by Adam Thorpe
Howard cupped his chin in his hand. He was, Jack realised, being unnaturally serious.
‘You know what they say about us English, that we like to keep our religion, like our sexual habits, to ourselves? You know, do it in the dark?’
Kaja giggled. She was slowly becoming the Kaja that Jack remembered.
‘Well,’ Howard went on, ‘I tend to think that anything’s possible – speaking as an Anglican – as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone. Terribly wishy-washy, sorry.’ He snorted through his nose, a noise Jack knew well: it was self-derisory. Howard was a supporter of the invasion of Iraq, on the basis that Saddam Hussein hurt a lot of people.
‘No,’ said Kaja, ‘I really agree.’
‘Good. Because I hate punch-ups about God.’
Kaja laughed. Howard was doing great. In fact, almost too great. Jack felt a twinge of jealousy. He was now kneeling, but his knees were sore.
‘And do you think your life’s a Passion, Mrs Krohn?’
‘Kaja. I hate that Mrs Krohn. But it’s complicated to change, right now.’
‘Then call me Howard.’
‘Oh yeah,’ said Kaja, ‘but you’re a great viola player and teacher, by the way.’
‘That somewhat diminishes your description of Jaan’s father,’ said Howard. ‘Great musician.’
‘Yeah, maybe,’ said Kaja. ‘But I don’t think so.’
There was a little silence. Jack didn’t like the way Kaja said ‘yeah’ all the time, and that language-school ‘by the way’, but she had done the same six years ago and he’d found it fine. Kaja was turned away from him and that’s how it must always be.
‘No, this musician was really great.’
‘Uh-huh.’
There was a pause, during which Jack’s heartbeats themselves seemed to be rapt.
‘He played banjo.’
Howard made a really peculiar noise, like bathwater going out.
‘Banjo?’
‘Cajun, jazz. Brilliant. And Estonian songs. He could play anything on the banjo. Then he stopped.’
‘The banjo?’
‘Why? Is there something wrong about it?’
Howard was staring at his splinted finger. ‘Not at all. But it’s not like the viola.’
She nodded, smiling and pulling on her cigarette. She blew the smoke out as if she was blowing out a candle.
‘Then he stopped. Just like that. He became a sculptor. He made sharks out of marble.’
‘Sharks?’
‘Why? Is there something wrong about sharks, too?’
Howard laughed. ‘Is this Mr Krohn?’
‘Are you the KGB?’
‘No, the CIA.’
Jack’s eyelids were cold against the metal of the keyhole. He felt sick. Kaja’s glance swept sideways and suddenly it seemed to meet his, which was impossible, but he removed himself with a lurch that wasn’t all that silent. And he froze, in case. But the voices went on. Jaan wasn’t his son. He did not have a son. The Queen looked down at him with regal contempt, the old faggot.
The voices had stopped. He looked through the keyhole again. Kaja was very still, looking downwards, her face mostly hidden. Then she fished out a tissue and blew her nose and wiped her eyes and held the tissue against them. Jack couldn’t see her eyes but he assumed this was what she was doing. He realised his face was screwed up into a kind of ball. He let the muscles in his cheeks go, very slowly. His knees were painful on Howard’s carpet. He wanted a cup of tea.
‘Truth was important for us,’ she said. ‘It was the only light. The only one. And the nature – and nature, too. Nature never lies, does she?’
‘I suppose not,’ said Howard, who looked pale and tired, as he would do after a concert. ‘Nature just gets on with it. Although you might call camouflage a lie. One of those moths with a fierce face in its tail. Or the other way round: a lie could be termed a camouflage.’
‘How can nature lie,’ said Kaja, very earnestly, with her head forward, ‘when she doesn’t know what the hell is a lie?’
That evening, as Jack was turning down the ring to the absolute minimum under the petits pois, feeling emotionally and physically spent, Milly started pulling her lacy top up carefully over her head. She wasn’t wearing a bra.
It had been a long day at a thermal comfort conference in Bath; her eyes were still smarting from the city’s horrendous pollution levels.
She unbuttoned her jeans skirt and stepped out of it. Then she got down on all fours, on the kitchen floor.
She was wearing a thong, which surprised him even more. It disappeared between the cheeks of her buttocks and reminded him of the cheese slicer in the delicatessen, sinking into a Dutch Gouda. She waved her rump at him, like an animal.
‘Take me,’ she ordered.
The blind wasn’t lowered, the light was on: everyone could see in. At the moment, there was no one passing on Willow Road, but there soon would be.
‘Eh?’
‘Quickly, it’s what the consultant said. Get the adrenalin going. Make it dangerous. Apparently the adrenalin helps. It’s an incredibly animal thing. Deep in the system. You might be eaten. Leapt on by a sabretooth.’
‘Which consultant?’
‘The new one. Juan-Carlos. Never give up, he said. It’s incredibly psycho-physical. That’s why he’s so expensive. And today’s good. Lunar cycle.’
‘Everyone can see in,’ he pointed out.
‘Just do it, for fuck’s sake. Pretend I’m a whore. Pretend I’m your mistress. Do it with my panties on. Doggy position.’
‘I haven’t got a mistress.’
She lowered her top half further, sinking onto her elbows, her head on the floor, so her buttocks were even more prominent, two great globes as pale as honeydew melons. There was a swollen red spot on the right cheek.
‘Please,’ she said. ‘Please.’
He calculated that the sight line from the street would be obscured by the kitchen units against the window, unless someone was looking from the Heath, from the twilit bushes on the rise the other side, where a bevy of giggly schoolgirls would usually gather of an evening, smoking and gossiping. Or up a tree: they’d have to be equipped with binoculars. He crouched and bent his knees and pulled his trousers and pants down, bewildered, scared, but already excited.
‘Not that one!’ she cried, reaching behind her, correcting him, guiding him past the cotton strip. ‘We’re making my baby! We’re making my baby, for God’s sake!’
A group walked past, talking and laughing, on heels that sounded as though they were in the kitchen itself. They didn’t look in, thank God. Milly was groaning and moaning, not keeping the volume down, as he tried to hurry himself up, grinding away between the straits of her cervical muscles. It was, in fact, pretty exciting, pretty pleasurable. He was crouching, trying to keep his head as low as possible.
Then he saw Edward Cochrane.
Edward Cochrane was waving at him from the street, an Oddbins bag in his other hand.
‘What’s the matter?’ gasped Milly.
‘It’s Edward.’
‘Just ignore him. Oh, it’s so good. Come, darling, come!’
‘I can’t. Not with bloody Edward looking.’
‘Oh, it’s so good, stay in, you’re so good! It’s the adrenalin! It’s the danger! It’s the sabretooth! Touch my breasts! Touch them!’
Jack nodded calmly at Edward from this awkward, crouched position, keeping his buttery, fish-smeared hands cupped over Milly’s breasts, moving his groin minimally but sufficiently so it didn’t show in his upper torso – the only part of him that could possibly, he reckoned, be visible to Edward. But Edward was looking puzzled. He’d probably been drinking in the Flask on the corner, his usual haunt. Jack’s chief terror was that Edward would come up to the front door, peer in through the window by the porch.
‘Oh, darling! Come! Come!’
Jack said, out of the corner of his mouth, ‘Edward’s still there. He’s lifting an Oddbins bag. I think he’s ask
ing us round for a drink.’
‘Oh, come as you’re looking at him! He’s the danger! He’s the adrenalin! He’s the sabretooth!’
Her hand reached between her legs and subjected his chestnuts to little delicious arpeggios with the tips of her fingers, partly subduing his embarrassment. Jack managed to shake his head politely at Edward and mouth a ‘No’ as Milly gave a great gasping moan and shuddered, sinking her head onto her arms.
‘Have you come yet?’ she asked.
‘Nearly.’
He had pain in his lower back. He was not a gymnast.
‘Oh, darling!’ she said, revolving her behind so much that he could barely keep his balance, let alone hold his head and shoulders still. ‘Fill me up with your spunky spunk!’
He saw Edward give a mournful shrug, looking very like Tony Hancock.
‘I’m nearly there. Don’t move around so much.’
Then, in a sudden surprising lurch, he slipped out of her by mistake and simultaneously, as she was attempting to stuff his equipment back in, all their hopes spilt out into her hand.
EIGHT
The following morning he was staring into space in his study, feeling a great hollow in his chest, when he was interrupted by a ring on the doorbell.
It was Edward Cochrane, no longer holding an Oddbins bag. Although it was ten in the morning, his neighbour was lightly drunk.
‘Did you get it open in the end?’
‘Get what open?’
‘The bottle! Cork stiff, was it? Wrist weak? I’ll bet it was a good one. I use a vacuum pump.’
‘It was not that good, Edward.’
‘Nothing worse than drinking a decent bottle on your own. At first I thought you were screwing your wife, all crouched over like that.’
‘Look, I’m working right now –’
‘Just keep an eye on her. Or you’ll end up like me. Drinking on your own. Doing everything on your own. No weak wrist here, look.’ He chortled, horribly. ‘You can always loan her to me, by the way. She’s terribly attractive and you don’t even know it. Sired three bonny nippers, me. No probs. No deficiencies in that quarter.’
He was sounding weirdly like a 1950s Etonian, suddenly.
‘Hey, Edward, sorry, we don’t even find you, um, funny any more. Just fucking rude.’
And Jack slammed the door on him, peevishly. On his own neighbour. Swearing at his own neighbour. Then he brooded on the term ‘deficiencies’, pacing up and down in his study.
Howard had reckoned the keyhole wheeze a resounding success. Jack wasn’t so sure. No, he wasn’t the father – in fact, he wasn’t anything much at all to Kaja. Maybe he was deficient in every way. But that didn’t stop him being involved.
He was faintly scared of her, because he didn’t know what she was up to. And therefore he was involved. She had come to London, to Howard, to his world, in the expectation – the sure knowledge – that she would meet him. And now they had talked. And she had said ‘maybe’. Why? This ‘maybe’ was a fudge. Jaan was nothing to do with him. More straightforward if he had been. Very special. His son.
But Jaan was someone else’s son. And not even Kaja’s ex-husband’s.
Jack felt himself part of a long line of men, shuffling past her. Head bowed. One of many.
‘I missed a bit,’ he’d said to Howard, afterwards. ‘Why did she start to cry, and then go on about truth?’
‘Apropros of nothing,’ said Howard. ‘Or maybe because I joked about being the CIA. You never know which bits are tender, with foreigners. By the way, at the door she said she was definitely going to phone you. About accompanying Jaan. It’s all much simpler now, isn’t it? No blood link. Collateral damage avoided. Thank me then, you ungrateful old sod.’
‘Thank you, Howard.’
Jack slept half the afternoon away, on his sofa, without meaning to. The phone went when he was deep in a dream, of which he could remember only a sense of confused flight and horses covered in black goo. He cleared his throat and answered. It wasn’t Kaja, as he’d anticipated. It was his Tuesday student, a little twelve-year-old Indian genius called Raj with perfect pitch, like his tutor. Raj lived above his parents’ snazzy deli in Chalk Farm. Jack had completely forgotten. Raj was ringing from the Middletons’ front door on his mobile, as no one was answering. It was after half past five.
Jack pretended he’d been in the garden, and splashed his face with cold water. They were working on phrasing, mainly, and Jack had suggested Satie’s second Gymnopédie in honour of Clara Knowles. The lesson went well, surprisingly. He told Raj to put more body into his little finger as it played the lowest note, and Raj found this very funny.
‘Your phrases don’t know where they end,’ Jack continued, tapping the score. ‘They have a beginning, a middle and an end, but you get to the middle at the end, or the end in the middle, so you’ve got nowhere to go for the next two bars. Each phrase is a story. Look, this one lasts five bars. You have to anticipate the progression of that story.’
‘Then by the end I’ve told all these stories,’ Raj said, very perky as usual. Apparently he was bullied at school because he was top in everything except sport.
‘Right,’ said Jack, feeling a warmth of appreciation inside him that was one of the nice things about teaching. ‘The big story Satie wants you to tell has all these smaller stories inside it. Mood stories, my old teacher called them. Like all of us,’ he added. ‘We’re each one big story with lots and lots of smaller stories.’
‘Except with each person they go on at the same time, some of them,’ piped Raj. ‘They overlap like scales on a fish. Not like in the music.’
Jesus, no wonder he gets bullied, Jack thought.
‘I think it’s more confusing than scales on a fish, with us, Raj,’ Jack said. ‘I think it’s more like a bundle of wires.’
‘Not bare wires connected up to a really massive generator, I hope,’ said Raj, squirming on the piano stool.
‘Nah,’ said Jack. ‘Only if you’re me.’
Which made Raj laugh so hard he nearly fell off.
And then the phone went again, and it was Kaja.
He didn’t want to get electrocuted. More to the point, he didn’t want anyone else to get electrocuted. He was due to meet Kaja at eleven tomorrow morning in Regent’s Park. Wednesday was her day off from the hotel work, she’d said. He’d not asked her what she did in the hotel, it didn’t seem the moment for possibly awkward questions. She might well be a room maid – peeling off soiled sheets and rubbing at drink rings on the bedside table, digging out stiff tissues from behind the mattress, piling up damp furry towels at the door to be washed and bleached at the expense of the planet. Once, in a four-star hotel in Madrid, he’d surprised the cleaner pilfering his bag. Big hotels were fungal, wish-fulfilment places you didn’t want to scrape at too hard.
You could say that, he thought, about the music world, and smiled to himself as he fiddled in the kitchen, waiting for Milly to get back from Oxford. His main task was to orchestrate this whole deal so that no one got hurt, no one squealed. Kaja had to understand that the whole thing was over. He’d apologise for fibbing, and then it would all be fine. He’d make amends with free lessons for Jaan. Help her out with cash. Do his bit for the new Europe.
Milly need never know. Kaja would become the mother of one of his music pupils, and no one would be the wiser.
His shirt smelt of the hospital, although it had been washed. His mother had settled into a routine of suffering that was almost banal.
When Milly got back at ten thirty – the Oxford train having stopped for an hour and a half in a tunnel for no apparent reason – she was exhausted and irritable. Enter the PMT Zone, Jack thought. Tread like a fox. Now Mikhel was dead, maybe the fox had been released from the cage by the woodshed. He really must ask Kaja.
The supper he’d prepared with care was not good: his usual shepherd’s pie, Milly’s favourite, but languishing in a low oven for an hour longer than it should have done had killed it in som
e way: it was dried out, with a smell that recalled sweaty pyjamas. Milly just frowned and poured herself more wine. It wasn’t his fault, he considered.
He’d been watching an obscure documentary on cable about a Romanian opera version of Racine’s Andromache, and now felt slack and English and dull. The killing of Pyrrhus had been enacted instead of reported, gallons of pigs’ blood poured into a tin bath behind the admittedly weak and screechy music. The young male composer had a stud in each ear and punkish hair and was obsessed by Stockhausen and Cage. Everything was fresh, in the end, if you wanted it to be.
Jack wished he was born somewhere painful and interesting, knowing this desire in itself to be Hampsteadthink.
He was describing the documentary to Milly, but she was grunting her responses. She was far away, glazed over. She had given a talk at a conference on yurts, and berated a planning official for the laws that made yurt-dwelling difficult. The official had smothered her in stupid, bony words and made her feel like a hippy.
This far-awayness irritated him, as if it was her duty to be fascinated – following some ideal domestic model – in a Romanian opera version of Andromache after a tough day with the yurts.
The bandstand in Regent’s Park was occupied by a children’s group from Croatia, some in jeans and T-shirts with Hot Shot Good – Its’ Croatia! printed on the front, the rest of them in folk costume.
He was early, and there was no sign of Kaja. It was weirdly, creepily hot for late September. He tried not to feel worried about it.
He sat down in a deckchair and the attendant came up to him and charged him. The singing was fine until it veered from Croatian choral or folk works to embrace British pop classics. ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ forced him to leave. This was all a mistake, he thought. The other people in the deckchairs, mostly elderly or tourists with cameras, smiled tolerantly and clapped along.
He felt sour and superior and damaged, and walked to the lake’s edge and back, just to check she wasn’t there.