Funeral Music

by Morag Joss

  ‘Doesn’t get us any further, does it? And it’s exactly two weeks now.’

  It didn’t. But when they went back up the path in the fading light and played the middle movement of the second Haydn cello concerto in the hut under the slanting shadows cast by the storm lanterns, Andrew felt inexplicably optimistic, delighting in the full-throated, deep singing of the Peresson cello. It was almost dark when they dowsed the lanterns, closed the hut and carried the instruments back down to the house. Sara followed him out to his bike and stood brushing the flowering tips of the huge rosemary bushes through her hand as he unpadlocked it from the railings by the gate.

  ‘Mind you lock up, now,’ he told her almost tenderly, reluctant to leave her standing there alone. He was much later getting home than he had said he would be and he told Valerie that he had had to nip back into the office after his lesson. It was the first time he had lied to his wife without actually being unfaithful.

  CHAPTER 15

  BY THE FLACCID whump of the door closing and the sigh of the bag dropping on the hall floor, Cecily got an inkling that Sue was depressed. Or perhaps, being depressed herself, she was simply more attuned to other people’s misery.

  ‘In here,’ she called, and went to put on the kettle. Sue dripped into sight and slumped in the doorway of the kitchen, seeping deprivation. Cecily took one look at her, put back the coffee jar and took down the instant chocolate, leaving the painted tin of Charbonnel et Walker, Derek’s ‘proper cocoa’, which she happened not to like, untouched. She made two large mugs of chocolate with extra powder and, sighing, stirred some gold top milk and two sugar lumps into each one.

  ‘Bring those,’ she said, pointing with her nose at a packet of chocolate digestives, and carried their mugs through into the sitting room. Sue obeyed and followed, her feet performing a little collapse with every step, and fell into an armchair. They sipped in tandem, each staring into the cold fireplace.

  ‘Oh, God,’ whispered Sue, rubbing her eyes so hard she seemed to be mashing them. It was the first words she had spoken since she arrived. ‘I shouldn’t be here. I wish I wasn’t.’

  ‘Oh, now, Sue, don’t,’ Cecily protested. ‘Don’t say an awful thing like that. You’re young and beautiful. Have a biscuit. What you’re feeling now will pass, you know. It will,’ she said, silently hoping that what she was feeling would too, despite being no longer young nor ever exactly beautiful herself. Attractive, maybe. Once. Sue stared at her.

  ‘I meant here. Here. In the house. It’s the weekend. You know – your boyfriend, the arrangement?’

  ‘Oh, I see. Oh, well, that’s a relief. I don’t have to lock up the aspirin then.’ She tried a bright smile, then sipped miserably at her chocolate. She took another biscuit.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, not this weekend. He’s with his wife.’ She said ‘wife’ in a voice like a swishing blade.

  ‘Oh, God,’ said Sue. ‘And Paul’s in Bristol, with God knows who.’

  It was twenty past three on Saturday afternoon. It is a depressing time in itself, twenty past three. Twenty past three is about the time, Cecily reflected, when it dawns on you that all those useful things that you vowed to achieve when you woke up determined to be brave about being dumped for the weekend will not be achieved, because you have dithered sluttishly through the day. The oven is still black and sticky, the kettle is still encrusted with limescale, the bed lies unmade, you still have not flossed, and your eyebrows, because you have still not had a proper look for the tweezers, still look like two brown caterpillars about to mate on your forehead. Yes, it is around twenty past three that you find yourself staring hard into the truth that you are such a slattern it can hardly come as a surprise that you have been dumped in favour of a bright, groomed, smiling, competent wife.

  She had got up with brisk discipline. Today would be like a day at a health farm, only at home, and hers would have the added feature of a few heroic domestic victories as well, like the oven. And she would bravely remove all the little dead lobelias and geraniums that she had planted up lovingly in her urn a few weeks ago and which had sadly and inexplicably died. She must have overwatered them, but just in case there was something wrong with the compost, she would replace it and start all over again. But the main thing for today, this book said, was to learn to treat herself as if she were a celebrity. Celebrate the Celebrity Within You. That way, you would enhance your self-esteem and soon other people would start to notice and treat you better too. Celebrate your inner self, and get acquainted with the celebrity within. She knew how to do it, she had read the whole book twice since she had bought it at the Healing Arts thing, along with all the organic vegetable and fruit-based skin, hair, nail and body preparations she needed to lard herself up for a forty-eight-hour orgy of relaxation, toning, moisturisation, energising and balancing. It said to start by wearing loose comfortable clothing. She had got dressed in one of Derek’s huge T-shirts which had had the effect at first of making her feel small inside it, slapped some cleansing cream on her face and gone down to fix a healthy breakfast. She had whizzed up a chopped apple, a banana, an orange and a tin of peaches in the Magimix and produced a pale orange porridge that had tasted a good deal better than it looked, when it was helped down with a dollop of yoghurt and a couple of spoonfuls of honey.

  Feeling too full to tackle the oven, she had plodded up to the bathroom to remove the face cream and embark on the day’s beauty therapies, starting with her hair. Despite having to swathe her head in an old towel which now had more orange and brown blobs on it than a leopard, and wear horrible little plastic gloves like the ones doctors put on when they are about to shove their fingers where they oughtn’t to go, she managed to uphold her inner celebrity pretty well. She maintained it even as she slopped the glossy gravy of the organic dye lotion into her hair and carefully combed it through, hoping, as she had hoped with every hair colour she had used for the past thirty years, that this one would be The One. The one that would make men under thirty turn and stare after her, the one that would make Derek startle and say, Why, you’re beautiful, the one that would give her hair the colour, shine, health and bounce that it was meant to have. The hair that would have got her a degree instead of a secretarial diploma, the hair that would not have let her be dumped by her boy husband after the second miscarriage in 1970, the hair that would have seen to it that the body it was attached to was an eight-stone, five-foot-nine model, instead of the rounder, shorter specimen that she actually inhabited. Cecily’s last skirmish with a hair colourant (Honey Ash Blonde) had left her hair looking whitishly rubbed out, curiously like the surface of limed kitchen cupboards. This one, she was confident, would restore some depth, a bit of soul.

  Not daring to risk dripping through the house, she sat upright on the bathroom stool for the required twenty minutes, cursing that she had forgotten to bring up a Cosmo to read. Then she spent another fifteen minutes with her head upside down in the basin, groping blindly for the taps in her efforts to sluice the stuff off. Eventually, after filling and emptying the basin seven times, she decided that the straw-coloured water that ran off her head was as clear as it was going to get. In her bedroom with the hairdryer, Cecily pictured herself emerging with the sort of gleaming curtain of hair that goes with those laughably perfect teeth in the shampoo adverts, the kind that make you worry that hairdressers are in league with dentists and working together in secret to create a master race. But the finished effect was as if the limed kitchen cupboards had been vandalised with Marmite.

  The book did not say anything about dragging alarmingly generous tufts of your own hair from the plughole or scrubbing the brown tidemark off the basin but, when these little details had been seen to, Cecily reckoned she was due for a sit-down and some deep breathing. Quality time, to think positively about some aspect of your life that you want to change, the book said. Like, maybe, not getting so worked up about hair colourants, or clearing fat greying headmasters out of your life, she wondered. But it had been impossible not t
o let her mind dwell on the trim figure, the naturally dark, burnished head and the solid career of smug, married Mrs Payne. She had pulled out the only photograph she had of Derek, the one of him in a suit holding a fountain pen that he’d had done for the school brochure and moped over it. There was none of him and her together.

  From that point she had not really risen from the sofa again, except to fix lunch which was meant to be a light salad (no mayonnaise), wholemeal toast and a soft-boiled free-range egg. She fried it instead and had it with oven chips. She spilt ketchup down the T-shirt, which was now making her feel huge. And shortly after that Sue had arrived, and Cecily was finding it oddly comforting to be in the company of a fellow dumpee. The photograph of Derek lay curling gently on the table beside the biscuits, old copies of Cosmo and the stupid book.

  Sue was saying, ‘Paul went off to Bristol again. He said it was to do with this antiques thing that he’s got going with this bloke in Paris. We had a row, so I went round to stay at my Aunt Livy’s. She was out and there’s these workmen all over the place, installing this thing. And the day nurse is on at me every five minutes: can’t I make them their tea and watch them with the paintwork, my grandad’s not very well and she’s got his diarrhoea to see to. I couldn’t stand it. I wanted some peace and quiet. It got on my nerves, so I came here.’

  ‘Was it a bad one – the row, I mean?’ Cecily asked gently.

  Sue gave another long sigh. ‘He was in London the other day, wouldn’t say what for. I was hoping it was to do with, you know, us. Him and me: a job, or a course, or something, so that we could be together properly.’

  She looked into her mug and swirled the dregs around. ‘It’s my fault. I was expecting too much. Anyway, he didn’t say a word when he came back. That was on Thursday. Then today he hands me a little package. It’s in a Harrods bag and I can feel it’s a box. I forgot to give you this, he said. It’s only a small thing. Well, I was over the moon. I thought, Oh, how sweet, he’s waited till the weekend.’

  ‘What was it?’ Cecily asked breathlessly.

  Sue continued to stare into her mug. ‘I suppose it’s quite funny in a way. I was that thrilled, he couldn’t understand why. I thought it was a ring.’ Her eyes filled with tears.‘And it was a pair of Donna Karan trainer laces.’ She paused. ‘They’re nice. As laces. But that’s not the point, is it? So I just burst into tears and he got mad with me. And he just refuses to discuss it: won’t say we won’t ever get married, won’t say we will. And then he says don’t forget he’s going to Bristol today and won’t be back till tomorrow. He said he’d told me. He hadn’t, though.’

  There was silence. They felt the crushing weight of twenty-three minutes past three. Sue reached for a biscuit. Cecily leaned forward and pushed the photograph of Derek across the table. Then she leaned over and picked a pine cone from the top of the basket that filled the fireplace and began thoughtfully pulling it to pieces.

  ‘That’s him, that’s Derek. He’s having a party tonight. Or his wife is. He’s doing the cooking,’ she said flatly.

  Sue, with her mouth full, tried to look sympathetic.

  ‘You know she’s been running these courses? No, I never really told you, did I? Well, it won’t do any harm. He’s my boss. She’s an education adviser, and she’s been running these courses for teachers. That’s why Derek and I have managed to have so much time together.’

  Sue nodded.

  Cecily went on, ‘They’re finished now except for the assessment, so she’s giving them all a nice little farewell supper and Derek’s doing the food. She expects him to.’

  ‘Well, he’s got to then, hasn’t he? He hasn’t got any choice. He’d probably much rather be with you.’

  ‘I don’t know. He likes all that mein host bollocks, and I think half the time he pretends she makes him do things. And the weekend before last wasn’t too good. We had a row on Friday night at the Assembly Rooms and he stormed off. He was meant to be picking me up later but he didn’t. I had to get a taxi back and the house was empty. I was furious. I was soaked through so I just had a bath and went to bed. I left him a blanket on the stairs. God knows where he went off to – he never really said. We made it up in the morning. We went shopping. Only for him, as usual. But everything was okay after that, or I thought it was.’

  ‘Well then,’ Sue said, without confidence.

  ‘You know, I think I’m just fed up with it all. I’m still angry with him for wasting our time like that, when we don’t have much. He’s just fooling around. He used to say he hated weekends with his wife, but he’s obviously looking forward to this one. The bastard is doing a fork supper for forty fat fucking infants teachers rather than spending the night with me, and he’s looking forward to it.’

  She tore at the remains of the pine cone. ‘Picture it, them all simpering into their Frascati and congratulating her because her husband’s in a pinny: “Oh, aren’t you lucky, I don’t think mine even knows where the kitchen is!” Ugh.’

  She seized another pine cone and ripped it in half. ‘Do you know, last week he actually consulted me about the menu? Did I think they’d want bread as well if there was a pasta salad.’

  ‘Incredible,’ Sue said, shaking her head. She reached for her own pine cone and began systematically taking it apart.

  ‘Yeah. Then I volunteered to do a pudding, and just for a second, not only did he think I was serious, he nearly accepted. “Oh, would you really have time? Perhaps a trifle?” he says. And I said sure, it wouldn’t take a minute to grind some glass.’

  Sue snorted bitterly.

  Cecily went on, ‘And then he went huffy with me for the rest of week. He went huffy. So yesterday, last thing, I told him he could make his own fucking trifle,’ adding in a small voice, ‘in front of the chairman of the governors.’

  In the silence that followed, she looked despondently at the little pile of brown dusty shreds that had accumulated in her lap.

  ‘I don’t want a lot, you know, nothing that other people don’t have. I’d just like’ – Cecily turned two huge, tearfilled eyes to Sue – ‘I’d just like to be secure. He said he’d look after me. I thought that meant he’d be leaving her. He knew I thought that. Just a bit of security – it’d be so nice. Not to have to worry. That’s not greedy, is it?’

  She waved unhappily in the direction of the urn outside, in front of the sitting room window. ‘Things like that,’ she said, sniffing, ‘little things. Going to the garden centre now and then. Being able to spend a bit, without panicking afterwards. Doing things together. It’s not a lot, is it?’ She sniffed angrily. ‘S’not going to happen, though. And after all I’ve done for him! When I think of how I’ve helped him, how he said we’d be together. God, the things I’ve done for him!’

  Sue was grinding the remains of the pine cone into powder. She was beginning to feel the warm, comforting feeling that comes from hearing that someone else has been every bit as craven and undignified over a man as one has been oneself.

  ‘Just look at us,’ she said. ‘We’re pathetic. All because of two bloody men. I could kill them. What shall we do?’

  Cecily looked back at her, deciding. ‘Only one thing to do,’ she said stoutly. ‘Have another pine cone, and I’ll get the glasses.’

  CHAPTER 16

  ON THE LAST day of June, Andrew arrived at Olivia Passmore’s office with a fairly clear idea of how he was going to handle her. By nature or perhaps by background, he was inclined to be intimidated by genuinely charming women like Olivia. His mother had not been like that, and the closest Valerie ever came to charm was when, in order to get something from him, she oozed with a shallow sweetness so cloying that he realised he preferred her quotidian crabbiness. So he could sometimes find himself a little nonplussed by the cared-for air of elegant women, how they smiled, their self-possession, the gracious poise with which they glided through conversation. He had observed some of those qualities in Sara when he had first met her, although now that he knew her better and had seen how
often she burst out laughing, how bright and surprising she could be, he was less in awe of her. Her fantastic musicianship, her genius were, of course, part of her, but they were not her. She was also a woman. She had that warmth that real women have; well, beauty, in her case. He was, he didn’t mind admitting, getting very fond of her, although he should not be thinking about Sara now. As he waited in the vestibule of the Assembly Rooms with a rather sulky DS Bridger in tow, he pulled his mind back to the minutes of Matthew Sawyer’s last charity meeting, which he had received yesterday, and the interesting little bit of information they contained, perhaps the thing they had been looking for. Olivia Passmore would call for firm handling and all his concentration.

  ‘Right, Bridger, you’re my bag man today,’ he said. ‘What I want from you is notes and no interruptions. Use your eyes, not your mouth. Got that?’