‘Eggs, anyone?’ asked Jennifer. She’d acquired a dozen, from somewhere. The scrawny hens, then, must be capable of laying. There were no egg cups, so we ate scrambled eggs on fresh bread. I offered her money, but she said no – Jack paid into the Band kitty for himself, Frances and Anne, and since Anne hadn’t come along but I had – We’re doing the washing up. That is to say, she does it, and I politely hover.
‘Do you know Anne well?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘She used to come to gigs sometimes to keep an eye on Jack, but she wasn’t really interested.’
Ah. That almost sounded like a gesture of friendship.
‘You didn’t come yesterday,’ she pointed out. Not so good.
‘I wasn’t feeling very well,’ I said. Better than that Jack preferred me not to go, which she would misconstrue.
‘Oh you poor thing! Would you like an aspirin?’
‘I’m better today.’
‘So you’ll be coming with us? Good. That’s company for Frances. I’m sure it’s all perfectly okay, but there are all those soldiers and she is only fifteen, and I’m not her mother –’ Her voice dies away.
‘Neither am I,’ I say, and her hands move busily in the dish water, where they seem very much at home. Good Lord, how has this woman achieved a dishcloth?
‘Did you ever read The Swiss Family Robinson?’ I ask.
‘No,’ she says, surprised. And then, ‘Should I have?’ as if I were the one able to judge ‘shoulds’ and ‘shouldn’ts’.
She polished up a saucepan really nicely, and quite unnecessarily. Presently she said –
‘Poor Anne, she doesn’t stand a chance, does she?’
Rejected wives have few friends. They die for the unmarried women who were once their friends. They must make new alliances amongst their own kind – the abandoned and desolate; the un-coupled. ‘Not much,’ I said.
I tried to explain that Anne was out of the running before I turned up and that notoriety is a contradiction to sexual bliss, but she wasn’t listening. Sandy came in, with his big double bass and she dived for her all-purpose bag and brought out Brasso and a cloth folded into a neat plastic packet. Sandy smiled kindly at her, but his eyes flickered to me, Starlady Sandra, Jack’s sex kitten (a kitten rather past its first youth, admittedly): if she’ll have Jack she’ll have not anybody, no, not Pedro the guitar-player or Stevie the trombonist – but surely she’d have king of the back row, the bass player, and if she would, he would: and Jennifer caught the look. Too bad. Now what would I do for a friend? Sandy took polish and cloth and saw to the brass keys which wound the strings. I watched amazed.
‘I’d do it but he doesn’t trust me,’ said Jennifer. ‘You know what these men are like with their instruments.’
‘Just wonderful,’ I said with feeling, and she looked at me with her mouth puckered, wondering if I meant what she thought I might have meant. Sandy knew I did, and raised his eyebrows ever so slightly at me. Why do these men, I asked myself, always choose women less quick in the mind than they? (To say ‘more stupid’ would be unkind.) The answer, I daresay, is that only such women are prepared to rush after them proffering Brasso and cloth. Or perhaps it’s the very preoccupation with dishrags and polishing cloths which renders a woman puzzled and slow. Poor men, I think, poor men, always in such a fix.
The washing up finished, Jennifer called through the echoey building. The ghosts didn’t stand a chance in the face of such good-hearted practicality.
‘All right, everyone! Time to hit the road!’
‘Don’t say that,’ muttered Sandy beneath his breath, but if I could hear it so could she. She was meant to. She took no notice, just wrinkled her nose at him, flirtatiously, and he wished she wouldn’t do that either.
‘So it’s okay for me to come today?’ I said to Jack. He had not made it plain whether or not I would be welcome on the bus, for reasons of his own but very much to do with whether he or I would henceforth have the upper hand. I’m not daft. These things must be worked out.
‘Of course,’ he said, apparently surprised. ‘Karl wants to talk to you. He has an idea for a TV series about a travelling jazzband and wants to know if you’d help him get it on.’
‘Ah.’
‘Will you?’
‘No.’
‘Good.’
So in I went with the Citronella Jumpers to Blasimon-les-Ponts, where the street flags fluttered up and down the streets, and stalls selling ethnic niceties from every corner of the globe lined the square; you could buy freshly made prawn crackers – smelling of real fish and quite disgusting – tortillas (from a microwave), African beads and bangles so high in the asking price, so cheap in the selling you’d think it’s some kind of plot and wouldn’t be seen dead in them. How do these street traders survive so far from home? Can they even tell one coin from another in a foreign land? I fear not, despite their reputation as shrewd and mean: it is they who get ripped off, not do the ripping – and not a thing on sale which couldn’t be bought in Camden Town Market, London, any day of the week, so universal have become the gewgaws of the world. Little groups of folk dancers, in the intricate, uncomfortable costumes of the past, danced and skipped and sang their way along the streets, to the music of pipe, violin and drum, while watching crowds grouped and applauded and dispersed, glad of at least something happening in what could only be the infinite boredom of their lives. What goes on behind the fastened shutters of the small French town? Nothing, I fear. The young and the old stare into space, and brood, and wait, sweltering in summer, freezing in winter. I said as much to Jack, who reproved me for my attitude. There was obviously something about gypsy fiddling he knew, and I did not.
Frances, after last night’s softening, will have nothing to do with me. She went off arm in arm with Jennifer. I sat with Jack and drank café au lait from agreeably large green cups, gold-rimmed. My wrist looked thinner and browner than usual. My hair had bleached in the sun. Nothing much mattered. I could live like this for ever. Close the shutters: be content, like anyone else round here, just to be. The Citronella Jumpers were to play at eleven thirty beneath the War Memorial; it was difficult to get details of time and place from the Festival Organisers, inasmuch as no one there spoke English. Only the French rivalled the British in their expectation, nay, determination, that theirs should be the universal language. I offered to translate but Jack wouldn’t hear of it.
‘Try and understand,’ he says. ‘This Band doesn’t want anything to go smoothly. It’s not the way we work. We like to pick things up by osmosis. We do not want to be organised. Efficiency is the enemy of creative energy.’
I’d like to know what the discovery of Athena entailed other than creative energy and efficiency combined. But I was sensible enough not to say so. I called for a bottle of wine, instead.