The Facts of Life (7 page)

‘It’s a dead day, Mr Pepper,’ she said, as she pulled on her cardigan. ‘Early closing
and
this weather. Close early, too, if you’ve a mind to.’

No sooner had the bell finished jangling with her closing of the door than he climbed up to the shelf she couldn’t reach and took his manuscript from its hiding-place. There was only the final movement to finish. It was to be the focal point of the quartet. He had been carrying the germs of the movement in his system weeks before he had even begun to think about the other, more sombre three. It was a presto, full of fever, of insane gaiety and furious syncopation. The melody was wilfully simple, its rhythm, a distillation of dance music he had heard at weddings as a child. It was lush, exotic – a parody verging on what, in later life, he would learn to call camp. He wrote all day, hour upon hour, pausing only when his bladder was bursting or his pen ran dry. And when he did break off, he whistled the melodies aloud, shielding his mind from interruption. If a customer had appeared, the door bell, let alone the effort of finding words and lending assistance would have broken his train of thought altogether. As it was, when the quadrangle clock in St Francis chimed the half hour after five, he realised, to his own astonishment, that he was on the final page.

Then the door bell was set flying on its spring. Edward glanced up, profoundly irritated. It was Sally, helmet over one arm, cheeks flushed with a touch of sun, brow creased into the look of anxiety with which she seemed to approach their every encounter. She looked around and, seeing him, relaxed into an open smile.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I’m early, I know. I was through by about four and staying at home seemed a waste. It’s going to be such a beautiful evening! It’s crystal clear now the cloud has lifted, and all the buildings have that kind of glow.’ She stopped her raptures and remained just inside the door, a hand still holding it ajar expectantly. ‘Hello?’ she said again.

‘I’ve been working on the last movement,’ he told her. ‘I’d almost finished it.’

‘I’ll go away for a few minutes,’ she said and turned back onto the street. The bell jangled again and she was gone as suddenly as she had appeared.

‘Wait,’ Edward called. ‘Don’t go.’ He stood and hurried to see if he could catch her but, although there were several women walking along the pavement, none of them looked like her. He had not noticed what she was wearing, his gaze having been drawn intensely as ever to her face. He returned to his chair behind the counter. There had been no hurt in her tone, no hint of umbrage. She had absented herself delicately, to make as few ripples as possible in his pool of thought.

Edward stared at the clusters of semiquavers on the page before him. For a few minutes, his mind was aglitter with images of her. Sally on the sunshiny street, hands clasped behind her back as she strolled, stooping slightly to peer into shop windows, or wrinkling her eyes as she stared up at a trio of swifts that wheeled, whistling, round an old college wall. He thought of her and could only see the page as a system of repetitious dots, circles and inclines. Then the compelling sounds re-entered his head and pushed her image back into darkness. He started to write again. The tendons in his hand grew tight with the effort to put the notes down fast enough. The telephone rang and he managed to ignore it, letting it clatter on as though it were someone else’s concern. He finished the last recapitulation of the main subject, hesitated, frowned, his stare searching the furrowed grain of the battered counter-top. Then, from nowhere, he found a strange, new chord and the makings of a short, unforeseen coda, slower than the presto, chilly and unsettling. The effect was that of a frame of unexpected irony being clamped around the image of hectic dancing; of a withdrawal from a joyful dream, revealing a cruel truth.

His father had hoped he would prove a classicist or an historian. His mother had cherished hopes he might combine the two and go into archaeology like her. He found Greek and Latin easier than other boys, perhaps because she had started him on them early as a kind of game. Her letters to him at Barrowcester – letters he kept in an old shoebox and never dared re-read – always contained a paragraph in Latin in which she mischievously wrote about the bullies or sadistic teachers he had described to her, secure in her assumption that no-one but her son would bother to translate them. When he left Tübingen, he was already a keen pianist but such were the attitudes at home and at the
Gymnasium
that no-one had encouraged him to consider music as a career or even contemplated the idea. Music was an accomplishment, not an end in itself. Jews had for too long provided entertainers and fiddlers for
goyim
celebrations and, looking back, he realised his mother felt an ambition for him to prove himself in a less racially typical field. It was his grandmother who encouraged his music. Whenever the two families met for dinner, she would steer him to the piano and make him play Mendelssohn – always Mendelssohn – to keep the political bickering at bay. Certain of the
Lieder ohne Worte
were now a kind of emotional shorthand for him. So precise were their associations that he had only to hear a few bars to picture the rich gilt and cluttered mahogany of the room his grandmother liked to call the salon. At Barrowcester he had played the piano eagerly, since it provided an escape from the school’s brutal society, and he found sympathy in his teacher, who he suspected was no less bullied by the other staff. The first few pieces he wrote there he wrote in secret, and then only in his last year.

He began to write short piano pieces and settings for over-wrought poetry at about the time that he started to suspect his letters home were going unread. There was a boy – Jarvis – whose father held a diplomatic post in Berlin. The post was no more, Edward suspected, than junior consul, but his letters were full of sinister news – about book burnings, shattered shop windows, the selective discrediting of eminent Jewish figures – and Jarvis passed the information on, with a harsh relish. After two months had gone by during which neither Edward nor Isaac had received replies to letters home, Edward stopped writing. His secret music became his one-way correspondence and a channel for his hope and dread.

Relaxed by his tutor’s good wine and sympathetic conversation one evening during his first year at Tompion, he confessed as much. Thomas insisted he play some of his compositions and, after listening, insisted, too, that he make time to continue.

The ending took him by surprise. He stopped, eyes flicking back and forth across the last two pages, as though a glance could confirm the integrity of what was before him. His writing hand twitched and was wracked with a sudden cramp. He let his pen fall and shook the ache from his fingers and wrist. He yawned nervously and stretched. The door bell sounded again and a perfectly bald man in a crumpled linen jacket came in.

‘Are you still open?’ he asked, a hand touching his bow tie.

‘Er. Yes. We are,’ Edward told him. ‘For a few more minutes.’

‘I’m looking for a nice edition of
In Memoriam
,’ the man said. ‘For a special friend.’

‘I’m not certain we have one. There are certainly some copies of the collected works. You’ll find all the poetry upstairs.’

‘Thank you.’

The man gave a neat smile and walked slowly up the narrow stairs, tugging on the greasy rope which hung there by way of a rail.

Edward shut the manuscript book and waited. When Sally came in again, he was ready for her. He jumped up from behind the counter and took her in his arms.

‘I’ve finished!’ he laughed. ‘It’s all done!’ He kissed her. She slipped cool hands inside his jacket, where his back was hot. She didn’t kiss him in return. Rather, she clasped him to her and laid her head on his shoulder, her face turned aside from his. The gesture was at once an embrace and a reprimand. She had her back to the stairs and missed the bald man’s soft-footed descent. Edward met his startled glance apologetically and had to push Sally gently from him.

‘Sorry,’ he said, to both of them.

‘Don’t mind me,’ the bald man said.

Flustered, Sally turned.

‘Dr Banks, I presume.’ The bald man laughed with unpleasantly triumphant recognition and shook her hand. He waved a copy of
In Memoriam
by way of explaining his presence. ‘Last time I saw you, you were just plain Miss. Well, Miss, anyway –
never
plain!’

‘Goodness, Dr Waltham. I don’t think you know Edward Pepper.’

The bald man smiled and shook Edward’s hand.

‘Ah, you found a copy,’ Edward said, taking the book. ‘I’ll wrap it for you.’ He furled it in tight brown paper, sealed it with string and exchanged it for Dr Waltham’s coins.

‘Dr Waltham’s an old friend of Dr Pertwee’s,’ Sally explained. ‘I used to meet him at her rooms sometimes, after classes with her.’

‘And how is your dear, er, Pygmalia?’ Dr Waltham asked.

Edward saw Sally flinch at the faint snobbishness in his tone.

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I think. I’m afraid she likes to tire herself out.’

‘She always did,’ said Dr Waltham. ‘Well. I won’t keep you both. Goodbye.’

He had barely turned the corner when Sally sprang forward and shot the bolts on the door.

‘Hateful man!’ she spat. ‘Always so soft-spoken and bloody self-satisfied.’

‘He was rather smooth.’

‘Smooth? He’s got a personality of mink. Always harping on about Dr Pertwee as my Pygmalia, whatever that’s supposed to mean, with that suggestive smirk, and always reminding me how common I am.’

‘Sally!’

‘I am. Bloody common. And there’s nothing I can do about it. Why should I
want
to do anything?’

She changed the sign in the window to read Closed and pulled down the blind left over from black-out regulations. She turned, hands behind her back, shoulders rounded. Her eyes shone with anger. He had never seen her like this. He slid a hand into his pocket to mask his erection.

‘Kiss me,’ she said. ‘Right here.’

As he walked over, she glanced down at his trouser fly.

‘Never mind that,’ she said.

Obediently he took his hand from his pocket and cupped her face in his palms. He kissed her slowly, his hips pressing hers. She kissed the side of his neck. He buried his nose into her hair.

‘Let’s go upstairs,’ she said. ‘We can lie down up there.’

‘The concert,’ he mumbled, as he led the way. ‘We should get there in time to get good seats. The acoustic’s so bad in St Francis.’

‘Never mind the acoustic,’ she said, as they reached the little room where the poetry and plays were shelved. ‘Kiss me.’

He held her against a bookcase, kissing her again, caressing her breasts. She was wearing what Miriam and his mother would have called a courting dress, a pale blue thing with buttons, that unfastened easily from the front. It was a garment whose name he had not understood till recently. Since he had met Sally, he had started to look more closely at women in the street and behind shop counters, noticing their clothes. He was becoming an expert on fastenings. He slid with her to the dusty floor, clumsily tearing off his jacket and shirt. He rubbed his cheek against her petticoat, feeling the firm material of her bra beneath its whispering smoothness. Taken unawares, he had no condoms with him. Instead, she pleasured him with her hands, running cold fingers around his buttocks and balls, rubbing at his penis with untender haste. When he slid an uncertain hand inside her knickers she froze for a while and stopped touching him, such was her concentration on her pleasure. He came in three spasmodic splashes across her thighs and the floorboards. They chuckled as he wiped up the mess with pages torn from an undistinguished edition of Matthew Arnold.

The bells struck again in St Francis and he remembered the concert.

‘Forget the concert,’ she sighed, kissing his nose, making him lie down again. ‘No more concerts. Not for a while. Take me dancing.’

‘Dancing?’

‘You’d think I’d suggested some impossible sexual feat!’ she said.

‘But I can’t dance.’

‘Believe me, you’ve got a sense of rhythm and two strongish arms; you can dance.’

‘Where?’

‘There’s a charity do on at the Empire Rooms, for the Red Cross or something. The nurses were talking about it. There’s a band from London. It might be fun.’

They went to a great gaudy room rank with saxophones and shandy, hair oil and a cocktail of cheap scents, and he found he could dance. He could not move like the men from the local air force base, perhaps, or the arrogant young shopboys, who manipulated their women like so many sides of beef, but he did better than walking round the room and turning at the corners – the charge Miriam had always levelled at him.

So began what he came to see as Sally’s half of their mutual seduction. He had paraded for her the jewels of his weighty cultural education – paintings, polyphony, symphonic rapture and harmonic introspection. Now she showed him different riches, ones she had discovered by instinct. She began to talk more of her mother than of Dr Pertwee. ‘Mum says this,’ she would say, or ‘My mother always says that …’, and he detected the unfolding of an interior power struggle.

She taught him dance steps, the names of band leaders and the ingredients of lethal, highly coloured drinks. His ears were opened to the intoxicating qualities of dance music. As he went about his business in the shop, he found the melodies to enviably simple love songs circling his mind, at once banal and beautiful in their frankness of purpose.