My father tided me over with small sums of money. My mother sighed. But every time I got another rejection a bouquet of flowers arrived from Clive. His devotion touched me and boosted my drooping confidence. Then, during a windy wander along the beach, Clive proposed. I was taken aback, especially when he stuck his hand in his pocket and took out a ring. I gawped at it. Diamonds and emeralds. Expensive.

  ‘Clive, you’re serious!’

  ‘Of course I’m bloody serious!’

  That a man should want to spend the rest of his life with me seemed a marvel beyond all marvels. Especially a successful and attractive man. Everything about him was attractive then, even his mood swings. My heart launched into a spinning dance of gratitude.

  ‘Yes!’ I whispered, but my voice was drowned in the crash of waves.

  ‘Did you say yes?’ he shouted.

  ‘Yes. Yes, yes, YES!’

  It felt like such a big adventure.

  ‘I’ll be earning enough money to support both of us,’ he pointed out when we’d got a little further down the beach. ‘You won’t need to lift a finger.’

  I pretended to gasp. ‘Does that mean I have to do all the cooking and cleaning?’

  ‘No, of course not. Not unless you want to.’

  Without a second thought I assured him that I did want to. ‘It’s only fair,’ I said. ‘We’ll be an old-fashioned couple. You Breadwinner. Me Housewife!’ It was all a bit of a joke at the time. But I never did get another job and the housewife role seems to have stuck.

  ‘So, what shall we do for your birthday?’ Clive said, putting a hand on my shoulder, making me jump. I put down the book I hadn’t really been reading.

  ‘I don’t know. I hadn’t thought.’

  ‘A nice meal out? Cinema? A trip somewhere? C’mon, El! What would you really like to do?’

  Really I’d like to make a trip up to the Harp Barn, but as my birthday fell on a Saturday that would be impossible.

  ‘Um … We could invite some friends out for a meal?’

  ‘Friends?’ he said, as if the word was foreign. ‘Who do you have in mind?’

  ‘Well, there’s Christina, of course …’ His forehead creased slightly. ‘It wouldn’t have to be just Christina,’ I went on quickly. ‘We could invite Phil and Rachel? Or do you have any friends from work you’d like to invite? Andy, perhaps?’

  Andy was the only colleague Clive ever mentioned with any degree of enthusiasm.

  ‘Oh, not Andy,’ he said.

  ‘Why not? He seems nice.’ I tried to remember the couple of occasions I’d met Andy but all I could recall was that he was a big man with a big beard and a big laugh. ‘He’s single isn’t he?’ I added. ‘Perhaps he might get on well with Christina.’

  ‘I doubt it. He’s only good for crude jokes. I’m sure Christina would find him very dull.’

  He opened the cupboard and got out a packet of pork scratchings. He pulled it open and offered me one, even though he knows I’m not keen. I wrinkled my nose and waved them away. The smell was disgusting. He threw a couple into his mouth and crunched them loudly.

  ‘Why don’t we have a snug pub lunch somewhere, just the two of us.’

  ‘Sounds nice,’ I said. It did in a way, but, if Dan and my harp were not an option (and they weren’t) I’d quite fancied something a bit more like a party, with other people involved. I don’t really get to see other people as much as I’d like. Clive works on the principle that we only need each other.

  ‘Just the two of us then! Where shall we go?’ Clive asked, screwing up the top of the pork scratchings packet and putting it on the side. ‘I know! How about The Crow’s Nest? That little place up near Doone Valley.’

  I considered. ‘Well, it’s great to have food with a view. But I got very cold last time we were there. I’m sure the climate’s a degree or two colder than it is here. I suppose the air gets a bit thin up there on the top.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with being thin on the top,’ he said, running his hands over his head.

  ‘Course not, Hon!’ Then I remembered that The Crow’s Nest serves a local brew that Clive particularly likes.

  ‘The Crow’s Nest is lovely,’ I said.

  ‘Sorted, then!’ he said.

  It’s just as well one of us is capable of making decisions.

  9

  Dan

  My girlfriend Roe Deer says it’s disgraceful how people are so seldom prepared to pay for music. Have people no idea, she asks, how many years of hard work it takes to learn an instrument? How many hours of practice every day? Not to mention the challenges of lugging a harp about to gigs, getting it insured, replacing broken strings? Not to mention the stress of live performance. Then there’s the hassle and expense of setting up and maintaining a website, doing your own publicity, recordings, photoshoots, etc. etc. etc. My girlfriend Roe Deer is very aggrieved about these things because, she says, you wouldn’t expect a plumber to come out and fix your taps for free. You wouldn’t make comments about how lucky he is to have that talent and what a pleasure it must be for him. You wouldn’t assume that plumbing is its own reward. You would pay him handsomely. Handsomely is what you should also pay somebody (i.e. her) for playing the harp.

  I agree with my girlfriend Roe Deer. Not so much about the money (I am not a money person) but about the value. Doctors and dentists minister to our physical needs. Prime ministers minister to our political needs. Plumbers minister unto taps. But harp-players (and indeed all musicians) minister unto something else. The something else is much deeper than the bits we can see, but far more important. In my opinion music ministers to the real person that hides inside the person-shell. In my opinion the real person inside the person-shell craves and needs music every day, otherwise the real person shrivels up into nothingness.

  This morning I woke up and the windows were dripping with condensation but the sun was powering through it. I pulled on my boots and jacket as quickly as I could and rushed outside. The air was glittery and scented with damp pine. The ground shimmered with dewdrops. Every blade of grass gleamed silky silver and every stone along the track shone like a diamond. I felt very rich to live on Exmoor. The birds were enjoying it as much as I was. So many tweetlings and twitterings! A buzzard, too, cruising above the clouds, casual as you like. The clouds today were white, glossy, freshly scrubbed and combed.

  Hills stretched out all around me, some decorated with skewed chequers of fields, some spotted with sheep, some wooded; pine patterns, oak patterns, beech patterns. Others rose up proudly ragged with gorse, heather and bracken, the colours of the moor.

  When I arrived back at the barn my eyes and lungs and soul were full of Exmoor. Ellie was just arriving at the same time. She clambered out of her car, wielding her big canvas shoulder bag and also a large-sized cake.
r />   We went in together. Ellie put the cake on the table.

  It was a brown cake, round, with thick squishy icing. She’d stuck three fir cones on the top. I thought this was a good decoration – much nicer than plastic penguins, which are what my sister Jo always sticks on a cake. If ever my sister Jo makes a cake, that is. Which is not often.

  I said to Ellie that this was a first for me. I had never tried fir-cone cake before. She laughed a big laugh in her slightly snorty way. ‘It’s not actually fir-cone-flavoured, it’s a chocolate cake,’ she told me. ‘I’ve just got it. It’s from the bakery in Porlock. I would have made one myself, but I … well, I ran out of time. I did add the fir cones myself though. They’re from the woods down in the valley.’

  I examined the fir cones admiringly.

  ‘I was careful to wash them in case of bugs,’ she said.

  I commended her for her wisdom. Bugs would do nothing to enhance either the flavour or the texture, I believed. I had eaten a bug only once in my life, because it had alighted on an egg-and-cress sandwich at precisely the wrong moment, i.e. a split second before the sandwich entered my mouth. The experience was not pleasant, either for the bug or me.

  ‘Cake!’ Ellie affirmed, rubbing her hands together. ‘I thought it would make a change from sandwiches.’

  ‘What’s wrong with sandwiches?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘But I like cake so much! And’ – she blew some sawdust off a chair, sat on it and looked up at me from under her eyelashes – ‘it’s a little celebration.’

  I asked what we were celebrating.

  ‘Can you guess?’ she said.

  I am not good at guessing but I thought I’d give it a go. I asked if we were celebrating the fact she potentially had a new harp teacher. One end of her mouth turned down a bit and she said, ‘No, not that.’