The Square

by Rosie Millard

  “Come on, mate.”

  “Bankers and their bonuses! They are all cunts, and you are the biggest one of them!” The piano has stopped playing. There is total silence in the jazz bar.

  “Arsehole!” is the man’s final volley. He is summarily ejected from the bar.

  There is an uneasy silence around the bar. The pianist starts playing again.

  Tracey picks up her Champagne flute and drains it.

  “Shall we go?” asks Alan.

  She nods silently, slides off the bar stool.

  “Does that sort of thing really happen often?” she says as they walk silently away from the bar.

  “Well, probably once or twice a year. It comes if you are regarded as In The Public Domain,” says Alan, proudly.

  They are weaving through the crowds on Shaftesbury Avenue, past people queueing outside the theatres, standing in the street waving for taxis, running for buses. Someone bumps into Tracey. Alan genteelly takes her arm, guides her up a small side street.

  “Well, that sort of put a hole in our evening. But it was an early evening drink. You probably have to be home by now, don’t you? What would you like to do? Do you think you ought to go home?”

  “Oh, Alan, I feel it’s not right to end our drink on such a nasty note. What would you like to do?” says Tracey. She feels very sorry for him.

  “I don’t know. But I do know actually, I need to be home pretty soon,” he says, snapping his wrist out and checking his watch.

  “Oh, why? Have you got someone coming round?” she says. “I mean, sorry, obviously you probably have things to do,” she smiles, remembering they were only ever meeting for an early evening drink.

  He pats his briefcase.

  “Crickets. Live. They’ll only survive another forty minutes or so in here.”

  “Oh my God!”

  “Don’t worry. The container is quite, quite sealed. But I need to get them home.”

  “Are you feeding them to… ”

  “The Munchkin. You betcha. Want to come and help me?”

  And so it is that Tracey, National Lottery winner, wife to Larry, mother to Belle and Grace, presence of light and laughter on the Square, goes back to Alan Makin’s flat to feed live crickets to a reptile.

  “Wow, this is swanky,” she says as she gets out of the cab, surveys the balconied apartment block with its Caryatids, semi-nude women made of stone bearing the portico of the building. She takes in the spectacular views across the Heath and down to the City.

  “Lubetkin,” murmurs Alan.

  “Oh,” says Tracey, who has never heard the name before and wonders what it means.

  “Based on Le Corbusier. Probably our most perfect example of international Modernism,” he says in the lift.

  “Our what?”

  “Britain’s. You know, Le Corbusier. The vertical city.”

  Thus thoroughly daunted by this introduction to pre-War Futurist architecture, Tracey humbly follows Alan as the lift doors open, seemingly straight into the hall of his apartment on the fourth floor of Highpoint Two.

  She walks into a double-height living room. It is white, immaculate, pictureless. Gentle lights quietly illuminate a room furnished with low sofas and curved tables. Two giant windows on either side of the room reveal immaculate landscaped gardens, sloping down. The lights of London spread out before her, almost at her feet. There is a tree inside the room, by the window. An indoor tree, planted in a shiny steel pot. There is no mess, no trace of soil or leaves on the white vinyl floor. Tracey does not quite know how to respond.

  “Alan, this is amazing.”

  He has his back to her, is sorting out something by the bar. Tracey glances across, sees an illuminated case beside him. The Munchkin. The reptile is sitting on his branch, as perfectly immobile as when she first encountered him all those weeks ago at Makin TV.

  “That’s it,” says Alan, almost to himself. He slides open a panel in the vitrine, expertly tips something into it, slides the panel shut at speed.

  The Munchkin blinks twice, is galvanised into action. Still squatting on his twig, he swivels his head, tongue lashes the desperately leaping crickets who are hopelessly trying to escape their certain fate, and crunches each in a matter of seconds.

  “I don’t think I can look,” says Tracey weakly.

  Alan comes up behind her with a glass of rosé and brings the wine across her body, gently brushing her breasts with his arm.

  “Don’t. Just look at London,” he murmurs.

  She takes the chilled wine, sips it, looks across the darkening Heath.

  “Berthold Lubetkin,” murmurs Alan Makin into her ear. “He did the penguin pool at London Zoo. Then he paid attention to us human beings. Rather well, don’t you think?”

  Tracey has no idea what or who he is talking about. She feels like she is standing in a museum. Or on the Moon.

  After a minute or two looking out of the window, Alan decides against telling Tracey that Lubetkin, disciple of Tatlin, was also architect of Finsbury Health Centre. He wanders off and casually sits on one of the immaculate sofas. It is decorated by a row of plumped cushions all arranged like diamonds along it. Adjacent to the sofa, is a low table on which rests a perfect assemblage of glossy magazines, all current editions, and a vase of peonies, all in bloom.

  Entranced by the united forces of wine, and perfect interior design, Tracey understands she is to join him beside this display. She knocks back the wine, deposits her glass on a mirrored plinth beside the indoor tree, and walks, slightly unsteadily, towards the sofa. She knows what will happen next. It is a play. That’s all it is. But the danger of it, the thrill of being in the moment, leads her forward. How dull life would be if she never experienced this moment, she thinks. As if he, Alan Makin, really did want to talk to her about makeup. What a fool. She should have had confidence in her first instinct. She realises she has started to sweat.

  Alan proceeds to suddenly, expertly and confidently unbutton her shirt, unclasp her bra and suck her nipples. The last cogent thought that speeds through Tracey’s mind as she lies back on the sofa and allows her skirt to be slid down towards the floor, is to wonder how many cleaners Alan employs, and whether they turn up every day. She decides, as he removes her underwear, that they definitely do.

  Chapter Twenty-Four Jane

  He realises that he actually finds her too thin. He can trace the bones of her back with a finger. Her nipples jut out from tiny breasts. He knows Harriet aches to look like this. He sees her agonies every day. Standing at the fridge, worrying about whether to risk mayonnaise. She longs to be thin. But this is not the desired shape for Jay. Jane is simply too thin.

  Still, he’s not going to make it spoil everything. He’s certainly not going to dump her. He doesn’t think he could, anyway. He is frightened about what it would do to her fragile, tense personality. And he loves the fact that she aches to have sex with him. She loves it. Any time, any place, anywhere. That is what really turns him on. It makes it hard to resist her. Knowing that she is always ready for it. Day or night. Morning or evening. Once they had sex on the way back from the school run. In the back of Jane’s Citroën. She had collected him after dropping George off and they had set to, in the car park of the shopping centre. On a picnic rug on the back seat. He enjoys the fact that she is always in a good mood after sex with him, too. Today is a perfect example of this.

  She arches her back, smiles at him from the wreckage of the hotel bed.

  “Have you ever slept with another woman?” he suddenly asks her.

  “Every man’s fantasy,” she retorts. “But no. Why do you ask?”

  “Just wondered. Any reason?”

  “Never had the opportunity. I’d quite like to have done, though. But I’m probably too old.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t know how to go about it. I mean I can hardly go to a lesbian pick up joint, could I? And I wouldn’t know the first thing about what to do with a woman in bed.”

 
; “It’s easy,” he says. “You just do what you like having done to you.”

  There is a pause.

  “I think it would be delicious,” she says. “You would just lick her tits like this,” he says, licking them.

  “And then slide your hand between her legs,” he continues.

  “Yes, but what about the fucking?” She is breathing quite hard now, pulling him on top of her again. God, she was good. Never satisfied. “That’s the bit I can’t quite renounce, you see.”

  It was true. She was unable to actually envisage ending her affair with Jay. She had always thought it was temporary, something she could dump at a whim. It started off in the summer. She originally put it down to a holiday romance. Then, she categorised it as something to keep her interested over Christmas. Then, she filed it under the title Twelve Month Fling. Now, she knew there was no reason to build in its obsolescence.

  It worked, that was the main thing. She couldn’t end it. Why should she?

  She walks home, swinging her arms happily, that familiar delicious ache in her groin.

  Although Jay had annoyed her, actually, between the action.

  “Do you think your husband fancies the au pair?” he had asked, after they had screwed again, after all that lesbian fantasy chat which had really turned her on. Yes, he had actually asked her that. Jane had explained about how Anya came over to play the Blüthner. She had laughed in his face, but now she considered it, it worried her. There was the piano playing, for a start. The girl was a marvel. Nobody could deny it.

  Then there was her height. That was pretty awe-inspiring.

  Furthermore, Anya had a sort of measured stillness about her which Jane could see might be magnetic. Sort of. If you overlooked the Eastern European accent, the inability to say V properly. And the fact she was an au pair, which was really only one notch above being an actual cleaning lady.

  She arrives home, throws her bag on the hall table and wanders downstairs into the kitchen, to find George standing in the middle of the room, eating a Müller Corner.

  “Hello darling,” she says to her offspring. “Please don’t snack between meals.”

  “Good day,” offers George. “Don’t disturb me at this moment. I am about to go and finish my animated film.”

  “For the Talent Show?”

  “The very same.”

  “Well, you’d better get a move on. It’s next week. And George, you’ll never guess.”

  “What?”

  “Alan Makin is presenting it. The whole thing.”

  “Oh my giddy aunt. I thought you were. Who is Alan Makin?”

  “Oh, never mind. He’s on TV sometimes.”

  George seems entirely unimpressed by this personnel change. He finishes his yogurt, licks the lid, positions the spoon in a glass and wanders out of the room. Jane hears his feet running upstairs.

  It is Thursday afternoon. At five o’clock, the door bell rings. It’s Anya, shyly smiling on the doorstep. It’s as if she has materialised out of Jane’s thoughts, thinks Jane nastily.

  “Oh, Jane. I, I mean Patrick said… I could come… ”

  “No problem,” says Jane shortly, suggesting that it is indeed the precise opposite. “Come in. You know where the piano is?”

  “Oh, yes, thank you.”

  Well I’m not bloody offering her a coffee, thinks Jane on her way to the kitchen.

  Anya walks into the music room and puts her manuscript on the Blüthner. She gazes around, takes in the perfect furnishings. The Toile de Jouy screen. The oil paintings. One picture is of a man who is wielding a rifle and a very dead mallard duck. He has the same choleric complexion as Patrick. She wonders if it is an ancestor.

  She pulls out the stool, sits down, plays her customary Bach prelude from the ‘48’, then rests her hands on the creamy keys.

  She looks at the manuscript. Beethoven. Piano sonata No. 14. In C sharp Minor; ‘quasi una Fantasia’ is the description. ‘A sonata, almost like a fantasy.’ She starts the piece. It is, of course, the ‘Moonlight Sonata’. As she starts, the lovely opening ascending triplets in the right hand in conjunction with the sonorous octaves in the left travel down into the granite boudoir which is Jane’s kitchen, and jolt through Jane’s entire body as if she has been electrocuted.

  Jane is downstairs, eating a biscuit. She allows herself one biscuit a week. This is her biscuit moment. And Anya is not adding to it with her fucking Beethoven. She is spoiling it. Jane feels like crying. But it is so beautiful, the liquid notes falling, the sustain pedal holding the whole beautiful melody in the air long after the keys have been pressed. And although she is trying to resist it, she cannot help but be transported by the music.

  The movement finishes and Anya moves onto the second, and the third sections of the Sonata, pieces whose complexity and speed leave the average piano student far behind and wander into the realm of the committed pianist.

  As Anya commences the Presto Agitato, the frantic third movement, Jane hears Patrick’s key in the door. Good, she thinks. He’s missed out on the bloody ‘Moonlight Sonata’ bit.

  Anya is bent over the piano, focusing furiously on the notes as they come rattling out of the instrument. Patrick pops his head round the door.

  “Anya! How marvellous!”

  The playing stops, the notes collide and tumble together, falling through the air and into silence.

  “Patrick, I hope this is alright.”

  “It’s marvellous. Just what I wanted. Do start again! I mean, pick up where I came in. Sorry.”

  “I’ll start from the beginning, it’s no problem. I needed to warm up a bit.”

  “Righty ho.” He backs out of the room, whistling.

  She turns several pages back, and recommences the piece with the Adagio Sostenuo, the famous Moonlight bit.

  The music ripples through the house. Patrick comes into the kitchen.

  “Jane. Isn’t this just terrific. My word! The ‘Moonlight Sonata’. Never knew someone who could play it!”

  “It’s not actually all that difficult.” She can’t help herself. “I mean, I’m not taking it away from Anya, but I knew someone in my form at school who could play this when we were about twelve. Gets harder. But this famous bit is a piece of cake.”

  “I’d like to hear George play it then,” retorts Patrick. “I think she’s great. And it’s just so nice to hear our piano being played by a real artist.”

  There is a pause as they listen to the playing. She has to ask him.

  “Do you fancy Anya, Patrick? I mean you seem very keen on her.”

  He looks at her, startled, a bun half way to his mouth.

  “Fancy her? No! Of course not.” He turns away, chewing mischievously. “Although she is rather severely gorgeous in a Slavic sort of way. Those cheekbones!”

  He considers the prospect. There is no point in hiding anything from Jane.

  “Well, I sort of do fancy her, I suppose. In an abstract way.”

  Even though she has just made love to another man that morning, still has traces of his semen dried on her thighs, the idea of Patrick fancying someone else infuriates her.

  “What? What the hell is an abstract way?”

  “Well, you know, if you weren’t here, and neither was anyone else, and we were in the Sahara desert together, I’d probably have a go.”

  “Have a go?” echoes Jane incredulously. “What the hell sort of language is that?”

  She looks at her husband of twenty years in a different way, actually looks at him from a different angle completely. She strips away the domesticated familiarity with which he has been so thickly veneered, sees him as a male predator on the vulnerable Eastern European au pair upstairs… no, it’s too ghastly.

  “God’s sake, Patrick,” she says. “We are not in the Sahara desert, thankfully.”

  “Well I like her coming here to play,” he says stoutly. “And as I am the one who is paying… ”

  “What?”

  He had failed to tell her this
bit of the arrangement.

  “You are what?”

  “Paying her. I said I’d give her twenty quid to come and tinkle the ivories. You know. Why not? Poor girl, she probably sends it back to her family in Warsaw or wherever she comes from.”

  “Whoosh.”

  “Whoosh? What are you talking about? What the hell is Whoosh?”

  “It’s where her family comes from, you dunderhead.”

  “Oh, sorry. Well, as I was saying. She probably sends it all back. She needs it. And we have enough to spare.”

  “Paying her. I cannot believe it,” says Jane. Upstairs, Anya is onto the Presto third movement. The notes cascade in a frothing fountain.

  Underneath the cadenza, Patrick dimly hears a tweeting sound. He glances up at the kitchen clock, a confection where the numbers go backwards and birdsong emanates from the device on the hour, every hour. At this point, a wren is busily chirping.

  A minute later Anya reaches the triumphant finish of the piece. There is complete silence in the house.

  Patrick stomps upstairs to the music room. He swings open the door. He is cross with his wife, and is determined to have his way.

  “That was terrific. Terrific. I wonder, er, Anya.”

  “What?” asks Anya.

  “Could you possibly play for us next Sunday at lunchtime? Jane’s parents are coming over. Might be rather nice. You know, showing off a bit! Give ’em a bit of Beethoven before the beef. Chopin before the chicken. Mozart before the… ” he breaks off, unable to fulfil the end of the rather strained pun.

  “… Mutton?” says Anya, whose family eat rather a lot of it in Poland.

  Patrick is delighted that she has joined in with the joke.

  “That’s it!” he says, fumbling in his corduroy trousers for a £20 note, and giving it to her with the confidence of a man who is used to paying people in petty cash.