Putney Read online

  To Anna and Lara

  ALSO BY SOFKA ZINOVIEFF

  Eurydice Street: A Place in Athens

  Red Princess: A Revolutionary Life

  The House on Paradise Street

  The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me

  CONTENTS

  Also by Sofka Zinovieff

  1 Ralph

  2 Daphne

  3 Jane

  4 Ralph

  5 Daphne

  6 Jane

  7 Ralph

  8 Daphne

  9 Jane

  10 Ralph

  11 Daphne

  12 Jane

  13 Ralph

  14 Daphne

  15 Jane

  16 Ralph

  17 Daphne

  18 Jane

  19 Ralph

  20 Daphne

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  Man is not free to avoid doing what gives him greater pleasure than any other action.

  Stendhal, Love

  1

  RALPH

  The moment he passed through the hospital’s revolving door, his mind turned to Daphne. On previous visits, he’d consciously conjured the memories as a way of combatting fear. Now it was like being one of Pavlov’s experimental dogs and he pictured her as soon as he smelled the iodine disinfectant and warm rubber, well before he got to the odours of suffering humanity in the lift and started to sweat. Flitting animal movements; narrowed, knowing eyes; dark, tangled hair; dirty bare feet. A boyish girl who ran and tumbled, an adventuring escape artist, a creature on the cusp. The images soothed him. They made him feel alive. The risky element was part of the pleasure.

  This was only his fourth session, but he was confident he could manage it by himself. He had strongly encouraged Nina to visit her ancient mother in Greece, playing down the number of treatments. She didn’t even know that he’d stopped the hormone medication in favour of the poisonous chemicals. Better alone. Less fuss. More chance of it all disappearing from view. He knew how to bring familiarity and, with luck, intimacy to a new location. It was satisfying to establish a routine. Even if he was only staying one day in a hotel he unpacked all his clothes, laid his old silk dressing gown on the bed and learned the name of the receptionist.

  He carried an aged, leather holdall containing a down pillow, a cashmere wrap, earphones for music, a bottle of tonic water and a packet of salted crackers. There was also a battered copy of Selected Poems of Thomas Hardy. He probably wouldn’t read them, but he would place the book on the bedside table as a declaration: I am a civilised man. It was a message as much for himself as anyone else.

  He spotted Annette at the nurses’ station across the large, open-plan space of the chemotherapy department. The cancer unit was all swathes of clear glass, making light and transparency the response to the hidden knots growing in the darkness of bowel or brain. It was not yet nine, but there were already people settling into colourful reclining chairs or lying in beds, hooked up to drips, murmuring quietly to companions and carers. Sunshine streamed in from high windows creating bright shapes on the floor.

  Annette was his favourite nurse and he was making sure that he became her favourite patient. Drawing up to the desk, he smiled and fished out a beribboned packet of chocolate almonds from his bag, presenting it with mock gallantry. ‘To the best nurse in London.’ He gave a small bow as if about to take her hand and ask for the next dance. Annette giggled indulgently. He hoped it was unusual to find someone who remained so suave when about to go into battle with a pipeline of Docetaxel. ‘Thank you, Ralph. And you’re not a bad patient.’ She patted his arm with a plump, dark hand and there was a waft of biscuits and Nescafé, mingled with sweet oil from her tightly braided hair. He liked the hints of the Caribbean that came through in her speech, even though she had already explained she was born in London.

  ‘You’re looking good today, Ralph. You know, you seem so young. Are you really coming up to seventy?’ Papers, lists, dates, certificates, doctors’ reports. Nowhere to hide once you’re in a system.

  ‘Not quite. Still over a year before I throw that party.’ There were already celebratory concerts planned for his seventieth, including a grand event at the Barbican. None of the organisers had heard about his failing health. He knew he looked good, though for how much longer was a question as hard to ignore as the anticipatory nausea now seeping through his stomach. All the same, he still boasted a full head of hair, even if it was not the rich brown of his youth. And his trouser size had not increased since he was a student – no running to fat for him. The crumpled linen jacket gave the impression of an Englishman abroad, while the faded jeans and plimsolls hinted at an attachment not only to youth, but to the garb of his own youth.

  Prodded, jabbed, tubed. ‘OK, Ralph, just relax now. I’ll come and check on you in thirty minutes.’ Here we go.

  John Dowland through the earphones today. Eyes closed to the melancholy soprano accompanied by a lute. ‘Flow, My Tears’. Then ‘Come Away, Come Sweet Love’. He was already somewhere else. Back. Not to his childhood home in Worcestershire, nor his student travels to India, but to a garden by the river: Putney. He pulled the cashmere shawl over him, drawing the moth-eaten, mouse-coloured softness across his nose and mouth. It had been his mother’s and, despite its long life and many travels with him, it nonetheless seemed to carry something of her smell. Hidden from view, he held on to his cock through his trousers. Limp as a dead fish, he thought. This is what it has come to – a piece of soft flesh, baby-wrinkled and pitiful, unable to do anything but pass a pathetic flow of piss.

  It was hard not to contemplate death, but he countered it by listing his successes to himself. At least I’ve lived my life, he thought. My music is appreciated. There have been television appearances, magazine interviews, university lectures, and trips where I was feted, applauded. Some silly fucker who didn’t understand the music had written a biography, and there were even three PhD theses. And, he thought, I’ve loved.

  He was twenty-seven when he met her. It seemed so young now – a boy, practically. Only a few years since he’d left the choking conventions and daunting expectations of his parents’ home near Worcester. He had returned from travels in Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria, where he had been recording musicians and storytellers in remote mountain villages. The people he had stayed with were often suspicious or laughed at his foreignness, but they plied him with absurdly generous hospitality. He sat for days on filthy buses, lugging a rucksack into which he could hardly fit a change of clothes after he had crammed in the cumbersome tape recorder and reels of tape. Sleeping in barns and on floors, he ate endless bean soup and hard, goaty cheese with dry bread, filled notebooks and sent back the recordings by registered post when he found a place with a post office. Ending up in Piraeus, he caught crabs from a woman he picked up in a nightclub and was issued with some foul ointments by a local doctor. His intention had been to seek out dives where musicians came together to play rembetika music, and though he couldn’t understand the words, he found people to translate and appreciated the dual inheritance of pain and humour in these gut-wrenching Greek blues.

  London seemed absurdly twee on his return. Cool, damp, muted. He felt burnt and dusty and as out of place as he had in the Balkans. Although he had met Edmund Greenslay several times, he had never been to his house before and didn’t know his wife or children. Edmund was older – in his late thirties – but his charismatic energy was boyish. The two men were planning to collaborate on a musical project, so when Ralph arrived at the house in Putney, it was with his battered rucksack packed with the tape recorder and tapes. He walked from his cramped attic flat in Earls Court through a soggy, English version of a summer afternoon. The sky appeared to have a hangover: headache and queasiness held in place by a stained eiderdown of clouds. In those days there had always been too much to drink or smoke the night before.

  Edmund opened the front door and spread his arms somewhat theatrically to embrace ‘the weary traveller’. He was dressed in a long, striped robe that accentuated his etiolated frame and made him look as though he’d walked off with a costume from Lawrence of Arabia. A marvellous scent enveloped him – like a new leather bag filled with green herbs.

  ‘Welcome, dear boy; welcome, my dear.’ Edmund repeated phrases as if there was doubt the first time around, though the second, unnecessary version often faded away. He looked like a darling of 1970s London bohemia but he used the old-fashioned, almost camp expressions of his pre-war childhood and his voice warbled slightly. ‘Come in, come in.’ He ushered Ralph ceremoniously into the house, which was painted jazzy colours like arsenic green and acid tangerine. Edmund helped relieve him of the knapsack and put his delicate white hands on his guest’s shoulders as if to take a better look.

  ‘Now, you must tell me everything. Chanting monks, flute-playing shepherd boys? Did you find those old women with the improvised mourning songs? And the food? The seductions? There were some of those, I hope? Were you chased from village to village by irate fathers waving blunderbusses and swearing vengeance?’ Edmund laughed, but his face was so sensitive it quivered like a deer’s, watchful and quick.

  As the men talked in the hallway, a slender, dark-haired child ran down the stairs. It was hard to tell if it was a boy or a girl. A sprite.

  ‘Daphne! Hey, Daphne, come and say hello.’

  Her eyes flickered past her father towards Ralph, lips opened as if to say something, and then she thought better of it. She was dressed in ripped shorts and a striped T-shirt and wore no shoes. Ralph
took in the grubby feet, the burnished skin that must have recently seen more than English sunshine, the muscular limbs and unbrushed, almost black hair. Teasing, moving like mercury, she knew how to disappear before you could get a grip. She laughed, skipped and slithered past them, through the front door that was still ajar and out along the garden path to the road. Without turning, she flicked one of her hands as if dismissing both men.

  His intestines juddered. Then, bewilderingly and somewhat shockingly, the beginning of a hard-on. He squatted down to the floor and opened up the backpack to gain time and distract Edmund, who was gazing after his daughter and laughing.

  ‘Daphne’s a free spirit. As you can see.’

  Ralph smiled, trying to disguise his turmoil.

  ‘I’m glad we can give her and her brother that,’ Edmund continued. ‘We were so battened down with restrictions. When I was growing up there was nothing but rules and barriers. It’s unnecessary. Children find their own way. And it’s important to let them.’

  ‘How old is she?’ Ralph stood up again.

  ‘Nine. You know, I think that might be the perfect age. A child at the height of her powers. Unafraid to be herself. A nonconformist without knowing it. It’s a splendid thing to witness.’ Ralph had never been attracted to children, or at least not since school. He had not ogled young girls or prowled in parks. This was something different from anything he’d known. Beautiful and pure and powerful. The beginnings of love.

  Before he had gathered his wits entirely, a striking woman approached. He knew Edmund’s wife was Greek; he’d said she was a lawyer who gave up her job with a City firm to try and save Greece. ‘You know, these dreaded colonels? The dictators?’ But Ralph had pictured someone sturdy and hard-nosed, not an adult version of the spirit-child just encountered. She, too, was agile and brown-skinned, with long, dark hair and discerning eyes that challenged him as if she understood his thoughts. You couldn’t say she was short, as her sinewy proportions were perfect, but next to her husband, with his long-boned, Anglo-Saxon extremities, she looked like another species.

  ‘How do you do.’ She held out a hand formally, and then, more affectionately, grasped Ralph’s with the other, clasping it between her warm, dry palms. ‘Ed told me about the young composer – your travels, the tape recordings … fascinating.’ Her voice was low and, though her English was excellent, a faint accent with richly rolling Rs betrayed her origins.

  ‘Ellie, meet my friend, Ralph Boyd. Ralph, this is Ellie, my wife,’ said Edmund, looking down with beneficence. ‘Eleftheria, to give her the full dues of her Orthodox baptism. Or Liberty, as I sometimes call her.’ He placed a tender hand on Ellie’s arm and she patted it.

  ‘I’ve just met your daughter.’

  Ellie merely smiled and said, ‘Come and meet our friends.’ He followed her down a staircase, past walls plastered with photographs, postcards and newspaper clippings in an open-ended collage. They entered a spacious, bright yellow room where maybe a dozen people sat at a refectory table or sprawled in armchairs. The scene spoke of unhurried pleasures: bottles of red wine, coffee cups, ashtrays, orange peel, the remains of a circle of Brie in its balsawood box. Open French doors looked out through a mass of overgrown honeysuckle towards the river.

  Ralph was introduced to four or five Greeks belonging to a political protest group, whose names he immediately forgot, and he sat down at the table next to an American woman called Meg. She gave off a potent waft of patchouli each time she fluffed up her mass of hennaed hair and talked about dreams and astrology – Ralph’s least favourite topics. He became mildly interested when she let drop that she was not wearing any underwear, something that scrutiny of her long, diaphanous skirt confirmed when she got up to go. As she left she gave Ralph her number, which he put in one of the side pockets of his army-surplus trousers.

  In later years, when Ralph discussed the early ’70s with contemporaries, he identified it as a flash of light exploding in the drab, post-war darkness. We all believed in taking pleasure where we found it. And why not? We were war babies, children of rationing and the frumpy 1950s. Eating a banana was a highlight of my childhood, for God’s sake. We respected men in uniform. We believed the authorities. And then there was this wonderful blast that rearranged all the pieces into a new pattern. It wasn’t that we left our parents’ generation behind – that’s nothing new. All the clichés of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll are not the point at all. No, we saw the world from a different perspective and were trying to make it into something better, freer and more honest.

  He hadn’t eaten lunch and Ellie made him up a plate of food – some sort of Greek lamb affair and his first taste of ratatouille, then glamorously unfamiliar in England with its defiant use of garlic, olive oil and audacious aubergines. Ralph had travelled but he was still an innocent in many ways. The Greeks lapsed more and more into their own language, furiously smoking, gesturing and shouting – apparently about the fascist junta which was strangling and torturing their country. They didn’t seem to notice when Edmund took Ralph off to his study – an appealing attic room overlooking the front garden and Barnabas Road. There were so many books they had been doubled up on the bookshelves, and the floor was stacked with towers of manuscripts and hardbacks as though it was a game to see how high they could be piled. His desk was a trestle table, also littered with books and papers, which threatened the prime position of a typewriter, and a chaise longue draped with rugs stood against one wall. The windows were almost at the level of the nearby bridge, and each time a Tube train passed there was an impressive roar, the room juddered and a tin of pencils on the desk rattled with sympathetic vibrations.

  When still in his twenties, Edmund had written a successful novel, Oedipus Blues, and had become quite well-known. ‘It’s all wine-dark sea and bouzouki riffs,’ he had said dismissively. ‘A potboiler really, that helped put food on the table.’ In fact, it was obvious that Edmund was proud of his idea that turned Laius and Jocasta into a bouzouki player and a singer in the poverty-stricken, twentieth-century port of Piraeus. A film had quickly followed the book and Ralph managed to see it at an afternoon screening in Soho. It included sailors, druggy musicians, thugs and prostitutes and, as Edmund liked to point out, was made a couple of years before Never on Sunday with Melina Mercouri. Laius and Jocasta abandon their deformed baby Oedipus in a ruined temple behind the shipyards where he is found by a holidaying English couple who take him home. Eddy (as he is named) returns to Greece as a young man, crashes into his natural father with his motorbike and ends up living with his mother. Ralph found the film rather melodramatic, but loved the book.

  ‘You know, I was inspired by real events,’ said Ed. ‘I witnessed an old man’s death in Piraeus. And that was the reason I met my wife.’ How suitable that Ed’s life should unfurl like a myth, thought Ralph, and he made an appreciative noise to encourage the storyteller.

  ‘I’d been travelling in Greece, mostly around the islands, sleeping rough, writing poetry, falling into the hands of sirens and enchantresses. You know the sort of thing. On that day, I’d returned to Piraeus. It was early evening and I was tramping around the port, searching for a bus to the centre. Then there was the most almighty commotion and dreadful crashing noise behind me. A motorbike had run over an old man. Ghastly. I tried to do something, though it was quickly apparent that he was beyond help. Blood all over the road. The rider was a young man. He was all right, though naturally very shocked. Then up walked this exquisite young woman – suntanned limbs, dark hair, white summer frock. A vision. And she started speaking to me in perfect English!’

  ‘So a coup de foudre?’ said Ralph.

  ‘Exactly! A bolt from the blue, Attic skies. I knew immediately that this was her. After the ambulance arrived we went for a drink. It turned out that her father was a Greek diplomat. She and her sisters had been brought up in London as well as Paris and Cairo, and she was studying law at the LSE. We stayed up all night, going from one dive to another – all near the port and full of the sort of people I put into the book. By morning I’d asked her to marry me!’

  ‘Did she say yes?’

  ‘Well, it took slightly longer for that,’ he chuckled. ‘But I knew she was the woman for me. And she agreed to see me again the next evening. So that was all right.’