Loving Amélie (4 page)

Despite having an open
invitation to visit Peter in his student accommodation, Chris never quite made the
trip. He had a weekend job in the local steakhouse and a post-office savings
account; but running his car swallowed up most of his pay and he never seemed
to have enough spare funds for a journey to France. He was also dating a girl
from college called Glynis, who wore black eyeliner and Doc Marten boots: she
would sit and listen to music with him all evening but never wanted him to
touch her. They eventually “stopped bothering”; and Chris subsequently saw her
with a string of butch girl friends, looking much happier. Peter found this
very amusing.

Chris received postcards from
his brother, on a regular basis, that he attempted to write in French. He was
learning new techniques and terms – such as
estouffade, fougasse, réligieuse
–
and these began to punctuate his writing. Chris often sat reading them on his
bed, bored and broke, turning them over to take in the picturesque foreign
scenes. Whilst he appreciated the levity of Peter’s filthy comments about
stuffing and breast meat, he also found himself perceiving the
unwritten
messages:
of his brother’s newfound pleasure and purpose in life.

After a year or so, Peter
returned to the West Midlands with his girlfriend, Linda. They had met at the
cookery school. Chris and Roy and Jean took to her instantly: she was bright
and friendly, with wilful blonde wavy hair that was usually held off her face
with a colourful hair band or scarf; and a compact, muscular physique that took
her from preparing a roast in the kitchen with their mum to helping Chris to
change a tyre with impressive ease.

Peter talked incessantly of his
time in France around the family dinner table, and Linda was his amiable
co-narrator: they seemed to have met almost as soon as Peter had arrived in
Montpelier and had been inseparable ever since. He was relegated to the sofa
while Linda was staying; although, inevitably, after the three of them had been
out at the local pub, Chris was aware of the sitting room door creaking open
and his brother tiptoeing up the stairs and into her bed:

“
Peter!
Your parents will hear us!” she
hissed.

Alongside Peter’s persuasive
whisper of denial, Chris heard both his parents snoring loudly in a kind of
duet of mercy, and stuck his own head under his pillow.

He gladly accepted Linda’s
offer to spend a week of the summer holidays with Peter at her parents’ house
in Surrey.

“There’s loads of space, we’ll
hardly notice you. We hope!” she had quipped.

There was little else to tempt
Peter at home.

Linda and her two sisters had
had the benefit of a benevolent and privileged upbringing, in a large,
comfortably shambolic house in Surrey. Her parents were well-educated and
fairly laid-back individuals – her father a stockbroker and her mother a
teacher. It was a different world altogether from working-class Dudley.

It seemed that all the girls
had the financial freedom to follow any path of their choosing. Although Linda
- the eldest - was very active and industrious by nature, it struck Chris that
she had ended up in Montpelier because her father had paid her way. He felt weirdly
proud of Peter, for getting there under his own steam, even if it had been the
steam generated by wild behaviour!

The next sister, Vanessa, was
more aloof (“probably a lesbian: you might like her” Peter had said,
provocatively) and spent most of the time Chris was visiting out riding her
horse or occupying herself out of the others’ way. The youngest, Nadine, was
more in Linda’s image: jolly and talkative; and played the cello. She was
studying music and hoped one day to be a professional musician. Although she
was a year younger than Chris, it was a natural development that, after their
first dinner all together the night before, and breakfast the next day, Nadine
would be his companion while Peter and Linda took a daytrip to London.

“Make sure she doesn’t talk you
quite
to
death, Chris old chap,” said Nadine’s father. He had a pipe bitten between his
teeth, and was preparing to leave in the Bentley that Chris was determined not
to be too effusive about. He added to his daughter: “And don’t forget your
practice, Pumpkin.”

“I won’t, Daddy.”

Nadine waved her father off and
duly ushered Chris up to her bedroom: it was the size of Chris’s and Peter’s
combined –
and
some. He hadn’t been much of a
Boy’s Own Stories
fan, but he imagined this would be the type of
room that would have featured in the girls’ equivalent tales, with a huge
quilted bed in a brass bedstead, covered with teddy bears and cushions and
festooned with scarves. It had its own fireplace. The walls were pinned with
posters of
The
Police
and
Duran
Duran,
alongside lesser known conductors and cellists and one entitled
The Anatomy of
the Orchestra.
There were photos of the three sisters at various stages of
girlhood, from babies to birthday parties; and a dressing table framed with a
myriad of tiny light bulbs. Beyond the open sash window, the paddock was
visible, where Vanessa was presumably riding her horse.

“Ah. Your cello,” Chris said,
battling with some anxiety at finding himself in this overpoweringly girly
environment with nothing worthwhile to say. “You don’t mind me listening while
you practice then?”

“Not at all,” said Nadine,
gaily. “Any audience is a good audience. Even an audience of one!”

She unzipped the instrument
from its case. It was, to Chris, an impressive, majestic-looking piece of kit.
He didn’t know anyone who could play the cello – most of his friends had
probably never even seen one. The only instruments he could recall at his
school were recorders that no one really wanted to play, partly because they
smelled of stale spit and also because they were a reminder of the enforcement
of end of term concerts that were as dreary as hell.

“I could be very cheeky and say
‘Any requests’?!” said Nadine.

Chris was gaping to make a
reply, when a woman, who must have been the housekeeper, knocked and entered to
take away the wastepaper bin and some empty mugs.

“Excuse me, Nadine. And young
man.”

“Oh,
thank you
, Mrs Crombie!” the girl
exclaimed, then turned her vivacious face back to Chris. She had huge hazel
eyes, intensified by an outer rim of darkness: he was reminded of biting into a
caramel and enjoying the contrasting colours it made, with the promise of
sweetness to follow.

“I don’t know much about
music,” he said. “But I am more than happy to listen.”

“Well, the good news is you don’t
have to know,” she smiled. “Just
listen
!”

She loosened her neck muscles
by turning her head from side to side, and worked her arms briefly like someone
preparing to swim a butterfly race. She then took the cello between her knees
and began to play a piece that Chris later learned was called
The Swan
, or
La Cygne
, by
Camille Saint-Saens. The unexpectedly sweet and accomplished sound that Nadine
drew from her instrument arrested him with a sense of both awe and humility:
her small, sturdy Linda-like hands gliding with such dexterity and poise up and
down the fret board; her pretty, knowing eyes opening and squeezing shut with
the passion of the exercise. He was deeply moved.

Nadine paused suddenly and
glanced up at her new friend. She gave a little explosive laugh:

“You look
horrified
!” she said breathily. She knew
she was brilliant; and that the piece so far had been flawless.

“I’m...very impressed,” Chris
replied, simply.

She got up from her seat and went
to look out of the window. With her back to him, Chris was wondering,
awkwardly, whether it was a signal for him to leave; until she turned round and
walked quickly to turn the key in the lock of her bedroom door.

“I’m happier that way,” she
explained; then regained her seat and continued to play to the end of the piece
with renewed vigour.

Chris’s concentrated delight in
her music had been supplanted by rising excitement at the significance of the
locked door. He wasn’t disappointed when she replaced the cello in its case and
said, with an upward tilt of her chin:

“Well, I think that would make
my father happy. We can kiss and cuddle a bit, if you like?”

“I would like that, a lot,” he
said with some difficulty, as his mouth was suddenly dry.

 
The amazing music. The locked door. He felt warmth in his
groin; although it was accompanied by a nagging reminder that his evenings with
Glynis and
The
Alan Parsons Project
had been his only foray so far into the world of
sexual adventure. Without any of the requisite adventure. Or further
enlightenment as to what might unfold.

Nadine was in charge; and
pulled of her sweater. She moved close to him and encouraged him to touch her
naked breasts, which he did so with cold, nervous hands. She began kissing him,
with thrusts of her pert little tongue, and determined moaning breaths that
quickened his lack of confidence into physical excitement. In a moment, she had
her hand down his jeans – the clever hand that had been bowing so
exquisitely a few minutes earlier – and was massaging him with a
different type of passion entirely. He thought his legs might give way.

“If I start you off, Chris,”
she said, releasing him from her tongue, “can you do the – you know
–
end
bit?” She bit her lower lip in mock dismay. It was another of her sister’s
expressions.

“Oh, yes,” he managed to reply.

When the siblings got together
later that evening to barbeque their supper, Chris was feeling very fortunate
indeed to have Peter for a brother. Cheap wine flowed; and the homemade burgers
tasted as good as any he would eat in his life.

Nadine went on to marry a
fellow cellist; but not before being a bridesmaid at Linda and Peter’s wedding,
where she gave Chris (the best man) a wedding night to remember. Speeches had
been made, and the cake cut: people were making appropriate comments about how
wonderful it was that the couple had made their
own
cake, when Nadine led Chris into the
shadows outside the marquee and began to guide him expertly under the satin and
netting layers of her dress. They had been flirting all day, fuelled by just
enough champagne; and Chris felt nothing less than triumphant at satisfactorily
concluding what had been started by their teenage fumbling those few years
earlier.

The phrase “chasing the cello”
became a euphemistic part of the brothers’ vocabulary from that time onwards.

Chapter Four

Chris was panicking.

The baby was crying like a
tiny, angry banshee, and the first bottle of milk he would ever give her was
taking an age to warm up. He had concluded that occasionally shaking some drops
onto his wrist was a pointless exercise, as he had no idea what “ready” felt
like. He then realised that he had no idea, either, how she was supposed to
drink the stuff: sitting up –
how?
– lying down? He quickly took a
bottle of Czech lager out of the fridge and tried it on himself. OK, there was
an optimal angle for reclining to achieve optimal comfort in swallowing without
choking. Perhaps he would include this in the first chapter of his book
entitled
Fatherhood
Tips for the Witless.

Still, Amélie wailed.

“Fuck it, we’re going in,” he
said, cradling the loosely swaddled person in his arms and applying the teat of
the bottle to her mouth. She stopped crying and sucked wilfully on the rubber
nipple with hungry Lilliputian glugs. He felt the tension in his upper body
relax into the feeding process; wondering how recently the tiny mouth had
suckled at her mother’s real breast. Wondering gave him a renewed pain in his
guts, but he said: “We can do this.”

After five minutes, Chris’s arm
began to ache and he wracked his brains for a hands-free method. As though she
had read her father’s mind and concluded he was a lunatic, Amélie vomited out
the teat of her bottle, together with most of the contents of her stomach, and
began to scream again.

“Oh, for f…! This isn’t good,”
he said. His lap was soaked, and the child was unfed and distinctly unhappy.

He had to find Sara.

He wouldn’t phone her: he
guessed she wouldn’t answer, particularly if she was
in flagrante
with Rick. He would up
sticks, baby in tow, find her and demand her help. He knew which of the
Hilton
hotels
they frequented most often for their clandestine meetings; and he would head
there. He rifled through the baby’s possessions and found, to his delight and
relief, a carrying device that he could clip around his waist to create a
front-loading papoose. Ingenious! He prised Amélie’s stiff little limbs into
her outdoor suit and guided her down into the carrier so she was against his
chest. He put a fresh bottle of milk into his pocket, grabbed his keys and
phone and headed for Sara.

At some point, Amélie must have
stopped crying – maybe out of sympathy for her amateur father – and
fallen asleep. She was surprisingly hot and heavy cargo for her size. People on
the tube looked on with interest: one old couple did so - he was convinced -
with the narrowed eyes of suspicion; while a young Asian woman, with the
blatant imperative of a tourist in London, took several photographs. As the
tube train rattled on and the baby sick dried on his trousers, they both began
to start smelling distinctly unsavoury.