Sex and Stravinsky (2 page)

‘But how did you know they’d fit me?’ Josh asks in wonder.

‘Because I walked around in them myself,’ she says. ‘We’ve got the same-sized feet.’

‘But how did you come to know that?’ he says.

‘There’s was a “9” printed in your flip-flops,’ she says. ‘You kicked them off that day I met you. In the kitchen, when that kettle started to whistle.’ Caroline’s shoes are toffee-coloured ankle-straps.

‘Hey, but you’re a great dancer,’ she says, looking down into Josh’s Harpo curls, since his face is currently level with Caroline’s non-cleavage. And it’s true about his dancing, thanks to Hattie Thomas, his ballet teacher; his beloved. Not only the two years of lessons with her, but the time spent staging things together at the university back home. A sequence from
The Indian Queen
, inserted into that production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
; that little
Pulcinella
duet they’d used in their Italian mime. And right now, given his current studies in mime, he’s somewhat preoccupied, day by day, with various theories of movement. He’s been brooding on the idea that all emotion is movement; all about push and pull. I love: I pull. I hate: I push. The previous night Josh was pleased to find that he had woken from a dream about Jacques le Coq’s ‘Movement Rose’. The thing was glowing there, no longer a mere diagram, but a great luminous window; a rose window, such as one might see at the altar end of a cathedral, diffusing light behind his sleeping eyelids.

At 4 a.m. he and Caroline retire to her room, where they take off their clothes and wake naked at midday in a warm tumble of bedlinen. This is Josh’s first time in Caroline’s room and, waking seconds before she does, he takes in that the room is as beautiful as she is. Her cloud-grey trouser suit is hanging from a hook on the back of the door; a thing she’s made from old union-cloth loose covers. Caroline has previously told him that she got the loose covers off the back of a truck at the access to the council dump. Having noticed the fabric on a three-piece suite, she’d had time to get off her bike and rap on the truckie’s window, which caused him to pull over.

‘Help yourself, my love,’ he said.

Then there’s her black-and-yellow plaid coat, made out of an old travelling rug – from a paper pattern, Vogue Paris Original. It looks like origami and has one flat, plate-like white button that she’s picked from a rusted toffee tin on a market stall. Caroline has two pretty upright chairs that she’s pulled, minus seats, from a builder’s skip in the Turl. Having cut them new seats made from scavenged plywood, she’s painted them with oyster satin-finish and made them pillow-ticking box cushions to match her pillow-ticking curtains. Pillow-ticking, Josh reflects, is one of her favourite fabrics. He envisages that, one day soon, he may well be the recipient of a home-made pillow-ticking suit.

By the following October, she has made Josh a camel-coloured winter coat out of two undyed wool blankets she’s had sent out from Australia. Josh is lost in admiration, both for his girlfriend’s range of skills and that she should so often find her raw materials not only in skips and on market stalls, but in those unspeakably horrible second-hand clothing shops in which he can never find anything except crumpled mounds of dead people’s underwear and ugly polyester shirts that come with turd-brown swirly patterns and figure-hugging darts.

In between, Caroline spends long hours in the Bodleian Library, displaying more application than anyone else in the place, as far as he can see. She also spends time in the language laboratory with earphones, teaching herself Farsi. And isn’t it just like Caroline, he reflects – brilliant Caroline, who already has better mastery of his own two necessary research languages – that is to say, Italian and French – to go and choose for a subject something that requires her to learn a wholly alien language before she can begin to read the documents?

‘But it’s
not
an alien language,’ Caroline says. ‘It’s Indo-European. And can we please call it “Persian”? “Farsi” sort of erases the richness of the past.’

She’s working, he knows, on something to do with old trade routes through Persia, and watching her at it is making him feel that there’s something delightfully soft-option about his own PhD subject, which requires him to visit archives and theatre museums in Paris and Naples, along with making trips to the ballet and the theatre. Sometimes he goes to the circus and to the comic opera as well. The major stress factor for him is having to board that puke-inducing Hovercraft, which is his cheapest way across the Channel to France.

Caroline is suitably put-down about the area of his research.

‘It’s kind of a girl’s subject,’ she says. ‘Know what I mean?’

When Josh and Caroline decide to get married, it’s very much a youthful, spur-of-the-moment affair, sparked by Caroline’s discovery that her college will make self-contained accommodation available to graduate couples – that’s as soon as an apartment should fall vacant. It’s a daring and radical step to be taking, though each, with a little frisson of excitement laced with fear, is secretly thinking that a marriage, what the hell, can always be undone – that’s if things do not appear to be working out as they should. So they make a date with the registry office and plan a small party at Caroline’s college with twenty-five of their friends. Families are not an option, since Josh’s parents are decamped from Durban to Dar es Salaam and their pensions will not stretch to long-haul flights; especially not these past two years, when they’ve been funding Jack, their old housemaid’s son, through school.

They are fairly old for parents, in any case. Having never intended to have children, given the high-risk nature of their political commitments in the apartheid state, old Professor Silver was already over forty when Josh came into their lives and he has, of late, become quite frail. Both banned from pursuing their careers, the Silvers were eventually obliged to cross borders in the dead of night and, thereafter, to sell their property – disadvantageously, from a distance. Josh promises to send photographs when he treats himself to a five-minute long-distance call from a public phone box, during which time Bernie and Ida Silver, jostling eagerly for turns with the receiver, yell down the line at him, as if they were required to make themselves audible across the miles, without the assistance of technology.

Caroline’s mother, on the other hand, spry and just turned sixty, has already expressed her family’s unwillingness to make the trip. She has done so in one of what Josh does not yet know are her characteristically brief and poisonous letters.

Dear Caroline

About the wedding, what a surprise, it doesn’t sound much of a do. Dad will be much too busy to come and I’ve got my health to consider. Your sister as you will appreciate is much too delicate to travel all that way, especially now what with all her schoolwork it has become so hard for her, because healthwise Janet as you should try to remember has always been less fortunate than you.

Love Mum

Then she’s added a postscript.

When you send Janet a birthday card this year I hope you make it a special one, not home-made as usual, do NOT forget because this time it’s her sixteenth!! Quite a milestone, sweet sixteen!!! Mum

‘Oh well,’ Caroline says, sounding to Josh, for the very first time, a little less than invincible.

The letter is somewhat puzzling to Josh, because why on earth should one sister’s birthday take precedence over another sister’s wedding?

‘What’s the matter with your sister?’ he says.

‘Oh,’ Caroline says. ‘She’s frail.’

‘Frail?’ Josh says.

‘Yes, frail,’ Caroline says, beginning to sound edgy. ‘She needs to take care, that’s all.’

‘Are you saying she’s mentally unstable?’ Josh says, after a pause.

‘Of course not,’ Caroline says. ‘Of course she’s not mentally unstable. She was always sickly as a child, for heaven’s sake. Aren’t people allowed to be frail?’

‘Yes,’ Josh says. ‘But –’

‘Look. Stop interrogating me, all right?’ Caroline says.

The episode causes Josh a flash of memory that has to do with Hattie Thomas. The unfavoured sister. Another talented girl of his acquaintance who was possessed of a preferred sibling of whom she almost never spoke. Weird that he should have found his way to both of them. Weird that they should both be so reluctant to open up. Josh finds this impossible to comprehend; he whose adoptive parents spoke of anything and everything and usually over dinner. From circumcision rituals to the theory of surplus value. From Non-conformism in
Adam Bede
, to the trafficking of women. By the time Josh is ten years old, he knows that his own birth mother had herself been effectively trafficked; tricked into a proxy marriage with a sleazy gold-digging stranger.

‘I’m sorry, Caroline,’ he says. ‘But I hate to see you upset.’

‘I’m not upset,’ she says. ‘End of story.’

And that afternoon she embarks upon a birthday card for her sister; a labour-intensive and highly skilled affair; a pull-out concertina construction made of thick, antique-white etching paper with intricate cut-out sections giving a filigree effect. Each frame depicts a stage in her sister’s growing up. Janet at four with a new puppy. Janet at eight with a bicycle. Janet at twelve in a party dress. Janet, Janet.

Josh has never before been witness to this particular aspect of Caroline’s talent.

‘Christ,’ he says. ‘You’re not going to give that card away? Caroline, I reckon it should be hanging in the Tate. Anyway, didn’t your mother say not to send “home-made”?’

Caroline makes the envelope out of the same thick etching paper. He watches her address the envelope in her large italic hand. ‘Miss Janet Abigail McCleod.’

‘I thought perhaps if it was especially nice,’ she says. ‘I mean, the bought ones are usually so crappy, aren’t they? That’s unless you’ve got fortunes to spend, which, as you know, I have not.’

Caroline makes her wedding dress from five yards of cream-coloured crêpe de Chine that have been left behind, as an accidental bonus, in a small chest of drawers she’s bought in the Animal Sanctuary shop. She’s stripped the chest with Nitromors but not before encasing the crêpe de Chine in a linen pillowcase and putting it through a cold wash in the college launderette machine to remove a faint, rust-coloured fold-mark.

The day before the wedding party, Caroline sends Josh to pick strawberries from a farm on the edge of Port Meadow, while she bakes a ham and makes a vat of potato salad. She makes two large, buttery onion tarts and prepares bowls of tzatziki and hummus. She devises a way of poaching a salmon in the absence of a fish kettle. Having first rigorously scrubbed the small steel sink in the student kitchen, she places the fish within it and covers it with boiling water. Then she seals the sink with a sheet of baking foil, which she weighs down at each corner with a large baking potato.

Josh, who stays over with her in Oxford that night, discovers that Caroline has also made these amazing nuptial pyjamas out of a pre-war satin bedspread. Silver Hollywood pyjamas which she puts on the night before the wedding. Josh is knocked out by Caroline in the pyjamas. He finds them incredibly provocative and, with hindsight, remembers them as the high point of his marriage. She is like a lithe and slippery silver fish, and next morning, lying with his face in the crumpled satin folds of her crotch, as she sits, knees apart, hands around a cup of coffee, it comes to him that Caroline is glimmering; glimmering, like that disappearing dream-girl in the Yeats poem about the hazel wood. A girl who, transformed from a silver fish, then vanishes on the air. There’s that bit about the golden and the silver apples belonging to the sun and the moon. An old man looking back. His life consumed with yearning; with seeking out the object of desire, through hollow and hilly lands.

Josh, at that moment, does not know quite how quickly the hollow lands will hove into view, or that the hilly lands are just around the corner.

‘There was this beautiful quilted medallion in the centre of the bedspread,’ Caroline is saying. ‘I’ve kept it because I’ll maybe make it into a fire screen. For one day when we’ve got our very own house.’

‘Yes,’ Josh says.

‘I want us to have one of those little Victorian terraced houses that’s got a fireplace with pretty tiles and a garden with climbing roses,’ she says. ‘Two up, two down. That’s all. It would be bliss to decorate a house.’

Josh has had no thoughts, to date, on the subject of interior decoration and probably never will have, so in this respect Caroline faces a future of unimpeded freedom to pursue her own vision of homemaking, though he’s noticed that, between the historical tomes, Caroline keeps a stack of glossy magazines with pictures of bedrooms and gardens and bathrooms. These are items she plucks from around the back of a local hairdressing salon, which means they are always just a month out of date.

It has never crossed his mind before that such things could play a part in the life of a woman with a serious brain. The Silvers’ furniture, beyond Bernie’s remarkable over-large desk and his collection of interesting art works, had the look of having been chosen randomly and for purely functional purposes. And the art works – mainly local – had on the whole been gifts over the years, in repayment for endless small loans and handouts to impecunious black artists. Josh could remember Bernie once laughing in the face of a gallery owner who had paid a visit in hopes of prising a particular painting from him; a painting of three rusted shanties on a windswept Eastern Cape wasteland.