The Square (23 page)

She arches her back, smiles at him from the wreckage of the hotel bed.

“Have you ever slept with another woman?” he suddenly asks her.

“Every man’s fantasy,” she retorts. “But no. Why do you ask?”

“Just wondered. Any reason?”

“Never had the opportunity. I’d quite like to have done, though. But I’m probably too old.”

“Why?”

“Well, I wouldn’t know how to go about it. I mean I can hardly go to a lesbian pick up joint, could I? And I wouldn’t know the first thing about what to do with a woman in bed.”

“It’s easy,” he says. “You just do what you like having done to you.”

There is a pause.

“I think it would be delicious,” she says. “You would just lick her tits like this,” he says, licking them.

“And then slide your hand between her legs,” he continues.

“Yes, but what about the fucking?” She is breathing quite hard now, pulling him on top of her again. God, she was good. Never satisfied. “That’s the bit I can’t quite renounce, you see.”

It was true. She was unable to actually envisage ending her affair with Jay. She had always thought it was temporary, something she could dump at a whim. It started off in the summer. She originally put it down to a holiday romance. Then, she categorised it as something to keep her interested over Christmas. Then, she filed it under the title Twelve Month Fling. Now, she knew there was no reason to build in its obsolescence.

It worked, that was the main thing. She couldn’t end it. Why should she?

She walks home, swinging her arms happily, that familiar delicious ache in her groin.

Although Jay had annoyed her, actually, between the action.

“Do you think your husband fancies the au pair?” he had asked, after they had screwed again, after all that lesbian fantasy chat which had really turned her on. Yes, he had actually asked her that. Jane had explained about how Anya came over to play the Blüthner. She had laughed in his face, but now she considered it, it worried her. There was the piano playing, for a start. The girl was a marvel. Nobody could deny it.

Then there was her height. That was pretty awe-inspiring.

Furthermore, Anya had a sort of measured stillness about her which Jane could see might be magnetic. Sort of. If you overlooked the Eastern European accent, the inability to say V properly. And the fact she was an au pair, which was really only one notch above being an actual cleaning lady.

She arrives home, throws her bag on the hall table and wanders downstairs into the kitchen, to find George standing in the middle of the room, eating a Müller Corner.

“Hello darling,” she says to her offspring. “Please don’t snack between meals.”

“Good day,” offers George. “Don’t disturb me at this moment. I am about to go and finish my animated film.”

“For the Talent Show?”

“The very same.”

“Well, you’d better get a move on. It’s next week. And George, you’ll never guess.”

“What?”

“Alan Makin is presenting it. The whole thing.”

“Oh my giddy aunt. I thought you were. Who is Alan Makin?”

“Oh, never mind. He’s on TV sometimes.”

George seems entirely unimpressed by this personnel change. He finishes his yogurt, licks the lid, positions the spoon in a glass and wanders out of the room. Jane hears his feet running upstairs.

It is Thursday afternoon. At five o’clock, the door bell rings. It’s Anya, shyly smiling on the doorstep. It’s as if she has materialised out of Jane’s thoughts, thinks Jane nastily.

“Oh, Jane. I, I mean Patrick said… I could come… ”

“No problem,” says Jane shortly, suggesting that it is indeed the precise opposite. “Come in. You know where the piano is?”

“Oh, yes, thank you.”

Well I’m not bloody offering her a coffee, thinks Jane on her way to the kitchen.

Anya walks into the music room and puts her manuscript on the Blüthner. She gazes around, takes in the perfect furnishings. The Toile de Jouy screen. The oil paintings. One picture is of a man who is wielding a rifle and a very dead mallard duck. He has the same choleric complexion as Patrick. She wonders if it is an ancestor.

She pulls out the stool, sits down, plays her customary Bach prelude from the ‘48’, then rests her hands on the creamy keys.

She looks at the manuscript. Beethoven. Piano sonata No. 14. In C sharp Minor; ‘quasi una Fantasia’ is the description. ‘A sonata, almost like a fantasy.’ She starts the piece. It is, of course, the ‘Moonlight Sonata’. As she starts, the lovely opening ascending triplets in the right hand in conjunction with the sonorous octaves in the left travel down into the granite boudoir which is Jane’s kitchen, and jolt through Jane’s entire body as if she has been electrocuted.

Jane is downstairs, eating a biscuit. She allows herself one biscuit a week. This is her biscuit moment. And Anya is not adding to it with her fucking Beethoven. She is spoiling it. Jane feels like crying. But it is so beautiful, the liquid notes falling, the sustain pedal holding the whole beautiful melody in the air long after the keys have been pressed. And although she is trying to resist it, she cannot help but be transported by the music.

The movement finishes and Anya moves onto the second, and the third sections of the Sonata, pieces whose complexity and speed leave the average piano student far behind and wander into the realm of the committed pianist.

As Anya commences the Presto Agitato, the frantic third movement, Jane hears Patrick’s key in the door. Good, she thinks. He’s missed out on the bloody ‘Moonlight Sonata’ bit.

Anya is bent over the piano, focusing furiously on the notes as they come rattling out of the instrument. Patrick pops his head round the door.

“Anya! How marvellous!”

The playing stops, the notes collide and tumble together, falling through the air and into silence.

“Patrick, I hope this is alright.”

“It’s marvellous. Just what I wanted. Do start again! I mean, pick up where I came in. Sorry.”

“I’ll start from the beginning, it’s no problem. I needed to warm up a bit.”

“Righty ho.” He backs out of the room, whistling.

She turns several pages back, and recommences the piece with the Adagio Sostenuo, the famous Moonlight bit.

The music ripples through the house. Patrick comes into the kitchen.

“Jane. Isn’t this just terrific. My word! The ‘Moonlight Sonata’. Never knew someone who could play it!”

“It’s not actually all that difficult.” She can’t help herself. “I mean, I’m not taking it away from Anya, but I knew someone in my form at school who could play this when we were about twelve. Gets harder. But this famous bit is a piece of cake.”

“I’d like to hear George play it then,” retorts Patrick. “I think she’s great. And it’s just so nice to hear our piano being played by a real artist.”

There is a pause as they listen to the playing. She has to ask him.

“Do you fancy Anya, Patrick? I mean you seem very keen on her.”

He looks at her, startled, a bun half way to his mouth.

“Fancy her? No! Of course not.” He turns away, chewing mischievously. “Although she is rather severely gorgeous in a Slavic sort of way. Those cheekbones!”

He considers the prospect. There is no point in hiding anything from Jane.

“Well, I sort of do fancy her, I suppose. In an abstract way.”

Even though she has just made love to another man that morning, still has traces of his semen dried on her thighs, the idea of Patrick fancying someone else infuriates her.

“What? What the hell is an abstract way?”

“Well, you know, if you weren’t here, and neither was anyone else, and we were in the Sahara desert together, I’d probably have a go.”

“Have a go?” echoes Jane incredulously. “What the hell sort of language is that?”

She looks at her husband of twenty years in a different way, actually looks at him from a different angle completely. She strips away the domesticated familiarity with which he has been so thickly veneered, sees him as a male predator on the vulnerable Eastern European au pair upstairs… no, it’s too ghastly.

“God’s sake, Patrick,” she says. “We are not in the Sahara desert, thankfully.”

“Well I like her coming here to play,” he says stoutly. “And as I am the one who is paying… ”

“What?”

He had failed to tell her this bit of the arrangement.

“You are
what?”

“Paying her. I said I’d give her twenty quid to come and tinkle the ivories. You know. Why not? Poor girl, she probably sends it back to her family in Warsaw or wherever she comes from.”

“Whoosh.”

“Whoosh? What are you talking about? What the hell is Whoosh?”

“It’s where her family comes from, you dunderhead.”

“Oh, sorry. Well, as I was saying. She probably sends it all back. She needs it. And we have enough to spare.”

“Paying her. I cannot believe it,” says Jane. Upstairs, Anya is onto the Presto third movement. The notes cascade in a frothing fountain.

Underneath the cadenza, Patrick dimly hears a tweeting sound. He glances up at the kitchen clock, a confection where the numbers go backwards and birdsong emanates from the device on the hour, every hour. At this point, a wren is busily chirping.

A minute later Anya reaches the triumphant finish of the piece. There is complete silence in the house.

Patrick stomps upstairs to the music room. He swings open the door. He is cross with his wife, and is determined to have his way.

“That was terrific. Terrific. I wonder, er, Anya.”

“What?” asks Anya.

“Could you possibly play for us next Sunday at lunchtime? Jane’s parents are coming over. Might be rather nice. You know, showing off a bit! Give ’em a bit of Beethoven before the beef. Chopin before the chicken. Mozart before the… ” he breaks off, unable to fulfil the end of the rather strained pun.

“… Mutton?” says Anya, whose family eat rather a lot of it in Poland.

Patrick is delighted that she has joined in with the joke.

“That’s it!” he says, fumbling in his corduroy trousers for a £20 note, and giving it to her with the confidence of a man who is used to paying people in petty cash.

“So, same again, only on Sunday. Midday?”

“I’ll come over on my way back from church. Do you go to church?”

“Good God no,” says Patrick, with feeling.

“Well, see you then. Lovely.”

“Lovely,” echoes Patrick.

She slams the door behind her, walks lightly down the steps and into the sun-filled Square. She knows just how Sunday lunch will be. Too much food, too much wine. The heat and smell of roasting meat suppurating through the house. She imagines being back in Lodz for her parents’ Sunday meal. She feels homesick when she thinks about it. Without question it would be wholly provided by food from the family smallholding on the opposite side of the road. Potatoes, beets and cabbage all grown by her mother. They might have some meat from the family pig which would have been slaughtered earlier that week. Or just thick Borscht soup and homemade bread, followed by jellied quince. Her father would drink beer. Everyone would have gone to church, caught up on local gossip and had a chance to see friends.

“Tell us, Anya,” her mother’s friends would say. “What is London really like? What is the family like who you look after? Are they nice to you? What do they eat?”

“They waste their food,” she would tell them. “They complain about having no money, but then they throw everything away.”

Anya throws nothing away. The fridge at Tracey’s house is evidence to it. It is full of tiny jars of cooked broccoli, small portions of rice and hard boiled egg. Half an onion, carefully wrapped in tin foil. A bowl of soup. A glass half-full of milk. It’s how she has been brought up. She hopes she might have influenced Belle and Grace not to waste all the food she cooks for them and puts on their plates, but she doubts it.

Chapter Twenty-Five Belle

She shakes Philip Burrell’s hand. He is standing before her, smiling, clasping her other hand tightly to his, trying not to look down her top. He has already paid her, several crisp notes stuffed into an envelope.

He is very pleased.

“Darling. It’s marvellous. The whole thing.”

Belle blushes, smiles. She puts the money quickly away in her bag.

“Thank you Philip. I’ve had a good time here. It’s been great.”

She means it. She’s enjoyed working at Philip’s studio more than she had anticipated, not just because there was a satisfaction in doing the work itself, but because she realised Philip and Gilda had offered her a different view.

Things that she had considered unsayable, undoable, were said and done at the Burrells’, just as if it was completely normal. Normal to have mouldings of genitalia in the downstairs loo, and topless pictures in the kitchen, normal to talk about long, long drinking sessions, and hint at other, more dangerous activities.

Gilda had even once implied very strongly to Belle, over the Brie sandwich at lunch, that she had, a long time ago, seriously toyed with the notion of having sex with an animal. And made it seem like a totally rational choice.

That was what fascinated Belle. She also loved the way Gilda played with the female dress code. Sometimes she was girly, other times butch. Her hair seemed to undergo almost daily transformations. Almost unconsciously, Belle had been influenced by this. It was a liberation of sorts to get out of her chosen uniform, dive into her mother’s or sister’s wardrobe and treat each day as an experiment.

Today, she is wearing a frilled, low cut dress scattered with tiny embroidered cherries. It is down this low neckline that Philip longs to gaze.

He feels he has the right to, anyway, because he has just been profiled in
Frieze
magazine. And he has just sold his first marathon course, which went for £150,000 at Basle Miami. He’s been told that will be reported in the
Evening Standard
, possibly with another, much more readable profile, certainly with a photograph of him on the gallery’s yacht which they had hired for the event. Ha. Let those johnnies at the Tate suck on that.

“It was your Amsterdam model,” Magnus had told him, about the sale. “They loved the fact that it involved the sports stadium.”