Communion Town Page 6

  We stood still in the flow of passers-by, chilly among bright flowerbeds. She looked drawn and polite, but then all the distance drained from her face and left only a question behind. In my head I heard an old country song from her record collection. I swear that I won’t make your exit slow, But won’t you break my heart before you go … I reached for her hand and she let me take it. She gave me a tired, convalescent smile, as though she knew what it was that I wanted to say.

  She was determined I should see the house where she had grown up. It was in the south, an hour’s train journey out of the city through gentle yellow hills. In the middle of a hot afternoon we alighted at a market-town railway station and climbed into a taxi. As we were driven out of the town along narrow roads banked by groves in which olive-pickers were working, my nose started running and my eyes began to itch. I blew my nose loudly into my handkerchief and was ambushed by a sneezing fit. When I looked over at her, stricken, she burst out laughing. Over his shoulder, the taxi driver said something jocular that I didn’t catch.

  The setting of her childhood and adolescence was a villa in the colonial style, built around a large central courtyard, with terracotta tile roofs and stucco walls the colour of baked earth. The first-floor windows opened to broad balconies. As we climbed out of the taxi, the front doors of the house opened, and for an instant it appeared she had brought me here to introduce me to her exaggerated, faintly parodic doppelgänger. The resemblance was strong, in spite of the older woman’s cream linen suit, her mass of orange hair, her cinched waist and billowing bosom. She wore heavy, precise make-up, with lips and eyebrows marked out in shapes identical to her daughter’s. They kissed three times on alternating cheeks and then the mother turned with stately poise to acknowledge me, holding out a hand, like something held in tongs, for me to shake. In the shadows of the hall behind her I glimpsed two pre-teenaged forms and heard sisterly whispers, but as we went in they fled with a slapping of sandalled feet.

  Lunch was about to be served on the terrace, her mother said. I followed them through the cool house. Father would not be joining us for lunch, her mother added as we emerged into the light again at the rear of the house, since he had so much work to do.

  The terrace looked across a silver-grey valley. All the olive trees I could see, her mother told me, belonged to the family. In the middle distance I made out the red rooftops of the town, stacked in the lee of a hill. A heavy wooden table in the centre of the terrace was already set with bread, cured meat, salad, wine and olive oil. I brushed my hand against hers, but something had annoyed her; as we sat down to eat, she rolled her eyes, letting her hair fall sulkily across her face as if she regretted coming here at all. Her mother carried on the conversation single-handed, telling me I would find it most interesting to be here at harvest time and, what’s more, I was especially fortunate because a Boy Singers Troupe was in town – I must make sure to see them perform because it was a fine old tradition and I must seldom have the opportunity … While she kept up a glassy monologue, the two girls, to whom I hadn’t been introduced, exchanged continual scandalised glances, nudging each other under the table and occasionally exploding into giggles.

  Later, as I was unpacking in the guest room, the younger of the girls wandered in behind me. Turning, I found her gazing thoughtfully at my guitar; I wasn’t sure whether she had noticed I was here. Peering past me into my suitcase, she mentioned that her father wanted to see me in his study. I didn’t know where that was, but before I could formulate the question she ran a fingernail across the strings of the guitar and walked out.

  ‘Come in and close it,’ her father said, when at length I knocked on the right door.

  He had a tall man’s stoop, and inclined his head as though to favour a slight deafness. He looked healthy and weatherbeaten in his open-necked shirt. His dark grey hair was receding but he wore it long at the back. I thought for a second that he was going to make some violent physical movement, but instead he pointed at a chair, and glared at his bookshelves as I sat down. The window behind him was open to the sunlight, tinted by the lemon trees in the garden, but the room was in shadow. Warm air drifted in, bringing faint melodies from the workers in the groves, and carrying unfamiliar pollens. A sneeze was gathering in my sinuses. He seated himself behind the desk.

  ‘We might as well,’ he said, ‘speak man to man.’ He gave a stony, protracted stare to the wall behind my head, challenging me to derive any ironies I wished from the statement, and let the silence swell. My eyes itched and my nose was starting to drip, but I cleared my throat to speak.

  ‘Quite clearly,’ he said, ‘all this is calculated to infuriate me.’ His diction was crisp. ‘I shan’t rise to it. As usual she’s determined to prove something or other. Let her do as she likes, and see the outcome.’

  He tapped the desktop with a thick fingertip.

  ‘But you listen to me. If I should learn that you have in any way – taken advantage …’

  His voice trailed off. He stared at me a while longer.

  ‘Do I make myself quite clear?’

  I nodded, not knowing what I was agreeing to.

  ‘Don’t think,’ he said at last, ‘that I can’t find you. Wherever you go.’

  I found myself thanking him, sniffing, wiping my nose, stammering assurances, as I made for the door. He had already turned his attention to some papers on his desk, and did not look up.

  The next morning she took me out early to see the estate. We tramped down into the valley under a filmy sky, our breath clouding and our feet sending stones ahead of us along the hard track. She was cursing in exasperation with her father.

  ‘He can’t help himself, can he?’ she said. ‘It’s all about him, every time.’

  In the groves the trunks looked like bodies frozen in motion. In the midst of struggling to escape, they had metamorphosed, and now they signalled their acceptance of the new life by sprouting silvery leaves and hard purple-black fruit. We passed gangs of workers as we descended the slope. In harvest time, she told me, her father employed more than a hundred labourers. They travelled down from the city for a few weeks’ work and received board and lodging in barns on the estate.

  ‘They’ve been out here since before dawn,’ she said.

  We paused to watch one of the gangs at work. They wore overalls, rubber boots and headscarves. Their greasepaint was utilitarian, as if someone had slapped a brushful of whitewash across each face. The inbuilt tunes jingling away in their breasts sounded distant but clear through the acres of trees. They had laid nets and groundsheets, and were dragging at the lower branches with rakes to dislodge the olives. Others had climbed ladders into the upper branches, and balanced there, scraping the fruit down with their hands.

  I rubbed my itching eyes and blew my nose. We continued into the floor of the valley, circling back towards the trail.

  ‘They’ll get a month’s work, then they’re packed back to the city or on to the next temporary contract,’ she said scornfully. ‘Sixty or seventy hours a week at less than minimum wage, no rights, no security. And if you listen to him you’d think he was doing them a favour.’

  We were halfway back to the villa when the sound of an engine made us turn. A motorised buggy, splattered with dried mud, was coming up the track, pulling a short trailer covered with a tarpaulin. It rattled to a stop beside us and a young man swung himself from the seat. She made a kind of squeak, a sound I hadn’t heard from her before, and threw herself into his arms. He lifted her easily off her feet. ‘Hey hey,’ he said.

  She turned to me happily. ‘This is Leo,’ she said. ‘We grew up together – you know, I’ve told you.’

  I didn’t remember that, but I nodded.

  He leant over and caught my hand. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you,’ he said. His face was fleshily handsome between a chestnut tousle and a grubby red kerchief knotted around his throat. He wore knee-high boots and jodhpurs stained with grass and mud. A stubby leather truncheon dangled from his belt.


  ‘We go all the way back,’ she was saying. ‘Leo’s family has the next estate. The pair of us were always planning to run away together.’

  ‘True. Nearly made it right across the valley, that time, eh?’

  ‘Yes, till you made me come home, sissy!’

  Leo gave a chivalrous shrug. The silence stretched. I got the feeling they might forget I was there, and exchange something too private.

  ‘I didn’t know you were home,’ she said at last.

  ‘Back for the harvest.’ He nodded. ‘Here, take a look.’

  He beckoned us over to his trailer and lifted the tarpaulin to show what was underneath. On the ridged metal bed lay three of the workers from the groves. Their limbs were cramped and bent, as rigid as wood, and their fingers had twisted into arthritic claws. Two were quite motionless but the third shivered feverishly. Disconnected plinks, clonks and twangs sounded from their thoraxes. Under their crusts of white paint, the three faces were paralysed in expressions of bewilderment.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ she said.

  ‘Mm hm.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Nothing out of the ordinary. They get worse every season. Can’t take care of themselves. They want to lay around in the Liberties half the year, then, come harvest time, ride the bus down and work fourteen straight hours. No surprise some of them fall apart. Don’t have the gumption, and so we end up with this. Eh?’

  He looked down at the quivering labourer, whose open eye held, perhaps, a fleck of comprehension.

  ‘Don’t you worry,’ Leo said. ‘These fellers are going to be fine. I’ll take them up to the sheds, have a tinker, give them a beaker of protein porridge and they’ll be well set up. You love that stirabout, eh? I do believe it’s the reason you come.’

  He grinned at the figures. Then he turned to me, becoming more formal, and gripped my hand again.

  ‘I’m delighted for you. Make sure and take good care of her.’ He winked. ‘Or else I’ll want to know about it! Now I’d best get these up the hill.’

  He climbed on the buggy and gunned the engine, then turned to us.

  ‘Listen, why don’t you two ride on with me up to the sheds? It’ll take you closer to the house. And, tell you what’ – he nodded to me – ‘while we’re there I’ll find you something for those allergies.’

  There was just room for all three of us, if she perched on the seat behind Leo while I sat in the trailer, holding tight to the sides. We bounced up the track.

  Later that day, as we walked through the town, we found a crowd gathering in the central plaza around a makeshift wooden platform. At the platform’s corners stood poles decorated with strings of flowers and swags of coloured cloth, and just behind it a striped tent had been erected on the back of a battered flatbed truck. As we watched, a man emerged from this ragged tiring-house and stepped directly on to the boards.

  ‘Most noble gentlemen, ladies, and my worthy patrons!’

  He towered over the crowd, twitching a moustache that was stiff and pointed with wax, and lifted his mortarboard in salutation. He was bald except for a waxy tuft at the crown of his large egg-shaped head. Along with the mortarboard he wore a dusty black gown, but when he threw back the wings of the drab garment and placed his hands on his hips I saw hairy forearms, gleaming leather trousers, pointed white boots and a waistcoat of threadbare red velveteen over a naked torso. He grinned, showing long, stained teeth – horse’s teeth. The crowd fell quiet as he raised his cane.

  ‘My boys have but one desire, and that is to please you!’

  His voice was an exaggeratedly clear, teeth-and-tongue baritone, penetrating and sustained like a singer’s. You could hear the ornamental curlicues at the end of each phrase. The tip of his cane slit the air.

  ‘For what have they travelled far through peril and privation? For what have they spent their tender lives in long study and hard schooling? For what have they endured the exquisite educations of which you are to enjoy the fruits? Why, for your pleasure alone. They feast or starve at your pleasure, gentlemen and noble ladies; they live or die, believe me, young masters and mistresses, as martyrs to your pleasure. And so, today, we present to you one of the old tales, which we call the tale of the little sweep.’

  An unresolved chord rang out, and two diminutive figures appeared on the platform, one holding a mandolin, the other a flute. They were perhaps ten years old, in white satin suits, silver-buckled slippers and chalk-white faces with red spots at the lips and cheeks. They began to play an intricate overture, its complex harmonies twining around the simple music that tinkled from inside their small chests. As they played, they danced: their movements were minimal, never more than a step one way or the other, but they were so exactly controlled, so synchronised, that in their ornate costumes they seemed less like boys than dainty, elaborate works of mechanical artifice. Every move of a limb, every facial expression, was disciplined and stylised. Their large, liquid eyes kept focus above the heads of the crowd.

  Four more children joined them on the platform, and with just a few gestures, rigid, exaggerated, yet graceful, they mimed a busy street scene into existence, singing in pure, unbroken voices in a language I didn’t recognise. Their master had withdrawn to the edge of the platform, from where, his cane twitching like a conductor’s baton, he began to narrate the performance, his voice resounding in the pauses between the boys’ songs.

  ‘The story goes that there was a poor sweep. This was long, long ago, gents and ladies, in the olden days and the historical times.’

  As he spoke, another boy entered, his satin suit simpler and baggier. His movements were as artfully exact as his schoolmates’, but to a different effect: he was expertly ridiculous. The titters started as soon as he appeared. Every detail, from his toes-turned-out walk to the way he slumped his shoulders and lolled his head, won laughter from the audience.

  ‘This sweep was the lowliest man in the city. Every day he swept up the offal in the slaughterhouse, loaded it up on his cart and hauled it to the dumps outside the city walls. He was filthy and he stank worse than you can imagine – yes, sir, even you! People held handkerchiefs to their noses as he went past, spat on him and cursed him. He never complained.’

  The sweep mimed dragging a cart, with enormous effort, across the platform. He evoked the invisible burden so well that you felt it: he strained against its weight, slipped, fell flat on his face and sprang up again like a piece of rubber. The other boys, impersonating scornful ladies and gentlemen, turned up their noses at him. I stole a sideways look at her face. She was laughing along with the rest of the crowd at the clownish sweep. The other performers slipped in and out of secondary roles using nothing more than skilful adjustments of their stances.

  ‘Now, one day, as our sweep was hauling his cart through the streets there was a commotion ahead, and he saw a squad of eunuchs approaching, brandishing staves, driving the people aside. Behind them came twenty female servants as beautiful as moons, as elegant as fawns, and in the middle of them a fine lady more beautiful and elegant than any, softer and more languid of limb, her eyes darker and brighter. All the women attended on her.’

  Still another child emerged from the tent: he was corseted into a white satin dress and crowned with a silver wig, and carried himself with a sinuous femininity that was balanced on the very edge of burlesque. The supporting cast turned themselves into eunuchs and serving-girls, and the sweep goggled amusingly at the lady. Two of the eunuchs supported her fingertips as she stepped daintily forward.

  ‘As they went past, the sweep cringed aside – but the fine lady paused, looked at him, and raised her hand. The eunuchs came forward and seized him; they bound his hands and dragged him to their mistress’s feet. She proceeded through the city with her entourage, and the sweep was hauled behind her. One or two passers-by began to protest at the rough treatment he was getting, but the eunuchs threatened them and they said no more. As for the sweep, he stumbled along in the mud, thinking to himself, this fine lady must hav
e been sickened by the stink of me; if I am lucky perhaps they will only beat me, but perhaps I will die today and no one will ever know.

  ‘They dragged him all the way up to the Fair Quarter, to Lizavet where the grandest houses stood in those days, and led him into a villa. As far as our sweep was concerned, it might have been the Autumn Palace itself. The eunuchs prodded him through an entrance hall, and frightened as he was he had to marvel at its columns and murals, its endless marble floor. But they did not stop here. They brought him into a bathroom – need I say that it seemed to him as grand as a ballroom? – and there, three pretty girl servants came in to him and said, take off your rags. He cowered, but at last obeyed and removed his tattered clothes. Wrinkling their pretty noses hardly at all, the servants washed the filth from his skin, scrubbed his horny feet and shampooed his matted hair. They brushed his teeth and trimmed his nails. Before long he smelt of orange blossom. Next they brought him a pile of silk clothing, blue as night and yellow as noon, and told him to put it on. But the sweep had never seen clothes like this; he touched the strange garments helplessly. Laughing, the servants dressed him.’

  As he spoke, the master’s eyes followed the boys’ movements with what seemed harried desperation, and his cane danced as if every part of the performance depended on it. The children, still moving with that stiff, stylised perfection of gesture, surrounded the sweep, artfully protecting his modesty as they mimed his toilette. They held their faces fixed in hyperbolic expressions as though they were masks. I wondered how much they had to practise. Next the servants brought in an invisible feast: the sweep could not believe his eyes, and his amazement redoubled when the fine lady entered and sat down to eat with him. The servants danced and the fine lady strummed a lute, then she led him away from the feast and lay down with him in a cradle of the other actors’ arms. All the time the audience’s hilarity intensified, until I wondered whether it could all be in appreciation of the children’s skill.