For the first year after Stella’s defection, Katherine’s spirit almost entirely leaves her body. She goes into work, she comes home, and that’s it. Nothing in life interests her. Nothing amuses her. It becomes a series of grim survival routines. There are times when we think it might be easier for us had Stella, like Lydia, simply died that night – or had we died ourselves.
‘If Stella was dead, then I could kill myself,’ as Katherine says to me one day. ‘The only reason I want to be alive is in case my daughter comes back.’ If anything positive comes of the business, it is that Katherine and I cling together. We move from shipwreck to mutual support.
Sally, Sonia, Roger – all of them recede, though Sonia proves herself a model tenant during that summer, and evolves into a valued family friend. She leaves us alone when we need it, and becomes a source of strength and conviction to Katherine. Knowing Sonia for the provoking and mercurial creature that I do, I was inclined, initially, to hold her suspect in her role as ideal tenant, but the letting arrangement had been the result of genuine and innocent coincidence. I had never given Sonia my home address and I had always refused to discuss my wife with her, even to the point of withholding Katherine’s name.
Having travelled up to meet Katherine in my absence, Sonia, of course, instantly recognized her from the photograph in the London bedsit. Not only that, but her eyes lit upon a second photograph on the bureau in our sitting-room – one, taken by my mother, of Katherine and me walking, arm in arm, on Hampstead Heath. At this stage, she tells me, she was all set to turn down the tenancy, though a combination of curiousity and attraction to Katherine held her in the house long enough for them to become firm friends.
And what clinched the thing was that, the previous day, Sonia had left the phone number of her prospective landlady with Sally’s assistant as a place where she could be reached during a part of the afternoon. And Sally, who had rumbled me, likes, of course, to know everything about everybody. At that point, Sonia decided to jump the gun and come clean with Katherine.
According to Katherine, both of them, having drunk in what had happened, burst into tears; then they flung their arms around each other; then they had supper together in our kitchen. They drank a lot and it got late. Sonia stayed over and, the next day, in Katie’s lunch hour, they looked over the Master’s Lodgings together, which are large enough to house a small school. The day after that was Tuesday. They lunched together in the Ashmolean café, after which they flew upstairs, passing through the exhibition room, to the bust of Sir Christopher Wren. They agreed that he was a gorgeous bloke and just their type.
‘The problem is,’ Katherine tells me, ‘that we both like brainy men. And you can tell by his face that he’s brainy.’
Sonia’s response was to say she’d like to kill me. And so it went.
A couple of weeks later, on yet another of her visits to Oxford, Sonia roped Katherine into visiting a dress shop with her, where Katherine bought a jacket and Sonia bought a sage-green linen dress with a Chinese collar and a row of white buttons down the front. After that, she returned promptly to London and touched down on her flat where she donned the carapace and sallied forth to ply me with champagne and bring me flowers, before denting my ego and aiming a blow at my shin in Fortnum’s tea-room.
In the event, these matters pale into insignificance in the face of our grief – mine and Katherine’s – over our precious daughter’s defection. Were anyone at that time to have found us sexy people, I would have judged them seriously warped in the brain.
Dear Sonia, in her new role as college head, quickly puts a stop to Katherine’s incessant catering for Roger and insists that this be undertaken by the college chef as part of his routine duties. And I may say that it is entirely thanks to Sonia’s encouragement that Katherine begins to write. She writes children’s stories. Katie sits all alone in the pristine, un-let outhouse – un-let since Sonia’s departure for the Master’s Lodgings. She sits, every evening after work, for hours and weeks and months and, without making her intention known to me – without quite making it known to herself – she addresses five books of stories to a little girl called Holly whom she has never met. She teaches herself Japanese book-binding and acquires sheaves of beautiful handmade paper from Falkiner Fine Papers Ltd in Southampton Row. She transcribes the stories, elegantly spaced, in her beautiful italic handwriting, leaving alternate pages empty for the pictures.
Finally, she makes contact with Izzy Tench through information about his whereabouts she finds in one of the art magazines in her shop, and she arranges to go and see him. She meets him in his new studio off the Mile End Road and takes along not only the books and photocopies to leave with him, but also a sheaf of photographs taken of Holly and Stella. One of the stories is called ‘Holly Finds the Butter Melon’.
Izzy is making sketches for a portrait of the Poet Laureate at the time, but the boy genius breaks off to give her books his whole attention.
‘But these are great, Katherine,’ he says at last. ‘These books are really superb.’ It is, perhaps, the longest and most committed utterance she has ever heard from him. To her joy, he expresses an eagerness to illustrate them and he produces, in time, a series of exquisite drawings in soft brown pencil which have – as do Katie’s texts – the quality of messages in bottles. Four of the books are published at six-monthly intervals over two years, and a fifth is due out next Christmas. They become, while not quite a mass-market event, a sustained cultish success – and Izzy’s illustrations are ultimately exhibited as a series in the exhibition room of the Ashmolean Museum, through which Sonia and Katherine once passed on their way to the bust of Sir Christopher Wren.
* * *
Sonia, having moved into the Master’s Lodgings in the September of that horrible year, appears in October in her new role as Master, just as I take up the three-year writer’s fellowship. She has got the job, Roger tells me, as the inevitable compromise candidate. It seems that, before either she or I get to putting in our appearance, there has been something of a civil war in the college over the Master’s appointment. The outgoing incumbent is a surprisingly downmarket character, with a cad’s gap between his two front teeth, a penchant for dog-racing tweeds, and a tendency to fart in public.
This brashly self-publicist male person has alienated almost everybody in the college by his blatant manoeuvrings on behalf of a somewhat limply undistinguished male acolyte who is afflicted with a nervous eye-blink. Yet – naturally – the serious outside contender, being a brilliant and somewhat abrasive scholar, is found to be possessed of a personality sufficiently forceful to strike fear into the faint-hearted, not to say the mediocre, among the fellows. The resulting compromise is Sonia.
In the event, Sonia turns out to be more of a force than the feebler dons have reckoned with. For a start, she sweeps into her first college meeting clothed, from shoulder to knee, in chamois leather and wearing her Annie Get Your Gun boots. She seats herself at the head of the table and addresses the company as ‘ladies’. I turn and grin at Roger, who grins back – Roger who, I would have to admit, has improved beyond belief since his severance from Sally.
There is, in fact, only one lady present at the meeting, other than Sonia herself. This is an erudite but curiously androgynous person who always wears a waxed hat indoors. After the meeting, we go for lunch, where Sonia seats herself beside the senior tutor and adopts her favourite, winding-up style.
‘The role of college head more often goes to women these days,’ she says, ‘not because women are coming up in the world, but because the job has been downgraded. It’s not about scholarship. It’s all about touting for funds. My situation is comparable with that of all those black mayors in American cities – as in, “Who is there sucker enough to want to govern a pile of trash cans?” ’
Who, precisely, the trash cans are is not quite clear to me, but Sonia’s words cause a detectable vibration of annoyance around the table.
Naturally, it does not help us that, within
a week of Stella’s defection, I have my mother on the telephone with the appalling news that her old friend Vanessa’s god-daughter has been knocked down by a motorcar and killed, right outside my London landlady’s house. Lydia’s death is a horrible blow. True, I hardly knew the child, but I have a firm impression of her as a young person possessing a robust and resilient spirit. I think of her as the last person in the world who ought to have died young. I consider her to have been temperamentally unsuited.
Furthermore, though I speak with the tall, sad man who is Lydia’s father and find him utterly decent and quite devoid of any implication of accusation, I cannot shift from my mind the idea that, in some way, Lydia’s death is my fault. He ventures the speculation that Lydia had merely wanted to share with me her pleasure in the A-grade mark. And he thanks me for my help to her.
Thus, had I not responded to her letter, Lydia would not have died. Had I not obliged her with my time and expertise; had I not treated her to tea and cream cakes; had I not subsequently rewritten the essay – thus ensuring its A-grade mark – Lydia would not have died. Had I not left London two days early, on that fateful evening in late June, in order to exorcize the effects upon my ego of Sonia’s mercurial brush-off; had I not headed home to accuse my wife of infidelity with my brother; had I only not been absent from the bedsit, Lydia would not have died.
And is there, I wonder morbidly, some dreadful, malign connection in the fact that Lydia dies on the night that we lose our daughter?
‘It was an accident,’ Katie says. ‘Dear Jonathan, it’s too horrible. It’s unspeakable. But it was absolutely not your fault.’
My mother is not so consolatory. She wants to know, in no uncertain terms, what precisely has ‘gone on’ between me and her friend’s poor god-daughter. Though she does not say so, she has clearly come to me with Sally’s take on my affair with Sonia Middleton. When I tell her that we held discussions on German Romanticism, she tells me, abruptly, that she was not ‘born yesterday’. This is true, since my mother is seventy-three.
She takes the moral high ground – and well she might, I concede – given that she and my late father were faithful, monogamous and true throughout the forty years of their marriage. They behaved extremely well. Looking at the roads taken by each of their six children will tell a different and, in the main, less uplifting story, but I draw a veil over this particular area for scrutiny.
Once my mother’s pep talk has wound down, and we have, as usual, flung mud at each other, I embrace her with tears in my eyes and I tell her – moving on from poor little Lydia – that I wish to Christ the Old Man hadn’t gone and bloody died so unnecessarily, at sixty-six. Given that this is something we can always agree on, she cries on my shoulder and wipes her eyes on my shirt.
‘If only the old fool hadn’t smoked so much, Jonathan,’ she says. ‘Just you keep doing Katherine that favour, at least. Don’t you ever start smoking.’ Since I am now forty-eight, and I gave up smoking at sixteen, I make her this promise with confidence.
I attend Lydia’s funeral and seat myself at the back. I listen uncomfortably, during the oration, to chunks of my own prose, as the priest reads an extract from Lydia’s A level essay from the lectern. Love and Death at the Mill. The effect is to leave me feeling cheap. I make no move when the throng files out into the churchyard and I keep my head down. For a while I sit there, registering that the day is fine but breezy. Branches scrape against the windows and the buttresses. The odd leaf has blown into the aisle.
When finally I get up to go, I see something that startles me. Beyond the dark little porch, in the arched segment of light that floods the doorway, Lydia crosses from right to left; Lydia transformed into Diana of the Uplands. Lydia dressed, not in mini-skirt and Doc Martens but in a long, dark skirt and jumper, and a billowing scarf. She is striding towards the lych-gate, preceded by two greyhounds, who are straining at the leash.
I blink and shake myself and she is gone. I sit down for a moment in the porch. Then I make my way briskly into the village and telephone Katherine from outside a pub.
‘Jon,’ Katherine says, ‘didn’t the girl have a sister?’
A sister. Yes, of course. There was the sister with the Bad Experience in Vienna; the sister who didn’t like blond men.
‘She had a sister,’ I say. ‘Thanks, Katie.’
‘Have you eaten anything?’ Katherine says. ‘I’m worried about you, lovey.’ I tell her that I’ll buy myself a pasty. I tell her that I’m just outside a pub. Then, just as I become aware of a disturbance, Katherine says, ‘What on earth is that noise?’
Across the road, Lydia’s sister has begun to scream hysterically. ‘He’s taking my dog,’ she’s yelling. ‘Help me. He’s taking my dog.’
I see then that a boozy-looking street person is making off in the direction of a small single-decker bus and that one of the two greyhounds is trotting happily at his side. So I sprint for all I’m worth and rugby-tackle the dog, meeting the pavement in horizontal position and encircling the greyhound’s collarless neck with both my hands.
‘Good dog. Good dog,’ I say, rising to kneeling position. The dog is utterly gentle, as greyhounds, of course, are – unless you happen to be a rabbit. Meanwhile the girl comes up, red-eyed and sniffling. She has a ferocious rash down one side of her face – the side that was turned away from me in the graveyard – and she is shaking too much to talk intelligibly. She keeps sobbing, ‘Oh Dilly,’ as she struggles to replace the dog’s collar – but she can’t, because of the shakes. So I take the collar from her and I do up the buckle. Then I stand up. Meanwhile we’re neither of us taking any notice of the old man, who is mumbling something mumbly in a mumblish sort of way. A drunken old fool talking to himself. It is only once I’m driving home that I wonder, idly, why the dog was going along so readily with the old boozer.
And that is all there is to say, except perhaps that, one year later, Katherine finds me slumped at my desk with my head upon my ledger and she senses that I am close to tears. I have been working at my accounts and a receipt has come along to distress me. I have at some point written over its hopelessly faded printout. What I have written says, ‘cello £595’. Though I stare at it for a good long while, I have no memory of this particular outgoing – but it serves to remind me that I no longer have the privilege of spending my money on my daughter.
‘It says “Sellotape”,’ Katherine says. ‘It’ll be “Sellotape, five pounds ninety-five.” You’ve abbreviated it, that’s all. And you’ve omitted the decimal point. And misspelt it, by the way. You don’t spell Sellotape with a “c”, Jonathan. You spell it with an “s”.’
‘Oh Christ,’ I say. ‘Oh Katie. What on earth would I do without you?’ Then I cart her off to bed. ‘I love you,’ I say, because, through all the pain and ageing, Katherine’s kindness and cleverness has never ceased to assault my juices. ‘I love you,’ I say. ‘I love you.’ I say it again and again. And again.
6. Die liebe Farbe
Ellen
My interview was due to take place with the Conrad Scholar at twelve that day. After Edinburgh, I had applied to Oxford in the hope of becoming one of his D. Phil. students and I was consequently planning to write a fat book with footnotes, such as Lydia had envisaged Martin Luther nailing to the church door in Wittenberg, multiplied by ninety-five.
Having returned to begin my second year in Edinburgh after the summer of Lydia’s death, I had picked up Stella’s copy of Heart of Darkness and had read it, non-stop, through the first night back. When I had finished – and it isn’t, of course, particularly long – I began it all over again. Over the next few months, I read my way through all of Conrad’s writings. Nobody had offered me tenpence pieces in order to make me do so. Nobody had been required to tie labels to the books, recommending them to me as NOT literature. I read them, and I read them again, simply because the books had laid siege to my mind.
Beautiful, terrible, gloomy books – Boys’ Books, if you like – and all of them, of course
, a far cry from the sexy French comtes and fairytale châteaux, the butch lacrosse teachers and horse-mad schoolgirls in which Lydia and I had once taken such delight. At the time – and ever since – they have suited me very much better. Perhaps this is called growing up.
But the pull of Heart of Darkness lay not only in the book’s unblinking stare into the dark channel that gapes before us when we forget to close our eyes to it. I responded readily to the story’s brooding implication of the ghostly doppelgänger, the other self; the ‘hypocrite lecteur’. Somewhere, in my darkest places, I suppose I felt myself to be incomplete. The bleakness that had come upon me with the death of my sister, the introspective tendency, had found its secret sharer.
Lydia’s death had left me with a legacy of insomnia, or, at least, a habit of wakefulness in the small hours. This is something I now share with Pen, the great friend of my first year. Like him, I am inclined to wake at four in the morning and shake off the dark and begin upon the routines of the day. But where Pen always got up and took himself swimming, I go to my desk. It accounts for how I ended up doing so well in finals. It accounts, as Lydia and I would once have put it, for how I became such a boring swot. I had more hours in my day.
So there I was, before 6 a.m., on the morning that I had seen my dead sister. I was washed, dressed and ready in my navy schoolmarm clothes, waiting to take the train to Oxford. I had already dabbed twice at my face with my tobacco-brown lotion that smelt of tar, because – as always before important events – the whole of my right cheek was afflicted with an un-scenic case of psoriasis. I could depend upon it, by then, to snatch away my looks at moments of challenge.
The Travelling Hornplayer Page 22
