by William Boyd
She screwed the cap back on her pen, picked up her glass and went downstairs. Softly, softly, one step at a time, she said to herself. She sat down in her sitting room a little overwhelmed at what had happened, sensing tears in her eyes. It had been such a long time. Foolish woman, she admonished. She was just happy to be back in her own house—her cosy white cottage in the Vale of Health in Hampstead—a house she had bought with all the money she had made from The Big Show.
Not entirely her home any more, really, given that Reggie had moved in after their marriage. It was full of his possessions, his stuff: posters of films he’d made or would have liked to have made—The Exterminating Angel, Belle de Jour, La Dolce Vita, The Red Desert, Il Gobbo. This was why he wanted to change his name to Rodrigo, she realised. Some preposterous hope that people would think he was half Italian or Spanish or Brazilian and that the new name would allow him to borrow, or steal, some of the allure of these foreign film-makers he so admired and envied. It was sad, she thought, sad as the crude abstract sculptures—unpolished curved pieces of welded metal—perched on windowsills and tables and the two black leather Eames chairs with stools that didn’t suit the shabby, Arts and Crafty look of the sitting room at all, she thought. She took her glass into the kitchen for a transfiguring, celebratory refill. Reggie had paid to redo the kitchen, she admitted, all granite and pale blond wood—again not exactly to her taste. Maybe he was quietly colonising the house, she thought, unkindly. Maybe she should reclaim the lost ground now she was writing again: she’d been too compliant, too passive.
She topped up her drink and stepped out through the kitchen door into her small square of back garden. There was a round teak table with a parasol and four chairs set on a neat raised terrace of York stone, a patch of lawn and a high beech hedge. No flowers apart from a border of perennial purple geraniums running along the foot of the hedge. She pulled a chair into the sunlight and sat down, thinking about Reggie and their marriage.
She knew Reggie had affairs, especially when he was making a film. He wasn’t an accomplished adulterer and she discovered his transgressions without really trying. She supposed she should be more bothered but she couldn’t stir herself to protest, somehow. Une épouse complaisante. Another novel-title for her long list. Anyway, her own libido seemed pretty much shut down as well, these days. She found herself wondering what Leonard Woolf had thought about Virginia’s affairs. Was he un mari complaisant? But then Virginia’s affairs were all with women. Did that make a difference? Still, she thought, now her career as a novelist was functioning again perhaps everything would change and she’d kick Reggie out the next time she caught him in one of his nasty, furtive dalliances. Just like his first wife, Marion, who had instantly chucked him out when she’d discovered his affair with me, she thought. God, Marion Tipton, what a vengeful, hostile, unforgiving woman. Though, she considered, maybe she had grounds for her bitterness. Reggie’s daughters had been young, six and eight. What were the girls’ names? Stupid names: Butterfly and Evergreen. Imagine growing up as Evergreen Tipton…As Elfrida thought back to the months of the affair with Reggie it seemed as if she was contemplating a different person, another human being entirely. Oh, that Elfrida Wing…
She heard the phone ring in the house and wondered whether to answer it. All right, she thought, in the spirit of the recent transfiguration I will start answering the phone, and she strode back indoors. She picked up the receiver. It was one of her oldest and closest friends, Jessica Fairfield. They had been at Cambridge together and Jessica had turned into a rather brilliant solicitor, so everyone told her; a senior partnership was imminent.
“There you are, darling. Glad I caught you,” Jessica said. She had a deep voice, it could have been a man on the line.
They chatted for a bit, Elfrida making sure her lies were not too bold. Yes, everything generally wonderful, writing again, Reggie was fine, happy to be directing his silly film.
“Listen,” Jessica said. “Are you busy tonight? Something’s come up.”
26
In the taxi on the way to the Royal Festival Hall Talbot found his mind returning repeatedly to his strange, unsought encounter with the young scaffolder, Gary Hicksmith. Was this natural or was there something growingly obsessive about this focus? Let it play out as it may, he thought, there was nothing to be gained by fantasising. He almost laughed out loud. There was everything to be gained by fantasising; surely fantasising kept you sane, interested in life, connected to events, to all manner of agreeable, hypothetical possibilities. Maybe, he considered further, the very ability to fantasise was a fundamental feature of our human nature. Animals didn’t—couldn’t—fantasise. Only Homo sapiens possessed that gift. We should cherish it.
He remembered his conversation with Anny’s friend, Jacques Soldat, on the front at Brighton and their amused, ever so slightly spiky speculation about a book called The Fantasy of Power. Soldat had a strange, aggressive manner, as if he lived to provoke and was suspicious and slightly contemptuous of everyone he met. It was born of self-confidence, though, this attitude—of success, not chippiness, that debilitating English disease. He brought Soldat to mind. What did Anny see in a man like that—at least twenty years older than she was? They did themselves no favours, these young, vulnerable actresses. Cornell Weekes, the urban terrorist, and Jacques Soldat, the radical philosopher. Surely she could have met and chosen someone more appropriate…Anyway, it wasn’t his problem.
He had telephoned Naomi to arrange where to meet and discovered she was laid up in bed with flu, so he was to go to the concert alone, she said. Fair enough, he thought, his weekend wasn’t running to the plan he’d made so he might as well discard it entirely. Also, it would give him a chance to spend some time alone with Humphrey, “man to man,” and determine the state of their relationship which, currently, to be honest with himself, he would describe as somewhat awkward and distant.
He picked up his ticket from the box office and wandered a while amongst the throng of concertgoers, wondering whether to have a drink now or at the interval. Interval, he thought. He bought a programme and saw that Richard Strauss’s tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra was to start the evening off followed by Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. He looked about him at his fellow members of the audience as he went upstairs to locate his seat in the auditorium and thought, as he always did when he found himself in a significant crowd, how simply odd other people were, how strange. Sometimes he wished—as if in another world that he controlled absolutely—that people should have labels on their backs describing who they were and what reasons they had for their presence: “Germanophile,” “Failed Artist,” “Bored,” “Classical Music Enthusiast,” “Trying to Impress,” “Aimless Tourist,” “Forlorn Lover,” or whatever. And what would his label proclaim? “Father of the Timpanist.” Perhaps he seemed just as odd to the others, this tall bald severe-looking middle-aged man, equally worthy of their curiosity and scrutiny.
He took his seat, to one side but with a good view of the orchestra, annoyed that he hadn’t brought his binoculars. Opera glasses were no good, not sufficient magnification, he found. He had been to hundreds of concerts in his life and found the experience immeasurably improved if you could watch the players through the precisely focussed lenses of binoculars. It was voyeuristic, he knew, but to see in close-up the intensity of concentration and the range of facial expression and distortion was stimulating and diverting. And when the musicians weren’t playing it was even more enticing: the covert scratching that took place, the adjustments of hair and costume, the whispers, the asides, the glances, the fiddling with the intricacies of the instrument, getting rid of saliva, moistening reeds, tiny twists of the pegs that tightened or loosened strings, one eye always on the score or the conductor—it was like being a peeping Tom in public, and uncensorable, wholly conscionable and permitted. For him it made the experience of concertgoing almost sensual, both an aural
and visual indulgence.
He watched the orchestra sidle diffidently on stage, edging past the flimsy music stands to find their seats. Scores were checked and straightened and then the usual groaning, creaking and screeching sound grew as instruments were tested and tuned. He saw Humphrey shuffle in behind his four-wide kettledrum set and deliver a few tentative pianissimo thumps to the heads, adjusting the tuning posts, and Talbot wondered, for the four-hundredth time, no doubt, what in heaven’s name had possessed his son to choose the timpani as his instrument?
He had asked him once and Humphrey had said, “Someone’s got to do it”—it was a joke—and then he followed the remark up with a more sincere observation. “Imagine an orchestra without percussion—hard and soft. We convert and reconnect all those centuries of sophistication with the roots of music, Dad. Rhythm, percussion—the rock on which all music is based. The caveman beating on a log with a club. We add atavistic power.” His words had all the studied artificiality of a prepared defence—no doubt he’d repeated them many times in answer to the same question—but they had made Talbot think. Maybe he was right. Timpani, the big drums, were the orchestra’s pulsing, throbbing heart. A good phrase, he thought; maybe he’d try it out on Humphrey on the taxi ride home.
The conductor came on stage in his white tie and tails, bowed low, stepped onto his little podium and Zarathustra began—the slow growl of the basses, the contrabassoons, the organ and then the trumpets calling, rising to the octave, then the orchestra and now Humphrey—bam-boom-bam-boom—molto pesante—thirteen blows thundering out into the auditorium. Richard Strauss, the timpanist’s favourite composer. For a minute or so Talbot felt a small flicker of paternal pride. The drums called out—muscular, thrilling, the beating heart of the orchestra—Humphrey leading the way. Talbot surrendered himself to the music.
Stirring stuff, Talbot thought, as he emerged from the auditorium at the interval, it would make the Grieg seem epicene and thin. He looked around and headed for the bar. He had pre-ordered a large Scotch and soda and, as he turned, he almost bumped into a woman who was also carrying her mid-concert sharpener. Gin and tonic, he guessed.
They looked at each other.
“Talbot, what a surprise.”
“Elfrida. Exactly. Well met, lovely to see you. Isn’t Strauss splendid? Almost makes me want to join the Nazi Party.”
“I wouldn’t go quite that far.”
“I’m joking.”
“Of course you are.”
They exchanged a few more musical platitudes as if to expunge the bad start to their encounter.
“I came here with my friend, Jessica,” Elfrida explained. “And then she started to feel faint just as we were about to take our seats so went home.”
“We’ve both been abandoned. Naomi has flu.”
“Naomi?”
“My wife.”
“Of course. Do give her my best wishes for a speedy recovery.”
As far as Talbot was aware, Elfrida and Naomi had never met.
“My son is in the orchestra. Timpani.”
“How fascinating. Thumping away. Marvellous. He must love Zarathustra.”
They both drank to fill the silence. Both lost in the awkward formality of their personas, Talbot thought, chronic social ill-at-easeness being the English middle-class status quo.
“Is Reggie here?” Talbot asked, stupidly, immediately wishing he hadn’t.
“No. He won’t leave Brighton, so he says. Not until the film is done.”
Talbot knew this wasn’t true. Reggie came up to London regularly to see the edit, the rough assembly of what he’d filmed. And to rendezvous with Janet Headstone, no doubt.
He and Elfrida wandered spontaneously away from the bar to a darker corner of the mezzanine, as if they were a couple, Talbot thought, controlled by unspoken assumptions and old habits, stuck with each other until the concert resumed, unable to think of a polite way of being alone.
As they talked on—politely, meaninglessly—Talbot looked more closely at Elfrida. He always forgot how tall she was—he didn’t have her filed away in his mind as a tall person—and very slim, wearing a grey suit with an indigo blouse, flat patent shoes. Her lips were a vivid red and there was a tone in her voice as she talked—a constant—dry, reedy, verging on cynical, he would say. He suspected she was wary of him, anyway, quite apart from her inbuilt lack of social ease, as he was part of Reggie’s world, not hers. She kept touching her hair, nervously, her fringe, the hanging sides, keeping the helmet in place with a quick brush of her fingers. What was she hiding from? he wondered. He glanced quickly at his watch—still ten minutes to go—asking himself when he could safely regain his seat. He was beginning to find the banal politesse of their conversation tiresome and awkward—no doubt she felt the same—but appearances must be kept up. Meeting the wife of a colleague you didn’t expect to meet, and didn’t particularly want to meet, provided its own mild social agonies.
Still, they talked on—about the Festival Hall itself, the pleasures of concertgoing, the Vietnam War, the house in Rottingdean, the particular strangeness of Brighton as a town. She seemed to relax a bit as she drank her gin and tonic. He wondered vaguely if a man (not him, obviously) would find Elfrida attractive, sexually attractive. He had no idea. She was clever, that was for sure, and she made him chuckle when she said that she thought Brighton functioned as a kind of rackety conscience-free zone for Londoners—like the Las Vegas of England, she said. It was well expressed and he knew what she meant: old norms of behaviour were more easily abandoned there, as if the town’s reputed loucheness were contagious. And he found himself thinking that if Reggie, and the film, and his own role in the film, hadn’t stood between them then he imagined that they might actually have come to enjoy each other’s company, unreflectingly. Might have. Yet another parallel universe.
The bell rang to announce the end of the interval.
“Do you know,” she said, “I think I might skip the second half. See how poor Jessica’s getting on.”
They made their farewells and Talbot watched her walk back to the bar. Strange woman, he said to himself. How many times had he made that observation about her? He wondered what observation she might make about him.
After the concert he met Humphrey at the stage door. They shook hands and he noted that Humphrey’s handshake was weak, like holding an empty glove. How could you tell someone that? That they should firmly grip a hand when shaken? Impossible. They walked up to Waterloo Bridge to hail a taxi.
“Wonderful concert,” Talbot said.
“I don’t think we were quite at our best.”
“Well, the punters seemed to enjoy it.”
In the taxi Humphrey chose to sit in the jump-seat diagonally opposite rather than beside him, Talbot noticed, as he quietly scrutinised his son. Humphrey was now in his mid-twenties, his hair was neatly long, carefully combed to cover his ears, with a sideswiped fringe revealing a triangle of pale forehead. He had a patchy soft moustache that didn’t suit him. A good head of hair, Talbot noted ruefully, but not handsome, missing out on the clean-cut, even features of the Kydds—nose a bit bulbous, and thin-lipped as well. He had been a pretty and charming little boy, Talbot recalled—his war baby, conceived and born during the conflict. And when Humphrey was little Talbot thought he could see in him a resemblance to Kit, his own brother, but that disappeared at pubescence. Talbot had married Naomi in 1941, while home on leave from Africa, and Humphrey was born before their first anniversary; Zoë following a year later. He thought of Zoë with something of a prick of loss. How your children change with adulthood! Two children, a boy and a girl, over and done with, Talbot thought. He actually couldn’t remember how often he and Naomi had made love after Zoë’s birth. They definitely had—there were many years when he still laboured under the delusion that he was perhaps 50% heterosexual.
“Are you staying toni
ght?” Humphrey asked.
“Of course. I came up specially to see—and hear—you play.”
“Thank you.”
“No need for thanks, Humph. I’m the one who should be thanking you. I felt very proud.”
“Thanks again…Dad,” he added.
“How are things in Manchester?”
“I really like it. I enjoy my life there.”
“Anyone special?” He smiled to make the innuendo seem fond, not prurient.
“Not really. Nice bunch of mates in the orchestra, you know.”
The thought entered his mind—and kept on going—that maybe Humphrey was queer. He decided not to speculate further.
They headed west through London for Chiswick, silent again. Humphrey lit a cigarette and smoked it awkwardly, as if he’d only just started smoking and hadn’t mastered the technique. He puffed away, not really inhaling, making a lot of smoke. Talbot lit up as well—smoke fighting smoke—and began to talk about anything: plans they had made for changing the Chiswick garden, Naomi’s struggles with the school board and the erratic and demanding progress of Ladder to the Moon. Humphrey appeared to be listening intently, nodding and smiling. Father and son engaged in genial conversation, Talbot thought, imagining some invisible witness watching them. Wasn’t it curious how your children could become complete strangers to you?