by Morag Joss
Andrew asked, very quietly, ‘Did he say any more about where he was going? Where did he say he was going, Anna?’
Anna looked at him wretchedly. ‘We’d got to the top of the steps out of Parade Gardens by then. You can see the abbey clock from there. I was saying, “Look, you’ve got to get Fonz better, he needs to go to a vet,” and he just said, “Christ, is that clock right? I’ve got to get down the station.” Then he started to drag Fonz off with him and the poor dog could hardly keep up. I grabbed his arm and I wouldn’t let go. I said, “Wait, you can’t, what about the vet?” He kept trying to pull away from me but I was holding on. He said, “Shut the fuck up about that. I’ll get him to a vet when I get there, okay?” People could hear us and everything.’
‘Did he say where, Anna?’
Anna burst into tears, nodding. ‘He was furious, he was trying to pull my fingers off his arm. It was so horrible. He said to me, “What do I have to do to fucking get away from you? Let me fucking go, you rich slag, and I’ll get him to a fucking vet.” ’
‘Anna?’
‘I was crying and screaming, “When, when?” People were watching. He started running and I went after him and then he turned and shouted back, “When I get to fucking York.” I let him go then.’
Adam Ward-Pargiter rose and took his sobbing, wounded, soft-hearted, over-privileged, immature daughter in his arms.
‘I am very grateful to you, Anna,’ said Andrew, with feeling.
CHAPTER 23
SARA HAD TAKEN to running every day, letting her mind wander over the lives of other people, a mental tactic which partly deflected her from dwelling on her own emotional dead end. She would not concede to herself that she missed the opera group, so she thought about them instead. It was Adele she thought about most, trying to grasp Adele’s view of the world, a world where it made sense to switch on the gas before leaving work one day and return and light a match on the next. Had there been some significance for her in the hiss of the gas, or in the simple turning of one of the four dials along the cooker front? It still seemed wrong and inexplicable. Mixed with her dismay and grief for Helene was something like anger that Adele would do such a thing, which was gradually replacing her disbelief that the girl could have done something so destructive, yet so unknowingly. Andrew might have called it acceptance, but it was a more restless feeling than that.
The lanes through the valley were slippery now with fallen leaves and the wet hedgerows were darkening with the slime of dying grass; the trample of her angry feet squeezed out the smell of composting vegetation into damp air that reminded her of warm cabbages. Three miles a day became four, then five. Anything to exhaust her body and fill her mind with feelings and thoughts not directly concerning Herve or Andrew. She left her answering machine switched off and answered the telephone only when she felt like it.
Brittleness entered all her dealings with Herve, who was (and this did not help matters) virtually the only person she saw. Routinely now in their rehearsals he was irritated to waspishness, while she played with an expression on her face (a face, he marvelled, that he had once thought lovely but now more and more had the look of his mother in it) that was close to sneering. She had announced almost ten days ago that she would no longer come every day to Camden Crescent but only every other day, so Herve now made the journey out to Medlar Cottage on the days in between, resentfully carting his keyboard, synthesiser, amplifier, percussion deck and the day’s music down the stairs of the flat, across the hall and out to a taxi with an unvaryingly hostile driver. At Sara’s house he would even more resentfully unload his keyboard, synthesiser, amplifier, percussion deck and the day’s music, carry them through the awkward narrow gate, up the steep stone steps, across the front garden, into the house and through to the large music room at the back. Sara would watch, occasionally holding open a door for him but making it clear that she wouldn’t so much as push in a plug. And then he would go back to pay the driver. And approximately three hours later, after a morning’s thankless work with the unaccommodating prima donna, he would do the whole thing again in reverse.
Sara got back from her run one Monday morning at the end of October to find Herve (and his keyboard, synthesiser, amplifier, percussion deck and the day’s music) sitting in the garden. It had been raining. When he saw her he jumped to his feet.
‘Half an hour, half an hour I wait! More!’ He thrust out his wrist as if she could read his watch from twenty yards. ‘Forty minutes! And you not even here!’
‘Why should I be? You’re early,’ she replied. She could see at once what had happened. But she was already enjoying his distress and deliberately prolonging the confusion because Herve’s climbdown, when it came, would be the more humiliating if she gave him maximum rein to abuse her for her lack of punctuality and professionalism, as she knew he was about to. She walked past him into the house, with the languorous, well-toned swing of someone in very short shorts who has found a five-mile run no trouble at all and knows her buns to be worth looking at. Look, don’t touch. Herve stared after her, his jaw working. She turned and came back to the door.
‘Are you coming in or aren’t you?’ With her eyes she took in all the equipment on the grass in its black vinyl, rain-spotted covers. ‘I expect you can manage. I’ve got to shower and dress, of course, but you’re welcome to come in and wait.’
She disappeared upstairs. Wait he did, pacing the music room after he had lugged in and set up the equipment, again single-handedly.
She reappeared half an hour later on the dot of ten o’clock wearing a black silk shirt and black Levi’s, gleaming with demonic health. As she took the Strad out of its case, pulled out the end pin and tightened her bow, she noted with glee that he had gone almost beyond speech. Almost.
‘What is this! This rudeness! So rude to me! Eleven o’clock! An hour late now. Sara, this is not right, not professional, this I cannot—’
‘It is ten o’clock, Herve. Not eleven,’ she said, calmly tuning up. ‘The clocks went back on Saturday. The clocks go back one hour, for the winter.’
‘So why do you not say? To inform me? How am I to know this? You tell me nothing!’
‘I say nothing, Herve, because it is in all the newspapers, to remind people. It is on the radio. And the television. And if you’d been out once in the past thirty-six hours and bothered to look up once, you’d have seen it on the abbey clock, or the Post Office clock. Or the clocks in shops. Everywhere.’
‘I do not see such things.’
‘Fine. Suit yourself. You don’t have to. But it’s not my responsibility to see them for you.’
‘All the time I am working, or I am thinking of work. And I have nobody to take care of these things for me. Now Helene does not ring me so much.’
‘You’re supposed to be a grown-up now, Herve,’ Sara said in a mild voice. ‘Not a child. But yes, it must be inconvenient, Helene grieving for her only daughter and not feeling quite so chatty. Not running after you.’
It was thrilling, making someone this angry. She wondered if she could make him lose his temper. He seemed determined not to. He merely shrugged with the discomfort of the thought she was burdening him with and switched on the tape recorder. It was a rough recording, but the sound that came eerily from the speakers was Adele’s voice, intoning his wordless, witless notions.
‘What is that?’ Sara jumped up and switched off the tape recorder. ‘Oh, how could you! How could you? She’s dead! How can you use her voice like this?’ She was appalled enough to cry.
Herve was defensive. ‘This for me is not the point. This is the sound I want.’ He turned on the tape again and the strange inhuman voice floated around them again. Sara was struggling with tears. Herve gave an annoyed sniff and with a ‘tch!’ switched off the machine. ‘Ach! No, maybe it’s not so good. The acoustic. Too dead. The workshop no good for recording.’
‘The workshop? You recorded that in Jim’s workshop?’
‘Yes, I don’t want fuss, interference. So
I visit Adele in the workshop,’ Herve said loftily. ‘Only one time. But, ach, the tape I cannot use.’
‘I think that amounts to exploitation. You know quite well she should have been offered a fee, don’t you? You can’t just get people to sing for you for nothing, you know that. That’s why you went to the workshop, so Helene wouldn’t know. That’s disgraceful.’
Herve shrugged. ‘You react too much, like always. I will not use the tape, even, so what fee? What harm? And Adele is dead, yes, very sad. But just an accident. Death is everywhere. We must accept it.’
With a sniff he jammed the music onto Sara’s music stand, with the clear message that he required her to start work straight away. Sara looked at it slowly without changing her expression of open contempt. Then caressingly she drew the cello against her, closed her eyes and as a slight smile settled on her lips, began to play. The grave, shiveringly rich sound of the Christiani cello of 1700 swept through the room, with a power that would have made salivating beasts lie down and turn over to be tickled. It was the first movement of Edouard Lalo’s Cello Concerto: touchingly, achingly Romantic, and Sara was playing it, to annoy him the more, with almost sexual joy.
Softly, she began to speak. ‘Like it, Herve? This is the sound this instrument makes, when it’s allowed to. Nineteenth century. Romantic, elegant. Grown-up music. It’s about the big things: big, unmanageable, awkward human things. Do you have any idea what I mean? Listen.’ She played on in silence for a while, not caring whether Herve was listening resentfully or allowing himself to be soothed. ‘People have died. Imogen Bevan died, and all you can do is think of yourself and cook up some nonsense about you being next, as if you were that important. And Adele is dead. So don’t talk to me about “just an accident” and try to sniff it away like it was something stuck up your nose.’ She drew breath, not wishing her anger to cut into the music. After a few measures she said, ‘Their deaths require explanation, at least. Adele is lost to the people who loved her. Do you hear that now, in the music? It’s about that pain, perhaps. Joy at what was. Loss, resignation. Mainly, it’s about love. There would be no grief, without love. In the end, it’s all about love. It’s not about ideas. Not about notions.’
She should stop here, she knew, she’d said enough to wound him. But a slightly nervous, dismissive pfaw! from Herve made her look up, and the sight of his petulant face struck a match in her which ignited with sudden, destructive heat.
‘And you know, Herve, it’s not that I’m stuck in the nineteenth century, although that’s what you’d like to think. You think emotions in music are outdated, don’t you? You’d like to say I’m just sitting in some cosy traditionalist time warp, wouldn’t you? But I love lots of contemporary music.’
She stopped playing abruptly and put down her bow. ‘Schnittke’s First Cello Sonata, for example.’ She played the opening few bars. ‘It’s wonderful. I can’t play it the way Natalia does, of course. Natalia Gutman: Schnittke wrote it for her. But it’s got emotions in it, all right. Wild, dangerous ones.’ There was no response from Herve. ‘So I expect it’s way beneath you and your notions. Anyway, it was written in 1986, after all. It’s over ten years old—how passé.’
There was a hellish silence, during which Sara must somehow, she realised afterwards, have made the decision to chuck the burning match into the dry gunpowder, although she was unaware of it at the time. For she said, ‘No, it’s not contemporary music I dislike, per se. It’s yours, Herve. Your “music”. Your pretentious, inhuman, self-regarding, tight-arsed—’
She got no further. With a wail and a spring towards her, Herve roared, ‘You! You dare to speak like this! You—you do nothing, nothing to make this music work! There is no collaboration! You are so . . . so head in air about those opera people, that Andrew—oh, I see all—and these dead ones, Adele and that other! They are dead! So you can do nothing! What about me? No, I am only game to you! And you accuse me! I need only some help from you, I get nothing. I travel all over, always alone, alone since my mother . . . my mother, she would be so angry at this. I have nobody now, I am alone, a stranger here, you put me in dangerous flat . . . I am so lonely . . .’ He sank onto the sofa and burst into tears.
‘Oh, stop that! Stop it! Don’t be ridiculous!’ she cried, more in desperation than anger, suddenly swamped with guilt. She grew flinty in her own defence. ‘That is complete nonsense. You know it is! You’ve pushed me to the limit! Stop it now! If we are to work together I cannot, I . . . I will not put up with this kind of thing.’
Herve drew in a deep breath and got to his feet. He spat his next words, but with his Slav dignity restored. ‘If. Yes, indeed, if. For myself, I am sick, sick of it all. I phone taxi now.’
‘Yes, do. And make them hurry,’ she snapped. As a sour silence curdled around them, Sara put away her cello in its case and Herve began snapping cables and leads apart, rather as if they were Sara’s neck. Unable either to stay in the room or say a civil goodbye she blurted, ‘I’m going outside,’ and stepped through the French window out to the garden. Almost before Herve had turned round to see the door swing shut behind her, she was lost among the dripping trees.
PART 3
AND SO THY THOUGHTS, WHEN THOU ART GONE,
LOVE ITSELF SHALL SLUMBER ON.
CHAPTER 24
THREE WEEKS TO the day after Adele’s funeral the last of the leaves came down in the Circus. Then, instead of flurrying winds that would have sent them rattling prettily round the railings, and crisp sunshine to illuminate the residents’ smart paintwork, rain came. It mired the ground under the plane trees and soaked the leaves in the gutters, so that people walking on the mulched pavements found their shoes claggy as if with wads of brown papier-mâché. The circle of wet, sulking house fronts looked out, one to another, with the suspicious disenchantment of hosed-down dogs.
Jim stared up at the weather from his basement kitchen window, beyond the still empty pot with its waterlogged compost, and tried to meet another day which had already looked him up and down with indifference. He had done all the necessary things. The shattered window and door of the workshop had been reinstated. The remains of the cooker had been taken away for examination and as soon as the room had dried out sufficiently he had had the walls replastered and repainted. He had bought some second-hand metal shelving and a work table from the classified section of the Chronicle. A surveyor came round and told him he was lucky that the structure of the building was still sound. Jim knew he should think himself lucky.
It was a relief, of course, to learn that Helene had been coaxed out of her bedroom. He had walked past the closed curtains of her windows in the days following Adele’s death and imagined them to be preserving a houseful of dark hatred for him. He supposed he was pleased to hear the opera was going ahead with, if anything, increased energy and commitment. But while Poppy had been round several times to try to reassure him that Helene was ‘desperate’ for his return to the group, he still had not heard as much, indeed anything, from Helene herself. And he would not accept that Helene wanted him back until that happened. Had he not made a big enough effort already? He still had some pride.
It seemed to him, walking home one day and hearing from Helene’s drawing room the strains (in every sense) of Valerie’s voice being coaxed up to a top G, that the shock of Adele’s accident had propelled the others forward and further into their own concerns while he, to his own surprise, had halted in his tracks. It was not at all what he had expected to feel. Instead of looking forward, after a decent interval of course, to the proper wooing of an unencumbered Helene who might really need him now, he had been brought to a standstill by his own guilt. He found himself unable to resume the pattern of work that he had been used to before Adele. She had always arrived on the dot of nine o’clock, compelling him to settle her to her work and leave on the dot of ten past in order to get down to the shop and have half an hour’s cleaning of the stock, ready for opening at ten. Without the spur of Adele’s punctuality he was getting la
ter and later opening up and lazier about the state of the stuff on the shelves. If somebody wanted a thing, should a little dust matter?
He must just get used to being alone again, just as he had got used to it after Audrey left him for Ronald Sweeting in 1968. But being left by his childless wife of seven years had felt, after the initial shock, like an unlooked-for luxury that was unexpectedly and suddenly his, like a raffle prize; it had made him realise that he already had spent much too long in her unsustaining company. That was not the same as what he now felt himself to be, which was lonely as well as guilty, for what he had done struck him now for the first time as wrong. And it made him lonely, even while he was trying to chat up punters, to think of the workshop at the back of the flat now sitting empty all day. He missed Adele’s progress with the chandeliers, but he also missed knowing that she was there, as if her very presence warmed the place in his absence and left behind a sweet atmosphere of industry. Whether it was that or his guilt at what he had done that sometimes caused him to break down without warning, he didn’t know.
CHAPTER 25
SARA CONTINUED TO suffer in the twenty-four hours following Herve’s exit from her house. The sight of him suddenly in a state of weeping collapse on her sofa kept looming at her from the back of her mind, and she began to dwell almost obsessively on her contribution to his unhappiness. She began to believe that she might even have created it, and she tried to numb herself by practising unnecessarily for hours, although nothing could induce her to practise anything by Herve. Even after a marathon of Elgar and Dvoák on the Monday she was again the next morning taken by surprise, as if hit from behind, by great swamping waves of remorse. People were meant to be ‘filled’ with remorse, weren’t they? Yet she felt somehow washed over and emptied by it, her wellbeing and self-worth leached away, leaving her with only an aching space in which reverberated, like an echo, the sense of her own hypocrisy. For it was surely hypocritical to be simultaneously capable of milking a piece of music dry of every last drop of emotion, and yet be deaf and blind to the real feelings of someone whose sufferings she could have allayed or even prevented. Life was falling short of Art in a big way, and although she did not elevate her misery quite to the height of philosophical discomfort, she was aware of the discrepancy and knew herself to be wanting. And on top of it all, like salt and vinegar sprinkled on ice cream, the continuing absence of Andrew was imparting an inappropriate and increasingly bitter flavour to this day, as it had done to every other.
