Lessons, page 28
“What?”
“It’s too soon.”
“For what?”
“I’ll be sixteen.”
“That’s why we’re going to Scotland. It’s legal.”
“I don’t want to. I can’t.”
She pushed her chair back and came round to his side of the table and stood over him. Her breasts were close to his face. “I think you’ll do as you’re told.”
He knew that voice from his first piano lesson. But this could be a game they were playing. If he nodded, even faintly, they would soon be upstairs, and how he longed for that now even though he knew it could destroy him. Once they were together on the bed he would say yes to everything. Afterwards when his mind was clear, he would regret it and it would be too late. He had to keep going. The main thing was to get out from under her. While she was so close he could not think, as she knew well. It was awkward, standing up without touching her. He crossed the room so that the sofa, where he had lain for days, was between them. It might just protect him.
She regarded him steadily. “Roland, what do you think this has all been about?”
“Loving each other.”
“And what does love mean? Where does it lead?”
He still believed that whenever she asked a question he was obliged to answer it.
He said, “ It doesn’t lead anywhere.” He had a brilliant idea, something half-remembered. “It’s a Ding an sich, a thing in itself.”
She smiled sadly and shook her head as she corrected him. “No, it isn’t, darling. It’s a commitment, to each other, to the future, a commitment for life. That’s what love is.”
“Not necessarily.” This was weak and it was too late to call it back.
She was coming towards him, smiling faintly. There was nowhere for him to back into. She said as she approached, “Come here. We shouldn’t be arguing. I want to kiss you.”
He took a step towards her and they kissed. At the same time she touched him through the thin white cotton. She would have felt him instantly swelling in her hand. He broke away, pushed past her roughly and went to stand by the dining table. The untouched roast was going cold.
She pointed. “Look at you. What’s that saying?”
“It’s saying I love you and I don’t want to get married.” He was pleased with this reply.
They were silent. Her expression did not change but he knew from experience that something was about to happen and he had better be ready. As always, she surprised him. From an armchair she picked up the satchel she took to Aldeburgh and bent over it to rummage among her sheet music. When she straightened he saw that she was flushed. To his horror he also saw tears in her eyes. But her voice was clear and steady.
“All right. Too bad. You’ll spend the rest of your life looking for what you’ve had here. That’s a prediction, not a curse. Because I don’t wish it on you. Love is all about chance and good luck. You happened to meet the right person for you when you were eleven. You were far too young to know it, but I did. I would have waited longer, but you showed up and it was obvious why. I should have sent you away but I wanted you as much as you wanted me. I had plans for us. They would have thrilled you. Now you’re backing out and I’m sorry. So get out. Take your stuff and leave and never come back.”
She threw the garden-shed key at his feet. When he started to protest she spoke over him louder than before, but not quite at a shout. “Do you hear me? Get out!”
While she accused him, as long as there was anger in her voice, he felt usefully unaroused. He picked up the key and, prompted by a vague notion of decency or gratitude, gathered from the table his birthday present, the envelope and papers. Without looking in her direction he turned and went through the kitchen. Outside it was still just light enough and raining steadily. He walked barefoot across the waterlogged lawn to the shed door. He needed both hands to turn the key. His trunk was not locked. The clothes he had worn when he arrived were on top. He dressed hurriedly in the doorway of the shed. The cash, his precious wad, was still in his back pocket. The pyjamas he screwed into a ball and tossed them out onto the lawn. A parting note. They would be sodden in the morning. She would be sorry when she had to carry them into the house, out of Mrs. Martin’s sight. He put the envelope in the trunk, closed it, lifted one end and dragged it across the lawn, round the side of the house, across the front lawn and through the gate. He knew from sending it by British Road Services that his trunk weighed around fifty pounds, a weight he could have carried but it was too big, too awkward. He set off along the road towards the pub. There was a grass verge and the trunk slid along it easily. By the pub car park was a phone box but he had no change, only pound notes. He went into the public bar and ordered a half-pint of bitter. The cigarette smoke, garbage from the lungs of others, was suffocating in the damp air and he was glad to be out again.
There was a one-man taxi service in Holbrook village and after he had spoken to the driver he waited with his trunk by the kerb. The rain kept on, but he did not mind—he had been indoors too long. From time to time he looked along the road towards the cottage. He was feeling the first touches of regret. If she had come out looking for him and had been persuasive he might have gone home with her and taken his chances. But it looked like the weather was keeping everyone inside tonight and in ten minutes his taxi arrived.
He asked to be taken to Ipswich railway station. While he was helping the driver lift the trunk onto the back seat he had no plan, no idea where he was going. But as they descended the hill past Freston water tower and went along the darkened foreshore, it came to him. Pack a carrier bag with a change of clothes and his books, deposit the trunk at the left luggage and check in to the Station Hotel. It looked run-down and cheap enough. He would hole up and read his set books and arrive on the first day of school well prepared for the sixth form. That plan fell apart as soon as he was standing on the pavement, watching his taxi draw away. A London train was just in, people were brushing past him, traffic on the main road was unusually heavy, there was tinny pop music playing from somewhere. He drew strength from this bustle. He was in the real world again. It was plain what he had to do. Last time she threw him out she had taken him back within days. A hasty note, a summons without explanation, delivered by the boy who resembled a mouse, and whose name was actually Thomas Meek. Next day, there was Roland on his bike, pedalling in a frenzy to her cottage, delivering himself up to her for lunch. It would happen again, she would come to claim him. He could never resist her. There was only one way to be free.
He had to act quickly, before he changed his mind. A friendly boy his own age helped him carry the trunk to the ticket office. His request was proud—a full-fare adult ticket, one-way. A porter took his luggage on a trolley to the guard’s van. Roland tipped him two shillings and sixpence. Probably too much but this was his new existence, the one in which he was in command. Before his train pulled out he had time to buy a newspaper. On the way to London he read about preparations for the grand opening of the Forth Road Bridge in Edinburgh, the city he had escaped from. He was too late into town to make an onward connection. The place he found near Liverpool Street station was even seedier than the one in Ipswich. He had never checked in to a hotel before. The feeling it gave him confirmed that he was doing the right thing. The next morning, before he took a taxi across the city to Waterloo station, he phoned his sister.
She was on the platform to meet him at Farnborough station. Her car was the same make as Miriam’s, so he knew how to fit his trunk in. Susan was not surprised about his change of plan. As Roland put it—like her and their brother Henry, like their parents and their parents, he would benefit from the minimum schooling the authorities required of him. He was done with classrooms and timetables. She stopped outside his old place of work and waited while he walked the quarter-mile to where Mr. Heron was supervising the digging. It was clear from the mud on his boots and jacket and the sweat on his face that he was short-handed. The gaffer seemed to have shrunk. Roland was fearless. He asked for the wages he was owed, and he offered—he did not ask—to work again. When he got the nod Roland set out his condition. He could work faster and harder than the forty-year-old chain-smoking fellows. He must be paid at the full adult rate or he would go elsewhere. As Mr. Heron turned away he agreed with a shrug.
After they had brought in his trunk from the car and heaved it upstairs to his bedroom, Roland and Susan had a cup of tea and settled on four pounds a week for his keep. Over the weekend it was beautiful weather again and he helped his sister in the garden. While she made a bonfire Roland went back into the house to bring out his books. Camus, Goethe, Racine, Austen, Mann and the rest. He dropped them one by one onto the flames. It would have been satisfying to believe that All for Love was consumed faster than the rest. But everything burned with equal ferocity. He wrote to his parents about his decision, assuring them he was earning good money. Over the following week, worried letters came from school, from Mr. Clayton and Mr. Bramley. A day later there was one from Mr. Clare, who urged him to return and continue the “vitally important lessons with Miss Cornell. You have a stupendous talent. Roland, it can be nurtured here—for free!” He ignored them all. He was already busy working extra hours at time and a half, and he had met a lovely, sweet-natured Italian girl, Francesca, in an Aldershot pub.
8
By mid-1995 Roland was out of funds, though hardly impoverished. Alissa forwarded the Child Benefit that had helped sustain her while she was writing The Journey. This weekly allowance of £7.25, hard-fought for by campaigners, went straight from government to all mothers, rich or poor, and now came from her London to her German bank to his London bank. She added a decent £250 a month for Lawrence’s maintenance. She passed a message through Rüdiger that she would send more if Roland wanted her to. He didn’t. There was enough to eat and drink, almost enough for clothes and school trips. Repairs, holidays abroad, a car, spontaneous presents and the piano tuner fell off the list. The bank overdraft was closing in on £4,000. He could not face a return entanglement with social services and join fellow supplicants slumped on steel benches screwed to the floor. He and Lawrence had lived well for two years, the rest went on tax at the new low rate. The household survived by Roland collating some of his earlier freelance careers. He wrote a little journalism, he taught tennis seven hours a week, he played lunchtime munch music at a superior small hotel in Mayfair. How could he be poor when he and Lawrence lived on an income just above the national average? Because poverty was not an absolute, so he had read, it was relative, and his friends, many of them graduates, were doing well in the professions, in science, TV and print. One couple, evangelists for a digital future, had opened an Internet café in Fitzrovia. They were flourishing.
There was an interesting term going about that he liked and used to console himself. Social capital. How could he complain when he was soon to be married? When he had a loveable interesting child, friends, music, books and health, when his son was not at risk from smallpox or polio, or from snipers hidden in the hills above Sarajevo? But he would have preferred social capital plus capital, and if his life was safe, it was also too safe. He rarely left London these days. Look what others of his generation were doing. He had not left home to publicise the Sarajevo siege and its atrocities as bold Susan Sontag had, by staging Waiting for Godot in the city’s National Theatre.
He and Daphne had decided to merge households. The four children were keen. Peter, down in Bournemouth in a peeling seafront apartment with his new friend, didn’t mind Roland living with the woman he had left. Roland had formed a suspicion that Peter had hit Daphne on occasions, but she refused to talk about it. It turned out that she and Peter, pushing against convention in their youth, were not actually married. Whatever had happened, the bitterness of their parting was largely spent. That was a bullet Roland and Alissa had dodged. He had signed papers prepared by German and English lawyers, paid for by Alissa. Now, with Daphne, the plan was clear. Find a big house and garden where Lawrence and his best friend Gerald, and the two girls, Greta and Nancy, would be happy and free. Roland was counting on Daphne’s genius for organisation. They had long been confidants, now they were lovers. It had started out wonderfully, had faltered a while and now was well again. Or well enough. At last he understood that there was no liberating elsewhere beyond the sandbag defences of Gurji camp, that on the other side of the best orgasm he’d ever had, a better one was not waiting.
He was just over three years short of his fiftieth birthday. His tennis clients were mostly decent players in their thirties wanting to “hit.” After a long session on court he noticed dull aches around his hips and electric twinges in his right elbow. He had his heart checked out—a bit ragged, some of the beats, but not so bad. At his doctor’s suggestion he submitted to a camera journeying around his large colon in search of polyps—nothing so far. A humiliating process but one of the drugs, fentanyl, gave him a taste of the old days. Thinking seriously for the first time in his life about his health and his inevitable deterioration added to his certainty that it was time to arrange a different kind of existence. Too late for Sarajevo. The future he had in mind was solid, secure, friendly, ordered, and he was coming to it after many delays and denials.
Months had passed since they had elatedly made these plans. But Daphne worked a fifty-hour week and was raising three children. Her au pairs came and went often. The public housing stock was pitifully diminished. The demand for affordable London homes to rent was overwhelming her mid-sized housing association. Roland’s hours were spread all over the day and he was needed at the school gates by 3:30. In six months, they had seen eleven places, all hovels or overpriced or both. For now, they lived in two small houses in Clapham.
Epithalamium Cards had not collapsed—it had been sold on to a big mainstream concern for a sum that was never disclosed to Roland. The money owed to him was on its way, the elusive Oliver Morgan had been telling him for four years. Certain legal and financial issues were being resolved. He was not to worry—his portion was increasing in value all the time. Roland’s recycled birthday and condolence verses were now on sale everywhere with a company said to be bigger than Hallmark. At school long ago he had read several pages of a set book, a novel by Georges Duhamel, Le notaire du Havre, enough to get the general idea. A hard-pressed family was waiting to receive a generous inheritance. The fortune was always about to arrive. Frustrated hope was slowly destroying these poor people. The money never came. Or perhaps it did. He didn’t read far enough to find out. It was a cautionary tale.
He could go weeks and the matter hardly crossed his mind. He was too busy and he reckoned he was more resilient than the family from Le Havre. But occasionally, waking in the small hours, his brooding insomniac mind would go searching for a cause. Then he would hear Morgan’s reassuring voice from a recent conversation. Roland, just be patient. Trust me. Lying in the dark on his back he attended to unspooling dramas—written and directed by someone else. He had no responsibility for the hiring of the East End thugs who snatched Oliver Morgan from his car and brought him to an abandoned bacon factory in Ipswich, where soon he, along with some senior executives from Krazikards Inc., dangled naked, upside down, their ankles secured by the chains of a moving belt transporting them towards the steel doors of a giant blast furnace. At their approach those doors slid open, a roaring jet of white flame rose twenty feet high. The bound men, writhing on their chains, squealed like pigs for mercy. By chance it looked like Oliver would be going in first. Time for Roland to intervene, to pause the conveyor belt. He spoke into Oliver’s upside-down ear. There were certain conditions. With what ease and speed the money was in his hands. But now the bedclothes were too hot and his noisily beating heart would not let him sleep.
It was during those early days, when the old friends became lovers, that Daphne explained her theory of domestic order. The centre of the modern home was no longer the sitting room, the parlour or the study of the paterfamilias. It was the kitchen, and the heart of the kitchen was its table. This was where children learned basic manners, including the unspoken rules of conversation, and how to be in company and where they would absorb for a lifetime the vital rhythm and rituals of regular meals and begin to take for granted their first simple duties in helping to clear away. It was where the post was opened, where friends sat around talking and drinking, while their host prepared their supper. And it was where, she pointed out, at his table they were squeezed up at one end because of the mountain of crap that occupied almost all the space. Under there was a nice old pine table. Clear it and the effect on the rest of the house would follow. It took him a weekend. Most of the mountain he binned, the rest he distributed around the house. She was wrong, there was no effect on the other rooms but the kitchen was fundamentally improved. As a new convert Roland worked hard to keep the table clear. It became a kind of hearth. Even Lawrence noticed.
Round this table various friends gathered during 1995. It could accommodate ten at a squeeze. If Daphne was not working too late she could get across by nine thirty. Her girls took Roland’s spare room and Gerald doubled up with Lawrence. Roland had limited cooking skills and ambitions. One course only: lamb chops, roast potatoes, green salad. To feed ten, he would count on forty chops. They made little impact on his overdraft. The wine was taken care of by the guests. They formed a shifting, ill-defined group. Many worked in the public sector—teachers, civil servants, a GP. Joe Coppinger came with Sofia, the doctor he was about to marry. There was also a cello maker, an independent-bookshop owner, a builder and a professional bridge player. The average age was around forty-five. Most were parents, none was rich, though everybody earned more than Roland. Most were heavily mortgaged, many had been married twice and had complicated families and complex weekly arrangements. Almost all had been educated by the state. There was a fair national and racial mix. The two schoolteachers were third-generation Caribbean. The bridge player was of Japanese extraction. Occasionally, Americans, French and Germans passed through. Two, Mireille and Carol, Roland’s previous lovers, came with their husbands, one of whom was from Brazil. Some were people Roland had met through tennis. The gatherings overlapped with other groups in other houses where the food was more sophisticated. On any given occasion about half would know each other.
