‘Last week the toxic sister uttered the word “probate”,’ Caroline says. ‘She threw it out over the phone. Ought I to be worried, I wonder? Ought I to be shaking in my shoes?’
‘Ach,’ Herman says. ‘Please. It’s nonsense. You can talk to my solicitor. That’s my company solicitor. We’ve got these guys in London. They’re the best. It’s all no problem.’ Then he says, ‘It’s a great place, London. I always love to visit there.’ Oh, Perfidious Albion, but then isn’t history sometimes ‘best forgotten’? His company, he says, keeps a flat there, in Canary Wharf. ‘I’d love for you to make use of it,’ he says.
This is not an offer he has ever made to Hattie, who doesn’t know of the flat’s existence, but as he says it he realises that, Christ Almighty, there is no way that this woman is ever going there without him. No way is she going to be walking back into her old life. It’s just not on. He’s not going to let it happen. Not this great-fuck, class-act Ozzie blonde. She with the longest legs and the spot-on fabulous clothes. And brainy. And sparky. Shit! Like nobody’s business. Not like poor old Hattie, his china-shepherdess wife.
Herman has not been feeling too great about himself with regard to the china shepherdess, who, over recent years, has become to him more and more of a turn-off. He doesn’t like what her presence is doing to him; has even noticed himself, on occasion, becoming a shade sadistic, but then it’s as if she’s inviting it. Like the way he effected that takeover of the one-time servants’ quarters. Project Studio. But he couldn’t stomach that way she kept on calling it ‘the cottage’. Just the thought of her messing up that promising, austere space; filling it full of all her old-lady clutter and chintz. It’s enough already that, of all the rooms in this fabulous house that he’s so admirably remodelled, she chooses to work in the turret, just as if she was Rapunzel, or as if she was yearning to spend her life inside one of those little Beatrix Potter books that she’s got in first editions. And where, just by the way, has the woman got to right now; now that time is so strangely standing still; blessing him with this benign and lovely vacuum, into which the fabulous Ozzie Wonder Woman has walked?
‘You hungry?’ Herman says suddenly, because he’s always had a healthy appetite and it’s come round to that time of day when he’d normally be throwing the china shepherdess out of the kitchen for fear of having her embark on something to do with mince. Christ, is it any wonder that Cat goes off her food? ‘Pasta?’ he says. ‘Linguini?’
And that’s when they hear the scream; a loud, non-stop screaming that rises above the shrill hum of the crickets; a sound that Herman recognises as the voice of his younger daughter. He vaults the veranda in one bound and Caroline is not slow to follow. One behind the other, they run like the wind across the grass, the tiny pinprick lawn lights clicking on as they go. They streak down the length of the garden towards the studio, from whence the sound comes. And little silver flowers of light are blooming where they tread.
Chapter Nine
Eight People
Jack hears the scream as he returns from another long day in the drama department; a day on which, as with all his days here, he feels himself to be uncomfortably alien; a feeling which is all the more intense for the fact that he is back in the place where he was born. ‘One day at a time,’ he says to himself each morning, in the lovely private haven of the studio, where he lingers as long as he can over a second espresso and a small slice of panettone; a thing that he finds to buy – thank God – in the local shopping centre.
Jack doesn’t ‘do’ emotion and yet to his annoyance he continues to find himself unsettled. Being back is difficult, even, at times, painful. It conjures occasional thoughts of his mother and his grandmother, both of whom cause him poisoning rushes of loathing where he strives to feel indifference. And the predominant local accent – that white-person accent – brings goosebumps to his skin, the more so because it is the very same accent in which he himself, many years earlier, had addressed the local shopkeepers. They were always needled by it; he, the uppity brown boy who talked like a white boy. So let us wind him up; take him down. Let us refuse to give him his change when he buys a bar of chocolate. Let us claim not to have in stock those much-favoured honeycomb sweets that Jack could very well see for himself, winking at him from behind the counter. Let us claim that we cannot sell him the aspirins that his mother has dispatched him to buy.
Right now, largely thanks to his grandmother’s village, he is made equally uncomfortable by the local Zulu predominance. Unlike Ida and Bernie Silver, Jack was never in his youth disturbed by the existence of the disadvantaged; merely by the occasions on which he’d been made to feel he was one of them by the accident of his pigmentation. So he feels himself strange here; always strange.
He casts his mind back over his own sixteen-year-old self; that person who had walked so easily out of his familiar life and stepped into another. He runs his mind over that exhilarating experience; the pillion ride through Mozambique; then crossing the Rovuma River into Tanzania. ‘Welcome to our country.’ The three nights and days he’d spent on a beach in Dar es Salaam; the frisson of elation as he’d fallen in line at the airport behind that man who was carrying a kora. Then the square, plastic in-flight plates and the bright little blue-painted bus that had conveyed him, via the university campus and the Plateau, from the Airport Léopold Sédar Sénghor to the Palais de Justice in the centre of Dakar. He remembers how his spirit danced in the air around his head as he walked the streets on that first day; as he took in the colour and the sound, the smell, the fabulous urban Frenchness of it. Then it was all about a richness and strangeness of which he so easily became a part. Now it has all to do with an alienating and somewhat unpleasant familiarity.
Jack remembers those years in Dakar as half a decade of heaven; years that had to do with adventure and fulfilment, where the present has to do with capitulation and compromise. Then he had only to billet himself over the first three nights in the cheapest brothel-type hotel and step out, his backpack worn lightly over his shoulder, to slake his thirst on hibiscus juice and to choose between the seductive plates of available roadside food. Lebanese or North African? Dainty meat-and-onion pies or perfumy fish and rice? Spicy tomato-and-okra stew lying on a bed of rice? Everyone around him was drinking a beer called Flag.
And into that intoxicating moment of remaking himself, teenage Jack had come to a decision. He would never again consume the flesh of animals; only fish and eggs. And, thanks again to that rural sojourn with his grandmother, he had long ago resolved not to touch the products of fermented milk or millet. So Jack walked past the little meat-and-onion pies. He subsisted, cheaply and well, on suppers of fish and rice and on breakfasts of French bread and butter. He alternated hibiscus juice with a knock-out strong sweet tea.
‘Here am I,’ he said to himself, on that first day. ‘A born-again vegetarian Zulu with a fake French passport and a pocket full of dollars.’ The idea made him high. In jubilation he walked the gracious radiating avenues, the looping giddy loveliness of the city’s cliff-top streets; walked tall, past the pink stucco houses of the affluent – and Jack, at sixteen, was by any standards tall, even among the statuesque local Wolofs.
‘ “My mother,” ’ he murmured, doing a little skip, patting that open-sesame passport which he carried in his inside pocket. ‘ “My mother, she is descendue from l’aristocratie des Wolof Kingdoms of Jolof.” ’
Within the week Jack had found himself a tiny room at the back of a baker’s shop and, while keeping himself well away from the British Senegalese Institute, he had managed to find himself employment by perusing news sheets and notices in the more salubrious retail outlets and hotel foyers. He arranged to give one-to-one English lessons in a couple of those very same stucco houses that he had so enjoyed strolling past. In addition, for two full days a week, he had found himself a job selling designer shirts in a clothing outlet for men. By the end of his fourth week Jack was spending his evenings working on French-to-English translations. H
e translated programmes for a local dance company and for an information sheet aimed at English-speaking tourists. He also did the odd current-affairs piece for a local journalist.
Having no problem with stepping over homeless beggars, Jack was not bothered by the city’s inequalities. He was indifferent to local and national politics, to riots or rigged elections, to whomsoever might, or might not, have been currently languishing in jail. He read the Paris-based weeklies over his lovely breakfasts of pain au beurre and café au lait. He played the occasional game of chess in a favourite café. From time to time, he treated himself to newly published paperbacks, which he bought in the good French bookshop. He began to take lessons in Senegalese dance and was drawn at weekends to the music clubs that sometimes went on all night; venues in which even Jack – aloof, urbane and self-contained Jack – found that he had to pinch himself in order to avoid disbelief that, every Saturday night, Youssou N’Dour was performing live. On the whole, he avoided all popular pursuits of the sweaty-multitude kind; anything that had to do with wrestling, canoe racing, pilgrimages and fêtes. Yet he was enchanted by the indigenous cinema and theatre; also by the ballet and the streets of rickety art workshops – because Jack had no problem with popular culture once it had been transfigured via the lens of the intellect.
It was only after he had met Eduardo that he went to his first football match and visited the one-time slave island of Gorée to watch the lantern processions. Together, they attended the celebration of an African High Mass. They visited an island full of birds. They spent a day in a nature reserve, along with the two small boys. Most frequently, Jack’s engagements with Eduardo had to do with visiting restaurants; beautiful expensive restaurants in which Eduardo always paid. Eduardo, after all, had become his patron.
The men met one Sunday as Jack sat alone beside a pink lake on a beach made of bleached white shells. He was, once again, reading Josh’s paperback Treasure Island. Eduardo, a widower with two small sons, was a Milanese art dealer with an interest in West African art and a house on the Corniche d’Est in which he liked to spend three months a year. This way he could avoid the North Italian winters while keeping his eye out for local talent. The trio were a merry party who had seated themselves close by. The time was almost two o’clock and Jack was beginning to feel hungry, yet he lingered because he was enjoying the sound of the Italian language, bouncing between man and boys as they unpacked their picnic lunch.
In spite of himself, Jack was quite unable to stop his own curious sidelong glances.
‘We disturb your peace?’ Eduardo said.
‘No,’ Jack said.
‘You are English?’ Eduardo said and he smiled. Then he said, ‘Your book.’
‘Ah,’ Jack said. ‘No. Mais j’étais mis en pension anglaise.’
The older boy was looking sideways at Jack’s book.
‘Tree-ah-soor-ay Iss-lund,’ he read out.
‘Bastiano’s favourite,’ Eduardo said.
Jack smiled.
‘Mine too,’ he said. He put down the book and began to pull on his T-shirt, making as if to leave.
‘Please,’ Eduardo said. ‘One stays because the water – it goes to change from rose to purple.’ Then he said, ‘You have eaten?’ He proffered food and wine, which had emerged from a pretty old Bakelite picnic hamper on to a red-and-white checked cloth.
Eduardo was urbane, cultivated and rich. He was everything Jack found alluring, especially in his courteous restraint. Eduardo enjoyed music and the arts, and he quickly discovered that this aesthetically pleasing and courteous young man was charming and well-read, spoke fluent French and English, knew maths and history, could draw and paint, was conversant with the current state of theatre and the arts, and furthermore – thanks to Jack’s early playtime experience in the Aladdin’s Cave of Josh Silver’s bedroom – he had, for all his unusual rectitude, an unexpected facility with young children. Yet the young man lived hand to mouth, in a low-life part of town. He rented sleeping space in a storeroom behind a baker’s shop and he sold shirts two days a week. The boy was an orphan; father a French intellectual, long deceased; mother likewise, a high-born local Wolof. He had clearly fallen on hard times; a not unfamiliar African story.
Eduardo’s sons, aged five and six, would soon be in need of a private tutor – that was if their father was to continue his habit of spending three months abroad. And so it was that, by the end of the afternoon, once the lake had indeed turned to purple, Jack had agreed to give the family English lessons and, that same evening, once Eduardo had put his sons to bed and left them in the care of his housekeeper, he treated Jack to the first of many fine dinners in a local fish restaurant.
It sat on a wooden pier and was entirely surrounded by water. Jack drank champagne for the first time in his life and he savoured a fillet of sea bass with a plate of miniature vegetables. He followed this with a heavenly tarte tatin, made with caramelised pears. By the time he was sipping a small glass of Barsac, Jack had surprised himself by agreeing to a three-month spell as part-time, live-in tutor to Bastiano and Vincenzo.
The inside of Eduardo’s house was beautiful beyond imagining and, though Jack had never been comfortable with yielding up any part of his careful separateness, he understood that Eduardo was sensitive to this, being himself both fastidious and private; all the more so for having been quite recently bereaved.
Jack duly brought to his new job some of the magic of that equivalent time in his own early life – his life before the fall – a time that had had to do with Josh’s Scuffy the Tugboat and Orlando the Marmalade Cat; with scissors and glue and the clapping of hands to the sound of an electric keyboard; with a painted cardboard post box on the back veranda of the Silvers’ house and with all those reams of scrap paper and Sellotape; that abundance of rubber bands and paper-clips that emerged from the drawers of a big silver desk with cut-glass, pear-drop handles; a desk that was his own, if he should ever find himself in a position to claim it. ‘This desk is a present from Bernard Silver to Sipho Jack Maseko. To await collection. He may be quite some time.’
For his part, Eduardo was not only grateful to Jack but also enjoyed his company, given that his young employee was naturally sensitive in keeping his distance; was never invasive; never pried. Jack – wonderful, thoughtful young Jack – was soon more like a favourite nephew, or an obliging, older stepson; a patently gifted and well-read young man, who, through poverty, through his orphan status, had been cruelly denied opportunity. Eduardo was astonished to learn that Jack had had no formal education beyond the age of sixteen, had not so much as completed the Bacc and, as the three months drew to a close, he made Jack a proposition.
‘Giacomo,’ he said, using a form of the young man’s name that both of them occasionally enjoyed. They conversed quite often in Italian these days, which Jack had been picking up apace.
‘Permesso –’
He suggested that Jack return with the family to Milan, where, within one year, he could accomplish the Baccalaureate along with perfecting his Italian via intensive private lessons. Then he might wish to enter the university – perhaps a literature course at IULM? In the winter months he would accompany the family to Senegal and resume his part-time tutoring duties. While in Italy, the boys would be in school. Naturally, Eduardo said, he would house and fund his protégé.
‘You are family now,’ he said.
The two small boys were content with the arrangement and Jack, still relishing the idea of his isolation, was equally inclined to relish the idea of a great first-world city, for what he knew it would have to offer. And so it was that, just in time for his twenty-first birthday – for which occasion Eduardo bought him the pistachio-green Vespa – Jack was right on track to become exactly what Hattie, on first meeting, took him to be: a bourgeois first-world Euro child; a person of sweet privilege; a Milanese intellectual who had come to embrace the de Chirico paintings of the CIMAC as his familiar friends; who never tired of the Scala Theatre Museum; a talented graduate
whose excellent long essay on the early works of Dario Fo was included for publication in a collection of papers to be edited by his tutor.
Then, suddenly, on two counts, Jack saw that he could hit the buffers. Trouble never comes by halves. It had, over the years, been a relief to him that Jacques Moreau, Miss Lundy’s dead French poet, had, for all his youthful arrogance, turned out to be unheard of outside that small Parisian poetry-reading circle from which the French teacher had plucked him. But actually to publish under a dead man’s name? Jack’s solution, after giving the matter much thought, was to approach his kindly benefactor and suggest that, in recognition of Eduardo’s generosity, he would very much like to use the family surname when it came to publication. For his professional life – if he should succeed in having such, Jack said with a modest smile – he would take it as an honour if he could call himself Moroni. Giacomo Moroni.
Kindly Eduardo was touched. He opened a bottle of chilled Prosecco.
‘To your first publication,’ he said.
In addition, he made his young friend a present of the three equestrian etchings that, by the next year, were hanging over the silver desk in Hattie’s garden studio.
Jack’s second problem had also to do with the dead French poet, whose passport was about to expire. Yet here again luck was with him; modified luck as Jack perceived it, but luck of a useful sort. The year was propitious. It was 1994 – the year of that first free and fair election in the land of his birth; an election that had brought to an end the laws of the apartheid state. On television, Jack, along with Eduardo and the boys, had previously witnessed the emergence of Nelson Mandela from twenty-seven years in prison; the global saint, blinking into the flashbulbs of several hundred news cameras. It was the year in which Jack, as a person of colour, could walk into the South African Embassy clutching his real-life birth certificate and declare himself to be Sipho Jack Maseko, son of Gertrude Thembisa Maseko, father unknown; born McCord Zulu Hospital, Overport, Durban, South Africa; a person eligible, under the new dispensation, to receive a passport as a citizen of that country; a passport which, given the visa regulations, would, regrettably, soon necessitate his departure from Italy.
Sex and Stravinsky Page 26