Sex and Stravinsky

by Barbara Trapido

  ‘So why dwell on the past, Hat?’ Herman says. ‘What for? Move on. Times have changed. We’ve all changed.’

  He likes to talk the jargon of ‘transformation’ and of course he’s got to be right. It’s no sin to trade in one’s value system for a better one. So why is she being such a witch?

  ‘All this nit-picking,’ Herman says. ‘It’s because you’ve gone and done your history exams. For Chrissakes, there are times when history is best forgotten.’

  It’s Hattie’s impression that Herman’s absences have grown more frequent since she became a graduate. At the time she began her degree course he couldn’t seem to see the point. She already had a career, didn’t she? And now she can’t deny that the experience has made her into a slightly different person. She’s sharper and more critical. She’s more assertive and more clued-up. More open-eyed.

  Years back; sixteen years back, Hattie had decided that her marriage was a mistake. She’d begun to think about leaving Herman, but then she got pregnant with Cat. And then, once Cat was four, she’d taken that trip to Europe.

  Hattie loved it. Loved it! Loved her time in England; loved it and longed to stay; was surprised how much she felt it to be ‘her’ place; loved the delicate, shifting light, the shades of grey, the urban terraces, the corner shops; the silver birch trees, the London Underground, the broadsheet newspapers, the chance to wear winter clothes. And little Cat, seated there, in the café at the National Gallery; little Cat in Regent’s Park, wrapped up in her red bobble hat, bright tights, fleecy red coat. Ankle boots with novelty laces. Only that Cat was forever chattering to her daddy on the phone. Daddy, Daddy, my daddy. When will I see my daddy?

  So Hattie accepted that she hadn’t the temperament for rocking anyone’s boat. She half suspected herself of having got pregnant in order to hang on in the marriage. Like a limpet, Mrs Wimp. That’s you, Henrietta Louisa Marchmont-Thomas Marais. Don’t you ever go down to the end of the town. Not ever. So, stay if you must, but don’t be pathetic. And she resolved, there and then, that when she got home she would work towards becoming a university student; English and history. She sat the necessary qualifying exams and waited until Cat had started school.

  At this time, Hattie put her own stamp on her brother James’s one-time bedroom in the turret, since it had hardly been used in years, given the five larger bedrooms of Marchmont House. She made it into her study; her private place in which to write her essays. And then, one day, between the essays, she suddenly found herself doodling into being the first page of her first Lola story. The essays and the lectures had given her back the fun of putting pen to paper that she recalled from primary school. And she had bought herself a PC.

  It was strange that on the very same day – the day she began that Lola story – she should have found her father’s pen. Oh my God, ‘that’ pen! The thing had been lurking, concealed, behind one of the miniature top drawers of her brother’s old bureau; the desk that had become her own. It was lying on a narrow, half-inch ledge between the drawer end and the bureau back, as if deliberately placed. The pen had been missing since the day the maid had got the sack for it, because – along with his inscribed wristwatch, his cigarette case and snuffbox (snuffbox!), his grandfather’s silver baptismal cup – it constituted one of her father’s significant dynastic hand-ons; a fetish object by which he defined himself. So when, some twenty-seven years ago, the pen was suddenly nowhere, there was serious trouble. For poor old Gertrude, accused of theft, it had meant the end of her employment. For Hattie, its reappearance served to mark a new beginning.

  Throughout her childhood, Hattie was always required to play second fiddle to her twin brother. James Alexander Marchmont-Thomas was the boy for whom neither expense nor effort was spared. Because James, unlike his sister, was destined to carry the family name and to inherit Marchmont House. James was the one in whom her parents vested their ambition and, in return, he had sucked them dry. Neither Hattie nor her parents have seen James, now, for something like eighteen years. He has gone to ground, God only knows where, or upon which continent. Or could it be that James is dead? And it was thanks entirely to Herman’s talent, both with money and with buildings, even from his early twenties, that her parents and the house were saved. Herman bought the house from his in-laws when he and Hattie got married, by which means he was able to save their faces by keeping it in the family and, at the same time, could take it on as the first of his post-student projects; a project guaranteed to make a splash in The Architectural Review. Because Marchmont House was a fabulous period piece; a marvellous opportunity. The parents, in their turn, could use the sale money to acquire a nice retirement flat in a location they considered sufficiently salubrious to accord with their social status. And then there was a decent lump sum left over, which, when properly invested for them – by Herman, of course – afforded them an acceptable income. Hattie’s parents were, by these means, grudgingly impressed with their son-in-law. He was, regrettably, from Afrikaner stock – ‘a Boer’, as Hattie’s father put it – but Herman was acceptably anglicised and, what with his surname being Marais, he was probably of Cape Huguenot descent; something which would have made his settler lineage somewhat older than that of Mr David Marchmont-Thomas.

  Hattie’s parents, on both sides, were descended from the 1820 Settlers. Their antecedents were, respectively, a one-time Suffolk seamstress and a basket-weaver from Norfolk, but they had quickly got to see themselves as a settler aristocracy; the Cape’s own Mayflower descendants; makers of the new Albion. Sailing to the Cape Colony on a British government promise of umpteen hectares of fertile farmland – land recently wrested from indigenous pastoral clansmen – their role, unbeknown to them, was to make themselves into a buffer zone between the Colony’s existing settlers and the disgruntled rump of the dispossessed. Hattie’s antecedents, like many of their fellow settlers, had not much idea of farming practice, especially on unfamiliar terrain, and at some time early on they had sold the land and moved on to start a clothing shop in town, which, over the course of a hundred years, had grown into a nationwide chain of prominent gentlemen’s outfitters.

  By the time of Hattie and James’s birth, however, in the first half of the 1950s, the business, which had not managed to move successfully with the times, had already closed four of its seven branches and, by the 1960s, there was just the one. And, for all its crowded window displays of dowdy flannel trousers and boring ties and brass-buttoned school blazers, along with those disheartening signs that shrieked ‘Back to School!’ at the soon-to-be-afflicted, the last branch could do little to stop the populace defecting to the OK Bazaars, or to the cheaper Indian emporiums.

  Yet the family still had trappings. It had the aforementioned Marchmont House, a charming, turreted Victorian landmark, a colonial gem within an acre of garden, high on Durban’s Berea, where, having taken on a slight whiff of haunted castle, and surrounded by post-war apartment blocks, it was beginning to look a little ominously like a candidate for the eager developer’s mallet. The Marchmont-Thomases had the Royal Crown Derby dinner service, complete with its forty place settings, and the portfolio of heirloom drawings by the much-revered colonial artist, Thomas Baines. They had the miscellaneous, framed sepia photographs of the family’s founding members, buttoned to the neck and seated, side by side, in cane armchairs, on the verandas of various handsome homesteads, some in the Cape and some in Natal. There was also a reserve of money, but since Hattie’s parents made a rigorous distinction between their income and their capital, the day-to-day tone of family life was cheese-paring. Much of the capital had been set aside, even before the twins’ birth, for the education of the male heir at an English public school; the selfsame school attended by Hattie’s father and his father’s father.

  Hattie’s appearance, fifteen minutes after the arrival of James Alexander Marchmont-Thomas, was, in truth, a relief to her parents, because, had two male twins been born to them, their capital would have been challenged. Compromises made. The boy
s sent off to a local public school. Something like that. But Hattie, being a girl, would require no more from the education system than a fee-paying girls’ day school of the more traditional sort, while the need for higher education would simply not arise.

  Hattie’s father, in the hospital lounge, was busily cracking open champagne.

  ‘A son and heir!’ he said.

  Throughout her infancy and childhood Hattie stayed small, which for a while caused health professionals to define her condition as ‘failure to thrive’. But Hattie somehow or other managed to thrive in her own understated and low-maintenance way. That’s when her sibling would allow it. For James Alexander Marchmont-Thomas was a thumper and a hair-puller; an ingenious tormentor, who never cared to stand still. He liked to stamp on his sister’s bare feet and to spread her sandwiches with red ants. But ‘Boys will be boys’ was the watchword, and he soon moved on to more sadistic forms of domination. He liked to dismember Hattie’s dolls and to bring discredit upon her, by shutting her out of the nursery bathroom until she wet her pants. He gave her enemas with the garden hose, which he would bully from the hands of Joseph, the gardener.

  Yet, once the children went to school, Hattie found a breathing space in her well-ordered, single-sex establishment, where her gracefulness, neatness and application did not go unacknowledged. Hattie loved all the schoolwork. She loved the reading books in the ‘quiet corner’, and the nature walks and the sessions when they did writing stories in special ‘composition’ books. She liked scripture and sums and sitting cross-legged in the hall with her friends during morning assembly. She was the sort of easy, undemanding child for whom all schoolteachers are grateful. And the children were fond of her as well – the more so because, in this all-girl context, being the smallest in the class had the curious effect of conferring status. Of all the lessons, Hattie particularly loved the music-and-movement class, where Miss Cayhill, thumping at the hall piano, invited the children to be moths and fairies; frogs and flowers; trees and bears.

  ‘Very good, Henrietta,’ Miss Cayhill said. ‘Stop, children. Now I want you all to watch Henrietta.’

  James, for all his apparent mental agility, did not get on with school. He could never concentrate for more than a minute and he was one of those children who plays up in class and likes to wind up the teachers. Regrettably, he always did these things in a way which was not so much amusing, as tiresome and inopportune. He interrupted the teachers. He elbowed his desk partners, causing them to smudge their work, so that no one wanted to sit with him. He tripped up classmates as they moved down the aisles. As time passed, he turned out to be always cribbing his homework – would-be verbatim – from others; verbatim, that is, bar the puzzling flurries of misspelling and missed-out words. He did this by filching prep notebooks from his neighbours’ desks, or by threatening the smallest of the form’s swotty types in the lavatories alongside the swimming pool. This was while he still bothered to hand in work. His reading was always pretty hopeless, his number work all scrambled, and – in the parlance of his deeply traditional and time-warped school – Marchmont-Thomas was, quite simply, a dunderhead. A dunderhead and a nuisance.

  ‘Sir, I think McNolty must have copied my prep, sir,’ he would say, but the masters were completely open-eyed about the Marchmont-Thomas son and heir. He told tall tales, he slouched and, as Hattie’s mother chose to put it, ‘James has always found it hard to study.’

  To his father’s chagrin, at the age of twelve, James was denied access to the English public school but, thanks entirely to last-minute interventions from influential members of the Rotary Club, the board of governors and possibly the Freemasons as well, he was grudgingly accepted by a high-status public school in his own country.

  Meanwhile, having been pressed into it by Miss Cayhill, Hattie’s father had reluctantly agreed to fork out the requisite sum for his daughter’s weekly ballet lessons in the local church hall. This on condition that she earned it back, by helping her mother with the mending. Mrs Marchmont-Thomas, circa 1965, was a little old-fashioned, perhaps, but not altogether aberrant, in keeping a mending basket full of socks with holes alongside her favourite wing armchair. And now each evening she had her little helper while James was away at school. But by the time he was fifteen, James’s predicted exam grades were such that they were thought to reflect badly on the school’s academic record, and his parents were asked to remove him.

  So James, after a summer filled with crammers – from whose grasp he frequently effected his escape – was sent (oh dear!) to a neighbourhood state boys’ high school of thoroughly good repute. But even there, his career did not last long, because he was caught taking drugs; a habit that Hattie’s parents considered so wholly unmentionable that Hattie was unaware of it until she came upon James’s scorched tinfoil, lying alongside a rolled-up banknote, on the old Lloyd Loom table in one of the garden sheds. James, she had taken note of late, had begun spending more and more time lurking near the sheds and the servants’ rooms. Then, shortly thereafter, came the business of the stolen fountain pen.

  Hattie, aged fifteen and sitting at her desk, had become aware one afternoon of an altercation taking place in the garden, between Gertrude, the housemaid, and her father. It appeared to her as a sort of mime sequence, because she was unable to hear either party’s words. Gertrude, divested of her shapeless maid’s overalls and standing, hands clasped, beside a cardboard suitcase tied with rope, was making what looked like a last-ditch appeal. She was standing sideways on to Hattie, who was realising, for the first time, that Gertrude was definitely pregnant. Her yellow polka-dot skirt was tight and riding up over her belly. Her blouse buttons were straining across her breasts.

  Just a month before, Hattie had been witness to one of those routine maid-and-madam exchanges in the kitchen of Marchmont House, in which her mother, poking a finger into the plump front of Gertrude’s overalls, was undertaking a sequence of that would-be Creole-speak that made white madams imagine they were thereby making themselves intelligible.

  She was doing so by omitting certain parts of speech and inserting others instead.

  ‘Gertrude, say for madam – no lies – you got piccanin dis-side?’

  ‘No, madam,’ said Gertrude.

  ‘You eat too much the putu or you got foh piccanin?’ said Hattie’s mother. ‘Madam she say foh piccanin.’

  ‘No, madam,’ said Gertrude.

  ‘Madam she say foh piccanin,’ said Hattie’s mother again, wagging a finger before allowing herself another poke at Gertrude’s front. ‘Madam she say foh Zulu boy come native kaia make foh piccanin. Zulu boy him too much fight make trouble. Zulu boy him no good.’

  ‘No, madam,’ said Gertrude.

  ‘Master he say no visitor,’ Hattie’s mother said. ‘You got foh Zulu boy visitor him no good? Make master foh too much cross – too much – he say no Zulu boy.’

  ‘No, madam,’ Gertrude said.

  ‘Zulu boy him too much drink,’ said Mrs Marchmont-Thomas. ‘Too much lazy-boy smoke dagga no good foh garden boy. Dis why master he like foh Joseph him make foh good garden boy. Joseph he from far-far-dat-side. Not lazy drunk like foh Zulu boy.’

  Joseph, the wizened ancient, hailed, originally, from Mozambique. He lived in the room adjoining Gertrude’s and had done so for as long as Hattie could remember.

  Gertrude was now on her knees in the grass, attempting to clutch at Hattie’s father’s hand, but he shook her off, without regard, and moved away towards the house. Then Gertrude clambered to her feet and began to walk away. One yellow polka-dot skirt, one pair of worn-out gym shoes, one cardboard suitcase tied with rope, and then Gertrude was gone; dismissed without a character. Pregnant and on the road; the road to nowhere. No job equalled no right of residence within the municipal area.

  Hattie, that afternoon, had been regressing in her reading, since the high-summer weather was somewhat enervating. She had put down her school copy of Silas Marner in order to reread one of her childhood favourites, Ball
et Shoes. She had just got to where the new lodger had gained the three girls entry into Mademoiselle’s ballet school, where Posy was to prove herself a star. But after witnessing the Gertrude episode, Hattie found herself too troubled to read on. She felt impelled to chase after Gertrude and say a proper goodbye. She wanted to give her money, but she didn’t really have any to hand. Things, perhaps? Valuable things? There was nothing she could hand to Gertrude that wouldn’t make her a suspect. ‘Hey, you? Native girl? Where from you get this gold watch?’

  At supper that evening, it materialised that Hattie had been mistaken. It was not so much Gertrude’s pregnancy that had led to her dismissal. It was theft. Gertrude had evidently helped herself to the heirloom fountain pen from Hattie’s father’s desk, because it was gone; missing without a trace. It was an item that until this day had always sat in a special green marble tray, alongside that blue-black bottle of Quink that Hattie found so pleasing, for the wide prism of its shape. Gertrude had obviously stolen the pen, even though she could hardly write. Because who else could possibly have done so?

  Supper was more than usually glum, and her father spoke abruptly to his daughter.

  ‘Henrietta, will you shift yourself there and help your poor mother in the kitchen?’ he said.

  And in the kitchen, Hattie found her mother was on a roll with martyred sighs.

  ‘Now I shall have all the work of training up some raw young native girl, straight from the kraal,’ she said. ‘Just as I had to do with Gertrude. Honestly, Hattie, you get no thanks from these people. I hope you’ll remember that when your time comes to keep house.’

  ‘Is Father certain that Gertrude took the pen?’ Hattie ventured, but her mother was in full flow.

  ‘They can’t help themselves, these people,’ she said. ‘They’ll steal anything that isn’t screwed down. Do carry the peas through for me, Hattie, would you?’