Alan Hollinghurst - The Stranger’s Child

After this as it happened Peter had a free period, when he was due to meet Corinna Keeping, an arrangement that now took on a certain charge. He doubted very much he would say anything. There was undeniable intimacy in the four-hand sessions with Corinna. Sharing her piano stool, he had a sense of the complete firmness of her person, her corseted side and hard bust, their hips rolling together as they reached and occasionally crossed on the keyboard. As the secondo player he did all the pedalling, but her legs sometimes jerked against his as if fighting the impulse to pedal herself. The contact was technical, of course, like that in sport, and not to be confused with other kinds of touching. None the less he felt she enjoyed it, she liked the businesslike rigour of its not being sexual as well as the unmentionable fraction by which it was. After a practice, Peter would find her mixed trace of smoke and lily-of-the-valley on his shirt. The meetings had no amorous interest for him at all, but he was naturally flirtatious and without really thinking he found they gave him a pleasant hold on someone generally considered a dragon.

She was waiting in the music-room, having just had Donaldson, who was doing Grade 7, for an hour. ‘Ah, well done, you’ve escaped,’ she said, with a mischievous jet of smoke, stubbing out her cigarette on the side of the tin waste-paper basket. ‘You got away from all those dear old bores.’

Peter merely grinned, took his jacket off and opened a window as if absent-mindedly. Far too soon to mention bullying, and though it had been on the tip of his tongue he saw clearly, now he was in her presence, that she would not be amused by an account of the pornography debate. He said, ‘Well, a lot of fuss about Open Day, as you can imagine.’

‘I suppose I can,’ she said, with a flick of her hard black eyebrows. ‘Of course I’m not asked to these highly important gatherings… I’m rather sorry you have to waste your time with them.’ It was her sly way of reaching to him over the heads of the other staff. Underneath it, he assumed, must lie wounded pride at coming back to teach music in the house she had lived in as a girl. Once he had asked her what the music-room had been in her day: the housekeeper’s bedroom, apparently, and the sick-bay next door the cook’s. ‘Have you looked at the Gerald Berners?’

‘I’ve looked at it long and hard,’ said Peter.

‘Rather dotty, isn’t it,’ said Corinna. ‘Mother will be thrilled, she adored Gerald.’

‘Well, I’m glad you’ve let me off the other two morceaux.’ It was just the simpler middle one they were doing, the so-called ‘Valse sentimentale’.

Corinna steadied the music on the stand. ‘Can you think of any other composers who were peers of the realm?’

‘What about… Lord Kitchener?’ Peter said.

‘Lord Kitchener? Now you’re being silly,’ said Corinna, and coloured slightly, but smiled too.

First of all they played straight through the piece. ‘I should just say,’ said Peter at the end, ‘that I assume it’s meant to sound as though I can’t play to save my life.’

‘Absolutely. You’ve really got it.’ With Corinna there was somehow a risk that one might revert to the age of eleven oneself, and get whacked round the head with a book. They went through it again, much more confidently, then she stood up for another cigarette.

‘Isn’t this main tune oddly familiar?’ Peter said.

‘Is it? I shouldn’t have thought any of Gerald’s stuff was familiar.’

‘No… I mean, I think he’s pinched it. It’s Ravel, isn’t it, it’s definitely French.’

‘Aha…?’

Peter played the tune again, very plainly. ‘God, you’re right,’ said Corinna, ‘it’s the Tombeau de Couperin ’ – and sitting back down she shunted him off the stool and played the Ravel, or a bit of it, with her cigarette between her teeth, like a pianist in a speakeasy.

‘There you are!’

‘Naughty old Gerald,’ said Peter, which was a liberty she allowed; though she then said,

‘It might just be naughty old Maurice, of course. You’ll have to check the dates. Anyway, we’d better look at the Mozart for ten minutes, then I must get back, I have to take my husband to the cricket club.’

‘Oh, in Stanford Lane?’ It was a pleasant ten-minute stroll from the bank. ‘I must say you spoil your husband.’

Though not cross, Corinna didn’t look pleased by this. She pushed the Trois Morceaux into her music-case, and then flattened the Mozart sonata on the stand. ‘I suppose you haven’t heard about him?’ she said.

‘Oh, no, I’m sorry… Has something happened?’ Peter saw him being knocked down in the Market Square.

‘Ah, you don’t know.’ She shook her head as if exonerating Peter, but still somewhat nettled. ‘People say it’s agoraphobia, but it’s not actually.’

‘Oh…?’

She sat down again. ‘My husband had a very bad war,’ she said, with her little quiver of irritable tension. ‘It’s something that’s very hard for people to understand.’

‘I’m afraid I only met him for three minutes when I opened my account,’ said Peter. ‘He couldn’t have been nicer – even to someone who had more than forty-five pounds.’

‘He’s a brilliant man,’ said Corinna, ignoring this pleasantry, ‘he should be running a far more important branch, but he finds many things difficult that other people don’t.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I think people need to know that, though of course he loathes having any special exceptions made for him. Probably he’d hate me telling you this. Essentially he cannot tolerate being alone.’

‘Yes, I see.’ Peter glanced at her face, unsure if this explanation marked a new intimacy. She jetted up the last bit of smoke, and stubbed the cigarette out in the bin.

‘He was escaping from a German POW camp when the tunnel collapsed.’ She beamed at the top line of the opening Allegro. ‘No light, no air – can you imagine? He thought he’d die there, but they rescued him just in time.’

‘Goodness,’ said Peter.

‘So that, my dear,’ said Corinna, with a sharp frown, ‘is why I need to take him to the cricket club,’ and she fired off the first bars with a snap of the jaw before he was nearly ready.

‘I can’t believe you’re doing this,’ said Jenny Ralph.

‘Oh, I don’t mind, honestly.’

She approached him awkwardly over the gravel in her high heels, her glass held away from her. ‘They’re using you again!’

‘It’s only while people are arriving – I like having something to do.’ Paul stood in the gateway and watched a large black Rover 3-litre coming very slowly along the lane, like a car at a funeral. He said as happily as he could, ‘I’m a bit of an outsider here, anyway.’

‘Well, you needn’t be shy,’ Jenny said. She was wearing a wide-skirted dress like a ballroom-dancer’s and a lot of eyeshadow, and the fact was she did make him feel a bit shy, despite his greater age. He was wearing his work suit, and wished he had something else. ‘And you’ve obviously hit it off with Granny.’

‘Oh… well, she’s interesting, I like her.’

‘Mm, well, she adores you,’ said Jenny, rather tartly.

‘Oh, does she?’

‘ “The bank clerk who quotes darling Cecil!” ’

‘Oh, I see…’ said Paul, laughing as he stepped out from the gate, but wondering again if he was just a figure of fun to them all. He smiled and waved at the car. The visors were down against the lowering sun, and the deafish old couple inside seemed a little bemused. The plan was that they were to go on past the house and leave their cars in the field opposite, walking back across the lane and in through the further entrance to the drive. If they were extremely frail, they could park in the drive proper. It was delicate work deciding if the numerous quite elderly arrivals were frail enough to qualify. In the field itself there was a further just possible hazard from cow-shit, which Paul thought it better not to mention explicitly. ‘Do mind your footing,’ he called out, as the car crept off.