by Adam Thorpe
‘All I need is a shaggy beard, then,’ said Jack, using a sneering reference to Pärt in some Sunday broadsheet that had prompted him to write a letter which afterwards he’d regretted, although it wasn’t published.
‘Quite right, quite right,’ said Roger, momentarily wrong-footed. ‘More spare ribs? Another sausage? Salad with it? Claudia’s Italian touch, this.’ He fished out a tiny block of feta cheese and popped it in his large mouth. Jack patted his stomach.
‘Thanks but no, Roger.’
They exchanged glances. Jack felt close to his old teacher, against all the odds, and the shared look expressed that. Roger Grove-Carey was a wreck with awful eye bags, marital resurrection or no. Yet he, like Jack, had once been ‘England’s most promising young composer’. He’d been a Maoist, too, like Cornelius Cardew – very briefly, but ragged shreds remained. Jack had never been a Maoist, or anything much else: his generation had been cowed by Thatcher, lured by dosh. A vivid image of the rats tearing at the snow leopard’s lunch in Tallinn Zoo crossed Jack’s mind. He wondered why he had thought of that, when he might have thought of Kaja in the Café Majolica or on the island with the long-necked cranes beating up from the reeds at twilight. The feel of her hand in his. The scent of her hair. Of the hot pinewood in the sauna. The slippery skin, like a seal’s.
‘Jack, you have to admit.’
‘Admit what, Roger?’
‘That you’re as badly fucked as me. What? Accept it. You weren’t hard enough. You were always touching the soft button. Girlish.’
Jack shook his head.
‘I’m not a fundamentalist, Roger. Fundamentalists blow up trains and buses.’
‘Oh God, I said to Claudia: I’ll bet you a kiss on the nipple we don’t get through the evening without mentioning the biggest non-event of the year.’
‘Non-event?’
‘In the long term it doesn’t matter, Jack. A few people blown up. So what? It happens all the time. Look at history. All history is legacy.’
‘All history is legacy,’ Jack repeated. ‘That’s really good. Seriously. I’ll remember that.’
‘Or look at prehistory,’ Roger went on, obviously flattered in a vulnerable part of him – which was probably most of him. ‘Think big, think abstract. Know what I think of when I read the latest big drama-queen headline or watch the TV news? The mass extinction of the Permian. Ninety-five per cent of life wiped out. We don’t know why, not for sure. Just wiped. Fossil record blank.’
‘When?’
‘Two or three hundred million years ago. A long time ago. Ninety-five per cent. Zapped.’
‘A very long time ago. Only geniuses like you can make sense of it, Roger.’
‘Exactly,’ said Roger, perhaps believing him after the flattery. The wine had left a red moustache on his upper lip. ‘Now where the hell’s your gorgeous wife? And she is gorgeous. Aesthetically. Sensually. In every way.’
‘Spiritually?’
‘Oh fuck that,’ Roger roared.
Milly came back with Claudia (Ricco settled at last), and there was an argument before dessert about embodied energy, which Milly explained as the energy required to transport a product. She pointed out that the bottles of Aussie wine they’d consumed had been incredibly costly to the environment.
‘What’s the point of bringing wine over from the other side of the world,’ she said, ‘when we’ve got wine lakes in Europe?’
‘It’s called trade,’ said Roger. ‘Loyalty to the Commonwealth. Anyway, the French no longer make good wine. Even their food’s gone off. We’ve got a hell of a lot more choice and it’s tastier.’
‘That’s complete TV-chef crap,’ said Milly, who then reeled off some frightening statistics she’d culled from her book on the British food industry, her barley-like earrings flashing gold. Jack was not really taking any of it in. Roger wasn’t, either, from the look of it. Claudia was in the kitchen, spooning the sorbet into bowls.
Jack got up and joined her while Milly and Roger were arguing.
‘Oh my God,’ said Claudia, cheerily, in her attractive Italian accent, ‘what are they discussing now?’
‘The wonders of British food,’ said Jack. ‘Can I give you a hand?’
‘It’s OK,’ said Claudia, who was over ten years younger than Jack. This fact suddenly struck him as annoying. Roger had no right. Claudia was small, thin in an attractive way, and gave the impression that she was not quite somebody until you talked to her, that she was retiring into the vague notion of ‘Italianate’. At home in Milan she would have flowered, been firmer – would have avoided the disaster of marrying Roger Grove-Carey.
Standing next to her, chatting about Italian food, Jack was surprised at how conspiratorial he felt: it was as if she knew that he knew how much she would rather have gone off with Jack Middleton. He had drunk more than he’d meant to, although Roger’s Aussie wine was way over-oaked and left a chemical backwash like creosote in the mouth. Claudia had very long, very black eyelashes and a mole, perched on her lower lip like a piercing stud.
He found he was wanting to flirt with her, and his jokes made her giggle.
She spooned out mango sorbet to join the peach sorbet and said how nice it was to have adult conversation. Jack recognised the sorbet as the classiest that the Finchley Road Waitrose ran to. Claudia could make it down there with the pushchair in a few minutes. That was her life, now. And this was his. He felt very andante, as if he’d smoked dope. Somewhere deep inside him was an excitement and a fear. It had been there ever since he’d realised his Estonian fling was not glassed off in the past. The word ‘fling’ was deliberately, cruelly inappropriate; he could hear it being said in Edward Cochrane’s drawl. ‘Fling,’ he repeated to himself in his head. ‘Fling. Fling. Fling.’
‘Ricco is extremely cute,’ Jack said, wishing he knew a lot of Italian.
Roger was raising his voice outside in a cheery tenor; he was flirting with Milly. Claudia smelt of barbecue smoke and baby oil. He imagined her small, lithe body under the simple dress and felt very much chilled out, next to her. He leaned back with his elbows on the kitchen counter.
‘He’s pretty lively,’ said Claudia.
‘Do you miss the music?’ Jack said, before he could stop himself.
Claudia shook her head, firmly. ‘Absolutely not!’ she laughed.
For some reason, this disappointed Jack.
‘You have a daughter, don’t you?’ said Claudia, putting the sorbet tubs back in the freezer, its breath wreathing about her face.
‘Er, no.’
Claudia looked at him, surprised. ‘Roger said you had a girl of five.’
‘Wrong on both counts. At time of press, we don’t have kids. Never have had. In fact, we lost it five years ago. Stillbirth. A boy. Called Max.’
Claudia covered her mouth with her hand, blinking furiously. ‘Oh my God,’ she said, ‘it must have been someone else.’
‘He’s got a lot of ex-students,’ said Jack, mastering his annoyance and, somewhere deep down, his sorrow. He hunched back his shoulders, as if his manliness had been questioned. ‘It’s no problem. Shall I take these out so they can throw sorbet at each other?’
Claudia laughed and squeezed his bare arm above the wrist, which was a profoundly un-English thing to do. Later that night, Jack was to picture himself pulling down her panties right there and then in the kitchen and treating her fanny like a blob of sorbet as she sighed as quietly as she could. In real life they took the bowls out. The touch of her cold hand on his arm was something he’d always remember, he thought, as he sat down. Her hand was cold because of the sorbet and the freezer. Normally it would have been very warm.
They were at the front door when Roger said, ‘We’re inviting you to the christening, we’ll let you know.’
Jack raised his eyebrows and expressed his surprise: part of the reason for Roger Grove-Carey’s loathing of composers like Pärt and Britten was his fervent atheism. One of his most notorious pieces (now entirely forgotten
) was God’s Got the Hump Because No One Believes in Him Any More, Oh How Sad, dedicated to John Cage and played on a Korg Poly-800 synth.
‘It’s Claudia’s idea,’ said Roger, rather shiftily. Claudia had said goodbye to them and was responding to curious noises on the baby alarm.
‘Good for Claudia,’ said Milly.
‘She must be very persuasive,’ said Jack.
‘I’ll go through the motions for her,’ said Roger, whose alcoholic nastiness had now mellowed into white-faced exhaustion. ‘I don’t care. I simply don’t care.’
‘Well, it’s nice for her,’ said Milly. ‘We’ll be there.’
‘One thing I don’t understand,’ said Roger, with a sudden intensity in his bleary eyes: ‘how you can stomach all that belief music when you don’t believe yourself. Sacred bloody takeaway!’
‘Ready-made barbecues,’ laughed Milly, stepping out of the door. ‘Come on, sweetheart. That was so lovely, Roger.’ She had flagged long ago, all but tottering on the threshold, reduced to a kind of upper-class skeleton of etiquette.
‘Belief leads to exclusion,’ Roger went on, not letting Jack say his bit. ‘I’d respect you more if you became Russian Orthodox, Jack, like shaggy beard himself. All music is music pretending to be music. Everything is music, therefore nothing is music. When I fuck the daylights out of Claudia –’
‘Roger,’ said Milly, looking as if she’d swallowed something sour, ‘please …’
‘When I stick my dickery-dock in my lovely young wife’s various orifices, that is music, my friends.’ Roger’s voice was loud enough to be heard up and down the street, which slumbered respectably in the lamplight. ‘Saying it is music. I am now performing my piece entitled Bread and Milk for Bloody Bártok. It lasts an indeterminate length of time. In fact, it lasts my whole lifetime. The applause will be terrific. It’s been gorgeous having you, guys, but I’m knackered because you stayed too late. Greetings.’
Roger raised his hand in a traffic-policeman way and looked terrible, like the Ghost in Hamlet under a fierce white spot, or something out of a combative production of Don Giovanni. Milly had backed out to the little iron gate. Jack was about to follow when he felt his arm being grabbed. Roger’s face was thrust towards his own, all teeth and glaring eyes.
‘You were so good once, you bastard. And you’ve let it all go.’ He turned his face towards the gate, where Milly was waiting, searching for the car keys in her bag. He looked as if he was about to cry. ‘For what?’
Jack wrestled his arm out of his ex-tutor’s grip, too annoyed and upset to reply. The man was a drunk. Half deranged by failure.
‘It was absolutely lovely, Roger,’ Milly mouthed, tugging Jack out of the gate by the wrist. She was charm on automatic pilot.
In the car, further down the street, she said: ‘Some of us have to work tomorrow. Do you know that?’
‘He’s a bum note,’ said Jack, slipping the clutch. ‘He’s not even funny any more.’
‘What did he say to you there, at the end? When he grabbed your wrist and then threw me a really deadly look?’
‘He asked if he could have a swing on your tits,’Jack said.
As they passed the house, they saw Roger still standing there, as if looking out for them. The window was down and Milly gave a crooked-finger wave, her smile unbeatable for dazzle factor.
‘He’s more than a bum note,’ Milly said, leaning back and closing her eyes. ‘He’s Pukesville.’
FIVE
It was late Monday morning. Certain trees had begun to hint at autumn tints over the weekend; or maybe Jack had only just noticed. Howard, who was doing a stint of teaching at University College School up the road, had dropped in for a coffee.
Inevitably, Jack mentioned Roger and there was a brief innings on atonalism. Howard bowled a low, deadly reference to Handel’s sixth concerto grosso, which had a sequence of notes in the fugue that used to be considered unnatural but was in fact derived from a natural harmonic sequence; Jack hit it to the boundary by pointing out how the likes of Brahms had already threatened the whole tonal harmonic system long before Schoenberg came along. He really wanted to talk about Jaan and Kaja but Howard was behaving like a crusty old fart, goading him. Jack did not mention what Roger had said to him at the front door, gripping his arm. He’d been shaken by it. He’d been shaken by the look Roger had given Milly, and how deeply he – Jack – had understood what it meant.
And then the phone went.
It was his mother. Although her origins were Irish (leaving Dublin at the age of six), Moyna sounded, as she always did, like a much quieter, female version of Bruce Forsyth. A school-friend of Jack’s had once pointed this out and Jack had cut him off for good.
It was a week or so since they’d last talked. Jack felt a fierce sympathy for his mother’s state, but also an impatience. She was annoying, not being able to see. She stumbled over things and broke things. She did not understand his music, although everything he wrote was to enable her to see, in some way. This had only recently occurred to him. His parents had stayed in the same house on the same estate partly out of inertia, partly for practical reasons. The house was not in any way adapted for someone blind, but Jack’s mother knew every corner of it by touch, if not exactly by instinct. Yet she could still say, now and again, ‘For the love of Mike, where’s the door?’
You do not develop your inner compass, being blind: quite the opposite. It’s an added cruelty.
She had burnt her hand on the cooker, again. Otherwise there was no news. He invited them up to Hampstead in three weekends’ time: booked up, any earlier. His parents adored, even worshipped, Milly, because she was class and she pulled all the stops out, as you would for people out of charity – political refugees, for instance. Black victims of torture or famine. It always made Jack wince and feel at the same time that he was not good enough as a son, because Milly would put her arm around his mum and give her a loving squeeze – something he never remembered doing in his life. Jack’s father, Donald, had a crush on Milly and went all soft and soppy in her presence, his mouth hanging open slightly when he was listening to her, his balding, wrinkled head cocked on one side. The fact that Milly frequently gave Donald lectures on ecology did not bother his father one bit – he who fed their square of lawn with heaps of chemical fertiliser, sprayed Scotts Rose Clear 2 (officially banned) on his floribundas and scattered metaldehyde pellets around his hostas to keep the slugs and snails down. Jack always felt that if Milly could dent his father’s addiction to garden chemicals, she would be making real progress.
‘Oh, we’d love to come,’ said Moyna.
‘I’ll clear it with Milly. Sunday lunch?’
‘Lovely, dear. Your very nice lasagne,’ she added – although he knew she thought it strange and disappointing, not to have a roast on Sunday.
‘Milly should be free,’ he insisted. ‘It can’t be the weekend after next as we’re down to the Hall and this coming one she’s got some kind of eco do in Kendal starting Sunday evening. But I’m pretty sure the twenty-fifth is good.’
‘September.’
‘Of course, Mum.’
The last week of September: time was white water.
And the whole of Sunday would be blown, both the morning for preparation and the afternoon for recovery. They would walk slowly on the Heath after lunch, his arm through his mother’s to guide her, feeling the stiffness of the non-sighted, her caution, and he would have drunk too much red wine and eaten too much vegetable lasagne made from heavy wholemeal pasta, and the Heath on a Sunday afternoon was unbearably full of groups like them, or thickset blokes in football shirts, or screaming kids. It might even be cold and raining.
Deep down, though, he wanted to do the right thing; he had some notion that in some parallel universe the event would be comforting and somehow holy. He was, after all, the only child of his parents left in England.
‘My mum.’
‘How is she, the poor soul?’
It touched him, How
ard’s concern. Howard was always popping up to Derbyshire to visit his aunt, who was in a home. He gave many free concerts in such homes.
‘Much as usual.’
‘I sometimes think being deaf must be a blessing. Modern life’s so full of bollock-awful noises –’
‘She’s blind, Howard.’
‘Confusing yours with Peter’s,’ said Howard, quickly. ‘Peter Mawes, the conductor.’
Jack stayed standing. His parents’ life in Hayes was very neat, very moral. Not a slug in sight. They hadn’t once strayed. It was admirable. They read the Daily Mail, like almost everyone.
‘Who’s looking very deep in thought?’ commented Howard.
‘I get like that,’ said Jack, ‘after my mum’s phoned.’
‘Don’t you have those bizarre things called siblings?’
‘My sister’s in Australia, my brother’s in Michigan. So they don’t count.’
‘They got out.’
‘They copped out, in my view,’ said Jack, who was jealous of the fact. ‘Someone had to stay.’
‘Cost ya,’ said Howard, jabbing his good finger at him.
‘Maybe. Maybe I’d be different if I was abroad. You can make Hayes in an hour and a half by Hanger Lane. How’s Jaan?’
‘He’s great.’
‘And his mum? How did she get hold of your name, by the way?’
‘Reputation,’ said Howard, as if it was self-evident.
‘You sure?’
Howard looked at him, puzzled. ‘Why?’
‘Why what?’
‘You’ve a problem with that?’
‘No.’
‘Then vy ze interest, Herr Middleton?’
Jack blushed slightly. Howard was examining him through narrowed eyes. ‘For the official biography, Howard. Every detail counts.’
‘By the way,’ said Howard, ‘you’ve reminded me. I gave her your home number. Hope you don’t mind.’
‘Why?’