‘Come on, everyone,’ Jennifer cried, and her voice echoed in melancholy fashion up and down the dusty corridors of the Hôtel de Ville. Sandy brought Jennifer on the trip because she was, as he explained to everyone, a fool of a woman but useful. She was little and pretty and anxious. Everyone liked her except me, and even I took exception to her on the flimsiest of grounds – that is to say, that she took being called a fool of a woman as a compliment, the best a proper man could do by the way of a wife.
‘Come on, lazybones,’ she cried out now, into the silence. ‘Come on. Let’s get the show on the road. The bus leaves at ten and everyone not on it gets left behind.’ (Oh she was, she was, a fool of a woman! Perhaps Sandy had it right.)
Now Jennifer was a good kind woman and I could see why her husband had brought her along, in spite of the opinion of her he so continually voiced. She could map-read, and pack swiftly, and thought it necessary (no one else did) to clean out the minibus from time to time, and produce clean, ironed, emerald green shirts for the Band to wear at formal gigs over acid green T-shirts. And also, of course, for the mutual pleasure of their nights together, a pleasure which I did not doubt. He was a deep-voiced, large-nosed (always a good sign) fellow, and I daresay with a deep and powerful stroke or so, of the kind he employed upon his chosen instrument, which could produce an agreeable enough response in Jennifer.
Make no mistake about it, these musicians are randy fellows and the instruments they choose to play, the music they care to make, reflect the manner of their love-making, their compulsion to beget. And if I unfashionably bracket the two, I daresay it is because I was reared by my grandmother more than my mother and am still permeated with the notions of the world before contraceptives were freely available, when the sexual drive was seen as something which suited nature’s purposes, not man’s; existing to create babies. The associated pleasures and excitements ensured the continuation of the race. Those who liked it fucked, and their genes survived. Those who didn’t, failed to reproduce. Thus a race who liked sex was created. Sexual pleasure was both the stimulus and the reward for reproduction: God’s way (great-grandmother) Nature’s way (grandmother) evolution’s way (mother) of making sure we fucked and fucked and fucked again, for the better continuance of the race, the more variant its surviving form. I have a special interest in evolution, in genetics, for reasons I will presently relate. My mind goes to it, whenever it can.
‘Breakfast up, everyone,’ cried Jennifer. ‘Don’t let the coffee get cold!’ And up and down the corridors floorboards creaked, and the murmur of voices arose, and doors opened, and Jack came bounding along the corridor towards me (a puff of dust rising with every footfall) and whirled me round and kissed me full on the lips.
‘Oh, you idiot,’ he said, ‘you idiot. What do you want with the likes of me?’
‘Just you,’ I said. ‘Only you.’
‘It’s no kind of life,’ he said, ‘to be married to a Band. When I think of what you’re used to.’
‘You mean I’ll turn into Jennifer?’
‘No such luck,’ he said, and vanished into the bathroom.
‘This toilet isn’t blocked,’ he called out, in satisfaction. ‘Rumour said it was, that we had to use the lamp-posts like the dogs we are.’
I did not claim credit for the unblocking, for fear of overwhelming my man with my competence.
‘Jack, Sandra!’ called Jennifer. ‘Where are you two lovebirds? Just because Sandra’s a star doesn’t mean she doesn’t need breakfast.’
‘Go down and face them,’ Jack called to me, from behind the closed door. ‘I’ll be a minute or so.’
And so I did. I went down to face my audience, my critics, in the high square kitchen, where spiders wove their webs and beetles pattered about the dusty floor, and slugs laid silver patterns on broken tiles, or had done until Jennifer put an end to their fun; she stayed up late the night we arrived, dizzy from exhaustion, to clean up, as she put it. So we could all start fresh in the morning, as she said. And so we did, because it was Jennifer who ran about the house, shifting mattresses, finding bolsters, fairly allocating the grisly grey blankets, while the rest of us just sat on the stairs, and finished off Steve’s red plastic flagon of yet grislier red wine, reluctantly shifting over whenever Jennifer pushed by: and so were saved the hours of grumbling negotiations while a consensus was reached on who should do what, and where, and worse, why. Easier, it was silently agreed, for Jennifer just to do the lot.
‘So there you are,’ said Jennifer brightly, filling in the awkward silence that fell upon the group around the table as I came into the room. They had been talking about me. ‘So that’s why you looked so familiar! A telly star. Why didn’t you tell us to begin with?’
‘We would have carried your bags,’ said Karl.
‘Aren’t we honoured,’ said Hugh, moving over, brushing not-so-pretend dust from a fruit box that served as a chair. He had a square plump face and was thinning on top, for all he was still in his twenties. He was the best drummer in the country, a distinction he shared with at least a hundred others, similarly described. He was hopelessly dyslexic, and (other than by speech, with which he was economical) could communicate only by drums. Bente thought he was a genius, because he’d told her so; she hovered over him, attending to his every whim. Why not? She had a well drummed upon look. I sat down and smiled vaguely, as I have learned to do when under attack, and Jennifer laid before us fine fresh bread, good Normandy butter, apricot jam with tiny whole (pitted) apricots still observable, hot foamy milk and weak grainy coffee. (I knew she’d slip up somewhere and she did, on the most important item) and some of us (not me) cried ‘wonderful! a miracle! how do you do it, Jennifer?’ or words to that effect, as expected, and she looked up, modest and triumphant, and looked shyly at Sandy whom she adores, for the pleasure no doubt of his slow base strokes.
And we ate and I thought that would be the end of it. They’d come to accept me, surely. I was the same person I’d been the day before – Jack’s doxy, cause of the Reading Embarrassment (Mrs Stubbs had turned up at Reading Station Car Park, the Band’s final pick-up point, to discover her husband with me in tow) and if they didn’t mind that why mind this? But they did.
‘Along with the raggle-taggle gypsies, oh,’ observed Pedro. Well, he would: his background being folk. The band put up with him and his vibes, but he wasn’t their regular guitarist. ‘Slumming along with us ordinary folk,’ said Karl (who’d been to Eton and spent his life slumming) and took from his pocket and unfolded (elderly men always fold a lot, and tightly, running a firm finger along every available crease: the only firm thing left, I daresay, so they use it whenever they can) a copy of the Sun some six months old, not just yellow but brown, and still discernible, that unfortunate photograph of me topless and apparently dancing on a table at a wild party, quite irrelevantly heading a report of a special public meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society. ‘New Look at Sandra’s Society’. Once they have this kind of photograph on their files they keep using it. I’d begged Matthew (my lawyer husband) to sue, but he said no: better to just let the matter die down.
‘That photo,’ I said now, tentatively, ‘is misleading. I was standing on a table to change a lightbulb, and stretching up, and wearing a tube top, and that’s the kind of thing that happens.’
They laughed.
‘If you want to dance naked on tabletops,’ said Steve, ‘that’s your business. I suppose the Press is after you now, to see what’s next, and we’re it.’
‘Jack’s it,’ said Karl, and laughed. Envious old trout.
‘All that’s behind me,’ I said. ‘Finished. This is a new life.’
‘We must seem very dull and ordinary to you,’ said Steve, glinting through his pebble glasses.
‘None of you seem the least ordinary to me,’ I said, ‘If anything, the lot of you are positively extraordinary.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Sandy, dangerously. It was obvious I was in a no-win situation. And Jennifer, sensing trouble, moved uneasily and said:
‘More bread, anyone? Who’s for another dollop of jam? I’m sorry it’s not home-made, but it’s better than nothing,’ but no one took any. They looked at me instead.
‘I think the Band’s great,’ I said. ‘And the music’s the greatest, and I’m proud to wear the Citronella T-shirt.’ And I raised my mug of coffee to them all, and that helped. A simple, sincere act of flattery has got me out of many a tight spot yet! But where was Jack? I needed him. My body, as much as my mind, noted his absence. And then I heard the notes of his trumpet out in the courtyard. Jack was practising scales, pre-breakfast, as was his habit. The notes would drift into a tune and then out again into another key and another scale and another tune. Jack, in fact, was showing off.
‘Pity he didn’t play like that last night,’ said Karl. ‘He was all to pieces.’
‘He doesn’t get enough rest,’ said Stevie of the abstemious trombone, leering at me through the pebble glasses, and Jennifer frowned and clucked.
We sat and listened, perforce, and the pure notes shivered the motes of dust from the kitchen shelves and they fell dancing in the streaming sunlight to the floor. But the silence was not easy. My presence inhibited ordinary conversation. Starlady Sandra, discoverer of the Planet Athena, for a short time a media celebrity: still, as they say, just about a household word, a faint flame fanned into brightness every fourth week on TV, whose views were solicited by feature writers as to what they were giving for Christmas, how they cut their toast, what length they wore their skirts, whose naked boobs had appeared in the Sun, was not wanted here. They felt as Jack did – cheated, taken for a ride. Silence was their weapon. They fell silent as teachers do when the Head comes into the staffroom, as the Mothers’ Union does when the Vicar approaches, as does Claridges’ Dining-Room as Princess Margaret enters. No matter how the Head jollies things along, or the Vicar swears the oaths of the common man, or Princess Margaret smokes yet another sinful cigarette, it only makes things worse. We are ordinary folk, they cry in their hearts, and proud of it. Nothing singular about us, no sirree! We’re every-day, part of the team; we are the herd whose whole point is our lack of singularity. Bad... to you who are singled out, for good reason or bad!
And then Frances said:
‘I don’t know what all the fuss is about. I’ve never even seen her programme,’ and everyone laughed, and felt easier, except Frances herself, who looked at me balefully with her lovely, moist, cowlike eyes. The white showed above the iris, I noticed. No amount of cosmetic surgery could cure that, I imagined.
‘Everyone had enough?’ said Jennifer, whisking a paper table cloth away. Did she bring them with her: did she expect the disaster of our billeting? Karl assured us before we left that we’d be put up in proper French hotels, two-star. Was it that Jennifer lay awake each night planning how to be everything to someone, to provide something for everyone, preparing for all eventualities? Perhaps as a child she’d read The Swiss Family Robinson; perhaps she’d been carried away by its enchantment, grown up always to have at hand the equivalent of one of those convenient shipwreck chests from which necessities could be produced – not a mere rope to tether the wild goat but, better still, a knife to cut the creeper to bind together to make the rope: for here she was with length after length of paper tablecloth that could be cut up into squares for toilet paper (toilet paper, anyone?) or spread on some filthy, wormy old door she could always somehow find and place on fruit boxes to make a table, so that breakfast (which she would also somehow extract from the natives) would not only taste good but look good – ah, this trip, this band outing, this general disaster was Jennifer’s moment of triumph, you could tell from the small smile of bliss on her lips. The great hour of the Band’s need! Spoiled only by me, bringing with me the flavour of illicit sex, my uneasy mixture of fame and notoriety, diverting the full attention of Jack the mad trumpeter, leader of the Band, he whom every woman fancied (even Jennifer) and I had got.
Jack put his trumpet away, and came to finish the last of the coffee and no one said anything nasty to him at all.
‘Time to hit the road, everyone,’ said Jennifer, and the Band dutifully rose, and made its preparations for departure, and Jack took me by the hand and led me up the dusty stairs with the broken banisters to the very top of the house, and the small under-the-eaves room, where doves cooed and fluttered (the roof must actually have holed. The French simply don’t seem to care about these things) and pushed me up against the wall, or one of them, and unbuttoned my jeans, and tugged them down and inelegantly but powerfully and briskly fucked me, so the ancient plaster behind me frayed and powdered and fell in showers over my heels. I remember I cried out, and the sound echoed. A lesser man would have said ‘hush’. Jack didn’t bother. He didn’t care. Let the Band know. What did they not already know?
‘Better?’ he said. How did he know? What did my face show? Had I appeared to so much as notice his sexual remissness, let alone care? Surely not! Oh, but I was truly colonised. Jack sent his spies into my head, amongst the crowded passages of my thoughts, taking note, detecting rebellion. He humiliated me as the conqueror does the conquered, making sure that’s the way it stays, that no one gets any ideas.
‘Better than what?’ I asked coolly, instead of saying yes, oh yes, and my defiance seemed to set him off again, and I was glad of it.
‘I must be going,’ he said. ‘They’ll be waiting. Mustn’t upset Jennifer. She’ll have her stopwatch out.’ But he kissed me lingeringly, almost romantically, as if in apology for the brusqueness of his behaviour, and I was glad of that too. I did not doubt he loved me – albeit as the conqueror loves the conquered. Let them mutter and murmur and squirm, that’s okay, that’s expected, that shows they’re worth the conquering; but let the spies report back any sign of real unrest, of organisation, and the iron hand descends, and informers turn into secret police, spies turn into torturers, and misery abounds.
‘That was to keep you going,’ said jolly Jack Stubbs. ‘Until I come home tonight.’
‘But what will I do all day?’ I asked.
‘It was you who said you wanted to stay behind,’ he stopped at the door and said. He was as tall as the door. He would have to stoop to leave the room, this lengthy man whose lengthiness extended to all other parts. I stayed where I was, my jeans at least modestly replaced, though I seemed to be shirtless – my shirt, I now observed, in a crumpled ball beneath my feet; how had that happened? – still pinned against the wall by the sheer memory of the extent of his presence within me.
‘Did I?’ I said. ‘I must have been mad.’
‘It’s best if you do,’ he said. ‘Frances is getting jealous. Give her a day on her own with me, and she’ll be fine.’
‘Keep an eye on her,’ I said, ‘or she’ll be off.’
‘She’s too young for that. Fifteen!’
‘Growing up fast,’ I said.
‘We’ll have to have a talk some time, you and me.’
‘What about?’
‘Things,’ he said. ‘Where we go from here. We can’t be on the road for the rest of our lives.’
‘Why not?’
‘You being who you are,’ he said. ‘It alters things.’
‘How?’ I couldn’t see it, wouldn’t; standing there in disarray.
‘A man has his pride,’ said Jack, Mad Jack, Leader of the Band. Proud Jack, like any other man. But love conquers all. Doesn’t it?
‘They’ll never have me back,’ I said. ‘I’ve burned my boats. You’ve no idea!’
He looked me up and down, with his bright knowledgeable eyes, and smiled, and moved back towards me.
‘Takes a lot of burning to sink a boat. Careful, or they’ll tow you back into port.’
‘They never will,’ I said. ‘Never, never, never!’
But Lear said seven ‘no’s’ in a row, and it did him no good at all. And the minibus’s horn went, long and loud, and Jack moved away from me, saying, ‘I have to go,’ and I knew he did, but I took it as a bad omen.
I had better report what happened after Jack left, pounding down the stairs, clatter-clatter, the better to keep Jennifer happy, though I had rather not. I watched the dust of his departure subsiding, gently falling through the beams of August sunlight – already just slightly autumnal – which shone through the cobwebby windows. I was released quite suddenly and irrationally, as when the door of a washing machine after its fast spin finally allows itself to be opened, from my pinning to the wall, and crossed to the window, and saw what I did not want to see. The Renault 12, packed with the day’s necessities – bass, banjo, guitar, clarinet, drums, trombone, trumpet, various stands, sound system, microphones, shirts, T-shirts, cassettes, stickers, badges, the Band itself, Sandy already at the wheel and Jack just getting into the back, pulling first Jennifer, then Frances, up behind him, the doors closing, the van driving off, and nothing left, nothing, just the bare French yard, the French morning sun, and a kind of lonely shuttered desolation.
I couldn’t bear it. My private parts still buzzed and zinged. What had been replete and satisfied now hungered and thirsted. The doves fluttered and pecked at my feet on the powdered plaster, for spiders and weevils and all the things Jack and I had disturbed. The birds seemed strangely tame and not disconcerted in the least by the odd activity of humans. I looked around for any possible source of satisfaction. It was going to be hard to come by. The door handle seemed about the right height, of cold, shocking metal. I took off my jeans and rubbed myself up against it and, with the aid of my fingers, came and came again, and cried out without shame, so the doves rose and departed through a crack between eaves and ceiling into somewhere less desperate and agitating. Then I felt better, as if I had involved just not the organic world but the inorganic in the patterns of the changing universe. Drawn them in, united them. My flesh and cold metal had had business together and very right it seemed. Thank you, long Jack. Thank you, brass door handle. May the electrons fly, may the cells of the flesh learn how to welcome them, and not resist them.
Perhaps I am mad.