Putney: A Novel - Hardcover

Zinovieff, Sofka

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0735275300 ISBN 13: 9780735275300

Publisher: Knopf Canada, 2018

Synopsis

In the spirit of Notes on a Scandal and Zoe Whittall's The Best Kind of People, an explosive, powerful and timely novel about the far-reaching repercussions of an illicit relationship between a young girl and a man twenty years her senior.

A rising star in the London arts scene of the early 1970s, gifted composer Ralph Boyd is approached by renowned novelist Edmund Greenslay to score a stage adaptation of his most famous work. Welcomed into Greenslay's sprawling bohemian house in Putney, an artistic and prosperous district in southwest London, the musical wunderkind is introduced to Edmund's beautiful activist wife Ellie, his aloof son Theo, and his nine-year old daughter Daphne, who quickly becomes Ralph's muse.
     Ralph showers Daphne with tokens of his affection--clandestine gifts and secret notes. In a home that is exciting but often lonely, Daphne finds Ralph to be a dazzling companion. Their bond remains strong even after Ralph becomes a husband and father, and though Ralph worships Daphne, he does not touch her. But in the summer of 1976, when Ralph accompanies thirteen-year-old Daphne alone to meet her parents in Greece, their relationship intensifies irrevocably. One person knows of their passionate trysts: Daphne's best friend Jane, whose awe of the intoxicating Greenslay family ensures her silence.
     Forty years later Daphne is back in London. After years lost to decadence and drug abuse, she is struggling to create a normal, stable life for herself and her adolescent daughter. When circumstances bring her back in touch with her long-lost friend Jane, their reunion inevitably turns to Ralph, now a world-famous musician also living in the city. Daphne's recollections of her childhood and her growing anxiety over her own young daughter eventually lead to an explosive realization that propels her to confront Ralph and their years spent together.
     Masterfully told from three diverse viewpoints--victim, perpetrator, and witness--Putney is a subtle and enormously powerful novel about consent, agency, and what we tell ourselves to justify what we do, and what others do to us.

About this title

About the Author

SOFKA ZINOVIEFF has published three acclaimed works of non-fiction, including Eurydice St: A Place in Athens, a memoir of her first year living in Athens, and The Red Princess, a biography of her paternal grandmother, as well as the novel The House on Paradise Street. She lives, with her husband and two daughters, in Greece.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

There was no clear point when the friendship started – Ralph was just around. He’d drop by or have lunch with her parents or wander into her room to see if she wanted to go for a walk or watch Blue Peter. Ralph was like a kind uncle or godfather. He took her to a concert of Indian music at the Roundhouse, swimming at Putney Baths, and he had the time to sit and talk with her about whatever seemed important to her then. It was he rather than her parents who accompanied her to see Oedipus Blues, the collaboration between him and her father that ran for a year in the West End and then went on tour. She hadn’t understood all the references to brothels and drugs but had a visceral comprehension of the taboos that were broken by young Eddy getting involved with his birth mother after he accidentally killed his Greek father. Most exciting of all was the real motorbike that roared on to the stage.

Right from the start there were secrets with Ralph, but they were sweet things like presents or notes. There were phases when she so frequently returned home to find something from him waiting in her room that she almost came to expect it. He gave her a copy of Edward Lear’s Book of Nonsense, marking a page.
 
There was an old person of Putney,
Whose food was roast spiders and chutney,
Which he took with his tea, within sight of the sea,
That romantic old person of Putney.
 
One day there was a pile of red petals in the shape of a heart on her desk, another time an expensive chocolate truffle in its own miniature cardboard container. She noted each episode in a diary, stuffed with scrappy mementoes and the pages stained with spilt drinks, food and tears.

For a long time she believed it was a coincidence when Ralph came across her in the street and walked alongside for a while or bought her a bar of chocolate. They established private names for each other. He was Dog; always waiting for her, he said, loyal as a hound. She was Monkey for her delicate hands and supple limbs. Or Strawberry, ‘Like strawberries in winter.’ And in those funny days not so long after the post-war era, strawberries were something special and seasonal – a treat that Libby’s supermarket generation would never understand.

When Ralph brought Daphne a record of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and gave an impression of how the danc­ers moved, he said, ‘You have to feel the pagan spirit.’ He looked like a madman with his uninhibited jumping, in-turned feet and manic rhythms, but persuaded her to join him. ‘I’ll take you to see it one day,’ he said when they fell to the ground, breathless and giggling. ‘It’s already sixty years old but it’s still astonishingly modern. There were riots when it was first performed. That’s what I’d like to happen with my music.’

One summer afternoon, when they sat on beanbags in her room, the sash window wide open to the garden, he explained how to listen to ambient sounds.

‘Can you hear the bass notes? The rumble of traffic in the distance, that chugging getting more muffled as the tug goes away along the river? Then you’ve got the high register. There, like those brakes screeching.’ He replicated the sound and then joined in the barks and yelps of some nearby dogs. Even more entertaining was his imitation of birdsong. He could do about twenty different species. Not just obvious calls like the cuckoo or the owl, but the sweet whistle of the blackbird, the thrush’s warble, the swallow’s chirp and the descending cry of the buzzard. He opened her ears to things she would not have noticed, but it didn’t feel as though he was trying to educate her. Another time, when he gave her a record of sacred music by Elizabethan composers like Tallis and Byrd, he turned it into an adven­ture, talking her through the parts, explaining some of the Latin, and identifying the entwined voices as though they’d crept into a dark, sixteenth-century church and were spying on the singers. ‘I sang that stuff as a child,’ he said. ‘A scrawny little choirboy in Worcester cathedral. I’d sail right up to the high Cs without a thought.’

When Daphne was eleven he took her to a recording studio to sing for his latest piece, Songs of Innocence and Experience. They were based on William Blake’s poems and Ralph assembled a huge children’s choir from several London schools and a band of Gambian drummers. For the Songs of Experience, he gathered up some homeless men and paid them to read the poems, accompanied by a small string orchestra. Ralph wanted untrained people rather than musicians – unpretentious voices of innocence and of experience. He was determined to have Daphne participate, and insisted she sing some solos, along with a young boy of about eight with an angelic voice. ‘Like a bird singing – the sounds coming straight from the body. That’s what I want.’

Singing in front of all those people was terrifying and, while she tried to do what Ralph requested, she couldn’t understand what was going on much of the time. The drummers wore African robes and treated the event as a party and Ralph encouraged it, providing beer for them and Coca-Cola and crisps for the kids.

‘Pandemonium,’ Ed said when he dropped by one day.

Little Lamb,
Here I am;
Come and lick
My white neck.

In the end, the recording was a success. Daphne even had her photograph taken for a piece in a weekend colour supplement. The journalist who interviewed Ralph, the drummers and one of the homeless men asked her what she thought. ‘It’s really super. I enjoyed it,’ she was quoted as saying. She never forgot her song; in fact, she had sung it as a lullaby to Libby when she was little.

My dear Strawberry girl,
I really really enjoyed yesterday. I can’t imagine who else could have done those solos or who would have given it what you did. I just felt so happy afterwards. I always hope you are happy and look forward to seeing you.
Love and a big lick on the ear from your devoted Dog
 
Daphne had been ten when Ralph met Nina. A friend of one of Ellie’s many cousins, she had come from Athens to London to study painting at the Chelsea School of Art and stayed on to do postgraduate work. She was invited to Barnabas Road one weekend when Ralph was there and Daphne had immediately spotted his attentiveness. Nina had a doe-eyed face with pleasing, regular features and an extravagant amount of chestnut hair that was so long she could sit on it. She often wore it in a loose plait, and dressed in kaftans and long skirts, all of which Ralph said made her resemble an Ancient Greek. Daphne was present when he told Ed that Nina was like a caryatid – classical and time­less. He appreciated women who didn’t slap on make-up or wobble around in ridiculous high heels and tight skirts. He often told Daphne: ‘Don’t think you’ll attract the boys with lipstick and feminine flimflam.’

After Ralph and Nina became a couple, Daphne over­heard Ellie gossiping on the phone about how Nina would be the perfect match for Ralph, being both pretty and intelligent but, most important, silent. This would allow him his fantasies, she said. And that’s what men need. And what’s more, despite her artistic inclinations, Nina would be a thoroughly traditional Greek wife, who would stick close to the hearth and the cradle and not ask questions. ‘Plus ça change.’ Daphne liked how her mother’s spiky verbal nails were hammered home. But in fact, Ellie and Nina became increasingly friendly. She often returned from school to find them ensconced in the kitchen chatter­ing away in Greek about the latest political developments or the impossible nature of English weather.

Ralph never hid his relationship with Nina. Quite the reverse. Daphne was his true friend and confidante who ‘should know everything’. Even his sexual escapades were not taboo in their conversations and there had always been various passing girlfriends he made fun of to her so they could both laugh about them. ‘A silly, drunken fuck,’ he said without compunction. ‘It’s like eating too much choc­olate – you feel greedy before and regretful after, but nothing serious. It’s just physical.’ He hugged her. ‘You’re the one I love.’ Nevertheless, when Ralph and Nina moved in together, Daphne was perplexed. This was evidently something much more serious than she’d understood, though he’d never explained it as such. He took her to see the terraced house they’d bought in Battersea while it was being decorated – a two-up two-down on the hill near the park, with a rickety extension for kitchen and bathroom. They edged past workmen sanding floorboards and repair­ing windows.

‘This is the best part,’ he said, leading her through a cramped garden to a shed. ‘This is where I’ll work.’ There were trees hanging over the wooden structure. ‘It’s almost like a grown-up’s tree house, even if it is on the ground.’

When Ralph announced he and Nina were getting married, Daphne felt a spasm of envy she couldn’t express or even comprehend. Although she was only eleven, Ralph had already made her grasp the exceptional position she held in his life. She didn’t say anything but he evidently noticed the change in her expression.

‘The thing is, I feel she’s like your family,’ he said, as if making an excuse. ‘And if there are babies, they’ll be half-Greek like you!’ He claimed he was getting closer to Daphne through this arrangement, becoming an honorary Greek of sorts, and Nina was as good as Daphne’s cousin, even if it wasn’t strictly the case in terms of blood. ‘You know it doesn’t affect how much I care about you.’

The wedding was held in Greece in September and, although all the Greenslays were invited, in the end only Ellie went. Ed had obligations at the university and the school term had just started. It was Daphne’s first year at Hayfield and she was pleased to have the excuse not to attend the nuptials. Before he left, Ralph tried to reassure Daphne that his feelings for Nina were entirely separate to the unique attachment to his young friend. ‘Nothing can change my love for my Miss Monkey,’ and he kissed her hand, moving his lips in little jumps up towards her elbow like an old-fashioned suitor. Eventually she giggled and he looked relieved.

It was true that Ralph’s marriage appeared to make little difference to the progression of his intimacy with Daphne. It was only a year or so later when they first kissed. Kissed properly, ‘like in films’, as she thought of it as a child. ‘Tongue sandwich,’ as boys sneered at school. She was twelve. It must have been a weekend and the weather was fine enough for a picnic. He collected her in his car, a Morris Traveller so decrepit that the timber frame had moss growing on it. Ralph had given the car a name. ‘Poor old Maurice, he’s trying to get back to nature. Soon he’ll start sprouting trees. Before long he’ll be a small, travelling wood with birds’ nests and badgers’ lairs. And I’ll be the madman in the forest, making music only the animals can understand.’ Daphne got into the front seat and noticed the back was filled with musical instruments – old gourds and goat horns tied up with twine, or a funny object hung with beads that he said was a Sudanese lyre. Never something normal, like a clarinet or a guitar, and although he’d been a violinist, he rarely touched the instrument any more. Ralph drove to Richmond Park, teasing her by taking his hands off the steering wheel and pretending that Maurice was driving by himself. ‘Maybe he’ll start flying like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.’ Later, she saw that Ralph was using his knees all the time.

When they arrived in the park, he handed over a paper bag. Inside were two reproduction Victorian masks made of card. ‘This one’s for you.’ He held up the face of a blond, plumed monkey and looked through the holes, making small grunts and grinning. ‘Here, I’ll help you put it on,’ he said and she twisted so he could tie the ribbons into a bow at the back of her head. ‘Ah, what a beautiful little monkey,’ he marvelled when she turned around. He stroked her hair and asked her to fix his mask – a dog with worried wrin­kles on its forehead and wearing a small red fez. ‘Your loyal servant and obedient hound,’ he said, his eyes all dark and shiny behind the cut-outs. They stared at one another as if they’d metamorphosed into different people or indeed animals. The ability to step outside herself, to masquerade as someone else, was a skill she learned from Ralph and quickly made her own. It was a recipe for instant freedom – as simple as changing your trousers or putting on a hat but being transformed by it.

‘Shall we go, Miss Monkey?’

They left Maurice in the car park and made their way towards a wooded area. A number of walkers stared at this odd pair. She felt vulnerable – a fox slinking across the open space – until they reached the green shade. After following a narrow path through the trees, they reached a clearing that was almost like a room; apart from a discreet opening, it was surrounded on all sides by bushes and trees.

She watched as Ralph put the picnic basket on the ground, unfolded a plaid blanket and stretched out on his back, his hands under his head. She lay down too, and gradually he turned towards her and caressed her face very slowly and gently underneath the mask. It felt nice. Any potential awkwardness was removed by their disguises.

‘We’re like animals in the enchanted forest,’ he said.

Inside the basket was a bottle, which he opened using the corkscrew on his penknife. Pulling off his dog mask, he took a swig and handed it to her.

‘I like drinking,’ she said, removing her mask too and tasting the slightly sweet white wine.

‘So do I.’

‘Sometimes I smoke too. I nick them from Ellie and she never notices.’

He leaned over and kissed her very gently on the lips. She didn’t respond, but nor did she draw back. Pulling away a few inches, he said, ‘I love you so much.’ Then he kissed her again, warm mouth just opened.

Looking up through the fluttering layers of green leaves made her feel reverse vertigo. Ralph lay on his side and looked as though he was examining her, lightly running his finger along her eyebrows. His face was deeply famil­iar; kind dog eyes, mobile features, and though he was much larger, his size was not imposing. ‘You’re the boss,’ he repeated. ‘I like it when you tell me what to do.’ She knew him, trusted him. A friend. ‘A special friend,’ was his expression. Not like the others – that was clear. He was free to pass between the age zones. She liked what was happening and was intensely curious about this man who loved her. Soft and dangerous. His skin hot against hers and slightly scratchy on her cheek. When he tried to slip his hand inside her shorts, she pulled it away. It gave her another sort of vertigo. They went back to kissing, long and slow and new, his tongue diffident, just inside her lips and along her teeth.

High above their heads, a parakeet with emerald plum­age landed on a branch and began chirruping. ‘A love bird,’ said Ralph, ‘escaped from its cage. Come to serenade us.’ He squawked and chirped until a strange aria emerged between man and animal.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Canada
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0735275300
• ISBN 13: 9780735275300
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 384