Gatherers and Hunters Read online

  The Weatherhead land, yes I did sell that, and I did sell it to the Albanian Collective as I think it was called, I told you all that before. But it was the bank foreclosing, not the buyers that time, it was the bank. I had to sell for a quick realisation and anyone knows a man in that bind has to settle for the best that’s on offer. A bargain then, well if you have to call it that. But I am not going to accept the blame for all that other talk about lowering values all through the district.

  I’ll give you that yes: population explosion. Who could have foreseen where that would lead? Do you think you could? They’ve always been polite to me and that’s my last word on the matter.

  No. No? Where was that? And who did you say was responsible? Gangs of them, that’s a bit too much surely. Thirty seven, and Sergeant Miller confirms this? I’d put it down to the younger generation and not just the kids of one ethnic minority. Majority, then.

  No, they’ve always spoken English to me. All of them. I think you’re a bit paranoid, once you forbid a thing like teaching their own kids their own language, well you only make the forbidden more desirable. Young Ibrahim never spoke his language at home, never, he made a point of teaching his mother and she was the hard one but in the end she was trying to speak in her new language.

  They do it to keep others out, to exclude them, you say? Like a code? Look, they sit for their exams in English, they read the bus timetables in English, Gawd’s sake, all the ­television is English, what do you mean?

  Very well, I’ll come over to the pub with you, right this minute. What do you mean, take the car? It’s no distance, the walk will be good for you. Stared at? Ganged up on? Look, the pub might be the only building on the main street left with a local owner, as you call it (I still have reservations on the Irish) but isn’t this a bit of a siege mentality? After all, they’re neighbours, not enemies.

  The Singer

  Kester

  You ask me about Juliet Klein? The town – our home town – was so proud of her, I was about to say the world was so proud of her, but you might just accuse me of exaggeration.

  Still, Juliet Klein had a voice that almost defined its own era, just as, a bit later on, Joan Baez and Odetta defined the late 1960s or thereabouts.

  Juliet would hate such a comparison. Hers was a voice for the 1950s, the decade that took to the long-playing record and stereo sound. There was a time when her ‘Skye Boat Song’ followed you everywhere, it was perhaps the first time music became ubiquitous, you couldn’t escape it and you couldn’t escape Juliet’s almost painfully pure soprano. It was a voice that is now so embarrassingly dated. You probably know all that.

  People said things about Juliet, but I loved her. I can say that now.

  No, I don’t know what happened to her, have you heard? You hear all those stories but none of them are true. Our involvement with each other was not in those very early days, out here, though of course we had known each other since childhood, how can you help it living in the same town?

  No, I stood on the sidelines like everybody else, including her mum and dad and even her brothers Victor and Nelson. We all did, though, when Juliet made that extraordinary leap into international fame. I’d put it at three years? After that, well. Oh yes, there was the Dead City LP. Die Tote Stadt; it was a mistake, let us at least be charitable. Though the title song itself was haunting. It still haunts me in a way, in fact I would say I’m glad it did not take off like ‘The Skye Boat Song’, which I cannot bear to listen to now.

  Not after all these years.

  What seemed engagingly sweet and vulnerable then now appears quite phony, the singing teacher over her shoulder, that stagey little gulp after the first phrase, the one moment of vibrato near the end. No, it’s funny how for years – four or five years at the least – that one song worked a sort of magic. And then, overnight, there was a change in the balance of the world and it was as distant and puzzling as Melba or Caruso on wax cylinders.

  When Juliet and I had that extraordinary and tense relation­ship – it was extraordinary – she had been virtually forgotten as a singer for a decade at least. It was in 1972. London. Even that is probably before your time.

  Of course you want to know the details, but let me put it into its proper perspective. 1972 was not the end. Not by a long shot. There was 1974 as well. Well, yes, 1974. The high and the low. The most and the least. I had never believed I would see myself grovel. I had never believed Juliet Klein would see me grovel.

  Again, that’s not true. ‘See me grovel’ – it’s a phrase, I don’t mean it literally. It’s almost as if I end up saying the opposite of the truth each time. Gwen was brought into this – into this Thing with Juliet – perhaps if I were honest I would also say Gwen, or the absence of Gwen, while I was in London two years earlier was the very real trigger.

  After all, it was because Gwen wanted me to contact Juliet in London – she had her address – that I made that fatal phone call. They were cousins you know, Gwen and Juliet. You haven’t met Gwen yet, you say? In their early years Gwen and Juliet did have a sort of family resemblance – they were both very fine boned, fragile to look at but somehow columnar steel underneath. Gwen was a fine contralto herself, when she was young: in the Oratorio style, which is now so very outmoded. Her speaking voice had a similar tone to Juliet’s, a slightly husky vibrato. It’s interesting that Juliet had that soubrette sound when speaking but the instant she burst into song – she fluted into song, I should say – the voice always produced that quite pure timbre. I used to tease Juliet when she was humble enough to be teased. I called it her choirboy tone.

  Look, let’s forget the fifties. And the sixties for that matter. Gwen and I married, Juliet was in the States, I think, much of that time, I’m usually charitable and call it all the Revival Campfire decade as far as Juliet was concerned, anyway she made no more records, at least not commercially and I’ve only heard rumours of a cassette pirated from a live performance in one of those rusty church halls; Jacksonville was it?

  Let me get to the point. My then wife Gwen was so loyal that when I got that International Travel Grant and it became clear that after three months in California I would be a month in London, it was Gwen who gave me Juliet’s address and, more important, her phone number.

  I had not even realised Juliet had been living somewhere in London. Telephonist for a taxi company, it turned out, not singing, of course, not singing.

  I was in London nearly three weeks before I dredged up her address and phone number. You’re right, simply to report back home at the end of the month, when Gwen and I reconnected.

  How can I explain this with any effectiveness?

  It was the voice, the timbre. It tore down fifteen years just like that. Juliet on the phone, that very first time.

  It’s the voice I’m talking about, not the body. The body had its own games in a way but that first phone call was voice, only the voice. Afterwards, when I walked away from that public phone in the pub on Bayswater Road and ordered a half pint, there was still that tingle, I could not concentrate. And I could not believe someone could take me over, quite against my will I can tell you. After all those years. Bloody Juliet. Bloody. Bloody.

  Of course we had arranged to meet. That evening. You’ve unlocked me now, you’ve got to take the consequences. Juliet has moved in, as always, she has taken over.

  Even here, even now, she has taken over. Don’t grin like that, it only shows you cannot understand the meaning of it, the intensity of it. You think all things intense are only momentary?

  Perhaps you are lucky. Perhaps you are not alive yet to the way things are, the way things might be. Some things continue, even underground, even unacknowledged, they ­continue. Like a curse. Like a sort of twisted blessing don’t ask me to decide which, and does it matter? Like the vibrations of angels’ wings. Juliet mattered.

  I’ll tell you that first meeting. That first re-meeting. Fifteen years ago? No, last week, last night.

  I know everyone changes.
And, remember, Juliet in those fifteen years had gone from being the soprano lead in the amateur stage musicals, into being an international star, an international voice rather. And then the voice blew itself out, the term these days is burn-out, but Juliet’s voice was ice, not fire.

  I know you don’t remember, you’re only a researcher you say, it’s okay, people look blank these days when I say Harold Blair, or even Marjorie Lawrence. My growing up is full of voices that seemed everywhere, that seemed eternal, and which never bothered to have properly engineered recording sessions. You could say the same about Juliet Klein, except that last LP was all recording engineer sound, like a bathroom or like the early Elvis Presley echo chamber. The Dead City.

  Juliet came up behind me on the concourse at Victoria station before I noticed her. She had been absolutely precise in her description of where we must meet and of course I respected that, it was a jolt back to old times in fact, a part of old times I had forgotten. Juliet and her precision. Juliet and her instructions. Juliet and her requirements that we all had to follow. In a sense we all went along with Juliet in that way. We all allowed her that sense of command, it was our connivance if you like, but it was genuine. We were all always so very well intentioned.

  I was waiting, exactly as she had specified, with the light full on my face, looking outwards, near the main noticeboard.

  Even so, I was quite startled when she recognised me. ‘And so, Kester,’ she said, that voice almost at my ear, and her hand just brushing my shoulders as if to reassure herself I was still the same height. I was. ‘And so, Kester, here you are, after all this time.’

  You could say I gave a start. You could say I had completely forgotten her uncanny instinct for recognising people. In truth, though, I melted. My knees melted, even if I did not slump. I was instantly vulnerable. I did not turn round, Juliet was already fronting me, in her fawn gabardine, and we were embracing. Old friends. Very old friends. Old strangers.

  It’s silly. I thought of those old choir days, the rehearsals. The funny way we embraced, not to seem too passionate. Not to seem unpassionate. She was still the kid sister of my friend Victor.

  Well, there was that time, the first weekend rehearsal for The Merry Widow, when we were all lolling around, lying on the floor, listening to our conductor’s new LP of South Pacific, fifteen or twenty of us, a tangle of grubs on the carpet.

  Juliet seemed to choose to lay her head with its long fair hair at an angle onto my tummy. Within ten minutes it was closer to my groin where her warm head was weighing against me. Then she did things with those blonde tresses. She knew what she was locating, though all the time she was making lazy comments to some of the other girls on the high points and the low points of the music.

  Yes, a tease.

  She had not changed.

  We didn’t even have to talk much. No asking about what happened when, who and where and the consequences. No talk of marriage – I still don’t know if Juliet had ever married, though she soon enough had the whole case history on Gwen, but that’s family, and when I married Gwen it was perhaps a subconscious marriage into Juliet’s family as well, a step closer.

  She could still have been sixteen years old.

  Can you believe that? Sixteen years old going on thirty-something? I suppose it was the clarity of the skin. Juliet always had – so did Gwen – that golden-brown skin. Victor had it too. The gods, or the goddesses, know their aim when they fire. Juliet had her hair longer than I remembered, but we are speaking about 1972, mind, and 1957 was long before girls let their hair grow long and lissome and alluring.

  All right, that’s my generation, but it was the glory of those years, the freedom of long hair, girls swishing it around, flicking it off their face, letting it fall over their breasts, down their curve of spine as if pointing towards the firm curve of buttocks. Oh, all right, I’m only human, you’ve got to forgive me.

  Juliet’s first act, after that embrace, was to toss her hair back over her shoulder.

  You’re the generation that would probably say she was like Emma Kirkby, but I keep reminding you Juliet broke with the concert tradition. I tried to get her to perform, in some dim smoky pub that night, it was somewhere near the British Museum. Of course I gave up after a bit, though I can remember being tetchy, despite Juliet’s long, still gaze that seemed to be directed back at me, and the way her hands had begun moving in that old, compulsive, blind person’s ­fingering.

  +++++

  Juliet was quite happy to speak about her present employment. ‘For the visually handicapped, it’s a gift,’ she said. Visually handicapped. That was her new term for it, in 1972. In her school days she wore those bottle-glass spectacles.

  It was when she ceased wearing spectacles that I became aware of her translucent beauty. And she was always so damned independent. I admired her for that. Gwen always tried to smother Juliet, whenever she came up from Brisbane in those days, before we really became serious, Gwen and I. It was Gwen’s nature, I’m not accusing her. That was in the days before Juliet had that little white cane. In London in 1972 the white cane was a compact, retractable model, high tech we would say now. Juliet used it surprisingly little.

  When I took her back to Victoria and she instructed me to the right platform, I let her go through the tickets and onto the waiting train all by herself. I knew that.

  ‘How do you know the train is in? Can you still see occasional glimpses?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s the weight of it. There. I don’t actually see it, I feel it. You see, Kester, it’s not a matter of visualising, but of taking account of. Of weighting, if you like.’

  Then she laughed lightly, and stroked my face, and left me.

  Of course I waited. I watched, from the sidelines.

  ‘Bitta orright, that wun,’ said the ticket collector. ‘I see her regular. Does shift work she says, keeps her outa peak hours. Got ’er ’ead screwed on real sharp, thet leddy.’

  He gave me a wink. ‘Carnt see a thing, y’know, mitey, carnt see a thing, just a sorta blurr she tells me, a sorta wash a light is what she tells me.’

  We both looked at the train, now pulling out. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘We’ve known each other since childhood.’

  ‘Hey, I c’n pick thet accent, you’re an Orstrylyun,’ the ticket collector said.

  ‘Too right,’ I said, laying it on.

  ‘But she’s not an Ozzie, not her. Thet’s not her accent.’

  ‘Ah well, she was a celebrity performer. In her time. A singer. And singers, you know, have their voice trained, so it’s different. But it’s true, fair dinkum cobber.’

  Was I going too far? I felt cocky and ebullient. It was Juliet doing it.

  ‘I guess she was orlweys a stunner,’ mused the ticket man, with that touch of regret in his voice. He was young, sturdy, rosy-cheeked himself.

  ‘She was that, all right,’ I said. I could not conceal the smugness, even as I continued with my put-on broad accent. ‘The great thing is, she is still a stunner.’

  That was the only time we really looked at each other, and he began to nod slowly.

  ‘We all have our burdens, but some get them heavier than others’, I said.

  I knew it sounded pompous.

  Silly, cheeky, confident, confiding, pompous: how could one person bring all these chameleon aspects of me out in such a harlequin muddle? I went back to my cheap hired lodgings.

  There was an appointment the next morning but I cancelled it. First thing I phoned Juliet again and insisted on seeing her.

  This time Juliet suggested I come over to her flat, she had two days off, and there was a little park nearby I might care to explore with her, it was her ‘retreat’.

  We had two days of passionate lovemaking.

  It was the sense of physical touch. From the very first moment of this second meeting, it was touch, touch, we could not get enough of physical contact with each other. We were voracious.

  Later, that afternoon, after we had in fact strolled thro
ugh the very ordered park with its over-green acid-bright grass and its as yet unmutilated elms (they would be all chopped out now, with the Dutch Elm Blight that was to follow) we ran – really ran – back to her flat.

  There’s no point in lingering over the details. I am assuming you must have experienced something intense and passionate and entirely sexual so you can substitute your own version of my specific giddiness.

  Let me give you only one example. Large changes in our life can sometimes best be indicated by tiny details. And from that two day period of rapture and intensified awareness of everything I particularly recall the throaty low cooing of wood-doves, very early morning.

  It was the park, outside, I suppose, the sanctuary. To wake with the air quite chilly outside the specific radius of our bodies, and to hear like a drone or musical burden the wood-doves repeating their hold on the world – I have only heard the sound a few times since, but it drives me almost to distraction with an old, unreturnable longing.

  And, curiously, a sense of fulfilment.

  Can I confide, even now – and to you! – it is a real sensation of union. We woke, on that now faroff morning, fully entwined. We had slept all night – or for some hours – physically joined, as if our innermost muscles would not let go after even the last hint of sensation. To wake – called by the wood-doves with their curious drone of insistence – and to discover that the dream of close union was no dream but the state of our bodies. Shared and sharing – you know, surely you know? – the true act of sex moves far beyond wakefulness, it is the point of intersection between wakefulness and the what we can only call dreaming, the body in flight, soaring. Angels with wings. So you can understand why I became, in a sense, imprisoned?

  +++++

  Look, I could go on. I did have to leave Juliet after those two days. Paris.

  Paris? Well, another story, sharp, complex and limpid. I think I really loved it but the problem was I was seeing it with someone else’s eyes, not my own.