The Goldberg Variations. Mark Glanville

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СКАЧАТЬ and bumps and hauls me behind her as she pushes a pram containing my new twin brother and sister towards Kensington Gardens.

      ‘You’re not walking properly!’

      Whack! Her hand comes down across the side of my face like a whip: it stings. My check goes warm, almost comfortingly so. I still can’t keep up.

      ‘You’re not walking properly!’

      Whack! This one catches me across the side of my head and makes me think about what I’m doing with my feet. Although I try to correct them, I find myself stumbling and tripping. Again and again her hand comes down. Much fainter is the reel of her shoving me against a stone step and smashing my tooth. The incident where she hurled me across the kitchen with such force that I hit the wall, landing half-conscious on the floor is someone else’s first-hand testimony. The cleaning lady witnessed it, but she didn’t want to cause any bother so she didn’t tell Mum. When I told Mum about the regular beatings, nanny Jeanette denied it vehemently and she believed her.

      Five years later Mum felt compelled to write a letter that should have led to me being watched by Special Branch for the rest of my useful life.

      … a compulsion to look at and to feel girls’ pants – another ghost 1 can freeze-frame. The moment the girls lined up to have their arithmetic books marked was always the highlight of an otherwise dull day. When they were all in position I’d crawl forward on my hands and knees, looking up their skirts for the statutory grey knickers. Or else, I’d deliberately misbehave and have myself thrown out of Scripture, partly because I wasn’t very good at drawing sheaths of corn, but chiefly because I knew the older girls would be doing gym then. I’d roam the corridors of the school, until I reached the hall through whose windows I could enjoy visions of pretty girls vaulting over horses and running about in their underwear.

      After five, the images linger long enough for me to examine them without the crutch of hearsay. We had a succession of au pairs: Sylvia, Maria, Gerda, Brigitte, Ulrike. I remember Mum crying in the kitchen and holding her in the familiar squidgy embrace, feeling her tears roll down my cheeks and the shock of emotional reversal.

      ‘Your father’s always been the same, I was even warned about him, dancing off with other girls at parties.’

      She’d tell me of the time she caught him ‘smooching with some silly girl’, and how she put on a Highland fling, grabbed a man at random and reeled past, bumping into him as hard as she could. She laughed at the memory and I guessed he’d seen the funny side too.

      ‘Always the same type. He won’t change. Once a womaniser …’

      A word that acquired heroic status in my mind. Other boys could be engine-drivers or firemen, I wanted to be a womaniser.

      I worshipped Dad. He was always around, as he worked at home. Page upon page emerged like the product of a twenty-six legged centipede dipped in ink. So long as I was quiet he’d allow me to sit with him, overlooked by a John Bratby painting in chunky, thumb-nail deep oil that years of indoor football eventually chipped away. Around the time I was able to translate its abstract shapes into men playing billiards, there’s enough primary evidence and eyewitness testimony for my history proper to begin.

       Now that I’m six I’m as clever as clever And I wish I could be six now for ever and ever

      sang Christopher Robin, and I believed him. All year I’d been reciting those lines as a mantra that promised to see off the ills of infancy. I’d crossed the first threshold and I could see rewards beyond it. Good things happened in autumn. Boots and hats and coats and gloves and scarves smothered me against the foggy foggy dew Dad often sang of. The trees painted their multi-coloured pictures and every footstep was an adventure in which you might crackle, crunch or slide. Each week Mum and I walked to the Kensington children’s library. Our jaunts recalled the golden days when I had no sisters, no brother Toby, a time before I was wrenched from Mum’s lap and hurled into the world of the nanny beyond. Our twenty-minute walk was the magic of the annual journey to Santa’s grotto repeated every week, and the books Mum and I chose, tales of witches, ghosts and other creatures living in fantastic realms, comforted me until the next visit. At night I kept my world alive even when the lights went out, continuing my reading with a torch under the sheets.

      Dad started taking me to football matches. I’d sit with him in the press-box, for the first time allowed into a world that had been exclusively his. Not that I was entirely ignorant of it. I could name every team in the country, plus dinosaurs like Wanderers, Blackburn Olympic, and The Royal Engineers. I knew all the F.A. Cup winners, year-by-year, League champions, Charity Shield opponents, but my one love was Manchester United. I don’t know why. It never occurred to me that they played a very long way from west London as I assumed that the entire universe bordered Holland Park Avenue and that if you went past North Kensington you’d fall off the edge. It didn’t matter that my first game was Chelsea v Nottingham Forest. Even now I can visualise an all-blue Osgood streaking through helpless red shirts to score the only goal of the game. A comforting, enveloping mist came off the damp wooden seats, the playing turf, from the mouths of ranked journalists, and the mugs of tea served at half-time. In those days, the players were as magical as the immortals I read about by torchlight. In my second game I saw Rodney Marsh score a hat-trick in a 4–0 QPR victory over Watford. His name echoed round Loftus Road to the accompaniment of a massive bass drum. I then started watching Dad’s own team, Chelsea Casuals, on the pitches in front of Wren’s Royal Hospital alongside the Chelsea pensioners in their magnificent red and navy uniforms and wondered how long it would be before I’d be able to play for them myself.

      Sport was always the bond between me, Dad, and eventually Toby. It was one that divided the family on gender lines. One day Dad appeared in the nursery with a long, green box.

      ‘Okay, kid. Let’s see what you’re made of!’

      His grin revealed a wolf’s crowded jaw in all its splendour.

      The pine table in the nursery where we normally ate our cornflakes was about to be transformed into a ping-pong table. Dad ripped apart the cardboard and hurriedly assembled the net with the eagerness of a lynch mob erecting a gallows. I juggled the ball on my bat. Having seen off all comers at a party recently, I was feeling pretty confident.

      ‘Ready, kid?’

      He served the ball gently and it bounced across the net, high enough for me to be able to smash it down on his side.

      ‘Pretty good, kid!’

      It was all going as I’d expected until I began to serve. The ball flew off the end of the table and under the battered red couch by the wall.

      ‘The table’s not long enough.’

      ‘Excuses, kid.’

      My game worsened with my growing frustration until, gradually, I mastered the short length of the breakfast table and Dad’s gentle returns left plenty of room for winning shots.

      ‘Okay, kid. How about a game? Play for service?’

      Dad bounced the ball across the net and I returned it with ease, but my next shot spun off against the window.

      ‘My serve.’

      Dad chopped at the ball and it came across the net gently enough, but, as I attempted to return it, the ball spun off viciously and hit the window.

      ‘1–0,’ beamed Dad.

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