2002 - Wake up (22 page)

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My brother embraces all forms of male bonding. If some chap announces that he has to shake hands with the Kaiser, see a man about a dog, then Greg feels obliged, out of sheer bonhomie, to accompany him. To stand at an adjoining urinal, to gaze, head at a slight upward incline, at some spot on the wall, and piss together. However recently he’s already done so. He’s never happier, my brother, than when jostling for space with a bunch of fellows, shoulder to shoulder, splashing the porcelain in one of those unpartitioned, rank urinals with an open gutter; he never feels more convivial, more fully human. Me, I’m the opposite. I find it hard to pee in public.

I’m thwarted by the presence of other human beings; other men, at least. I’ve never had that problem with women, with lovers. That terrible intimacy, isn’t it? Did other people wonder about that when they were children? I did: do couples go to the bathroom together? A man and a woman? I could imagine sex from the moment I gained an inkling of what it entailed, but doing the business with her in the same bathroom? Her, with me there? Disgusting.

Since growing up, I rather like it. Pissing, certainly. There’s something enduringly girlish about one’s wife peeing. On a long drive, for example. You stop in the middle of nowhere; I step to the verge, and while I unzip my flies and empty my bladder of milky piss I watch Lily unpeel her leggings and knickers as she squats. When I’ve finished myself I sidle over and watch her piddle stream along the ground from between her feet. Why is that so appealing? I don’t know. I’m sure other people know more about these things than I do.

Occasionally Lily will let me lie beneath her. She claims it doesn’t turn her on, though I don’t see how that’s possible. Says she only does it for me. When we bought the house, in the trees beyond the lawn, I can feel the moss below me, she squatted and peed on my face.

§

I’ve got so much to think about, I almost forgot about what happened at the weekend. There are four concerts annually, organised by our choirmaster, and Saturday night saw the first of the year. He’d invited Bjorn Lungstrom, the Norwegian pianist, to come and play Chopin, Debussy and Ravel in our village church. All two hundred and sixty tickets were sold out in advance, proceeds going towards famine relief. And Lily and I offered the use of our house and garden for interval refreshments.

It’s become a part of this modern tradition that the intervals are catered for as if the concerts take place in high summer: a glass of white wine, strawberries and cream, consumed standing on someone’s lawn. Although the house has to be made ready or a marquee erected and standing by, members of the church claim that all but one or two of the twenty-odd concerts thus far have taken place on what turned out to be days of unseasonably temperate weather for spring or autumn, evenings on which it was a delight to be outside.

Who were we to argue? I ordered thirty boxes of Chablis, orange and apple juice, two hundred punnets of strawberries from Israel and tubs of whipped cream—all, according to Lily’s instruction, organic. All this we paid for, as part of the hosts’ customary contribution—a sort of toll for membership of the village establishment.

I left it to my wife to hire caterers, but she insisted on recruiting the nephews and their friends.

“Glint and Lee want to do it,” Lily said. “Earn themselves some money. And it’ll do them good to do a bit of work for a change. Look at them: their laziness is crippling them.”

“Honey,” I said, “do you think that’s wise? You know how oafish our nephews are, and their mates are doubtless worse. People won’t want to have their drinks spilled by ruffians who look like they’re about to mug them; they want to be served by pretty girls in black skirts and little white pinafores. I don’t blame them.”

“Oh, wake up, man,” she said. “We’re in the twenty-first century now. We did make it, you know. You’re given an opportunity to combat stereotypes, both the concert-goers’ and the boys’, and all you can do is moan about it.”

I didn’t argue, though I knew I was right. People depend on protocol. The more casually we dress, so workers in the service industry get smarter. You go to a cocktail party, you go to the opera, and millionaires are dressed for the weekend. While minimum-wage waiters and waitresses serve you in neatly pressed white shirts, trousers with creases in them, leather shoes that shine.

§

Anyway, the day came and what do you know? Easter’s late this year but still, it was the mildest day of the year so far; almost balmy, it could have been June. The sun rose in a blue sky and gently warmed the morning. I hired the muscle of some men from work to collect rented trestle tables, chairs for the infirm, wine glasses, cups and saucers, cutlery. The food and drink was delivered: the fruit supplier, an old competitor when we were still small traders called Bob Canman, came in person and found me overseeing Richard’s gardening gang sprucing up the lawn and flowerbeds.

“Listen,” Bob said, as we reached the back door where he’d parked, “f’m awful sorry, John, but there’s been a mistake. I ordered them direct from Tel Aviv myself.”

“What mistake?”

“They’re not organic.”

“Tell me you’re joking.”

“They’re beautiful strawberries, though. Here, taste one.”

I ran it under the tap and put it in my mouth. It was soft and succulent and sweet, it melted in the saliva on my tongue. It gave one that sensation rarely known: that you’re tasting fruit about five seconds past its peak, its zenith, of ripeness. It was the most perfect strawberry I ever ate. So was the next.

“What I’ve done,” Bob said, “is I’ve put them into boxes marked Organic. But at the same time I’m telling you.” He looked at me with the anxious expression of a man without power who’s taken the initiative.

I took a twenty from my wallet, nodded towards the figure sat behind the wheel of Bob’s van. “You did the right thing,” I said, slipping the note into his hand. “Treat yourself and the lad there to a pint on the way home.”

§

Three of Glint’s pals helped unload the boxes of strawberries from the van to our scullery. Each of them wore his hair identically sculpted with gel and plastered close to his skull, in a style that in barbers’ sign language declared, HERE is A TEENAGECRIMINAL. They sniggered to each other, though they found it impossible to speak or even look at me; when I spoke to them they could only look away, at some unspecific spot, with an expression of resentment at my having addressed them.

“Wash the strawberries in the sink at the back of the garage there, and put a helping into each of these bowls,” I said. “About this many,” I showed them. There were four hundred bowls. “And put dollops of cream on all but a few while the first half of the concert’s in progress.”

I left those lads to it and took Lee and his best mate with me to plant stakes along the verge from the church to our entrance. Being the Old Rectory, this is not far; we’re next door, in fact, though owing to the layout of the churchyard and our garden and the curve of the lane, it’s a two hundred yard walk. There used to be access across the lawn and through a small gate into the graveyard, for the Rectors of past times, but what with the dead buried in the new cemetery out on the edge of the village and atheistic occupants before us, this gateway has grown over with disuse. And our new perimeter fence has now stoppered it for good. So this pair of boys helped me skewer four stakes with cardboard signs tacked to them promising:

Refreshments This Way →

They took turns to hold the posts steady while I thumped the tops with a sledgehammer: neither of them could quite raise the hammer with ease and I certainly wasn’t going to trust them swinging it. I was reminded how weak a boy is, how enervated by adolescence, until all of a sudden the testosterone kicks in, muscles are defined, and one feels oneself to be strong. A young man, at last. And after that you think you’ll get ever stronger, this is something you assume, and you will for a while, for ten, twenty years. Until one day you’ll go to lift a familiar weight—a sack of spuds, say—and find it’s a heave, a strain to accomplish. In middle age you experience again the weediness of puberty.

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I bathed and changed into black trousers, anemone-blue silk shirt and jacket and was looking out of our bedroom window at the garden when my wife came up from behind and hugged me. “It looks great,” she said, though I could tell she was leaning her head against my back, and probably had her eyes closed, too. “Everything’s ready. Beryl’s here.”

Our cleaning lady was going to supervise the catering operation. Lily wasn’t quite naive enough to leave our nephews and their fellows entirely in charge of themselves.

“How’s our boy?” I asked.

“I just fed Jacob,” she said. “He’s gone to sleep. Sonia’s here to keep an eye on him.”

“You’re happy to leave him?” I asked. “The first time.”

“I’ll sit in a pew by the door,” she said. “I’ve got your bleeper. It’ll be fine. I don’t want to miss it, especially the Chopin.”

“I know. Well, let’s stroll over.”

“Hey,” she said.

“What?”

“I’m glad you’re not wearing a tie.”

I hadn’t thought about it. “You don’t want me to, do you?”

“Of course not.”

“I’m OK like this?”

“Yes,” she said.

“You’re happy I’m not in cords and tweed? You know, I said I didn’t want to go rural.”

Lily laughed, shaking her head.

“You look stunning,” I told her. She was wearing her Nicole Farhi black slacks, a charcoal cardigan, and she’d painted her face. My wife does the abracadabra women do, this metamorphosis into painted elegance. Lily smiled graciously at my compliment. She kissed me, lightly, so as not to disturb her lipstick.

“You know I love you,” she said. I think she maybe even believed it.

“We’re doing OK, aren’t we?” I said.

We walked hand in hand round to the church. People greeted us, I was surprised at how many folk we’ve got to know here already. The choirmaster was at the door, presiding in a regal way, and why not? He deserves it. The Rice-Wallingtons were there, the old moneys in the village, decrepit aristocrats: they both look worn out by the effort of a lifetime spent affecting aloofness. Jeff Flyme, who calls himself a farmer, though I can’t see him on a tractor, somehow, with his young partner, his catamite really, Shay, a chap with whom my wife falls into instantly profound conversations whenever she sees him.

The Rector, Justin, caught my eye, and winked. I was surprised to see him—and his wink included acknowledgement of this—because I know music doesn’t do much for him, and this little parish is one of six he covers, so he was under no obligation to come. He wasn’t wearing a tie, either, never mind a dog-collar. I like Justin. He’s barely thirty, and he seems to be one of a generation of whom even the clerics seem to feel no need to profess faith in an outmoded religion. But, Justin told me, the church still provides not only a social function, but also a legitimate forum to discuss ethical issues; it’s just that today priests need no longer justify opinion with, “Jesus tells us this,” or “According to scripture.”

Last time we met, Justin collared me and said, “Tell me, what is it with this GM thing?”

I blanched. “What do you know about it?” I asked him.

“Only what I read,” he said. “But you’re in the food business, aren’t you? These suicide seeds. This terminator gene. I mean, is it really going to feed the starving, or what do you think?”

§

Of course there were many strangers amongst the audience. As they filled the pews I sat down near the front next to Jo Bingle, Lily’s best new friend in the village, a young spinster who has her own shop in town selling funky kitchen equipment, and a cottage along the lane here with a stable and paddocks; she’d offered a field for tonight’s car parking. Jo asked where Lily was and I nodded over my shoulder.

“By the door, just in case,” I told her. “The baby. She said to me to sit here and say hello. How are the horses?”

“Pony. Fine.”

“You looking forward to this?”

“Of course. It’s the occasion as much as the music, isn’t it?”

“I guess,” I agreed. “The Chopin should be good.”

It was almost seven-thirty. I closed my eyes, let my mind listen to the sing-song cacophony and the peculiar hushed bustle of secular concert-goers in a country church. I inhaled the scent that Jo was wearing, concentrated my attention towards the barely discernible contact of our beclothed thighs—my trousers, her skirt and glossy tights—and idly wondered whether we’ll ever have sex together. Not vividly enough to encumber myself with a substantial hard-on; just, you know, with that semeny feeling flowing to and fro in my prick.

Then there was a sinking towards silence, as people’s voices drained away: I opened my eyes, to see the choirmaster mounting the chancel step. After a short introduction he gave us Bjorn Lungstrom, who entered from the vestry to enthusiastic applause. Justin, I fancied, must have envied him this reception.

Lungstrom played our Bechstein beautifully, so far as I could tell. I mean, I’m no judge. I had a good view and, to be honest, my appreciation was as much of his athletic as his musical achievement. His feet drew my attention: stepping on and off the pedals with what looked like involuntary, reflex movements. Self-obsessed little feet. Their hiccuping dance seemed to bear scant relation to the music.

Lungstrom started with a piano transcription of Mussorgsky’s
Night on the Bare Mountain
. I’d read the programme notes, I knew the quadruple
forte
and daring harmonic figures were inspired by hellish Russian fairy tales. But what it made me think of were silent movies—whose piano accompaniments were of course prompted by just such nineteenth-century music as this. As if, due to my ignorance, Mussorgsky ripped off the music he inspired, when I closed my eyes I saw blurry black and white characters running around and over-acting furiously. Keystone Cops,
The Perils of Pauline
.

That’s what I do in concerts. I let the music lead me into whatever daydreaming narratives it will, conjure whatever images appear. I envy people who can concentrate on the music itself. Sometimes the music virtually evaporates from my awareness altogether and does no more than seal me off within an unrelated stream of thought. So it was after the Mussorgsky. Bjorn Lungstrom began playing Schumann, and my mind drifted.