I cycle round to Ellie’s and inspect Nico, who is looking much better. I tell Ellie about the missing key. She looks vague and says she doesn’t think she’s got it, but she supposes she might. She looks helplessly round her chaotic kitchen and I can see that there is no point in pursuing this. Ellie was once the orderly member of our trio but motherhood seems to have put paid to that.
‘But you have got your own key to my house?’ I ask. ‘The one you’ve always had?’
‘Yes,’ she says doubtfully, ‘I’m sure I have.’
‘Well, find it. Jon’s going to need it this evening.’
‘Why?’
‘Because Annie and I will both be on stage.’
‘Oh, yes. I don’t think I’m going to be able to get to Annie’s play. With Nico and everything.’
‘It would do you good to get out. Have you even been out of the house this week?’
‘I had a nice trip to the doctor’s.’
‘Seriously. Get Ben to look after the kids and come with me tomorrow afternoon.’
‘I don’t know. I’m not sure he can manage both of them.’
‘Ellie! Don’t do this. Don’t assume that he’s useless. It’s what I did and look what happened to me. Nico’s looking better, isn’t he? He’ll be fine with Ben.’
‘I’ll see.’
She looks so exhausted that I’m thinking of offering to take Nico out as well as Freda. ‘I could—’ I start, eying Nico, but Freda’s sharp eye has noted my wobble and she takes command.
‘Come on, Granny,’ she orders, taking my hand firmly in hers and dragging me towards the door. ‘We really must be off.’ And that is that.
The plan is to visit the playground, where Freda intends to attempt the black run of the big slide, to move on to The Pumpkin for elevenses and then to pass the rest of the morning browsing in the children’s sections of Marlbury’s two bookshops, where I shall spend far more money than I meant to because buying books is virtuous, isn’t it?
The playground goes well. Freda baulks, in the end, at the dizzy height of the big slide and is disappointed with herself, but my definition of a successful playground outing is that it is one in which no blood gets spilt, so I am quite happy and try to console Freda with my philosophy of refusing the arbitrary challenge. ‘You don’t have to do things, you know,’ I say, ‘just because they’re there.’ She looks doubtful but I persevere as I push my bike into town with her strapped into her seat on the back. I need to go carefully: recently she has become resistant to my teacher’s instinct to extend the range of her understanding. I don’t get it, she will say dismissively, and shut the lid on me.
‘You wanted to be brave,’ I say, ‘but slides are supposed to be fun. If it’s not fun for you, then why do it?’
‘Because it’s good to be brave,’ she protests.
‘Yes, it is, but it’s good to be brave when you need to be. Like when you had an injection at the doctor’s and you didn’t cry. That’s brave.’
‘You were brave with the spider,’ she says, ‘in the bath.’
‘I was. You have to learn to be brave with spiders because you’re bound to meet them from time to time, but you can take or leave slides. I’m not brave with slides.’
I have stopped wheeling and I turn to look at her. She is grinning. She is picturing the absurd sight of her grandmother hurtling down a slide, but she is too polite to say so.
At The Pumpkin, she is thrown into an agony of indecision as she presses her nose to the glass display cabinet to view her cake choices. She gets her choice down to a shortlist of three and dithers for a long time between a chocolate éclair, an iced gingerbread man and a fancy cupcake. In the end, the cupcake wins and we order it, together with a bambinoccino for Freda, a latte for me and the éclair for me too, in case the cupcake proves disappointing and she wants to swap.
We claim the best table, in the window, and watch the street outside as we wait for our order. A dog with a squashed-looking face is led by and I am reminded of the dog, Billy, and the impostor in the niqab and the boy with the angelic voice. ‘Has Liam been coming to the holiday activities?’ I ask Freda.
‘Yes,’ she says, watching the dog, ‘but he was sad.’
‘Why was he sad?’
She gives a disconcertingly grown-up shrug, which must be copied from someone. ‘Someone murdered his dog, didn’t they?’ she says.
I restrain myself from telling her that only people can be murdered and ask, ‘When did that happen?’
She turns to look at me, surprised at my stupidity. ‘Everyone knows about that, Granny,’ she says. ‘Someone murdered his auntie and his cousin and his dog.’
‘I didn’t know that was his dog.’
‘His mummy gave his dog to his auntie because she was too much trouble.’
‘His auntie was too much trouble?’
She sighs in exasperation. ‘No, the dog. She was too much trouble.’ She says, and gives another of her grown-up shrugs. ‘His mummy’s got depression,’ she adds.
So the dog wasn’t called Billy but Billie, I think, as in Holiday. I have several other questions for Freda but our order has arrived and demands her full attention. Freda likes to dismantle food, to arrange it in its component parts. Give her a pizza and she will carefully remove the slices of mushroom, bits of ham, chunks of pepper and whatever else and put them in neat piles round the edge of her plate. She will then eat the base and follow up with the toppings. She does a similar job with her cupcake, which has a mound of pale pink butter cream on it, and two deep pink spun sugar roses, with leaves, perched on top. It is, in fact, very like the kind of cake to which I compared Lavender earlier this morning, but Freda is a little young for metaphor so I don’t tell her that she is, in effect, eating her step-grandmother.
We linger over our repast but after that things have to speed up a bit if I’m to be on campus to teach the wives at two o’clock. To accelerate matters, I spend freely in the bookshop, then deliver Freda and her pile of loot to her home and head for my office, skipping lunch to make up for the éclair. I notice, as I check my emails, that the job application form is still sitting on the top of my in-tray. Later. Later.
Only Ning Wu turns up for the class. She has no information to offer about the others, is disinclined to chat and wants to take the opportunity of the one-to-one to sort out some specifically Chinese problems. These are mainly with pronunciation. Ning Wu has been here for a whole academic year; she has attended classes religiously, done all her homework and made lists of new vocabulary on her iPad. What she has not done at all, I suspect, is speak English socially outside the classroom. Her husband is one of a group of Chinese graduate students studying in the Business School and he and Ning Wu socialise entirely in that group. Her sons, one at Acorns and one at infant school, are completely fluent of course, and she is frustrated by her lack of progress. She has tried to socialise more widely but people find her so hard to understand that she gives up and retreats into her Chinese world. It’s a bind many overseas students find themselves in.
Her main difficulty – and it’s a very common difficulty with both Chinese and Japanese speakers – is consonant clusters. Chinese has a much higher vowel to consonant ratio than English does, so Chinese speakers tend to put vowels in between consonants. Thus, spread, for example, will become something like sapared and is likely to be heard as separate by a native English speaker. Of course, our consonant clusters don’t seem like a problem to us but consider the word strength: seven consonants to one vowel. What a nightmare for anyone more accustomed to a one-to-one ratio. A word that is one syllable for us can extend to four syllables on a Chinese or Japanese tongue. Or crisps: think about that. What chance of getting what you want when you ask for a packet of cirisipis?
For pronunciation work you need to be uninhibited and to have a sense of humour, because it involves a lot of facial contortion, aspirating and spitting. Ning Wu is solemn and dignified, so I am the clown, twisting my face about making exaggerate
d efforts with lips and tongue. Ning Wu follows my instructions politely but she is just too ladylike. After three-quarters of an hour, I give up and ask if there’s anything else she would like to work on. He, she and it, she tells me. And my heart sinks because there is no answer to this. You just have to remember I want to say. How hard is that? Bizarrely to us, in spoken Chinese, the same sound stands for he and she and it. It’s not that they don’t make gender distinctions – they do in writing – but in speaking they all sound the same. I draw a clumsy picture on the board: a man, a woman and a dog – what else? She practises sentences about these three and I go home with pronouns ringing in my ears.
I arrive home just in time to see Annie and co heading off for their evening at the Aphra Behn in the flat-tyred Volvo and a cloud of noxious exhaust. I remember that I’m supposed to be leaving supper for Jon and I curse Annie when I find that all the convenient food I stocked up on has been demolished and not replaced. I’m quite hungry myself, having skipped lunch, and I know the evening ahead will be long and trying, so I throw together a large macaroni cheese with bits of mushroom and tomato in it and eat a third of it, leaving the rest for Jon to heat up. I find a bag of salad leaves and instead of my usual random sloshing of oil, lemon and salt, I make a proper vinaigrette, which I hope will compensate for the leaves being two days past their Best Before date. I write a note to Jon, introducing him to his supper and inviting him to help himself to beer (in the fridge) or wine (in the bottle just opened and partly consumed by me), and to fruit and ice cream. I think of leaving him instructions about reheating the macaroni cheese but decide that this would be patronising. He is, after all, nearly a doctor; he must have done harder things than this, mustn’t he?
I am, by now, tired and grumpy. My supper may sustain me later but at the moment it’s weighing me down, and my glass and a half of wine has taken me straight to the sleepy stage, bypassing the cheerful lift I was hoping for. I climb onto my bike and pedal on leaden legs down to the abbey. My only comfort, as I turn the wheels, is that everyone else will be feeling as grumpy as I am. The technical rehearsal is the nadir of the rehearsal period as far as amateur actors are concerned. You are tired at this point as rehearsals have become more frequent and combining them with the day job has become hard work – though nothing to the week ahead, when you will be performing every night. On top of that you are terrified because first night is forty-eight hours away. What you want is to get on stage and rehearse, to reassure yourself that you do know what you’re doing and you can remember the lines, but instead you are tantalised by being required to go on stage but not to act. You are in the hands of the technical crew, who move you about the stage and shine lights on you as though you were no more than a piece of scenery. It is at this point that you realise, if you didn’t know it before, that the techies regard the actors simply as a nuisance, an irritatingly unpredictable intrusion on the perfection of their staging. A friend of mine, a great lighting man and much in demand for amateur productions, once complained to me that he was lighting a production of The Importance of Being Earnest. ‘What a terrible play that is,’ he said. When I said that I supposed it might seem a bit heavy-handed these days but … he interrupted me. ‘Oh it’s not that,’ he said. ‘It’s the hats. All those bloody great hats the women wear. Impossible to light their faces. Four hats in the final scene and will they wear them on the backs of their heads? No! What am I supposed to do?’
In theory, I straddle the two worlds of cast and crew this evening since I need to scrutinise the costumes under the lights as well as doing my bit as an actor, and because of that I do grudgingly appreciate what a difficult job it is to light an open-air production, where you constantly have to adjust to the fading of the natural light. In fact, I think as we proceed and the unfriendly evening chill starts to seep into me, everything is more difficult in an open-air production: actors have to project twice as hard – and then some, if an ambulance goes screaming by or a low-flying plane amuses itself up above – in damp, cold conditions which are disastrous to the vocal cords; costumes need constant restoration – muddy hems, ruffs that detach themselves in a brisk breeze, torn sleeves from attacks by tree branches, sodden velvet crushed by a sudden squall. And then there’s the audience: the cold, the wet, the inaudibility, the hard chairs. Yes, we have all of us been to the one magical open-air performance on a still, balmy night, when no extraneous sound could be heard but the gentle song of a nightingale and the light faded exquisitely until, in the velvet darkness, the magical final scene was played in a golden pool of light and a pin could be heard dropping in the breathless silence. But haven’t we paid for it, that one rapturous, remembered moment? In trying to recapture it, how much cold, misery and boredom have we suffered? As evidence of the triumph of hope over experience it trumps second marriages every time.
With my costumier’s eye in, I can’t say I’m very happy with my costumes. I hired them from the Aphra Behn and I took trouble with colours and have altered things to fit, but the effect is not what I hoped for and I decide that the actors are to blame. They are just not wearing them right. They have had several opportunities to wear them for rehearsal but they have mainly only worn bits of them – a skirt or a cloak or a hat. Now they are in full fig they look awkward. The men have no swagger and the women no grace, I think gloomily. Several of the men have little, short cloaks which are meant to swirl dashingly from one shoulder, but they all look as though they’re auditioning for Richard III. And the women stride about in their skirts as though they were in jeans and trainers (some of them, I suspect, are indeed wearing jeans under their skirts to keep warm, and I do sympathise but there will be none of that in performance). Conversely, Michael Da Souza, who is playing Friar Francis, is mincing about in his cassock, holding it up in front of him like a pantomime dame.
‘Michael,’ I say, ‘you won’t trip over it. I’ve made sure it’s the right length. You can stride about. Go into the abbey and watch the priests in there. They stride about and their cassocks billow about nicely round their feet.’
‘Yes,’ he says dutifully, but he doesn’t move.
‘Well, go on then,’ I say, sounding very much like a hearty PE teacher, ‘let’s see you stride.’
He turns and I see his hands go to lift up his skirts. ‘Hands by your sides,’ I order, now moving into RSM mode. He drops his hands and walks on. I watch to see if his cassock billows out nicely round his feet and I am assailed by the memory of the niqab person and the dog running at his/her feet and I know that there is something wrong with the picture but I can’t work out what it is. One thing I do see now, in my mind’s eye – and I should have thought about it before – is that the ‘woman’ was wearing trainers. They were black trainers, admittedly, but definitely trainers, all the same, and I think, now, that that was what the child, Lara, might have been laughing at. Now I feel bad because I think that if I had been paying attention the trainers would have told me that this was an impostor of some kind and I could have told Paula or David, and Jamilleh need not have been involved and would not, now, be lying half-strangled in hospital.
There is something else, though. Something else is wrong with my picture and I can’t work out what it is. It hovers there, on the edge of my consciousness, like a word you can’t quite find, and just as I think I’m going to reach out and touch it, Michael’s plaintive voice comes breaking in. ‘You’re not even watching me!’ he protests, like an aggrieved child, as he comes marching back towards me, and I realise that I have been standing with my eyes closed as I try to recover the picture and its soundtrack.
‘Sorry, Michael. That’s great,’ I say and then, without even knowing that I’ve made a decision, I turn and head for the dressing room. I need to think and I can’t do it here. It is already nearly ten o’clock and we have just reached the beginning of act four. We could be here for hours yet and there is no chance that I can find my inspiration while I stand around getting cold and cross. The dressing room is empty because everyone i
s needed for the big scene of Hero’s and Claudio’s aborted wedding. Focus, focus, I tell myself as I change out of my costume. Don’t think about anything else.
I pick up my bag, take a look round the room, promise myself that I will come in in the morning and clear up the chaos that will be left, and slip out. The quickest way to make my escape would be through the darkness of the cloisters but I have been told to be aware and I have had a bad experience once before in these cloisters so, instead, I set off the other way, through the school courtyard where, rounding a shadowy corner, I bump straight into our director, the loathsome Dominic. Caught, I try going on the offensive. ‘Skiving off, Dominic?’ I ask. ‘Leaving it all to the techies?’
It doesn’t work. ‘And you? Some sort of emergency?’ he asks.
I could invent an emergency but I don’t feel like it. Instead I say breezily, ‘Something like that,’ and make to sashay past him. He grabs hold of my arm, though. ‘Where the hell do you think you’re going?’ he asks, his face close enough for me to get the benefit of the gin and cigarettes that have been sustaining him. He has a cigarette in the hand that isn’t holding me, and I wouldn’t put it past him to stub it out on any bit of bare flesh he can find on me. I go still. We stare at each other. He seems to realise that he is overacting. He releases my arm. ‘Well?’ he asks, more mildly, dropping his cigarette and grinding it under his foot.
I decide to try the truth. ‘The fact is, Dominic, I have something on my mind and I have to go away and think about it. If I stand around here any longer I shall lose it and it could actually be a matter of life and death.’
He looks at me, and even in the murky light of the tasteful ‘antique’ lamps that light the courtyard, I can see an expression of such dislike on his face that I am slightly taken aback. ‘You really think you’re something, don’t you?’ he asks, but because it’s obviously not really a question I don’t try to reply. ‘You walk out of here,’ he says, ‘and you don’t come back.’
Weep a While Longer Page 14
