The Square (8 page)

However, the man doesn’t want to leave the stage humbly.

He doesn’t seem to notice that his time is up with Alan Makin.

“But I thought it was good to be aspirational,” he retorts. “And keep money circulating in the market. Isn’t that Keynesian? Isn’t that capitalism?”

Everyone laughs.

Makin moves into aggressive mode with the speed of an accelerating BMW.

“You feel pretty good about yourself, don’t you?” he says to the man. “Like you’ve made it. But you haven’t. In fact, the little I know about you, and your money situation, I already would say you are way off making it.”

Gosh, that’s a bit below the belt, thinks Tracey.

“You come up here with your plasma screen, and your Merc, and you start to brag to us all about your ambitions to be a property mogul, and tell us how in debt you are. You are living in folly! And I will make you see it.”

The man goggles at Makin.

All at once, Tracey stands up. She doesn’t know how she is suddenly standing up, but she is. She needs to prick this man’s balloon. She doesn’t care that he is from the TV. She’s had enough of it.

“What are you doing?” hisses Harriet.

“Mr Makin,” shouts Tracey, waving urgently. “I have a question for you. Is this the point?”

Alan Makin looks slightly irritated. He squints out into the body of the marquee to answer her. He also looks at his watch. Tracey blusters on, aware of Harriet staring at her from somewhere by her right elbow.

“What’s that?” shouts Alan across the hall.

“I mean, what is your definition of Making It? For you it might be wealth. Or fame. For other people it might be other things. Raising a family. Looking after an ageing parent. Being a great friend. Overdrafts aren’t the end of the world, are they? I mean, are they?”

Everyone applauds.

Alan Makin looks thunderously at her. After the first thrill of adrenalin, Tracey is beginning to wonder how she can end this confrontation, and sit down again.

“He probably didn’t mean to become overdrawn,” she continues in a faltering voice, pointing at the man on stage. The man nods vigorously at her.

“No, I didn’t,” he shouts back to Tracey.

Cheers from the audience. This inspires her.

“Nobody in this tent did.”

Alan gives him a withering look.

“None of us did,” continues Tracey. “Debt just happened. Crept up on us. Somehow owing hundreds of pounds became owing thousands of pounds, and then tens of thousands, and then the figures stopped relating to actual money, and just turned into little black marks on a piece of paper.”

Everyone has turned round and is now looking at her.

“All that happens from the credit card companies is that you get a bill.” She pauses. “With the interest rate written down in monthly figures, so it looks terrifically small, and a nice message saying all you have to do is pay the minimum fee, which is minuscule. And then it offers you Increased Credit.”

More nods, and a few claps.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with making it, or not making it, or whether you are a success in life or not. It really doesn’t. About whether you are a fantastic mother, or a fantastic wife.” She pauses. Should she confess? “Do you know I have an overdraft, even after winning the bloody Lottery a few years ago!”

This gets a laugh.

“Oh, God Tracey,” moans Harriet beside her. “Please shut up.”

“Oh, I remember now. The famous Lottery couple. Looks like you need a Makin Makeover,” says Alan, recovering his poise. “But not now. Next time!”

Tracey takes this as a signal to sit down, and does. She is shaking, slightly. Harriet looks at her, smiling tightly.

“That was weird.”

“Sorry, Harriet, do you think that was rude?”

“No,” says Harriet, whose face indicates otherwise.

“Really sorry, Harriet. I just felt… I felt for that man on stage.”

“No, it’s fine. It was funny. Not sure about the Lottery mention, but never mind.”

Middle class people are so uptight about the Lottery, thinks Tracey. She then wonders, as she always does, how what Larry did, winning a bit of money, well quite a lot of money, on the Lottery, is really any different from winning a bonus on the Stock Market.

Alan shakes hands with the man on stage, and claps him on the back.

The agent steps up to the microphone. “Alan will be signing books here for everyone. Please form an orderly queue.”

When they get back to the Square, Harriet drops her off and leans across the passenger seat.

“You were great,” she says, exuding the bitter stench of tobacco over Tracey.

“Not too weird?” Tracey says, still worried.

“No, no. It was fine. Why don’t you get in touch with Alan Makin, though. I dare you! You never know. He might have you on one of his shows. He could do a Makeover on you, and you could say all that stuff again, on TV. Apart from the Lottery bit, of course. But seriously, Tracey, he might help you out with your overdraft.”

She thinks about it at night, lying in bed, surrounded by the evidence of her lucky, lucky win; the perfect house, the immaculate kitchen, a wardrobe full of shoes, quietly existing in the soft darkness all around her.

Chapter Seven Roberta

She’s knows she is lucky to have an allotment. She got it under the Austerity Enterprise scheme from the local council. It used to belong to some woman who never used it. She did use it, actually, but not for vegetables. She just grew sunflowers on it. This was regarded as inessential. It was taken away from her. Now it belongs to the piano teacher who plants vegetables in it.

Roberta’s back aches. This has got to be the last row. Please let it be the last row. She looks back at the small pots. How many are there? Fifteen? Twenty? Surely she can put these all in the same row, can’t she?

Are leeks a less deserving enterprise than sunflowers? Is a beautiful flower, which manages to swivel round and look at the sun every day, less important than a leek? The council certainly judged so, and Roberta, whose name was first on the waiting list, was the beneficiary of that judgement. Food before art.

She bends down stiffly and quickly picks up a little pot, holding it by its plastic rim. The ribbons of bright green in the centre of the pot wave encouragingly. Carefully, she tips the dome of soft compost into her gloved hand. It falls easily into her palm, the sandcastle shape contained by a web of thick white latticed roots leading to the fleshy cylindrical core. She dusts crumbs of soil from the long ribbons. Leeks.

She pushes the raised line of soil askance with her toe, and puts the leek into it. Still crouching down, she picks up the next pot. Squatting now, she swiftly decants the baby leeks, pot after pot, into the open ground, each in its allotted place. After three, she stands up, stretches, walks along and squats down to plant three more in their places. Allotted, on the allotment. At last the job is completed.

She stands up and walks along the row, treading down the rich black compost with her boot, walking carefully so the flat long emerald leaves aren’t imprinted with its muddy sole. The light is nondescript, the sun absent. She hears children shouting on their way home from school.

They sprouted last year, tiny green hairs in miniature square containers made of card, their nursery the sunny, wind-free world of her kitchen table. A packet’s worth. Then, she pricked them out into larger pots. Now she’s planting them in the garden for the winter, a task as ancient as it is repetitive. She’ll have leeks all season long. Braised, stirred with olive oil over a gentle heat, simmered with melted cheese tempering the blackened edges.

Hanon is repetitive too, considers Roberta. Repetitive exercises designed to strengthen the fingers and improve fluency. She’d rather play the piano than plant leeks. But this means a winter’s free vegetables.

Eighteen months, for three rows of leeks. Does anyone ever think about this in Waitrose? Do they hell.

Later, back at home, washing the soil off her hands, stretching her aching back, she feels content with her morning. She considers the small leeks now securely wrapped underground. Completely free, bar the 30p for the packet of seeds. She got the compost from Patrick, who gave her a whole bag of it. Fifty litres. Why do they always measure compost in terms of liquid?

“Robs, old thing, we never use this, why don’t you take it?” he had said to her bluffly one day, after she had finished teaching and was bringing her cup into the kitchen before leaving. Patrick was dangling a bag from his hand.

“Bought by Jane in one of her mad gardening schemes. Lost interest after about a week, ha ha! But I know you have an allotment. Would you like it? I’ll give you a trowel too, if you like.”

She had slipped the trowel, its red unused blade and still shiny wooden handle, testifying that it had never been left out all night in a flower bed, into her coat pocket and awkwardly lugged the long, heavy plastic bag back home on the bus that night, slightly worried it might mix with petrol fumes and explode. Wasn’t that how the IRA used to make its bombs? Fertiliser and petrol? She’s not sure.

Food before art.

But that’s not true, she thinks, sitting at her upright, playing Bach’s Prelude No. 1 in C Major, the first of the Forty-Eight Preludes and Fuges. Art is food.

She breaks off, notices her answerphone winking at her. She gets up from the stool, rewinds it. This machine is about to be as defunct as a typewriter, she notes. She’ll have to upgrade to something digital and seamless. She reaches the beginning of the tiny tape, presses Play.

“Hello, Roberta, it’s Tracey here,” says Tracey. “Listen, Roberta, I need to talk to you about Belle. I’ve been thinking, well, she’s been thinking about her piano playing, and it’s sort of made me start thinking, about next term’s lessons. Can you call me please? Any time.”

Roberta feels her stomach clench. She knows very well what that sort of message means. It means ‘my daughter is fed up with her lessons and wants to stop, and as I have done my parental duty to introduce her to the piano, I want to stop too.’ That’s the start.

It is a piece in four movements. First, comes the theme. I want my child to stop learning. Then there are usually two variations on it. “Well, I’m not going to stand in her way, because the effort has become too great.” That’s the first variation. “Of course (laughs) we all know she will regret it when she is thirty, but that’s teenagers for you.” This is the second variation. “As Oscar Wilde probably never said, education is wasted on the young, ha ha, now thank you so much for all your hard work, really. Thanks so much, Roberta.”

Finally, the coda. “Of course we will recommend you to all and sundry, you have been absolutely amaaazing, good night.” Exeunt, to rapturous applause and the scraping sound of a bank account, her own bank account, at rock bottom.

No more Bach tonight. She tucks her hair behind her ears. She stretches her aching back. She pulls down the file above her piano, opens it. On it is a list of names each written carefully in a column. At the top of the page, a large heading:

The Square. It’s the list of all her pupils. So far, there are no purple lines through the names. Parents in the Square do not want to deny their children piano lessons. If Tracey prevails, she will be the first to do it. And her move might encourage others.

Roberta looks at the precious list of names. She thinks about Belle. Then she thinks about George. Boy George. Only a child, but with the singular cleverness and adult grace of the singleton.

After his lesson last week he had lingered by the Blüthner grand, standing there in his shorts, his finger tracing the bright walnut grain with its shapes of skulls and berries.

“Roberta.”

“What is it?” she had said. “You did well today. Really well.”

“I need your help.”

She was slightly alarmed. Her relationship with George was uncomplicated, and this she found relaxing. What was the boy going to confess to her now?

“You know there is to be a Talent Show here. Later on,” he eventually blurted out.

Her first thought was simply marvelling at how this community will stop at nothing to proclaim how amazing it is in every way. Her second thought was one of genuine curiosity.

“Oh, George, how fascinating. What will you show off to everyone?”

George sighed mournfully.

“Mother says I must play the piano.”

Of course.

“Well, that might not be so ghastly. What would you like to do?”

“Well, I am much better at building Lego, but if Mother says it, then the piano,” – he tapped Middle C with a small digit – “it must be.”

“Why don’t you do both?”

“What, build Lego to music? My dear Roberta, I don’t think so.”

“Yes, but, let’s think, I know, why not show a film? With Lego characters. You know, on a stop-frame animation. And then play a piano as accompaniment to it. You could have a screen up in the hall, or wherever the Talent Show will be.”

He gaped at her. She could see the idea take fire by the light in his face.

“Could I? Why, yes, I could,” he said, as if she wasn’t there. He was quite used to holding conversations with himself.

“It won’t be in a hall, but we could have a screen out in the park. Right above the piano. Roberta, thank you. I will go and start crafting the screenplay right away!”

She started packing up her bag, smiling to herself. He might not be an infant Mozart, but he had initiative, she’ll give him that.

“Righty-o. I’ll have a think about what you might play to go alongside. I assume you will have some form of keyboard with you?”

“Oh, certainly. I think Mamma is letting this old thing out for the night.”

A Blüthner? Outside? These people.

She stops musing about George. She calls Tracey. Before the call, she runs through the conversation in her mind, although she instinctively knows what she has to do. She must concoct a conversation so clever, so adroit, so full of acknowledgement of what the child has, what the child could have, that the parent will fear missing it. Furthermore, alongside this positive strand, she must also present a parallel sense of fear, a dark foreboding about what the child might be missing out on, the entire boundless and bountiful world of the piano repertoire, eternal and endlessly sustaining, a glorious future that Tracey, and more importantly Belle, can in no way even contemplate being part of once the appropriately named fall of the piano, in other words the lid, has been slammed down on it.