by Adam Thorpe
‘But you’re a rich boy, Jack. You don’t need to think about your CD sales. About chasing engagements –’
‘Even if I were not rich, I wouldn’t think about it. You can’t confuse CD sales with musical quality. That’s the road to shite.’
‘E. coli capitalism,’ said Howard, raising a finger. ‘We’re all in it. Even you. I think what you do, Jack, you do very well,’ he added, in a compassionate tone. ‘And Good in Adland is brilliant, as is Why Are We the Same?’
‘Composed in 1992 and 2000 respectively. Great.’
‘Good in Adland is a classic. You can roll over and spend the rest of your life having your tummy tickled.’
‘It’s eleven minutes long,’ Jack pointed out.
‘Most people,’ said Howard, ‘would give their left ear to have written a classic. Even two minutes long.’
Jack felt suddenly that he couldn’t be bothered. About anything. About Kaja or Jaan or music or the end of the world. The lawn was too nice, too warm. He could drift off for ever. Howard was a piece of shite. He could tell him what he really thought of his viola playing. Unearthly, beautiful, but shallow.
‘I watched you hide behind the tree, the other day, Jack.’
‘Eh?’
‘In Bolton Gardens, when Kaja K was leaving. Like a dirty old man. Then you scarper from my concert. I saw you. You spotted her, went pale, and scarpered. Every time I mention her your ears go dayglo pink.’
Jack levered himself with an effort onto his feet and brushed grass from his trousers. He refused to wear shorts and his legs were sweaty.
‘It’s complicated.’
He started walking away. His friend sprang up, bouncing on his toes. Howard swam three times a week and did weights in a Soho gym. One forgot that. Running in front, he turned and stood with his arms out.
People were glancing at them, wondering if it was community theatre.
‘Go to hell,’ said Jack, brushing past him.
‘You know how she found me, Jack?’
‘She went to a concert or something.’
They were walking down the slope towards the bridge over the stream and the damp, rather evil-smelling hollow where there were always nettles. Jack’s feet were out on their own, just taking the rest of him with them, one at a time.
‘She did,’ Howard nodded. ‘The Florian Rooms, last year. Lots of Haydn. But before that. How did she find me before that?’
‘Perhaps she likes Haydn.’
‘She already knew about me. Via your CD. Why Are We the Same? On which, if you recall, I make a fiendish little contribution in the second variation.’
‘She told you?’
‘She asked me to sign the CD. She gave nothing away, not then. I thought she was unusual, having such a recherché taste in music. I told her so.’
‘Thank you, Howard.’
‘Took some time to get ourselves organised. For the lessons. She was extremely persistent.’
‘You mean, you’re thinking she’s taking her son to your lessons in order to get near me?’
‘Spot on.’
‘Way off-piste, Howard. She could’ve contacted me directly. If she’s about trying to squidge money out of me, she could’ve called me.’
Howard was smiling at him. He’d walked straight into the trap, if trap it was.
‘She’s called you already, apparently.’
Jack’s face flushed crimson. He turned away. Howard hammily cleared his throat.
‘What actually happened in Estonia, Jack?’
‘Eh?’
‘Fill me in.’
Jack blew a soft raspberry. ‘I met her in Tallinn, in a café. Then I saw her in this amateur concert. I gave her your name and number. We had a fling.’
‘A fling. Is Jaan your kid?’
‘Um, possibly.’
‘Harrumph,’ said Howard. ‘As Pooh said. I think.’
Jack looked away and down at the stream. They were in the evil-smelling hollow. There were flies and nettles around the bridge and the stream was more black mud than water. A group of hefty Americans were trying to pass. Some of them were waddling in their shorts, misshapen with obesity. Howard and Jack had to press themselves to the bridge parapet to let them pass: very cheery and loud, they were, like a nightmare vision of the future of the human race.
‘Penguins,’ said Howard, loud enough for them to hear. ‘Although penguins are supremely graceful underwater.’
‘OK, Howard. How about you come back for a bite to eat? I’ve got some nice Stilton, organic celery, stuff. My complete confession for pudding.’
‘Yum yum,’ said Howard.
‘They’re probably eating fugu,’ said Howard, biting his celery.
They were in the garden room, doors wide open.
‘Who are?’
‘The Quartet, in Nagasaki. Fugu is deadly if it’s not prepared properly. They’ll think they’re coming down with something and then their tongues will tingle and they’ll all die and I’ll be the only survivor. I’ll be interviewed and appear on telly. It’s all meant.’
The grape juice settled sweetly in Jack’s mouth, leaving a slight furriness. It didn’t go with Stilton. He could not tell Howard about the magical interlude in Estonia. The two – Howard and Estonia – were incompatible. There was a strained silence, punctured at intervals by Howard’s celery, its cleft filled with cottage cheese.
‘I’m waiting,’ said Howard. ‘Assuming Milly hasn’t got the place bugged.’
‘Marita’s downstairs.’
‘I hadn’t noticed her ultrasonic ears. Question one: did you meet the parents?’
‘What?’
‘Well, you obviously knocked her up.’
‘Howard, you’re gross.’
‘It’s an interrogator’s technique,’ said Howard, scratching his neat, brindled beard.
‘I just don’t…’
‘You just don’t.’
‘No.’
They looked at each other. A strand of celery was stuck in Howard’s teeth. He was negotiating it out with his tongue. His gingery eyebrows were raised. He looked very ugly.
‘You’d have made a good fucking priest,’ said Jack.
‘Thank you. I did consider it when I was thirteen. Then my voice broke. OK, tune up with: I remember. Go on. I, remember.’
‘I, remember. This café,’ said Jack, surprising himself. ‘The Café Majolica. In Tallinn. Back in ’99 it was the Finns, not the Brits, who were the drunken oafs.’
‘We’re only havin’ fun, guv,’ said Howard, with his arms out like an Italian. ‘Carry on. It’s good. I, remember.’
‘I, remember. Her in the café. Seeing her. In the window. As a reflection, at first. The waitress.’
‘Oh, Jack.’
Howard was pitying him. He was pitiable.
‘Sorry, sorry.’ He waved his hands in the air, conducting a phantom orchestra of embarrassment.
‘You got the most ginormous crush.’
‘Probably. Probably that.’
‘You git.’
The clarinet in the Barber sang swan-like through the speakers. Sometimes Howard simply pissed him off. Then the strimmer started.
He got up and closed the French windows, muting the machine’s whine.
‘I can’t believe there’s anything left to sodding strim,’ he said.
‘And?’
He briefly sketched what had happened, a kind of potted translation of some wild and complex and very profound happening in another language. He got up to about their third day on Haaremaa. He was pacing up and down the room. He stopped. The batteries or whatever were empty. It was like thinking about Mahler in text messages.
‘I was a git, fine. Now she’s obviously come back to blackmail me, it’s what these girls from the ex-Communist states or Thailand or wherever do: they put the nets out, sleep with everyone, and then they hook some poor sod and then they keep on reeling in until you’re out of the water, gasping. You end up either having to marry them, t
he whole passport angle, or pay them off. It’s classic. It’s obviously not my kid.’
‘You’ve been reading those newspapers again, naughty boy.’
‘I’m pissed off. Really pissed off.’
Jack started to tremble, suddenly. He was standing against the French windows and trembling. He ran his hand over his face.
‘I really fucking am,’ he said.
He walked out into the garden with long strides, right to the end where generous piles of shrubbery hid the houses beyond. The rough lawn was bare of toys, because this house had no children. The garden’s calculated wildness now did nothing for Jack’s peace of mind. Overgrown, summer-blown flowers were bowed over in the beds, no longer beautiful – weeds to anyone else. Right at this moment, he’d have gone for the chemical-fuelled bleakness of his parents’ garden in Hayes, with its plastic chairs tipped against the rain.
Howard appeared in the distant French windows, looking down the length of the lawn to where Jack was standing, arms folded and mouth pursed. Max would have been running about with a ball, the same age as Jaan so he could picture him. Max’s hair had been blond, very pale and thin. It might have turned black, though. He hadn’t actually seen the eyes: they would have been a newborn’s blue. Max wasn’t a newborn, he was a newdead. Probably not even worth a ghost, or a soul, or whatever. That fucking four-by-four. It wasn’t fair. The strimmer next door started up again, wincing on something tougher than grass.
Jack yelled. He yelled so fiercely it hurt his throat, lifting him onto the balls of his feet like a cartoon figure.
‘Don’t worry, carry on, don’t mind me, I’ll just go on taking my fucking Valium!’
The strimmer stopped.
‘What do you say?’ came a deep, silky tenor voice from over the fence. It was not the male half of the diminutive Albanian couple, it was the Italian millionaire himself.
‘That noise, all the time,’ shouted Jack, enunciating clearly for the foreigner. ‘Sorry, but it is fairly antisocial. I’m a composer!’ he added, as if this was something comic.
Jack knew what the Italian millionaire looked like: he was a scary, short, big-shouldered man in his late forties who wore the requisite black shades, but who only came for two weeks in July and left an expensive ambery scent drifting up and down the street whenever he dived in or out of his red Porsche. Jack had never talked to him before.
Howard had vanished. There was a silence. Jack could not imagine Harrison Birtwistle doing this.
‘You are a – what?’
‘A composer. Of music. Modern music.’
He felt his voice was audible all over Hampstead, and that everyone was listening.
‘Modern music? Rock? Pop? Heep-hop?’
There was a smile in the voice. Faintly mocking. Total superiority.
‘No, definitely not,’ called out Jack, who wanted this to stop. He’d approached the side of the garden, but the uncropped shrubs grew out at least five feet from the fence. ‘Contemporary,’ he added. ‘Contemporary, um, classical!’
‘I like Ricky Martin!’ came a shout from the other side of the garden. It was the painter-decorator with the tinny tranny.
‘Great!’ Jack shouted back. ‘I don’t!’
The painter-decorator laughed. ‘I didn’t think you would! You don’t know what you’re missing, mate!’
There was a sudden burst of Italian from beyond the shrubbery: the millionaire was talking to, or scolding, a girl, perhaps his daughter or his mistress. Or perhaps the housekeeper. Or even his wife. He sounded annoyed, and so did she. Jack started to walk back to the house.
‘What about Cream?’ shouted the painter-decorator.
Jack opened his mouth to reply but the strimmer started up again like a dentist’s drill for ogres.
‘You’re spilling the beans but keeping half of them pocketed,’ said Howard, who had switched on the TV in the front sitting room and was watching cricket on Star Sports. Sri Lanka versus Bangladesh, live from Colombo. He looked as if he owned the place.
Jack had apologised for his behaviour, and Howard had waved it away like a bad smell. ‘Samaraweera’s at ninety-nine,’ he said. ‘The pitch is too small for him.’
Jack sat on the arm of the sofa. Now the cricket was on, he felt disinclined to continue. Cricket made everything outside it feel overdramatised. He wished he hadn’t told Howard anything. His relief was accompanied by a sense of loss. He’d shared the treasure that he’d guarded for six years. It was no longer quite as precious.
‘Y’know, I didn’t feel in any way, um, paternal towards the kid, over in your place. Nothing. Sweet kid, but that was it. There’d have been some instinctual attraction, wouldn’t there?’
‘No idea. I’ve never had a kid.’
‘Well, I reckon there’d have been something,’ Jack said, watching Mashud miss a catch off Samaraweera, wincing at it as Howard rocked back on the sofa. ‘Yup. I reckon there’d have been something.’
Howard was examining his bad finger. He had sat on it in his excitement.
‘He does quite look like you, that’s the funny thing. Right down to the Hitler flop of hair. Oof! Corker!’
Jayawardene’s stumps had gone flying.
‘Bye-bye, captain. So. How did you ride off into the sunset? Tallinn airport, was it? In front of the twin-prop? Here’s looking at you, kid?’
‘Aren’t you watching the cricket?’
‘Simultaneously, Jack. It’s called multitasking. I’ve got half an hour. Then it’s straight back home for our Jaan’s lesson. Gimme the authorised, pocket version.’
‘Not the revised?’
‘Absolutely not,’ Howard murmured with his fists in the air, as Samaraweera hit the next ball for four.
We sat on the little terrace at the back of the dacha and looked out at the vegetable garden and the raspberry canes and the golden poplars at the end, where the forest began. The fox in its cage was a dim shadow, silent as ever but moving. I wished I could release it. I ignored its psychotic-looking glare, though, not even trying to talk to it when I went down there to fetch wood. Rooting for eggs in the chicken run nearer the house, I’d be close enough to the cage to know it was watching me, and it was uncomfortable. I could feel its animosity as this kind of corrosive force, worse than the fetid smell of the cage. Kaja or Mikhel would feed it on scraps, which it ignored for a while and then wolfed up when it thought we weren’t looking.
I needed to get back to Tallinn and phone Mill. She might have tried the flat. I should have left a contact number. She might have had an accident. I looked out at the dacha’s long garden.
‘I’ve got to go back to England in two days. You know I said that.’
We would be going back to Tallinn in the bus, together. Catching it the day after tomorrow. I had hardly worked on my piece since meeting Kaja. I felt a sense of panic, suddenly.
‘It’s going to be hard,’ I added.
‘For me, or for you?’
‘Both of us, obviously.’
‘Oh, well, maybe,’ she said.
I did not want a scene before the restaurant. I was taking the family out. It was a thank-you meal. Kaja was hunched up in her chair. She rubbed her forehead with the back of her fingers, shook the hair from her eyes. She might have been crying: the edges of the lids were red. She would stroke the trunks of trees and say, ‘Hi there. How are you doing, tree?’ And then, in case they wouldn’t understand, she said the same thing in Estonian. It sounded like a poem in Estonian. She knew a lot of the work of a famous Estonian poet called Jaan Kaplinski off by heart:
The radio is still playing
Schubert’s unfinished symphony,
the voice of the rain fills the pauses,
the silence the voice of the rain.
No one knows where they come from.
No one knows where they go.
She believed everyone was on earth to fulfil something unique.
This unique thing was a mystery to the one fulfilling it, and to everyo
ne else, but it was not a mystery to God. When I asked her one time what kind of Christian she was – the island being mainly Lutheran – she laughed and said, ‘Why do you think I’m a Christian?’
‘You believe in God, so I thought…’
And she’d laughed again, putting her hand over my lips, but I was none the wiser. Her hand was slightly sticky, not with tree sap but with sugar. She had been making an egg-flip.
She explained that sometimes in special moments that weren’t always on solitary walks in the forest, you could come very close to knowing why you were here on earth. This was her one belief, unconnected to any religion. This revelation was not a thought, it was not a feeling, it was something for which the human brain had no instruments to register, so your whole body received the sensation like a tide in the blood. I was spellbound, listening to this.
I told her about the white clouds and the music from them in Hayes.
This was the next day, in the rocket station. A few piss-smelling concrete huts with smashed windows; wooden poles without wires; the puddled dilapidation of something resembling a mini golf course, then a long track to four big squared-off tumuli, half covered in tufts of grass. The launch pads. One of the Cold War hot spots. Young birch sprouting already.
I had never told anyone in my life before about the music from the white clouds. Not even Milly.
‘Is Hayes a magic town? Very old and English with beautiful gardens and roses?’
I laughed. ‘Er, not quite,’ I said.
I wanted to run it down, but didn’t know where to begin. I even felt a pulse of affection for it. For Hayes! We had climbed one of the launch pads, hand in hand. I said, quite puffed, on the top: ‘OK. Put it like this. If the Soviets had nuked Hayes from here, the joke goes, they’d have caused millions of pounds’ worth of improvements.’
‘Ah,’ she said, without smiling. ‘So you are even more special than I think.’
And she pressed me close against her as we looked out from the grassed-over launch pad.
I did feel special, just then. I did feel that I was placed on earth for a purpose, mysterious though that was and would always be.