Waiting for Kate Bush (35 page)

It took her a long time to answer. “I’d have thought,” she finally said, “that you’d be quite pleased to see me in anything I chose to wear, and quite possibly even grateful.”

My inner four-year-old had hold of the steering wheel. Anyone with any sense would have pulled to the side of the road, set the handbrake, and run for cover. “Because I’m fat?” I demanded. “Because I’m fat I’m supposed to feel grateful for the attention of a 52-year-old Irish boarding house keeper? Well, I’m not that fat.”

“You’re not fat at all, in fact, except in your mind. You’re actually very attractive, but not nearly so attractive to warrant an attitude like that. If I’m a 52-year-old Irish boarding house keeper, what are you, a 54-year-old Yank expat nutter with body dysmorphia and no visible means of support?”

“Get out!” the four-year-old screamed, or at least croaked.

“I won’t,” she said, “not until I’ve spoken my piece. And don’t forget who owns the bloody house, you.

“Do you honestly imagine it’s me who’s getting the long end of the stick here? Well, think again. I know you used to be in adverts, and that you were fantastically pretty. As I said, you’re still very attractive, and not just for a man your age – for any man, full stop. But who do I look like to you? Do you think the boys weren’t after me from the age of 14? Do you know that when I was 23 both
Mayfair
and
Penthouse
wanted me to pose for them? And
Mayfair
wasn’t rubbish then like it is now. It was upmarket in those days, a gentleman’s magazine, rather than a lad’s.”

There’d been a time when Kate was thought to have posed for
Penthouse
– Kate who, in the early years of her fame, had always seemed deeply discomfited to be described as sexy. It had actually been another dark-haired Kate, Kate Simmons, in the photos, but that hadn’t kept a succession of lowlifes from using the
Penthouse
photos on the covers of various Kate Bush bootleg albums over the years.

“And what about after my Roger topped himself?” Mrs. Cavanaugh continued. “Do you suppose I wasn’t being asked out by two pop stars you’ve probably heard of, though who can be sure which stuff of the Brits’ you got in the States, and a footballer, a striker in the Premiership, who girls were flinging themselves at? Do you suppose that even now I can go to bloody Sainsbury’s without some fine bit of stuff asking for my phone number? Open your eyes, you! Open ’em up!”

“You’re 52 years old,” I reminded her, even though I knew I’d already lost, even though I’d much sooner she’d savagely ripped my clothes off and ravaged me. “In our culture, a 54-year-old man’s got more sexual capital than a 52-year-old woman, or a 40-year-old woman, probably. How old is Robert de Niro? Al Pacino? Stallone? Richard Gere? Or Sean fucking Connery, for that matter? And they’re all still huge stars! Tell me a woman their age who’s paid a quarter what they’re paid. Go ahead!”

“I will not have that language in my house!” she said, jumping to her feet, even her hair on fire. “And what was the last big hit Sylvester bloody Stallone was in?”

It occurred to me that
Rambo
had been 20 years ago. How time flies when you’re having fun, and when you’re not!
“Rocky,”
I blurted, ridiculously.

“Rocky!” she howled. “Duncan was still a sprog when
Rocky
was out, you arrogant, egotistical gowl!”

“Not the original!” I said. “The latest sequel.
Rocky 27
. It set box-office records. They had to have mounted policemen to control the crowds.”

She glared at me scorchingly, and glared at me scorchingly, and glared at me … and exploded, as I did too, in laughter. Oh, we screamed, but that was only at the beginning. In a wink, we were both laughing so hard that we were silent except for occasional shrieking intakes of air. Between us, we could have floated a toy boat with our tears.

Mr. Chumaraswamy tapped in annoyance on his ceiling, my floor. “Maybe,” I managed, “you ought to get down there and see if he needs some more sympathy.” Which struck both of us as the funniest thing ever said in English.

There was no staying on the bed. We were both on the floor, rolling across it, pounding it. Poor Mr. Chumaraswamy tapped again, louder. We both pounded back, which got us laughing even harder. I was quite sure I was going to split open. Mr. Chumaraswamy hadn’t made a fortune in IT consultancy by fighting unwinnable battles. He tapped no more.

We finally regained control of ourselves. There was no trace of sexual tension between us now. It felt as though we’d turned onto a new motorway or something. I wasn’t entirely sure I was pleased.

“I haven’t just been sympathising with Mr. Chumaraswamy,” she said. “I think it’s time you knew that.” I couldn’t have spoken if I’d wanted to. “I’ve always quite fancied Asians,” she sighed. “They’re remarkable lovers, as you might hope that those born into the culture that gave us the
Kama Sutra
would be. But Seetharaman isn’t like the others I’ve had.”

I didn’t want to know. I passionately didn’t want to know. “How
could
you?” I finally managed.

“It’s always been the one thing with you, Mr. Herskovits. But nobody’s all dominant or all submissive, except maybe those shaven-headed macho types you see in the contact magazines, the ones who probably think if they admitted to fancying a bit of subjugation now and again, everyone would infer they’re queer. Dominance and submission are two movements of the same muscle. And dominant is all I ever get to be with you. That leaves a whole half of me unfulfilled.”

I could feel my own nostrils flaring. “Let me get this straight. Mr. Chumaraswamy from downstairs, Mr. Chumaraswamy, who might be the only person in the world who regards
Lionheart
as Kate’s best album, dominates you.” I pulled a face to express my incredulity.

“It so happens that he does, and let’s hope your puss doesn’t freeze like that. Dominating isn’t about being tall and fit, or wearing a black leather waistcoat with nothing underneath so your tattoos show. It’s about understanding how exactly those things that are most repugnant to a woman in an everyday setting can be fantastically exciting in an erotic one.”

I didn’t know what she meant. “Being ordered about,” she said. “Being treated like an accessory, a plaything. If somebody tried to do that in the real world, I’d bloody his nose for him. But in the bedroom, there’s something exhilarating about having no control. As I’d hope you, of all people, would understand.”

“You and Mr. Chumaraswamy. You and … Seetharaman.”

“It’s unbecoming for you to be so petulant, Mr. Herskovits. I don’t
remember either of us promising the other exclusivity.”

I was doing the sums in my head. How could I take any pride at all in having as a lover the same woman Seetharaman bloody Chumaraswamy downstairs had? The longer I thought about it, the more mortified I became. And while I was becoming mortified, here came my inner four-year-old again, screaming for vengeance.

“We didn’t,” I agreed. “I’ve been seeing someone else too, you know.”

“Bollocks,” she said. “I’d have known. I’d have sensed it.”

I shrugged. I felt pretty suave, shrugging.

“Anybody I’d know, assuming, just for the sake of conversation, that I believe you?”

“Oh, I don’t think you’d know her,” I said, examining my own ravaged fingernails, the very picture of nonchalance. “She’s very much younger, you see. In her twenties.” I was almost tempted to whistle.

“Sorry,” she said. “That one won’t work with me. Age is a chronological accident. It makes no sense at all to envy someone because she’s younger than you.”

“Of course it does. Younger people are prettier, and have greater vitality.”

“Younger people have less life experience, and only a very rudimentary sense, in most cases, of their own absurdity. Not being able to talk to them is a pretty high price to pay for their being a little more energetic and a lot less prone to complaining about the pain in their joints.”

I felt ashamed of myself for never having realised how clever Mrs. Cavanaugh was, or how droll. But it wasn’t the time to say that, and she didn’t give me the chance anyway. “When you see some film star marry somebody 25 years younger, doesn’t it make your flesh crawl? It does mine. You just know somebody like Demi Moore thinks a young actor’s interest affirms her youthfulness, but all it really affirms is that he finds wealth and fame sexy. Well, that’s front-page news, isn’t it?
Wealth and fame make one attractive to the opposite sex shock horror!
And it isn’t even filmstars. They’re just the ones you hear about. What about all the middle-aged entrepreneurs and captains of industry with their trophy wives? That’s as sickening as somebody driving around sneering in a flash car, imagining that the car’s seen as a manifestation of his virility. As I said, it makes my flesh crawl.”

“She isn’t only younger,” I said, retreating onto ground that felt pretty mushy underfoot. “She’s fantastically pretty as well. She walks into rooms and conversations stop.”

She shrugged. “A woman in her twenties being fantastically pretty doesn’t impress me so much anymore. It’s mostly to do with luck at that age, isn’t it? Show me a woman who looks really good after 45 and I’ll be impressed because she’ll have looked after herself. And to a great extent, the kind of person she is will show in her face.”

I thought, of course, of Kate. As much as I’d loved her music from first hearing, I’d never lusted after her. Going on the basis of the photographs of her taken at the
Q
Awards and at Rolf Harris’s birthday party, she was actually much more attractive at 45 than at the time of her emergence, when her nipple on the front of buses caused the virtual collapse of the London public transport system. In her twenties, she’d seemed forever to be pulling faces, daring us to like her. At 45, she seemed serene, comfortable with herself. At 54, I found that extremely sexy.

“How’s the lovemaking?” Mrs. Cavanaugh asked, bringing me back to the here-and-now. Her handsome face was remarkably blank, free of either hurt or insinuation.

I couldn’t get traction on the mushy ground. The harder I tried to run, the deeper I sank. I thought of saying something about how soft the skin of a woman in her twenties was, or even how firm her breasts, but there are depths to which even I won’t sink. “Really good,” I finally said. “Fantastic, really.”

“So in other words you haven’t actually been lovers.” I hadn’t spoken of Nicola’s soft skin, and Mrs. Cavanaugh wasn’t smirking. Even completely unclothed while making love, I’d never felt so naked with her. I realised we were actually being quite gentle with one another. I thought of trying to scoff at her perception, but couldn’t manage it. At the same time, though, I was able to keep myself from affirming her impression. I left it at a shrug.

She got up. We’d been gentle with one another, but there was no question that she was hurt. “Well,” she said, “I suppose I’ll see you at breakfast in the morning.” She went to the door.

“Aibheann,” I said. “Wait.”

I’d have given anything at that moment not to have her looking at me as she was. She shook her finger at me. “No,” she said. “Aibheann’s not for you.”

* * *

Kate had come, when interviewed about
Hounds Of Love
, to find promoting her work more and more onerous. In her studio, she worked in virtual isolation. There being no window, as in nearly all recording
facilities, between studio and control room, she communicated with the faithful Del or whoever else was pressing the Record and Stop buttons as one whose children had emigrated to Tasmania would have, solely by voice. But then, after months of that virtual seclusion, when the album was finally complete, she was expected to traipse blithely into roomfuls of people, all of them gaping at her adoringly (or otherwise). A frightful shock to the system!

Little wonder she decided to stay well out of the public eye for a long while after
Hounds
, to spend quiet time at home thinking about what she wanted to say next. She dashed off a few songs, only to realise she wasn’t happy with them. Thinking that her gift was depleted, that she hadn’t anything interesting to say anymore, she did as Peter Gabriel had done years before after leaving the group with which he first came to fame – devoted herself to gardening.

Backed by Michael Kamen conducting the National Philharmonic Orchestra of London, she recorded a version of the title song for Terry Gilliam’s film
Brazil
, singing it sufficiently gorgeously to crush the lilies in one’s soul. Hearing her at such times, one wished fervently that she’d bring the same understated dignity to her own stuff.

Across the Atlantic, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard senior Alek Kershishian, years away from the ignominy of directing
Madonna: Truth Or Dare
, was spending $2,000 of his own money to produce a rock opera inspired by and entitled
Wuthering Heights
. As re-imagined by Kershishian for his senior thesis, Cathy and Heathcliff leave the moors for the big city and become … Madonna and Billy Idol. What many people who attended the show, staged at the American Repertory Theater, liked best about it was hearing Kate’s music at a very high volume.

EMI realised it might be waiting quite a long time for her next album, and put together a compilation,
The Whole Story
, which it convinced the man on the Clapham omnibus he needed via the most expensive TV advertising campaign in EMI history to that point. Encouraged by the project’s success, they hurriedly compiled Kate’s video performances as well. Though she was thought initially to have been afraid that the whole thing smacked of the same sort of exploitation, she wrote a new song about a dastardly scientific misuse of music, ‘Experiment IV’, and shot an elaborate B-movie film to promote it in an old military hospital designed by Florence Nightingale. She gamely wore a life-size cast made for her by Image Animation to portray The Thing. There was some disgruntlement among Katefans about how little time she appeared on screen as herself.

When she ventured conspicuously out into the world, it was almost invariably on behalf of Good Causes. She sang ‘Running Up That Hill’ and ‘Let It Be’ with David Gilmour at Amnesty International’s
The Secret Policeman’s Third Ball
. After shooting the video (shown first with Nora Ephron’s
Heartburn)
for her song ‘Experiment IV’, she and her family attended a party in her honour hosted by the
Homeground
fanzine, imagining she’d be able to have a nice meal before doing a bit of mingling. She was instead swamped by those who adored her. It gave a girl second thoughts about going out.