Hattie finds things more difficult at first, but in the main this has to do with all the immediate, complicated stuff that serves to impede any hopes of serenity in the matter of making a getaway. Unlike Caroline, who has all her current effects contained within two travel bags, Hattie has other sorts of baggage and quite a lot of it. There are her twins in the Cape. And there is James; poor old terminal James, who, in the unlikely event of his surviving his time in hospital, will need some form of sheltered care. She and Josh, with Zoe in tow, undertake a three-day high-speed consumer survey of all available establishments for which James might just be eligible. And Hattie also has the task of speaking to her parents. She tells them first that she has found their son, who is alive but gravely ill. After a while, she tells them that, within the week, she herself is taking off to go and live in England.
Predictably, the former intelligence becomes the focus of all their interest. Mrs Marchmont-Thomas, weeping tears of joy and sorrow, becomes increasingly exercised about the possible inadequacy of Hattie’s proposals for James’s care.
‘But why an institution for him?’ she says. ‘Why on earth can’t James have his nice old room back? His little room in the turret?’
‘Not possible,’ Hattie says firmly. ‘That’s simply not an option. For a start, he couldn’t make the stairs. Mother, James is incredibly frail. And besides, as I’ve just told you, I’m going to live in England.’
This is Mr Marchmont-Thomas’s cue to come into his own.
‘You surely can’t think of going abroad,’ he says. ‘When it’s clear that you are needed here at home?’
‘Oh but I can,’ Hattie says. ‘You’ll find that I most certainly can.’
She feels herself suddenly to have grown a foot taller as she hears herself say these words – or is it that her father has begun to shrink with age? Having succumbed to this form of blackmail in years gone by, it delights her to know that she will never be doing so again.
‘You may remember,’ she says now, addressing both her parents, ‘that Marchmont House belongs to Herman, who has no responsibility for James.’
She desists from pointing out that her royalties will be covering the cost of James’s care; also that their own top-notch retirement flat comes courtesy of Herman, to whose chagrin the place is so perennially crammed with heavy items of dark-brown heirloom furniture that there is barely space to breathe. Yet her father, as always, is looking dapper, in his dark suit with watch chain.
She gives her parents the telephone number for her brother’s hospital ward.
‘About going to visit him,’ she says. ‘I’d advise you to make it soon.’
She kisses her mother on the cheek. Her father, who doesn’t do kissing, offers his hand instead.
‘Back to the Old Country, eh?’ he says. ‘You’ll find that it’s not what it was.’
And then – thank God – there is the conference to take her mind off these things. On the platform she talks briefly and personally about what dance has meant to her, how, for all its physical battering, it drew her out from an oppressive childhood, into a world of weightlessness and lift. She talks about how she has chosen, now, to focus on Stravinsky’s Pulcinella – a thing to which Josh Silver introduced her many years ago; a ballet with songs and masks; a ballet that, for all its unlikely balance of pisspot slapstick and delicate romance, is revealing itself as capable of having relevance to real life. Because Person A, who was lost – presumed dead – has turned out to be alive. And Person B, who for many years has walked in the shoes of another, is now most wonderfully unmasked. And then, of course, there is Person C. Well, frankly, he has all to do with the business of pairing off; with picking out one’s life’s dancing partner from the profusion of characters crowding the stage, all leaping and swirling before one’s eyes in the same tall conical hats. She says, in conclusion, that her next Lola story will be set in Pulcinella’s home town. Lola will be on her way to Naples.
After that, she and Josh take off their shoes and nod to Jack, who is standing in the wings, with his finger on the Pause button of a portable CD player. In response, he releases the sound of that slowed-up, stretched-out ‘recomposition’, full of rasping discords and pastoral yearnings. Hattie and Josh then mime the last scene in which – via grief, betrayal and bereavement, via ecstasy and muddle – they finally come together. Per voi il core struggendo si va.
At Marchmont House, in the five-day space that Herman has tactfully afforded them, Hattie begins to flap and dither about what to keep and what to ditch.
‘That clock,’ she says. ‘It’s so beautiful. And I know that Cat and Herman hate it. Will there be room for it in your house, or am I getting to be like my parents?’
Then she’s at the kitchen dresser, pulling out her great-grandmother’s china plates.
‘What do you think?’ she says to Josh. ‘Shall I get massive rolls of bubble wrap and make a start on these? Or shall I get in the packers to do it after we’ve gone?’
‘Leave it,’ Josh says. ‘For heaven’s sake, Hat. Just walk away from it.’
Having been adamant that the three of them travel together to London, he has been obliged to buy new tickets, since the last ones couldn’t be exchanged. Their initial flight will be to Cape Town, so that Hattie can go and see her twins. Then, from there, it’s on to Heathrow. He’s made the booking on his credit card in the hope of being able to pay it off from the Witch Woman’s bundle that Caroline has left under the floor.
‘Just leave all that, I beg you,’ he says. ‘Caroline will pack it for you. And she’ll arrange to have it shipped. There’s nothing she likes better and she’s very good at it. Caroline is a packing genius. Zoe will back me up here. Isn’t that right, Zoe?’
But Zoe has gone very quiet. She has her nose in a copy of What Katy Did, and she doesn’t appear to be listening.
‘Everything in the turret will be left just so for you, my darling,’ Hattie says to Josh’s child. ‘It will be your very own bedroom – your special place, for when you come to visit your mother.’
Zoe wishes that Hattie wouldn’t keep on calling her darling and she especially doesn’t like to think about coming back here to stay – what with Mister H. Munster in residence, as well as that tall shouty girl. The thought of it is giving her the horrors. She wishes that they could just go; go quickly; just get on that plane and go home. But Hattie, who is coming with them, has got about a million plates that she’s pulled out all over the floor. Zoe has never seen so many plates. It’s like she was planning to have a banquet or something.
Hattie and Josh make a quieter pair of lovers than Herman and Caroline. They are smaller and less glamorous and a lot more understated. They are northern-hemisphere lovers. But they are intensely in love, for all that. They relish every minute in each other’s company. Their greatest pleasures are simple walks in woods and meadows and on towpaths. They have taken to making weekend visits to old Cotswold churches and they often walk holding hands. Such spare cash as they have, they spend on theatre visits and the ballet. They care so little about their clothes that Zoe thinks they’ll end up like those embarrassing oldies who always wear sandals with socks. Hattie loves the gentle drizzle and the slanting silvery light.
The three of them take up residence in the pretty little terraced house that Caroline has so tastefully made ready, and for which they now – rather quickly and indifferently – acquire some additional bits of furniture. Hattie ships out the grandfather clock, but soon commits it to auction, where it fetches a very good price. She has four of the elm-wood chairs in the house, but the plates are permanently in store. Zoe inhabits the small back bedroom while Josh and Hattie share the slightly larger one that overlooks the street. Sometimes one or other of the pair will go off for a couple of hours to do some paperwork in the old bus, but mostly they are together, each bent over their writing at either end of the living-room table.
They sign up Zoe for a ballet class that takes place in north Oxford and Hattie supervises
her practice. In the evenings, they usually eat carton soup, or scrambled eggs, or cheese on toast, especially on the days when Josh stays over in Bristol. Sometimes, at weekends, Hattie will rouse herself to roast a chicken, but she never leaves it in the oven long enough, so it’s always sort of sloppy and anaemic; not crisp and golden as it should be. Plus Caroline used to make stuffing for a chicken, with things like pine nuts and dried apricots and wild rice mixed with freshly chopped home-grown herbs.
Hattie loves it that you can get around by bike, so they right away buy her a bicycle. Because Caroline’s is, of course, hopelessly too big. So it stays exactly where she left it; a tall old Dutch bike with a large wicker basket, leaning up against the garden wall. Zoe finds herself staring at it when she should be doing her homework, because every time she looks up from her desk the bicycle is right there; right in her line of vision.
Things are trickier for the girls, though, on the face of it, easier for Cat. Not only is she older, but she’s highly intelligent, talented, strident, demanding and manipulative; born into a large paternal family of doting, warm-hearted and affluent persons with easy top-dog assumptions. So Cat is on an upward trajectory, much bolstered by the energy and skill of her father and her new stepmother. Once the tenant has voluntarily moved on and Caroline is ensconced in the studio, Cat is all too ready to enter it. It’s always fun to watch Caroline at work – I mean, she’s doing fashion, isn’t she? How cool is that? Cat is quick to understand that she was never going to capture the heart of the beautiful Giacomo, but she doesn’t care that much; not once she’s thought about it. Because wasn’t he a little bit weird when you got to think about it? Not to mention that he turned out to be that horrible James’s son. In short, the tenant has swiftly and easily disappeared from her life.
That’s until one day, five years on – five years on from the ‘now’ time, making it the year 2000 – when, as a one-year exchange student in Milan, the brightest of her year – Cat looks up and sees the tenant as she sits at a café table in the Piazza della Scala. A tall, handsome, size ten blonde with slightly peculiar eating habits, she is in the company of her adoring current boyfriend. Cat has lots of adoring boyfriends, sometimes more than one at a time. Easy come, easy go. And it could be that the deceptive ease with which she let go of her mother has something to do with the shallowness that marks her emotional life.
The tenant is walking through the square, still dressed top-to-toe in black. He doesn’t look in her direction and she’s sure he hasn’t seen her. She feels no urge to intervene. He is merely the person whose fabulous book once helped to kick-start a school art project that won her a national award; an award that made her the envy of her classmates and caused that creepy Alan to come sliming up to her, just as though he’d never chucked her over in favour of her one-time best friend Michelle. But all that is very so-what and seriously in the past. Since then, she hasn’t looked back. She’s sailed into the architectural school and now she’s using her time in Italy to study rationalist-modernist trends in early Fascist architecture; those beautiful, austere, industrial-looking structures that are so much in evidence around Milan. Cat finds herself quite drawn to the romance of the Fascist aesthetic.
She gets on OK-ish with her mother these days. Or they manage, at least, to coexist. She has always set the terms of their meetings – either in her father’s London flat or, together with her older siblings, once a year at the Cape in summer. Never at home. Most recently she has arranged for her mother to pay a brief visit to Milan. The emphasis is on ‘brief’. She’s booked a small hotel room for Hattie and she’s even used some of the extra cash she’s got from her dad to book two tickets for Stravinsky’s Pulcinella. It’s not her cup of tea, to be sure, but she likes to keep the visits well structured. Keep them busy; keep them brief. That way they don’t end up quarrelling. She takes note that her mother, for her sins, is on to Lola book eight.
Things prove rather more difficult for Zoe, who is younger and a lot less pushy about making her own needs known. Thanks to her mother, she’s been rigorously trained in self-denial. And, unlike Cat, she has no extended family of merry, extrovert aunts and cousins, and there isn’t an uncle in sight, though admittedly there is, on one bleak winter’s day, an unannounced, one-off, one-hour visit from a person who turns out to be her mother’s sister Janet, the once-upon-a-time Less Fortunate. She turns up on a day when Zoe is home alone and she’s babbling about how she’s ‘dropped in’ to collect her late mother’s Hummel figurines that she says were promised to her by Caroline.
‘I’ve only got one china figure from Gran,’ Zoe says, and, in the earnest hope of getting rid of the woman, she offers up the little china lady reclining on a china bed, her little china husband holding her china hand.
‘Really and truly,’ Janet says with a sigh, and she rolls her eyes to heaven. ‘You won’t have heard the last of this.’
She accepts the offering somewhat grudgingly and is never seen again.
The Gérard affair proves a far more lowering experience, for all Josh’s conscientious efforts. Her dad is certainly as good as his word in making contact with the French headmistress and discovering her dear friend’s current whereabouts. The boy has departed from the school, she says. It was all for the best. He has been sent to live with his grandmother in a village near Narbonne, which means that he is no longer a part of Zoe’s school’s French exchange programme. The conifer house has been repossessed. Véronique has left school and has got herself a job. There is no news of Gérard’s très triste dad, who has doubtless by now been dispossessed of the little forest hat.
Hattie, Josh and Zoe board the Eurostar for Paris, from whence they take the sleeper train for the south.
‘We’ll make a holiday of it,’ Josh says, and he books them into a B & B, though for himself, he’d much rather stay in Paris and take them all to the Comédie Française and linger around the Gard du Nord so that he could show dear Hattie where he once had his little student garret, in those days before he’d returned to the news of Caroline’s father’s death.
For Zoe the train journey south ought to have been the best fun, just like being in that going-to-the-seaside ballet that she’s always wanted to see. Le Train Bleu, with the enormous Picasso backdrop. The two huge ladies, their hands clasped high, running, in their bathers, towards the sea. Oh! Oh! The sea! The sea! But anxiety is keeping Zoe from enjoyment. And the fact that every dog in Paris appears to be travelling south by train for the summer vacation is causing her to brood upon the possible fate of Mimi the chocolate Labrador.
In the village, where they approach the house, Zoe is appalled to find that Mimi is, by her lights, worse than dead. She’s kept fixed to a chain at the gatepost, where she has no shelter from the blazing sun and nothing to do but bark. In her pathetic, body-wiggling welcome, she treads in her own stale water bowl, inverting the last of her liquid refreshment on to the greedy earth.
Gérard is not at home, for all that he has been forewarned of her arrival by Josh’s telephone call. They find him, taller and more filled out, playing football in the square and he is patently not best pleased to be interrupted by his erstwhile woodland ballet partner; a ghost from his former life, in the figure of a small, red-headed girl who does nothing to enhance his local street-cred.
He shakes hands politely but stiffly with Zoe’s father and with her stepmother, then with Zoe herself. He declines the offer of dinner that night in a local restaurant. He shifts unwittingly from foot to foot in his eagerness to be gone. Then his teammates summon him back to the game by means of those bullish male noises that Zoe has always found so strangely other whenever she’s heard them emanating from sports fields and recreation grounds back home. It occurs to her to be thankful that she’s not wearing the ‘Zizou’ T-shirt.
‘Gérard,’ she says. ‘About Mimi . . .’ She wants to blurt out to him that the dog should not be kept chained up, but she loses heart and gives up.
He makes a little almost-bow and then h
e’s gone.
The three outsiders hover to watch the game for something like half a minute.
‘Please, Dad,’ Zoe says. ‘Please. I’d like to go now, if that’s all right.’
School is never quite the same, since Mattie and Maggs are more bonded than ever and when the French exchange comes round again, Zoe, as in a game of musical chairs, is the one who is left standing. She’s of an age when she is just about to change, and adolescent introspectiveness comes with a heavy dose of introversion. It begins to dawn on Zoe that her previous, ebullient interactions with her dad – those lovely ‘silly’ times she always had with him – were quite a lot to do with the two of them reacting to Caroline’s grown-upness. The mood between them has changed with Hattie’s coming, so that things like their collections of prize news billboards have gradually dwindled until they are no more. Gone are all the ‘Brad Pitt Haircut Boys’ and ‘Cold Flat OAPs’.
All the silly stuff has quietly fallen into disuse.
‘I saw a butcher’s shop that was called a Meat Boutique.’
‘I passed a restaurant that was called The Rumblin’ Tums.’
‘I was on a bus that said “13 seated plus 2 standees”. Then it said, “OR, 11 seated plus 2 standees plus 1 wheelchair”.’
‘So it could have said, “9 seated plus 2 standees plus 2 wheelchairs”?’
‘Or “5 seated plus 2 standees plus 4 wheelchairs”?’
‘It could have not had any seated at all. And no standees either. That would have made enough room for 7½ wheelchairs.’
It all simply stopped, because it had somehow stopped being funny.
Zoe finds that she feels self-conscious, once she’s joined the ballet class, where everyone else is quite a lot younger, and she’s already missed out on acquiring a place at a school for the performing arts. Truth to tell, she’s been yearning to do ballet for so many years before her wish is granted, that she is on the edge of having exorcised the need before it gets to be realised.
Sex and Stravinsky Page 30