After that, it was all much worse. Anyone can have a misunderstanding over the phone. Phone conversations are like that, because you can’t see the other person’s expression. But when a person just walks out on you when you’re about to apologize, you feel as if you’ve been kicked in the stomach. That’s how I felt, anyway. After that, I simply couldn’t ring her. I was afraid she’d do it again. I didn’t want to have that feeling again, so instead, I filled the time with practice, practice, practice.
And then of course there was the trip, and the audition and the excitement of it all. I did still think about Mags, but it was like a sore spot that you try to avoid touching, so when she floated into my mind, I shooshed her out again, and so it went on.
Mags
What happened was this.
My mother was babysitting for Lorna while Lorna’s mother, Fionnuala from next door, went shopping. She’d never left the baby before, even for an hour, but took her everywhere in a little pouch thing that she strapped onto her chest. Today, though, she needed to try on some summer clothes, and she couldn’t do that with Lorna fastened to her, so Mum had volunteered to mind her for a little while.
I went with her, to keep her company.
“I don’t need company,” my mother had said. “Lorna is company.”
I glared at her.
“But of course, if you’d like to come, I’d be very glad to have you,” she added quickly.
The real reason I was so keen to go with her was that I was avoiding Gillian, and I was trying to fill up my time with things that were not-Gillian. I was so cross with her about the other day, first abandoning me and then not even bothering to apologize. I felt as if she’d squashed me underfoot like a wriggling insect. I know she’s older and she thinks I am a bit silly sometimes, because I’m younger, but there’s no need to treat me like some sort of a pest.
As it happened, Lorna was fast asleep when we got there. In the daytime, she slept in a basket on the kitchen table.
“Why doesn’t she put her upstairs in the bedroom?” I whispered, as Fionnuala closed the front door behind her.
“She can’t bear to have her out of her sight,” said my mother. “Even when the baby’s asleep, Fionnuala wants to be able to see her, hear every snuffle, scoop her up at the first sign of a whimper.”
“That’s daft,” I said.
“No, it’s not,” said my mother. “I was exactly the same with you. Kept you with me every minute. Couldn’t bear to be parted from you. I even used to put you on the floor outside the bathroom while I whisked in to use the toilet. I’d leave the door open, in case you moved in your basket.”
“Really?” I said, surprised at how touched I was to hear this. “I didn’t know.”
My mother smiled, but she didn’t say anything more.
“Let’s have some tea,” I said then, “while we wait for Lorna to wake up and entertain us. I’ll put the kettle on. I bet you’re glad of company now. You’d be bored just sitting here looking at her, wouldn’t you?”
“No, I wouldn’t be,” said my mother. “But I’m glad you’re here all the same. Why aren’t you out in the woods, though? It’s another lovely day.”
“Don’t want to,” I said. “Now, where does she keep the teabags?”
“Top left, over the kettle,” my mother said. “Biscuit tin is top right. I’ll get the mugs.
“What news of your friend Gillian?” Mum asked when the tea was made. “You’re not meeting her today? I thought you two were getting on so well.”
There she went again, trying to organize a social life for me. Before I could answer, or avoid answering, the basket on the table creaked. I looked over the edge. The baby was moving. She arched her back, stretching up her arms and waving her tiny fists in the air. Her mouth opened in a little rosy O and her eyes blinked open, deep and blue and clear.
“Oh, goody,” said my mother. “She’s woken. We can pick her up.”
“You are a baby addict, Mum,” I said with a laugh. “You really are a bad case.”
My mother grinned at first, but then suddenly she turned her lips right in over her teeth, with her mouth closed, so that they disappeared altogether, and there was just a crazy line across under her nose, like a gash, where her mouth should be.
Oh, God, she’s going to cry! I held my breath, as if I could stop the world by not breathing. She’s trying not to cry. Time kept creeping forward. I knew, because I could hear Fionnuala’s kitchen clock ticking, ticking. I had to say something; I couldn’t go on never saying anything about the saddest thing.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
My mother shook her head, but still her mouth was a crack across her face with no lips.
Until the saddest thing had happened, we had had something to look forward to together, me and Mum, something that kept us both linked to Dad. And then.…
The saddest thing was that my mum was going to have a baby, but then, two weeks after my father died, it just got washed away in the night. All the upset and shock and grief had made my mother so sick, she’d said, she couldn’t hang on to the baby. She just didn’t have strength enough for two. That was the saddest thing. We never even knew if it was going to be a boy or a girl. That made it worse, somehow, not knowing if it was going to be a boy or a girl. It’s not the very saddest thing of all—that’s not having Dad anymore—but in a way it was the worst thing, because it made everything else even sadder than it was already. That’s why I call it the saddest thing.
“I mean,” I went on, “I mean that I’m sorry about what I said the other day, when Don was here. I shouldn’t have said it. I meant it as a joke—sort of. But I shouldn’t.…” I trailed off. Maybe I’d said too much already. Maybe I was making it worse, by reminding Mum of what I’d said that day.
There was one of those awkward moments when nothing seems to happen. The clock ticked on, like a clock in shock, its hands to its face in horror. Tut-TUT, it seemed to say. Tut-TUT.
My mother relaxed her mouth and her lips reappeared, to my relief. Then she gulped down the rest of her tea, pushed her mug aside, and leaned over to lift the baby, who was just starting to whimper, out of her basket.
“She’s too hot,” my mother said, not really to me. “I think she’s too hot.”
Lorna smiled at my mother as she unwrapped her from her sleeping shawl and put her down on it to kick. A little dimple appeared in one cheek when she did it.
“Look, Mags,” my mother whispered. “She’s smiling. She’s not old enough to smile, but she’s doing it, look! For us.”
“Bloody marvelous,” I said. “I think she’s going to turn out to be human. That’ll be such a relief to her mother. She’ll turn out a fine daughter and be a comfort to Fionnuala in her old age.”
My mother turned to me then and looked right at me. There were tears in her eyes, but my nonsensical patter had made her smile all the same.
“Oh, Mags,” she said, and her voice was all choked up.
Flummoxed, and feeling tears starting in my own eyes, I looked away.
“Durn mugs,” I said, gathering them and the teaspoons and moving to the sink. “Better wash ’em up before the lady of the house gets back, eh?”
I left Mum chatting to Fionnuala when she got home, and took a walk in the woods. I felt as if my brain were boiling in my head. I could do with a bit of soothing shade.
I sat for a while on my table rock in the clearing, dangling my feet in the miserable trickle that was all that was left of the stream in this heat. I noticed the depression I had dug by the rock only a few days before, meaning to create a cool place for storing food. It looked like something I had done years ago, in my distant childhood. I couldn’t imagine myself now ever using it. This whole place, though it was pleasant enough, didn’t seem to belong to me anymore. After I’d dried my feet on my handkerchief, I tried crawling into the tunnel I’d made, but the ferns and scrub had grown quickly in the hot weather and had closed over from lack of use. I felt grumpy, as if I�
��d lost something important, but I didn’t know what it was. I blamed Gillian for whatever was wrong, though I knew that wasn’t really fair.
I picked myself up and started to wander home. As I went by the foresters’ hut, I glanced automatically upward. Tim waved to me over the low balcony of the porch.
“Watch you don’t fall over,” I called up to him, “and come to a sorry end, like Tosca.”
“Tosca!” he snorted. “No chance! Come up and have a cup of tea with me?”
“I will burst if I have another cup of tea,” I shouted, “but I’ll call up to say hello.”
I liked Tim. There was no need to fall out with him just because his sister was a conceited brat.
As I set my foot on the bottom wooden step, I fancied I heard a snatch of violin music. It reminded me of the day I’d been meant to meet Gillian. I’d imagined I heard violin music that day too. I skipped up a few more steps, and it came again. Not anything I recognized, not really music, just notes, seemingly random. I hesitated. I didn’t think I was imagining it anymore. Gillian must be there. Still, I’d accepted Tim’s invitation, so I carried on up the steps.
Tim met me at the top and threw his arms open. For one awful moment, I thought he was going to sweep me up into a giant hug. I didn’t think I could cope with that, but it turned out that he was just ushering me dramatically through the door into the dark and resinous interior of the hut. I expected it to be cool in there, because of the dark, but the little wooden hut seemed to soak up the sun and instead of the fresh and delicious cave I expected, the air was thick and heavy, almost as if you could touch it.
“You’re not sitting in here in this heat, are you?” I said to Tim.
“No,” he answered. “I’ve been out on the porch, having my tea. Gillian’s in here.”
I peered through the dusky air and made out Gillian, twiddling with her violin.
“I thought you couldn’t play in here,” I said, even though I wasn’t supposed to be speaking to Gillian after the way she had stood me up. I was dying to know what had happened, of course—how come she’d suddenly lost interest in finding her dad and where she’d gotten the money to go to the audition after all.
“I’m not,” Gillian said, as if nothing had happened between us, as if she had never let me down, as if she had nothing to apologize for. “I’m just tuning up.”
She emerged from the shadows and walked past me, out onto the sunlit porch. She didn’t say any more. She didn’t explain. Maybe she was waiting for me to ask. I was bursting to, but I didn’t want to give in. I felt she owed me an explanation. I shouldn’t have to ask. She twiddled a bit more, made some dreadful scraping noises, and then she started to play, nothing interesting, just scales. She kept stopping to tune the instrument and complain that the heat was ruining the tone.
After about a dozen scales, I clapped my hands to my ears and made a face at Tim, who was leaning against the balcony.
“I can’t stand it!” I mouthed to Tim.
“I know,” he said loudly. “Drives me mad too. And my mother. That’s why Gill has to practice out of doors. Wah-wah-wah.…” He sang the last bit in a squeaky violin-like voice, in time with Gillian’s playing. Doh-re-mi.
“The first three notes just happen to be…,” I sang loudly, to drown out the violin.
“Wah-wah-wah!” Tim joined in, and we both laughed.
Gillian tossed her head, turned her back on us, and continued playing.
“Let’s go!” I mouthed again.
Tim grinned and took my hand. Together we tiptoed down the “fairy” steps and ran away into the woods, the wah-wah-wah of the scales chasing us as we ran.
We stopped when we could no longer hear the tortured notes.
“I think it’s safe here,” Tim said, and he sat down on a fallen tree trunk. “There’s no wind, so the sound doesn’t carry very far. Poor Gillian. She’s a nervous wreck, you know, over this audition, and my mother is making her life a misery.”
I plonked myself down next to Tim. I felt very tiny beside him. “So she is going?” I asked. “What happened? How come it’s suddenly all right? I’m confused here.”
“It’s not really all right,” Tim said, “it’s just that when Zelda found out that Gillian had her heart set on going, and was even planning to go so far as to track Dad down and nobble him for the money, she shelled out herself instead.”
“That’s funny,” I said, trying to plait some fern fronds. I soon gave that up. They were too brittle. “It would have made more sense, you’d think, to let him pay for it, to insist, even, that he paid for it.”
“I don’t properly understand it either,” Tim said, “except that Zelda and Dad have a sort of competition going on between them. They both want to be the best parent. So she probably figures that if she gives Gill the money, then she has one up on Dad. Something like that. People who used to be married have a very odd way of going on. That’s the only way I can explain it. And the bonus for Zelda is that if Gillian passes the audition and gets offered a place, then Dad’ll have to pay the fees. Maybe she thinks it might be fun to land him with that bill.”
“So you mean your mother is taking a kind of gamble—she’s paying for Gillian to go to the audition in the hope that she gets a place and then your father has to pay up? That’s—”
“Horrible,” Tim said. “I know. But that’s the way it is. Everything comes down to money in our family. Every single thing. And it’s not fair. Gillian’s really a cracker on that fiddle. Her talent shouldn’t be a football between our parents, but there you are, that’s the way it goes. Never get divorced, Mags.”
“I’m not married,” I said.
Tim laughed. “I know that, Mags,” he said. “I meant.…”
“I know what you meant,” I said. “I’ll keep that advice in mind. Thank you. I believe it costs a fortune, that school.”
“Not really,” Tim said. “It’s more than Dad would want to pay, but it’s not all that terribly expensive. I mean, you have to take airfares into account as well, it’s not as cheap as going to the local comprehensive, you do have to budget for it, but—”
“I thought it costs thousands.”
“Yes, but very few thousands for most people. Hardly anyone pays the full fees, unless they’re rich. It’s subsidized like mad. A family like us would only have to pay a small fraction of the real cost.”
“He lied to me, then,” I said, half to myself. “About the money. I wonder why he bothered.”
“To you? You’ve met my dad? How come?”
“Oh, it’s a long story,” I said. “Tell me something. Is it true that your mother is an opera singer?”
Tim laughed again. “She wishes! She had her voice trained, she’s done a few amateur productions, but you couldn’t call her an opera singer, unless you were being very kind. She’s a dilettante. That’s Dad’s word, not mine.”
“Oh, I see. I thought … When are you off to England?”
“Day after tomorrow,” said Tim, “with Pigair.”
“What?”
“You know, pigs might fly, and so might we if we felt like it, but actually we prefer staying on the ground and insulting our passengers, that’s more fun.”
I laughed. I’d heard of them. Then I stood up and brushed myself off. I knew I should say something about wishing Gillian well at the audition, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was too annoyed with her.
“Well look,” I said, “I hope everything … you know, bon voyage and all that.” It wasn’t much, but it was the best I could manage.
“I’ll walk you home,” Tim said, by way of answer.
“No,” I said. “I’d rather go on my own. Give me a head start, OK?”
Tim looked disappointed, but he nodded. “OK,” he said, and he gave an absurd little wave. I waved back, wiggling my fingers. Then I turned on my heel and started to run, leaving him sitting there, idly chewing the sweet end of a long stalk of grass.
I was wearing runners, and I m
ade quick progress over the uneven ground. As I neared the foresters’ hut again, I could hear Gillian’s endless, boring scales searing the air. There is something terribly depressing about listening to scales. It’s probably worse if you have to play them.
I stood for a moment to get my breath, and I imagined Gillian sawing away endlessly, desperate to get everything right, to make every sound perfect. It made me feel sad inside. Nothing is ever perfect. There is no such thing as perfection. How awful to devote your life to trying to achieve the unattainable! Quite suddenly the scales stopped, though, and something new seemed to float dreamily on the warm, still air. It was so delicate a sound to start with, I thought for a moment I was imagining it, but just as I reached that conclusion, the music lifted and drifted to me through the shadowy sunlight. The sound lifted again and now I could hear it quite clearly, pouring through the woods like the sunshine—soft, warm, intense, just this side of unbearable, and then, when I thought it was really going to get unbearable, something somewhere seemed to flip over an edge, and there it came again, the blackbird, swooping toward me, endlessly, delightedly swooping. It alighted for a moment on a twig, swayed briefly, and then slipped off again into the slanty air and disappeared over the treetops, and I knew what I had to do. It wasn’t much, it probably wouldn’t have any effect, but I still had to do it.
I closed my eyes and crossed all the fingers I could manage and I wished and wished. I wished so hard I began to see little multicolored lights dancing inside my eyelids. I’d had a lot of practice at wishing, but my wishes had never come true. I’d wished on falling stars and on blown-out birthday candles, on shiny copper pennies and at wishing wells, but nothing worked. Maybe that’s because I’d been wishing for myself, I thought now. Maybe to come true a wish has to be completely selfless. Maybe you don’t need a falling star, just an open heart. And so what I wished for this time was that Gillian would pass her audition and get her place in that school she seemed to care so much about. I felt so sorry for her, caught in the crossfire of her parents’ constant battling, and working so hard to get this thing she wanted so desperately. She deserved it, not for being a delightful person, but for being so good at what she does best, and for working so hard at it.
Second Fiddle Page 11
