Sometimes she could also hear Paul playing. Working
out some melody or other on the old
Bechstein he'd brought over on a friend's truck all the
way from Islington, after they'd split up.
He tuned it himself, but recently either the heat or
the damp had got into the hammers and some
of the notes jarred even Geraldine's imperfect ear.
Other nights there would be jazz. Wild, impromptu
sessions with clarinets and saxophones
played by the various young men who seemed to inhabit
the outhouses. She met them
occasionally at meals, or on the path to the chemical
toilet, hidden behind the alders on the river
bank.
It was high summer. Drought. The leaves bronzing
on the trees in August and the ground baked
a cruel ceramic under a sky of burnished tin. The
river Creuse had slowed to a slimy crawl -
barely visible as movement - past the wooden jetty.
A fishing dinghy dangled from a rope on
the rail, but the water was too shallow to float it properly.
Where the water was deepest behind the sluice, mature
trout lay on the bottom in the shadow of
the wheel, perfectly balanced against the imperceptible
current, and the sun-shafted air above
them was stained with dragonflies of silver and lapis
lazuli. Geraldine leant against the rail and
watched them for an hour at a time.
Behind her she could hear Yvette screaming in the crazy
mixture of English, Russian and French
she used when she was angry. Then she stamped out
onto the jetty, swinging the fringed Indian
skirt she wore against her bare brown legs, to cast an
enamel bucket on a piece of cord out into
the sluice, scattering fish and dragonflies.
`He only asked you here because you were sick,' she told
Geraldine. Yvette had black hair and
eyes and long slim arms where the sinews quivered beneath
the skin like steel wires. Yvette was
strong. She guarded Paul. Making him practice.
Making him eat. Keeping the young men in
their places. - He must have quiet to compose.
How can he hear the notes in his head if you are
here?
Did she, like Geraldine, see him leave through the open
windows late at night and take the path
through the alders to the outhouses. Guy, Charles,
Pierre - the names rotated as they came and
went. Students from the Conservatoire. Yvette
must have known.
The air was sterile. Only the dust proliferated. Impossible to work.
`Geraldine writes,' Yvette had said viciously that first
evening in response to a question from one
of the boys. She had made it sound like an insult,
rolling the Rs against her epiglottis and
spitting them out through her teeth.
She writes. Present tense. Continuous action.
A lie. The portable manual typewriter she had
brought with her lay zipped tight on the wobbly pine
table under the round window. A new A4
pad beside it. Three pens. A still life by
Bonnard. The only movement a frayed cotton curtain
convulsed by the air flow.
Paul was playing again. Chopin. From the jetty
Geraldine could see into the kitchen where
Yvette was squatting on the floor peeling vegetables,
and through the door ajar behind her she
could see Paul's grey pony-tail swinging to and fro like
a limp phallus as he followed the
escalation of the notes.
`Chopin irritates,' Yvette said at lunch, delivering the
consonants like olive stones. `He's so
trivial.'
`He composed that piece at Nohant,' Paul said, `When
he was living with George Sand.'
`Isn't that somewhere near here?' Guy/Charles/Pierre
asked in French, suspending a knife above
the smoked sausage.
`About fifty kilometres,' Paul said. `But
there's nothing much to see.'
`Geraldine would like to go.' Yvette said, taunting
her with her eyes.
Paul shrugged. `Take the Renault if you want to.
Personally I think it's a rip-off.'
Soon, Geraldine thought, they would go back to Paris,
to the two-roomed flat off the Rue
Bourget. Paul teaching at the Conservatoire, Yvette
taking casual translation jobs to pay the
rent. And the beautiful young men would go back
to their studies. Geraldine could see them all
in her mind, perfectly placed - glimpse a window, a dust
covered piano, dead flowers, a stained
Indian shawl thrown across a bed.
Last night Paul had asked her if she wanted to stay on.
`We come down sometimes at weekends,'
he said, `But you'd have it to yourself during the week.'
She thought of the cold house-share
she'd been offered in Newcastle. She had no ties.
People envied her. She could go anywhere.
Next day after breakfast Paul's half-brother Jonathon
arrived unexpectedly from the states. He
was wearing a T-shirt that played the Marseilleise which
he'd bought in Paris to celebrate the bi-
centenary of the glorious revolution. It had cost
him three thousand francs. Crazy, he said.
Three thousand francs for a T.shirt! He was on
a business trip to Europe, en route for Madrid
and Lisbon. He had a bottle of Armagnac with him
and two bottles of Veuves Clicquot, a pound
of fresh goat's cheese, a baguette and a huge basket
of fruit.
`You don't have to worry about feeding me,' he said to
Yvette. `This is all I want.' He'd seen the
kitchen before, he told Geraldine on the jetty.
He couldn't risk getting the shits. Not with an
Elsan. He would stay overnight, he said, and then
get the fast express from Clermont-Ferrand
to Madrid. It had a restaurant, proper beds and
colour TV.
Jonathon had become fatter, Geraldine observed.
The skin sagged away from his jaw bone, and
his stomach bore testimony to the size of his expense
account. She enquired about his wife, his
children. His ex-wife now, he said, and the children
were in college. His hair was cut too short,
she decided, and his lips were too loose, blurring the
words, which also had a kind of elasticity,
their meaning expanding, slipping this way and that on
the dry air.
He'd been sorry about the child, he said. He'd heard
about her marriage. `That was bad luck,
two bad apples in a row.' He laughed. First
his brother, then that other bastard. `What was his
name? Colin something?' She would have to
be more careful next time.
She should come to the states, he said. Plenty of
guys there would show her a good time. `Good
solid fellas. None of this aesthetic crap.'
He made a limp-wristed gesture that seemed to include
the whole of the mill and its empty granaries.
Geraldine could see a ball of spit in the corner of
his mouth like a spider's cocoon.
At lunch one of the floorboards gave way under the leg
of the Bechstein - dissolving away to
sawdust as the piano lurched sideways. `It's the
hot summer,' Jonathon said. `The damp's been
the only thing holding this place together.' He
poked a finger here and there in the woodwork,
stirring up little clouds of powdered wood.
`It's you! You!' Yvette accused Geraldine. `I knew if you came something would happen.'
Paul and the boys propped up the piano temporarily on
a piece of board. They would level it up
later, Paul said. Yvette served a cast-iron pot
of ratatouille with french bread and a bowl of
fromage frais. She didn't speak at all for the
rest of the meal. Didn't look at Jonathon slicing up
apples and goat's cheese to put on his baguette.
`Written any good books lately?' He quipped at Geraldine
across the table.
She shook her head, feeling her lips shrivel with distaste.
`You ought to write yourself a blockbuster,' he went
on, `make real money.'
Paul laughed, swinging back his pony-tail. `You'll
never get her to do that,' he said. `Earning
money's sordid. Real writer's don't do it.'
Geraldine thought she heard Yvette murmur `Or real musicians',
but she wasn't sure.
In the afternoon, when everyone seemed asleep, Geraldine
took the keys from their peg behind
the kitchen door and walked up the track to the clearing
where the Renault was parked. As she
fiddled with unfamiliar left-handed controls the passenger
door opened and Jonathon slid into
the passenger seat.
`Yvette told me,' he said. `You don't mind if I
go with you?' And he crossed his soft leather
shoes under the dashboard.
The roads were straight and black, scribbling their way
across the landscape between burnt fields
and brown-paper hedgerows. The old Renault's gearbox
was sloppy and she smiled to see him
wince as she went accidentally from second to fifth and
back to fourth. It was further than Paul
had indicated - a good hour's fast driving.
And then the chateau was smaller than she had expected.
Hardly a chateau at all really, although
perfectly proportioned behind the curved gateways.
Inside the paint was peeling from the walls
and the hallway stank of damp. `Just like the mill,'
Jonathon said. He pointed out the huge
structural cracks spidering their way across the ceilings,
and in the kitchen a wooden beam had
been installed as a prop.
In the dining room there was a chandelier made of pink
and blue barley-sugar twists of Venetian
glass. Vulgar. But then, Jonathon said, the
French weren't afraid of vulgarity. Not like the
English. The English were born with net curtains
in their minds. That was why England was
going down the pan.
The table was set for dinner, with cards written out in
George Sand's handwriting. Chopin, Lizst,
Musset. They had come to eat here, sleep here.
Some of them with the great Aurora herself.
And Chopin had stayed for seven years. Downstairs
the piano he had played. Upstairs the bed
they had slept in together. The hangings were a
rich blue, and her writing desk was lined with
blue silk to match.
There were twenty or thirty other people pushing round
with them. Eager for a glimpse of dirty
linen, Geraldine thought, of unmade beds, semen on the
sheets. That was what people came for.
Not to look at the desk, or the pens she cramped in her
cold fingers, writing through the night
to keep herself and the children, the house, her lovers.
George Sand had never had any problems
with inspiration. Outside the windows
it was green, untouched by drought, and the light that
filtered through the trees was blue-green like the wings
of dragonflies.
In the tiny church outside the gates Geraldine paid five
francs for a candle, spiking it onto the
iron stand. Jonathon found her a match to light
it. The wax was creamy and translucent like
skin. `Didn't know you were a Catholic? Or
did you just go to school with the nuns?' Jonathon
asked.
Geraldine ignored him, wishing herself alone, concentrating
hard on the frail spiral of blue and
yellow as the wick caught hold. Religion is a kind
of voodoo, she thought. It works because you
believe in it. But who do you pray to when you
no longer believe in God?
On the way back Jonathon talked about Yvette. Did
Geraldine know that he'd known her before
Paul did? But yes, she had known. Paul had
told her about Yvette, about Jonathon, and the mill,
in the long irregular letters he sent her, written on
scraps of music, old programmes, once a paper
napkin with the name of some restaurant on it.
`You should be more like Yvette,' Jonathon said.
`You need to be tough. Now she's a real survivor.'
That night after dinner Yvette sang vocal improvisations
while Paul played the piano and one
of the boys the alto flute. The strange sounds
floated past Geraldine as she sat in darkness at the
edge of the jetty. Layers of notes twisted together
in strange relationships. And she thought of
George Sand, manipulating the different strands of her
life.
`Bloody awful row,' Jonathon commented from the
cane chair beside the kitchen door. He
turned his head away from the music. `Not that
she can't sing when she wants to. She used to
sing in a cafe before Paul picked her up. Did I
tell you about that?' He dropped his cigarette in
a shower of sparks onto the boards, grinding it quickly
out with his shoe. `I'm surprised this
place hasn't gone up in smoke years ago,' he said.
`Calor gas, candles, paraffin lamps.' He
paused briefly to listen to the music. `I just
wish he'd make something of his life,' he said,
lighting another cigarette. `All that talent!'
In the darkness of the bedroom Geraldine watched Paul
make his stealthy way along the river
bank, before she climbed into bed and lay sweating between
rough cotton sheets. A long silence.
And then there was a movement on the stairs outside her
room, the slight contact of bare soles
on wood - Yvette's laughter mingled with Jonathon's softer
baritone, and then in the room above,
urgent, unmistakable, orgasmic noises.
She dreamed - but it seemed real - that they had bought
pastries and fruit in Boussac and a bottle
of wine for 5 francs. It was less than a dollar
he said. The same price as the candles. They ate
the picnic in a clearing off the road, signposted as
a prehistoric site. The dolman, empty of
bones, tilted among knee-high cow parsley and mustard
grass and their flung nectarine stones
skipped silently across the clearing, trimming the flower
heads like pebbles over water.
`Do you want to fuck?' He asked when they had drunk half the bottle of wine.
Geraldine's labia were juicy like the fruit and he sucked
at them, supporting her naked buttocks
with his hands. She could feel the lichen on the
stones scouring her back as he pressed her
down. But in the dream Jonathon's face suddenly
became Yvette's. They were lying breast to
breast and Geraldine could feel Yvette's hair under her
fingers, springy like horsehair, and Yvette
was talking to her in a mixture of Russian and French
she didn't understand.
Then she was dancing naked on the wooden jetty , feeling
the night breeze from the stream
fingering her skin. Someone in one of the
outhouses was playing the flute, very high, almost
out of range. And through the open doorway
she could see an upturned lamp on the piano, and
paraffin flames, driven by the wind, were pouring like
a river of joy across the keys.
© Kathleen Jones
First Published in Panurge UK
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Bongate Mill Home Page
Kathleen Jones
Lately it's begun to bother me that my life has become
so exclusively female. The little red
notebook beside the phone has line upon line of women's
names in it. My own friends, mother's
of my daughter's friends. When I go into
the bathroom the shelves are loaded with soap, bottles
of bath oil, exfoliant gel, anti-wrinkle cream, the girl's
zit lotions and eye shadows, and the
cabinet bulges with what my mother would have discreetly
called `women's things'.
Men no longer whistle at me from building sites.
Girl friends ring me up to invite me to all-
women dinner parties where we eat vegetarian high fibre
food and discuss our ex-husbands.
Men are people you pass in the street, faces on television,
always with someone else in wine bars
on Saturday night.
I remember when I was a child, my mother had two unmarried
friends called Doreen and Sue,
who lived chaste, unimaginable and (she somehow managed
to imply) pointless lives without
men. They lived in an Edwardian semi with Doreen's
elderly mother. They had both been
engaged during the war, but one fiancee had been killed
at Tobruk and the other went off with
a girl in the WRACS.
Doreen was a senior civil servant with short masculine
hair and a series of elegantly cut grey
suits with permanently pleated skirts. She had
oddly sexy legs, smooth and hairless in sheer
nylons, and tiny feet she pampered with hand-made leather
shoes. Sue had taken up offers of
training after the war and become a dentist. She
was very plump and made her own dresses in
bizarre fabrics that looked like furnishing material.
She was lazy and comfortable and had thick
blonde fluff on her upper lip she never bothered to remove.
They came into our lives on Bank Holiday weekends, evicting
me from my bedroom to sleep on
a shake-down on the sitting room floor. They brought
my mother un-affordable Elizabeth Arden
cosmetics in presentation caskets, malt whisky for my
father and once they gave me the triple-
layered net petticoat my mother had refused to buy.
They would sit at the table in our bare,
functional kitchen, after lunch, smoking cigarettes and
drinking Amaretto with their coffee. The
bottle had pictures of Italy on the label and a coy looking
cupid in a medallion around the neck.
They giggled over mutual memories, talked about politics,
books, Hollywood gossip, the war.
They did everything together, shopping, theatre, art
galleries, holidays in France. Such a pity,
my mother used to say when they'd gone. Such a
waste.
I asked my friend Kate, who always seems to have a lover,
`How do you meet men?' `I don't
know,' she said. `It just happens.' The last
one was an artist. She admired a painting in a gallery
and it turned out to be one of his and he said why don't
we go for a coffee and that was it.
I look at myself in the mirror. Thirty-something.
Divorced. Three children. It stares back at
me. All that history written in the little lines
trawling my neck, the anxious tightening round the
eyes, the softening outline and lengthening vision.
Kate on the other hand - twice married, two children,
mid forties - is tall and magpie coloured,
her face grooved like a record of everything she's ever
done, and always in black clothes pinned
together with bits of jumble sale diamante where the
zips have gone. She looks dangerous.
Perhaps that's what men go for.
I once tried it. Shoving my hair back in an old
fifties turban and putting on a post-war crepe de
chine dress with a dipping hem and one of those full-skirted
coats with a velvet collar and nipped
waist that had belonged to my mother. But I looked
as though I was auditioning for amateur
theatricals, so I gave the clothes to Kate.
My last encounter with a man was at an evening class.
I went to learn how to make terrariums
out of bits of glass and lead. It had seemed a
good idea at the time to learn some kind of useful
craft, and I imagined them full of green plants reflecting
underwater light on the window sills
of my flat. I planned to give them to friends for
Christmas. The shapes of coloured glass,
diamonds, squares, and hexagons of blue and wave-green,
were beautiful. They had a satisfying
scrunch as the cutter bit through the glass. But
afterwards I cut my fingers on the rough edges
and found it difficult to line them up for soldering.
The man sitting at the bench next to me used to help.
He would stand behind me and put his
arms over mine to hold the pieces while I moved the soldering
iron down the edge. He smelt of
wool and skin and hair. Natural - not cosmetic
- things. He was interested in glass, he said. His
grandfather had been a glass blower in Ireland.
He said he dreamed of taking early retirement
and having a stained glass workshop.
One night he rang up. `I hope you don't mind,' he
said, `but it's my fiftieth birthday.' He called
it the Big Five Oh. `I'm on my own,' he went on,
`and I wondered if you'd come out and help me
celebrate?'
He had always seemed friendly and pleasant, so I said
yes. The girls were very excited about my
date. They supervised my make-up and hair and dragged
out my blue dress from the back of the
wardrobe. It's out of fashion, but I've kept it
because of the colour. It's a happy dress, the girls
tell me, a lucky dress. But they have romantic
ideas imbibed from picture papers and American
teenage soaps.
He'd arranged to meet me at a small french bistro near
his flat. I refused the cocktails he pressed
on me, preferring to stick to sherry. I know where
I am with sherry. He was drinking whisky,
doubles, and he ordered an extra large bottle of wine
with his meal. `We might as well enjoy
ourselves,' he said, `and we don't have to stagger very
far afterwards if we do have a `touche' (he
pronounced it the french way making a little measuring
gesture with his fingers) too much to
drink.' And he laughed.
The menu was unbelievable. My eyes lingered greedily
on the prawns in pernod, the peppered
steak flambe'd in brandy, the chicken breasts in cream
and lemon. I ordered some deep fried
Camembert as a starter, little crisp brown buttons with
a soft, creamy interior.
He was noisier and more expansive than he'd been at evening
classes. During the meal he kept
touching me, little gratuitous points of contact as he
passed the wine, the accidental brush of
knee under the table.
I asked him about himself. He was in insurance apparently,
posted here temporarily for nine
months or so. His real home was in Devon.
He went back there at weekends `to refuel'. As he
talked I could see his unmentioned wife hovering over
his shoulder, washing his immaculate
shirts, prising the pieces of solder out of his hand-knitted
jumpers in the immaculate detached
house he described overlooking the Tamar. Her whole
existence confirmed by the single
indiscreet `we' he used when talking about a planned
holiday in Spain.
I glanced down at my plate. The waiter was serving
my steak au poivre on a bed of shiny red
pimentos grinning up like a row of vaginas. My
head was saying `he's a creep', but my body was
saying `he's not wholly repulsive and he really fancies
you'. The steak was very thick between
my teeth, crusted with pepper and mustard and the rich
juices trickled down my throat. A little
flame, lit by the wine, had begun to burn at the base
of my spine. Very few of Kate's men friends
would have been able to afford a meal like this.
Last year it had been a climber she'd met when
doing a bit of topless sunbathing in a secluded spot
at the top of the Avon Gorge. He'd heaved
himself over a pinnacle of rock and landed right beside
her in a clatter of pitons. He was at least
twenty years younger than her. `So what,' Kate
said. `I'm not intending to settle down with him
for life. Anyway, who wants all that droopy middle-aged
flab in bed with you? I've plenty of
my own.'
I looked across the table at his polished forehead, where
the hair was receding, and the expense-
account bulge under his shirt and wondered what it would
be like.
It was raining when we left the restaurant after an enormous
bill he'd settled with his Diner's
card. I wondered how he'd explain that to his wife,
and whether he would claim me against
expenses for business entertaining. A skittish
east wind had blown up. We both shivered and
I clutched my wool coat tighter round my neck.
`Is there room for two under that coat?' he
joked, putting his arm round me.
In the restaurant he'd asked if I would go round to his
flat for a night cap. He had a bottle of
champagne in the fridge for the occasion he said, and
he wanted me to see the three terrariums
he'd completed, all planted up. When he took early
retirement, he said, he might go into
business selling them. `What about your wife?'
I asked. He paused, then shrugged. `My wife
and I live on different tracks,' he said, `I go my way
and she goes hers. It's understood.'
By whom? I wanted to ask.
He walked me home and we stood on the doorstep like middle-aged
teenagers and I explained
that I couldn't ask him in because of the girls.
He kissed the soft skin on the inside of my lips
and touched my breasts and hair with practised hands.
Stupid with wine and food and sexual
desire, I could feel my body respond to these terrible,
unwanted caresses, programmed by
wretched biology. `No strings,' he said in my ear,
`just fun. You wouldn't regret it.'
When I was young I used to imagine Doreen and Sue to be
perpetually virgin and think how
awful it must be. Later, married, I wondered about
their ambiguous relationship.
Then, a few years ago, when Doreen died of cancer, my
mother went to pack up her belongings
and take them down to Oxfam. Sue couldn't bear
to touch them. Wouldn't even go into her
room. At the back of a drawer my mother found a
box of letters from one of Doreen's
colleagues, another senior civil servant. He was
married, but couldn't divorce his wife because
of his position, or so he said. They had, apparently,
met for lunch every day, written to each
other, and once they had gone to Italy, to Tuscany, for
a holiday. They were beautiful letters,
my mother told me on the phone, so full of loving.
`Such a pity,' she said. ` Such a waste.'
My favourite fantasy before drifting off to sleep is the
one where I meet a New Man - the kind
that are never free because other women are hanging on
to them like mad. He takes me out,
sometimes to an expensive restaurant on the river, or
to the opera. I'm wearing a dress I once
saw in a boutique in Clifton, jade green and turquoise
squares of silk weighted with tiny tassels
of glass beads. He drives me home in his open-topped
car and we make love under beech trees
in a field. Sometimes I alter it slightly and he's
in one of the caring professions with holes in his
sweaters and we sit at a pavement café counting
the pennies in our pocket linings. But the end
is always the same.
Yesterday Kate rang me up to invite me to supper.
`No men,' she said. `I'm giving them up.'
She's just spent a week in Amsterdam. `A mistake,'
she said. `I thought - him being an artist
. . . . but I never seem to learn. Why do
we do it?'
The off-licence had some Amaretto in a green glass bottle
with coloured pictures of Italy on the
label. Cupid, in his medallion on the neck band,
aimed the arrow with a menacing gesture -
sending out the call sign we all seem programmed to read.
I ran my finger gently down the long
neck of the bottle, seeing the green eye of the liquid
inside reflecting the room's light across the
counter.
I bought some to take to Kate's.
© Kathleen Jones
Broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Afternoon Story
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Kathleen Jones