by Tim Pears
Holly was almost as excited as I was by this revelation. I’d never heard it before, but Dad admitted it was true.
‘It’s never been just a town-versus-country debate,’ he said. ‘The countryside’s always been divided. But anyway, I never sabbed Ma’s hunt.’
‘But you’ve just collected money for the hunt staff,’ I said, unable to fathom such hypocrisy.
‘In case you youngsters hadn’t noticed,’ he said, ‘they don’t chase real live foxes any more. Nothing wrong with having a fun day out galloping around the countryside. Anyway, the truth is it means more to me to support Ma than oppose hunting.’
Holly asked Grandpa whether that was why he shook a red bucket.
‘I’ve been following on foot all our married life,’ he told her. ‘I’d follow your grandmother through the gates of hell, if I could.’ He looked into the rear-view mirror, caught my gaze; perhaps Holly’s too. ‘You should have seen her forty years ago,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t find a braver horseman in this county. She was the Field Master, she had a hundred riders behind her.’ He shook his head. ‘What a sight she was, leading the charge. Magnificent. The people around here revere her, you know. As they did her father.’
We sat in silence, as the car climbed the lane up the hill. As do you, Grandpa, I thought. Our grandfather had built his business up from nothing, and become a wealthy, respected, powerful man. It was his wealth, after all, that had allowed our grandmother to live the way she did. But if you didn’t know that when you saw him and Grandma together you’d never guess, so modestly did he defer to her.
We were driving around the garden, below the house, when Holly said, ‘She won’t ride with the hounds today, will she, Grandpa?’
Our grandfather brought the car to a halt in the yard, across from the empty stables, and switched off the engine. He shook his head. ‘I had a word with one or two people,’ he said, with a kind of quiet certainty that made me question my assumption of a moment before, and wonder about their relationship all over again, and where the power lay between them.
‘Even if she tries,’ Grandpa said, ‘and I wouldn’t put it past her, despite her promise to me, they won’t let her. Don’t worry. Not now.’
3
‘Actually, Grandma,’ said Baz, ‘this is a really weird family.’
We were all having lunch, spinach soup with rolls.
‘Exactly,’ Xan agreed.
‘The sons have had sons,’ Baz continued, ‘and the daughter’s had daughters.’
‘Just look around the table,’ Xan suggested.
I saw Gwen, and her two girls; Jonny and his two boys; my father, and myself. ‘Wow,’ I said.
‘That’s incredible,’ said Holly.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Grandma said. ‘What about Matt?’
Holly’s mouth assumed the shape of an O of embarrassment that she’d forgotten her own brother.
Baz was unfazed. ‘He doesn’t count.’
‘No,’ Xan agreed.
‘He’s not here.’
‘He will be,’ Grandma declared with utter, misplaced confidence in her prodigal grandson. She made no effort to conceal the fact that Matt was her clear favourite, just as Jonny, according to my father, had enjoyed this status when they were growing up, something he and Gwen had accepted: the younger brother could do no wrong. His every achievement was met with lavish praise, his misdemeanours with indulgence. I knew this strand of the fabric of our family myth, but it seemed to have unravelled since: Grandma appeared to treat her now middle-aged children with equal measures of affection and disdain, Uncle Jonny no longer his mother’s golden boy.
Matt had taken over this position, apparently pretty well from the moment he was born, the first of Grandma’s grandchildren, and neither his sisters nor the rest of his cousins, myself included, minded, as far as I could tell: I came here every summer, yet knew a postcard from Matt meant more to our grandmother than my month-long presence, and was unbothered by her heart’s irrational preference.
‘I’m not sure Mattie will be coming now, Ma,’ Auntie Gwen, Matt’s mother, sighed. ‘It’s Boxing Day already.’
At that very moment, unbelievably, we heard the blast of a horn. A car was coming down the drive, on the blind side of the house from where we were sitting at the dining-room table. The twins rose from their seats in unison, and leaped to the window behind them.
‘Sports car,’ said Xan. ‘Classic.’
‘Red,’ Baz stated. ‘Triumph.’
‘Spitfire,’ Xan suggested.
‘Precisely,’ Baz agreed.
‘Mattie,’ trilled Sidney, rising from the table herself.
I don’t think I was the only one to look at Grandma then. Her face was suffused with a kind of joyful vindication, which I have fixed in my memory, with the sound not of others pushing their chairs back, chattering excitedly – these have vanished, in truth, and return only as I summon them now through a decisive act of will – but with a sound which was in the background: that of the deep-throated growl of Matt’s vintage sports car as it swung into the yard, and then additional guttural roars as he gunned the throttle before switching off the engine. My grandmother, I thought, looked imperious, gracious, truly happy.
It was quite curious what ensued: most of those at the table rushed outside to greet my long-awaited cousin – their son, grandson, brother, nephew. Because of this very eagerness of theirs, perhaps, mixed with my own shyness, I felt a certain reluctance to do so myself. He’s taken so long to get here, I thought, why should we all interrupt our meal and run to him? Let him come to us! Then I realised that the only other two people who’d remained at the lunch table were my own parents. A momentary spasm of pride and solidarity, during which we smiled at each other in, I assumed, shared acknowledgement, was followed by a gut-sagging sense of disappointment. Yes, the mean-minded Oxonians remained in their seats, unlike those outgoing inhabitants of the capital who generously acclaimed their relative’s arrival.
Was I doomed, by genetic inheritance, by a gloomy temperament, to be forever on the outside, a spectator of events? A cloistered academic? A chronicler; the one who relates the tale, set forever apart from the action, the story itself, that arena occupied by heroes and heroines? To be aloof from one’s own life: what a sentence.
Matt came towards the house, the others swarming around him. I watched through the window. No one was carrying his bags; in the excitement they all seemed to have left them in the car. As they came into the kitchen we three finally stood up, and Matt stepped over to kiss my mother, and hug my father, ‘Uncle Rod!’, and shake my hand, telling the assembled company, ‘He’s almost as tall as I am!’
Matt had blond-brown hair, a small nose, generous lips, brown eyes, just like Holly; but he was incredibly handsome; her slight flaws had been made perfect in him. His eyes were dazzling, his teeth were unblemished. It was as if when Holly came along nature tried to copy what it had achieved with her brother, but narrowly failed. He wore a T-shirt under an unbuttoned shirt, loose jeans, a beaded necklace, a bracelet on one wrist. His hair appeared bleached. Matt looked as if on this English winter’s day in the middle of the countryside he was just about to go surfing.
Matt’s mother and sisters fluttered around him like handmaidens, collaborating to meet his every whim: soup, roll, a glass of beer; knife, spoon, plate, bowl. Even the twins regarded him without their customary cynicism, but watched him eagerly.
‘Do give me your place, Jonny,’ Matt demanded of his uncle. ‘I want to sit next to Grandma.’
‘Move along,’ Grandma told her son, and she sat beaming at Matt as he ate.
‘How long are you staying?’ Baz asked him.
‘He’s here now, that’s all that matters,’ Grandma told the assembled company, holding Matt’s left hand in hers. ‘Here to stay.’
‘I have more care to stay than will to go,’ he said, squeezing Grandma’s hand.
I heard my mother murmur under her breath, ‘More light and
light it grows.’
It occurred to me then that, alone among all of us, Matt knew nothing yet of Grandma’s illness. Except, I reflected, Auntie Gwen would surely have phoned to tell him?
I still have, somewhere, the single-page programme Holly and I typed out on our grandfather’s computer, down in his study, for the concert our parents obliged us to perform that afternoon. I took photos with my new paparazzo camera, in which Sid, Holly, Xan and Baz each posed as if caught unawares; Xan did the same for me, and we uploaded them on to the computer, and printed them, as thumbnails, on the programme.
The concert was dedicated to our grandmother, but actually there was a list of people thanked for one reason or another which included every member of the audience: our respective parents, of course, for music lessons paid for; our grandfather, for hosting the occasion; as well as Matt, ‘for coming’. This last was my suggestion, by the way, but Holly took it as a thoughtful contribution and typed it up, rather missing the irony in my tone of voice.
We performed in order of age, starting with the eldest, Sidney, partly because she was prepared to go first ‘into the lions’ den’, as she put it, but also because we figured the audience – their patience tested by the standard of our playing, even given the planned brevity of the concert – might be more self-indulgent the younger the musician. Grandma sat in her chair by the open fire, pine logs burning, with Matt sitting on the floor, leaning back against the front of her chair beside Grandma’s legs, her hand resting on his shoulder, his hand across his chest resting on hers. Grandpa sat in his chair on the other side of the fire, turned so that he could see the piano in the corner of the room. My parents, uncle and aunts sat on the sofa and chairs, which we’d configured into a crescent from Grandma’s chair around to the window, in front of the Christmas tree.
With Holly as her page-turner, Sidney took her seat at the baby grand piano. She turned to the audience and said, ‘I’m going to play Rose’s Theme by James Horner.’ She peered at the sheet music, as if to make sure it was the right one, then turned back to the grown-ups. ‘He wrote it for the film Titanic, starring Leonardo di Caprio and Kate Winslett. It’s the theme tune. So you might recognise it.’ She peered again at the music, screwing up her eyes and leaning forward. It can’t have been easy to play with her torso at that angle, her weight pressing forward into her arms, but she launched bravely into the wash of notes. Whether anyone would have recognised it, except as a vaguely familiar dirge, is unlikely. Sid’s fingers appeared to be stubby digits tentatively connected to her mind, tapping indelicately, perfunctorily, on the keys of the pianoforte, rather as if she were typing the tune rather than playing it, like a journalist in an old black-and-white movie. It was what my mother called plinketty-plonketty piano: you felt that whoever Sid’s teacher was had drummed into her that the most important thing was the beat: Sid nodded her head like a metronome as she played, keeping herself in time.
When she’d finished, Sid stood up and took a bow, facing the audience with her left hand stretched out and touching the piano still like a professional, an artist unwilling yet to relinquish their physical union with the instrument. The applause was raucous. Uncle Jonny yelled, ‘Superb! Bravo!’ Matt put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. Auntie Gwen had tears in her eyes, whether moved more by the music or her daughter’s moment in the spotlight I wasn’t sure. My parents and Aunt Lorna on the sofa clapped politely.
Holly, one month older than me, was up next, and she began by giving a potted history of her instrument, the saxophone. ‘A wind instrument made of brass,’ she explained, ‘possessing woodwind characteristics.’ It was invented by Adolphe Sax, she informed us, born in Belgium, died in Paris, France, in 1894. There were twelve members of the saxophone family, apparently, the most popular and recognisable being the large tenor sax. ‘Mine is an alto,’ Holly explained. ‘Like the others, it has twenty keys, which control the notes.’ She carried on describing the ways in which a saxophone was similar to or different from an oboe, and a clarinet, but not for much longer. She’d gone over her introduction with me earlier, and I’d advised her to curtail it. The audience, I said, would be eager to hear her play. Now, as she began to perform her first piece, Glenn Miller’s ‘In the Mood’, I realised how wrong I’d been. Everyone would have emptied their pockets to have her carry on talking as long as possible. Holly was an even worse musician than her sister. Each note she blew was separate, adrift, from the one before and the one that came after. There was no flow, and thus no tune, just a series of blasts that sounded as if they came from a wounded beast. With indigestion. I actually feared that anyone at all musical, like Mum, might be forced to clap their hands over their ears, because the volume of each elephant blast was truly impressive. Holly could have performed in the coach house and we’d have heard her perfectly well. She must have had unnaturally strong lungs inside her thirteen-year-old frame; should have been a hill runner, a deep-sea diver, rather than the blower of a wind instrument in this limited domestic space.
When she finished, the last note died with a sigh of relief, and Holly herself took a deep breath and announced that she was going to also play ‘Au Clair de la Lune’ by Claude Debussy. My mother’s blank expression amounted to an act of heroic self-control.
How low and confined is our self-concern. As Holly took Debussy apart, note by painful note, and I noticed the dogs slink from the room, I took pleasure in the prospect of how well received my own offering would be, following what had gone before. I was an efficient rather than a natural musician, and I’d rehearsed the piece I was going to play on my guitar until I had it note perfect.
‘I’m going to perform one of the studies, the études, of Matteo Carcassi,’ I said. ‘Opus sixty, number twenty-five.’ I played the piece as well as I’d ever played it, stood up, took a bow holding the guitar by its neck, acknowledged my family’s gratitude for my melodic competence.
The twins had instructed us to put to be confirmed under the title of their piece in the programme. I’d presumed they were still arguing about what they’d perform. Now Xan set up a karaoke machine, while Baz told everyone that, ‘We wanted to do something authentic. From the street.’ They couldn’t announce the material in advance as there were ‘copyright issues’, and that this was to be a ‘guerrilla performance’.
‘“Mess Wiv Me”,’ Baz said, ‘was written by N-Kay and featured Darren Baker and Zinc. It came out this year and went straight to number one on the underground chart. To help you get a handle on it, this song mixes N-Kay’s Grime style with dance rhythms from Darren and an R&B flavour from Zinc.’ He turned to his brother and said, ‘Hit it.’
What followed I find difficult to describe. My twin twelve-year-old cousins took on the personae of hip-hop gangsters: they each went into a kind of mistrustful slouch, using their whole bodies to augment a surly expression; at the same time, they both appeared to try to be seductive to the womenfolk in the room.
‘If you’re lookin’ at me you better be sure,’ Xan rapped.
‘Give me the eye better know what for.’
Baz came in on the end of each line, his voice adding emphasis.
‘Take one look cos you know I can make it
Waste my time? You know that I hate it
Come on to me, you better not fake it
So give it up, girl,
cos you know that I’ll take it.’
What made the performance particularly authentic, one gathered, were the lewd gestures the boys made with their bodies. Xan spent most of the song with one hand on his crotch, the other pointing at his grandmother, or one of his aunts.
‘Mess wiv me you mess wiv my bruvver
In a tight spot we back up each uvver
Share the blood, the trouble, the fee,
Mess wiv my bruvver you mess wiv me.’
Baz’s favoured move was to hold one hand to the back of his head, the other on his stomach, and to bump and grind his groin. It was a hideous spectacle, my cousins’ pubescent sexual c
ontortions in our grandparents’ drawing room. I could feel myself sweating with embarrassment, knew my hot cheeks were flushing crimson. Yet no one objected. Grandma gazed vacantly, as she had through everything else. What the others thought I couldn’t imagine, but when this repulsive performance came to an end they applauded cheerfully. Even the twins’ own parents appeared unabashed.
Afterwards, two of the adults, Mum and Auntie Gwen, fetched tea and chocolate cake as a reward for our efforts.
‘Why have you got this piano, anyway?’ Holly asked Grandpa. ‘Mum doesn’t play. Do you, Uncle Rod?’ she asked my father.
‘We’re all cloth-eared,’ Uncle Jonny proclaimed, in no way ashamed.
‘Tone-deaf,’ Auntie Gwen regretted.
‘Ma forced us all to have lessons,’ Dad said. ‘We each of us gave up as soon as we could.’
‘Not a moment too soon,’ said Grandpa, the first words he’d uttered all afternoon, which made them sound all the more heartfelt, and allowed the pretence and tension in the room to escape in laughter.
4
Sidney collected tea cups and plates and carried them away on a large tray. Auntie Gwen requested volunteers to help her in the kitchen. Lorna put herself forward and told the twins to come too. Matt climbed to his feet and said, ‘Dear, dear, is that the time already? What a fabulous afternoon we’ve all had. However much it pains me, better hit the road before darkness falls.’
A sense of shock rippled through the room. Our cousin had only arrived a couple of hours earlier, and he was leaving already? I imagine we must all have looked towards our grandmother then. I know I did.
‘Now the rest of you lot stay here,’ Matt said. He blew kisses around the room. ‘It’s been wonderful to catch you all, but I want Grandma to see me off. Just the two of us.’
