The Square. It’s the list of all her pupils. So far, there are no purple lines through the names. Parents in the Square do not want to deny their children piano lessons. If Tracey prevails, she will be the first to do it. And her move might encourage others.
Roberta looks at the precious list of names. She thinks about Belle. Then she thinks about George. Boy George. Only a child, but with the singular cleverness and adult grace of the singleton.
After his lesson last week he had lingered by the Blüthner grand, standing there in his shorts, his finger tracing the bright walnut grain with its shapes of skulls and berries.
“Roberta.”
“What is it?” she had said. “You did well today. Really well.”
“I need your help.”
She was slightly alarmed. Her relationship with George was uncomplicated, and this she found relaxing. What was the boy going to confess to her now?
“You know there is to be a Talent Show here. Later on,” he eventually blurted out.
Her first thought was simply marvelling at how this community will stop at nothing to proclaim how amazing it is in every way. Her second thought was one of genuine curiosity.
“Oh, George, how fascinating. What will you show off to everyone?”
George sighed mournfully.
“Mother says I must play the piano.”
Of course.
“Well, that might not be so ghastly. What would you like to do?”
“Well, I am much better at building Lego, but if Mother says it, then the piano,” – he tapped Middle C with a small digit – “it must be.”
“Why don’t you do both?”
“What, build Lego to music? My dear Roberta, I don’t think so.”
“Yes, but, let’s think, I know, why not show a film? With Lego characters. You know, on a stop-frame animation. And then play a piano as accompaniment to it. You could have a screen up in the hall, or wherever the Talent Show will be.”
He gaped at her. She could see the idea take fire by the light in his face.
“Could I? Why, yes, I could,” he said, as if she wasn’t there. He was quite used to holding conversations with himself.
“It won’t be in a hall, but we could have a screen out in the park. Right above the piano. Roberta, thank you. I will go and start crafting the screenplay right away!”
She started packing up her bag, smiling to herself. He might not be an infant Mozart, but he had initiative, she’ll give him that.
“Righty-o. I’ll have a think about what you might play to go alongside. I assume you will have some form of keyboard with you?”
“Oh, certainly. I think Mamma is letting this old thing out for the night.”
A Blüthner? Outside? These people.
She stops musing about George. She calls Tracey. Before the call, she runs through the conversation in her mind, although she instinctively knows what she has to do. She must concoct a conversation so clever, so adroit, so full of acknowledgement of what the child has, what the child could have, that the parent will fear missing it. Furthermore, alongside this positive strand, she must also present a parallel sense of fear, a dark foreboding about what the child might be missing out on, the entire boundless and bountiful world of the piano repertoire, eternal and endlessly sustaining, a glorious future that Tracey, and more importantly Belle, can in no way even contemplate being part of once the appropriately named fall of the piano, in other words the lid, has been slammed down on it.
At the same time, she must subtly remind Tracey, the committed parent, of things that perhaps Roberta herself does not hold all that special, but she’s pretty sure Tracey does because every single parent on the Square does. Firstly, there is the glory, the parental pride in the prizes that might be forthcoming, prizes for her offspring, the Grades taken, the applause, perhaps even a medal, of the words of marvel hanging in the air from peers that Belle can indeed justify thanks to the complete mastery of E Flat Minor (harmonic and melodic) and some Chopin preludes.
Now, thanks to George, she also has a Talent Show to add to the cornucopia.
She must remind her of Belle’s Life Chances. Of her Personal Statements, pieces of writing to achieve a university place, in which commitment to an instrument – it doesn’t really matter which, (but piano is the top, surely, along with the violin) – is proof of superior brain power and discipline.
Roberta clearly has not emphasised this enough in her lessons so far with Belle. So, a three point plan is needed. These are the things she must highlight. The value to the child. The acclaim to the parent. The fragility of the future. These are the things that Roberta has to drum into Tracey’s perfectly coiffed head, in order to keep the precious booking, which is worth £60 a week to Roberta.
She rolls her shoulders. Maybe she should cut her rate. No. She can hardly get by with what she is currently earning, no matter how many leeks she plants.
Up until now, she has – foolishly, she now realises – thought that music was enough for the appetite of families in the Square, but it is not.
She picks the phone reciever up.
Chapter Eight George
Having ensured complete privacy by positioning the Do Not Disturb sign on the handle of his bedroom door, George pulls his mother’s bra out of the pocket of his hoodie and inspects it, turning it over in his hands. What a construction, he thinks. All those straps and hooks and hard metal bits, covered with frills in order to look soft. If you’re not wearing it, what could one do with it? He has no intention of giving it back to her. He assumes it’s hers anyway. Doesn’t know who else it could belong to.
He gets a pair of scissors from his desk. He wants to deconstruct it. Those pointed cups would look awesome in his Star Wars desert assemblage, quite honestly. They could be alongside the Pods and the Lunar Landing Craft. Actually, he thinks, breathing heavily, his mouth moving with the excitement, they would look like those sand dunes that C3P0 walks over at the beginning of… one of the films, he can’t remember which one, but his mind is alive with possibility. Anyway, playing the piano to a film showing his Lego pieces in action would be awesome, he knows it.
He picks up the scissors and prepares to liberate the cup from the strap of his mother’s underwear. It is harder than he thinks; he is not ready for the tough white plastic below the cup. How do ladies wear this sort of stuff? Doesn’t it hurt them?
After a few minutes of concentrated effort, he is rewarded with two separate moulded cones of coffee-coloured lace, supported by seams and curved pieces of white plastic. He tosses away the straps in a bin. George likes his room to be tidy.
He enjoys knowing where everything is in his room, like a pair of scissors or a protractor. So he can get right down to work with whatever is uppermost in his mind, be it a Wombles book, or building his Lego. Actually, scrap the Wombles book. He liked the first two, but felt that after that, the series ran out of steam. His father insisted on reading all seven to him, however, so he was forced to listen for practically the whole of the Autumn Term last year, but did so from politeness rather than actual interest. He was aware that this book, the Wombles, was something his father had ‘grown up with’ and so had to be experienced again. Parents were like that, George knew. Always keener on things they had known when they were young. Well, not always a bad thing. It worked with Lego, at least. Because both his father and mother had played with it, and knew it, and weren’t afraid of it, they were always okay about buying him more of the stuff. Whereas if it had been a new thing, he suspected they would have regarded it with suspicion, as they did with anything electronic.
He sighs, idly scratches his hair, positions Cup One beside his Droid Destroyer and looks at it. It sort of worked. If you could forget where it came from. Maybe if you built some sort of covering frame around it, to hold it in position, that might work. He’d attend to that later. He puts Cup Two in a drawer, replaces his scissors in the Deloitte pen holder (which he had been given by his father after a conference, along with a
bag, a pen and a baseball cap), and saunters downstairs.
As he reaches his parent’s room he wonders how many other bras his mother has in stock, as it were. He pushes open the door and walks in, inhaling the strange sensation of adult privacy which he found always lingered in the bedroom of a parent, anyone’s parent, but most of all, his.
He toys with opening his mother’s top drawer, running his fingers along it, but then sees the door of the ensuite bathroom is slightly ajar.
George loves going into his parents’ bathroom, because it it is frowned upon by his parents, and he is never allowed to go there. “You have your own bathroom, darling,” his mother would say to him. “That ought to be enough. Honestly! When I was young, I had to line up with my sister and we had to share a bath… ” and on and on she would go like that.
But here he is, suddenly, in the forbidden room. It’s exciting. George looks round, wondering which of the attractions he ought to experience first. First, he has a look at his father’s electric razor. Then, he weighs himself. The needle reads two stone six pounds. Is that a lot, or not enough? He has no idea. It’s fun, standing on the scales. I wonder how much I can make myself weigh, he thinks, jumping on them. The needle swings frantically to seven stone. It doesn’t appear to go right back to zero, however, so he gets off quickly and kicks the scales underneath a towel.
He looks at himself in the giant mirrored wall beside the bath, opens the mirrored door of the cabinet above the basin. Then he stands in the middle, between the two, and waves his arms, marvelling at how the dual reflections go back into a sort of corridor of infinity. He always does this. It’s a bit like being inside the Doctor Who title sequence.
After about five minutes, George remembers to examine the contents of the cabinet over the basin. As he did last time. And as last time, the cabinet seems to to contain a lot of very dull stuff such as Pepto-Bismol. And plasters, and athlete’s foot powder.
There is another cabinet, however, on the opposite wall, which George hopes might prove more fruitful. He crosses the room and swings it open. It it is crammed with devices and products for every facet of Jane’s complex beauty regimen. Eyelash curlers. Eyebrow dye. Bikini wax strips. Nose strips. Masks. And a lot of removers. Cuticle removers, hair removers, spot removers. Alongside removers, there are all sorts of creams. What is the difference between creme and cream, thinks George.
His mother certainly has a lot of both creams, and cremes. Looks like she has a special cream for every single part of her body. Face cream. Creme de Corps. Foot cream. Hand cream. Neck cream. Nail cream. Eyelid cream. Thrush cream. What can that mean, wonders George. Something about a bird, maybe.
He reaches in, sees something else in the cupboard. He pulls it out. It is a small pink battery driven device with two ears on it. He switches it on. It jumps around in his hand. Wasn’t his mother mad, having electronic toys in her bathroom? Wasn’t that dangerous? He had always been told it was dangerous to have electricity in a bathroom. He holds the toy, lingering over it, wondering why it quivers as it does.
He would quite like to keep it upstairs in his room, but something about its very pink, squidgy nature and unsettling suggestion of entertainment makes him think this is a private toy, or something medicinal perhaps, that his mother does not want to find by accident anywhere else in the house. He replaces it carefully and softly closes the cabinet.
He quickly uses the toilet, remembering to flush it. Forgetting to wash his hands, he tiptoes out of the ensuite bathroom and goes downstairs to answer the door bell, which he realises is ringing.
It’s Anya on the front doorstep. George looks up at her, smiling. “My mother is… ”
“… Not here?” says Anya.
“No. She had to go out for about two hours. She said I was not to answer the door. Oh, whoops.”
“George. If your mother says you are not to answer the door, try to remember that. Never mind. It’s only me. Now, you know your piano teacher Roberta? Who teaches you the piano.”
George bows in assent.
“I was wondering, if she could come over today?”
“Today? But my lesson isn’t until Friday. Plus I haven’t practised.”
“No, not for you. For Belle. Our piano is broken and Roberta is on her way over to our house, in order to give Belle her lesson. You know Belle, don’t you? Grace’s big sister. Would that be alright?”
George raises his eyebrows, as if shouldering the metaphorical weight of the household and all the decisions thereof.
“Should think so. What time?”
“In about half an hour.”
“Good. Mother will be back by then, I should think.”
He closes the door carefully and walks back into the house. He’s not sure how he feels about sharing his piano.
Chapter Nine Jane
It is so dangerous, but then danger is part of the allure.
“Is it the whole allure?” says Jay, lazily tracing his finger down her back. It is mottled and livid with red scratches.
She shivers with pleasure, rolls over and looks up at him.
“Of course not.”
At Jane’s house, Roberta is teaching Belle on the lovely Blüthner. But Jane doesn’t know this, because she and Jay have stopped meeting in each other’s houses. After the near miss in the hall, she has insisted on meeting for sex in hotels.
But it must be done in the proper, acknowledged way. Hotels. This is how the adulterous act. Booking a day room in a hotel. Several days beforehand. You can’t just turn up and ask for a room, it must be done in advance. Otherwise you might be mistaken for a prostitute. You have to ring up a day or two beforehand and say, with great authority,
‘I need a day room. I am travelling in from London, and I need to rest for a while.’ After you have done this once, you then just ring up the same hotel and say, with the same authority,
‘A day room, please.’
Does the hotel suspect? Probably. The hotel acknowledges she needs a day room. Jane pretends the hotel believes this need. The appurtenance of propriety to the necessity of the day room is crucial.
Although today, she acknowledged, was a bit more complicated than most. She had forgotten that George was going to be off on an Inset Day. She remembered, with a swoop of guilt laced with love, laced with guilt again, how he used to call them Insect Days. When she had found out that this term’s Insect/Inset Day clashed with the day she had pre-booked in the hotel, her day, the day for her and Jay, she had toyed with the idea of cancelling, but knew deep down that she would be unable to. She couldn’t bear to cancel her assignment for sex.
George would be alright on his own in the house for a few hours, she reasoned. He could be upstairs, playing with his Lego. Wasn’t that alright? She needed to see Jay. Needed to be with him, alone. Wasn’t it alright to put her needs, for once, above those of everyone else in the house? The pull of the appointment was greater than the presence of her own child.
She is addicted to her affair. She finds the falseness, the invented drama, and most of all the forbidden nature of it utterly intoxicating.
Running through town towards the day room, she prefers not to, doesn’t even need to think about why she is doing it. She is not going to think about George, left alone in the house. She is not going to analyse why she is running across town.
She knows the reasons better than she knows her own body. Having an affair is not part of the story, of her life story. It is frowned upon and disallowed. But it’s happening. She can’t help it. At these moments of transgression, even though she cannot admit to anyone, sometimes even to herself that she is doing it, even though the whole thing is but a dramatic image of a partnership, in spite of this all she feels alive, that she is really living. It is a paradox, she thinks. She doesn’t want to really acknowledge she is doing it, but the fact of doing it makes her feel more real than everyday life with Patrick.
Sometimes a man will wolf whistle at her. She will turn and smile at him. You don’t know
where I am going, she thinks. Or maybe he does. Perhaps he’s whistling because of unseen pheremones, or hormones, or whatever they are. When she is heading towards Jay she feels as if there’s a great big neon sign above her head reading I Am About To Have Spectacular Sex.
La la la. Ha ha ha. As she crosses the road in front of Argos, she imagines the meeting in the hotel lobby, the kissing in the hotel lift, the running along the hotel corridor towards the hotel bedroom, the tearing of each other’s clothes. The direct physicality, no prologue. She’s not even there but she is already starting to sweat with excitement, envisaging the discarded clothes, how they heap up, the shoes, kicked anyhow along the floor. Somehow the fact they start taking their clothes off in a hotel corridor helps.
The hotel corridor is crucial. The wholly corporate nature of the scene is important because it makes it seem more unreal. It’s as if they are in a play. Even though it makes her feel alive.
The hotel is good. When she is indulging in the hall of her house, kissing Jay beside the clutter of George’s shoes, allowing her breasts to be touched beside a picture of Saint Paul de Vence which her mother had given them as a wedding present, it seems much more immoral. There is too much of the quotidian around her. It makes her feel suffocated, these reminders of her parallel duties, and it provokes unwanted feelings of guilt.
Jane feels guilty, of course, but it annoys her. She doesn’t ‘do’ guilt. There is no guilt in a corporate hotel whose corridors are decorated with neutral pastel prints lining the walls in exactly the same point on each floor, and fire extinguishers at the corners, and perhaps a vending machine, and tall silver ashtrays yet to be made redundant, squatting in those little round points in the middle where people get in the lift. The whole thing is like a stage set.
Today, it’s even more theatrical than ever.
“I dare you,” says Jay, amused, on the phone before they meet.
“What?”
“I dare you… to turn up this afternoon with nothing on.”
The Square Page 7