‘Coffee and cheesecake,’ the waitress announced.
‘All my love,’ Iris said.
‘Pardon me?’
Iris looked at her. ‘I didn’t say anything.’
The blank, sooty eyes examined her.
‘It was cappuccino you was wanting?’
Iris looked at the frothy, steaming cup. ‘Yes, thank you.’
‘The cheesecake’s fresh.’
She smiled dismissal at the girl, and together they both had a final look at the man. He was waiting for his Welsh rarebit and still looking at Iris in what she could have sworn was an inviting way. She felt a slow blush creeping up her neck in the manner of a young girl, which she was not. Most decidedly was not. She started on the cheesecake. Perhaps after all there was going to be someone.
His order had arrived. She liked the way he ate, unhurriedly, calmly. He caught her looking and she turned her attention to the coffee, uninteresting and too weak. We would have a little house, she thought, perhaps by the river, not a so-called ‘town house’ made of matchboxes, something older, more mature, that’s what she was, but that was what a man needed, someone to rely on, who would always be there.
She would give up work – he looked as if he could keep her – and economise by making things for herself, the house, growing vegetables if there was a tiny garden, she’d always had green fingers. They wouldn’t need many friends, not when she had someone of her own, they’d be self-sufficient, stay at home most evenings, people’s eyes would light up with envy – ‘my husband, meet my husband’.
He was smiling openly now, she smiled back, her heart singing. The cheesecake was gone but she scarcely recalled eating it. He had finished, too, except for the last of his coffee. His smile was a bit lopsided really, rather attractive; lazy, dreamy eyes. He beckoned to Jean for the bill.
Iris called for hers, her hands shaking a little as she fumbled in her purse. Would he come over, or would they meet outside? She wished she’d worn her new suit, nearly had, but it still grew chilly in the evenings. All my love, Iris. On cards and telegrams. On birthdays and anniversaries, and sometimes on nothing at all.
He was standing up now and looking straight at her, or rather at her right ear. She glanced behind her, and a girl with green eyes, bathed in auburn hair, tall and reed slim, was getting up from her table. She wore a pale pink suit and her legs seemed to go on for ever. She insinuated herself past Iris’s table and went over to the man. Together they walked out of the shop, he holding the door open for her. They stood for a moment on the pavement laughing into one another’s faces, then disappeared down the street.
Iris waited for the pain, which started in her throat, to recede …
It did so, slowly numbing as it went.
She was nothing; a fat fool. How could she have expected him to see inside her where lay all the love? Had there been a mirror opposite she would have been all right; would never have made such a stupid mistake, believing that she looked as she felt. In dissection she and the green-eyed girl would prove identical, except in Iris there would be more tenderness, more compassion, more love.
He probably hadn’t even seen her at all, sitting there fat and flushed with her coffee and her cheesecake, and her kind but untidy face.
She saw the green-eyed girl in the house by the river. It would have to be the town house though, and no vegetables, quite definitely no vegetables; you couldn’t grow courgettes and avocado pears. She’d lie there in a leisure gown waiting for him to come home; if he was late she’d scold and he’d soon grow tired. Tired of her green eyes and her auburn hair and her scolding, and their voices would rise, and they would live in toleration not in love, and most probably when his hair grew grey and she’d sucked him dry she would put on her town clothes and leave the river, and sit in a coffee bar where a man would smile at her …
The Food of Love
1968
I have always loved Hermione. Always, that is, from the moment the lights changed to red in the Bayswater Road and I was halted, frozen-lashed in the traffic, not five yards from where she stood.
She wore long black boots and earmuffs, and changed her weight from one foot to the other, peering up the road for the bus. She was far too beautiful to have to work, yet I supposed she must: why else shiver in the queue for the 88 so early in the morning? It was almost the end of March and should have been less cold.
I wondered, had my motor scooter been pumpkinned into a saloon, would I offer her a lift? The lights turned amber, green, and the moment of speculation passed, or should have. All day it remained, although the colour of her hair evaded me; all night the lights-brief glimpse I had had of her kept me turning in my bed.
She was there next morning. It was snowing slowly and the signals were green. I tried to idle past but a taxi hooted. Not much of a ration to nourish an entire day. By the end of the week there was little more: one morning she was obscured by the bus; another, her back was turned against the nasty wind that knifed over from the park. I spent Saturday and Sunday waiting for Monday.
There was a spare seat on the Vespa; girls had straddled it. Not plucked from bus stops, though, in snow, unsuitably clad. I could not remember their names.
On Monday the lights were red once more. A lorry driver who could have got across had the view of her; on Wednesday, too. By 8.15 my day was finished. On Friday I did not think I could endure the weekend. My mind works slowly, it must do, for a third week passed before the solution came. I would travel by bus; stand behind … excuse me, I’m so sorry, a smile, may I introduce … my name is …
The willing Vespa, left behind, chid silently. The Bayswater Road extended itself. My heart chirruped; not the spring.
She wasn’t there. Was not there. Not then. Not any day. Disappeared. Gone. I languished. Could not work. How could you lose a beautiful girl in the Bayswater Road? In the country perhaps, not in the Bayswater Road. To lose presumed having …
I conceived a plan. An orderly plan, fruit of my orderly mind. I used my drawing board to etch a neat map embracing every street within a ten-minute walking radius of where she had stood. Must she not live somewhere within it?
The evenings lengthened, for me. I combed each and every pavement, eliminating windows, passers-by. It pays, you see, to have an orderly mind. Within a week I found her. On steps in Chester Street with a bag of groceries, No. 4. Don Quixote, I patted my Vespa, sang home. Finding was one thing. I appealed to my orderly mind: nothing. To my mother’s knee … if you want a thing badly enough …
Badly enough? I was lighter by half a stone, vague, irritable. The next night I bathed, changed, changed again, stood ten minutes limp-kneed on the step of No. 4, chic with window-box; rang the bell; Don Quixote. Ha!
Footsteps. I opened my mouth and she the door – wide.
‘I …’
‘I’m so glad you’ve come. I thought no one was going to.’
I looked behind me. Only the Vespa, drunk again, at the kerb.
My luck, I thought, a party and no one’s turned up. I followed her and, indeed, no one was there. It did not look as if she was expecting anyone. Books and busts in the tiny, elegant room, no bottles, ubiquitous party dainties. She took my coat. I did not protest. Unmanned. I could not. Without the boots she was … I don’t know. A scent, an essence turning your head, ingredients unidentifiable. She said, ‘Sit down.’ I sat. Would have stood on my head, in the fire …
There was infinity in her eyes, unhappiness.
‘I was so afraid no one would come …’
I have come from the ends of the earth. The Bayswater Road.
‘… where did you see the advertisement?’
Advertisement. What was it I was to be? Butler, valet, lodger, chef ? I would be all or any. Lie down at her feet if necessary, die.
There was a ring on her wedding finger; not plain. I could not be sure. About the room no sign of a man: widowed, separated, divorced?
She sat down opposite me and leant forward until I saw m
y own reflection in her pupils.
‘I did not know,’ she said, ‘which newspaper would bring the best results.’
A gardener perhaps, I could manage that …
‘So few people today,’ she went on, ‘seem to care for the violin.’
The violin!
If there is one sound calculated to arouse in me a combination of fury, anguish and hysteria, it is that of bow upon string.
That is not all. I am tone deaf.
‘One has, of course, to have the physiological qualities in addition to the talent …’
The chair and I became as one.
‘… a left hand suited to the instrument, flexibility of both arms, and the ability to sol-fa with perfect precision. You have a violin?
I was as likely to have in my possession a stuffed elephant.
I breathed a deep breath. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I have no violin.’
‘I have one you can use until we see how you progress. The outlay,’ she was looking at my shoes, ‘for any worthwhile instrument is quite considerable.’
Men have done many things for love: raced time, endured, slain dragons. I wished there had been a dragon.
For Hermione I kept the appointment for my first lesson.
She was more beautiful, a shade, perhaps, more sad. I sat, as one transfixed and watched her as she laid a violin case upon the table as tenderly as if it were a newborn babe. She opened the lid, removed a swathe of cloth in which it was encased and lifted the instrument from its velvet crib with love.
‘The violin,’ she said, ‘is the smallest and highest pitched of one of the most important families of stringed musical instruments, to which it gives its name. Perhaps I go back too far?’ She looked at me questioningly. ‘You are familiar with the rudimentary principles?’
‘I know nothing. Nothing.’
‘It consists essentially of a resonant box of peculiar form, over which four strings of different thicknesses are stretched across a bridge, standing on the box in such a way that the tension of the strings can be adjusted by means of revolving pegs.’
There was a tranquillity about the room. Real chairs and rugs. No permutation – endless units on sterile walls. I could not picture her in such a setting.
‘Many speculations have been advanced with regard to the superiority in tone of the old Italian instruments over those of modern construction.’
It was not the construction of the violin she held with such obvious pleasure at which I looked.
‘The excellence of an instrument, according to the best authorities, is dependent upon its varnish and the method of application. In this respect there can be no doubt that the southern climate placed the makers whose work lies in higher latitudes at a disadvantage. In a letter to Galileo in 1638 concerning a violin which he had ordered from Cremona, a writer states that “it cannot be brought to perfection without the strong heat of the sun”.’
Not violins perhaps, but teachers?
‘The violin, I must tell you, is not an easy instrument to master. The beginning is thankless.’
I prayed silently for its delay.
‘One has to acquire precision and tone, and learn the necessity of going slowly at first …’
I would be a very paragon of slowness.
‘… in order eventually to acquire a sure technique. These are the parts of which the violin is composed. I do not expect you to remember them all at once.’
I stood by her. Her perfume convinced me that I should not remember even one.
‘First the violin itself. The scroll, the pegs, the nut, the neck, the strings, the fingerboard, the belly …’
I shut my eyes.
‘… the button and the chin-rest. Now for the bow …’
The bow.
‘… the magic wand that does the trick.’
I needed no magic wand.
‘It is nothing more than a modification of an archer’s bow having, instead of a string, many dozens of fine white horsehairs that are coated with resin to give their surface some friction.’
The lessons took place twice a week. I would not have believed such exquisite torture existed. I, whom a thousand Menuhins could not educate in as many years to distinguish note from note, learnt with pain to up-bow, down-bow, to execute the minor sixth and the augmented fourth.
To the new pupil the teacher must demonstrate the model position of the violin. She controls his bow until he can play the first exercises while conserving perfect suppleness of arm and wrist. Needless to say, after several lessons, I had not mastered the requisite suppleness. She continued to control my bow; I, myself. I do not know which one of us it was who suffered more.
Our relationship made less progress than our lessons, which by any standards was little enough. Between the solfeggio and the manipulation of the left hand I told her about myself, my life and aspirations; she countered always with an exposition on the change of strings or the importance of the left elbow which must, she emphasised, fall under the centre of the violin.
It became urgent to clarify what was fast becoming an intolerable situation. I was willing to woo her, win her slowly, tolerate the perfect pain of Tuesdays and Fridays, but only if she was free, ultimately, to be mine.
Each direct question, however delicately put, was met with evasion or, infinitely worse, the sound of bow upon string.
I began to look for clues. There was never anyone in the hall or sitting room when I called, no sign of another person in the house; no photographs, no mention of a past.
Had she a husband, perhaps, who worked late on Tuesdays and Fridays? I begged to change the nights of the lessons. She agreed. I came on Mondays; on Wednesdays and Saturdays; once, cunningly, on Sunday. She was always alone, impersonal. Sometimes I thought the hour passed without her seeing me at all. She looked often at the ceiling, unremarkable as far as I could judge, her mind seemingly on something else. The more remote she became, as the weeks went on, the more distracted I.
I could not go on for very long without declaring the reason for my visits, which had she not been so preoccupied she must have guessed, listening to my own cacophony.
Often I wondered why she persevered with so inept a pupil. It was almost summer and myself at breaking point, when I discovered.
One unsuspecting Tuesday I rang the bell, which must be worn with imprints of my finger. There were wallflowers in the window box.
She always opened the door immediately, but not today. When she did, I could see she had been crying. It had not made her ugly.
She wore a sleeveless dress. I followed her into the sitting room, where she told me to sit down, as I had on the first occasion. Usually I went straight to the music stand and examined with sinking heart what was to be the day’s torment.
I did as she asked, preferring to take her in my arms and soothe with my lips her reddened eyes. I waited. What was to be? She could no longer dedicate herself to so incompetent a performer? The lessons were to end?
But no: she took the violin from the table, tightened the bow and tuned the strings, an accomplishment she had admitted I would never master. I was about to stand up to take the hated instrument from her when to my surprise she tucked it beneath her own chin. I say surprise because, although until this moment I had not realised it, I had never heard her play.
She looked at me just once, straight at me, forgetting this time the ceiling, shook the hair back from her eyes, inclined her head, then applied herself to the sounds she gradually released into the room. Even I, unable after countless lessons, diligently given, to distinguish note from note, knew this was music. I did not understand but was aware the cadence she produced was born of harmony, sincerity, inspiration.
She played for twenty minutes, although it seemed no more than five. As she played the tears slid down her lovely face to land, slow-rolling, on the violin.
If I had muscles they did not twitch, afraid with so much sadness all around that I too might weep.
When the music was done she stoo
d, quite still, as if it still continued, in the soundlessness. If before I had not dared to move, now I was stone. She seemed to wait for the last echoing notes to return from the corners of the room into which she had released them, to the strings which spawned them.
Then it was over.
She put the violin, which must have been damp, away in its case, loosened the bow, packed all away and fastened the clasp with finality. There was obviously to be no lesson.
She dried her eyes, more red than previously, and sat beside me. What would we speak of ? My pitiful scrapings? The reason for her tears?
‘I have not been honest with you,’ she said to me.
‘Nor I with you.’
‘It was obvious from the first that you would never master the violin. You have no ear.’
‘It was not proficiency on the violin I was after.’
‘I needed the money.’
I looked round the room, not having considered her desperate for funds.
‘My husband was a lawyer.’
Was.
‘Barristers don’t earn much, when recently called, not even when they’re working.’ She glanced at the ceiling as I had watched her do so many times. ‘It’s a year since Basil worked. He’s been ill. We knew there was nothing … At first I went out to work …’
It seemed a lifetime since the Bayswater Road.
‘… then I didn’t want to leave him for so long. I put the advertisement in. You were my only pupil.’
Of all budding violinists in London, I.
‘Last night he died. That was his favourite concerto. I’ve taken your money under false pretences.’
Her secret was out. Mine, fortunately, she seemed not to have heard.
We live in Sussex now, in a little house from the back of which you have a clear view of the Downs.
In our sitting room there are real chairs and rugs, books and busts: Bach, the master of counterpoint; Chopin, who knew the precise meaning of the piano; Beethoven with his prodigal architectural sense; Wagner with his genius for orchestration.
The Man Who Understood Women Page 13