‘Jack,’ I say, ‘Jack, where will we live?’ How hard it is to be a free spirit!
‘Why,’ he says, ‘in the van.’ So I am to live like a gypsy, am I, without a postal address?
‘You take your washing round to your wife,’ I say. ‘I can hardly do that.’
‘No,’ he says. ‘She’d put your delicate things through the heavy soiled white wash. She does that to me when she’s angry. I have no socks left unshrunk.’
‘I’ll take them to the launderette,’ I say, ‘along with mine. Your future will be soft socks, delicately laundered.’ Anything I will do for him, anything: or that part of him which so wonderfully, nightly, becomes me. I will bath in the public wash-house, if I must.
‘You’ll miss your work,’ he says, ‘your friends.’
‘I’ll sit in the van and write a book,’ I say. ‘I’ll follow you to every gig. I will never be bored. We could,’ I add cautiously, ‘get a radio telephone.’
‘I suppose so,’ he says, ‘but it might be the beginning of the end.’
‘Then we won’t have one,’ I say. ‘There will be only you and only me.’
‘Anne keeps my diary,’ he says. ‘The bookings come through to her. I call her once a week, from a pay phone. Or go round.’
‘I’d rather you called her,’ I say.
‘I think I’ll have to,’ he said, ‘at least for a time. She’d got herself into a real state. Perhaps I’d better call her tomorrow, calm her down.’
‘I’d rather you didn’t,’ I say.
‘I have to have someone to keep the diary,’ he says.
‘I’ll do it,’ I say.
‘How can you, from the van?’ he asks. And he starts to sing in a husky voice, like some old, old black folk singer, ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes’. I realise he’s a little drunk. He gets through two bottles of wine a day at least, and quite a lot of beer. Playing the trumpet is thirsty work. Matthew drank no more than half a bottle of wine a day, and unlimited Perrier water.
A kind of cold creeps into my heart: and worse, I have the sensation that the hot hard fleshy tool around which my own soft flesh is wrapped, is not flesh at all, but cold metal: like some kind of makeshift rod – wire coat hanger not hazel dowsing twig. The effect is the same: the wire twists and turns as does the twig, but the process is different.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asks. ‘Don’t you like my voice?’
‘I love your voice,’ I say. ‘I love you,’ and the magic works, and he is warm again, and the ghostly lover, the grave dweller, who was there for a moment, is gone.
Jennifer Says...
‘But where will you and Jack live?’ asks Jennifer.
‘In the back of the van,’ I say.
‘It won’t last,’ she says.
‘It will,’ I say.
‘He’ll go back to his wife.’
‘He won’t,’ I say.
‘She keeps his diary,’ says Jennifer. ‘He’ll have to. And there’s Frances to think of and one thing leads to another. What he usually does is live in the van all summer and with Anne all winter.’
We’re whispering. We’re in the kitchen. It’s four in the morning. I couldn’t sleep, and got up and came downstairs, braving ghosts. I found Jennifer wrapped in a blanket, head on the table, dozing. Sandy felt too hot and sweaty to have her in his bed, she said. So she got out of it.
Hearing this, I feel an expression on my face that quite shocks me. I remind myself of my grandmother. I borrow Jennifer’s mirror – she has one in her bag, of course, and study my face, and yes, there it is, in my pursed and disapproving lips! My father’s narrow, perfect Gestapo lips – he must have been the handsomest SS officer in the whole German army – but on them my grandmother’s expression whenever she said ‘I don’t approve of that!’ or ‘Oh no, it wouldn’t be safe’. Is this the result of environmental variables, or of the dreaded polygenes? What the hell; I pull myself together. If Jennifer wants to play masochist it’s nothing to do with me. I rearrange my face so it displays less disapproving lineaments.
‘She won’t have him back,’ I say.
‘She will,’ says Jennifer. ‘She’s the kind who thinks half a man is better than no man at all. And he has no right to ask you to live in the back of a van. What will people think of you? You’ll amount to nothing.’
‘The back of the van’s just fine by me,’ I say. I, Sandra Harris, Stargazer Supreme, Lady Astronomer, aged forty-two, non-procreator of the race, herself an end in itself, not a mere hander-on of life, will live in a van to the end of her days, if that’s what Jack the mad trumpeter decrees.
This woman I hardly know, who appears to be me, goes back to bed and settles her body in beside the man she hardly knows. His hairy arm moves round her smooth back. Forty-two she may be but her skin’s as smooth and pale and freshly ironed as ever, and she’s off with the raggle-taggle gypsies oh. Oh, and oh, and oh again.
‘Hush,’ he says. ‘Remember Frances.’ In some matters, let it be said, he is more delicate than she.