Sex and Stravinsky
BARBARA TRAPIDO
For Megan Vaughan
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Afterword
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Author
Chapter One
Josh Meets Caroline
Josh meets Caroline in a shared student house in London. The time is late 1970s so everyone in the house looks hideous. That’s everyone except for Caroline, but she doesn’t live there. Not yet. All the men have got too much hair, which tends to come lank, matt and flecked with dandruff. The women wear floaty purple cheesecloth things – either cropped floaty purple things, worn over flared jeans, or full-length floaty purple things that go from shoulder to ankle. Josh remembers this as the Purple Time.
The women also have lots of hair, long, lank and drooping from centre partings, but theirs has less dandruff since it’s better cared for. Josh, like all the others, has too much hair, but because his is so curly it looks shorter. He wishes it would grow in a Jimi Hendrix fuzz but because his curls are looser the effect is more Harpo Marx, except that it’s red. Josh’s hair, in his youth – in the Purple Time – is a dark, chestnut red. And, since facial hair for men is more or less obligatory, he discovers that his beard and moustache grow in an interesting speckle of red, black and white, like the chalks in a Watteau drawing. His work on the evolution of the clown has caused him to look at Watteau drawings. Whenever he sees photographs of himself these days, twenty years on, in the ‘now’ time – that is to say, 1995 – he thinks it is he who looks like a clown, but then everyone looks pretty weird. Except for Caroline.
Josh is quite short because his legs are short. He’s been told several times, by Greek persons, that this has to do with the Greek in him. That’s if ever he lets drop that the man who fathered him – a small-time crook, an unscrupulous, loutish ne’er-do-well, a man he never met beyond babyhood – was Greek. And his name isn’t really Josh, come to that. It’s George. Caroline always looks fabulous in old photographs, except that sometimes her head has been cut off. This is because she’s taller than everyone else in the picture. Caroline is blonde and six foot tall.
Josh meets her one Sunday morning when he trundles woozily downstairs wearing a long cotton tunic that comes from Tanzania, courtesy of his parents. Adoptive parents. He’s feeling the need for instant coffee and hasn’t yet surfaced properly, so his focus, behind his lenses, is fairly restricted. First, he takes in that the area of kitchen worktop around the kettle is devoid of its usual clutter and that his housemate Keiran’s saucer of squeezed-out reusable tea bags is no longer in evidence. There’s a nice corner-bakery smell that has taken over from the odour of dustbin and then when he looks up, widening his range, he sees that there’s a blonde Amazon standing at the sink with her back to him and that she’s wearing big yellow washing-up gloves.
The blonde, from behind, has what looks like regulation long straight hair, only nicer, because hers has thickness and lift like curly hair that happens to be straight and for the moment she has gathered up half of it to the crown of her head, with a large tortoiseshell clip. The Amazon is wearing loose black drawstring trousers that hang on gaunt, jutting hip bones and on her torso she has the top half of a black bikini. The faint outline of her ribs is visible under the flesh and Josh can see that her spinal cord is indented slightly, like rope under the skin. Her shoulder blades are two beautiful, almost-rectangles, one just slightly higher than the other, that hold him in thrall. Her neck is elegantly long. Everything about her is long. Then she’s finished rinsing the crockery and she pulls off the washing-up gloves. Sensing Josh’s stare, she turns round. Grace Kelly sort of face, Josh notes. Broad cheek-bones. Squarish jaw. Widely spaced blue eyes.
He takes a step backwards, thinking, Oh my God, just look at yourself, would you? Morning dog-breath. A bloke in a dress. Where is your nightcap, Mr Scrooge? Where is your candlestick, Mr Wee Willie Winkie?
‘Hi,’ he says. ‘Excuse me. I’ll just get the kettle on. If that’s OK.’
It’s a whistling kettle that sits permanently on the gas hob, so it’s always encrusted with the grease that splatters from student fry-ups. Except that now it isn’t. The kettle is revealing itself as a thing made of gleaming dark-green enamel. Racing green, as it’s called these days in ad-man speak.
‘Something’s happened to this kettle,’ he says, staring at it hard, his lazy right eye drifting slightly outwards behind his glasses as he holds it under the tap, so that, for a moment, he sees two slightly overlapping green kettles, before the edges once again cohere.
‘I cleaned it,’ the Amazon says. ‘With washing soda. I’m Caroline, by the way. I’m visiting Tamsin.’
Ozzie, Josh notes. The girl’s from Oz. Love the vowels. A bit like home, only different. Diphthongs as monophthongs. It’s Josh’s drama school training that accounts for this tendency to see phonetic symbols dancing in the air when people speak. Josh is from Durban, but he’s been in London for a year. Everyone else in the house is English except for Tamsin, who’s Australian. Marty’s parents are from Jamaica but he’s been raised in Lewisham.
‘Hi,’ Josh says, ‘I’m Josh.’ Then he says, ‘It smells kind of different in here. It smells nice.’
‘Could be that I’ve emptied the bin,’ she says. ‘Plus I’ve got muffins in the oven. Fancy a muffin with that coffee? They’re just about ready.’
The muffins are made with bananas and a sprinkle of wheat bran, so they’re moist along with having texture. It’s quite a while since he’s eaten a muffin. The only approximation he’s managed to find in London is what he thinks of as a cup cake. Then there are those crumpet-type things called ‘English muffins’ that taste like ceiling tiles. Well, that’s until your housemates tell you they need toasting.
‘They’re called Seven-day Muffins,’ Caroline says, ‘because you make up the dough and keep it in the fridge for seven days, you see. Then every morning all you need do is take out enough dough for that day’s breakfast and pop it into a muffin tray. Bingo.’
‘Bingo’. Who the hell says ‘Bingo’? He wonders, Is the woman speaking tongue-in-cheek? Josh, whose mother – adoptive mother, that is – combined her professional life not only with political activism, but with large dollops of Yiddishe Mama, is familiar with basic cooking procedures, only he’s wondering, now, how on earth the Amazon has come by the muffin trays, not to mention the washing soda. Does she cart baking tins and household cleaners around in her luggage?
‘I reckon these should be called One-day Muffins,’ Josh says. ‘They’d never last seven days.’
‘You can make up the dough in larger batches and freeze it in seven-day portions,’ Caroline offers helpfully. ‘I could show you guys how to make up a batch for the freezer, only you’d need to get hold of some decent plastic storage boxes.’ Then she says, ‘Have another. Feel free.’
‘Tell me,’ Josh says. ‘Are you a being from earth? Or what manner of being are you?’
‘Come again?’ Caroline says. ‘I’m from Melbourne.’
‘I really like your clothes,’ he says.
‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘Actually, I quite like yours.’
Caroline is wearing the bikini, she explains, because she’s been sunbathing in the yard.
‘Before breakfast is the best time for sunshine in England,’ she says. ‘Only time, I should say. Most students miss it. They’re always asleep.’ Then, unexpectedly, the Amazon smiles. ‘Still,’ she says. ‘You’re awake, aren
’t you? Well, sort of.’
Josh doesn’t yet know that Caroline has made the bikini from a paper pattern, along with the drawstring trousers, but being patronised by a beautiful, judgemental creature strikes him as quite entertaining. And being smiled on by her is an altogether pleasing sensation. It’s a bit like being smiled on by the Blessed Damozel.
Caroline is a graduate student at Oxford, she tells him. History. She’s been in the country for eight months on a three-year scholarship. That night she, Josh and Tamsin go to the cinema in Tottenham Court Road. They see Polanski’s Chinatown, with Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway. Then, within the month, Caroline has invited him to be her partner at her college ball. And Josh, who knows that he will never completely get over his passion for Hattie Marais, née Thomas – Hattie, his first love, his dainty five-foot ballet girl back home; Hattie, who turned him down in favour of Herman Marais, that loudmouth architectural student, that brawny rugger-bugger – is nonetheless both beguiled and entertained by Caroline. Beguiled by her grace and beauty; entertained by her remarkable spread of ability, which she combines so relentlessly with motivation. Caroline is quite simply Wonder Woman, and that’s in itself diverting, even though she herself is not a person with whom one can giggle and conspire. Caroline is not a ‘fun’ person and Josh is almost never really funny with her; not in the way he always was with Hattie. Caroline is not comfortable with what she calls his ‘clowning’. ‘You do it because you’re short,’ she says.
But then Caroline is such an awesome creature, so gaspingly prodigious, that Josh doesn’t really notice at first how much she is given to wrong-footing him. Or, combined as it is with that eager, early-on sexual attraction, it acts as a sort of come-on. Mistress Caroline Killjoy, with her repertoire of fabulous clothes. In her interactions with him, there’s almost always an element of put-down.
Caroline, even in her student days, is no mean cook. She knows the uses of coconut milk and cardamom pods. While her contemporaries are stuck with pulses, and tinned pilchards, and mounds of oily grated cheddar, she’s already making her own pesto with fresh basil that she grows from seed in flowerpots and her careful student budgeting allows for tiny bags of pine nuts and pecorino cheese. She has bought herself a stone mortar and pestle from a homeopathic pharmacy in Regent’s Street and she keeps it sitting next to her copy of The Crusades through Arab Eyes. She makes glazed fruit tarts. She makes a fruit mousse, mixing dried apricots, stewed and puréed, with gelatine, whipped cream and frothed egg whites. For Josh, she makes an airy angel whip, contrived from what she’s recycled from the college fellows’ discarded champagne flutes. Gleanings from the Warden’s garden party, for which she’d offered services as waitress.
Though Josh is shorter than Caroline by more than half a ruler, this doesn’t stop her from wearing four-inch heels to the ball. Caroline not only dresses beautifully, but she makes all her clothes herself, like a girl from the 1950s.
‘You’re kidding,’ Josh says, when she reveals that she has run up her own ball gown. Furthermore, as is the case with almost all her outfits, she has made it out of something else. Caroline, that night, is a vision of beanpole loveliness in a toffee-coloured Thai-silk dress with a wide V-shaped neckline that falls in papery folds from her naked shoulders, revealing small white breasts that have the gradients of shallow meringues. The dress is close-fitting and ruched like a festoon blind. This is because Caroline has made it out of a festoon blind that she found in the Broad Street Oxfam shop, just a stone’s throw from her college. And she’s honoured her undertaking to clothe her partner as well. She’s assembled the complete black-tie get-up from a retro-heap near the bus station and has, for a mere two pounds fifty, bought Josh a pair of Savile Row black shoes.
‘But how did you know they’d fit me?’ Josh asks in wonder.
‘Because I walked around in them myself,’ she says. ‘We’ve got the same-sized feet.’
‘But how did you come to know that?’ he says.
‘There’s was a “9” printed in your flip-flops,’ she says. ‘You kicked them off that day I met you. In the kitchen, when that kettle started to whistle.’ Caroline’s shoes are toffee-coloured ankle-straps.
‘Hey, but you’re a great dancer,’ she says, looking down into Josh’s Harpo curls, since his face is currently level with Caroline’s non-cleavage. And it’s true about his dancing, thanks to Hattie Thomas, his ballet teacher; his beloved. Not only the two years of lessons with her, but the time spent staging things together at the university back home. A sequence from The Indian Queen, inserted into that production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; that little Pulcinella duet they’d used in their Italian mime. And right now, given his current studies in mime, he’s somewhat preoccupied, day by day, with various theories of movement. He’s been brooding on the idea that all emotion is movement; all about push and pull. I love: I pull. I hate: I push. The previous night Josh was pleased to find that he had woken from a dream about Jacques le Coq’s ‘Movement Rose’. The thing was glowing there, no longer a mere diagram, but a great luminous window; a rose window, such as one might see at the altar end of a cathedral, diffusing light behind his sleeping eyelids.
At 4 a.m. he and Caroline retire to her room, where they take off their clothes and wake naked at midday in a warm tumble of bedlinen. This is Josh’s first time in Caroline’s room and, waking seconds before she does, he takes in that the room is as beautiful as she is. Her cloud-grey trouser suit is hanging from a hook on the back of the door; a thing she’s made from old union-cloth loose covers. Caroline has previously told him that she got the loose covers off the back of a truck at the access to the council dump. Having noticed the fabric on a three-piece suite, she’d had time to get off her bike and rap on the truckie’s window, which caused him to pull over.
‘Help yourself, my love,’ he said.
Then there’s her black-and-yellow plaid coat, made out of an old travelling rug – from a paper pattern, Vogue Paris Original. It looks like origami and has one flat, plate-like white button that she’s picked from a rusted toffee tin on a market stall. Caroline has two pretty upright chairs that she’s pulled, minus seats, from a builder’s skip in the Turl. Having cut them new seats made from scavenged plywood, she’s painted them with oyster satin-finish and made them pillow-ticking box cushions to match her pillow-ticking curtains. Pillow-ticking, Josh reflects, is one of her favourite fabrics. He envisages that, one day soon, he may well be the recipient of a home-made pillow-ticking suit.
By the following October, she has made Josh a camel-coloured winter coat out of two undyed wool blankets she’s had sent out from Australia. Josh is lost in admiration, both for his girlfriend’s range of skills and that she should so often find her raw materials not only in skips and on market stalls, but in those unspeakably horrible second-hand clothing shops in which he can never find anything except crumpled mounds of dead people’s underwear and ugly polyester shirts that come with turd-brown swirly patterns and figure-hugging darts.
In between, Caroline spends long hours in the Bodleian Library, displaying more application than anyone else in the place, as far as he can see. She also spends time in the language laboratory with earphones, teaching herself Farsi. And isn’t it just like Caroline, he reflects – brilliant Caroline, who already has better mastery of his own two necessary research languages – that is to say, Italian and French – to go and choose for a subject something that requires her to learn a wholly alien language before she can begin to read the documents?
‘But it’s not an alien language,’ Caroline says. ‘It’s Indo-European. And can we please call it “Persian”? “Farsi” sort of erases the richness of the past.’
She’s working, he knows, on something to do with old trade routes through Persia, and watching her at it is making him feel that there’s something delightfully soft-option about his own PhD subject, which requires him to visit archives and theatre museums in Paris and Naples, along with making trips to the ballet and the theat
re. Sometimes he goes to the circus and to the comic opera as well. The major stress factor for him is having to board that puke-inducing Hovercraft, which is his cheapest way across the Channel to France.
Caroline is suitably put-down about the area of his research.
‘It’s kind of a girl’s subject,’ she says. ‘Know what I mean?’
When Josh and Caroline decide to get married, it’s very much a youthful, spur-of-the-moment affair, sparked by Caroline’s discovery that her college will make self-contained accommodation available to graduate couples – that’s as soon as an apartment should fall vacant. It’s a daring and radical step to be taking, though each, with a little frisson of excitement laced with fear, is secretly thinking that a marriage, what the hell, can always be undone – that’s if things do not appear to be working out as they should. So they make a date with the registry office and plan a small party at Caroline’s college with twenty-five of their friends. Families are not an option, since Josh’s parents are decamped from Durban to Dar es Salaam and their pensions will not stretch to long-haul flights; especially not these past two years, when they’ve been funding Jack, their old housemaid’s son, through school.
They are fairly old for parents, in any case. Having never intended to have children, given the high-risk nature of their political commitments in the apartheid state, old Professor Silver was already over forty when Josh came into their lives and he has, of late, become quite frail. Both banned from pursuing their careers, the Silvers were eventually obliged to cross borders in the dead of night and, thereafter, to sell their property – disadvantageously, from a distance. Josh promises to send photographs when he treats himself to a five-minute long-distance call from a public phone box, during which time Bernie and Ida Silver, jostling eagerly for turns with the receiver, yell down the line at him, as if they were required to make themselves audible across the miles, without the assistance of technology.
Sex and Stravinsky Page 1
