The Square (25 page)

“But nobody wanted to speak it. Everyone wanted to learn English.”

She shrugs.

“So as soon as I left university I came over here to perfect my grammar. And my accent.”

“Ah, university. You have a degree? Where was that?” says Norman. He suggests the only Polish city he has heard of. “Warsaw?”

“No, Krakow.”

There is a silence across the table. “Mint sauce?” says Jane.

“What did you read there?” persists Norman.

“History of Art,” says Anya. “Krakow is the Polish centre of culture. You know our Black Madonna, that is in Krakow.”

“Oh yes, yes, super,” says Norman, who has never heard of either place or icon.

Jane has heard just about enough of Anya’s intellectual credentials, piano playing and knowledge of medieval panel paintings. She thumps roast potatoes on each plate. She takes particular pleasure in giving Anya five. Well, let her get fat.

“George is playing the piano next week,” says Patrick. “We are having a Talent Show in the Square, and he’s performing. Playing a piece on the piano. That is if we can get the bugger out into the Square. If not, it will be a keyboard.”

His mother looks at him inquiringly.

“Can’t he just walk out?”

“The piano, Mother. Not George!”

“Oh, how wonderful, George,” says Joy. “What will we hear?”

George squirms in his chair.

“I am wearing a Storm Trooper costume,” he blurts out.

“Marvellous!” says Norman. “Is that the same as a Super Trooper?”

“No, Dad,” says Patrick. “That is Abba. A Storm Trooper. This is about
Star Wars.
”

“Well,” says Norman, laughing genially. “Let’s hope it doesn’t cook up Stormy weather. Or maybe it’s your performance, which will go down a Storm, eh?”

George looks at his grandfather with a serious face.

“No, I am going AS a Storm Trooper. From
Star
Wars?”

“Please don’t talk like an Australian, George,” says Jane. “Beans, Joy?”

“Well, what are you playing on the piano?” asks his grandmother. “Thank you, Jane.”

“I am playing the theme tune to
Star Wars.
Well I was going to play Hanon. You know, Hanon,” says George. His grandparents look at him blankly.

“Hanon. Very boring exercises. I was going to play Hanon against an animation of Darth Vader invading our house, but Roberta told me I couldn’t.”

“Oh, what a shame,” says his grandmother, who met Roberta once, was corrected by her about the best time to prick out cabbages and has henceforth disliked her intensely. “Is that the woman with the allotment?”

“Yes. She is also George’s piano teacher,” says Jane brusquely. “Gravy?”

“Why did she stop you?” asks Joy. “Piano exercises might be boring but you know they are essential, Georgy.”

“Oh, she felt my film was a bit dodgy. The film I made to go along with the Hanon. I did a computer animation with Lego. And it was all my idea. I showed Darth Vader arriving to see Mummy on the sofa having her bum-bum smacked by Jay the next door neighbour. And Darth Vader has his lightsabre to attack them, you see.”

A terrible quiet falls over the dinner table.

Jane actually freezes, her fork half way to her mouth. Her parents-in-law both cough and look down with fascination at their plates, as if this is the first time they have noticed there is food on them.

“This is delicious lamb, Jane,” says Norman.

“So Roberta said… ” continues George, anxious to hold onto his audience.

“That’s enough, George,” says Patrick. He has gone a funny shade of red. He refuses to meet Jane’s stricken look.

“Cranberry?” whispers Jane.

Patrick swallows hard. He turns to Anya. “Tell my parents, Anya what is the main difference between life here and life in Warsaw, sorry, in where is it you live? Whoosh?”

“Lodz. The main difference? People in my home city are less bothered about their houses. Whereas here, the house is treated almost as a real life person. Or a pet.”

“Is that so?” says Jane, faintly. Her brain is drumming inside her head. It’s like an onslaught of white noise in her brain. She feels rooted to her chair. How the hell did George come up with that story? She shoots him a death stare, but he is busy playing with his napkin ring. Eventually, he drops it on the floor.

Jane sees herself as if she is crouched on the ceiling, or in another room. How the hell is she going to explain herself to Patrick? She quickly runs through a variety of options.

The first option must be that George has made it up. What could the second option be? That she was doing some Pilates with Jay. During a dinner party. It’s such a ludicrous idea she almost laughs aloud, even in her frantic state of mind.

George has made it up.

It’s the only thing to do. She’ll have to laugh it off. Pretend it’s a flight of fancy. Or maybe not. Why not come clean, she thinks, crazily. Anya is telling her parents-in-law about Lech Walesa and Solidarity. Her mother-in-law is telling Anya that they had a lit candle in their front room one Christmas because of him. Jane blesses the Eastern Block and the fact that the Eastern Bloc au pair is there, talking.

“I’ll get pudding,” she murmurs.

She stacks the dirty plates and carries them out, where she considers her position, frantically.

What if she just confesses all? Like a skier seeing the potential disaster before her on the piste, she sees the future. Or what might be the future. The house with a For Sale sign outside, crates with divided furniture in the hall. George taken out of school. Sent to board. Or… where? Where would he live? And with whom? Well that bit is simple. He’d much rather live with his father, she knows it. If it came down to it, in a court, he would always want to live with Patrick. Where would she live, then? She’d have to leave the Square. And would Jay leave Harriet to come with her? Would she even want him to? She peers into her future and runs away from it, fast.

She gets the coffee beans out and grinds them. Everyone will have coffee, real coffee. Even the au pair.

Patrick comes into the kitchen, leans on the stone counter, looks at his wife. His face is blazing.

“What the fuck,” he says slowly, “is going on?”

She looks up at him earnestly, opens her eyes very wide, and lies to save her marriage and the status quo, lies as if she can’t stop, blaming everything on her child.

“I have absolutely no idea. You know what a silly bloody fantasy world George lives in, darling. I have no idea what he is talking about. I can only think… ”

“What?” says Patrick coldly.

“I can only think that he has seen some crazy film at school and put two and two together to make five. I’ve been talking about Jay a lot, yes, I have come to think of it, a lot recently, what with all the help he has been giving me with the Talent Show. It’s been a lot of work, Patrick, and you have hardly focused on my obligations for it. So I have been talking a lot about Jay… I think that must be it. I don’t know what he is talking about, I really don’t. Of course not.”

Patrick looks at her, gathers up the pudding bowls.

“Well. I’m bloody glad that George is not doing anything humiliating for the show. That’s all I can say.”

He walks back, prepared to deliver crumble to his parents.

Jane feels like weeping over the granite island.

Chapter Twenty-Seven The Talent Show (i)

The day of the Talent Show dawns beautiful and cloudless. It is very early in the morning. The moving team has turned up on time, thank God, thinks Jane. The team is the vicar’s sole contribution to the day. It has arrived with a set of low trolleys on wheels in order to move the Blüthner into the Square. They’re used to moving pianos; there are a lot of pianos in churches.

“I know, it’s mad,” says Jane to them, giggling. She likes flirting with workmen, in a superior sort of style.

The vicar’s team walks past her, purposefully, to the music room. The grand has been cleared of its array of gilt framed family photographs, the flotsam of a marriage. It is now closed, waiting ponderously to be moved.

The team contemplates the Blüthner. “Bit of a thing, a concert grand,” says one of the men, after a moment or so of silence.

“And it will have to come back later on this evening, you know that don’t you? Has Reverand Ian told you that, too?” says Jane.

“Yep,” says the man testily. He is measuring the Blüthner. He then measures the door.

“When did this thing last come in here?”

“Oh, ages ago.”

She dislikes his slighting tone. She can’t actually remember when, or how the Blüthner got here. Perhaps when they first moved in; Patrick and her, just the two of them. She had wanted to learn how to play piano, and he insisted that he buy it for her. She remembers protesting, and him insisting. She thinks it was on their first wedding anniversary. A symbol of their marriage, perhaps. A thing of beauty, hardly ever used but impossible to shift. And yet when it was first put in this room, it seemed to symbolise all their ambitions for the future, for how they were going to be, here on the Square. She feels a fierce protective love for the instrument. Even though she barely played it.

“At that time, it was all a bit of a slum around here, you know. I think we were just about the only people to have a whole house. Flats everywhere else.” Apart from Jay and Harriet in their house, of course, she thinks with a stab.

The moving men are wholly unconcerned with the history of the gentrification of the Square. They are only focused on one thing. Moving the Blüthner.

“How did you get it in here?” asks the man.

Jane shrugs. “Pass. Sorry. Coffee, anyone?”

She leaves them to it.

First, they try rolling it towards the door, slanting it diagonally. The instrument creaks ominously, then lurches. The men put it quickly back on its feet. The men stand around looking at it, as if it is about to utter a pronouncment. When it remains stubbornly silent, they try another ruse. They tilt the entire back of the piano up, so it looks like a crazy upright in a dream. That doesn’t work either.

Jane comes back with the tray of coffee and some shortbread biscuits.

“Thanks. We’ll have to take the window out,” the main man tells her, through a mouthful of biscuit.

“What?”

“The window. We’ll have to get it through the window.”

“Have you seen the drop outside?” she replies.

The men shamble round, open the front door, survey the architecture of the bay window and the level of the ground beneath it. There is a significant drop beneath the window sill, made worse by a trench dug close to the wall.

“It was a damp course… ” Jane can’t bring herself to explain in detail why there is a trench beneath the window of the music room.

There is an awful pause.

“We’ll need to put up some scaffolding, I think,” says the foreman of the team. “I mean, that’s what we would do normally. We can’t carry it. Can’t lift it. We’ll have to put a platform out from the window.”

“Why ever can’t you lift it out?”

“Health and Safety.”

Oh, for God’s sake, thinks Jane. She looks at the men.

“You look healthy enough.”

The men look flatly back at her, drinking her coffee.

“We can get some scaffolding in, if you really want this piano outside, and back inside, but that will cost you,” pronounces the foreman.

“How much?”

“£750. Or £650 cash.”

Forget it. Bugger off with your silly trolleys. The Blüthner will stay put. Like my marriage, she thinks. It is not something that can be pushed around.

“Forget it. So sorry. Can you thank the Reverend for the thought. Leave the coffees when you’ve finished. Thanks for trying.”

She turns on her heel, resolute. She will find a solution. She is not going to allow the day to be thwarted. There is her son, and his piece. She is not going to let him be pushed aside. Shame we can’t use the Blüthner, but there is another option. There is always another option. There must be.

She hears the team depart in their Transit, slamming the doors.

She walks into the music room, drumming her fingers on the polished mahogany lid of the grand which, now closed, seems to have retreated into itself like an invertebrate in a shell.

She will call Tracey, she decides. It’s a bit early, but too bad. There is no point in emailing or texting either. It has to be a phone call. Old fashioned and direct. As Tracey’s precious TV star is now presenting the whole thing, she can have joint responsibility. Jane enjoys doing this; thinking of something, then justifying it immediately via a little debate in her head. The discussion of whether to call Tracey thus resolved, she puts it into action.

Tracey is lying on a sofa in the living room in Highpoint. She has got up very early and has arrived at the flat in order to go through Alan’s script with him.

Before this task, however, the pair have enjoyed each other in an energetic and loud manner on the breakfast bar above the Munchkin’s vitrine. The reptile had remained entirely neutral to these carnal goings-on, clutching his twig, motionless.

It’s alright, thinks Tracey. In Alan’s flat, it’s alright. This place is so strange, it really is as if normal rules don’t apply. She can screw Alan Makin here.

“Alan, can I just ask you something?” she says presently.

“Of course, my cherubina,” says Alan. He is as yet still undressed.

“Have you got your script in your head? Do you know what you are saying?”

“Mais sans doute
,” he responds. Clad only in a towel, he parades around the room.

He is in a great mood. He loves hosting these little local events. Of course he does them for nothing, makes nothing out of it but there is something so gratifying about the waves of adoration that he feels his presence provokes, he does them quite often.

“When shall we go to the Square?” she asks, as her phone rings.

“Oh, God, it’s Jane. What the hell,” she mutters, pressing the tiny button on the device. Alan decides to start performing post-coital Alexander Technique stretches against the plate glass windows. Tracey fervently hopes nobody in the landscaped gardens suddenly decides to look up at the building.