Lessons, page 15
Suddenly she pushed the bed covers away and rolled on top of him, sat up—and it was complete, accomplished. So simple. Like some trick with a vanishing knot in a length of soft rope. He lay back in sensual wonder, reaching for her hands, unable to speak. Probably only minutes passed. It seemed as if he had been shown a hidden fold in space where there was a catch, a fastener, and that as he released it and peeled away the illusory everyday he saw what had always been there. Their roles, teacher, pupil, the order and self-importance of school, timetables, bikes, cars, clothes, even words—all of it a diversion to keep everyone from this. It was either hilarious or it was tragic, that people should go about their daily business in the conventional way when they knew there was this. Even the headmaster, who had a son and a daughter, must know. Even the Queen. Every adult knew. What a facade. What pretence.
Later she opened her eyes and gazing down at him with a faraway look said, “There’s something missing.”
His voice came faintly from beyond the cottage walls, “Yes?”
“You haven’t said my name.”
“Miriam.”
“Say it three times.”
He did so.
A pause. She swayed, then she said, “Say something to me. With my name.”
He did not hesitate. It was a love letter and he meant it. “Dear Miriam, I love Miriam. I love you Miriam.” And as he was saying it again, she arched her back, gave a shout, a beautiful tapering cry. That was it for him too, he followed her, just one step behind, barely a crotchet.
* * *
He went downstairs ten minutes after her. His head was clear, his tread was light and he took the steep stairs two at a time. The clocks had not yet gone back and the sun was still high enough. It was not even one thirty. It would be a delight now to be on his bike, taking a different route to school, the Harkstead way, at speed, passing close by the pine wood that contained the secret lake. Alone, to prize the treasure that no one could take from him, to taste it, sift it, reconstruct it. To get the measure of the new person he was. He might extend the ride, take the farm tracks to Freston. The prospect was sweet. First, a goodbye. When he arrived in the sitting room she was bending down to gather up the papers from the floor. He was not too young to sense a shift of mood. Her movements were quick and tense. Her hair was tied back tight. She straightened and looked at him and knew.
She said, “Oh no you don’t.”
“What?”
She came towards him. “You absolutely don’t.”
He started to say, “I don’t know what you mean,” but she spoke over him. “Got what you came for and heading off. Is that it?”
“No. Honestly. I want to stay.”
“Are you telling me the truth?”
“Yes!”
“Yes, Miss.”
He looked to see if she was making fun of him. Impossible to tell.
“Yes, Miss.”
“Good. Ever peeled a potato?”
He nodded, not daring to say no.
She brought him into the kitchen. By the sink, in a tin bowl were five big dirty potatoes. She gave him a peeler and a colander. “Did you wash your hands?”
He tried to sound curt. “Yes.”
“Yes, Miss.”
“I thought you wanted me to call you Miriam.”
She gave him a look of exaggerated pity and continued. “When they’re done and rinsed, chop them into four and put them in that pot.”
She stepped into some clogs and went into the back garden and he started work. He felt trapped, bewildered, and at the same time he felt he owed her a great debt. Of course, it would have been wrong, appalling bad manners to leave. But even if it had been right he would not have known how to withstand her. She had always frightened him. He had not forgotten how cruel she could be. Now it was more complicated, it was worse and he had made it worse. He suspected he had brushed against a fundamental law of the universe: such ecstasy must compromise his freedom. That was its price.
The first potato was slow. Like woodcarving, at which he had always been useless. By the fourth he thought he had the hang of it. The trick was to ignore the detail. He quartered and rinsed his five potatoes and put them in the pot of water. He went to the kitchen’s half-glazed door to see what she was up to. The light was golden. She was dragging a cast-iron table across the lawn towards a shed. Pausing, then dragging a few inches at a time. Her movements were frantic, even angry. The terrible thought came to him that there might be something wrong with her. She saw him and waved at him to come out.
When he got to her, she said, “Don’t just watch. This thing is bloody heavy.”
Together they stored the table in the shed. Then she put a rake in his hands and told him to sweep up leaves and put them on the compost heap at the bottom of the garden. While he raked beech leaves from next door’s tree, she was busy in the borders with her secateurs. An hour passed. He was dumping the last of the leaves on the compost. Across the open space he could make out a slice of the river, part of an inlet, tinted orange. He could step over the low fence into the field, walk round the front of the cottage, retrieve his bike and be off. Never come back. It would hardly matter if the world was ending. He could do all that. But it was simple—he couldn’t. His urge to leave surprised him as much as his inability to. It was a matter of courtesy to help out, to stay for lunch. He was hungry, the leg of lamb he had seen in the kitchen would be far superior to anything at school. It helped, or simplified matters minutes later, when Miriam told him to rake the front garden also. He had no choice. As he turned to obey she pulled him back by the collar of his shirt and kissed him on the cheek.
She went indoors to prepare lunch while he pushed a wheelbarrow with his rake down a side passage and set to work out front. It was harder. The leaves were massed between and behind thorny rose shrubs along the borders. The rake’s head was too wide. He had to go down on all fours and scoop the leaves out with his hands. He collected up the empty plastic flowerpots, sweet wrappers and other rubbish that had blown in. Just beyond her front gate was her car and his bike leaning against it. He tried not to look at it. Perhaps it was hunger that was making him irritable. That and the fiddly nature of the job.
When he was done at last and had returned the rake and wheelbarrow to the shed, he went indoors. Miriam was basting the lamb.
“Not ready yet,” she said, and then she saw him. “Look at the state of you. Your trousers are filthy.” She took his hand. “You’re all scratched. You poor darling. Get your shoes off. Into the shower with you!”
He let himself be led upstairs. The backs of his hands were indeed bloody from the rose thorns. He felt cared for and just a little heroic. In her bedroom he undressed in front of her.
Her tone was warm. “Look at you. Big again.” She drew him towards her and fondled him while they kissed.
The shower was not a good experience. The water came out in a dribble, with a hair’s breadth turn of the tap between icy and scalding. When he returned to the bedroom, towel round his waist, his clothes were gone. He heard her coming up the stairs.
Before he could ask, she said, “They’re in the washing machine. You can’t go back to school covered in mud.” She passed him a grey sweater and a pair of her beige slacks. “Don’t worry. I’m not lending you my knickers.”
Her clothes fitted well enough, though the slacks looked girlish around the hips. There was an odd little loop that was supposed to go under his heel. He let it drag. As he followed her down the stairs the thought that they were both barefoot pleased him. At their very late lunch she had a glass of white wine, which she said she preferred at room temperature. He did not know the rules of wine but he nodded knowingly. She poured him some home-made lemonade. At first, they ate in silence and he was nervous, for he was beginning to understand how quickly her moods shifted. It was also worrying that he was without his clothes. The washing machine was turning, making little moaning sounds. But soon he did not care because he had a plate of roast lamb, pink, even bloody in places, which was new to him. And seven large roast potatoes and much buttery cauliflower. When it was offered he had another plate of meat and then a third and a total of fifteen roast potatoes and most of the cauliflower. He would have liked to pick up the half-full gravy boat and drink it all because it was surely going to be thrown away. But he knew his manners.
Finally she raised the subject, the only real topic. Since it had been the cause of his visit he had automatically assumed the matter buried.
“I don’t suppose you read the papers.”
“I do,” he said quickly. “I know what’s happening.”
“And what do you think?”
He thought carefully. He was so full of food, and he was also a new person, a man in fact, and at that moment he was not really bothered. But he said, “We might all be dead tomorrow. Or tonight.”
She pushed her plate aside and folded her arms. “Really? You don’t look very scared.”
His present indifference was a heavy weight. He forced himself to remember how he had felt the day before and the night before that. “I’m terrified.” And then, suddenly feeling the rich aura of his new maturity, he returned her question, in a manner that would never have occurred to a child. “What do you think?”
“I think Kennedy and all of America are behaving like spoiled babies. Stupid and reckless. And the Russians are liars and thugs. You’re quite right to be frightened.”
Roland was astonished. He had never heard a word against the Americans. The president was a godly figure in everything Roland had read. “But it was Russians who put their missiles—”
“Yes yes. And the Americans have theirs right against the Soviet border with Turkey. They’ve always said that strategic balance was the only way to keep the world safe. They should both pull back. Instead, we have these silly dangerous games at sea. Boys’ games!”
Her passion astonished him. Her cheeks were red. His heart was racing. He had never felt so grown up. “Then what’s going to happen?”
“Either some trigger-happy idiot out at sea makes a mistake and it all blows up, just like you fear. Or they do the deal they should have done ten days ago like proper statesmen instead of driving us all to the brink.”
“So you think a war might really happen?”
“It’s just possible, yes.”
He stared at her. His own position, that they might all die tonight, was largely rhetorical. It was what his friends and the sixth-formers said at school. There was comfort in having everybody say it. But hearing it now from her was a shock. She seemed wise. The newspapers were saying the same kind of thing, but that mattered less. Those were stories, like entertainments. He began to feel shivery.
She placed a hand on his wrist, turned it and found his fingers and interlocked them with hers. “Listen, Roland. It’s very, very unlikely. They might be stupid, but both sides have too much to lose. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what I’d like?” She waited for his answer.
“What?”
“I’d like to take you upstairs with me.” She added in a whisper, “Make you feel safe.”
So they rose without letting go and for the third time that day she towed him up the stairs. In the fading light of the late afternoon it happened all over again, and again he wondered at himself, how earlier in the day he had been so eager to get away, to regress and become a kid on a bike. Afterwards he lay on her arm, his face level with her breasts, feeling a growing drowsiness begin to smother him. His attention drifted in and out of what she was quietly saying.
“I always knew that you’d come…I’ve been very patient, but I knew…even though you didn’t. Are you listening? Good. Because now you’re here you should know. I’ve waited a very long time. You’re not to speak about this to anyone. Not to your closest friend, no boasting about it, however tempting it is. Is that clear?”
“Yes,” he said. “It’s clear.”
When he woke it was dark outside and she had gone. The bedroom air was cold on his nose and ears. He lay on his back in the comfortable bed. From downstairs he heard the front door open and close and then a familiar ticking sound that he could not place. He lay for half an hour in loosely associated daydreams. If the world did not end then the school term would, in fifty-four days. He would make the journey to Germany to be with his parents for the Christmas holidays, a prospect of comfort and boredom. What he liked was to think about the stages of the journey, the train from Ipswich to Manningtree, where the River Stour ceased to be tidal, change there for Harwich to get the night boat to the Hook of Holland, walk across the railway lines on the quayside and climb up onto the train to Hanover, at all stages checking the inside pocket of his school blazer to make sure his passport was still there.
He dressed quickly in the clothes she had lent him and went downstairs. The first thing he saw was his bike propped against the piano. She was in the kitchen, finishing the washing-up.
She called to him. “Safer in here. I spoke to Paul Bond. Did you know, I teach his daughter. It’s fine for you to stay overnight.” She came towards him and kissed his forehead.
She was wearing a blue dress of fine corduroy with darker blue buttons down the front. He liked her familiar perfume. Now it seemed that for the first time he really understood how beautiful she was.
“I told him we’re rehearsing a duet. And we are.”
He wheeled his bike through the kitchen into the garden and propped it by the shed. It was a night of stars and the first touch of winter. Already the beginning of a frost was forming on the lawn that he had raked. It crunched underfoot as he moved away from the kitchen light in order to see the smudged forked road of the Milky Way. A Third World War would make no difference to the universe.
Miriam called to him from the kitchen door. “Roland, you’ll freeze to death. Get inside.”
He went immediately towards her. That evening they played the Mozart again and this time he was more expressive and followed the dynamic markings. In the slow movement he tried to imitate her smooth and seamless legato touch. He thundered his way through the allegro molto and the cottage seemed to shake. It hardly mattered. They laughed about it. At the end she hugged him.
The next morning he slept in late. By the time he came downstairs it was even late for lunch. Miriam was in the kitchen preparing eggs. The pages of the Sunday paper, the Observer, were spread across an armchair and the floor. There was no change, the crisis continued. The headline was clear—Kennedy: No deal till Cuba missiles are made useless. She gave him a glass of orange juice and made him play another Mozart duet with her, this time the F major. He sight-read all the way. Afterwards she said, “You play the dotted notes like a jazz musician.” It was a rebuke he took as praise.
When at last they sat down to eat and she turned on her radio for the news, the story had moved on. The crisis was over. They listened to the deep voice, rich in authority, issue the deliverance. There had been an important exchange of letters between the leaders. The Russian ships were turning back, Khrushchev would order that the missiles be removed from Cuba. The general view was that President Kennedy had saved the world. The prime minister, Harold Macmillan, had phoned his congratulations.
It was another cloudless day. The low afternoon sun, well past the equinox, blazed through the glazed upper half of the kitchen door into the little sitting room and spilled across their table. As he ate his omelette, Roland felt again the insidious desire to be off, hurtling along the route he had in mind. Out of the question. He had already been told that while she ironed his clothes he would be washing the dishes. She had earned the right to tell him what to do. But she had it from the beginning.
“What a relief,” she kept saying. “Aren’t you happy? You don’t look it.”
“I am, honestly. It’s amazing. What a relief.”
But she read him well. Somewhere below a layer of decorum, barely available to himself, was a sense he had been cheated. The world would go on, he would remain unvaporised. He needn’t have done a thing.
* * *
Mr. Clare, head of music, busy with his production of Mother Courage, for which he had written an original score, told Roland he would be taking future lessons from Miss Cornell again.
“She knows about your progress, the sight-reading and the rest. She’ll be delighted to see you. She’ll also take you for your extra ninety minutes. The school will pay for that. My hands are full. I hope you’ll understand. Good lad.”
It was obvious whose initiative this was, though she had not mentioned it to Roland. She informed him that they would be playing the Schubert Fantasia and a Mozart duet in a concert in Norwich. A week later he saw a poster. It advertised the school Christmas concert on 18 December. Under Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 was Mozart and under him was his name and Miriam’s. Sonata for two pianos, D major, K448.
“You’d have refused if I’d told you. I’m the teacher, you’re my pupil and these concerts are what I want you to work towards. Now, enough of that. Come here.”
They were in bed at the time. It was 6 a.m. He sometimes crept out of the dormitory at five, pedalled like a maniac through the dark, along the muddy tracks. He had the journey down to fifteen minutes, then fourteen. Her front door would be ajar, an exciting crack of yellow light. He would race back, post dawn and merge unnoticed with the boys going into breakfast at 7:30. Where young Marlow had his mizzen mast in high seas, Roland had his bike. He went to Erwarton on free afternoons, and weekends when he wasn’t playing in a match. He took his prep in a carrier bag on his handlebars to her house but rarely touched it when he was there. On Sundays he was usually with her for lunch. He now told the housemaster where he was going—piano lessons and rehearsals were their badge of respectability. Whenever he left her she made a strict arrangement for the day and hour of his return. She kept him close. He often set out from school reluctantly as November turned to December and the trees were stripped leafless by a wind which was said to blow in from Siberia unhindered by a single hill. He hung about less with friends, he cancelled sessions in the darkroom. His reputation among his year was that of a dedicated and therefore boring pianist. No one was curious about his absences. He was late handing in work. His essay on Lord of the Flies, which he had intended to be twice the required length, was a poor and hurried thing, barely three pages in large well-spaced handwriting. C minus minus in red biro was the reckoning of Mr. Clayton, the inspirational English teacher. “Have you read it?” was his only remark.
