Sex and Stravinsky Read Online Free PDF

have taken jobs in Leeds and they’ve offered us the bus. We can buy it from them in monthly sums over three whole years and for only four hundred pounds. That’s incredibly cheap, Josh. It works out at less than twelve quid a month. Anyway, it’ll be such fun. Much better than some crappy breeze-block student flat with no garden and smelling of fish fingers. I need you to say you’re pleased.’
    Pleased. Josh has been feeling really high these last five weeks and now his heart is somewhere inside his shoes.
    ‘Why are you doing this?’ he says. ‘It’s stupid, Caro. It’s too drastic. You’re upset. I can’t deal with it. I need you to slow down.’
    ‘It’s done,’ she corrects him. ‘I’m not “doing” it, Josh. It’s done.’
    ‘We should’ve discussed it,’ he says. ‘You should have told me.’
    ‘It’s done, precisely because I know that it’s our only option and I know that you would’ve tried to stop me,’ she says. ‘This way we can both live on your grant and I can give all my salary to Mum and Janet.’
    Josh says nothing. Absolutely nothing. His life experience in the household of his adoptive parents has predisposed him to respect personal sacrifice as an honourable thing, and once again he’s amazed by Caroline’s ability to cut a swathe through every obstacle and emerge with workable solutions. Nonetheless, he has a queasy feeling that this particular solution is an insult to Caroline herself as an unusually talented person; a case of casting pearls before swine. But Caroline, as he’s had the opportunity to observe, is clearly devoted to her unlikeable mother and sister. And maybe unlikeable is an irrelevance? Maybe need is simply need?
    ‘I think it’s all a bit drastic,’ he says. ‘First of all, is it reversible?’
    ‘It’s done,’ she says. ‘Of course it’s not reversible. Josh, it makes sense. I’ve had my chance at uni and why shouldn’t Janet have the same?’
    ‘You got funded,’ Josh says. ‘And aren’t you quite a lot brainier than Janet? Caroline, you’re brainier than anyone I know.’
    ‘And you think that I should use my brain to abandon my mother and sister?’ she says. ‘They’re my own flesh and blood.’
    This is true, he’s reflecting ruefully, and not for the first time. By some bizarre, inexplicable twist in that doubly twisting DNA, the Witch Woman and the Less Fortunate are Caroline’s flesh and blood. But then his own flesh and blood would be that pair of weirdos he’s never known and never much bothered about. The puny Greek fraudster and the catatonic convent girl. God Almighty, why should he care? It’s Bernie and Ida Silver who have always been his nearest and dearest – and they don’t believe too much in flesh and blood. They believe in the human race. And wasn’t little Jack, the housemaid’s boy, more brother to him than the wretched Janet could ever be sister to Caroline?
    ‘Look, Josh, I’m all they’ve got,’ Caroline is saying. ‘And face it, my DPhil’s screwed. I’ll never get to Iran. Not now. Both of us know that. This way is good. I’m fine with it. The world needs teachers. Who needs another person with a doctorate in something or other?’
    There’s a long pause.
    ‘Caroline,’ Josh says. He’s thinking of the wonderful days just past that he’s spent poring over the set designs and the scores for Stravinsky’s Pulcinella , his hands clothed in archive-issue white cotton gloves. ‘I’m not giving up my PhD. I can’t. I hope you don’t expect it of me.’
    ‘Of course not,’ she says. ‘Go for it, Josh, please. If we live in the bus, then you can give up this place. Getting to London will be an easy commute for you and you’ve got your travel allowance.’
    This is true. Josh has got his travel allowance, for which, mercifully, he is required to submit receipts. There is no way, thank the Lord, that this money can be spent on Caroline’s mother and sister.
    And Caroline is right, as