Whistling for the Elephants (2 page)

Our other
moment of closeness came every night after supper. We played bridge in the
library with some cheerful octogenarians in evening wear. It was the only time
I think Mother found me useful. She could never be bothered to remember what
cards had been played. I usually bid rather wildly so that Mother was assured
of being dummy. She liked the shuffling and the dealing of the cards because
she thought it showed off her long fingers. After that she much preferred to
lay her hand down and just pretend to watch while she sipped Brandy Alexanders.

‘Oh,
Dorothy has such a good brain, clever, numbers, et cetera. I’ll leave it to …
her,’ she would announce, smiling as if genuinely pleased.

Nothing
stopped the elegant routine of those lazy days. At least it shouldn’t have. I
don’t know what caused more stress to Mother that trip — the talent contest, my
hair or the hurricane.

I
signed up for the talent contest in secret. Before the New York posting we had
been about five months in Paris. Usually Father’s postings involved some nod
towards my continuing education, but I don’t remember even an attempt at school
there. The only concession had been a Mine Henri who had provided pianoforte
lessons on a Thursday afternoon while Mother rested. (Thursday lunchtime was
the weekly gathering of the Parisian International Ladies Lifeboat Association
and she was always exhausted.) Mine Henri and I had worked rather hard at what
I now realize was a simplified and possibly repetitive version of Beethoven’s
The
Bells.
I thought it sounded wonderful. My new notion was that I was
actually a child prodigy whose talents had inexplicably been overlooked. I was
ready to sweep everyone away with my bit of Beethoven and the boat talent
contest was, I knew, the place to do it. Mother had never heard my musical
expertise and I thought to surprise her. I suppose in a way I did. We had gone
to the lounge to watch the show and Mother had joined the captain and a group
of socialites for coffee. She gave the tiniest murmur when my name was called and
for a brief moment I swelled with pride at her unaccustomed full attention as I
marched to the piano. I sat down and prepared myself My hands went to the
keyboard and I began. My left hand carefully pounded up and down on the same
two notes for the one-minute duration of the piece while the right plodded out
something close to the tune. When I had finished there was complete silence.
So, rather carried away, I played it all again. There was an even deeper
silence when I had finished but I feigned exhaustion and left my instrument.
Mother never opened her eyes once as I walked back across the dance floor to
some belated but kind applause.

Had I
been older I would have realized that I never had a chance. The prize was
easily swept away by a man who did impersonations of World War Two bombers
using only his tongue, a paper cup and a great deal of microphone technique.
As the only entrant under forty, I got a consolation voucher to spend on board
in the establishment of my choice. Mother never said a word but I knew I had
let her down. Perhaps she too had expected that I was about to reveal a light
under my rather ample bushel. I don’t know which of us was the more
disappointed. I should have been brilliant and I wasn’t. I was just a kid. A
regular kid. Mother went straight to bed. The next morning she didn’t even
want the newspaper read out. I wandered down to the Commodore deck a failure.

The
Commodore deck was home to, amongst other amenities, the barber’s shop. It had
the most lovely smell outside it. I suppose it must have been bay rum or something.
Men came and went in the big red leather chairs. It looked so comforting. Great
hot towels gently wrapping their faces. A bit of jovial chat with the man in
the white coat, who snipped away with hardly any hair falling on the floor at
all. I had been to the ladies’ hairdresser with Mother and that was quite
different. All rather shrill. Lots of bright pink bottles of things, hundreds
of little stabby hairpins and everything happening at too high an octave. The
barber’s looked and smelled more like Christmas. I stood there for about an
hour looking in the window and watching customers come and go. After a while
the place emptied as everyone went to change for something. There was always
something to change for. The barber came out into the corridor in his white
coat and shook a small towel in the air. He was about to go back in when I
surprised myself.

‘I’ve
got a voucher,’ I said. He looked at me as I produced the talent-contest
voucher from my blazer pocket. ‘Can I have a haircut?’

‘What’s
your name?’ he asked.

‘Dorothy.’

‘Well,
Dorothy, I don’t really do little girls. You need to go with your mother to see
Mrs Harton down the hall at the ladies’ salon.’

‘But I
want you to do it.’

‘What
sort of haircut?’

I wanted
to say ‘like a spy’ but I knew that involved having a moustache as well so I
said, ‘A boy’s one.’

He
shrugged. ‘Okay, it’s your money.’ And he did it. It seems odd now. Maybe he
was sick of rich people and didn’t care any more. A short haircut. A really short
haircut. I didn’t have the hot towel on account of not having a moustache, but
otherwise it was wonderful. When he had finished I looked in the mirror and for
the first time in my life I saw myself. An absurdly small, slightly freckled
child with short red hair, now swept into a neat side parting. A young snake
released from a confining skin.

The
hurricane occurred that night and I remember feeling that somehow it was my
fault. Had I known about Shakespearean portents in the weather then I would
have been sure that my Samson-like shearing had angered the elements. I don’t
know why we didn’t avoid the storm but we didn’t. We steamed straight into the
worst of it. The weather meant Mother didn’t emerge for supper so I hadn’t seen
her between the haircut and going to bed. I awoke in my cabin to find a heavy
blue-leather-and-mahogany chair walking slowly by itself across the room
towards my bunk. Outside the porthole the sky had disappeared and been
replaced entirely by sea. I wasn’t a child given to panic but this didn’t seem
right. I crawled off my bed and had to clamber uphill to Mother’s room. In my
hurry I quite forgot my cap. All the pillows from her bed had slipped and she
was now lying quite comfortably on what had previously been the wall. She was
doing her nails and didn’t look up as I came in.

‘All
right, darling? I didn’t want to wake you, et cetera,’ she said against the
rasp of her file.

‘I
think we’re on our side,’ I said, looking at yet more water beyond Mother’s
window. Mother looked at the window.

‘That
can’t be right, darling. Aaagh!’ Mother fell back into almost a dead faint on
the pillows.

‘It’s
all right, Mother. I don’t think we’ll drown. We’ve been on our side for some
time.

‘Dear
God, what will your father say?’ I couldn’t think what Father would say if we
drowned. Something appropriate.

‘I
expect he’d have a word with the shipping company,’ I replied.

‘Oh
darling, how could you? Your beautiful hair.’ Mother began to weep. In the face
of a potentially watery grave only my appearance was causing my mother grief I
looked out of the porthole. Under the strain of the storm, the ancient
stabilizers of the
Hallensfjord
had simply given way and we were, to put
it mildly, listing. The Atlantic wind continued to whistle outside. Mother,
unable to face anyone with me by her side, went back to sleep and I went to
have a look. There was no danger of sinking and no one seemed in the least bit
distressed. At least no one in first class. They had paid far too much money to
do anything as undignified as drowning. A rope had been strung up in the
ballroom to assist passengers with cabins on the raised side of the vessel to
get to them. I spent some time with a Polish waiter hauling myself to the top
of the shiny wooden floor and then sliding swiftly down to the other end. The
only person I remember being at all put out was the chef He sat drinking gin in
the Polar Room and weeping and weeping.

‘My
kitchen is ruined. I can do nothing for you. Steaks and lobsters. I am reduced
to steaks and lobsters.’

‘Nonsense,’
said one of my octogenarians. ‘We don’t mind one bit. Come on. Chin up, man.’

Everyone
was most sympathetic but there was an underlying sense that the chef was
behaving rather badly. It was far too much emotion, even for a person allowed
to be ‘creative’. I think some attempt was made at a lifeboat drill in the
Columbus Bar but Mother refused to go. She said her nails weren’t dry yet and
anyway what shoes could she possibly wear at this angle?, but I knew she didn’t
want to be seen with me. Mother liked the idea of lifeboats. She had raised
money for them even when we lived in landlocked countries.

Everything
was like a strange
Alice in Wonderland
dream. The library tables stood
all askew. People picked a spot to walk to and then sort of fell towards it.
That evening, in full dinner dress under large orange life-jackets, my
octogenarians and I played gin rummy on the floor. As I was going to bed I met
my Polish waiter in a corridor on the Boat deck. He was trying to push open the
door to the wooden deck outside. I don’t know why. There was no job to do out
there. No one had had a drink on deck all day. He pushed at the door but the
wind was too fierce. At last he managed it and the heavy door almost ripped
from his hands as he flung himself outside. It was utterly foolish but I
followed. The storm was blowing itself out but the wind didn’t want to let go
of the boat. The waiter turned his face to the blast and then slowly put his
hands up as if arrested. He smiled as he leaned his whole body forward at an
angle and began doing press-ups against the wind. It was so strong it held him
easily. I struggled to his side and put my hands up in a great act of faith. We
did press-ups on the wind and I wanted that. I wanted that feeling all my life.

Father was waiting for us
at Pier 96 when we docked. We saw him from quite a long way off, like a patient
fly waiting on a great wooden arm. I don’t know what to say about Father. I
didn’t know him that well. I suppose a lot of people have never seen their
father naked; I had never seen mine without a tie. We could see him from the
embarkation deck. An immaculate, entirely white-haired head. His back ramrod
straight and his collar so tight that he constantly twitched his head sideways
to relieve the pressure. He saw us but he didn’t shout. He never shouted. A
cricket ball with an unlucky bounce had once hit him in the throat at school
and I never heard him speak above a whisper. He didn’t need to be any louder.
You always knew where you were with Father. He was a man of few but clear
notions in life. They were mostly to do with men:

Manners
maketh man

Coloured
shirts on a man are a sure sign of

homosexuality
and

Never
trust a man in a ready-made bow tie.

Ex-Army,
he had a surprising amount of chin for an Englishman and rather more hair than
must have been thought sensible in the mess. He had not been ‘fast track’
enough for the services and they had tipped him out as major, fit for nothing
except to be in charge. After a comfortable and extended bachelorhood, at the
age of forty-five he had made up his mind to marry and picked the first
attractive woman who came along. Twenty years younger than him, Mother had
rather shocked him by producing two children. I don’t know what he thought
about fatherhood except that it was an awkward announcement to make at his
club.

After
the Army, Father travelled with the Foreign Office. I’m not entirely sure what
he did. I desperately wanted him to be a spy but in my heart I knew he wasn’t.
His shoes were too squeaky and he was clean-shaven. I think he was something to
do with protocol. It was both his business and his passion to know exactly how
one ought to behave in any given situation.

‘Hello,
my dear.’ He patted me on the back and kissed Mother politely on a proffered
cheek. ‘No trouble, I hope?’

We were
three days late. Mother dismissed it with her hand and frowned at the customs
officer examining her lingerie.

‘Hey,
lady, whatja got here?’ the Bronx officer shouted, holding up an intimate item.
The family shuddered. We were not ready for New York.

I didn’t
know why but Father had done a very strange thing. We had had many postings and
had lived in one city-centre flat after another. This time, he had rented us a
house. Not just any house but one outside the city. The sort of place that
families actually lived in. With a garden. I suppose it should have been the
first hint that things weren’t quite right. Now that I think about it,
certainly it was a place where no one Father knew would ever bump into Mother
by chance. It was a hideaway but I didn’t take it as that. I was too excited. I
had also fallen in love with Father’s car. A station wagon. I had never heard
of such a thing. Powder blue and unbelievably long. Longer than necessary for
any conceivable car purpose. A huge, pointy, chrome-covered, road-eating
monster. It was too big to be just for business. It was a family car. Our first
family car.

‘It’s a
Pontiac,’ whispered Father.

I kept
saying the word over and over to myself like a kind of mantra. ‘Pontiac,
Pontiac, Pontiac.’ We headed off on the expressway. ‘Pontiac, Pontiac, Pontiac,’
all the way upstate, about fifty miles to Sassaspaneck. I didn’t know I was
going home. Pontiac. Pontiac.