Sex and Stravinsky (39 page)

‘Was she in the hut as well?’ Josh says.

‘No,’ Caroline says. ‘She was in a house near by. There’s an older sister. The family is patently dysfunctional, though the boy was doing his best. I had a word with the head, who has promised to follow it up.’

‘Christ Almighty,’ Josh says. ‘Our little girl. It sounds like
Cold Comfort Farm
.’

‘Zoe and the boy were teaching themselves to dance,’ she says. ‘She’s got this ballet obsession; just like a hundred and one little girls, as I’ve always persuaded myself. I’ve always insisted she was not to bother you with it. I’m really sorry, Josh. I should have been more indulgent with her. I know that now. I should have respected all our needs before those of my wretched mother. Isn’t hindsight a wonderful thing?’ He sees her wiping her hand across her eyes. Then she says briskly, ‘None of us ever has to enter that house of hers again. The Garden Haven horror house. I’ve smashed up all the Hummel figurines, by the way.’

‘Come again?’ Josh says.

‘Not now,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to talk about it. It’s over. I’m going for a swim.’ She pecks him briefly on the cheek. ‘Be happy,’ she says. ‘Oh God, I can’t begin to tell you how much I love it here! I really, really do!’ And then she’s gone.

In her bedroom, Cat is being comforted by her dad, who listens to her staccato, hiccuping phrases as he gently strokes her back.

‘I hate her!’ Cat is saying.

‘Relax, my baby,’ he says.

‘And that stupid midget!’ she says. ‘All they do is prance around acting smug and clever.’

‘Shsh,’ Herman says, and he starts to massage her neck.

‘They do!’ Cat says, sitting up suddenly. Her face red and swollen, she nonetheless has a spirited shot at mimicry. ‘ “Oh, Cattie-pie, Josh and I are off to the NSA Gallery, because we’re so-o arty-farty, don’t-you-know?” ’ Then, when Herman laughs, she adds, ‘It’s true, Dad. They’ve been hanging out together nearly the whole time you’ve been away.’

Herman is making circular movements with his thumbs at the points where his daughter’s shoulders meet her neck. He observes a small, lingering stain from Cat’s recent contact with black hair dye. What she says is offering him the convenient possibility that, instead of appearing the supplicant with Hattie, he can have a plausible shot at accusing his wife of playing away. Hattie the marriage-wrecker. Then, what the hell, he’ll take out the rest of the week; billet himself with his sister Lettie for a night or two, along with Cat and Caroline; get his two favourite women out of the fray; give Cat a chance to be a child again with her exuberant younger cousins; then on to the Cape for a couple of days; decamp with Esther, his older sister – the one who, with her husband, owns a wine estate on the edge of Stellenbosch. Look in on his student twins while he is about it. Cat will enjoy a visit to her siblings and get a foretaste of that seductive campus life among the orchards and the avenues of oak trees. And all of them – Jonno and Suz included – will be crazy for Caroline, he’s quite sure.

‘I wish Caroline was my mother,’ Cat says viciously, and right on cue.

‘Shsh, baby,’ Herman says, still massaging the back of her neck. ‘How’s about we pay Lettie a visit? We’ll invite ourselves over for lunch.’

Cat is as a person instantly recovered.

‘Yea-ah!’ she says, and she throws off his massaging thumbs. ‘And Dad? Can Caroline come?’

Herman encounters Hattie, barefoot, on the staircase as he exits his daughter’s room. She has just left Zoe in the turret, still wearing the black-and-silver tutu and with the completed typescript of
Lola in Wenceslas Square
planted in her lap.

‘I’d love you to be my critical reader,’ Hattie has told her. ‘Please tell me what you think.’

Unfortunately for Herman, because she is now two treads above the landing, his wife has added height. Nonetheless, he fixes her, eye to eye, with a cold, stern look.

‘I think you’ve got something to tell me,’ he says.

But Hattie has seen him with Caroline that morning; has read his body language as she stood in her kitchen doorway; has heard him call Caroline ‘babe’. She has observed the looks that pass between them, their eyes shining with love. Something more than love. Love infused with sexual excitement. It’s had the effect of making her remember how once, in her salad days, Herman had had that effect on her; those days when, being green in reason, she had not gone to England with Josh. It has the effect now of making her forgive herself. So she faces him down, making steady eye contact, smiling at him sweetly as she does so, thinking objectively that, yes, he’s really quite a catch. She wishes Caroline well with him; thinks what an alpha couple they will make and how delighted Lettie will be at the prospect of a new tennis partner.

‘You want to tell me that you’ve fallen in love,’ she says. ‘You’ve found somebody else. Herman, I know. It’s all right. I know. It’s been waiting to happen for a while. Go for it, is what I say. As if I could ever stop you. I hope she’ll make you very happy.’ Then she continues her descent, still sleepless and a bit rumpled, in yesterday’s clothes, her linen shirt curling up at the hem. After a moment, she turns back and looks up at him. ‘I won’t be in your way for long,’ she says, ‘though I need to sort something out for James. Perhaps your company has a “property” for me somewhere? A little condo on the Berea, maybe? Just for a few weeks? I think Cat might welcome having me “offstage”. She’s been missing you like crazy.’

Herman, possibly for the first time in his life, is feeling himself wrong-footed.

‘This house is mine,’ he says unnecessarily. ‘I hope that’s understood.’

She needles him by blowing him a kiss as she moves on down the stairs. He notes with displeasure those abused and undersized feet; dancer’s feet that, for quite a while now, he has found a little bit repellent.

So both girls get what they imagine they want; that’s to be the child of the other one’s mother. For Zoe, it’s all too thrillingly like what happens in
Masquerade at the Wells
, though she knows that she cannot put this analogy to Cat, whom she’s been quite careful to avoid. It’s clear to her that Cat despises her as a drippy, flat-chested little crawler. Anyway, they don’t get too much of a chance, given that Cat disappears with Herman Munster, before Caroline and Josh have taken her aside to explain to her what’s happening. Then Caroline goes off, following the others to Lettie’s house. It’s Lettie who comes to collect her.

Caroline’s goodbyes are like those of a person who is taking a weekend break.

‘I’ll see you soon-soon, my darling,’ she says. ‘You be good now, sweetheart.’ And she gives her daughter a hug.

It’s a public sort of hug, undertaken in front of Cat’s waiting aunt, which is necessarily inhibiting – though, inside, Zoe is suddenly thinking that it’s all got to be her fault, because ever since France she’s been so horrible. And that it’s going to be really embarrassing to have to tell Mattie and Maggs, because they’re always going on and on about how fab her mother is. There was never any chance that she would choose to stay in this place with Caroline and Herman Munster, but what if Hattie gets tired of her? Because what if she’s not brainy enough to say anything that isn’t stupid and obvious about the typescript of
Lola in Wenceslas Square
? She’s wishing that she could be reading the story in a proper book with a cover, and not having to think of clever things to say about it.

‘Your dad is going to sort things for you with Gérard,’ Caroline is saying, and then she and her wheelie bag are gone; stowed in Lettie’s four-by-four.
Voom. Varoom
. Gone.

Afterword

It goes without saying that Herman and Caroline, Hattie and Josh are better off with their swap. It’s wonderful for Herman and Caroline – most especially for Caroline, given all those years of thou-shalt-not – that they can now indulge the shiny newness of their strong mutual attraction. Because from the moment Herman paid for those long, chilled mango drinks and handed her that cell phone in the airport café, the two of them have been inhaling enchantment from the pheromones that began at once to dance in the air between them. Thought-bubbles were forming over their heads, plumped out with cartoon love-hearts and smoochy scarlet lips.

Caroline, as everyone knows, is good at making bold and radical decisions when situations require them and she’s brilliant at making them work. She’s done this before, when she gave up her DPhil and, using an old red bus as her austerity nerve centre, committed herself to a life of make do and mend. On that occasion she didn’t look back and she doesn’t mean to do so now. Whatever the faults or virtues of that phase of her life, she’s not going to beat herself up about it; certainly not from the vantage point of Herman’s fabulous house. Because those days are over and – thanks to her mother’s recently exposed treachery – she’s finished and done with guilt. Naturally, she understands that things might be difficult for Zoe, but people must learn to make their own way. They must toughen up and deal with stuff; whatever stuff life chooses to throw at them. Isn’t that what she’s always had to do?

Watching Herman with his daughter – with all of his three children, come to that – has made Caroline concede that she hasn’t, after all, been one of this life’s greatest mothers, and this is a little bit irksome to her, because she’s accustomed to always being the best. She sees now that being a five-star domestic researcher, school-project manager and personal shopper; finder of specialist map shops and black Moschino jackets; world’s best home pattern-cutter and baker of birthday cakes – alas, only once a ballerina cake – does not quite add up to the same thing. But what the hell, she’s done her best and how was she to know different? For God’s sake, would you take a look at the role model
she’s
had to grow up with.

She knows from all her years of teaching that it’s often a lot easier to deal with children who aren’t your own – especially if those children happen to be like Kate Marais. She and Cat have hit it off big time, right from the very start. Cat is an absolute dreamboat. And so are Herman’s sisters, who, in their warm and ready acceptance of her, their ebullience and their easy sense of entitlement, their splashy parties and barbecues, make a context in which she feels herself appreciated and loved. All of the sisters dote on their brother, who is their only male sibling, and they rejoice to see him hooked up with a woman who, unlike Hattie, doesn’t make them feel uncomfortable. All of them find Caroline to be the soul of wit, which comes as quite a surprise. They fall about laughing at almost everything she says and beg to have her tell them all her stories.

The Grudge Fudge has become a family favourite. Make up a batch of Grudge Fudge and give it to someone you hate.

‘So have you made any fudge for us today?’ Lettie will say to her. ‘We’ll soon know when we’re not welcome.’

Caroline loves to throw parties for them herself. And she loves it, the way that Lettie’s sparkly blue eyes will so readily fill with tears of laughter.

Caroline, being the woman she is, doesn’t bring out the bully in Herman, who is now most solicitous in the matter of her new career. Does she want to go back to the language lab and to those old trade routes through Persia? Hell, no. She most certainly does not. She signs up instead at the local art school and becomes a student of fashion. Herman makes over the studio for her use, which is to be her study-workshop. She has plans to start a business in there, designing party dresses and ball gowns. Wedding dresses as well. Flashy frocks, and why not? She travels with Herman quite a lot and has taken to playing golf. London, Tokyo, the Seychelles. They have a plan to follow the bus routes, from Chillingollah to Pinnaroo; from Tintinara to Dimboola, because – who knows? – they might turn up a tall ageing blonde, who once gave away a baby on a bus. To do so would be seriously exciting, and if they don’t? No worries.

Hattie finds things more difficult at first, but in the main this has to do with all the immediate, complicated stuff that serves to impede any hopes of serenity in the matter of making a getaway. Unlike Caroline, who has all her current effects contained within two travel bags, Hattie has other sorts of baggage and quite a lot of it. There are her twins in the Cape. And there is James; poor old terminal James, who, in the unlikely event of his surviving his time in hospital, will need some form of sheltered care. She and Josh, with Zoe in tow, undertake a three-day high-speed consumer survey of all available establishments for which James might just be eligible. And Hattie also has the task of speaking to her parents. She tells them first that she has found their son, who is alive but gravely ill. After a while, she tells them that, within the week, she herself is taking off to go and live in England.

Predictably, the former intelligence becomes the focus of all their interest. Mrs Marchmont-Thomas, weeping tears of joy and sorrow, becomes increasingly exercised about the possible inadequacy of Hattie’s proposals for James’s care.

‘But why an institution for him?’ she says. ‘Why on earth can’t James have his nice old room back? His little room in the turret?’

‘Not possible,’ Hattie says firmly. ‘That’s simply not an option. For a start, he couldn’t make the stairs. Mother, James is incredibly frail. And besides, as I’ve just told you, I’m going to live in England.’

This is Mr Marchmont-Thomas’s cue to come into his own.