Sex and Stravinsky (22 page)

Bernie’s old room is currently occupied by a Professor Nathan Lewis and it is he who was able to make Jack aware that both Ida and Bernie were dead. The academic staff will doubtless have changed several times; persons moved on as part of the global diaspora; the anti-apartheid brain drain. Some retired to one-bedroom flats in Marylebone or Montmartre. Some working for human rights on the West Bank, or in Sierra Leone. Some in Perth or Auckland or Winnipeg. Some heading Cambridge colleges, or chairing committees of the British Medical Association. Yet the desk is still there, its large adhesive label apparently intact within the top right-hand drawer. ‘This desk is a present from Bernard Silver to Sipho Jack Maseko. To await collection. He may be quite some time.’

‘Thank you,’ Jack says again to Hattie. ‘It is quite big, you see.’ And he smiles his rare but enchanting smile.

‘You’re very welcome,’ Hattie says, making as if to withdraw. ‘I’ll leave you to get settled.’

With his elegant manners, his fluent but somehow unplaceable English, Hattie takes Herman’s tenant for a Euro child, a child of sweet first-world privilege; father a diplomat, mother an art dealer, international schools in Geneva and Prague – something like that. Well, you’ve only got to look at his shoes.

‘Let me know if there is anything you need,’ she says.

Each morning over those first few days, as Jack surfaces to a hundred bird calls and to that slice of bright subtropical sky, his first half-awake thoughts are all of Dakar. Then he remembers where he is and he thanks God for the studio. It’s really quite weird to be back here, but he has always loved a few beautiful spaces. He recalls, to his puzzlement, that his landlady had referred to the studio as ‘the garden cottage’. A ‘garden cottage’, as he has already discovered, is a term much in local use for an upgraded one-time servants’ billet. For Jack a cottage is a literary concept, having to do with northern Europe; a picturesque, timber-beamed minihouse, as depicted in those illustrated fairy stories that he long ago read with Josh; a low rustic dwelling, dwarfed by a charming topknot of thatch; wild eglantine and beanstalks clawing at tiny leaded windows. And a witch lurking within, bent double over a cauldron.

Witches in hovels he does know about from his own too personal experience and it’s thanks to his hag-like grandmother, who had dominion over him in ‘the native reserve’; the horror time that carved three years out of what, until then, he had assumed was his rightful childhood at the Silvers’ suburban house. They were years that changed him for ever; years that taught him the ugliness of want and the indignity of ever disclosing emotional need. The hag is probably long dead. Ditto his mother, who abandoned him there at the age of six. He does not know for sure, of course, and frankly he cares less. Good riddance to them both. Gertrude, who dumped him, and the witch, who shook her broom at him; a broom with which she would rearrange the dust of the hovel’s wretched mud floor. Do not think of it, Jack Maseko aka Jacques Moreau. Do not go there.

Jack loathes the imperfections that poverty brings; its power to bend the spine, roughen the hands, blacken and loosen the teeth, make for rheumy eyes and pinched, lopsided cheeks. He loathes its power to compel co-existence with cockroaches and bugs; with mosquito bites and stomach cramps and intestinal worms; its power to bring on birth defects: club feet, untreated squints, blindness and withered legs. But here and now, his studio – this lovely space – is no cottage. The studio is a haven of artful, filtered light. The studio is both perfect and perfectly monochrome. Well, that’s except for the cool greenish tinge to the bathroom’s translucent glass fittings.

Standing, as it does, at the end of a fabulous garden, hidden from the main house by a hedge of tall bamboo, the studio has bougainvillea and a passion fruit vine clambering up a plastered wall that borders his terrace. Azaleas grow on his terrace in large clay tubs and those flowers that he remembers as red-hot pokers. Jack appreciates the privacy and the dimensions of the studio, because in the past he has either lived in cramped back rooms or he has shared. First there was the bunk bed, where he slept above his mother in the Silvers’ backyard room. Then there was his grandmother’s hovel where five of them slept on the floor. After that there was boarding school; then his five square metres in a storeroom at the back of a baker’s shop in Dakar. Living with Eduardo was always rather deluxe – whether the holiday house in Senegal that overlooked the sea, or the apartment in Milan – but his bedroom in either place was always next door to the two little boys. Bastiano and Vincenzo, his pupils. So the studio, for all his complex misgivings, is a sort of paradise. A place all his own and undefiled.

On his first afternoon there, Jack, having walked the distance to the local shopping mall and back, bakes biscuits in his small new oven – four almond cookies on a baking sheet twenty centimetres square – and he eats them, two and two, sitting out at his garden table on the terrace. The first two, he eats at 4 p.m., with a wide white cup of mint tea. Then, as the light goes, he eats the second two, dipping them into a glass of chilled Vin Santo; or a delicious local version of Vin Santo that he’s bought in the ‘bottle store’. That’s what people used to call those places; those shops in which black persons were forbidden to buy alcohol. The Vin Santo is from a Cape wine estate called Klein Constantia and it tastes of flowers and apricots. It tastes of honey and marmalade. It tastes the way he remembers the contents of Ida Silver’s fridge.

An avocado and a pawpaw tree are visible to him, heavy with fruit, over the vista of low neighbourhood roofs. He’s taken aback by the unremembered lushness of this place, his once-upon-a-time home town; by the depth of its shiny greens. Jack is aware that his studio would once have been a shed-like row of basic rooms to house domestic servants. And where his green-glass bathroom is, there would have been a concrete appendage with utility cold shower and hole-in-the-floor flush toilet. His sloping slate roof with its oblong inlets of glass would once have been sheets of corrugated tin with gaps that let in mosquitoes and spiders, along with that fierce, slanting rain. The interior walls would all have been black with paraffin smoke from rickety Primus stoves. He knows – albeit sketchily, because his mother, being taciturn, never furnished him with detail – that it was from a servant’s room in a grand sort of house like this one that, long ago, she was evicted and sent packing. He knows that this happened shortly before he was born. He knows that, afterwards, she went to work at the house of Bernie and Ida Silver, where he’d spent his early childhood. That was before his horror time in the witch’s hovel, of course. And, after that – after his rescue – the Silvers packed him off to boarding school, and he never saw any of them again. Bernie, on that last day, drove him as far as the Swaziland border, where one of the school staff members was waiting to pick him up.

And Gertrude? She never turned up at the house where the Silvers had so carefully arranged for her to be employed; the place for which Bernie had given him the address and the telephone number. Not that he had ever tried to phone his mother, but he had got letters from her would-be employers. They had made efforts to discover his mother’s whereabouts, but all without success. So Jack never heard from his mother, who was in any case near illiterate, for all Ida’s determined efforts at adult education. She simply dropped out of his world. This never really bothered him; not after she’d delivered him up to the mercies of the witch’s hovel. Both Josh and Ida wrote regularly, though his need for them had passed. He’d been schooled by then in emotional self-sufficiency. He was Jack Maseko, Swaziland schoolboy. That was until the day he decided to cross another border and walk out of his schoolboy life. At that point, Jack became Jacques. He moved on. He wore a different mask. It was thanks to Josh, admittedly, that he’d always been so interested in masks.

Jack is not much of a ‘people’ person. And, given how much the turn of his life has been dependent upon a handful of windfall benefactors, it would have been burdensome were he to have embraced all those to whom he was beholden. He would have had to experience the complicated ambivalence that can come with too much dependence; an endless see-saw of resentment and gratitude. So Jack is not grateful and he likes to stand alone. He is himself. He is whichever version of himself he chooses to present. And if he never felt much for his mother, it can’t be denied that the woman had never appeared to feel very much for him. The circumstances of his conception were hardly the most felicitous – not that she had ever properly filled him in on these – and, though she took over Pru’s job as the Silvers’ domestic servant, Gertrude was never a spontaneous and warm-hearted woman like Pru. She entered the household by accident, clammed-up and emotionally opaque; a person who had early on bought into the idea of her own racially inferior and servile status. Gertrude was always a firm upholder of caste barriers and, as such, for all the convenience of her unconventional billet, she resisted the Silvers’ aberrant and colour-blind style. There was nothing for it, since, however unwillingly, she herself had crossed those barriers of caste – and the shaming evidence of this transgression was her offspring’s paler skin.

Gertrude’s taking up residence in the Silvers’ backyard was something that nobody had planned. It was not a relationship that quite dovetailed – which was why, on that first evening, a muted and somewhat suspicious Gertrude watched in puzzlement as the Silvers scurried about finding sheets, pillows and candles for the unused, cobwebby maid’s room at the far end of their small yard. Ida gave Gertrude a Thermos of milky tea and a box of Ouma Rusks. She gave her two bananas and a bath towel and a slice of her home-made chocolate-and-almond cake. There was a mattress in the room on a small iron bed frame, which Josh made up with clean linen, and a rickety kitchen chair. Both were items that pre-dated the Silvers’ purchase of the house.

And early next morning, Ida went and did the thing she was best at. She haggled on behalf of the dispossessed, confronting a besuited Mr Marchmont-Thomas on the doorstep of Marchmont House. He was on his way to go marking time at his club. Ida first presented him with her card. She told him she had come to collect the illegally withheld papers of one Mrs Gertrude Maseko.

‘
Mrs?
’ said Hattie’s father, knee-jerk sarcastic. ‘Well, bless my soul!’ But he capitulated almost at once. ‘A silly misunderstanding,’ he said. ‘Good Lord, the stupid woman. She only had to ask.’

Ida waited, as grudgingly invited, in the gloomy mould-green drawing room of the amazing colonial villa she had driven past almost every day on her way to work from her own more modest three-bedroom house. As a serious cook, she was disappointed that the interior should smell so much of boarding house; of boiled cauliflower and beef shin; all evidence of a depressing cuisine that comes devoid of tomatoes, or olive oil, or herbs. But this was precisely the kind of time-warped diet that the Marchmont family clung to as ‘plain English food’; admirably non-devious food; food of a kind that would always ensure against what Hattie’s father called ‘gyppo guts’.

Then Mr Marchmont-Thomas, his teeth bared unpleasantly in place of a smile, wanting to be shot of the woman, appeared with Gertrude’s papers.

‘Here we are then, Mrs . . . urm.’ He glanced at Ida’s card. Bloody trouble-maker. ‘Mrs Silver,’ he said. Jewess, of course. Nice little earner. Funny how these people were so often called Silver or Gold. ‘She steals, you know – your Mrs Gertrude Thing,’ he said. ‘Light fingers, I’m afraid.’

Gertrude stayed for the next ten years. It solved the problem of the absent character reference and she was dependable and hard-working. The Silvers doubled her wages and Jack was born three months after her appearance, by which time the still somewhat basic servant’s room had been fitted with electric light, a pair of gingham curtains and a carpet. Ida was not an ‘interiors’ person, but the room boasted a decent new single bed and a small folding cot for the baby, while the adjoining servant’s washroom now had a lavatory bowl and a shower that ran hot and cold. And Gertrude had access to the Silvers’ washing machine so that Jack’s little vests and nappies hung on the line in the yard. Yet Gertrude never loosened up; never accommodated to the family style; never became quite comfortable with her own son Jack, who, in all sorts of ways, was a different kettle of fish.

Since, unlike the garden of Marchmont House, the Silvers’ backyard was small, the servant’s room was not much more than twelve metres from the constantly open kitchen door, which granted Jack ease of entry. Josh loved to play with Jack; welcomed him into the enticing den of his own bedroom where they read stories together, clapped hands and stomped, dressed up in funny hats, drew pictures and did cutting-out. They also did headstands against the wall. For Jack, Josh’s bedroom was an Aladdin’s Cave of puppet theatres, art materials, tape recorders and walls of books, which still included, between the more adult tomes, a feast of childhood favourites that Jack quickly took to heart.
Scuffy the Tugboat
;
The Wind in the Willows
;
The Little Prince
;
The Box of Delights
. Jack loved
Little Bear
and the big flat Orlando books. He especially loved
Treasure Island
. He adored Josh’s electric keyboard. And, across the hall, was Bernie’s study, where before very long the marvellous silver desk with its pear-drop, cut-glass handles yielded up quantities of scrap paper and Sellotape and paperclips, along with scissors, glue and rubber bands.

Jack knew that one day, when he became a white person, he would own a desk like this. He knew that he would be a white person, because the evidence was before him. He was already a whole lot lighter than his mother, so it was clear to him that, while everyone was born dark brown, some people would then start to fade, after which they would go on to own all these beautiful things. People like himself. Special people. Meanwhile Jack’s determinedly barefoot mother cooked pots of maize porridge for his breakfast, but Jack liked toast and marmalade with lots of oozy butter. He liked dates and sugared almonds. He liked the cartons of peach and apricot juice that lived inside the Silvers’ fridge.