The Square (16 page)

Hanon is anything but artistic, at least not in the way most people normally think of artistic things, which is romantic and chaotic, ponders Roberta. But it is beautiful. This music is beautiful because it is fixed, disciplined, necessary. Every exercise is rationally and unemotionally considered. Hanon is like fundamental architecture. That is because it supports playing. Learning how to play it is like learning how to drive a car, or touch typing. It grants you the prowess to move on.

Eventually, George comes to the end of the next page.

“Now we have to do your pieces.”

“But, Roberta… what about my film soundtrack?”

She holds a hand up. Grade Two must be conquered.

“Later. Let’s get on with your piece.”

He begins the short Mozart.

A commotion in the hall. Patrick’s friendly face appears around the door.

“Hullo, Roberta. All ensconced I see. Good, good. George? Sounding good, old chap. Sorry I was late.” He looks at his son inquisitively.

“Mater?”

“Out,” says George. “Something about flowers.”

A pause. “Oh. Oh, yes, I think she’s getting flowers for tomorrow. Supper party tomorrow night, Roberta. All normal existence must stop because we shall all focus on canapés and how to fold napkins into swans.”

He makes a face at Roberta. This mad old social whirl we engage ourselves with.

Roberta smiles at him, arranges her features neutrally and turns back to George. She is not going to join in, conspiratorially, with the criticism of a dinner party – or, as Patrick insists on calling it, a supper party. She is paid to be here. But honestly. Mater.

“Go from the end of that bar.”

Patrick backs off and closes the door, humming as if to show how at ease he is in his own house.

George plays the end of the piece, twice.

He turns to Roberta expectantly. She looks at her watch.

“Alright. Now we can talk about your soundtrack.”

“Oh, brilliant. Right.”

There is a silence.

“It’s got to be three minutes long.”

“Okay.”

“And it needs to start off very dramatically. Sort of dah dah dah DAH.”

Beethoven’s Fifth. She smiles.

“Are you bringing along an entire orchestra, then?”

“Of course not. But haven’t you always said that the piano contains the potential of an entire orchestra within it?”

He’s too clever for me.

“Alright, a very dramatic start. Good. People will like that. Then what?”

“Then, then it has to go very very quiet. Weeny, weeny, like mice. And a bit dreamy.”

Weeny dreamy mice?

“Sort of lovey dovey.”

Lovey dovey weeny dreamy mice?

Roberta starts to get a bit nervous about what her pupil is going to produce in front of, let’s face it, potentially most of her clients in the Square.

“And then LOUD again.”

Well, maybe it will be alright, she thinks, dubiously.

“Sounds interesting. Shall we try working out a little sequence? Shall I write down some notes for you?”

She picks up his manuscript book where she writes down his weekly duties, and blindly rootles in her bag for a pencil.

“What’s the film beside it going to show, then?”

“Well, I think it is going to be ordinary, and then dramatic, possibly with Darth Vader. And then ordinary again.”

“Okay… Sounds good to me.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“Well, I think it will work.”

“Yes. Mother doesn’t. Roberta my dear, I hope you don’t mind me saying so but you are a bit different from Mother.”

That makes her laugh.

“Come on then, what about some big chords for the begining?”

He places his fingers on the keys, arms straight, and then presses them all down together, in the style of a maestro.

“Like this, I thought.”

“I think you are in B flat. That’s good.”

She writes down the chords, simply.

“I’ll play those a few times, maybe eight. Then it all gets twinkly. Like this.”

George puts his face down, very close to the keyboard and plays three consecutive notes in a quavering staccato.

This is beginning to sound like some sort of piece which might have been composed by Dadaists, thinks Roberta. She has visions of chairs scraping and people leaving. Not really, nobody would be so cruel, but she sees she needs to take this piece in hand.

“Are you going to think about a melody?”

“What?”

“You know, a tune. You could incorporate Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, or something.”

“Roberta, my dear.”

“Well, if it’s good enough for Mozart, it’s probably good enough for you.”

“This is a soundtrack. It’s BOUND to sound strange. It has to go alongside the action on the film. But maybe you’re right. Oh, I don’t know.”

He sniffs, looks straight ahead at the piano. Takes his hands away from the keys. His face is suddenly very red.

“I’ve got a brilliant idea,” says Roberta, who cannot bear tears from her pupils.

“What?” he says in a small choking voice.

“Why don’t you set it to Hanon? It’s completely neutral. You could set anything to Hanon. But it goes on and on, like a river. You know, you can have lots of action on the screen and dear old Hanon will just chug away in the background. And you can make some bits loud and some bits soft. Plus, it’s something you know how to play, which is always a help for nerves. And also, it sounds properly classical.”

“So my parents will like it.”

“Well, let’s just call that a serendipitous side effect.”

He starts to smile, rubs his hands together.

“And now, for the world premiere… ”

Roberta stands up. She’d like to give George, this strange little solitary boy, a hug. Or rumple his hair. She can’t do that. Instead she picks up Hanon.

“I’ll look at what we might choose and bring my suggestions back next week. Fortissimo, piano, forte.”

“Yes. The thing is, Roberta,” he says happily.

“What?”

“When everyone thinks I am practising, actually I will be preparing for my film score!”

Chapter Seventeen The Dinner Party

She had written the menu for the supper party out a week ago, after the guest list was settled. It was her turn to deliver the long-formatted procedure. Three courses, sometimes four with cheese. Chocolates. Champagne as the sharpener.

“Do you remember when we always had a G&T before dinner?” Patrick sometimes says, longingly. “Oh for the days of the aperitif. When fortified wine was seen as a treat.”

Nobody calls it dinner any more either. It’s a supper party, lavish but in casual clothing.

As if they are all going to watch the sun set from the terraces at the Petit Trianon, having bedded down the cattle.

As the guests sit around the table, still in that strict Fifties gender formation always described as Boy, Girl (unless there is a gay couple present), the hostess takes a deep breath. The starter is crucial, for it is the starter which shall indicate the style of the evening. The evening shall either be Showing Off supper, in which case the visitors will be humbled by a spectacular dish revelling in an unfamiliar cuisine, or its counterpart, Nursery supper, in which the host deliberately humbles herself with school dinner standards.

Both are acceptable, depending on the day of the week, weather, and whether a child has insisted on being present. Nobody likes children being there. Children at night are even more awkward than gay couples or someone with a gluten allergy. Gay couples are at least deeply fashionable, and can be very funny indeed. Allergies are annoying but are usually ironed out earlier. Children are just irritating.

“I think we will have squid, for starters,” says Jane.

Patrick eyes her from the bed. This event is simply an invented hurdle, an adult challenge for people who don’t have many challenges left. Unlike George, Patrick thinks, whose life is a stream of Grades and exams and achievements. Patrick considers his life to be a straight line of, well, living, interrupted occasionally by small hurdles such as holidays, the occasional illness, and dinner parties.

He doesn’t even count having sex as part of the continuum, because it is not. He remembers a period when Jane never wore anything to bed. She would just wriggle in beside him, slightly slippery, her skin briefly chilled from the air in the bedroom, but containing a deep watery heat from her bath. Then, of course, they would fuck. Nowadays however, she gets dressed for bed, pulling a long dress or pyjamas over her naked body. That’s it. As the material goes on, he sees the familiar soft contours disappear, breasts, belly, triangle, knees. It goes from chin to calf. There is no subsequent fucking.

This evening is no different. Chastely enrobed thus, Jane continues to discuss squid.

Which, as Patrick must acknowledge, is hardly an aphrodisiac.

“… spiked with chilli and served in kiwi fruit, on a bed of cous cous? It’s a dish from Tangiers. I read about it in the
Observer
last week. Looks like a nightmare to prepare, but if I do it the day before… ”

“What next?” asks Patrick lazily.

Jane has worked out the main course already. Lamb baked in individual tiny pumpkins. Followed by cheeses, specially delivered from somewhere in the middle of France, a place which Jane has heard is frightfully dull, but has amazing dairy. And then, as a deliberate nod to the nursery option, but with irony, a pavlova featuring Greek cherries and curdled Chantilly cream.

She sighs. The menu will take Jane a full three days to assemble and cost several hundred pounds in terms of raw ingredients, Champagne, wine, bottled water both fizzy and still, a range of cut flowers and a few downloaded tracks of something obscure and Seventies to waft around in the air.

The whole thing must be casual. Any artifice must be lightly draped across the night in an effect of naturalness. This is the style of supper parties on the Square, and Jane is the mistress of the oxymoron.

“Who’s coming again?” says Patrick.

“I have told you this before. Beth and James, you know, the couple from work. Tracey and Larry. You and me. And Jay and Harriet.”

He snorts, remembering the previous event at the Residents’ Association meeting.

“Have you reinforced the chairs?”

“Patrick!”

“It was bloody funny though. Seeing that chair completely knackered and Harriet on the floor.”

“Also I’ve done something rather brilliant.”

“Oh, yes?”

“I am installing Anya, that au pair of Tracey and Larry’s. I’m putting her in the kitchen to do the washing up. I’ve got her for a bargain price.”

Patrick raises his eyebrows by response. He knows Anya. He thinks she is rather beautiful, in a wild Slavonic way. He has never spoken to her. She is the sort of au pair he would never have trusted himself to hire, in the days before George’s school hours were so long there was no point in hiring anyone to look after him.

He turns over, away from his wife in bed and envisages Anya in the kitchen.

Two days later, the supper party is upon them.

As far as Anya is concerned, she is quite happy to be in the kitchen area of the knock-through for £10 an hour. She’d be happy to be anywhere for £10 an hour, frankly. She can hear the Seventies music upstairs, which she likes. She knows that at a key moment, the conversation and footsteps will move from the upstairs living room down to the basement dining ‘zone’.

The candlelit dining table is prepared. Anya thinks it looks a bit like an altar; a high rectangle, swaddled in white linen and gleaming with silver, glass and flowers. She hears the guests clatter downstairs towards the dining table. Here we go, she thinks.

She considers heating up the cold, big plates ready for the main course. Certainly at home, her parents always liked hot plates for the meat dish.

Jane comes in suddenly, ready to carry out the squid and cous cous. Anya suggests that the main course plates be heated up. To her surprise this goes down very badly.

“Oh, no! Anya, not at all! Nobody has hot plates any more!” Jane cries.

“The whole point is that food must be served at room temperature.”

Anya apologises for the idea.

Jane’s face is rather flushed. She is wearing a pleated dress of silvery linen which has a high ruff at the collar. It has no sleeves, so it can show off her thin, long arms. The pleated skirt brushes the top of her knees. She is wearing sheer glossy tights and very high heels with a Mary Jane strap. Crystal earrings swing from her lobes. A small headband decorated with flowers goes around her hair.

She looks artfully decorated, almost in concert with the table.

Squaring her shoulders, she takes the wide china plate and walks with a tiny spring in her step towards the table. Good, Patrick has done the placements. Boy, Girl, Boy, Girl.

“So, everyone. Squid and kiwi.” She pauses for the cries of acclaim around the table. Yes, tonight is going to be showy.

“Where does it come from?” she says, pleased to be asked. “Oh, somewhere in Morocco I think. Tangier? Casablanca? Yes, it’s quite novel but apparently the flavours ‘meld’ together. Well, according to the
Observer
, they do!”

She serves her friends, who sit waiting to be fed. Jay, she serves last, a small smile playing around her features. She’s not seen him since the dreary meeting in the park, but tonight is different. Tonight she is on show.

“Wine?” says Patrick, standing, grasping the crystal decanter, sloshing the light red liquid into the glasses.

“Apparently red is what must be drunk with this dish. According to the
Observer.”
He rolls his eyes theatrically. “Only reason we get a newspaper these days! Supper party tips!”

Everyone laughs.

Unseen, George tiptoes past the table, making his way towards the kitchen where Anya is sitting, reading.

“Hello Anya,” he says.

“Good evening George,” says Anya, who has a soft spot for him.

“Aren’t you meant to be in bed?”

“I suppose I’m ‘meant’ to have done a lot of things,” says George, quote marks hanging in the air. “I’m ‘meant’ to have played the piano, for one thing, to the guests tonight. But I ‘was not to be found’ at the right time. What’s this?” He pokes at the lamb in little pumpkin shells which is resting at room temperature.