Aldous stood up for Juliette, putting her side to Colette later.
‘She’s been living as a married woman in her own place for five years. She wants to preserve her independence. Without the lock she’s just our daughter living back home again. With the lock she’s an independent woman renting a room in a house that happens to belong to her parents.’
‘I still don’t like it. That room used to be ours. It was where Julian slept as a baby. It’s like a bit of the house has been taken away.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Aldous, rummaging in his pocket and producing a little brass Yale key, as shiny as new money, ‘I made it a condition that I have a spare key, in case there’s a fire or something.’
Colette had only just got used to passing the door with the little round lock fitted, when she noticed Juliette and Boris staggering in the front door with huge cans of Dulux non-drip emulsion in their hands.
‘You’re not going to decorate the room are you?’
‘Of course I am, mother.’
‘But you haven’t even been there a week. Why do you have to do everything so fast?’
‘Do you think I can sleep easily when I’m being stared at by a picture of Janus nearly naked, painted by my ex-husband?’
‘She’s decorating Janus’s room,’ she said to Aldous a little while later.
‘Good. That’ll save us the trouble.’
‘But – shouldn’t we have a say in it? It’s our room.’
‘She’s paying rent for it. Where’s the beef?’
When Julian, egged on by Myra, decided to play the piano and walked into the music room, he felt like Howard Carter breaking the final seal that opened onto treasures. But these were junk treasures. Crumbling old books, crusty pairs of shoes, hillwalking boots still caked in mud. Janus hadn’t walked over hills in ten years. The room was given a faintly rank odour by the presence of these things. Pornographic magazines were clumsily stacked beneath the piano.
‘Why doesn’t your Mum throw these away?’ said Myra.
‘In case they come in useful,’ said Julian, sitting nervously at the piano. He hadn’t sat here for many years. The last time had been for one of Janus’s drunken tutorials, which he gave occasionally, mainly to express his disgust at the lack of musical knowledge in his young sibling. There was a piece open on the music rest. It was Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Julian knew the names of the notes on the musical stave, and, after some thought, could remember where middle C was on the keyboard. In theory it seemed a simple task. Merely put one’s fingers onto the notes described by the notation, and hit them in the right order. The opening Promenade was teasingly inviting, a single line of melody, one note at a time. It took Julian only a few minutes to play those opening bars, and he was delighted by the fact that he recognized the music. The next bar consisted of chords, however, and proved more difficult, though Julian managed it, at a hundredth, perhaps, of the required speed. He made a diagram on paper of the notes on the keyboard so that he could stop going through the alphabet every time he wanted to find a note. After a day’s practice he felt he could give an almost passable performance of those opening bars, the chords as well.
In the kitchen, the sound of the piano disturbed Colette. Its hesitant, clumsy slowness, the way Julian had to try two or three times to get a single chord right. In her memory Janus had never played like that, even in the earliest days of his learning. He had begun with the simplest pieces, of course, but they had always been confidently played, right from the beginning. Even when he played wrong notes one almost didn’t notice them. Julian’s playing was a parody of that. It was as though the old piano had been lobotomized, and was reduced to a stuttering, slurring fool.
For a week Julian hammered away at the first Promenade and then, having mastered it to his satisfaction, moved on to Gnomus. The night before he left for Gravesend, he said to his mother, ‘Mum. I’ve decided I want to be a musician. I don’t want to be a sailor any more. I want to be a pianist.’
Had Julian said this a few months before, Colette would have been delighted. Instead she now found herself irritated by her youngest’s fickleness.
‘Believe me, Julian, you will make a much better sailor than you will a pianist.’
She had come up to his room while he was packing. She was surprised by the tidiness of the room, which she rarely visited. Aldous had redecorated it a few years previously, giving Julian the choice of colours. At first he’d enthusiastically insisted on black. He’d wanted black everything – walls, ceiling, floor, bedclothes . . . Aldous had refused, to Julian’s disappointment, who seemed to expect his father to share his vision. Aldous had to patiently explain that in an entirely black room, light would never get much beyond its own bulb. It would sink into the walls never to return. This didn’t seem to put Julian off, but eventually they reached a compromise. Julian had his room papered with dark purple wallpaper in rigid, geometrical designs. A dark blue carpet on the floor. Purple curtains. The hovel, apparently, of a manic-depressive, though Julian had never seemed happier.
‘Aren’t you sad that you’re leaving home?’ Colette asked her son.
‘No,’ said Julian. He had his framed rucksack on the bed and was loading it with books.
‘That’s a bit hurtful, Julian . . .’
‘You want me to be sad? You want me to be unhappy?’
‘No . . .’ Colette felt unable to explain her feelings. Julian wouldn’t have understood.
‘Do you really think you should take all those books? What have you got in there?’ She peered into the rucksack. ‘You seem to have the complete works of Joseph Conrad. It’ll weigh a ton . . .’
‘I don’t have to carry it far . . .’
‘And what’s all that scrap paper? You won’t have to do much writing will you . . .’
‘That’s my novel,’ said Julian, quickly covering up the wad of paper that was leaking from the rucksack.
‘Novel? Is it a new one? You haven’t given me anything to read for ages. What’s it about?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Julian, as though the question had been a stupid one.
‘Do you think it’s safe to take it, I mean it might get lost, it looks like a lot of work there . . .’
‘Conrad lost his first novel. He had to rewrite it from memory. This is coming with me to China . . .’
Colette was surprised at how tearful she felt when Aldous drove Julian to the station the next day, though she didn’t actually weep. But the house was changing too fast for his absence to be noticeable for long.
That evening she and Aldous were invited to Juliette’s room for a meal. An elaborate piece of theatre, because the meal had to be cooked in the kitchen, and Aldous and Colette were confined to the lounge so as not to spoil the surprise. At eight o’clock they went upstairs and knocked on Juliette’s door with a bottle of wine in their hands. Boris answered and allowed them into the house within a house that was Janus’s old room. Colette was disorientated. She recognized nothing of Janus’s room. Even the structure of walls, ceiling and floor seemed to have altered. His single bed had gone, replaced by the pale grey sofa bed from Boris’s flat, on which Aldous and Colette had slept during their weeks of exile from Fernlight Avenue.
The walls had changed from blue to green and were covered in framed pictures. The bare bulb was now dressed in an enormous spherical lamp shade that looked as though it was made of paper. The furniture had been painted. A floor level lamp created a warm, homely glow and soaring shadows. A piece of vegetation Juliette called a rubber plant grew lusciously from a pot on the bureau. The oddest difference was in the floor. Previously it had echoed, but now it was silent, gagged by a thick, light brown carpet.
Colette realized that her daughter had not got rid of Janus in order to take his room, but rather had moved into his room in order that he should not try to move back.
‘You’ll have to decide what to do with the music room next,’ said Juliette, once they’d sat down in front of the
lasagne that Juliette had made.
‘What do you mean?’ said Colette.
‘You can hardly get in there at the moment it’s so full up with stuff. It could be such a lovely room. The trouble is with the piano in there, and all Janus’s things, there isn’t room for much else.’
‘I’m not getting rid of the piano,’ said Colette.
‘But with nobody to play it . . .’
‘Me and daddy play it, thank you . . . And Julian has started learning it.’
‘But you could get yourselves a little upright,’ said Boris, trying to be helpful.
‘A little upright?’ said Colette in disgust, ‘that’s like asking the owner of a borzoi to swap it for a poodle . . .’
The changes kept coming. One morning Colette was going through her booty from Angad’s, the goods she still felt impelled to take. She spread them out on the kitchen table, as was her habit, and then was totting-up on a sheet of paper the total cost of the things she’d stolen – shrimp paste thirty-five pence, Sparkling Spring fifty-two pence, a roll of Sellotape fifteen pence – when she was aware that the dark-haired female anthropologist, James’s girlfriend, had passed by her into the room and was making tea at the stove.
James had always been very secretive about his girlfriend, and had tended to smuggle her in and out of the house, which made Colette feel she was the proprietor of a sleazy seaside guesthouse. The girl, whom Colette called ‘The Anthropologist’, but who was in fact called Marilyn, was making herself a cup of tea using leaves from her own packet. She sat at the table where Colette’s stolen goods were displayed, and drank.
Colette was interested in her tea, which seemed to be purple.
‘You’re not studying us, are you?’ said Colette, after several minutes of awkward silence.
‘Studying you?’
‘Yes. You’re an anthropologist, aren’t you? Don’t they study people?’
‘Yes.’
‘I should warn you, James’s girlfriends tend to come unstuck when they start trying to delve. He was going out with a psychology student once. She tried psychoanalyzing us all. She didn’t say as much, but that was what she was up to. James should have warned her. I humoured her, but then she tried it on Janus, that’s James’s older brother, and the poor girl ran from the house. We never saw her again.’
‘Are you trying to frighten me?’
‘Frighten you? No, why, is that the effect?’
‘James has told me all about Janus,’ she said, ‘I think it’s a very sad story. Someone so gifted failing so badly. I admire your bravery, not many mothers could do that to their own children.’
‘Do what?’
‘Have them sent to prison.’
‘Is that what James told you, that I had him put in prison?’
For the first time the anthropologist’s calm, assured demeanour slipped. Colette had paused in her work of putting her stolen goods in the larder, rearranging the already overstocked shelves to make room for them, and it was perhaps this sudden bearing down of her attention on the seated anthropologist that caused her unease.
‘No, he didn’t say that, but that’s all part . . . I mean, he’s in prison anyway, but you would have – if he’d broken his eviction rules – wouldn’t you?’
Colette gave the woman, whose face was hidden partly by hair and partly by the mug of tea she was holding protectively to her lips, a long glare, which did its job of tightening even further the knots of her faux pas.
‘Do anthropologists ever study their own countries?’ she asked sternly.
‘A bit.’
‘Do anthropologists brought up in the African bush ever come and study life in somewhere like London?’
‘Not much. Anthropologists raised in the African bush will tend to study the African bush.’
‘Isn’t that a bit stupid?’
‘Not really. Anthropology has always been about the West looking towards other cultures. If someone raised in the African bush has studied anthropology, they’ve become westernized to a degree, which means they’re part of this Western discourse of self and other . . .’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Colette, ‘so you make everyone see the world from your point of view. Is that the idea?’
‘No, on the contrary.’ The anthropologist, having reached securer ground, lowered her tea, revealing three-quarters of her face, which Colette could see was pretty, despite a certain puffiness around the eyes, which had the slow, moist blink of a tortoise. ‘We’re trying to make the West see the world from other points of view. That’s why we’re not really interested in places like this . . . I mean this country. This place. We’re only interested in other places . . .’
A month after his departure, Julian returned for a weekend at Fernlight Avenue. Colette was astounded by the change such a brief time away had wrought. She hardly recognized her son. It was partly to do with the uniform he was wearing, the dark black trousers and light blue shirt with silver epaulettes.
It took her a long time to get used to his voice, which seemed to have deepened and become louder. He’d been so quietly spoken before. Now he seemed to be bellowing around the house.
‘Why are you shouting all the time?’ Colette asked after their early conversation in which Julian had filled everyone in on his activities. He’d spent most of the last four weeks bobbing up and down the lower reaches of the Thames playing at captaining little boats. In the last week he’d had experience of handling a small pilot ship.
‘Ships are noisy places,’ Julian yelled at his mother across the kitchen, ‘you have to talk like this just to make yourself heard, sometimes you have to use a megaphone . . .’
‘I shouldn’t think you’d need to,’ said Colette, her hands over her ears.
That evening Julian spent a long time at the piano, his fingers staggering through the first Promenade. He said that there was a grand piano, a Steinway, at the college, and that he’d been practising there.
Myra arrived in the evening and everyone went to The Volunteer to celebrate Julian’s first month away from home.
Julian visited nearly every other weekend after that. A quiet, rich Christmas followed, the most peaceful Colette could remember. Suddenly everyone in the house was moneyed. Julian had money from his Sealink sponsorship, Juliette was now getting a grown-up wage from the Finchley Mercury where she’d quickly progressed to reporter, even James was getting money from somewhere or other. It meant that the presents round the Christmas tree nearly filled the room, heaped like a coastal defence. Their unwrapping took the whole afternoon, and the paper that had sat so smartly around the cubes and cylinders of the presents flooded the room in its torn, unwrapped dishevelment. Aldous, who spent the afternoon in his red armchair, did, at one point, actually vanish beneath wrapping paper, his hand rising feebly, Canute-like, against its tide.
‘Just what I wanted,’ said Julian the sailor, unwrapping The 1979 Beano Book, while drinking a glass of Madeira.
That Christmas afternoon Colette felt was the happiest of her entire life. Myra came over from Enfield Highway to spend the rest of the day at Fernlight Avenue, Juliette and Boris were around for the whole day, even the anthropologist joined in the occasion, and although she might, on the quiet, have been analyzing the day in terms of kinship and ritual, it didn’t stop her pulling a cracker with Colette, and a wishbone with James, and even wearing a paper crown. They all wore crowns that afternoon. There wasn’t enough space at the table for them all, not even with both its leaves extended. The drunkenness of the evening was pleasant and sociable. They played games in the front room, mainly charades. Colette couldn’t remember playing games like this before (it had been Boris’s idea), even when the children had been little. Nor could she remember laughing quite so much. Aldous trying to mime Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday. (‘The French Connection?’ Marilyn had said).
Only once or twice did Colette allow herself to remember Janus, and how he might be spending his Christmas. During the dinner she considered propos
ing a toast in his honour. She just wanted everyone to think about him, for a moment. But, looking at the happy faces around the table, she couldn’t bring herself even to mention his name. She might have felt saddened that he seemed to have been forgotten so thoroughly, but the sensation was lost in the warm tide of laughter that filled the house that day. Everyone was laughing. She hadn’t known laughter like it before. Laughter that hurt. That deafened.
23
In January Colette sent a birthday card to Brixton Prison. But Janus had already been released. He phoned her a few days later. Colette didn’t recognize the voice at first.
‘Hallo, how are you?’
‘Who is it?’
‘Janus.’
She felt terrible for having had to ask, but she had never heard Janus on a telephone before.
‘Janus. How are you?’
‘I’m okay,’ he said.
There was a flatness to the voice, a coldness.
‘Where are you? Are you out of prison?’
‘I was released last week.’
‘Where are you staying?’
‘I’ve been put in a probationer’s hostel in Hackney.’
‘Janus, are you okay?’
‘Yes, I’ve said.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Doing?’
‘Yes, have you got a job? Are you looking for a job?’
‘Yes, I’ve got a job . . .’
‘What sort of job?’
‘It’s just a job. Listen, can’t we talk properly? I can’t really tell you all this over the phone. Can we meet somewhere?’ Filling a pause left by Colette, Janus went on quickly, ‘Don’t worry. I’m not coming round. My probation officer has made it all very clear to me. I can’t go within half a mile of the house and I’m not going to. But I don’t want you to come down here, it’s not really very nice, so can we meet somewhere on neutral ground?’
‘Yes, of course, Janus. Where . . . ?’
‘How about the café in Brimstone Park? I can meet you there on Saturday. I work the rest of the week. Can I meet you there on Saturday at one o’clock?’
I’ll Go To Bed At Noon Page 39