by Morag Joss
Leaving her cello case leaning on the wall by the door, Sara made her way down the stairs and called out, ‘Do you remember the ones? One was dark blue and the other one green; they had those big gold dots on them.’ Not that she thought for a second that they would be easily confused with anything in Imogen Bevan’s mug collection, but how else was she to get a closer look? But just then Dotty appeared from the kitchen with the mugs, one in each hand. Sara took them and put them in her shoulder bag.
‘Thanks. Dotty, what on earth are you doing with the carpets?’
‘Oh, nothing, nothing. It’s nothing to do with the carpet. I’ll be putting it back. It’s the floorboards. They were just loose, one or two of them. Loose floorboards, that’s all.’
‘Oh, right. Well, I’ll let you get on, then.’
She turned and climbed the stairs, with Dotty close behind, almost shooing her off. Sara retrieved her cello case and turned to say goodbye. Dotty gave a little exclamation of surprise.
‘You are her! I knew you were.’ She shook her head in disbelief. ‘I knew it. Tell me, why did you say you were someone else?’
‘Tell me, why did you say you were fixing floorboards when you haven’t got any nails?’ Sara smiled sweetly.
Dotty stared at Sara, tightened her lips and looked back hard at her, blinking. ‘I didn’t say I was fixing them. I just said they were loose. I’ve lifted them because I . . . because I’ve lost an earring. I think it might have got down . . . somewhere . . . under the floorboards. I’m just searching.’
‘Oh,’ said Sara. She turned back just as Dotty was closing the door. ‘Good luck with the search, then. For whatever it is.’
CHAPTER 16
ALTHOUGH IT WAS Cosmo who was talking it was Herve they were all looking at. Or almost all, for Adele in the window seat had turned over the sheets of music she had been given and was absorbed in drawing something on the back. Sara sat next to her, glancing down occasionally at the detailed snowflake pattern that was emerging. It was astonishing; six points like double-ended daggers radiated from a central point, each branch embellished with elaborate little darts, cuts and bladelike edges. As far as Sara could tell it was accurate and symmetrical down to the last detail, but being unwilling to interfere with the air of self-possession that surrounded Adele she did not ask to have a closer look. She wondered if Adele remembered the soothing garden of Iford with its squares and paths.
Herve had been installed in the large wing chair by the fireplace while Helene, having obviously conceded what was her habitual throne, perched slightly outrageously on the arm, marking her new possession like a self-appointed composer’s moll. Jim, Phil, Poppy and Valerie occupied the other chairs and the sofa, which had been swung round towards the baby grand piano at the end of the room where Cosmo was intoning unhappily, trying not to notice that nobody was really listening.
‘So, ah,’ Cosmo said at last, taking his place at the piano, looking frightened. ‘Ah, are we ready to start?’
Sara slipped off the window seat and went to her place slightly behind the piano where her cello and music stand were ready. She set the pitifully easy music on the stand and nodded to Cosmo that she was ready.
Sheets of music were rustled and throats cleared as the room filled with the nervous expectancy of amateurs about to sing in front of strangers. Helene stood up, planted her feet and took up a pose of exemplary magnificence, the professional guiding the timid. She looked round, smiling her oh-the-joy-and-wonder-of-music smile, pressed four fingertips into the tungsten musculature of her diaphragm, lifted her head and drew her lips back across her teeth. She was ready to sing.
Gentlemen coming into the room in boots,
where ladies are,
shew little regard to them or the company!
The schooled voice was huge; there was something both lovely and quite unlovable in the sheer scale of it. It was steady and rich, sustained by solid technique and decades of marathonic training, which yet could not quite conceal the friendly, fifty-five-year-old wave in its timbre. She finished with a purse of the lips, smirked and turned to Jim with a look of quite inappropriate hilarity while he, jerking his shoulders convulsively, replied in a breathy but surprisingly round baritone:
Except they have no shoes!
A frightened Valerie came in slightly sharp, in a tremulous soprano, with:
Ladies dressing and behaving like Handmaids
must not be surprised
and then, in three parts, Valerie, Jim and Helene sang:
if they are treated as Handmaids!
although only Helene could be heard, very nearly louder than lovely.
Sara looked over at Herve, whose eyes were dancing over the ceiling. He had sucked both cheeks in tight and was puckering up his mouth, seeming to suppress a series of small explosions in his nose and throat. Helene turned, looked at Valerie and said in a loud, concerned whisper, ‘Sneezing fit. He’s not a well man.’ Valerie nodded.
Cosmo rapped on the piano. ‘If I may have your attention, please?’ he said, and spent the next quarter of an hour schooling his singers in some of the finer points of the performance. None of his remarks involved Sara, so she merely sat sluggish and bored. The music was facile dross, far too easy even for Andrew, and she was inwardly wondering how it was that she had got herself involved with such no-hopers. At what point had she consented to be dragged down to such mediocrity? She felt as if she were braising in a lumpy stew of her own stupidity.
Herve, having arrested his fit of whatever it was, continued to sit in the wing chair, inscrutably gorgeous, his blue eyes suggesting the beautiful, serene recesses of his own assured genius, and the infinite depth of his patience with these members of a lower order of humanity. Jim and Valerie returned to their places and Helene announced that she was ‘just popping down’ to see to the coffee. Cosmo sweated at the keyboard as Adele and Phil made their way over to the piano. The pace picked up as Cosmo bashed out what sounded to Sara like a reasonably creditable tune, the kind of forgettable ditty that you feel quite affectionate towards on a first hearing, because it almost, but not quite, reminds you of something. Taking a deep breath, and with none of Helene’s stage posture or Jim’s shoulder twisting, Phil sang out in an easy tenor voice that made Sara think of a slim little yacht with a white sail going before a favourable wind.
Immortal Newton never spoke
More truth than here you’ll find,
Nor Pope himself e’er penned a joke
Severer on mankind.
It was a natural, good voice, not a great one. Perhaps that added to the surprise. Because what then drifted out of Adele’s mouth, as if just carelessly let go like a helium-filled balloon, was the most spellbinding voice that Sara had ever heard, a sound that made the hairs stand up on the back of her neck and sent a shiver down her spine. It was a creamy, effortless soprano of unearthly purity and strength.
The picture placed, the busts between,
Adds to the satire strength;
Wisdom and Wit are little seen,
But Folly at full length.
The obscure banality of the words was irrelevant. Adele took Cosmo’s poor melody higher and higher, soaring and trilling over top As and B flats, carelessly playing her own voice like an instrument on which she had never needed a moment’s tuition. When she stopped and looked round placidly, everyone was sitting a little straighter. Herve was staring, enraptured. Spontaneous applause broke out, to which Adele did not visibly react.
But, Sara thought, while the voice is beautiful, the singing is not. Adele merely replicated, with that exquisite instrument, the notes and words that she had been taught. While she sang perfectly in tune she gave no shape or dynamic shading to the music’s phrases. She sang words clearly, but without seeming to understand or care for their sense. She had reached the end of her performance without apparently noticing that the opportunity to communicate anything had been and gone. This did not appear to bother Herve, who was on his feet, his eyes on fire w
ith an enthusiasm that Sara had not seen before.
‘Bravo!’ he cried.
As the clapping subsided Helene appeared at the door with a large tray, smiling as if the applause had been for her entrance. Cosmo got up from the piano blushing, looking anxiously at Herve. To his apparent relief he was ignored by everyone except Poppy, who was beaming her amazed approval and squeezing his arm. Other people formed their customary twos and threes round the room, excluding Sara. Adele was back in the window seat. Poor girl, Sara was thinking, she probably doesn’t understand what’s going on, and made her way over to join her. But there was something about Adele, almost a hint of granite in the clear eyes, that defied pity, that gave the impression that she was not uncomprehending but rather infinitely discerning in her attentions. The grave stare that she turned on Sara as she sat down was oddly hurtful. Sara felt herself to have been assessed and found lacking in real interest, not a feeling she was used to. Just as she was wondering whether to speak, and risk further spurning by asking her if she remembered Iford Manor, Adele was on her feet again. Pouring the coffee was her job, and the compliant Phil who had been busy with the cups allowed himself to be quietly demoted to assisting her. Adele shuffled back to Sara with a cup and saucer, and as she handed it to her, met her look with nothing so obvious as recognition, only the merest softening of the eyes. Sara held her breath, feeling both immensely gratified and rather preening, absurdly like the peacock in the garden. The moment passed. Now Adele was making her way round to hand cups to Cosmo and Herve. There she paused, looking from one to the other.
‘Backward!’
She pointed first at Herve.
‘Forward!’
Her finger swung round to Cosmo.
‘Backward!’
She looked neither baffled nor embarrassed, in contrast to the two men.
‘I know all about it,’ she said.
‘Now, Adele, we don’t point, do we, dear?’ Helene was at her side. ‘Pointing’s rude. You sang so sweetly, darling. I heard you from downstairs. Didn’t she, everyone?’ Murmurs rose. Jim appeared at Adele’s other side.
‘All right, Adele?’ His voice was kind. Adele looked up at him and round at Phil, waiting silently behind her with the plate of biscuits.
‘Backwards. Forwards,’ she said, her voice rising. ‘I know all about it. I go backwards. Twenty-five. You can have a biscuit. You want it, don’t you?’ She pulled the plate of biscuits away from Phil and turned to Cosmo, who shot Poppy a look that said save me.
‘Twenty-five,’ Adele informed nobody in particular, holding it out. ‘You want it, don’t you? You can have a biscuit.’ She began to laugh at some hilarious private joke.
‘Twenty-five?’ Poppy asked appeasingly. ‘Lovely.’ Gently she took the plate from her and gave it back to Phil. Adele drew a hand up to her mouth and bit it excitedly, still laughing. Poppy quietly lifted her hand away and pulled it down towards Adele’s dress pocket. The laughter subsided. ‘Hands in pockets, Adele, that’s right. No biting. There. Now, I think you’ve been doing more drawings, haven’t you, Adele? May I see? Will you show me your drawing?’ Adele turned and made her way back to the window seat. She did not look again at Sara. While Poppy oohed over the drawing Adele sat with her hands clasped under her throat and her head tilted, ignoring her completely. Her contribution over, there seemed to be nothing more she wanted to say.
CHAPTER 17
THE NEXT MORNING Sara calculated peevishly that it was time to give herself a day off. Because of her recent tour, including the practice and other commitments before it and the work with Herve following, it had been months since she had allowed herself a full twenty-four hours in which to do exactly as she liked. She rang Herve and cancelled their rehearsal. Then she put on her running clothes and began this day all to herself with a gentle jog through the valley, gleeful in her selfishness.
She wondered what Andrew was doing. Probably trying to run the Bevan enquiry from the sofa, or even pretending he could walk comfortably to his car and drive to the police station. He would never permit himself to skive off as she was doing, and would probably be mildly shocked at the pleasure she was taking in it. In some ways Andrew’s work was not so different from hers; they both understood about long, dogged hours that sometimes seem thankless and pointless, hers practising with Herve, Andrew’s with routine, repetitive and unpromising enquiries. He had combed through the details of Imogen Bevan’s life and found it morally blameless, sparse in events and essentially solitary. In Imogen Bevan’s cupboards there had been not so much as a jar past its sell-by date, let alone skeletons. So Andrew was now pursuing the most, indeed the only sensible line of enquiry. Guiltily, Sara saw for the first time how exasperating it must have been for him when she, instead of really trying to help, had tried to get him to latch on to some sensational invention of hers about dastardly enemies of the dead woman. She had been using his work as some kind of attention-seeking recreation for herself and when, with that untimely telephone call from Bridger, Andrew had shown that he would not be distracted from the real job he had to do, she had flounced out. She stopped abruptly in the lane, hands on hips, winded less by the exercise than by the realisation that she had been behaving unforgivably.
She walked on, head down, thinking. Poor Andrew. She pictured him, in pain, interviewing Brendan Twigg’s friends, probably fruitlessly. Nonetheless, he would stay with the enquiry, she thought guiltily, until the end. He would find some new line to take, something else to try, and it would be based on some actual truth about Imogen Bevan and the circumstances of her death, not some smart-arsed ‘instinct’. How could you, after all, lie on your back in a cornfield when it was your job to track down the killer of a sweet, innocent old lady? An innocent old lady, then. Well, an old lady, certainly.
What had Dotty been doing, going at the floorboards with a claw hammer? It crossed Sara’s mind wildly that however devoid Miss Bevan’s cupboards might be of skeletons, she might have had a corpse or two under the floorboards. What had Dotty really been looking for? Sara mentally measured the hallway and concluded, a little disappointed, that it would have to be a dainty corpse to fit down there. She was conscious that she was doing it again, speculating largely for her own amusement, and suppressed the dangerous tingle of inquisitiveness. Perhaps Dotty had actually just been looking for an earring. No reason why ringless, unbraceleted Dotty, without so much as a locket round her neck, might not indeed have lost an earring. No reason at all.
After her shower she put on a narrow dress of heavy grey linen and black loafers, casting aside the utilitarian black trousers and white shirts that had become her habitual uniform for the joyless sessions with Herve. Having decided that she would not play at all today, she looked out from the drawing room window at the valley drenched in autumn sun and reflected that today might be her last chance this year to play up in the hut at the top of the garden. Very soon she would have to shut it up for the winter. Even if she just did an hour, she might make some sense of Cosmo’s stuff and out of respect for Herve she could work on the new sketches he had given her on Tuesday. But to her intense annoyance, after she had climbed the slippery path with both cello and music case, opened out the doors and bolted them back, dusted off the chair and tuned up, she found that the music was not in her case. Neither Cosmo’s funny little cello continuo, nor Herve’s monstrous rumblings was there. It was infuriating, but she was going to have to go back to Helene’s to retrieve them because somehow, probably in her indecent haste to get away last night, she had managed to leave it all behind.
Parking was a nuisance, of course, and Sara’s temper with the sheer temerity of all these other people who had the nerve to bring their cars into town did not sweeten the errand. Entering the Circus on foot, she marched with a scowling face round to Helene’s door. Her welcome was so warm that Sara practically blushed at the uncharitable things she had been thinking about the opera.
‘Just in time for a sandwich, dear! You’ll have a bite and a cup of
coffee with me, won’t you? I’m on my own, Adele’s at the workshop. You pop in and find your music—I expect it’ll be somewhere near the piano, try under the window seat too—and I’ll put the kettle on!’
The blasted music was nowhere. After quarter of an hour’s searching she was interrupted by Helene, who came up from the kitchen with a tray.
‘I expect Cosmo has it,’ Helene said soothingly. ‘He’s got bundles and bundles of stuff all over the place. But we can’t ask him now, he’s gone off somewhere, for a walk, I expect. He doesn’t get much exercise.’
They settled themselves in chairs at a low table with coffee mugs and smoked salmon sandwiches. ‘It seems to be coming on well now, the project,’ Sara said, unable to bring herself to call it an opera. ‘Adele’s so lucky, having you do all this for her. Oh, but look,’ she added quickly, ‘I don’t mean that I think she’s lucky in the usual sense. I mean, things can’t be easy for her. It must be difficult.’
‘Oh, thank you for saying that. It is difficult.’ Helene sighed. ‘Most people don’t realise. Now they’ve all seen Rain Man people think it must be entertaining in some way. Well, they should see how entertaining it is to have your child in nappies until they’re fifteen.’
