Sex and Stravinsky (26 page)

Then he headed out on the airport bus for the Kenya Airways flight. Jack had never flown before and he didn’t know the procedure, but he knew that the plane would touch down in Nairobi, where certain passengers would alight. The airport, mercifully, was not very large and he was well on time. Once in the departure lounge, it was obvious to him which passengers were flying to Dakar. Everything about them was different. Their clothes were markedly different and they were speaking French or Wolof. Jack’s forearms goose-pimpled with excitement as he opted to get in line behind a man who was carrying a kora. And then he was in the air.

Chapter Seven

Caroline

Having seen off her daughter on a three-week French exchange and her husband on a month-long trip to his one-time home town on the east coast of South Africa – a trip that will culminate in a conference on mime – Caroline, infallible, industrious Caroline; prodigious Caroline, has been making progress with her renovations to the family’s recently acquired Victorian terraced house; a house that is the realisation of her modest, graduate-student dreams, all those years ago. Two up, two down and a lean-to kitchen at the back.

Within the week she has paint-stripped the window frames and the banisters, blow lamp in hand, and wearing a mask and goggles. Then she has waxed the exposed wooden surfaces. In the kitchen, where the furnishings are of sufficient an age to charm her rather than repel, she begins by sugar-soaping all the walls and the ceiling. Then she cleans up the old Belfast sink, with its nice wooden draining board, and she undertakes an invisible mend to a small chip in the glaze. Caroline removes several decades of grease from a pretty antique cooking stove, an electric item shaped like a Queen Anne cupboard on cabriole legs, but veneered in mottled enamel. There is something about old mottled enamel that always lifts her spirits, so she’s delighted to discover that all the stove’s parts still work.

Making liberal use of the Spar shop’s Own Brand washing-soda crystals, she cleans up a 1950s blue-and-cream plywood dresser, its name fixed to the front in raised chrome cursive: ‘The Pantrix’. It has a pull-down, enamel-work surface with integral wooden bread board and several door panels made of dimpled glass. Prior to Caroline’s ministrations, it also has forty years of toast crumbs set in sausage grease, which coat all its outer surfaces. The kitchen’s open wooden shelves all exhibit a disgusting, glued-on compound: a sort of caramel substance in which several small insects have met their end. But Caroline, who enjoys a challenge, has a strong and splendid right arm.

Next, she rips off the textured, swirly orange vinyl that covers the kitchen floor and is rewarded by the sight of old red quarry tiles beneath. All the same, it puzzles her that the red quarry tiles should themselves have been coated with red floor-paint. She removes the blistering paint without much trouble, before scrubbing, sealing and polishing the quarry tiles to a lovely, matt-brick richness. Then, covering the floor with two large groundsheets, she paints the kitchen ceiling white and the walls pale blue and cream, to match The Pantrix. Finally, she fixes a repro laundry rack on pulleys to the ceiling; a thing she has acquired from Scotts of Stow by mail order, and on it she hangs a miscellany of pots and pans, along with her ladles, whisks and colanders. The laundry rack is one of the very few items that Caroline has bought new – and it is with a touch of Ozzie feminist irritation that she takes note of its name. It’s called ‘The Sheila Maid’.

Immediately outside the kitchen door is a small flagstone yard, which, with Pathclear and a sturdy garden broom, she transforms from its drain-and-dandelion dankness to a shady scented patio, with the help of her clematis and honeysuckle, and her several old fish kettles of kitchen herbs. Mint and parsley; marjoram and sage; fennel, rosemary and chives.

Having previously employed a builder to knock through the two tiny ground-floor living rooms, the house, once dark and poky, is now filled with light, and the walls here and there are coated in new sepia plaster which reminds her of old walls in Rome. What a time it is since she has travelled anywhere – but upward and onward, Caroline! In the bathroom she removes the tacky hardboard bath panels to discover that her tub has pretty feet. She spends a morning treating patches of rust on its iron underside and, next day, paints the treated surfaces a soothing pastel grey. Meanwhile, having applied mould repellent to the walls and regrouted the white ceramic tiles, Caroline sets herself to papering the bathroom with three rolls of pale-grey Jane Churchill polka dots, which – being Caroline – she has found for thirty pence each in a basket of bin ends in the Red Cross charity shop.

In the bedrooms she rips away the cladding from both the cast-iron fireplaces and sweeps up two dead starlings from one of the grates. She throws the pocky nylon carpets out of the front sash window, before gathering them up from the pavement and carting them off to the dump. Then she washes and undercoats the upstairs floorboards, before painting them pale grey. Meanwhile, she’s collected the floor sander she’s hired, complete with edging attachment, and, having checked the downstairs floors for loose nails, Caroline switches on the great roaring kidney-shaking machine and proceeds to sand the living-room floorboards.

Oh dear! It is precisely because of the great roaring machine that she doesn’t hear the three calls from her mother to her mobile phone. Caroline’s mother has been phoning her daughter to complain of chest pains. Her ‘heartburn’, as she calls it, is getting worse. In between making attempts to reach her daughter, Caroline’s mother has been swallowing over-the-counter antacids in a peppy mix with blood-pressure tablets and her daily dose of Warfarin. Then, for good measure, she has taken all of it twice. And it’s because of the great roaring machine that Mrs McCleod, who has suffered a cerebral haemorrhage, lies for twenty-four hours, unobserved and unattended, in a heap alongside her bed in the house at Garden Haven. Because Caroline, after a day spent operating the sander, has driven back home to the bus up the Abingdon Road and has then, uncharacteristically, fallen asleep, exhausted, without checking her messages; without so much as washing her feet, or brushing her perfect white teeth.

Caroline spends the following day finishing off her downstairs floors with the edging attachment and vacuuming up the quantities of sawdust created by the big roaring machine. Then, at evening, she finally goes home to spruce up. She takes an indulgently long hot shower, washes and dries her beautiful thick hair, anoints her skin with thrifty E45 cream and drives off to her mother’s house in freshly laundered clothes. She has with her a wholesome supper for two – a home-made cucumber soup; pork medallions on a bed of creamed spinach, along with some braised fennel; a salad of plums tossed lightly in a dressing of yogurt, mint and honey. Having rung the bell and knocked at the front-room window, Caroline finally lets herself in with her key. On a first round she doesn’t see the old woman, slumped unconscious and hypothermic, on the far side of the bed and she goes back downstairs. It is only a delayed mental image of the half-made bed that causes her to take a second look. Then it’s all stations go.

The ambulance arrives with laudable speed and it’s hands-on emergency care by a skilled paramedic, before Caroline’s mother is carefully stretchered out of her house. And it’s 4 a.m. before the old woman, tagged, assessed and processed, is carted off for a brain scan. Finally Caroline goes home to the bus and catches two hours’ sleep. At 9 a.m. she is telephoned by a neurosurgeon from the hospital. There is evidence of her mother’s having had several previous small strokes, he says, probably over the past year and all of them undiagnosed. Right now she has a significant subdural haematoma, a blood clot the size of a bath sponge, pressing down on her brain.

The neurosurgeon plans to operate within the hour, he says, and he assures her that the prognosis for recovery is reasonably good – though age could be a negative factor. The surgery he describes sounds to Caroline like prehistoric trepanning. The surgeon will drill a hole in the side of her mother’s skull and draw out what Caroline envisages as a Petri dish full of half-set red jelly. Unfortunately, he tells her, there is a possibility that the cavity will refill with blood, in which case, after a second scan, he will need to operate again.

By now Caroline is in no frame of mind to focus on sanded floorboards. The home-improvement project is put on hold as she spends anxious days at the hospital, alternating between the League of Friends canteen on the ground floor and the neuroscience ward upstairs, where the old woman, her eyes firmly closed in sleep, lies motionless, with what look like several Frankenstein bolts jutting from the side of her shaven head. In between, Caroline pays brief visits to Garden Haven, gathering up basic toiletries, dealing with perishable foodstuffs, searching hurriedly through her mother’s drawers for address books and letters, in the hope of finding some way to make contact with her sister. Since she has no luck here or, being agitated, gives up too soon, she decides instead to contact the Australian Embassy and place the matter in their hands.

She then makes equally unsuccessful attempts to contact Josh at the beachfront hotel where he is booked in for the three weeks prior to the conference. Josh never seems to be in and he doesn’t respond to her messages. I will not worry about him, Caroline tells herself, though she’s feeling unusually vulnerable and just a little bit needy. I will not think of gun crime. Josh will be busy, she tells herself. He’ll be out of town. Visiting old friends? Old family servants? Something like that. Then there is Zoe. Caroline, with her first two calls to the household of her daughter’s French exchange, is unlucky enough to get Véronique, who is monosyllabic, ungracious and unhelpful to a degree, even when speaking her own language. On a third attempt she gets Maman, who tells her, somewhat abruptly, that her daughter Zoe is ‘out’.

‘
Vueillez la dire que sa grandmère est très très malade
,’ Caroline says. ‘Please, Madame, will you ask her to call me?’

‘
D’accord
,’ says Maman. ‘
Certainement
.’ But Zoe does not phone back.

Next day, Caroline calls again.

Zoe, Maman says, ‘
est sortie
’.

‘A school trip?’ Caroline asks.

‘
Oui
,’ says Maman. ‘
Le school-trip. Exactement
.’

By this time Caroline’s mother has begun somewhat feebly to open her eyes and has sipped a few teaspoons of Lucozade. Caroline, who has eagerly followed up this development by bringing in a jar of thin, carefully strained chicken broth and a small home-made pear smoothie, finds that her mother simply spits these out the moment tiny particles of either are deposited on her tongue.

‘Jam,’ she says. This appears to be her only available word. ‘Jam,’ she says again.

Caroline is convinced that her mother is asking for Janet; the estranged but favourite daughter.

‘Don’t worry, Mum,’ she says. ‘I’ll find Janet for you, I promise. The Australian Embassy has got it all in hand.’

‘Jam,’ the old woman says.

‘Is there anything you’d like me to bring in for you?’ Caroline says. ‘Anything at all, Mum?’

‘Jam,’ is all her mother says. ‘Jam. Jam.’ Her speech is barely above a whisper.

By the next day, she is relieved to find that the Australian Embassy has left her a message. They have a contact number for a person they believe to be her sister. Janet has not been difficult to find, since she holds the position of editor at a national family magazine based on ‘Christian values’.

Back home in the bus that evening, Caroline calculates the time difference and psychs herself up to phone her sister. As a preliminary, she checks out Janet’s magazine on the Web. It materialises as a cringeworthy publication of such unbearable homespun smugness that it embarrasses Caroline as a form of emotional bad faith in conjunction with intellectual death. Cosy advice, interspersed with judgemental harangues, advertisements for virginity merchandise and novelty reach-out projects for the promotion of community goodwill.

‘Do you experience negative feelings about a colleague, friend or neighbour?’ trills the editorial, under a small, homely photograph of Janet, sixteen years on from Caroline’s last sighting of her. ‘Try making a batch of our scrumptious Grudge Fudge and take it round with a smile (
see p.52
).’

On the telephone, Janet is distancing and cold.

‘It’s better you deal with Mum,’ she says. ‘My place is here at Mark’s side. His work is very important.’

‘Janet,’ Caroline says pleadingly, ‘Mum’s just had brain surgery. She can’t speak. She’s not eating. She can barely open her eyes. All she can say is your name. Just the one word, that’s all. Over and over. How important can Mark’s work be?’

‘Pardon me?’ Janet says, with that upward inflection Caroline has never before noticed she finds extremely irritating. She wonders, for a moment, whether she has it herself. ‘Mark is working for Jesus,’ Janet says. End of story.

‘Mum said he was an accountant,’ Caroline says. It’s a remark that Janet chooses to ignore. ‘Look. Please, Janet. Take my number,’ she says. ‘Think about it, won’t you? Try and find a flight. It would be so great if you could come over. It might make all the difference.’

‘Not possible,’ Janet says. ‘Unfortunately. Tell Mum we always remember her in our prayers.’

Then the line goes dead.