‘I know, I know.’ She was bored with the talk, now, irritated by his solicitude. ‘I take your point. Come back if you like. We both know you were going to anyway. Might as well be now as later.’
And I am frightened. And I would be happier to know there was someone else around. And I do miss you. She would never have said any of it, but thoughts couldn’t be controlled as easily as speech.
There was a slam of the door at the far side of the big studio and Saul came bustling towards her out of the shadows. ‘Sweetie! What’s this I hear? Mugged, my darling, in your own flat? I tell you, we’re getting as bad as New York here!’ He said it with melancholy pride. ‘Such a thing to happen – I’m shattered! So tell me all about it, darling, every bit – what did they get? Did the bastard hurt you any? Did he –’ His voice dropped. ‘Did he try anything?’
‘Oh, Saul, for Christ’s sake, leave the poor girl alone! Bad enough it happened, and she had the police to talk to and the rest of it – don’t you go putting her through a catechism –’
‘No, Solly, he didn’t try anything.’ Maggy, perverse suddenly, smiled cheerfully at the fat little man, ignoring Theo, bringing Saul into a cosy chattiness with her, wanting to make Theo feel shut out. ‘Must have been an Irish mugger, because the silly idiot took my bag, bashed my head on the banisters, and then dumped the bag in the front area, without taking anything from it – daft, isn’t it?’
Saul’s eyes opened wide. ‘Took nothing? Didn’t try anything on you? You’re putting me on!’
‘Honestly! He turned my bag upside down on the front step, the police reckoned, went through it looking for something, and didn’t find whatever it was, and then just dropped it over the railings into the area – and I had a fair bit of cash in my purse too. I knew I wouldn’t have time to get to the bank today, being Friday and all, and no banks tomorrow, so I’d taken out a lot of cash. I’m going down to Dorset in the morning for a couple of days – or I was – so there was a lot of cash there, over a couple of hundred quid, and he just left it. Really weird.’
‘You didn’t tell me that!’ Theo said sharply.
‘Didn’t I? Maybe you didn’t ask the right questions.’ She smiled at Saul again.
‘Anyway, that’s what happened. A real non-starter when it comes to a robbery.’
‘Terrible, terrible,’ Saul said, but now his concern sounded a little abstracted. No money gone and no sexual assault meant nothing to get really excited about. He looked over this shoulder as the distant door slammed again. ‘Ah – the fellers – so where you been, you lot? We’ve been here ready and waiting for hours!’ He bustled away, all bonhomie and cheerfulness as Komo came gut of the shadows, lugging his double bass.
‘Hi, Maggs – hi, Theo Fuckin’ parkin’ round here – if you don’t get those bleedin’ wardens organized, Solly, I ain’t goin’ to come here to work no more, you hear me? I got better things to do in the mornin’ than have fights with bleedin’ traffic wardens –’
‘So give me your keys, and I’ll send one of the boys to park you. What do you want of my life? Don’t I lay on the best of everything here, don’t I give you the best damned studios in the whole of London, including the Beeb, and you expect we should let you drive your van right inside? Maybe you’d rather park in my office, hey? I’ll move my desk out for you, hey? –’
Arguing pointlessly they went away, and Chalky and Danny, who had followed Komo in, grinned at Maggy and made expressive faces at Komo’s departing back.
‘He’s in a bad way, Maggy, I warn you. Really tried one on last night,’ Danny said, and began to set up his drums, pushing the big instruments about as though they were made of butter. ‘He’s been moaning all the way from Balham. Here, Chalky, give me a hand with this –’
‘Did he, then?’ Maggy said grimly, and got to her feet. ‘I’ll soon deal with him – I’ve not had the best of nights myself, and I’m in no mood for one of his temperaments, that’s for sure. Go talk to him, Theo. Make yourself useful –’
She felt better now. The day had started properly and as the studio lights began to snap on and the engineers got themselves organized in the booth behind the plate-glass walls at the far end of the big room she felt her headache recede. There was work to be done, and she was going to do it, and do it well.
Theo picked up her crisp mood and nodded and went away after Komo, and after a moment appeared on the far side of the glass wall, and began to talk to the engineers, their mouths moving dumbly, and Saul and Komo followed him in there. Maggy stood for a moment watching them, as Komo waved his arms about and shouted soundlessly and Theo made soothing gestures at him.
More coffee appeared, brought by one of the blue-jeaned boys who were always hanging around the place, waiting to be discovered by one of the Greats while they worked for Saul as dogsbodies for tuppence a week, and this time she took it gratefully. She had had no breakfast, waking late from her Mogadon-induced sleep, and she needed a lift.
Chalky did too. ‘Here, pretty boy – you with the face – go get me a bacon sandwich. And a hot Danish to follow. I don’t blow good on an empty belly.’
He arranged himself on a tall stool, his heavy buttocks flopping over the edge and his belly resting cosily on his thighs. ‘C’mon, Maggy, let me buy you a nosh. You look like you haven’t eaten for a week.’
‘You’ll make us all as fat as you are, Chalky. But I could do with some breakfast. Make it a fried-egg sandwich, on brown, though. And no Danish – Chalky, how’d you get on with the new top page I gave you? Better, eh?’
‘Like always, me darlin’, like always!’ Chalky picked up his clarinet and blew a few notes, cascading them into a ripple of sound that was soothing and yet exciting at the same time, and she grinned at him, and Danny, catching the lift in her mood, rattled a short cadenza, flourishing his sticks like a drum majorette. They all laughed then, and Komo came and joined them, grinning and cheerful, his black face as amiable now as it had been scowling a few minutes ago.
They slipped into the comfortable pattern of a morning’s work, going over the score, working through a few bars at a time where the tricky sections came, Danny extemporizing a little, Maggy leading him at the piano. Their food came, and they ate, still talking, stopping sometimes to play another few bars to sort out a difficulty and then eating again, and Theo came and joined them now, leaning on Maggy’s piano, watching her as she worked.
There was a little smear of egg yolk on her chin, and that warmed him; it made her look younger and softer, exposing the vulnerability he knew was in her. She was looking good this morning, her red hair, tightly curled, standing up in an aureole and her usual pallor seeming thicker and whiter. It was not an unhealthy pallor precisely, but it did show how tired she was, as did the shadows under her chin and at her temples. But for all that, she seemed alert and tense in a creative sort of way, as though she were like an overstrung violin. Even her clothes added to the tense look; tight black leather pants, a baggy black sweater and streaming yellow silk scarf; all very now, very trendy in its fifties nostalgia. Clever Maggy, he thought, as the group slid at last into a full run-through. Clever Maggy, using the best of yesterday to make today her own. She did it with her music as well as her clothes, coming on as strong as any of the twenty-year-old kids who littered this business. But Maggy wasn’t twenty, hadn’t been for a long time. Maggy was a very grown-up lady, a very complex grown-up lady, with a lot to offer a man, in lots of ways. She looked up at him and frowned suddenly; she hated being watched when she worked, so he nodded and grinned and went back to the booth. There’d be time, eventually, to say what he wanted to say.
He waited until they had taped the ninth run, going over and over the score in Maggy’s usual meticulous way, and everyone was beginning to look frayed; it had been a long morning and a hard one, but the work was beginning to sound good. He came down from the booth and went over to her where she was sitting on her piano stool, the headphones over her ears, listening to the playback. She sat there wi
th her eyes tight shut, her fingers moving over the invisible piano keys on her lap as she concentrated on the tape and then grunted as it came to an end and she pulled off the headphones.
‘These cans are bloody awful,’ she said dispassionately. ‘They’d make Paganini sound like a honky-tonk player. Solly!’ She turned and waved to the plate-glass wall. ‘I need new cans – or there’s something sour up there. Come and listen to this! You too, Hal!’
Solly, in the booth, threw his eyes up in exasperation and came scuttling out with Hal Isaacs, the producer, behind him, and there was a bustle with the earphones as Danny stretched and lit a cigarette and Chalky began to choose the runners for the afternoon’s races at Sandown Park.
‘Maggy, where are you going tomorrow?’
‘Mmm? How d’you mean?’ She had her head down over her score, marking it yet again in her meticulous hand-writing, going over and over again the pauses, the emphases, the shape of the piece they were recording. Usually he admired her painstaking professionalism, but now it irritated him. But he knew better than to let her know that.
‘You said you were going down to Dorset.’
‘Oh – yes. I’d thought about it –’ She looked up at him then, her lower lip caught between her teeth, suddenly doubtful. ‘I don’t know now, though –’
‘Why not?’
She sat silent for a moment, as Hal and Solly began to argue about the technical quality of the tape, shouting at each other with great energy but no real acrimony.
‘I’m silly, I suppose, but it was this daft business last night. I mean, it was really mad, wasn’t it? Someone sits hiding on the top flight of my stairs, goes to the trouble of picking the lock on the street door to get in – so the police said, anyway – takes the bulb out of the light, hangs around for God knows how long till I get there, shoves me over to pinch my bag, and then doesn’t take anything. It’s mad, it did me no harm apart from a minor bash on the head, and it’s left me shit-scared. You know that? I was shaking like a baby by the time the police had gone and I went to bed. Terrified – which is crazy, when you think about it. So, I thought –’ She shrugged. ‘So I thought I’d better stay home for the weekend after all. You know, climbing back on the horse you just fell off? Or something –’ Her voice trailed away.
‘Maybe if you can work out why the chap mugged you, whoever he was, you’ll feel better,’ Theo said, carefully.
‘Why? But why does anyone ever do such a thing? That’s a daft –’
‘You said it was daft because he didn’t do what you’d expect. He left your money behind. So – working out why would be a very relevant thing to do.’
She stared at him, her forehead a little creased. ‘But how can I work out why? I mean, damn it, where do I even begin?’
‘Begin with what he did with your bag when he took it.’
‘Nothing! I told you that!’
‘Not at all! He definitely did something. Went through it, and then chucked it into the area. Looking for something that wasn’t there. You said that yourself.’
She shook her head. ‘I suppose so – I’ve really been rather thick, haven’t I? All shook up, I suppose, too shook up to think straight. Yes, that’s what he did. Looked for something that wasn’t there –’ She bent her head and looked at her score again, avoiding his eyes.
‘Well, what might that have been?’ Theo said, still tentative, still not wanting to alarm her.
‘You tell me.’ She looked at him with her eyes so blank of expression they seemed almost opaque. ‘You tell me.’
‘Where had you been yesterday? The bank, of course – you said that. But it couldn’t have been cash the guy wanted or he’d have taken it. So it wasn’t someone who saw you at the bank and then followed you –’
‘I wasn’t followed. I was laid in wait for. Really, you’ll have to do better than that.’ All her suspicion was aroused now. She remembered fleetingly how she had felt about Oliver’s behaviour the previous afternoon and thought – am I mad? Getting paranoid delusions? Thinking everyone is after me?
Theo went on as carefully as ever. ‘Well, what do you think? Where did you go that might have encouraged someone to think that you had something valuable? Valuable enough to – er – go ahead of you, wait for you –’
She laughed now, as the engineers joined the group of men in the middle of the studio arguing over the equipment. There was something wrong with one of the leads, and an engineer began testing it, and she laughed again, looking at them.
‘Honestly, Theo, you’re as bad as that lot there, digging around to find a gremlin in the works. Why don’t you just come out with it? You know where I went yesterday afternoon, don’t you? Just as Oliver did.’
‘Oliver?’
‘Yes, Oliver. He was waiting for me when I came out of the place. Said he just happened to be taking a walk, but I reckon that was one hell of a just-happened. Don’t you? And now here’s you digging around to find out where I went yesterday. Could it just happen that you know perfectly well where I was? You spent enough time talking to Friese after Dolly died. And Friese is a great talker, isn’t he? So, come on, Theo. Tell me all. You know where I was yesterday afternoon, don’t you?’
He was silent for a moment. ‘Yes,’ he said at length, and looked across at the engineers now arguing furiously with Solly while Hal tried to calm them all down. ‘Look, this is going to take ages to sort out. Come out for lunch, what d’you say? We can go to that Chinese place up the road. I’ll tell Hal and Solly –’
She let him do as he chose, let him send the others off for their usual liquid lunch at the pub and let him bring her jacket and put it over her shoulders. Not until they were sitting at the oilcloth-covered table at Kuo Yuang and had ordered their seaweed and Peking duck did she speak again. And then only said, ‘Well?’
‘Well, what?’
‘What was the catechism about? You complained when Solly wanted to ask questions, but your own – about as subtle as a bulldozer, and about as efficient, too –’
He sighed and leaned back in his chair, holding his teacup between his fingers with great delicacy. He looked a little foolish suddenly, the small cup seeming incongruous in his big hand, and some of her suspicion melted away. Damn it all, this was Theo. She’d lived with him, one way and another, for three years. Why suddenly look sideways at him now, just because he was asking questions?
‘Look,’ she said. ‘I went to the safe deposit yesterday, as you obviously know. Friese said that I’d find enough there to pay off the debts the Westpark’s lumbered with. Okay. So I expected to find – I don’t know. Money? Share certificates? Something. I imagine you expected the same –’
‘Yes, I did. Friese said there was a box, so – well, what else could there be in there? There’d be no use in the thing otherwise. What was there?’ He looked at her solemnly, no hint of the eagerness that had so filled Friese’s expression, and later, Oliver’s. Just an owlish stare, and she laughed at him.
‘Go on. Guess. Tell me what you imagine was there –’
He shook his head, angry suddenly. ‘Stop playing silly buggers, Maggy. I’m not playing games, believe me. You were pushed over last night by some hoodlum or other and would you believe, I’m upset about it. Yes, I was curious about that box – I’d be a bloody liar or a fool if I said I wasn’t – but I really am far more concerned about who got to you last night. I thought it might be linked with the damned box in some way – that’s why I asked. Okay? Make what you like out of that –’ Sulkily he finished his tea, poured out another cup, looking, Maggy thought, like a ruffled Mrs Tiggywinkle.
She leaned forward and patted his hand. ‘Well, yes, I suppose – look, all that box had in it were papers. Piles of tatty bits of paper to do with the houses we lived in, she and I and those damned boarders, years ago. A pile of newspaper cuttings, there were those, and some photographs. That’s all –’
He stared at her. ‘Nothing else?’
‘Not a bloody thing else. So there�
�s no reason there why anyone should mug me, is there?’
He shook his head, mystification all over his face. ‘I don’t really – the photographs – what about them? Was there anything there that would explain?’
‘I didn’t look at them properly. I suddenly felt – I didn’t feel good. It was shut in and stuffy – well, not stuffy exactly, but oppressive and – I felt ill, and got the hell out.’ She looked down at her hands. She didn’t want to tell him just how much that photograph of Dolly had affected her. ‘So I don’t know what there is in detail. I suppose I’ll have to go back and look again.’ She said it with distaste. Going back there wouldn’t be agreeble.
‘Can you go back? Without having that Friese there?’ Theo said sharply.
‘Yes, of course. I’ve got the key. Why?’
‘Because maybe – he’s not a man I like or trust. There was something about the way he rabbited on to me about Dolly and her affairs and you – I don’t trust him.’ He stopped then and stared at her. ‘The key, you say? What key?’
‘The one to the safe deposit box, of course. I’ve got it here.’ She turned in her chair so that she could scrabble in the pocket of her jacket, hanging over the back. ‘Here it is –’ She held it out to him, and then, as he reached out to pick it up, almost without thinking closed her hand on it, and put both clenched fists in her lap. He blinked, and then as though he had not noticed the moment of distrust nodded and leaned back in his chair.
‘Maybe that’s what your mugger was after.’ He said it in a conversational way, as the waiter came to put hot plates in front of them and bowls and chopsticks. She served herself greedily and began to eat. It seemed a long time since the fried-egg sandwich.
‘The key?’ she said, her mouth full. ‘How could he be? Who knew I had it?’
‘Friese,’ Theo said, and watched her, making no attempt to eat himself. ‘Maybe he wanted to get whatever was in there. Did he tell you what was in it?’
Reprise Page 5
