I recognise her right away – Debbie Ansell, the US President’s middle daughter. How much younger she looks, I think as she runs across the terrace and leans over the parapet, than our home-grown ten-year-olds. The pink knee-length frock and white ankle socks are so 1970s. My childhood era, not hers.
Intrigued, I set aside my laptop and climb off the bed. Intrigued too because my online horoscope – not that I believe a word of it – said today’s lucky colour was pink. I naturally thought ‘Financial Times’, though I don’t need luck when it comes to making money.
I slip into my Donna Karan robe, avoiding my reflection in the 19th century gilded French dressing-mirror. Not because of face or figure hang-ups – both still good for a woman in her late thirties – but because I’ve had another sleepless night and know I look like shit. If things don’t get back to normal soon, I’ll have to resort to sleeping pills.
I pad across the carpet to the wall of glass dividing my bedroom from the terrace and slide open the door. Debbie Ansell’s long straight hair, similar to my own, flutters in the breeze like a tattered platinum pennant in the deep blue Cornish sky. The opposite of Meggie who’s grown Ethan’s dark curls.
Gus Ansell’s brought his entire family this time. They’re staying at the PM’s Cornish residence half-a-mile away, and it seems Debbie’s doing some solo exploring. I banned all visitors when their sympathy – or, in some instances, veiled accusations – became unbearable, so she’s the first person I’ve seen in weeks, apart from Elena, my cleaner.
Unaware of my presence, and before I can gather my wits, the child unbuckles her sandals and climbs on the parapet and jumps.
Cursing the lunatic inventors of tombstoning, I fly across the terrace, my heart revving up so fast that the subsequent rush of blood to the head makes me fall to my knees and slump hard across the parapet with an involuntary oof! The pink bundle hurtles downwards, missing the first outcrop of rock by mere inches. Unless a gust of wind catches her just right, there’s no way she’ll reach the relative safety of the sea. Down, down she goes, arms outstretched now like some exotic bird. As I frantically pray, to a God I’ve never believed in any more than I believe in astrology, Debbie Ansell hits the rocks at the base of the cliff.
The sea heaves and crashes only feet from her, depositing white tentacles of foam. Seagulls and guillemots screech and wheel above the grey-blue water. Out to sea, a fishing-boat lies at anchor, its occupants blissfully ignorant of the catastrophe I’ve witnessed.
Becoming aware of the parapet digging into my hips – and of my precarious position – I ease myself back, gasping for breath. A fist of pain rises from my stomach to my throat and I throw up on the terrace.
When the heaving subsides, I sit by the stinking mess and weep, for the first time in my entire adult life.
The robe exchanged for jeans and camisole from Stella McCartney’s latest collection (the jeans sandpapering my grazed knees at every step), I pound across the fields towards Hilltop Manor, the PM’s summer residence, stampeding a herd of Simmental cattle en route. I top the penultimate slope and a black track-suited figure steps into my path. His matching cap bears the letters PMPS. The PM’s personal security. The Acid Drop tang of his aftershave hangs between us like a barbed-wire fence.
“Sorry, Miss, you can’t go any further. This is private property.”
It is, but I power walk here twice a week without seeing a soul. Something’s up.
“I have to see the President. It’s about his—”
“I’m sorry, but you’ll have to go back. This is private property.”
A parrot. Great. Before I can scream, another black tracksuit appears. “Everything okay, Mike?”
Mike the parrot shifts to accommodate his colleague and I see what’s going on at the bottom of the hill: people relaxing in the shade of a stand of willows beside the stream; picnic hampers and tartan rugs spread out on the buttercupped grass. More black tracksuits roam the slope beyond, between the willows and the dense conifers that mark the Hilltop Manor boundary proper. While children strip down to bathing suits, a familiar figure rises to his feet from a folding chair and stares in our direction.
“Look,” I say, hands on hips, “I have to speak with the President. I know he’s down there, so don’t tell me he isn’t. His daughter’s hurt, maybe even—”
“His daughter?” A flash of interest crosses the parrot’s features. “You mean Debbie?” He glances at his colleague, who shoots him a warning look.
Seeing the PM and the President striding up the slope, I try to dart past the tracksuits, but they’ve grasped my arms almost before I can think about it. “Mr Ansell!” I yell, struggling to free myself. “I have to talk with you! It’s really important!”
The two world leaders stop a short distance away. “What,” calls Gus Ansell, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth, “could possibly be that important on a fabulous day like today?”
“Your daughter – Debbie. She’s had an accident.”
“An accident?” He looks back down the slope. “But she’s down there, with the rest of them.” He peers over his shades. “Where the heck is that girl…? Hey, Sally! You seen Debbie anywhere?”
Setting down the largest wine-glass I’ve ever seen – making the bottle look redundant – Sally Ansell gets unsteadily to her feet. (There’ve been rumours about her drinking; rumours the White House is continually denying.) Others, the PM’s wife included, half-rise from their own seats, then sit back down when, presumably, they’re assured of Sally Ansell’s physical stability.
She takes a step or two and, with meerkat-like bobbing, checks the identities of the children playing in and around the stream. “Not here,” she calls. “Gone for a walk, I guess. You know what she’s—”
Her bare foot’s tangles with a picnic rug and she crumples like an imploding 60s tower block. People leap up to assist.
Gus Ansell turns and scrutinises me, then mutters something to the PM.
“Frisk her,” orders the PM. “If she’s clean, let her through.”
I’m back home twenty-five minutes later. Half the world, including me, fell for Gus Ansell’s apparent devotion to his family (not to mention his movie star looks) but we’ve been well and truly fooled. Emergency calls made, he took me aside and asked if I was interested in going with him to Hilltop Manor, ‘for a little light relief after all the excitement.’ I stared at him aghast. “Your daughter’s injured, maybe dead, and all you can think about is sex?” “Honey,” he said, his arm snaking around my waist, his gaze slithering into my cleavage, “Debbie’ll be just fine. She’s always pulling stunts like this. She must have broken just about every bone in her body.”
If it’s true, the White House has somehow managed to keep it from the media. It’s the first I’ve heard of it, and I read all the news online every morning, national and international, before plunging into the world’s stock markets for the day, and (as Ethan gave up pointing out years ago) a good part of the night.
I run down the steps to the boathouse, pausing briefly outside the picture window of Ethan’s empty studio. He’s taken everything; not even a paint-hardened brush remains. He even took the self-portrait I love. The dark curls tumbling over his forehead look so realistic I once found myself reaching up to run my fingers through them.
It strikes me then that I can’t remember when I last did that for real.
The dinghy’s motor fires up first time. I roar out of the boathouse and round the cliff to find they’ve got there before me. An unmarked cruiser staffed with US Navy personnel rides the Atlantic swell close to the rocks where Debbie Ansell lies. Each time the dinghy tops a wave, sunlight glints off the silver emergency blanket covering her, momentarily blinding me. A figure sits beside her, a medic I suppose, arms resting on his knees, head bowed. A scene of unexpected inactivity.
“Hallo there! Permission to come alongside?”
One of the sailors, a woman, leans over the side with a loudhailer. “Move away. This is a US Navy operation.”
I steer the dinghy a little closer. “I’m Chelsea Drummond! I alerted the President! How is she? Please, I need to know.”
A few others have joined her and are looking at me – and the bloody stains on the legs of my jeans – with interest. I suddenly know how it feels to be a zoo exhibit.
Now I’m almost alongside, she lowers the redundant loudhailer. “So you’re the one who saw her jump? Well, I can tell you she’s alive, but barely. Looks like she might just get her wish this time.”
My mind goes blank for a moment. Then, as the meaning of her words sidles in, I feel as if I’m being lowered feet-first into ice-cold water. “No.” I shake my head, incredulous. “No, it wasn’t like that at all.”
“So.” The pause stretches out between us. “How was it, then?”
Looking up at the faces staring down at me, I’m almost sure I see group accusation. Do they think now that I pushed her?
An inexplicable feeling of guilt rushes through me like an Atlantic roller. “They call it tombstoning here,” I say, trying to keep my voice steady in the unexpected onslaught. “She must have heard about it and decided to try it. She missed the water, that’s all. I mean, for God’s sake, she’s only ten. What could be so bad that she’d…” I trail off, not wanting to voice the words. And, my encounter with her parents fresh in my mind, suspecting it might be true after all.
“You’ll have to leave.” Her face is unreadable now; they all are. “The rescue copter’s almost here.” She gives a dismissive nod but continues to stand there, her free hand gripping the side of the cruiser.
I feel her eyes boring into me all the way back to the boathouse. A voice, maybe hers, whispers in my ear, disrupting my critical thoughts: Whoa, lady. Who the hell are you to judge?
I swallow a second mouthful of sticky-sweet Cointreau. Its orange-peel warmth spreads through my body from the inside out and I begin my pacing again, scarcely aware of the urgent bleeping of stock price alerts, of money made and lost.
Neglect. That’s what Ethan accused me of. The shock of that word, ugly with its hard consonants (and completely unfair, I yelled at him), was enormous. But bigger still was the shock of Meggie saying, yes, she wanted to be with her daddy; wanted to live with him in his new studio in Penzance. She didn’t even say goodbye. Her aloofness alarmed me at first. It seemed so unnatural for an eight-year-old; so unnatural for a child I’d given birth to. And so damned ungrateful! Then, a day or so later, I told myself she’d come around. And so would Ethan. We were good together once.
Blinking hard, I set the half-empty glass down on my desk. The helicopters arrive; two, I think. The whup whup of rotor blades thuds through the office ceiling, causing the Baccarat chandelier to sway and tinkle. Whup whup whup. Perhaps they’ve come for me as well as Debbie Ansell.
I kick off my Gucci sneakers and undress, wincing as I peel the jeans from my wounded knees. Naked, I walk past the flashing, bleeping monitors and out onto the terrace, to watch the rescue of the President’s middle daughter, praying it’s not too late.
****************************
Sophie had just discovered a new word: pomposity. She liked words like that, words that tripped melodiously off the tongue and gave the impression of, well, pomposity. And now, here was its perfect application - the Headmaster’s farewell assembly for the Year 11 leavers.
“Follow your dreams,” he proclaimed, clutching his jacket lapels and staring dreamily into the mid-distance. “Set your sights on your goals, set them high and, with circumspect but single-minded determination, go for them. Seize the moment, seize the opportunities that changing circumstances bring, seize on to the unmistakable inner stirrings of your heart.”
Come again? thought Sophie.
“Wanker,” muttered the girl sitting next to her.
“Whatever aims and aspirations you might have,” concluded the Headmaster, “go for them with the utmost zeal and panache.”
Nice words, thought Sophie. Zeal. Panache. She mouthed them to herself, relishing their inner sound.
“Prick,” muttered the girl sitting next to her.
And then... school was out. It was hardly the euphoria and celebration of that last scene in Grease. Some of the lads ripped off their ties and ceremoniously shredded them with scissors. Some of the girls defiantly lit up fags before they were even out of the school gates. There were a few cheers, plenty of hugs, one or two tears. Sophie wandered home alone, feeling the novelty of her new found freedom more as an unwanted responsibility than a blessing, another chain rather than a release.
The trouble was, she thought as she pondered the Headmaster’s pompous words, she didn’t have any dreams or goals. Or rather, for she was essentially a pragmatic girl (she liked that word, too), she recognised that all her dreams were unattainable. She wanted to be a Premiership footballer but, being a girl, that was clearly a non-starter. She rather fancied the idea of being a doctor but the most she could hope for was a handful of C grades when the GCSE results came out. An artist, perhaps, but how many people actually made a living out of painting pictures?
“Plenty of jobs going at Tesco,” her mother suggested.
Sophie sighed. Sitting at the supermarket checkout was hardly the thrilling, fulfilling life she had envisaged for herself.
“They’re always looking for care assistants down at the nursing home,” was her father’s contribution.
Could be worse, thought Sophie. Could be much better, though. Surely. She’d looked up ‘zeal’ and ‘panache’ in her dictionary. Somehow they didn’t really apply to care assistants and checkout girls.
She tried the job centre. What was she looking for? One of the little white cards to leap out at her, screaming her name?
That was where she met Bob. They were standing next to each other, both staring vacantly and hopelessly at the bulletin boards.
“Bugger all, as usual,” said Bob, more interested in looking at Sophie than the rows of job descriptions. “Fancy adjourning to a local hostelry for a coffee?”
Sophie gave him a quick glance. Scruffy clothes, unkempt hair, hands thrust into the back pockets of his jeans. Not exactly her type, she thought, although she had not the slightest idea what her type might be. Then, unaccountably, the Headmaster’s speech flashed through her mind. “Seize the opportunities that changing circumstances bring.” “Yeah, why not?” she replied, smiling for the first time that day.
“A touch of serendipity, us meeting like this,” he said. How could she not fall for a chap who used a word like ‘serendipity’? So fragile and innocent was her heart, a flower barely opened, that a single word was enough to conquer it.
So began the wild and reckless phase of Sophie’s life. Bob lived in his own flat - well, a bedsit, actually - drove his own car and pursued a lifestyle that Sophie had never before encountered. Bohemian, he liked to call it - another word that appealed to her although she didn’t really know what it meant. It seemed to involve not working, spending rather a lot of time in bed, smoking rather a lot of hash and talking rather a lot of crap with other Bohemians - or good-for-nothing, layabout, druggy, spongers, as her father preferred to call them. Sophie was sucked in. Getting a job seemed low on Bob’s list of priorities - if, indeed, the concept of prioritising had ever occurred to him. A perfunctory weekly visit to the job centre was the extent of his efforts to find employment. Money seemed to appear from somewhere, probably from his well-off father who, Bob claimed, was happy to support his son’s attempt to make a name for himself as an artist. Not that Sophie ever saw him applying paint to any of the blank canvases that littered his bedsit, but he and his mates rambled on about expressionism and post-modernity and other phrases that sounded good to Sophie and became included in her developing vocabulary.
“Bollocks!” Her father dismissed her attempts to justify her new boyfriend’s artistic inclinations. “The bloke’s clearly a no-hoper.”
“Can’t you find yourself a decent boy and a steady job?” her mother pleaded.
But Sophie had rapidly outgrown the hopes her parents had lovingly woven for her. She moved into Bob’s bedsit. Autonomy and independence were her latest words. Spontaneity and self-sufficiency - words she rolled around her mouth and released into the world like sparkling soap bubbles, watching them drift away and burst into nothingness.
“You won’t get a penny from me!” her father roared at her as she left home with a couple of suitcases. “We’ll see how long your precious independence lasts. Autonomy my arse!”
Her mother slipped her a few tenners as she left. “Make it last,” she whispered. “And try to get a job, dear.”
Money continued to trickle into Bob’s life from sources he never explained. He gave her enough to buy food and he kept her glass full whenever they went out drinking. She came to see this as payment for her services as cook, housekeeper, laundry maid and bed companion. Her father would have added whore but Sophie felt that she was doing nothing that she didn’t freely and, for the most part, joyfully decide to do. It wasn’t that she was in love with Bob - or so she told herself, love being the one word she felt unworthy to use - merely captivated by a life of which she had never dreamt, and relieved to be free of the expectation, from home and from school, to make her way in the world. Freewheeling, Bob called it, which evoked the image of gliding downhill on her bicycle, the wind blowing through her hair, careless of what lay at the bottom, of the effort required to pedal back up.
Bob had a way with words that she found irresistible, a playful verbosity that rivalled her ex-headmaster’s. “My little wallaby,” he called her, which probably wasn’t very flattering but the way he pronounced ‘wallaby’ always made her giggle. “Make us a beverage,” he’d demand, rather than simply ask for a cup of tea. “A brief perambulation?” he’d suggest when he fancied a stroll. And the words he whispered to her during their lovemaking - though she’d never repeat them - were more poetic than anything she’d ever heard at school, little onomatopoeic jewels she treasured in a secret compartment of her memory.
She began to experiment with Bob’s paints and the experience of watching the rich colours spread and grow and flow, like a living being, over a huge, bare canvas was truly - another word she loved - cathartic. And the names on his watercolour palette filled her with as much rapture as the colours themselves: ultramarine, vermilion, alizarin, cerulean blue, burnt sienna.
Bob looked on, neither praising nor criticising.
“It conjures up the taste of anchovies, the sound of tumbling cataracts,” he commented upon looking at one of her creations. “Real synaesthesia.”
Sophie reached for her dictionary. Words like that oozed through her mind like melting honey, thrilling her like the touch of Bob’s fingertips, sliding down her back.
But, for all his fancy words, he never told her that he loved her. Such clichés belonged to a world he despised. For him, it was enough to enjoy the moment.
After a few months, though, the enjoyment began to pall. When he wasn’t stoned, Bob became moody and his idleness deepened, bordering on sloth. Sophie grew restless. At first, she had been awed and bewitched by the fact that he was five years older than her, but now it seemed that the age difference had been reversed, that he was the naive and immature one. Once, his solipsistic soliloquies had sounded like music from a higher world. Now, as she familiarised herself with her dictionary, they collapsed into self-indulgent prattling.
When, finally, he and his mates decided, on an impulse, to spend the last weeks of the summer in Ibiza, she gave up on him.
“What’s the problem?” he asked. For him, nothing was ever a problem. “Living’s really cheap, out there. Come on, it’ll be great. Truly transcendental. Romanticism personified.”
“What about the plane fare?”
“Get it from your old man. That’s what I’m doing. That’s what filial affiliation’s all about.”
So Sophie left Bob with his sophistic arguments, his fancy words, his selfish fantasies and his stoned mates. She returned home, depressed. Her father wore his “I told you so” expression and her mother, more sympathetically and rather tentatively, suggested, “How about trying Tesco?”
On her way to the supermarket, resigned to the inevitable, she bumped into her old Headmaster, Mr. Pomposity.
“How goes it, Sophie?” he greeted her cheerily, having abandoned, for the duration of the holidays, his headmasterly tones.
“Still looking for a job,” she replied, wearily.
The Headmaster, always one for fatuous platitudes, offered her the benefit of his oft-delivered but rarely solicited advice. “Follow your heart, girl.”
Where was her heart? she wondered. In Tesco? Certainly not. With Bob? Equally certainly not. But the thought of Bob rekindled the image of those enticing empty canvases and delicious tubes of paint, the memory of how beautiful it felt to bring them together, to watch the colours flow.
“D’you reckon I could get into college on an art course?” she asked suddenly.
“I reckon you can do anything you want to do,” declared the Headmaster, seizing the opportunity to deliver more of his favourite words of wisdom. “Decisiveness, that’s the word. Decisiveness and perspicacity. Perspicacity and consequentiality. Not forgetting zeal and panache, eh, girl? Zeal and panache: those are the words.”
She turned away from Tesco and started walking briskly in the direction of the college. Decisiveness was the word that had taken root in her mind. She liked the emphatic sound of it, the four staccato syllables, like firmly planted footsteps marching into the future.
Words, she thought, are like the colours on a painter’s palette: beautiful in themselves, perhaps, but, when put together, so much less than the finished picture.
*********************
Adrienne’s mother was a Francophile. Her love of France arose from the fact that the only foreign trip of her life had been her honeymoon, which she and Adrienne’s father spent at Cap D’Antibes in 1961. Adrienne’s father had grumbled about the heat and the food, whilst slyly eyeing the bikini-clad French girls playing with beach balls in the surf. They wouldn’t be coming back HERE again, he had decreed, angry with himself and with the burgeoning erection in his shorts. Plenty of perfectly good places at home, where you could get plain decent food and didn’t have to be troubled by all…THIS. But Adrienne’s mother had been transported by the azure sky, silky sand and wild smells of lavender, rosemary and sex. She loved the way the proud young waiters strutted like matadors between the tables at the pavement cafes, the way their brown hands brushed flesh for a second too long when handing her change, and the way their liquid eyes locked hers as they bid her a wistful ‘bon soiree’.
When, six months later, their daughter was born, she insisted on a French name for the child, although Adrienne’s father raged against the very idea for days. Eventually she learned to silence his protests by producing her breast and latching the obliging infant on to it, a procedure which generally caused him to leave the room fast with a stricken expression of nausea and jealousy. Thus, Adrienne Marjorie Babbage entered the world. Her mother beamed down at the squashed pink face, and made a wish. She wished for a journey, a magical journey, which might lead, ultimately, to the top of the Eiffel Tower on a hot August night. Here a young brown-eyed man – an artist, perhaps, or an actor – might rain kisses on Adrienne, spread Paris at her feet, and then whisk her away in an open topped sports car. Adrienne’s mother liked this daydream very much.
By the time Adrienne was eight years old, her mother’s dreams of brown-eyed Parisians, sports cars and magical journeys were running into trouble. Adrienne was a solid, solemn child with a lazy eye and a marked aversion to all things foreign. “Why did you give me this silly name?” she demanded of her mother one evening. “Adri-ENNE, Adri-ENNE. It’s stupid. I don’t want to be called Adri-ENNE. I’m English. It’s ADE-rienne. You can jolly well start calling me ADE-rienne.” Adrienne’s father emerged briefly from behind his Daily Express. “You could always be called ‘Marjorie’, you know,” he said hopefully. “That’s your second name – a good English name.” But the little girl shook her head firmly and folded her arms and that was that. Her mother looked at the lumpen child and conceded sadly that maybe she was right – maybe such a pretty name was, well, wasted on such a doughy little creature. Her father winked conspiratorially at his daughter, and was rather hurt when she stared back blankly at him. He had hoped they could become allies together against her mother, who frankly wasn’t getting any easier as the years went by, but the child was such an oddly self-contained little thing. He never could tell what she was thinking. He raised his Daily Express again, to shield himself from that steady, uncurious gaze. Not for the first time, he wished his wife had given him a son.
Adrienne moved through the motions of school with no visible effort. Her teachers would sometimes pause briefly over her plain, workmanlike essays, which gave the required amount of information and insight – no more, no less – and they would feel a rise of frustration, a feeling of being ‘played’ by a child clearly capable of more, but almost wilfully witholding. At parents’ evenings they would attempt to voice these concerns to her vague looking mother and tight-lipped father, before giving up and accepting that Adrienne – “ It’s ADE-rienne, Miss”– would do fine in Secretarial Studies. After all, there were always other pupils in more genuine need - children whose families were feeling the crush of the three-day week, strikes, and sudden lay-offs. The chilly little Babbage unit appeared to be doing well on the father’s wages at the Town Hall. There was no question of needing assistance in paying for the school exchange trip to Bulgaria, in Adrienne’s final year, for example.
There had been a vague register of surprise in the staff room when Adrienne Babbage had opted for the Bulgaria trip. One of the teachers, scanning the lists, had to be reminded of who she was. “Oh, that big sweaty unit with the bubble perm,” the maths master had airily described. “Legs like those things they slice kebabs from. Ugly Duckling, destined to grow into an Ugly Duck.” Adrienne’s form teacher, who was also N. U. T Shop Steward, had protested and accused him of sexism, but to no great affect.
Adrienne’s mother had emerged briefly from her low-level depression to become animated and enchanted about her daughter’s first trip abroad. This could be the start, she prayed, of broadened horizons and sophistication. Smudgy images of the Eiffel Tower, and a young man emerging from the shadows, began to re-form in her painted-over mind. On the morning of departure, she helped Adrienne board the coach, observing with some pain the other girls with their sleek hair and glossed lips. She frowned slightly as Adrienne spread out in a seat on her own and immediately opened a book. “You needn’t wait,” Adrienne said, looking up briefly. “We’ll be ages yet. I’ll see you in a week.”
Her mother had a walked away from the coach in tears, and spent the week alternating between hope and despair. Seven days later Adrienne dismounted, alone, from the coach, face blank as her classmates leaped excitedly at their parents. Adrienne’s mother finally sealed her dreams away at the far reaches of her mind. “Load of old rubbish.” Adrienne pronounced. “One morning they gave us an egg broken into a bowl of hot water for breakfast. The whole place stank and the electricity kept going off. I’m never going abroad again. That’s that.”
Adrienne left school that summer, and was not invited to the parties where former classmates learned quick bittersweet lessons about the combined properties of Cinzano, warm nights and absent parents. She took a clerical job in the Property Department of the Town Hall, and put two thirds of her wages in a savings account each month. The remaining third she spent, on records, photographs and posters of a tall mournful singer called Bernie Tait. She methodically covered the pale blue walls of her small bedroom with pictures of the singer, until her narrow bed and tallboy stood out in relief against the patchworked frieze.
Each day at noon, her elderly colleague Frank would run his Morris Minor up to the Broadway and bring back the lunch orders. Adrienne would always order “a knobbly loaf” from the baker’s, and would work her way though it during the course of the afternoon. Former classmates, seeing her in the street, might have said that in her shape and pallor, Adrienne was starting to resemble a knobbly loaf.
Adrienne’s father finally succeeded in summoning up a tumour, and died angrily on his wife’s birthday. His funeral was a small affair, though four of his colleagues from the Town Hall turned out and doubled the numbers. Afterwards, they stood shuffling in a semicircle around Adrienne, who sat upright in a kitchen chair by the table. Adrienne’s jaws worked mechanically as one triangular sandwich after another vanished from the ziggurat piles constructed by her mother. “Your Dad liked a sandwich,” said Geoff from Planning, desperately. Adrienne stared at him and pulled a handful of crisps from a bowl. Afterwards, the four colleagues from the Town Hall agreed that the girl was obviously in shock, each knowing quite well that she was not.
Adrienne returned to work, while her mother spent days staring at her own reflection in the dormant TV screen. They ate meals together in silence, Adrienne often propping a magazine against a sauce bottle. Her mother sat pleating the hem of the tablecloth while Adrienne cleared her plate, and then automatically refilled it for her daughter. She would clean the kitchen, while Adrienne played records upstairs and sorted her collection of Bernie Tait memorabilia. Delivering the late-night bacon sandwich, she would tap at the door before placing the covered plate on the landing floor and backing down the stairs.
Adrienne’s mother became ever more translucent and tired, and accepted her role as ghost in the house with no great resistance. She forgot how to miss conversation, as she forgot what conversation was, and contented herself with the dozen or so words Adrienne addressed to her in the normal course of a day. These were often dietary commands – “stop sneaking garlic into the shepherds’ pie, it ruins it” – or requests concerning Adrienne’s other interest – “can you make sure you pick up my magazine. Bernie’s in it this week.” Her mother never questioned, never argued.
On the evening Adrienne failed to come home, her mother sat neatly in the kitchen while her daughter’s plate of casserole grew a thick Bisto skin in the oven. She passed half an hour rearranging the cruet set, and picking crusted brown sauce from around the cap of the bottle with her fingernail. It was the first time in three years that her daughter’s routine had ever deviated by as much as a minute, she observed to herself with a remote curiosity. She knew that eventually an explanation would emerge, and feeling no need to seek it, she continued to work at the rim of the sauce bottle while the kitchen slowly filled with the smell of burnt meat.
When, the doorbell rang three hours later, Adrienne’s mother was still sitting at the kitchen table. The evidence of her industry – fifteen small, neat pyramids of salt and pepper from the emptied cruets – sat in regular rows on the white table cloth. Adrienne’s mother was carefully connecting the pyramids to one another with a thin arterial line of brown sauce, and she reluctantly replaced the lid on the bottle before rising slowly from the table and padding to the front door.
The young man who stood there was handsome and dark, with neat short hair and large brown eyes. “Mrs Babbage?” he asked. Adrienne’s mother beamed, delighted. She offered her hand, and the young man looked surprised. He transferred the peaked cap he was holding from his right hand to his left, but didn’t return her handshake. It was then that Adrienne’s mother noticed the silver numbers on his epaulettes, and the hissing radio which crackled at his hip. She also noticed the large older man, also in uniform, looming from behind. “Can we come in please, Mrs Babbage?” said the older man. “I’m afraid we need to speak to you about your daughter Adrienne.” Adrienne’s mother frowned. “Ad-rienne,” she mused aloud. “You said Ad-rienne and not Ade-rienne.” The two policemen exchanged glances. “Your daughter,” said the brown-eyed young officer, “was very clear about how she likes to be addressed. She’s co-operating fully with us, so of course we’re anxious to co-operate fully with her too. Mrs Babbage, your daughter was picked up by a patrol car in the gardens of a young woman called Pascalle Lefevre. She was found to be in possession of a length of sash cord and a six-inch carving knife. We have reason to believe that she intended to force entry to Miss Lefevre’s premises, and to carry out a very serious assault. Your daughter is in a great deal of trouble, Mrs Babbage.”
Adrienne’s mother stepped backwards into the house, and the two policemen followed. She began to laugh. Of course there had been a terrible mistake, but it could all be rectified. “ I’m terribly sorry but you’ve come to the wrong house.” She said. “Adrienne certainly doesn’t know any French girls. She’d never go about with a French girl, never.” She sat on the stairs and smiled up at the men.
The older man rolled his eyes. “Of course she bloody…” he began, but the younger man cut in, gently but firmly , bending down to Adrienne’s mother. His eyes were so beautiful, she thought. “Mrs Babbage,” he said softly, “Pascalle Lefevre is a model, and she’s the fiancée of a popular musician…”
Then Adrienne’s mother felt herself to be falling, tumbling through clouds, while images of an upside-down Eiffel Tower played before her eyes, and wild accordion music screamed in her head. As she lurched forward and the ground rose up to meet her, the brown-eyed young man stepped in quickly, caught her, and held her in his arms.
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From the shade of the old Baobab tree, Jamu watched the shimmering centipede of vehicles, in the noon-day sun, making their way towards the village. So, Jamu thought, the foreigners have come, after all. Gabriel had been right.
He eased his old back against the trunk, his brown, leathery skin merging with the ancient wood.
‘When you die,’ Eddah, his old woman, told him, ‘we’ll push you up inside the hollow of that baobab tree.’ She was right; this was his place, full of peace.
Jamu had known for weeks that the important foreigner, a famous musician in his own country, wanted to meet him. Gabriel had told him this when he came back from the township.
‘Why me?’ Jamu asked him. ‘My fiddle’s only an old piece of wood and some gut. It’s not so special. What can this music man learn from Jamu? He will wonder why an old lizard like me can still stand, let alone play.’ But Jamu’s belly feeling told him this was not so. His music was special. In fact, he would go as far as to say, or think – because he was a modest man, that it was the best.
People came from surrounding villages to hear him play, creeping into the fire-lit circle at dusk. The night sounds of the forest stilled then, as if its inhabitants, along with the congregation, sensed, in his haunting notes and old story-songs, the scent of their ancestors. But, that was different. They were local people and had the same ways. Not like city folk.
Jamu watched as jeeps were unloaded and tents set up. With some ceremony, a large, black box was lifted from inside a Land Rover. It looked like a box the Christians used for their dead.
A man, taller than the other, reached into the box and pulled out a strange object, which had the vague shape of a curvy woman. The foreigner spun the object like a child’s hurly top, his eyes narrow in the glare of the afternoon sun. His skin was as pale as the fullest moon. Reluctantly, Jamu rose and made his way down to greet the stranger.
His name was long, too long to remember, and unpronounceable.
‘We’ve to call him Dom,’ Daniel, who was acting as interpreter, reported. He was puffed up in his hot, black city suit; Jamu wore his everyday clothes.
‘Welcome,’ he said. ‘My name is Jamu.’
Later, when Jamu was persuaded to produce his fiddle, Dom crouched on his heels, by his feet, admiration shining from his strange looking face. Jamu chose not to notice.
‘Let me hear you play,’ Dom urged. Jamu started to play. As still as a hawk, this Dom-man closed his eyes and listened.
Next day, Dom produced his instrument from the black box. It was made of shiny, red wood and almost as tall as Jamu. So beautiful, Jamu thought, his fingers aching to stroke it.
‘It’s called a cello,’ Gabriel reported as Dom began to play. His body swayed, his eyes held a faraway look that Jamu understood so well. The strange music soared upwards as if searching for some unknown thing.
Jamu sat by Dom, his eyes swinging back and forth with each draw of the bow, his heart flooding, like a river during the rainy season, with long-forgotten memories of youth and vitality.
Then Dom played Jamu’s rough, hand made fiddle. The villagers laughed as Jamu’s gnarled fingers guided Dom’s large smooth hands. They laughed at the wild-cat noises Dom made and he laughed with them. Then it was Jamu’s turn to play Dom’s cello.
‘Ah, this feels good,’ Jamu breathed, his bony knees in control of the instrument. ‘Here is power,’ he thought. Then Dom helped him find the notes and taught him a simple tune. The long bow was unwieldy between his perspiring fingers. The droning dirge he produced from the bowels of the cello sank into the hot, beaten earth under his feet. ‘Ai-eee, like an old toothless cat calling in the night,’ he tried to joke with Dom.
Dom was kind.
‘It takes time. Many years of practice,’ he said. Gabriel gloated as he interpreted. Eddah sniffed loudly and went back to stirring the porridge for their evening meal.
At sunset, Jamu played as usual, shades of figures gathering round the fire. It was an old melody, one of his father’s, evocative and sad. Then Gabriel reported that Dom would like to try to play Jamu’s fiddle again. Jamu passed it over. Dom played, not the crude notes of the previous day, but reproducing the old melody note for note. Latecomers assumed it was Jamu. But, by the time they reached the clearing harsh camera lights were recording the foreign maestro’s glory.
Jamu felt old and useless. How could this foreigner play his fiddle so well when, earlier, he couldn’t play a note? Dom’s face glowed with youth and triumph.
‘How can I, a useless old man, hope to master this Dom’s cello?’ It was too complicated, too big. His simple fiddle was primitive and rough. ‘Like me,’ he sighed.
Piercing a look at her husband’s face, Eddah whispered, ‘Listen, foolish old man. Listen! There is no heart in his playing. A clever trick of memory only. Where are the soaring spirits of your father and grandfather in his playing? Listen,’ she hissed. Jamu listened. He looked. Dom’s eyes were as dull as a dead crocodile’s. Perhaps his old woman was right.
Dom’s group stayed for a week in the village recording its music, sucking it up into black boxes through black pod-shaped objects. They listened to the old story-songs and to the sweet voices of the children. They even listened to Gabriel, puffed up in his Sunday best. Most of all they listened to Jamu.
‘I want to hear everything you know, Jamu,’ Dom told him. ‘I want the world to hear it.’ Jamu wanted to believe him. Perhaps this foreigner would steal his music and his status, making him look foolish in front of everyone? He played anyway. It didn’t matter. He was just a vain, foolish old man. Yet, despite these feelings tightening his chest like drying cowhide, he had to acknowledge Dom’s unquestionable talent. Besides, without knowing why, Jamu couldn’t dislike him.
They were leaving at dawn. Dom grinned his thanks to Jamu, crushing his hands between his strong fists in farewell.
‘One more thing, he says’. Ill at ease, Gabriel shuffled from foot to foot. ‘One favour he asks. Dom would like your fiddle as a memento. The villagers waited for Jamu to speak. His old bones shivered in the morning air. This stranger had taken away his status, made him a laughing stock. Now he wanted to take his fiddle as well. But it’s only a useless hunk of old wood. Like me, he sighed. He shuffled towards his hut to fetch it.
‘Pah! You have always been weak, Jamu,’ Eddah hissed from the doorway. Jamu halted for a moment. Somehow, Eddah seemed always to be right. He went back to the compound, bowing his head, in lying shame, telling Dom that, should he give his fiddle away, the wrath of his spirit ancestors would descend on the village. Dom understood. He shook Jamu’s hand and told him, through Gabriel, that the poignancy and beauty of his music would stay with him always. Eddah’s smile was triumphant.
**
From the baobab tree, he watched the black dots moving purposefully towards the horizon. Drained, Jamu slumped against the ancient hulk. Its knotted roots dug into his bony backside and, for a time, he remained hunched up, feeling some satisfaction from the penance of discomfort his uncharitable act, and his jealousy, he thought. Dom was a fine musician. It wasn’t his fault that Jamu played like a baby monkey on his fine cello. His old fiddle, after all, was only a hunk of wood from the old baobab tree.
Eddah was toiling up the slight incline towards him. Mostly indifferent to his music, Jamu knew she wouldn’t understand his feeling. He struggled to his feet, helping her up the last few steps.
‘Tired, Jamu?’ Her voice was unusually tender. ‘We are not getting any younger.’
‘Indeed. Soon, you will be stuffing me inside this old hollow tree.’ he sighed.
‘I said we are not getting any younger. That doesn’t mean we are too old.’ Her voice had the sharpness of bitter herbs. ‘Besides, the hollow isn’t big enough.’
‘Of course it is, woman. Think of all the hunks of wood I have hacked from it over the years, so that I could play our ancestors’ tunes for those wretched villagers, who don’t appreciate my efforts.’ Jamu went on. ‘Now, I am shamed by a foreigner. Now, that old baobab tree can be my coffin. It’s fitting. I’m more than ready.’
‘I tell you, it is too small.’
‘Don’t be foolish, wife. Come and see.’ He pulled her round to the other side of the tree.
‘There! Look for yourself. Even try it,’ he said, pushing her towards the aperture. But Eddah was right. There wasn’t room enough in the hollow tree, even for her tiny figure, because Dom’s shiny cello was blocking the hole in the tree. It stood tall and straight, like a warrior keeping guard, it’s bow alongside as if waiting for a command. Eddah shielded her broken-toothed smile and waited too.
‘But why? I don’t understand.’
‘That foreigner,’ Eddah said, ‘wanted your fiddle, so I put it in his big black box, and, since there was no room for his alongside it, I thought he would want you to have his to practice on, as he practiced on yours.’
‘He didn’t practice, woman. He is a – what did they call him? He is a maestro. That’s what he is. He played it blind.
‘Ha! That Gabriel, that sleeker than a snake city cat, crept into our hut when we were picking yams and took your fiddle so that the foreigner could practice and not lose face in front of the villagers.’
‘Wife, I don’t believe you.’ Eddah’s face was stony: Eddah never told lies. Slowly, Jamu reached forward, lifting the bow with one hand and clasped the neck of the cello with the other. The gut felt good and familiar to his touch and the bow’s silky tendrils teased his wrist. He pulled himself erect so that he towered over the instrument. He plucked at the strings. Good strong notes. He twanged a few more, picking out a melody – Eddah’s favourite – before she made her way down the hill to prepare their porridge.
Jamu turned to face the crimson glow of the rising sun, like an old warier paying homage. The sun broke free. The last jeep disappeared over the hill. Jamu grinned, like a child and spun the cello on its point.
‘Why not? It’s only an old piece of wood after all.’
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