Kindergarten (6 page)

Lilli began by reading the story of the nativity from St. Luke’s gospel, words of scripture—“swaddling clothes,” “a multitude of the heavenly host”—that had been a part of the mind since early childhood, like some hymns, and certain poems and stories, as if they had always been there, a rhythm of sound that awakened memories of the time before the words had been understood.

When Lilli had finished reading, Jo stood up and began to sing, in his clear, pure voice, “In the bleak mid-winter,” the carol he was going to sing in the service on the Green. Lilli was not going to come out into the rain and cold, though Sal was coming round later that night, and Matthias would not have been alone in the house. Sal and Lilli would watch from the dining-room window.

Everyone applauded when he had finished, and he bowed to each of them in turn.

“Thank you,” he said. “Unexpected and gratifying, if a little lacking in Smack.”

It was Corrie’s turn now.

He brought over one of the dining-chairs, and sat down with his cello, spending a long time shifting his position until he was completely satisfied. Jo, standing beside him, looked at him for his signal.

Corrie took a deep breath. They were going to perform one of the songs he had written for “Hansel and Gretel.” He had found the words in
Kinderstimmen
, the final poem in the book: “Auf meines Kindes Tod.” It was by Joseph von Eichendorff, a nineteenth-century German writer. He had got Jo to learn it in the original German.

“This is especially for Lilli,” he said. “You won’t recognise the music, but I think you’ll recognise the words.”

He felt very nervous of playing this in front of other people, even though they were people who had often listened to music he had written, but Lilli had given him a part of herself in giving him her painting: he would now give her a part of himself in return, a piece of music he had written himself.

He nodded at Jo and, bent over the cello, began to play the long piece of wordless music before the song began. At the exact moment he moved into a higher key, Jo began to sing:

“Von fern die Uhren schlagen,
Es ist schon tiefe Nacht,
Die Lampe brennt so düster,
Dein Bettlein ist gemacht.
Die Winde nur noch gehen
Wehklagend um das Haus.
Wir sitzen einsam drinnen
Und lauschen oft hinaus.
Es ist, als müsstest leise
Du klopfen an die Tür …”

The illustration of the empty cradle was on the wall opposite them.

When he had finished playing, Corrie held his position for a moment, and then relaxed, leaning back and looking across at Lilli. She was gazing across at the painting, holding tightly on to Matthias as he sat on her knee, lying against her. She said nothing for some time, and then looked at him.

“You wrote that music, Corrie, didn’t you?”

He nodded.

“I have never heard that poem as a song before, but your music made it into a beautiful one. Thank you.”

After they had listened to some poetry, and Matthias had sung a song he had heard on the radio, the same line over and over again, Jo played a gavotte on his flute, composed for him by Corrie, as Matthias did one of his dances, jigging from foot to foot, and turning round and round. The last candle finally went out as Corrie was playing his cello. They listened in the darkness, in the firelight, until he had finished, and then the lights were put on and the presents opened.

C
ORRIE
had just finished drying the last plate when Jo, who had finished his share of the washing-up a short while before him, reappeared in the kitchen.

“Come and listen!” he whispered, signalling to Corrie like a very small boy expressing urgency in an old black-and-white film.

Corrie moved out into Lilli’s hall, closing the kitchen door behind him, moving very quietly, caught by Jo’s mood. He sat down on the bottom stair, beside Jo, his feet next to some of Matthias’s scattered toys. There was a little woolly bear that he remembered Mum buying him in Bamburgh when he was seven. He picked it up and dangled it by one of its paws.

From upstairs they could hear Lilli telling Matthias the story of “The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids.” Matthias had come down, washed and dressed for bed, when they were in the middle of doing the dishes, to kiss them both good night. Jo sat with his knees pulled up against his chest, and his head leaning on its side on top of them, listening very intently.

“‘The seven little kids cried, “You must show us your paws first before you can come in, so that we will know that you really are our dear kind mother.” So the wolf put his flour-covered paws in through the window, and when the little kids saw that they were white, they believed that he really was their mother, and they opened the door. And in came the wolf! They were terrified, and…’”

Lilli sounded quite anxious. She always read stories well.

They listened a little longer.

“Corrie, do you remember when Mum used to read me that story?”

Jo’s face was turned away from Corrie, and he could not see his expression.

“Yes, I do.”

“That time when I had asthma really badly.”

“‘In tears,’” Lilli was saying upstairs,” ‘the mother goat called out the name of her youngest child, and a little voice said, “Mother, dear mother, I am hiding in the clockcase.’”

Jo pushed at the bear that Corrie was holding by its front paws, until it rocked backwards and forwards.

“When we were in the dining-room, before we opened the presents …” Jo, began. “When we were there, performing for Lilli, it reminded me of the Victorian Evening.”

“Yes.”

“That was the last time we saw Mum, and we didn’t realise.”

Jo’s hair was tousled from where it had rubbed against his knees.

On the Sunday night before Mum had flown to Rome, they had put on a Victorian Evening for Lilli, who was still suffering the after-effects of her stroke. Dad had driven Mum to the airport early the following morning, when he and Jo were still in bed.

Then, unexpectedly, Jo smiled.

“I’ll always remember that evening.”

Jo had drawn a programme for Lilli in a variety of elaborate Victorian type styles, and they furnished the window-bay of Lilli’s dining-room like the corner of a Victorian drawing-room, carrying through the scrapscreen from their living-room, moving the chaise-longue round, and putting Jo’s model theatre on a small tripod table and Cyril—deputising for an aspidistra—on a
jardiniére
from the sun lounge. Wearing Victorian clothes, they performed for an hour, with Lilli as their only audience. They acted part of
Lady Audley’s Secret
, with Jo, who rapidly assumed a woman’s costume, a memorable Alicia. Mum was Lady Audley. They read the death of Little Nell; extracts from a handbook of Victorian etiquette; “Casabianca,” “Lips That Touch Liquor Shall Never Touch Mine,” among other poems—and sang several Victorian songs. The one Corrie remembered best was Mum and Jo singing “Won’t You Buy My Pretty Flowers?”

Upstairs, Lilli was reaching the end of the story.

“‘… the heavy stones made the wolf fall into the well, and he was drowned. When the seven little kids saw what had happened, they came running up to the well and shouted for joy, “The wicked wolf is dead! The wicked wolf is dead!” They danced around the well with their mother.’”

Jo pushed at the bear again, and it fell to the floor.

He was bending down to pick it up when the doorbell was rung, three times, in a signal they recognised.

“Sal.”

Sal had been Mum’s closest friend, and was a regular caller at both houses.

When Corrie opened the door, she staggered in, struggling with her umbrella and several parcels, as if she had been given a violent push in the back. She groaned, leaning back against the door, straining to close it.

“What a night!”

She dumped the parcels into Corrie’s arms, and bent down to kiss him on the cheek. He was still only five feet, three and one-half inches tall.

“Happy Christmas, gorgeous.”

She ran her hands through the tight curls of her newly permed hair, shaking out the wetness, and brushed at the front of her clothing. Then she peered closely at Corrie’s hair, assuming a scowl. She claimed to be deeply resentful of Corrie’s dark curly hair, a style she could only achieve by visits to the hairdresser’s.

“You’re not really letting poor little Jo sing out on the Green in this weather, are you, you rotten swine?”

“Did you call my name, belovèd?” asked Jo, standing up and striking a dramatic pose.

“Can it be he?” Sal said, clutching her hands to her heart as she turned to face him.

“My own!” he called. “I yearn to be with you! Clasp me to your bosom! Madden me with desire!”

Jo dived into Sal’s arms, and she hoisted him up into the air, his feet dangling, and pressed him against her.

“My angel!”

It was a performance they went through regularly, once in the middle of Norwich market-place when they had seen Sal there. A stall-holder had offered Jo a cauliflower to swap places with him.

“Can we tone down these scenes of unbridled passion?” Corrie asked.

“Heavens, we’re observed!” said Jo, his voice rather muffled.

Lilli was coming down the stairs.

“I like that new pendant you’ve got round your neck,” she said to Sal. It was the first time she had joined in one of their silly sessions.

Sal started laughing, and dropped Jo.

“He’s too heavy to wear for long,” Sal said. “You’ve been feeding him up again.”

“We’ve left you a few scraps,” Corrie said. “Mind that lump in the carpet.”

Sal stepped over Jo, and took Corrie’s arm as they went through into the dining-room.

“D
O YOU
happen to have the time on you?” Corrie asked later, as they walked through Lilli’s kitchen towards the sun lounge. He had been asking Jo the time every quarter of an hour or so since Jo had unwrapped his present. Corrie had given him a combined Christmas and birthday present, an expensive gift that he had been saving up for for some time: a Snoopy wrist-watch, with the dog’s front legs as the hands of the watch. Clutching a tennis-racket in one hand, Snoopy lugubriously swung his arms round and round the dial.

Exaggeratedly, Jo pulled back the cuff of his shirt and moved the wrist with the watch on up towards his face, twisting his wrist from side to side so that the watch faced towards him, then away.

“The time by my brand-new Snoopy watch is eight-ohseven precisely.”

“I say, what a spiffing watch! “

Corrie and Jo often spoke in the slang of old-fashioned school stories, assuming a painfully genteel and high-pitched accent, parodying their fictional roles.

“Santa brought it for me. I can tell the time now!”

“How
super
!”

The lights were on again on their side of the sun lounge, and in the kitchen. Baskerville was lying in his basket beside the desk with an expression of utter abandonment and desolation on his face. He lumbered to his feet as they came in, looking guardedly pleased.

Jo waved the parcel he had brought through from Lilli’s, and began to circle around Baskerville.

“I’ve got a prezzy for you!”

Corrie heard them chasing each other about the sun lounge as he went through into the kitchen, and then into the living-room, leaving the light off. He looked out through the front window towards the tree in the centre of the Green. No one was there yet.

There were bangs and slitherings from the back of the house, and Baskerville barked a couple of times. Corrie sat in the dark for a short time, and then went back through into the sun lounge. Baskerville was stretched out on the floor, chewing an enormous bone.

“I got him so excited that he wet himself,” Jo said, wiping at the tiles with a mop. “I’ve never had that effect on anyone before.”

Baskerville, grasping the bone on its end between his two front paws, shifted his position slightly, and the bone fell forward and hit him sharply on the nose. He looked startled, and scrabbled backwards.

“Baskervilles don’t like bones.”

Jo put the mop and bucket back in the corner, and then walked towards Corrie. He raised his eyebrows, pulling the corners of his mouth down in an expression of innocence. He had an extraordinarily mobile face, his features always shifting. When he talked, every particle of him took part in the performance. He could make Corrie giggle very easily sometimes, by just looking at him.

“I have my theories about you and Sal,” he said. “The whole thing became clear to me when you sneaked away into the dining-room together, leaving me lying on the floor.”

“And I thought we were being so discreet.”

“It’s obvious. She’s studying you to use in her next novel. In the interests of research, writers are sometimes compelled to undergo some very unpleasant experiences.”

“Do you think that my perversions…”

“Many and varied though they are…”

“…are advanced enough to interest her?”

Sal was quite well known as a writer of novels for young people—“New Adults,” they were called by the publisher—usually dealing frankly with complex emotional or sexual difficulties.

“You could work on them a bit,” Jo said. “Show a bit of imagination.” He looked at Baskerville. “Why not have a passionate affair with Baskerville? I don’t think she’s used that one yet.”

Baskerville, looking vaguely troubled, edged away and eyed Corrie with deep suspicion.

“He doesn’t look too keen on the idea.”

“Poor old Baskerville. The dignified butt of vulgar jesting.”

Jo began to stroke Baskerville’s head, and then continued speaking. “She is good, though, isn’t she?” he asked. “Her novels.”

“
Stephen’s Child
is.”

“Not as good as
Small for His Age
.”

“Just because it’s about you.”

“Judging by the title. Actually”—Jo’s voice became excruciatingly cultured—“I warmed to the subtle nuances of the adverbial clauses…”

“Well-educated infant!”

“…reminiscent, one feels, of the later period of Henry James.”

“One does indeed. One also thrills to the shimmering evocativeness of the setting.”

“And the daring audacity of the semicolons.”