Grasshopper Read online

  ‘Oh, you must be the girl Selina told me about who climbed an electricity pylon with a boy and the boy got killed.’

  I was disproportionately upset. Well, perhaps it wasn’t all that disproportionate. I think it was the idle, the thoughtless, way she said it, as if it was something that might happen to anyone, all in the day’s work, just one of those things. That upset me and knowing for sure that Max and Selina talked unfeelingly about me to their friends upset me too. At lunch I was seated not next to Max, which the cushion designer whispered to me would have been ‘the proper thing’ as the party was for me, but between the actor and a man I hadn’t yet spoken to who turned out to be an accountant. Whether he was Max’s accountant or just a friend who happened to belong to that profession, I never discovered. After telling me his name, which I quickly forgot, and what he did, he never spoke to me again. We had ricotta cheese wrapped up in smoked salmon, followed by pasta, a potato dish with salad and a lemon cheesecake. The actor said that it would be fine if only one or two of one’s friends served a whole lunch or dinner from the Marble Arch Marks & Spencer but the trouble was that everyone did it, so you found yourself eating the same things wherever you went. Then he said, ‘Oh dear, I keep forgetting she’s your aunt.’

  I smiled. I’d managed to secrete one of the smoked salmon and cheese parcels into my pocket, wrapped up in my (paper) napkin. Mabel would enjoy it for supper. The food might be routine for some but it was a novelty to me after all those tins of things on toast and I ate greedily. Just as well, for no one addressed another word to me. I didn’t mind that. I listened.

  A lot of the conversation was about Selina, her rise to fame, her star status. The producer began it, as he began every new subject, laughing at his own wit and shooting questions at everyone. Wasn’t Selina brilliant? Would anyone dream of being out of the house at eight-thirty unless they had set the video? Max said nothing but looked – I was going to say ‘sulky’ except that that’s not a word to apply to anyone as august as he was. When the compliments became too fulsome he pursed his lips and looked down at his plate. A change of subject brought him relief and he smiled.

  It was at that lunch that I first heard of the couple called Andrew Lane and Alison Barrie. I’ve only known one person of the age I was then who buys a newspaper and that was Silver. Sometimes I watched television and sometimes I listened to the radio but not to news programmes. So I had never heard of the Lanes (they were married, but Alison didn’t use her husband’s name) till that birthday lunch when we were all eating our cheesecake. I can’t remember which of the company first mentioned them, I suppose it was the television producer, but I remember the question.

  ‘What do we think about those Lanes, then?’

  ‘Who?’ Selina said.

  ‘Don’t you read your daily paper, Selina? They’re the couple who have run away with the child the pernicious social services won’t allow them to adopt.’

  I wasn’t very interested. I only listened because I was trapped. Everyone began to talk at once. All had their views. The adoption process in this country was draconian and cruel. Social services departments said they put the interests of the child first but in practice that was the last thing they did. Political correctness was ruining people’s lives. How about this stupid rule that children of mixed race had to be adopted by mixed-race parents?

  I said everyone began to talk at once but Wanda the restaurateur didn’t talk. She left her cheesecake half-eaten and, waving her glass, said abruptly to Max, who wasn’t generous with the Chablis, ‘Can I have some more wine?’

  Someone realized then and they stopped awkwardly. The cushion woman told me while we were having coffee in the drawing room that Wanda, now divorced, had tried for years to adopt a child but had been turned down on the grounds of being too rich and upper class. The television producer must have known, everyone there knew, but people were so thoughtless, didn’t I think?

  ‘Sorry, I keep forgetting Selina’s your aunt.’

  I left the party as soon as I could. Max encouraged my departure with an approving, ‘An essay to write,’ but Selina, catching up with me at the head of the stairs, said that I couldn’t be expected to know, doubtless I’d never been taught, but it really wasn’t done to leave a party given in one’s honour until everyone else had left. Now why hadn’t my etiquette-conscious mother taught me that?

  I went down the stairs, put the smoked salmon parcel on Mabel’s plate and gave the wardrobe a push to set the hangers ringing. I was getting to like their music, the sound of jangling chimes.

  7

  I saw little of Max or Selina for a long time after that party. Living below ground, you see no comings and goings of the occupants of upper floors. The taxi that comes for them, the postman with a parcel they open the door to, their departure on foot, the van bringing the wine or food delivery, all this is as hidden from you as if it were happening a mile away. They may have forgotten my existence, for I made no noise. Something was wrong with the volume control on the television set and I could never make voices rise above a whisper. I had no friends arriving in the evening and leaving late at night. I had no friends. Instead of going upstairs to the yellow drawing room, I began making my weekly phone call to my mother from a call box. After some initial grumbling, she let me reverse the charges.

  Days passed when I spoke to no one but Mabel and old Mrs Fisherton. No one came and no one phoned. Well, they couldn’t, I had no phone. I’m not being self-pitying. I know it was my own fault. It was just an extension of the way I had been since Daniel died, reclusive, shut in, hiding away from everything and everyone. In those long months there had only been one person who tried hard enough to reach me and persisted in breaking through the barriers I had put up, Guy Wharton. I had never answered his letter. I had called my mother from a call box but I had never called him. Most women would have said I was crazy. Mum certainly would have. Guy was rich, good-looking if you like that stocky dark type, clever and with the kind of job mothers of girls love, something important in a merchant bank. While I was at home for Christmas, he too was at home on the other side of the river. He phoned and asked if he could come over to see me. I didn’t want to talk to him but Mum refused to lie for me, so I took the receiver from her with very bad grace and said I had a bad cold, I couldn’t see anyone.

  Beryl brought his second letter down to me. It looked as if it had been steamed open and sealed up again but that was something I could never have proved even if I had cared. He was writing to ask if he could take me out to dinner the following week.

  ‘I haven’t anything to wear,’ I said to Beryl. ‘Would jeans do?’

  ‘Are you asking me, love? I was never took out for dinner in me life. I’ll tell you what, you can have a lend of my girl’s long black skirt, she’s about your size. She says forget about the little black dress, it’s a long black skirt’ll take you anywhere so long as you put something bright on the top.’ This was a version of Beryl’s own habitual gear, on that particular day black leggings and a jumper in the shade Silver called ‘hairdresser pink’. ‘And talking of long skirts,’ she said, ‘I’ve found out what the Indian woman’s name is. Nasreen. Well, I’ve heard of Irene and Doreen but I ask you, Nasreen.’

  ‘What about the people with the futons on the floor?’ I said. ‘And what’s happening to the Silvermans?’

  ‘Well, dear, they’ve got so many houseplants it’s like a rain forest in there. I half expect to see a tiger come prowling out but they haven’t got no pets.’

  ‘The Silvermans?’

  ‘No, love, not them. The other lot. Mr Silverman and Mrs, they’ve only been up to London once since Christmas. Funny having Christmas in London when you’ve got a country place, isn’t it? Still, it takes all sorts. They was all up here then, the girl and what she calls her partner and the one called Julian and the boy. Silver, I mean. He had to give his pals the go-by for the festive season. It’s no good asking me any more because I’ve told you all I know.’


  Beryl brought the black skirt and I wore it when Guy took me to dinner at the first really good restaurant I had ever eaten in, a place in Knightsbridge. I asked him something that had hardly been mentioned between us before. When he came up the field and saw us on the pylon, heard me screaming and came running, where had he been before, and why had he once said if only he had been ten minutes earlier, as he might easily have been?

  He looked across the table at me in silence, making a rueful face. I thought it was a nice face, squarish, with good firm features, a strong jaw, a wide forehead, a straight nose. His eyes were dark brown, an eye colour I’ve never found attractive, but his were clear and honest. He’d raised his eyebrows and half-smiled.

  ‘Are you really sure you want to know?’

  ‘Why?’ I said. ‘Is it something awful?’

  He laughed. ‘Not at all awful. Banal. I asked because it occurred to me you might think it a trivial thing to make such a difference.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘My parents were away. They’d gone on holiday to France. I was home on my own for the weekend and I’d arranged to meet a friend of mine, a chap I was at school with, for a drink. We were to meet at the White Rose.’

  First of all he thought he’d take his car, but that would very much restrict what he drank and he hadn’t seen the friend for a long time. Walk, why not? A mile and a half there and a mile and a halfback if he went across the fields. In the event, of course, he never got to the pub. But he had set off about the time Daniel and I were looking at the pylon and thinking of climbing it, about the time Daniel said, ‘People do go up, you see. They go up using the footholds, like climbing a ladder.’

  Guy had got as far as the bridge. Then he had one of those second thoughts or fears we all have sometimes, you don’t have to be an obsessive-compulsive to have them. He thought he had forgotten to lock the front door. The house was old and the front door one of those with a doorknob that don’t automatically lock when you close them. There had been burglaries in the neighbourhood recently. Those days were gone, he remembered from his childhood, when you could go out and leave your house doors and car doors unlocked. He turned round and went back.

  ‘And the door was locked,’ he said. ‘I needn’t have gone back. That going back meant a delay of ten minutes even though I took the car with me that second time.’

  ‘If you’d got there ten minutes earlier, you could have shouted at us and warned us.’ I said it almost sorrowfully, hating retrospective hope. ‘If you’d told us we were earthed and the current would go through us, maybe we’d have listened.’

  After that I talked to Guy as I never had before. I told him about playing truant from GUP – it was happening more and more often as March came in – and about living below ground. He was sympathetic.

  ‘Do a secretarial course instead,’ he said, ‘and I’ll find you a job in my dad’s firm. Then you could get a mortgage and buy yourself a flat on top of a high rise.’

  He thought it was a joke, as it would be to most people. Anyway, I decided being a secretary might be worse than a psychological business person. I thanked him for the dinner, which was very good, and he said he’d phone me at Max’s. That would be a bit of fun for Selina, I thought.

  *

  The dream in which exams loom but you have done no work, not only have failed to prepare for them but scarcely know what the subjects mean or the answers to the kind of questions likely to be put to you, was becoming my reality. In June we would be assessed on our year’s work and that assessment would be taken into account when degrees were awarded. The more I thought of it, the more I avoided setting foot on campus – or, to put it more accurately, the wasteland between the canal and Wormwood Scrubs. I never dreamed of GUP. I dreamed of Daniel, the sounds he made while he hung in the latticework of the pylon and I held him till I could hold him no longer.

  When parents take their children on holidays abroad in term time, they make the excuse that the children learn more in those few days in the Maldives or Costa Rica than they ever would in school. I acquired more knowledge in Maida Vale that spring than GUP could have taught me. The trouble was that it wasn’t the sort of knowledge I was here for and it wouldn’t help me to pass exams. I didn’t much care, I blocked GUP off and tried to close my mind to it. I looked at buildings, I looked at churches. I even went to church on Sunday mornings to see what these buildings were like inside, to see what Street had done for the interior of St Mary Magdalene, its clerestories and its walls of striped brick and stone, and Comper for St Cyprian’s, Glentworth Street, white and gold with angels on the altar. The Irvingites at the Holy Catholic Apostolic in Maida Avenue were unwelcoming, didn’t throw me out but made me cover my head with a rather nasty chiffon scarf they produced from a collection kept for that purpose. I joined the library and read books on architecture. I read Ruskin in a spirit of amazement and doubt. ‘Architecture is the art which so disposes and adorns the edifices raised by man, for whatever uses, that the sight of them may contribute to his mental health, power and pleasure.’ That was all right, I agreed entirely. But as for some of the rest of it, did he really mean all this? ‘There is nothing magical about a salvia leaf’? Was he mad? Or was it all a colossal send-up?

  When it was Easter I went home and Guy came round to ask me out on the Saturday night. But I was back in London by then. At ten-thirty on Easter Day I was in St Augustine’s, Kilburn Park, for Sung Eucharist, aware of the cold splash of holy water and the sound of hymns I had never heard before, but almost entirely rapt in contemplation of the size of the place, the narrow aisles, the buttresses, the gallery and its Gothic reredos and the profusion of sculpture in the chancel. This was a rough area of London, or so Beryl said, muggings-land, Heroinville. Her eldest son refused to drive down Kilburn High Road and made a detour along Carlton Vale. Yet in the midst of it, in a green oasis of lawns and tall trees, stood this cruciform church, vast and gracious, its spire visible for miles. That spire was half as high again as a pylon, a tapering needle more than 240 feet tall.

  The wisest thing I could have done at this point would have been to go to Max, tell him how much I disliked the Psychology and Business Studies course and ask him how I could change and do Architecture instead. I nearly did. I went upstairs one Sunday evening (St Mar’s, Paddington Green, that morning, the eighteenth-century church restored with compensation for building the Westway which takes its noisy and brutal route past its windows) and, forgetting my mother’s rules, knocked on one door after another until Selina came.

  ‘Haven’t seen you since for ever, darling.’

  I had nothing to say to this.

  ‘I suppose you’ve been frantically busy. Like me. We’re shooting the seventh series and you know what that means, a six a.m. start for little me.’

  She was alone in the sitting room at the back of the house, a pretty place done in pink and grey with french windows opening on to a balcony. The drawing room was too grand for daily use. I later found out from Beryl that both rooms had been dismal when Max and Selina first met, furnished much like old Mrs Fisherton’s. Beryl told me that Selina had spent a fortune on doing them up, all the money she got from series one and two of Streetwise. She patted the pink velvet chair next to hers, motioning me to sit down, as if I were a regular visitor. Although they didn’t seem to have had any company that day and it was a Sunday evening, she was dressed in a smart green suit with ruffle-necked blouse pinned with a cameo brooch.

  ‘I was wondering,’ I said, having rehearsed this, ‘if I could have a word with Max.’

  Did I mean now? She could hardly have looked more aghast if I had asked to bring fifteen friends round to supper.

  ‘Well, now,’ I said, ‘or soon.’

  ‘He’s working on his book, darling. It’s more than my life’s worth to disturb him. He’s got a deadline of May 1st.’

  ‘Would you ask him? Would you ask him if I could see him tomorrow or Tuesday?’

  Selina said she could try. She did
n’t know if I could be made to understand this but Max was peculiar about this sort of thing. He liked to arrange his own appointments. In other words, he didn’t care for people wanting to see him. It was for him to want to see them.

  ‘I’m sure he’ll see you. In his own time. I mean, only the other day he was saying he must have a talk with Clodagh, wasn’t he?’ She had begun one of those dialogues with herself. ‘I must have another chat with Clodagh, he said. Those were his words. Something like that, anyway. I must get Clodagh up here and see how she’s getting on. So he’ll be sure to send for you. I’ll be amazed if he doesn’t after what he said. It’s just a matter of time.’

  All right, I said, but would she ask him just the same? It was important. I really needed to see him. Downstairs again, I played the wardrobe bells. After a lot of practice I’d learnt how to make different music according to which parts of the doors or sides I slammed my hand against. Mabel came in through the window. I picked her up and cuddled her and told her I didn’t think Max would send for me, or not for weeks. Selina’s passing on my request would very likely annoy him and he’d keep me waiting. I was right. I heard no further word about a meeting with Max.

  Since then I’ve often thought about how different my life might have been – like Guy, I’m something of a ‘might have been’ and ‘If only’ person – if he had agreed to see me, if he had sent me a note or a verbal message via Selina. I’d have gone up those stairs to the top but, this time, I’d have knocked on the door. Max would have said, ‘Come!’ He was the kind of person who talked like that. When I went in he’d have been sitting at his desk, he wouldn’t have looked up but kept me waiting for, say, two minutes, while I contemplated the quantities of paper in which, by then, the room might have been ankle-deep. I imagined him turning round at last, sniffing the air and asking if I’d been smoking, and perhaps saying, like a doctor, ‘What seems to be the trouble?’