Sex and Stravinsky (32 page)

‘Are you sure about this?’ Josh says. ‘It sounds a bit too alliterative for comfort.’

‘Go on, it’s fun,’ Hattie says. ‘It’s beautiful, as you’ll remember. Ignore the Tourist Board Speak. You’ll love it.’

Josh knows that he will love anything designed to prolong his time with Hattie. To have found Hattie again has been heaven, though, all through these days, he’s become increasingly aware that time has begun to gallop. He struggles to blot out the awful fact of his impending real life, which intrudes, occasionally, on the edges of his mind. He ought to be calling Caroline; has done so only once, and that on the morning of his arrival. He ought to be buying a phone card; making the effort. But then, by the same token, Caroline ought to be calling him. She could always leave a message for him at that pocky little hotel. Not that the somewhat clueless and intermittent ‘receptionist’ would be one to inspire confidence in the relay of accurate messages. Josh has recently begun to doubt whether the woman can write.

‘I sometimes get sick in cars,’ he says. ‘I can’t vouch for myself if we “meander”.’ Hattie laughs and promises to stop off and buy him a pack of Sea-Legs. ‘It doesn’t meander that much,’ she says. ‘And I’m a very careful driver.’

He’s enchanted to observe that Hattie – grown-up Hattie – is wearing driving gloves. He hasn’t seen such things in years. And isn’t it oh, so like her, he reflects, that, given the amazing drama of the local ecology – the wildness of the wetlands, the elating scenery, the fern-capped forests, the Drakensberg Mountains with their massive peaks, the rampant hibiscus beauty of the place – that she should suggest the Midlands; that region of picture-postcard farmland terrain, now apparently dotted about with little tourist tea shops, craft boutiques and alfresco farmhouse lunches in rose gardens; a sweet, verdant landscape that dances to the tune of Hattie’s transplanted English soul.

They dawdle together in a leather craft shop, where Josh buys a pair of sandals for Zoe, emulating Hattie, who has chosen the identical pair for Cat – sizes 4 and 8, side by side on the counter.

‘I suppose our daughters would hate each other,’ Hattie says. ‘Were they ever likely to meet.’

The sun shines down on them as they make their way through Hilton and Howick, Dargle and Nottingham Road. They stop off among the gentle hills to enjoy a pot of Earl Grey and scones with home-made jam in the stable yard of a pretty farmhouse, turned B & B. Then, by the time they have lingered too long in a basket shop – no ordinary baskets these; exquisite artworks, each and every one – the daylight is threatening to vanish.

‘We really ought to make tracks,’ Hattie says, glancing at her watch. ‘I can’t leave Cat on her own for ever, much as one’s teenage daughter might relish such a prospect.’

Josh has been dithering over whether to buy a basket for Caroline, but he’s never been much of a shopper and she’d probably reproach him over the expense, especially as the baskets don’t come cheap. Good thing too, he decides. The makers are skilled craftspersons, after all, and not the ill-used hawkers they once were; their wares haggled down from nothing to less than nothing on beachfront pavements and street corners. He desists from making a purchase, since Hattie is clearly anxious to be off. Something about the daughter. And, yes, he thinks, as they settle back in the car; yes, there is something edgy going on between Hattie and the daughter, but maybe that’s just teens? He’s not escaped the girl’s noxious glances, but more disconcerting for him by far is Cat’s astonishing likeness to Herman Marais, though she has, of late, transformed her hair from blonde to raven black.

By contrast, as Josh marvels, Hattie is ever and always the same, day after blissful day. Her hair, her eyes, her adorable ears, her dainty hands on the steering wheel in those gloves with the crochet uppers, her size, her body weight – all is as ever it was. He can scarcely credit that sweet girlish Hattie can have given birth to the trio of hearty blond giants whom he’s noticed, in several framed photographs, dotted about that eye-poppingly affluent and stylish house; a house that Hattie appears to float through with every sign of detachment and indifference.

And then, as darkness falls, he turns to wondering how many murders there might have been in these parts, along this very stretch of winding road, for all the gentle rise and fall of its Constable appearance. How many victims of Inkatha vigilantes; how many farmers currently living behind security fences with guns beside the pillow?

And then, ‘Good God!’ he says out loud. ‘Hey, Hat. This is the place where I met Gertrude.’

‘What?’ Hattie says.

‘Gertrude,’ he says. ‘Right here is where I nearly ran her over. You know that boring Gertrude who used to work for my parents?’

‘I never met her,’ Hattie says. ‘But she had that cute little boy. I came to supper one weekend when he was about four. He was eating rye bread with cream cheese.’

‘It was pretty well around this time of day,’ Josh says. ‘It had suddenly gone pitch dark. I’d been running a mercy errand for my mother. All very urgent and clandestine. Taking food and stuff to this starving family. The dad was in jail. Black political prisoner. They’d got nothing. No money, clothes. Nothing. I’d had these boxes I’d delivered to them and then, on my way back, there was suddenly this woman right in front of me, just walking in the middle of the road. Absolute pitch darkness. Plus my eyesight’s especially crap at night. I never drive after dark. God, I didn’t even have a licence. Not in those days. I wasn’t yet sixteen. I might have killed her if she hadn’t been wearing this bright-yellow polka-dot skirt. Jesus, it scared me rigid. This bright-yellow apparition looming up in the headlights. She was pregnant, I could tell – with this white blouse kind of popping its buttons over her boobs. Cardboard suitcase on her head, tied with rope. You know how people do that? Walk right in the middle of the road, with a suitcase on their head? Fuck me, it must be two decades since I’ve seen anyone do that – walk along with a suitcase on their head. She was avoiding the snakes, she said.’ And then he’s suddenly off on one of those little trademark esoteric asides that, in normal circumstances, always gave Hattie so much pleasure. ‘You know in
The Pilgrim’s Progress
?’ he says, but right now something quite other is invading Hattie’s mind.

‘Yellow polka dots?’ she says.

‘You know how Christian is forever carrying this “burden” on his back? Well, in Africa he carries his burden on his head. That’s in all the local illustrations. The book was a total smash hit in these parts. I heard someone give a seminar about it.
The Pilgrim’s Progress
in Africa. It was the Victorian evangelical missionaries’ best-ever tract. On a par with the Bible. Isn’t that fun? New converts would tell the stories of Christian’s journeys when they were on their own journeys, and then they’d tell the same stories backwards on their way home. You know. Oral tradition.’

‘You were fifteen?’ Hattie says, staring intently into the darkness. ‘We’re about the same age, Josh, aren’t we?’ She’s thinking back to her mother’s kitchen. Marchmont House in the days of the mould-green carpets. Her mother poking at Gertrude. ‘Madam she say foh piccanin.’ ‘Madam she say foh Zulu boy come native
kaia
make foh piccanin.’ ‘Master he say no visitor.’ And then, that follow-up scene she’d witnessed from her window, as she’d sat there reading Noel Streatfeild. Gertrude taking leave of her father. Gertrude, clearly bulging out front. Yellow polka-dot skirt. Suitcase tied with rope. Some sort of altercation. The pale Afro child at the Silvers’ dinner table. Gertrude’s child. So who, exactly, had been the ‘visitor’?
Oh my God!

‘Where was she going, do you know?’ Hattie says cautiously, her voice coming out rather small.

‘Oh,’ Josh says. ‘She was walking back into bundu-land. She’d got the sack that day and her shitty white employer hadn’t paid her wages, so she’d got the bus for as far as she’d had the fare and then she’d started to walk. I found out that he’d also taken the trouble to withhold her papers, so she couldn’t look for other work. She was shipping out to this rural dump where her mother lived. Remember you once came with me to that place? We went there to kidnap little Jack. Oh boy.’ And Josh heaves a heavy sigh. Then he says, ‘I persuaded her to get in the car and I gave her this can of disgusting sun-warmed Fanta. It was all I had. Then I told her my mother could get her papers back. So that’s what happened. She came back with me and after that she somehow just stayed. Then she gave birth to Jack. I remember my dad rushing her off to the McCord Zulu Hospital. No doubt it’s had a name-change in recent years.’

Hattie makes no reply. Gertrude. Pregnant. Dismissed without a character. By Mr Marchmont-Thomas. Grandpa Ghoul.

‘We used to have this fabulous woman who’d just retired,’ Josh is saying. ‘Pru. God, I loved that woman. And then, thanks to me, we got poor old stolid Gertrude.’

‘And you got little Jack,’ Hattie says, deciding against disclosure. She, like Josh, is all too aware that their time together is limited and to what purpose spoil it?

‘True,’ Josh says, and he sighs again. ‘I adored that little boy. And then, at some point – God knows – he just went to ground. At sixteen he stopped writing to me. Left his boarding school. Vanished.’

‘Vanished?’ Hattie says.

‘The school never heard from him again,’ Josh says. ‘Possibly he hooked up with Gertrude, but she’d disappeared as well. Maybe they went to ground together. By then I’d been in England seven years. Caroline and I were finding life quite complicated, but both I and my mother did whatever we could think of. No show. Not long ago it occurred to me that he just might have applied for a passport. That’s assuming he’s still alive; a big “if” in a bad world. I mean, given that, with the regime change, a number of black South Africans have begun to use their right to travel. I began to check it out, but so far not a word. And the bureaucracy in these parts is something else. The wheels grind slow. The thing that doesn’t quite add up for me is that, at school, Jack was brilliant. Really thriving. Whereas he and Gertrude – well, she was not only a bit of a dumbo, but she was always distinctly unfeeling towards him. I don’t think she even liked him. Maybe to do with his conception? I mean, he
was
markedly pale, wasn’t he? You must have noticed that?’

‘Yes,’ Hattie says.

‘Do you think some white bastard raped her?’ Josh says. Then he says, ‘A sad thing for me is that I was so distracted around that time when Jack got sent off to boarding school. The parents were committing a significant chunk of money to it. They were about to hop the country. I was leaving for London. It was such a shitty, awful time. Police spies everywhere, tracking people down. The good guys thrown in jail. Dying in jail. The parents taking such risks. They took off in the middle of the night. They nearly got grabbed. I remember feeling terrible because all I could think about was you; that I was leaving the country and you weren’t coming with me.’

Hattie tells herself she must concentrate. The roads can be tricky. People driving without licences; driving on forged and stolen licences; people out to hijack your car. Herman will insist on buying high-status cars. Expensive cars. Even for the wife. She’d feel much safer in a little old banger. Her mind is darting about. Josh. Gertrude. Her father. The pale child eating cream cheese on rye. Vanished. Back again to Josh, who had left the country without her. What a fool she’d been. She’s right now grateful for the driving gloves, which are a help against sweating palms. She gives up and pulls over on to the side of the road. She leans her head on the steering wheel and sighs.

‘I shouldn’t be stopping here,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry. Give me a moment.’

‘Are you all right?’ he says. ‘Gosh, I didn’t plan to be so glum.’ Hattie says nothing. He thinks she’s not going to reply.

When she does, though it’s too dark to see her clearly, he can hear the tears in her voice.

‘Josh,’ she says. ‘About you, I’m sorry. I was stupid and I was wrong. I thought I didn’t “love” you. I didn’t know what love was. I think it’s true to say that there wasn’t much of it about in my family. I had some idea about the sort of person that one was supposed to fall in love with and that person wasn’t you.’

‘Hat –’ Josh says.

She’s casting her mind over her family; her immediate here-and-now family. Herman, who is admittedly splendid, but in a way that has never had much to do with her and now has less and less. The twins, Suz and Jonno; stridently coping young adults, who are ever more strangers to her. And then there’s Cat. Daddy’s Girl, who longs for her daddy’s return. And the house, the heirloom house – brother James’s one-time heirloom – the repository of all her unhappy childhood memories; the house from which, thanks to Herman, she has never managed to escape. She’s been bound to it all these years, just as she was in the days of that ballet scholarship; the scholarship she’d been instructed to turn down, because she was ‘needed at home’. Home? The house now belongs to Herman, and she thanks God for that. She finds it something of a comfort that it was never hers at all.

‘My ballet teacher loved me, I believe,’ she says. ‘Though my lack of fight left her feeling let down.’

‘Hat –’ Josh says, but she goes on.

He longs to cup her face in his hands; her lovely pointed face with those enormous, wide-spaced eyes. He wants to hold her hands; her dainty hands. And, of all things, wouldn’t she just be wearing those funny, old-fashioned little gloves?

‘The parents couldn’t help themselves,’ she says. ‘That stuffiness. The snobbery. It was all they had. They were so crippled and hidebound. Still are. Their sense of being a cut above. They’d focused all their ambition on my brother, who would carry the family name. For God’s sake, a shopkeeper’s name. Basket-weavers from Norfolk who’d got lucky. Anyway, by the time I met you, James’d already sucked them dry.’