After Purple (2 page)

There was a small grey puddle left in the bottom of my bowl and one waterlogged sultana floating in it. The crumb was still trembling on Leo's lip. He loved me. I pushed my nightdress up above my navel. Leo likes navels. We often did it on the kitchen floor with a pile of spread-out
Listeners
underneath us, I was used to being screwed on Bertrand Russell or Alistair Cooke or Letters to the Editor. Sometimes he rammed my head against the skirting. He always hurt. That was one of the reasons I lived with him, the recklessness, the scarlet-edged excitement. With Adrian, it was all pale pink candlewick and vaginal deodorants and
tenderness
.

The crumb fell off his lip at the exact moment I swallowed the sultana. That worried me. He was brewing a second pot of tea. He should have grabbed hold of my wrists by now and pinioned me against the wall. He's very thin, the sort of build you'd call gangling if he were anyone else, but so strong he's cut out of sheet metal, with steel rods where ordinary men have bones.

His dressing-gown had fallen open again. (He never wore pyjamas.) His skin was smooth, almost polished, with a dull, sallow tinge to it, as if he'd been painted in a bad light on a foggy evening. He didn't have vulgar things like body hair. He was like one of those ancient, precious icons of Christ the Saviour, where fuzz would have been sacrilege.

I held out my hand to him. He left it stranded, pawing the air like a limp, foolish thing without an owner. Leo gave me headaches — the endless tension, the unpredictability. I pulled my nightie down again. He had picked up his cup and was walking towards the door. He wasn't angry, just preoccupied. Bertrand Russell made him nervous. I heard his footsteps fade and vanish up the stairs, followed by the higher, brighter footsteps of the piano, racing and tumbling down again.

The piano was the most expensive thing he owned. It was a Bechstein grand in inlaid ebony, and twice as old as he was. The removal men couldn't get it down the narrow curving stairs into the basement, so it stood in my territory. In fact, I didn't have much territory left. Once the piano was established, that room became his living-room, (which he and Otto called a drawing-room and my mother would have called a disgrace, since no one bothered cleaning it). That encouraged him to use my bedroom, too — not for sleeping in, but for storing the largest and most gloomy of his canvases. I often went to sleep surrounded by ruined temples or anorexic nudes, tipped on their sides and glaring. I could hardly complain, when it was all his house to start with. Even with Adrian, I'd never got my half. Other wives have joint mortgages and shared bank accounts. Adrian thought more in terms of pocket money, or presents of huge boring (improving) books he wanted to read himself.

Leo was playing very loud. and fiercely. He had plunged straight into the middle of a piece, a general sort of pandemonium where his hands keep crossing over on the keys and he hurls himself about a lot. He'd been practising it for at least two months. It sounded fine to me, but then I'm not musical. (Another thing between us.) I hated Leo's music and yet I worshipped it. I can't even type, let alone play an instrument. I've never had the knack of doing different things with each hand, except in bed. When Leo first showed me his musical scores, I was dumbfounded. A hundred pages of squiggles was a whole crashing symphony, or the sobbing tangle of an opera. A murder or a deathbed or Man's Highest Aspirations crammed into five straight lines and a clutch of crotchets. It was like God in a grain of sand or the Bible on a silicon chip, and gave me that same sinky, trembly feeling as when I watched television programmes on “Man and The Cosmos” and realised we were just a small, second-rate planet spinning towards extinction.

I shut the kitchen door. The music was crashing and pounding through the house, booming down the stairs, churning up my breakfast. I felt extinguished by it, excluded. I had no idea who the composer was. I never dared ask Leo things like that, in case the piece was so ludicrously well-known that even an ignoramus would have known it. I
was
an ignoramus. My lack of musical knowledge so appalled me that I always kept it quiet, which saved me from contempt, but never taught me anything.

It had been much the same with Adrian. He wasn't musical, but he wrote textbooks on medieval history and I don't know history, either. At smart dinner parties I used to say that Adrian divorced me because I thought Stephen and Matilda were a folk group. Adrian didn't divorce me, anyway — I walked out on him — but even if he had, he would have done it on the grounds of just that sort of flip remark, not because of my ignorance. On the other hand, if you don't know anything (I mean
really
know, like Leo and Adrian know things, or Bertrand Russell, or the man at the auction rooms) you have to get by on flip remarks, or by regurgitating chewed-up bits of other people's conversations. I stole whole sentences and served them up, not as stale and tepid left-overs, but as my main Dish of the Day. Their owners never noticed, because I changed things round or tacked bits on from someone or somewhere else. My vocabulary was already quite impressive, but it couldn't compare with theirs. They had whole freezers and larders full of freshly-brewed opinions and ideas, jumbo-sized tins and packets, while I had only a few rinds and husks pinched from their plates and secreted in a paper serviette, the sort of thing you'd tip into the dog's dish.

It amazed me, really, how ordinary people could remember things. Adrian talked about thirteenth-century battles as if he'd been standing there in person, handing the king his breast-plate or picking up the arrows. He probably knew what Matilda ate for breakfast. Leo could play whole piano sonatas off by heart, without the music. If he turned on Radio Three in the middle of a concert, he knew immediately the name and dates of the piece and the composer. I could listen to an hour of it and still not guess whether it was Mozart or
The Merry Widow
.

I opened the door a crack. The music punched me in the face again. It was pouring down the stairs like lava, coating and choking everything with noise and heat and fury. Leo had me trapped. I could only escape by bolting out of the back door in my nightdress. If I wanted my clothes, I'd have to walk right up the stairs past the source of the eruption, that black, smoking, evil-minded Bechstein.

I didn't want my clothes — I wanted Leo — so I braved the stairs and stood deafened at the door of the drawing-room, watching his body lurch and plunge along the keyboard. The room was shuddering with the impact, objects trembling on the table, walls and ceiling wincing. I was totally shut out. I think that's why I resented Leo's music — he gave it his full devotion and attention, when I could never win them for myself.

I waited a while until he'd reached that section where the piano draws its breath and quietens down a bit, then I walked towards him and stood behind his shoulder. The music was merciful now, forgiving — armies kneeling in the snow and laying down their swords, brother embracing brother. I wanted to slip in underneath the notes and have Leo's slow, dark, bony hands stroke and gentle me the way they did the keys.

“Leo …”

“What?” He leant away from me to rumble down the lowest end of the piano. “Well,
what
?”

“Oh … nothing.” It was pointless, really. He was squeezing such feeling out of those notes, such
anguish
, my own petty little needs could hardly raise a murmur.

He paused a moment, flexed his fingers, closed his eyes. “I'm meeting Otto for breakfast,” he said. He made the name sound grand and showy like the climax of the piece.

“You've
had
breakfast.”

“Lunch, then.” He was already playing again, Otto's name now frilled and furbished with a flurry of arpeggios.

“You said we'd have lunch
together
.”

“We could have done. But you just turned breakfast into lunch.”

“I
didn't
.”

He answered with a mocking little trill in the left hand.

“Anyway, you told me Otto doesn't eat breakfast.”

“He doesn't eat at all.”

“So why are you having lunch with him?”

“I'm not, I'm having breakfast.”

“Oh, Leo …”

Both hands were jeering at me now, turning their backs on me, jabbing the notes with a slow, lazy scorn.

“When are you leaving?”

“Now.”

“But you're not dressed.”

“No.”

“So couldn't we … ?”

“No.”

The music had turned loud and fierce again. He should have stopped by now. I think he'd tacked a new bit on, simply to shout me down. The right hand was darting like a lizard over the keys, while the left one kept on repeating the same phrase, the same phrase, the same …

I suddenly wanted to chop it off — that hand — smash it into pulp. All the fury I had ever felt towards him, all the pain, resentment, pique, humiliation, was pouring into that left hand. On and on it went, the same dazzling, murderous phrase; spinning, sparkling, screwing the room tighter and tighter, while the right hand raced and tumbled over it. The piano was throbbing, the whole room roaring and trembling. Leo had his eyes closed. He was communing with the souls of dead composers, deafening and insulting me in a language I couldn't understand. I hadn't a clue what key he was in, I didn't even know which century. It was like Adrian again. All those confusing battles in the Hundred Years War; strings of kings with the same name but different numbers, Henrys and Edwards whom I always muddled up. Feudalism, scholasticism, internationalism — all those impossible words with ‘-ism' on the end of them. The only one I understood was sensualism. I wanted to lie down under the piano, on my back, and have Leo's thundering hands play the same phrase over and over and over me, pounding me, dazzling me, in any key he chose. Eroticism. Barbarism. Steel rods rammed against my breasts, sheet metal gouging out my stamens. And there he was, vertical, not horizontal, making love to that dead, smug, preening slob of a Bechstein, pouring out lies about tenderness and emotion, (
dolce
and
grazioso, con somma passione
), when he was a pig, a brute, a thug, a …

I didn't slam out, just slipped into my bedroom, lay down on the mattress (which my mother called a divan), closed my eyes and snuggled up against my father. I hadn't seen him since I was a tiny kid, but I still knew what he looked like. He was so tall, I only came up to his thighs and he could pick me up with just one hand and sling me over his shoulder. He bought me sweets on Saturday afternoons, and when he read
Red Riding Hood
, he made his voice all frightening for the wolf.

I didn't want to think of wolves, so I moved on to my second father who was actually a step-dad. His name was God and He lived in the convent boarding school where my mother sent me to give herself what she described as breathing space. You had to be a proper baptised Catholic to claim Him as your
real
father. The other three hundred blessed girls all were. They feasted on His flesh and blood and wore His naked body on a chain around their necks. I was the only step-child. The difference showed, of course. My mother got as irritable with God as she had done with my father, so she moved me to a godless college where I first discovered Life and Lib and cheese-and-hashish sandwiches and mortal men like Adrian.

Adrian told me God was an irrelevance and replaced Him with Philosophy. On Saturday afternoons, he bought Spanish plonk and Durex Gossamer instead of jelly babies, and read me history books in place of fairy tales before we went to bed. There wasn't that much difference, so I married him. Actually, I didn't have much choice. God was still cold-shouldering me because I wasn't a cradle Catholic and my father had long ago pissed off and married someone else.

I shivered in my nightie. Leo and the Bechstein hadn't relented yet. I tried to picture him and God and Adrian and my father, and even Bertrand Russell and Bernard Levin, all fighting over their claims to me, all begging me to give them one more chance. It didn't really work. They were much more interested in demolishing each other's theories than they were in wooing me. Instead of their impassioned pleadings, all I could hear was Leo's jeering music shrilling and scoffing underneath the door. I longed for my father to wrap me in his great-coat and pretend I was Goldilocks sleeping off the porridge. Or God to sneak me into bed with Him and pull the blankets tight. Or even Leo to simply stop his playing and prove I still existed. There was only Adrian left. I was crazy to have left him. I only did it because we'd had a row and I wanted him to come panting after me and beg me not to go. Instead, he had gone grovelling round to Janet's and asked her to marry him. (I didn't even know he
had
a Janet.)

I booted her out of my bed and set up house with Adrian again. Things had been safer then, predictable. He always came home (and left it) at the same time, and made careful, unobjectionable remarks in the right order. Simple things like breakfast cereals never became reasons for contempt. He'd shared a packet with me, most mornings, and even helped me enter the competitions on the back. (Complete the line: “We eat Kellogg's Ricicles because …”) He took the competitions very seriously, juggled words, jotted headings. We might have won a trip to the Bahamas. Adrian would have taken the cash in lieu of, and then gone somewhere grey and cultured and boring, like Ephesus or Athens, which had history and temples instead of golden sands. We always had five or six different cereals, so we lived in constant expectation of new cars, world cruises, day trips to Disneyland. Most of the packets were too tall for our poky little larder, so we stood them in a row on top of the refrigerator. It was an old fridge with an intermittent judder, and every time it juddered, one or two of the packets fell on their backs. We never moved them to a safer place, just picked them up again. They were like our children, I suppose, bright and sweet and shared and always falling over. I suppose that's why divorce hurts so much. Not the obvious things, the division of the property, the haggling in the courts, but the loss of a plastic Batman in the cornflakes packet, or the chance of a cabin cruiser with two coupons from Puffed Wheat.