Waiting for Kate Bush (30 page)

Maybe my own hearing was becoming more acute. We revisited the theme of my being too harsh in my self-judgement. She said my judging myself so harshly was maladaptive. By my own admission, according to her notes, it didn’t make my behaviour more palatable to me. Its only effect, in fact, was that it made it hard for me to live in my own skin. I’d never thought of it in quite that way. What she seemed to be saying made sense pragmatically. And here I’d always presumed that shrinks were encouraging me to be less ferociously self-critical on moral grounds. What a little fool I’d been.

But, but, but. (It was hardly like me to make any actual progress, not as long as there was air in my lungs for a clever rebuttal.) It felt that if I were gentler with myself, as either she or another of the countless dozens of shrinks I’d consulted over the years had put it, I’d be letting myself off the hook for my monstrousness. It seemed right that I should hold myself fully accountable.

Something about that pleased her. She began to speak. I leaned so far forward that I nearly had my ear in her mouth. Wasn’t trying to hold one’s self accountable, she wondered, the impulse of a highly moral person? For one exhilarating moment, I thought she might be onto something, only to conclude that her nearly incomprehensible accent and inaudibility concealed a remarkable flair for sophistry.

When I confessed that conclusion, she pretended not to know what sophistry meant.

* * *

Released in America,
The Dreaming
actually showed up briefly in the
Billboard
chart, but not long enough to make it distasteful to a small, burgeoning cadre of cultists. EMI, which owned its American subsidiary, Capitol, and stood to profit from her breaking through in the world’s biggest record-buying market, urged Kate to accept Fleetwood Mac’s invitation to tour there with them. She declined, but agreed at least to come over and trade bons mots with David Letterman on late-night TV, only for the turbines of the Queen Elizabeth II, which had seen action in the Falklands War, to pack it in before she could set sail. A Canadian farmer spent $4,000 of his own money to try to get her to come over, but succeeded only in starting
Breakthrough
, a North American counterpart of the British fanzine
Homeground
. EMI decided that the next best thing was to send her
Live At The Hammersmith Odeon
videotape, which was rather more likely to do what it was told, out on tour.

While ‘Suspended In Gaffa’ did well in the more discriminating duchies of Europe, EMI promoted the single ‘There Goes A Tenner’ in the UK with a conspicuous absence of wellie, and then had the effrontery to tell Kate it might be a fab idea if she stopped producing herself. Piqued, she had her own state-of-the-art (for a few months at least!) 24-track recording studio fitted at East Wickham. Feeling as though she had to choose between being famous and staying as close as possible to her own work, she chose the work, and was proud of herself.

* * *

As I’ve mentioned, my understanding, when I started gaining weight, was that people thought of us fat as jolly. Judging by the recent succession of the confused or distraught or sexually ambivalent into my room, though, I’d come to believe that what people really thought was that we’re terrific listeners, great providers of shoulders on which to cry. Here, in other words, came Mrs. Cavanaugh herself, redder-lipped than usual, seeming to expect it to rain in my room, in a full-length mac, buttoned nearly to the neck.

It was the anniversary of her husband’s suicide. She’d spent the day listening to Kate’s ‘You’re The One’ over and over. It seemed to run in the family. She was filled with sadness, but there was no one to whom she could turn for solace. Duncan seemed preoccupied with trying to decide whether he should leave Gemma for Nimalka. Cathy’s new
managers had her jumping through hoops from the moment she woke to the moment they finally allowed her to stagger into bed. She’d told Gilmour not to visit unless he was sober, and he was only intermittently sober. Mrs. Cavanaugh had plenty of women friends, but since Cathy’s appearance on
Megastar
, none seemed to have the time to return Mrs. Cavanaugh’s calls. But if I were busy or something, Mrs. Cavanaugh would certainly understand. She kept her hand on the door.

I assured her I wasn’t busy at all, and then reassured her. Finally she actually came in and sat down on the edge of the bed. She declined tea. She declined biscuits. (Ashamed of how many of hers I’d taken to eating, I’d bought my own supply.) I sat down and let her talk.

Her Roger, whom she’d married a few weeks after turning 17, had been a bus driver at first, and an amateur musician. He’d enjoyed driving the bus, and had accompanied a Dusty Springfield soundalike on guitar. Duncan was born a few months after their marriage. She had a photo.

No matter how many times this happens to me, I never seem to learn. Even while assuming that the world looks at me and sees me as my vibrant, sexy, Marcel Flynn-modelling, 33-year-old self, except with a few more creases in my forehead and slightly sparser hair, I look at middle-aged and old people and imagine they were never other than what I see before me, never not grey and sagging, never not wearing bifocals on a cord round their necks so they won’t forget where they put them, never not reconciled to the boredom of being alive and waiting, though they’re unlikely to admit it, to getting back where they once belonged. But here was irrefutable proof that matronly, harried, profoundly nonsexual Mrs. Cavanaugh had once been quite the fox, in a macramé choker and feather haircut, big false eyelashes, platform shoes, and a skirt just barely there. And Rog! He wouldn’t have looked out of place on stage with Rod Stewart, Jack the Lad in a satin suit and an artichoke coiffure.

Once having given up on rock’n’roll, Roger drove his bus and dreamed of being able to save enough to buy a little pub somewhere and play his guitar in it if he was able to hire someone reliable to look after the bar. He gambled, but hit a couple of jackpots, and by the time Duncan was 12 and Gilmour had been born, he and Mrs. Cavanaugh were only a couple of months short of realising their dream. But then a Scottish actor called Tam MacPherson, despondent because his native Glaswegian accent always broke through on stage when he drank, and because he couldn’t keep himself from drinking, stepped in front of Roger’s No. 82 bus between Finchley and Golders Green one humid September afternoon and died before the ambulance could arrive.
Roger swore that Tam had intended the accident, and got a couple of passengers to corroborate his impression, but in the two months he was suspended before London Transport announced they believed him, Roger started drinking too.

“He rang Tam’s family to tell them how sorry he was. I was there when he did it. They screamed at him, called him a heartless bastard and put the phone down on him. As far as they were concerned, they were the only ones whose lives were ruined by the accident. But it was as though Tam was trying from beyond the grave to pull my Rog into whatever corner of Hell he’d wound up in.”

Roger had nightmares. He apparently forgot what it was like to get a decent night’s sleep. He carried on drinking. He walloped those he loved. He was sacked for missing his shift too often. He began spending the money he and Mrs. Cavanaugh had saved for their pub. He took to walloping her until she armed herself. He hanged himself, leaving a note saying it would have been poetic justice for him to step in front of a bus, but he wouldn’t wish the nightmares on another driver.

I told her I was very sorry. She held up her hand to silence me. “I’ve not told you the whole story yet. A month or two before the accident, I’d begun seeing someone. You know, on the sly. He was a writer, a playwright. He claimed to have a novel in the works too, but he never let me read any of it. Serge. I met him at the newsagent’s where he worked part time for extra money.

“Actually, it’s a bit of an exaggeration to say I was seeing him. I slept with him twice, and then he seemed to lose interest. I was in love with him, though, and kept in touch, hoping he’d have a change of heart. I’d be shocked to find out Rog knew anything about it, as it had been so brief, and we’d been discreet, but I think he could sense something wasn’t right even before the accident.”

I shook my head in commiseration, and wondered if it would be proper for me to hold her. “I’m not telling you the whole story. I didn’t sleep with Serge only twice. There was a third time.” She filled her lungs and put her shoulders back, steeling herself for what she had to say. “I was actually shagging my beautiful wild dark Russian poet the night my husband topped himself. And I will never be able to forgive myself for that.”

So this was the torrent she was dressed for. But no tears came. When this woman steeled herself, she stayed steeled. She turned to me dryeyed and repeated, “Never.”

I told her there was something comparable for which I could never forgive myself. I recounted the incident involving Babooshka in her
mascot costume after the Montgomery High School football game. My eyes didn’t remain dry, nor my cheeks.

She touched my leg. “There’s a very big difference, though, isn’t there? No matter how long or severe your estrangement from your daughter, you can continue to hope some day you’ll get the chance to make it up to her, and she to you. No such hope is available to me.”

I felt foolish, and then angry, though I certainly didn’t express it. Of the many psychotherapists I’ve seen, only around a quarter have said anything of real value, something that’s stuck with me. I’ve told you about the little Turkish one’s perception that my being hard on myself was wrong not on moral grounds, but on practical ones. Well, years before, one of her many predecessors, in response to my musing that it was stupid for me to feel as I did about something, gently pointed out that our feelings are neither wise nor stupid on their own. They are what they are, and the stupid thing is to try to deny them. None of us is in another’s skin, so how can one person tell another whose pain is the greater? (Yes, yes, I know. All this goes out the window when, for instance, one hears a teenager who hasn’t the most rudimentary conception of how good she has it whining because she hasn’t been given the money to buy these designer jeans or, slightly later, that car. The rule clearly applies only to fully formed adults.)

On the one hand, my coming to confront my own cowardice after the Montgomery High School game did indeed seem pretty trivial in comparison to Mrs. Cavanaugh’s husband hanging himself in part because he’d sensed her infidelity. But on the other, how was it her place to judge?

“You remind me somehow of Serge,” she said. “Obviously you’re much older than he was at the time, but I sense a real kinship. I know you think of yourself as grotesque, just as he did.” She waited for affirmation, but I was too busy sulking about her adjudging my pain as inadequate to give it to her. “One of the most beautiful men I’ve ever laid eyes on, with the longest eyelashes in the world, and he thought himself so ugly that he had to quit the job at the newsagent’s. He couldn’t bear the thought of anyone seeing him. That’s one of the reasons it was possible for us to be so discreet. And I sense a lot of that in you, Mr. Herskovits.”

I wasn’t sure I knew where this was going. I wasn’t sure I was enjoying my uncertainty. “It’s more than four years since I’ve been with a fellow,” she said. “But I do miss it sometimes, the feel of a fellow’s hands on my thighs and breasts. And I deserve it, Mr. Herskovits. I do. I work harder than any woman I know. And I’m not
ancient, not by any means. Not yet 52. Younger than yourself by a bit, I suspect.”

I had a pretty clear idea of where it was going now, as she winked, and boy, did I not want it to go there. She was indeed pretty well preserved, and she was indeed a few years younger than I, so it was insane but I thought of her as a mother figure. If she wasn’t the last person on earth I’d want to interact with erotically, she was certainly near the very top of the list of people I knew.

She seemed to be reading my thoughts. “I suspect you’ve never viewed me as a prospective lover. I suspect, in fact, that you think of me as somehow maternal, since it’s my house you live in. Well, I came prepared. I chose what I’m wearing under this mac to help you see me in a whole new light.” She reached for her top button. She unbuttoned it. I felt as though I was in one of those nightmares involving sudden incapacitation of the voicebox. I wanted to shout, “No!” but was silent.

She unbuttoned a second button. “‘The thought of you sends me shivery,’” she said. “‘I’m dressed in lace, sailing down a black reverie.’ Do you recognise that, Mr. Herskovits?”

Of course I did. From
The Kick Inside
’s ‘L’Amour Looks A Lot Like You’, which I suddenly realised I might not have appreciated to the full.

A third button. It was actually quite sexy how she was doing it, so very, very deliberately, and accompanied by a look on her face that seemed to dare me to stop her. A fourth button. And then a respite from buttons, a gentle pulling apart of the part of the mac she’d liberated. Black lace beneath it. A fifth button. No mere black lace brassiere, but a corset. And how gorgeous her breasts looked, bulging.

She got to her feet and began, with the utmost deliberateness, to undo the mac’s belt, only to stop before she’d accomplished it. The tip of her tongue between her lips: a brief appearance. “I could stop at any second, you know,” she taunted, her voice huskier than I’d ever heard it. “All you have to do is say the word.” But her eyes said, “Just try to get me to stop.”

I was quite beyond rational thought by this time, what with every spare molecule of blood in my immense body having rushed with police escort to the telephone pole between my legs. She stepped towards me, just out of my reach. She smelled like every fantasy of my teens and early twenties, of the time of my most rapacious virility, somehow transformed into an odour. I was a page in a book on the Large Print shelf in the library to her. I reached for her. She stepped backwards. “Just drink it in,” she said. My hand came down. She stepped nearer again. I breathed in deeply through my nose, and then
again. “I’m fed up with having to do all the unbuttoning,” she said, not a fraction of 52 now, but a 24-year-old coquette. “Why don’t you do a couple.” She laughed at the trembling of my hands, her laughter the auditory equivalent of her smell. Large Print.