There but for The_ A Novel - Ali Smith [40]
And Arlen had this little dog, Terence says, like a fox terrier or that kind of dog, who was quite badly behaved and kept running away and getting lost.
His name was Pan, the child says.
So, there was Harold Arlen, Terence says, standing there and rubbing his forehead, worried, one minute saying, I can’t think what to do with this tune, then the next minute whistling for that little dog to come back—
Terence whistles the tune of the some-day-I’ll-wish-upon-a-star part of the tune exactly like he is whistling for a little dog to come back.
Everybody at the table laughs out loud, even Richard.
I won’t ever forget that! Hannah says. That’s brilliant! Tell me another one like that.
Okay, Terence says. Brooksie. What else? Something else.
The man who, when they were boys, sat next to the other boy in school because of the alphabet, the child says.
Yep, Terence says. Yip.
Yep yip! the child says. Yip yip yooray!
She claps her hands above her head. Bernice laughs.
Yip Harburg, Terence says. The man who wrote the words. He wrote the words to so many songs we all just know, just like that. He was born a poor Jewish kid in New York, his parents were sweatshop workers, and he grew up in a house where he and his sister slept on chairs pushed together at night, they were so poor.
Snore, Richard says.
No, listen, Hannah says. And his parents made sweatshirts, go on, Terence.
He lit the gas lamps on Broadway as a boy, Terence says, it was his first job. And in the school he went to, they sat their kids in alphabetical order. One day he took out some poems he loved—
Could this be, sorry Mark and, eh, your friend, the gayest conversation I’ve ever heard in this house, or possibly any house? Richard says.
Don’t, Hannah says. It’s for my dream.
One day, Terence says, he had a book of poems with him in school and he was reading them, and the kid sitting next to him said, they’re not just poems, you know. They’re more than poems. And this kid took Harburg home with him, and played him some 78s on a gramophone, because the poems he’d been reading were the lyrics for Gilbert and Sullivan songs. H for Harburg. G for Gershwin. He was twelve years old and he’d been sitting next to the twelve-year-old Ira Gershwin, right there, next to him, at school. And they both grew up to be …
To be what? Hannah said.
So is Ira Gershwin something to do with the more famous George Gershwin? Caroline says.
She was his wife, wasn’t she? Jen says coming in with plates balanced on her arm.
He was his younger brother, Mark says.
It comes into his head how much Faye loved songs. He had quite forgotten how much.
It does sound like a girl’s name, though, doesn’t it, Ira? Caroline is saying.
There’s no way I’d ever call a daughter that, Hannah says.
Then she tells them all the story of the daughter of a woman she knows at her Parent Teachers Association who woke up one day in the middle of a field in Cornwall wearing new clothes. She didn’t remember buying the clothes. She had no idea what she was doing in a field in Cornwall or how she’d got there. The last she remembered was being out for a drink on a Saturday night after work. The next thing it was Tuesday morning. And she was in a field miles from home. And she was dressed in new clothes. And when she looked at her credit card she’d bought them on that. But she didn’t remember any of it.
Selective memory after shopping spree, Hugo says. Endemic among women. Sorry. Is that a bit sexist?
Yes, Miles says smiling.
Think so, do you, Miles? Hugo says.
He closes his eyes at the same time as he turns his head in Miles’s direction.
It’s not funny, Hannah says. It’s true. It really happened in really real life.
Oh my God, Caroline says. Had anything … happened to her? You know, anything (she nods towards the child)—bad?
That’s the thing. It didn’t seem to have, Hannah said. But she didn’t know. She couldn’t know for sure.
Had anything good happened to her? the child